Siegfried the Dragonslayer Meets the Web:

Using Digital Media for Developing Historical

Awareness and Advanced Language and
Critical Thinking Skills1

Ann Marie Rasmussen

Duke University

In the spring semester, 2010, I taught a small, Wagner’s Ring Cycle; watched parts of Fritz Lang’s
German-language seminar for advanced non-na- silent Nibelung films; read Göring’s infamous “Sta-
tive speakers that used the legend of Siegfried the lingrad” speech from January 1943 and Heiner
Dragonslayer as a tool for teaching German culture Müller’s play, Germania: Tod in Berlin; and
and history: “Identity and Nationhood: The Myth watched the recent, made-for-German-TV movie,
of Siegfried and the Nibelungs in German Litera- The Dark Kingdom.
ture and Culture.” We read Das Nibelungenlied In recent years, advanced German-language
and the Volsungasaga (source language Old Norse) courses have moved away from the traditional fo-
in modern German translations.2 We studied the cus on literature, responding to “the prevalent stu-
Sigurd (Siegfried’s Old Norse name) carvings in dent trend to gravitate towards courses that deal
the Norwegian stave churches and the magnificent with either culture or language rather than litera-
rock carving in Eskiltuna, Sweden (dating from ture” (Blake 7–8). Regardless of whether advanced
around the year 1000, it was our oldest artifact).3 German language courses focusing on culture
We also studied nineteenth- and twentieth-century treat, for example, environmental policies in con-
works of art; listened to selections from Richard temporary Germany or the Siegfried legend, they
1 I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers whose
the Volsungs on reserve. It is critically important to read
comments and suggestions improved this article. Special this text because it provided the basis for Wagner’s Ring
thanks to my colleague, Dr. Andrea Grafetstätter, who Cycle. Students were also assigned short excerpts of
generously shared her treasure trove of contemporary Härd’s book on the reception of the Nibelungen material
Nibelungen materials, to the staff of the Center for In- in nineteenth-century Germany, which gave them the
structional Technology, Perkins Library, Duke Univer- opportunity to gather pertinent German vocabulary. In
sity, and especially technology specialist Amy Hendrix. I future years I will assign articles from the popular-schol-
also want to thank my colleague, Professor Emeritus arly German magazine for history and culture, Damals,
Jochen Vogt, for teaching the class on Heiner Müller’s which produced a thematic cluster of articles on the
Germania Tod in Berlin. Nibelungenlied in 2011 (issue 3).
2 For useful reference works in English focusing on the 3 See Sigurd stones and Sigurd rock carving in the bib-

Nibelungenlied and related texts, see both McConnell liography. The website of the Sigurd rock carving at
and Gentry. Heinzle and Waldschmidt’s volume is an in- Ramsund, Eskilstuna, Sweden, deserves special men-
valuable resource containing myriad primary materials tion. This interactive website allows the user to pan 360
related to the Nibelungenlied. The students read the en- degrees around the site, to zoom in on the actual rock
tire text of the Nibelungenlied in the Reclam edition, carving, and to activate a graphically designed view of
which contains the Middle High German original and a the site as it might have been one thousand years ago.
modern German translation. I could not find a modern The Old Norse inscription, carved in runes, is transcribed
German translation of the Saga of the Volsungs, so I used and translated into Swedish and English. All commen-
“Geschichte der Völsunga” from the 1920s Thule- tary is in both Swedish and English. This site is a great
Sammlung. Although it is in Fraktur, the students man- teaching tool.
aged fine. I also put English translations of the Saga of

106
RASMUSSEN: SIEGFRIED MEETS THE WEB 107

are well placed to use web-based materials and ing, defined as organizing events and persons in re-
digital media to enhance student learning of the lationship to one another chronologically. This
language and to capture student interest. The valuable critical thinking skill, foundational for the
Siegfried course addressed fundamental linguistic practice of history, was a prerequisite for mastering
learning goals of improving German by providing the Siegfried material. Or to put it the other way
opportunities for learners to expand vocabulary, around: the Siegfried course presented an oppor-
develop complex syntactic structures, further read- tunity for students to grapple with and integrate
ing strategies for diverse texts, enhance aural com- into their knowledge base an active understanding
prehension, become better writers overall, and use of the big picture of change in German history and
a variety of opportunities for speaking German. It culture over time. Improving students’ ability to
did so by pursuing an interactionist approach fo- think chronologically might also make them more
cused on student’s agency, on their negotiation of critically competent users of the vast amount of
meaning in L2 with one another, and on collabora- Internet materials, because it could help them build
tive activities using authentic materials and situ- robust comparative frameworks and categories.
ated knowledge (van Lier). Digital media and web- Individual, web-based research projects seemed
based activities were integrated into the course, highly unlikely to achieve these goals. But could a
with the aim of enhancing students’ critical thinking different technological tool help here? To support
skills through self-reflection. student mastery of this sort of chronological think-
Teaching a course on the Siegfried legend ing, I assigned work with an e-learning, timeline
brought the aim of deepening students’ cultural building tool, Google Docs Simile.4
and historical knowledge into the language-learn- The second, related challenge emerged from
ing mix. This meant addressing two additional the enormous variety of the surviving evidence.
learning challenges more commonly associated The Siegfried legend circulated in the entire north-
with the teaching of history. First, there is the enor- western region of Europe, whose long, vexed his-
mous historical range of the Siegfried material, tory precedes and shapes the national boundaries
which mirrors the legend’s remarkable long life and of Germany, the Netherlands, and the Scandina-
resiliency. The story of Siegfried the dragonslayer vian countries. It survives in an extraordinary vari-
spans nearly two thousand years of Western Euro- ety of materials, from rock carvings, sculpture,
pean history, from its genesis in the time of the painting, opera, and film to texts from different eras
so-called Barbarian migrations of the fourth and and in different, Germanic source languages. This
fifth centuries to its most modern incarnation as an geographic, linguistic, and evidentiary diversity
open-air theatrical spectacle now performed every challenged students to acquire a high degree of cul-
summer before the cathedral in Worms. The dan- tural literacy for an entire region and to apply ap-
ger was that the course would result in a jumble of propriate interpretive tools to different kinds of evi-
dates, names, events, and geographical terms that dence. The pedagogical approach of using situated
would leave students confused and disoriented knowledge and authentic materials prompted the
rather than grounded and knowledgeable. Indeed, creation of a task-based activity that could integrate
given the reach of the topic, access to the “previ- and foster linguistic, cultural, historical, and tech-
ously unimaginable amounts of historical informa- nological literacy and critical thinking skills. For
tion—texts, images, music, video—[…] available their final project, the students worked collabor-
to our students (and us) at the click of a mouse” atively as a team to design a simulated alumni tour.
(Kelly) could be potentially disabling or even para- The syllabus offers this description: “design a ten-
lyzing. day, Siegfried tour of sites, museums, and any
Another pedagogical challenge, then, was other highlights, for college alumni, including ex-
teaching students how to navigate the long time- tensive lecture notes for the tour guide.” The stu-
span or big picture of historical change suggested dents used a blog tool to carry out and present this
by these materials while deriving meaningful work.5
knowledge from it. To be successful, the course had Using Simile and Wordpress was new for me.
to teach the cognitive skill of chronological think- After talking with the library’s academic technology

4 There are many such timeline-making programs on 5 Wordpress MU is the version that was in service at

the market, for example, xtimeline, timelinemaker, and my university in the spring 2010. The current, supported
SmartDraw, «http://www.smartdraw.com/», which is a version there is now Wordpress 3.
business tool.
108 UP 44.2 (Fall 2011)

consultant, I chose these tools, which Duke Univer- Timeline Building with
sity Perkins Library’s Center for Instructional Tech- Google Docs Simile
nology (CIT) recommends and fully supports. The
outstanding support that CIT offers was an incen- The four students worked together to construct
tive for me to experiment with new forms of a timeline for the Siegfried material using Google
e-learning in the first place. My priority was that the Docs Simile. The library assisted with the technol-
technology was a tool that should serve learning, ogy and provided software support. A staff mem-
and not the other way around. ber came to class and introduced the tool, created a
The small class size, with just four students, al- data entry form for Simile and mounted it on the
lowed me to make explicit pedagogical experimen- class blackboard website, and acted as all round
tation within the course, reframe the seminar as a troubleshooter and consultant.
student-centered instructional environment fo- Simile proved to be very useful for making
cused on research collaboration, and enlist the sense of two thousand years of history and the vi-
students as critical thinkers whose reflection and cissitudes of the Siegfried material, which would be
feedback on technological methods and tools was daunting for any undergraduate course. In Elea-
crucial in developing my understanding of the nor’s words: “As students we were flooded or am-
potentials and pitfalls of using this academic tech- bushed by information from all sides and all time
nology.6 periods.” Yet at course’s end the students had inte-
In sum, the interaction and task-based peda- grated into their thinking a robust grasp of Euro-
gogy embedded the acquisition of linguistic and pean history. In an end-of-semester evaluation,
cultural proficiency within the development of criti- one student responded to the question: “Did your
cal thinking skills while putting the students, as it knowledge of European history and culture im-
were, in the driver’s seat. At semester’s end, in April prove?”
2010, they presented the course, demonstrating
their use of innovative learning strategies, at the I think the main area of European history and cul-
Tenth Annual Duke University CIT Showcase, an ture that I feel I have learned about is the time be-
tween the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of
in-house conference.
the Holy Roman Empire. I had very little back-
ground in the Huns, the Goths, the Burgundians,
or the Vandals, and seeing how those groups
mixed really helped me understand a bit better the
modern day cultural similarities existing through-
out parts of Europe.

Figure 1. Screen Shot of Timeline

6 I will call the four students Lisa, Mike, Morgan, and

Eleanor, which are pseudonyms.

RASMUSSEN: SIEGFRIED MEETS THE WEB 109

This answer is especially interesting because it that made no historical sense for this diffuse mate-
demonstrates not only an understanding of histori- rial. Thus the late thirteenth-century manuscript
cal dates and events, but also the ability to engage known as the Codex Regius, a foundational wit-
historical knowledge to make sense of the current ness to the tradition because it contains the Old
world. By the end of the course, this student was Norse Sigurd/Sigfried poems, was arbitrarily as-
able to construct, on her own, powerful and mean- signed the date Wednesday, January 1, 1270, in
ingful links between past and present. order to get it into the timeline, even though the Co-
The timeline assignment was simple. For their dex Regius, like most medieval manuscripts, lacks
midterm, the students were to work together to dates and can at best be dated to a span of decades
construct a timeline of the Siegfried material, from based on the scientific analysis of its parchment (or
its historical origins to the present. Part of the as- paper), ink, and book design, and the stylistic and
signment was finding dates, events, and materials, linguistic analysis of its contents. In any case, this
and evaluating their relevance. As data, students mechanical, technical requirement provided an
were encouraged to use assigned readings and to immediate lesson in the fact that Simile’s very
mine introductions and footnotes. The assessment mode of construction presumes modern conven-
standards, posted on our blackboard website, were tions that information can and should be highly
as shown in Figure 2. specific and precise (day, month, year), whereas
working with evidence from the distant past, for
which such narrow dating is impossible, requires
Spring 2010 Timeline (Midterm Exam)
one to think in more general, and contextual, chro-
Assessment Standards
nological terms.
Accuracy The students also made excellent use of the
Dates 10% multiple modalities in building the timeline; they re-
German Language 25% ported enjoying its multi-media capabilities and
Content Tags 25% made good use of them. They quickly figured out
Selection how to add photos and drawings.
Relevance 15% One student, Mike, added Youtube links, in-
Contextual Dates 15% cluding national flags waving while national an-
Design and Added Features 10% thems played, and snippets of Wagner arias. The
sense of creative fun and play balanced well with
Please note the following guidelines.
! —The content tags must be concise, yet read- the learning objectives of the task.
able. In her CIT showcase presentation, Eleanor
! —Dates should be selected with a view to ad- stressed that the benefits of using the timeline tool
vancing the timeline’s overall narrative. The rel- extended to the collaborative nature of the timeline
evance of a contextual date to the timeline’s nar- work. The students elected to divide responsibility
rative should be apparent from the content tag. for the material among themselves: Morgan was
the expert for medieval Scandinavia; Eleanor for
Figure 2. Handout, Midterm Assessment medieval Germany; Mike for the nineteenth cen-
Standards tury; and Lisa for the twentieth century. They main-
tained this division of labor for the final project as
well. Creating a timeline collaboratively meant that
The timeline assignment was successful; the the students were responsible to their classmates
students found it easy to use Simile; they liked that for the accuracy and relevance of the information
multiple users could work together seamlessly and they found and shared. No single student could
effortlessly; because it is web-based, they were able have done all this, but by using the timeline they
to use it any time of day and update as they went were able to gain and share expertise, and so learn
along, whenever, as Eleanor expressed it, they from one another. The individual group size of four
stumbled on something interesting. That is to say, students was also ideal; the students suggested that
students were both archiving information and ma- groups should be no larger than five for the timeline
nipulating it at the same time. They accommo- work to be maximally beneficial to learning; thus a
dated themselves well to the timeline’s eccentrici- larger class size could have multiple groups carry-
ties, the chief one being that every entry had to ing out the project.
have a specific start and stop date, a requirement
110 UP 44.2 (Fall 2011)

Figure 3. Screenshot of Timeline with Photograph

The timeline assignment achieved the poten- called out for discussion and interpretation. Thus
tial identified by T. Millis Kelly who noted that we found ourselves directly confronted with the
need to talk about the course theme: why did the
one reason it is likely that student learning is being legend of Siegfried the Dragonslayer gain rele-
transformed by digital media is that the use of net- vance and currency around the years 1200, 1800,
worked information transfers control over the ex- 1870, and 1925? What else was happening at
ploratory aspect of learning from the instructor to
those times? Why wasn’t the legend particularly
the student. When our students pursue their own
lines of reasoning, rather than just trying to answer
significant or active at other times? What connec-
a question posed by their professor, it is possible tions could we draw between political events at
that they will arrive at new insights that neither these times and the need or desire to create a na-
they nor we anticipate. (no page number) tional identity? The timeline project led seamlessly
into the final project because it made manifest the
I do not believe that my students arrived at linguis- key locations and time periods that had to figure in
tic, cultural, or historical insights that were new to the simulated alumni trip.
the field, but it does appear that this sort of explor- Another benefit came to the fore clearly in Elea-
atory learning anchored in their minds a robust nor’s presentation as well. When Eleanor said that
framework for describing and analyzing historical “the timeline helped us find and pinpoint key loca-
change. tions that were important for our final project,” she
Above all, building the timeline meant that the was talking about correlating time and place. As
students grappled concretely with the complexities they built their timeline, the students began linking
of chronological thinking. There was the actual task time and geography in meaningful ways. They be-
of making a timeline, which made them responsi- gan by looking up dates; they ended by mapping
ble for understanding and manipulating data and and visualizing time and space together.
information in a way that reading, for example, a
perfectly adequate two-page encyclopedia article
on the Siegfried legend likely could not do. Equally Final Project Using a Blog Tool
important was studying the timeline that finally
emerged. When it was complete, the students no- For their final project, the students designed a
ticed that there were epochs with lots of entries and simulated 14-day (it couldn’t be done in ten days,
others with none. This pattern of hills and valleys, they said) alumni tour of Europe organized around
or evidence and gaps, was visually immediate and the Siegfried theme, which they named “Siegfried
RASMUSSEN: SIEGFRIED MEETS THE WEB 111

the Dragonslayer: An Epic Tour through Europe alumni tours, we talked about budgets; the differ-
about an Epic Work.” ent needs and interests of different age groups; and
Supported again by the Center for Instructional the problems of travel logistics (for example, why
Technology, Perkins Library, Duke University, the alumni travel groups never take the train). The stu-
students used the blog tool, Wordpress, to create dents found interesting this opportunity to measure
and publish this multi-media project. The final pro- their imagined tour against real-world standards.
ject built on and expanded the knowledge students Because Wordpress is basically a blog tool, the
gained by constructing the timeline. The students students were intrigued by the possibility of build-
retained the division of research expertise they had ing a website for a tour that could also function as a
devised for the timeline work. The tour began in group blog. They imagined creating a blogging site
Scandinavia, moved south to Worms and Xanten within the tour website that would allow tour partic-
and on to Bayreuth and Munich, ending in Berlin. ipants to chronicle their journey and to stay in
The students researched travel arrangements and touch with people at home, while generating mar-
hotels, but the main focus was on Siegfried-related keting text for subsequent tours. Such a possibility
activities, from visiting the stave churches in Nor- was less interesting to the Alumni director and my-
way to the Nibelungenmuseum and summer the- self than to the undergraduates, but as I reflect on
ater performances in Worms; the opera in Bay- the students’ enthusiasm for this aspect of their
reuth; and so on. The website was well illustrated imagined trip, I am struck by the eagerness they
and well designed. Itinerary, activities and venues imagine that others will have to communicate and
where extensively annotated and discussed in both share their experiences.
German and English. The students found the blog tool we chose,

Figure 4. Screenshot of a Final Project Web Page

The final result was impressive. The then-direc- Wordpress, easy to use. In Mike’s words: “I know a
tor of Duke University’s Alumni Education and decent amount about computers but about website
Travel Office met with the class and gave them “real design I know absolutely nothing. … Wordpress
world” feedback on the completed tour. Like the provided an easy way for four people who were not
CIT staff support, this portion of the class was con- very well versed in this sort of website design to pro-
ducted in English. Yet the value of these collabora- duce a rudimentary website.”
tions to the overall project outweighed, in my mind, The version of Wordpress we used had aes-
the exit from a classroom immersion environment. thetic issues. After an hour or so of failed experi-
After she explained the real-world business of mentation with drop-down menus on the prettier
112 UP 44.2 (Fall 2011)

templates, the students elected to stick with the tire Ring cycle just in time for this class. We were
odd-looking one that actually worked. More prob- able to read the libretto (which is not so long), and
lematic was that the version of Wordpress we were the edition’s clear, concise, and short contextu-
using did not have a function to make collaborative alizing essays. In class we discussed basics of Wag-
work transparent. A user editing in this version of ner’s unique musical style, especially leitmotifs and
Wordpress could not tell if others were also working highly emotive music, features of his style once
online, so users could and did delete one another’s controversial and innovative and now familiar to
work by accident. Since each student was responsi- American students from film scores. Then each stu-
ble for a specific section of the trip, this became a dent was responsible for one of Wagner’s operas,
problem only when merging everything. Acciden- presenting in German a synopsis that focused on
tal deletion of someone else’s work was not a prob- musical highlights. Extensive use was made of
lem with Simile, which lists who is online and what YouTube. This approach may come across as su-
each user is changing in real time, showing exactly perficial compared with a comprehensive class-
what is being typed. Therefore, for others develop- room treatment of these works, but it allowed the
ing projects based on this article, I would recom- class to cover a lot of material in a short time and to
mend exploring a range of blog tools to identify one practice using German with new modalities; this
that suits the needs of the teacher and the class. time, using the discourses of art and music. Mike
Finally, I made the decision not to correct the stu- was a Wagner fan, and so the class was able to
dents’ German before “publication” of the website. profit from his knowledge of, and enthusiasm for,
This decision followed the rationale stated for the Wagner.
course, namely, that students were in charge of cor- The class also used this collaborative approach
recting their own grammar and usage, which in ear- to learn about famous works of art based on the
lier assignments figured as a part of their grade. Siegfried myth, with each student researching and
presenting a different artist: the paintings and
drawings by the Swiss artist, Henry Füssli (Mor-
Other Challenges and Some Solutions gan); the early nineteenth-century Nibelung fres-
cos in the royal palace in Munich (Mike); the ex-
The reader may wonder, more prosaically, how pressionist drawings of Ernst Barlach (Eleanor);
the course dealt with the gargantuan, virtually and finally, Anselm Kiefer’s moving and enigmatic
megalomanaical length of the nineteenth and modern paintings (Lisa).7 Discussing paintings was
twentieth-century German Siegfried classics that another way to use and practice German at a so-
are probably most responsible for its continued phisticated level, since it involved description and
popularity in the modern world. After all, Wagner’s analysis as well as interpretation.
Ring Cycle consists of four operas (Der Ring; I varied this approach for the Lang film. We
Siegfried; Die Valküre; and Götterdämmerung), viewed the film in class time during the penultimate
and is about fifteen hours long: while Fritz Lang’s week of class, while the students were working on
Die Nibelungen, an ambitious, two-film cycle from their final project. Two students volunteered to be,
1924 consisting of Siegfried and Kriemhilds as we put it, in charge of the fast-forward button.
Rache, is, depending on the version, four to five Lisa and Morgan each previewed one film, pro-
hours long. vided plot synopsis, and shared selected sequences
Keeping the overall course goals in mind (again, all in German). Because the students had
helped make the solution to this potentially read the medieval sources (both the Volsungasaga
off-putting dilemma clear. The course goal was not and the Nibelungenlied) they skillfully analyzed the
mastery of this material, but rather learning about it mix of artistic license and historic reconstruction
contextually for its importance in creating notions that typifies Lang’s vision. They discussed histori-
of German identity, and for improving German cal changes in film-viewing behaviors, the ways in
language skills. To accomplish this, the class again which films themselves are constructed with certain
engaged in collaborative learning. Fortuitously, viewing behaviors in mind, and the ways in which
Reclam published an inexpensive edition of the en- technological advances (DVD and so on) are
7 The most valuable teaching resource for this assign-
color illustrations are accompanied by excellent articles.
ment was the illustrated exhibition catalogue edited by (Please be reminded that fair use permits us to make one
Wolfgang Storch, Die Nibelungen: Bilder von Liebe, copy of any image for instructional purposes.)
Verrat und Untergang, whose sumptuous, magnificent,
RASMUSSEN: SIEGFRIED MEETS THE WEB 113

changing viewing behaviors. The monumental, Concluding Remarks

theatrical qualities of Lang’s filmic concept cer-
tainly stood out as a specific, historical idiom that Regarding German language skills, the stu-
sought to legitimize a specific understanding of dents encountered a wide variety of authentic ma-
German identity. terials in a range of linguistic domains and registers
The class spent two sessions in the library’s of German. They read difficult scholarly writing on
Rare Book Room, working hands-on (white- art, opera, the nineteenth-century creation of a
gloved of course) with remarkable examples of ex- German national identity, as well as narrative
quisite nineteenth- and early twentieth-century translations of medieval texts and contemporary
German art books. After browsing holdings made materials written in informative and more collo-
available on a cart, students chose one book to re- quial styles, gleaned from web-based final project
search in more detail and present to the class. It be- research, from descriptions of museums to medi-
came clear to the students that these books testi- eval-themed menu offerings at specialized restau-
fied, as well as contributed, to the making of the cult rants. They encountered and engaged with a wide
of Wagner and the modern mythology of German- variety of authentic genres: texts, translations;
ness. movies; opera; painting; buildings. All class presen-
Our twentieth-century texts included the re- tations were in German. They wrote copious
cent-feature film that was shown on German Sat 1 amounts of German, again, in different genres and
television as a mini-series in 2004, Dark Kingdom.8 registers. Additionally, they extensively edited and
We read Goering’s infamous 1943 speech inciting corrected one another’s German texts so that the
German officers to the defense of Stalingrad (the documents posted on the timeline and the final
German army had in fact already lost the battle), project website would be as grammatically and idi-
which was important as background for under- omatically accurate as possible.11 Students noted
standing the allusions to the Nibelunglied in Heiner how much easier it is to recognize and correct
Müller’s play, Germania Tod in Berlin (1971), a grammatical errors in someone else’s writing.
brilliant, dense montage of historical and political The course’s explicit focus on improving L2
allusions that are virtually unintelligible to Ameri- proficiency provided a unifying framework for the
can undergraduates.9 These class sessions were all wide variety of texts and objects studied. It was also
conducted in German. our good fortune that so much of the surviving
When I teach this course again, I will include Siegfried material consists of wonderful, memora-
contemporary material. The possibilities are end- ble, image-based compositions of all kinds. The vi-
less, ranging from Oscar Straus’s 1904 operetta, sual nature of this evidence worked extremely well
Die lustigen Nibelungen, comic books, children’s with the “‘intensely visual nature of multimedia,’
books, and comic films such as Siegfried starring [which] automatically privileges the visual over the
comic and actor Tom Gerhardt, to more serious textual” (Moss).
works such as Moritz Rinke’s play written for the The value-added unique to this course came in
Wormser Nibelungenfestspiele in 2002.10 This the area of fostering the cultural-fluency, histori-
contemporary material supplies a host of opportu- cal-knowledge, and chronological-thinking skills
nities for new, collaborative projects. Students tak- necessary for understanding German history and
ing this course, thoroughly familiar with the medi- culture. The increased focus on contemporary
eval and nineteenth-century Nibelungen materi- Germany in undergraduate German courses may
als, would, I believe, find it fascinating to analyze respond well to students’ professed interests. How-
and interpret the meanings attached to the ever, they may not always serve students well if
Nibelungen legend in modern Germany. they do not equip them to see and describe, much

8 At the time I was not able to find Reinl’s 1966 feature

educational view into the mind of a political architect of
film, Die Nibelungen, starring Uwe Beyer. One modern National Socialism.
film beyond Lang is probably enough, however. 10 For a discussion of very recent German works adapt-

9 Heinzle and Waldschmidt’s volume includes the en-

ing Nibelungen material, see Schindler.
tire text of Goering’s long, rambling, largely incoherent, 11 For a recent discussion of some of the ways in which

and delusional political speech. Reading at least excerpts computer-assisted, collaborative writing enhances sec-
of such a primary document provides students with an ond language acquisition, see Elola and Oskoz, and
Warschauer.
114 UP 44.2 (Fall 2011)

less interpret and analyze, the mediated versions of It may be that relatively little attention is paid
the deep past that permeate—indeed saturate nowadays to fostering critical, historical thinking
—German culture at every level. The figure of skills in language and literature courses. Yet surely
Siegfried provided a series of excellent signposts these are higher-order cognitive and analytical
around which students could generate and grasp a skills that are fundamental to a liberal arts educa-
conceptually sophisticated “big picture” of change tion, which also have their place in the foreign lan-
over time in German-speaking lands. guage curriculum.
In the end-of-semester evaluation and assess-
ment, one student wrote the following in answer to
References
the question, ‘Did your knowledge of German his-
tory and culture improve?’: Blake, Robert J. Brave New Digital Classroom: Technology
and Foreign Language Learning. Washington, D.C.;
Most definitely. I had not really ever approached
Georgetown UP, 2008.
the idea of a “Germanic” people before, at least
Classen, Albrecht. “Das Hildebrandslied im heutigen
not before about the 19th century during the
Literaturunterricht? Eine Herausforderung und eine
movement towards unification. I had no idea that
grosse ungenutzte Chance.” Die Unterrrichtspraxis/
Das Nibelungenlied was so ingrained in German
Teaching German 38 (2005): 19–30.
culture; that it is their version of King Arthur—it
Edel, Uli, dir.. Dark Kingdom: The Dragon King. Feature
pops up everywhere! I had really only heard of
film 2004. German mini-series, Sat 1, 2004.
Siegfried in relation to the Ring Cycle, which is
Elola, Idoia, and Ana Oskoz, “Collaborative Writing: Fos-
clearly only a small portion of the myth. I also re-
tering Foreign Language and Writing Conventions De-
ally enjoyed how we were able to travel through
velopment.” Language Learning and Technology 14.3
time by focusing on one theme. If anything, hav-
(2010): 51–71. «http://llt.msu.edu/issues/october2010/
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