Program 2

Continuities of right-wing aestetics:

Syberbergs Wagner/Hitler-Complex

Tuesday, March 19, 2013, 6:30 p.m.

a video-lecture by Peter Grabher

Both in the anti-Semitism of Richard Wagner as well as in his anti-modern art religion, the unappreciated artist Hitler found a congenial colleague and predecessor. Consistently, „fascism adds up to“ - according to Walter Benjamin – „a aestetization of politics“. Famously, Winifred Wagner dedicated Bayreuth completely to the Fuehrer and the NS-agitation film „The Eternal Jew“ (1940) quotes Wagner at a crucial point. Departing from this constellation, the video-lecture interrogates Hans-Jürgen Syberbergs filmic Hitler/Wagner-Complex, contextualizes it in the memorial epochal break of the 1970ies and presents different readings of his monstrous, anarchic and irrational montages – by Susan Sontag, Michel Foucault and Serge Daney but also on behalf of the „New Right“. Film Clips: „Winifred Wagner and the History oft he house Wahnfried 1914–1975“ (D 1975), „Hitler, a film from Germany“ (D 1977-1980), „Parsifal“ (D 1982)

Peter Grabher,

born 1969, historian and film scholar, teaches at a viennese college. 2006/07 research stay at the École normale supérieure, Paris. Works on his dissertation under the title »›here and elsewhere‹. Palestine-Israel in essay film«. Literature: »Sowjet-Projektionen. Die Filmarbeit der kommunistischen Organisationen in der Ersten Republik (1918-1933)«, in: Christian Dewald (Ed.), Arbeiterkino. Linke Filmkultur der Ersten Republik, Wien: Filmarchiv Austria 2007. Member oft he viennese group KINOKI (http://www.kinoki.at).