Hitler, Here is Your Victory

"Culture? When I hear the word culture I reach for my pistol." --Herman Goering

HE IS INTRODUCED as the man of the 20th century, this very democratic leader who eliminated unemployment, who failed as an artist and so projected his fantasies onto the world of earth and people and blood, who knew "what every little man wanted--to be great." And after seven hours of mannequins and puppet Hitlers, Goerings, Goebbels and Speers and props from the attic of German history, Hitler becomes the common man, everyman, including ourselves--not an aberration in history, but an integral part and natural consequence of it--he is our progenitor, our mentor, as well as our innermost dread.

No one is spared in Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour misty epic, Our Hitler, least of all the audience. Syberberg seeks to resurrect Hitler and pit him against the world he left behind--a filmic judgment day for Der Fuhrer--and the audience is forced to look into its own eyes. Confusion. No connections. No conclusions. "The results are exhilarating, confounding, and not at all closeended," critic David A. Rosse from the University of California at Berkeley, correctly pointed out. Ultimately, your judgment of Syberberg's Hitler hinges on how you judge your most intimate self.

This is not a film for the masses, Syberberg seems to say in every frame. The authoritarian director guides the work through monologues, dialogues with Hitler, the confessions of Himmler and Hitler, all of it set in the same small studio. The props reconstruct a dream world--often surrealistic--and the actors walk amidst the mannequins in front of slide projections of Hitler's Obersalzburg mansion, his party rallies, old photographs. There are four parts, 22 chapters, and significant hunks of the work deliberately bore, like a condescending challenge, 'Are you good enough to keep up with us?' In one such scene, an actor sets a picnic table in front of a slide projection of trees and ferns, eats lunch and prattles about his relationship to Hitler as Obersalzburg servant. It's quite dull. Even... yes, banal. "Why are you fidgeting in your seats?" he turns quickly and asks the audience, smiling. "Bored?" He continues, undaunted by the repressed jeers. Syberberg knows he's boring the masses and, with contempt, he continues. Adolph Hitler, he points out, did everything but bore the masses.

Through montage, Hitlers flash briefly in various modes. Hitler as dictator, arm coiled back in statuesque salute; Hitler as paper-hanger--perhaps the most brilliant characterization--at work in overalls and roller, cursing the Jews and grumbling to himself about politics. Hitler as Chaplin, entertainer. Hitler's face is mocked: the haircut and moustache, his trademarks. Anyone can wear that face--like kindergarten games, drawing the hair over the forehead and the tufted whiskers above the lip on pictures of people in magazines; yes, anyone can look like Adolph Hitler--he is the common man playing out his most banal fantasies. And, the film implies, anyone with the will can be Adolph Hitler. Hitler is climactically embodied by an actor in lengthy monologue, dressed in the togas of Nero, rising up from Wagner's grave, his faced piqued in totalitarian scowl:

Yes, I am the bad conscience of the democratic government. I cleaned up the pigsty of history... only through monumental sexual repression did I muster the will and the drive to fashion my ends... I was and I am the end of your most secret desires. Salut.

THE PHILOSOPHY of Nietzsche echoes in the background: "You must walk the paths of greatness." And it is too bad, Himmler (played admirably by Heinz Schubert) reflects later under the hands of his obese masseur, that "the path of greatness is strewn with corpses." Syberberg never shows the corpses, but traces the phenomenon back to its birth as fantasy, a dream in the Nazi mind, with tortured mannequins hanging from the gallows, dismembered dolls, as the film proceeds from its first parts, "The Grail" and "A German Dream" to "The End of Winter's Tale" and "We Children of Hell."

Hitler reappears later after he sinks back into Wagner's grave. He is a puppet. A mannequin. A marionette. A ventriloquist's doll. "Is this the world you pit against mine?" he asks. "In the United Nations, 110 out of 159 countries torture and murder, so each time the U.N. votes, a purely democratic majority votes for inhumanity. Without the extinction of the Indians, the progress in America would have been impossible. I am immortal as long as the world exists," he says, as the ventriloquist undresses him through a series of suits and costumes. "Well done."

Syberberg indicts the German lawyers, "those hard-working conscientious citizens," who legitimized Hitler's dream. He indicts Hollywood, which determines the quality of its productions democratically--at the box office. "The customer is always right," and "Business is the freedom of democracy," and "One for all and all for one," these were the axioms of the German dream. And so, when the dream was blighted, Hitler declared that "worker equals artist" and instituted the rule of mediocrity. "He legitimized trash," the ventriloquist says. And we are reminded that Hitler was a failed painter and a man who enjoyed the cinema. "He would watch the latest films from America," the Fuhrer's projectionist says. "He loved John Wayne. But when the war started he stopped watching the films. He only watched the newsreels, before they were shown to the public."

Failing as an artist, Hitler went into politics. Politics, "the art of the possible," Syberberg says. And there he directed his banal drama.

THERE IS A CONSTANT undercurrent in this film, background monologues that threaten to convert Our Hitler into a polemic, recordings of speeches by Hitler, Goebbels, Goering. The props, the voices, the music (mostly Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart and Nazi Party songs) play off each other to produce the ideological confusion that is the character of this film, that was also Nazi Germany.

In order to understand this hellish confusion, Syberberg demands an intellectual involvement with Hegel, Schiller, Nietzsche, Wagner, as well as German history from Ludwig I. With this background, with the physical patience to sit through a seven-hour abstraction, one can understand the twists and evil that forged the Nazi ideology from German culture, but that understanding quickly fades back into confusion as Syberberg asks, "Was he [Hitler] too made in God's image?" Invariably, as the title implies, Adolph Hitler is related to everyone, and the most important effect of Our Hitler is the introspection it forces, the realization that Hitler was human--not an aberration--and humans still populate the earth.

The culture that Hitler created has been preserved in bits and pieces in the years since 1945, in plastic and asphalt and machines, and they are abstracted on Syberberg's set. The puppets (crafted with cracked faces and a preserved realism) and mannequins are at least half-human, and the actors sometime pose as mannequins. It all seems jerky, not serious, but at the end of every visual fantasy Syberberg's rejoinder emerges out of the monologue to remind you how serious he is: "God created ten men beating their breasts, lamenting, and one who entertained them, laughing. Which are you?"

SYBERBERG'S VISIONS of the Hitler phenomenon are tied together from part to part by the wanderings of Amelie Syberberg--the director's child--through the mise-en-scene. Cuddling a stuffed dog with swastika tags, hurrying from corpse to corpse, the rubble of the bombed Reichstag. She begins and ends each part of Our Hitler, and she leads us to Hitler's last stand, where the ventriloquist approaches his Hitler dummy and puts him on trial. "You are to blame for the successful imperialism of Moscow, Adolph Hitler. You are to blame for the eternal Jew, wandering, for homes without tears, towns that cannot weep, motor-landscapes. Adolph Hitler, here is your victory."

Amelie Syberberg follows this cue, in the last scenes of the film, stripping down to a white, flowing dress, hurrying past a projection of Frankenstein's bride. She sits on the moon, the stars above--out of human reach--she sits with her hands over her ears.