The narrator of this novel constantly shifts between being an audience-member and backstage reporter at a 21st-century open-air performance of a play based on the medieval Nibelungenlied and being a witness directly involved in the events of the story. Sometimes she is interviewing actors in the interval, sometimes she is travelling down the Rhine or the Danube in a leaky dinghy.

All this multi-media ambiguity — because Fritz Lang's 1924 silent film is always there in the mix as well — gives Hoppe the chance to toss around complicated thoughts about epic stories and their representations in culture, the way theatre and film work, and how it might feel to be stuck in the rigid logic of such a story.

But she's also looking at the oddities of this particular story and the characters in it. Was the personality of nordic action-maiden Brunhild actually based on Pippi Longstocking? Is everything really Siegfried's fault? How is it that the king of the Huns, Etzel (Atilla), has so little to do in the story? Was Kriemhild beautiful, evil, or both? How did a man from the Worms Rowing Club in a Woolworth's track-suit get mixed up in it all? Was the final showdown in Etzel's hall actually a cake-fight?

An interesting mix of the serious and the silly, which, whilst it doesn't attempt to deny that they matter too, goes out of its way to avoid getting bogged down in the most obvious discussion points (injustices of feudalism, blond-hero-cult, negative roles of women, cruelty to dragons and dwarves, the way the Nazis used the story, etc.). We are presumed to be aware of all that sort of thing, I suppose. ( )

Felicitas Hoppe erzählt die Nibelungen-Saga anhand einer Aufführung der Wormser Festspiele nach. Es wird vorausgesetzt, dass man die Geschichte kennt. Die Autorin schöpft aus dem Vollen, oft witzig mit amüsanten Bezügen, oft skurril stellt sie diese Aufführung dar und den Stoff so in gegenwärtige Zusammenhänge. Das gelingt oft und entgleitet ihr nur hin und wieder.
Dennoch fragt man sich: Warum dieses Buch? Es erzählt das Nibelungenlied größtenteils doch nur nach, wenn auch auf stilistisch ganz neue Weise. Umdeutungen oder überhaupt Deutungen vermisse ich, bzw. sie kommen nur in den Teilen, in denen die Schauspieler interviewt werden. Wie auch schon anderen gefallen mir diese Teile daher am besten.
Aber gerade wenn man sich dem Nibelungenlied erneut nähern möchte, ist das ein gelungenes Buch, das sich schnell und unterhaltsam liest. ( )