“I think of Germany in the night
And then sleep leaves me.
Everything is purely fictitious.
All historical people and events, any similarities are purely coincidental. This is no joke. The judicial reality of everyday life makes this disclaimer necessary. Thirty heirs of Hitler have already come forward with legal claims, and they are not alone. For Hitler was never tried: this leads to claims, and we live in a state founded on law and justice. Freed from similarities in the depiction of people and events, and without the restricting four walls of what is called reality in this world, we are thus free to pass judgment according to the intrinsic laws of our chosen universe, and we are finally putting him, this Hitler, on trial—we with our possibilities. Yet what else is this world but, first of all, us who make, present, and watch its film. This world and me and my film. Bursting sunspots of the ego in the cosmos of hard cuts, fragments of an inner projection, memories of an old world in the black studio of our imagination, full of now lonely human marionettes, changing characters of the self, endless material for monologues, monodramas, and tragedies on celluloid. Dances of death, dialogues of the dead, conversations in the kingdom of the dead, a hundred years later, a thousand years, millions. Passions, oratorios.
Who knows. But how is one to, who am I to, how are we to, who am I, who are we, who acts for us and for whom do we act, why, what remains, once again everyone together, leftovers of a lost civilization and of a lost life, our Europe before its collapse. Farewell to the Occident. Sub specie aeternitatis and everything on film, our new chance. The story of the death of the old light in which we lived, and of our culture, a remote singing.
An artificial light now through the black envelope of our film fantasies in the mind’s eye. The echo of fading music in our ears.” HJS
