6 - End-Times in the Hall: The Modern Reception of the Apocalyptic Ending of the Nibelungenlied

Summary

AT THE END oF Thea von Harbou's sentimental Nibelungenbuch of 1924, stones speak. The tower and palace at Etzel's court mourn the fiery downfall of their brother, the great hall. But appearances are deceiving. Out of the smoldering ruins emerges the voice of the hall, telling his brethren he is not to be mourned, but rather envied, for a young boy has taken up fallen Volker's bow and fiddle and gone out into the world to sing of the burning building and all the heroic events that took place there (267–68). With this ending, von Harbou, who also wrote the screenplay for Fritz Lang's two-part film, Die Nibelungen (1924), connects the violent end of the Nibelungenlied with memorymaking and inverts the original intention behind the destruction of the hall. She glorifies the Germanic past and the heroes who died there, stressing that they will never be forgotten, an integral part of a well-known mythological narrative about German identity: out of the ashes of apocalyptic conflagration arise the German people, loyal and fire-tested. Indeed, von Harbou knew the importance of this particular memory location to making myths for the German people. It is the mnemonic nature and instrumental use of this space that the present paper investigates. Many studies consider related issues concerning the modern reception of the Nibelungenlied, such as the use of characters or events for political and ideological reasons during the tumultuous years of Wilhelmine, Weimar, and Nazi Germany. My approach builds on these studies but differs from them by adopting the methodology of recent cultural analysis that investigates the meaning of physical space in the cultural imagination, in this case the Germanic hall that is so central to the tragic, apocalyptic ending of the Nibelungenlied.

There have been so many cultural reimaginings of this space, starting in the early Middle Ages and continuing through the postmodern era, that the destruction of the hall can be considered what Jan Assmann calls an Erinnerungsfigur: events, people, and locations that loom so large in the cultural memory that they are instrumental to creating cultural identity.