Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
Encyclopedia
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg is a German film director
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...

, whose best known film is his lengthy feature, Hitler: A Film from Germany
Hitler: A Film from Germany
Hitler: A Film from Germany is a 1978 Franco-British-German experimental biopic directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, produced by Bernd Eichinger, and co-produced by the BBC. It starred Heinz Schubert, who played both Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler...

.

Early life

Born in Nossendorf
Nossendorf
Nossendorf is a municipality in the Mecklenburgische Seenplatte district, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany....

, Pomerania, the son of an estate owner, Syberberg lived until 1945 in Rostock
Rostock
Rostock -Early history:In the 11th century Polabian Slavs founded a settlement at the Warnow river called Roztoc ; the name Rostock is derived from that designation. The Danish king Valdemar I set the town aflame in 1161.Afterwards the place was settled by German traders...

 and Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

. In 1952 and 1953 he created his first 8 mm
8 mm film
8 mm film is a motion picture film format in which the filmstrip is eight millimeters wide. It exists in two main versions: the original standard 8mm film, also known as regular 8 mm or Double 8 mm, and Super 8...

 takes of rehearsals by the Berliner Ensemble
Berliner Ensemble
The Berliner Ensemble is a German theatre company established by playwright Bertolt Brecht and his wife, Helene Weigel in January 1949 in East Berlin...

. In 1953 he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany, where he in 1956 began studies in literature and art history, completing them the following year. He earned his doctorate in Munich with his thesis on "The Absurd
Absurdism
In philosophy, "The Absurd" refers to the conflict between the human tendency to seek value and meaning in life and the human inability to find any...

 in Dürrenmatt
Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Friedrich Dürrenmatt was a Swiss author and dramatist. He was a proponent of epic theatre whose plays reflected the recent experiences of World War II. The politically active author's work included avant-garde dramas, philosophically deep crime novels, and often macabre satire...

." In 1963 Syberberg began producing documentary films about Fritz Kortner
Fritz Kortner
Fritz Kortner was an Austrian-born stage and film actor and theatre director.Kortner was born in Vienna as Fritz Nathan Kohn. He studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. After graduating, he joined Max Reinhardt in Berlin in 1911 and then Leopold Jessner in 1916. Also in that year...

 and Romy Schneider
Romy Schneider
Romy Schneider was an Austrian-born German film actress who also held French citizenship.-Early life:Schneider was born Rosemarie Magdalena Albach in Nazi-era Vienna, six months after the Anschluss, into a family of actors that included her paternal grandmother Rosa Albach-Retty, her Austrian...

 for Bavarian Radio and others.

Cinema

For Syberberg, cinema is a form of Gesamtkunstwerk
Gesamtkunstwerk
A Gesamtkunstwerk is a work of art that makes use of all or many art forms or strives to do so...

. Many commentators, including Syberberg himself, have characterized his work as a cinematic combination of Bertolt Brecht's
Bertolt Brecht
Bertolt Brecht was a German poet, playwright, and theatre director.An influential theatre practitioner of the 20th century, Brecht made equally significant contributions to dramaturgy and theatrical production, the latter particularly through the seismic impact of the tours undertaken by the...

 doctrine of epic theatre and Richard Wagner's
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

 operatic aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

. Well known philosophers and intellectuals have written about his work, including Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag was an American author, literary theorist, feminist and political activist whose works include On Photography and Against Interpretation.-Life:...

, Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze
Gilles Deleuze , was a French philosopher who, from the early 1960s until his death, wrote influentially on philosophy, literature, film, and fine art. His most popular works were the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus , both co-written with Félix...

 and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher. He was also a literary critic and translator....

.

In 1975 Syberberg released Winifried Wagner und die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried
Wahnfried
Wahnfried may refer to:*Wahnfried, Richard Wagner's villa in Bayreuth*Richard Wahnfried , the long-time alias for German composer and musician Klaus Schulze...

 von 1914-1975
(English title: The Confessions of Winifred Wagner), a documentary about Winifred Wagner
Winifred Wagner
Winifred Wagner was an English woman married to Siegfried Wagner, Richard Wagner's son. She was the effective head of the Wagner family from 1930 to 1945, and a close friend of German dictator Adolf Hitler....

, an Englishwoman who had married Richard Wagner's
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

 son Siegfried
Siegfried Wagner
Siegfried Wagner was a German composer and conductor, the son of Richard Wagner. He was an opera composer and the artistic director of the Bayreuth Festival from 1908 to 1930.-Life:...

. The documentary attracted attention because it exposed Mrs Wagner's unrepentant admiration for Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

. The film thus proved an embarrassment to the Wagner family and the Bayreuth Festival
Bayreuth Festival
The Bayreuth Festival is a music festival held annually in Bayreuth, Germany, at which performances of operas by the 19th century German composer Richard Wagner are presented...

 (which she had run from 1930 until the end of the Second World War). Winifred Wagner objected to the inclusion in the film of conversations she did not know were being recorded.

Syberberg is also noted for an acclaimed visual interpretation of the Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...

 opera Parsifal
Parsifal (film)
Parsifal is a 1982 German musical film directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, based on the opera of the same name by Richard Wagner. It was shown out of competition at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival....

in 1982.

Controversy

Syberberg's work has attracted criticism at least since the publication of the film script of Hitler: A Film from Germany, particularly from the Left, who were amongst many targets of his criticism in that book. In later essays, although he never presented himself as a conservative or sympathizer with German nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...

, his comments began to scandalize a broad spectrum of writers and critics in Germany and elsewhere. Even Susan Sontag, who had written the introduction to the English translation of the book version of Hitler: A Film from Germany, was reportedly shocked by some of his later statements, though she claimed that her feelings about his films were unaffected.

In one notorious example Syberberg wrote in Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Kriege (On the Misfortune and Fortune of Art in Germany after the Last War, 1990):

"Whoever joined the Jews and the leftists was successful, and it did not necessarily have anything to do with love, or understanding, or even inclination. How could Jews tolerate that, being that these others only wanted power."


Ian Buruma
Ian Buruma
Buruma is a nephew of the English film director John Schlesinger, a series of interviews with whom he published in book form.-Works:*The Japanese Tattoo with Donald Richie ISBN 978-0-8348-0228-5...

, in the New York Review of Books, quotes several of Syberberg's controversial statements. Syberberg described modern German art as "filthy and sick... in praise of cowardice and treason, of criminals, whores, of hate, ugliness, of lies and crimes and all that is unnatural." He also wrote that:

"The Jewish interpretation of the world followed upon the Christian, just as the Christian one followed Roman and Greek culture. So now Jewish analyses, images, definitions of art, science, sociology, literature, politics, the information media, dominate. Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...

 and Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...

 are the pillars that mark the road from East to West. Neither are imaginable without Jewishness. Their systems are defined by it. The axis USA-Israel guarantees the parameters. That is the way people think now, the way they feel, act and disseminate information. We live in the Jewish epoch of European cultural history. And we can only wait, at the pinnacle of our technological power, for our last judgment at the edge of the apocalypse…. So that's the way it looks, for all of us, suffocating in unprecedented technological prosperity, without spirit, without meaning... Those who want to have good careers go along with Jews and leftists [and] the race of superior men [Rasse der Herrenmenschen] has been seduced, the land of poets and thinkers has become the fat booty of corruption, of business, of lazy comfort."


Buruma writes:
"It is not for his aesthetics, however, that Syberberg has been attacked, but for his politics. The strongest criticism of his book was published in Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel
Der Spiegel is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg. It is one of Europe's largest publications of its kind, with a weekly circulation of more than one million.-Overview:...

, the liberal weekly magazine. Syberberg's views, wrote the critic, were precisely those that led to the book burning in 1933, and prepared the way for the Final Solution
Final Solution
The Final Solution was Nazi Germany's plan and execution of the systematic genocide of European Jews during World War II, resulting in the most deadly phase of the Holocaust...

 of 1942. In fact, he went on, they are worse, for "now we know that they are caked with blood…. They are not just abstruse nonsense, they are criminal." The Spiegel critic compared Syberberg to the young Hitler, the failed art student in Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

, who rationalized his failure by blaming it on a conspiracy of left-wing Jews. Syberberg feels he is an unappreciated genius, and he too blames it on the same forces.


"Frank Schirrmacher, the young literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , short F.A.Z., also known as the FAZ, is a national German newspaper, founded in 1949. It is published daily in Frankfurt am Main. The Sunday edition is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung .F.A.Z...

, and the scourge of woolly thinkers of all political persuasions, is equally opposed to Syberberg and draws similar parallels with the Twenties and Thirties. And like the critic in Der Spiegel, he singles out for special censure an interview with Die Zeit
Die Zeit
Die Zeit is a German nationwide weekly newspaper that is highly respected for its quality journalism.With a circulation of 488,036 and an estimated readership of slightly above 2 million, it is the most widely read German weekly newspaper...

in which Syberberg claimed that he 'could understand' the feeling of the SS
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...

 man on the railway ramp of Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp
Concentration camp Auschwitz was a network of Nazi concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II...

, who, in Himmler's
Heinrich Himmler
Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was Reichsführer of the SS, a military commander, and a leading member of the Nazi Party. As Chief of the German Police and the Minister of the Interior from 1943, Himmler oversaw all internal and external police and security forces, including the Gestapo...

 words, 'made himself hard' for the sake of fulfilling his mission to the end. He did not admire this feeling, but he could understand it. Just as he could understand its opposite, the rejection of principles to act humanely."

Filmography

  • 1965 - Fünfter Akt, Siebte Szene. Fritz Kortner probt Kabale und Liebe
  • 1965 - Romy. Anatomie eines Gesichts
  • 1966 - Fritz Kortner spricht Monologue für eine Schallplatte
  • 1966 - Wilhelm von Kobell
  • 1966 - Die Grafen Pocci - einige Kapitel zur Geschichte einer Familie
  • 1968 - Scarabea - Wieviel Erde braucht der Mensch
  • 1969 - Sex-Business - made in Pasing
  • 1970 - San Domingo
  • 1970 - Nach meinem letzten Umzug
  • 1972 - Ludwig - Requiem für einen jungfräulichen König
  • 1972 - Theodor Hierneis oder: Wie man ehem. Hofkoch wird
  • 1974 - Karl May
  • 1975 - Winifred Wagner und die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried von 1914-1975 (Original: 302 min, US version: 104 min)
  • 1978 - Hitler: A Film from Germany
    Hitler: A Film from Germany
    Hitler: A Film from Germany is a 1978 Franco-British-German experimental biopic directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, produced by Bernd Eichinger, and co-produced by the BBC. It starred Heinz Schubert, who played both Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler...

  • 1981 - Parsifal
    Parsifal (film)
    Parsifal is a 1982 German musical film directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, based on the opera of the same name by Richard Wagner. It was shown out of competition at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival....

  • 1984 - Die Nacht
  • 1985 - Edith Clever liest Joyce
  • 1986 - Fräulein Else
  • 1987 - Penthesilea
  • 1989 - Die Marquise von O.
  • 1993 - Syberberg filmt Brecht
  • 1994 - Ein Traum, was sonst
  • 1997 - Höhle der Erinnerung


Syberberg is featured at length in the film The Ister (2004).

Secondary literature

  • Guido Goossens Verloren zonsondergangen. Hans Jürgen Syberberg en het linkse denken over rechts in Duitsland, Amsterdam University Press, 2004.

  • Solveig Olsen Hans Jürgen Syberberg and his Film of Wagner's Parsifal, University Press of America, 2006.

  • Klaus Phillips, et al. New German Filmmakers, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1984.

External links

  • Syberberg's Homepage
  • Hans-Jurgen Syberberg Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
  • The Ister, a film featuring Syberberg, Bernard Stiegler
    Bernard Stiegler
    Bernard Stiegler is a French philosopher at Goldsmiths, University of London and at the Université de Technologie de Compiègne. In addition, he is Director of the , founder in 2005 of the political and cultural group, , and founder in 2010 of the philosophy school,...

    , Jean-Luc Nancy
    Jean-Luc Nancy
    Jean-Luc Nancy is a French philosopher.Nancy's first book, published in 1973, was Le titre de la lettre , a reading of the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, written in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe...

    , and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
    Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
    Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe was a French philosopher. He was also a literary critic and translator....

    .
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