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264 ART FORM AND MATERIAL
Hebbel himself gives the reason in his famous diary: 'It seems to me that on the foundation of the Nibelung saga one could build a purely human tragedy which would be quite natural in its motivation.'
What, then, did Hebbel do? He kept the mythical foundation, that is the skeleton of the story. But he gave it a different interpretation. The actions and events remained largely the same, but were given other motives and explanations.
Thus the same event, being given quite different emphasis, was turned into a different theme. The theme and content of Hebbel's Nibelung trilogy is not identical with that of the Nibelung saga. For although in Hebbel's drama Hagen kills Siegfried, as he does in the saga, he does so from entirely different motives and Kriemhild's vengeance, as depicted in Hebbel's drama, is a tragedy of a quite different order than the same event in the Germanic epic.
Nearly every artistically serious and intelligent adaptation is such a re-interpretation. The same external action has quite different inner motives, and it is these inner motives which throw light on the hearts of the characters and determine the content which determines the form. The material, that is the external events, serve merely as clues, and clues can be interpreted in many ways — as we know from the detective stories.
It often happens that a writer uses a second time, in another art form, the material he himself has once already used in a certain art form. We know that nowadays, especially when it is a question of adapting novels or plays for the films, this is mostly done for financial reasons. A successful novel can be adapted first as a play and then as a film, and thus make money for its author several times over. But sometimes such adaptations are made with quite serious artistic intentions.
Let us take a case in which no suspicion of financial motives can arise. We know that Goethe wanted to make a play out of his very interesting story The man of fifty', which is a part of his Wilhelm Meister. The plan of this play has been preserved— it gives, already divided into acts and scenes, the content of the projected play, which is the content of the story, only told in a different way. This different way very instructively shows why Goethe felt the need of re-writing in another