The Politics of Longevity - Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Essayism and The Art of Outliving Oneself

New German Critique
The Politics of Longevity:

Hans-Jrgen Syberbergs Essayism
and the Art of Outliving Oneself
Adrian Daub
If my descendants have other tastes, I shall have ample
means for revenge: for they could not possibly have
less concern about me than I will have about them by
that time. All the contact I have with the public in this
book is that I borrow their tools of printing, as being
swifter and easier. In recompense, perhaps I shall keep
some pat of butter from melting in the market place.
Montaigne, Essays
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.
137
Published by Duke University Press
New German Critique
138Politics of Longevity
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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Adrian Daub139
This article proposes that in Winifred Wagner Syberberg found his

unlikely muse of aesthetic self-destruction and that his own essayistic project,
pursued through word and film and interview, constituted in essence a strategy
for outliving oneself. The strange blend of styles Syberberg employed in his
filmic and written essayistic output of the 1970s and 1980s seems calculated
not only to make visible a particular kind of malignant obsolescence but to
ensure that Syberbergs own essays aged badly. When Syberberg interviewed
Winifred Wagner in 1975, she was an isolated, embittered old crone, hopelessly out of step with the world around herwithin a decade, Syberberg
seemed to occupy much the same place, and while he blamed this fact on all
manner of things, it is at least arguable that his obsolescence was self-imposed.
After all, in his self-justifications he increasingly reached for anti-Semitic and
revisionist topoi, all but ensuring that, just as Winifreds gestures (aided by
Syberbergs editing), even when trying to cleanse themselves of Nazism, his
efforts solicited only more suspicion and rejection. In short, it seems he had
learned obsolescence from Frau Wagner herself.
In this regard Winifred Wagner was as good a teacher as any: what Brigitte Hamann calls Winifreds superannuation was not merely visible or perceptible in Syberbergs interviewsit was downright spectacular. Here was a
woman who not only refused to renounce and repress all that she had done and
thought before 1945 but had, when all of Germany was busy concocting stories
of supposed resistance to the Nazis, created a story for herself that, if anything,
suggested a longer and deeper relationship with Hitler than was actually the
case.2 It was the exact reverse of a Persilscheinas stridently as old Nazis
and Mitlufer whitewashed their records, she blackwashed hers. Syberberg
had set out to film an unrepentant Nazi, but what he got was much more: a
woman defiantly and flamboyantly out of joint with her culture, a malignant
anachronism that referred to the New York Jewish press as though nothing
had happened between 1933 and 1975.
It was a legerdemain that, before long, her interviewer would come to
employ himself. In contemplating the ramifications of German unification in
1989, Syberberg lists those things about which one may not speak; they are
familiar formulas for viewers of Hitler, Karl May, or Ludwig (beauty, feeling,
enthusiasm [Schnheit, Gefhl, Begeisterung]), but in their midst crops up a
nasty word, noxiously out-of-time and, in 1989, almost comically inopportune:
2. Brigitte Hamann, Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitlers Bayreuth (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 2006), 490.
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Schlesien.3 It squats like Winifred in Wahnfried, a resolute irritation in a time

that would like to pretend that German unification and Schlesien have nothing
to do with one another. The essay in which this unburied word with the great
troubling power is dropped and left lying, openly and provocatively, in the dust
is titledAntigone. While Antigone is of course a rather common figure in
German postwar culture, Syberberg outrageously chooses to have the offending corpse refer not to the unburied victims of Nazism but to matters unmentionable in the postwar moral consensus. It is an outrageousness he seems
giddily aware of.
Is it possible, then, that Syberberg, having realized the explosive potential of the kind of flamboyant obsolescence displayed by Winifred Wagner,
decided to deliberately employ as a strategy what in Winifred herself had
simply been a reaction formation? It is clear that Syberberg, the lionized hero
of academe, the alchemist who seemed to make nonbarbarous art after Ausch
witz, subsequently evinced a nearly uncanny knack for squandering his moral
high ground. Whatever the degree of self-consciousness to this project,
what matters for my argument is that this purposive profligacy has its formal
correlativesit is to some extent coterminous with Syberbergs essayism.
The need to squander all sympathy one elicits is at base nothing other than
what Sren Kierkegaards Fear and Trembling referred to as the mothers
blackened breast:4 the ethics of not wanting to be loved. Georg Lukcs
described this stratagem in a 1911 essay on Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen:
If the man whom Regine Olsen loved had to leave her, then the man who
left her had to be a villain and a seducer, so that her path to life might remain
open [dann sollte, der sie verlie, ein Schuft und Verfhrer sein, damit ihr
der Weg ins Leben offen stnde].5 That essay appeared in a volume titled
Soul and Forms, prefaced with one of the most enduring writings of Lukcss
early period: ber das Wesen und Form des Essays. But beyond the vagaries
of publication histories, too, blackening the breast and the practice of essayism are inextricably linked.
If there is something of a just-so story (How Syberberg Got His Infamy)
to tracing this trajectory across the different media under the rubric of essayism, there is a substantial hermeneutic payoff to the gambit as well. It will not,
3. Hans-Jrgen Syberberg, Vom Unglck und Glck der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Kriege (Munich: Matthes und Seitz, 1990), 161.
4. Sren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay (New York: Penguin, 2006), 10.
5. Georg Lukcs, Die Seele und die Formen (Berlin: Fleischel, 1911), 68. Kierkegaard himself
refers to his attempts to unseduce Regine Olsen as blackening the breast in his journals (Papirer,
16 vols. [Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 196878], 10: A 146, October 13, 1853).
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Adrian Daub141
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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lifeas in Montaigne, his essayism is not a reflection but an expression of life,

a form of organizing life. In keeping with the ethic of superannuation, however, Syberberg seems to regard the essay as a mode of sacrificing the self so
that others path to life might remain open.
What makes the connection between blackened breast and essay more than
just an editorial accident is that essays, like people, themselves have biographies, destinies integral rather than accidental to their quiddity. An essay is,
since Montaigne, a letting-stand of a snapshot. Like the body of Polynices,
the essay is a set of ideas, opinions, impressions decaying in public, a moment
lying on the field of battle to agebadly. Essays, insofar as they survive, are
outliving themselves. As Montaigne puts it, in a remark quoted above, the
essayist writes for his friends and neighbors; the public finds use in the essay
only insofar as it keep[s] some pat of butter from melting in the market
place.6 Here too, then, the image is of superannuation, of a melting, spoiling
body wrapped in the blanket of a dated, obsolescent essay.
But how can something offered with such wry self-deprecation as a
Montaigne essay be said to worry about such superannuation? Orson Welles
claimed that the essay does not date, because it represents the authors contribution, however modest, to the moment at which it was made.7 The relationship between moment and legacy concerns Lukcs as wellessays may well
become incomprehensible, he admits, but we read them nonetheless. The
obsolescence of an essay is thus not of a piece with that of a scientific hypothesis, which loses its value at the moment when a newer, better one comes
along.8 But that does not mean (pace Welles) that the essay knows no obsolescence: It cannot become superfluous [kann es nicht mehr berflssig
werden],9 but its aging, its faltering comprehensibility, and its incommensurability with our horizons appear to be very much part of the essay as form.
That is because the essay does not just champion the moment, is not
simply modest, as Welles would have it. It is that, to be sure; but it also
totalizes that moment, is flamboyantly immodest, and while as form it may
acknowledge the contingency of its insights, on the level of content it asserts
all the more apodictically what it knows will eventually be falsified. Unlike
the lyric, it arrests time but then surrenders the arrested moment to time. For
6. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1948), 504.
7. Cited in Jonathan Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2007), 136.
8. Lukcs, Die Seele und die Formen, 6.
9. Ibid., 7.
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Adrian Daub143
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.
12. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, vol. 2 (Paris: Charpentier, 1862), 52; Complete Essays of
Montaigne, 222.
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the organization of his sauces [la police de ses saulces]13 in a discourse

swollen with rich and magnificent words, and the very ones we use to talk
about the government of an empire.14 Yet it becomes clear elsewhere in the
Essays that the essay as genre is itself such a discourse that debates la police
de ses saulces in the tones otherwise reserved for theological debate: it is
obsessed with details, like the steward, stakes a ludicrous, impudent claim to
the dignity that attaches to theology (or metaphysics), yet in the end deals only
with the science of guzzling. Again and again in the Essays Montaigne distinguishes the sublime discourse of theology and the discourses appropriate
for more terrestrial, creaturely concerns.
In fact, these essayistic discourses seem to be, for Montaigne, coterminous with our creaturely constitution. For instance, Montaigne seems to regard
the humor of our whims, the inconstancy of our actions and inclinations as the
ultimate motivation behind the piecemeal knowledge of the essay: Not only
does the wind of accident move me at will, but, besides, I am moved and disturbed as a result merely of my own unstable posture,15 he writes, and his
descriptions of this unstable posture suggest strongly that the human patchwork, so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment,
plays its own game,16 resembles nothing so much as his own collection of
essays. Just as the essay is the myopic detail dressed in the garb of theological
dignity, so our average human wants and interests sabotage the coherent totality of life that Montaigne seems to associate with the ancients. A man who
has not directed his life as a whole toward a definite goal cannot possibly set
his particular actions in order. A man who does not have a picture of the whole
in his head cannot possibly arrange the pieces.17 On the one hand, we have a
coherent, overarching whole with a hint of the divine; on the other, a scattered,
necessarily multiple, necessarily contradictory assemblage of individual
moments, each imbued with a temporality born of mutability, instability, and
our animal fickleness.
If for Montaigne the essay is to some extent theology diverted by the
vicissitudes of creaturely life, by la police de ses saulces, then its longevity is
a result of this diversion: its eternity is that of theology, not, however, its
insights into the science of guzzling. The essay, which, as Adorno puts it,
inflames itself without scruples with that which others have done before [an
13. Montaigne, Essais, 51; Complete Essays, 222.
14. Montaigne, Complete Essays, 223.
15. Ibid., 242.
16. Ibid., 244.
17. Ibid., 243.
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Adrian Daub145
dem, was andere schon getan haben],18 is profoundly antiheroic. Is it not

precisely its longevity that makes it so? It shows up too late, overstays its
welcome, has the right comeback only on the way to the airport. Heroes live
on in legends; essayists, like diarists, live on in the embarrassing minutiae of
their own bodily infirmities, their own momentary and ill-considered obsessions and neuroses. Syberberg can complain that the feuilleton ridicules him
as hypersensitivebut this complaint itself is obscene, self-defeating, airs
dirty laundry. He can sententiously announce that the lack of recognition that
greeted his films and writings necessitated moving to a non-German publisher
(Diogenes in Zrich)only to hilariously undercut his posturing by publishing his next book with a German publisher once again. The prophetic stance
already contains its own future unmasking as pure histrionics; its relentlessness knows that it risks becoming symptom, megalomania. And here lies the
main distinction between Montaignes brief essays, his inconstant actions,
and Syberbergs overlong filmic and written essays: Montaignes essays are the
result of a diversion or decomposition of the totality of meaning that attends to
theological discourse or, as Lukcs will call it, the groe sthetik before
which the essays pride grows powerless;19 Syberbergs essays, however,
perform that diversion or decomposition themselves.
This seems to be at least implicitly Syberbergs own understanding: he
followed up both Hitler and Parsifal with a book of reflections and notes
(Die freudlose Gesellschaft and Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget,
respectively) interweaving the reception of his filmic essays with general
essayistic reflections on the current state of Germany; in the case of Hitler, he
even prefaced the actual film with a book-length explication of the films aesthetic and its initial reception in Germany. The essay positions itself, as Peter
Brger writes, in between the texts which it cites and comments on, and
which it provisionally connects to its situation20in this sense Syberbergs
essay films, and to some extent Germany itself, become textual fodder for his
essayistic mill. What these texts construct is an indictment of their time and
18. Theodor W. Adorno, Der Essay als Form, in Noten zur Literatur, vol. 11 of Gesammelte
Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 11.
19. The essay may calmly and proudly oppose its fragmentary nature to the small perfections
of scientific exactitude and impressionistic freshness; but its achievement, its fulfillment become
impotent once the big aesthetics has arrived (Ruhig und stolz darf der Essay sein Fragmentarisches den kleinen Vollendungen wissenschaftlicher Exaktheit und impressionistischer Frische
entgegen stellen, kraftlos aber wird seine reinste Erfllung, sein strkstes Erreichen, wenn die
groe sthetik gekommen ist) (Lukcs, Die Seele und die Formen, 3637).
20. Peter Brger, ber den Essay, in Das Denken des Herrn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1992), 10.
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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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techniques used by Montaigne, Rudolf Kassner, Nietzsche, William Hazlitt.

There is, then, something in these films that seems to compel viewers to
describe them in terms of writing. What is unusual in Syberbergs oeuvre is
that he takes that step himself, producing what might be called essay films as
well as more traditional essay textsand that he himself establishes correspondences, both implicit and explicit, between the essayistic techniques he
uses in both. Our Hitler is perhaps Syberbergs most famous entry into the
essay-film canon, and it is the best place to examine those features of Syberbergs films that qualify them as essay films, and the kind of essayistic tradition these features place him in. While most essay films identified by film
scholars rely on their essayistic forebears without explicit acknowledgment,
and at times may not even be aware of those forebears (Corrigan, for instance,
counts Michael Moore as a film essayist, who would probably fail to list either
Montaigne or Nietzsche as among his chief influences), Syberberg is not just
thorough but downright obsessive in constructing a lineage for his practice,
and he understands that practice as in some sense essayistic.
Hitlers assignation to the essay film genre is a common, though by no
means universal, one. What threatens to escape attention in this straightforward designation is that, for all the things essays traditionally are, they are
rarely ever monumental. There is, in other words, something troubling about
an essayist who makes a seven-hour picture and explains it in a six-hundredpage book. That is not to say that calling Hitler an essay film is somehow illadvised; however, it seems that any exploration of the films essayism would
require thinking through (1) the question of how its monumentality, its aesthetic bombast square with and complicate its undeniably essayistic character,
and (2) the question of what precisely the relationship is between films like
Hitler and Winifred Wagner and the long tail of written essays and books they
seem to drag after them. When these films first came out, most critics tended
to regard the books and articles either as distractions or as aides for deciphering the films they accompaniedignoring the fact that they too formed an
essayistic project that could be neither fully delimited from nor fully identified
with the essay films on which they commented.
In an early scene in Syberbergs Hitler, a Film from Germany, a circus
announcer (played by Heinz Schubert) addresses himself to the camera using
a giant mouthpiece while standing in front of a giant back projection, first of an
anonymous crowd, then of planet Earth. The mouthpiece is suspended from a
scaffold, and when Schubert lets go of it, it begins rotating slowly, so that at
one point the planet appears to be behind the mouthpiece, while at another
it functions almost as the cameras mouthpiece through which Earth appears
New German Critique
Adrian Daub149
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.
New German Critique
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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Adrian Daub151
representation.32 Montaignes essayism confronts a coherent, overarching

whole with divine authority with a scattered, necessarily multiple, necessarily
contradictory confusion of moments, born of the mutability, instability, and
our fickleness of the embodied subject.
Syberbergs Hitler is not in fact a body, but rather, as we are told even
in the German title, it is A Film from Germany, a film to be judged by the
filmic medium itself. How could a body enter into this spectral production?
Indeed, the body enters in the form of a question, of a constant questioning
and destabilization of the seemingly regressive trial of images by images.
Syberbergs film is occupied with the trouble with Hitler;33 Hitlers absent
body34 is the films central concern. Syberbergs provocation is a double one:
he addresses himself exclusively to the image of Hitler, but at the same time he
displays an obscene fixation on the (often bodily) details of Hitler, which could
be revealing if they were few and carefully assembled, but which in their sheer
quantity (Hitlers valet discourses about the dictators health and dietary regimen for nearly forty minutes!) cannot be significant. Syberbergs film proceeds
by insisting that it will address itself to Hitler only insofar as he signifies (as
Sontag puts it, Hitler as sign), yet it turns its attention to the insignificant
Hitler, that part neither indicative of good or evil, or anything else for that matter. This is what Syberberg calls his quest for the banal, his own cinematic
police de ses saulces.
In charting this banality, the film circulates between an intense preoccupation with bodiliness and with those factors that absent the bodies in question, make them unavailableabove all film. Hitlers interest in the body
behind the film is marked from the outset as somewhat perverse and certainly obscenewhether it presents Hitler as an anus expelling gas (The
greatest fart of the century [Der grte Furz des Jahrhunderts]) or focuses
ten-minute shots on Heinrich Himmlers fleshy gut, Hitler consistently indulges
a gaze that cannot get enough of the body. In an iconic scene, the dead body of
Hitler rises from the grave of Richard Wagner. Of course, because we dont
have a Hitler in a cage, to exhibit, to spit at or to kiss his hand [da wir keinen
Hitler haben, im Kfig, zum Ausstellen, zum Anspucken oder zum Handkssen], these bodies have to be spectacularly absent for much of Hitler. The
actors lend their bodies to many identities; several actors inhabit a particular
personality or identity during the film. Often the film replaces the dead body
32. Jean Starobinski, Montaigne en mouvement (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).
33. Santner, Trouble with Hitler, 524.
34. Cited in Timothy Corrigan, New German Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 157.
New German Critique
with a ventriloquist dummy or a hand puppet. It thus approaches bodies through

those who handled, touched, observed the historical bodies behind the Holocausthence the importance of masseurs, valets, body men. In their (at times
interminable) descriptions, usually taken verbatim from historical accounts, we
once again do not get the body, just everything around itthe body is the limit
we can approach asymptotically but can never actually touch.
But we also approach these bodies through different typesHitlers projectionist Ellerkamp, for instance, or the bodyguard who actually burned Hitlers dead body in the Reichskanzlei garden. These characters seem to have
to do less with a close approach to the body than with absenting it. As Roland
Barthes makes clear, the voice, its grain, is an eloquent disclosure of the
body that emits itaccordingly, the film focuses on dislocated and disembodied voices in search of a body, what Michel Chion calls acousmatic voice.35
In one scene, for instance, the voice of Hitler aids the actor Heinz Schuberts
transformation from circus announcer into Hitlerthe transformation depends
on the fact that the voice has no clear home on or off screen, but rather floats
about ready to attach itself to any or no body. The uncanniness of the out-ofbody voice is a central preoccupation of Syberbergs Parsifal,36 but Hitlers
essayism is also primarily voiced. All the texts on which the film meditates
and which it puts into interplay are spokenits voices do not, however, coincide with personas or particular stances; discourse and voice seem incongruous. Whether voice-over, acousmtrie, or dubbedHitlers voices seem to be
mostly ventriloquists voices.
The strange status of the voice in Hitler, always somewhat dislocated yet
always in desperate search for location, is emblematic for the status of the body
in the film in general. While the film fetishizes the absent body, its fetishism
proceeds by a strange mixture of attraction and aggression. Throughout the
film there is an antagonistic motive (attempting to bury Hitler) and an obsessive search for the very object of that motive (the absent body). Many of the
films Frankensteinian attempts to bring to life Hitler-the-body stake their hope
on the alchemy of the filmic imagecompounding footage, sound documents,
interviews, reenactments. But when Hitler comes most alive, it is indeed as
puppethere he is really present as what the film claims he was (and as that
body which the film wants to bury). Much has been made of the derealizing,
alienating effect of Hitlers puppetry sequences. The actors sit with Hitler,
Himmler, Speer on their laps, speaking into the camera, although always con35. Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 18.
36. Ibid., 153.
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Adrian Daub153
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.
New German Critique
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).
New German Critique
Adrian Daub155
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.
New German Critique
constantly establishing resemblances and analogies) and his concomitant

literal-mindedness.
In Syberbergs essay, an actual trial is under way, an exorcism within
the collective psyche that is (always at the moment of locution) identical with
the individual one.50 At those moments, Syberberg as author, his audience, and
his text are subjected to a forcible integration or even identification: Syberberg
as text, insistently eliding the public (the politics, the establishment, the cinema) and the (corporeal) private (airing dirty laundry, being just about personal fixations). As noted above, both the dispersive surrender to texts and
the insistent (over)integration of the material into mere extensions of an overweening single authorial subjectivity can be shown to be part of the essayistic tradition. However, Syberberg uses his films hybrid aesthetic to make this
doubleness not just visible but unavoidable. Through his insistent commingling of alienation effects and illusion effects, Syberberg translates what is at
most an ambivalence in essayistic form into a stark contradiction of absolutely opposed terms.
It was the banal side of National Socialism that ignited Syberbergs interest in
the subject matter in the mid-1970sit was Uncle Wolf, not the Fhrer,
whom he came to Wahnfried to find. And of course the story of Hitler told in
Winifred Wagner is essentially an airing of dirty laundryit is a family story,
one that the films subject perhaps should not be telling. Wahnfried, Syberberg
remarks in the film, is a place that links indivisibly the private and the official
[untrennbar das Private und Offizielle], where family history and national
culture [Famliengeschichte und Nationalkultur] are nearly indistinguishable.
Once again, the essay mediates between public discourse and the maybe
too private. Marcia Landy has rightly pointed to Winifred Wagner as a film
essay,51 and although its style is noticeably distinct from Hitlers, what connects both films is their emphasis on discourse: Winifred Wagner consists
mainly of the claustrophobically framed subject herself (a claustrophobia also
used in Hitler) discoursing either from notes or from memory, intercut with
50. In this, Syberberg once again seems to hark back to Montaigne. As Starobinski has pointed
out, Montaignes essayism emerged from an almost baroque vision of the theatrum mundi, an
understanding of the thoroughgoing dissimulation of immediacy, such that every engagement with
culture itself carries a whiff of inauthenticity and even mendacity. However, Montaignes essayism
is not conceived as a corrective that is outside this theatrum but understands itself as part of the
practice it critiques. Similarly, Syberberg literalizes the trial metaphor, but what is on trial is the
film itself as much as its nominal subjects.
51. Marcia Landy, Politics, Aesthetics, and Patriarchy in the Confessions of Winifred Wagner, New German Critique, no. 18 (1979): 155.
New German Critique
Adrian Daub157
other bits of discoursequotes, questions, commentaries. But it is not simply

their essayistic way with words that connects these seemingly disparate films
the two poles of cinematic essayism Syberberg puts into play in his Hitler film
make their presence felt in this earlier work as well.
Winifred Wagner begins the film the same way she actually began her
sit-downs with Syberbergdiscoursing to him (seated behind the camera) at
length about her early childhood and introduction to Wahnfried, uninterrupted
and in a rather rehearsed fashion, at times consulting her notes. Syberberg
for his part appears to be aiding Winifreds uninterrupted dialoguebut he
appears (offscreen but on film) doing just that. It is Winifreds role to constantly attempt a seamless discursive production, while it falls to the filmmaker to anarchically, perhaps even a bit sadistically, interrupt and unsettle the
very seamlessness of the discourse. At the beginning of each day of shooting
(clearly identified through intertitles), Syberberg shows Winifred sitting down
in her study, a carefully arranged and presented bourgeois idyll; he allows her
to decide when to roll the camera and what to talk aboutexcept of course that
he (1) does not actually follow her directives and (2) includes those very directives in his film.
Winifred even includes emendations of previous statements that she
reads as though they were preformulated press releasesNachtrge, as she
calls themwhich she seems to assume will be edited together with the material it pertains to, which in Winifred Wagner they are not. Syberberg the interviewer appears to be goading Winifred into a kind of totalizing production
that Syberberg the filmmaker (and editor) then almost brutally undercuts. For
instance, when Winifred describes the ramifications of the outbreak of World
War I on the Bayreuth Festspiele, a narrative that seems particularly canned
and rehearsed, the camera zooms in on her face, thereby emphasizing Winifreds eyes fixed on her notes. By emphasizing not only the producedness of
her discourse but also the rather imperious control she exerts over that discourse, Syberberg seems not simply to indict Winifred (as someone who has
something to hide), he also associates her with the totalizing, all-controlling,
overweening production of the Gesamtkunstwerk. By prefacing several of the
days into which the interview is subdivided (of which there are five, rather
than the Rings four) with their own overture, in which Winifred situates
herself in the space in which she will be interviewed (sitting down at her desk,
perusing her notes), Syberberg further heightens the analogy between Winifreds discourse and the Wagnerian artwork.
The politics of Winifred Wagner proceeds from an insistent gendering
of the two aspects of Syberbergs aesthetic: just like the Gesamtkunstwerk,
New German Critique
Winifreds discourse conceals, obfuscates, and overwhelms the audience

with its well-prepared and well-arrayed wealth of details. The filmmakers
devices, on the other hand, the camera, the printed intertitles, the counterintuitive editing choices, function, as Marcia Landy puts it, as Brechtian distancing device[s] to call attention to the contradictions and omissions in Winifreds narration.52 In her discussion of the film, Landy claims that Winifreds
discourse alludes to the rhetorical, heavily orchestrated, visually opulent,
strenuously scripted art of the Gesamtkunstwerk, but she fails to note that the
same is true of Winifreds discourse itself (as presented by Syberberg)it too
is heavily rhetorical, orchestrated, opulent, and strenuously scripted. As a total
aesthetic (and by consequence depoliticized) production, it virtually calls out
for the stark simplicity of Syberbergs editing style, anti-rhetorical [and]
visually and aurally limited.53
Deceptive, artificial, overwhelming feminine aesthetic productivity meets
masculine demystification. Winifred is given leeway to produce enough discourse to hang herself with: she is afforded the luxury of glancing at her notes,
only to have that gesture radically foregrounded to the point that her discourse
is always already suspicious; she is given control over the sequence of questions, only to have Syberbergs edits reframe that control as imperiousness. Any
subjective power she is given paradoxically redoubles on her, making her ever
more an object of the (male) filmmaking subject. In Winifred Wagner, then, the
two essayistic polarities that characterize Syberbergs Hitler face each other, if
anything, in even greater starkness and irreconcilability: the deceptive overintegration of the Gesamtkunstwerk and the unsettling alienation effects of the
epic theater are not only linked with femininity and masculinity in general,
the films pas de deux stages their confrontation as that between two persons.
In Hitler this personified contradiction, which gives Winifred Wagner its
unsettling undertones of masculinist aggression, has become a kind of formal
schizophrenia, and that aggression itself has turned into auto-aggression. On
the one hand, Syberbergs film disperses its authorial voice, proffers various
and at times contradictory opinions, uses editing and montage (especially of
sound) to unsettle any unitary meaning its aesthetic production may contain.
On the other, Syberbergs film is hawkish in its insistence on the primacy of
the aesthetic itself, positing it over and against the real, however conceived.
In so doing, it recurs to an odd marriage of Richard Wagners aesthetic of the
Gesamtkunstwerk and Bertolt Brechts epic theater (what Syberberg terms
anti-Aristotelian theater). This odd combination of the spectacular or phan52. Ibid.
53. Ibid., 154.
New German Critique
Adrian Daub159
tasmagoric, on the one hand, and the defamiliarizing (dereifying), 54 on

the other, emerges paradigmatically in the films opening. This sequence also
inaugurates the insistent genealogization of both techniques: Syberberg uses
neither in ignorance of or without regard for their particular histories, the projects and commitments they are entangled in. Syberberg retains this double
commitment throughout his film, a double commitment that corresponds to
two coexistent strands of essayism.
Part 1 of Hitler, a Film from Germany opens on a painting of a wooded
landscape, taken from Ludwig IIs Munich palace and featured prominently
in Syberbergs Requiem for a Virgin King (1972), where it figured as the object
of Ludwigs yearning (Sehnsucht), his Garden of Eden. The sound track underscores the association: the first few bars of the overture to Parsifal, one of Wagners most phantasmagoric pieces and a locus classicus for Adornos argument that Wagners music transfigures historical time into pure space. The
annihilation of time and history is indeed one of the overarching principles
of Syberbergs aesthetic: the film unfolds in its entirety on a studio stage, hermetically sealed off, where time becomes spatial55 as sound and image (be
it in the shape of front projections or distant sound and music).
The opening continues with a prolonged series of zooms and dissolves,
showing first a drop shape, then a snow globe. Inside it, we can eventually
make out the Black Mary, the worlds first film studio, around it a backdrop
from a Mlis film. Another lap dissolve finally reveals the studio in which
Hitler is to be performed. Strewn about the stage we see the often bizarre props
of the film to come (Sontag speaks of an allegory-littered wasteland);56 the
camera zooms in on the stage, slowly eclipsing the cinematic apparatus, until
the frame contains only a smoking carcass on a stone slab (later revealed to be
Goebbels) and a giant tree, the Weltesche (World Ash Tree), an actual backdrop
from the first Bayreuth performance of Wagners Walkre, which appears as a
frontal projection, a technique that recurs throughout the film. Eventually, the
projection takes up the entire screen, and we cut to the credits.
As in Winifred Wagner, we are introduced to the props, to the locus
of performance (and to its outside, which is not again glimpsed in the film)
before they occur in any fictive context. Yet the very way in which they lie
about reminds one of a crime scene: their distribution is at once accidental
and necessary, and this storehouse of allegories signifies precisely by the very
54. Jameson, In the Destructive Element Immerse, 100.
55. Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat, 45.
56. Susan Sontag, Syberbergs Hitler, in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1980), 139.
New German Critique
haphazardness of its arrangement, by the fact that these powerful dialectical

images are already present, waiting to be involved in some kind of action,
waiting to mean. How the stage and its objects are revealed both as means of
aesthetic production and as materialized allegorical images is characteristic of
the twin legacies of Wagner and Brecht in Syberbergs oeuvre:57 Syberbergs
props (much like his subjects) are dereified and mystified, at once just things
and more than things.
The sequence is accompanied by two rather lengthy pieces of text (as
well as a short quote that opens the latter), one in the form of subtitles over the
painting, the other spoken from the first of the films several offscreen voices
(in this case Andr Heller). One emphasizes the importance and dangerous
lure of the imagination and sounds a cautionary yet hopeful note: Long is the
history of faith, its victories over us and its defeat at our hands.58 The spoken
text opens with a quote from Heinrich Heine: Denk ich an Deutschland in
der Nacht / bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht [I think of Germany in the night /
and then sleep leaves me]. Heines poem (Nachtgedanken) treats Germany
as at once an object of Sehnsucht and something of a night terror: The poem
concludes, with typical Heinian irony, with a French daybreak that dispels
the German nightmare.
Yet the main text (one could even say the mission statement of Hitler,
a Film from Germany), which follows the Heine quote, clearly calls for a lingering in the German nightmare, in the calamitous space of the imagination.
Whereas in Winifred Wagner, the filmmaker used montage and written texts to
undercut Winifreds deception, Hitler instead thinks with the deception rather
than demystify it. It is, we are informed, in this seven-hour dream sequence
that we are finally putting him, this Hitler, on trialwe with our possibilities. The opening texts are thus in disagreement with one another, while the
opening images (Garden of Eden, World Ash Tree) point to the phantasmagoric, spectacular qualities of the Gesamtkunstwerk, which is characterized precisely by a lack of dialogue, by constant and insistent agreement.
The sound track that underpins this second text is once again significant:
it is an entracte from Rheingold,59 which uncannily mirrors the concerns
expressed in the text Heller reads. At least at this moment, then, far from inter57. Jameson, In the Destructive Element Immerse, 105.
58. Hans-Jrgen Syberberg, Hitler: A Film from Germany, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982), 26.
59. It may be observed that using an entracte (Verwandlungsmusik) further foregrounds the
theatricality of this opening sequence. After all, an entracte is where a play (or opera) acknowledges that it has to be produced and does not simply exist (which is the mark of phantasmagoria).
However, in the case of Wagner, Verwandlungsmusik is indeed often intended to preclude such
New German Critique
Adrian Daub161
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.
New German Critique
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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Adrian Daub163
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.
New German Critique
Syberbergs verbal incontinence had, if not by his admission, then at

least by his contemporaries assessments, something pathological about it.
Lopate has pointed to the linkage of the essay with a confession of pathology,
prejudice, or limitation.66 At first glance, Syberbergs written output seems far
from professing any such pathology or limitation, owing more to the bombast
of Nietzsches Ecce Homo than to Hazlitts understated ironyif anything, it
appears to betray pathology and limitation despite itself. Yet the ease with
which one sees through Syberbergs bluster to the neurosis, myopia, and paranoia that are easily discerned behind his discourse raises the question
whether the very transparency of the surface texts ridiculousness solicits a
hermeneutic of suspicion. No reader, it seems, could possibly take Syberbergs
discourse at face value; one is almost forced to understand it as hysterical,
eminently capable of being deciphered but unable to decipher itself. In other
words, Syberbergs writings share his films preoccupation with and indulgence of the banalthe obsessions they wear on their sleeves are trivial,
their grievances petty, their presentation shot through with equal amounts
montage and phantasmagoric bombast.
We have already noted that Syberberg followed up both Hitler and Parsifal with extensive essay volumes meditating on the meaning of their respective
receptions. But at least Hitler is not simply shadowed by an essay text; it is also
accompanied by Der FilmDie Musik der Zukunft (again, an explicit reference
to Wagner), which the films opening credits call die sthetik zu diesem Film.
This expression deserves some parsing: the book in question is described as
Die sthetik; moreover, the aesthetics is not of this film, a mere justification of
certain poetic choices, but to this film, establishing forms that would exceed the
framework of Hitler and of which it is nonetheless the fulfillment. The essay
may calmly and proudly oppose its fragmentary nature to the small perfections
of scientific exactitude and impressionistic freshness; but its achievement, its
fulfillment become impotent once the big aesthetics has arrived.67 The groe
sthetik is thus the anti-essayistic par excellenceyet here a filmmaker not
only includes a reference to this all-deciding, all-settling aesthetic in his essay
film but places the reference in that films opening credits!
Lukcss point seems to be that the essay, as the artifact of a fragmented
world, gestures toward a totality that is no longer available; should that totality
of meaning once again become available (in the guise of the groe sthetik),
66. Lopate, In Search of the Centaur, 245.
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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.
New German Critique
What, then, is a psychologist? While the whole answer would require

(and has required)70 a book, suffice it to say that the psychologist reads for the
multiplicity of the I in reality (e.g., in morality). This psychology thus consists in the dispersal of the I while cultivating it as the position from which
to speak. There is thus an immanence to Nietzschean psychology that is lacking in what we would today recognize as psychology proper (which takes itself
to speak from an extrapsychic or metapsychic ground). What kind of essay
could address itself to such a psychologist? It would have to be marked by the
same kind of immanence, persist in its subject rather than leave it for some
outside ground. This essay would have to understand itself as identical with an
I, but an I that is always multiplealways immanent in the essay (rather
than a subjectivity that may or may not enter into the essay), underwriting
everything that essay says, even if each utterance ends up contradicting itself.
This simultaneous insistence on immanence and fragmentation is what
characterizes Nietzsches own discourse (beyond his essay on Wagner) and
what has made him so unacceptable to manyNietzsches madness or his
megalomania. This megalomania, Alenka Zupancic shows, is at once an
overassertion of an ego, as its complete withdrawal. The event (philosophy, art,
etc.) speaks and declares itselfwhere I was, it will be.71 While seemingly
lording over all its communications, the communicating subject in fact immolates itself on the pyre of the compound of its self-contradictory utterances. Of
course, Syberbergs text, too, has this visionary aspect, presuming to speak for
everybody and nobody. The Real of the declaration is the impossibility of distinguishing between its presence and its announcement. Similarly, the modern German notion of pathos (as opposed to the Greek concept) is characterized by a proximity to affect, closer to one of Wittgensteins toothaches
than to sublime feeling.72
Nietzsches style functions as a manifesto the fulfillment of which it is
itselfSyberbergs Hitler functions similarly. Hitlers theories about Germany
cannot be applied to any other aesthetic objectHitler is not its example but
its only possible fulfillment. The film calls for and announces itself, and it
denounces the world through its existence. Hitler is at once the film that allows
a working-through (Trauerarbeit), but it is also already the promise of the film
70. Most famously, Walter Kaufman, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Prince
ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981).
71. Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsches Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2003), 12.
72. Rainer Dachselt, Pathos: Tradition und Aktualitt einer vergessenen Kategorie der Poetik
(Heidelberg: Universittsverlag Winter, 2003), 232.
New German Critique
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.
New German Critique
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.
New German Critique
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
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.
New German Critique
profoundly juvenile, self-obsessed, laughable, to say nothing of offensive. But

the very devotion and exactitude with which Syberberg moves through his
parcours of postures and positions may yet contain, in a strange way, the
value, the objectivity of his hypersubjective, private, solipsistic funhouse.
It forces us to reckon with the ridiculous, pointless, juvenile, megalomaniacal,
farcical aspects of mourning. At the very least, Syberbergs essays do away
with the illusion that there is a tasteful, restrained, measured relationship to
a past so overwhelming, so ineluctable, so phantasmatically overdetermined
as the German catastrophe. By styling his essayism as a visual-textual original sin, casting himself as impudent, measureless messiah, ultimate victim
and redeemer, Syberberg, like Kierkegaard, draws our attention to the minutiae of mourning, the lazy Existenz that gets wished away or is supposedly
refined into the mourning work. Syberberg the essayist, whether or not by his
own design, is the prophet of the unacknowledged, oversubjective, creaturely
elements of our everyday relation to a traumatic, irremissible past.

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