lime leaf

The lime leaf is the tiny exception in Dieter’s grandmother’s tale of Siegfried’s invulnerability, and later becomes a pointed image in the story of Dieter’s grief. In the legend she tells him, a leaf stuck to Siegfried’s back leaves one place unprotected; after using the tale to urge Dieter to defend himself against sorrow, Lavinia finds his own leaf and pulls it away. The repeated image makes vulnerability both the detail that defeats perfect protection and something another person can recognize and remove.

The Leaf in the Dragon-Slayer’s Tale

Dieter’s grandmother introduces the lime leaf beneath the Heede Riesenlinde, a great tree she calls a Lindwurm, or dragon tree. Her adapted account of Siegfried says that he kills Fafnir, the dragon who lived in the lime tree, and becomes armored after bathing in the dragon’s blood. His protection is almost complete: a lime leaf sticks to his back, leaving a small place where he can still be harmed.

Dieter responds to the story by asking whether the dragon lived in that very lime tree. His attention to the dark hollow in the roots gives the legend a childhood immediacy, but the leaf’s role is already precise: it marks the limit of an apparently invincible body.

A Lesson in Grief and Self-Protection

The grandmother turns the legend into counsel for the bereaved boy. She tells Dieter to think of himself as Siegfried and to treat the sadness caused by his parents’ deaths as a dragon he must quell. In her lesson, he should overcome grief and form a protection of will against what she calls superfluous love, so that nothing can hurt him.

The leaf complicates that instruction. Siegfried’s armor does not erase the possibility of injury; it concentrates it in one small, identifiable weakness. The story thus gives Dieter an image for the tension between the wish to become untouchable and the fact that protection is never absolute.

Lavinia’s Reversal of the Image

The image returns in a brief reversal: Lavinia has found Dieter’s lime leaf and pulls it away. The episode does not explain what the leaf means to Lavinia or what follows from her gesture. Its force comes from its placement after the grandmother’s lesson: the sign of the vulnerable place that Dieter was urged to guard is now in someone else’s hand.

Across the two appearances, the lime leaf moves from a detail in an old heroic tale to an image attached to Dieter’s private grief. First it exposes the flaw in Siegfried’s invulnerability; then its removal gives the protective lesson a concrete, unsettling counterpart. The book leaves the gesture unexplained, preserving the image’s ambiguity rather than resolving it into a second moral.