Echoing
Sidney’s claim that poetry creates a better reality, a model to emulate and
aspire to, Shelley states, “Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in
human character; nor can we doubt that those who read his verses were awakened
to an ambition of becoming like to Achilles, Hector and Ulysses: the truth and
beauty of friendship, patriotism and persevering devotion to an object, were
unveiled to the depths in these immortal creations: the sentiments of the
auditors must have been refined and enlarged by a sympathy with such great and
lovely impersonations, until from admiring they imitated, and from imitation
they identified themselves with the objects of their imagination.”
The Nibelungenlied’s Siegfried belongs
alongside the aforementioned heroes as an embodiment of ideal perfection. His exploits are proof of a powerful and
crafty being: in order, he slays a dragon, gains possession of a vast treasure,
and uses his magic cap to win and subdue Brunhild, Queen of Iceland, for King
Gunther of Burgundy, in exchange for permission to marry Princess
Kriemhild. Like Achilles, he has one
fatal flaw: instead of a vulnerable heel, Siegfried has a weak spot on his back
where a linden leaf landed just before he bathed himself in dragon’s blood, the
source of his near-immortality. When
Brunhild discovers it was Siegfried (disguised as Gunther, thanks to the magic
cap) who broke her spirit, she claims he not only symbolically deflowered her
when he took her arm ring but also literally took her maidenhood. She convinces Gunther to kill Siegfried, and
he conspires with Hagen von Tronje, who, with the help of an unwitting
Kriemhild, finds the exact location of Siegfried’s corporal weakness. While hunting, Hagen fulfills Brunhild’s wish
when he and Siegfried are alone at a spring.
Siegfried,
as portrayed by Paul Richter, certainly meets the expectations of an epic hero
in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried. He is physically superior to any other
character in appearance and strength; as the embodiment of Germany, its legacy,
and its ideals, Richter’s Siegfried provided a moving image for the first time
to a centuries-old epic hero. Shelley
argues that poetry teaches “self-knowledge and self-respect,” and it is hard
not to imagine German viewers at this time identifying with Siegfried and
feeling puffed up as his superiority, divinity even, becomes apparent over the
course of the film. The flip side of
this heightened sense of self, unacknowledged by Shelley, is the stratification
of others that results. That Siegfried
is clearly superior means that others are either average or inferior; Richter,
in all of his Aryan perfection, clearly represents German purity, while
Alberich and Brunhild just as clearly represent Jewishness. This dichotomy problematizes one of Shelley’s
key claims of poetry: “Poetry turns all things to loveliness; it exalts the
beauty of that which is most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is
most deformed.” Alberich meets all the
requirements of a deformed character, but nobody at any point would consider
him beautiful. Epics have always had
villains and monsters, of course, but the advent of film made it possible to
ascribe recognizable physical characteristics, many of the stereotypical ethnic
variety, to them, effectively making the unfamiliar familiar, an
anti-Shelleyism. One of Shelley’s
primary ends, love, is thus thwarted.
Shelley’s definition of love—“a going out of our own nature, and an
identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action,
or person, not our own”—is impossible when one raises himself up at the expense
of putting down the other.
Die Nibelungen: Siegfried caught Germans
at a particularly vulnerable time; in the midst of the Weimar Republic’s reign,
the average German despised the government that had committed the ultimate betrayal by agreeing to the
terms of the Treaty of Versailles. The
economy floundered due to the reparations they agreed to pay and the resulting
inflation. According to The Holocaust Chronicle, “In the early
1920s, one dollar was worth 100 marks.
In January 1923 the mark fell to 18,000 per dollar. Hyperinflation had replaced inflation. Later in the year, the exchange rate soared
to 4.2 billion marks to the dollar.” The
disappearance of a middle class is felt in Siegfried,
considering the different groups represented in the film. What groups outside of nobility, after all,
are represented? The blacksmiths figure
prominently in the film’s exposition, and their portrayal is anything but
positive. Their living conditions are
primitive, squalid, and their appearance Neanderthal. Out of this muck comes Siegfried,
transcending the hopelessness of his upbringing. Siegfried, juxtaposed with the other
blacksmiths, must have been an inspiring figure, especially to those Germans,
harshly affected by the war, who remembered better times.
A
downtrodden people need a restorative narrative; the Germans found theirs by
looking to the past and claiming Teutonic, or völkisch, purity. Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw explains, “The
central strands of völkisch ideology was extreme nationalism, racial anti-Semitism,
and mystical notions of a uniquely German social order, with roots in the
Teutonic past, resting on order, harmony, and hierarchy. Most significant was the linkage of a
romanticized view of Germanic culture (seen as superior but heavily threatened
by inferior but powerful forces, particularly Slavs and Jews), with a social
Darwinian emphasis upon struggle for survival, imperialist notions of the need
for expansion to the Slavic east in order to safeguard national survival, and
the necessity of bringing about racial purity and a new elite by eradicating
the perceived arch-enemy of Germandom, the spirit of Jewry.”
At least
two characters in Siegfried are
represented with distinct Jewish characteristics/stereotypes: Alberich and
Brunhild. Alberich, interestingly, takes
on a somewhat different role in Siegfried
than in the Nibelungenleid. In the latter he guards Siegfried’s treasure;
in the former he is defeated by Siegfried and is turned into stone. In literature dwarves have been known to
hoard treasure, so an anti-Semitic German audience would have associated them
with Jews. Alberich’s appearance is
strikingly Jewish, in more ways than one: his visage bears a resemblance to the
following propaganda poster that claims a Rothschild stronghold on the
world.
His exaggerated crown of thorns suggests a perversion of the crucified Christ. While “cunning” in the Nibelungenleid, he ultimately works with Siegfried. Collaboration was not meant to be in Die Nibelungen, though, as Alberich means to deceive Siegfried.
Brunhild,
too, is assigned a high degree of Jewishness in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried.
She is Siegfried’s foil, her dark, thick hair and pointed features
contrasting sharply with his golden locks, among other things. Her relationship with Gunther is interesting
in its implications of German purity, or lack thereof. Gunther is an emasculated figure, willing to
acquiesce to impure, outside influences.
He allows Burgundy to become tainted by Brunhild. A contemporary German viewer may have
connected Gunther to the leaders of the Weimar Republic, who were perceived as
ideological weaklings. Like Alberich,
Brunhild is portrayed differently from the source in Die Nibelungen, and though the differences are subtle, they
emphasize her Jewishness/Otherness. When
she is defeated in competition and taken to Burgundy, she is unwilling to
submit to Gunther. As mentioned, at
Gunther’s request Siegfried uses the magic cap to disguise himself as Gunther,
and he promises to break her will, on condition that he does not actually take
her maidenhood. In Siegfried he lives up to the promise; after he steals her arm ring,
the audience sees him slip away, as the real Gunther slides in to take his
place. The Nibelungenleid implies that Siegfried actually took Brunhild’s maidenhood, despite Gunther’s plea not to. Such miscegenation would have been
unthinkable to the German viewer.
Die Nibelungen, following in the
footsteps of Wagner’s Der Ring des
Nibelungen, “attempted to recapture Germany’s grandeur and mystical past (The Holocaust Chronicle).”
It offered models to imitate, and many Germans of the era arguably
internalized its romanticized version of purity. To the modern viewer, though, Die Nibelungen: Siegfried stands as an
example of romanticism gone wrong.
Shelley is correct in his belief that “poets are the unacknowledged
legislators of the world.” What he
failed to acknowledge were the possible negative effects of creating the
better-than-reality persona: if his or her enemies are given human (ethnic)
characteristics, the poet is perpetuating worse-than-reality stereotypes.
No comments:
Post a Comment