From Iron Age Myth to Idealized National Landscape: Human-Nature Relationships and Environmental Racism in Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen

Abstract

From the Iron Age to the modern period, authors have repeatedly restructured the ecomythology of the Siegfried saga. Fritz Lang's Weimar film production (released in 1924-1925) of Die Nibelungen presents an ascendant humanist Siegfried, who dominates over nature in his dragon slaying. Lang removes the strong family relationships typical of earlier versions, and portrays Siegfried as a son of the German landscape rather than of an aristocratic, human lineage. Unlike The Saga of the Volsungs, which casts the dwarf Andvari as a shape-shifting fish, and thereby indistinguishable from productive, living nature, both Richard Wagner and Lang create dwarves who live in subterranean or inorganic habitats, and use environmental ideals to convey anti-Semitic images, including negative contrasts between Jewish stereotypes and healthy or organic nature. Lang's Siegfried is a technocrat, who, rather than receiving a magic sword from mystic sources, begins the film by fashioning his own. Admired by Adolf Hitler, Die Nibelungen idealizes the material and the organic in a way that allows the modern ''hero'' to romanticize himself and, without the aid of deities, to become superhuman.

The darker side of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis: coloniality in modernist cinema

“…Although the workers in Metropolis are portrayed as white bodies by white actors, their subterranean location external from the metropolitan demos aligns with Lang's vertical geography of coloniality and modernity seen in Die Nibelungen. 30 Beneath the colonial machinery that animates Metropolis lies an even more primordial space, the 'Catacombs'. They are unequivocally external to Metropolis since Freder refers to 'the 2000-year-old Catacombs deep below the lowest levels of your Metropolis'.…”

“…As in Metropolis, the objectification of human bodies at the exteriority of modernity signifies a restoration of the natural order of white supremacy in that, as Bratton interprets, 'the "bad animals" are gone, and the Nibelungen as Untermenschen have become soulless creatures of stone'. 57 Yet in Metropolis¸ the Machine-Human incarnates a subversive danger in the clarity with which modernity's reliance upon coloniality is laid bare.…”