Volume 27, Number 2 · February 21, 1980
Eye of the Storm
By Susan Sontag
Hitler, A Film from Germany
directed by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland Giroux later this year)
by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg
Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag (Hamburg), 315 pp., DM15 (to be published in English translation by Farrar, Straus &
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's Hitler, A Film from Germany is not only daunting because of the extremity of its achievement, but discomfiting, like an unwanted baby in the era of zero population growth. Art is now the name of a huge variety of satisfactions—it has come to stand for the unlimited proliferation, and devaluation, of satisfaction itself. Where so many blandishments flourish, bringing off a masterpiece seems a retrograde feat, a naïve form of accomplishment. Always rare, the Great Work is now truly odd. It insists that art must be true, not just interesting, a necessity, not just an experiment.
Review, 6783 words
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