Der Fall Homburg – nach Marco Bellocchios Verfilmung DER PRINZ VON HOMBURG (1996)

Abstract: If cinematographic reception of literature tries not only to visualize the original texts but also to reinvent them on the basis of interpretive patterns, then specific cross-breeding phenomena which can be investigated through intercultural and transmedial analysis come to the fore. Marco Bellocchio’s movie Il principe di Homburg di Heinrich von Kleist (1996), a little studied testimony of Kleist’s international reception, transforms the original historical background of the play – the war between Brandenburg and Sweden during the XVII century – into an ideal and universal scenery, allusively referring to Kleist’s own times, when Prussia had to struggle for survival against Napoleon. Bellocchio visualizes the play in a innovative way by setting it in a permanent nocturnal, dark bluish light, rich of disquieting shadows, and by emphasizing Homburg’s somnambulism as an aspect belonging to depth psychology. However, in Bellocchio’s adaptation the main conflict represented in the play remains unaltered: an old monarch leads his officers as if they were machines, and a young prince, loved by the same officers for his temerity, commits insubordination in order to prove how, at war, individual initiative is not less important than strategy. Found guilty for this, in conformity with war law, he must die. Actually, his disobedience has a deeper motivation. At the bottom of his heart Homburg strives for the whole merit of the victory at Fehrbellin and for the right to marry princess Natalie. If Kleist, towards the end of his play, builds accurately the logical frame for reconciliation and, as a result of this, lets Homburg fall on his knees before the iron leader of the March, quite conversely Bellocchio, a filmmaker who in his career portrayed young and ambitious rebels fighting tight-lipped for principles or at least dreaming intensely about their fulfilment, makes Homburg refuse the rigorism pursued by the Kurfürst in the application of the law. The final capital punishment is what the offender deliberately accepts to pay in order to preserve the state from collapse. This position of consenting scapegoat enables the rebellious and ambitious young man to convert his failure into a sort of problematic victory upon his opposite party, yet the reasons for the conflict remain unchanged. Therefore, the final reconciliation – based on the royal mercy dispensed by the Elector to the brave scatterbrain – although justified by the higher purpose of war, seems to be, much more in the film than in the play, a sort of foolish comedy.