Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen

Rating:
Summary: The misrepresentation is mainly by omission
Review: David Levin's book _Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang and the Nibelungen_ centers around the allegation that Mime in Wagner's opera _Siegfried_, and Alberich in Fritz Lang's 1920 film _Die Nibelungen_ (both dwarfs), are antisemitic representations.

Levin's arguments for these twin accusations will cause jaw-dropping disbelief in anyone familiar with Wagner's or Lang's work. He writes: "Thus Mime is repeatedly shown to be narrating (a terrible thing in Wagner's eyes and works) while Alberich embodies a version of 'Hollywood' cinema (a terrible thing in Lang's eyes and works)."

Anyone who's seen or heard a Wagner opera knows that far from narration being "a terrible thing in Wagner's eyes", it's a Wagner specialty. All Wagner's important characters are incorrigible narrators, to an extent that's notoriously off-putting for newcomers. (Levin later claims that Mime is unique because he narrates events that haven't previously been represented in dramatic form. Nice try, but so do most of Wagner's other characters, from Senta and the Dutchman to Wotan and Gurnemantz.)

This isn't just a minor error. It's actually Levin's whole argument concerning Wagner: that Wagner's character Mime was a narrator, Wagner hated narrators and thought narration was somehow Jewish, therefore Mime is an antisemitic representation and the _Ring_ is an antisemitic parable.

But if we took Levin's test seriously, all the major Wagnerian characters would be Jewish representations, and Wagner would emerge as the most obsessively philosemitic dramatist in history. (Except that according to Levin's test, everyone in Greek tragedy and Japanese Noh drama is Jewish too.)

Levin's accusation against Fritz Lang is that his _Nibelungen_ film, made in Germany in 1920, was antisemitic in its depiction of the dwarf Alberich. Levin gave two grounds for his claim that Lang's Alberich is an antisemitic representation.

First, Levin said that Lang's biographer Lotte Eisner had claimed that critic Siegfried Kracauer had thought that Lang's depiction of Alberich was antisemitic. Unfortunately for Levin, Kracauer's discussion of Lang's film is in print, and Kracauer made no such allegation. More importantly, Kracauer's opinion would only have weight if Kracauer had actually provided arguments or evidence in support of this reading of Lang's film. So Levin's first piece of supporting evidence is unsubstantiated hearsay; that one critic, Kracauer, may or may not have thought Lang's Alberich was a Jewish caricature, but provided no arguments in support of that interpretation, which he probably did not support.

Well, you can't get much more convincing than that!

And Levin doesn't. His other argument is that Alberich took Siegfried into an underground cave and shone an image on the wall: the Nibelungs mining for gold. Levin argued, essentially, that projecting images on a wall (a symbol of filmmaking) is somehow a Jewish thing to do. Therefore Lang's Alberich is an antisemitic Jewish caricature.

Obviously that's not much of an argument, expressed so baldly. So Levin expressed it hairily. Delving into the works of Freud, Klein, Lacan, etc, he engaged in a great deal of oracular pronouncing and general arm-waving. It's probably fair to describe Freudianism as a dead religion now the Freud Wars are over, and Levin did his case little good by tying so much of it to the Freudian tradition.

But against Levin's psychoanalytic flights of fancy there's just one awkward fact. It's that Fritz Lang was of Jewish descent, and he fled Nazi Germany to America (to Hollywood) partly because of politics and partly because of his Jewish ancestry.

How did Levin deal with that awkward fact? The same way he dealt with the awkward fact that _everybody_ in Wagner is a narrator, not just Mime. Levin simply didn't mention it. But at one point he cited a biography of Fritz Lang, so he can't credibly claim ignorance of the awkward fact.

An intellectually honest academic has to mention facts that hurt their thesis, and argue around them. A book that simply buries awkward facts, presumably in the hope that the readers won't know better, is not an intellectually honest book.

Levin does a lot of omitting awkward facts. For example Levin tells us that when Wagner's Siegfried (_Siegfried_ Act II) killed Mime it was because Mime was sort of Jewish; Siegfried heard Mime narrating, and realised that narrators are aliens who should be killed. Next stop, Levin suggests, is the Holocaust.

But Levin can only argue this by omitting the actual content of Mime's speech. Mime was telling Siegfried, inadvertently but truthfully, that he intended to drug Siegfried unconscious and then decapitate him. Thus Siegfried could not risk sleeping, if he wanted to wake up again. In a forest, unattended by a police service with the resources to apprehend murderous stalkers, Siegfried killed Mime in self-defence: not because Mime was a narrator, but because Mime would kill him the next time he fell asleep. (By the way Mime's threat to Siegfried was not even narration. It was exposition. Since "narration" is such a central concept in Levin's book, he should at least know what "narration" means.)

Here, as with his claims about narration in Wagner, and whether Fritz Lang is likely to have made antisemitic movies, Levin used the technique known as "misrepresentation by omission". He also applied this technique in his discussion of Wagner's prose. But although I'd meant to discuss such things as Levin's claim that Siegfried burnt down the world ash tree in order to forge Nothung (a false claim that suggests that Levin may not have actually read the _Ring_ libretto), and many other things, I'm close to the word limit.

Basically this book is nonsense. Wagner students are used to this sort of thing; Wagner brings out this sort of tin-foil-hatted lunacy in some academics. But admirers of Fritz Lang, in the real world a victim rather than a perpetrator of Nazi bigotry, have the right to be a little annoyed by this mildly misleading piece of work.

Cheers!

Laon

Rating:
Summary: Save your money
Review: I heard the author speak at a conference on Wagnerism and Music
overseas, and it contained the gist of this book. Basically the
author is a professional hand-wringer victim, who travels around
the world cadging free meals and lodging by trotting out a very
shop-worn personal rant against Wagner, Lang, and the Nibelung
legend. It reminded me of nothing so much as a very whiny baby
who's grown up to be an equally whiny guy who's found a comfy
living whining at music conferences, and is ultimately a boring,
tiring person who needs to get a real life-and stop whining!

His rant really ticked me off, it is very puerile and boring.

If ya gotta buy the book, buy it used.