Na'ama Sheffi makes it very clear in her book (see previous post on this book) that Wagner has been shaped into the scapegoat of the Holocaust. Her book really examines principally why this has occurred in Israel, both in its historical genesis as well as the socio-political motivations for sustaining the situation.
Today, I thought I would examine broader reasons as to why others would find it convenient to find in Wagner, a scapegoat for the Holocaust.
The first thing I am going to have to controversially ask (would you expect any less of me?) is why we are even concentrating so hard on the Holocaust. The most heinous ethnically motivated slaughter carried out by Hitler was not of the Jews at all. In his hands, at least 26 millions Soviet citizens died as a consequence of unleashing Operation Barbarossa upon the Soviet Union. Many Soviet figures suggest that the actual toll could have been much higher, and Russians tell me they were taught in school that the figure was between 30-40 million*. During the Cold War, this number was deliberately underplayed to belittle the Soviet sacrifice. It is too often forgotten that this carnage was strongly racially driven by Hitler's view of the Russians as atheist-communist Untermensch who deserved to be wiped out. However, somehow or another, in the West we have been conditioned into thinking that Hitler's murderous opus magnus was his still appalling murder of six million Jews.
The answer to the reason why we have this skewed view of Hitler's crimes is complex. Firstly, there is the legacy of the Cold War, which tended to underplay the Soviet role in defeating Hitler. The reality probably is that the Western Allies' role in this was at best ancillary, if not even irrelevant. Numbers like this speak for themselves:
Siege of Stalingrad casualties 1,250,000 – 1,798,619
Siege of Leningrad casualties 1,117,000 – 4,500,000
Battle of Moscow casualties around 1,000,000
Second Battle of Karkov 300,000
Battle of Kursk 257,125 – 388,000
Siege of Budapest 422,000
Operation Bagration 528,000 – 1,430,000
Battle of Berlin casualties 1,298,745
Numbers taken from Wikipedia
The list of such battles goes on and on, but it does not even begin to reckon with the apocalyptic civilian toll of deaths — brutally executed, left to die of hunger, cold, and disease.
Even if you add together the total German, Japanese, British-Commonwealth and American casualties, it is still an order of magnitude less than the Soviet deaths. The mind simply boggles. Yet there can be no doubt that this was the ultimate sacrifice that destroyed Hitler.
The second reason, other than the Cold War, is that it is an awful inconvenience to think that Communism saved the day and secured victory against the forces of Nazi evil. Indeed, the inconvenient truth is that had it not been for the aggressive drive to industrialisation engendered by the Russian Revolution, which transformed an agrarian Imperial Russia into an industrial juggernaut, the Soviet Union would never have withstood the onslaught of the German war machine.
No, I am certainly neither Marxist no Communist, but history is written by the victors, and since the Communist block lost the Cold War, their side of the story has been buried. Just because the truth is inconvenient doesn't mean that we should prefer to believe in fairytales.
Part of the reason for Hitler targeting Jews within the realm of Imperial control was because key figures in the 1918-19 Revolution that lead to the formation of his hated Weimar Republic, such as Rosa Luxenburg, were left-wing Jews.
Jews were attracted to socialism because of its vision of a new start to society where everyone was "united and without difference"** (to use Wagner's words in Judaism in Music). This is why Hitler always ranted about a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy (see Ian Kershaw's Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis). As far as he was concerned, by targeting Jews, he was targeting Communists as a stepping stone towards unleashing the full fury of his wrath by means of a genocidal war of extermination against the Soviet Union.
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| A Soviet T-34-85 tank proudly bearing the name of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (Владимир Маяковский). The T-34's shock appearance sent shivers of fear through the ranks of the Wehrmacht. It was precision engineered for hyper-efficient mass production allowing them to hunt in packs, had revolutionary design features, and could outrun the Tiger before punching through her armour. It is regarded by experts as the single most important tank design in military history. How could the atheist Untermensch engineer such a miracle of precision military hardware? The answer: the Russian Revolution. |
No, I am certainly neither Marxist no Communist, but history is written by the victors, and since the Communist block lost the Cold War, their side of the story has been buried. Just because the truth is inconvenient doesn't mean that we should prefer to believe in fairytales.
Part of the reason for Hitler targeting Jews within the realm of Imperial control was because key figures in the 1918-19 Revolution that lead to the formation of his hated Weimar Republic, such as Rosa Luxenburg, were left-wing Jews.
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| A 1957 Soviet stamp commemorating Rosa Luxemburg (Роза Люксембург) |
Jews were attracted to socialism because of its vision of a new start to society where everyone was "united and without difference"** (to use Wagner's words in Judaism in Music). This is why Hitler always ranted about a Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy (see Ian Kershaw's Hitler 1936-45: Nemesis). As far as he was concerned, by targeting Jews, he was targeting Communists as a stepping stone towards unleashing the full fury of his wrath by means of a genocidal war of extermination against the Soviet Union.
The most celebrated Western offensive is the Normandy invasion, or D-day:
Normandy Landings casualties 14,000 – 19,000
We are told this single handedly destroyed the German Third Empire**. In reality, come D-day, the Wehrmacht was already a spent force, and the Western Allies opened an offensive — not to stop Hitler — but to stop the Soviets from completely overrunning the whole of Europe. D-day was an anti-Soviet offensive and marked the beginning of the Cold War rather than the end of the Third Empire. The whole wartime story about D-day being an anti-German offensive is mostly just propaganda.
The third reason that Hitler's decisive battle on the Eastern front is underplayed is because of a certain embarrassing sympathy that the West has with him in his religious crusade against communist atheism. For when the Third Empire fell, America rose to take over the Nazis' role as the leading anti-Communist and anti-humanist force in the world. Hitler remained a member of the Catholic Church until the day he died, and in 1941 he told one of his generals, Gerhard Engel, that: "I am now, as before, a Catholic and will always remain so." Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf:
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.
It is even more acutely embarrassing as it makes nonsense of the Neocon ideology that America is a Force for Good, fighting with God against Atheism and Humanist ideologies like Nazism. Wrong. And Hitler's crusade against Communist Russia was an ethnically and religiously motivated genocide to wipe the atheist-humanist Slavs he hated so much off the face of the planet. It is a religious crusade that the West secretly sympathises with to this very day. That is, genocide is fine, as long as you are not killing Jews.
The Nazis carried out their first mass extermination of Jews to coincide with Luther's birthday:
The Wehrmacht even had the words "Gott mit uns" ("God is with us" or "with God on our side") inscribed on their belts.
The fourth and final reason why we have been conditioned to think that the Holocaust is synonymous with Hitler's crimes is because of what has been termed by Norman Finkelstein, the Holocaust industry. Finkelstein, the son of a Holocaust victim, feels that an industry has grown to create an often exaggerated mythology of the event, a mythology that can be harnessed to political ends. This whole mythology often distorts and exaggerates the truth about what really happened — a distortion of the truth that Finkelstein feels is an insult to the victims. Admittedly, this sort of mythologisation of history is just human nature. I tend to agree with Carl Jung that the myth making faculty is fundamental to human nature.
That is why neolithic cave wall have mythological symbols on them, since humans are as hardwired to make myths as birds are to make nests. Not surprisingly, Finkelstein feels that he is the voice of reason left crying in the wilderness. You can no more stop the human myth making faculty than you can stop a great white shark from eating prey.
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| Abstract cave wall paintings made by Cro-Magnon man circa 30, 000 BC |
That is why neolithic cave wall have mythological symbols on them, since humans are as hardwired to make myths as birds are to make nests. Not surprisingly, Finkelstein feels that he is the voice of reason left crying in the wilderness. You can no more stop the human myth making faculty than you can stop a great white shark from eating prey.
This brings us back to the growing literature that propagates the myth about how Hitler, the Disciple, was just Wagner's puppet being manipulated from the grave by his Meister — Wagner, the Prophet of the Holocaust with his instruction to exterminate the Jews secretly encrypted into his operas. Like the one about Salieri murdering Mozart out of jealously, it makes for a good story with instant mass appeal. Expect a Hollywood movie like Amadeus to come out about the Wagner myth soon. It also perfectly plays into the hands of the Holocaust industry's myth makers.
Norman Finkelstein divides the Holocaust literature into those that analyse it in monocausal and multicausal terms — monocausal accounts, he believes, are "largely devoid of scholarly interest" It should be obvious that those who argue that WWII and the Holocaust were caused solely by Richard Wagner are at the extreme end of the monocausal myth making camp. The growing influence of the Holocaust industry myth makers means that we cannot expect an end to the explosive dissemination of the Prophet and his Disciple myth about Wagner for countless decades to come. Indeed, I sincerely doubt that I will see it openly exposed as a myth within my lifetime, so emotively politico-mythologised has it become.
This, at last, brings me to the topic of the title of this thread: why would you want to turn Wagner into the mythical scapegoat of the Holocaust? The answer is partly that the masses like to have simplistic explanations. They do not like complex multicausal analyses that make for heavy academic reading. Give the angry masses the name and address of the one whose window they should throw the brick through, and they will do it. Sheffi puts it bluntly in saying that the underlying raw emotion exploding out here is that of "we hate the Germans" (see previous post and translation of her interview with Die Zeit).
The other reason is that it is much easier to target Richard Wagner as the cause of the Holocaust than to target Christianity, especially since Israel is highly dependent on Christian America for political and military support. We are certainly unlikely to see Jewish organisations in American declare a Jewish "Jihad" against Christendom as vengeance for the Shoah. However, there is more. Joachim Köhler is German, and not as far as I am aware, Jewish.
The other reason is that it is much easier to target Richard Wagner as the cause of the Holocaust than to target Christianity, especially since Israel is highly dependent on Christian America for political and military support. We are certainly unlikely to see Jewish organisations in American declare a Jewish "Jihad" against Christendom as vengeance for the Shoah. However, there is more. Joachim Köhler is German, and not as far as I am aware, Jewish.
A scapegoat in ancient times was sacrificed to the gods so the people could feel cleansed of their sins. The fact is that the finger of blame for Nazism has been pointed in many directions — at Hegel, Beethoven, Bruckner, Nietzsche, Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Fichte, Schelling, Jung, Marx, Engels, Luther etc. You name it, if they are German (or even for being Swiss German or Austrian), they have been blamed or implicated. Indeed, Martin Luther once said:
The Jews deserve to be hanged on gallows seven times higher than ordinary thievesAnd elsewhere:
We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them.Likewise:
My advice, as I said earlier, is: First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire…
The Nazis carried out their first mass extermination of Jews to coincide with Luther's birthday:
On the 10th of November, 1938, on Luther's birthday, the synagogues in Germany will burn. The German people will finally break the might of the Jews in the economic front of a new Germany, and thereby the God-blessed fight of the Führer to free our people will be crowned victorious. In this hour, that man's voice must be listened to, who once began as the German prophet of the 16th century, but forced by experience and reality to become the greatest anti-Semite of his time — the great cautioner of his people against the Jews.
The Protestant-Lutheran regional Bishop Martin Sasse of Eisenach in the Foreword to his essay Martin Luther and the Jews — Away with them!, Freiburg, 1938
Am 10. November 1938, an Luthers Geburtstag, brennen in Deutschland die Synagogen. Vom deutschen Volk wird ... die Macht der Juden auf wirtschaftlichem Gebiet im neuen Deutschland endgültig gebrochen und damit der gottgesegnete Kampf des Führers zu völligen Befreiung unseres Volkes gekrönt. In dieser Stunde muss die Stimme des Mannes gehört werden, der als der Deutschen Prophet im 16. Jahrhundert einst als Freund der Juden begann, der getrieben von seinem Gewissen, getrieben von den Erfahrungen und der Wirklichkeit, der größte Antisemit seiner Zeit geworden ist, der Warner seines Volkes wider die Juden.
Der evangelisch-lutherische Landesbischof Martin Sasse aus Eisenach im Vorwort zu seiner Schrift Martin Luther und die Juden - Weg mit ihnen!, Freiburg 1938
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| Von den Juden und Ihren Lügen (The Jews and their Lies) by Martin Luther |
Other, more recent writers have footed the blame at the German people as a whole for allegedly being "Hitler's willing executioners". Even the Catholic Church has been blamed, since the lifelong Catholic Hitler grew up in a church which taught that the Jews were the evil murderers of Christ:
Even Pope Benedict XVI is a former member of the Hitler Youth.
Isn't it just so wonderfully convenient when everybody, including Hitler, can be instantly absolved of blame for the Holocaust since he was just being forced to do it by the spectre of Wagner, his demonic Prophet. By sacrificing Wagner as the mythical scapegoat, the blood spilt cleanses the whole of Germany and Christianity past-future-present of its sins, and gives the likes of Köhler a shining good conscience whenever he goes to church. The guy is probably a Christian Democrat (German Tory), who has found this a good way of muzzling Wagner's undesirable socialist-anarchist ideas. He clearly wishes to spare his beloved Führer the deep shame of having adopted a hated "Bolshevik" as semi-official state composer. Even better still, Köhler can now discuss other German thinkers or artists of his choice without fear of the finger of blame being pointed in his direction. I hope he sleeps well at night!
The great irony with Köhler is that in doing this, he is maliciously framing a victim as the scapegoat onto whom a torrent of hatred is to be directed, just as the Nazis did to the Jews. Not only that, but to support this, Köhler is having to fanatically fight to perpetuate monstrous Nazi propagandist distortions about Wagner, as though they were the external truth uttered by a Prophet, whose every word he would have us believe with obsequious credulousness. Who is the one really behaving like a Nazi here — Köhler or Wagner? Or maybe Köhler just plain wants us to be Hitler's unquestioningly faithful believers?
Even Pope Benedict XVI is a former member of the Hitler Youth.
Isn't it just so wonderfully convenient when everybody, including Hitler, can be instantly absolved of blame for the Holocaust since he was just being forced to do it by the spectre of Wagner, his demonic Prophet. By sacrificing Wagner as the mythical scapegoat, the blood spilt cleanses the whole of Germany and Christianity past-future-present of its sins, and gives the likes of Köhler a shining good conscience whenever he goes to church. The guy is probably a Christian Democrat (German Tory), who has found this a good way of muzzling Wagner's undesirable socialist-anarchist ideas. He clearly wishes to spare his beloved Führer the deep shame of having adopted a hated "Bolshevik" as semi-official state composer. Even better still, Köhler can now discuss other German thinkers or artists of his choice without fear of the finger of blame being pointed in his direction. I hope he sleeps well at night!
The great irony with Köhler is that in doing this, he is maliciously framing a victim as the scapegoat onto whom a torrent of hatred is to be directed, just as the Nazis did to the Jews. Not only that, but to support this, Köhler is having to fanatically fight to perpetuate monstrous Nazi propagandist distortions about Wagner, as though they were the external truth uttered by a Prophet, whose every word he would have us believe with obsequious credulousness. Who is the one really behaving like a Nazi here — Köhler or Wagner? Or maybe Köhler just plain wants us to be Hitler's unquestioningly faithful believers?
It is little wonder that the Holocaust industry keeps endlessly citing the end of the exact passage where Wagner speaks of redemption for Jews and Germans alike from the evils of the past — "thus will we be united and without difference!"*** — as precisely the one that supposedly proves that he single-handedly caused the Holocaust. If you are really fanatically driven to read a passage to mean the diametric opposite of what it is saying, then, as Hume said: reason will always be the handmaid of the passions.
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| so sind wir einig und ununterschieden! thus will we [Jews and gentiles] be united and without difference! Scan from original 1869 publication of das Judentum in der Musik |
Notes:
* Russians accuse Westerners of belittling the sacrifice made, and of allowing Cold War propaganda to colour how we view the war. On the other hand, Cold War era Western authors tended to accuse the Russians of exaggerating. Why it is considered acceptable to downplay the Soviet sacrifice but it is a heinous act of Holocaust denial to do the same with Jewish deaths is unclear. Irrespective of what the real numbers of Soviet deaths are, it is of such an incomprehensibly apocalyptic magnitude that numbers lose all meaning anyway.
** Third Empire: the Holy Roman Empire was considered the First Empire, the Second Empire was the Bismarckian Empire under the Kaiser. It is annoyingly sometimes left half translated as the Third Reich, but Reich just means "empire" eg das Britische Reich, das Römische Reich. In future, given her size, we should perhaps use the expression The Reich to refer to the British Reich.
*** "so sind wir einig und ununterschieden": see previous posts where I go through the translation of the final paragraph of Judaism in Music word by word. Also see the post going through the essay as a whole. You will find that in the essay Wagner unequivocally expresses his support both for assimilationism and for an independent Jewish state ("ein jerusalemisches Reich"). For a book that supports my reading see Dieter David Scholtz. I have gone through most of his books, his bibliographical references and carefully studied the German Urtext of Wagner's writings, and I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusions. Alas, no English translations available. Of course, there are English translations of all of Joachim Köhler's books with rave reviews in the New York Times.
Further reading:
Review of Joachim Köhler's Book Wagner's Hitler
Betrayal
** Third Empire: the Holy Roman Empire was considered the First Empire, the Second Empire was the Bismarckian Empire under the Kaiser. It is annoyingly sometimes left half translated as the Third Reich, but Reich just means "empire" eg das Britische Reich, das Römische Reich. In future, given her size, we should perhaps use the expression The Reich to refer to the British Reich.
*** "so sind wir einig und ununterschieden": see previous posts where I go through the translation of the final paragraph of Judaism in Music word by word. Also see the post going through the essay as a whole. You will find that in the essay Wagner unequivocally expresses his support both for assimilationism and for an independent Jewish state ("ein jerusalemisches Reich"). For a book that supports my reading see Dieter David Scholtz. I have gone through most of his books, his bibliographical references and carefully studied the German Urtext of Wagner's writings, and I agree wholeheartedly with his conclusions. Alas, no English translations available. Of course, there are English translations of all of Joachim Köhler's books with rave reviews in the New York Times.
Further reading:
Review of Joachim Köhler's Book Wagner's Hitler
Betrayal
Robert P. Ericksen & Susannah Heschel
Paperback: 244 pages
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers (January 5, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0800629310
ISBN-13: 978-0800629311
http://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-Robert-P-Ericksen/dp/0800629310
The Secret History of Jesuits
Paperback: 244 pages
Publisher: Augsburg Fortress Publishers (January 5, 1999)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0800629310
ISBN-13: 978-0800629311
http://www.amazon.com/Betrayal-Robert-P-Ericksen/dp/0800629310
The Secret History of Jesuits
Edmond Paris
Publisher: Chick Pub (August 1, 1983)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0937958107
ISBN-13: 978-0937958100
Publisher: Chick Pub (August 1, 1983)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0937958107
ISBN-13: 978-0937958100
I read via Google books excerpts from Mrs. Sheffi's book. I'm afraid I only partially share your enthusiasm. Sheffi gets an "A" for her intentions, "A" for explaining the historical context and genesis of Wagner's works and of his antisemitism, "A" for chronicling the Wagner boycott in Israel as well as providing the context but a big fat "F" for her knowledge of Wagner. There are two mistakes, both on page 30, that are IMO, unforgivable.
ReplyDeleteThe first is her narration of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's interpretation of Wagner's prose writings in which he claims that the composer "championed the institutions of absolute monarchy". Sheffi follows this with an assertion of her own:"Wagner himself would propably not have endorsed this shallow interpretation". There is no "propably" about this. In "Heroism and Christianity" essay Wagner clearly stated his preference for a constitutional monarchy, therefore Chamberlain's claim is a lie, plain and simple. This incident testifies that Sheffi failed to consult primary sources. And since she is likely to speak German, cnsidering her area of expertise, this makes the error all the more egregious.
The second is Sheffi's assertion that "Chamberlain conversed often with Wagner". The two men have never met and never exchanged a single word, wheteher in person or in writing - FACT! Chamberlain once saw Wagner over the room in 1882 and that is as close as he got to the Master. In the most important acpect of deconstructing the myths surrounding Wagner, namely Wagner himself, Na'ama Sheffi displayed sloppy scholarship as well as apalling ignorance which is why I am, in spite of my wishes to be more enthusiastic about the book, remain at best lukewarm.
Regards.
Yes, there are plenty of factual errors that need correcting in Sheffi's book, when it comes to discussing Wagner's works and nor is she an expert on Chamberlain. The one chapter out of ten in the book where she goes through Wagner's oeuvre can be largely ignored as it isn't her area. However, her strength is mostly in being able to analyse the historical and sociological background to the Israeli ban on Wagner performance in great depth. That is the raison d'etre of the book. The fact that the book comes from an Israeli author puts a different perspective on things, and this alone is reason to promote it. In an era where the Holocaust industry is increasingly exhorting people worldwide to lynch Wagner to extract vengeance for victims, and to carry on the memory, hers is still a welcome voice of reason - one that is going to be drowned out very soon, as this trend is getting worse and worse. I am deeply pessimistic about the situation.
ReplyDeleteHowever, despite misgivings about her depth of knowledge about Wagner, she does make one interesting and positive point in that Friedrich Engels looked at the Siegfried as a representation of "German youth". It is yet another confirmation that Wagner belongs ideologically in the Young Germany camp of left-wing thinkers. Even Nietzsche tells us that Wagner chose Siegfried as a revolutionary hero, and he probably got it straight from Wagner himself.