Siegfried in Victory and Defeat

Winder McConnell (Nibelungenleid, 98-99) sketches the changing uses of the epic in the mid-20^th century: “During the Weimar Republic, the themes and motifs of the Nibelungenlied had been employed by authors of antirepublican persuasion to express optimism for Germany’s future, but poets and dramatists sympathetic to the Third Reich spoke in terms of the present. Siegfried was seen by some as the prototype of Nordic man, as the embodiment of the Nordic spirit. His fate was compared with that of the German race.” Hans Henning von Grote saw in Siegfried “the destroyer of dark forces, the personification of loyalty and the ever-recurring hero in times of peril.”

Uses of the epic shifted with shifting fortunes. “Josef Weinheber’s poem ‘Siegfried-Hagen’ (1936) compares the perilous situation of the ‘blond-haired hero,’ murdered among his ‘friends,’ with that of the Reich, which the poet considers in danger of collapsing as a result of inner strife and lack of harmony.”

The epic expressed “the historic mission of the German people and the natural and necessary battle for existence of the individual as well as the race, or the people.” For the Nazis, the Nibelungs were “considered the epitome of courage, prowess in battle, and, above all loyalty.” The warriors of the epic came to express the “spirit of the warrior” and were “models for a new generation of soldiers.” 

But “as the military victories of the years 1939 to 1942 gave way to the defeats of 1943 to 1945, the emphasis was placed more on the fatalistic acceptance of catastrophe, of defiance in the face of death and total destruction. To die was not important; to die with honor in a heroic struggle, as the Nibelungs had done, was paramount. War was considered the test of the heroic man, that which ultimately gave meaning to one’s existence.”