The Nibelungenlied: The Lay of the Nibelungs (Oxford World's Classics) Read Online Free PDF

frustrations attendant upon the first Bayreuth Festival of 1876 left Wagner feeling betrayed. If Siegfried had once been the embodiment of the New Man and the
Ring
a lesson in revolutionary thinking, the passing years brought about a change in Wagner’s perception of the tetralogy. His second wife, Cosima (1837–1930), reports a conversation with him in 1882, only months before his death, in which he discusses the end of the cycle: ‘He is pleased with it all, so heathen and so Germanic! … He recalls Gobineau [the racist thinker Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, 1816–82] and the Germanic world which came to an end with this work.’ By now Siegfried was no longer the man of the future, but was consigned to a phase in the history of the world’s evolution, re-auditioning for his role in the
Nibelungenlied
, while the
Ring
as a whole was felt to describe a phase in world history that pre-dated the degeneration of the species, reflecting a pristine Germanic Paradise that could never be regained. Myth had again become history.
Filming the
Nibelungenlied
    The
Nibelungenlied
has met with decidedly mixed fortunes in what has often been termed
the
medium of the twentieth century, cinema. The first director to tackle the subject was the Austrian Fritz Lang (1890–1976), intended by Goebbels to be the creator of National Socialist cinema before he fled the Third Reich in 1933. Lang’s two-parter was made in the Babelsberg studios and their grounds in Berlin, in 1923–4. It is one of the great works of the silent era of Weimar cinema. The opening title dedicates the film ‘to the German people’, in huge Gothic print. Its script was by Thea von Harbou (1888–1954), Lang’s then wife, who was later to become a member of the Nazi party. The first part,
Siegfrieds Tod
(
Siegfried’s Death
), was re-released in a sound version in 1933, reflecting the iconic significance of Siegfried in the Third Reich. Significantly, the second part,
Kriemhilts Rache
(
Kriemhilt’s Revenge
), with its final massacre of the Nibelungs, was not re-released; the Nazis had little interest in a film that concentrated on defeat. Lang’s two-parter remains for the most part true to the medieval poem, though it does draw for its earlyscenes on Richard Wagner. An accusation of racism has been levelled against the second part, Lang himself admitting that he wanted to portray ‘the world of the wild Asiatic hordes of the Huns’. 30
    It is the monumental, geometrical style of the films’ sets and the Expressionist camerawork that make Lang’s two-parter a masterpiece, in particular the beautiful forest scenes with their concrete trees. As Manvell and Fraenkel put it: ‘The dragon in
Siegfried’s Death
remains one of the best-realized of screen monsters, controlled by a team of operators stationed both inside and beneath the monster, which was some twenty metres long.’ 31 Its only rival in pre-war cinema is
King Kong
(1932).
    In 1966–7 Harald Reinl (1908–86), a prominent and versatile representative of what came to be regarded by the young lions of New German Cinema as ‘Opas Kino’ (‘Grandad’s Cinema’), directed a colour remake of Lang’s films, with the hammer-thrower Uwe Beyer playing Siegfried and Herbert Lom taking the part of Etzel. It would be a kindness to describe Reinl’s film as mediocre, but worse was yet to come. The end of the 1960s and the early 1970s witnessed the nadir in the history of German film. The majority of cinemas turned themselves into
Bahnhofskinos
, ‘station cinemas’, showing an unvaried diet of soft-or hard-core pornographic films. Thus it came about that in 1971 Adrian Hoven directed an ill-conceived remake of the first Lang film, shown as part of a double bill:
Ich eine Groupie
prefacing
Siegfried und das sagenhafte Liebesleben der Nibelungen (Siegfried and the Legendary Love-life of the Nibelungs)
. Hoven’s film follows the plot very loosely; it incorporates more bathing scenes than were the norm in