Hitler: A Film from Germany
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Hitler: A Film from Germany is a 1980 experimental 4-part film, directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, sponsored by Bernd Eichinger, and co-produced by the BBC. Along with Syberberg's characteristic and unusual motifs and style, the film also is notable for its great length of 442 minutes. Starring both as Hitler and Himmler was Heinz Schubert, an actor popular from his role as a tyrannical bigot in the TV-series Ein Herz und eine Seele, a German adaptation of Til Death Us Do Part and All in the Family.
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[edit] "Plot" overview
Far from following any actual plot or story, the film consists mostly of monologues spoken by actors in historical WWII-era costumes in front of rear projections (a predecessor to the bluescreen technique used in cinematography), supported by original WWII audio recordings of speeches and radio broadcasts, both German and allied, and by music by German composers Wagner, Mahler, Mozart, Beethoven, and Haydn.
The monologues are recitals of historical sources, partly on the personalities and lifestyles of Himmler, Hitler, and other high-ranking Nazis, partly their original own words. The rear projections show historical photos of prominent Nazis, propaganda posters, photos and films from Hitler's Berghof mountain retreat and its surrounding areas in the Alps, WWII warfare and from liberated concentration camps.
The actors don't just stand there while the recite, but either walk a long way straight towards the camera as they do so, or walk around in the sets, walking "from picture to picture" as indicated by the rear projections behind them. In the second case, the rear projections often mimic an actually three-dimensional area they stride across, such as Hitler's Berghof and its surrounding vicinities, or a change of rear projected scenery corresponds with a change in their monologue's topics.
[edit] Content
The film intends not so much to outline historically accurate biographies, as it is meant to parody and satirize Nazi propaganda and ideology, along with popular notions about Hitler's personality and Nazism, both pre-war and post-war, by emphasizing moot points and clichees, often into humorous absurdity. For this purpose of parody, Hitler and other Nazis are at times shown as accurately dressed glove puppets made to talk by their particular actors, dressed in modern clothes, or Hitler's actor sometimes is made to look like Charlie Chaplin while he imitates Hitler. Sometimes Hitler even comments on post-WWI politics. Another aspect of parody is by often relating to Himmler's esoterical believes or post-war crypto-historical urban legends about esotericism and occultism in Nazism.
[edit] The 4 parts
As the film does not follow any stringent plot, its 4 parts do not chronicle any chronological story. Instead each part explores one particular topic.
- Part 1: Der Gral (The Grail) deals with Hitler's cult of personality in Nazi propaganda.
- Part 2: Ein deutscher Traum (A German Dream) focusses on pre-Nazi German cultural, spiritual, and national heritage that Nazi propaganda related to.
- Part 3: Das Ende eines Wintermärchens (The End of a Winter's Tale) tells about the Holocaust and the ideology behind it, particularly from Himmler's point of view.
- Part 4: Wir Kinder der Hölle (We Children of Hell) consists mostly of Syberberg himself reading out scenes from the script that were not shot, climaxing in Syberberg talking to a Hitler puppet on how he completely destroyed Germany spiritually, combined with a satire on former Nazis that after the war make profits of the Nazi era by running a Nazi tourism and entertainment industry for foreigners.
[edit] Recurring plot devices
One particular plot device, especially for mocking post-war fascination and clichees about Hitler and Nazism, is endless recitals from the non-fictitious auto-biographies of people in direct contact with Hitler on his lifestyle, such as by Hitler's personal valet Heinz Linge (played by Hellmut Lange) and his adjutant Otto Günsche (played by Peter Kern), talking to the camera as if the spectator would be a young person that intends to learn about Hitler, while these seemingly endless passages end with original radio broadcasts on German war casualties and lost battles. This plot device thus mocks both Hitler's affiliation with his own personality and his increasingly delusionary state that made him more and more unable to accurately lead a war the longer it lasted, as well as it mocks post-war German fascination with every little detail about historical Nazism and its personage, indicating that this post-war fascination might be nothing but subconscious admiration that will once lead Germany to repeat the same downfall as apparent in the radio broadcasts.
Himmler's personality is sometimes explored in a similar way by reciting the memories of such people as Himmler's personal astrologist (played by Peter Moland), or his masseuse Felix Kersten (played by Martin Sperr), though not as extensively as in Hitler's case and not ending in such dramatic radio broadcasts.
Especially unusual is the portrayal of Himmler's personality. While Hitler is always impersonated by Heinz Schubert, Himmler's role is split into several actors, including Schubert among others, each indicating a different purported aspect about Himmler's personality, such as "the esoterical ideologue" (played by Rainer von Artenfels), dressed as an SS member, or "the military leader" (leading a war for Nazism and Germany, against the Jews and other degenerated, "un-German" influences; played by Helmut Lange as well), dressed like an ordinary Wehrmacht officer. Whenever Himmler is impersonated by Schubert, he probably does so to indicate all aspects of Himmler's personality combined.
[edit] Narration and fictitious characters
Some continuity is given to the film by Syberberg's narration and fictitious characters. Syberberg's offstage narration partly philosophizes on pre-war and post-war German fascination with Hitler and Nazism, while in the beginning he tells a mythologized tale about the shortcomings of the Weimar Republic and its downfall giving rise to the Third Reich. Later-on, the narration focusses on comparing Nazism to basically "inhumane" pornography, Stalinism and socialist East-Germany. In order to draw parallels between Nazism and pornography, Syberberg also arranges quite graphical scenes, involving a realistic, life-sized reproduction of Goebbels's carbonized, dead body covered in his burned and melted flesh, as found and photographed by the Red Army, inflatable sex dolls, and dildos (as the credits indicate that "some" scenes were shot in 1977 while most of the film was shot in 1980, it is noteworthy that 1977 was the last year before Goebbels's body, being in the possession of the Red Army and remaining in an East-German Soviet military basis along with the bodies of Hitler, Goebbels's wife and Goebbels's children, was actually burned by KGB officers as ordered by Breshnew).
A mythologized portrayal of Democracy and Germany is impersonated by Syberberg's young daughter, Amelie Syberberg, holding a puppet and walking around in mystical sets to Syberberg's narration, also appearing later in the film. It is not clear which of the two, Syberberg's daughter and her puppet, is Democracy and which of them is Germany.
The film's first part 30-minute intro is seperated into two 15-minute acts, the first being Syberberg's mythologized narration of the end of the Weimar Republic, the second half being Schubert impersonating a circus announcer within an actual circus set announcing "the great, magnificient" Hitler ("the German Napoleon") in ad-speech and show-biz jargon, while also outlining that the purpose of the film is not only being "the Big Hitler Show" but also a film on Germany and German mentality in general, about "the Hitler within us all" and "Auschwitz as an ideological battle of racial warfare".
A similar role as the circus announcer is later introduced when a freak show compere (played by Rainer von Artenfels as well) enters the film within a prop set of a cabinet of curiosities, demonstrating various oddity objects and Nazi relics, such as the Spear of Destiny ("as owned by Thomas the Apostle, Saint Maurice, Constantine the Great, Charlemagne, Otto I, Henry IV, Frederick I Barbarossa, the Habsburg dynasty...and then Hitler!") and the philosopher's stone both found by Himmler's SS, Himmler's Germanic Urpferd (purported evolutionary ancestor to the modern horse), and Hitler's semen in a phial. This compere then also introduces the various supporting characters, each introducing themselves in third person after he has announced them.
Among them is also Ellerkamp (played by Harry Baer), a fictitious SS-member, later a post-war projectionist and film producer, and The Cosmologist (played by Peter Lühr), the latter partly based on Hans Hörbiger, creator of the Welteislehre, but the Cosmologist is portrayed as still being alive during Hitler's reign and after WWII, and he looks more like Leonardo da Vinci and Socrate rolled into one (actually strikingly similar to the TV-version of Slartibartfast by Douglas Adams) than Hoerbiger himself.
[edit] Props, set design, and visual style
The film's visual style was developed by Henri Langlois, using props and set designs from the Cinémathèque Française that had originally been used for a film called Der Film - Die Musik der Zukunft ("Film: Music of the future").
[edit] English version
As the film was co-produced by the BBC, it was also released in an English version. While all of the monologues spoken by the actors are subtitled in the English version, Syberberg's translated offstage narration is spoken by a native BBC narrator. Due to the BBC's co-production, the German language used in the film, including the original WWII radio broadcasts and authentic speeches, is translated more sophisticated than in many Anglo-American documentaries on Nazi Germany. One advantage of the English version is that every time when a new character is introduced or an original recording is heard, it is initiated in the subtitles by the character's name or the speaker's name, while the German version lacks such identifications.
[edit] Available copies
In 2003, Syberberg made full-length copies of the both the German and the English version of the film available online on his website (see external links below).
