The Fatherland Union Paper

The following passage from Wagner's Fatherland Union Paper is from a book called Wagner as I Knew Him by Ferdinand Praeger. It was written at the time of the Dresden uprisings of 1849—the historical blueprint for all idealistic pro-democratic uprisings since—and was used as part of the indictment by the counter revolutionary crack down against the revolutionaries. 

I have added the original Paper at the end of this post. However, it is unnecessarily long winded, so I have shortened it just slightly, so as to make it more readable, but still retaining its most essential points (conciseness was never Wagner's strongpoint, and he often repeats himself). If you want to read the full article, so as to be able to check that I have not doctored the original article so as to change its meaning, please click on the link to the online book. 

The picture of Wagner standing with musket in hand against his oppressors is remarkably at odds with current populist stereotypes. Right-wing propagandist, H.S. Chamberlain desperately tried to have the book suppressed. Sadly, he has succeeded, because the English language literature rarely, if ever, cites from it, and shows signs of being whitewashed by the sort of propaganda that Chamberlain and his successors continue to proliferate to try to convince the world into thinking that Wagner championed their views. In view of the pro-democracy movements that have mushroomed around the world in recent times, it is now high time that the first hand historical evidence—long suppressed about Wagner—be revealed to the world.

Even as late in his life as the second of May, 1874, Wagner spoke to Cosima of the profound impact that his experience of the Dresden uprising of 1848 had upon him: 

I think that I would have never conceived The Ring if it weren't for this movement. 

Ich selbst, ich hätte glaube ich, den Ring nicht konzipiert ohne diese Bewegung. 

The Fatherland Union Paper is a truly remarkable document, which, infinitely more than the truly endless screeds written about him since, summarises everything that Wagner stood for and believed in till the end of his days—the very essence of his life and art.

For expressing the peaceful pro-democratic sentiments in the Paper, Wagner suffered eleven years of exile with a potential death sentence over his head. Unlike his friends, August Roeckel and Michael Bakunin, Wagner managed to only just evade capture. This was an experience as a fugitive dissident in exile, unparalleled amongst any truly major figures, not only in music, but, in all of Western art. There is every reason to think that this was the seminal event in Wagner's life that shook him to the very core of his being, and shaped everything that he was as both man and artist. Indeed, the Dresden pro-democratic uprising marks a turning point in Wagner as an artist, from an above average German composer of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, to the truly major artist that he became: the experience was profoundly transformational. 

This Paper reveals the true meaning of Wagner's German nationalism: a belief that it was the duty of the true patriot of the Fatherland to embrace a classless and democratic universal brotherhood, where all people had a right to vote, and where all people were treated humanely and equally, regardless of race. Keep in mind too, that enlightened Germans felt free to openly express their love for their Fatherland, because German nationalism arose as a rebellion against the oppression of Napoleonic despotism. Indeed, this is the very historical origin of the Iron Cross: a symbol of patriotic resistance against Napoleonic oppression. For example, John Edward Toews writes:

In the gable of the main portal, a frieze representing the ceremonial dedication of the Iron Cross in 1813 brought together the religious and national forces mobilised by Prussian political leadership in what Schinkel imagined, like his nationalist heroes Goerres and Arndt, as a populist crusade by the German people against their foreign oppressors.

For the Schinkel of 1814-15, the general sign of this historical conjuncture of sacred and secular narratives was the Iron Cross. Designed by Schinkel himself in 1813 as the Prussian decoration for individual valor in the Wars of Liberation, the Iron Cross connected the recent struggle against Napoleonic domination to the defence of Christian-German civilization by the medieval order of the Teutonic Knights.

In 1814, when Johann Gottfried Schado's Goddess of Peace driving a four-horsed chariot was recaptured from her French kidnappers, brought back from Paris, and festively restored to her original site atop the Brandenburg Gate, she was reconsecrated as a Goddess of Victory and given a military standard with a prominently displayed Iron Cross, making her a symbol of national liberation and a rediscovered national identity.

From p135-136 of Becoming historical: cultural reformation and public memory in early nineteenth-century Berlin (Cambridge University Press, 2004)

The Iron Cross as a symbol of the struggle by the Allies for liberty from Napoleonic tyranny

It was this idealistic and Romantic hope that Germany might rise to become a liberating "force for good" that lead Wagner to compose Parsifal with its story about the Knights of the Holy Grail, as well as to write: 

Here we must now contemplate whether that which the Germans lost in their fight for Reformation, and which had to be given up—unity, and a power of position in Europe. In contrast to that they kept the unique position through which they were destined, not to be the rulers [Herrschern] of the world, but its ennoblers [Veredlern]. For what we are not destined for, that we cannot be. We can with the help of our related Germanic peoples bring around the whole world to [the way of] our unique cultural creation, without ever becoming the rulers of the world.

Hier will es uns nun dünken, als ob Das, was die Deutschen in ihren Reformationskämpfen verloren, Einheit, und europäische Machtstellung, von ihnen aufgegeben werden mußte, und dagegen die Eigentümlichkeit der Anlagen sich zu erhalten, durch welche sie zwar nicht zu Herrschern, wohl aber zu Veredlern der Welt bestimmt sein dürften. Was wir nicht sein müßen, können wir auch nicht sein. Wir können mit Hilfe aller uns verwandten germanischen Stämme die ganze Welt mit unseren eigentümlichen Kulturschöpfungen durchbringen, ohne jemals Welt-Herrscher zu werden. 

Wollen wir hoffen? My translation. Vol 10 p 130: Richard Wagner Gesammelte Schriften ed Knapp, Leipzig

Compare this with these words in the Fatherland Union Paper:

The sun of German freedom and German gentleness shall alike warm and elevate Cossack, Frenchmen, Bushmen, and Chinese.   

We too easily forget that Germany then was remembered more for belonging with the Allies, who, together with the British, defeated the despot Napoleon at Waterloo in a War of Liberation against an empire almost as large as that of Hitler's after him.  On hearing that Napoleon had crowned himself Emperor, Beethoven struck out the dedication of the Eroica to him in a fit of rage:

So he is no more than a common mortal! Now, he too will tread under foot all the rights of man, indulge only his ambition; now he will think himself superior to all men — become a tyrant!

Napoleon crowning himself Emperor

Wagner felt part of the naively idealistic German nationalist movement that arose during the uprising against Napoleon, and died with only increasingly uneasy inkling of the dark depths that the once idealistic German nationalism would degenerate into in the century following his death.

Goya depicted the brutality of the Napoleonic forces in their rampage through Europe

Indeed, Wagner's Fatherland Union Paper simply brims with one juicy quotable quote after the other:

And when all who draw breath in our dear German land are united into one great free people, when class prejudices shall have ceased to exist, then do you suppose we have reached our goal? Oh, no; we are just equipped for the beginning. Then will it be our duty to investigate boldly ... the cause of misery of our present social status, and determine whether man ... can have been destined by God to be the servile slave of inert base metal. We must decide whether money shall exert such degrading power over the image of God—man—as to render him the despicable slave of the passions of usury and avarice. The war against this existing evil will cause neither tears nor blood.  

In the coming contest we shall find that society will be maintained by the physical activity of individuals, and we shall destroy the nebulous notion that money possesses any inherent power. And heaven will help us ... dispel the false halo with which the unthinking mind invests this demon money. Then shall we root out the miseries engendered and nourished by public and secret usury, deceptive paper money and fraudulent speculations. This will tend to promote the emancipation of the human race (whilst fulfilling the teachings of Christ ...)

The sun of German freedom and German gentleness shall alike warm and elevate Cossack, Frenchmen, Bushmen, and Chinese.  

Let us be children of one Father, brothers of one family.

We further insist upon the unconditional right of every natural-born subject, when of age, to a vote . . .  

Therefore let us abolish monarchy altogether as autocracy, i.e. sole-reigning, becomes impossible by the strong opposition of democracy, — the reign of the many   

If Prussia insists on monarchy, it is to suit its notion of Prussian destiny, a vain idea that cannot fail to pale soon. 

It should be particularly noted that these ideas about the enslavement of man by the enthralment to power and money became the central ideas that went on to inspire Wagner's opus magnus, The Ring of the Nibelung. Likewise, note that the Paper alludes to the creation of the Free Man, which appears in the Ring as "der freier als ich der Gott" (the one freer than I — the God) in die Walküre (see also the thread on that work): the ideal of a human race emancipated from the bonds of religious and financial institutions.

Exactly like the Fatherland Union Paper, The Ring is above all about the hope of the possibility of the emancipation of humanity from enslavement to the lust for money ("the demon money") and power. That is to say, that The Ring is fundamentally anti-capitalist and anti-monetarist in its message: the lust for gold is the root of all evil. Yet this anti-capitalist ideology harmoniously co-exists in The Ring, just as in the Father Union Paper, with his sense of patriotism. 

Right towards the end of his life, in 1881, Wagner was to write about the meaning of the Ring using the exact same words, and concepts found in the Fatherland Union Paper:

If gold appears to be the daemon that chokes the innocence of mankind, then our great poets are letting the invention of paper money pass them by like a devilish spook. The ominous Ring of the Nibelung as a share market portfolio completes the gruesome picture of the ghostly masters of the world.  

Erscheint . . .  das Gold als der Unschuld würgende Daemon der Menschheit, so läßt unser größter Dichler endlich die Erfindung des Papiergeldes als einen Teufelsspuk vor sich gehen. Der verhängnisvolle Ring des Nibelungen als Borsenportefeuille dürfte das schauerliche Bild des gespenstischen Weltbeherrschers zur Vollendung bringen. 

From Erkenne dich selbst

Compare these words to those in Fatherland Union Paper:

. . . it be our duty to investigate boldly ... the cause of misery of our present social status, and determine whether man ... can have been destined by God to be the servile slave of inert base metal. We must decide whether money shall exert such degrading power over the image of God— man—as to render him the despicable slave of the passions of usury and avarice. The war against this existing evil will cause neither tears nor blood.  

. . . we shall destroy the nebulous notion that money possesses any inherent power . . .[and] dispel the false halo with which the unthinking mind invests this demon money. Then shall we root out the miseries engendered and nourished by public and secret usury, deceptive paper money and fraudulent speculations. This will tend to promote the emancipation of the human race (whilst fulfilling the teachings of Christ ...)

The words and ideas are both exactly the same, right down to the metaphor of the "daemon money". There has been absolutely no turnabout in his thinking.

Furthermore, in Wagner's denouncement of monetarism in the Paper as "usury, deceptive paper money and fraudulent speculations", you also see in the choice of the word "usury" that his pro-democratic patriotism already co-exists with his anti-Semitism—however, sadly misguided they are—which has anti-capitalist roots. Even then, much later on the 14th of November, 1879 Wagner was to say to Cosima:

Alas! Not just the Jews, but every creature seeks to further their own interest. It is us, we of the state, who condone such things. So too the stock exchange, in the beginning a free, decent institute—what have we permitted to become of that? And he spoke of the current debts that the states gets into and how that once again only drives the evil speculative spirits! 

Ach! Nicht die juden sind es, ein jedes Wesen sucht sein Interesse zu fördern, wir sind es; wir der Staat, die wir solches gestatten. So auch die Börse, anfänglich eine freie, gute Institution, was haben wir daraus werden lassen. Und er [Wagner] erzählt von der jetzigen Anleihe, welche der Staat macht und die wiederum nur ein Vorschub diesem bösen spekulativen Geiste leistet! 

Just as in the Fatherland Union Paper, Wagner is saying that the evils of monetarism ("usury, deceptive paper money and fraudulent speculations") are rooted in the universal characteristics of human nature that go far beyond ethnicity or race: greed has no race. 

In Erkenne dich selbst (Know Thyself) Wagner further says:

What is not recognised is attacked, and we thereby we attack ourselves, supposing that the Other had attacked us. Who does not experience this again when, with that teaching in mind [know thyself] he looks upon the current movement against the Jews? 

Was nicht erkannt wird, darauf wird losgeschlagen, und, schlagen wir uns damit selbst, so vermeinen wir, der Andere hätte uns geschlagen. Wer erlebte diese nicht wieder, wenn er, mit jener Lehre im Sinne, etwa der heutigen Bewegung gegen die Juden zusieht? 

That is to say, often the Jews are blamed for things that come from within ourselves! Things are projected upon the Jews that are only reflections of our inner selves — so, says Wagner: know thyself. The root of all evil, the lust for god and power, lies within ourselves.

Indeed, Wagner was to write to Angelo Neumann, his Jewish friend and theatre director:

From the modern anti-Semitic movement I stand completely distant. In an upcoming issue of the Bayreuth Blätter there will appear an article by me that ardently [Geistvollen] announces that it will actually be impossible for me to associate myself with that movement. 

Der gegenwärtigen antisemetischen Bewegung stehe ich vollständig fern; ein nächstens in den Bayreuther Blättern erscheinender Aufsatz von mir wird dies in einer Weise bekunden, daß Geistvollen es sogar unmöglich werden dürfte, mich mit jener Bewegung in Beziehung zu bringen.

p139 of Angelo Neumann's book Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner, Leipzig 1907.

All of these quotes conclusively demonstrate that Wagner never degenerated into the alleged traitor to the ideals he espoused in the Fatherland Union Paper.  He never wavered from those ideals. Indeed, it would simply be inconsistent for a liberal minded artist to have suffered through so much, for so many years in the name of freedom and democracy only to make an ideological about turn into a proto-fascist.  

Such a monstrous betrayal of his friends exists only in the wishful fantasy of right-wing ideologues and their fanatical ideologies, for properly understood, everything Wagner and friends loyal to him wrote repeatedly contradicts them. The ignoramuses cannot base these claims on anything that Wagner wrote or said, and are reduced to repeating ad infinitum that "it is so because our Prophet, the Führer, spoke thus". Alas, these propagandists, who wish to twist Wagner into a fighter for their cause, have spawned endless offspring who continue to carry on in like manner today. That is to say that they wish us to believe that the rantings of a fascist beer-hall musicologist and art school reject count for more than everything Wagner every said or stood up for.

Of further interest is that in the Paper, Wagner equally denounces Communist revolutionary violence as a madness equal to that of monarchist despotism. In the name of the Father he calls for a peaceful, voluntary renouncement of autocracy by an enlightened monarchy, transitioning his Germany towards parliamentary democracy, where all races are equal, as a way of averting the violence that he foretold, and which would later eventuate in the Russian Revolution:

Do you think that you scent in this the teachings of communism? 

Are you then so stupid or wicked as to confound a theory so senseless as that of communism with that which is absolutely necessary to the salvation of the human race from its degraded servitude.

In other words, it is simply false to claim that at the time of the Dresden uprisings, Wagner was a communist or Marxist revolutionary, who later turned his back of these violent revolutionary ideals. The Fatherland Union Paper clearly shows that he never was that species of socialist revolutionary in the first place, but was instead a pacifist-democratic socialist.

However, one thing the Paper does really make clear is that Wagner believes that one day Germany will become a republic. You can clearly see that the 1848 German Dresden uprising in which Wagner took part was really a historical pre-cursor to the November German Revolution of 1918-19. The anti-capitalist sentiments in The Ring were born of the Dresden uprising, with its profoundly anti-capitalist belief in an apocalyptic collapse of the ancient regime. The Ring firmly places Wagner in the political camp that represented everything that the Nazis hated and sought to exterminate with violent political clamp downs against both the Social Democrats (SPD) as well as the German Communist Party (KPD). In fact, concentration camps were initially set up to imprison, persecute, torture, and murder their political opponents from the SPD and KPD. The number of political opponents persecuted numbered around 100,000 of whom hundreds were murdered.  One day the world will truly learn to laugh at what high irony it was that an arch-enemy had been made the quasi-official composer of the fascist Deutsche Reich.

It is truly astonishing how everything we know about Wagner, the man and artist, is so perfectly summarised in this Paper. The Wagner who wrote the Fatherland Union Paper and The Ring of the Nibelung are one and the same man. Contrary to what Chamberlain and his prodigy even today will try to convince you into thinking, absolutely nothing has changed. There has been no about face in his idealistic liberal thinking. Wagner, the true German patriot, is Wagner the pro-democratic liberal dissident. It is simply wrong to claim that because Wagner was a nationalist that he can only have been a proto-fascist. Indeed, he patriotically calls for a peaceful transition to a united democratic republic in the the very name of God and Fatherland.

You can also see, how truly, Wagner the liberal, democratic thinker, and idealistic German patriot is the artistic successor of Beethoven, and why Wagner's favourite work was the Ninth Symphony:

Freude schöne Götterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium. 

Alle menschen werden Brüder,
wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt

In fact, Wagner the enlightened liberal is far ahead of his time. Yet when he clearly sings "Einigkeit und Recht und Freiheit für das deutsche Vaterland" (unity and justice and freedom for the German Fatherland) the uninformed hear "Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles". Once they have stopped shouting, the true voice of Richard Wagner, the liberal dissent in exile, may one day be heard once more. 

What is the Relation that our Efforts bear to the Monarchy? 

The Fatherland Union Paper 

by Richard Wagner 

(condensed version - for full version click here) 

Do you honestly believe that by marching resolutely onward from our present basis we should very soon reach a true republic, one without a king? Let me tell you to what goal our republican efforts are tending.  

Our efforts are for the good of all and are directed towards a future in which our present achievements will be but as the first streak of moonlight. With this object kept steadily in view, we should insist on the overthrow of the last remaining glitter of aristocracy. As the aristocracy no longer consists of feudal lords and masters who can enslave and bodily chastise us at their will, they would do wisely to obliterate old grievances by relinquishing the last remnants of class distinction...  

Should they answer us that the memory of their ancestors would render it impious to resign any privileges inherited by them, then let them remember also that we too have forefathers, whose noble deeds of heroism, though not inscribed on genealogical trees, are yet inscribed — their sufferings, bondage, oppression, and slavery of every kind — in letters of blood in the falsified archives of the history of the last thousand years.  

To the aristocracy I would say, forget your ancestors, throw away your titles and every outward sign of courtly favour, and we will promise you to be generous and efface every remembrance of our ancestors. Let us be children of one Father, brothers of one family. 

Therefore, do away with the first chamber. There is but one people, not a first and a second, and they need but one house for their representation.  

We further insist upon the unconditional right of every natural-born subject, when of age, to a vote. The more needy he be, the more his right, and the more earnestly will he aid in keeping the laws which he himself assisted in framing and which, henceforth, are to protect him from any similar future state of need and misery.  

And when all who draw breath in our dear German land are united into one great free people, when class prejudices shall have ceased to exist, then do you suppose we have reached our goal? Oh, no; we are just equipped for the beginning. Then will it be our duty to investigate boldly, with all our reasoning power, the cause of misery of our present social status, and determine whether man ... can have been destined by God to be the servile slave of inert base metal. We must decide whether money shall exert such degrading power over the image of God — man — as to render him the despicable slave of the passions of usury and avarice. The war against this existing evil will cause neither tears nor blood.  

The result of the foregone victory will be a universal conviction that the highest attainable happiness is commonwealth, a state in which as many active men as Mother Earth can supply with food will join in the well-ordered republic, supporting it by a fair exchange of labour, mutually supplying each other's wants, and contributing to the universal happiness. Society must be in a diseased state when the activity of individuals is restrained and the existing laws imperfectly administered. 

In the coming contest we shall find that society will be maintained by the physical activity of individuals, and we shall destroy the nebulous notion that money possesses any inherent power. And heaven will help us to ... dispel the false halo with which the unthinking mind invests this demon money. Then shall we root out the miseries engendered and nourished by public and secret usury, deceptive paper money and fraudulent speculations. This will tend to promote the emancipation of the human race (whilst fulfilling the teachings of Christ, a simple and clear truism which it is ever sought to hide behind the glamour of dogma, once invented to appeal to the feeble understanding of simple-minded barbarians), and to prepare it for a state towards the highest development of which we are now tending with clear vision and reason.  

Do you think that you scent in this the teachings of communism?  

Are you then so stupid or wicked as to confound a theory so senseless as that of communism with that which is absolutely necessary to the salvation of the human race from its degraded servitude.  

Are you not capable of perceiving that the very attempt, even though it were allowed, of dividing mathematically the goods of this world, would be a senseless solution of a burning question, but which attempt, fortunately however, in its complete impossibility, carries its own death-warrant. But though communism fails to supply the remedy, will you on that account deny the disease? Notwithstanding that we have enjoyed peace for thirty-three years now, what do you see around you? Dejection and pitiful poverty; everywhere the horrid pallor of hunger and want. Look to it while there is yet time and before it becomes too late to act! 

Think not to solve the question by the giving of alms; acknowledge at once the inalienable rights of humanity, rights vouchsafed by the Omnipotent, or else you may live to see the day that cruel scorn will be met by vengeance and brute force. Then the wild cry of victory might be that of communism, and although the impossibility of any lengthened duration of its principles as a ruling power can be boldly predicted, yet even the briefest reign of such a thraldom might be sufficient to expunge for a long time to come all the advantages of a civilisation of two thousand years old.  

Do you believe I threaten? No; I warn! When by our republican efforts we shall have solved this most important problem for the weal of society, and have established the dignity of the freed man, and established his claim to what we consider his rights, for our great effort. For when we have succeeded in solving the emancipation question, thereby assisting in the regeneration of society, then will arise a new, free, and active race, then shall we have gained a new mean to aid us towards the attainments of the highest benefits, and then shall we actively disseminate our republican principles.  

Then shall we traverse the ocean in our ships, and found here and there a new young Germany, enriching it with the fruits of our achievements, and educating our children in our principles of human rights, so that they may be propagated everywhere. We shall do otherwise than the Spaniards, who made the new world into a papistic slaughter-house; we shall do otherwise than the English, who convert their colonies into huge shops for their own individual profit. Our colonies shall be truly German, and from sunrise to sunset we shall contemplate a beautiful, free Germany, inhabited, as in the mother country, by a free people. The sun of German freedom and German gentleness shall alike warm and elevate Cossack, Frenchmen, Bushmen, and Chinese.  

You see our republican zeal in this respect has no termination; it pushes on further and further from century to century, to confer happiness on the whole of the human race! Do you call this a Utopian dream? When we once set to work with a good will, and act courageously, then every year shall throw its light on a good deed of progress. 

But you ask, will all this be achieved under a monarchy? My answer is that throughout I have persistently kept it in view, but if you have any doubts of such a possibility, then it is you who pronounce the monarchical death-warrant. But if you agree with me, and consider it possible as I realise it, then a republic is the exact and right thing, and we should but have to petition the king to become the first and most genuine republican.  

And who is more called upon to be the most genuine republican than the king? Can it be considered a sacrifice for a king to see his free citizens no longer subjects? This right has been acknowledged and granted by the new constitution, and he who confirms its justice and adopts it with fidelity, cannot see a sacrifice in the abolition of subjects, and the substitution of “free men."  

It is the spirit of our time, the new state of things, that has grown up, which seems to give to the simplest among us the power of prophecy. There is a decided pressure for a decision. There are two camps amongst the civilised nations of Europe; from one we hear the cry of monarchy; republic, is the cry of the other.  

Will you deny that the time has come when a solution of this question must be arrived at, a question, the reply to which embodies all that which, at the present moment, excites human sympathies down to their lowest depths? Do you mean to say that you do not recognise the hour as inspired by God? Well, then, it would seem as though the heavens had stricken you with blindness. No; at the present moment we clearly perceive the necessity of distinguishing between truth and falsehood, and monarchy as the embodiment of autocracy is a falsehood — our constitution has proved it to be so.  

All who despair of a reconciliation throw yourselves boldly into the arms of the republic; those still willing to hope, lift their eyes for the last time to the points of existing circumstances to find a solution. The latter see that if the contest be against monarchy, it is only in isolated cases against the person of the prince, whilst everywhere war is being waged against the party that lifts the monarch on a shield, under the cover of which they fight for their own selfish ends. This is the party that has to be thrown down and conquered, however bloody the fight. And if all reconciliation fails, party and prince will simultaneously be hit. But the means of peace are in the hands of the prince; if he be the genuine father of his people, and by one single noble resolution he can plant the standard of peace, there where war seems otherwise inevitable peace will reign.  

Let us then cast our glance around, and seek among the European monarchs those said to be the chosen instruments of heaven for the great work of paternal government, and what do we see? A degenerated race, unfit for any noble calling! What a sight we find in Spain, Portugal, or Naples. What heartache fills us when we look in Germany, on Hanover, Hesse, Bavaria. Let us look away from these! God has judged the weak and wicked; their evils extend from branch to branch.  

If Prussia insists on monarchy, it is to suit its notion of Prussian destiny, a vain idea that cannot fail to pale soon. If Austria is of the same mind, it is because she sees in her dynasty the only means of keeping together a conglomeration of people and lands thrown into an unnatural whole and which cannot by any possibility hold together much longer.  

By what we have achieved we are rapidly nearing our goal, — the republic . . . It is not we who shall proclaim the republic; it will be our king, the noblest of sovereigns. . . Does it appear to you that by this proposition, monarchy would be altogether abolished? Yes, so it would! But the kingdom would thereby be emancipated. Do not deceive yourselves, ye who clamour for “a constitutional monarchy on the broadest basis”.  

You are either not honest in reference to that basis, . . . for every step you take in advancing on that democratic basis will be an encroachment on the power of the monarch, viz.: his autocracy; and in this light only can a monarchy be understood, therefore every step you take in a democratic direction will be a humiliation to the monarch, since it will bespeak a distrust of his rule. How can love and confidence prosper in a continual conflict between totally opposed principles? . . . Let us save the monarch from such an unhappy half-life. Therefore let us abolish monarchy altogether as autocracy, i.e. sole-reigning, becomes impossible by the strong opposition of democracy, — the reign of the many, — but, on the other hand, let us set against this the complete emancipation of royalty.  

Would this not be the grandest realisation of Christ's teaching, “the highest among you shall be the servant of all," for in serving and upholding the liberty of all, he raises in himself the conception of liberty to the highest pinnacle, the divine. The more earnestly we dive into the annals of German history, the more we become convinced that the signification of sovereignty, as we have given it, is but a resuscitated one... and its greatest aberration will be found in the present un-German conception of monarchy.  

Should we wish to formulate our heartfelt wishes into a petition, then I am convinced we should have to count our petitions by the hundred thousands, for their contents would lead to a reconciliation of contesting parties, at least of all of them that mean well. But only one signature is wanted here to be conclusive, that is, the signature of our beloved king, whom from the innermost depth of our hearts we wish a happier lot than he can at present enjoy!  

A Member of the Fatherland Union. 

16th June, 1848. 

Praeger writes that:

It will be noted that it is not signed Richard Wagner but only "A Member of the Fatherland Union." This mattered not, as the author was well known, and when Wagner was numbered among those accused by the government, this paper was filed as part of the indictment against him.