Our Hitler: A Film by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

Abstract

A good deal of the interest aroused by the so-called New German Cinema in the 1970s and 1980s was generated by the impression — as well as the expectation — that the films of Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Wim Wenders, and others were not just another European new wave but would show the world how Germany intended to come to terms with, or move out of, the shadows cast by its disastrous history. Especially in the late 1970s, an image-composite emerged of the recent past, thanks to several films by Fassbinder and the work of Alexander Kluge, films like Margarethe von Trotta’s Die bleierne Zeit (The German Sisters, 1981), Helma Sanders-Brahms’ Deutschland bleiche Mutter (Germany Pale Mother, 1980) and Edgar Reitz’ monumental Heimat — Eine deutsche Chronik (Heimat — A Chronicle of Germany, 1984): they all, directly or indirectly, re-assessed West Germany’s self-understanding in relation to the Nazi legacy.1 But, among these films, it was only in Syberberg’s brooding, melancholy Hitler — Ein Film aus Deutschland (Our Hitler, 1978) that the figure of Hitler himself was both thematized as a historical figure and represented on screen, albeit mostly in mockingly oblique guise, as puppet or automaton or as an undead vampire rising from the grave, with features borrowed from the circus, the cinema, the fairground, and the toy shop.