When you visit the Austrian city of Tulln, on the banks of the Danube River, you can see the figures as you approach the park on the banks of the Danube River. The figure of a woman gracefully holds her skirts as her headdress seems to flutter in the wind. Opposite her, at the centre of the tableau, a man stands with one foot forward; his left hand grasps the sword at his side, yet he holds his right forearm across his chest, and his head is uncovered. He is clearly a warrior, but he has not come to fight. This is Etzel, or Attila, striding larger than life out of the medieval German epic poem the Nibelungenlied (The Lay of the Nibelungs) to meet his bride Kriemhild against the backdrop of Tulln’s scenic gardens and riverside park. The monument seems almost overly grand for its surroundings; it looks old. However, it was actually erected in 2005.
Not far from Tulln, around that time, another Nibelung monument was redesigned at the University of Vienna: statue known as the Siegfriedskopf, showing the head of Siegfried in repose. The head was prominently displayed in the university entrance hall from 1923 until 2006. Now it is barely visible in a rectangular structure that appears to be a glass box. The box is covered with white lettering that obscures the contents, though a closer look reveals three objects within: a sculptured head beside a low oblong piece and a taller cube, perhaps a base and a pedestal no longer in use. Each component is also individually encased within the larger structure as well; each enclosure, inside and outside, is covered with text. One cannot see any of the original sculpture unobstructed, no matter how closely one looks. I am a scholar of German medieval literature; the Nibelung story is one of my favorites, but I had never expected to see a monument like this one or the monument in Tulln. In different ways, the monuments startled me; I kept wondering “what is this?” or “why this and why here?” The head of Siegfried had a contentious history that the current installation attempts to remedy.
Recontextualizing Medieval Heritage and Identity in Contemporary Austria offers a unique look at these monuments in their communities in three ways. First, as a medievalist and a student of German-speaking cultures, I was intrigued with the public display of medieval literature as contemporary heritage in Austrian communities: focused on the Nibelungs or, more locally, regional literature from the province of Styria (in the Styrian Literature Pathways of the Middle Ages). I wanted to explore what these older stories could mean for communities today. Second, Austria sits at unique historical, cultural, and social intersections in central Europe and—between 1987 and 2012—it produced the public displays of medieval German literature that I explore in this book. I argue that these displays articulate how Austria has worked to orient itself toward Europe and the EU at the threshold of—and into—the twenty-first century. Third, I examine how these monuments in Austria can lead us eventually to question fraught cultural legacies in the United States. In July 2020, a Confederate statue of Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, was briefly reimagined during demonstrations after the murder of George Floyd. The statue was covered with posters, colours, slogans, words, prayers, symbols—these images and words temporarily infused the cold stone of the past with the vibrant intensity of now. Unlike the Siegfried head, however, the Lee statue has been removed from its public space and will likely not be seen again in any form.
The Nibelung monuments and the Literature Pathways bring medieval narratives into the present; as audiences respond with surprise (“what is this?” or “why is this here?”), the monuments prompt reflection in addition to amusement. Ultimately, we can see this prompt as part of the process described in German as Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, or working off the past. This brings me back to my questions of the persistence of medieval afterlives in contemporary communities, not just in Austria but also in the US where we have to create our idea of the “medieval” from the legacies of Anglophone tradition. Most Americans are not familiar with the Nibelung legend and certainly not with Styrian literature of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, debates with respect to topics such as memory, commemoration, medievalism, and public display have similar valence in Austria and the United States. As a professor of German language and literature, I work in a space where the myth of the Lost Cause—that the South waged a noble fight in the Civil War and won a moral victory for a higher cause—still reverberates today, not unlike the myth of the Nibelungs in the German-speaking world. In both spaces, appropriations of medieval literary cultural heritage generate uncannily similar resonances where content may differ but intention and affect align: the persistence of the right wing in Austria and white supremacists in America, the virtuous lost causes emerging from defeats of the Civil War or the First World War, or the reception of the Nibelungs and American medievalist tropes of Arthurian chivalry.
Certainly, the legacy of the Confederacy in the United States—no longer just in the American South—feels very distant from the Austrian installations in Recontextualizing Medieval Heritage. Monuments are a statement of values for the community that erects them. The monuments and installations in this book stand as moments in a process of change and reflection (Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung or working off the past). It is work we need to do in the US as well. Ultimately, I hope to demonstrate how the medievalism that leaves its traces in the Lost Cause draws from the same deep well that fed the inspiration for the Literature Pathways. As we receive, perceive, display, and rewrite our medieval heritages, we dip into that well again and again. When we do so, we can change the narratives of our past and our future.
By Alexandra Sterling-Hellenbrand
