In the endless discussions of the historical origins of the Holocaust, an emotive populist view has arisen that fantastically exaggerates Richard Wagner's role, as though he were virtually the sole writer in the 19th century to have addressed the ethnic tensions between Jew and Gentile following emancipation—the so-called Judenfrage (Jewish question). The reason for this is that too many want to prove the Goldhagenist hypothesis that a racially based exterminationist anti-Semitism was culturally pervasive in Germany well before the rise of National Socialism in the twentieth century, to the point that Germany was long culturally predestined to be a nation of "Hitler's willing executioners". It is a simpleton's narrative that sees twentieth-century genocidal anti-Semitism as an outgrowth of nineteenth-century German Romanticism, as though National Socialist ideology had emerged fully formed, begging to be enacted out by the regime. To fit the narrative, the term Judenfrage is forced to take on an exclusively Wagnerian meaning. Both Wagner and German anti-Semitism are henceforth deemed a priori synonymous with a call for genocide awaiting its fulfilment in National Socialism. In this, we see not only Wagner, but a whole nation on trial.
What is often deliberately skirted over is the fact that, apart from Wagner, other left-wing ideologists of the day also expressed, what are by today's standards, uncomfortably anti-Semitic ideas. One example of such a thinker is Karl Marx.
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| Karl Marx |
His most important writing on this subject is his essay Zur Judenfrage (On the Jewish Question). Essentially, what you find in there is virtually identical to what Wagner says about Jews in das Judentum in der Musik (see previous threads on this essay discussing the English translation and meaning of words, as well as an overview of the ideas in the essay). Let's take a little look at the sort of things that Marx says in this essay:
Judaism has held its own alongside Christianity, not only as religious criticism of Christianity, not only as the embodiment of doubt in the religious derivation of Christianity, but equally because the practical Jewish spirit, Judaism, has maintained itself and even attained its highest development in Christian society. The Jew, who exists as a distinct member of civil society, is only a particular manifestation of the Judaism of civil society.
The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails.
What, in itself, was the basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, selfishness.
The monotheism of the Jew, therefore, is in reality the polytheism of the many needs, a polytheism which makes even the lavatory an object of divine law. Practical need, egoism, is the principle of civil society, and as such appears in pure form as soon as civil society has fully given birth to the political state. The god of practical need and self-interest is money.
Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.
The god of the Jews has become secularised and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.
The view of nature attained under the domination of private property and money is a real contempt for, and practical debasement of, nature; in the Jewish religion, nature exists, it is true, but it exists only in imagination.
It is in this sense that [in a 1524 pamphlet] Thomas Münzer declares it intolerable
“that all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.”
Contempt for theory, art, history, and for man as an end in himself, which is contained in an abstract form in the Jewish religion, is the real, conscious standpoint, the virtue of the man of money. The species-relation itself, the relation between man and woman, etc., becomes an object of trade! The woman is bought and sold.
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
The groundless law of the Jew is only a religious caricature of groundless morality and right in general, of the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest surrounds itself.
Here, too, man’s supreme relation is the legal one, his relation to laws that are valid for him not because they are laws of his own will and nature, but because they are the dominant laws and because departure from them is avenged.
Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism which Bauer discovers in the Talmud, is the relation of the world of self-interest to the laws governing that world, the chief art of which consists in the cunning circumvention of these laws.
Indeed, the movement of this world within its framework of laws is bound to be a continual suspension of law.
Judaism could not develop further as a religion, could not develop further theoretically, because the world outlook of practical need is essentially limited and is completed in a few strokes.
By its very nature, the religion of practical need could find its consummation not in theory, but only in practice, precisely because its truth is practice.
Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw the new creations and conditions of the world into the sphere of its activity, because practical need, the rationale of which is self-interest, is passive and does not expand at will, but finds itself enlarged as a result of the continuous development of social conditions.
Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society, but it is only in the Christian world that civil society attains perfection. Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions extrinsic to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another.
Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has merged again into Judaism.
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.
The groundless law of the Jew is only a religious caricature of groundless morality and right in general, of the purely formal rites with which the world of self-interest surrounds itself.
Here, too, man’s supreme relation is the legal one, his relation to laws that are valid for him not because they are laws of his own will and nature, but because they are the dominant laws and because departure from them is avenged.
Jewish Jesuitism, the same practical Jesuitism which Bauer discovers in the Talmud, is the relation of the world of self-interest to the laws governing that world, the chief art of which consists in the cunning circumvention of these laws.
Indeed, the movement of this world within its framework of laws is bound to be a continual suspension of law.
Judaism could not develop further as a religion, could not develop further theoretically, because the world outlook of practical need is essentially limited and is completed in a few strokes.
By its very nature, the religion of practical need could find its consummation not in theory, but only in practice, precisely because its truth is practice.
Judaism could not create a new world; it could only draw the new creations and conditions of the world into the sphere of its activity, because practical need, the rationale of which is self-interest, is passive and does not expand at will, but finds itself enlarged as a result of the continuous development of social conditions.
Judaism reaches its highest point with the perfection of civil society, but it is only in the Christian world that civil society attains perfection. Only under the dominance of Christianity, which makes all national, natural, moral, and theoretical conditions extrinsic to man, could civil society separate itself completely from the life of the state, sever all the species-ties of man, put egoism and selfish need in the place of these species-ties, and dissolve the human world into a world of atomistic individuals who are inimically opposed to one another.
Christianity sprang from Judaism. It has merged again into Judaism.
The Three J's:
I call thee three J's
Who want to stand for God
You certainly will them meet
The Junker, where he can,
The Jew, where he wants,
The Jesuit—be silent!
Die drei Jota:
Ich nenne dir drei Jot'
die stünden gern für Gott:
du triffst sie sicher an,
den Junker, wo er kann,
den Juden, wo er will,
den Jesuit – schweig' still!
Wagner: München, 28. November 1865. Wagner-SuD Bd. 12, 368. Digital Bibliothek.
Here is what Wagner wrote in the Fatherland Union Paper:
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 . . .
See the post entitled The Fatherland Union Paper for more details regarding this source text
Then for those of you who still believe in the bizarre myth about how Wagner risked his life and imprisonment participating in the Dresden pro-democracy uprisings with musket and grenade in hand, only to do an about-turn late in life by mutating into a right-wing Nazi ogre, here is a quote from two years before his death in the February-March 1881 issue of the Bayreuther Blätter. Here is my translation:
"Property" is practically held to be more sacred than religion in our state-run society . . . Since property is deemed the foundation of our entire existence as a society, it seems all the more destructive that we do not all own property, and that the greatest part of society even comes disinherited into the world. Society is thus manifestly reduced by its own principle to such a state of dangerous discontent, that it is forced to estimate all its laws to the impossibly of settling this antagonism. Protection of property, in its widest universal legal sense — what armed force is selectively maintained for — can truly mean nothing else than a defence of the Haves [Besitzenden] against the Have-Nots [Nichtbesitzenden]. As many serious and keen calculating minds have applied themselves to the study of the problem before us, a solution to this — the final one perhaps being an equal distribution of all property — is something nobody has wished to bring to fruition; and it seems as if, through state exploitation of an apparently so simple a concept as property, a stake had been driven into the body of mankind that makes it waste away from the misery of a painful illness.
On the same page, Wagner goes on:
So many clever and admirable things have been thought, spoken, and written about the invention of money and its value as a cultural force capable of all things, that in contrast to praise of it, it should also be cursed, as it has been exposed in sagas and poetry. 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. This dominance by the proxies of our advanced civilization is seen as a spiritual, or even as a moral force. Vanished Faith has been replaced by that in Credit, which must be [protected] through the most powerful and sophisticated safe guarding against fraud or loss, and maintained by our fictitious mutual honesty. We then experience what next comes to light in the name of the blessing of this credit, and it does not seem evil to wish to ascribe the guilt solely to the Jews. They are certainly virtuosi where we are bunglers. Even the art of making money out of nothing is something our very own civilisation has invented, and if the Jews carry the responsibility for that, then so it is that our entire civilisation is a barbaric-Judaical mixture [barbarisch-judaistisches Gemisch], certainly not a Christian creation. . . . [The Jew is] a wonderful, incomparable phenomenon; the plastic daemon of the fall of humanity in triumphant certainty, and German citizen to boot of Mosaical religious faith, the darling of liberal princes and guarantor of the unity of the Reich.
Keep in mind that in Judaism in Music Wagner was to refer to the "predatory bestiality" of "Christian-Germans". By "barbarisch-judaistisches Gemisch", it certainly means a mixture of the unchristian barbaric Germanic, with Jewish elements.
I can hardly see any difference to what Wagner wrote and what Marx wrote:
Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self-established value of all things. It has, therefore, robbed the whole world – both the world of men and nature – of its specific value. Money is the estranged essence of man’s work and man’s existence, and this alien essence dominates him, and he worships it.
The god of the Jews has become secularised and has become the god of the world. The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange.
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!
It seems there is a double standard here. If Marx says it, then it is just because of the old fashioned anti-Judaic attitudes of his generation, which must be seen in the greater light of the liberalism of his thinking. If Wagner says it, it is incontrovertible evidence that he single-handedly caused WWII and the Holocaust, because Hitler was merely the mindless automaton of a Disciple acting out the commands of Prophet Richard. If you ignore these simplistic myths and examine the reality of the situation, by reading Wagner's writing in the context of the social mores of the times, it is really very much consistent with left-wing thinking, right down to his liberal belief in the assimilation of the Jews.
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| Wagner unambiguously explains in the 1869 edition of Judaism in Music that he is advocating "Assimilation" for the betterment of society. Scan from original 1869 publication |
Both Wagner and Marx even talked about the disappearance of Jews altogether. Marx wrote about a “world without Jews” and Wagner (in Erkenne dich selbst) about a future where there would be “no more Jews” (kein Juden mehr). In both instances, however, the ideal is utopian in which there are no longer be any ethnicities and divisive nationalisms in a united socialist humanity.
As far as left-wing nationalism goes, Marx and Engels were also the authors of The German Ideology. Despite Marxism being an internationalist movement, where the worker has no nation, there are ideological remnants of the sort of republican Young Germany ideology of Heine, Börne, and Wagner left in their writings.
In terms of being aggressively anti-Semitic, Wagner's friend, the anarchist-socialist thinker Michael Bakunin was much more militant in his tone:
This whole Jewish world, comprising a single exploiting sect, a kind of blood sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite, going beyond not only the frontiers of states, but of political opinion, this world is now, at least for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and of Rothschild on the other... This may seem strange. What can there be in common between socialism and a leading bank? The point is that authoritarian socialism, Marxist communism, demands a strong centralisation of the state. And where there is centralisation of the state, there must necessarily be a central bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, speculating with the Labour of the people, will be found.
Another notorious left-wing anti-Semite of Wagner's time was Eugen Karl Dühring, who is remembered most for Marx's attack on him in his Anti-Dühring of 1877. In March 1874, August Bebel, one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party, wrote a favourable review of one of Dühring's books on economics for the party paper, Volksstaat. Yet Dühring too was a socialist, albeit one highly critical of Marx. Dühring retains much notoriety as one of the fathers of a racially based anti-Semitism, who thought that Jewish racial characteristics were pre-determined and unalterable: that Jews would always be Jews. Wagner was "horrified" by Dühring's thinking. Dühring wrote lengthy polemics against Wagner, dismissive of his assimilationist ideals in which Jew and German could be become "united and without difference". There is not the slightest shred of evidence that Wagner ever accepted Dühring's racial anti-Semitism. Despite this Richard J. Evans writes:
despite the misguided efforts of some of his defenders, can there be much doubt about Wagner's own antisemitism, which progressed from the cultural criticism of Judaism in Music to an increasingly visceral racial hatred towards the end of his life.
Evans: P149 Journal of Contemporary History, Vol 37, No I
It is certainly true that in Know Thyself, published just two years before his death in 1881, Wagner does say this:
the Jew is the most astonishing example of racial consistency that world history has ever produced . . . even intermixing will not injury them. Man or woman mixes with the most foreign of races and always a Jew will again come to light.
der Jude ist das erstaunlichste Beispiel von Racen-Konsistenz, welches die Weltgeschichte noch je geliefert hat . . . selbst die Vermischung schadet ihm nicht; er vermische sich männlich or weiblich mit den ihm fremdartisten Racen, immer kommt ein Jude wieder zu Tagen.
Erkenne dich selbst. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March issue, 1881
According to Saul Friedländer, the expression "der plastische Dämon des Verfalles Menschheit" (the plastic daemon of the fall of humanity) on p39 of the original printing of Know Thyself is also the only phrase ever publicly quoted by a major National Socialist party figure (Goebbels).
Unfortunately for Evans, for whom I have great respect as a historian, Wagner is a far too complex a philosophical mind, one whose ideas resist reduction to such jingoistic formulae. However, what Evans patently ignores is the fact that Wagner's Know Thyself remains fundamentally an anti-capitalist document written in the same vein as Marx's essay on the Jewish question:
it the Jew appears with his papery stock exchange bell, so one throws him one's money in order to be made a millionaire overnight out of spare change.
läutet aber gar der Jude mit der papieren Börsenglocke, so wirft er ihm sein Geld nach, um mit seinen Sparpfennigen ihn über Nacht zum Millionär zu machen.
Erkenne dich selbst. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March issue, 1881
The socialist message in Know Thyself remains abundantly clear:
"Property" is practically held to be more sacred than religion in our state-run society. . . . Since property is deemed the foundation of our entire existence as a society, it seems all the more destructive that we do not all own property, and that the greatest part of society even comes disinherited into the world. Society is thus manifestly reduced by its own principle to such a state of dangerous discontent, that it is forced to estimate all its laws to the impossibly of settling this antagonism. Protection of property, in its widest universal legal sense — what armed force is selectively maintained for — can truly mean nothing else than a defence of the Haves [Besitzenden] against the Have-Nots [Nichtbesitzenden]. As many serious and keen calculating minds have applied themselves to the study of the problem before us, a solution to this — the final one perhaps being an equal distribution of all property — is something nobody has wished to bring to fruition [glücken wollen]; and it seems as if, through state exploitation of an apparently so simple a concept as property, a stake had been driven into the body of mankind that makes it waste away from the misery of a painful illness.
Erkenne dich selbst. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March issue, 1881
Furthermore, in the same essay, Wagner expresses his grave doubts about the alleged racial purity of the Germans. "If you want racial purity", he says to us, "look at the Jews—not the Germans". Wagner even suggests in the same essay that, unlike the Jews, the Germans are a bunch of racial mongrels as a result of war and intermixing:
Here it must first be recognised that it is, by comparison, very difficult, if at all possible to specify with certainty whether we can speak of a German race, one very distinctly preserved and unchanged, like that of the Jewish race.
Hier müsste denn wohl zunächst erkannt werden, dass, wenn wir von einer deutschen Rasse reden wollten, diese mit einer so ungemein ausgesprochen und unverändert erhaltenen, wie der jüdischen, verglichen, sehr schwer, ja fast kaum, mit Bestimmtheit zu spezifizieren sei.
Erkenne dich selbst. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March issue, 1881
This greater racial purity places Germans at a distinct disadvantage to the Jews with the strength of their unbroken cultural and racial lineage:
Despite the emergence of these disadvantages, relative to the Jewish race, in the German race (if we should still believe in such a thing) that cannot seemingly be compensated for at all, we still believe that in order to illuminate the current [anti-Semitic nationalist] movement, the reawakening of something approximating the German instinct is to be encroached. As we found that it was necessary to refrain from the pronouncement of a pure racial instinct, we ought, in contrast, to perhaps permit ourself to investigate a much more elevated goal (that the present-day people can only be aware of in a dark and fully delusory way, as an instinct first and foremost) that is of nobler origins and having a loftier goal — that which must be named as the Spirit of Pure Humanity.
Erkenne dich selbst. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March issue, 1881
It is in attaining a Pure Humanity, beyond all racial differences, Wagner tells us at the end of Know Thyself that there "will be no more Jews" (kein Juden mehr geben). This is why Wagner says very clearly that it is "necessary to refrain from the pronouncement of a pure racial instinct". The nobler goal is a Pure Humanity is one in which all ethnicities have grown "united and without difference". The position is the same as that of Judaism in Music in 1850.
In fact, in Know Thyself, Wagner makes reference to Rudolf von Gneist's 1872 idea that the intermixing of races was advantageous:
Nonetheless there is an inner motive at the base of the present day movement, no matter how little it may be announced by its current principles. We believe that in it we can see the reawakening of the lost spirit of the German people as it motive. The antagonism of the races is spoken of. In this sense we are prompted towards a renewed contemplation of self-awareness, in which relationship here certain human race-types stand in to one another. Here, however, it must first of all be recognised that we can only with much difficulty talk, if indeed at all with any particular specific certainly, about a German "race" that is strongly pronounced and preserved unchanged, as compared to the Jewish one. When experts discuss the issue whether mixed or purely kept races are more valuable to the development of the human race, we only arrive at the decision when we understand what it means by the progressive development of humanity. The obviously more advanced development of the Romanian people or the English, as mixed races, has been praised over the somewhat purely kept people of Germanic races.
Dennoch liegt der gegenwärtigen Bewegung offenbar ein innerliches Motiv zum Grunde, so wenig es sich such in dem Gebahren der bisherigen Leiter derselben noch kundgeben mag. Wir glaubten zuvor dieses Motiv als das Wiedererwachen eines dem deutschen Volke verloren gegangenen Instinktes erkennen zu dürfen. Man spricht von dem Antagonismus der Racen. In diesem Sinne wäre uns eine neue Einkehr zur Selbsterkenntniss veranlasst, do wir uns denn deutlich zu machen hätten, in welchem Verhältnisse hier bestimmte menschliche Geschlechts-Arten so einander stehen möchten. Hier müsste denn wohl zunächst erkannt werden, dass, wenn wir von einer deutschen „Race” reden wollten, diese mit einer so ungemein ausgesprochenen und unverändert erhaltenen, wie der jüdischen, verglichen, sehr schwer, ja fast kaum, mit Bestimmtheit zu spezifizieren sei. Wenn die Gelehrten sich darüber unterhalten, ob gemischte oder rein bewahrte Racen für die Ausbildung der Menschheit wertvoller seien, so kommt es für die Entscheidung wohl nur darauf an, was wir unter einer fortschrittlichen Ausbildung der Menschheit verstehen. Man rühmt die sogenannten romanischen Völker, wohl auch die Engländer, als Misch-Racen; da sie den etwa rein erhaltenen Völkern germanischer Race im Kultur-Fortschritt offenbar vorsaustünden.
Erkenne dich selbst. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March issue, 1881
At the conclusion of Heldentum und Christentum—another very late work published in September 1881—Wagner further writes:
we have to keep a hold of the fact that the efficiency of the noblest races' domination and exploitation of the lower races, justified through naturalistic terms, has established a completely immoral [unmoralische] world order . . .
[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 . . .
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| "schlechtin unmoralische Weltordnung" Wagner condemns Gobineau's racist worldviews as a "totally immoral world-order" |
Wagner then goes on in the same sentence to write of his hopes of:
a possible sameness of all people made equal to each other through the intermixing [Vermischung] of every more similar growing 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 . . .
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 . . .
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| "eine mögliche Gleichheit aller" A probable reference to Schiller's words set by Beethoven: "aller Menschen werden Brüder" "all mankind shall become brothers" |
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| "Vermischung" "intermixing" (misch = mix) or "interbreeding" |
Here, in Wagner's late writings, we see an unclouded vision of a "pure humanity" rendered "united and without difference". This shows that this is the same Wagner who wrote in the 1869 post-script to his Judaism in Music:
If, by comparison, this element is assimilated [assimiliert] in this manner, so that together in community [gemeinschaftlich] with us, it helps to mature the development of a loftier humane [menschlichen] establishment, the most candid disclosure of the difficulties of assimilation [Assimilation] is surely more desirable rather than its concealment.
Soll dagegen dieses Element uns in der Weise assimiliert werden, daß es mit uns gemeinschaftlich der höheren Ausbildung unsrer edleren menschlichen Anlagen zureife, so ist es ersichtlich, daß nicht die Verdeckung der Schwierigkeiten dieser Assimilation, sondern nur die offenste Aufdeckung derselben hierzu förderlich sein kann.
That is, despite the difficulties that go with the assimilation of the Jews, it remains a possible ultimate liberal ideal. With the articulation of this ideal comes a vehement rejection of a Dühringian racial anti-Semitism driven by the sort of "increasingly visceral racial hatred towards the end of his life" that Richard J. Evans alleges that Wagner adopted in his late years. Nor has Evans ever been able to come up with even a single bibliographic citation of a published statement verifiably coming directly from Wagner himself to support his claims of escalating racial hatred.
This means nothing less than that if you are going to indict Wagner for having single-handedly caused WWII and the Holocaust, you need to co-indict his friend, Bakunin, along with Marx and Engels. Some will insist on ranting about the fact that Nazis called themselves the National Socialist German Workers' Party and campaigned on the slogan Wir Arbeiter sind erwacht! ("We the workers have awoken!"):
The real problem here is that the main reason that Hitler exterminated the Jews was because he blamed "Jewish Bolshevism" for the "stab in the back" of the 1918-19 German Revolution that set up the Weimar Republic. His genocidal campaign against the Jews was at one and the same time an attempt to cleanse society of what he thought were the roots and origins of "degenerate" left-wing socialist ideologies, irrespective of whether that left-wing ideology was a pro-democratic Social Democratic one, or a Communist one. Richard J. Evans tells us that in the lead-up to the 1933 elections Hitler declared:
'Never, never will I stray from the task of stamping out Marxist . . . There can only be one victor: either Marxism or the German people! And Germany will triumph!'
Richard J. Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich. Loc 5964 Amazon eBook edition.
Evans reminds us that war against the left extended to include both democratic socialists as well as Communists:
This referred, of course, to the Communists and the Social Democrats.
Richard J. Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich. Loc 5964 Amazon eBook edition.
Hitler's war of extermination against Judaism and his war against the political left are one and the same thing. Hitler said:
I feel like the Robert Koch of politics. He discovered the bacillus and thereby showed medical scholarship new ways. I discovered the Jew as the bacillus and the ferment of all social decomposition.
Tagebuch Walter Hewel, 1941 in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis
The Nazis referred to the Weimar Republic as the "Jewish Republic" because many of the chief protagonists of the Revolution such as Rosa Luxemburg of the Spartacist League were Jewish. Socialism appealed to many Jews because of its vision of an egalitarian society into which they were fully assimilated because all ethnic-religious divisions would have been swept away. Indeed, Marx was himself was Jewish. In Mein Kampf, Hitler writes:
If the Jew gains victory over the people of this world with the help of his Marxist Confession of Faith, then his crown will become the Dance of Death (Totentanz) over the human race . . . That is why I believe that I am acting as the agent of the Almighty Creator. In that I am warding off the Jews, I am fighting to do the Lord's work.
Siegt der Jude mit Hilfe seines marxistischen Glaubens-bekenntnisses über die Völker dieser Welt, dann wird seine Krone der Totentanz der Menschheit sein . . . So glaube ich heute im Sinne des allmächtigen Schöpfers zu handeln: Indem ich mich des Juden erwehre, kämpfe ich für das Werk des Herrn.
Mein Kampf. From the chapter entitled: Marxismus als Zerstörer der Kultur (Marxism as the Destroyer of Culture). My own translation.
Another section of Mein Kampf is entitled "Bolschewisierung Deutschlands als Mittel jüdischer Weltherrschaft" – "the Bolshevisation of Germany as a Path to Jewish World Domination". In other words, his genocide was driven primarily by his anti-left wing crusade of hatred, which he felt was equally a God-sent mission against the offspring of Judas. His followers regarded him as their Messiah.
You might wonder then why, if there are so many obvious socialist ("Bolshevik") ideas throughout Wagner's writings, Hitler gave so much important to Wagner in his Reich. The answer is that Wagner is difficult to read or understand. His works are full of complex symbolism and philosophical ideas. Even Theodor Adorno scarcely managed to begin to grasp their full complexities, let alone some strange art school reject with no tertiary education, who allegedly drew these pictures:
In fact, there were some people in the Nazi party who did tweak to the high irony of the fact that their art school reject had inadvertently enthroned a virtual "Bolshevik" as a state-approved composer. Brian Magee tells us:
As Heinz Tietjen, who had been general manager at Bayreuth during the Nazi era, said after the Second World War: ‘In reality the leading party officials throughout the Reich were hostile to Wagner . . . The party tolerated Hitler's Wagner enthusiasm, but fought, openly or covertly, those who, like me, were devoted to his works—the people around Rosenberg openly, those around Goebbels covertly.’ This was chiefly because the political and social tendencies of these works, if taken in the least bit seriously, were contrary to everything the Nazis stood for. During Wagner's career up to and including the writing of the Ring libretto his political views were radically left-wing ...
Magee: Wagner and Philosophy, Penguin Books 2001
Which is to say that some people did try to point Hitler's mistake out but didn't dare to speak out too loudly for fear of completely embarrassing him, or making him look totally foolish in full view of the whole world. Truly, there is much "banality of evil" involved when it comes to the truly hilarious and ultimately bizarre usurpation of Wagner by the National Socialist. It is the same phoney usurpation of ideas that lead the Nazis to put on false airs of being "socialist revolutionaries".
In conclusion, I cannot overemphasise the importance of staunchly denying attempts by the political right to distract attention away from themselves by displacing the origins of National Socialist genocidal racism onto a left-wing scapegoat, irrespective of whether that scapegoat be Wagner, Bakunin, or Marx. The narrative about the origins of such vile genocidal ideas must instead focus firmly back on the political right. It is easy to find plenty of such genocidal anti-Semitic lunatics without ever having to examine a word of Marx or Wagner's writings. Not only that but the far-right was placed in power by those who traditionally belonged to the middle right. This included the Christian centre-right who feared the "Godless communists" and had a centuries-old tradition of teaching about the "spawn of Judas." The churches ended up being complicit with National Socialism because they considered it the lesser of two evils compared to Godless communism.
In rejecting the idea that genocidal anti-Semitism is purely the creation of the political left, we must also pour cold water over sensationalist narratives that continually point the finger at Wagner to "prove" the myth that already by the nineteenth century all Germans were psychopaths rabidly infected with a deliriously genocidal anti-Semitism that made "Hitler's willing executioners" out of them all.
In conclusion, I cannot overemphasise the importance of staunchly denying attempts by the political right to distract attention away from themselves by displacing the origins of National Socialist genocidal racism onto a left-wing scapegoat, irrespective of whether that scapegoat be Wagner, Bakunin, or Marx. The narrative about the origins of such vile genocidal ideas must instead focus firmly back on the political right. It is easy to find plenty of such genocidal anti-Semitic lunatics without ever having to examine a word of Marx or Wagner's writings. Not only that but the far-right was placed in power by those who traditionally belonged to the middle right. This included the Christian centre-right who feared the "Godless communists" and had a centuries-old tradition of teaching about the "spawn of Judas." The churches ended up being complicit with National Socialism because they considered it the lesser of two evils compared to Godless communism.
In rejecting the idea that genocidal anti-Semitism is purely the creation of the political left, we must also pour cold water over sensationalist narratives that continually point the finger at Wagner to "prove" the myth that already by the nineteenth century all Germans were psychopaths rabidly infected with a deliriously genocidal anti-Semitism that made "Hitler's willing executioners" out of them all.
This post has been substantially revised and rewritten, thoroughly debunking the myth perpetuated by Richard J. Evans that, although when he wrote Judaism in Music he was liberal and pro-assimilationist, in his late years Wagner turned towards a Dühringian racist anti-Semitism. I have deliberately used quotations coming from published late texts to prove how wrong this view is.
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