Shell Shock Cinema by Kaes Anton

Author:Kaes, Anton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-04-14T04:00:00+00:00

A fiery retelling of cold-blooded murder. The mad minstrel and the face of revenge in the Nibelungen.

Her final gesture: she takes a folded cloth and opens it, revealing blood-soaked soil from the forest where Siegfried was killed. “Now, earth, drink yourself to the full,” she demands. Her words are symbol-laden, a call to the union of blood and soil that will later play such a prominent role in Nazi racist ideology. She opens her eyes wide and falls back, but Attila catches her and lays her on the ground. “Take her home to Siegfried, her dead husband. She never belonged to anyone else.” In a final static shot the camera captures Attila kneeling behind Kriemhild, echoing the final scene in the film’s first part, where Kriemhild knelt behind Siegfried.

There are signs that Lang critiques the unremitting single-mindedness with which Kriemhild follows through on her revenge. Both the Nibelungs and Attila comment disparagingly on her actions. Her zombielike appearance may be another clue; it recalls that of a dead person who exists only to haunt the living. Finally, at the end, there is the irony of her pointless demand for the treasure, which spoils the purity of her grief for Siegfried. All support an ambivalent reading of the film, not as a postwar nationalist revenge fantasy, but instead as a reminder of the high price exacted by archaic codes of honor and loyalty.

And yet, Kriemhild’s Revenge sheds new light on the war even as the film tries to incorporate it into German myth. While Siegfried mobilized the propaganda lie that the German army was undefeated and an innocent victim of betrayal (the stab-in-the-back legend), Kriemhild’s Revenge turned Germany’s role as victim into that of an avenger, only to see itself victimized once more by its fixation on revenge. The two parts thus address two divergent responses to the war: the glorification of the fallen soldier as hero, and the hesitant realization of the self-destructive potential of revenge. Lang’s Nibelungen gives mythic expression to the difficulty faced by the German people after the First World War. How were they to assimilate the war experience? Was it possible to fashion a coherent narrative of violence and defeat in which the death of a soldier was something other than senseless?54

Despite technological advances in warfare, the ideology harnessed to defend the killing stemmed from medieval myth. Appeals to loyalty and honor during the war—and many books and articles invoked these traits as exclusive characteristics of the German people—have such abstract absoluteness that they become suspect. The “heroism” required to fight to the bitter end is indistinguishable from a death wish. Kriemhild, who at first represents the grieving home front, actively joins the battle in order to exact revenge. It has become a total war, without discrimination between civilians and warriors, entailing the annihilation of all.55

Lang again toys with this apocalyptic worldview in Metropolis, only to pull back and suggest a conciliatory ending. The Nibelungen shows the willing self-destruction of a civilized society, while Metropolis invokes the idea of a battle against modernity itself.

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