Der Grosse Konig - about the German spirit and its tragic heroism Firstly, this tragedy is due to excessive idealism, which, due to excessiveness and its romantic jerks, often drives it in the opposite direction - into excessive stiffness and tightness of matter. That is, he with his idealistic and beautiful impulses in his inner content only aggravates all the time his life, because in the end he lacks adequateness.
He'd find adequacy humiliating. He also feels the perverse joy of such self-destruction, for it gives a sense of some power over being itself. Who else, besides the German spirit, could create the concept of transcendental consciousness in all its self-sufficiency, is, as it were, being-in-being, which claims to compete with being itself, wants to be equal to it.
Second, closer to the movie. A colossal, incredible difference with Soviet propaganda films about Stalin! Nothing in common!
The film depicts only one depersonalized German spirit, in which individuals are even somehow too dissolved. Frederick is no leader or teacher, he is only the greatest concentration of this spirit. So we see the German spirit in some kind of continuous self-induction, self-resonance, and only in this sense in self-knowledge.
There can be no question of appearing in a dress uniform and giving a couple of orders to create some absolutely perfect life. In the final, Friedrich suffers because of the national ruin caused by the war. But what he does, again, is not the embodiment of an ideal at all costs (and any price is usually human lives). He can only try to do the best he can, and only within the framework of a certain way of life and moral standards which the German spirit has taken upon itself in the person of all its representatives. And in the finale, where it is fitting to celebrate, we see Frederick, who ... cries! Yes, in the frame flashing crushing fields, restored after the war mill. But the main thing is the tears, which act as the guarantor of a kind of loving self-reproduction and self-recovery of the German spirit. It's something.
Also in the final is an important moment. Frederick does not want to go to the victory parade and take his supreme place in the palace hierarchy. Sure! Down with formalism and objectification of court statuses! Down with the bureaucracy! Through the form of Friedrich, secluded for sadness over the national mountain, the German spirit returns directly to itself, bypassing the pull of mediation. It's a scandal! Arbitrary! This is socialism on the throne!
The movie stinks of miscalculation. It is all the same mustiness, stiffness, stagnation of “matter”, hanging on the wings of the spirit with unbearable weights. And -- she doesn't find a vividly emotional, liberating resolution. They, the Germans, cannot afford it. This is for some French people who have no order and do not know where they are going. Such joy would be just too material. Only the moderate, economic joy of a newly plowing field, of a newly toiling mill. And there's a lot, a lot of work to do. Satisfaction is economically restrained for a new round of self-induction. I'm sorry, but the perception of such images to me, a simple "subhuman", and, I'm sure, a hysterical like Hitler, literally bites the balls. Too proud of the idealism of self-control.
And finally, the German aesthetic. It made me realize that there is nothing more amusing than Goethe as a symbol of the German spirit. Goethe, this is much more of a European man with a passion for romance. Pushkin’s African origin is nothing compared to Goethe’s inland Africa in the German spirit. He's kind of like a Belle after the war, but for all the time. These two and many more exist almost to take prying eyes away from intimate German self-deepness. It's almost just following basic decency. In the middle of the German spirit... Schiller and Hegel, the hated Goethe, will tell you much more than that you are not a German.