"In the Destructive Element Immerse": Hans-Jurgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution
1981; The MIT Press; Volume: 17; Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/778253
ISSN1536-013X
Autores Tópico(s)German History and Society
ResumoHad not existed, he would have to have been invented. Perhaps he was. So that Syberberg may really be the last of those puppets of mythical German heroes who people his films. Consider this, which has all the predictability of the improbable: during the war a certain stereotype of the German cultural tradition (teutonic philosophy; music, especially Wagner) was used by both sides as ammunition in the accompanying ideological conflict; it was also offered as evidence of a German national character. After the war it became clear that: 1) the history of high culture was not a very reliable guide to German social history generally; 2) the canon of this stereotype excluded much that may be more relevant for us today (e.g., expressionism, Weimar, Brecht); and 3) the Germany of the economic miracle, NATO, and social democracy is a very different place from rural or urban central Europe in the period before Hitler. So people stopped blaming Wagner for Nazism and began a more difficult process of collective selfanalysis which culminated in the anti-authoritarian movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. It also generated a renewal of German cultural production, particularly in the area of film. The space was therefore cleared for a rather perverse counter-position on all these points: on the one hand, the affirmation that Wagner and the other stereotypes of German cultural history are valid representations of Germany after all; and, on the other, that the contemporary criticism of cultural irrationality and authoritarianism-itself a shallow, rationalistic, Enlightenment enterprise-by repressing the demons of the German psyche, reinforces rather than exorcizes them. The Left is thus blamed for the survival of the Fascist temptation, while Wagner, as the very culmination of German irrationalism, is contested by methods which can only be described as Wagnerian. As undertakes in his films a program for cultural revolution, he shares some of the values and aims of his enemies on the Left; his aesthetic is a synthesis of Brecht and Wagner (yet another logical permutation which remained to be invented). The Wagnerian persona is indeed uncomfortably, improbably strong in Syberberg: witness the manifestoes which affirm film as the true and ultimate form of the Wagnerian ideal of the music of the future and of
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