Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (review)

Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal. David J. Levin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. 207. $29.95.

According to Theodor W. Adorno's seminal Versuch über Wagner (1937/38 [In Search of Wagner, 1981]), Richard Wagner's music dramas foreshadowed the twentieth-century culture industry in embryonic form; Wagner's orchestration favored sonic effects over structural coherence so as to assimilate high cultural traditions to popular taste. Adorno was therefore not surprised by Wagner's enormous popularity among film practitioners during the heyday of classical studio filmmaking. Like Wagner's mature mythological operas, classical studio films und film scores were designed for audiences no longer capable of concentrated reception; like Wagner's music, they were meant to be seductive, to overwhelm the audience's internal censor, to manipulate minds and engineer emotions. Meticulously tracing the ways in which Richard Wagner and Fritz Lang recycled that seemingly most German of all literary sources, the Nibelungenlied, David Levin's succinct, densely argued book shares Adorno's suspicion about certain complicities between Wagner's operas and the products of twentieth-century industrial culture. Levin's primary focus, however, is not how Wagner or Lang, in their distinctive ways, tried to beat audiences into submission by privileging effect over textual integrity. Instead, his critical attention is directed at the ways Wagner's and Lang's texts--The Ring of the Nibelung (1854-1874) and The Nibelungen (1924)--consistently encoded political or moral judgments as aesthetic judgments, the ways their respective appropriations of the Nibelungen material strategically staged conflicts between good and bad modes of aesthetic representation in order to address questions of national identity and articulate anti-Semitic sentiments. It is, for this reason, not Adorno's notion of monumental seduction but rather Sigmund Freud's concept of disavowal that plays the central role in Levin's attempt to triangulate Wagnerian musical drama and Weimar narrative cinema. Both Wagner's and Lang's work on the Nibelungen, according to Levin, present bad aesthetic objects, propositions, or practices only to discard such flaws of appearance or self-figuration in the end and thus reinforce the morally good and aesthetically beautiful. Perceptions of lack and absence are redeemed by politically precarious acts of refiguration, acts that hope to remake the national community by exorcizing the "ugly Jew."

Rather than comment on Wagner's or Lang's violation of aesthetic form or closure, then, Levin draws our attention to how their texts are driven by incessant desires for totalization. The Nibelungen material catalyzes aesthetic practices that strenuously separate self and other, the familiar and the foreign; both the composer and the filmmaker, instead of trying to bridge cultural differences or particularities, employ the Nibelungen myth in order to divide the world into absolute, self-contained opposites. Ironically, however, and symptomatically, these strategies of aesthetic totalization and national redemption cannot do without elements of paradoxical sacrificialism. Wagner sacrifices Siegfried because he falls short of Wagner's own aesthetic ideals, namely, to replace narrative self-stylization with acts of pure presentationalism. Born without name or story, Siegfried sets out to find a personal narrative without understanding that his seemingly innocent quest serves much larger schemes and designs. What Siegfried considers his path to freedom and autonomy in fact plays right into the hands of Hagen and what Wagner regarded as a typically Jewish predilection for narrative control and manipulation. Siegfried must die so that German musical drama can finally emancipate itself from foreign operatic models and dispense with their manipulative, and putatively Jewish, valorization of narration over spectacle.

The first part of Fritz Lang's Nibelungen adaptation, too, surrenders the heroic figure of Siegfried to a much larger aesthetic cause. In Lang's film, Siegfried embodies a fundamentally flawed regime of (German) viewing that falls victim to the machinations of Hagen and his control over the visual field. Hagen, according to Levin's...