An experimental path, and a German trilogy

The notes stay with the director Syberberg, whom they call an original experimental artist. In his own time, they write, his films were often avoided: confusing, dull, and long. That reaction, they add, also shows that he did not take a conventional or commercial path. He studied literature and art history in Munich and made an 8mm film about Brecht. In the 1960s he made some 180 short documentaries for television. He was interested in the relation between film and history. In 1975 he made a documentary on Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law, The Confessions of Winifred Wagner, as a way, they write, of questioning the German history of his own present.

Between 1972 and 1977 he made what they call a German trilogy: Ludwig II: Requiem for a Virgin King (1972), Karl May (1974), and the best-known of the three, Hitler, a Film from Germany (1977), also called Our Hitler. Our Hitler, they write, runs 7 hours 9 minutes. It is a novelistic film and a documentary, made with the acting of a performer they name as Hans Schubert and with a wide range of edited images. Hitler appears in many identities and in a hypocritical light. Dramatic narrative and documentary elements are joined into something theatrical, mysterious, and fantastic. Syberberg, they say, saw clearly how media teach the public to perceive history. History is more easily understood from newspaper headlines than from the facts themselves, and in an age of mass media a real event can be distorted or made to seem slight. That, they write, is what he wanted Our Hitler to show, and he believed that aesthetics is always bound up with morals.

A turn toward German Expressionism

Watching the film sent the writer back to the techniques of German Expressionism. They place a golden stretch of the German film industry between 1919 and 1933. After the First World War, they write, the mood of German society weighed heavily on the industry; the Treaty of Versailles left a political and psychological darkness of humiliation and defeat, and Expressionist film both recorded that shaken mood and remade it. Late in the war, Germany had already begun to notice the force of film and to try to invent an image of itself on the screen. Expressionist work, they say, gave concrete form to primary feelings such as anxiety, love, and hate, sought a high aesthetic standard within, and built complete studio sets without. It used extreme or unbalanced light, abstracted sets, and unusual camera angles. Those elements, they write, became an important ground for American horror films in the 1930s and for film noir in the 1940s and 1950s. Metropolis, they add, is hard to separate from the origins of science-fiction film: a fully industrial city, cyborgs, a mad scientist, a vertical split of housing by class, and the machinery of computers and telephones.

In 1917, they write, the government founded a company and merged several studios; that company was UFA, Universum-Film AG. Erich Pommer, as UFA’s leading producer, made The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), The Last Laugh (1924), Metropolis (1927) and The Blue Angel (1930). The golden stretch, they say, runs from Caligari in 1919 until Hitler’s intervention in the industry in 1933. They list a grotesque mise-en-scène: twisted, exaggerated studio sets, heavy dramatic shadows, extreme chiaroscuro, unusual spacing, tilted camera angles, a mobile and subjective gaze, unnatural make-up and costume, and a stylized, almost theatrical playing. Light and shade, they write, set the mood and drew a character’s inner state; the relation of light to shadow could be ignored, so that the border of consciousness and the unconscious seemed to collapse. German directors looked through the camera as through a window into a mind.

A question of film, and a line from a biographer

Expressionist film, they write, has to be understood against a German history of the mind: a culture of theory and of elites that dreamed of revolution yet kept the will to reform inside an inner world and the world of art — as, they say, the Enlightenment often stayed a culture of theory, the Sturm und Drang a cultural revolt, and German Romanticism a turn into idealist philosophy. The gap between self and reality met the Expressionists as a kind of fate, and a Faustian spirit of repeated, dynamic becoming rather than a static harmony. The style was later taken up in earnest by film noir and the Nouvelle Vague, and borrowed often in horror and psychological film. Its historical meaning, for the writer, is that it put a classical question of film aesthetics in the open: how can film shed the duty merely to record reality and stand as an art with its own freedom? They close with a line they attribute to Ian Kershaw, Hitler’s biographer: Hitler was not only a tyrant who forced his will on the German people; he was himself a product of German society, and a figure who drew admiration, which helps explain why his shadow still falls. To understand that history matters, they write, but it is more urgent to face a society’s deeper problems, an appeal that politics and society do their duty, and that any such fall be avoided. The notes leave the subject there, before a later list of works cited. The same Korean report, at fuller length, sits on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Student notes on Syberberg’s Our Hitler, a German trilogy, and a turn toward Expressionism.

Last updated 15 November 2026