After the Second World War, French philosopher Vladimir Jankélevitch refused to teach German thinkers in the Sorbonne. He held German poets and philosophers responsible for the fanatical adhesion of the German people to a deranged fuehrer and a corrupted regime. It is this bonding that led millions of men to committing hideous crimes in the name of German Arian superiority. Nationalism, philosophy and poetry became synonyms to a struggle for a better place in the European chessboard. Germans felt neglected by the History they were supposed to dominate. Never did a nation cherish more the idea of spiritual guidance; never were a people more obsessed with the idea of spiritual superiority in the world. Ever since the marriage of Faust to Helen of Troy, the most beautiful daughter of Zeus, the symbolic idea of the union of Modern Germany and Ancient Greece became a passionate infatuation that soon became a struggle for domination, not only spiritual, philosophical and poetical, but also political.
After the Napoleonic wars and the spread of the revolutionary message in Europe, Hegel writes in paragraph 347 of his Principles of the Philosophy of Right (1821), that throughout History the Universal Spirit incarnates itself in a dominant national people (Herrenvolk) who has the ultimate responsibility to take Humanity one more step in the quest of the absolute. “Against this absolute right that such a people has, being the actual degree of the development of the world’s Spirit, argues Hegel, the other nations are without rights”. Of course, after the Greeks and the Romans, Germans are the ultimate step in the progression of the Universal Spirit, as he stipulates in paragraph 354. This would become the dominant theme in the circles of German nationalism. And with Moltke’s canons bombarding Paris, during the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and the birth of the first German State, Marx predicted an escalation of this struggle of pride and prejudice, which actually lead to the First World War.
It is during the Great War, that Max Weber presents his own vision of the motifs behind the bloodshed. In an allocation on October 1916, Deutschland unter den europäischen Weltmächten, the German sociologist and political thinker renews with the Hegelian tradition. Germans have a debt towards humanity that other peoples do not, he asserts. And he continues: “Future generations won’t blame the Swiss, the Danish, the Dutch or the Norwegians for the abandon without a fight of the West into the hands of Russian bureaucracy and Anglo-Saxon liberal (society) conventions. They will accuse rightfully the Germans for the decadence of the state of education and culture (Gestaltung) of the Earth”. And he concludes: “We had the obligation to become a State of power in order to decide the future of the Earth, and we had to fulfill this obligation by this War” (Wir mußten ein Machtsstaat sein und mußten, um mitzusprechen bei der Entscheidung über die Zukunft der Erde, es auf diesen Krieg ankommen lassen). It is clear to Max Weber that Germany ought to and actually had entered the Great War not to obtain material benefits such as colonial power and territories for its expanding industry, but in order to impose its superior moral and cultural values to the World.
In the aftermath of the Great War, the impotence of the Republic of Weimar and the context of the economic crisis that followed the 1929 collapse of the Stock Exchange market, a desolating economic and social landscape intensified the humiliating sentiment of the defeat. During this period, German intelligentsia sought any opportunity to revive the German spirit. No member of the intellectual elite saw the darkness and the hatred behind’s Hitler’s rise, blind they were with the vision of the triumph of the German moral existence. Some even enhanced those dark feelings. On the 25th of May 1933, right after pledging obedience to the Fuehrer, Martin Heidegger spoke again of “spiritual guidance” (geistig Führung) in his Rektorats Rede, the nomination discourse as he accessed the Rector’s Office of the University of Freiburg. Only this time, he associates the “spiritual world of a nation” (geistige Welt eines Volkes) not to “the superstructure of a culture” (der Überbau einer Kultur), but to the “forces of earth and blood” (erd- und Bluthaften Kräfte), and cries out to the German people for emotional power and existential shock (Erschütterung seines Daseins).
In those dark times, the controversial figure of Stefan George (1868-1933), a revolutionary conservative, becomes the incarnation of the German poetical genius. Around him, an impressive number of young and older disciples form a Circle (Georgekreis) and vow an authentic cult to the Master. This Circle dominated the intellectual and academic scene in the Weimar years. They were supposed to incarnate the philosophical and poetical perfection of the German spirit. For his disciples, George was the ideal of a prophet and a priest, while he thought of himself as the messiah of a new kingdom that would be led by intellectual and artistic elites bonded by their faithfulness and unconditional obedience to a strong leader. After 1904 and the Nietzschekult years, the Georgekreis elected Plato as its divine philosopher and of course their favorite work was the Republic, in which the Philosopher showed that there could come no end to malice and pain in the world until the philosophers took over the power in the political societies and imposed their spiritual guidance. The idea that philosophers, scholars and poets should play the Prince’s secret advisers behind Hitler and the Nazi party in order to re-establish the greatness of the nation suddenly became the mainstream ideology after 1930. Hitler’s propaganda machine found actual support and efficacy in the Circle. George himself was not a Nazi, if for not other reason than his homosexuality that didn’t exactly fit the Arian standards. Actually, when Hitler came to power in 1933, Joseph Goebbels offered him the presidency of a new Academy for the Arts, but George refused it and fled to Switzerland only to die in Locarno a few months later. But most of his disciples were excellent Nazis.
In order to destroy the malicious ghost of the past quest for German spiritual supremacy that led to Hitler’s rise out of Germany’s decay, the main character of the film, Walter Kranz, a disenchanted poet in search of money and new thrills for his poetical creation, identifies himself to George to the point of signing with George’s name in his own bank cheque, recreates George’s religious cult in his lectures by paying German-Arians to act as his disciples, and even has homosexual experiences in order to fully become George. In his person, Fassbinder found the perfect example of an ambiguous poet that pushed the German people into the hands of chaos and destruction. For Fassbinder, this image was the enemy, as it was for the German youth in the 1970’s who felt that history was only repeating itself, just like the end of the film: after the death of Frau Kranz, a new woman moves in, actually his ancient lover, and takes her place in the kitchen and in the household. After his miraculous resurrection, Herr Kranz publishes another novel and continues his lifestyle, until the next writer’s blues, the next breakdown, the next crisis. “We shall not capitulate like our fathers”, were the words of the Rudi Dutschke Generation. Fassbinder’s Satansbraten (1975-76) is an attempt to smash this holy image of the figure of German poet as spiritual guide, showing the putrefaction, the filth and the depravation behind the glorious scenic play of spiritual ceremonials that celebrated the supremacy of the German spirit. In this way, Reiner Werner Fassbinder seeks to humiliate the national sentiment of moral superiority. And to do so he turns to the expressive means of Antonin Artaud and his Theater of Cruelty. In Le Théâtre et son double (1938), Artaud writes: “Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theatre is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to reenter our minds”. By “cruelty” Artaud refers to a violent, austere, physical determination to shatter the false reality that “lies like a shroud over our perceptions”.
From this perspective, sadism is an excellent theatrical choice, as in sadomasochistic process the sadist’s ego is satisfied and fulfilled through the humiliation of the innocent and the vulnerable. As shocking certain scenes of this film may be, we must never forget their symbolic meaning. And the harsher is the shock, the sharper gets to be the awakening of the critical conscience. It’s actually the means utilized by another great director, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Salò, or 120 Days of Sodom, was also a film about fascism, and the last days of Benito Mussolini’s regime in the Republic of Salò, regime that according to Pasolini still dominated Italy in 1975, when the film was released. Need it be reminded that Pasolini’s film was released the year of his death, the 1st November 1975, just before the beginning of the shootings of Satansbraten? This film was probably a tribute to his gone friend.
Fassbinder’s film is a lesson to retain, a reminder of the harm that intellectual elites are capable of once persuaded of their superiority. Despite the provocative and cruel scenes, it is a lesson of humility and a silent tribute to the victims, the innocent and the weak.
Orfeo Rosso 