Abstract
Intellectually, one of the major results of World War II in Europe was the virtual elimination of the Right-wing anticapitalism that had flourished in Europe up through the end of the Weimar Republic and which has been so well documented in such famous scholarly studies as Fritz Stern’s 1961 The Politics of Cultural Despair 1 and Armin Mohler’s Die konservative Revolution.2 As Stefan Breuer has rightly noted in his recent well-received contribution to the ongoing debate on the concept of a “conservative revolution,” it is very difficult to sift through the various strands of this Right-wing anticapitalism, from Ernst Rohm to Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in Germany alone—not to mention the various related strands of thought in other European countries—and find a common thread.3 Hence it is probably wrong to speak of a conservative revolution; rather, it would be more correct to use the plural and speak of a multiplicity of conservative revolutions. In general, however, it would probably be correct to assert that most conservative revolutionaries in pre-1933 Europe shared both a distrust of finance capitalism and a glorification of the nation state, which they perceived as an organic unit. Such conservative revolutionary sentiment did not, for the most part, survive World War II in Western Europe, even if, as Breuer and others have suggested, it did migrate to various Third World nationalist regimes in the postwar period.
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Notes
Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961).
Armin Mohler, Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932: Ein Handbuch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972).
Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), p. 180.
On Alain de Benoist and his development as an intellectual, see Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite: Jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes & Cie, 1994).
Alain de Benoist, “Zwang zur deutschen Geburt,” interview in Stefan Ulbrich, ed., Gedanken zu Großdeutschland (Vilsbiburg: Arun, 1990), p. 219.
Little has yet appeared in English on Syberberg’s 1990 book. The most extensive analysis to date has been Ian Buruma, “There’s No Place Like Heimat,” The New York Review of Books v.37, n.20 (December 20, 1990): pp. 34–43.
See also Marilyn Berlin Snell’s related interview with Syberberg, “Germany’s Heart: The Modern Taboo,” New Perspectives Quarterly v.10, n.1 (Winter 1993): pp. 20–25, which deals with similar topics but does not mention the book explicitly; and John Rockwell, “The Re-Emergence of an Elusive Director,” The New York Times, September 2, 1992, C13, 15.
Russell A. Berman, Cultural Studies of Modern Germany: History, Representation, and Nationhood (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 7.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 52.
Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Kriege (Munich: Matthes & Seitz, 1990), p. 30. All future references to this book contain page numbers in parentheses.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), p. 7.
Jürgen Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), p. 75.
See, e.g., Martin Broszat, ed., Bayern in der NS-Zeit, six volumes (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1977–1983);
Rainer Zitelmann, Hitler: Selbstverständnis eines Revolutionärs (Hamburg: Berg, 1991)
and Rainer Zitelmann and Eckhard Jesse, eds., Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1991).
In English, see David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany, 1933–1939 (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966)
and Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
This is not the place for an exploration of the sexual imagery of German “liberation.” However, Syberberg is not completely outside the bounds of contemporary German discussion in his musings. While Syberberg was writing these lines Helke Sander was working on her controversial film BeFreier und Befreite (“Liberators and the Liberated,” a title that plays with the German word “Freier” that also means “suitor”; David Jonathan Levin has suggested the translation “Liberators Take Liberties”), about the problem of rapes, particularly by Soviet soldiers, in Germany during the last year of the war. Christoph Hein’s short story “Die Vergewaltigung” (“The Rape”) deals with the same issue. Christoph Hein, Exekution eines Kalbes (Berlin: Aufbau, 1994), pp. 131–138. Much earlier, in 1970, Christa Wolf ’s short story “Liberation Day” had already presented American soldiers as gum-chewing seducers. See Christa Wolf, “Liberation Day,” trans. Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian in Granta 42 (Winter 1992), pp. 55–64, esp. pp. 63–64.
By 1994 Syberberg had admitted that his hopes for German reunification had been dashed, and that the process of cultural erosion had continued. See Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Der verlorene Auftrag (Vienna: Karolinger, 1994).
Thomas Elsaesser, “Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland,” Sight and Sound v.2, n.5 (September 1992): pp. 49–50; here, p. 50.
Rudy Koshar, “Hitler: A Film from Germany,” American Historical Review v.96, n.4 (October 1991): pp. 1122–1124; here, p. 1124. On Syberberg’s Hitler,
see also Koshar , “Hitler: A Film from Germany: Cinema, History, and Structures of Feeling,” in Robert A. Rosenstone, ed., Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 155–173.
For a useful analysis of Strauß’s recent writing, see Arthur Williams, “Botho Strauß: The Janus-Head above the Parapet—Final Choruses and Goat Songs without Beginnings,” in Arthur Williams and Stuart Parkes, eds., The Individual, Identity and Innovation: Signals from Contemporary Literature and the New Germany (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), pp. 315–344.
Botho Strauß, “Anschwellender Bocksgesang,” Der Spiegel v.6 (1993): p. 204.
See Stephen Brockmann, Julia Hell, Reinhilde Wiegmann, “The Greens: Images of Survival in the Early 1980s,” in From the Greeks to the Greens: Images of the Simple Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 127–144.
Arnulf Baring, Deutschland, was nun? (Berlin: Siedler bei Goldmann, 1991).
Mathias Wedel, Einheitsfrust (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1994);
cited in Henryk M. Broder, “ ‘Zu kurze Banane,’ ” Der Spiegel v.12 (March 21, 1994): p. 210. Wedel used the neologism “Ossifizierung,” which translates literally as “easternization” and is a play on the word “Ossi,” i.e., a resident of the former German Democratic Republic. The word also suggests a relationship to “ossification.”
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© 2006 Ruth A. Starkman
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Brockmann, S. (2006). The Rebirth of Tragedy: Syberberg, Strauß, and German Identity. In: Starkman, R.A. (eds) Transformations of the New Germany. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403984661_3
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