Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Is there aesthetic, perhaps even political, value to being short-lived? Are there
ideas more beautiful for being ephemeral, for having been pushed out of existence before their time? And, if this is so, what happens to ideas that continue
to exist after their time insteadwhose moment has long passed but who have
somehow failed to pass away? There are plenty of literary or political careers
cut short at precisely the right moment, others that might have been remembered quite differently had not a pesky few decades of festering obsolescence
intervened between a lifes high point and its end. How differently would, for
instance, Gnther Grasss or Martin Walsers presence loom on the German
scene today, had they not lived past 1980? One has only to compare the saintly
image of John Lennon preserved in print and in memory around the world,
New German Critique 120, Vol. 40, No. 3, Fall 2013
DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2325455 2013 by New German Critique, Inc.
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with the grotesque spectacle of Mick Jagger carcassing before our very eyes
onstage, to see how important a timely exit can be for timelessness.
This is true not only for artists. The tumultuous and calamitous history
of the twentieth century has provided for many such spectacular carcasses, in
particular in Germany. And while Paul von Hindenburg and Wilhelm II were
certainly such cases, it was particularly the Nazi years that deposited their
share of strange, alarming, out-of-place presences at the doorstep of the postwar world. How much irritation was occasioned in a nation trying to block
twenty years from its memory by the unsettlingly deathless bodies of Leni
Riefenstahl, Ernst Jnger, and Carl Schmitt? (And it was their bodies, rather
than simply their presence: not the mere sight of Riefenstahl but the sight of
the eighty-year-old in a diving suit.) Worse yet were those bodies that stalked
out of the Nazi past and ran for office: why did Hans Filbinger not have Roland
Freislers good sense to die in a bomb crater in 1945? The postwar years were
marked by strangely persistent foreign bodies whose very presence was an
irritating and inconvenient reminder of things long since successfully
repressedthat of Rudolf Hess, for instance, interred in a Spandau prison
holding only him, or Albert Speer mingling at Frankfurt cocktail parties.
One such life spectacularly out of joint, a moraine of an earlier age refusing to be repressed or forgotten, was Winifred Wagner, wife to Richard Wagners son and longtime head of the Wagner clan, and the spectacle of her
malignant, noxious obsolescence was staged by Hans-Jrgen Syberberg in his
1975 film Winifred Wagner und die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried 1914
1975 (Winifred Wagner and the Story of the House of Wahnfried, 19141975).
Syberberg initially interviewed Winifred Wagner for the project that was to
become his most famous film: Our Hitler, part of the filmmakers German
Trilogy (alongside Karl May and LudwigRequiem for a Virgin King). In
this trilogy Syberberg pioneered a new and highly idiosyncratic form of filmic
essayism well received by academe and the art worldonly to then write
essays reflecting on his work that seemed to invoke, in Eric Santners words,
in essence an anti-Semitic version of Nietzsches anti-Socratic account of the
decline of tragic drama.1 Within a few years, the man whom Susan Sontag
had lauded on Hitlers release as a cross between Walter Benjamin and Richard Wagner had become a nonperson, a strange caput mortuum not unlike the
erstwhile mistress of Wahnfried.
1. Eric Santner, The Trouble with Hitler: Postwar German Aesthetics and the Legacy of Fascism, New German Critique, no. 57 (1992): 17.
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to be sure, produce a more palatable Syberberg, but it may nuance his unpalatability some. For one, it will no longer require drawing a strict line between the
Hitler film and its aftermath, or else holding up Syberbergs films as aesthetically interesting and only sheepishly admitting to the existence of the accompanying volumes. Furthermore, rather than limply use Syberbergs written
essays to explain his films, the overarching rubric of essayism as a lived
practice would allow us to explain how Syberbergs essays and essay films
interact and why they share the formal features they share.
These formal resemblances attain particular importance in Syberberg
because his essayism depends on a story of why he switches forms. When the
Vienna Kunsthalle put together an exhibition and a series of screenings in
2008, the exhibition catalog had the title Syberberg: Film nach dem Film
(Syberberg: Film after the Film). Syberberg, at that point a self-proclaimed
exile from German film, gives his contribution the title Nach dem Film: Das
Buch (After the Film, the Book). If few filmmakers have written as much
about their own films (whether before, during, or after making the film) as
he has, Syberberg nevertheless has fraught relationships to the book-sized
essays that announce or explain what he perceives as the failure of his film
projects. The message of the Vienna catalog is that the book is the only path
open to one whose films are kept from the public. That those books are if
anything less palatable than the films they accompany, and often do not clarify
them very much, seems to be part of their conceit. Syberbergs essayism is thus
not a project that integrates seamlessly its different media (film, book, and
more recently his blog); rather, at least to his own mind, this mixture of media
itself tells a story of persecution.
A final boon of this approach concerns the category of essay: there is
some agreement that Syberbergs films are somehow essayistic, but there is
little accounting for the exceedingly strange kind of essayism Syberberg can
be said to employ. Unlike most assignations that are happy to find a few formal correspondences between essay film and the written essay in the tradition
of Montaigne, the present article asks how something as monumental, as encyclopedic, and as sclerotic as Hitler or Die freudlose Gesellschaft could possibly be called an essay. Clearly, we need to tell the story of the essay a little
differently if we want to make it capacious enough for Syberbergs bizarre
oeuvre. As I show, it is not in spite of their length that Syberbergs films and
books can count as essays; instead, they are essayistic in their length, insofar
as they enact the strategy of superannuation, a blackening of the breast that
reverses the temporality of essayism proposed by Lukcs. Despite this reversal, Syberbergs essays maintain Montaignes Essays concern with a utility for
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all its modesty, it never hesitatesit has all the answers now. What Theodor W.
Adornos influential celebration of the essay as a putting-in-play of nonidentity
neglects, for instance, is the fact that the essay does two things: it posits something with absolute authority, but its tyrannical streak is always tempered
with awareness that this very authority will ironically turn out to be the
essays greatest liability. The essay is provisional, but not at the cost of being
tentative; its relationship to otherness (in particular the otherness of texts) is
paradoxically both solicitous and dictatorial. There is, Santner writes, no
major essay on Syberberg that does not at some point invoke the term Trauerarbeit as the key to the meta-psychological underpinnings of Syberbergs
film aestheticbut we might say that at least formally the essay is the antimourning work par excellence.10
It seems that many of what we call essays occupy this position, or one at
least close to itwhat matters in this context is that Syberbergs essayism
exaggerates both the solicitous and the dictatorial poles of the traditional essay,
and that the style he arrives at as a consequence is more openly or overtly
paradoxical than more traditional (or more subdued) essays manage to be.
The critic is the one who discerns destiny in the forms [Der Kritiker ist der,
der das Schicksalhafte in den Formen erblickt], Lukcs writes.11 Syberberg
does not reinvent the essay; the essay is itself doubleit is of the moment, but
it sublates that moment with a semiserious appeal to totality and posteriority.
Syberberg exaggerates this doubleness, makes it a formal feature of his aesthetic. At first blush there is something absurd about claiming essayistic status for Hitler simply in terms of scaleessays are supposed to be small, selfcontained, imbued with humanistic modesty instead of an impersonal monumentalism. But Syberbergs films are monumental only so that they can all the
more monumentally unravel. They are not Promethean and singular; instead,
they go on too long: their excessive accumulation and concentration are means
to their inevitable dispersal.
In one of the Essays Montaigne relates the story of his encounter with
the chief steward of Cardinal Caraffa: I asked him about his job, and he
replied with a discourse on the science of guzzling [un discours de cette science de gueule], delivered with magisterial gravity and demeanor as if he
had been expounding some great point of theology [quelque grand poinct de
theologie].12 Montaigne extensively mocks this man, who can expound on
10. Eric Santner, Stranded Objects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 103.
11. Lukcs, Die Seele und die Formen, 17.
12. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, vol. 2 (Paris: Charpentier, 1862), 52; Complete Essays of
Montaigne, 222.
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world through that times and worlds reaction to Syberbergs films. As such,
Syberbergs writings are quintessentially essayistic (text commenting on text
commenting on text ad infinitum), but they also come across as petulant, as
always one riposte too many. Expressions of a philosophical sprit descalier,
Syberbergs writings never take any critique or attack lying downthey seem
to dignify anything with a response, understanding any criticism leveled at the
films on whose (textual) reception they comment as at base an index of what is
wrong with Germany, capitalism, modernity.
This may seem childish and not a little megalomaniacal. But if I am right
in suggesting that flogging a dead horse is not simply a preoccupation of Syber
berg the man but an inherent feature of his essayistic aesthetic, it emerges as
extremely sly as well. In Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget (The Forest Is
Black and Silent), his six-hundred-page explication of the (relative) failure of
the Parsifal film, Syberberg provides an exhaustive list of literary afterlives
of artists destroyed or almost destroyed by the criticism of their work, of those
who fell silent or ordered their papers burned upon their death: Arthur Schnitz
ler, Italo Svevo, Franz Kafka, Heinrich Bll, Arthur Schopenhauer. Syberberg,
the text implies, instead braves the posthumous, surrenders his products to a
public he knows to be hostile, cruel, and incomprehendingnot in order to
flee the world, desert it like a coward, and remain in a purely contemplative
stance towards it, but in order to deal a blow to the satanic in this world [um
diesem Satanischen in der Welt einen Sto zu versetzen], as a remark by Ernst
Bloch on Schopenhauer runs that Syberberg quotes. Rather than burn his papers
or fall silent, Syberberg channels his hypersensitive reactions into more
textmore essays.21
Syberbergs essay films and his film essays both participate in their
aftermathsthey become obsessed with their own reception and they seem
to presume that this reception is going to be negative. In this, they actually
reverse the temporality of Lukcss influential characteristic of the essay as
form: there the essay was the prophet of a full elaboration, of a totality yet to
come (Lukcs compares him to John the Baptist who goes out to preach in
the wilderness);22 here it is the postmortem on such an elaboration, on a perfection ill understood by its contemporaries. There is, in other words, nothing
accidental about what Syberberg understands as the rejection of his aesthetic
21. Hans-Jrgen Syberberg, Der Wald steht schwarz und schweigetneue Notizen aus
Deutschland (Zrich: Diogenes, 1984), 543.
22. Georg Lukcs, On the Nature and the Form of the Essay, in Soul and Form, trans. Anna
Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975), 16.
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practice; his aesthetic practice always already presumed that rejection. Reversing the formula I proposed in the beginning of Walsers counterfactual death
in 1980, I would suggest that the biggest danger Our Hitler ever faced was
receiving the Goldener Br at the Berlin film festival. It was a film meant to
decompose, misunderstood and shunned, in plain view, an indictment and
an irritant. In this context it is only fitting that while initially Syberberg was
thrilled to juxtapose his films negative German reception and the much more
favorable notices he received from American intellectuals such as Sontag, his
later essayistic efforts almost seem designed to alienate his international viewers as well. Syberberg, it almost seemed, had to help out and resecure for his
work the obscurity that it formally required.
The idea of an essay film was first proposed by Hans Richter in his article
Der Filmessay: Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms from 1940,23 though
attempts at an essayistic mode of presentation go back to the very beginnings
of film. In the sequel, the moniker has been applied to a wide gamut of aesthetic products, from Dziga Vertovs collages, via Chris Markers experimental films, to Werner Herzogs deliberately subjective documentaries. Although,
as a self-consciously nongeneric genre, the essay film has proved difficult to
reduce to a set of techniques, there is a definite set of features commonly associated with its exponents: from Richter on, they have been conceived as inherently first-person films that involve a great deal of self-reflexivity.24 Timothy
Corrigan suggests that they have a constitutive tendency . . . to respond to and
depend on cultural events that precede them.25 Philip Lopate adds the following criteria: essay films rely on words and text, they have an identifiable voice,
they have a problem and a project, they have a point of view, and they have a
nonutilitarian attitude to style and language.26
In outlining these and similar canons of essay films, theorists usually
recur to an analogy to a (written) essayistic tradition, in the tradition of Alexandre Astrucs camra-stylo,27 trying to show that a films use of montage, the
combination of image and text, the use of voice-over correspond to linguistic
23. Christa Blmlinger and Constantin Wulff, eds., Schreiben Bilder sprechen: Texte zum
essayistischen Film (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1992), 19598.
24. Jack Ellis and Betsy McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York: Continuum, 2005), 262.
25. Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
26. Philip Lopate, In Search of the Centaur: The Essay-Film, in Beyond Document: Essays
on Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 246.
27. Alexandre Astruc, Naissance dune nouvelle avant-garde: La camra-stylo, in Du stylo
la camraet de la camra au stylo: crits, 19421984 (Paris: Archipel, 1992), 32428.
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as though through an iris. It is an emblematic image for the film to come: conceived as much as a speech at a (filmgoing) public as the speech of a particular public community (us Germans), Syberbergs film toys relentlessly with
matters of the private and the public, with accusation and identification. If
Syberbergs film never allows these binaries to settle into easily definable and
opposable categories, then the rotational work that always aligns and realigns
these terms is done by his mouthpiece, by his constant shift of mode of address,
and by a constant solicitation of sliding identifications vis--vis his texts and
images. It is these rotations that mark Hitler as profoundly essayistic.
Nevertheless, the essayistic mouthpiece itself is also emphatically filmic:
at one point suspended before a rear projection of the Black Maria, Thomas
Edisons film studio in West Orange, New Jersey, the mouthpiece resembles
the recording cone used in the so-called Dickson Experimental Sound Film
from 1894 to 1895, the first film to attempt to synchronize recorded sound and
recorded image and thus the first stirring of the integrative film aesthetics that
led Hermann Haefker to postulate the Gesamtkunstwerk as the telos of all
film.28 Of course, in this historic seventeen-second reel the cylinder is not a
mouthpiece, something to amplify a voice outward, but a sound collectorit is
unidirectional, whereas the uses to which Schuberts announcer puts the same
suspended object are insistently bidirectional. Whether it embodies the monomania of the Gesamtkunstwerk or that of the individual embodied authorial
voice, the rotation and duality of the mouthpiece/cone insistently undercut the
megalomania of the announcers monologue.
It is at this point that the differentia specifica of Syberbergs essayism
comes into view: the filmness of Syberbergs essay film is connected to the
notion of the total work of art that combines synesthesia and an overweening
authorial subjectivity. Prima facie, it seems downright bizarre for an essay film
to invoke, with any degree of seriousness, the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk. But
in fact there are two traditions of essayism that interact in Syberbergs film to
effect both the rotations and the identifications those films solicit. Much like
in the case of the mouthpiece, which offered a visual (iris) effect through a
mode of address, this double essayistic rhetoric will assert itself in two distinct
ways of looking, of combining images and texts. The mouthpiece image, then,
plays with, but at the same time relies on, the assumption of a standpoint,
moreover, the standpoint of a text producer. Our vision of the world in rear
projection is identical with our speaking to it and its speaking to us. Is this not
28. Hermann Haefker, Knnen kinographische Vorfhrungen hheren Kunstwert haben?, in
Geschichte der Filmtheorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2004), 5261.
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also precisely the situation of the essay? The essay takes a standpoint (as
Adorno puts it in his Essay as Form) from which it surveys its texts, which it
cites and comments on,29 a standpoint that is to cast light on and to be interrogated by the texts. The essay takes this standpoint only provisionally.30 If the
essay changes standpoints, this occurs precisely because the essay as form is
directed at and located in a contradictionif it were to arrest that contradiction
into paradox, it would not be an essay; rather, its principle is that it always
thinks beyond that contradiction and thus toward a new standpoint.
Syberbergs text is simply Hitlernot the man, however, but the film.
It is a film staging a trial of a film, and, as I showed in the example of the circus
announcers monologue, insistent in its self-reflexivity. This provisionality and
self-reflexivity is characteristic of the historical essay; at the same time, however, as Graham Good points out, Montaignes Essays had a pronounced dislike for the infinite proliferation of textuality that is necessarily entailed in a
continuous and multifarious succession of standpoints.31 But if Montaigne
wanted to return to interpreter les choses rather than les interpretations,
he did so once again by textual means. Montaignes position was thus marked
by irony: the poison was the cure. Or: the essay was at once characterized by
insistent textuality and by the obsessive search for something beyond the
text, for les choses; it was, to hark back to the episode Montaigne relates
about the cardinals steward, a police de ses saulces hoping against hope to
become theology.
Returning to the mouthpiece for a moment, what is curiously lacking
in the scene is a speaking body: for all the standpoints and perspectives,
there seems to be no one to take them. The circus announcer strolls around
the rotating mouthpiece, is first seen speaking through it, but soon harangues
the audience without requiring its aid. It is a mouthpiece without voice. Looking for that missing body is a persistent obsession of Hitler. Again, this dovetails with what has been, ever since Montaigne, another vital aspect of the
essay form: the human body, in particular the monstrous, private-cum-public,
the obscene body, as described in theological detail by the chief steward of
Cardinal Caraffa. The essay is authorized by an insistently corporeal subject
and addressed to one. For Montaigne, as Jean Starobinski shows, the body
offered one way to critique the world of socially produced appearancesa
corrective to the dissimulations of the world, a constant thorn in the side of
29. Brger, ber den Essay, 10.
30. Graham Good, The Observing Self (London: Routledge, 1984).
31. Ibid., 2.
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cealed by background shadows or the frame of the coffin from which the puppet raises its head. But at the same time, the obscenity of these sequences lies
not only in making Hitler a puppetit lies at least as much in the puppets arms
and hands. Hitlers face, a source of constant fascination from both his admirers and his enemies at the time, is revealed for all its stunted artificialitybut
his hands, equally the object of adulation (Martin Heidegger is reputed to have
succumbed to them)37 and similarly characteristic tools of his rhetoric, are
scandalously alive, scandalously fleshly as they dance around the dead puppet.
Far from caricatures, these are (literally) actors hands, eloquent and, perhaps
for that reason, seductively human.38
In this dialectic, then, we find replicated the essays temporality, not in
terms of discourse, but in terms of image: just as Montaignes essays are
indices that human creaturely discourse cannot readily attain to the lofty
poincts de theologie, so Syberbergs Hitler, a Film aus Deutschland, is an
index of the missing body of Hitler. In Montaigne, the momentary nature of
the essay made it a fragmentary and time-bound piece that allowed no picture of the whole;39 Lukcs similarly pointed to the essays fragmentary
nature as capable of messianic sublation once the groe sthetik redeems all
partiality in one overarching totality. Syberbergs oeuvre thematizes precisely the space between fragment and totalityit is the space between the
Gesamtkunstwerk and what disrupts it and that between the body and the
image that points to and can only lament the bodys absence. But unlike
Montaignes or Lukcss humility, Syberbergs megalomaniacal staging of
this old essayistic binary foregrounds the essays necessary falling-short:
here is a film that thinks it can alchemically produce the bodybut cannot;
here is a film that claims to synesthetize and criticize at oncebut fails and
fails spectacularly; here is an essay that aims to give us filmic theology, but
ends up giving us the police de ses saulces.
Hitlers obscene fascination with the banal was at least one of the reasons that few critics took issue with one part of the film or another, but instead
either chose to reject the project wholesale as impolitic or bypassed it altogether to attack its creator. After all, banality derives from bannum, which
denotes a forcing of the hand, a compulsionfittingly, preoccupation with the
37. Claudia Schmlders, Hitlers Face: The Biography of an Image, trans. Adrian Daub (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 3.
38. In fact, the first puppet the film introduces is Ludwig II, rocked tenderly in the lap of Andr
Heller; the book version of Hitler features a frontispiece showing Syberberg in a similarly tender
pose with the Ludwig puppet.
39. Montaigne, Complete Essays, 243.
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banal stands suspected of pathology. One does not disagree with Hitler, a Film
from Germany, one diagnoses, accuses, despises its creator, a calculated implication of the fourth wall in the Drama that is Syberberg, an essay from Germany. In this, Syberbergs stagings recall Nietzsches pseudo-communicative
mode: both share an interest in provocation, allowing the readers outrage
to have a hand in writing the outrageous text. This implication of the audience in the text is indeed something Syberberg appears to associate with
Montaigne, producing only for a community of well-meaning friends [gutwilligen Freunde] to whom he addresses himself in secret missives [geheime
Botschaften].40 But what distinguishes Syberbergs essayism from Montaignes, and what moves him decisively into the neighborhood of Nietzsches,
is the overweening presence of the authorial subjectivity in the writingone
cannot like or dislike this or that part of Syberberg; Syberberg is what totalizes, terrorizes his materials, bullies them into agreement with one another.
In adapting essayistic strategies, Syberberg thus deliberately puts into
play two, if not contradictory then at least conflicting, modes of essayism. As
Anton Kaes points out, making a film about Hitler that not only eschews documentary (or, better yet, didactic) modes but also is insistently artistic and artificial is to make an extremely strong metaphysical claim for art.41 Making a
Hitler film that is not narrative but insistently spectacular or phantasmagoric
seems to lay an implicit claim to aesthetic means of production fatally reminiscent of what Susan Sontag terms the Fascist aestheticRiefenstahl, Speer,
and Joseph Goebbels. Syberberg effects this diversion of both narrative and
documentary with an idiosyncratic and highly self-conscious blend of Wagnerian and Brechtian aesthetics that allows his objects to become at once mythic
and demystified. By instituting a constant dialectic between the banal and the
larger-than-life projections that form both the topic and the aesthetic principle
of his film, Syberberg can lay claim to an aesthetic that performs Benjamins
dreaded aestheticization of politics in order to pass through it, to sublimate
rather than repress it.
Hitler, a Film from Germany manages to combine documentary and spectacular (phantasmagoric) modes by recurring to what Syberberg conceives of
as an explicitly German essayistic tradition. For one thing, his structural principles, irony and hyperbole, clearly come out of a Nietzschean tradition,42 as does
40. Syberberg, Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget, 347.
41. Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 4142.
42. See, e.g., Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1985).
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what might be termed his aphoristic energy.43 In The Will to Power Nietzsche
speaks of the magic of the extreme, and indeed the link between extremity
and magic (the magic circle of phantasmagoria) forms a vital aspect of my
argument. It also, I would argue, accounts for the megalomania, monumentality, and bombast of Syberbergs filmic output. Rather than sensu stricto
fragmentary, it appears on the scene with the outrageous, impudent claim to
the absolute plenitude and presence it formally defers. A similar mechanic is
observable even in the mode of address of Hitler: the filmmaker emerges as
the lone wolf (or perhaps Lukcss John the Baptist who goes out to preach
in the wilderness?)44 of his own egomaniacal discourse. For a film concerned with a trial of images by images, Hitler seems altogether too suffused
with an author/ization. The film constantly questions the possibility of a
quest that it has written on its banners (one commentator speaks of a selfconsciously quixotic project).45 But if it undoes its own project, it does so
often through excess, by inserting the filmmaker insistently into his creation,
and through an almost unsavory obsession with the banal tooth brushing,
vegetarian, health-obsessed petit bourgeois bodies behind the catastrophe of
the twentieth century.
What Fredric Jameson identifies as Syberbergs rebuke to the esprit de
srieux46 is very much in keeping with Adornos claim that only hyperbole is
true,47 but this means at the same time that hyperbole has or seeks some relation to truth. Indeed, Syberbergs polemical bent (one commentator has suggested that Syberberg is incapable of a nonpolemical thought)48 and insistent
foregrounding of his thesis seem to rely on a relation to reality that is not
merely discursive but tends toward the anchorage of an (as yet absent) absolute
knowledge. Whereas Lukcs writes that the essay is not about judgment but
about the process of judging,49 Syberberg presents his process of judgment
as a trial, literalizing Adornos emphasis on essayistic subjectivity as the staging ground for contradictions. There is a doubleness, too, in the insistent
metaphoricity of Syberbergs claims (like filmic dissolves, the films texts
43. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1998), 18.
44. Lukcs, On the Nature and the Form of the Essay, 16.
45. Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat, 41.
46. Fredric Jameson, In the Destructive Element Immerse: Hans-Jrgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution, October, no. 17 (1981): 100.
47. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklrung (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1973), 140.
48. Santner, Stranded Objects, 108.
49. Lukcs, Die Seele und die Formen, 18.
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acting semiautonomously, the musical score, the text, and the image are relatively integrated. Unlike the emblems scattered about the stage, the music not
only retains a right to commentary on the images but influences even the flow
of the text. Interestingly, then, image and text (at least at times) seem to line up
all too well. Tautology, permanent over-determination60 is one of the phrases
Adorno introduces in discussing Wagnerian phantasmagoria; indeed, it
appears as though in this opening sequence text, image, and music, far from
being fragmented, constantly risk saying the same thing.
In general, this sequence, in particular when considered the opening to
an essay film, rather than emphasize jarring shifts of perspective, fragmentation, and self-reflexivity, proceeds in an organic fashion, through dissolves and
zooms. Indeed, the invocation of Georges Mlis can hardly be considered
accidental in this context: the films static camera and the vaudeville spectacle
unfolding on a stage clearly hark back to Mliss techniques. Syberbergs
essay thus begins by invoking the antipode to the forms ancestor. After all, on
the standard narrative it is the Lumire brothers who are associated with documentary subjects (and by extension with the essay film), while Mlis stands
for illusion and spectacle.61 This theatricality asserts itself in the opening
through the remarkable absence of montage. The voice-over suggests that the
film will consist in protruberances of the self in the cosmos of hard cuts.62 In
fact, however, the sequence that these words accompany is marked if anything
by a complete absence of hard cuts. The logic of this opening sequence thus
subverts both narrative and documentary logicsit is primarily metaphorical.
Rather than combine separate elements, those elements come to stand in for
each other. The cut, the main method of tripping up Winifred, has almost disappeared in Hitler, as have the intertitles and the written discourse.
The integrative form of essayism associated with the (excessive) Gesamt
kunstwerk correlates to another style and another genealogy of the essaywe
acknowledgment. In particular, the mechanical hammering in this particular Verwandlungsmusik
is less an acknowledgment of the technological apparatus at work behind the closed curtains than
a way to displace or repress it. In fact, we may think of its very volume as intended to drown out the
sound of pulleys and wheels on stage.
60. [The Whole] becomes tautologous, permanent agreement. Music repeats what the words
said in the first place, and the more important the music tries to be, the more redundant it really
becomes, at least in terms of the meaning it is supposed to express (Theodor W. Adorno, Versuch
ber Wagner [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977], 98; Adorno, In Search of Wagner [London:
Verso, 2005], 9192).
61. Nora M. Alter points out that the essay film genre challenged Siegfried Kracauers influential separation into realistic and formalistic films (Projecting History: German Nonfiction Cinema [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002], 910).
62. Syberberg, Hitler, 32.
162Politics of Longevity
might associate it with the name Nietzsche for purposes of shorthand. It insists
on the accumulation of meaning, it superimposes world, subjectivity, and text to
an extent that the three become almost indistinguishable. Of course, this kind of
essayism has its subversive, ironic sidebut, as Alexander Nehamas points out
apropos Nietzsches aphorisms, this irony is the result of saying too much.63
Like the redoubling effects of the Gesamtkunstwerk, this mode of essayism
pursues the i (pleion, too much) to the point of o (pleionasmos, tautology). Rather than being dispersive, derealizing by montage (as in the
epic or Brechtian mode), it is integrative, derealizing by hyperbole. Instead of
a moment of rupture, it creates a moment in which the overintegration begins to
buckle under its own weight. This tipping point is probably best illustrated by
Syberbergs most complete foray into the world of Wagnerhis 1982 film/
opera Parsifal, which has actors lip-synch to an operatic sound track sung by
never-glimpsed singers. The first scene after the overture has the knight Gurnemanz address two young pages who have stood watch outside the grail
knights castle.
Chions claim of acousmatic uncanniness notwithstanding, the initial
impression of the scene is precisely the opposite: the scene is, if anything, too
coherent, each part corresponding too well to all the others. Not only are the
two young squires played by actual young boys rather than the usual female
sopranos with bound chests and cropped hair; the set seems more realistic than
what even the most ambitious designer might achieve on the stage of an opera
house, and the cognitive dissonance between the lip-synching actors and the
bodiless offscreen voices, indeed off-putting and uncanny elsewhere in the
film, barely registers at all because of the shots width. The scene works all too
well, to the point that, when the sun comes up and the background is illuminated by a rear projection of a Caspar David Friedrich painting, we may find
ourselves smiling at . . . well, at what? If the appearance of Friedrichs crucifix
(taken from the Tetschen altarpiece) is an alienating moment, that alienation
has nothing to do with factors external to or intruding on the scenerather, the
scene buckles under the weight of detail perfectly compounded on detail,
agreement that somehow transcends naturalism and becomes again stridently
artificial.
This bifocal vision with its insistence on the phantasmagoric and the
demystificatory is characteristic for Syberbergs essayism in general. On the
one hand, the sequences textual modes, its careful juxtaposition of film, music,
and image clearly bespeak an essayistic legacy. The film appropriates texts and
63. Nehamas, Nietzsche, 23.
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images and subjects them to an (albeit archaic kind of) montage. However,
much like in Syberbergs written essays, it is not quite clear whether this montage allows any other voices to emerge, or whether Syberberg the Wagnerian
does not simply replace any polyphony and counterpoint with a Gesamtkunstwerk. Of course, as evidenced by Winifred Wagners constant downward glances
on which Syberbergs camera fixates with such relish, there is little that is more
artificial, more supplementary, and hence more capable of superannuation
than the written word. In defending his strangely overdetermined aesthetic
project, Syberberg turned to written essayism that in many ways picked up
on the same two poles. Rather than allay or stabilize the inherent strangeness
of Hitlers filmic world, Syberbergs writings tend to compound and accentuate its oddities. Just as Hitler, his essays are syncretic, esoteric, and profoundly
alienating while being suffused with an overweening and all-knowing authorial subjectivity that always already knows what bit of discourse goes where.
Here, then, the moment of totality, associated with dream, madness, and psychosis in Hitler the film, is enforced via more traditionally writerly foibles:
megalomania, obscenity, and paranoia.
So far I have associated the essay with a queasy, uncanny sort of immortality.
Like Nietzsche, Syberberg is striving, according to form, to substance, for a
small immortality [der Form, der Substanz nach um eine kleine Unsterblichkeit bemht].64 But, if Nietzsches aphorism plays with the idea of la petite
mort, then what of essayisms little immortality? Little death comes after
the expenditure of life force, upon the conclusion of somethinga little
immortality would then be the obverse, a never-concluding expenditure. And
it is not simply the question of product that is at issue here: Roland Barthes
points to the little death as the objective of all literature;65 a constant productivity without release, is that still an experience of literature? Syberbergs films
often feel endless, but critics have by and large countenanced, if not the films
themselves, then at least their longueur. But the obsessively productive quality
of Syberbergs essayismcompounding six-hundred-page books on sevenhour filmsseems designed to test the limits of our patience for little immortality. Where is our moment of respiteis there not one point, one bad review,
one prize Syberberg did not get that would not have to occasion the spilling of
more ink?
64. Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, vol. 2 (Munich: Hanser, 1954), 1026; Nietzsche, The AntiChrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 223.
65. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Macmillan, 1975), 58.
164Politics of Longevity
Adrian Daub165
the essay would become a mere precursor, and no independent value could be
found for it [nur Vorlufer zu sein, und kein selbstndiger Wert wre fr ihn
erfindbar].68 There is thus something utterly perverse in offering up an essay
(there is no the essay; the essay is necessarily several), along with the aesthetic
that would obviate the necessity of essayistic form altogether. But the gesture
gets stranger yet if one takes into account that, after creating an essay film
which proclaimed the abrogation of essayism in its opening titles, Syberberg
writes a volume of reflections, themselves essayistic, on that very essay film.
In other words, the groe sthetik that for Lukcs marked the end point or
telos of all essayism (a defragmented world of renewed coherence) for Syberberg becomes the starting point of an increasingly fractured aesthetic practice. Where for Lukcs the ceaseless buzzing and blooming confusion of
essayism would cease with the messianic arrival of the groe sthetik, Syberberg actively decomposes that groe sthetik through his own overproductivity. Much like a joke that continues after its punchline, the groe sthetik
loses its monolithic character once it is continued and expanded ad nauseam
Syberbergs essayism thus reverses the temporality of Lukcss essay, turning
its teleology into decomposition.
It is this breakdown, this decomposition characteristic of Syberbergs
essayism, that invites the pathologization and diagnosis of his films and texts.
They are essays less in search of our agreement or self-recognition than in
search of a psychologist, a cunning diagnostician; they claim to speak for a
community but instead bespeak individual psychological obsessions. In a brief
prefatory note to Nietzsche contra Wagner Nietzsche writes that this is an
essay for psychologists, but not for Germans [da dies ein Essay fr Psychologen ist, aber nicht fr Deutsche].69 For psychologists but not for Germans
not for German psychologists but for Germans tout court. In fact, Nietzsche
seems to imply that to be a German and to be a psychologist is a contradiction in terms. And an essay, it seems, would address itself to psychologists
rather than Germans. What kind of an essay would not be for Germans? In
the context of Nietzsche contra Wagner, Nietzsche has in mind that his diagnosis of a German malaise will not be able to penetrate through the degenerate
irrationality of German Wagner adoration. The essays labor for Nietzsche
consists in cutting through irrationality; however, it is equally clear that this
does not make the essay rational in any straightforward sense.
68. Ibid., 37.
69. Nietzsche, Werke, 2:1037.
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Adrian Daub167
that will be possible at the conclusion of said mourning work. As such, Hitler
is not something to be emulated or repeated in time; its reception, as obsessively chronicled and reflected in Syberbergs essays, cannot be that of gradual
acceptance, as more and new examples of its aesthetic spring up (something a
traditional essayist might chronicle in his or her work), but has to be almost
epiphanic, a sudden and total embrace. This is precisely why Syberbergs written essays are always works of disappointment: the very iteration of the essayistic oeuvre is an index of the failure of the epiphanic moment. The essay no
longer chronicles the gradual acceptance of a new aesthetic but rather mourns
that the messianic moment passed unseized. In fact, the nature of Hitlers megalomania thus formally requires disappointment, has disappointment already
built in.
We might thus describe Syberbergs essayistic output as reverse prophecy: rather than play John the Baptist to the messianic event, it either coincides
with whatever it announces or in fact follows it in time, to explain why the
messianic event had to be misunderstood, why the moment had to be missed.
Many of those writing on Syberbergs filmic essays have turned to his written
ones for further elucidation and have, one and all, returned frustrated and
somewhat scandalized. His virulent and sometimes whining73 essays add
little to the films; what is more, they do not even come close to fulfilling their
ostensible mission, to describe the reception of the films they are companioned
with. They contain extremely little in the way of concrete incidents, specific
observation, or even individual reviewsDie freudlose Gesellschaft refers to
reviewers by their initials, but rarely if ever cites their opinions. Their effect
(and, I would argue, their intent) is to detract from rather than add to the stature of the films they accompanythey are not justifications, they are indictments, a Destruktion of the messianic moment that has, in the moment of
essayistic writing, already passed.
Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget, written as a companion piece to
Parsifal, contains the infamous essay Bekenntnis jenseits der Nacht, which
constituted the pice de rsistance in Santners characterizing of Syberbergs
later writings as an anti-Semitic version of Nietzsches anti-Socratic theory
of tragedy. Much of the essay presents the vituperation of the gay community
of the international art world [Schwulenszene des internationalen Kunstbetriebes],74 leftists who tried to endear themselves to the generation of the
emigrants [sich Liebkind zu machen bei der Generation der Emigranten] as
73. Corrigan, New German Film, 146.
74. Syberberg, Vom Unglck und Glck der Kunst, 103.
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the only authority untainted by the guilt of the fathers, and filmmakers who
courted public opinion [ffentlichem Medienurteil] like parasites, feeding on
the surfeit of the semblance of life [berflu des Scheinlebens].75 Santner is
absolutely correct about the anti-Semitic vocabulary deployed in this essay, but
what makes this vocabulary all the more maddening is that its anti-Semitism
seems to be deployed in the service of an aesthetic effect. In the opening, I
pointed to the word Schlesien as such a marker deployed to mask a wound
about which one may not speakthis essay consists almost entirely of such
words: the semblance of life, parasites, their media [ihren Medien]. And who
they are is only barely camouflaged, as Santner points out: the strange locution sich Liebkind machen refers to a recognizably German Jewish name.
Syberberg styles his indictment as a self-accusation: he has kept faith
with the exiles, groveled for film funds, and partaken of the Schwulenszene of
the international art world. Whatever we might accuse him of, he has gotten
there before us. Yet we are always tempted to go farther in our accusations, are
downright invited to do so: as the word Liebkind makes clear, the text invites
and rewards a hermeneutics of suspicion, and its aggressive gyrations, like
much of Syberbergs writings, are self-defeating, or rather self-indicting. The
aggressive confession of Bekenntnis jenseits der Nacht is meant to scandalize, to enlist us in the same rejection of Syberberg in which Syberberg himself is engaged. As so often is the case, Syberberg the essayist turns this sort
of global kind of rejection into a quasi-existential gesture. This is, in short,
Syberbergs version of the blackened breast: truly rejecting the corrupt postwar
world would not only entail a retreat into inner exile but also require the will to
be wronged, misunderstood. It would mean to renounce everything, also that
fairy tale belief [Mrchenglauben] that good will triumph in the end and that
the Princes or his good deeds will be discovered against what his detractors
[alle Verleumder] say. But, Syberberg asks, who is strong enough for this
[wer ist stark genug dazu]?76
Being strong enough is precisely Syberbergs project: he knowingly
deploys language that will be instantly legible and read against him. He invites
and rewards viewers to understand him better than he seems to understand
himself. He hammers his theses to the point that they altogether stop being
political (about the Left, about gays, about Jews, etc.)instead, they speak
only of the personal obsessions of the man who wrote them. They impart no
information other than seemingly against their own intentionsbut this is of
75. Ibid., 104.
76. Ibid., 106.
Adrian Daub169
course the strategy familiar from Kierkegaard: If the man whom Regine
Olsen loved had to leave her, then [that man] had to be a criminal and a seducer,
so that her path to life may be open.77 Montaigne, too, declares his book an
integral part of my life;78 the querulous multiplicity of the essays collected
there are not concerned with some third-hand, extraneous purpose79 but are
gestures of life itself. They are not expressions of their writers unstable posture, insofar as their diffident assemblage replicates the way individual human
actions never manage to come together into a coherent whole; they instead
constitute that unstable posture.
This is the possibility that a thinking-through of Syberberg as essayist
raises: just like Montaignes essayism, Syberbergs seems imbued with a creaturely ethic, if one wants to call it that, and with a kind of affirmation of life
in contradiction and incoherence. Lukcss essay on Kierkegaard suggests that
the blackened breast is meant to clear a path to life. Is this Syberbergs ultimate aim, too? Do his self-subverting megalomania and the self-pathologizing
obsessiveness of his discourse map out a similar path to life? If so, however,
they do so for others: Syberbergs essayism shares Montaignes interest with
managing everyday, creaturely life, or Nietzsches interest in historys utility
for life; but he combines it with an ethic of sacrifice inherited from Hlderlin (who saw sacrifice as a form of absolute communication)80 and Nietzsche.
Syberberg flamboyantly ruins his reputation, squanders his fame, alienates
friendsin short, blackens the breastso as to clear a path to life for others.
In this too, then, Syberbergs essayism is the antimourning work par excellence: mourning work, after all, has to be performed by the mourner; here
we have instead the prophetic, histrionic individual performing the mourning all by himself for the uncomprehending massto exhibit, to spit at or to
kiss his hand.
If this is the upshot of Syberbergs essayism, this final turn of the interpretive screw does little to make the filmmakers project more palatable. Syber
bergs self-stylization as a messianic prophet of mourning, blackening his
breast before a populace that, like that of Jorge Luis Borgess Three Versions
of Judas,81 must not know the extent of and the artifice behind his sacrifice, is
77. Lukcs, Die Seele und die Formen, 68.
78. Montaigne, Complete Essays, 504.
79. Ibid.
80. Karin Schutjer, Narrating Community after Kant: Schiller, Goethe, and Hlderlin (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2001), 175.
81. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998),
16367.
170Politics of Longevity