Years ago Felicitas Hoppe published a wonderful retelling, Iwein Lowenritterthat still inspires children and parents to this day. Who now of theirs Nibelungen Expected something similar, was mistaken. She worked on the material for far too long for that. In her fantastic USA travel book Truth from 2018 there are corresponding sprinkles. For example a visit to Quentin Tarantino: “Screenwriters are dreamers. They dream of treasure, revenge and bloodlust, of murder and manslaughter, of cemeteries in which the ghosts of the Rhenish Nibelungs rise up every night against the ghosts of the Russian Huns. ”At some point the remark that the Nibelungs“ drink their own blood for that To extinguish the fire of self-annihilation from within. ”Truly no material for children. Not after going through so much mythomaniac abuse, especially during the Nazi era.
But even Richard Wagner is largely ignored here. On the one hand, it ties in with Fritz Lang’s silent film, which Adolf Hitler was so enthusiastic about, and, on the other, with the Worms Nibelungen Festival, which, however, puts an ostrich-sized cuckoo egg on the stage. On the one hand, there is a procedure that has long been her own and that she is in Hoppe and Truth perfected, but here it went a further revolution, namely that of playful mystifications, the alternating fading of inventions and fantasies with so-called facts. Products of a mercurial imagination and wandering imagination that obey a sharp logic. If Jean Paul wrote today, he would probably write similarly. On the other hand, it seems, there is an impulse in it to preserve the childlike nature with its ability to enchant the world, in this case of course: to regain it. Because the Nibelungs, with their obsession with treasure, fit perfectly into the dreams of the nursery, but their deadly serious obsession with vengeance are a nightmare from which they first have to be freed themselves in order to let them play back in the game of fantasies and dreams.
Not everything was planned that way in the original
Treasures have been part of the basic equipment of literature since time immemorial. And eerily more beautiful with Stevensons Treasure Island at the latest they moved into childhood. But how do you conjure up an enchanting dish from the iron ration? “The most worthless things are the most valuable. These are the so-called treasures. ”- said Yulia Marfutova in her brilliant debut at the beginning of the year Heaven a hundred years ago. This gives literature its freedom to become a treasure itself. Pilon in John Steinbecks Tortilla Flat knew: “I am not allowed to covet this treasure for myself. If … then the treasure digs deeper and deeper into the earth like a sea shell, and then I will never find it. ”The real treasure is for the others. Of course, that was not the case in the old Nibelungs. And consequently the treasure escaped. At least that’s what Hoppe’s reading is. The treasure of childhood “has fooled us, it has changed its plan and direction.” The enormous treasure, with its core piece of the golden rod as a means of dominion over the world, is as fluid here as mercury, like its disembodiment in the ‘golden one Thirteen ‘, which “not foreseen in the original”, but as a “freelance” appraiser is just as intangible and changeable as the narrative self (or rather: narrative). The latter, in turn, interviews the other players during the breaks – a piece in its own right – observes the almost desperate general order in the equally lively changing stage play, director Ms. Kettelhut, who is descended from Fritz Lang’s film architect, as well as the bloodthirsty audience, on whose account again, it seems, not at least the bloodthirsty goes on stage. This is not about love, but about power and the other passion: revenge. “Because the queen lives better with nothing in the world than with her eternal mourning: a veiled banking secret, a temporary bomb.” Krimhild, “Germany’s most agile super widow, the most beautiful sold bride by all ”, but only through an even greater treasure than their own, one who“ nourishes their hope for eternal vengeance ”. The vengeance, at the end of which stands the downfall of all, to dissolve Stalingrad’s loyalty to the Nibelung, simmering in the “cauldron of their loyalty” – and here it is really in place – is the virtuoso achievement of Hoppe in her brilliant novel, which supposedly inevitable fate counteracted with evasive feints, with ironic cheerfulness and childish follies.
“The only thing that is certain is that in the past, at least one hears, there were plenty of poets and singers who could describe misery and death, his closest friend, far better than I could”. Not only does the showdown turn into a cake battle among gangsters, but the supposedly heavy German material turns into a pan-European garment – the treasure from Norway, the Burgundians today French, Dietrich von Bern from Verona, Etzel = Attila and so on from the Rhine to the Danube, from the North Sea to the Black Sea. All adorned with their arabesques and the finest lace against mania for power and the intoxication of love, thirst for blood and greed for capital. At the end she brings the medieval to the Lied attached legal action back into the game, in which an attempt is made to mourn the fate of all those involved and to find a Christian conciliatory way out. Here Ms. Kettelhut’s “Triumph of patience and the long breath that rises above all the Nibelungs.” Last but not least, the novel that offers such lessons is: “It is not the journey that is dangerous, but the arrival, not the sea, but the coast. “, A tribute to storytelling. “Guessing is one thing, acting is a second thing, and telling a story is a third thing. And as history teaches us, the story almost always wins. “Followed, of course, by the following sentence:” Which is why the kings naturally did not allow themselves to be stopped “…
Felicitas Hoppe’s book is a treasure, a house treasure, so diverse that it no longer has to change shape, but will renew itself and multiply when it is reread.
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