But Syberberg is not one-of-a-kind; rather, he’s a symptom: the highly sensitive, unstrategically candid representative of the identity philosophy of a German educated middle class that has been gaining strength again since reunification. He has one foot in the splendid national-revolutionary camp, in the Matthes and Seitz culture, among the right-wing Foucaultians, and the other foot deep in the traditional inner life of that band of German teachers who sing the famous song: “The Yanks took away our Hölderlin/Bratwurst and replaced it with Negro music and the hamburger.” Syberberg’s Wagnerian anti-Semitism (an arrogant resentment of the aesthetics of Adorno, Bloch, Benjamin, Marcuse, Kracauer) might still be disregarded; the admirers of Steffen Heitmann have not yet roused themselves to go there, perhaps they will never do so again. Apart from that, as early as the turn of 1989/90, Syberberg was already offering what Botho Strauß and Alain Finkielkraut only let out in 1993, and what the weaker graduates of the integrated upper grades, frightened by unemployment, AIDS, and Polish car thieves, will only be thinking in 1995, at the earliest. The normalization-nationalism represented by the eccentric but by no means untypical (and by no means unimportant) artist Syberberg contains six ingredients, six discourses.
(1) There is, first, the very usual mythification of history, that is, the excision of tales of heroes and suffering, the “epics,” the great symbolic narratives in which the national icons are molded. [ . . . ]
(2) The second learning step is the occupation of land [Landnahme], another well-known construct. Here Syberberg has a thing for Prussia, which not every normalization-nationalist will want to go along with, “Prussia as Europe’s backbone,” Prussia as Kleist-land (“Kleist killed himself when he saw his land in misery and saw no way out for himself”). Effective and plausible, however, is the assertion of an indissoluble link between land and “human cultures.” What matters is “memory” – “regardless of who is still living there.” [ . . . ]
(3) The third motive is authenticity and ethnicity, the argument in favor of “nature” and against the “plastic world,” against “cheap, convenient, quick throw-away products like punk, Pop, and junk,” that’s to say, the damning verdict – so popular among nationalist circles all over the world – against mass phenomena and against cultural phenomena. [ . . . ]
(4) The celebration of “genuineness” and “originality” is joined by the class discourse; nothing new, of course, most recently rehashed in the German-speaking region by Hans Sedlmeier (Loss of the Middle), Emil Staiger, and dozens of others, yet of constitutive importance for the national biotope. [ . . . ]
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