Word: himmlers
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...penetrating dramatist of culture clash and the clever animater of received wisdom. His new novel stretches from the Edwardian Age through the 1970s. At the halfway mark, the reader has already had brushes with Freud, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Havelock Ellis, Mussolini and Heinrich Himmler...
This is not a film for the masses, Syberberg seems to say in every frame. The authoritarian director guides the work through monologues, dialogues with Hitler, the confessions of Himmler and Hitler, all of it set in the same small studio. The props reconstruct a dream world--often surrealistic--and the actors walk amidst the mannequins in front of slide projections of Hitler's Obersalzburg mansion, his party rallies, old photographs. There are four parts, 22 chapters, and significant hunks of the work deliberately bore, like a condescending challenge, 'Are you good enough to keep up with...
...PHILOSOPHY of Nietzsche echoes in the background: "You must walk the paths of greatness." And it is too bad, Himmler (played admirably by Heinz Schubert) reflects later under the hands of his obese masseur, that "the path of greatness is strewn with corpses." Syberberg never shows the corpses, but traces the phenomenon back to its birth as fantasy, a dream in the Nazi mind, with tortured mannequins hanging from the gallows, dismembered dolls, as the film proceeds from its first parts, "The Grail" and "A German Dream" to "The End of Winter's Tale" and "We Children of Hell...
...Rasch, a much decorated Waffen SS commando. Assigned to deliver the lists in Stockholm, he is betrayed by his bosses. His trail leads to neutral Ireland and England and finally back to Germany. There the disillusioned Rasch attempts to capture vital files from Schloss Wewelsburg, the Black Camelot that Himmler assembled as a Teutonic perversion of King Arthur's court. In one of the best siege narratives since The Guns of Navarone, Rasch and other embittered SS men infiltrate the monstrous castle at the same time that it is being destroyed on Himmler's orders...
...Jews and gentiles alike. Television's Holocaust may have done something to restore that fund of good will toward Israel. The past, Israel's raison d'être and validation, the pedigree of its suffering, came crowding back in the series' deadly lists: Kristallnacht, Eichmann, Himmler, Babi Yar, Sobibor, Theresienstadt, Auschwitz-or, rather, television's elaborately imagined approximations of all of them. "It is only a story," the network's ads proclaimed, "but it really happened...