Becoming Wagner

After the nuclear war depicted in the Gerstenmeyer series, an incestuous pair of twins attends a scandalous performance of Wagner's Valkyrie in Vienna. Unheard-of things happen on stage and in their box. The plot of Valkyrie is partly reflected in the present of the two Wälsung couples. This time, however, the story is told somewhat differently than in Thomas Mann's version. It is more contemporary and open. Incest is examined in greater detail and culminates in the question: Does incest between twins inevitably always lead to a hero, such as Siegfried? But then one of the twins sleeps with his mother, murders his father, and thus introduces a Greek, Oedipal element into the plot. Only the birth of the heroine Viktoria, not Siegfried, as the offspring of the twin couple, brings us back to a Wagnerian plot line, albeit in a highly varied form. All this takes place during a pandemic that brings down the last warlord in Vienna in the wake of the so-called virus revolution. Ritschie is then celebrated as a successful revolutionary and does not have to flee back to Switzerland for decades like his clone father. But then his son kills him. Gerstenmayer solves the murder with forensic brilliance. In his novel, C.-A. Rebaf does not let Walhall go up in flames at the end, as Wagner does, but instead resurrects it in a more southern location with new omens.