Author Description

Along with Fassbinder and Wenders, Hans Jürgen Syberberg (1935-), has been a figurehead of the New German Cinema. A filmmaker, theatre director and video artist, Syberberg soon found international resonance, even outside the circle of film critics. In the 1990s, he openly declared his political leanings and since then he has been seen as a pioneer of the New Right in Germany. Lost Sunsets explores the roots of Syberberg’s politics and the artistic evolution of his art. Goossens traces his intellectual and artistic origins to his childhood in the Pomeranian village and later in the Stalinist East Germany. Did the James Joyce of the New German Cinema indeed turn sharply to the right in the 1990s? Or were the German critics right al along when they suggested that his work in the 70s was a symptom of a swing to the right? This book is not only an intellectual biography of an artist and a New Right publicist, but also an outline of the cultural history of the German Left, from the Expressionist debate before the Second World War to the ‘What’s right, what’s left?’debate of the 90’s.