Recently, I am noticing that a remarkably high percentage of those German films that are released on international dvds have as topic the Nazi time. But not enough with this newer productions, one is even eager to re-release older movies about this one and the same topic, which seems to be of such great interest. What are the reasons? Is it the still bad conscience of the Germans themselves which cannot be made responsible for what their fathers or grandfathers did? Or do the sons and grandsons of the "liberators" of Nazi Germany have to indulge now in their past, because the present does not look so glorious anymore? Syberberg's "Hitler" is grandly overrated, in my opinion. It is a pseudo-intellectual work which is pretending much more than what it really is. In almost 8 hours the director scatters the undigested morsels out of textbooks in philosophy, German literature and film history over his audience. Or do you know what Hegel has to do with the Third Reich? Do you know why Oskar Loerke, Ernst Stadler, August Stramm and the dadaists come to "honor" in this movie? Do you really believe that the "Hollywood fascists" ended the carrier of Erich von Stroheim, leaded by Gloria Swanson? This film is crowded with poetic and metaphysical "knowledge" that is just picked up from encyclopedias, mixed with pure nonsensical "interpretations" and randomly spread in the legion of massively overlong monologues. If you watch attentively, the movie presents you a full contents of assumingly every experimental shot that you can find listed in the histories of film technique - of course, randomly used, the absence of any recognizable structure being blamed to the lack of understanding of an allegedly illiterate audience.<br /><br />Principally, I like the idea of digging out classics of the German New Wave between the Oberhausener Manifest and its end with the dead of Fassbinder. But where, where are the films of Alexander Kluge, Peter, Thomas and Viktor Schamoni, Werner Schroeter, Horst Bienek, Peter Lilienthal, Jean-Marie Straub, Ula Stöckl, Peter Fleischmann, Hans W. Geissendörfer, Ulrike Ottinger, Walter Bockmayer? At the same time when dubious film companies are re-releasing the unrestored and horribly dubbed German pre-New Wave movies, the so-called "Kriminalfilme" and "Lederhosenfilme" and present them to a surprised American audience that cannot have any idea about the background on which these movies had been made, at this very same time the films of the New Wave generation that purposely cleaned up with this so-called "Papa's Cinema", are simply not available on international dvds. And if you buy the German dvds, than you will realize that practically all are not region-free. Well understood, we speak here about several hundreds of films which would be well worth seeing international distribution. However, Syberberg's "Hitler" does definitely not belong to the pearls. Its director released "Hitler" for free on his own homepage and offers region-free copies of his collected works for a dumping price.