The British Nazification of Wagner's Legacy

Recently declassified documents suggest that the real reason that home office opposed Edward VIII's marriage to Wallace was because she was a known Nazi sympathiser — a sympathy she shared with her future husband. When forced to choose between his commitment to Great Britain and to Nazi Germany, Edward VIII chose Nazi Germany.

The story about home office objecting on the grounds of Wallace being a divorcee was little more than a smokescreen to cover up the embarrassing situation.

Banished to the Bahamas by Churchill to get him out of the way, Edward VIII — now the Duke of Windsor — gave an interview to Foulton Oursler:

"Hitler, he said, was the right and logical leader of the German people . . . He regarded Hitler as a great man" Oursler wrote. 

The Duke told Oursler that the war was "between two very stubborn peoples" and suggested that Roosevelt soon would have to act as a mediator between Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Hitler, telling them that "you two boys have fought long enough and now you have to kiss and make up." 

"Tell Mr. Roosevelt that if he will make an offer of intervention of peace, that before any one in England can oppose it, the Duke of Windsor will instantly issue a statement supporting it and that will start a revolution in England and force peace," the Duke's aide told Oursler.

This was Fulton Oursler's final conclusion:

Did the Duke harbor hopes that such a revolution would restore him to the throne? The question seems almost irrelevant. By sending his plea to the President, he had already stepped beyond the bounds of diplomacy and trespassed on treason.

Here is an interesting documentary on the subject. It is a bit partisan but the basic information it is based on can all be found elsewhere from more neutral sources.

 

In short, sympathy for the Nazis went all the way to the top of British public life. In light of this, it should come as little surprise to learn that the most fanatically Nazi elements that emerged in Bayreuth several decades after Wagner death from around 1910-30s were British in origin: Houston Chamberlain and Winifred Wagner (née Williams). Even after the war, Winifred was to refer to Hitler as USA — unser seliger Adolf (our blessed Adolf).

However, the most insidious pro-Nazi voice, who must be outed, when it comes to the discussion of Wagner in the English language world, must surely be that of William Ashton Ellis. In every translation I have studied by Ellis, he continuously downplays the liberal and socialist elements in Wagner's writings, and grossly exaggerates anything he can find that could be made to sound as inflammatory, right wing and racist as it possibly can be — right down to the point of totally changing the words used by Wagner. These are not "translations", they are near complete proto-Nazi rewrites of the Urtext. Given that Ellis "translations", to this very day, remain the only ones available in English, it can be said with much certainly that both Winifred Williams and Houston Chamberlain would have first encountered Wagner's thinking in the form of an Ellis perversion.

Here are some prime examples.

1. Heldentum und Christentum (final paragraph): 

[Wir haben] das festzuhalten, daß, wie die Wirksamkeit der edlesten Race durch ihre, im natürlichen Sinne durchaus gerechtfertigte, Beherrschung und Ausbeutung der niedrigen Racen, eine schlechthin unmoralische Weltordnung begründet hat, eine mögliche Gleichheit aller, durch ihre Vermischung sich änhlich gewordener Racen uns gewiss zunächst nicht einer ästetischen Weltordnung zuführen würde, diese Gleichheit dagegen einzig aber uns dadurch denkbar ist, daß sie sich auf den Gewinn einer allgemeinen moralischen Übereinstimmung gründet, wie das wahrhaftige Christentum . . .

 My translation:

We have to keep a hold of the fact [festzuhalten] that the efficiency of the noblest races' domination and exploitation of the lower races, justified entirely in naturalistic terms, has established [begründet] a completely [schlechthin] immoral [unmoralische] world order  [Weltordnung] — a possible sameness of all people [aller] made equal to each other through the intermixing [Vermischung ] of races can only lead to an aesthetically ordered world if this sameness were conceivable when grounded on a universal moral consensus such as the true Christianity . . .

William Ashton Ellis translation:

Here we shall have to bear in mind that, if the noblest race's rulership and exploitation of the lower races—quite justified in a natural sense—has founded a sheer immoral system throughout the world, any equalising of them all by flat commixture decidedly would not conduct to an æsthetic state of things. To us Equality is only thinkable as based upon a universal moral concord, such as we can but deem true Christianity elect to bring about.

Note the unambiguous condemnation as "completely immoral" of Gobineau's world order of allegedly superior races subjugating inferior ones. LEO gives us a translation of schlechthin as "par excellence", but "plainly" is another dictionary option but whether you say "plainly immoral" or "immorality par excellence", the condemnation is total. Ellis has done his best to try to subvert this by inserting the statement suggesting that Wagner thought it was "quite justified in a natural sense". The way Ellis translate the sentence reders it self-contradictory and almost incomprensible. It is clear that it should be translated as saying that Wagner thought that the attempt to justify the "completely immoral world order" using dubious biological justifications was outrageous.

2. Judaism in Music

Daß das geschichtliche Elend der Juden und die räuberische Rohheit der christlich-germanischen Gewalthaber den Söhnen Israels diese Macht selbst in die Hände geführt haben braucht hier nicht erst erörtert zu werden.

My translation:

That the historical misery [Elend] of the Jews and the predatory bestiality [räuberische Rohheit] of the Christian-Germanic power-brokers [Gewalthaber] towards the Sons of Israel has lead this power into their hands, need not be discussed here first.

William Ashton Ellis translation:

That the historical adversity of the Jews and the rapacious rawness of Christian-German potentates have brought this power within the hands of Israel's sons—this needs no argument of ours to prove.

Namely, that when Jews were forced into the dehumanising work of usury through oppression, it turned them into "degenerate" capitalists with powerful influence in the modern world after legal emancipation. Even Theodor Herzl accepted that Jews had become "degenerate" due to centuries of brutal oppression (see Theodor Herzl: from assimilation to Zionism by Jacques Kornberg, Indiana Press, 1993).

For a start Wagner uses the phrase "Elend". The dictionary should give you the following options to translate this word:

misery
calamitousness
affliction
poverty
wretchedness
distress
destitution
hardship
plight
squalor
unhappiness
penury
sordidness
adversity

Of course, Ellis chooses the word that least emphasises the sense of misery and distress suffered by the Jews.

The most important phrase to note is the comment about the treatment of Jews throughout history as being one of "räuberische Rohheit". I recommend that you run this phrase through Google translator. A machine gives you "predatory brutality". If you click on "brutality" in Google, you get "bestiality" as an alternative option. I have chose "bestiality" because predatory beasts are bestial, whereas people are brutal. As for the phrase "rapacious", I must confess to have been unfamiliar with the word, and the choice of an unusual word that avoids the intense emotional impact of the word "predatory" is clearly deliberate. 


The word "Rohheit" certainly does mean "rawness" in a literal sense, but as Google translator correctly identifies, it should be translated according to its figurative meaning of "brutality" or "bestiality". That is, the choice of the words "rapacious rawness" is a malicious effort to try to systematically undermine the harsh sting of condemnation implicit in these words. In fact, I knew even before I pulled out the Ellis translation that he would "translate" these words a "rapacious rawness": my predictions were absolutely correct.


Finally, note the word Gewalthaber, which you may struggle to find in a dictionary. However, a synonym for this is Machthaber, for which Google translator gives the following options:

ruler
potentate
dictator

Gewalthaber is a compound word of Gewalt + haber. Gewalt is a much stronger word for Macht (power) and literally means violence or coercion but can mean power. Haber comes from haben = "to have" ie literally "haver" or "one who has". So Gewalthaber means one who holds onto violent, coercive power. And what word does Ellis choose? Of course, the least negative one possible: potentates.   


Lastly, also see my post entitled The Appalling State of English Translation of Wagner's Prose Works, where the Ellis "translation" (if we can even call it that) of a passage of Know Thyself (Erkenne dich selbst) is critiqued in detail to show how he deliberately undermines the socialist ideas in Wagner's writings. 


It would not be an exaggeration to hail William Ashton Ellis as the British father of Nazified Bayreuth. Ellis is obviously the sort of pathetic scum that would later march around to the tune of Elgar's Land of Hope and Glory doing the fascist salute in black uniforms:

Some friends of William Ashton Ellis

Sir Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts

Anyone who uses an Ellis translation in a discussion of Wagner has absolutely zero credibility, other than as a Nazi bootlicker. His translations of Nietzsche have been dismissed as the work of a crank over a half century ago. So why waste your time with an Ellis perversion of a text by Wagner when you could go straight to quoting from Mein Kampf ? After all, that is pretty much exactly what Houston Chamberlain did. Or was that Hitler quoting from Chamberlain? Whatever! — they are all scum.

Sadly, there is at least one British writer who has devoted his life to keeping the flame of the Nazified interpretation of Wagner's legacy alive for all eternity. His name is Barry Millington and his pernicious influence has reached all the way to the top of British musicology by being published and promoted by Grove's.