In Autumn 2018, the police in the German federal state of Nordrhein-Westfalen started the evacuation of protesting environmental activists in the Hambach Forest with an auditory assault, the playing of high volume music, among others Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”. This is the latest instance of a long tradition of using the “Ride of the Valkyries” in demonstrating acoustical dominance and power, starting with the Nazi propaganda videos.

In this presentation, we will explore the transmediation of the “Ride of the Valkyries” in the context of war and propaganda, from Wagner’s opera, to Nazi-newsreels, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apokalypse Now (1979) and on to the evacuation of the Hambach Forest Camp 2018 and its news coverage. In each of these instances, the music interacts differently with other forms of communication and moves between aesthetic and journalist/political contexts. With every remediation, aspects from former representations are transmediated, building up a larger communicative potential. The music is from the beginning embedded with connotations to elitism, power, war, and heroism, which becomes inflicted with Nazi ideology in the propaganda videos and ‘turned around’ and ‘aimed at’ Vietnamese foot soldiers in Apocalypse Now. The use of “Ride of the Valkyries” in the Hambach Forest thus becomes associated with the USA’s fight against Vietnamese guerilla fighters in the jungle, but seems less sensitive to the role of the Wagner’s music in Nazi-propaganda. Even here, however, it still relies on connotations of elitism and domination in a fine interaction of the composite meaning potential(s) of the piece.