The Triumph of the Will

The most famous of all quotations from Hitler about Wagner is that: "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must first know Wagner". Today we will examine just how profoundly prophetic this statement was. Indeed, no truer words have ever been spoken.

In a previous thread we looked at a letter written by Wagner to August Roeckel explaining the meaning of the Ring of the Nibelungs. In it Wagner wrote:

In detail: the power of evil, the actual poison of love, is concentrated in the gold, which is stolen from nature and misused in the Nibelung’s ring: the curse upon it is not redeemed until it is returned to Nature, until the gold is once again delivered into the depths of the Rhine. This, too, Wodan does not learn until the very end, at the final goal of his tragic course: what Loge touchingly and repeatedly told him at the beginning Wodan most overlooked in his lust for power; at first he appreciates only the power of the curse - from Fafner’s deed; it is not until the ring must destroy Siegfried, too, that he understands that only the return of the stolen gold will atone for the evil, and he therefore associates the terms of his own desired destruction with this atonement of the original wrong. Experience is everything.

We also saw Wagner explain to Roeckel that the fundamental idea of the Ring is that the root of all evil is the lust for gold and power: money and power are all corrupting and destructive:

"Surely you don’t seriously suggest this magnificent woman’s [Brünnhilde's] symbol of love is precisely this accursed ring?" — then that is just what I want you to feel, and to realise that this is the most awful, most tragic peak of the power of the Nibelung’s curse: for then you will realise the real need for the whole last drama Siegfrieds Tod. This is just what we still have to go through to reach a full appreciation of the evil of gold.

We also saw how that this idea is the same as that found in Wagner's pro-democratic Fatherland Union Paper in which he makes it clear that the duty of the true German patriot to believe in democracy and equality for all peoples and races:

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.  

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.

Lastly, we saw how Wagner accepted Schopenhauer's ideas about the destructive powers of the Blind Will that underlined human psychology as the explanation for what drove human beings to be so destructive. Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt in December 1854 about his discovery of the philosophy of Schopenhauer:

Apart from my - slow - progress with my music I have now devoted my time exclusively to a man, who - if only through his writings - has been a gift of heaven to me in my loneliness. This is Arthur Schopenhauer, the greatest philosopher since Kant, whose ideas - as he puts it - he has completed by thinking them through to their logical conclusion. ... His central thought, the final denial of the Will to Live, is of frightful seriousness, but the only Salvation. Of course this idea was not new to me [b]ut it was this philosopher who first showed it to me with such clarity. If I think back to the storms of my heart and the terrible cramp with which it clutched - against my Will - at the hope of living, indeed when these storms even now still rise in tempestuous strength - now at last I have found a palliative, which alone helps me to sleep in sleepless nights; it is the deep and innermost yearning for Death: total unconsciousness, absolute non-Being, the extinction of all dreams - unique and final Salvation!

The denial of the Blind Will was the source of Salvation. However, this Will was also the fundamental life force itself - so to deny it would mean nothing less than the denial of the Will to Live itself. Wagner in particular focused on Schopenhauer's idea that Love, as a self-denial, was a denial of the Will to Live.  Schopenhauer wrote (the World as Will and Representation):

Love .... leads to Salvation, to the entire surrender of the Will to Live, i.e., of all volition, and also how another path, less soft but more frequented, leads men to the same goal, a paradoxical proposition must first be stated and explained; not because it is paradoxical, but because it is true, and is necessary to the completeness of the thought I have presented. It is this : "All Love (αγαπη caritas) is Compassion."

 From this arose Wagner idea about Salvation through Love. Salvation from the Blind Will to Power comes from Love. From this arises the conflict in the Ring between Power and Love. That is to say, for Wagner, the Will to Power is the root of all evil.

Let's compare this to Hitler's ideas about the Will.

The turning point for Hitler was the war on the Eastern Front against the Red Army. It is estimated that around 23 million Soviet citizens died as a result of the decision by Hitler to realise Operation Barbarossa. In the great Red Army counter offensive of Operation Uranus in November of 1942 the Wehrmacht 6th Army found itself surrounded as the Volga froze over in the dreadful cold of the Russian winter. Rather than take responsibility for sending his forces in ill prepared for such a situation, Hitler went wild with rage, blaming his military personelle for the situation. General Schmidt noted on his return to the Wolffschantze "The Leader himself will decide on all further measures fo military discipline in this matter". He took to taking over control himself in areas he was ill qualified, and started to grossly micromanage the situation.  Rather than attempt to break out of their encirclement or withdraw troops from elsewhere to allow the 6th Army to escape, Hitler fatally ordered that they "hold steady" and form a "Fortress". The result was a slaughter.

From this point on things progressively got worse against the merciless onslaught of the Red Army counteroffensive. So too did the increasingly out of touch Hitler's outbursts of rage. Particularly noteworthy in these rants was his increasingly desperate insistence on the unconditional belief in der Macht des Willens (the Power of the Will) that would overcome defeat the relentless onslaught of the Red Army:

Hitler was asking too much of the German Army. Major General Hans von Greiffenberg, chief of staff of Army Group Centre, said: ‘It is highly doubtful whether the Führer's order to stand fast – whatever the cost – was justified from a military point of view. He was determined to withstand the enemy - but the losses forced on our troops by making such a stand were extremely high. Hitler was strongly influenced by the example of Napoleon in 1812. But there was no proof whatsoever that a retreat, once started, had to lead to the collapse and disintegration of the entire front.  

Then Greiffenberg observed: ‘Hitler did not want to realise what was really happening. Instead, he began to believe that all difficulties could be overcome by sheer, unbending willpower [der Macht des Willens]. This was the moment when the Führer finally lost touch with the realities of the war in the east.'

Michael Jones: The Retreat. P115 of EPUB edition (my bold emphasis)

Note that a famous Nazi propaganda film by Leni Riefenstahl is entitled Triumph des Willens: the Triumph of the Will.

Hitler himself once said:

It is always the right of the stronger to assert their Will 

Stets hat der Stärkere das Recht, seinen Willen durchzusetzen

Despite the impending defeat, as the Red Army closed in on Berlin itself, Hitler wrote:

in spite of all setbacks [the war] will one day go down in history as the most glorious and heroic manifestations of a people's Will to Live." 

(Quoted from p343 of Beevor's Berlin: the Downfall - the emphasis with capitals is mine).

With this it becomes absolutely clear that Wagner and Hitler's ideas are absolutely diametrically opposed to one another. For Wagner, Salvation for humanity could come only by awakening to the root of all evil in the Blind Will - and to deny it, by embracing the power of self-sacrificing Love, a Love that meant the very denial of the Will to Live. For Hitler, his mission was the ruthless assertion of the Triumph of the Will at all cost, and the fanatical assertion of the Will to Live even as his Empire crumbled around him. He ended it all by finally committing suicide.

Here is what Schopenhauer had to say about the futility of suicide:

And conversely, whoever is oppressed with the burden of life, whoever desires life and affirms it, but abhors its torments, and especially can no longer endure the hard lot that has fallen to himself, such a man has no deliverance to hope for from death, and cannot right himself by suicide. The cool shades of Orcus allure him only with the false appearance of a haven of rest. The earth rolls from day into night, the individual dies, but the sun itself shines without intermission, an eternal noon. Life is assured to the Will to Live; the form of life is an endless present, no matter how the individuals, the phenomena of the Idea, arise and pass away in time, like fleeting dreams. Thus even already suicide appears to us as a vain and therefore a foolish action; when we have carried our investigation further it will appear to us in a still less favourable light.

But as far as the life of the individual is concerned, every biography is the history of suffering, for every life is, as a rule, a continual series of great and small misfortunes, which each one conceals as much as possible, because he knows that others can seldom feel sympathy or compassion, but almost always satisfaction at the sight of the woes from which they are themselves for the moment exempt. But perhaps at the end of life, if a man is sincere and in full possession of his faculties, he will never wish to have it to live over again, but rather than this, he will much prefer absolute annihilation. The essential content of the famous soliloquy in “Hamlet” is briefly this: Our state is so wretched that absolute annihilation would be decidedly preferable. If suicide really offered us this, so that the alternative “to be or not to be,” in the full sense of the word, was placed before us, then it would be unconditionally to be chosen as “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” But there is something in us which tells us that this is not the case: suicide is not the end; death is not absolute annihilation. 

Therefore suicide affords no escape; what every one in his inmost consciousness wills, that must he be; and what every one is, that he wills. Thus, besides the merely felt knowledge of the illusiveness and nothingness of the forms of the idea which separate individuals, it is the self-knowledge of one’s own Will and its degree that gives the sting to conscience. 

Suicide, the actual doing away with the individual manifestation of Will, differs most widely from the denial of the Will to Live, which is the single outstanding act of free-will in the manifestation, and is therefore, as Asmus calls it, the transcendental change. This last has been fully considered in the course of our work. Far from being denial of the Will, suicide is a phenomenon of strong assertion of Will; for the essence of negation lies in this, that the joys of life are shunned, not its sorrows. The suicide wills life, and is only dissatisfied with the conditions under which it has presented itself to him. He therefore by no means surrenders the Will to Live, but only life, in that he destroys the individual manifestation.

From the World as Will and Representation (with minor edits from an older translation)

For Wagner, as for Schopenhauer, the ultimate Salvation came from the self-sacrifice of Love, a Love that denied the Will to Live, and destroyed the root of all evil: the Will to Power. Hitler's suicide was only his final "strong assertion of Will", not the final and true sacrifice of Love that Brünnhilde grants Wotan:

This and this alone is the reason that Hitler was so prophetically right when he said that whoever wants to understand him must understand Wagner. No truer or finer words have ever been spoken. For Wagner's ultimate message, most particularly in the Ring, is about understanding everything that makes Hitler utterly evil, obsessed with gaining the Rheingold for himself: the source of all power, of all evil and of all suffering that would make him Master of the World if he would forsake Love. Wagner foresaw all that was evil about Hitler - his obsession to assert his absolute Will to Power, his plotting to gain the Rheingold for himself, and his complete lack of humanity and compassion for his fellow man.

The art of Richard Wagner, the liberal artist, stands opposed to everything Hitler ever stood for. However, this will not placate the brutally wilful Nazi apologists who regard their Führer as a higher authority on Wagner than Wagner himself. They will vomit hatred that I have dismissed their Führer as a total madman, whose feculent beer hall musicology is worse than worthless.