Wälsungenblut (1965)

The story is about an unconditional, almost incestuous love between siblings in Germany before the First World War. The aristocratic Arnstatt family belongs to the social elite of Wilhelmine Germany before 1914. The family is headed by the elderly Count Arnstatt. His long-grown, working children, Kunz and Märit, are as much at home in the villa estate as the nineteen-year-old twins Siegmund and Sieglinde Arnstatt, two beings of ethereal beauty. These solemn young people—“slender as rods and childlike in stature despite their nineteen years,” as Mann describes them in his source text—are inseparable. Their ideas and views of life, as well as their judgments of others, are always in perfect accord and often marked by an air of haughty distance. They express their assessments of others with equal snobbery and cutting clarity. Sieglinde is engaged to Lieutenant Beckerath, an ambitious young officer who is in no way the intellectual equal of the two siblings and whom they regard as clumsy and commonplace. From the outset, Siegmund and Sieglinde make their social and intellectual superiority over Beckerath apparent. Siegmund in particular makes sure that Beckerath never gets close to his female alter ego, Sieglinde, whom he naturally claims for himself—and himself alone. A joint visit to the opera, Richard Wagner’s *Die Walküre*, becomes a narcissistic exercise in self-reflection: in the Nordic god-children Siegmund and Sieglinde performing onstage, they see no one but themselves. The twins listen, fascinated, to the musical ecstasy of love between their doubles. Dream and reality begin to blur. Beckerath, who wanted to take Sieglinde to Spain on their honeymoon, feels increasingly excluded; he senses there is something between the twins that he can never break through. Their relationship approaches incest—touches, wishes, and desire define this ambivalent pair, though at first they do not take the decisive step. But one evening, shortly before bedtime, all restraint finally gives way. As if following a ritual, Sieglinde visits her brother as she does every night to say “good night.” This time, however, they shower each other with caresses.