“Fascist”, it appears, is the go-to epithet for
characterizing nationalists and racists we don’t like. “Nationalist” is apparently the go-to epithet
for characterizing fascists we do like.
The Western media is coping with the conspicuous and
undeniable presence of fascists in the Ukrainian paramilitaries by rebranding
them. A recent case in point was in a
Reuters article celebrating the doughty defenders of Mariupol i.e. the Azov Battalion, which
discommodes Kyiv-friendly observers by unapologetically marching under the fascist
“Wolfangel” banner:
Many in the Azov
Battalion have unabashed Ukrainian nationalist sympathies, prompting rebels to
label them neo-fascists.
From time to time,
Azov fighters in Shyrokyne greeted one another with ironic Roman salutes and
then grinned at their own humor. That kind of idle larking and the battalion's
flirtation with neo-Nazi symbolism is seized upon as confirmation of their
critics' worst fears.
The infamy appears
only partly deserved, however.
Some embrace fervent
Ukrainian nationalism as a repudiation of the heavily Russian-dominated Soviet
legacy, all while serving with fighters from a wide array of political and
ethnic backgrounds. Chit-chat switches casually from Ukrainian to Russian and
back again.
Let me offer my back-of-the-envelope guide to discriminating
between “unabashed nationalist sympathizers” and “neo-fascists”. Nationalists let their fervor, their bigotry,
and enthusiasm play out in the quotidian realm, along the spectrum from
vociferous Internet commentator to soccer hooligan.
Neo-fascists do something about their nationalist
convictions, by joining an armed fascist formation which considers implementing
a national or racial political and social agenda, by violence if necessary, an
existential national imperative beyond state sanction. That’s been a powerful strain in Ukrainian
political thought since the 1930s that flourishes today, and not just in the Azov Battalion.
Trying to submerge “fascism” in the mushy
nomenclature of “nationalism” is an exercise in self-delusion that, in my
opinion, balks understanding of trends throughout Europe and not just in
Ukraine.
A classic German film by Fritz Lang, Die Nibelungen, provides an opportunity to reflect upon the
difference between unabashed nationalism and meat and potatoes fascism. The epic, split into two stand-alone films, Siegfried and The Revenge of Kriemhild, is available on Netflix, so readers
interested in film and fascism are invited to have a look. I’ll wait.
…
For those readers who did not just sit through four and a
half hours of black and white silent film, I will mention that this is not
Wagner’s Nibelungen. Instead of the hallucinogenic word salad and
musical bombast of the Wagnerian Ring cycle, Lang and his wife and
scriptwriter, Thea von Harbou, went back to the ur-text of the Nibelungen Saga,
a medieval epic that was rediscovered in the 19th century and was
adopted as the German foundation myth, its Iliad, in order to give age,
nobility, and gravitas to the Germanic historical tradition, its recently
established Kaiser, and Bismarck’s newly-minted nation.
The original Nibelungen is a simple story of a boy, his
dragon, his utterly bugnuts wife, and the interesting folk they encounter.
UFA spared no expense to bring Die Nibelungen to the screen. The artistic and technical resources
of German cinema are on full display in the sets, costumes, makeup, and
cinematography, as are the expressive power of silent-film acting. The movie is quite compelling and, to the
patient, rewarding. Remarkably, much of the
syntax of modern film—the closeups, cross cutting, establishing shots und so weiter—appears to be fully
developed at this early date.
Die Nibelungen was
made in 1924, as Germany was still trying to come to terms with the epic
calamity of its defeat in World War I, the exile of Kaiser Wilhelm, loss of
territories in the east and west, the rise of communism as a potential
organizing principle opposed to German nationalism, and the appearance of the
not-quite-ready-for-prime-time Weimar Republic.
The explicit purpose of the film was to buck up the German people and
assure them that the national mojo had not been lost.
The first title-card in The
Nibelungen dedicates the film “To the German People.”
There’s a lot of good writing about the Lang movies. William Ahearn referenced several important
works on his site and included this quote from Lang:
In 1974, in an interview with Focus
on Film, Lang said: “By making ‘Die
Nibelungen’ I wanted to show that Germany was searching for an ideal in her
past, even during the horrible time after World War I in which the film was
made. At that time in Berlin I remember seeing a poster on the street, which
pictured a woman dancing with a skeleton. The caption read: ‘Berlin, you are
dancing with Death.’ To counteract this pessimistic spirit I wanted to film the
epic legend of Siegfried so that Germany could draw inspiration from her past,
and not, as Mr Kracauer [author of From Caligari to Hitler; he links the films
to Nazi themes—CH] suggests, as a looking forward to the rise of a political
figure like Hitler or some such stupid thing as that.”
Unfortunately, it’s kind of hard not to think and look
backward at “stupid things” such as Nazi racial ideology when looking at the
depiction of Siegfried’s human and barely-human foils in the picture.
Siegfried benefits
greatly from a charismatic turn in the title role by Paul Richter. Richter is, there’s no other way of putting
it, gorgeous. He’s studly, buff, noble, merry, and with a disingenuous and spontaneous demeanor which
is pretty much supposed to embody the positive “German” self-image--as I understand it. I invite readers to test this generalization, as well as subsequent generalizations
about the stereotypes of non-Germanic people (which I do not endorse and carefully identify as
stereotypes by the use of “quotation marks”) Lang and von Harbau perhaps chose to depict, by watching the films and drawing their own conclusions.
We first meet the blonde Richter displaying his energy and effervescence
while rusticating in the forest realm of Mime the Blacksmith. Actually, he materializes like a shaft of
golden light forging a sword amid a group of slovenly oafs who, I regret to
say, may possibly be meant to represent a certain easterly contingent of the northern
European woodland population. Siegfried
impulsively decides to seek the hand of Kriemhild, sister of King Gunther of
Burgundy, in marriage and jumps on his snow white steed to venture off. Consider the box for “German” initiative and
vigor—in contrast to the lackadaisical deportment of certain neighbors—checked.
Next, Siegfried slays the dragon, in this case an enormous
and to modern eyes somewhat unconvincing puppet that weighed one and a half
tons and was operated by 32 men. He
bathes in the dragon’s blood, thereby acquiring imperviousness to all
weapons—except on his shoulderblade, where a linden leaf alights and blocks the
shield-sauce. (Speaking of sauciness,
Siegfried’s rear is on display in the bathing scene, but it is not Paul
Richter’s. Richter refused to do the
scene nude and Rudolf Klein-Rogge--another member of the Lang troupe, Thea von
Harbau’s first husband and, subsequently, star of Metropolis --stepped up to depict the heroic booty.)
Siegfried then encounters a suspiciously “Jewish”-looking
individual, Alberich--depicted as “not a handsome Jew, naturally, but as a vile Jew.”, as
one contemporary account put it -- a tricky dwarf from whom Siegfried acquires the treasure of the Nibelungen,
in addition to a worrisome curse. Then
it’s Off to Burgundy! To woo Kriemhild with his glamor and treasure.
Burgundy is “Germanic” but also kind of “Frankish”, if you
get my drift, with a pervasive and oppressive Christian establishment that
contrasts with Siegfried’s apparently joyous, unselfconscious paganism. Siegfried wins Kriemhild, but also gets
embroiled in all sorts of intrigue and betrayal in the gloomy court,
culminating in his murder—yes, he is STABBED IN THE BACK—by the king’s henchman,
Hagen.
Siegfried ends
with Kriemhild vowing revenge for her husband’s murder.
In the second film, The
Revenge of Kriemhild, Siegfried’s widow marries Attila the Hun in her quest
for revenge and the manpower to inflict it.
Attila is portrayed by the protean Karl Klein-Rogge, who transforms
himself from Paul Richter’s butt-double in the first film to a depraved and
cadaverous, phrenologically-challenged “Mongoloid” Oriental despot in the sequel. It is interesting though unfortunately
meaningless that the German form of Attila, “Etsel”, was the name Henry Ford
gave to his son, Anglicized as “Edsel” (it was the given name of one of Ford’s
closest friends).
The Huns are subhuman “Asiatic” hordes (“Slavs” or “Bolsheviks”
in my reading) whom Kriemhild (“Spartacist”/”race traitor”, perhaps) is able to
wrap around her little finger. When her
brother, the King of Burgundy, and Hagen and a small company arrive at Attila’s
encampment in an ill-starred reconciliatory visit, she gins up a massacre that
fails, thanks to the Euro-valor of the Burgundians and the fecklessness of the
debased Huns.
However, the vastly outnumbered Burgundians are unable to
escape and find themselves trapped inside Attila’s castle. Kriemhild orders wave upon wave of attacks,
all of which are beaten back by the doughty knights. Finally, she orders the hall torched (the
inspiration for Wagner’s Gotterdammerung),
the roof falls in, everybody dies, THE END.
Well, the King and Hagen make it out, but they choose death instead of
dishonor so THE END. To be honest, Lang
missed a trick when he omitted the fate of Kriemhild described in the original
edda: an enraged Burgundian retainer cuts her in half as she stands amid the
corpses of her brother and her countrymen and she doesn’t even notice until she
bends over to pick something up and literally FALLS TO PIECES. THE END.
The Burgundian band of brothers are explicitly identified as the Germans; when the king is offered a dirty deal of safe passage in return for giving up Hagen to Kriemhild’s wrath, the riposte is “You don’t understand us Germans.” And before the final inferno in Attila’s hall, one soldier speaks longingly of his wish to see “the green waters of the Rhine” again. At the time the film was released, German audiences were well aware that the Rhine was under Allied occupation and German troops forbidden to approach within 20 miles of the river per the terms of the Versailles Treaty. They were also aware that the French had occupied the Ruhr, on the “right” or east bank of the Rhine, in retaliation for Germany’s non-payment of reparations. Not only that, the French were currently engaged in an escapade to try to encourage the creation of a Rhenish Republic to permanently alienate the Rhine Valley from Germany. The Rhine crisis was the mother of hot-button issues for Germans, all Germans I suspect and not just over-the-top German nationalists, during this period.
For those with an interest in historical parallels, it could
be said that the Rhineland represented the “classy, European elite-status schloss und kultur” element of German
national identity as Kyiv does today for Ukrainian nationalists; and loss of
the Rhine represented loss of caste, and a disastrous descent toward parity
with “those people” inhabiting the eastern reaches of northern Europe.
The Revenge of
Kriemhild did not find much favor with audiences or critics. Kriemhild does little more than glower,
grumble, and occasionally point a minatory finger as the ape-like “Huns” caper
about; the characters are universally unsympathetic and viewers are unable to
develop a sporting interest in their fates which, it transpires, are
universally dismal. One critic described
The Revenge of Kriemhild as a “vast,
spectacular pageant of boredom.”
On the other hand, everybody loved Siegfried. Including Hitler,
who cried at the ending.
The character of Die
Nebilungen as a national/nationalist rallying cry is indisputable, and its rather
nasty nationalist/racialist approach to Germany’s relationship with its
neighbors, though implicit is, I think, genuine.
Nationalism/racism themes inform both halves of Die Nibelungen, and both films fed into
the unsavory theme of “dolchstosse”, the idea that Germany could only have been
defeated in the Great War by the unpatriotic machinations of socialists and
Jews in the homeland.
The general theme of the film is superior Teutonic stock
gets cut down thanks to its inferior numbers, its hubris, and its quixotic
devotion to noble ideals, especially when confronted with the duplicitous scheming
of its enemies. It’s not just the tragedy
of Siegfried, the invincible German hero vulnerable only to treachery; The Revenge of Kriemhild recapitulates
his death at the collective level.
In fetishizing German martial valor, the film reflected broadly-held attitudes in Germany after
World War I.
As Friedrich Altrichter, author of a widely-cited 1933 work
on “the soul of the German Army” put it (h/t to the website Long Story Short Pier
for the quote):
He had become
painfully aware of the enemy’s overwhelming firepower, of his superiority in
the air, of the countless tanks against which one could oppose nothing of equal
force. Everyone recognized that Germany, economically exhausted and lacking
important raw materials, helplessly faced the enormous harnessing of the
world’s resources. But all this had nothing to do with the feeling of
superiority as person, soldier, and fighter. The fact that this feeling of
superiority was retained after the war’s conclusion is of utmost significance
for the German future. It preserves a feeling in society that the battlefield
was not left as loser, despite the lost war and the mighty collapse.
But the movie doesn’t quite qualify as “fascist” for a
variety of reasons. First off, it was
made too early—1924-- to be part of the Nazi bandwagon. It was a Weimar product, approved by Weimar
censors.
Second, Lang was not a fascist. Lang elaborately overstated his anti-fascism
after he left Germany and emigrated to the United States, but the fact is he did leave Germany after the Nazis took power.
Goebbels had actively recruited him to lead the Nazi cinema program on
the strength of Die Nibelungen &
Lang’s overall stature in the German film industry. But Lang demurred and left the country, maybe
not the next morning as he endlessly declared in his potted autobiography,
but soon after.
The Testament of Dr.
Mabuse may not have been, as Lang pretended, his conscious riposte to the
rise of Hitler (see David Kalat's book, The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse for an in-depth discussion of the gestation of the movie and its repurposing as part of Lang's self-cultivated anti-fascist mythos), but it was a brilliant and unsettling look at a monomaniacal
genius declaring “I am the state” and mobilizing a secret army of thugs and
fanatics to destroy Weimar Germany through street terror, intimidation, and
sabotage of its political and economic institutions. And it was banned by Goebbels (who secretly
loved the film and frequently screened it in private) because its depiction of
individuals and an entire society spiraling into madness worked against the
will-exalting/subconscious and psychoanalysis-detesting Nazi program for social
renewal.
Finally, Die
Nibelungen doesn’t fit the fascist script.
The movie acknowledges, explores, exalts and panders to nationalism and
racism. But nationalism and racism
ultimately are the instruments of annihilation, not rebirth and triumph.
At the end of the day, the dolchstossing of Siegfried is committed by another German, Hagen,
enabled by the spinelessness of King Gunther and the gullibility of Kriemhild. And the calamity that befalls the Burgundian
party in the second film is entirely the work of Kriemhild, who basically has
to take over from an initially conciliatory and remarkably disengaged Attila
the Hun to organize the massacre.
Taken as a whole, in other words, Die Nibelungen was not a fascist infomercial effectively advocating exclusionary
racial unity over democracy and socialism as the indispensable recipe for
national survival, unless the definition of “national survival” includes
“burning your nation to the ground” (which, interestingly enough, is exactly
what Hitler did!).
Eventually the Nazis had their chance to
revisit Die Nibelungen.
In 1933, with Hitler in power, Siegfried was re-released in
a truncated form, Siegfrieds Tod (Death of Siegfried), with passages of
Wagner finally chunked in (the notoriously protective and contentious Wagner
estate had denied music permissions to the film when it was first made). Netflix viewers can rest assured that they
have watched a careful reconstruction of the original 1924 version—released on
BluRay by Murnau Stiftung in 2012—and not the Nazified release.
According to scholar Adeline Mueller (in Joe & Gilman, Wagner and Cinema, Indian University
Press, 2010) the 1933 version was
re-edited without Lang’s input to shift focus away from the fecklessness of the
Frankish king and the role of his cowardice in Siegfried’s death —after all,
his royal seat stood on the shores of the hallowed Rhine at Worms! Can’t irresponsibly disparage German
leadership!—in order to put the onus on one Burgundian bad apple, Hagen, for
the demise of the Teutonic paragon.And the entire second half of the opus—The Revenge of Kriemhild—the downer-bloodbath in which Germanic back-biting, vindictiveness, and stubborn malice effect the destruction of the entire Burgundian nobility—got ditched.
Ironically or perhaps understandably the Nazis had no
appetite for Lang’s vision of self-annihilation of a group of obtuse, violent, and
vicious German nationalists.
It is also amusing, I suppose, that Hitler was
recapitulating American artistic judgment.
For the 1924 release in New York, only Siegfried made the cut; The
Revenge of Kriemhild stayed in the can and sank virtually without a trace
on its US release three years later. And
to reduce the “embittered-loser” vibe that would have set Americans’ teeth on
edge, the last few minutes of Siegfried—Kriemhild’s
vengeful mutterings that set up the second movie—were reportedly excised. Instead, Siegfried died heroically and
pitifully…and then, in a tacked-on live-action epilogue, was transported to
Valhalla by the Valkyries to the tune of the funeral march from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung! The pit orchestra was
recruited from the Metropolitan Opera, and the arrangement apparently
represented a flank attack on the Met’s ban on Wagner & indeed all sung
German opera in place since World War I.
Mueller writes:
One practical
explanation for this epilogue is that it provided a more conclusive ending to
Siegfried, given the absence of Part 2.
Another motivation was that American preference for happy endings…the
renunciation of revenge suggests that the New York version of Siegfried sought
to rewrite…history itself…to “speed the healing of the wounds of war”.
In other words, Siegfried got to go to Valhalla early using the EZPass lane of youthful
martyrdom, so no biggee, right? Bygones
be bygones?
Of course, Hitler didn’t feel that way, and decided to do
something about it. That “something” was
transforming his nationalist and racist inclinations into a political and
paramilitary movement, fascism.
I expect a lot of members of the Azov Battalion feel the
same way.
