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Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache
1924 Drama / Adventure / Fantasy
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Credits
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Director: Fritz Lang
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Script: Thea von Harbou
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Photo: Carl Hoffmann, Günther Rittau
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Music: Gottfried Huppertz
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Cast: Margarete Schön (Kriemhild),
Gertrud Arnold (Königin Ute),
Theodor Loos (König Gunther),
Hans Carl Mueller (Gernot),
Erwin Biswanger (Giselher),
Bernhard Goetzke (Volker von Alzey),
Hans Adalbert Schlettow (Hagen Tronje),
Hardy von Francois (Dankwart)
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Country: Germany
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Language: German
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Runtime: 144 min; B&W; silent
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Aka: Kriemhild's Revenge; The She Devil
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Summary
After the death of her husband Siegfried, Kriemhild appeals to her brother Gunther to
have his killer, Hagen, executed. When Gunther refuses, Kriemhild allows herself
to be married to Etzel, the king of the Huns. After Kriemhild provides Etzel with
a son and heir, she asks him to invite her brothers to his court. Despite Kriemhild’s
pleas, Etzel refuses to harm his guests - until Hagen kills his baby son. A violent
conflict suddenly erupts between the Niberlungs, loyal followers of Gunther, and the Huns.
Kriemhild is determined to have her revenge, even if it means sacrificing her brothers...
Review
Kriemhilds Rache is the dramatic conclusion to
Fritz Lang’s epic two-part film Die Nibelungen,
based on a famous Germanic poem from Medieval times. In the first part,
Siegried, we saw how Queen Kriemhild was tricked
into betraying her husband Siegfried, allowing her evil sister-in-law Brunhild to have
him killed. The second part is concerned with Kriemhild’s revenge on her husband’s
killer, the vassal Hagen Tronje - and a bloody affair it is too.
With an enormous budget, Lang was able to realise some of the most spectacular sequences
ever seen in cinema up until this point - including some truly ambitious battle scenes
involving many hundreds of extras. This is a triumph of German cinema in the 1920s.
The sets were some of the most extravagant ever to have been assembled in UFA’s Berlin
studios, and give the film its extraordinary scale and darkly expressionistic feel.
There are two plausible interpretations of this film. The first is that revenge
is something which ennobles the human spirit; it is cowardice or folly to let an act of
evil go unpunished. The avenger is a hero, someone who must be prepared to sacrifice
everything so that retribution may be arrived at. Kriemhild is not only morally
justified in what she does, she stands as an emblem of divine justice. This is hardly
a Christian view, but it is probably how many German people, watching the film in the
1920s, would have felt. In the humiliating aftermath of the First World War, the
nationalistic sentiments of the film would have been readily picked up, nourishing thoughts
of revenge against those who had brought a great nation to its knees.
The second
interpretation, which is more evident today, is that revenge is a terrible thing, something
which brings only devastation and misery, and resolves nothing. It is a conduit by which
evil may enter the world and wreak mayhem. Notice how, in the course of the film,
Kriemhild becomes increasingly fanatical in her desire to avenge the death of her husband.
She loses all trace of humanity and is transformed into a single-minded automaton, strangely
reminiscent of the Maria android in Lang’s later film
Metropolis (1927). She becomes almost
oblivious to the death and destruction that happens around her, and even sanctions the
murder of her elder brother in order to fulfil her revenge. This descent into fixated
madness is horribly prescient of what would happen to Germany under the Third Reich in
the decade after the film was made.
© James Travers 2007
For World Cinema on DVD...
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