Rather than devise a spectacle in the past tense, by attempting to simulate unrepeatable reality or showing a photographic document, this is a sort of spectacle in the present tense – “adventures in the head”. Reality can only be grasped indirectly – seen reflected in a mirror, staged in the theater of the mind. A fiction without being a narrative and a document without claiming objectivity for it: a hybrid form without respectable parentage? But in contrast to the lavish DeMille-like décors that Wagner projected for his tetralogy, Syberberg’s film is a cheap fantasy.
The music should however not be misinterpreted as crudely illustrative, some (more or less) musical (symbolic) references are made; like beginning and closing all parts with a silent lonely child, an ironic mock of the complexity of the subject presented as something simple and also evoking symbolism of melancholy which musically is referred to by the, seemingly simple, beginning and ending on “one” note. Maybe this music could be viewed upon as “abstract storytelling”, having no real “plot” but constantly shifting its focus with different gestures, states, and reflections and so on.

Ein deutscher Traum is the second part in cycle I (from the large work “synthetic fragments”) consisting of 4 parts named after Syberbergs film; I – Der Gral, II – Ein deutscher Traum, III – Das Ende eines Wintermärchens, IV – Wir Kinder der Hölle;

A grail, a dream, a tale.
Hell.

The monad, the word and the idea, belongs to the western philosophical tradition and has been used by various authors, most famously by Leibniz that designates the monad as metaphysical point (without extension) in which the entire universe is reflected.

Monads are manifest, they are everywhere, and there is no extension without monads. They are, then, the plenum, that is to say, the condition of an infinitely dense universe, but nevertheless they are unextended. However, this doesn’t mean that they lack of any function (as far as they project and reflect force), matter (since they come with it) or that they are extended (considering that they don’t interact with anything in the world).

The ‘intensive infinity’ within the monad is in excess of any concept. Monadic fullness is dizzying, ‘confused.’ The infinity within the monad is infinitely analyzable, which means that it cannot be captured by a finite consciousness, but is lost for intentionality. Nonetheless, this loss is not an abstract negation of knowledge, since the monad has all the complex determinacy of an intensive gathering of relations.

The ‘pregnant’ fullness of the monad intends no mythic re-enchantment of nature. On the contrary, it definitively secularizes temporality, and shows how the modern notion of progress reintroduces the Christian via recta into the representation of time.
Walter Benjamin’s monad is simultaneously packed with all of its predicates – past, present, and future. Benjamin describes the intensive infinity within the monad as its absorption of all of its ‘virtual history’ (both becoming and passing away) in a pre-stabilized essence. We become aware of the infinite complexity in our perceptions by intensifying our attention to what is already implicit in our representations.

monade (diskontinuierliche Endlichkeit) – Oscillation measures the failure of a limit to exist.