Tristan, Marx and the Subjugation of the Irish

One common and absolutely appalling myth that I have repeatedly exploded on this blog as a pernicious Nazi lie is that Wagner was once a liberal, even a socialist-anarchist, who risked life and limb standing up for freedom and democracy in the Dresden uprising only to get out of bed one morning to find he had turned into a Nazi ogre. Mostly this discussion has centred around The Ring of the Nibelung, although at least once I have also touched on Parsifal (with respect to the notion of the regeneration of mankind's lost humanity). One work not touched on at all in this regard is Tristan.

In all truth, most of my life I would have dismissed as fanciful, any attempts to read anything even remotely socialist into the story of Tristan und Isolde. Until now that is, when on reading the following passage again, it fully dawned on me what I had overlooked. This comes from Erkenne dich selbst published in the February-March issue of the 1881 Bayreuther Blätter*:

"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.

The requisite consideration of the historical emergence and development of our [political] state is in my view worthwhile to the judgement of its character. Just as through this, rights and the status of law begin to appear inferable and explicable, so too does it explain — and even seemingly sanctify for good — the inequality of property, indeed even the complete dispossessedness of a great portion of citizens as a consequence of the last conquest of a country, such as that of England through the Normans, or again that of Ireland through the English. Far removed from it, we ourself admit to the difficulties of the analysis of such challenges. We must clearly recognise the transformation of the original concept of property through the legally justified sanctification of the appropriation of property, so that the sale title appears in the place of the property acquisition. Between both of which the seizure of property through violence acts as the mediator. 

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 counterpoint to praise of it,  its curse should also be noted, 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  [Börsen-Portefeuille] completes the gruesome picture of the ghostly masters of the world. This dominance by the proxies of our advanced civilisation 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. 

My emphasis in red.

I have given you a large, virtually continuous quotation from the text so that you can clearly see the context of the discussion, where right in the middle of that you get a brief discussion about the conquest of Ireland by the English that has caused the Irish to become one of the oppressed, and dispossessed Have-Nots (Nichtbesitzender).  

You will rightly ask what any of this has to do with Tristan und Isolde. The first obvious thing is that Isolde is being "given" to the English King Mark as kind a gift or trophy — a symbol of English dominion over the Irish. We have encountered this once before in Wagner when we discussed die Walküre. There Sieglinde was "found" and "given" to Hunding as a "gift". Sieglinde describes herself like this:

Dies Haus und dies Weib sind Hundings Eigen

This house and this wife are Hunding's property 

We also discussed how a translation of Eigen as "own" (as in "this house and this wife are Hunding's own") is a totally incorrect translation, and that Eigen with the capitalised "E" mean that she is Hunding's property. The whole idea is that in our barbaric, loveless, and dehumanising capitalist world, women are reduced to commercialised objects to be brought and traded.  It is once again about the degradation of humanity by the avarice for power and gold: the essential theme of The Ring. It is also the theme central to 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. 

Please see the post on The Fatherland Union Paper for a detailed discussion.


In the case of Isolde, her fate really symbolises the fate of a nation and her people. Isolde's dehumanisation represents the rape of a nation. There is absolutely no question whatsoever that first and foremost, Tristan und Isolde is a study in the evils of power, both at a personal and political level, and its misuse in the brutal subjugation of a people.

This analysis of the dominion over Ireland by England is not by any means unique to Wagner, for  the extensive analyses by Marx on the fate of Ireland are considered the culmination of his writings on ethnicity and nationalism. This cannot by any means be dismissed as pure coincidence, nor can Tristan be reduced to a mere romantic love story. Indeed, if there is anything truly masterly about Wagner the dramatist, it is that he hides the political analysis in there so perfectly well that it is virtually undetectable to the censor, for there is no overt political sermonising of the sort of you find in Berg's Wozzeck or Nono's Intolleranza. 

This is what Marx said in a letter to Engels, dated November 30, 1867. Marx observed the English misrepresentation of the colonial situation of Ireland:

What the English do not know is that since 1846 the economic content and therefore also the political aim of English domination in Ireland have entered into an entirely new phase. ….What can be more ridiculous than to confuse the barbarities of Elizabeth and Cromwell, who wanted to supplant the Irish with English colonists (in the Roman sense), with the present system, which wants to supplant them by sheep, pigs and oxen! …. Clearing the estate of Ireland! is now the one purpose of English rule in Ireland.

Elsewhere Marx was to say to the German Workers’ Educational Society in London on December 16, 1867:

. . . all Irish branches of industry have been destroyed, all we have been left is the making of coffins. It became a vital necessity to have land; the big landowners leased their lands to speculators; land passed through four or five lease stages before it reached the peasant, and this made prices disproportionately high. The agrarian population lived on potatoes and water; wheat and meat were sent to England; the rent was eaten up in London, Paris and Florence. In 1836, £7,000,000 was sent abroad to absent landowners. Fertilisers were exported with the produce and rent, and the soil was exhausted. Famine often set in here and there, and owing to the potato blight there was a general famine in 1846. A million people starved to death. The potato blight resulted from the exhaustion of the soil, it was a product of English rule.

Through the repeal of the Corn Laws Ireland lost her monopoly position on the English market, the old rent could no longer be paid. High prices of meat and the bankruptcy of the remaining small landowners further contributed to the eviction of the small peasants and the transformation of their land into sheep pastures. Over half a million acres of arable land have not been tilled since 1860. The yield per acre has dropped: oats by 16 per cent, flax by 36 per cent, potatoes by 50 per cent. At present only oats are cultivated for the English market, and wheat is imported.

With the exhaustion of the soil, the population has deteriorated physically. There has been an absolute increase in the number of lame, blind, deaf and dumb, and insane in the decreasing population.

Over 1,100,000 people have been replaced by 9,600,000 sheep. This is a thing unheard of in Europe. The Russians replace evicted Poles with Russians, not with sheep. Only under the Mongols in China was there once a discussion whether towns should be destroyed to make room for sheep.

This whole situation of the exploitation of the Haves by the Have-Nots in Erkenne dich selbst is precisely the one described in great detail by Karl Marx in the bestial destruction of Ireland by English oppression. The very language, the ideological basis, is something that Wagner and Marx have entirely in common. The fact that Wagner hides the political message from the censors of his age does nothing to diminish the fact that he is making a very clear and unambiguous political statement.

One day we will see that Tristan und Isolde is no less a study of the degrading, dehumanising and corrupting influence of capitalist avarice for money and power than The Ring of the Nibelung. Perhaps the very choice of an Irish setting should force us to realise that it is far more fundamentally Marxist in its ideological basis than even The Ring. The fact that this overtly political dimension is so well concealed, so perfectly blended into an apparent love story, is an extraordinary testimony to Wagner's greatness as a dramatist.




[*Original German text from Erkenne dich selbst (Know Thyself):

Eine fast grössere Heiligkeit als die Religion hat in unserem staatsgesellschaftlichen Gewissen du „Eigentum” erhalten:  [für die Verletzung jener giebt es Nachsicht, für die Beschädigung dieses nur Unerbittlichkeit.] Da bei der Beurteilung des Charakters unserer Staaten die geschichtliche Entstehung und Fortbildung derselben uns der unerlässlichsten Berücksichtigung werth dünkt , indem nur hieraus Rechte und Rechtszustände ableitbar und erklärlich erscheinen, so muss die Ungleichheit des Besitzes, ja die völlige Besitzlosigkeit eines grossen Teiles der Staatsangehörigen, als Erfolg der letzten Eroberung eines Landes, etwa wie England’s durch dis Normannen, oder auch Irlands wiederum durch die Engländer, zu erklären und nötigen Falls auch zu rechtfertigen für gut dünken. Weit entfernt davon, uns selbst hier auf Untersuchungen von solcher Schwierigkeit einzulassen , missen wir nur die heut zu Tags deutlich erkennbare Umwandelung des ursprünglichen Eigentums-Begriffes durch die rechtlich zugesprochene Heiligkeit der Besitznahme des Eigentums dahin bezeichnen, dass der Kauftitel an die Stelle des Eigentumserwerbes getreten ist, zwischen welchen beiden die Besitzergreifung durch Gewalt die Vermittlung gab.

Soviel Kluges und Vortreffliches über dis Erfindung des Geldes; und seines Werthes als allvermögender Kulturmacht gedacht, gesagt und geschrieben werden ist, so dürfte doch seine: Anpreisung gegenüber auch der Fluch beachtet werden, dem es von je in Sage und Dichtung ausgesetzt war.

Erscheint hier des Gold els der Unschuld würgende Dämon der Menschheit, so lässt unser grösster Dichter endlich die Erfindung des Papiergeldes als einen Teufelsspuk vor sich gehen. Der verhängnissvolle Ring des Nibelungen als Börsen-Portefeuille dürfte des schauerliche Bild des gespenstischen Welt beherrschers zur Vollendung bringen. Wirklich wird diese Herrschaft von den Vertretern unserer fortschrittlichen Zivilisation als eine geistige, ja moralische Hecht angesehen, da nun der geschwundene Glaube durch den Kredit, diese durch die strengsten und raffinirtesten Sicherstellungen gegen Betrug oder Verlust unterhaltene Fiktion unserer gegenseitigen Redlichkeit, ersetzt sei.

The German spelling has been modernised eg Eigentum rather than Eigenthum, like Tannhäuser instead of Thannhäuser. This is standard practice in German academic publications. Text taken from the original Bayreuther Blätter publication, February-March issue, 1881.

The section highlighted in maroon was omitted from the English translation because it just makes the sentence wordy and awkward without adding a great deal. Wagner tends to be unnecessarily wordy. The omitted section means "for the breach of it {ie of property} there is clemency — for damage to it there is only ruthlessness {or "grimness"}." I felt that the omission cleaned the text up and enhanced clarity without detracting from it. With the exception of this one section, the above quotation is from a contiguous block of text. I have given the source, please feel free to check it against it.

I include the details of what text I have edited out in the passage here so that you can see that, unlike most commentators on Wagner's writings, I am being completely transparent and honest. There can be no question of the use of dubious quilted quotations, of potentially incriminating phrases strung together to mean something totally different to their original context.]