When Hesse wrote his
Narziß und Goldmund: Geschichte einer Freundschaft (the subtitle of the first publication in
Die Neue Rundschau was omitted in the 1930 book publication), the impact of cinematic montage techniques on contemporary literature was sending shockwaves through the creative industries. In contrast to experimental modernist writers like Alfred Döblin or John Dos Passos, however, Hesse describes a “story of a friendship” in relatively traditional fictional form and focuses more on the philosophical and psychological matters at hand. While Ruzowitzky’s in many ways conventional adaptation is suitably entertaining, the adventure film falls flat in view of the philosophical and psychoanalytical depth of Hesse’s text. Nonetheless, the story Ruzowitzky tells—supported by Henning Fuchs’s musical score—does evoke emotions and atmospheres inherent in the novel. As translation scholar André Lefevere pointed out in his polysystem theory, the transposition of a text into another language and/or medium is a form of rewriting that is always already a form of adaptation to given political or civic conditions.
1André Lefevere, Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (New York: MLA, 1992). Considering Ruzowitzky’s screenplay in this context, it is certainly a text produced through this multi-layered process of “rewriting” as Lefevere put it. Prevalent topics today—such as domestic abuse—are woven into the fabric of the film, and by choosing a bestselling and canonical novel, Ruzowitzky not only follows established practices of film adaptations of the “Konsenskino” (consensus cinema), but also brings attention to crimes all too often committed within a household, while increasing the audience and readership of the original literary source. Thus, the decision on which texts are selected for adaptation for the mass medium of film has potentially far-reaching implications. In Ruzowitzky’s transfer of Hesse’s literary text to the cinema screen—and the smaller screens reached by digital screening services—he mediates knowledge and responds to social challenges within the constraints of mainstream filmmaking and neoliberal economies. This film, too, springs from a rich tapestry of older reimaginings—homoeroticism and bro culture in
Zachariah, the celebration of the body in
Siddhartha, friendship and spiritual journeys in
Zachariah,
Siddhartha,
Steppenwolf, and other, non-Hesse films of the 1970s and beyond—and reveals an awareness of the visual and narrative traditions and developments it is part of.
As a contribution to our civil society, Ruzowitzky’s
Narcissus and Goldmund adds first and foremost a meditation on love and friendship. Here, Narcissus’s love for Goldmund, his early (somewhat melodramatic) repression of longing, his bloody self-flagellation and suffering when he pushes Goldmund to explore the world and find himself (and perhaps his mother), is beautifully depicted by Sabin Tambrea. His own fear of (the certainty of) sexual desire is rendered ambivalent in light of his conviction that God is love and love is—in its essence—divine. Only in death is Narcissus’s love unambiguous and thus complete when he holds Goldmund in his arms in the pieta scene as the film draws to a close. Violence in contrast is obviously evil, perpetrated by destructive individuals like Lene’s plague-infected rapist, Goldmund’s abusive father (who here turns out to have killed his wife in a rage triggered by her incomplete submission to his authority), and Lothar, a man of God who spreads rumors of homosexual impropriety. In order to emphasize this distinction more clearly, Ruzowitzky adds homophobia, domestic violence, rape (rather than attempted rape in the source text), and Lothar’s and other closed-minded conservatives’ rejection of artistic representation into the mix, which are important topics for critical debate in the public sphere. At the same time, his film displays a vision of loving friendship that reimagines aspects of Hesse’s utopian subtext.
2Cf. Ingo Cornils, “Zwischen Mythos und Utopie: Hermann Hesses Suche nach dem Endpunkt des Seins,” German Life and Letters 66, no. 2 (2013): 156–72. He portrays the relationship between two men as tender, caring, steadfast, and supportive, and thus highlights Hesse’s desire to counter conservative masculinity of his time, which led to so many boys and men—having been fed a diet of heroism, militarism, and nationalism—enthusiastically signing up to fight in the First World War. Ruzowitzky’s script and collaborative adaptation centers on two men that are neither heroic nor complete. They struggle and fail, but their friendship withstands all challenges. As Thomas Lang points out: “In today’s visual worlds of Netflix and Co., relationships among men are often characterized by violence and competition, certainly not by tenderness or emotional attraction. This film, after all, contradicts that.”
3Lang, “Echte Gefühle in falschen Kulissen.” It is to Ruzowitzky’s credit that
Narcissus and Goldmund emphatically condemns homophobia and violent masculinities as destructive to individuals and communities. The struggle to represent philosophical and psychological complexities in narrative film, however, remains. This Hesse adaptation reflects the director’s awareness of the need to critically engage with themes challenging our civil society today and to raise questions in classrooms such as: What does it take to lead a meaningful life? How do we define success? As Ruzowitzky’s film is all too visibly shaped by the demands of the neoliberal film industry and its mass audience, the fact that, implicitly, success is also defined in financial terms might bring this latest adaptation full circle.
Hesse explored profound philosophical problems in his work, raising existential and spiritual questions in his stories, which predominantly focus on the development of the individual. Ruzowitzky’s film implicitly points to a mechanism (striving for financial success) that potentially not only affects the development of an individual but also a work of art. Critic Jed Pearl considers “authority and freedom” the essence and “lifeblood” of the arts.
4Jed Pearl, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts (New York: Knopf, 2021), 6. Ruzowitzky and his team are experts in the craft of filmmaking and their “authority” is evident. But paying too much attention to the demands of the market—or, in other words, an imagined mass audience’s desire for action and adventure—potentially limits one’s freedom: the other essential precondition to making art, according to Pearl. Films are costly endeavors and thus challenge the need for freedom and independence, but auteur filmmakers such as Jane Campion or Christian Petzold have shown us that film can be art and—even as an adaptation of a literary text—sovereign. Even though Ruzowitzky enriches not only the public sphere with his imagination and skills, but also the teaching of
Narcissus and Goldmund in schools, his
Narcissus and Goldmund is problematic in view of art’s freedom and authenticity. Hesse’s text provided both narrative highlights and artistic inspiration, but “industrial art[’s] … internalized relation with money”
5Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 1989), 77. shapes not only this adaptation project but, at a closer look, the story it tells.