Hans-Jürgen Syberberg

Many commentators, including Syberberg himself, have characterized his work as a cinematic combination of Bertolt Brecht's doctrine of epic theatre and Richard Wagner's operatic aesthetics.

The film is about the town Demmin in north-eastern Germany, where Syberberg grew up and where he has made attempts to reestablish the central market square as a communal space.

In later essays, although he never presented himself as a conservative or sympathizer with German nationalism, his comments began to scandalize a broad spectrum of writers and critics in Germany and elsewhere.

[7] In one notorious example Syberberg wrote in Vom Unglück und Glück der Kunst in Deutschland nach dem letzten Kriege (On the Misfortune and Fortune of Art in Germany after the Last War, 1990): "Whoever joined the Jews and the leftists was successful, and it did not necessarily have anything to do with love, or understanding, or even inclination.

Syberberg described modern German art as "filthy and sick... in praise of cowardice and treason, of criminals, whores, of hate, ugliness, of lies and crimes and all that is unnatural."

So that's the way it looks, for all of us, suffocating in unprecedented technological prosperity, without spirit, without meaning... Those who want to have good careers go along with Jews and leftists [and] the race of superior men [Rasse der Herrenmenschen] has been seduced, the land of poets and thinkers has become the fat booty of corruption, of business, of lazy comfort.

The Spiegel critic compared Syberberg to the young Hitler, the failed art student in Vienna, who rationalized his failure by blaming it on a conspiracy of left-wing Jews.

"Frank Schirrmacher, the young literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the scourge of woolly thinkers of all political persuasions, is equally opposed to Syberberg and draws similar parallels with the Twenties and Thirties.

And like the critic in Der Spiegel, he singles out for special censure an interview with Die Zeit in which Syberberg claimed that he 'could understand' the feeling of the SS man on the railway ramp of Auschwitz, who, in Himmler's words, 'made himself hard' for the sake of fulfilling his mission to the end.