Die Nibelungen: Kriemhilds Rache (1924) - film review

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...

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

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