A Dream, What Else?

From the catastrophic fall of the city after war (via Hecuba), to the strange and marvellous ambiguities of The Prince of Homburg and its strangely ambiguous ending, and then to the way this almost naïve and hopeful dream of a new martial society, organised around the poles of wildness and discipline, turns into the nightmare of colonialism and conquest (mistaking “swap” for “rob”, but where “swapping” territorial ownership itself implies some terrible questions) and the hubris of technology (via Faust, Part Two, with Goethe’s own mysterious ending here recalling Kleist’s Natalie while calling for a remembrance of some eternal feminine principle as that which never ceases to call to us from or as the highest peak or the farthest horizon).

The filmmaker seems to be saying that, if we are to begin to genuinely and frutifully digest the German catastrophe, we have no choice but to turn back to precisely those sources that seem to be lost to (or to have been rejected by) post-War Germany as one of the self-imposed costs it was forced to pay as a result of that very catastrophe, but to turn back to them in order to reinvent their significance by re-interpreting them through a new kind of apparatus. There is nothing easy about this strange and mysterious film, but at times it seems as if Syberberg is the only one who ever asked himself what the cinematic instrument could ultimately be for, and how it could really compose with the theatrical arts. And, in this case, all accompanied by Beethoven at his most cheerful (but that means the Pastoral Symphony, not the “Ode to Joy” with its “undying testimony” to the Age of Enlightenment, which, during the early years of the Third Reich, the great German-Jewish phenomenologist felt could be understood “only with painful feelings” – Husserl (1970), p. 10 – and which has today become the “Anthem of Europe”).