Drawing on the famous dialogue between Wotan, father of the gods, and his favourite daughter Brünnhilde in the third act of The Valkyrie, Jelinek reconstructs the events of Wagner’s epic Ring cycle and extends them into the present day. The book focuses on gold and money, the ever-alluring prizes after which we strive and which serve as a motivation for virtually everything we do. Their effect is charted all the way from the epic struggle for the Nibelung treasure in mythological prehistory, through Marx’s ideas as developed in Das Kapital, which was written almost contemporaneously with Wagner’s Ring cycle, right up to the current global financial crisis.
While rooted in Wagner’s libretto, this sophisticated mesh of interwoven ideas also covers recent and current events, such as the way that world leaders act in times of financial crisis, or the murders committed by the German neo-Nazi NSU group. Jelinek offers fascinatingly rich context for current political debates, as well as some intriguing new ideas, while never straying far from her leitmotif, the birth of capitalism.
