Word: hitler
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...Barbaric, Mystical, bored," writes Grass of the 20th Century. Historians will one day recognize The Tin Drum as representative of a universal 20th Century experience, yet Grass' novel is above all a German work, addressing the provincial guilt and unease of post-war Germans, drawn to Hitler like adolescents to pornography and unable to cleanse themselves under the searchlight of vengeful, scrutinizing time...
...myths that has almost Biblical significance for those that lived through The War and knew Nazi Germany; and for the younger generation, for whom the swastika and the "heil" are the lost trapping of a confusing, all too-recent past. Even Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's seven-hour nightmare, Our Hitler, with its pounding Wagner and Beethoven, acknowledges Oskar's drum. It beats in time to the modern German effort to recreate Hegel's sense of history, Goethe's sense of self, Nietzche's sense of strength and Gunter Grass' cheeky sense of post-modern myth--the eerie drumbeat of barbarism...
...greater willingness to accept compromise. The corrosive effects of runaway inflation of 1922-23 gave rise to an acute awareness of the desirability of stable prices. The defeat and destruction wrought by World War II called attention to material needs and, with politics so tarnished by the Hitler experience, the primacy of economic ends seems self-evident...
...culture that Hitler created has been preserved in bits and pieces in the years since 1945, in plastic and asphalt and machines, and they are abstracted on Syberberg's set. The puppets (crafted with cracked faces and a preserved realism) and mannequins are at least half-human, and the actors sometime pose as mannequins. It all seems jerky, not serious, but at the end of every visual fantasy Syberberg's rejoinder emerges out of the monologue to remind you how serious he is: "God created ten men beating their breasts, lamenting, and one who entertained them, laughing. Which...
SYBERBERG'S VISIONS of the Hitler phenomenon are tied together from part to part by the wanderings of Amelie Syberberg--the director's child--through the mise-en-scene. Cuddling a stuffed dog with swastika tags, hurrying from corpse to corpse, the rubble of the bombed Reichstag. She begins and ends each part of Our Hitler, and she leads us to Hitler's last stand, where the ventriloquist approaches his Hitler dummy and puts him on trial. "You are to blame for the successful imperialism of Moscow, Adolph Hitler. You are to blame for the eternal Jew, wandering, for homes...