Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal
224
Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal
224Paperback(Revised ed.)
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Overview
Levin begins with an explanation of the book's theoretical foundations and then applies these theories to close readings of, in turn, Wagner's cycle and Lang's film. He concludes by tracing how Germans have dealt with the Nibelungen myths in the wake of the Second World War, paying special attention to Michael Verhoeven's 1989 film The Nasty Girl. His fresh and interdisciplinary approach sheds new light not only on Wagner's Ring and Lang's Die Nibelungen, but also on the ways in which aesthetics can be put to the service of aggression and hatred. The book is an important contribution to scholarship in film and music and also to the broader study of German culture and national identity.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691049717 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/19/1999 |
| Series: | Princeton Studies in Opera , #14 |
| Edition description: | Revised ed. |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, And The Nibelungen
The Dramaturgy of Disavowal
By David J. Levin
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1998 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-02621-3
CHAPTER 1
Representation's Bad Object
THE NIBELUNGEN, AGGRESSION, AND AESTHETICS
IN MAY OF 1995, Frank Castorf, the controversial artistic director of the Volksbiihne (People's Theater) in East Berlin, presented a radical reworking of Friedrich Hebbel's grandiloquent mid-nineteenth-century drama Die Nibelungen. Castorf's production bore the marks of its aspiration to radicalism on its sleeve, or at least in its title: "Die Nibelungen: Born Bad." The newly amalgamated title did not just span languages, it spanned cultures, epochs, and genres, for Castorf drew his subtitle from Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. The juxtaposition of Hebbel and Stone was not limited to the title; rather it kept popping up during the course of the production, which spanned a grueling 6 1/2 hours in two evenings. Several video monitors were visible on stage and at selected moments fragments from Stone's film appeared onscreen while the soundtrack rumbled through the theater.
In one sense, Castorf's gambit was transparent: he assumed the directorship of the Volksbuhne with the explicit charge of attracting a more youthful audience. Inplaying Hebbel off against Stone, he juxtaposed the ostensibly stodgy and remote concerns of the mid-nineteenth-century drama with Stone's hip and accessible, even outrageous, work. (Stone's film had aroused a good deal of hand-wringing when it arrived in Germany. Initial screenings were accompanied by debates about cinematic nihilism and the responsibilities of cinema in a democratic culture.) The bridge that Castorf built to ease his target audience into the work also afforded him an escape from—or at least an opportunity to resituate—the work's historical and national specificity. Once Castorf had his young audience in tow, he took them and the work for a ride in formulaically unfamiliar territory That is, he packed up the work and the kids and whizzed by the Third Reich in order to land Hebbel and company in the wild, wild west
Beyond the marketing strategy, there is also a dramaturgical polemic implicit in Castorf's production It is not that we see the Nibelungen differently as a result of an individual directoral interpretation, which was the case, for example, with Thomas Langhoff's production of Knemhild'sRevenge (the second part of Hebbel's two-part drama) at the Deutsches Theater just across town There, Langhoff offered a reading of the text in a traditional sense, although his reading was certainly not traditional His rendering reinflected the work by critically reinflecting its text thus, in Langhoff's reading, Hagen emerges as an utterly charismatic military leader while Siegfried is unusually passive On the other hand, Castorf staged the text as unreadable, riven by its discursive and ideological entwinements Like Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, Castorf did not seek to present the text as such, but rather its cultural, historical, and political saturation But unlike Syberberg, who famously renders that saturation with heaps of ambivalent ur-German bric-a-brac, Castorf looked abroad to remflect the work's voice with the jargon of Generation X Here, but not just here, the Nibelungen spoke of and to Germany's tortured historical identity
My readers will certainly not be surprised by the assertion that the Nibelungen material is ideologically rife or historically overdetermined Indeed, a number of scholars have undertaken detailed surveys of the ideological content and historical appropriation of this material, I will not do so here Of course, the ideology of the work is found not only in its content and reception Indeed, in recent years a sizable body of criticism has relocated the ideologies of national representation in aesthetic form Thus we might ask, if the various Nibelungen works have so much to tell us about the relationship of the Germans to their history, are we looking in the right places for their testimony? The question is unduly coy, for it hides a polemic that needs to be stated plainly Over the course of the past thirty-five years, we have learned a good deal about the astonishing historical and ideological trajectory of this material But critics have traced that trajectory largely in terms of content and reception, I propose instead that we examine it on the level of aesthetics Each of the works I will consider poses its principal concerns—including questions of community, identification, and power—as properly aesthetic This is not to say that the political is only or merely aesthetic, but rather that it is important to examine the ways in which these works render their politics in an aesthetic register.
I seek to account for the politics of aesthetics in two famous—and famously perplexing—renderings of the Nibelungen material: Richard Wagner's operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen and part one of Fritz Lang's two-part film Die Nibelungen. Wagner's tetralogy and Lang's film have played crucial roles not just in the history of Nibelungen adaptations, but in the overall history of their respective genres and, more important, in the elaboration of what we might term an aesthetics of national identity. In Musica Ficta, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe argues that "Wagner's aesthetic politics has nothing of a political aestheticism or of an 'aesthete' politics ... rather it aims at what Benjamin and Brecht, speaking of Nazism, called an aestheticization of politics." The same holds for Lang's film. These works have consciously, even programmatically, addressed the question, What is German? They have, at the same time, provided a vision of what is not German. Both works pose and respond to these questions in the aesthetic realm as properlyaesthetic problems. For example, Siegfried is inflected in both of these works as explicitly Germanic, heroic, fearless. His death, then, is the death of a prototypically Germanic hero. These are noteworthy—and familiar—points. But in Wagner's Ring, Siegfried is killed in the course of reciting an impromptu tale, an autobiography of sorts; in Lang's DieNibelungen, he is killed while—indeed, for—bearing a visual mark over whose production he has no control. I will argue that these moments—recourse to autobiography or loss of control over the visual realm—tell us a great deal about the politics of these works. But they do so only indirectly. That is, these works repeatedly formulate their ethical judgments in aesthetic terms. What these works endorse as good (an ethical judgment) will be presented as good art (an aesthetic judgment); and conversely, what is ethically bad is marked as aesthetically bad. Thus, a good character in these works is marked by aesthetic qualities that the work endorses, while a bad character is marked by aesthetic qualities that the work loathes. Why would this be? And how does it come to pass? These are questions addressed in this study.
In the Introduction to his 1816 edition of the Nibelungenliedl Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen offers the following assessment of the work
The saga of the Nibelungen, of Siegfried and Criemhild—one of the greatest and most meaningful anywhere, and especially for us—is a German ur- and tribal-saga, unto itself it is rooted, reposes, and keeps watch It rises above history and is itself one of its oldest monuments Although so much of what really happened in those olden days remains hidden to us, the saga offers us the oldest and truest inner history It reigns and creates according to its own inner laws, just as the so-called "wondrous" within it goes its way alongside the ordinary
Von der Hagen's claims, and their hyperbolic presentation, are typical for scholarly accounts of the Nibelungenhed in the early nineteenth century The first argument, that the epic represents "a German ur- and tribal-saga," is quite familiar, if also highly charged in criticism of the Nibelungenhed Since the early 1970s, a growing number of critics have subjected that claim to rigorous historical and ideological interrogation, examining how the work came to be appropriated by the volatile forces of German nationalism This appropriation culminated in the wildly chauvinistic reception of the Nibelungenlied in the literary criticism of the National Socialists, and many contemporary critics write with at least one eye to the work's dubious destiny between 1933 and 1945 Thus, we possess a detailed map of the uneven ideological terrain occupied by the Nibelungenlied since its rein traduction into German culture in the latter half of the eighteenth century
Von der Hagen's second claim is more convoluted and less familiar He argues that although much of the historical evidence of "what really happened in those olden days" is lost, the work offers "the oldest and truest inner history" The term Geschichte that von der Hagen employs is famously ambiguous—designating history as well as story—and both meanings are at play in the claim The Nibelungenlied redresses the paucity of concrete Geschichte (in the sense of historical evidence) by providing an internal Geschiehte (in the sense of a story) There are a number of reasons why von der Hagen would inflect his claim in this way The need for cultural legitimation had become particularly acute with the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire—and with it the external, political traces of the German nation—in 1806. Von der Hagen was seeking to join the battle for national legitimacy on the cultural front: without political history in his favor, he struck out in search of an alternative. Not surprisingly, he hedged history into story under cover of Geschichte, abandoning the depressing facticity of Germany's history in favor of a more reassuring, "inner" story. The Nibelungenlied provided just the sort of cultural cover he needed. Here, the story would pick up where history left off. Like many of his compatriots, von der Hagen turned to the Nibelungenlied to tell a tale that he longed to tell: the prehistory of the German nation. That tale, in turn, has been told and retold: in every epoch since the early nineteenth century, in every conceivable genre—in painting, poetry, ballet, sculpture, literature, drama, opera, and on screen. And although we have a strong sense of the political appropriation of these works, we know comparatively little about the politics of representation within them. This is odd, because the historical appropriation and functionalization of the work are prefigured on the level of representation: here, the inner Geschichte tells and retells the story of how very treacherous representation can be and how important it is to control its production.
Of course, representation will mean different things in different works, especially when those works span genres, source materials, and epochs. Nonetheless, each of these works displays a recurring concern with the politics of representation and, more precisely, the politics of reiteration. In Lang's film of the mid-twenties, the concern involves control over spectatorial absorption and physical appearance; in Wagner's Ring, it involves control over one's own tale. I read both works allegorically: in both, control over narrative dissemination is shown to be essential to power. As these works embody the perils of a narrative appropriated in the service of a greater—devious, unethical, nihilistic—cause, they also figure those perils within the work. That figuration takes the form of a mise-en-abyme, where problems of content—such as control of one's appearance—are also rendered as problems of form. This happens repeatedly and in various guises in these works—this study examines how.
The problem in these works is not unlike the problem in Castorf's production. In each, a good deal of anxiety accrues to the very project of narrative totalization; the project, that is, of producing a fully fledged, totalizing account of the nation. In the following pages, I will attempt to account for the genesis and terms of this project of narrative totalization. For now, I want to suggest that once a narrative is fully rendered in these works, vulnerability ensues. This is how we can explain Castorf's determination to break up Hebbel's work with snippets of Stone's film. When it comes to the Nibelungen material—and in this sense, the material arguably stands in for a problem that dogs an aspiration to a totalizing representation of "Germanness"—a full, totalizing rendering repeatedly produces vulnerability.
The Dramaturgy of Disavowal
Lang's film and Wagner's tetralogy are both reworkings of earlier material. But how is that reflected and figured in the works? How does the project of reformulating the material relate to the recurring scenes of reiteration that they present?
To begin with, reiteration in these works is bound up with scheming and aggression. In Wagner's Ring, reiteration constitutes a celebrated compositional technique (in the form of the Leitmotif) and an ambivalent dramaturgical tick (in the form of narratives that are formulated and reformulated during the course of the tetralogy). While heroic characters in Wagner's work often narrate without a conscious intent to manipulate or mislead, less appealing characters use narration as a weapon to deceive and ensnare. Thus, a malevolent character such as Mime, who narrates with great fervor and then repeats those narratives ad nauseam, is distinguished by that fact: his corruption is signaled by his recourse to narration, and, more important, his conscious manipulation of it. On the other hand, Siegfried, who is, of course, a heroic figure, is killed in the course of narrating his past. And not just narrating it, but reiterating his narration. That is, the tale that Siegfried tells of his past in act III, scene ii of Wagner's Gotteidammeiung diverges in one extremely important feature from the tale of his past recounted in act I, scene ii of the same opera. Hagen, who sets up both scenes, makes good use of the discrepancy in Siegfried's story: he kills Siegfried for perjury. Of course, he does not kill Siegfried solely because the latter retells his life story. But there is a recurring scene of trickery played out in these works that seems to converge around a desire to revisit and refigure a tale. Why would this be? Why would the scene of retelling yield aggression? And whence the determination to control that scene?
In the Nibelungen film, reiteration and its functionalization take a different form. Here, the project of rendering the epic on film produces a set of concerns that have less to do with narration than with cinema. As I show in chapter three, the film is produced in response to anxieties concerning the role of German film and German film audiences in the face of Hollywood's broad success in Germany in the early twenties. These concerns do not just surround the production of the film; they play an important part within it. Thus, characters from the saga are reinflected with qualities—such as naive spectatorship and loss of control over appearances—that can be understood in terms of contemporary anxieties about German film culture. Those qualities emerge in the film's reformulation of the source material for a prototypically nationalist cinematic culture in the mid-twenties.
We can gain a preliminary sense of what distinguishes these two works from one another and what similarities they share by returning to the scene considered above, the scene of Siegfried's death. In the film, Siegfried dies not while retelling a tale but for appearing to have betrayed his master. My argument will apply a great deal of pressure to this notion of appearance, since Siegfried does not simply appear to have betrayed Gunther, rather Hagen makes it (and him) appear thus. In chapter three, I suggest that Siegfried becomes vulnerable when he cedes to others his own explicitly magical control over appearances. Thus, both the film and the tetralogy depict an aesthetic problem—be it visual or narrative dissemination—as a central dramaturgical concern. But this sounds more like a dramaturgy of reflexivity than a dramaturgy of disavowal, promised in my title. How are the two related? I will argue that they are related through villainy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, And The Nibelungen by David J. Levin. Copyright © 1998 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsPreface
Ch. 1 Representation's Bad Object: The Nibelungen, Aggression, and Aesthetics
Ch. 2 Where Narration Was, There Darstellung Shall Be: Wagner and the Scene of Narration
Ch. 3 Viewing with a Vengeance: The Dramaturgy of Appearances in Fritz Lang's Siegfried
Postscript: Disavowal and Figuration: The Nibelungen after the Third Reich
Notes
Works Cited
Index
What People are Saying About This
"This book will have a major impact not just on scholarship on Wagner and Lang, or even in the areas of music and film; I am confident that it will also produce a new reflection on the relationship between close readings of individual cultural objects and broader thinking on issues such as German national identity and self-understanding."—Michael W. Jennings, Princeton University
This book will have a major impact not just on scholarship on Wagner and Lang, or even in the areas of music and film; I am confident that it will also produce a new reflection on the relationship between close readings of individual cultural objects and broader thinking on issues such as German national identity and self-understanding.
This book will have a major impact not just on scholarship on Wagner and Lang, or even in the areas of music and film; I am confident that it will also produce a new reflection on the relationship between close readings of individual cultural objects and broader thinking on issues such as German national identity and self-understanding.
— Michael W. Jennings, Princeton University