The Witness, Memory and the Truths of the Past – Modes of Narrating History in Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s Winifred Wagner (1975)

Abstract

This article focuses on a meeting of generations that takes the form of an interview film : Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s Winifred Wagner oder die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried (1975). The only ‘actress’ of the five-hour film is Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law, who was the head of the Bayreuth Festival in 1933-1945. A historical narrative, Syberberg’s film is simultaneously also a document and an oral history based on an individual’s memory. Although the film is extraordinary in many ways, it gives the spectators an opportunity to reflect on the ways of narrating history that are common in audiovisual historical narration. Syberberg presents us with a witness who has experienced the past, but simultaneously also comments on the problem of remembering. Despite its controversies and ambivalence, Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s memory-historical film comes very close to the post-positivist thoughts that researchers like Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli were sketching while pondering the possibilities of oral history.