Felicitas Hoppe’s new novel “The Nibelungs” – Culture

Felicitas Hoppe could not have suspected this when she realized her long-term resolution to retell the Nibelungenlied – that the “triple G”, her catchy abbreviation for Kriemhild’s brother trio Gunther, Gernot and Giselher, would circulate as a formula for combating epidemics when the book was published. Should we now, infected by Hoppe’s irrepressible love of tales, imagine three warriors under “Vaccinated, recovered, tested” who set out to defeat the virus? Better not, because the three of them come to a terrible end, in the original text as well as in this adaptation called “The Nibelungs”, which wants to be read as “a German silent film” and which earned Felicitas Hoppe a place on the long list of the German Book Prize . Hoppe disguises herself as a screenwriter for this silent film, but also appears in it herself, sometimes as a “silent witness in the dinghy” on the rivers Rhine and Danube, sometimes as the “last singer” or “riding messenger”. She would have fun in such further spinning, if it corresponded to her literary process of interspersing little foolishness over and over again at the highest level of reflection.

Medieval heroes and heroines have done it to Hoppe. In 2006 her sophisticated novel about “Johanna” (von Orléans) appeared, followed two years later by the beautiful children’s book “Iwein Löwenritter” based on the Arthurian epic by Hartmann von Aue. Since then, she has been drafting her own version of the Nibelung fabric (which is much older, but became literature in the High Middle Ages), inspired by the “strange desire to roll it up all over again, right into the present, beyond Update and kitsch, the greatest enemies of the reception of a Middle Ages that we still know little about “. So it said in an early workshop report.

A noble cause, a difficult task. Kitsch and striving to update it shape the popular reception of the Nibelungenlied in the 20th century, not to mention the well-known attempts at nationalist-political instrumentalization. The only German silent film based on the epic was made by Fritz Lang almost a hundred years ago and can be considered a total work of art, even if it has the stigma of being one of Hitler’s favorite films. It is best to spread the royal cloak of oblivion over the following cinema adaptations. The Nibelungen Festival in Worms, founded by the Nazis in 1937, briefly flared up again in 1956 and run as a cultural tourism event at great expense since 2002, is a chapter in itself, but that the update kitsch there under a seemingly serious, magnificently sponsored festival cloak is cheerful – comedic at best – will continue to bloom is out of the question.

It is hard to believe that the history of the staging of the games also includes a “G-Trilogy”, but it is true: Behind it are the plays “Carnage”, “Gold” and “Glut” by Albert Ostermaier, who thus rhyme with the core themes of the Nibelungen myth to the point. “Gold”, which premiered in 2016, bears the subtitle “The Film of the Nibelungs” and shrilly describes the “making-of” of a new cinema version of the blood-soaked material. When Felicitas Hoppe now takes on the perspective of the film adaptation and makes the Worms open-air theater the starting point of her extravagant Nibelungen fantasy, it may seem epigonal. But of course she, the passionate literary explorer, follows her own trail on water and on land.

The author loves the intricate, the enigmatic and the fairytale costumes

Originally the book was supposed to be called “The Last Treasure”. The reason for this is explained in the workshop report mentioned: “Because it is not the people, but the things, it is the bare matter that drives the telling of the story and gives the ‘Nibelungenlied’ a motor and a furor. The treasure, the liquid, movable asset , is the main protagonist of my retelling … “Nothing new, however. What Faust’s Gretchen could still complain about, namely that everything only depends on gold and pushes towards gold, has long characterized every staging of Wagner’s “Ring” as a cynicism that guides the knowledge, and that money rules the world has never been as evident as it is today. But Hoppe wouldn’t be Hoppe if she hadn’t transformed this insight into a pawn – into an “algorithm nicknamed the Golden Thirteen”, a ghostly mutating drifter that one gets less and less to grasp the more one reads about him.

As clearly and analytically as the author thinks and argues, as a narrator she loves the intricate, the enigmatic and the fairytale-like costume. And it is not always easy to follow her on this wild revolving stage trip between the stages of the Nibelung drama, in which extras and the audience also play en masse. The whole thing wouldn’t work as a silent film, because people talk, yell and sing as much as they can. During the big booze before the Burgundians leave for the Hunnenland, the men’s choir Worms-Pfiffligheim even intones, with full quotation from the text, the sordid version of the “Danube song”, whose beer tent suitability has been debated for months: If that doesn’t cause any trouble, because Hoppe’s contextualization of the rough Verse might be too subtle for some, as well as others of its allusions and ideas.

Death is a layman from Worms in a Woolworth tracksuit

The director of the spectacle is a Ms. Kettelhut who, it is no coincidence, bears the same name as Fritz Lang’s film architect, but who does her craft in a more “conservative” and “housewife way” way. The dramaturgy, on the other hand, is responsible for none other than Quentin Tarantino, according to the credits. Death is a layman from Worms in a Woolworth tracksuit, and you can find out how the main actors relate to their roles, what they think about the play and the location of the theater, to what extent they are historically informed, politically conscious or philosophically trained in interviews in which Hoppe’s reflections on the epic flowed into an effortless, conversational tone.

The rest is a firework of unrestrained subjective associations and imaginations, clad in a garment of language that shimmers adventurously between high notes and puns, often funny, but too dreamy and thought-heavy for a festival satire. Here and there is quoted from the prose transmission of the Nibelungenlied by Uwe Johnson, rediscovered in 2006, to which the book is also dedicated.

The “lament” attached to the epic, about the function and client of which research is still brooding, as well as about sources, manuscripts and possible authors of the poem, ultimately serves Hoppe as a foil for a verbose work of mourning and revelation. Casual conclusion: The “witness in the dinghy” secretly loves Queen Kriemhild, who in the end turns out to be “Germany’s most relentless super widow”, and after the collective demise it turns out that it was not the evil Uncle Hagen, but the superhero Siegfried who was to blame for everything . The treasure is sunk, but the Golden Thirteen lives on.

And now? Has the plan to shed new light on the old song worked? Perhaps, in the sense of a suggestion for (re) reading. “Everyone should read it so that he can receive the effect of it according to the measure of his ability,” wrote Goethe to Schubarth in 1819. And suddenly one is happy to have learned by heart those magical introductory verses that shine out from the reception garbage of centuries as untouched as alien: “We are in old mæren / wonders vil …” You will now once again give food for thought, thanks to Felicitas Hoppe.