As suggested in my last post, there will a resumption of regular articles that give snippets of insight into the sort of background research that needs to go into what will eventually be a book on Wagner's place in German history.
The following article comes from Alex Ross, who is also writing a book about Wagner.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler?mbid=social_twitter
For once something on the subject of National Socialist Germany written by a nonhistorian is actually worth reading. It seems the message might be getting through that if you are going to write about this immensely complex subject, you actually have to know something about it. That might seem glib, but there are countless speculative books by nonhistorians who blunder into this field like so many drunken bulls staggering into a China shop, imagining that knowledge gleaned from watching old episodes of Hogan's Heroes and 'Allo 'Allo! makes them extraordinary experts in the field:
Book after book is fed to an insatiable and gullible public on the subject of "the Nazis". While there are rare gems buried amongst them, the ones written by nonhistorians tend to be even less than worthless. A couple of examples of shameless pulp fiction in the guise of history are Hitler's Philosophers by Sherratt and Wagner's Hitler by Köhler. The amount of pure rubbish that gets churned out all too often beggars belief.
So it is a relief to read Alex Ross and to see that at last someone has actually read about the subject before writing about it. This isn't to say that I agree on every point, but then again given that nor do historians, enlightened discussion over complex nuances is both welcome and expected, but the importance is that where there are differences in our viewpoints they fall within academically acceptable shades of grey. Nowhere do the old pop hits that make historians cringe and facepalm such as a Daniel Goldhagen (see the section on Goldhagen in the Köhler review) and William Shirer (see Sir Richard J Evans critique him and how difficult it has been for historians to get the lay public to stop pandering to Shirer) get trotted out ad nauseam. Other nonhistorians naively think that dated 1960s discussion lead by Hanna Arendt about "totalitarianism" can be taken unqualified as gospel half a century later after being embellished with a bit of Adorno saying something like "no poetry after Auschwitz". This is not to dismiss Arendt outright, as much of her writings have passed the test of time, but the sprawling volume on totalitarianism is considered problematic. In the meanwhile, the literature on this subject has exploded since the 1960s, a literature so vast that no writer can ignore it with disdain without looking foolish.
One critical point is that there was resistance to the rise of Hitler in Germany, whose coming to power was not the walk in the park abetted by a nation long preconditioned as "Hitler's Willing Executioners" that retrospective speculators have written about. Hitler called his book My Struggle for good reason rather than My Walk in the Park. If there was fierce opposition in Germany, there were those in the US and UK who were strongly sympathetic to fascism, justified as a lesser of two evils compared to Bolshevism. In the US, it just happened that a democratic socialist president was firmly in power who had no sympathy for the far right: Franklin D. Roosevelt. However, there was a strong right-wing opposition to Roosevelt more sympathetic towards Hitler than Roosevelt:
As far as some Republicans went, any enemy of an incumbent Democrat president could only be a friend of theirs. The fascist-sympathetic element rallied around the cry of "America First":
It is no coincidence that Donald Trump's motto is thus "America First".
That is, fascism was not a uniquely German way of thinking engendered of the "German Mind" as inculcated into the heads of the German Volk by centuries of brain-washing by German poets and philosophers, thus inducing the German mindset to guide its Volk down an exceptionalist historical path (Sonderweg) different from other nations—a path long predestined, perhaps even by centuries, to lead straight to Auschwitz. Fascism was rather a violent reaction to a particular set of unstable post-WWI political circumstances that colluded to throw it to the forefront of history. Outside of Germany, strains of thought had existed similar to the far right völkische Bewegung (die Völkischen) in German-speaking countries, where it too had been long relegated to the fringes of society until the massive social turmoil unleashed by WWI and the Great Depression catapulted it to centre-stage of politics:
Similar extremist fringe movements (e.g. the Ku Klux Klan) have existed on the desparate outskirts of American society too. Hitler, perhaps unsurprisingly, gazed admiringly towards American industrial development, to the anti-Semitic writings of industrialist Henry Ford's The International Jew, and the Jim Crow laws. Nor is it a coincidence that the Trumpist America First phenomenon has arisen at a time memories of the WWII era and the rise of fascism have begun to recede from collective memory.
In a sense, Donald Trump is the new Henry Ford, both being quasi-aristocratic American populist plutocrats. It is the resurgence of a streak that had always been present in American society.
That said, pre-WWI movements such as die Völkischen were not Nazis or fascists—even the term "proto-fascism" assumes far too much of a linear teleological continuity between the pre-WWI far right and what exploded to the forefront of history in the aftermath of WWI. Nor is the twenty-first-century Alt-Right the same thing as twentieth-century fascism. History does not repeat, or as Sir Richard J Evans states in this summary of his views retweeted by Evans himself:
Authoritarian approaches and populism are rising but this is not fascism again says Prof Evans so don’t use 20th century tools to fight 21st century autocrats.
https://twitter.com/NagyMohacsi/status/1052982719716753409
Professor Evans (who is always worth reading) explores this idea in more depths here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/19/fascism-a-warning-madeleine-albright-the-road-to-unfreedom-timothy-snyder-book-review
Getting back to the article by Alex Ross, while there are endless complexities raised, which we could debate till the end of time, it is a relief that, for once, a nonhistorian has actually done some serious study of the subject rather than merely assuming that memes about the National Socialist era repeated in the media (social and traditional) and popular press (films, dramas, novels etc) can be taken as gospel.
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