The Nibelung

"No other material, safe Faust, is carrying the same weight in German cultural history....Rinke manages to break free of this burdensome pathos, and so he achieves that lightness which, according to Brecht, comes hard.... he cracked the fable open from within and discovered it anew: by using a gestus of 'tragical irony'. In language and dramaturgy, Rinke creates again and again an exciting state, suspended between Middle Ages and modern times, sometimes poetically oscillating, sometimes imbibed with laconic irony, between pre- and post modern, as if the story were taking place yesterday morning.» (Peter von Becker in the after word to the book edition of Nibelung.)