David Blackbourn

Norbert Elias died in Amsterdam in 1990, shortly after his 93rd birthday. His achievements were recognised only late in life. He was 57 when he first gained a permanent university post, and his work was not widely known until the late Sixties. When the recognition came it was abundant, however: honorary doctorates, prizes and decorations from European governments. Far from basking in this acclaim, Elias stepped up his output, writing more books in his eighties than in all his previous decades put together. He also acquired disciples, especially in the Netherlands and Germany, who tended the flame after 1990 by issuing unfinished fragments and materials, such as Reflections on a Life. This contains a biographical interview first published in Dutch, and Elias’s ‘Notes on a Lifetime’, which originally appeared in German.

Goethe, Heine and Wilhelm von Humboldt did it, although not Wagner; Clemenceau did it on 22 different occasions; characters in Maupassant, Turgenev, Fontane and Schnitzler did it. In 19th-century Europe practically everyone was doing it, except the English. We are talking about fighting duels.

In 1947, the Allied Control Commission pronounced the death of Prussia, symbol of militarism and knee-jerk obedience, and alleged progenitor of Nazism. It has stayed dead. The GDR was never, as some liked to believe, the continuation of Prussia by other means. Junker estates were broken up, and Prussia was distributed among the Poles and Russians as well as the Germans. Recent events are unlikely to change any of that. Restitution of property almost certainly does not apply to the former estates, and the Oder-Neisse line is fixed. Leningrad may have become St Petersburg again, but Wroclaw will not revert to Breslau. Meanwhile, the Hohenzollerns have much less chance of staging a comeback than several Ruritanian dynasties with an equally grubby record. Lord Vansittart and A.J.P. Taylor can rest easily in their graves.

Every picture tells a story – even the illustrations on the covers of books. Michael Kater’s cover shows a rather shabby, cabbage-patch Hitler attending a harvest festival in 1936, receiving the salutes of a crowd in which the faces of adoring women are prominent. The image is both revealing and misleading. The peasant costumes certainly alert us to the affinities between Nazism and provincial kitsch, and Hitler’s studied geniality also reminds us of his extraordinary personal popularity, always much greater than that of the party as a whole or of its other leaders. But the illustration is more likely to mislead if it reinforces the popular idea of a Hitler cult among women. Jill Stephenson, writing in the collection of essays edited by Peter Stachura, disposes effectively of what one recent writer has called ‘the sacrificial willingness of women to be Hitler’s devotees’. The complex and changing position of women in the Third Reich admits of no such conclusion, while it is certain that before 1933 women always gave less electoral support to National Socialism than men. Hitler would have done better without female suffrage, just as he would have done better in 1932 with first-past-the-post elections rather than PR.’

While Syberberg was making this film, over three thousand West German schoolchildren were asked to write an essay on the subject ‘What I have heard about Adolf Hitler’. The wording was not intended to elicit a prepared answer, but to trawl the everyday fragments and commonplaces gleaned by the children from parents and neighbours. The results prompted widespread hand-wringing in the serious press. Hitler’s birth was variously placed between the 16th century and 1933, his nationality given as Swiss, Dutch and Italian, his politics as Communist and Christian Democratic. Alongside sharp and telling detail (‘No more bicycle thefts’) came involuntary testimony to thoughts which had been put out of mind: the Jews had ‘had their ears boxed’; some had been killed (‘many hundreds’, ‘several thousand’), but they had asked for it, and anyway the Germans were not the only ones. Unacknowledged guilt perhaps explains why Hellmut Diwald’s reassuringly apologetic Geschichte der Deutschen was a recent best-seller. It certainly reinforces the moral imperative behind this film and explains some of Syberberg’s lyrical intensity. Mad Germany has hurt him into poetry, as it did Heine, quoted at the beginning and the end of the film. Syberberg wants to confront Germans with their collective responsibility for Hitler, conceiving his art as a ‘work of mourning’. As Susan Sontag notes in her introduction to this book of the film, he is close to the position of Alexander and Margarethe Mitscherlich, who argued in The Inability to Mourn that the Germans remain the victims of a collective melancholia which follows from their refusal to accept and work through the grief of their own recent history.