Hans Otto Theater Potsdam | “The Nibelungs”: The old shame is false shame

Beware of the irony trap! »The Nibelungen« after Friedrich Hebbel at the Hans Otto Theater Photo: Thomas M. Jauk Potsdam's Hans Otto Theater is back from the season break. Director Alice Buddeberg opened the new season with “The Nibelungen” based on Friedrich Hebbel. Germanic cult and loyalty to the Nibelungen, war and bloodshed on the big stage. In the 19th century, Hebbel wrote the literary companion to the National Awakening that had long since gripped society. The Nazis were happy to appropriate his work for their own purposes, also because the author did not make things difficult for them with his writings.

In times of renewed national dullness, tragedy offers sufficient target in the theater. The story is well known: the dragon slayer Siegfried, blessed with an invisibility cap and balm sword, invulnerable except for a spot the size of a linden leaf on his shoulder blade, joins forces with King Gunther. For him he fights with Brunhild, wins her for him and acquires the hand of Kriemhild, the king's sister. Until betrayal and death and revenge make all alliances forgotten.

And how does Alice Buddeberg tackle the drama? Here Brunhild and Kriemhild each meet their younger alter egos. Retelling and play alternate. The ensemble shares the role of Siegfried among themselves – with the greatest possible distance.

The three-hour Potsdam production follows the female perspective on the Nibelungen saga in a fine reading of Hebbel's text. Kriemhild compares the representation and memory of the same events, exposing them as mere male fantasies. In Buddeberg's version, Brunhild names the rape by Siegfried as such. She makes Kriemhild an accomplice in the crime, and she not only inadvertently reveals the "hero's" secret, the source of his vulnerability, but rather becomes the person who commissioned him to murder him.

This is much more than a directorial idea. The female characters move into the center of the production and the Germanic myth about the Nibelungen - embellished with beautiful words - is exposed as a rape story. The female solidarity between the very unequal women Brunhild and Kriemhild seems like a glimmer of hope within a very bloody constellation.

Buddeberg elegantly incorporated texts by Inge Müller, co-author and wife in the shadow of Heiner Müller, into the theater work. “I don’t love heroes,” Müller confesses in her poem “Love after Auschwitz,” which this evening shows the connection between the medieval epic, Hebbel’s dark 19th century, the post-war period and up to the present day.

“The old shame is false shame,” it says in the same poem. It is no coincidence that this reads like an echo of Gisèle Pelicot's dictum "Shame must change sides." Here the women don't just speak up; they become actors.

However, the production suffers from the indecision between Hebbel's psychologism and a more analytical approach to the legend. The male brutality that the evening accuses is not necessarily a productive contradiction to the humor that dominates long scenes. The man appears as a joke when his monstrosity is supposed to be shown. And once again the irony trap that has killed many a clever evening at the theater snaps shut.

In general, it is the demonstrative and explanatory nature with which the production gets in its own way a little. The overly clear creates a certain inertia. No Germanic myth without long blonde wigs, it seems. In this way, the conflicts that were brought out by the director soon disappear from focus.

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