Last revised December 2017
No further revisionary updates will be made as a book on this subject is being written.
Authors wanting to cite my work: please wait for the publication of my book.
All conclusions in blog articles are provisionary, and due to more recent research, there may be substantial differences to the final published book, which will not be under a nom de plume.
Introduction
This is an in-depth critical review of Joachim Köhler’s book Wagner’s Hitler - the Prophet and his Disciple. Köhler is a freelance German writer and novelist. All page references are to the English translation of Köhler’s book by Ronald Taylor (hardcover edition).
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| Joachim Köhler and Adolf Hitler |
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| The original cover for the German edition sadly demonstrates that the English title of Wagner’s Hitler—The Prophet and His Disciple is neither a joke nor mistranslation |
Title: Wagner’s Hitler – The Prophet and His Disciple
Author: Joachim Köhler
Translated by Ronald Taylor
Original German title: Wagners Hitler – der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, 2001
English translation: ISBN-13 9780745627106
Original German edition: ISBN-13 9783896670168
Length: 384 pages
Readers who wish to read the book for themselves should note that if your library lacks a copy, then copies can readily be purchased cheaply second hand at Abebooks (readers are strongly discouraged from buying new copies).
I first became aware of Köhler’s book in the late 1990s after it was published in German, well before it appeared in English. I relegated it to the status of a hoax and thought nothing of it. I preferred the journalistic neutrality of Dieter David Scholtz, since checking his claims against readings of Wagner’s primary source texts validated them. So it came as a surprise to discover that the hoax book had been translated into English, whereas none of Dieter David Scholtz’s series of books on Wagner has yet been translated into English. Wagner’s writings show him to have been a democratic socialist revolutionary, who became radicalised by the 1848 revolution into a revolutionary Communist—before moderating his political outlook late in his life to become a European constitutional federalist (anticipating the European Union). He remained an ethnic assimilationist, and a passionate lifelong pacifist throughout his life.
Dieter David Scholtz and Joachim Köhler’s books form a tit-for-tat exchange of prosecution and defence. Köhler has been widely translated into English to give the prosecution free reign over the floor while robbing the defence of a right of reply, while Scholtz’s books have lapsed into obscurity and fallen out of print. The closest to right of reply has come from Milton Brener’s book Richard Wagner and the Jews, which does a fair job despite being hampered by a reliance on unreliable translations by William Ashton Ellis. The book entitled Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich, based on a symposium organised by the legendary Israeli Holocaust historian, Professor Saul Friedländer, in a response to Köhler’s book, contains landmark essays critical of Köhler, amongst them by key historians such as Saul Friedländer and Joachim Fest, but this too has yet to appear in English.
Wagner’s Acquittal
Since the original publication of this review, Köhler has recanted his “petulant prosecution” (as Joachim Fest called it) in an article tellingly entitled Wagner’s Acquittal (of the charge of causing or inciting the Holocaust), published in The Wagner Journal (8, 2, 43–51: July 2014). Köhler has too late conceded to the growing academic literature which has shown that there occurred a political regime change in Bayreuth after Wagner’s death. The new regime, lead by Wagner’s French-born second wife, rewrote history by creating a mythical völkisch Wagner in collaboration with her propagandist henchman, the English-born Houston Chamberlain, while making self-serving claims to be the humble executants of Wagner’s will. This regime change introduced an institutional discontinuity between the Bayreuth of Wagner’s time and that of his heirs. It was a discontinuity that reflected both the changing socio-political milieu of German society, while Wagner’s posthumous fame made millionaires out of his nouveau riche bourgeois family, thus introducing a socio-economic discontinuity to Bayreuth’s infrastructure. Forgotten were the days when Wagner was a struggling avant-garde revolutionary artist, as the family inherited an artistic legacy now worth a fortune, before the 1918 abdication of the Kaiser made ersatz royal family out the Wagner dynasty. Köhler’s polemics had been misdirected at a mythical Wagner concocted after his death, not the historical Wagner who had been deleted from history and willfully overwritten to force the story to conform to the now right-wing ideologies of the newly bourgeois family heirs. Or to quote from Orwell:
The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
George Orwell: 1984
It remains as relevant as ever to critique Köhler’s earlier failed hypothesis so as to appreciate why historians have rejected Köhler’s invention of oversimplified “straight lines” of unbroken lines of continuity where historians find only catastrophic discontinuities and “twisted roads”. Wagner controversies have nothing to do with Wagner at all, but rather constitute attempts to keep alive the discredited theory originating in wartime Kraut-hate propaganda that Germans had always been militaristic, racist, and authoritarian—that they will for forever remain the same—for once a German always a German, this being eternally predestined by German blood and soil, with Wagner forcibly interpreted as the perfectly incontrovertible case in point:
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| Allied war propaganda was often the mirror inversion of German propaganda: both made claims to an immutable character inherent to German “blood and soil”. Only anti-Hun propaganda rephrased this as “once a German—always a German!” Both represent the same propagandist oversimplification in inverted form. |
Polemicists always love to assume that there exists an immutable ideological continuity to “The German Mind”, allegedly magnificently exemplified by the incontestable example of Wagner, who proves that Kraut-Think maintained its monolithic, hate-filled imperialist outlook throughout history, untouched by socio-political disruptions and catastrophic discontinuities. Historians reject notions about the linear continuity of a uniform national character, for far from being ideologically homogeneous, societies are inherently divided by explosive class conflict driving cataclysmic historical discontinuities that ensure there can never be such a thing as an immutable and homogeneous “German Mind” other than in the eyes of propagandists.
Hate, Guilt, and Self-Hate
The Israeli historian, Na’ama Sheffi has further written a whole book debunking the Wagner myth entitled The Ring of Myths, and, in an interview about the book with Die Welt, she stated that Wagner is being manipulated in Israel into a symbol of the Shoah to keep alive the myth of the eternally hate-worthy Ur-Kraut of history, just to keep the flame of wartime propagandist emotions burning undiminished—emotions of the kind that scream “we hate the Germans”.
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| Israeli historian Na’ama Sheffi argues that Wagner is being manipulated into a symbol of the Shoah by those who insist on screaming “we hate the Germans”. |
Likewise, wartime Germans in exile like Thomas Mann and Theodor Adorno, and German-Americans like Otto Tolischus and Peter Viereck, under threat of internment as alien insurgents or spies, chose to frantically bash Wagner so as to “prove” they were not “one of the Hun”. Post-war Germans feeling oppressed by the burden of history today feel alleviated of their guilt through outbursts of hatred towards Wagner by affirming the wartime views of such Germans in exile, “proving” that they too are no longer “one of the Hun”. For too many, history must be seen in terms of either Allied or Nazi war propaganda, thus compelling us to beat on the old drums of hatred and war till the end of time—it seems there must never be a middle path of academic neutrality.
For all the gratuitous seductions of such blindly jingoistic hatred, far more insightful were Friedelind Wagner’s words in a wartime broadcast from America:
“I asked myself how my grandfather Richard Wagner would have acted in my position. Would he have stayed, would he have placed himself at the disposal of the Nazis, would he have lent his name, which is also my name, to their crimes? There can be no doubt: Richard Wagner, who loved freedom and justice even more than he loved music, would have been unable to breathe in Hitler’s Germany. Thus we commemorate a great German, though our country is at war with Germany.”
The Allies were not fighting the spirit of Goethe, Beethoven or Wagner ... but ‘the evils of Hitler and his hopes of world domination’. She was speaking in the spirit of her grandfather, she continued, when she prophesied that the hour of the Nazi’s Götterdämmerung would soon come...
Friedelind Wagner quoted in Eva Rieger: Friedelind Wagner: Richard Wagner’s Rebellious Granddaughter. My emphasis
In undertaking a post-mortem of Köhler’s original thesis, the reader will gain incisive insight into why it would be better if we embraced the fact that it is high time that wartime Wagner myths based on anti-Hun propaganda be allowed to meet their supreme Götterdämmerung.
The Crux of Köhler’s Theory
The crux of Köhler’s book had been that the phenomenon of Hitler could be explained solely on the basis of his devotion to a secret mission to realise his Masterplan “to transform the world into a Wagnerian drama”. Köhler had pronounced with complete certitude that Hitler had pursued no political aim whatsoever beyond that of realising a Grand Plan to transform the world into a super-Wagnerian opera production:
[In] the last radio address [Hitler] gave to the country, in January 1945, he repeated: ‘Only he [probably should read “He” i.e. God] who gave this task can release me from it.’...
The nature of this task was certainly not to pursue a set of political aims, that is, to arrange the political and social realities of the time in the interests of the nation whose Chancellor he was. Reality meant for him the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama...
Köhler, p.270. My emphasis
Von der könne ihn, wie er bei seiner letzten Rundfunksansprache in Januar 1945, »nur der entbinden, der mich dazu berufen hat«.
Nun bestand Hitlers »Aufgabe« gewiß nicht darin, Politik zu machen, sich also mit der Wirklichkeit im Interesse der Nation, deren Kanzler er war, zu arrangieren. Seine Wirklichkeit bestand in der Aufgabe, die Welt in ein Wagner-Theater zu verwandeln...
Joachim Köhler: Wagners Hitler—Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker. S.384. ISBN 3-442-75547-6. Siedler Verlag, München, 1999
In what Köhler himself now confesses is a failed thesis, Wagner had taken the place of God Himself, as the providential playwright scripting the course of world history, the Grand Puppet Master secretly controlling Hitler from the beyond, manipulating him freely as His beer-hall opera impresario and chief executioner of His divine Will. The National Socialist Party had become an opera company disguised as a political party, one that had transformed the German Imperial Chancellery into an opera house. World War II and the Holocaust had come to be rendered as Hitler’s histrionic enactment of grand opera on the world’s stage. As Wagner’s puppet, Hitler was helpless but to be under the control of his Dark Lord, so that only “[H]e who gave this task” of realising the operatic Masterplan could cut the puppet strings and “release” him from the clutches of Providence.
Merely Acting Under Orders
The transfer of guilt onto a nineteenth-century opera composer had become so total in Köhler’s failed thesis as to have perfectly exculpated Hitler of all responsibility for the Holocaust, as it had reduced Hitler to little more than a hapless puppet forced to execute orders from his God-like Meister.
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| The Prophet and his Disciple: Köhler exculpates Hitler of his responsibility by transferring guilt for his actions onto a long-dead nineteenth-century opera composer. |
The way Hitler had been portrayed as “acting under orders” from Wagner recalled the way Adolf Eichmann pleaded innocence on the grounds he was merely “acting under orders” from Hitler. Eichmann claimed he was but a mere puppet forced to carry out an extraordinary Führerbefehl (Führer Order) to commit genocide. Historians think that Eichmann made up the self-exculpatory story of a Führer Order since no formal documentary evidence exists for anything like a Führerbefehl ever having been issued. Eichmann had always been acting on his own initiative in ordering mass murder, “working towards the Führer” by anticipating what was expected of him to advance his career.
Köhler sadly realised only too late that he had concocted similar excuses of “acting under orders” on Hitler’s behalf. Köhler had claimed that Hitler (the disciple) had no choice but to act as a puppet controlled by Wagner (the Prophet) to carry out a divinely providential Meisterbefehl (Master Order) emanating directly from the supreme Meister Himself. Köhler had even painted a kitschy scene where the Meisterbefehl to execute the Masterplan of the Final Solution from Wagner was handed down to Hitler through the dying Chamberlain as he lay on his deathbed, thus establishing a direct chain of command going Wagner-Chamberlain-Hitler. Joachim Fest notes that all Köhler had to support this was pure conjecture.
The reaction of other leading historians in this period has been that of similar exasperation. Sir Richard J. Evans wrote in his review of Köhler’s book:
Yet to make Wagner directly responsible for the nazi extermination of the Jews, as Köhler does, is hardly plausible. Köhler achieves this only by erecting dizzying and unstable structures of inference and correspondence, in which phrases and quotations are time and again ripped from their context in the writings or sayings of Hitler and Wagner and made to look as if they are saying the same thing. None of this is remotely persuasive.
Evans: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), p. 149. My emphasis.
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| Sir Richard J. Evans’s devastating expert testimony in the David Irving trial, dramatised in the film Denial, left the notorious Holocaust denier’s reputation shattered. Yet Evans was equally as damning of Joachim Köhler’s idea that: “reality meant for [Hitler] the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama”. |
A History Based on 1940s Political Satire
If National Socialist propaganda had claimed to stand on the shoulders of great German artists and thinkers like Wagner and Luther, Allied war propaganda had exaggerated this for polemico-satirical effect by tipping this on its head in overstating that National Socialism was an operatic movement run on Wagnerian principles, but like the story about Hitler going mad from syphilis contracted during sex with a Jewish rentboy, this has not stopped some humourless bores from taking such delightful witticisms seriously. Authors who repeat such fake stories must keep in mind that Sir Richard J. Evans excoriated Holocaust denier, David Irving, precisely because of his wilful use of fake quotations. It behoves no serious scholar to follow such an example, and write history as farce.
Sir Richard J. Evans has further argued that:
No sensible historian has argued that the total package of Nazism was present in earlier social or political movements or ideologies. What historians have tried to do is to find out where the different parts of Nazi ideology came from.
Evans: Rereading German History. My emphasis.
Least of all, no sensible historian would ever claim that the “total package of Nazism” was present wholesale in the writings of a nineteenth-century opera composer whose “vision” Hitler set out to fulfil in a grand conspiracy veiled from the whole world:
All this took place without his ever revealing the secret of his mission. As, on the one hand, he kept its origin in the Wagnerian world to himself, so, on the other, he laid a veil over its terrible consequences.
Köhler, p.16. My emphasis.
For all of the melodrama in his expression, Köhler failed to provide an explanation for why during the previous fifty years or so prior to his book, none of the legion of historians working on this era had unveiled the “terrible” secret of the operatic origins of Hitler’s “mission”. Nor did Köhler explain why Hitler needed to be so secretive. Was he so ashamed of his grand operatic “mission” that he would conceal it so carefully that it would take over fifty years to unveil his “terrible secret”?
Why would Hitler not stand in front of the roaring crowds to declare that his chief political mission was to “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama”? The answer is that he would no more have conceded to such an accusation from Allied war propaganda than he would have announced before roaring crowds of Party faithful that he had only one testicle. The fake quote oft attributed to Hitler that goes “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” (first found in Tolischus, 1940) was just a satirical concoction of Allied war propaganda trying to make Hitler look ridiculous by insinuating that he ran his nation on operatic principles:
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| The fake quote “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” first appeared in a 1940 American propaganda book without a date or primary source citation. The “quote” made up by Tolischus is untranslatable into German, and no original German version or primary source has ever been found. Köhler’s idea of a conspiracy to turn the world into a “super-Wagnerian opera” originates in Allied war propaganda. |
Another author claimed in 1942 that even the economic structure of the German state ran according to operatic theory:
...the internal economic and political structure of Nazi Germany is almost entirely the result of the twentieth century interpretation of Wagner’s theories.
Gregory, 1942
Numerous economists have since studied the economic policies of the National Socialist regime, but none have concluded it was based upon operatic principles. It is difficult to conceive what Wagnerian macroeconomic theory would even look like. Neither Adam Tooze in The Wages of Destruction, Statistics and the German State 1900-1945, nor R.J. Overy in The Nazi Economic Recovery 1932-1938 have uncovered any evidence that the National Socialist economic and political structure was “the result of twentieth-century interpretation of Wagner’s theories”. This, as we will find recurrently, is typical: a bombastic proclamation evincing sweeping certitude is made, but as soon as the evidence-base for this is critically examined, the thesis rapidly disintegrates.
Peter Viereck in 1942 similarly proclaimed extraordinary familiarity with Hitler’s inner psyche, in his Harvard PhD thesis:
Though he knew much of Wagner’s prose by heart [no supportive citation], it is the operas that were the main source of emotion throughout Hitler’s life, a deeper emotion than with any man or woman [no supportive citation].
Viereck: Metapolitics (1942). My bold emphasis.
These amusing proclamations evincing sweeping certainty can only be considered satirical parody based on conjecture. In 1942, virtually no details of Hitler’s personal life were known, as media access was limited even for German journalists, with the existence of Eva Braun being entirely kept secret. Nor were the contents of Hitler’s private library known, which posthumously turned out to have included none of Wagner’s writings, thus explaining why Hitler never once quoted from Wagner’s extensive body of prose writings either in private or in public. There is no evidence of even the slightest familiarity with Wagner’s actual prose writings. However, the certitude of such speculators who make such grossly exaggerated proclamations about Hitler knowing “much of Wagner’s prose by heart” always increases exponentially in inverse proportion to the amount of evidence.
Hermann Rauschning likewise claimed, in another 1940’s propaganda book, proven to be largely fake, that Hitler acknowledged “no forerunner”—“with one exception: Richard Wagner” (Hitler Speaks, 1940). Rausching also depicted Hitler shrieking, pointing into empty space exclaiming “there, there in the corner!”—a line lifted straight from a Guy de Maupassant short story. Given the popular legend associating Wagnerism with madness, it was inevitable that some witty anti-German propagandist would satirise Hitler as a twentieth century King Ludwig II who had been driven mad by his fanatical obsession with Wagnerian opera, causing him to run the “internal economic and political structure” of an entire nation on operatic theories. It is just another one of many colourful wartime rumours alleging that Hitler was stark raving mad. Another similar variant blames the hypnosis used on Hitler during his attack of hysterical blindness after a gas attack in WWI from which he never woke up, alternatively psychodynamic instability induced by a missing testicle, sado-masochism projected onto the world stage (according to the Freudian, Walter C. Langer), or else his mother’s breastfeeding of the infant Adolf as an act of “breast-mouth incest” leaving him “unsuitable for any normal erotic relationship”.
Sir Richard J. Evans astutely notes in the section Was Hitler Ill? in The Third Reich in History and Memory that such entertaining stories were mostly based on rumour and hearsay that circulated around bars during the war:
The problem with many of such speculations is that the evidence they use is unprovable except on the basis of the kind of rumours that circulated round the bars of Europe and the USA during the war, and were retold and, no doubt, embellished, by barflies like Putzi Hanfstaengl, whose anecdotes provided much of the basis for Langer’s psychoanalytical account.
Sir Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory (Kindle Locations 2343-2346). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.
Nor did the unveiling of Köhler’s “secret” derive from fresh archival evidence that would force academic historians to reconsider their dim view of such speculations about Hitler, based as they are largely on entertaining rumours that circulated around the bars of Europe and America. In place of evidence, Köhler based his history written as a farce on a speculative interpretation of just a single word (Untergang), passed off as incontestable certitude. Or as Joachim Fest noted in his review of Köhler’s book:
Köhler... writes “without doubt”, where considerable doubt has been raised, and “certainly” exactly where no certainty exists.
Köhler ... schreibt “zweifelsfrei”, wo erhebliche Zweifel angezeigt sind, und “sicher”, wo es gerade keine Sicherheit gibt.
Joachim Fest: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1997. My translation.
In other words, the basic tenet of this literature is that the less the evidence, the greater the certainty—but best of all is when there is no evidence at all, since that would be the equivalent of smoking gun evidence conferring transcendental certitude.
Köhler’s grand conspiracy about Hitler’s secret “mission” to transform the world according to a Wagnerian Masterplan have predictably been ignored by academic historians, along with Köhler’s claims to having “unveiled” the operatic origins of World War II and the Holocaust. The hoax should have ended then with a healthy squall of laughter, since not a single academic historian accepts that Party ideology originated in nineteenth-century opera along with a conspiracy of silence to “veil” the “terrible” “origin [of National Socialism and the Final Solution] in the Wagnerian world”.
Unfortunately, there exists such a yawning gulf between academic historiography and pop history, that despite having recanted his views, Köhler’s sensationalist speculations have taken on a life of their own, as it does its rounds with the usual lot of wacky conspiracy theories on the internet. Köhler’s ideas form the basis of the layperson’s understanding of the origins of one of the major events in history—all conveyed in gross oversimplifications and distortions allowing the uneducated masses to run roughshod over every nuance found in academic tomes dedicated to the serious study of the era.
Parallels with Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners
Köhler’s conspiracy theories shared much in common with Daniel Goldhagen’s populist book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, which, although unanimously condemned by virtually all historians across the world, has gripped the layperson’s imagination:
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| The German edition of Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners translated into German as Hitlers willige Vollstrecker |
It is no coincidence that in German translation, the title of Goldhagen’s 1996 book shares the word “Vollstrecker” (executant) in common with Köhler’s 1997 book, which, in German, is Der Prophet und sein “Vollstrecker”. The basic tenet of Goldhagen’s book is that:
Genocide was immanent in the conversation of German society. It was immanent in its language and emotion. It was immanent in the structure of cognition.
Goldhagen: Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1996, p. 449
It was predictable that someone would exaggerate Goldhagen’s thesis to claim that the influence of Wagnerian opera alone sufficed to brainwash “The German Mind”, programming it so as to make genocide “immanent in its language and emotion”, and “immanent in the structure of cognition”.
Along with arguably the greatest of all Holocaust scholars, Raul Hilberg, who said “I take exception to Goldhagen’s thesis, which is worthless” (quoted in Rosenbaum), Sir Richard J. Evans expressed dismay at Goldhagen’s vast pop appeal to a lay audience as his book hit the top of the bestseller list, writing that:
... the debate over [Goldhagen’s] book has opened up yet again the gulf between academic and popular history. The most popular general history of Nazi Germany is still William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960), which takes a similar line to that of Goldhagen, and repeats wartime propaganda about the pervasiveness of antisemitism, racism, militarism and authoritarianism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German culture.
Sir Richard J. Evans: Rereading German History. My emphasis
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| Professor Raul Hilberg, the author of a landmark three-volume study, The Destruction of the European Jews, called Goldberg’s book “worthless”. Widely regarded in his time as the world’s leading Holocaust scholar, Hilberg failed to mention Wagner once in the entire 1536 pages of this seminal work. The third and final edition of Hilberg’s study appeared years after the publication of Köhler’s book, but Hilberg disdainfully ignored Köhler’s ultra-Goldhagenist views as being equally “worthless”. Hilberg regards discussion of nineteenth-century opera as an utter irrelevance to the subject. Musicologists studying Wagner need to either follow Hilberg’s example or risk violently rewriting worldhistory from a grossly distorted opera-centric perspective. |
Like Joachim Köhler, William L. Shirer is another non-academic journalist who replaces nuanced analysis of complex historical phenomena with simplistic formulae fit for mass consumption fuelling the quick sale of books on a subject for which the public shows an insatiable appetite. Authors like Shirer who repeat anti-Hun war propaganda have long been left behind by academic historians, their views dismissed as a crude populism that cannot be considered serious academic historiography.
Evans went on to dismiss Goldhagen’s book (originally his PhD thesis) as a “startling failure of scholarship”, attributing it to him being a political scientist rather than a historian, thus lacking knowledge of the background historiographic literature:
How can we explain this startling failure of scholarship in a book which after all began its life as a Harvard dissertation? It is surely relevant to note that it was supervised and examined not by historians but by political scientists, whose knowledge of the empirical aspects of the subject was clearly limited. ... Not surprisingly, for all its resonance in the press, serious British specialists in German history, including Ian Kershaw and Arnold Paucker, condemned the book as ignorant and simplistic ...
Sir Richard J. Evans: Rereading German History. My emphasis
The principal aim of this critical review of Köhler is to confront this wave of “ignorant and simplistic” populism, which makes crude assertions flying in the face of serious academic historiography. There is a common link between Köhler, Shirer, and Goldhagen. All of these populist writers push an “ignorant and simplistic” caricature of “The German Mind”, as the singular sufficient cause of a German Sonderweg leading straight to Hitler. The controversial concept of the Sonderweg is often translated as “special path”. However, sonder can mean strange, weird, or peculiar in German. The word Sonderling means a “weirdo”, literally a “strangeling”. The Germans are caricatured as being the strangelings of European culture, and German culture caricatured as the quintessential expression of an innate and deep-seated genocidal streak inherent to “The German Mind”:
Goldhagen argues that Germans killed Jews in their millions because they enjoyed doing it, and they enjoyed doing it because their minds and emotions were eaten up by a murderous, all-consuming hatred of Jews that had been pervasive in German political culture for decades, even centuries past. Ultimately, says Goldhagen, it is this history of genocidal antisemitism that explains the German mass murder of Europe’s Jews, nothing else can.
Sir Richard J. Evans: Rereading German History. My emphasis.
Even in Germany, lay audiences supported Goldhagen with rapturous applause during public debates against leading left-wing historians like Hans Mommsen. Faced with this profoundly negative caricature of Kraut-hate, Köhler reacted with an explosive mixture of hate and self-hate, in which chaotic feelings of guilt, anger, and resentment drove him to seek redemptive expurgation through a convenient wholesale blame-shifting onto Wagner, who ended up the scapegoat chosen to bear the cross of his nation’s future sins, with Hitler as the Resurrection and Second Coming of history’s original operatic Ur-Kraut. The identities of Wagner and Hitler merged into one as WagnerHitler, and the histories of their timelines, 1813–1883 and 1889–1945 respectively, were likewise merged into a single homogeneous epoch stripped of the slightest discontinuity.
Köhler had thereby enthroned Wagner as The Lord of the Strangelings, and declared guilty of having single-handedly masterminded the course of German history down the path of its historical Sonderweg—straight to the crematoria of Auschwitz. Wagner’s works had been interpreted according to the a priori assumption as to the correctness of the Goldhagen interpretation of history, resulting in views of Wagner’s work infinitely more nazified than anything any National Socialist ever dreamt of, and, in a circular argument, such interpretations had then been proffered as evidence of the correctness of the Goldhagenist view of history. In this tautological paradigm, the orgiastic enjoyment of murdering Jews by the million was viewed as having been aestheticised by Wagner into a sublime expression so intense as to have decisively programmed “The German Mind” so that its very “structure of cognition” would make the rise of National Socialism a preordained historical inevitability.
The Failure of the Sonderweg Hypothesis
Ron Rosenbaum rightly points out that attempts to locate the origins of National Socialism and the Final Solution in German cultural and literary roots have a long history, and represent little more than tired old 1950s clichés:
... the effort to find the deep root, the ur-explanation of Hitler and the Holocaust in some intrinsic pathology of German culture was something German intellectuals themselves had been seeking for decades since the war. One version of what might be called “German exceptionalism” was the notion of the “Sonderweg”—the special path German history and culture had taken in the centuries since the Reformation. In its more pointed, more self-lacerating form, this became the postwar “Schuldfrage” controversy—the blame question, in which some German thinkers contended there was something not merely exceptional but deeply darkly wrong in German culture. That the violent extremism of thought to be found in Nietzsche and Wagner made Hitler possible if not inevitable.
Rosenbaum: Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (Chapter 19: Daniel Goldhagen: Blaming Germans)
Sir Ian Kershaw also tells us that this type of thinking had its roots in wartime anti-German propaganda when he wrote of:
...the crude interpretation of Anglo-American writers after the war, that Nazism could only be seen as the culmination of centuries of German cultural and political misdevelopment reaching back to Luther and beyond. [Footnote 12: Classics of the genre are Rohan O’Butler, The Roots of National Socialism (London, 1941), and William Montgomery McGovern, From Luther to Hitler. The History of Nazi–Fascist Philosophy (London, 1946). Such anti-German distortions were massively popularized in William Shirer’s bestseller, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York, 1960).]
Sir Ian Kershaw: The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (Bloomsbury Revelations) (p. 9). Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Both Köhler and Goldhagen had thus failed to say anything original at all, and merely represent shrill attempts to revive the archaic Sonderweg theory long rejected by mainstream historians specialising in this era, especially when Sir Richard J. Evans noted that:
In a curious way, this echoed the Nazis’ own version of German history, in which the Germans had also held by some kind of basic racial instinct to these fundamental traits [such as militarism, hatred of human rights and democracy], but had been alienated from them by foreign influences such as the French Revolution.
Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany
Nor would anyone still entertaining the old-fashioned “blame question” (Schuldfrage) permit all blame to be shifted wholesale and in its entirety onto a single nineteenth-century opera composer.
The protestations of Sir Richard Evans against such a monocausal culture-centric view of the Sonderweg have fallen on deaf ears outside of academic historical circles. Nor is Evans an isolated voice in the community of academic historians, for the overwhelming majority of historians ignore Köhler, and have about as much time for him as they have for Nazi UFO and Satanist conspiracies.
Yet outside of historiographic circles an ever-growing pop literature has been allowed to balloon, pushing ever more exaggerated views about Wagner’s allegedly all-dominant influence in shaping Party ideology—an “alternative” literature based on “alternative facts” entrapped in its own self-certain and secluded tautological bubble, oblivious to the degree to which such theories have been shunned by serious historians.
Admittedly, allusions to such pop literature can occasionally be found surprisingly even coming from professional historians. For example, historian Mike Rapport states in his book on the 1848 German Revolution:
It was still a long way from 1848 to 1933 but one disillusioned German ‘fourty-eighter’ who was a harbinger of that dark future was the composer Richard Wagner...
Rapport 1848: Year of Revolution, p144. Hachette Digital, London, 2008
However, Rapport is no specialist in the Dritte Reich era. He casually implies that, after participating in the 1849 pro-democracy uprisings musket and grenade in hand, Wagner’s disillusionment with violent revolution as a means of social change turned him into the “harbinger” of National Socialism. What sets Köhler apart is the way he would build an unstable construct of an operatic Sonderweg leading straight to National Socialism with Wagner as the demonic playwright who had scripted the course of world history a half-century after his death, based on the romantic fairytale about the course of history having been steered by “The Darker Side of Genius”. Such myths about musical talent having Satanic origins have a long history in music, with Niccolò Paganini having been refused a church burial due to rumours of his talents having been acquired from the devil, and it is said that Domenico Scarlatti would cross himself at the mention of Handel’s talents as an organist. The speculation that Wagner misused his musical talents to exert Satanic influence over world events after his death are just another variant of this myth which enjoys widespread currency in equally lurid Nazi Satanist literature where Wagner is regarded as an “intuitive” practitioner of “Tantric sex magick [sic]” (more on this subject later).
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| Köhler presents a romanticised caricature of Wagner as a kind of Dr Evil using Tantric sex magick to manipulate his Mini-Me Hitler puppet from beyond the grave |
Exculpating Hitler
A key objection noted by Ron Rosenbaum is the unacceptable consequence of accepting Daniel Goldhagen’s theory of “eliminationist anti-Semitism”—such theories exculpate Hitler of guilt by displacing the weight of responsibility away from him:
... like all explanations that narrow their focus too sharply to a single point, the eliminationist anti-Semitism hypothesis inadvertently but implicitly tends to exculpate those factors it eliminates from primacy: Christian anti-Semitism, European cultural hostility to the Jews, the Nazi Party (which becomes in this view less the evil inciter and instigator of German hatred than the obedient servant of the evil wishes of an evilly conditioned German people). Even Hitler is, to an extent, exculpated. If Germany was pregnant with murder, that pregnancy was not his monstrous conception; he just brought the hot towels and boiling water to assist in its delivery.
Rosenbaum: Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (Chapter 19: Daniel Goldhagen: Blaming Germans)
Nazi opera conspiracies “narrow their focus” down so “sharply to a single point” that even Hitler and his Party were exculpated of the primacy of their guilt, as a nineteenth-century opera composer was scapegoated at the convenient exclusion of a vast plethora of complex socio-political factors eliminated from primacy. Hitler’s role had been reduced to that of a midwife delivering Wagner’s pre-formed “monstrous conception” with which he had left “The German Mind” pregnant. In his review of Köhler’s book, entitled Wagner’s Willing Executioner in a clear reference to Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Joachim Fest also remarked on this exculpation of Hitler:
[Köhler’s] thesis diminishes the primacy of Hitler’s criminality just as it blows Wagner’s choleric, often seemingly merely peevish, anti-Semitism out of all proportion until it attains the prominence of a cohesive ideology.
Joachim Fest: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 18th July 1997 (my translation)
If Hitler had been captured and placed on trial, any claim to innocence on the grounds of operatically induced insanity would have been heartily laughed out of court. The responsibility for the crimes of National Socialism lies not with a long-dead opera composer, but with Hitler and his fascist regime. To assert otherwise would be to exculpate Hitler and his Party.
A Craven Surrender to Nazi Propaganda
On vilifying Wagner as The Lord of the Strangelings and “harbinger” of the Holocaust, polemicists have glorified themselves as heroic Nazi hunters. Yet their actions involve a craven surrender to National Socialist propagandist attempts to reinvent their tub-thumping as an inspired movement rooted in great art. It legitimises propagandist attempts to hide behind a bowdlerised version of Wagner as a fig leaf to conceal the hollowness of its rhetoric. Rather than deflating the empty and bloated Führermythos, it merely helps to inflate that mythos to ever more exaggerated heights. It seems those who follow the Hitlerist path of studying the Dritte Reich as a phenomenon dictated by psychology and culture, are so held in thrall by that mythical facade that they stand paralysed before it, quivering in their boots, unable to see past the spectre.
For to lend their bloated beer-hall ideology an air of legitimacy, National Socialist propaganda alleged that artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Dickens, Cervantes, Dante, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Wagner had all represented visionary forerunners and “prophets”. They used this phoney narrative to crown themselves the supreme heirs to the Western cultural tradition as an artistically inspired movement, in order to elevate beer-hall ideology out of the gutter up to the zenith of Western civilisation.
This is why Sir Ian Kershaw tells us in his Hitler biography:
Kubizek’s later claim that Hitler had read an impressive list of classics—including Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Herder, Ibsen, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—has to be treated with a large pinch of salt. Whatever Hitler read during his Vienna years—and apart from a number of newspapers mentioned in Mein Kampf we cannot be sure what that was—it was probably far less elevated than the works of such literary luminaries.
Kershaw: Hitler—Hubris 1889–1936
As Sir Ian Kershaw tells us, Hitler’s background was far less elevated than high philosophy:
Hitler’s scene was less high-flying. His milieu was that of the beer-table philosophers and corner-cafe improvers of the world, the cranks and half-educated know-alls.
Kershaw: Hitler—Hubris 1889–1936
Timothy Ryback likewise reminds us that the cultural influences on Hitler of far greater impact were that of the petty bourgeois pop culture and kitsch-culture industry of his immediate historical milieu rather than major nineteenth-century Romantic era thinkers:
Hitler’s essential core ... was less a distillation of the philosophies of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche than a dime-store theory cobbled together from cheap, tendentious paperbacks and esoteric hardcovers, which provided the justification for a thin, calculating, bullying mendacity.
Timothy Ryback: Hitler’s Private Library, p175
The problem with locating the origin of National Socialist in the writings of great poets and philosophers of the past is that it ends up being an inflationary romanticisation of Nazi beer-hall propaganda, obsequiously surrendering to them the honour of hegemony over European culture. Post-Marxist thinker, Ernst Bloch’s demand to concede nothing to National Socialist claims to cultural legitimacy not only ends up forgotten but violently overridden:
The music of the Nazis is not the Prelude to Die Meistersinger, but rather the Horst-Wessel-Lied; they deserve credit for nothing else, and no more can or should be given to them.
From Über Wuzerln des Nazismus (1939). In the Suhrkamp Verlag edition of his works: Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormärz, p.319-320.
Hitler’s ideology of beer-hall thugs simply does not deserve elevation out of the beer-hall to the lofty heights of Nietzsche and Wagner even for the convenience of polemic. Or as Sir Ian Kershaw puts it:
Hitler, the nonentity, the mediocrity, the failure, wanted to live like a Wagnerian hero. He wanted to become himself a new Wagner—the philosopher-king, the genius, the supreme artist. In Hitler’s mounting identity crisis following his rejection at the Academy of Arts, Wagner was for Hitler the artistic giant he had dreamed of becoming but knew he could never emulate, the incarnation of the triumph of aesthetics and the supremacy of art.
Kershaw: Hitler—Hubris 1889–1936
While many a Jewish mother may give her blessing to polemics against Wagner, and teach her children to hate him to commemorate the memory of victims of the Shoah and keep alive the flames of Kraut-hate, however well intentioned this may be, it is hard to see how turning the victims of National Socialism into extras in a giant opera production can honour victims in any way. Any distorted historiography of this era, however seductive it may be, does the memory of the victims of the regime no justice, especially where this involves a failure to demythologise and deromanticize National Socialism by academically stripping it down to the nakedness of its imminent historical contingencies.
The Nazi Opera Conspiracy Theory
Fails to Impress Historians
In his 1997 review of Köhler’s book, Joachim Fest notes that Köhler’s title seemed exaggerated: Hitler’s Wagner might have been more logical than Wagner’s Hitler. After all, Richard Wagner (1813 – 1883) died six years before Adolf Hitler (1889 – 1945) was born, making it more logical to write about how Hitler pushed his personal interpretation of Wagner for propaganda purposes. However, in the exaggeration essential to conspiracy theories, Hitler’s role in world history became little more than that of an opera impresario manipulated by a puppet-master. This is why Köhler’s book was entitled Wagner’s Hitler suggesting Wagner’s ownership of Hitler and his crimes.
The dead Wagner thus possessed Hitler to ghostwrite Mein Kampf leading Köhler to attribute quotes from Mein Kampf to Wagner before concluding that they were saying the same thing. Or to quote Sir Richard Evans’s review “phrases and quotations are time and again ripped from their context in the writings or sayings of Hitler and Wagner, and made to look as if they are saying the same thing”.
Joachim Fest was to remark on the astonishing diligence (“erstaunenswerten Fleiß”) of the author in researching his book. In a later essay published shortly before his death in 2000, Fest also calls Köhler’s book a “polemic”:
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| Famous German historian and key Hitler biographer, Joachim Fest, contributed to a series of essays edited by the great Israeli Holocaust historian Saul Friedländer |
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| Joachim Fest is scathing in dismissing Köhler’s “Polemik” (polemic) over "Wagner's Hitler". Fest in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich, p 25 |
The Stark Contrast with Mainstream Academic History
To bring the reader back down to earth, I can only sincerely plead with readers to earnestly study the writings of genuine academic historians’ accounts of the Dritte Reich or Holocaust coming from recognised authorities on the era such as Sir Ian Kershaw, Sir Richard Evans, Saul Friedländer, Peter Longerich, Hans Mommsen, Christopher Browning, Raul Hilberg, Mark Roseman, Zara Steiner, David Cesarani, or John Toland. You will find that not one of such heavyweights amongst modern academic historians much bothers to mention Richard Wagner’s name (other than rarely en passant), let alone partitioning any blame to him, since no genuine historian permits reduction of WWII and the Holocaust to operatic history. A product of a lifetime of study, Raul Hilberg’s landmark three-volume study of the Holocaust does not make a single mention of any nineteenth-century opera composers, and credulous readers are invited to confirm this for themselves by conducting a Google search of every word in each volume by following the following links:
The Destruction of the European Jews: Volume I
The Destruction of the European Jews: Volume II
The Destruction of the European Jews: Volume III
Although Wikipedia is not always a reputable source of information, the entry on the Holocaust is exceptionally well-written, but neither the English language nor the Hebrew language versions once mention Wagner. As for the trolls to this blog who insist that rejecting Nazi opera conspiracy theories, as Raul Hilberg does, constitutes Holocaust denialism, they are at liberty to edit the Wikipedia entry so that it states this—along with an amendment to the biographic details on Raul Hilberg replacing the current statement hailing him as “the world’s preeminent scholar of the Holocaust” with one calling him a Holocaust denier. The Wikipedia editors will welcome your vandalism in much the same way as if you had edited the entry on the moon to say it was made of cheese.
However upsetting the petulantly self-righteous may regard this, it is an inescapable fact that you will no more find a reputable academic Holocaust historian state that a nineteenth-century opera composer caused the Holocaust than you will find a qualified astrogeologist asserting that the moon is made of cheese. Nor do historians any more debate whether the Holocaust was caused by a nineteenth-century opera composer than climatologists debate whether anthropogenic climate change really exists. The non-historian is duly invited to confirm this for themselves, and if this review encourages readers to do nothing else than to study seminal mainstream works on the history of the Dritte Reich and Holocaust, then this present review would have been worthwhile. Readers are also strongly encouraged to go to the Yad Vashem Institute website, which promotes education and quality academic research on the Shoah, with readers also being offered online educational courses.
Nor since the publication of Köhler’s book, has any respected historian come remotely near trashing decades of peer-reviewed academic research to replace it with Köhler’s comic book narrative where Hitler is seen as a puppet, forced by his Meister to enact an operatic Meisterbefehl for war and genocide. However deep the emotional Kraut-hate appeal such reductivistic narratives may retain, they represent dead-ends that prevent us from studying serious academic accounts of a seminal event in history from which we still have much to learn. For that reason alone it is imperative that we refuse to allow grossly oversimplified and distorted narratives to overshadow serious academic historiography.
Thus, while Köhler’s book asserted with a well-nigh transcendental level of incontestable certitude that Hitler worked according to a premeditated operatic Masterplan, most historians today strongly doubt the existence of any preformed Masterplan whatsoever:
For the stepwise fulfillment of the escalation of exclusion of Jews from German society up to the “Final Solution” after 1933, the increasing consolidation of hatred towards the Jews represents a conditional, but not sufficient factor. Likewise, the Holocaust never in itself sprang out of a consistent “Masterplan”.
Hans Mommsen: Das NS-Regime und die Auslöschung des Judentums in Europa. My translation (the Anglicism, “Masterplan”, in the original German text has been retained, and has not been corrected to “Master Plan”).
Köhler’s thesis, however, strongly overrode this position by concluding in one foul sweep that there not only was a Masterplan, but that it took the form of a grand operatic Meisterbefehl to occultly “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama”. It could have hardly been more fantastically out of step with the state of the current scholarly literature on the origins of the Final Solution.
Likewise, in the minor footnotes to his landmark Hitler biography to which Köhler is banished, Sir Ian Kershaw expressed full agreement with his illustrious colleagues, Sir Richard J. Evans and Joachim Fest:
It is nevertheless a gross oversimplification and distortion to reduce the Third Reich to the outcome of Hitler’s alleged mission to fulfil Wagner’s vision, as does Köhler, in Wagners Hitler.
Kershaw: Endnote 121 from Hitler: 1889-1936—Hubris
Köhler’s, Wagners Hitler, takes this [reduction of history to opera] on to a new plane, however, with his overdrawn claim that Hitler came to see it as his life’s work to fulfil Wagner’s visions and put his ideas into practice.
Kershaw: Endnote 129 from Hitler: 1889-1936—Hubris
Joachim Fest also expressed grave concern about the lack of academic neutrality and replacement of all nuance with a dubious polemic reminiscent of a “petulant prosecution”:
With an astonishing diligence he has brought sometimes disparate sources together as it supports his viewpoint, but basically what he presents is less an investigation than a petulant prosecution [ein gereiztes Plädoyer]. ... The dubious accusatory character of the book renders any nuanced differentiation an impossibility. According to Köhler everything ideological is already prefigured in Wagner: the hatred of the Jews, the eternal exterminationist rage, and the system of elaborate justifications. Only the question of “how”—“of its technical feasibility”—as he calls it, did he yet leave open a vacancy that Hitler reputedly filled. What he saw as his historic mission, was nothing more than the actualisation of Wagnerian postulates and Hitler consequently merely the political executioner thereof.
Joachim Fest: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. My translation and emphasis
Similar views expressing concern about the gross exaggeration of the alleged influence of nineteenth-century opera on Hitler have been expressed by leading Israeli historians such as Na’ama Sheffi:
Wagner is accepted [in Israel] with such difficulty because he is being manipulated as the symbol of National Socialism and the memory of the Holocaust. Therefore his anti-Semitic comments and their influence on the National Socialist regime, however ill defined, have been very much exaggerated.
Na’ama Sheffi: Interview with Die Welt. My translation and emphasis.
Notice that Sheffi states that Wagner is being manipulated into the symbol of the Holocaust. That is why you get these people who think that, far more than Hitler, Wagner is the face of the Holocaust. That is why they state that anyone who rejects Nazi opera conspiracy theories is a Holocaust denier, even if that means accusing all Holocaust historians of Holocaust denialism. But in legal terms, there is no such thing as symbolic guilt of a crime. To emotionally manipulate an ignorant mob into hating someone for their symbolic guilt of a crime committed long after they died is to make a scapegoat of them.
In Holocaust scholarship, such propagandist distortions of history fabricated to launch vengeful Kraut-hate attacks lacking academic neutrality have always been frowned upon. Nazi opera conspiracy theories are a way of surreptitiously indulging in such hate by wilfully manipulating Wagner into the Ur-Kraut and Ur-Nazi of world history suggesting that Wagner is incontrovertible evidence that “proto-Nazism” was all-pervasive in German culture well before the twentieth century. Similar polemics against other German historical figures including Luther, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Herder have largely lost popularity, leaving Wagner as the final bastion against whom such base populist hatreds are directed:
It has been all too easy for historians to look back at the course of German history from the vantage-point of 1933 and interpret almost anything that happened in it as contributing to the rise and triumph of Nazism. This has led to all kinds of distortions, with some historians picking choice quotations from German thinkers such as Herder, the late eighteenth-century apostle of nationalism, or Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century founder of Protestantism, to illustrate what they argue are ingrained German traits of contempt for other nationalities and blind obedience to authority within their own borders. Yet when we look more closely at the work of thinkers such as these, we discover that Herder preached tolerance and sympathy for other nationalities, while Luther famously insisted on the right of the individual conscience to rebel against spiritual and intellectual authority.
Yet there could hardly be a worse candidate against whom to direct such polemics—far worse so than Herder or Luther—since no major artist of comparative status in the entire canon of Western art fought so valiantly behind the barricades as a true patriot to his country in order to realise his artistic vision of democratic socialism. Unfortunately, for some pop historians, keeping alive the Kraut-hate sentiments of Allied war propaganda is so critical as to justify overwriting world history with a fictional narrative wielded as an instrument of belligerence for keeping the eternal flame of Kraut-hate alive. As a result, even some well-meaning individuals have fallen prey to the trap of accepting the opportunistic view of right-wing revisionist historians who have attacked German liberal thought emerging out of the 1848 pro-democracy revolution (including Wagner, Feuerbach, Marx and Engels) as being the very source of the Kraut-Think that historically predestined the rise and triumph of National “Socialism”.
Unlike the lay public, however, professional historians left such emotive anti-Hun narratives based on Allied war propaganda behind in the 1960s. As a result, the disconnection between populist Nazi opera conspiracy theories and mainstream historiography has become total. Nazi opera conspiracy theories exist in an alternative universe oblivious to the research of mainstream academic historians, who regard such conspiracies as they do similarly off-the-planet Nazi UFO conspiracies. Not even Daniel Goldhagen has come out to support Köhler, because he would not wish the collective exculpation of “The Germans” by narrowing of the focus of blame to just a single opera composer, forced to bear the cross of the sins of his future nation.
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The most respected academic studies of the Holocaust such as this seminal 2016 one
by David Cesarani completely ignore Nazi opera conspiracies.
Like Hilberg, Cesarani never once mentions Richard Wagner’s name,
let alone accepting the “thesis that Hitler based his entire philosophy and
the whole Nazi apparatus on ideas explicitly drawn from Wagner’s writings and operas” (Kershaw).
It is unacceptable to attempt to aggressively overwrite mainstream studies of
the Final Solution with histrionic speculations based on nineteenth-century opera.
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Another key reason Köhler’s theories are ignored by mainstream historians is that they amount to a claim that rather than being a product of cataclysmic socio-political disruptions—WWI, 1918-19 German Revolution, the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and the Great Depression—Hitler can be explained solely as a byproduct of romantic art and culture alone. Köhler’s book was subtitled in its English version, “a sceptical view”, since it claims to have discovered the real origins of WWII and the Holocaust in nineteenth-century romanticism alone, with a deep scepticism of academic historiographic emphasis on imminent socio-political and economic contextual determinants. It would certainly be a scandal were such a “sceptical view” of mainstream academic historiography accepted, since it would have necessitated at least as massive a rewriting of our current understanding of history as the acceptance of Holocaust denialism. Libraries full of studies would have had to be trashed to make room for the academic mainstreaming of Nazi opera conspiracies.
How Wagner is Forced to Fit Reductivistic Intentionalist Paradigms
Theories about the origins of the Final Solution can be broadly divided into paradigms that are intentionalist or structuralist (also called functionalist). Intentionalist paradigms claim that there existed a Masterplan forming a “straight path” towards the fulfilment of a well-defined premeditated plan to commit genocide on a vast scale, predating Hitler’s rise to power. Structuralist (or functionalist) paradigms locate the origins of the Final Solutions in a functional by-product of the unique socio-political power structure of National Socialist Germany amid the context of a catastrophic war of attrition. The structuralist paradigm posits a tortuous “twisted road to Auschwitz” in place of the simplistic “straight path” posited by intentionalists. Or as Steven R. Welch phrases it:
There was no straight path from Hitler’s anti-Semitic intentions to Auschwitz but rather a ‘twisted road’ characterised by haphazard development, improvisation and ad hoc decisions by various groups within a chaotic polycratic system of rule. The Final Solution arose in a piecemeal fashion, emerging through responses by local Nazi officials to the immediate context created by the war.
Steven R. Welch: A Survey of Interpretive Paradigms in Holocaust Studies and a Comment on the Dimensions of the Holocaust (download from Yale University website)
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| Most modern scholars accept the idea of a “twisted road to Auschwitz” |
Here, by way of contrast, is a good summary of the intentionalist paradigm written by Elly Dlin (former director of the Dallas Holocaust Museum):
Gerald Fleming (among others) makes reference to documents, speeches, utterances and testimonies about Adolf Hitler (including ones that predate his joining the National Socialist Party in 1920) to trace an “unbroken continuity of specific utterances...a straight path...a single, unbroken, and fatal continuum...to the liquidation orders that Hitler personally issued during the war” (Gerald Fleming: Hitler and the Final Solution; p.13 and 24).
My emphasis
Dlin went on to say that:
The intentionalist school was fed by the solid tradition of fervent anti-Hun propaganda that emerged from both of the two World Wars in the 20th century Europe...
Hence why extreme intentionalist paradigms fabricate interpretations of Wagner’s opera as epitomising “Hun” thinking that typifies the allegedly ubiquitous “antisemitism, racism, militarism and authoritarianism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German culture” (Evans) of the sort that made genocide inevitable. Allied anti-Hun propaganda also formed the mirror image of National Socialist propaganda alleging the national character, which ran through the “pure” blooded German, had for all time been violently anti-Semitic and fanatically militaristic in its chauvinistic nationalism, with Wagner being forcibly interpreted as the archetypal case in point that proved this prejudice beyond doubt.
Once extreme intentionalism is accepted, it becomes logical that Wagner has to be made out to have steered German history down an “unbroken continuity of specific utterances...a straight path...a single, unbroken, and fatal continuum...to the liquidation orders that Hitler personally issued during the war” following the script of an operatic Masterplan of grand premeditated intentions handed directly from Wagner to Hitler. Interestingly, these sorts of anti-Kraut propagandist interpretations of Wagner as history’s original Hun appeared only with the outbreak of world war, suggesting that such interpretations are themselves by-products of historical circumstance.
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| An article in the Daily Telegraph from 1914 Suddenly all things German were out, and Wagner came to be reinterpreted as history’s original Hun. Some even blamed Wagner for causing WWI, which would have been a remarkable achievement indeed for a pacifist socialist. |
These wartime propagandist readings of Wagner stand in marked contrast to the sort of interpretation presented by the likes of George Bernard Shaw in his pre-war 1898 book, The Perfect Wagnerite, emphasising the Feuerbachian socialist revolutionary aspects of The Ring. Shaw’s book highlights how the wartime politicisation of Wagner interpretation has engendered a gross reductivism, lowered to the level of crude propagandist slogans.
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| Shaw’s book, The Perfect Wagnerite, revealed the revolutionary socialist side of Wagner. The full text of the book even features on the Marxist.org website. |
Furthermore, there exists a spectrum of ideas as to the origin of the Final Solution, ranging from extreme intentionalist paradigms to extreme structuralist paradigms, along with those more moderate theories which are intermediary, or even forming a synthesis of both:
Extreme Intentionalism
Moderate Intentionalism
Moderate Structuralism (Functionalism)
Extreme Structuralism
Synthetic
Most modern historians fall into the synthetic to moderate structuralist camp. At the far extreme intentionalist end of the ideological spectrum lies Daniel Goldhagen who posited the origins of the Holocaust in a purely culturally predetermined and fanatically exterminationist anti-Semitism allegedly so imminent to the structure of cognition of “The German Mind” as to have made it predestined that someone like Hitler would make “willing executioners” of all Germans—once again curiously matching the same view pushed by National Socialist propaganda.
Sir Richard J. Evans thus says of Goldhagen that “his book constitutes a craven surrender to the Nazi view of German history” (Rereading German History) in that it entailed a wholesale acceptance of the propagandist line that Hitler was little more than the humble servant of the Will of the German People (der Wille des deutschen Volkes) to fulfil their unique Destiny of eliminating the Jews—a transcendental Will allegedly present for centuries in all Nordic-Germanic Aryan people, as expressed in the writings of Luther, Wagner, and Shakespeare.
Nazi opera conspiracy theories occupy a unique position, one so extreme as to be off the standard scale in constituting the most grossly exaggerated form of hyperintentionalism, locating the origins of the Final Solution in toto out of a single word (Untergang) taken out of an essay from the writings of Richard Wagner, whose intentions Hitler and his Party allegedly carried out for the sole purpose of “transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama”. In the history of Holocaust scholarship, this constituted a uniquely hyperbolic reductivistic paradigm which locates the origin of the Final Solution to a microscopic point of historical ideological origin in just a single word written by a nineteenth-century opera composer. It posited an “unbroken continuity of specific utterances...a straight path...a single, unbroken, and fatal continuum” drawn from this microscopic focal point of origin of a single word, directly to the crematoria of Auschwitz.
This presents a position that radically precludes all possibility of structural influences from the “political and social realities of the time” in favour of a dogmatic paradigm dominated by the grossly monocausal intentionalist influence of nineteenth-century opera alone and in its entirety. It is a position so radically extreme that serious academics writing on the subject simply ignore this theory outright for being too comically exaggerated to even bother discussing. Not even those in the synthetic camp with a moderate intentionalist orientation such as Saul Friedländer, Yehuda Bauer (Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Zara Steiner would ever support such an extreme position. However, its seductive simplicity, radically stripped of every nuanced convolution along a “twisted road” to Auschwitz, guarantees the raging popularity of Köhler’s extreme thesis with the lay public, thus suggesting that academic historians ought to critically tackle the explosive expansion of this populist opera conspiracy literature in the same way that the profession systematically debunked Holocaust denialism.
When most serious historians doubt whether there was even a clearly defined and premeditated “intentionalist” programme to commit genocide right from the start, it naturally seems rather ludicrous to suggest that the single-minded political mission of the National Socialists can be reduced with such perfect certitude to nothing other than that of a secret intentionalist programme to obediently execute the “vision” of an almost hundred-year-old operatic Masterplan on the world’s stage—a “vision” whose existence is based entirely on the strained interpretation of just a single word (Untergang) taken out of context from an essay by a nineteenth-century opera composer for which no evidence exists of any leading Party member ever having read. Even as late as 1940 Heinrich Himmler wrote:
I hope completely to erase the concept of Jews through the possibility of a great emigration of all Jews to a colony in Africa or elsewhere. . . . However cruel and tragic each individual case may be, this method is still the mildest and best, if one rejects the Bolshevik method of physical extermination of a people out of inner conviction as unGerman and impossible.
Quoted from Christopher Browning’s book The Origin of the Final Solution p.70 of eBook edition.
In this same section of Himmler’s report can be seen Adolf Hitler’s personal hand-written comment: “very good and correct”.
It constitutes a far-fetched speculation to suggest that Himmler and Hitler had an abrupt change of heart, gripped with a violent desire to “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama”, resulting in the premeditated enactment of a Masterplan for an operatic Final Solution kept so secret by the Nazis that not a single historian has ever uncovered evidence for its existence. The unanimous conclusion of historians who have ignored Köhler is that if he really fancied himself as an Indiana Jones exposing sensational Nazi opera conspiracies, he should have stuck to writing fiction instead of pulp fiction disguised as history.
Most historians think that the organisational structure of the Party plus the catastrophic series of defeats against the Red Army brought about a set of “structural” circumstances that were unique in precipitating a so-called “cumulative radicalisation” colluding to engender the Holocaust. Historian Robert Gerwarth summarises this concept well:
Nazi Germany was not a smoothly hierarchical dictatorship, but rather a “polycratic jungle” of competing party and state agencies over which Hitler presided erratically. The “cumulative radicalisation” in certain policy areas emerged as a result of tensions and conflicts between powerful individuals and interest groups who sought to please their Führer by anticipating his orders. Within this complex power structure, individuals contributed to Nazi policies of persecution and murder for a whole range of reasons, from ideological commitment and hyper-nationalism to careerism, greed, sadism, weakness or—more realistically—a combination of more than one of these elements.
Robert Gerwarth: Hitler’s Hangman—the Life of Heydrich
However, Gerwarth’s acceptance that “hyper-nationalism ... careerism, greed, sadism, weakness or—more realistically—a combination of more than one of these elements” also accelerated the process of “cumulative radicalisation” demonstrates the fact that most modern historians are willing to combine elements of intentionalist paradigms into the framework of structuralist thinking.
On the other hand, historians will inevitably disregard Nazi opera conspiracy theories, since this posits a grossly oversimplified theory based on the sweeping assumption that far from being a messy “polycratic jungle”, National Socialist Germany was a harmoniously organised teleological structure neatly centred around its single-minded devotion to secretly “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama”.
The Alien Abduction Methodology of Nazi UFO Conspiracy Theories
The way Köhler took his “gross oversimplification and distortion” onto “a new plane” has been perhaps rather harshly been described to read like an alien abduction account—an accurate metaphor, however, as far as the grossly speculative methodology goes. After all, Köhler’s methods compare well to that of similar kitschy and sensationalist pseudo-histories on the Dritte Reich. For example, there is an extensive Occult Reich literature with luridly sensationalised accounts of Nazi Satanism, as well as allegations of cover-ups of Nazi survivalism, or, worse still, risible pseudo-histories involving Holocaust denialism. There is even a story about WWII being caused by Hitler’s missing testicle, or by Hitler going mad from neurosyphilis contracted from sex with a Jewish rentboy. Another equally bizarre story claims that UFOs are secret Nazi weapons developed in conjunction with the aliens to be used for their impending world-domination:
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| Joachim Köhler belongs firmly in a long tradition of sensationalist pseudo-histories about National Socialist Germany. Köhler’s Nazi opera conspiracy is close kin to Nazi UFO conspiracies |
Fantasies, urban legends, literary inventions and pure lies came after the war at the beginning of the ‘60s. Any book that dealt with Nazis and the occult, Satan, UFOs or secret treasures was assured to be sold at thousands of copies. Among the purely commercial approach of fake historians and storytellers, there were a few “honest” though fanatic people who managed, by their writings and teachings, to develop a kind a semi-religious version of Nazism that has formed the basis up until today for neo-Nazi movements throughout the world.
Frank Lost: Nazi Secrets. My emphasis
Yet beneath such populist sensationalism often creeps an insidious right-wing revisionist historicism that dismisses the influence of socio-political and economic structural realities that condition history in favour of a romantic culture-centric view of history following a script written by dead poets and philosophers. It is a view that avidly feeds a “semi-religious” mythical view of a romanticised National Socialism that forms the basis of neo-Nazi movements today. Köhler represents a kindred romanticisation since he stated explicitly that the “political and social realities of the time” along with the “interests of the nation whose Chancellor he was” were totally irrelevant to understanding what drove Hitler, since the sole sufficient cause for the “special path” history took was nineteenth-century romantic art.
Once the imminent socio-political contextual background is deleted from our understanding of Hitler and replaced with that of late nineteenth century romantic opera, this account becomes ahistorical. That is why historians refuse to accept the view that National Socialism can be seen as a Dead Poets’ Society operated under remote control from beyond the grave by long-dead literati or thinkers such as Richard Wagner or Martin Luther. Figures such as Wagner and Luther belong to a different era, born of different socio-political contexts which they were addressing with their ideas. So disparate are such historical contexts that no a priori assumption of transcendental teleological continuity between them and that of twentieth-century fascism can be made.
If the National Socialists did romanticise history by implying that they stood on the shoulders of many a Great Man, this was pure self-adulatory propaganda, one that aimed to manufacture a phoney glow of cultural legitimacy and of a mythical historical “Destiny”, but which does nothing to change their original radicality born of their violent severance from the past, as engendered by that most radical of all discontinuities from the past—namely the catastrophic socio-political disruption of World War I and its social aftermaths.
Texts such as Mein Kampf or the Second Book (Zweites Buch) are thus pervaded with a fanatical engagement with the living “political and social realities of the time” such as World War I, the humiliation imposed on Germany by the treaty of Versailles, the rise of Marxism after the Russian revolution, the Freikorps, the German Revolution of 1918-19, the struggle for imperialist expansionism into new Lebensraum, and the coming conflict with the Soviet Union and America. Attempts to wring readings out of Hitler’s writing to the effect he ignores the political context of his age in favour of an escape into a fantasy world of nineteenth-century opera are speculatory to the point of being totally off-the-planet.
It is fanciful nonsense to suggest that Hitler was a twentieth century King Ludwig who had gone mad from excessive preoccupation with Wagnerian opera, causing him to neglect his stately duties in the “interests of the nation whose Chancellor he was”, in its place striving to “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama”. Wagner simply is not the playwright who scripted the course of world history, for no one person can have so much influence on the world, least of all a dead one. Even Hitler’s importance in shaping the Dritte Reich is arguably much exaggerated over broader socio-political structural determinants.
Rather than Wagner being transcendental proof that history runs under remote control according to the thoughts of dead poets and philosophers, he is, on the contrary, proof that art is powerless to steer the course of history. Wagner’s pacifist and anti-capitalist vision in The Ring of apocalyptic annihilation for the Gods of War that rule the world no more ended Bismarckian militarism than the Weimar era cabaret singers satirising Hitler in gay and lesbian clubs brought down the Dritte Reich. Art is sufficiently open to interpretation that it can easily be manipulated by demagogues to support ideologies diametrically opposite to those of the artist. Instead of listening to the artist, especially when someone like Wagner left a vast legacy of letters and prose works, most people listen to the demagogue instead.
It is purely wishful thinking of the sort that belongs in a romantic fairy world to imagine that twentieth-century history would have turned out differently if only German history had not been hijacked down the path of a Sonderweg by Wagner’s “dark genius”. It may be heartbreaking to many, but as much as those in the arts may crave to believe otherwise, the toad that must be swallowed is that art simply does not have such magico-romantic power over society or the course of history. Nor is having an interest in opera sufficient justification for a reader of history to collapse world history down to operatic history.
... time and again Wagner called for the annihilation of the Jewish race, an alien body in an Aryan German state. Hitler took him at his word.
Presumably, these “aliens” Taylor references were of the ufological, Close Encounter kind, since a meticulous search of his complete writings and letters demonstrates that never once did Wagner come close to calling for such a thing, and Taylor failed to provide a bibliographic citation in Wagner for us to verify the statement: it does not exist. Nor did Köhler ever “time and again” show us examples where Wagner ever stated such a thing. As Sir Richard Evans notes, Köhler kept quoting Hitler and then attributing the quote to Wagner—time and time again. Wagner himself is never allowed to speak for himself for more than a few words before Köhler jumps in to lecture us about what the quote “really” means—enter the quotation from Mein Kampf, placed straight in Wagner’s mouth. The one time Wagner is allowed to speak for more than one sentence, it turns out that Köhler has tampered with the quote.
To read Köhler is like reading a well-documented account of an alien abduction. The supermarket shopping docket shows he was in that area at a particular time and place, likewise the receipt from the petrol station, then the dent on the car and the little bruise to the forehead is shown etc etc ad nauseam. Then, after endless, yet excruciatingly detailed—but ultimately banal—documentation, the punch line hits: “then the aliens abducted me—I have proven it”. All the astonishing diligence in meticulously collecting documentation—the detailed dockets, the endless pictures of the little dent on the side of the car—it all supposedly proves “the aliens abducted me”. You then scratch your head and wonder how on earth the fantastic leap to the unsupported conclusion appeared out of left field.
The astonishing diligence of the thorough groundwork leading up to the bizarre conclusion will inevitably fool a lot of gullible lay people. Anne Midgette, a New York Times arts journalist—clearly no historian—gasped with horror in describing it as “chilling” and highly “persuasive”. The response stands in marked contrast to that of a seasoned professional in Professor Evans, who wrote that “none of this is remotely persuasive”:
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| New York Times: “Chilling” Arts journalist Anne Midgette wrote: Joachim Köhler’s chilling and exhaustively researched book “Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple”, ... makes a persuasive case for its thesis that Hitler based his entire philosophy and the whole Nazi apparatus on ideas explicitly drawn from Wagner’s writings and operas. Midgette: New York Times, 14th October 2001 |
The Invocation of a Secret Conspiratorial Society
The fatal weakness with Köhler’s hypothesis was the lack of even the slightest scrap of evidence demonstrating that Hitler ever suggested that his political mission constituted that of a singular devotion to realising his occult knowledge about Wagner’s “vision”, whether in public or in private. Even if Wagnerian opera really was all that drove him, there was no reason to think that he would have wanted to have kept this an extraordinarily well-hidden secret. To defend the stark variance of Köhler’s views with those of mainstream academic historians, Köhler was forced to dismiss the canon of academic historiography dedicated to studying the origins of the Final Solution as having been misled by a whole lot of “lies”:
What had begun with a lofty silence about his role as redeemer led to persistent lies about the ‘final solution’.
Köhler, p16. My emphasis
However, like those conspiracy theorists who claim that the Nazis hid their knowledge of UFOs, Köhler suggested that Hitler too hid his arcane knowledge about an operatic Masterplan from the world behind a protective veil of “lies”, until Köhler sensationally uncloaked them. The operatic Masterplan was allegedly kept veiled from shortsighted academic historians, its secrets privy only to a shadowy inner core of True Faithful known as the “Bayreuth Inner Circle”—an all-powerful conspiratorial society that secretly ruled the Dritte Reich from Bayreuth, scripting the shadowy Protocols of the Elders of Bayreuth known only to an Inner Circle of initiates. The secretive nature of the Society was the reason why no mainstream academic historian of this era had hitherto managed to crack the secret code language of the Bayreuth Protocols to unlock the dark “secret”. It seems that invocation of mysterious conspiratorial societies is an essential part of the formula of every conspiracy theory, and Köhler did not fail to disappoint.
Köhler’s ideas show similarity to those found in lurid and sensationalist Occult Reich conspiracy literature. For example, the following passage from a trashy Occult Reich conspiracy book by the author of Storm Troopers of Satan and Alien Arrival: Salvation or Destruction, could well have come straight from Köhler’s pen:
Wagner described the Jews as ‘the devil incarnate of human decadence’ [no bibliographic citation] and called for ‘a Final Solution’ to ‘the Jewish problem’ [no bibliographic citation].
From section entitled Pagan Revivalism and Völkisch Christianity in The Nazi Occult War: Hitler’s Compact with the Forces of Evil by Michael FitzGerald (Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2013).
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| Like Köhler, FitzGerald is another self-proclaimed “expert” on history. The two would do well to collaborate to see if they can decipher secret messages to the aliens encoded in Wagner’s scores. |
As is usual in non-academic publications, FitzGerald fails to provide primary bibliographic source citations for his Wagner “quotes”—because they are unashamedly fake. A meticulous word-for-word search through the entire written works and letters of Wagner in searchable digital format (Digitale Bibliothek Band 107: Richard Wagner: Werke, Schriften und Briefe; Directmedia, Berlin 2004), demonstrates that he never calls Jews “the devil incarnate of human decadence” (using Teufel, inkarniert, Dekadenz, Entartung, or Jude as individual search terms), and the term “Endlösung” is likewise completely absent from his writings or letters. Nor does any serious historian believe that the term “Final Solution” had its origins in a nineteenth-century opera composer.
Professional historian, Christopher Browning, in his landmark book The Origins of the Final Solution, states that the term Endlösung, or Final Solution, was first used in an in-house note by Heydrich on the 19th of December of 1939, and that it became an official term after the Wannsee Conference held in Berlin on the 20th of January, 1942. Mark Roseman has devoted a whole study to how the Wannsee Conference contributed to the development of the Final Solution, and again no evidence has come to light suggesting it had nineteenth-century operatic origins. The minutes of the Wannsee Conference have been preserved, and readers who study them will nowhere find the transformation of the world into opera discussed, suggesting that any notion that the Wannsee Conference constituted a meeting of an opera theatre’s artistic board of directors is comical. Never does Heydrich—an accomplished violinist and the son of an opera composer—ever talk of “transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama”, any more than he does of transforming the world into a Shakespearean drama by taking vengeance on the backstabbing Shylocks. It would be a remarkable discovery if Köhler had proven that the “Final Solution” originated fully formed as a grand operatic Masterplan some sixty to a hundred years prior to the Wannsee Conference.
The closest Köhler came to “proving” the operatic origins of the term “Final Solution” came from Köhler’s willful misreading of a passage from Know Thyself (Erkenne Dich Selbst):
[Hitler] was the embodiment of the ideal German invoked by Wagner in his operas, a blend of the heroic and the hallowed in whose hands the realization of the ‘grand solution’ lay. ‘After all sense of false shame has been overcome’, the Master had declared, ‘we must not flinch from the final decision [letzte Erkenntnis]’ [citation to Erkenne Dich Selbst], the decision that will lead to the removal of the Jews from the face of the earth. But he, Adolf Hitler, had jettisoned this shame.
Köhler, p.165
Here is the original text from which this was taken:
We Germans could, precisely as a result of the present-day instigation of [anti-Semitic] movement [in Berlin 1879–1881] only conceivable amongst ourselves, realise this great solution [to the madness in the conflict between political parties—“im Wahnsinn des Parteikampfes”] far more than any other nation without timidity, and, to the very marrow of our existence, carry out the dictum “know thyself”. The fact that we hereby penetrate sufficiently deeply, after overcoming all false shame, by not flinching from the ultimate insights [letzte Erkenntnis], should be suggested by those who advance ahead of those filled with foreboding.
Uns Deutschen könnte, gerade aus der Veranlassung der gegenwärtigen, nur eben unter uns wiederum denkbar gewesenen Bewegung, diese große Lösung eher als jeder anderen Nation ermöglicht sein, sobald wir ohne Scheu, bis auf das innerste Mark unseres Bestehens, das „Erkenne-dich-selbst“ durchführten. Daß wir, dringen wir hiermit nur tief genug vor, nach der Überwindung aller falschen Scham, die letzte Erkenntnis nicht zu scheuen haben würden, sollte mit dem Voranstehenden dem Ahnungsvollen angedeutet sein.
From Wagner: Erkenne Dich Selbst (Köhler’s citation is to volume X, p.274 of the Leipzig edition of the Sämtliche Werke, but the essay was originally published in the Bayreuther Blätter in 1881)
Examination of the original text shows a secret call for the Final Solution (Endlösung) of the Jews through genocide no more exists here than a cryptic message to the aliens. The original text is undoubtedly vague and obscure, but it scarcely justified distortion into the grossly speculative readings put forward by Köhler. The words “letzte Erkenntnis” and “Endlösung” have only the most distant of resemblances, and it was highly fanciful of the translator to forcibly make them appear more similar, by wilfully mistranslating “letzte Erkenntnis” as “final decision”. The word Erkenntnis is related to the Erkenne of Erkenne Dich Selbst (know thyself), and is better rendered as “insight” than as “decision”. Thus “letzte Erkenntnis” means “ultimate insight”. More on Know Thyself later.
The sort of gross speculation found in both Occult Reich and Nazi opera conspiracy literature, in which merely stating that the term “Final Solution” had operatic origins turns it into incontestable fact, is hardly any more taken seriously by mainstream academic historians than speculations found in Nazi UFO conspiracy books, and similar “pulp fiction in the guise of history”: to do so would entail total academic suicide.
History is Rewritten Based on Just One Word from “Judaism in Music”
The central pillar of Köhler’s thesis about the operatic origins of the Final Solution rested precariously upon the strained interpretation of a single word: the word Untergang in Judaism in Music. After presenting his sensationalised interpretation based on one word, Köhler concluded that Hitler’s reading of this one word formed the secret core “vision” that his Party religiously adhered to. While Köhler was meticulous enough to know not to shoot himself in the foot with errors as risible as those in Occult Reich literature claiming that an opera composer engineered the “Final Solution to the Jewish problem”, the end result was hardly any less so.
Joachim Fest and Saul Friedländer, both major historians of the era, criticised Köhler in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich, and corroborated my own reading of Judaism in Music as a liberal document relative to its time, one which advocated Jewish assimilation. The word Untergang has various translations e.g. downfall, decline, destruction, ruin, doom etc. The German film Der Untergang, for example, was translated as Downfall.
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| The German film title Der Untergang was translated into English as Downfall |
Wagner sometimes uses the term Untergang to mean an apocalyptic revelation, and there is no more reason to think it meant a call for genocide than does the use of the term “apocalypse” in Jewish theology. Above all, Wagner makes it unambiguously clear that he wanted his essay to be understood as a call for the assimilation of Jews into the Christian German majority through their acceptance of Jesus as the Messiah resulting in the downfall (Untergang) of Judaism—precisely the idea of the Ahasverus metaphor. In the 1869 German version, Wagner categorically uses the word “assimilation”:
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| Wagner called for the “Assimilation” of the Jews. Taken from an original 1869 printed edition in German. |
Even blind Freddy can see it in black and white. There are simply no grounds to read “annihilation” when Wagner writes “assimilation”. This instantly relieves us of any need to read deeply between the lines to imagine fantastic genocidal conspiracies.
Christian Wilhelm von Dohm (1751 – 1820), a historian and friend of Moses Mendelssohn, had previously linked emancipation with assimilation in the Age of Enlightenment:
Much of the case [Dohm] put forward in On the Civic Improvement of the Jews rested upon the Jews’ capacity to become happier and more useful members of society, once there was an end to the oppression ‘so unworthy of our age’, which had corrupted them. The removal of legal discrimination, he assumed, would lead to the assimilation of Jews into Gentile society and the gradual disappearance of a specific Jewish identity.
Gareth Stedman-Jones: Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
Abbé Grégoire, further added the idea of the need for Jewish “regeneration” from their “corruption” induced by centuries of oppression. Only Wagner furthers Abbé Grégoire’s Enlightenment concept of regeneration through his idea that both German and Jew alike had been left in need of the “salvation of regeneration” through “communism” after corruption through the “deepest deprivation of civilization”.
Far from championing Enlightenment ideals of assimilation, the National Socialists regarded assimilationists with abject contempt as it leads to miscegenation and racial contamination of Aryan blood. So while during the forced emigration phase of Jewish persecution, the National Socialists supported forced migration to Palestine, they never accepted a policy of assimilation, which they considered worse than Zionism. Historian, Professor Robert Gerwarth summarises the hostility of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the Final Solution, towards assimilationism:
From [Heydrich’s] vantage point, the assimilationists who refused to emigrate represented the greatest obstacle to a successful Jewish policy: ‘The assimilationists deny their Jewish origins either by claiming that they have lived in this country for generations and that they are Germans or by maintaining, after getting baptized, that they are Christians,’ thereby trying ‘to undermine Nazi principles’. [Citation to: Reinhard Heydrich’s Wandlungen unseres Kampfes; Munich and Berlin, 1936, p.10 ff]
Robert Gerwarth: Hitler’s Hangman—the Life of Heydrich; p.95
It is the height of absurdity to suggest that the National Socialist Final Solution originated in assimilationist theories. This explains far better why the National Socialists avoid referring to Wagner’s writings on the Jews, since Wagner’s assimilationism would have been totally unacceptable to them—an explanation far more plausible than one evoking a fantastic conspiracy to keep the operatic origins of their racial ideology a secret.
The great Israeli Holocaust scholar, Professor Saul Friedländer, both of whose parents were murdered during the Holocaust, writes:
However, on the previous page, in which Wagner calls upon the Jews to follow the example of Börne in order to give up for the sake of “the redemption into genuine human beings”, he clearly says that the vanishing of their social, cultural, and religious idiosyncrasies will restore them into a universal and redeemed humanity. In this interpretation of redemption there still echoes Wagner’s revolutionary ideals of his age. One can interpret Wagner’s first anti-Judaic pamphlet not as a call for the annihilation of the Jews, but rather read it as the appeal for the elevation of Judaism as a culture, in order to remove the “Jewish spirit” ... Can the Jews be liberated of their “Jewish spirit” like Börne? To Hitler it must have all seemed ideologically unacceptable.
Saul Friedländer: Hitler und Wagner. My translation from the published German version. My emphasis.
In other words, Wagner’s anti-Semitism is an early left-wing variety of socialist or revolutionary anti-Semitism that also found expression in the writings of Karl Marx, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Ludwig Feuerbach, Heinrich Heine, and Ludwig Börne. Some of these writers, including Marx, Heine and Börne, were themselves assimilated ethnic Jews, and it is no coincidence that Heine and Börne, both prominent left-wing writers of the day, are singled out for praise and admiration by Wagner, unlike Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, whom he regards as reactionaries. Indeed, it was probably Heinrich Heine (upon whose poem Tannhaüser, Wagner based an opera) who instilled an intense dislike for Meyerbeer into Wagner after Wagner met Heine in his Paris apartment. Amongst other visitors to Heine’s Paris apartment included Karl Marx, who is on record as having called a rival Jewish thinker, Ferdinand Lassalle, “Dieser jüdische Nigger” (this Jewish nigger).
Joachim Fest also confirms Professor Friedländer’s reading of Wagner:
Even the famous sentence about the Redemption of Ahasvar that concludes the essay about “Judaism in Music” means nothing less than the sublation [Aufhebung] of the peculiar role of the Jews in society through the transformation of their relationship. First through revolution, the opposites of Jew and non-Jew are annulled in an aesthetic world-order, where they will emerge “united and undifferentiated” from one another. Seen from the standpoint of predominantly pre-revolutionary thinking, he saw in the Jews, not a biological element, but rather a symptom of the illness of a materialist civilisation, where once it has been overcome, the Jews are freed of the daemonic power that drives civilisation to its decay. With Hitler it is totally different. He thought of all Jews as being undeliverable from the stigma bound to their ancestry and blood, from which they could never get away.
From Joachim Fest’s essay in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich. My translation.
Köhler took things to such extremes that even Paul Rose, a Jewish writer and early pioneer of Nazi opera conspiracy theories, now distances himself from Köhler. In his contribution to the book based on a symposium lead by Professor Friedländer, Rose changes his tune:
What did Wagner mean by Untergang? Is he speaking metaphorically? Or did he mean a physical Untergang? I tend towards the opinion that Wagner thought in 1850 in the first line of a self-destruction of the Jewish identity and less of a physical destruction through violence.
From p.289 of Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich. My translation.
To this, I would add that this aim of the disappearance of Jewish identity through assimilation used to be considered an enlightened and progressive ideal back in those days, the logical next step after emancipation. Wagner was born in 1813, a year after the emancipation of the Jews in Prussia. Wagner argued that Jews would always be uprooted and homeless vagabonds, eternally tormented by their alienation, unless they fully assimilated and became left-wing “authentic” Germans like Börne and Heine who could rightfully call the Fatherland their home (if they were right-wing, it was proof were still too “Jewish” and inadequately assimilated). Hitler, on the contrary, regarded the Jews as the root of all left-wing, “Judeo-Bolshevik” thought, hence alien to what was “truly German”.
Arnold Schoenberg also interpreted Wagner along similar lines. Schoenberg read Wagner’s writing as a demand for the Jews to assimilate and become German. In 1935 Schoenberg said:
Wagner, perhaps not sure of his own pure Aryan blood, gave Jewry a chance: ‘Out of the ghetto!’ he proclaimed, and asked Jews to become human, which included the promise of having the same rights on German mental culture, the promise of being considered like true citizens.
But it was not the destiny of the Jews to develop like Wagner desired. It was not our destiny to disappear, to meld and assimilate with Germans or any other people. ... We had to remain Jews and, always when Jewry was endangered by assimilation, Providence ... made the new-starting racial anti-Semitism her instrument.
Schoenberg: Mailam Reception, March 29, 1935 in Style and Idea (Ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black), p.503 [note: this is not the Dika Newlin edition of the same title]
The reference to the final paragraph of Wagner’s Judaism in Music is unmistakable. Even more remarkably insightful is Schoenberg’s observation about the “new-starting racial anti-Semitism” of the National Socialist regime. This is consistent with modern academic historians who regard it to have been unprecedented, and violently original in its catastrophic rupture from the past.
Like Schoenberg, Theodor Herzl (the founder of Zionism), had believed in the path of assimilation for much of his life—right down to the disappearance of the Jewish identity into Gentile culture. If you are going to call Wagner a Nazi for having advocated assimilationist ideas, you would have to do the same for Herzl, a committed lifelong Wagnerian, who likened the founding of Palestine-Israel to a grand staging of Wagnerian opera.
Compare the interpretations by Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Rose, Joachim Fest and Saul Friedländer with that of Köhler’s:
... the Jews must be made to understand that they have no right to exist and must therefore assist in the task of their own destruction (Untergang), then thus purged they will be able to return to the Bosom of Mother Nature and be born again.
Köhler p.88
Those who have read my analysis of the final paragraph of Judaism in Music will know that Wagner talks about the Jews going through the pain of “rebirth through self-destruction” together “just as we do” (wie uns):
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| “Selbstvernichtung” Wagner writes “self-annihilation” not annihilation of one side by the other From original 1869 printing of Judaism in Music |
That is, both Jew and Gentile alike are to undergo the pain and suffering of the Untergang (apocalyptic revelation of self-discovery). The pain of self-annihilation is something the Jews must suffer “like us” (wie uns):
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| “wie uns” “just like us” the Jews must likewise suffer through “sweat, need [Noth], anguish [Ängste], and a surfeit [Fülle] of pain and suffering” From original 1869 printing of Judaism in Music |
Through communal suffering both become united in one collective humanity (“Gemeinschaftlich mit uns Mensch werden”) divested of ethnic and class antagonisms:
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| “Gemeinschaftlich mit uns Mensch werden” “collectively become human with us” From original 1869 printing of Judaism in Music |
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| Gemeinschaftlich means “jointly”, “collectively” or “communally” Wagner wants Jew and Gentile to be part of a joint community of a commonly united humanity From original 1869 printing of Judaism in Music |
The result is that Gentile and Jew alike must “jointly” (gemeinschaftlich) regenerate their lost humanity to become “united and undifferentiated”. For not only have the persecuted become degraded, but the persecutor too has become dehumanised by succumbing to rapacious bestiality (räuberlicher Rohheit):
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| Wagner wrote of “the rapacious bestiality [räuberlicher Rohheit] of the Christian-Germanic tyrants [Gewalthaber] towards the sons of Israel” in Judaism in Music |
Both sides are equally in need of regeneration of a lost humanity. It is part of Wagner’s regenerationist socialism. Only through regeneration to humanity will the two sides become “united and undifferentiated”:
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| thus will we be united and undifferentiated “so sind wir einig und ununterschieden” From original 1869 printing of Judaism in Music |
How or why the Jews should volunteer to participate in their own literal physical annihilation by the Germans to be reborn in “the Bosom of Mother Nature” was left entirely obscure by Köhler. Wagner actually writes “self-annihilation”—not annihilation of one side by the other. The words “Bosom of Mother Nature” never occur in Wagner’s essay, being an allusion to Schiller’s Ode to Joy, as used in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (“An den Brüsten der Natur”). It seems a subplot to the conspiracy involved “Beethoven’s Hitler”, where Beethoven joined Wagner to be handed to the National Socialists on a silver platter as another “prophet” of National Socialism.
Köhler went on to forcibly interpret everything in Wagner’s Ring according to this exterminationist interpretation:
In Wagner’s vicious essay the intensification of the conflict between Jewishness and Germanness laid out in the Ring of the Nibelung virtually assumes the character of an incitement to action.
The Ring is never mentioned in the essay. Nor does Wagner ever suggest that The Ring is a conflict between Jews and Germans. In any case, Wagner completely and utterly annihilates the warmongering Germanic gods and their dominion over man through an apocalyptic Untergang in The Ring.
This was the precise moment the unsupported leap to the conclusion that “the aliens abducted me” occurred. Prior to this moment, the bibliographic citations to sections of Judaism in Music (albeit in the incorrect edition of Wagner’s complete works) came thick and fast (like the shopping dockets, pictures of the dent in the car etc). Suddenly, when the big punchline hit, all bibliographic citations abruptly vanished into thin air as Köhler brazenly proclaimed:
This was the precise moment the unsupported leap to the conclusion that “the aliens abducted me” occurred. Prior to this moment, the bibliographic citations to sections of Judaism in Music (albeit in the incorrect edition of Wagner’s complete works) came thick and fast (like the shopping dockets, pictures of the dent in the car etc). Suddenly, when the big punchline hit, all bibliographic citations abruptly vanished into thin air as Köhler brazenly proclaimed:
‘Never mind’ threatens Wagner, ‘that only one thing can lift the curse that lies upon you, the way the curse was lifted from Ahasverus—by annihilation!’ [no supportive citation] This bald statement, breathtaking in its ruthlessness, marks a new, violent phase in the development of anti-Semitism in German [no supportive citation]. The most cold-blooded spokesman of this phase in the century to come knew every word of Wagner’s essay [no supportive citation].
Köhler p.88 (my bold emphasis)
In fact, the great pity is that Hitler did not know “every word of Wagner’s essay” because, if he had, Hitler might have striven to fulfil Wagner’s call in the essay for the “gemeinschaftliche Assimilation” (collective assimilation) of the Jews into German society, where both would become “united and undifferentiated”.
This leaves us all the more puzzled as to where Köhler got his information that Hitler “knew every word of Wagner’s essay”. Joachim Köhler’s assertion flew in the face of the conclusions of historian, Sir Richard J. Evans, who states that:
Despite the grand certitude of his pronouncements about Wagner, Köhler offered no primary source citation to support his claim that Hitler “knew every word of Wagner’s essay”, because no evidence exists that Hitler even knew of its existence, nor that he had read it, let alone that he knew even a single word of it. The less the evidence the greater the certitude. Today, Köhler admits as much as he now writes:
There is simply no evidence to support the thesis that National Socialist racial ideology was based on just one word written by a nineteenth-century opera composer. No evidence exists that any of the leading members of the Party even knew of Wagner’s essay, let alone that they had read the essay in question, let alone having unanimously interpreted it as a call for the annihilation of the Jews, and let alone having collectively acted on this interpretation. Professor Saul Friedländer says that neither Hitler nor any other of the high ranking National Socialist party members ever once quoted from Wagner’s Judaism in Music. No record exists of either Hitler ever having read the essay, nor does a copy of it exist in his library (see Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life). Neither Hitler nor any other high ranking Party officials ever stated that Party policy was based on this passage. Whereas Henry Ford (his Der internationale Jude, Band I-II—The International Jew) is listed, not a single one of Wagner’s writings even so much as makes it onto the National Socialist party recommended reading list:
This leaves us all the more puzzled as to where Köhler got his information that Hitler “knew every word of Wagner’s essay”. Joachim Köhler’s assertion flew in the face of the conclusions of historian, Sir Richard J. Evans, who states that:
[Wagner’s] influence on Hitler has often been exaggerated. Hitler never referred to Wagner as a source of his own antisemitism, and there is no evidence that he actually read any of Wagner’s writings.
Evans: The Third Reich in Power (my emphasis)
Despite the grand certitude of his pronouncements about Wagner, Köhler offered no primary source citation to support his claim that Hitler “knew every word of Wagner’s essay”, because no evidence exists that Hitler even knew of its existence, nor that he had read it, let alone that he knew even a single word of it. The less the evidence the greater the certitude. Today, Köhler admits as much as he now writes:
Wagner’s vision of the future culminates in the notion that the Jews reach true liberty–called redemption–only if they become free human beings released from their chains. This can succeed collectively only with the non-Jews, who must pass through the same process of revolutionary conquest of the self. Wagner here adopts Marx’s thinking and summarises Marx in his words addressed to the Jews: ‘take part […] in this work of redemption, this rebirth through self-destruction’ [nehmt … an diesem, durch Selbstvernichtung wiedergebärenden Erlösungswerk teil], then we shall be ‘united and indistinguishable’ [‘united and undifferentiated’ in my own translation]. ... it sounds like an incitement to mass suicide and the Holocaust, but it means something completely different. The ‘work of redemption’, the ‘rebirth through self-destruction’, as already in Marx’s case, is a declaration of Hegel’s ‘Aufhebung’ or ‘overcoming’. The modern world calls it ‘revolution’.
Köhler: The Wagner Journal (8, 2, 43–51)
There is simply no evidence to support the thesis that National Socialist racial ideology was based on just one word written by a nineteenth-century opera composer. No evidence exists that any of the leading members of the Party even knew of Wagner’s essay, let alone that they had read the essay in question, let alone having unanimously interpreted it as a call for the annihilation of the Jews, and let alone having collectively acted on this interpretation. Professor Saul Friedländer says that neither Hitler nor any other of the high ranking National Socialist party members ever once quoted from Wagner’s Judaism in Music. No record exists of either Hitler ever having read the essay, nor does a copy of it exist in his library (see Hitler’s Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life). Neither Hitler nor any other high ranking Party officials ever stated that Party policy was based on this passage. Whereas Henry Ford (his Der internationale Jude, Band I-II—The International Jew) is listed, not a single one of Wagner’s writings even so much as makes it onto the National Socialist party recommended reading list:
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| “Bücher, die jeder Nationalsozialist kennen muß” “Books that every National Socialist must get to know” Henry Ford makes the list but not Wagner. There are stronger grounds to ban Ford motor vehicles in Israel than Wagner operas |
Nothing made sense from the standpoint of Köhler’s theory, in which far from being a messy “polycratic jungle”, the entire National Socialist state functioned smoothly and harmoniously around operatic principles religiously based on this essay. If the National Socialists really unanimously agreed that Wagner was preaching anything so radical here, why is it that they all act as though Wagner’s essay on the Jews never existed? The reason becomes obvious when you actually read the essay with its unequivocal call for “assimilation”. Worse still, Wagner conceded the need for the Jews to have their own state: Zionism. None of this would have been considered remotely ideologically acceptable to the party.
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| Wagner accepted the need for the Jews to have their own “Jerusalemic realm” |
The theory that Wagner was single-handedly responsible for radical politicization of anti-Semitism simply proves baseless. For the Social Democrat, Eugen Dühring, was the progenitor of a theory placing an original racial left-wing anti-Semite at the centre of his thought during Wagner’s own time. In 1881, Dühring wrote a vicious racially anti-Semitic essay calling upon the German “to eradicate the parasitic races, just as one would eradicate poisonous snakes and wild predators”. Wagner, like Marx and Engels, also refused point blank to have anything to do with Dühring’s theory that systematised anti-Semitism into a socialism of fools. Dühring and Wagner were immensely hostile to each other. Dühring later wrote:
Herr Wagner seems to think he had attained the art, mediated through Wagner Societies and patronage certificates, of redeeming the Jews from themselves—something even Christ not once managed to achieve. Yes, Herr Wagner, who imagined himself a kind of universal reformer wanted thereby to collect another tax from the Jews. The truth shorn of deception is that Herr Wagner was unable to even redeem himself of the Jews.
No less a historian than Professor Saul Friedländer agrees that the reason Judaism in Music is never mentioned by any leading Party member because the liberal assimilationist ideas in there would have been regarded as totally “unacceptable”. Nor do modern neo-Nazi websites do anything to promote Wagner’s essay, whereas they gleefully promote Luther’s writings on the Jews. That is exactly how Dühring viewed Wagner’s essay on the Jews—as totally unacceptable—and Dühring seethed with anger at Wagner for his idea that there could be “redemption” for the Jews that would make Jew and Gentile “united and undifferentiated”.
As for Wagner’s response to Dühring, Cosima records that Wagner dismissed Dühring’s writings as being “appalling” (ersetzlich). On another occasion, she records that Wagner was utterly “horrified” to find out that a visitor was a “Dühringianer”. There is thus strong evidence that Wagner rejected extreme doctrines elevating racially based anti-Semitism of Dühring’s kind to ideological centrality, whether they came from the left like Dühring, or, as we shall later see, from the völkisch right. For, in the wake of 1871, both anti-Semitism and German nationalism started to be abandoned as left-wing causes as they mutated into right-wing causes.
As for Wagner’s response to Dühring, Cosima records that Wagner dismissed Dühring’s writings as being “appalling” (ersetzlich). On another occasion, she records that Wagner was utterly “horrified” to find out that a visitor was a “Dühringianer”. There is thus strong evidence that Wagner rejected extreme doctrines elevating racially based anti-Semitism of Dühring’s kind to ideological centrality, whether they came from the left like Dühring, or, as we shall later see, from the völkisch right. For, in the wake of 1871, both anti-Semitism and German nationalism started to be abandoned as left-wing causes as they mutated into right-wing causes.
Wagner Rejects Right-Wing
Völkisch Anti-Semitism in “Know Thyself”
Another key quote that Köhler pulled out to back up his polemical distortion of Judaism in Music is from Know Thyself, where Wagner calls the Jews “the plastic daemon of the decline of humanity” (der plastische Dämon des Verfalles Menschheits). Professor Friedländer tells us this was the only Wagner ever quoted by a major National Socialist figure: by Goebbels in a 1933 speech (Friedländer p167). This is also the only Wagner quote found in Daniel Goldhagen’s notorious and widely criticised book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners. Despite this fact, Köhler wrung his interpretation principally out of Judaism in Music.
However, there are strong grounds for reading Know Thyself as a repudiation of right-wing völkisch anti-Semitism. In the essay, Wagner rejects the very existence of racially pure Germans, even suggesting that such a concept is “delusory”:
When Wagner talks about the regeneration of Pure Humanity (regenerationism), he always means the bottom-up regeneration of a grassroots socialist movement, reflecting the influence of Bakunin’s anarchistic socialism. In discussing Mikhail Bakunin in his autobiography, Wagner talks about the regeneration of lost humanity by “Communism”, which is not a violently imposed top-down Marxist-Leninist statist variety, but regenerated from bottom-up:
Furthermore, Wagner actually says in Know Thyself:
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 ourselves 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.
Know Thyself: Bayreuther Blätter, 1881 My emphasis. My translation.
When Wagner talks about the regeneration of Pure Humanity (regenerationism), he always means the bottom-up regeneration of a grassroots socialist movement, reflecting the influence of Bakunin’s anarchistic socialism. In discussing Mikhail Bakunin in his autobiography, Wagner talks about the regeneration of lost humanity by “Communism”, which is not a violently imposed top-down Marxist-Leninist statist variety, but regenerated from bottom-up:
[Bakunin] had preached Communism there, and had now returned to the frontiers of the Slavic world through France and Germany, from which he expected the salvation of the regeneration of humanity from the deepest deprivation by civilization.Second part: 1842-1850 Wagner My Life, 399[Bakunin] hatte dort den Kommunismus gepredigt und war über Frankreich und Deutschland nun wieder an die Grenzen der slawischen Welt zurückgekehrt, von welcher er, ihrer mindesten Verdorbenheit durch die Zivilisation wegen, das Heil der Regeneration der Menschheit erwartete.Zweiter Teil: 1842-1850 Wagner-Leben, 399
Wagner further says in Know Thyself that only the Jews were pure blooded, unlike the Germans who could scarcely even be deemed a “race” at all, being complete mongrels. It is a position that is the diametric opposite of the National Socialist view on race. It recalls the fact that his one-time close friend, Nietzsche, once called Wagner “the antidote against everything German par excellence” (Ecce Homo, III 6). Indeed, Cosima quotes Wagner as saying on the 2nd February 1880:
Where are there Germans left anywhere? The heroic breeds all disappeared during folk-migrations leaving only philistines behind. . . The French remain the Gods and Masters of the world.
From Cosima’s Diary
Furthermore, Wagner actually says in Know Thyself:
What is not recognised is attacked, and we thereby attack ourselves, supposing that the Other had attacked us. Who does not experience this again when, with that teaching in mind [know thyself] he looks upon the current movement against the Jews?
Know Thyself, 1881
Wagner is paraphrasing Schopenhauer who said that to attack another is to attack oneself. Schopenhauer says that “the inflicter of suffering and the sufferer are one” (The World as Will and Representation Book IV). Thus to attack the Jews is to attack oneself. Here Wagner is referring to the early Christian völkisch right-wing anti-Semitic movement, partly lead by pastor Adolf Stöcker, centred around Berlin between 1879–1881—a movement about which Wagner bemoaned to Cosima in her diary entry of 28th of October, 1881, that was trouble was afoot (das Schlimme sei bei der Anruf) when anti-Semitism was being taken up by Father Stöcker’s reactionary side of politics that stood “against progress” (gegen den Fortschritt), and that “the alien side [die Fremden] could not possibly understand that” (die Fremden könnten das gar nicht verstehen).
In Know Thyself, Wagner also says that “money is the daimon that chokes the innocence of mankind”. Here, too, the idea is the same as that paraphrased by Joachim Fest:
[Wagner] saw in the Jews, not a biological element, but rather a symptom of the illness of a materialist civilisation, where once it has been overcome, the Jews are freed of the daemonic power that drives civilisation to its decay.
For Wagner, capitalist decay is a symptom found not only in the Jews, but in the whole of civilisation itself. Wagner further tells us that if we were to overcome capitalism to regenerate a Pure Humanity “there would be no more Jews” (Know Thyself), or for that matter any racial difference dividing humanity. Of course, that is exactly the idea of Judaism in Music, as well as being indistinguishable in its thinking to that of Karl Marx’s essay, “On the Jewish Question”. If we go through the self-annihilation of the Untergang, then what is revealed is a Pure Humanity shorn of its primitive tribal and ethnic identities that tear apart humankind’s unity. This is why the Untergang is an apocalypse or revelation. It is the Utopian vision of a world where alienating ethnic and class antagonism has been replaced by identities that stand “united and undifferentiated”. This is why Professor Friedländer says that “in this interpretation of redemption there still echoes Wagner’s revolutionary ideals of his age”, because this is a variety of revolutionary anti-Semitism totally unrelated in its historical origins, and ideological roots to völksich anti-Semitism.
This helps us understand why on 22nd February 1881, Wagner wrote back to his Jewish friend Angelo Neumann—whom Wagner once triumphantly hailed as “the bravest of his race”. Neumann had been alarmed by rumours that the völkisch right had adopted Wagner as their “chief apostle”:
The upcoming article Wagner referred to was Know Thyself, where Wagner distances himself from the völkisch extreme right-wing anti-Semitic politics of Pastor Adolf Stöcker. It dates from two years before Wagner’s death in 1883, thus emphatically refuting any suggestion of any late swing to the völksich right-wing in Wagner’s views after the publication of Judaism in Music. As far as Wagner was concerned, the new völkisch anti-Semitism came from “the alien” (die Fremden) side of politics—the side that stood “against progress”—and he refused to have anything to do with it.
The Cosima diaries further confirm Wagner’s staunch refusal to associate with the early right-wing völkisch movement when völkisch anti-Semite, Bernard Förster (who married Nietzsche’s sister), approached Wagner to start an anti-Semitic newspaper:
In short, Wagner quite rudely told Förster point blank to shove himself and his anti-Semitic völkisch newspaper straight up Bismarck’s backside. Cosima also records in her diaries on the 6th of July, 1880, when a repeated plea was made (either by Cosima or by Bernard Förster) to get Wagner to sign a petition to Bismarck urging him to side against the Jews, the irritated Wagner refused to do so point blank: “I am meant to sign that?” he exclaimed out loud while ridiculing its “devotional expressions and the anxiously expressed concerns”.
What this shows is that far from being transcendentally definitive proof of the all-pervasive acceptance of authoritarianism, genocidal anti-Semitism, and militant imperialism amongst Germans after 1848, the case of Wagner is decisive evidence that the narrative of a German Sonderweg in the nineteenth century, paving the way for the inevitable rise and triumph of Hitler in the next, is a complete and utter myth. Germans like Wagner had not betrayed the ideals of 1848 and become supine in their blind acceptance of Bismarckian imperialist authoritarianism, but had remained active and politically engaged:
Disastrously, however, Cosima herself did support the völkisch far right, but she had to wait until Wagner was dead and out of the way before she could gleefully welcome them with open arms, and give the sanctification of the family name to their adoption of Wagner as their “chief apostle”, turning Bayreuth and Wagner Societies into centres where the völkisch far-right congregated, while laying the foundations of the Wagner myth for generations to come.
Flying in the face of doubts of historians, Köhler stated in his book that:
Köhler could not find a single citation to back up his claim that late nineteenth century Germany had become pregnant with exterminationist anti-Semitism, let alone that Hitler took orders for his genocidal Masterplan from someone else. There were multiple steps of unstable inference here, each of which posed immense difficulties that needed to be overcome before the conclusion of Köhler’s speculations could be accepted. No quote from Hitler acknowledging Wagner’s ideological influence exists, or as Sir Richard J. Evans states: “Hitler never referred to Wagner as a source of his own antisemitism”, so in its place came unstable inference presented as incontestable fact.
However, what Wagner does continue to say decades after the initial publication of Judaism in Music is:
The term “absorb” here clearly refers to the concept of assimilation, thus demonstrating that Wagner remained an assimilationist to the end. The closest that Köhler came to proffering evidence for his reading of Wagner as an exterminationist rather than an assimilationist, was through placing words from Chamberlain in Wagner’s mouth:
Although Wagner never met Chamberlain, Köhler assumed a priori that anything Chamberlain, Himmler, Goebbels, or Hitler says automatically reflects Wagner’s “real” views and that they can be quoted interchangeably. The end result was a circular argument that Wagner is a clone of Chamberlain because Chamberlain’s words can be placed in Wagner’s mouth to show they were saying the same thing. In actual fact even Chamberlain mocked exaggerated claims about Jewish conspiracies:
This is certainly not to defend Chamberlain in any way, but rather to demonstrate that Köhler is entirely mistaken to assume that words from Chamberlain or Hitler can be freely placed in Wagner’s mouth to “prove” they are saying the same thing. In other words, it impossible to establish the existence of a simple linear continuity between early right-wing völkisch movements, and later radicalised National Socialist völkisch ideology. Then given Wagner’s outright rejection of the early völkisch movement, it is even harder to draw another simple straight line from Wagner to any form of völkisch anti-Semitism, let alone later radicalised forms of it. Between Wagner’s time and that of the 1920s-40s, historians feel that there are too many historical discontinuities to permit such “straight lines” to be drawn. For example, Sir Richard J. Evans writes:
Likewise, Peter Longerich also objects to the drawing of “straight lines” where there are only abrupt discontinuities:
It is just impossible to draw simplistic “straight lines” leading from National Socialism backwards to late nineteenth-century völkisch movements that arose in the Bismarckian Second Empire. It is an ignorant and simplistic reading of history that imagines neat “straight lines” where historians find only catastrophic discontinuities. It is harder to extend that line back to earlier left-wing anti-Semitism of the likes of Marx, Wagner, Feuerbach, Proudhon, Heine, and Börne, especially when Wagner refused point blank to have anything to do with right-wing völksich anti-Semitism because it came from the “wrong” side of politics.
Another good illustration of how hard it is to draw simple “straight lines” of influence is the example of Dietrich Eckhart, Hitler’s early völkisch mentor, who at the end of his life said that his erstwhile disciple had gone stark raving mad:
Köhler’s favourite sport was Jew spotting in Wagner’s works. For instance, he assumed Beckmesser is a Jew. Köhler begged the question by failing to first present a convincing case for why anyone should assume that Beckmesser is a Jew. Nowhere in the ten volumes of his collected works, and dozens more volumes of his letters, does Wagner once say Beckmesser is Jewish. Nor does Köhler present any historical evidence that the role of Stadtschreiber (town clerk) was ever given to a Jew in Reformation Germany, centuries before the emancipation of the Jews, as is often claimed, or that anybody in Wagner’s time interpreted Beckmesser as being Jewish.
The best that Köhler could come up with was this, based on the claim made by Gottfried Wagner that the only thing Hitler talks about in Mein Kampf is opera:
As historian Peter Viereck objected:
The word Stadtschreiber never once occurs in Mein Kampf. What Hitler writes is: “almost every clerk [Schreiber] was a Jew and almost every Jew a clerk” (Fast jeder Schreiber ein Jude und jeder Jude ein Schreiber). Hitler is talking about Jewish clerks allegedly shirking service on the front during World War One. No matter how carefully one searches through Mein Kampf, neither the name Beckmesser nor the Meistersinger is mentioned anywhere.
In his essay, “The Most German of All Operas” - Die Meistersinger through the Lens of the Third Reich, David B. Dennis asks the question:
Dennis conducted an astonishingly exhaustive survey of material to answer this question:
After all of that, Dennis concludes that:
If you are going to argue that if Hitler enjoyed Wagner that therefore all his villains must be Jews, you would have to do the same for Shakespeare. Are all Shakespeare villains, not just Shylock, caricatures of Jews? After all, why else would Hitler have admired Shakespeare? Hitler also liked Disney animations, a favourite being Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and of which he owned a copy for personal viewing. Does that mean Snow White is Aryan, and the dwarves caricatures of Jews? Or that Hitler was trying to transform the world into a Disney animation?
Despite being a putative target of the parody, not even Eduard Hanslick, a right-wing Jew, regarded Beckmesser an anti-Semitic caricature. Hanslick notes that:
In a previous post, I have argued that this Reformation era setting work contains a veiled anti-Catholic message. Beckmesser may even be a caricature of Catholic authoritarianism and dogmatism. In private, Wagner often expressed hostility towards Catholicism, but felt hampered from publicly expressing himself for fear of offending his Catholic father-in-law, Franz Liszt. Beckmesser’s song has been demonstrated to be a parody of Italian coloratura operatic conventions (Egon Voss: Studien zur Instrumentation Richard Wagners, 1970). Wagner suggests to Cosima on 17th March 1873 that in Beckmesser “with his pedantry worthy of honour, I thought of the Germans in their true essence” (Cosimas Tagebuch). Wagner is clearly ridiculing the Germans, with Beckmesser as a caricature of the German tendency to be a pedantic stickler to the rules.
Mahler did not write The Ring. The closest thing that Wagner had to say is recorded by Cosima on 18th November 1882:
This relates to the passage in Heldentum und Christentum (1881) where Wagner paraphrases Gobineau’s ideas:
It is Wagner’s summary of Gobineau’s world view, one that the late Wagner then proceeds to thoroughly condemn as being “a totally immoral world-order” (eine schlechthin unmoralische Weltordnung):
This essay is often cited as evidence of support for Gobineau, when in actual fact it is Wagner’s counterargument against him. It is the same Wagner who talks about the Untergang of the races in Judaism in Music, as he annihilates the Germanic Gods of War, to whom humanity is enslaved, in a Götterdämmerung. Wagner said to Cosima on the 17th of December, 1881:
This is just a reference to the same words published in Wagner’s Heldentum und Christentum:
Note that the blood of Christ transcends race, and belongs neither “to the white or any other race”. To suggest otherwise is an “outrage”. Yet this does not stop polemicists from claiming this passage expresses the idea of the “Aryan Jesus”, a reading that is unsustainable based on the original text.
Wagner is condemning Gobineau’s racism as an “outrage” and “totally immoral world-order”. Wagner cites Schopenhauer’s idea that what unites all human beings is the capacity for awareness of suffering that leads to compassion. That is also the central idea of the Parsifal, which Wagner completed the following year in 1882. Parsifal is therefore about the hope of a unified humanity (die Einheit der menschlichen Gattung) joined by compassion.
Götterdämmerung is about the annihilation of racial differences in expectation of a Utopian ethnic union of all humanity after release from servitude to the theocratic order of the Gods of War. Namely that of:
It is made clear that the disappearance of races will occur through intermixing (Vermischung):
Blind Freddy should be able to see that this word says “intermixing”. The contrast with National Socialist racial ideological fight again miscegenation could not be starker:
In presenting a völkisch interpretation of Wagner, Köhler consistently presented us with an infinitely more radically nazified interpretation of Wagner than the National Socialists dreamt of in their wildest dreams. Köhler’s misguided polemic inadvertently turned him into their latter-day propagandist spokesperson.
Nor did Köhler try to present even “the slightest solid evidence” for his speculations, instead substituting merely saying so, albeit with blindingly emotional gusto.
This helps us understand why on 22nd February 1881, Wagner wrote back to his Jewish friend Angelo Neumann—whom Wagner once triumphantly hailed as “the bravest of his race”. Neumann had been alarmed by rumours that the völkisch right had adopted Wagner as their “chief apostle”:
A strong anti-Semitic party in Berlin had loudly proclaimed Wagner as their chief apostle; which moved George Davidsohn (a well-known political writer and friend of Wagner) to write, calling my attention to the risk we ran in our Berlin enterprises if the rumour spread that Wagner was a member of this society. I wrote to Mme. Cosima asking if this were true, and received the following reply from Richard Wagner. Dear Friend and Benefactor:-
Nothing is further from my thoughts than this same “Anti-Semitic” movement; see the Bayreuth papers for my article which will prove this so conclusively that people of sense will find it impossible to connect me with the cause.
Richard Wagner
Bayreuth, February, 1881.
From Personal Recollections of Wagner by Angelo Neumann. The original German version: Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner.
The upcoming article Wagner referred to was Know Thyself, where Wagner distances himself from the völkisch extreme right-wing anti-Semitic politics of Pastor Adolf Stöcker. It dates from two years before Wagner’s death in 1883, thus emphatically refuting any suggestion of any late swing to the völksich right-wing in Wagner’s views after the publication of Judaism in Music. As far as Wagner was concerned, the new völkisch anti-Semitism came from “the alien” (die Fremden) side of politics—the side that stood “against progress”—and he refused to have anything to do with it.
The Cosima diaries further confirm Wagner’s staunch refusal to associate with the early right-wing völkisch movement when völkisch anti-Semite, Bernard Förster (who married Nietzsche’s sister), approached Wagner to start an anti-Semitic newspaper:
Dr Förster sent us an invitation for the founding of an anti-Semitic newspaper. R[ichard] recalled that had written to him from Naples:
“You should take a look to see if you fit in Prince Bismarck’s trash [Kram], and it looks like you fit into the trash, because you’ve adopted his entire programme. It looks like we Bayreuthers with our ideals are going to be very isolated”.
Dr. Förster schickte ihn einen Aufruf zur Gründung einer anti-semitischen Zeitung. R erzählt, daß er von Neapel aus ihm geschrieben zu haben:
»Sehen Sie, ob Sie in Fürst Bismarcks Kram passen und Sie scheinen in den Kram zu passen«, —und Sie scheinen in den Kram zu passen, denn Sie adoptieren sein ganzes Programm. »Wir Bayreuther mit unseren Ideen werden sehr einsam bleiben”.«
Cosima Tagebuch: p672 Sonnenabend 22ten Januar 1881. My own translation.
In short, Wagner quite rudely told Förster point blank to shove himself and his anti-Semitic völkisch newspaper straight up Bismarck’s backside. Cosima also records in her diaries on the 6th of July, 1880, when a repeated plea was made (either by Cosima or by Bernard Förster) to get Wagner to sign a petition to Bismarck urging him to side against the Jews, the irritated Wagner refused to do so point blank: “I am meant to sign that?” he exclaimed out loud while ridiculing its “devotional expressions and the anxiously expressed concerns”.
What this shows is that far from being transcendentally definitive proof of the all-pervasive acceptance of authoritarianism, genocidal anti-Semitism, and militant imperialism amongst Germans after 1848, the case of Wagner is decisive evidence that the narrative of a German Sonderweg in the nineteenth century, paving the way for the inevitable rise and triumph of Hitler in the next, is a complete and utter myth. Germans like Wagner had not betrayed the ideals of 1848 and become supine in their blind acceptance of Bismarckian imperialist authoritarianism, but had remained active and politically engaged:
A few decades ago, historians searching for the longer-term roots of Nazism’s theory and practice looked to the ruptures and discontinuities in German history: the failed revolution of 1848; the blockage of democratic politics after unification in 1871; the continued dominance of aristocratic elites over a socially and politically supine middle class; the entrenched power of the traditionally authoritarian and belligerent Prussian military tradition—in short, everything, they argued, that had come by the outbreak of the First World War to distinguish Germany from other major European powers and set it on a ‘special path’ [Sonderweg] to modernity that ended not in the creation of a democratic political system ..., but in the rise and triumph of the Third Reich.
Such arguments were discredited by the 1990s, as it became clear that imperial Germany’s middle classes had been far from supine, its political culture was active and engaged... The 1848 revolution was shown to have transformed German political culture, not to have restored the old regime. ... [T]here was no domestic ‘special path’ [Sonderweg] from unification to the rise of the Third Reich...
Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory 2. Imagining Empire. My emphasis.
Disastrously, however, Cosima herself did support the völkisch far right, but she had to wait until Wagner was dead and out of the way before she could gleefully welcome them with open arms, and give the sanctification of the family name to their adoption of Wagner as their “chief apostle”, turning Bayreuth and Wagner Societies into centres where the völkisch far-right congregated, while laying the foundations of the Wagner myth for generations to come.
This mythical völkisch Wagner, created after his death, is only now being exposed for the lie that it is. In an excellent paraphrase of the landmark study by Professor Saul Friedländer (whose parents were murdered by the regime), Nazi Germany and the Jews, Daniel Fraenkel writes on the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial website:
Friedländer emphasizes in this context the special role played by the Bayreuth circle, though not by Richard Wagner himself, in the transmutation of the struggle against the Jews into “the central theme of world history” (p. 89). According to his analysis, Wagner’s anti-Semitism ... had a profoundly ambivalent quality insofar as no fanatical anti-Semite would have allowed the presence of such close Jewish workers amongst his inner entourage.
Daniel Fraenkel: review of Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vol.1: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (New York: Harper Collins, 1997).
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| Saul Friedländer’s landmark study of the Shoah is the second largest after Raul Hilberg’s. Unlike Hilberg, Friedländer actively debunks Nazi opera conspiracy theories, rather than merely disdainfully ignoring them. |
[Hitler’s] campaign to exterminate the Jews was part of his love for Wagner. He had to hate the Jews because he loved the man who hated them.
Köhler, p. 293
Köhler could not find a single citation to back up his claim that late nineteenth century Germany had become pregnant with exterminationist anti-Semitism, let alone that Hitler took orders for his genocidal Masterplan from someone else. There were multiple steps of unstable inference here, each of which posed immense difficulties that needed to be overcome before the conclusion of Köhler’s speculations could be accepted. No quote from Hitler acknowledging Wagner’s ideological influence exists, or as Sir Richard J. Evans states: “Hitler never referred to Wagner as a source of his own antisemitism”, so in its place came unstable inference presented as incontestable fact.
However, what Wagner does continue to say decades after the initial publication of Judaism in Music is:
If ever I were to write again about the Jews I should say I have nothing against them, it is just that they descended on us Germans too soon, we were not yet stable enough to absorb them.
Cosima’s Diaries, 22 November 1878. My emphasis
The term “absorb” here clearly refers to the concept of assimilation, thus demonstrating that Wagner remained an assimilationist to the end. The closest that Köhler came to proffering evidence for his reading of Wagner as an exterminationist rather than an assimilationist, was through placing words from Chamberlain in Wagner’s mouth:
I hate the Jews and hate them and hate them! The Jews very existence is an offence against the divine laws of life.
Houston Chamberlain quoted in Köhler
Although Wagner never met Chamberlain, Köhler assumed a priori that anything Chamberlain, Himmler, Goebbels, or Hitler says automatically reflects Wagner’s “real” views and that they can be quoted interchangeably. The end result was a circular argument that Wagner is a clone of Chamberlain because Chamberlain’s words can be placed in Wagner’s mouth to show they were saying the same thing. In actual fact even Chamberlain mocked exaggerated claims about Jewish conspiracies:
... the Jew is alien to us, and consequently we to him, and no one will deny that this is to the detriment of our culture, yet I think that we are inclined to underestimate our own powers in this respect and, on the other hand to exaggerate the importance of the Jewish danger.
Chamberlain quoted in David Luhrssen: The Hammer of the Gods
This is certainly not to defend Chamberlain in any way, but rather to demonstrate that Köhler is entirely mistaken to assume that words from Chamberlain or Hitler can be freely placed in Wagner’s mouth to “prove” they are saying the same thing. In other words, it impossible to establish the existence of a simple linear continuity between early right-wing völkisch movements, and later radicalised National Socialist völkisch ideology. Then given Wagner’s outright rejection of the early völkisch movement, it is even harder to draw another simple straight line from Wagner to any form of völkisch anti-Semitism, let alone later radicalised forms of it. Between Wagner’s time and that of the 1920s-40s, historians feel that there are too many historical discontinuities to permit such “straight lines” to be drawn. For example, Sir Richard J. Evans writes:
Saul Friedländer...admitted he could not subscribe to Goldhagen’s thesis that German society was already permeated by antisemitism before 1933. It was ‘much too sweeping’, blurred crucial distinctions between different types and degrees of antisemitism, and ignored the effects of events such as the First World War, the collapse of the German Empire, and the world economic crisis of 1929-33, in radicalizing and spreading antisemitic views. As a political scientist, said Friedländer, Goldhagen ignored the discontinuities and changes in German history over the period in question.
Sir Richard J. Evans: Rereading German History, p.170 (my emphasis)
Likewise, Peter Longerich also objects to the drawing of “straight lines” where there are only abrupt discontinuities:
The line could be traced further within the right-wing, ethnic nationalist movement known as the ‘völkische Bewegung’ that formed after the turn of the century and was highly charged with anti-Semitic sentiments ... [A] picture could be painted of a virtually constant stream of radical anti-Semitic movements that led inexorably to the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis. ... However, this image of a clear, uninterrupted line of anti-Semitism in Germany is the result only of a superficial examination of history. It is important, too, to consider the political contexts in which such radically anti-Semitic movements developed. ... With the end of the First World War, however, the context in which the nationalist radical anti-Semitic movement was to operate changed fundamentally. These new conditions for a breakthrough in radical anti-Semitism in Germany are much more important than the anti-Semitic tradition that can be traced back to the early years of the Second Empire.
Longerich: Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, p.10. My emphasis
It is just impossible to draw simplistic “straight lines” leading from National Socialism backwards to late nineteenth-century völkisch movements that arose in the Bismarckian Second Empire. It is an ignorant and simplistic reading of history that imagines neat “straight lines” where historians find only catastrophic discontinuities. It is harder to extend that line back to earlier left-wing anti-Semitism of the likes of Marx, Wagner, Feuerbach, Proudhon, Heine, and Börne, especially when Wagner refused point blank to have anything to do with right-wing völksich anti-Semitism because it came from the “wrong” side of politics.
Another good illustration of how hard it is to draw simple “straight lines” of influence is the example of Dietrich Eckhart, Hitler’s early völkisch mentor, who at the end of his life said that his erstwhile disciple had gone stark raving mad:
Eckart apparently felt estranged from Hitler at the time of his death from heart failure in December 1923. It was ironic that this tireless promoter of Hitler as the German messiah came to feel that his protégé had developed delusions of grandeur. “The way Adolf is carrying on now goes beyond me. The man is plain crazy”, he said, complaining of the total identification of Hitler with the movement, whose existence beyond Hitler became increasingly incomprehensible.
Eckhart quote in David Luhrssen: The Hammer of the Gods, p 173.If you were going to assume that Wagner, Chamberlain, Eckhart, and Hitler are perfect clones between whom perfect “straight lines” of influence can be drawn to the point that they can be quoted interchangeably, what was there to stop anyone from just saying that Köhler was yet another clone and freely attributing Nazi quotes to him, thus “proving” he too was saying the same thing as all the rest of them? The crude methodology of insisting that you can draw imaginary “straight lines” with perfect certitude, precisely where no certitudes exist is too simple: all you have to do is just say it, and it all your wildest fantasies become incontestable truths. The moon is made of cheese, the tooth fairy exists, the earth is flat—and Nazi Satanists made UFOs in collaboration with opera loving aliens.
Jew Spotting and other
Character Assassinations
Köhler’s favourite sport was Jew spotting in Wagner’s works. For instance, he assumed Beckmesser is a Jew. Köhler begged the question by failing to first present a convincing case for why anyone should assume that Beckmesser is a Jew. Nowhere in the ten volumes of his collected works, and dozens more volumes of his letters, does Wagner once say Beckmesser is Jewish. Nor does Köhler present any historical evidence that the role of Stadtschreiber (town clerk) was ever given to a Jew in Reformation Germany, centuries before the emancipation of the Jews, as is often claimed, or that anybody in Wagner’s time interpreted Beckmesser as being Jewish.
The best that Köhler could come up with was this, based on the claim made by Gottfried Wagner that the only thing Hitler talks about in Mein Kampf is opera:
[Hitler] first put forward his racist interpretation of Wagner’s Meistersinger in the pages of Mein Kampf. Wagner, said Hitler, portrayed his Beckmesser as a pedantic town clerk; but in the First World War ‘almost every clerk [Schreiber] was a Jew and almost every Jew a clerk’ . . .
Köhler p.260
As historian Peter Viereck objected:
One book (by the rebel great-grandson Gottfried Wagner) even declares that there is not a single line in Mein Kampf that doesn’t derive from Wagner. Mein Kampf has major sources unconnected with Wagner, such as the lost war, German humiliation by Versailles, and the Free Corps of 1919-1920.
Viereck: Preface to 2006 edition of his 1941 book Metapolitics
The word Stadtschreiber never once occurs in Mein Kampf. What Hitler writes is: “almost every clerk [Schreiber] was a Jew and almost every Jew a clerk” (Fast jeder Schreiber ein Jude und jeder Jude ein Schreiber). Hitler is talking about Jewish clerks allegedly shirking service on the front during World War One. No matter how carefully one searches through Mein Kampf, neither the name Beckmesser nor the Meistersinger is mentioned anywhere.
In his essay, “The Most German of All Operas” - Die Meistersinger through the Lens of the Third Reich, David B. Dennis asks the question:
. . . did German audiences address the Beckmesser character as obviously anti-Jewish in the years leading up to the Holocaust? “The question demands a study of its own,” admits a supporter of this view. But thus far, none has appeared. . . . Is there proof that the opera itself was explicitly used to motivate actions against Jews, or, more broadly, to create a cultural atmosphere that encouraged people to do so?
Dennis conducted an astonishingly exhaustive survey of material to answer this question:
To determine if specific characters of Die Meistersinger inhabited the “anti-Semitic imagination” of Germans in and around the Nazi movement, I have studied a wide range of sources. These include all the material collected in secondary assessments of Wagner’s place in German political culture, especially that of the right wing, including Hartmut Zelinsky’s Richard Wagner: ein deutsches Thema (1976) and Berndt Wessling’s Bayreuth im Dritten Reich (1983). I have also examined every article on Die Meistersinger that appeared in Zeitschrift für Musik from 1933 to 1938 (its last edition); in Die Musik from 1933 to 1943; and in the Zeitschrift für Musikwissenschaft from 1918 through 1935. Outside music scholarship, I have checked journals such as the National-sozialistische Monatshefte (1935-41), Volk im Werden (1933-35), Volk und Rasse (1929-38), the Zeitschrift für deutsche Bildung (1925), and the Zeitschrift für deutsche Geistesgeschichte (1935-38). Besides serials I have assessed publications devoted to linking Wagner with anti-Semitic, volkish, and then Nazi culture, including Paulus Cassel, Der Judengott und Richard Wagner (1881); Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagner (1896); Karl Grunsky, Richard Wagner und die Juden (n.d.); Curt von Westernhagen, Richard Wagners Kampf gegen seelische Fremdherrschaft (1935); Peter Raabe, “Wagners Meistersinger und unsere Zeit” (1935); Karl Ganzer, Richard Wagner und das Judentum (1938); Richard Stock, Richard Wagner und die Stadt der Meistersinger (1938); and Johannes Bertram, Der Seher von Bayreuth (1943). Moreover, I have surveyed a wide range of literature considered central to German racist culture as a whole: Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Die Grundlagen des neunzehten Jahrhunderts (1899) and his correspondence with the intensely anti-Semitic Cosima Wagner; the works of Richard Benz; the racist theories of Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss and Hans F.K. Günther; Richard Eichenauer’s Musik und Rasse (1937); the collected articles and speeches of Joseph Geobbels; Alfed Rosenberg’s Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (1930) and his collected essays. Finally, I have inspected every major article on Wagner in general (numbering almost three hundred) and on Die Meistersinger in particular (over thirty) that appeared in both of the major Nazi newspapers, the Völkische Beobachter (1920-45) and Das Angriff (1927-33).
After all of that, Dennis concludes that:
This investigation has uncovered no evidence that Nazi cultural politicians, or volkish forbears and associates, referred in public discourse to the character of Sixtus Beckmesser as Jewish, or to his fate in Die Meistersinger as foreshadowing National Socialist policies against Jews.
If you are going to argue that if Hitler enjoyed Wagner that therefore all his villains must be Jews, you would have to do the same for Shakespeare. Are all Shakespeare villains, not just Shylock, caricatures of Jews? After all, why else would Hitler have admired Shakespeare? Hitler also liked Disney animations, a favourite being Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and of which he owned a copy for personal viewing. Does that mean Snow White is Aryan, and the dwarves caricatures of Jews? Or that Hitler was trying to transform the world into a Disney animation?
Despite being a putative target of the parody, not even Eduard Hanslick, a right-wing Jew, regarded Beckmesser an anti-Semitic caricature. Hanslick notes that:
[T]he Wagnerians have given him the nickname “Beckmesser” and proved that they do not understand their Meister and his lucid figure. The town clerk Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger is the sort with a sheer pettiness, clinging to pedantry, a Philistine without any sense of beauty or a spiritual horizon, a narrow-minded stickler to the last syllable. Every false emphasis, anything differing from the rule is denounced as a crime against art and believes that just the one single error is the end of the singer.
[D]ie Wagnerianer haben die Beiname “Beckmesser” aufgebracht und damit bewiesen, daß sie ihren Meister und dessen verständlichste Figur nicht verstehen. Der Stadtschreiber Beckmesser in den Meistersingern ist der Typus eines an lauter Kleinlichkeiten und Nebensachen hängenden Pedanten, Philister ohne Schönheitssinn und geistige Horizont, ein bornierter Silbenstecher, der jede falsche Betonung, jede von der Regel abweichende Note als ein Verbrechen an der Kunst ankreidet und mit der Addition dieser einzelnen Fehler den Sänger vernichtet zu haben glaubt.
Hanslick quoted in Dieter David Scholtz: Richard Wagners Antisemitismus (my translation)
In a previous post, I have argued that this Reformation era setting work contains a veiled anti-Catholic message. Beckmesser may even be a caricature of Catholic authoritarianism and dogmatism. In private, Wagner often expressed hostility towards Catholicism, but felt hampered from publicly expressing himself for fear of offending his Catholic father-in-law, Franz Liszt. Beckmesser’s song has been demonstrated to be a parody of Italian coloratura operatic conventions (Egon Voss: Studien zur Instrumentation Richard Wagners, 1970). Wagner suggests to Cosima on 17th March 1873 that in Beckmesser “with his pedantry worthy of honour, I thought of the Germans in their true essence” (Cosimas Tagebuch). Wagner is clearly ridiculing the Germans, with Beckmesser as a caricature of the German tendency to be a pedantic stickler to the rules.
Another example of Köhler’s Jew spotting was with the Nibelung dwarfs in The Ring. Once again Köhler failed to present evidence that Wagner, let alone the National Socialists, thought of the Nibelungs as being Jewish. The closest he could come is to quote Mahler—who had long converted to Catholicism (assimilated Jews were often prone to the odd anti-Semitic outburst):
Although I am certain that Wagner intended Mime to be a parody of a Jew, he cannot in all consciousness be allowed to exaggerate to such as degree as this.
Mahler did not write The Ring. The closest thing that Wagner had to say is recorded by Cosima on 18th November 1882:
Early in the day we went through the old hosts of the Nibelung by Richard from the aspect of the races: the gods the whites, the dwarfs the yellows, the blacks the Ethiopians, Loge the mixed bloods.
In der Frühe heute gingen wir die Gastalten des Richards des Nibelungen durch vom Gesichtpunkts der Rassen aus, die Götter, die weiß, die Zwerge, die Gelben, die Schwarzen die Ethiopier, Loge der métis.
This relates to the passage in Heldentum und Christentum (1881) where Wagner paraphrases Gobineau’s ideas:
Whereas the yellow races saw themselves as having originated from apes, the whites claimed to have originated from the gods and as being alone suited to domination.
It is Wagner’s summary of Gobineau’s world view, one that the late Wagner then proceeds to thoroughly condemn as being “a totally immoral world-order” (eine schlechthin unmoralische Weltordnung):
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| Wagner condemns Gobineau’s racist ideas as a “totally immoral world-order” From original printing of Heldentum und Christentum in the Bayreuther Blätter, 1881 |
This essay is often cited as evidence of support for Gobineau, when in actual fact it is Wagner’s counterargument against him. It is the same Wagner who talks about the Untergang of the races in Judaism in Music, as he annihilates the Germanic Gods of War, to whom humanity is enslaved, in a Götterdämmerung. Wagner said to Cosima on the 17th of December, 1881:
For the Germans, everything is a striving, a sad realisation for me, the essence present in them turns to me. One thing is certain, however: the races have played themselves out, as I have ventured to express as the effect of Christ’s blood.
Bei der Deutschen ist alles in Erstreben, eine traurige Einsicht für mich, der in an die noch vorhandenen Keime mich wende. Eines ist aber sicher, die Rassen haben ausgespielt, nun kann nur noch, wie ich es gewagt habe auszudrücken, das Blut Christi wirken.
My translation and bold emphasis.
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| Richard Wagner: supreme annihilator of the German Gods of war. “Wagner is the antidote against everything German par excellence” (Nietzsche: Ecce Homo III 6) |
This is just a reference to the same words published in Wagner’s Heldentum und Christentum:
The blood of the Saviour flowing from his head, from his wounds on the cross—who would commit such an outrage as to ask [frevelnd fragen] whether it might belong to the white or any other race? We should call that divine to approach the source, full of foreboding for what that which we referred to as constituting the unity of the human species, namely the capacity for conscious suffering.
Das Blut des Heilands, von seinem Haupte, aus seinen Wunden am Kreuze fliessend, - wer wollte frevelnd fragen, ob es der weissen oder welcher Race sonst angehörte? Wenn wir es göttlich nennen, so dürfte seinem Quelle ahnungsvoll einzig in dem, was wir als die Einheit der menschlichen Gattung ausmachend bezeichneten, zu nahen sein, nämlich in der Fähigkeit zu bewusstem Leiden.
My translation and emphasis
Note that the blood of Christ transcends race, and belongs neither “to the white or any other race”. To suggest otherwise is an “outrage”. Yet this does not stop polemicists from claiming this passage expresses the idea of the “Aryan Jesus”, a reading that is unsustainable based on the original text.
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| “die Einheit der menschlichen Gattung” “the unity of the human species” Taken from the original printing of Heldentum und Christentum, 1881 |
Wagner is condemning Gobineau’s racism as an “outrage” and “totally immoral world-order”. Wagner cites Schopenhauer’s idea that what unites all human beings is the capacity for awareness of suffering that leads to compassion. That is also the central idea of the Parsifal, which Wagner completed the following year in 1882. Parsifal is therefore about the hope of a unified humanity (die Einheit der menschlichen Gattung) joined by compassion.
Götterdämmerung is about the annihilation of racial differences in expectation of a Utopian ethnic union of all humanity after release from servitude to the theocratic order of the Gods of War. Namely that of:
. . . a possibility of the sameness of all people through the intermixing of ever similar growing races . . . a oneness only conceivable through a commonly agreed moral ground, just as we must think that the True Christianity calls us to carry out.
. . . eine mögliche Gleichheit aller, durch ihre Vermischung sich ähnlich gewordener Racen uns gewiss zunächst nicht einer ästethischen 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 Christenthum sie auszubilden uns berufen dünken muss.
Wagner: Heldentum und Christentum, 1881. My translation
“eine mögliche Gleichheit aller” (a possibility of the sameness of all people): Heldentum und Christentum, 1881
It is made clear that the disappearance of races will occur through intermixing (Vermischung):
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| “Vermischung”. Heldentum und Christentum, 1881 Wagner believed in the disappearance of racial difference through “intermixing” |
Blind Freddy should be able to see that this word says “intermixing”. The contrast with National Socialist racial ideological fight again miscegenation could not be starker:
[In Mein Kampf] Hitler had issued a vehement warning against miscegenation and against the danger for the racially pure that occurs through products of racial mixing. Himmler commented [handwritten marginalia in his copy of Mein Kampf]: “The potential for undoing racial mixing exists.”Again a quote from Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer:
Katrin Himmler and Michael Wildt: commentary in The Private Heinrich Himmler: Letters of a Mass Murderer (pp. 25-26). St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.
The Jew is a mongrel. He has hereditary traits of Aryans, Asians, Negroes and Mongols. In a mongrel, evil prevails. The only good he has is the white color. A proverb from the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands is: “The white come from God, and blacks come from God, but the mongrel is from the devil”.
Der Jude ist ein Mischling. Er hat Erbanlagen von Ariern, Asiaten, Negern und Mongolen. Bei einem Mischling herrscht das Böse vor. Das einzige Gute, das er hat, ist die weiße Farbe. Ein Sprichwort der Bewohner der Südseeinseln lautet: "Der Weiße ist von Gott, und der Schwarze ist von Gott. Der Mischling aber ist vom Teufel."
Reader letter from Erna listing, Gelsenkirchen, Oswaldstraße 8 published in Der Stürmer, January 1935
In presenting a völkisch interpretation of Wagner, Köhler consistently presented us with an infinitely more radically nazified interpretation of Wagner than the National Socialists dreamt of in their wildest dreams. Köhler’s misguided polemic inadvertently turned him into their latter-day propagandist spokesperson.
Sir Richard Evans summed up Köhler well:
Like many critics of Wagner, Köhler also assumes that the villains of the various music dramas, from Beckmesser to Amfortas, were intended by Wagner as portrayals of Jews, for which there does not appear to be the slightest solid evidence.
Richard J. Evans: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), pp. 149-150
Nor did Köhler try to present even “the slightest solid evidence” for his speculations, instead substituting merely saying so, albeit with blindingly emotional gusto.
Wagner Remained a Lifelong Socialist
Right-wing writers often evince a seething resentment over the tradition of the presentation of socialist interpretations of Wagner’s works, such as is found in the centenary Boulez-Chéreau Ring cycle. They consider this to be blasphemy, and a monstrous defilement of every value they have ever held dear. Nazi opera conspiracy theories can be read as a final convulsive reactionary effort to object to socialist interpretations in order to reclaim Wagner for the far-right. “Zurück vom Ring!” exclaimed Köhler, as he desperately made his last desperate effort to wrest Wagner back from his rightful place amid the radical political left.
Here is the predictable statement of perfect certitude that Köhler made about Wagner’s political views:
All the progressive humanistic ideas that have been ascribed to Wagner and have found their way into interpretations of the Ring are based on conceptual misunderstandings. By ‘democracy’, for instance, Wagner means an authoritarian state ruled by the elite [no supportive citation].
Once again, Köhler’s aliens strike, as all bibliographic citations mysteriously vanish into thin air. That is simply because Wagner never once came close to saying such a thing. Wagner never talked anywhere about “democracy” being an “authoritarian state-rule by the elite”. The very idea of democracy as an “authoritarian state ruled by the elite” seems contradictory. What Wagner actually said about democracy was this:
We insist upon the unconditional right of every natural-born subject, when of age, to a vote. The more needy he be, the more his right, and the more earnestly will he aid in keeping the laws which he himself assisted in framing and which, henceforth, are to protect him from any similar future state of need and misery.
Therefore let us abolish monarchy altogether as autocracy, i.e. sole-reigning, becomes impossible by the strong opposition of democracy, —the reign of the many.
From The Fatherland Union Paper, 1849.
Again on p.50 Köhler stated:
But he would never have stomached an elected parliament.
Köhler p.50
Why would Wagner have risked life and limb to support the pro-democracy movement of 1848 if he could “never have stomached an elected parliament”? Köhler seems to have been lost for an explanation, since Wagner never said anything of the like. Wagner’s actions in support of democracy, a red-blooded socialist revolutionary with musket in hand and grenades at the ready like a nineteenth-century Che Guevara, speak immeasurably louder than Köhler’s petulant prosecution. Köhler, who has never raised a finger to fight for democracy, makes such words up as it suits him from the cosy comfort of his armchair, and then puts them in Wagner’s mouth.
Köhler went on:
When he talks of ‘socialism’ he has in mind the art-loving masses whose lives find their culmination in attending the Bayreuth Festival.
Again, no citation required because we are to blindly accept the “Eternal Truth” of Köhler’s ufological level speculations because he said so.
It is true that the late Wagner becomes disaffected with violent revolution as a means of social change. Under the influence of the Buddhist influenced philosophy of Schopenhauer, Wagner becomes an animal rights campaigner, a vegetarian, and an even more staunch pacifist. Wagner continues to talk enthusiastically about socialism in his Schopenhauerian period. One example is Religion and Art—dating from 1880, three years before his death, and several decades after the Dresden uprisings:
The welfare of religious instruction has by contrast recently turned tentatively towards major workers’ unions, whose authority cannot be ignored by well wishing friends of humanity. Their real or perceived abuses in the area of the rightly existing state-based society. However, the guardians of the same must appear totally unjustifiable [ungestattbar]. Even that apparently most just demand, which so-called socialism raises against a society educated by our civilisation, and when considered carefully, brings the authority of this society immediately into question. In regard to this, it must appear to be impracticable to bring into motion . . . the legal resolution of what exists by law. The postulates of the socialists can be recognised in nothing other than the lack of clarity of what leads to incorrect settlements. The errors caused by the superlative reckoner of our civilisation are immediately recognisable. Still, one might even view . . . the present-day socialism as being a quite remarkable, seen from the side of our state society, as long as it and . . . vegetarians, animal rights activists, and moderationists, march in genuine and inner union.
Die Fürsorge religiöser Belehrung ist hiergegen neuester Zeit wirklich versuchsweise den großen Arbeiter-Vereinigungen zugewendet worden, deren Berechtigung wohlwollenden Freunden der Humanität nicht unbeachtet bleiben durfte, deren wirkliche oder vermeintliche Übergriffe in die Gebiete der zu Recht bestehenden Staatsgesellschaft den Hütern derselben aber durchaus ungestattbar erscheinen mußten. Jede, selbst die anscheinend gerechteste Anforderung, welche der sogenannte Sozialismus an die durch unsere Zivilisation ausgebildete Gesellschaft erheben möchte, stellt, genau erwogen, die Berechtigung dieser Gesellschaft sofort in Frage. In Rücksicht hierauf, und weil es untunlich erscheinen muß, die gesetzlich Anerkennung der gesetzlichen Auflösung des gesetzlich Bestehenden in Antrag zu bringen, können die Postulate der Sozialisten nichts anders als in einer Unklarheit sich zu erkennen geben, welche zu falschen Rechnungen führt, deren Fehler durch die ausgezeichneten Rechner unserer Zivilisation sofort nachgewiesen werden. Dennoch könnte man, und dies zwar aus starken inneren Gründen, selbst den heutigen Sozialismus als sehr beachtenswert von Seiten unserer staatlichen Gesellschaft ansehen, sobald er mit den drei zuvor in Betracht genommenen Verbindungen der Vegetarianer, der Tierschützer, und der Mäßigkeitspfleger, in eine wahrhaftige und innige Vereinigung träte.
My translation. P.240 Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Band X. My Emphasis
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| Towards the end of his life, Wagner still spoke highly favourably about socialism (“Sozialismus’) in blatant defiance of Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws. From Religion and Art, 1880 |
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| Wagner enthusiastically describes the socialism of his day as being “sehr beachtenswert” (quite remarkable) From Religion and Art, 1880 |
The language here is often deliberately murky because of the political ban on socialism in Germany during much of this period. Obscurity in this age was a defence against censorship. Despite this, the phrase “sehr beachtenswert” leaves us in no doubt as to Wagner’s positive outlook towards socialism. All this, right towards the end of his life in 1880. However, this is not the only example. The injustice of a legal system built merely to maintain the state of inequity between the Haves and Have-Nots is explored elsewhere in Know Thyself (1881):
Once again the text dates from very late in Wagner’s life (two years before his death). Wagner openly discusses the possibility that socialism (the “equal distribution of all property”) may be a viable solution to society’s ills. The ideas contained in these late passages reflect ideas that come from Proudhon’s thesis on property as well as Feuerbach’s ideas about socialism. Brian Magee gives us an excellent summary of Feuerbach:
The way of thinking in both passages from Wagner’s late years demonstrates that Wagner remained a liberal-minded socialist and pacifist right to the end. Wagner is someone who took up revolutionary activism in his younger years, only to later eschew violent social change, concerning himself with Buddhist inspired pacifism and animal rights. Eschewing armed political revolution hardly means that he made a “brazen volte-face in political outlook” to become a Nazi as Köhler alleged. However, Köhler wants to further follow in the footsteps of far-right German historian, Ernst Nolte, and accused Wagner of being both a communist as well as a fascist all at once, these being grossly conflated as being the “same thing”. On p.50 Köhler stated that at the time of the Dresden uprising in 1849:
Wagner’s attitude towards communism is rather complex and ambivalent. In actual fact, at the time of the Dresden uprising Wagner said this in The Fatherland Union Paper (1848):
What Wagner actually argued for at the time in this paper was for universal suffrage and democracy with a socialist vision of equitable society. That is, unlike Marx in his Communist Party Manifesto, also from 1848, Wagner’s official public position expressed in his own revolutionary pamphlet, first read on the 16th of June, 1848, a year before the 1849 Dresden uprising, was that of democratic socialism. Nonetheless, at other times, as we will later explore, Wagner did express profound sympathy for an abstract ideal of communism, but not always in a militant revolutionary or statist form violently imposed by intellectuals from top down but regenerated from the grassroots upwards (regenerationism). Keep in mind, however, that Karl Marx himself thought that revolution would pass first through a stage of democratic socialism before ultimately evolving into communism.
The next speculation that Köhler would have had us believe is that after risking his life to participate in the Dresden uprising to fight for democratic socialism, Wagner woke up one morning to find himself transformed into a fascist ogre. The only proof Köhler produced for what he called a “brazen volte-face in political outlook” was this statement from Cosima’s diary from 3rd June, 1878 (some three decades after the Dresden uprising):
Köhler wilfully altered the quotation so as to make Wagner say that he had “no objection if the socialists were ground into the dust”. Neither the word “dust” nor any reference to “grinding” occur anywhere in the original text. These words have been totally made up by Köhler, who tampers with quotes to support his speculation. Nor is this the only occasion where Köhler tampered with evidence to suit his needs.
Although not openly stated in the main text, on looking up the bibliography at the back of Köhler’s book, the phase placed in quote marks, as usual, turns out to come straight from Mein Kampf only made out to look like it is a direct quote from Wagner. This is what Wagner actually said about the relationship between communism and culture:
Once again, in his autobiography, Wagner states:
Ignoring every primary source of evidence, Köhler pushed the view that the only thing discussed in Mein Kampf is opera, on the assumption that this book was written by Wagner long after his death. Köhler even quoted words from another publication edited by Karl Grunsky 1924, some forty years after Wagner’s death, and then passed the words off as Wagner’s own:
The phrase “international Jewry” is another anachronistic term originating from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian hoax book published in 1903, some twenty years after Wagner’s death in 1883. The phrase “Judeo-Bolshevism” also represented hostile propaganda against the 1918-19 German Revolution that established Weimar democracy in an age where many leaders in the left-wing revolutionary side such as Rosa Luxemburg and Kurt Eisner were Jewish. Marx himself was from a part Jewish ethnic background.
The trouble is that no serious historian would ever claim that the National Socialist polemical slogan “Judeo-Bolshevism” had its origins in a nineteenth-century opera composer. Weimar era propagandists alleged that socialism—indeed any form of liberalism in general—constituted an international Jewish conspiracy, an unGerman and alien Other forcibly imposed upon them so as to rob Germans of their authentic right-wing identity. Even the democratic Weimar Republic was dubbed “the Jewish republic”.
The phrase “Jewish-Bolshevism” also played up fears that German revolutionary Bolsheviks would try to repeat what happened in the 1917 Russian Revolution and attempt to create a German Soviet Republic. Unfortunately, it was grossly anachronistic to read National Socialist propagandist slogans against the Russian Revolution and 1918-19 German Revolution into Wagner’s writings from 1848-1883. That could only be achieved through the assumption that Wagner and Hitler belong to one and the same epoch devoid of even the slightest of discontinuities separating them, thereby permitting the mergence of their identities into the singular chimeric figure of “WagnerHitler”.
When Wagner’s primary texts are examined critically, far from running an anachronistic polemic claiming that socialism and Weimar democracy were an alien Other (hence “Jewish”) to authentic German national identity, it can be demonstrated Wagner thought, just like Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, that as the Aufhebung of egoism, communism was the very apotheosis of true German national identity.
The Dolchstoßlegende (“stab in the back myth”) that emerged during the Weimar Republic is another political slogan that Köhler tried to wring a Wagnerian theme out of. The origins of the expression “stab in the back” is said to have been a journalistic invention first published either in mid-December 1918 by the nationalist newspaper Deutsche Tageszeitung or else in the Neuen Zürcher Zeitung 17th December, 1918 where it was stated as coming from a British general Sir Frederick Maurice (Lars Broder Keil: Deutsche Legenden: vom “Dolchstoss” und anderen Mythen der Geschichte). According to this idea, the German military remained undefeated. Most importantly, the Dolchstoßlegende never originated from Hitler, but predates his entry into the public sphere.
At the end of the First World War, Germany was severely running short of supplies. It would have proven impossible to maintain all-out modern warfare indefinitely against the Allies. Both soldiers on the front and people back home had had enough of it. Widespread strikes broke out, soldiers and sailors mutinied. Revolution was in the air, as socialists saw this as the beginning of the worldwide collapse of capitalism prophesied by Marx. The German Revolution of 1918-19 forced the abdication of the Kaiser and gave birth to Weimar democracy. Wagner’s democratic dream, crushed in 1849, had at last been realised in Germany.
Later, Hitler and the National Socialist counter-revolutionaries blamed Germany’s loss in the Great War on the revolutionary forces, rather than face the reality of the fact that catastrophic military defeat on the battlefield was inevitable. Rather than accepting they had been defeated in battle, the right claimed that the German forces on the front had only been forced to surrender because they had been “stabbed in the back” by the revolutionaries. Hitler and the National Socialists deluded themselves into thinking that Germany would have won the war, had it not been for the treacherous “stab in the back”.
Some of the leading political figures in the German Revolution of 1918-19 were Jewish. This gave rise to malicious right-wing propaganda about a conspiracy of “back-stabbing” Jewish Communists trying to take over Germany. The National Socialists liked to rant about a “Jewish-Bolshevik” plot of back-stabbing Jews. However, counter-revolutionaries came up with the slogan well before the National Socialist party ever existed:
The notion of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy cannot possibly have originated from Hitler, since like the Dolchstoßlegende, it predates his entry into politics. Of course, Köhler wants us to know that the notion of a “stab in the back” by “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspirators was originally coined by Hitler as a reference to the way Siegfried is killed in Götterdämmerung. Yet despite the total absence of evidence to this effect, Köhler would have us first believe that Hitler was the sole creator of the myth, and next, that because Hitler created it, that it, therefore, must be a Wagnerian metaphor. Köhler claimed that in Hitler’s view, the German Siegfried gets “stabbed in the back” by his allegedly Jewish Nibelung plotters. No evidence is provided to substantiate this wild speculation about the origins of the myth, or that Hitler ever interpreted the Dolchstoßlegende in such a Wagnerian light—naturally since absolutely no such evidence exists.
To see if there is any evidence that the “stab in the back” metaphor had Wagnerian origins I studied detailed accounts of the German Revolution and the Weimar Republic by Pierre Broué, Erberhard Kolb, Bernhard Fulda, Hans Mommsen, and Heinrich August Winkler. I also studied Hitler’s Mein Kampf and his Zweites Buch. I went through the major Hitler’s autobiographies by Joachim Fest, Sir Ian Kershaw (full two-volume edition) and John Toland. I went through books on the Holocaust by Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedländer, David Cesarani and Christopher Browning. I went through major biographies of Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, and Reinhard Heydrich. I found absolutely nothing about the “stab in the back” expression being originally conceived as a reference to anything in Wagner. This was just part of Köhler’s alien abduction fantasy. Köhler failed to provide even a single scrap of evidence to support his speculation—because no such evidence exists, except in Köhler’s wildest imagination. Once again Köhler’s interpretation of events represented a complete rewriting and falsification of history based on operatically based fantasy.
Clearly, this suggests that, quite on the contrary, the National Socialists thought of the Stab-in-the-Back metaphor as being Shakespearian rather than incontestably Wagnerian as Köhler alleged with his usual absolute certainty. It looks like the door is open for a polemicist to make good money peddle another tall tale about Shakespeare’s Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple, for there are fools aplenty out there of Shakespearean proportions who will believe anything you assure them is The Truth:
Köhler also claimed that the sword, Nothung, could only be a symbol of German militarist aggression in a way that is totally anachronistic. This Germania that Köhler ascribes to Wagner was a militaristic one as depicted in this 1914 German war propaganda image:
However, what he overlooked is that the “stab in the back” metaphor was equally used by the revolutionary left. According to Pierre Broué, in Die Kommunistische Internationale (no. 12, 30 July 1920 columns 2143-8), Paul Levi denounced the counter-revolutionary Kapp Putsch as “a crime” and “a stab in the back for the greatest action of the German proletariat”. Broué also gives an example of the revolutionary side using the sword metaphor:
That is, the Social Democrats had joined forces with the conservatives to prevent the formation of a Russian styled Soviet Republic in Germany. The revolutionaries called for the proletariat to rise up ‘sword in hand’ against the Social Democrats. There is good reason to think that this left-wing revolutionary use of the sword metaphor is closer to the spirit of Wagner’s Ring.
For a start, Wagner was a friend of the anarchist-socialist thinker, Michael Bakunin. Friedrich Nietzsche, a former disciple of Wagner, tells us that Wagner created Siegfried as a revolutionary hero:
Nietzsche probably got this information straight from Wagner himself. George Bernard Shaw uses the expression “Siegfried Bakunin” because Siegfried is the anarchistic destroyer of the theocratic order of l’ancien regime. When Siegfried shatters Wotan’s spear with his revolutionary sword, he shatters the symbol of old world bourgeois authority. Nietzsche goes on:
Siegfried is a young and idealistic anarchistic revolutionary hero. Just as counter-revolutionary forces crushed the 1848 revolution and the idealistic Frankfurt Parliament hardly sooner than they arose, so too is Siegfried “stabbed in the back” by the counter-revolutionary Hagen.
The German 1918-19 Revolution was the successor of the German 1848-49 Revolution that Richard Wagner participated in. Wagner’s Germania is actually Veit’s 1848 liberal Germania holding the sword of justice adorned with the olive branch of peace. There is good evidence that the 1918-19 revolutionary side’s use of the metaphors of the heroic “sword” and the “stab in the back” is more consistent with their use by Wagner himself. The National Socialists were the ones who delivered the young and idealistic Weimar Republic its “stab in the back”, just as counter-revolutionary forces crushed the idealistic revolutionary heroes of 1848. That is the tragedy of Siegfried’s death.
By lecturing us about how the sword Nothung must only be interpreted as a symbol of counter-revolutionary German militarism, Köhler ended up conferring his blessing on the violent usurpation by the far-right of Wagner’s originally revolutionary sword symbolism. After the popularity of socialist interpretations of Wagner amongst post-war stage directors, Köhler aggressively reasserted the Eternal Truth of Nazi counter-revolutionary propaganda, by trying to reclaim Wagner for his side of politics. His National Socialist masters would have been proud of their disciple, as he fought fanatically to keep Wagner free of the “taint” of liberal interpretations of his philosophy and art. In the long-standing battle by opposing sides of politics to claim Wagner for their own, Köhler showed determination to safeguard the supremacy of Nazi interpretations of art.
Wagner even wrote that The Ring should only be performed to celebrate the success of the next revolution:
As for claims for Wagner’s support for militarism alongside genocidal racism, Cosima records Wagner as stating that the only instance in which he thought that any war had been just was the American Civil War leading to the abolition of slavery:
Although Wagner’s late religious work, Parsifal, is often thought to represent a turn towards the religious right, the views of Schopenhauer and Feuerbach on religion are really only subtly different. Even in accepting Schopenhauer’s ideas on religion, Wagner retains his radicality, and Parsifal does not represent a swing from the far left towards a late turn towards a reactionary Christian far right anticipating the Positive Christianity of National Socialist theology. This is why even as late in his life as 1880 Wagner writes:
Yet Köhler kept Wagner in his book so completely muzzled that he is never allowed to speak uninterrupted for longer than one sentence in the whole 378 pages of the book. There is only one apparent exception and there the original quotation has been tampered with. Here is Köhler’s version of the quote from Wagner on religion:
Apart from the phrase “Alexandrinian-Jewish-Roman-despotic” it looks like a totally different text from the original source cited in the bibliography. Such misuse of citations shows how Köhler had to tamper with evidence to support his speculations.
Köhler then went on: “A picture of his ideal Jesus, free of Jewish and ecclesiastical associations was given by Wagner in 1849 ...”. What Wagner wants to do is to free his Jesus not only of Old Testament Yahwistic theology dominated by a theocratic God-King, but also of authoritarian Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox dogmatism. Köhler called this a “perverted form of Christianity”, however, such rejection of an anthropomorphic and despotic God-King sitting on a throne was common amongst liberals in the eighteenth to nineteenth century. Radicals such as Spinoza preferred a pantheism, in which Nature became divine and self-determining, rather than being subject to the dictatorship of a God-King who rules as an alienated Other to the world. The reactionary line Köhler runs is that such deviation from conservative theological dogma is a “perverse” heresy of witchcraft and Nazism. It is a similar objection to that encountered amongst eighteenth century reactionaries, who regarded pantheism as “worse than atheism”. Even Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, approves of Spinozan pantheism, calling it a “sexed-up atheism”.
In the footnote (numbered 1) by Glasenapp (also on p298), he explains that what Wagner is doing is applying Schopenhauer’s philosophy to Christianity: “the pure, unmixed Christianity is nothing other than a branch of noble Buddhism, which after its alternative Indian path found its way to the coast of the Mediterranean” (my translation of Glasenapp’s paraphrase which he cites as coming from letter to Liszt, June 7, 1855, in Volume II of Liszt letters). Such neo-Buddhist philosophical ideas being heretical, in the Middle Ages it would have been decried as “witchcraft”, but this being passé today, instead it draws accusations of “Nazism”
Alberich is a dwarf. Köhler has left it entirely to the reader’s imagination how a dwarf is supposed to be the Antichrist. Hitler left no speeches or writings in which he discussed the Antichrist, let alone the Antichrist as a dwarf. As with speculation in the Occult Reich literature, Köhler gave us no references to chase.
Wagner’s Schopenhauerian liberal theology starts with a death of a Yahwistic God, of a sort so liberal that it certainly did not form the foundation of official National Socialist theology. There is evidence that Hitler remained sympathetic to his conservative Catholic roots. Sir Ian Kershaw writes in his biography of Hitler:
Köhler on p167 stated that:
This is clearly something the Christian-right wants badly to believe. There is a growing literature discussing the complicity of the Churches with the National Socialist regime. Although blaming Luther for steering German down its supposed Sonderweg is hardly any more credible than blaming Wagner, some pop historians like William Shirer nonetheless attempted to foot the blame for National Socialism entirely on Martin Luther. Shirer claims Hitler was entirely Luther’s stooge. In this view, Luther is seen as the more “obvious” candidate to be framed as the Great “Prophet”, whose command to throw “hellfire” at the Jews was fulfilled by his little “disciple”, Hitler.
The German Christian-right have predictably reacted with horror to the Luther thesis. The most inflammatory passages in Shirer were censored from the German editions of his book. Köhler likewise goes on a mission for God to cleanse Luther and the German Churches from defilement in the eyes of pop culture by the sin of complicity with the National Socialist regime, a complicity that followed centuries of Christian vilification of the Jews. Köhler shifts all blame for these sins from Wagner, who was chosen to bear the cross of the German churches’ sins, and made him solely responsible for the entire history of Christian anti-Semitism. That was why Köhler meticulously avoids even the slightest mention of Hitler’s deep reverence for Luther—the author of The Jews and their Lies:
In this book Luther writes:
And follow their “Prophet”, the National Socialists did, “hellfire” and all:
Historian John Toland writes in his Hitler biography:
Köhler’s Christian-right scapegoating polemic was so exaggerated that it backfires, only serving to highlight attempts to deemphasise Christian anti-Semitism. It was thus entirely predictable that next Köhler publishes a hagiography of Luther full of glowing admiration for him while systematically underplaying his anti-Semitism. Not a single mention is made of his essay, The Jews and their Lies. After all, Luther has been cleansed of his guilt of association with National Socialism by blaming all the sins of the regime on Wagner:
That said, the narrative of linear degrees of escalating proto-Nazi Christian anti-Semitisms starting in the age of the Roman Empire, passing through Medieval Jew-hatred, escalating in the Reformation with Martin Luther, and then finally climaxing in the Shoah, rests every bit as unconvincingly on sweeping assumptions of linear historical continuity, as does the story about escalating degrees of left-wing anti-Semitism passing from Wagner and Marx through to Dühring and Marr before climaxing in National “Socialism”. Whenever such straight lines are drawn through history, it is invariably for the sake of self-serving polemic.
Köhler liberally makes facts up. For example, Köhler stated:
Köhler fails to give us a citation to support this claim. So once again I did my own research. I looked through Adrian Weale’s The SS: A New History, Robert Lewis Koehl’s The SS: A History 1919-45, as well as The Waffen-SS: A European History by Böhler and Gerwarth. Nothing corroborating Köhler could be found. Wagner is never mentioned once, and nor is Parsifal. This, despite the fact that Koehl spent thirty years researching the SS. The Waffen SS was never called the “Blood-Order of the Knights of Parsifal” to “protect the King of the Grail”. Weale does mention an obscure subsection of the Waffen SS called Office VII:
Köhler skips any mention of the strange sun-worship and the mystical invocation of Odin and Thor at SS wedding ceremonies:
The Waffen SS liked to use Nordic-Viking imagery. Köhler deliberately skips over this as it becomes too far removed from anything in Wagner that it would be obvious that the National Socialist use of Nordic-Germanic mythology had lost all connection with opera. Study rooms in Himmler’s Wewelsburg Castle also carried names such as “Gral” (Grail), “König Artus” (King Arthur), “König Heinrich” (King Henry), “Heinrich der Löwe” (Henry the Lion), “Widukind”, “Christoph Kolumbus” (Christopher Columbus), “Arier” (Aryan), “Jahrlauf” (run of the year), “Runen” (runes), “Westfalen” (Westphalia) and “Deutscher Orden” (Teutonic Order). These generally have nothing to do with anything in Wagner, and emphatically refute the idea that all National Socialist iconography can be assumed to be operatic.
Köhler has made this up as well:
There is no citation to back up the citation placed in quotation marks. A thorough search through an electronic database of Wagner’s collected writings and letters demonstrates that no such quotation exists anywhere in his writings: it is fake evidence that is completely made up. Nor does David Luhrssen in his scholarly study of the Thule Society confirm Köhler’s claims to transcendental certainty. Luhrssen writes:
Köhler similarly professes mock horror on “unveiling” occult conspiracies while “offering titillating glimpses” into alleged “Nazi secrets”. Köhler passes off the quotation about the doctrines of Thule Society as though it came from Wagner, but, as usual, it comes from an unrelated source dating from long after Wagner’s death—a fact left unmentioned in the main text, which the reader only discovers on checking the bibliography. Here is Wagner’s final word on the intermixing of races, resulting in:
The mixing of races would result in everyone becoming “united and undifferentiated”.
If the reactionary right usurped the image of the sword of justice and turned it into an image of a militant Germania brandishing her sword in anger, the same usurpation can be seen with the image of the wolf. Siegfried is a lone wolf because he dares to rebel against what he naively sees as the injustice of social conventions that treats women as property to be bartered and sold. Many of the radicals in the Young Germany movement anticipated twentieth-century radical feminism by arguing that marriage was a petit bourgeois institution for the enslavement of women. That is the precise situation in which Sieglinde, given as a “gift” to Hunding as a wife, finds herself, and from which Siegfried frees her, even if that mean shattering the bonds of the institution of marriage in favour of the sexual revolution of anarchical free love.
Köhler confers his blessing to the right wing usurpation of wolf symbolism by creating false associations in his attempt to forge a phoney link between the reference to Wotan’s guise as a wolf in The Ring and Hitler’s Wolfschanze, one of his military headquarters (Führerhauptquartiere):
Köhler mentioned the Wolfschanze (Wolf’s Lair) several times, yet he provides no proof to show that Hitler had in mind an obscure reference to a wolf in The Ring. The name “Wolf” is actually derived from Hitler’s first name. “Wolf” is an old diminutive form of “Adolf”, like “Bill” is the diminutive of “William”. Hitler even called his dog, “Wolf”. If there was a musical influence, it might just as well be the Disney song “who’s afraid of the big bad wolf”—it was a tune Hitler was fond of whistling:
Köhler’s claim that Hitler spied for the German army under the codename of Wolf during the “1920s” (sic) is also nonsense. There are no references to back this claim up. The most thorough study of Hitler in this period come from Thomas Weber and Othmar Plöckinger, and they mention nothing of the kind—nor do Joachim Fest, Allan Bullock, John Toland, Volker Ullrich, or Sir Ian Kershaw in their respective Hitler biographies. In fact, Weber says that Hitler was officially discharged from the army on the 31st of March, 1920 (Weber: Hitler’s First War), while Volker Ullrich specifically debunks the story as a myth in volume one of his biography.
It is remarkable that, in Köhler’s whole book, he never allowed Wagner to speak for himself uninterrupted. In the short space of this present review, primary quotations allow Wagner to speak uninterrupted for much longer than in the whole of Köhler’s 378-page book. The book was supposed to be about Wagner, yet when a view is ascribed to Wagner, instead Köhler feeds the reader a quote from Hitler, Goebbels etc, made to look as though it came from Wagner. The a priori assumption is that a quote from Hitler, Goebbels et alia is a perfect substitute for a quote from Wagner, since they always say the same thing. Köhler then concludes that this proves that Wagner is a Nazi because everything he “says” is the same as what key Party members say. The end result is a dizzying cycle of an infinitely self-perpetuating tautology calculated to thrill and mesmerise many a gullible dilettante.
The same objection was made by Sir Richard Evans, who states that:
It is striking that almost every quote has been ripped out of context, or even outright tampered with and quotes from Hitler or other National Socialists put into Wagner’s mouth to make it look as though he had made the statement. By this method, you could convict anyone for being a Hitler clone, ripe to hang on the same gallows as Eichmann. If there is anything “chilling” about Köhler’s book it is his willingness to falsify facts and maliciously tamper with evidence.
August Kubizek’s book The Young Hitler I Knew remains a favourite of neo-Nazi groups. Copies of the book circulate on neo-Nazi websites (I refuse to link to them), but with chapter 8 (Enthusiasm for Richard Wagner) curiously removed. Sir Ian Kershaw reminds us that the book started life as a commission from the National Socialist Party:
As is his usual practice, Köhler tampered with, and surreptitiously embellished the quote. Kubizek says that the young Adolf would “recite the text of some note or letter by Wagner”, but Kubizek does not say that he did so “by heart” from a passage of one of his essays:
Köhler conveniently omitted the fact that Kubizek says that whenever his young friend, “Wolf”, read from Wagner, he came up with the same the self-aggrandising interpretation “which were invariable”: “So you see”, he would say, “even Wagner went through it just like I have” (Kubizek, page 84). When all of this begs the question as to whether Kubizek’s uncorroborated testimony is even reliable, it is predictable that academic historians like Sir Richard J. Evans conclude that “there is no evidence that [Hitler] actually read any of Wagner’s writings”. There is simply no evidence that National Socialism can be interpreted as a form of Operatic Socialism.
The trouble is that the Hitler who allegedly “read” these Communist Revolutionary works by Wagner was barely 17-years old. Did Köhler think that the 17-year-old Adolf “set about attending to the reorganisation of the country” according to Communist Revolutionary ideals? Like other biographers, Hitler says in his semi-autobiographical Mein Kampf that his radicalisation occurred in the face of the catastrophic traumas surrounding World War One and its seismic socio-political aftershocks, casting grave doubts over Köhler’s claim such “political and social realities” of Hitler’s own time can be ignored to recontextualise him into a narrative of radicalisation by exposure to nineteenth-century romantic opera at age twelve, thus making nineteenth-century history the more relevant historical background to the rise of Hitler.
The hypothesis that the political radicalisation of Hitler occurred on seeing Lohengrin at age twelve, and then at the age of seventeen while reading Feuerbachian Communist Revolutionary works by Wagner, flies in the face of what we know of Hitler.
Yet recontextualise Köhler does, in making sweeping statements about the monocausal operatic genesis of the political Hitler out of the historical background of nineteenth-century romantic opera:
Another problem with the alleged straight line of influence from Wagner to Hitler is that Wagner’s prose writings are so stylistically impenetrable that Thomas Mann found them unreadable. Thomas Mann in German himself presents a formidable challenge to read, so for a seventeen-year-old without a tertiary education to have read Wagner would have been an extraordinary feat. Wagner’s theoretical prose writings are harder to read than Marx or Hegel, who are themselves notoriously difficult even amongst those with postgraduate degrees. No less a Hegel authority than Frederick Beiser says that reading Hegel’s prose is “often a trying and exhausting experience, the intellectual equivalent of chewing gravel”. No less a Wagner authority than Brian Magee, a lecturer in philosophy and author of two books on Wagner, confesses to finding Wagner’s prose writings impenetrable:
Even Köhler, a philosophy graduate, admitted to finding Wagner’s prose hard going, when he describes them as being written in “Byzantine sentence structures” (p. 121).
If a Wagner authority like Magee finds Wagner’s “Byzantine sentence structures”, impenetrable, it raises serious questions as to whether a seventeen-year-old schoolboy would have managed them. The Young Hegelian socialist thinker, Feuerbach, was a pupil of Hegel, and the chances that the seventeen-year-old Adolf read Wagner’s turgid Feuerbachian period revolutionary works with much comprehension appear vanishingly slender. If Kubizek’s account of the young Adolf’s response to alleged attempts at reading Wagner inspire little confidence that he managed to penetrate their turgidity, then along with the striking absence of any of Wagner’s prose writings from Hitler’s personal library, the fact that Hitler never once officially quoted from any of Wagner’s prose writings speaks volumes. Hitler also left heavy marginalia in books he studied intensively, but not a single book by Wagner containing his handwriting survive, a fact heavily at odds with speculative claims alleging that all Hitler ever read was Wagner. Doubtless, Hitler took them with him when the aliens evacuated him from the bunker onto the safety of their UFO.
Nor do historians think that National Socialist ideology was derived from the proto-Marxist socialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. Köhler’s blatant attempts to shift the ideological origins of National Socialism to socialist philosophy constitutes a blatant right-wing revisionist history attempting to shift the blame for fascism onto the left. However, since the revolutionary Wagner who wrote the Feuerbachian The Artwork of the Future and Art and Revolution was ardently pro-democratic and socialist, it makes it all the more a pity that the young Adolf failed to make either head or tail out of Wagner’s impenetrable prose. For if he had, history might have turned out differently as Hitler might have used his considerable talents in the service of his ideological sworn enemies on the opposite side of politics, rather than murdering them in concentration camps.
Köhler’s favourite part of Kubizek’s book concerns the “vision” involving Rienzi. A professional historian like Sir Ian Kershaw is much more sceptical:
Sir Ian Kershaw takes Köhler to task for taking Kubizek’s melodramatic kitsch seriously:
If professional historians consider the uncritical acceptance of Kubizek as though it were gospel to be unbefitting a serious historian, Köhler condescends to relying on even more dubious sources. Sir Richard Evans takes Köhler to task for his reliance on Hermann Rauschning:
Here is a typical use of Rauschning by Köhler:
Sir Richard Evans and Sir Ian Kershaw represent immensely respected historians who are, to use Evan’s owns words, “worlds away in every sense” from their complete antithesis of such off-the-planet pulp fiction in the guise of history. With his reliance on discredited sources such as Rauschning, it is little wonder that Evans dismissed Köhler’s thesis in stating that his “speculations” were “in no way convincing”.
Köhler had a splendid explanation for why Wagner’s name is virtually never mentioned by Hitler or any other leading Party members:
Köhler pretended to be gifted like Harry Popper with the ability to magically “decipher” a secret code language, which, like “parseltongue”, spoke to him to indicate that a statement “says the opposite of what it means”. In this way, anything could be turned into “chilling” smoking gun evidence that Wagner is guilty of genocidal witchcraft. Especially evidence to the contrary.
It is exactly the same reasoning you find in Nazi UFO conspiracies. The earth-shattering lack of evidence for such a kitsch phantasm actually proves “the opposite”, and counts instead as definitive proof of its veracity. The startling lack of evidence proves the abysmal depth of the diabolical conspiracy. Whenever he finds contradictory evidence, our petulant inquisitor could claim that anything “says the opposite of what it means” (sic)—but only where it suited him.
It is high time that readers be asked to choose the mainstream academic historians’ accounts of the Dritte Reich and Holocaust over the distorted fringe ideologies found in Köhler’s, doubly so now that not even Köhler believes in his own Occult Reich and Nazi UFO level speculations. Such speculative methodologies—where vast unstable structures of inference and correspondence are constructed in the glaring absence of evidence—merely get in the way of a credible academic understanding of history. To ask the reader to choose the large body of academic evidence-based historiography over gross speculation is entirely in harmony with the educational aims and scholarly goals of academic organisations such as the Yad Vashem Institute for Holocaust Research. If this present review achieves nothing else other than to encourage readers to ditch pop pseudo-histories in favour of academically credible accounts, then it would have been worth the effort in writing it.
Köhler may superficially appear to be researched with “astonishing diligence”, but, as Joachim Fest noted, his supportive bibliography turns out to consists of a whole lot of banal padding, like the shopping dockets to show the alleged ufological abductee was in a certain vicinity on a certain date, or the endless photos of the dent on the side of the car. However, when the juicy punchline hits, the run of supportive citations mysteriously vanished into thin air: such supportive evidence no more existed than the footage of the abducting aliens. The resulting unstable structures of inference built around claims to have unveiled the “dark secret” of an occult operatic Masterplan, rapidly disintegrated under scrupulous academic examination. Mainstream academic historians thus no more accept Köhler’s virtual exculpation of Hitler by full transfer of the blame of guilt onto a nineteenth-century opera composer, than they accept Occult Reich and Nazi UFO conspiracy theories.
The sad thing is that all Köhler has achieved is to honour Hitler by crowning an art-school reject and beer-hall graduate as the supreme Wagner interpreter of all time. Köhler evinces a craven surrender to Nazi propaganda in an attempt to systematically raise perversely nazified beer-hall Wagner interpretations up out of the gutter to the status of high culture, as though anything by the National Socialist regime could be taken seriously in this way. National Socialism comes to be painted as a vastly artistically inspired cultural movement, with approved artists reinterpreted as their forerunners and prophets. Yet never during the era of the National Socialist movement did any Party propagandist of any influence expound so deeply nazified an interpretation of Wagner as Köhler honours them with. Köhler’s cynical radicalisation went immeasurably further in his nazification of Wagner than anything manufactured by the either Houston Chamberlain or National Socialists themselves. Even after Köhler has recanted the ideas in his book, the ideas in there will take on a life of their own, where they will be relished by all neo-Nazis who will find Köhler’s elevation of fascist beer-hall rhetoric to the status of an artistically inspired “visionary” ideology to be mandatory reading.
The rest of us are left with a grossly speculative book by a writer running roughshod over every nuance to draw imaginary “straight lines” running between a nineteenth-century opera composer writing and vastly complex events involving millions of people from the century after his death, which are reduced to little more than grand opera. In Sir Richard Evans’s words: “None of this is remotely persuasive”.
This is why when you read respected serious historians of this era like Sir Ian Kershaw, Sir Richard J. Evans, Saul Friedländer, Hans Mommsen, Raul Hilberg, Peter Longerich et alia on the Holocaust, you would hardly anymore find an opera composer blamed for causing World War II and the Holocaust than you find Shakespeare being blamed for everything. Accounts of the Holocaust that amount to an extreme theory of a premeditated “operatic intentionalist” Masterplan where “reality meant for [Hitler] the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama” have been laughed out of court by serious historians. Kershaw regards such grossly oversimplified and distorted monocausal narratives reducing the vast complexities of World War II and the Holocaust down to little more than grand opera as tabloid journalism sinking to a level very much like that of other populist writers indulging in the grand recidivism of reducing the entire phenomenon of Hitler down to him only having one testicle. This dismissal typifies how Kershaw and all other leading historians have collectively received Köhler’s work, and it is high time that the general lay public follow their example.
The final nail in the coffin for Köhler is that not a single reputable historian cites his writings on Wagner in studies of the Dritte Reich or Holocaust. They all behave as though Köhler never existed. Impact factor is the ultimate test of the academic significance of a work. After over ten years, Köhler has had zero academic impact factor in the field of academic history, and not even he is any longer able to sustain belief in his theories. When Sir Richard Evans summed Köhler up in saying that his rampant “speculations” born of “dizzying and unstable structures of inference and correspondence” were “in no way convincing”, he was speaking for his profession at large. Köhler would have exerted just as much influence on academic historians if he had written a Nazi UFO conspiracy book. The only place Köhler’s pervasive influence can be felt is in crass Occult Reich pop histories, which have welcomed his Nazi opera conspiracy theories with open arms, with his ideas having taken on a cult-like following.
The sad thing is that even after he has retracted his ideas, Köhler’s sensationalist kitschy pulp fiction in the guise of history retains sufficient dizzying emotive power to mislead vast numbers of lay readers and other non-historians—including musicologists, social commentators, political scientists, and art historians. The vast majority of non-historians religiously adhere to Köhler’s original thesis without question. Köhler can retract his claims, and historians can expose the weaknesses in his arguments endlessly, and it can be guaranteed to be of no avail in overcoming the seduction of its crude emotive simplicity. Occult Reich type speculators rightly intuit that such emotively driven “gross oversimplification and distortion” sells books, and every one of Köhler’s titles with all their “petulant prosecution” remain on sale unadulterated. For the majority of the population, erudite academic analyses about the historical origins of the Holocaust and WWII are filled with “twisted paths to Auschwitz” so convoluted in their structural nuances, that all of their research ends up being ignored by simpletons who prefer to be fed a neat little fairy tale about how it was all caused by some nineteenth-century opera composer. We must all sadly learn to fully accept that it is virtually a total waste of time trying to reason with this sort of quasi-religious faith driven by emotive populism.
It is child’s play to debunk Nazi opera conspiracy theories, which belong with other kitschy Nazi UFO conspiracy theories and lurid Occult Reich pseudo-histories. The harder question is that of “why”? The answer is that Köhler’s attitude towards Wagner is something that has been taken up by the Christian right who want to the finger of blame to be pointed away from Luther onto Wagner, while pursuing a reactionary Romantic and culture-centred historiography, in which the lofty flights of genius by great poets and philosophers becomes the fuel allegedly propelling the engine of history.
Journalist William Shirer’s best-selling pop historiography, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich blamed Martin Luther for Hitler, effectively making this book Luther’s Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple. Daniel Goldhagen agreed with Shirer in writing that:
Hitler implied in Mein Kampf that he wished to be remembered alongside Frederick the Great, Luther and Wagner. Yet there has never been the same proliferation of polemics aggressively blaming Luther for the Dritte Reich and Holocaust.
In America, right-wing historian Peter Viereck pursued a similar agenda of locating the origin of Hitler in the cultural influences of dead poets and philosophers alone in his 1941 book, Metapolitics. Viereck fiercely denounced the view that socio-economic and socio-political determinants had precipitated the rise of National Socialism as being a left-wing conspiracy theory based on an “economic determinism” invoking a “capitalist plot” by “the Protocol of the Elders of Wall Street”. In place of socio-economic influences, cultural determinants were to blame, only this time Wagnerian opera. Viereck conveniently ignores the fact that as early as 1919, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted with startling foresight that the punitive economic conditions imposed upon Germany by the treaty of Versailles would lead straight to another world war:
Despite this, the young Viereck claimed to have discovered the origins of World War II in nineteenth-century opera libretti (but waited until he was almost 90 years old in the year of his death before confessing that the grand simplicities of his youthful PhD thesis don’t work).
Amongst post-war pioneers of this trend in right-wing culture-centric historiography was German historian, Joachim Fest. Fest was a co-editor of the centre-right newspaper Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, where he was notorious for his hostility towards the left. Historian Hans Mommsen once accused Fest of rewriting history according to his right-wing political agenda. Here is a typical quotation from Fest’s 1973 biography of Hitler:
Fest was widely criticised for this type of speculative right-wing psychobabble, including by Kershaw. Much of Fest’s 1970s Hitler biography still relies on Rauschning, since it predates the demonstration that his Hitler Speaks was a forgery, which includes histrionic narratives where Hitler hears voices, awakes at night with convulsive shrieks, pointing at an empty corner shouting “There, there, in the corner!”—a line later proven to have been lifted from a short story by Guy de Maupassant.
Köhler shows his support for the German right by citing Fest numerous times in his book, whereas the Hitler biography by historian John Toland (long available in German translation) is too liberal in his approach, and Köhler can only make sparse use of him. Kershaw’s Hitler biography post-dates Köhler’s book, but Köhler would be equally unlikely to find much use of his writings. Hans Mommsen is predictably ignored for being way too left-wing, as is the German translation of Raul Hilberg’s monumental three-volume study on the Holocaust The Destruction of the European Jews, as “die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden” in the early 1990s, also available to Köhler at the time of writing.
The striking thing about Köhler is that his right-wing culture-centric reading of history were so grossly exaggerated that moderate right-wing historians like Joachim Fest and Peter Viereck washed their hands of him. Köhler has become such a liability that moderate right-wing historians cannot be seen to be associated with him. To support Köhler would be academic suicide, like throwing support behind the Occult Reich literature. Forced to pick between academic honesty and Köhler, even centre-right historians have now come clean in admitting the correctness of the view of Wagner as a radical left-wing liberal. Right-wing historians prefer that than risk being discredited by a damaging association with Köhler’s kitschy ufological type of populist conspiracies. Köhler has been unceremoniously dumped by his own side. It is likely this isolation that lead Köhler to being forced to retract his Nazi opera conspiracy theories.
If Fest dismissed Köher’s book as a “polemic”, come 2006, even the 89-year-old Viereck had decided that enough was enough, and reacted to Köhler’s theories as being gross exaggerations devoid of all “nuance”:
In the same essay on Wagner in the Dritte Reich, where right-wing historian Joachim Fest writes dismissively of “Joachim Köhler’s polemic over Wagner’s Hitler”, Fest first names a whole lot of socialist thinkers who influenced Wagner such as Marx, Burckhardt, and Tocqueville. However, Proudhon, Feuerbach, and Bakunin are all curiously absent in Fest’s role-call of influences. Although only a first step, it is nonetheless a candid admission from the right that Wagner’s legacy now belongs firmly back amongst radical left-wing and liberal thinkers. Viereck even admits that Wagner was a staunch pacifist, who expressed strong opposition to pan-Germanic militarist expansionism. Or to paraphrase a line from Casablanca: “welcome back to the fight Mr Wagner”.
Nor should it be forgotten that no other major composer in the history of music ever risked life and limb for the sake of democracy then had to go into exile with a death sentence hanging over his head for his beliefs. In a contemporary eyewitness report published by one of Wagner’s many Jewish friends, Ferdinand Praeger:
Praeger: Wagner as I Knew Him (my emphasis)
Sir Richard J. Evans also endorses Praeger’s account of Wagner’s revolutionary pro-democracy activism, side by side with his socialist-anarchist friend, Mikhail Bakunin upon whom George Bernard Shaw thought Wagner had based the character of Siegfried:
Notice how the metaphor of left-wing revolution as a “storm” (“REVOLUTION comes rushing and roaring on the wings of the storm”) that would blow away the ancient regime has, like the symbolism of the liberal sword of justice entwined with the olive branch of peace, been usurped by the reactionary far-right (eg “Storm Troopers”, “Der Stürmer”) so as to come to mean the very opposite of what Wagner intended. It is the same twentieth-century fascist ideological usurpation with systematic inversion of the meaning of iconically left-wing terms, so that “socialism” becomes National “Socialism”, Franco’s putsch against the Republicans in Spain being called a “revolution”, and with Goebbels and Hitler deeming the annihilation of Weimar democracy a “German revolution”.
On hearing the news that his revolutionary friends Mikhail Bakunin and August Röckel had received the death sentence, Wagner wrote to his imprisoned brothers-in-arm in 1850, making the true meaning of Wagnerian heroism in the face of dire necessity, Noth, abundantly clear:
Straight after the 1848 revolution, Richard Wagner started on his Ring of the Nibelungs about the apocalyptic annihilation of the barbaric ancient regime and its theocratic imperialism sanctioned by the Gods of War, writing in 1851 that the work would “hand to the people of the Revolution the significance of that Revolution in its noblest sense”, and that it should only be performed to celebrate the success of the “next revolution”. Those pushing the populist view claiming that Wagner’s direct ideological influence on history steered Germany down its historical Sonderweg to fascism, should hang their heads in ruddy shame. For the historical Wagner makes his latter-day critics with all of their phoney certitudes look rather hypocritical as they issue petty accusations from the comfort of their armchairs, never having suffered so much as a flea bite fighting for liberty in their lives.
Joachim Fest finishes his critique of Köhler by reminding us that the name of the assassination plot to kill Hitler was none other than “Operation Valkyrie”, invoking the name of the mythic Germanic angels of death, who were to be visited upon the Führer:
The fact that the highly respected Joachim Fest has publicly dissociated himself from Köhler represents a historic turning point. Köhler has shot himself in the foot. Until then, the post-war German right had always preferred Nazified interpretations of Wagner, albeit for polemical purposes, rather than admit that Wagner was a liberal revolutionary who fought with musket and grenade in hand to bring socialist democracy to Germany.
In his biography of Hitler’s arch-nemesis, Vladimir Lenin, Robert Service writes:
As for another of history’s great Wagnerians, there is also Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. Ever since Wagner’s own time, there has been a constant struggle for different sides of politics—the left, the right, and even Zionists—to claim Wagner for their side. It is a struggle that is far from over. For now, the political right seems to have claimed victory, as they assert the supremacy of their Nazified interpretations of Wagner, and arrogantly mock any possibility of evidence-based alternative views as they disparage the centenary Boulez-Chéreau Marxist Ring cycle as “blasphemy”.
All of this just makes it all the more certain that Wagner has been made into a scapegoat by Köhler. This is likely in response to writers like Daniel Goldhagen who hold that all Germans, and not just active Nazis, were “Hitler’s willing executioners”. Goldhagen charges that all Germans are collectively guilty of causing WWII and the Holocaust. Germans thereby become the Songerlinge, the sadistic “strangelings” of world history—children of the Sonderweg. Köhler, the Christian right-wing polemicist seeks to “ethnically cleanse” the German people and churches of their defilement in sin by blame-shifting onto Wagner, the scapegoat chosen to bear the cross of the sins of the entire history of Christian anti-Semitism. Never mind the fact that Wagner himself strongly doubted that such a thing as “the German race” even existed.
This helps us appreciate why Köhler gets so touchy on the subject of the complicity of the Churches with the National Socialist regime. Both the Catholic Church as well as the Protestant Church have been implicated. On this point, Köhler becomes unusually anxious to shift all blame to Wagner. I have studied numerous books on the relationship between the Church and National Socialism, yet not a single one of these mentions Wagner, let alone accepting Köhler’s claim that National Socialist theology was based on Parsifal:
As usual, Köhler provides not the slightest scrap of evidence for his sweeping ex-cathedra pronouncements evincing such certitude. Once again, I found myself forced to search for corroboratory evidence in literature exploring the relationship of the churches with fascism including titles by Daniel Goldhagen, John Cornwell, Richard Steigmann-Gall, Ericksen & Heschel, Derek Hastings, Guenter Lewy, Karp & Köhler, Rainer Brendel, Karlheinz Deschner, Anthony Sciolino, David Cymet, Christopher J. Probst, Uriel Tal, Paul C. Hinlicky, Peter Longerich, Gabriel Wilensky, Manfred Gailus, Rainer Bucher, Olaf Blaschke, Philipp Thul (ed.), Denzler/Frabricius, Sibylle Biermann-Rau,
Bernd Heim, and Matthew Hockenos. None of these 25 studies even once mention either Wagner’s name or Parsifal in this connection. While this is not an exhaustive bibliography of writings on this topic, but a search through thousands of pages of writings has failed to turn up evidence corroborating Köhler’s claims, leaving one bewildered as to where he got such ideas from.
It seems that our “good” Christian, Köhler, becomes even more acutely sensitive in relation to Wagner’s polemics against the Catholic Church:
This almost certainly constitutes Köhler’s central motive for devoting himself to writing such tiresome polemics against Wagner with such tenacity: Köhler is on a crusade for God and Pope. Köhler’s wildly trumped-up accusation of exterminationist anti-Semitism against Wagner are his rhetorical weapon to extract revenge for Wagner’s tirades against Roman Catholicism. The Catholic Church played a key role in crushing the 1848 revolutionaries, just as it provided “ratlines” to help Nazis escape prosecution. The foreword to Karlheinz Deschner’s remarkable book God and the Fascists puts it succinctly:
It would hardly be damaging to point out Wagner’s hatred of the Catholic Church, so instead, Köhler petulantly trumps up charges of exterminationist anti-Semitism, so as to misuse the Holocaust as a rhetorical weapon to bash Wagner with, in a self-serving crusade of vengeance. The last thing that motivates Köhler is an empathy for victims of the Holocaust. Köhler makes false pretensions to being a conscientious Nazi hunter trying to expose Germany’s dark past. In reality, by scapegoating Wagner, Köhler only whitewashes the whole situation. Köhler ends up achieving the exact opposite of what he pretends to be doing. However, that is precisely Köhler’s aim: to cleanse the Deutsche Volk, Martin Luther, and the Church of the defilement brought upon them by Hitler. Out, damned spot!
Meanwhile, the perpetually inflammatory Goldhagen goes on his own petulant polemic about the complicity between the Catholic Church and the National Socialist regime. Pope Pius XII has even been called Hitler’s Pope:
Perhaps someone will soon follow Köhler’s pioneering example in entertaining us with an equally grotesquely exaggerated polemic entitled The Pope’s Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple, invoking a grand conspiracy where Hitler is portrayed as a puppet of the Vatican driving a secret war of extermination against the “Godless Communists” and “the Spawn of Judas”:
It is little surprise that Köhler becomes so explosively touchy about the role of the Catholic Church during the National Socialist period. It is enough to drive Köhler into a frenzy to beat his scapegoat, Wagner, into a pulp to cleanse the Church and the Christian right of its sins. Köhler manages to totally avoid all mention of the fact that Hitler was born into the Catholic Church, where he was indoctrinated with Christian anti-Semitism from a young age:
By scapegoating Wagner to bear the sins of the Church, which failed to exercise its moral influence by objecting to genocide while it knew the Holocaust was underway, this helps those on the Christian right to sleep better at night and attend mass with a shining good conscience.
Köhler also used the book Hitler’s Table Talk to claim that Hitler later changed his position to become vehemently anti-Christian. This is another source that Kershaw considers potentially problematic and warns that it be “treated with due caution” (Preface to Hitler 1889-1936 Nemesis), although Professor Evans often quotes from it. In the same source, Hitler also expresses frustration at his failure to unify the Protestant Churches in Germany. Hitler continued to hold Jesus in high esteem, and considered him an Aryan fighter who struggled against Jewry. Hitler possibly dreamt of creating an ultramontane Reichskirche—a united Christian Church of which he would be the Prophet, a Reich’s Pope, and new Holy Roman Emperor holier than the Roman one. Europe would be spiritually and politically united as in the Middle Ages, thus reversing the split engendered by the Reformation (denounced as the away-from-Rome movement in Mein Kampf). Even the phrase the Dritte Reich (Third Empire) was originally a reference to the third kingdom of heaven mentioned by the Apostle Paul.
In essence, the Christian right in Germany have turned from the post-war position of blaming the Jews for the Holocaust to blaming Wagner. The German Evangelical Council of Darmstadt after the war called the Holocaust a “divine visitation and called upon Jews to stop rejecting and crucifying Christ” (see Bart Ehrman, p.36 and Erikson & Heschel, p.19). Pastor Denkhaus, a member of the regional council of Bremen said that it was the Church’s job after the war to make the Jews repentant for causing the Holocaust, which was divine retribution for persecuting Christ, and that “whoever helps to rebuild a synagogue helps bring about damnation” (Matthew Hockenos, p121). Since scapegoating the Jews for causing the Holocaust looks rather poor form, the Christian right have chosen a new scapegoat: Wagner. Hitler and the Christian right are innocent because they were “forced” to commit atrocities by puppet master Wagner (“He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”) who controlled them using Tantric sex magick from beyond the grave.
Better still, Köhler’s polemic against Wagner allows him to go on a crusade to purge the German Christian right of the weighty burden of its guilty conscience by surreptitiously shifting responsibility for the Holocaust onto the political left. National “Socialism” becomes, in Köhler’s view, entirely the responsibility of the radical socialist political Left starting with Wagner. World War II and the Holocaust were caused by a left-wing “socialist” movement that was born of the revolutionary 1848 pro-democracy movement that Wagner and Bakunin boldly championed—literally with musket and grenade in hand. Köhler even condemns Wagner’s 1849 pro-democratic political activism as a “barbaric act” (p.46), the very model of monstrous barbarism that spawned National Socialism by pushing Germany down the path to its supposed Sonderweg. This allows Köhler to trace the origins of exterminationist anti-Semitism to left-wing politics, thus indirectly also implicating Marx, whose utterances on the Jews are virtually identical to those of Wagner, Feuerbach, Proudhon, and Bakunin. That is why Köhler simultaneously accused Wagner of being both a Communist and a National “Socialist”. For Köhler, following in the footsteps of his fascist apologist mentor Ernst Nolte, these are conflated as being the exact same thing. Köhler even called communism “that crude and savage perversion of the Christian doctrine that screams with thinly disguised greed ‘what is yours, is mine!’” In this way, Köhler’s runs his Christian-right crusade against the whole of the political Left. Gott mit uns is the motto of the Christian-right’s evangelical mission:
Unfortunately for Köhler, there is a long tradition amongst Jews of free-spirited, liberal and critical thinking, of the sort that will eventually see through the tricks of imposters. That is why Hitler vilified the entire Left as being “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspirators scheming to take over the world, who had to be preemptively destroyed lest they succeed. And that is why so many of Wagner’s friends were liberal Jews.
Academic historians have long ago seen through Köhler’s right-wing game of grossly distorting and misrepresenting history for his own political ends. Köhler probably secretly gloats in triumph at the fact that, even after retracting his claims, he has built up a semi-religious cult which regards his thesis as “obvious” and “incontestable”. Despite the huge obstacle to the widespread acceptance of credible academic readings of history Köhler has erected, it can only be hoped that the tide of critical opinion will eventually turn. It must not be forgotten that the great Jewish Holocaust writers have always stressed the power of truth and justice over petty vengeance and scapegoating as the ultimate form of anti-Nazism. One can only hope that this noble tradition will be kept alive.
Given the long tradition of both liberal thought and Wagnerianism amongst enlightened Jews, educated Jews everywhere will be intelligent enough not to allow themselves to be duped by charlatans who abuse the memory of the Holocaust to their own political ends. Above all, what is really at stake here is something immeasurably more important than Richard Wagner, either the man or his music. It was George Orwell who wrote in 1984 that “who controls the past controls the future”. So what truly matters is truth and honesty in academic historiographic methodology, and ultimately that is always far more important than all else, for whoever opens the door to any form of self-serving right-wing revisionist pseudo-history is well on the slippery slope towards opening the door to that most sinister sibling of kitsch Occult Reich and Nazi UFO fantasies—Holocaust denialism.
The news as of July 2014 is that Joachim Köhler has officially retracted his charges against Wagner in an essay entitled Wagner’s Acquittal—acquittal, that is, of the charge of inciting or causing genocide. This retraction of charges was published in The Wagner Journal in the July, 2014 (8, 2, 43–51) issue. However, Köhler’s book, Wagner’s Hitler, remains in print, and as far as the general public is concerned World War II and the Holocaust were certainly and without doubt caused by an opera composer. Nor will Wagner’s Hitler be the last word in Nazi opera conspiracy theories, which will remain alive as long as Goldhagenism maintains its populist emotional appeal, irrespective of whatever retraction Köhler has made.
The Nazi opera conspiracy literature was born in the 1940’s, and Köhler is only one amongst many authors who have sequentially built on the body of literature, and it can be guaranteed that the same old arguments will continue to be repeated until they become “The Truth”. Meanwhile, with every year our understanding of the structural intricacies of the so-called “twisted road to Auschwitz” leading to the Holocaust improves. With it, the complexity of the picture grows, and the more simpletons will prefer to grasp at simplistic single-shot, monocausal explanations devoid of complexity and nuance. Yet every few months or so another “academic” publication appears from non-historians that take Nazi opera conspiracies seriously. That makes it all the more important that such simplistic monocausal and culture-centric explanations continue to be systematically debunked, since Nazi opera conspiracies, and their kin, are only likely to explode in popularity, propelled by the power of the internet until the voice of academic historians can no longer be heard beneath their din.
For a review of Köhler’s sequel to Wagner’s Hitler, entitled Richard Wagner—The Last of the Titans, see the thread posted here. In any case, whoever said that Wagner was the last of the Titans? For an alternative view on that subject, see this thread.
Readers may be interested to know that right-wing writers like Joachim Köhler merely plagiarise the writings of Theodor Adorno, which they misuse to further their own petty political agendas. I have critically reviewed Adorno’s essay on Wagner here.
For a detailed study of Wagner’s pacifist and anti-pan-Germanic views advocating European federalism, see this post on Constantin Frantz’s Open Letter to Richard Wagner.
Elly Dlin
“Property” is practically held to be more sacred than religion in our state-based 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 given their blessing to [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.
Eine fast grössere Heiligkeit als die Religion hat in unserem staatsgesellschaftlichen Gewissen du ,,Eigentum” erhalten . . . Da das Eigentum als die Grundlage alles gesellschaftlichen Bestehens gilt, muss es wiederum desto schädlicher dünken, dass nicht Alle Eigentum besitzen, und sogar der grösste Teil der Gesellschaft enterbt zur Welt kommt. Offenbar gerät hierdurch, vermöge ihres eigenen Prinzipes, die Gesellschaft in eine so gefährliche Beunruhigung, dass sie alle ihre Gesetze für einen unmöglichen Ausgleich dieses Widerstreites zu berechnen genötigt ist, und Schutz des Eigentumes, für welchen ja auch im weitesten völkerrechtlichen Sinne die bewaffnete Macht vorzüglich unterhalten wird, in Wahrheit nichts anderes heissen kann, als Beschützung der Besitzenden gegen die Nichtbesitzenden. Wie viele ernste und scharf rechnende Köpfe sich der Untersuchung des hiermit vorliegenden Problems zugewendet haben, eine Lösung desselben, endlich etwa durch gleiche Verteilung alles Eigentums, hat noch keinem glücken wollen, und es scheint wohl, dass mit dem an mich so einfach dünkenden Begriffe des Eigentums, durch seine staatliche Verwertung, dem Leibe der Menschheit ein Pfahl eingetrieben Worden ist, an welchem sie in schmerzlicher Leidens-Krankheit dahin siechen muss.
The German spelling has been modernised eg Eigentum rather than Eigenthum, like Tannhäuser instead of Thannhäuser. Text taken from copy of the original Bayreuther Blätter publication, February-March issue, 1881. My translation and emphasis.
Once again the text dates from very late in Wagner’s life (two years before his death). Wagner openly discusses the possibility that socialism (the “equal distribution of all property”) may be a viable solution to society’s ills. The ideas contained in these late passages reflect ideas that come from Proudhon’s thesis on property as well as Feuerbach’s ideas about socialism. Brian Magee gives us an excellent summary of Feuerbach:
Instead of finding the meaning of life in the fulfilments of loving and being loved, such people look for it in the self-aggrandisements of wealth and power, which involve treating others in ways that make loving relationships impossible, and therefore create a loveless existence even for the rich and powerful themselves. After many generations of this an evil order of things has evolved in which a comparatively small number of people own and control everything, and subjugate the rest. Ownership and control are sustained by huge, elaborate forces of coercion: armies and police forces, laws and prisons, scaffolds and firing squads, churches and schools, conditioning and custom - not to mention the invisible whips of poverty and hunger. An inhuman social order has developed in which relationships are based typically on force, deception, fear and need. The rich and powerful are spiritually destroyed by the lovelessness of their lives, and the rest are prevented from achieving fulfilment by their lack of means, and their consequent enslavement to the bitter necessities of the loveless economic and social arrangements imposed on them by the others.
The only remedy for this ... is revolution. The whole evil order of things must be swept away. Obviously the tyrants and exploiters will not renounce their power voluntarily, for it itself provides the criteria by which they judge what is desirable, and it is therefore what they live by. So they will have to be deposed and expropriated.
Brian Magee: Wagner and Philosophy. Chapter 4: Wagner, Feuerbach and the Future (iii)
You can easily see how even right at the end of his life, Wagner is still expressing ideas that unmistakably derive from socialist thinkers such as Feuerbach, Bakunin, and Proudhon.
The way of thinking in both passages from Wagner’s late years demonstrates that Wagner remained a liberal-minded socialist and pacifist right to the end. Wagner is someone who took up revolutionary activism in his younger years, only to later eschew violent social change, concerning himself with Buddhist inspired pacifism and animal rights. Eschewing armed political revolution hardly means that he made a “brazen volte-face in political outlook” to become a Nazi as Köhler alleged. However, Köhler wants to further follow in the footsteps of far-right German historian, Ernst Nolte, and accused Wagner of being both a communist as well as a fascist all at once, these being grossly conflated as being the “same thing”. On p.50 Köhler stated that at the time of the Dresden uprising in 1849:
At the most he would only have ever accepted the ‘communism’ for which there was a general desire, and which he himself also spoke, as a first step towards his vision of an artistic paradise on earth.
Wagner’s attitude towards communism is rather complex and ambivalent. In actual fact, at the time of the Dresden uprising Wagner said this in The Fatherland Union Paper (1848):
Do you think that you scent in this the teachings of communism?
Are you then so stupid or wicked as to confound a theory so senseless as that of communism with that which is absolutely necessary to the salvation of the human race from its degraded servitude.
What Wagner actually argued for at the time in this paper was for universal suffrage and democracy with a socialist vision of equitable society. That is, unlike Marx in his Communist Party Manifesto, also from 1848, Wagner’s official public position expressed in his own revolutionary pamphlet, first read on the 16th of June, 1848, a year before the 1849 Dresden uprising, was that of democratic socialism. Nonetheless, at other times, as we will later explore, Wagner did express profound sympathy for an abstract ideal of communism, but not always in a militant revolutionary or statist form violently imposed by intellectuals from top down but regenerated from the grassroots upwards (regenerationism). Keep in mind, however, that Karl Marx himself thought that revolution would pass first through a stage of democratic socialism before ultimately evolving into communism.
The next speculation that Köhler would have had us believe is that after risking his life to participate in the Dresden uprising to fight for democratic socialism, Wagner woke up one morning to find himself transformed into a fascist ogre. The only proof Köhler produced for what he called a “brazen volte-face in political outlook” was this statement from Cosima’s diary from 3rd June, 1878 (some three decades after the Dresden uprising):
R[ichard] reckoned that he would have nothing against it if the Socialists were totally and utterly suppressed, only one would need to use the right means.
R. meinte er würde nichts dagegen haben, wenn die Sozialisten ganz und gar unterdrückt würden, allein die rechten Mittel müsse man anwenden.
My translation
Köhler wilfully altered the quotation so as to make Wagner say that he had “no objection if the socialists were ground into the dust”. Neither the word “dust” nor any reference to “grinding” occur anywhere in the original text. These words have been totally made up by Köhler, who tampers with quotes to support his speculation. Nor is this the only occasion where Köhler tampered with evidence to suit his needs.
In the next sentence in Cosima’s same diary entry for the 3rd June, 1878, Wagner refers to the Social Democrats, so the previous reference to the “Socialists” probably refers specifically to a party known as The Socialist Party (big “S”), rather than to socialists (small “s”) in general. In Know Thyself, Wagner refers to some political parties of the period:
Included is one obscure “Socialist Party”. In German, “die Sozialisten” can mean “the socialists” as well as “The Socialists”—unlike in English, in German, both take a capital “S”. More important than these informal anecdotes, never intended for publication, is how we have seen Wagner consistently write favourably about socialism in his late published works from the 1880s. Official publications carry more weight than sketchy diary entries from Cosima. Why Wagner disliked The Socialist Party is left unclear in Cosima’s skeletal diary entries.
Also contradictory is Wagner statement, equally sketchily recorded, in which Cosima relates that:
Notice how little Cosima records of this conversation. Wagner was reputedly so loquacious that it was hard to get a word in, and so he probably spoke at length on Bismarck’s repression of socialism, yet Cosima largely ignores the conversation because it flies in the face of her own right-wing völkisch sympathies. It demonstrates how selective Cosima’s diary records are.
The Anti-Socialist Laws (Sozialistengesetze) Wagner refers to were passed by Bismarck to curb the rise of the Socialist Democrats, fearing a socialist revolution setting up a similar communist regime to that of the Paris Commune. The laws were first passed by the German Reichstag on the 19th of October, 1878, to last until the 31st of March, 1881, but were extended a further four times (May 1880, May 1884, April 1886 and February 1888). Wagner considered this to be “verhängnisvoll”: ominous, fateful, catastrophic, cataclysmic, or disastrous.
However, Wagner, after the 1848 revolution, becomes deeply disillusioned with party politics in general, but without this being the swing towards a reactionary stance as some like Köhler have speculated. Wagner rightly recognised that the failure of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament was that it was a top-down revolutionary model lead by intellectuals, lacking grass-roots momentum:
The “Conservatives”, the “Liberals”, “Conservative-Liberals”, finally the “Democrats“, “Socialists” or even the “Social-Democrats” etc.
»Konservative«, »Liberale« und »Konservativ-Liberale«, endlich »Demokraten«, »Sozialisten«, oder auch »Sozial-Demokraten« u.s.w.
»Erkenne dich selbst« Wagner-SuD Bd. 10, 274 (Digital Bibliothek)
Also contradictory is Wagner statement, equally sketchily recorded, in which Cosima relates that:
Some time ago R. had told me how ominous the Socialist Law was...
Schon vor einiger Zeit hatte R. mir gesagt, wie verhängnisvoll das Sozialisten-Gesetz sei...
Cosima Diaries: Tuesday 1st of July, 1879.
Notice how little Cosima records of this conversation. Wagner was reputedly so loquacious that it was hard to get a word in, and so he probably spoke at length on Bismarck’s repression of socialism, yet Cosima largely ignores the conversation because it flies in the face of her own right-wing völkisch sympathies. It demonstrates how selective Cosima’s diary records are.
The Anti-Socialist Laws (Sozialistengesetze) Wagner refers to were passed by Bismarck to curb the rise of the Socialist Democrats, fearing a socialist revolution setting up a similar communist regime to that of the Paris Commune. The laws were first passed by the German Reichstag on the 19th of October, 1878, to last until the 31st of March, 1881, but were extended a further four times (May 1880, May 1884, April 1886 and February 1888). Wagner considered this to be “verhängnisvoll”: ominous, fateful, catastrophic, cataclysmic, or disastrous.
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| The Anti-Socialist Laws passed by Bismarck sent a lot of socialists into exile abroad. In this poster, a Wagnerian looking Siegfried character slays the Fafner-like dragon of the Socialist Laws (Socialisten-Gesetz). Below it are the words: Proletarier aller Länder vereinigt euch! (proletariat of all countries, unite). Amongst those commemorated for having died in exile include Karl Marx. |
However, Wagner, after the 1848 revolution, becomes deeply disillusioned with party politics in general, but without this being the swing towards a reactionary stance as some like Köhler have speculated. Wagner rightly recognised that the failure of the 1848 Frankfurt Parliament was that it was a top-down revolutionary model lead by intellectuals, lacking grass-roots momentum:
On the success of this step, I now clearly saw only how our politicians stood with respect to awareness of the spirit of revolution, and that a real revolution never arises from above from the standpoint of learned intellectualism, but only from below, out of the impulse of pure human necessity. The lies and hypocrisy of the political parties filled me with a disgust which drove me back into the deepest loneliness.
An dem Erfolge dieses Schrittes gewahrte ich nun erst ersichtlich, wie es bei unseren Politikern um die Erkenntniß des Geistes der Revolution stand, und daß eine wirkliche Revolution nie von Oben, vom Standpunkte der erlernten Intelligenz, sondern nur von Unten, aus dem Drange des rein menschlichen Bedürfnisses, zu Stande kommen kann. Die Lüge und Heuchelei der politischen Parteien erfüllte mich mit einem Ekel der mich zunächst wieder in die vollste Einsamkeit zurücktrieb.
Wagner: Eine Mittheilung an meine Freunde (1852). Wagner-SuD Bd. 4, 310-311. Digitale Bibliothek. My translation and emphasis.
Köhler also alleged that Wagner’s “brazen volte-face in political outlook” from communist to fascist was driven by the same hatred for “Jewish-Bolshevism” as that found in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Far from the case, even much later in Wagner’s life, at the time of the Paris Commune (a radical socialist government that ruled Paris from the 18th of March to the 28th of May 1871), Wagner, writing in a new foreword to a reprint of Art and Revolution (1849), still expresses immense sympathy for communism as a universal ideal, one that he hopes will regenerate itself in the future out of the ashes of 1848 as a vital grass-roots socialist force that grows in Bakuninist anarchistic manner from bottom-up. This is why Wagner admits that his support for revolution no longer had the same militant “vigour”, since that would be a return to an imposed top-down intellectual model of social change that lead to the failure of the 1848 revolution:
That is to say, for Wagner, communism was the music of the future, Zukunftsmusik, and Wagner’s late “regenerationism” is just another euphemism for this. There is immense hesitancy in his words, because as Wagner notes, he is once more placing himself at great danger of running afoul of political prosecution in the Bismarckian Empire if he were to once more openly support militant communism, especially since Bismarck emphatically reinstated the death penalty while introducing his anti-Socialist laws. Yet these words prove, once again, that far from remaining supine in blindly embracing Bismarckian militarist imperialism, Wagner remained politically engaged in opposition. Rather than Wagner being the eternal archetypal case in point incontestably proving that Germans after unification in 1871 simply threw the liberal ideals of 1848 out the window to become supine reactionaries, Wagner time and again explodes such myths.
Notice that Wagner, as late in his life as the 1870s, still writes “communism is the antithesis of egoism”. Throughout his life, Wagner repeatedly and consistently uses the word egoism, not only in his critiques of capitalism as egoism, but in his 1864 attacks on right-wing patriotic nationalism as an instrument for drumming up militarist sentiment. In State and Religion Wagner even goes on an interminable Wahn monologue of his own, pitilessly decrying the madness of right-wing patriotic nationalism:
Further, in The Artwork of the Future (1849), Wagner writes:
In The Artwork of the Future (1850), Wagner also writes of the “bearing fruit of egoism through communism” (das Aufgehen des Egoismus in den Kommunismus), as the sterility of isolated egoism is supplanted by the fecundity of the “Me and You” (das Ich und Du).
Again in The Artwork of the Future (1850) Wagner writes:
As for the claim that with his late interest in Schopenhauer, Wagner turned his back on liberalism, this again proves to be false wishful thinking from those belonging to the Cosima-Chamberlain völkisch line of posthumous interpreters. Absolutely no contradiction between the Feuerbachian and Schopenhauerian periods exists whatsoever, for Wagner translates Schopenhauer into Young Hegelian (and thus Feuerbachian) terms using the concept of Aufhebung (which is usually translated as sublation, but can also mean negation or abolition):
This writing comes from very late in Wagner’s life, in 1880, corresponding to his writing Parsifal, putting lie to speculation about a late about-turn in political orientation. For the late Wagner of 1880, Schopenhauer’s Denial of the Will was the supreme apotheosis of the “complete denial and abolition [Aufhebung] of egoism” (“vollständige Verneinung, Aufhebung des Egoismus”), which he wrote of as being the essence of communism in 1849. For that is why the Aufhebung of the Will is an affirmation. Wagner has transformed Schopenhauer into a communist through an Aufhebung of the blindly egoistic Will. Given how proto-psychoanalytic Schopenhauer is, Wagner must be seen as having anticipated the philosophy of the Frankfurt School. Whereas Wagner synthesises Feuerbachian proto-Marxism with Schopenhauerian proto-psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School synthesises post-Marxist and post-psychoanalytic thought.
The position here is corroborated by ideas found Wagner’s 1855 Dante-Schopenhauer letters to Franz Liszt, where Wagner implies that the sublimest act of sainthood is that of becoming a communist through the Aufhebung (abolition) of egoism:
Yet Köhler violently disregarded Wagner own words published in primary source texts, instead “proving” that the National Socialist polemical notion of Judeo-Bolshevism originated with a nineteenth-century opera composer by overwriting Wagner’s words with Hitler’s before concluding they are saying the same thing:
The author [i.e. Wagner himself], however, could have fallen into the greatest danger due to his frequent association with communism, were he to appear in Paris today with this present writings on art [i.e. his Feuerbachian socialist book, Art and Revolution], because he obviously positions himself, in opposition to “egoism”, on the side of this most taboo denomination. I think now though, it comes as no surprise that the measured German reader ... is concerned whether he should place me among the supporters of the recent Paris Commune. Yet I do not deny, in this regard (the above Feuerbachian writings being taken in the same sense), that communism is the antithesis of egoism, though not with the vigour as you see emanating from me here [in the earlier 1849 book, Art and Revolution], since this concept expresses not a sociopolitical ideal but rather a principle, ... conceived in its fullest measure as regenerating [wieder herstellen] itself as the universal essence of the future.
In den allergrößte Gefähr könnte aber der Verfasser durch seine häufige Anziehung des Kommunismus gerathen, wenn er mit diesen vorliegenden Kunstschrift heute in Paris auftreten wollte; denn offenbar stellt er sich, dem »Egoismus« gegenüber, auf die Seite dieser höchst verpönten Kategorie. Ich glaube nun zwar, daß der gewogene deutsche Leser, welchem dieser begriffliche Gegensatz sogleich einleuchten wird, über das Bedenken, ob er mich unter die Parteigänger der neuesten Pariser Commune zu stellen habe, ohne besondere Mühe hinauskommen wird. Doch will ich nicht läugnen, daß ich auf diese (den gleichen Feuerbachschen Schriften in demselben Sinne entnommene) Beziehung des Gegensatzes des Egoismus durch Kommunismus, nicht mit der Energie, wie es von mir hier geschehen ist, eingegangen sein würde, wenn mir in diesem Begriffe nicht auch ein sozialpolitisches Ideal als Prinzip aufgegangen wäre, nach welchem in das Volke in dem Sinne der unvergleichlichen Produktivität der vorgeschriftlichen Urgemeinschaftlichkeit auffaßte, und dieses im vollendesten Maaße als allgemeinschaftliches Wesen der Zukunft wieder hergestellt dachte.
Einleitung zum dritten und vierten Bande, Kunst und Revolution (Introduction to the Third and Fourth Volume, Art and Revolution). Wagner-SuD Bd. 3, 6. Digitale Bibliothek 107. My translation.
That is to say, for Wagner, communism was the music of the future, Zukunftsmusik, and Wagner’s late “regenerationism” is just another euphemism for this. There is immense hesitancy in his words, because as Wagner notes, he is once more placing himself at great danger of running afoul of political prosecution in the Bismarckian Empire if he were to once more openly support militant communism, especially since Bismarck emphatically reinstated the death penalty while introducing his anti-Socialist laws. Yet these words prove, once again, that far from remaining supine in blindly embracing Bismarckian militarist imperialism, Wagner remained politically engaged in opposition. Rather than Wagner being the eternal archetypal case in point incontestably proving that Germans after unification in 1871 simply threw the liberal ideals of 1848 out the window to become supine reactionaries, Wagner time and again explodes such myths.
Notice that Wagner, as late in his life as the 1870s, still writes “communism is the antithesis of egoism”. Throughout his life, Wagner repeatedly and consistently uses the word egoism, not only in his critiques of capitalism as egoism, but in his 1864 attacks on right-wing patriotic nationalism as an instrument for drumming up militarist sentiment. In State and Religion Wagner even goes on an interminable Wahn monologue of his own, pitilessly decrying the madness of right-wing patriotic nationalism:
The actual externalisation out of egoism carried out in the patriotic act, however, is, at all events, an already so violent effort that it cannot forever and in the long run continue. The delusion [Wahn] towards which it is impelled, is still so strongly mixed with a truly egoistic idea that the relapse from it into the sober, purely egoistic mood of the day is usually strikingly rapid, and this mood itself continues to fill the actual breadth of life.
Die in der patriotischen Handlung vollzogene thatsächliche Entäußerung des Egoismus’ ist jedoch immerhin eine bereits so gewaltsame Anstrengung, daß sie unmöglich immer und auf die Dauer anhalten kann; auch ist der Wahn, der dazu treibt, noch so stark mit einer wirklich egoistischen Vorstellung vermischt, daß der Rückfall aus ihm in die nüchterne, rein egoistische Tagesstimmung gemeiniglich auffallend schnell vor sich geht, und diese Stimmung selbst die eigentliche Breite des Lebens auszufüllen fortfährt.
Wagner: Über Staat und Religion (1864). Wagner-SuD Bd. 8, 13. Digitale Bibliothek. My translation.
Further, in The Artwork of the Future (1849), Wagner writes:
The most complete satiation of egoism is attained in Communism, that is, through the complete denial and abolition [Aufhebung] of egoism, for a need is satisfied only when it is no longer present...
Die vollkommenste Befriedigung des Egoismus erreicht sich im Kommunismus, d.h. durch vollständige Verneinung, Aufhebung des Egoismus, denn ein Bedürfniß ist nur dann befriedigt, wenn es nicht mehr vorhanden ist...
Wagner: Das Künstlerthum der Zukunft (1849), Wagner-SuD Bd. 12, 255. Digitale Bibliothek. My translation.
In The Artwork of the Future (1850), Wagner also writes of the “bearing fruit of egoism through communism” (das Aufgehen des Egoismus in den Kommunismus), as the sterility of isolated egoism is supplanted by the fecundity of the “Me and You” (das Ich und Du).
Again in The Artwork of the Future (1850) Wagner writes:
Only through Communism does egoism find itself completely satiated.
Egoism ... which, has brought such immeasurable misery into the world, has also brought such deplorable mutilations and untruth into art...
Nur im Kommunismus findet sich der Egoismus vollständig befriedigt.
Der Egoismus, der so unermeßlichen Jammer in die Welt und so beklagenswerthe Verstümmelung und Unwahrheit in die Kunst gebracht hat, ist allerdings anderer Art, als der natürliche, vernünftige, der in der Allgemeinsamkeit sich vollständig befriedigt.
Wagner: Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1850). Die drei reinmenschlichen Kunstarten in ihrem ursprünglichen Vereine. Wagner-SuD Bd. 3, 71 Digitale Bibliothek. My translation. The digital scan of an original period printing can be found on Google books.
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| There are +50 hits to the word Egoismus (egoism) in Wagner’s digitalised complete works (Digitale Bibliothek 107) with a further 30 hits in Wagner’s own writings to the word Egoist, 22 hits to the word Egoisten (egoists), and a further 25 hits to the the word egoistisch (egoistic). |
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| These hits to the word Egoismus correspond closely to the 22 hits to the word Kommunismus in Wagner’s complete works. Wagner uses the word Kommunismus more often in Das Künstlerthum der Zukunft (The Artwork of the Future) than Marx himself does in the entirety of Das Kapital. |
As for the claim that with his late interest in Schopenhauer, Wagner turned his back on liberalism, this again proves to be false wishful thinking from those belonging to the Cosima-Chamberlain völkisch line of posthumous interpreters. Absolutely no contradiction between the Feuerbachian and Schopenhauerian periods exists whatsoever, for Wagner translates Schopenhauer into Young Hegelian (and thus Feuerbachian) terms using the concept of Aufhebung (which is usually translated as sublation, but can also mean negation or abolition):
However, as he himself alone is that which strives against himself, thus his rage expresses itself as a nothing other than his self-negation. The only thing that can finally bring him to a self-realisation that that which can neutralise suffering is compassion, which as the Sublation [Aufhebung] of the Will, expresses the negation of a negation—something we understand according to the rules of logic as an affirmation.
Da er aber doch selbst wiederum allein nur dieses sich Entgegenstrebende ist, so drückt sein Wüten nichts Anderes als sein Selbst-Verneinung aus, und hierüber zur Selbstbesinnung zu gelangen darf endlich nur das dem Leiden entkeimende Mitleiden ermöglichen, welches dann als Aufhebung des Willens die Negation einer Negation ausdrückt, die wir nach Regeln der Logik als Affirmation verstehen.
Wagner: Religion und Kunst (1880). Gesammelte Schriften X, p245
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| Aufhebung des Willens The Sublation of the Will |
This writing comes from very late in Wagner’s life, in 1880, corresponding to his writing Parsifal, putting lie to speculation about a late about-turn in political orientation. For the late Wagner of 1880, Schopenhauer’s Denial of the Will was the supreme apotheosis of the “complete denial and abolition [Aufhebung] of egoism” (“vollständige Verneinung, Aufhebung des Egoismus”), which he wrote of as being the essence of communism in 1849. For that is why the Aufhebung of the Will is an affirmation. Wagner has transformed Schopenhauer into a communist through an Aufhebung of the blindly egoistic Will. Given how proto-psychoanalytic Schopenhauer is, Wagner must be seen as having anticipated the philosophy of the Frankfurt School. Whereas Wagner synthesises Feuerbachian proto-Marxism with Schopenhauerian proto-psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School synthesises post-Marxist and post-psychoanalytic thought.
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| National Socialist propaganda hardly based itself in toto on Wagner’s ideals of communism as the negation (Aufhebung) of the Will and the capitalism of its blindly egoistic avarice. On the contrary, it glorified the Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) |
The position here is corroborated by ideas found Wagner’s 1855 Dante-Schopenhauer letters to Franz Liszt, where Wagner implies that the sublimest act of sainthood is that of becoming a communist through the Aufhebung (abolition) of egoism:
This act of the Negation of the Will [Verneinung des Willens] is the actual deed of the saint: that he finally completes himself in the complete abolition [Aufhebung] of personal consciousness...
Dieser Akt der Verneinung des Willens ist die eigentliche Handlung des Heiligen: daß er sich endlich nur vollendet in der vollständigen Aufhebung des persönlichen Bewußtseins...
Wagner: Dante-Schopenhauer (1855). Wagner-SuD Vol. 16, 100. Digitale Bibliothek.
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| Lenin depicted as a saint. For Wagner, the essence of communism was the negation (Aufhebung) of the individual Will’s egoism: the same as the essence of sainthood |
Yet Köhler violently disregarded Wagner own words published in primary source texts, instead “proving” that the National Socialist polemical notion of Judeo-Bolshevism originated with a nineteenth-century opera composer by overwriting Wagner’s words with Hitler’s before concluding they are saying the same thing:
As Alberich wants to turn the world into a culture-less Nibelungen state, so Marxism ‘delivers the world straight into the hands of the Jews’.
...thus the egoist becomes a communist, the One becomes the All, Man becomes God, and the artistic becomes Art.
...somit wird der Egoist Kommunist, der Eine Alle, der Mensch Gott, die Kunstart Kunst.
Wagner: Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft, (The Artwork of the Future) 1850. Der Mensch sein eigener künstlerischer Gegenstand und Stoff. (Man as the Object and Material of his own Art). Wagner-SuD Bd. 3, 67. Digitale Bibliothek. Urtext also available on Google Books.
Once again, in his autobiography, Wagner states:
As to the Proudhonian [anarchistic socialist] and other socialist doctrines concerning the destruction of the power of capitalism through direct productive labor, he [the revolutionary August Röckel] created a whole new moral world-order, one to which he gradually won me over by some very appealing utterances, to the extent that I, on my part, now began the realisation of my artistic ideal.
Auf die Proudhonschen und anderer Sozialisten Lehren von der Vernichtung der Macht des Kapitales durch die unmittelbar produktive Arbeit baute er eine ganz neue moralische Weltordnung auf, für welche er mich allmählich durch einige sehr anziehende Behauptungen darüber selbst insoweit gewann, daß ich nun wieder meinerseits darauf die Realisierung meines Kunstideals aufzubauen begann.
Wagner: Mein Leben (1864-1880). My translation.
Ignoring every primary source of evidence, Köhler pushed the view that the only thing discussed in Mein Kampf is opera, on the assumption that this book was written by Wagner long after his death. Köhler even quoted words from another publication edited by Karl Grunsky 1924, some forty years after Wagner’s death, and then passed the words off as Wagner’s own:
Above all Wagner had pointed to the two directions these disasters would come. One is that which calls itself ‘communist’—that crude and savage perversion of the Christian doctrine that screams with thinly disguised greed “what is yours, is mine!”’; the other, characterised by an insatiable covetousness and a desire to spread its tentacles over oceans and continents as far as the eye can see, is international Jewry.
Köhler p192
The phrase “international Jewry” is another anachronistic term originating from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian hoax book published in 1903, some twenty years after Wagner’s death in 1883. The phrase “Judeo-Bolshevism” also represented hostile propaganda against the 1918-19 German Revolution that established Weimar democracy in an age where many leaders in the left-wing revolutionary side such as Rosa Luxemburg and Kurt Eisner were Jewish. Marx himself was from a part Jewish ethnic background.
The trouble is that no serious historian would ever claim that the National Socialist polemical slogan “Judeo-Bolshevism” had its origins in a nineteenth-century opera composer. Weimar era propagandists alleged that socialism—indeed any form of liberalism in general—constituted an international Jewish conspiracy, an unGerman and alien Other forcibly imposed upon them so as to rob Germans of their authentic right-wing identity. Even the democratic Weimar Republic was dubbed “the Jewish republic”.
The phrase “Jewish-Bolshevism” also played up fears that German revolutionary Bolsheviks would try to repeat what happened in the 1917 Russian Revolution and attempt to create a German Soviet Republic. Unfortunately, it was grossly anachronistic to read National Socialist propagandist slogans against the Russian Revolution and 1918-19 German Revolution into Wagner’s writings from 1848-1883. That could only be achieved through the assumption that Wagner and Hitler belong to one and the same epoch devoid of even the slightest of discontinuities separating them, thereby permitting the mergence of their identities into the singular chimeric figure of “WagnerHitler”.
When Wagner’s primary texts are examined critically, far from running an anachronistic polemic claiming that socialism and Weimar democracy were an alien Other (hence “Jewish”) to authentic German national identity, it can be demonstrated Wagner thought, just like Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, that as the Aufhebung of egoism, communism was the very apotheosis of true German national identity.
The Stab in the Back Myth is Falsely Alleged to have Wagnerian Roots
The Dolchstoßlegende (“stab in the back myth”) that emerged during the Weimar Republic is another political slogan that Köhler tried to wring a Wagnerian theme out of. The origins of the expression “stab in the back” is said to have been a journalistic invention first published either in mid-December 1918 by the nationalist newspaper Deutsche Tageszeitung or else in the Neuen Zürcher Zeitung 17th December, 1918 where it was stated as coming from a British general Sir Frederick Maurice (Lars Broder Keil: Deutsche Legenden: vom “Dolchstoss” und anderen Mythen der Geschichte). According to this idea, the German military remained undefeated. Most importantly, the Dolchstoßlegende never originated from Hitler, but predates his entry into the public sphere.
At the end of the First World War, Germany was severely running short of supplies. It would have proven impossible to maintain all-out modern warfare indefinitely against the Allies. Both soldiers on the front and people back home had had enough of it. Widespread strikes broke out, soldiers and sailors mutinied. Revolution was in the air, as socialists saw this as the beginning of the worldwide collapse of capitalism prophesied by Marx. The German Revolution of 1918-19 forced the abdication of the Kaiser and gave birth to Weimar democracy. Wagner’s democratic dream, crushed in 1849, had at last been realised in Germany.
Later, Hitler and the National Socialist counter-revolutionaries blamed Germany’s loss in the Great War on the revolutionary forces, rather than face the reality of the fact that catastrophic military defeat on the battlefield was inevitable. Rather than accepting they had been defeated in battle, the right claimed that the German forces on the front had only been forced to surrender because they had been “stabbed in the back” by the revolutionaries. Hitler and the National Socialists deluded themselves into thinking that Germany would have won the war, had it not been for the treacherous “stab in the back”.
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| 1919 antisemitic postcard in: March 26, 1919 Vienna Arbeiterzeitung |
Some of the leading political figures in the German Revolution of 1918-19 were Jewish. This gave rise to malicious right-wing propaganda about a conspiracy of “back-stabbing” Jewish Communists trying to take over Germany. The National Socialists liked to rant about a “Jewish-Bolshevik” plot of back-stabbing Jews. However, counter-revolutionaries came up with the slogan well before the National Socialist party ever existed:
Not surprisingly, the attempted putsch on 6 December [1918] by monarchist elements, which was openly aimed at the executive, used the classical argument of the anti-Semites when it called the Executive’s headquarters in the Prussian Landtag a ‘synagogue’.
Pierre Broué: The German Revolution 1917-1923, p183.
The notion of a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy cannot possibly have originated from Hitler, since like the Dolchstoßlegende, it predates his entry into politics. Of course, Köhler wants us to know that the notion of a “stab in the back” by “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspirators was originally coined by Hitler as a reference to the way Siegfried is killed in Götterdämmerung. Yet despite the total absence of evidence to this effect, Köhler would have us first believe that Hitler was the sole creator of the myth, and next, that because Hitler created it, that it, therefore, must be a Wagnerian metaphor. Köhler claimed that in Hitler’s view, the German Siegfried gets “stabbed in the back” by his allegedly Jewish Nibelung plotters. No evidence is provided to substantiate this wild speculation about the origins of the myth, or that Hitler ever interpreted the Dolchstoßlegende in such a Wagnerian light—naturally since absolutely no such evidence exists.
To see if there is any evidence that the “stab in the back” metaphor had Wagnerian origins I studied detailed accounts of the German Revolution and the Weimar Republic by Pierre Broué, Erberhard Kolb, Bernhard Fulda, Hans Mommsen, and Heinrich August Winkler. I also studied Hitler’s Mein Kampf and his Zweites Buch. I went through the major Hitler’s autobiographies by Joachim Fest, Sir Ian Kershaw (full two-volume edition) and John Toland. I went through books on the Holocaust by Raul Hilberg, Saul Friedländer, David Cesarani and Christopher Browning. I went through major biographies of Heinrich Himmler, Alfred Rosenberg, and Reinhard Heydrich. I found absolutely nothing about the “stab in the back” expression being originally conceived as a reference to anything in Wagner. This was just part of Köhler’s alien abduction fantasy. Köhler failed to provide even a single scrap of evidence to support his speculation—because no such evidence exists, except in Köhler’s wildest imagination. Once again Köhler’s interpretation of events represented a complete rewriting and falsification of history based on operatically based fantasy.
However, one cartoon in the Völkischer Beobachter (the official mouthpiece of the National Socialist Party), depicts Germania being stabbed in the back by Shylock, suggesting there is just as strong a case to be made for “Shakespeare’s Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple”:
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| Der französische Shylock im Ruhrgebiet The French Shylock in the Ruhr region Völkischer Beobachter, 5th April 1923 |
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| Hitler’s personal library contains a leather bound copy of the complete works of Shakespeare—but not of Wagner. Does that now mean the creator of Shylock caused WWII and the Holocaust? |
Clearly, this suggests that, quite on the contrary, the National Socialists thought of the Stab-in-the-Back metaphor as being Shakespearian rather than incontestably Wagnerian as Köhler alleged with his usual absolute certainty. It looks like the door is open for a polemicist to make good money peddle another tall tale about Shakespeare’s Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple, for there are fools aplenty out there of Shakespearean proportions who will believe anything you assure them is The Truth:
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| Shakespeare’s Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple. |
Köhler also claimed that the sword, Nothung, could only be a symbol of German militarist aggression in a way that is totally anachronistic. This Germania that Köhler ascribes to Wagner was a militaristic one as depicted in this 1914 German war propaganda image:
However, what he overlooked is that the “stab in the back” metaphor was equally used by the revolutionary left. According to Pierre Broué, in Die Kommunistische Internationale (no. 12, 30 July 1920 columns 2143-8), Paul Levi denounced the counter-revolutionary Kapp Putsch as “a crime” and “a stab in the back for the greatest action of the German proletariat”. Broué also gives an example of the revolutionary side using the sword metaphor:
In [Karl] Radek’s opinion, the declaration of ‘loyal opposition’ deceived the masses by giving them the illusion about the possibility of constructing a revolutionary government without first having disarmed the counter-revolutionary violence at a moment precisely when it was necessary to summon the working class to fight and to receive ‘sword in hand’ a [Social Democrat] government which in reality was essentially directly against it.
Pierre Broué: The German Revolution 1917-1923 p387. My emphasis.
That is, the Social Democrats had joined forces with the conservatives to prevent the formation of a Russian styled Soviet Republic in Germany. The revolutionaries called for the proletariat to rise up ‘sword in hand’ against the Social Democrats. There is good reason to think that this left-wing revolutionary use of the sword metaphor is closer to the spirit of Wagner’s Ring.
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| Like Veit’s Germania, the Soviet Rodina (motherland) brandishes her sword of justice against fascist imperialism in another revolutionary use of sword symbolism |
For a start, Wagner was a friend of the anarchist-socialist thinker, Michael Bakunin. Friedrich Nietzsche, a former disciple of Wagner, tells us that Wagner created Siegfried as a revolutionary hero:
Wagner had believed in the Revolution all his life, as only a Frenchman could ever have believed in it. So he searched through all the mythic runes, and believed that in Siegfried he had found his perfect revolutionary.
Nietzsche: The Case of Wagner
Nietzsche probably got this information straight from Wagner himself. George Bernard Shaw uses the expression “Siegfried Bakunin” because Siegfried is the anarchistic destroyer of the theocratic order of l’ancien regime. When Siegfried shatters Wotan’s spear with his revolutionary sword, he shatters the symbol of old world bourgeois authority. Nietzsche goes on:
‘Whence comes all evils in the world?’ Wagner asked himself. From ‘ancient oaths,’ he answered, like all ideologues of Revolution. Put plainly: from conventions, laws, moralities, institutions—everything that the old world, the old society is supported by. ‘How can one rid the world of its evils? How can one do away with the old society?’ Only by declaring war against ‘oaths’ (traditions, morals).
The Case of Wagner
Siegfried is a young and idealistic anarchistic revolutionary hero. Just as counter-revolutionary forces crushed the 1848 revolution and the idealistic Frankfurt Parliament hardly sooner than they arose, so too is Siegfried “stabbed in the back” by the counter-revolutionary Hagen.
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| Siegfried, the revolutionary embodiment of the idealistic Young Germany is “stabbed in the back” |
The German 1918-19 Revolution was the successor of the German 1848-49 Revolution that Richard Wagner participated in. Wagner’s Germania is actually Veit’s 1848 liberal Germania holding the sword of justice adorned with the olive branch of peace. There is good evidence that the 1918-19 revolutionary side’s use of the metaphors of the heroic “sword” and the “stab in the back” is more consistent with their use by Wagner himself. The National Socialists were the ones who delivered the young and idealistic Weimar Republic its “stab in the back”, just as counter-revolutionary forces crushed the idealistic revolutionary heroes of 1848. That is the tragedy of Siegfried’s death.
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| Veit’s Germania hung in the Frankfurt Parliament during the 1848 pro-democratic revolution. She carries the sword of justice in one hand wrapped in the olive branch of peace, and the revolutionary tricolour flag of liberty in the other. Broken lie the chains of bondage at her feet as a new dawn rises. |
By lecturing us about how the sword Nothung must only be interpreted as a symbol of counter-revolutionary German militarism, Köhler ended up conferring his blessing on the violent usurpation by the far-right of Wagner’s originally revolutionary sword symbolism. After the popularity of socialist interpretations of Wagner amongst post-war stage directors, Köhler aggressively reasserted the Eternal Truth of Nazi counter-revolutionary propaganda, by trying to reclaim Wagner for his side of politics. His National Socialist masters would have been proud of their disciple, as he fought fanatically to keep Wagner free of the “taint” of liberal interpretations of his philosophy and art. In the long-standing battle by opposing sides of politics to claim Wagner for their own, Köhler showed determination to safeguard the supremacy of Nazi interpretations of art.
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| The Frankfurt Parliament 1848-49: Germany’s first experiment in democracy. “I think that I would have never conceived The Ring if it weren’t for this movement”. “Ich selbst, ich hätte glaube ich, den Ring nicht konzipiert ohne diese Bewegung”. Wagner to Cosima on 2nd May, 1874 |
Wagner even wrote that The Ring should only be performed to celebrate the success of the next revolution:
A performance is only thinkable after the Revolution: the Revolution will firstly bring artists and listeners to me. The next revolution must of necessity bring the entire theatre industry to an end: it must and will destroy everything—this is inevitable. Out of the ruins I will summon that which I require: I shall then find what is necessary to me. I will found a theatre on the Rhine, with an invitation to a grand dramatic festival: after a year of preparation I will perform my complete work over the course of four days: with it I shall hand to the people of the Revolution the significance of that Revolution in its noblest sense. This audience will understand me: those of the present day cannot.
An eine Aufführung kann ich erst nach der Revolution denken: erst die Revolution kann mir die Künstler und die Zuhörer zuführen. Die nächste Revolution muß nothwendig unsrer ganzen theaterwirthschaft das Ende bringen: sie müssen und werden alle zusammenbrechen, dies ist unausbleiblich. Aus den trümmern rufe ich mir dann zusammen, was ich brauche: ich werde, was ich bedarf, dann finden. Am Rheine schlage ich dann ein theater auf, und lade zu einem großen dramatischen Feste ein: nach einem jahre vorbereitung führe ich dann im Laufe von vier Tagen mein ganzes werk auf: mit ihm gebe ich den menschen der Revolution dann die bedeutung dieser Revolution, nach ihrem edelsten sinne, zu erkennen. Dieses publikum wird mich verstehen: das jetzige kann es nicht.
Wagner: Sämtliche Briefe Vierter Band, p.176 (letter to Theodor Uhlig, 1851). My translation.
As for claims for Wagner’s support for militarism alongside genocidal racism, Cosima records Wagner as stating that the only instance in which he thought that any war had been just was the American Civil War leading to the abolition of slavery:
In the evening R. talks about America and the American war with admiration as the only war with a humane purpose
Cosima Diary:Vol II p382 15th July 1879
Cosimas Tagebuch Vol II p382 15th July 1879: Abends spricht R. über Amerika und den amerikanischen Krieg mit Bewunderung als des einzigen Krieges zu einem humanen Zweck
Misrepresentation of Wagner’s View on Religion
Although Wagner’s late religious work, Parsifal, is often thought to represent a turn towards the religious right, the views of Schopenhauer and Feuerbach on religion are really only subtly different. Even in accepting Schopenhauer’s ideas on religion, Wagner retains his radicality, and Parsifal does not represent a swing from the far left towards a late turn towards a reactionary Christian far right anticipating the Positive Christianity of National Socialist theology. This is why even as late in his life as 1880 Wagner writes:
“Knowest thou thy creator, world?” Thus exclaims the poet, who, out of the dictates of conceptual verbal-language had to express the inexpressible with an anthropomorphic metaphor in a misleadingly symbolic manner.„Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?”—so ruft der Dichter, der aus Bedarf der begrifflichen Wort-Sprache mit Hilfe einer anthropomorphistischen Metapher etwas Unausdrückbares nur mißverständlich bezeichnen muß.
Wagner: Religion und Kunst (1880). Gesammelte Schriften X, p 250
In Art and Religion (1880), Wagner quotes Schiller's Ode to Joy only to say that this God is an anthropomorphic metaphor (anthropomorphistischen Metapher)
Yet Köhler kept Wagner in his book so completely muzzled that he is never allowed to speak uninterrupted for longer than one sentence in the whole 378 pages of the book. There is only one apparent exception and there the original quotation has been tampered with. Here is Köhler’s version of the quote from Wagner on religion:
If we reject the Church, the priesthood, indeed the whole historical phenomenon of Jesus Christ, then only for the sake of Christ whom we wish to preserve in all His purity. What we must therefore ruthlessly eradicate is what harms and distorts this Saviour. And what is to be worshipped as a new ideal object of faith is a sublime, pure Redeemer cleansed of all Alexandrinian-Jewish-Roman-despotic accretions.Köhler p216
The only citation Köhler gave us, which was made out to be one continuous extract, was from Glasenapp’s Wagner biography Vol. 6 p298-299. Here it is:
Words like “Church” (Kirche) or “priesthood” (Priestertum) do not occur in the citation. Feel free to carefully search through the rest of the source to confirm this. My translation from Glasenapp’s book where he quotes from a letter by Wagner to Wolzogen dated the 17th of January, starts with the words “‚Es sollte mir leid tun, wenn wir Dr. Förster...”:
I would be sorry if Dr [Bernard] Förster [husband of Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche] should lose as a result of a misunderstanding on his behalf. I would certainly concede to you that you have a right to remove even such a praiseworthy essay for the Bayreuther Blätter if you so wished. I almost fear that it would become difficult for us reach an agreement over what all of the future will recognise as the truth. Cleansed and redeemed of all Alexandrinian-Jewish-Roman-despotic disposition, he is, and is signified by, the incomparably sublime and plain Redeemer of the historically recognisable Jesus of Nazareth.
Es sollte mir leid tun, wenn wir Dr. Förster, aus dem Grunde einer Mißstimmung seinerseits, verlören. Allerdings muß ich Ihnen darin sehr recht geben, daß Sie gewisse Auslassungen aus dessen so verdankenswertem Aussatze für die »Bayreuther Blätter« entfernt wünschten. Fast fürchte ich, es möge uns schwer werden, mit unseren Freunden und Gönnern zu einem Einverständnis darüber zu gelangen, was uns für alle Zukunft der wahrhaft erkannte, von aller alexandrinisch-judaisch-römisch-despotischen Verunstaltung gereinigte und erlöste, unvergleichlich erhaben einfache Erlöser in der historisch erfaßbaren Gestalt von Jesus von Nazareth bedeutet und ist.
Glasenapp: Das Leben Richard Wagners in sechs Büchern, p298-299
Apart from the phrase “Alexandrinian-Jewish-Roman-despotic” it looks like a totally different text from the original source cited in the bibliography. Such misuse of citations shows how Köhler had to tamper with evidence to support his speculations.
Köhler then went on: “A picture of his ideal Jesus, free of Jewish and ecclesiastical associations was given by Wagner in 1849 ...”. What Wagner wants to do is to free his Jesus not only of Old Testament Yahwistic theology dominated by a theocratic God-King, but also of authoritarian Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox dogmatism. Köhler called this a “perverted form of Christianity”, however, such rejection of an anthropomorphic and despotic God-King sitting on a throne was common amongst liberals in the eighteenth to nineteenth century. Radicals such as Spinoza preferred a pantheism, in which Nature became divine and self-determining, rather than being subject to the dictatorship of a God-King who rules as an alienated Other to the world. The reactionary line Köhler runs is that such deviation from conservative theological dogma is a “perverse” heresy of witchcraft and Nazism. It is a similar objection to that encountered amongst eighteenth century reactionaries, who regarded pantheism as “worse than atheism”. Even Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion, approves of Spinozan pantheism, calling it a “sexed-up atheism”.
In the footnote (numbered 1) by Glasenapp (also on p298), he explains that what Wagner is doing is applying Schopenhauer’s philosophy to Christianity: “the pure, unmixed Christianity is nothing other than a branch of noble Buddhism, which after its alternative Indian path found its way to the coast of the Mediterranean” (my translation of Glasenapp’s paraphrase which he cites as coming from letter to Liszt, June 7, 1855, in Volume II of Liszt letters). Such neo-Buddhist philosophical ideas being heretical, in the Middle Ages it would have been decried as “witchcraft”, but this being passé today, instead it draws accusations of “Nazism”
The subject of religion seems to be a touchy one for Köhler. For example, Köhler writes on p 73:
Köhler has again put Hitler’s words in Wagner’s mouth. Like Luther before him, Wagner thought that Christianity had lapsed into error, and believed that Schopenhauer led the way to spiritual renewal. Wagner’s ideas about the renewal of Christianity through a Schopenhauerian neo-Buddhist vision of universal compassion for the world’s suffering are expressed in his last work, Parsifal.
Köhler went on, once again creating false relations between Hitler and Wagner merely by mentioning them in the same sentence:
Hitler, who loathed the Church as much as his predecessor [Wagner], added: ‘What Christ began, I shall finish’.
Köhler has again put Hitler’s words in Wagner’s mouth. Like Luther before him, Wagner thought that Christianity had lapsed into error, and believed that Schopenhauer led the way to spiritual renewal. Wagner’s ideas about the renewal of Christianity through a Schopenhauerian neo-Buddhist vision of universal compassion for the world’s suffering are expressed in his last work, Parsifal.
Köhler went on, once again creating false relations between Hitler and Wagner merely by mentioning them in the same sentence:
. . . In his speeches Hitler concentrated on the concept of the Antichrist, whom Wagner vividly and savagely personified in the figure of Alberich.
Alberich is a dwarf. Köhler has left it entirely to the reader’s imagination how a dwarf is supposed to be the Antichrist. Hitler left no speeches or writings in which he discussed the Antichrist, let alone the Antichrist as a dwarf. As with speculation in the Occult Reich literature, Köhler gave us no references to chase.
Wagner’s Schopenhauerian liberal theology starts with a death of a Yahwistic God, of a sort so liberal that it certainly did not form the foundation of official National Socialist theology. There is evidence that Hitler remained sympathetic to his conservative Catholic roots. Sir Ian Kershaw writes in his biography of Hitler:
Hitler told Goebbels in the summer of 1935 that he wanted ‘peace with the Churches’—‘at least for certain period of time’. He took the ‘question of Catholicism’, noted Goebbels, ‘very seriously’.
Kershaw: Hitler 1889-1936 Hubris
Köhler on p167 stated that:
Wagner’s redeemer was as far removed from the Jesus of the Gospel as National Socialism was from Christianity.
This is clearly something the Christian-right wants badly to believe. There is a growing literature discussing the complicity of the Churches with the National Socialist regime. Although blaming Luther for steering German down its supposed Sonderweg is hardly any more credible than blaming Wagner, some pop historians like William Shirer nonetheless attempted to foot the blame for National Socialism entirely on Martin Luther. Shirer claims Hitler was entirely Luther’s stooge. In this view, Luther is seen as the more “obvious” candidate to be framed as the Great “Prophet”, whose command to throw “hellfire” at the Jews was fulfilled by his little “disciple”, Hitler.
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| There is a growing literature discussing the complicity of the Churches with the National Socialist regime |
The German Christian-right have predictably reacted with horror to the Luther thesis. The most inflammatory passages in Shirer were censored from the German editions of his book. Köhler likewise goes on a mission for God to cleanse Luther and the German Churches from defilement in the eyes of pop culture by the sin of complicity with the National Socialist regime, a complicity that followed centuries of Christian vilification of the Jews. Köhler shifts all blame for these sins from Wagner, who was chosen to bear the cross of the German churches’ sins, and made him solely responsible for the entire history of Christian anti-Semitism. That was why Köhler meticulously avoids even the slightest mention of Hitler’s deep reverence for Luther—the author of The Jews and their Lies:
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| The Jews and their Lies by Martin Luther |
In this book Luther writes:
My advice . . . is:
First, that their synagogues be burned down, and that all who are able toss in sulphur and pitch; it would be good if someone could also throw in some hellfire.
Second, that you likewise will shatter and destroy their homes . . .
And follow their “Prophet”, the National Socialists did, “hellfire” and all:
On the 10th of November, 1938, on Luther’s birthday, the synagogues in Germany are burning. 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.
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| An image of the original text by Bishop Martin Sasse: Martin Luther and the Jews—Away with them! Freiburg, 12th November, 1938 |
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| Covers of the Gospel in the Dritte Reich: a Sunday Paper for German Christians. Left: cover of November 5th issue. Right: cover of November 12th issue. |
Historian John Toland writes in his Hitler biography:
The decision taken, the Führer made it known to those entrusted with the Final Solution that the killings should be done as humanely as possible. This was in line with his conviction that he was observing God’s injunction to cleanse the world of vermin. Still a member in good standing of the Church of Rome despite detestation of its hierarchy (“I am now as before a Catholic and will always remains so”), he carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God. The extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of God . . .
John Toland: Hitler—the Definitive Biography, p.703. My emphasis
Köhler’s Christian-right scapegoating polemic was so exaggerated that it backfires, only serving to highlight attempts to deemphasise Christian anti-Semitism. It was thus entirely predictable that next Köhler publishes a hagiography of Luther full of glowing admiration for him while systematically underplaying his anti-Semitism. Not a single mention is made of his essay, The Jews and their Lies. After all, Luther has been cleansed of his guilt of association with National Socialism by blaming all the sins of the regime on Wagner:
That said, the narrative of linear degrees of escalating proto-Nazi Christian anti-Semitisms starting in the age of the Roman Empire, passing through Medieval Jew-hatred, escalating in the Reformation with Martin Luther, and then finally climaxing in the Shoah, rests every bit as unconvincingly on sweeping assumptions of linear historical continuity, as does the story about escalating degrees of left-wing anti-Semitism passing from Wagner and Marx through to Dühring and Marr before climaxing in National “Socialism”. Whenever such straight lines are drawn through history, it is invariably for the sake of self-serving polemic.
Make Facts Up
Köhler liberally makes facts up. For example, Köhler stated:
The rebirth of National Socialism from the spirit of music—to adapt the Nietzschean phase—took place in the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth.
Nietzsche never talked about the “rebirth of National Socialism”. He died before National Socialism ever existed. Nor is there even a single historian anywhere who thinks there ever was a “rebirth” of National Socialism, since until its appearance in the 1920s, it never existed, nor could it since the historical conditions necessary to its rise simply had not come together. No professional historian would make such an amateurish blunder using a phrase like the “rebirth of National Socialism”, which yet again serves to merge late nineteenth and early twentieth century German into a single monolithic epoch conveniently expurgated of every discontinuity.
Köhler made this claim up too:
Köhler made this claim up too:
The SS was a secret organisation long before it was empowered to embark on its real role. Founded as Hitler’s personal body guard of Blackshirts, it quickly took over the function of the Blood-Order of Knights in Wagner’s Parsifal, an elite band pledged to protect the King of the Grail . . .
Köhler p291
Köhler fails to give us a citation to support this claim. So once again I did my own research. I looked through Adrian Weale’s The SS: A New History, Robert Lewis Koehl’s The SS: A History 1919-45, as well as The Waffen-SS: A European History by Böhler and Gerwarth. Nothing corroborating Köhler could be found. Wagner is never mentioned once, and nor is Parsifal. This, despite the fact that Koehl spent thirty years researching the SS. The Waffen SS was never called the “Blood-Order of the Knights of Parsifal” to “protect the King of the Grail”. Weale does mention an obscure subsection of the Waffen SS called Office VII:
Himmler, in typical grandiose style, described Office VII as: “The “Defenders of the Grail of the Third Reich”. However, it proved to be no such thing. ... SS-Obersturmbannführer... Paul Dittel, an academic expert on Freemasonry, became acting head of the department. However, he also found much of its work futile and its staff far below the level he had respected: “Office VII was, for the most part, a typical collection of semi-intellectuals . . . mostly old members of the National Socialist Party, including university failures, some minor officials and quite a number of simple tradesmen”. If desk officers did ever display academic rigour, their efforts were generally not welcomed. ... By the end of 1943, Office VII was little more than a haven for SD personnel seeking to avoid service at the front.Adrian Weale The SS: A New History p.61 (my emphasis)
Köhler skips any mention of the strange sun-worship and the mystical invocation of Odin and Thor at SS wedding ceremonies:
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The Sonnenrad (sun-wheel) or “Black Sun” swastika was the old Norse symbol of sunworship.
Here it is seen with a Totenkopf. The Sonnenrad was used by the SS Panzer Division “Wiking” (Viking).
The Sonnenrad is found on the floor of Himmler’s Wewelsburg Castle, centre of neo-pagan Odin worship.
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Köhler has made this up as well:
The [Thule Society’s] basic doctrines were unashamedly derived from Wagner, issuing a challenge ‘to fight the forces of the Devil and prevent the adulteration of Germanic blood by intermixing with foreign races’.
Köhler p.149
There is no citation to back up the citation placed in quotation marks. A thorough search through an electronic database of Wagner’s collected writings and letters demonstrates that no such quotation exists anywhere in his writings: it is fake evidence that is completely made up. Nor does David Luhrssen in his scholarly study of the Thule Society confirm Köhler’s claims to transcendental certainty. Luhrssen writes:
The lacuna in scholarship attracted the interest of fantasists and frauds, imaginatively coloring the blank spaces with lurid depictions of the Thule Society as a nexus of Satanism, politics, and conspiracies stretching across time and space. The Third Reich was so aberrant and, for many, so perversely intriguing, that irrational explanations have been eagerly and often carelessly embraced by popular audiences as supplement or substitute for the economic and political rationales of mainstream historians. Lending a false note of credence to a farrago of ungrounded speculation, the Thule Society gained a prominent place in the legend of an “Occult Reich” after being cited in several prominent pseudo-histories. In the pantheon of popular culture Thule became evil incarnate, a shadow in the dark zone where fantasy eclipsed facts.
. . . many of these books professed horror at the dark doings of Nazi occultists while offering titillating glimpses into their secrets.
Luhrssen: The Hammer of the Gods p.203-206
Köhler similarly professes mock horror on “unveiling” occult conspiracies while “offering titillating glimpses” into alleged “Nazi secrets”. Köhler passes off the quotation about the doctrines of Thule Society as though it came from Wagner, but, as usual, it comes from an unrelated source dating from long after Wagner’s death—a fact left unmentioned in the main text, which the reader only discovers on checking the bibliography. Here is Wagner’s final word on the intermixing of races, resulting in:
... a possibly of the sameness of all people made equal to each other through the intermixing of races can only lead to an aesthetically ordered world if this sameness were conceivable when grounded on a universal moral consensus such as the true Christianity . . .
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 . . .
From Heldentum und Christentum, 1881. My translation.
The mixing of races would result in everyone becoming “united and undifferentiated”.
The Aliens Join Forces with
the Werewolves and Fairies
If the reactionary right usurped the image of the sword of justice and turned it into an image of a militant Germania brandishing her sword in anger, the same usurpation can be seen with the image of the wolf. Siegfried is a lone wolf because he dares to rebel against what he naively sees as the injustice of social conventions that treats women as property to be bartered and sold. Many of the radicals in the Young Germany movement anticipated twentieth-century radical feminism by arguing that marriage was a petit bourgeois institution for the enslavement of women. That is the precise situation in which Sieglinde, given as a “gift” to Hunding as a wife, finds herself, and from which Siegfried frees her, even if that mean shattering the bonds of the institution of marriage in favour of the sexual revolution of anarchical free love.
Köhler confers his blessing to the right wing usurpation of wolf symbolism by creating false associations in his attempt to forge a phoney link between the reference to Wotan’s guise as a wolf in The Ring and Hitler’s Wolfschanze, one of his military headquarters (Führerhauptquartiere):
The name Wolf went back to Wagner, who had given Wotan, clad in his wolfskin, the pseudonym of Wolf. Hitler now adopted it as his own nom de guerre. He had spied for the German army in the 1920s under the name of Wolf . . .
Köhler mentioned the Wolfschanze (Wolf’s Lair) several times, yet he provides no proof to show that Hitler had in mind an obscure reference to a wolf in The Ring. The name “Wolf” is actually derived from Hitler’s first name. “Wolf” is an old diminutive form of “Adolf”, like “Bill” is the diminutive of “William”. Hitler even called his dog, “Wolf”. If there was a musical influence, it might just as well be the Disney song “who’s afraid of the big bad wolf”—it was a tune Hitler was fond of whistling:
Köhler’s claim that Hitler spied for the German army under the codename of Wolf during the “1920s” (sic) is also nonsense. There are no references to back this claim up. The most thorough study of Hitler in this period come from Thomas Weber and Othmar Plöckinger, and they mention nothing of the kind—nor do Joachim Fest, Allan Bullock, John Toland, Volker Ullrich, or Sir Ian Kershaw in their respective Hitler biographies. In fact, Weber says that Hitler was officially discharged from the army on the 31st of March, 1920 (Weber: Hitler’s First War), while Volker Ullrich specifically debunks the story as a myth in volume one of his biography.
The problem is that Wolfschanze was not the only nickname for Hitler’s various military headquarters invoking wolves. Others, left unmentioned, include Werwolf (Werewolf), and Wolfschlucht (Wolf’s Glen) I and II. There are no more werewolves in any of Wagner’s operas than there are aliens. Nor is there a “wolf’s glen” in any of Wagner’s operas. However, there is a “wolf’s glen scene” in Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz:
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| An illustration of the famous wolf’s glen scene from Weber’s Der Freischütz and its romantic fascination for the supernatural. |
Why did Köhler fail to mention that? Probably because it would make his ideas look like a Nazi werewolf speculation, to add to the cornucopia of quasi-ufological speculations surrounding the Dritte Reich. We can all gleefully look forward to reading about Weber’s Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple narrating the fairy tale of how the occult Nazi opera conspiracies encrypted in Carlo Maria von Weber’s operas empowered the “dark genius” of Weber, father of German nationalist romantic opera, to exert supernatural control over world history by steering Germany on remote control from beyond the grave down the diabolical path of its fateful Sonderweg. Weber’s opera, Oberon, would be the perfect place for Köhler to start speculating—Oberon is, after all, the King of the Fairies:
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| Oberon: King of the Fairies Wagner too wrote an opera on a similar theme: Die Feen. In claiming that Hitler sought “not to pursue a set of political aims, that is, to arrange the political and social realities of the time in the interests of the nation whose Chancellor he was” seeking instead to “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama”, Köhler makes the fairies in Die Feen a more powerful shaper of history than the socio-political realities of Hitler’s own lifetime. |
Problematic Use of Quotations
It is remarkable that, in Köhler’s whole book, he never allowed Wagner to speak for himself uninterrupted. In the short space of this present review, primary quotations allow Wagner to speak uninterrupted for much longer than in the whole of Köhler’s 378-page book. The book was supposed to be about Wagner, yet when a view is ascribed to Wagner, instead Köhler feeds the reader a quote from Hitler, Goebbels etc, made to look as though it came from Wagner. The a priori assumption is that a quote from Hitler, Goebbels et alia is a perfect substitute for a quote from Wagner, since they always say the same thing. Köhler then concludes that this proves that Wagner is a Nazi because everything he “says” is the same as what key Party members say. The end result is a dizzying cycle of an infinitely self-perpetuating tautology calculated to thrill and mesmerise many a gullible dilettante.
Here is a good example:
The message that Hitler preached, wrote Konrad Heiden, a journalist who fled Germany in 1933, never changed. ‘It always came down to the same thing – that everything was to be blamed on the Jews’. It was the old theme, repeated over and over by Wagner and Chamberlain, on which Hitler wrote his own variations.
Köhler p.140
While there is a citation for the Heiden quote, we are not given a single example of Wagner saying that “everything is to be blamed on the Jews”. There is no primary source citation to back up the veracity of the claim that this came from Wagner, and later repeated by Hitler, simply because Wagner never stated such a thing. By placing someone else’s words in quotation marks, Köhler gave the false impression that the quote originated from Wagner, but on closer inspection, the attribution turns out to be fraudulent. It is just another moment where the previous run of credible primary citations abruptly dries up just as the juicy punchline hits, only to be replaced by pulp fiction in the guise of history.
The same objection was made by Sir Richard Evans, who states that:
. . . to make Wagner directly responsible for the nazi extermination of the Jews, as Köhler does, is hardly plausible. Köhler achieves this only by erecting dizzying and unstable structures of inference and correspondence, in which phrases and quotations are time and again ripped from their context in the writings or sayings of Hitler and Wagner and made to look as if they are saying the same thing. None of this is remotely persuasive.
Evans: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), p. 149 . My emphasis.
It is striking that almost every quote has been ripped out of context, or even outright tampered with and quotes from Hitler or other National Socialists put into Wagner’s mouth to make it look as though he had made the statement. By this method, you could convict anyone for being a Hitler clone, ripe to hang on the same gallows as Eichmann. If there is anything “chilling” about Köhler’s book it is his willingness to falsify facts and maliciously tamper with evidence.
Kubizek – A Dubious Source
August Kubizek’s book The Young Hitler I Knew remains a favourite of neo-Nazi groups. Copies of the book circulate on neo-Nazi websites (I refuse to link to them), but with chapter 8 (Enthusiasm for Richard Wagner) curiously removed. Sir Ian Kershaw reminds us that the book started life as a commission from the National Socialist Party:
The core of the book, we should recall, began life as a manuscript commissioned by the Nazi Party. A copy of the second part of this original text survives today. The fifty typescript pages, dealing with the Vienna period, are far shorter than the corresponding sections of the book. A great deal, therefore, has been added to the original account—itself composed over thirty years after the events it describes. Glowing adulation of Hitler is abundantly evident in the typescript, whereas the book is inevitably more guarded, even though an unmistakable current of admiration remains.
Sir Ian Kershaw: foreword to The Young Hitler I Knew.
Kubizek hid the typescript, and, in 1953, published his book in revised form, after being released from imprisonment by the allies. Köhler relied heavily on Kubizek. Unlike academic historians, Köhler failed to subject Kubizek to critical scrutiny. Köhler made the most exaggerated use of Kubizek’s book:
‘Sometimes’, wrote Kubizek, his friend would ‘quote by heart from a letter or passage from Wagner or recite from one of his essays, such as “The Work of Art of the Future” or “Art and Revolution”’. Both of these essays, written during Wagner’s exile in Switzerland, were included in the third volume of his collected works; the former in particular, with its coded call to revolt, would have gripped the impressionable young Hitler, who having nothing else to do, set about attending to the reorganisation of the country.
Köhler p.83. My emphasis.
As is his usual practice, Köhler tampered with, and surreptitiously embellished the quote. Kubizek says that the young Adolf would “recite the text of some note or letter by Wagner”, but Kubizek does not say that he did so “by heart” from a passage of one of his essays:
It might happen that on one of our rambles Adolf would suddenly abandon the subject upon which he had been up to that moment holding forth... and recite the text of some note or letter by Wagner, or maybe a thesis—Kunstwerk und Zukunft (‘The Artwork of the Future’) or Die Kunst und die Revolution (‘Art and Revolution’). Although it would not be an easy matter to follow the thread of these I would always pay close attention and look forward to Hitler’s concluding observations, which were invariable. ‘So you see’, he would say, ‘even Wagner went through it like I have. All the time he had to tackle the ignorance of his surroundings’. These comparisons seemed very exaggerated to me... but my friend, who saw his own life as a parallel to that of Wagner, was barely seventeen...
Kubizek, p.84. My emphasis.
Köhler conveniently omitted the fact that Kubizek says that whenever his young friend, “Wolf”, read from Wagner, he came up with the same the self-aggrandising interpretation “which were invariable”: “So you see”, he would say, “even Wagner went through it just like I have” (Kubizek, page 84). When all of this begs the question as to whether Kubizek’s uncorroborated testimony is even reliable, it is predictable that academic historians like Sir Richard J. Evans conclude that “there is no evidence that [Hitler] actually read any of Wagner’s writings”. There is simply no evidence that National Socialism can be interpreted as a form of Operatic Socialism.
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| “Only through Communism does Egoism find itself completely satiated” “Nur im Kommunismus findet sich der Egoismus vollständig befriedigt”. From an original 1850 printing Wagner’s The Artwork of the Future |
The trouble is that the Hitler who allegedly “read” these Communist Revolutionary works by Wagner was barely 17-years old. Did Köhler think that the 17-year-old Adolf “set about attending to the reorganisation of the country” according to Communist Revolutionary ideals? Like other biographers, Hitler says in his semi-autobiographical Mein Kampf that his radicalisation occurred in the face of the catastrophic traumas surrounding World War One and its seismic socio-political aftershocks, casting grave doubts over Köhler’s claim such “political and social realities” of Hitler’s own time can be ignored to recontextualise him into a narrative of radicalisation by exposure to nineteenth-century romantic opera at age twelve, thus making nineteenth-century history the more relevant historical background to the rise of Hitler.
In my father’s house, I do not recall hearing the word [Jew] at all during my father’s lifetime [1837—1903]. I believe the old gentleman would have seen, in the particular emphasis placed upon this term, a cultural backwardness.
Im väterlichen Hause erinnere ich mich überhaupt nicht, zu Lebzeiten des Vaters das Wort auch nur gehört zu haben. Ich glaube, der alte Herr würde schon in der besonderen Betonung dieser Bezeichnung eine kulturelle Rückständigkeit erblickt haben.
Mein Kampf: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Munich. 1943 edition; p.54. My translation
The hypothesis that the political radicalisation of Hitler occurred on seeing Lohengrin at age twelve, and then at the age of seventeen while reading Feuerbachian Communist Revolutionary works by Wagner, flies in the face of what we know of Hitler.
Yet recontextualise Köhler does, in making sweeping statements about the monocausal operatic genesis of the political Hitler out of the historical background of nineteenth-century romantic opera:
How did Hitler become ‘Hitler’?
Apparently everything about him was pure theatre. He attached no importance to having an identity of his own—what mattered was his mask. ... This corresponds in turn to the role which had been waiting since Wagner’s time for someone to fill. And precisely because Hitler himself did not represent anything, he could give himself over entirely to this role [of becoming Wagner’s puppet].
Köhler, p.145
Another problem with the alleged straight line of influence from Wagner to Hitler is that Wagner’s prose writings are so stylistically impenetrable that Thomas Mann found them unreadable. Thomas Mann in German himself presents a formidable challenge to read, so for a seventeen-year-old without a tertiary education to have read Wagner would have been an extraordinary feat. Wagner’s theoretical prose writings are harder to read than Marx or Hegel, who are themselves notoriously difficult even amongst those with postgraduate degrees. No less a Hegel authority than Frederick Beiser says that reading Hegel’s prose is “often a trying and exhausting experience, the intellectual equivalent of chewing gravel”. No less a Wagner authority than Brian Magee, a lecturer in philosophy and author of two books on Wagner, confesses to finding Wagner’s prose writings impenetrable:
The turgidity of Wagner’s own writing has something to do, I believe, with the fact that he was so impressed by Hegel’s. . . . Even so, it remains a minor tragedy that Wagner is so turgid a writer, because it means that one of the supremely great minds of all time is not satisfactorily accessible through his writings, and that these writings are scarcely read any more (except in certain academic circles in the German-speaking world, where there is now a thriving industry devoted to them). Even for someone as interested in Wagner as I am, reading him is not a pleasure . . .
Magee: Wagner and Philosophy; Chapter Six: Opera and Greek Drama (iii)
Even Köhler, a philosophy graduate, admitted to finding Wagner’s prose hard going, when he describes them as being written in “Byzantine sentence structures” (p. 121).
If a Wagner authority like Magee finds Wagner’s “Byzantine sentence structures”, impenetrable, it raises serious questions as to whether a seventeen-year-old schoolboy would have managed them. The Young Hegelian socialist thinker, Feuerbach, was a pupil of Hegel, and the chances that the seventeen-year-old Adolf read Wagner’s turgid Feuerbachian period revolutionary works with much comprehension appear vanishingly slender. If Kubizek’s account of the young Adolf’s response to alleged attempts at reading Wagner inspire little confidence that he managed to penetrate their turgidity, then along with the striking absence of any of Wagner’s prose writings from Hitler’s personal library, the fact that Hitler never once officially quoted from any of Wagner’s prose writings speaks volumes. Hitler also left heavy marginalia in books he studied intensively, but not a single book by Wagner containing his handwriting survive, a fact heavily at odds with speculative claims alleging that all Hitler ever read was Wagner. Doubtless, Hitler took them with him when the aliens evacuated him from the bunker onto the safety of their UFO.
Nor do historians think that National Socialist ideology was derived from the proto-Marxist socialist philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. Köhler’s blatant attempts to shift the ideological origins of National Socialism to socialist philosophy constitutes a blatant right-wing revisionist history attempting to shift the blame for fascism onto the left. However, since the revolutionary Wagner who wrote the Feuerbachian The Artwork of the Future and Art and Revolution was ardently pro-democratic and socialist, it makes it all the more a pity that the young Adolf failed to make either head or tail out of Wagner’s impenetrable prose. For if he had, history might have turned out differently as Hitler might have used his considerable talents in the service of his ideological sworn enemies on the opposite side of politics, rather than murdering them in concentration camps.
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| The Artwork of the Future (1849) was written in the same year as the Dresden uprising. “Dedicated to Ludwig Feuerbach in grateful reverence”. Image from original publication by Otto Wigland, Leipzig, 1850 |
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| Feuerbach—the Roots of Socialist Philosophy by Ludwig Engels. Engels and Marx greatly admired Ludwig Feuerbach as a socialist philosopher whose thinking laid the foundation for their own. The most famous turn of phrase from this book is: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” |
Kershaw Mocks Köhler’s Use of Kubizek’s Melodramatic Rienzi “Vision”
Köhler’s favourite part of Kubizek’s book concerns the “vision” involving Rienzi. A professional historian like Sir Ian Kershaw is much more sceptical:
Another story described by Kubizek, and repeated in countless books on Hitler, also seems elaborated to the point of near fantasy. This is the lengthy episode of the nocturnal climb up the Freinberg, a mountain just outside Linz, following a visit to a performance of Wagner’s Rienzi, an early work about a Roman tribune of the people who was eventually cast down by his one-time followers. Kubizek has Hitler, in near ecstasy, elucidating the meaning of what they had seen in almost mystical terms. After the war Kubizek remained insistent that the story was true. The evening evidently left its mark on him, and he reminded Hitler of it when they met at Bayreuth in 1939. Kubizek concludes his chapter on the ‘vision’ by telling how Hitler recounted the episode to his hostess, Winifred Wagner, ending: ‘in that hour it began’. But this was Hitler showing off his ‘prophetic qualities’ to an important admirer, Frau Wagner. Whatever happened on the Freinberg that night that so impressed the impressionable Kubizek, nothing ‘began’ then.
Sir Ian Kershaw takes Köhler to task for taking Kubizek’s melodramatic kitsch seriously:
Kubizek’s account [of the Rienzi story], is, however, highly fanciful, reading in mystical fashion back into the episode an early prophetic vision of Hitler’s own future. Plainly, the strange evening had made a lasting impression on Kubizek. He reminded Hitler of it when they met at Bayreuth in 1939. On the spot, Hitler seized on the story to illustrate his early prophetic qualities to his hostess, Winifred Wagner, ending with the words: ‘in that hour, it began’ (Kubizek, 118).
Kubizek, more impressed than ever, subsequently produced his post-war, highly imaginary depiction, with the melodramatically absurd claim at the forefront of his mind. This has not prevented the ‘vision’ on the Freinberg being taken seriously by some later writers. See e.g. Joachim Köhler, “Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker”, Munich, 1996, ch.2, esp. 34-5.
Sir Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1889-1936—Hubris. Endnote 128. My emphasis
Kubizek’s kitschy story smacks of a propaganda gimmick adulating Hitler as some visionary genius. Sir Ian Kershaw suggests that the attempt to create an association with Wagner is “highly fanciful”, a melodrama peddling a bloated image of Hitler as some sort of art-loving beer-hall “visionary”. Kershaw rightfully ridicules Köhler for having been so gullible in taking such pretentious schmaltz seriously. David Luhrssen has criticised the populist Occult Reich literature with its titillating stories of Satanic Nazi rites as “pulp fiction in the guise of history”—and Köhler’s book belongs squarely in the same company. It highlights the danger of failing to promptly deflate bombastic Party kitsch-propaganda, instead placing an inflationary instrumentalized variant of it on a pedestal exalting it as some Eternal Truth, thus inadvertently perpetuating the romantic mythologisation of the regime.
Hermann Rauschning: an Even More Dubious Source
If professional historians consider the uncritical acceptance of Kubizek as though it were gospel to be unbefitting a serious historian, Köhler condescends to relying on even more dubious sources. Sir Richard Evans takes Köhler to task for his reliance on Hermann Rauschning:
Nor is Köhler’s credibility helped by his reliance on dubious and discredited sources such as Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, a record of interviews most of which never took place outside Rauschning’s mind.
Here is a typical use of Rauschning by Köhler:
One of the few whom [Hitler] admitted into his sanctum—and who published their discussions even before the outbreak of the war—was Hermann Rauschning. Although Rauschning, then President of the Danzig Senate, attributes many more statements to the Führer in his Conversations with Hitler than he can possibly heard, he must have been [no supportive citation] an ideal person with whom to discuss Wagner. An eloquent Classical scholar, he had also studied music in Munich, where he got to know the Wagner epigones, and had also attended the Bayreuth Festival. Whenever Hitler met a connoisseur of Wagner, he abandoned his inhibitions and talked freely [no supportive citation], so it was this shared love of the Master, we may presume, that led Rauschning, a member of the Party, being admitted into the private recesses of Hitler’s mind [no supportive citation]. It is hardly possible that what Rauschning subsequently recorded is merely the product of his imagination—it resembles too closely the secret doctrines of the Bayreuth inner circle.
Köhler p238 (my emphasis)
Because Köhler wanted to believe “it is hardly possible” that Rauschning is a fraud, it, therefore “must be presumed” authentic, thus proving Köhler’s conspiracy theories. Köhler and Rauschning confirm each other’s fantasies in an unbreakable circular argument. Where is the evidence that “whenever Hitler met a connoisseur of Wagner, he abandoned his inhibitions and talked freely”? None exists, and nor did Köhler provide a single citation to support his speculations. Köhler is using Rauschning’s fantasies as proof of his own, because you badly want to believe that “it is hardly possible” that fairies could be a fiction, it, therefore “must be presumed” to be completely and utterly true. Köhler considered himself right because he said so, and he said so because he right—therefore he was right in saying so. There is no point in arguing with this sort of thing.
In his speculations about some secret doctrine of “the Bayreuth Inner Circle,” Köhler looks to Rauschning as “confirmation” that he has correctly deciphered the code language of a secret society. Köhler wanted us to believe he was privy to occult knowledge of some secret society’s hidden conspiracies that controlled the world—a quintessential part of all conspiracy theories. Köhler would have had us believe that he alone understood the secret society’s “code language”, just as Harry Potter understands “parseltongue” (the language of snakes). It was just gross speculation based on discredited sources.
In his speculations about some secret doctrine of “the Bayreuth Inner Circle,” Köhler looks to Rauschning as “confirmation” that he has correctly deciphered the code language of a secret society. Köhler wanted us to believe he was privy to occult knowledge of some secret society’s hidden conspiracies that controlled the world—a quintessential part of all conspiracy theories. Köhler would have had us believe that he alone understood the secret society’s “code language”, just as Harry Potter understands “parseltongue” (the language of snakes). It was just gross speculation based on discredited sources.
It was Joachim Köhler’s grave misfortune that Sir Richard Evans reviewed Köhler’s book at the same time as he reviewed Sir Ian Kershaw’s monumental two-volume biography of Hitler. Evans was quick to dismiss Köhler’s phantasmagorical “speculations” that, by comparison to Kershaw, seem to occupy it’s own ufological orb “a world away in every sense” from mainstream academic historiography, before moving on to praising Sir Ian Kershaw:
Speculations of [Köhler’s] kind are a world away in every sense from the most substantial of the books under review here, Ian Kershaw’s massive two-volume biography of Hitler.
Evans: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), p. 150. My emphasis
Indeed, in the preface to volume one of Hitler 1889-1936: Nemesis, Sir Ian Kershaw writes:
I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether.
Sir Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1889-1936: Nemesis
Sir Richard Evans and Sir Ian Kershaw represent immensely respected historians who are, to use Evan’s owns words, “worlds away in every sense” from their complete antithesis of such off-the-planet pulp fiction in the guise of history. With his reliance on discredited sources such as Rauschning, it is little wonder that Evans dismissed Köhler’s thesis in stating that his “speculations” were “in no way convincing”.
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named
Köhler had a splendid explanation for why Wagner’s name is virtually never mentioned by Hitler or any other leading Party members:
Chamberlain chose hardly to mention the key word ‘Wagner’ at all in his Wagnerian study Foundations of the Nineteenth Century —‘out of tact and prudence’, as he explained. The hallowed name of the Master is also studiously avoided in Mein Kampf.
Köhler p.116
If Hitler and the other National Socialists almost never mention Wagner, really, they are always secretly referring to him using a secret code language that formed part of a grand conspiracy of silence. Wagner’s sacred name is so “hallowed” (sic), that, like Lord Voldemort, Wagner apparently becomes “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”:
So Köhler would have us believe he had uncovered a diabolical conspiracy of silence—where the whole of the National Socialist political apparatus occultly functioned entirely around the beck and call of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named manipulating them by witchcraft from beyond the grave—without anyone ever once mentioning the Master’s Too-Hallowed-To-Utter name. This was why those “foolish” academic historians could never find the slightest shred of evidence for the spellbinding influence of Wagner’s all-dominant “dark genius” over them all.
It is a method of prosecution found in witch trials in which the lack of evidence of guilt is used as evidence that the accused used witchcraft to hide the evidence. In the inquisition, petulant prosecutor Köhler would summarise the case by saying “your Honour, the evil Wagner is guilty of the genocide of millions on the basis of the earth-shattering impact of the total lack of evidence, thus unveiling the diabolical depth of the conspiracy, for all can now see the sheer potency of his evil dark genius in using witchcraft to conceal the obvious evidence of his guilt”.
Identical sensationalised speculations about Wagner being some sort of “practitioner of sex magick” for the occult manipulation of world history from beyond the grave can be found in Occult Reich books:
As for storms and pastoral scenes, these can equally be found in Shakespeare. If you are going to discover the roots of the “mythical undertones” of German fascism in the storms and pastoral scenes from Wagner, you might as well go all the way and discover the foundations of German fascism in the fairies from Wagner’s Die Feen (The Fairies). These populist writers of lurid pseudo-historical kitsch feel perfectly at liberty to make the most fantastic leaps of unstable inference, without once feeling the need to even try to find convincing support for them.
Only Köhler had gone one step further than Occult Reich speculators in claiming that evidence demonstrates “the opposite” of what it appears to, because he understood some secret code language:
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| Köhler believes that “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” maintained absolute control over “his” Hitler-puppet by witchcraft, under a grand conspiracy of silence |
So Köhler would have us believe he had uncovered a diabolical conspiracy of silence—where the whole of the National Socialist political apparatus occultly functioned entirely around the beck and call of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named manipulating them by witchcraft from beyond the grave—without anyone ever once mentioning the Master’s Too-Hallowed-To-Utter name. This was why those “foolish” academic historians could never find the slightest shred of evidence for the spellbinding influence of Wagner’s all-dominant “dark genius” over them all.
It is a method of prosecution found in witch trials in which the lack of evidence of guilt is used as evidence that the accused used witchcraft to hide the evidence. In the inquisition, petulant prosecutor Köhler would summarise the case by saying “your Honour, the evil Wagner is guilty of the genocide of millions on the basis of the earth-shattering impact of the total lack of evidence, thus unveiling the diabolical depth of the conspiracy, for all can now see the sheer potency of his evil dark genius in using witchcraft to conceal the obvious evidence of his guilt”.
Identical sensationalised speculations about Wagner being some sort of “practitioner of sex magick” for the occult manipulation of world history from beyond the grave can be found in Occult Reich books:
Wagner provided the musical setting for Hitler’s vision of German global domination. His epic melodramas are a granite monument in music to the grandeur of Aryan superiority and sacrifice. Without Wagner’s Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) tempered with pastoral interludes, Nazism would not have acquired its mythic undertones.
Both Theodor Reuss, a practitioner of Tantric sex magick [sic], and Sar Peladan, the French writer on the occult, believe that Wagner was an intuitive magician.
From The Nazis and the Occult: The Dark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich by Paul Roland.
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| Lurid popular pseudo-histories about the Occult Reich are not taken in the least bit seriously by academic historians. Many of their methodologies have a great deal in common with those of Köhler and his equally lurid Nazi opera conspiracies |
As for storms and pastoral scenes, these can equally be found in Shakespeare. If you are going to discover the roots of the “mythical undertones” of German fascism in the storms and pastoral scenes from Wagner, you might as well go all the way and discover the foundations of German fascism in the fairies from Wagner’s Die Feen (The Fairies). These populist writers of lurid pseudo-historical kitsch feel perfectly at liberty to make the most fantastic leaps of unstable inference, without once feeling the need to even try to find convincing support for them.
Only Köhler had gone one step further than Occult Reich speculators in claiming that evidence demonstrates “the opposite” of what it appears to, because he understood some secret code language:
In order to understand the Bayreuth cult one must first decipher its language. To take it literally is to play into the hands of tricksters. Not infrequently it says the opposite of what it means . . .
Köhler p115 (my emphasis)
Köhler pretended to be gifted like Harry Popper with the ability to magically “decipher” a secret code language, which, like “parseltongue”, spoke to him to indicate that a statement “says the opposite of what it means”. In this way, anything could be turned into “chilling” smoking gun evidence that Wagner is guilty of genocidal witchcraft. Especially evidence to the contrary.
It is exactly the same reasoning you find in Nazi UFO conspiracies. The earth-shattering lack of evidence for such a kitsch phantasm actually proves “the opposite”, and counts instead as definitive proof of its veracity. The startling lack of evidence proves the abysmal depth of the diabolical conspiracy. Whenever he finds contradictory evidence, our petulant inquisitor could claim that anything “says the opposite of what it means” (sic)—but only where it suited him.
Next, the New York Times lends it a phony veneer of apparent credibility by gasping during an attack of the vapours about how “chilling” and “persuasive” such ufological level speculation is. After all, “it is hardly possible” for the Truth to be otherwise. Bring out the smelling salts.
Conclusions
It is high time that readers be asked to choose the mainstream academic historians’ accounts of the Dritte Reich and Holocaust over the distorted fringe ideologies found in Köhler’s, doubly so now that not even Köhler believes in his own Occult Reich and Nazi UFO level speculations. Such speculative methodologies—where vast unstable structures of inference and correspondence are constructed in the glaring absence of evidence—merely get in the way of a credible academic understanding of history. To ask the reader to choose the large body of academic evidence-based historiography over gross speculation is entirely in harmony with the educational aims and scholarly goals of academic organisations such as the Yad Vashem Institute for Holocaust Research. If this present review achieves nothing else other than to encourage readers to ditch pop pseudo-histories in favour of academically credible accounts, then it would have been worth the effort in writing it.
Köhler may superficially appear to be researched with “astonishing diligence”, but, as Joachim Fest noted, his supportive bibliography turns out to consists of a whole lot of banal padding, like the shopping dockets to show the alleged ufological abductee was in a certain vicinity on a certain date, or the endless photos of the dent on the side of the car. However, when the juicy punchline hits, the run of supportive citations mysteriously vanished into thin air: such supportive evidence no more existed than the footage of the abducting aliens. The resulting unstable structures of inference built around claims to have unveiled the “dark secret” of an occult operatic Masterplan, rapidly disintegrated under scrupulous academic examination. Mainstream academic historians thus no more accept Köhler’s virtual exculpation of Hitler by full transfer of the blame of guilt onto a nineteenth-century opera composer, than they accept Occult Reich and Nazi UFO conspiracy theories.
The sad thing is that all Köhler has achieved is to honour Hitler by crowning an art-school reject and beer-hall graduate as the supreme Wagner interpreter of all time. Köhler evinces a craven surrender to Nazi propaganda in an attempt to systematically raise perversely nazified beer-hall Wagner interpretations up out of the gutter to the status of high culture, as though anything by the National Socialist regime could be taken seriously in this way. National Socialism comes to be painted as a vastly artistically inspired cultural movement, with approved artists reinterpreted as their forerunners and prophets. Yet never during the era of the National Socialist movement did any Party propagandist of any influence expound so deeply nazified an interpretation of Wagner as Köhler honours them with. Köhler’s cynical radicalisation went immeasurably further in his nazification of Wagner than anything manufactured by the either Houston Chamberlain or National Socialists themselves. Even after Köhler has recanted the ideas in his book, the ideas in there will take on a life of their own, where they will be relished by all neo-Nazis who will find Köhler’s elevation of fascist beer-hall rhetoric to the status of an artistically inspired “visionary” ideology to be mandatory reading.
The rest of us are left with a grossly speculative book by a writer running roughshod over every nuance to draw imaginary “straight lines” running between a nineteenth-century opera composer writing and vastly complex events involving millions of people from the century after his death, which are reduced to little more than grand opera. In Sir Richard Evans’s words: “None of this is remotely persuasive”.
This is why when you read respected serious historians of this era like Sir Ian Kershaw, Sir Richard J. Evans, Saul Friedländer, Hans Mommsen, Raul Hilberg, Peter Longerich et alia on the Holocaust, you would hardly anymore find an opera composer blamed for causing World War II and the Holocaust than you find Shakespeare being blamed for everything. Accounts of the Holocaust that amount to an extreme theory of a premeditated “operatic intentionalist” Masterplan where “reality meant for [Hitler] the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama” have been laughed out of court by serious historians. Kershaw regards such grossly oversimplified and distorted monocausal narratives reducing the vast complexities of World War II and the Holocaust down to little more than grand opera as tabloid journalism sinking to a level very much like that of other populist writers indulging in the grand recidivism of reducing the entire phenomenon of Hitler down to him only having one testicle. This dismissal typifies how Kershaw and all other leading historians have collectively received Köhler’s work, and it is high time that the general lay public follow their example.
The final nail in the coffin for Köhler is that not a single reputable historian cites his writings on Wagner in studies of the Dritte Reich or Holocaust. They all behave as though Köhler never existed. Impact factor is the ultimate test of the academic significance of a work. After over ten years, Köhler has had zero academic impact factor in the field of academic history, and not even he is any longer able to sustain belief in his theories. When Sir Richard Evans summed Köhler up in saying that his rampant “speculations” born of “dizzying and unstable structures of inference and correspondence” were “in no way convincing”, he was speaking for his profession at large. Köhler would have exerted just as much influence on academic historians if he had written a Nazi UFO conspiracy book. The only place Köhler’s pervasive influence can be felt is in crass Occult Reich pop histories, which have welcomed his Nazi opera conspiracy theories with open arms, with his ideas having taken on a cult-like following.
The sad thing is that even after he has retracted his ideas, Köhler’s sensationalist kitschy pulp fiction in the guise of history retains sufficient dizzying emotive power to mislead vast numbers of lay readers and other non-historians—including musicologists, social commentators, political scientists, and art historians. The vast majority of non-historians religiously adhere to Köhler’s original thesis without question. Köhler can retract his claims, and historians can expose the weaknesses in his arguments endlessly, and it can be guaranteed to be of no avail in overcoming the seduction of its crude emotive simplicity. Occult Reich type speculators rightly intuit that such emotively driven “gross oversimplification and distortion” sells books, and every one of Köhler’s titles with all their “petulant prosecution” remain on sale unadulterated. For the majority of the population, erudite academic analyses about the historical origins of the Holocaust and WWII are filled with “twisted paths to Auschwitz” so convoluted in their structural nuances, that all of their research ends up being ignored by simpletons who prefer to be fed a neat little fairy tale about how it was all caused by some nineteenth-century opera composer. We must all sadly learn to fully accept that it is virtually a total waste of time trying to reason with this sort of quasi-religious faith driven by emotive populism.
Discussion: Köhler and the Religious Right’s Blame Shifting Exercise
To these belong also the great fighters of this world, who, though not understood at present, nonetheless have carried out the fight for their ideas and ideals. Their lives and their work are then studied with touching and grateful admiration. Especially in dark days of distress, such men have the power of healing broken hearts and elevating the despairing spirit of a people.
To these belong not only the great statesmen but also the great reformers. Alongside Frederick the Great stands also Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
Zu ihnen aber sind zu rechnen die großen Kämpfer auf dieser Welt, die, von der Gegenwart nicht verstanden, dennoch den Streit um ihre Idee und Ideale durchzufechten bereit sind. Sie sind diejenigen, die einst am meisten dem Herzen des Volkes nahestehen werden; es scheint fast so, als fühlte jeder einzelne dann die Pflicht, an der Vergangenheit gutzumachen, was die Gegenwart einst an den Großen gesündigt hatte. Ihr Leben und Wirken wird in rührend dankbarer Bewunderung verfolgt und vermag besonders in trüben Tagen gebrochene Herzen und verzweifelnde Seelen wieder zu erheben.
Hierzu gehören aber nicht nur die wirklich großen Staatsmänner, sondern auch alle sonstigen großen Reformatoren. Neben Friedrich dem Großen stehen hier Martin Luther sowie Richard Wagner.
Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, p.232. My translation. Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Verlag Franz Eher Nachf., G.m.b.H.; Munich, 1943
It is child’s play to debunk Nazi opera conspiracy theories, which belong with other kitschy Nazi UFO conspiracy theories and lurid Occult Reich pseudo-histories. The harder question is that of “why”? The answer is that Köhler’s attitude towards Wagner is something that has been taken up by the Christian right who want to the finger of blame to be pointed away from Luther onto Wagner, while pursuing a reactionary Romantic and culture-centred historiography, in which the lofty flights of genius by great poets and philosophers becomes the fuel allegedly propelling the engine of history.
Journalist William Shirer’s best-selling pop historiography, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich blamed Martin Luther for Hitler, effectively making this book Luther’s Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple. Daniel Goldhagen agreed with Shirer in writing that:
Martin Luther’s antisemitism was ferocious and influential enough to have earned him a place in the pantheon of antisemites.
Goldhagen: Hitler’s Willing Executioners, p.53. New York, 1996
Hitler implied in Mein Kampf that he wished to be remembered alongside Frederick the Great, Luther and Wagner. Yet there has never been the same proliferation of polemics aggressively blaming Luther for the Dritte Reich and Holocaust.
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| Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is effectively Luther’s Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple. Shirer makes it explicit that he thought Hitler was not Wagner’s stooge, but was owned instead by Luther. |
In America, right-wing historian Peter Viereck pursued a similar agenda of locating the origin of Hitler in the cultural influences of dead poets and philosophers alone in his 1941 book, Metapolitics. Viereck fiercely denounced the view that socio-economic and socio-political determinants had precipitated the rise of National Socialism as being a left-wing conspiracy theory based on an “economic determinism” invoking a “capitalist plot” by “the Protocol of the Elders of Wall Street”. In place of socio-economic influences, cultural determinants were to blame, only this time Wagnerian opera. Viereck conveniently ignores the fact that as early as 1919, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted with startling foresight that the punitive economic conditions imposed upon Germany by the treaty of Versailles would lead straight to another world war:
If we aim at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare say, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the later German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.
John Maynard Keynes: The Economic Consequences of the Peace (Chapter VII). 1919
Despite this, the young Viereck claimed to have discovered the origins of World War II in nineteenth-century opera libretti (but waited until he was almost 90 years old in the year of his death before confessing that the grand simplicities of his youthful PhD thesis don’t work).
Amongst post-war pioneers of this trend in right-wing culture-centric historiography was German historian, Joachim Fest. Fest was a co-editor of the centre-right newspaper Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, where he was notorious for his hostility towards the left. Historian Hans Mommsen once accused Fest of rewriting history according to his right-wing political agenda. Here is a typical quotation from Fest’s 1973 biography of Hitler:
In Rienzi or Lohengrin or Tannhäuser, Hitler, the rejected Academy candidate sitting over his water colors in the reading room of the home for men, recognized magnified aspects of his own confrontation with the world. Both Wagner and Hitler, moreover, possessed a furious will to power, a basically despotic tendency. All of Richard Wagner’s art has never been able to conceal to what extent its underlying urge was the boundless need to dominate.
Joachim Fest: Hitler, p.50
Fest was widely criticised for this type of speculative right-wing psychobabble, including by Kershaw. Much of Fest’s 1970s Hitler biography still relies on Rauschning, since it predates the demonstration that his Hitler Speaks was a forgery, which includes histrionic narratives where Hitler hears voices, awakes at night with convulsive shrieks, pointing at an empty corner shouting “There, there, in the corner!”—a line later proven to have been lifted from a short story by Guy de Maupassant.
Köhler shows his support for the German right by citing Fest numerous times in his book, whereas the Hitler biography by historian John Toland (long available in German translation) is too liberal in his approach, and Köhler can only make sparse use of him. Kershaw’s Hitler biography post-dates Köhler’s book, but Köhler would be equally unlikely to find much use of his writings. Hans Mommsen is predictably ignored for being way too left-wing, as is the German translation of Raul Hilberg’s monumental three-volume study on the Holocaust The Destruction of the European Jews, as “die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden” in the early 1990s, also available to Köhler at the time of writing.
The striking thing about Köhler is that his right-wing culture-centric reading of history were so grossly exaggerated that moderate right-wing historians like Joachim Fest and Peter Viereck washed their hands of him. Köhler has become such a liability that moderate right-wing historians cannot be seen to be associated with him. To support Köhler would be academic suicide, like throwing support behind the Occult Reich literature. Forced to pick between academic honesty and Köhler, even centre-right historians have now come clean in admitting the correctness of the view of Wagner as a radical left-wing liberal. Right-wing historians prefer that than risk being discredited by a damaging association with Köhler’s kitschy ufological type of populist conspiracies. Köhler has been unceremoniously dumped by his own side. It is likely this isolation that lead Köhler to being forced to retract his Nazi opera conspiracy theories.
If Fest dismissed Köher’s book as a “polemic”, come 2006, even the 89-year-old Viereck had decided that enough was enough, and reacted to Köhler’s theories as being gross exaggerations devoid of all “nuance”:
[M]y Wagner-Hitler research was greeted with general skepticism in 1941. ... But today the Wagner link has gone too far in the opposite direction. Countless exaggerated articles on WagnerHitler. Today what is overlooked is the crucial differences between the two. One book (by the rebel great-grandson Gottfried Wagner) even declares that there is not a single line in Mein Kampf that doesn’t derive from Wagner. Mein Kampf has major sources unconnected with Wagner, such as the lost war, German humiliation by Versailles, and the Free Corps of 1919-1920. In turn, the complicated Wagner (again, we need nuance) ... was influenced by ... strains, such as pacifism, Christianity, Feuerbach, Bakunin, Buddhism, Schopenhauer..., and a fanatic vegetarianism and anti-vivisection. The last two were shared by Hitler but not by the Party.
Peter Viereck: Metapolitics. Preface to 2006 edition of his 1941 book. My emphasis
In the same essay on Wagner in the Dritte Reich, where right-wing historian Joachim Fest writes dismissively of “Joachim Köhler’s polemic over Wagner’s Hitler”, Fest first names a whole lot of socialist thinkers who influenced Wagner such as Marx, Burckhardt, and Tocqueville. However, Proudhon, Feuerbach, and Bakunin are all curiously absent in Fest’s role-call of influences. Although only a first step, it is nonetheless a candid admission from the right that Wagner’s legacy now belongs firmly back amongst radical left-wing and liberal thinkers. Viereck even admits that Wagner was a staunch pacifist, who expressed strong opposition to pan-Germanic militarist expansionism. Or to paraphrase a line from Casablanca: “welcome back to the fight Mr Wagner”.
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| Welcome back to the fight Mr Wagner |
Nor should it be forgotten that no other major composer in the history of music ever risked life and limb for the sake of democracy then had to go into exile with a death sentence hanging over his head for his beliefs. In a contemporary eyewitness report published by one of Wagner’s many Jewish friends, Ferdinand Praeger:
. . . the barricade at which Wagner and Hainberger were stationed was about to receive such morning meal as had been prepared, the outposts being kept by a few men and women. Amongst the latter was a young girl of eighteen, the daughter of a baker belonging to this particular barricade. She stood in sight of all, when to their amazement a shot was suddenly heard, a piercing shriek, followed by the fall of the girlish patriot. The miscreant Prussian soldier, one of a detachment in the neighbourhood, was caught redhanded and hurried to the barricade.
Wagner seized a musket and mounting a cart called out aloud to all: “Men, will you see your wives and daughters fall in the cause of our beloved country, and not avenge their cowardly murder? All who have hearts, all who have the blood and spirit of their forefathers, and love their country follow me, and death to the tyrant”.
So saying he seized a musket, and heading the barricade they came quickly upon the few Prussians who had strayed too far into the town, and who, perceiving they were outnumbered, gave themselves up as prisoners.
Praeger: Wagner as I Knew Him (my emphasis)
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Eugene Delacroix: Liberty Leading the People, 1830
“I value Delacroix as the closest relation of Wagner” Friedrich Nietzsche (251-256 Werke Vol 2, 725) |
... democratic deputies now formed a new Saxon government, and revolutionaries flocked to its defence from outside the city. Among those who mounted the barricades was the Court music director Richard Wagner (1813-83), who had come under the influence of the ideas of Proudhon and Feuerbach and saw revolution as a way of creating the ideal conditions in which to achieve his mission as a universal artistic genius. Enthused by the uprising, he declared optimistically: ‘The old world is ruins from which a new world will arise; for the sublime goddess REVOLUTION comes rushing and roaring on the wings of the storm’. More radical still was the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. He had arrived in Dresden in March 1849 after ... telling the delegates at the Pan-Slav Congress in Prague in June that they should ‘overthrow from top to bottom this effete social world which has become impotent and sterile’.
While Wagner busied himself making hand grenades and looking out for the Prussian army from the top of the Frauenkirche, Bakunin helped build the barricades. It was all to no avail. The Prussian government acted with lightning rapidity, sending its troops to the Saxon capital by train. Some 5,000 Prussian and Saxon soldiers marched in on 9 May 1849; demolished the barricades, and overcame the resistance of the 3,000 poorly organized revolutionaries defending them; 250 of the insurgents were killed in the action, 400 were wounded, and 869 others were arrested. ... Nearly 2,000 insurgents fled to Switzerland, among them Wagner. He reported that Bakunin ‘had to submit his huge beard and bushy hair to the tender mercies of the razor and shears ... A small group of friends watched the operation, which had to be executed with a dull razor, causing no little pain; under which none but the victim himself remained passive. We bade farewell to Bakunin’ he added, ‘with the firm conviction that we should never see him again alive’. Despite his disguise, Bakunin was arrested, and had the distinction of being sentenced to death twice, first by the Saxons for his part in the uprising, then by the Austrians for his inflammatory rhetoric at the Pan-Slav Congress in Prague.
Richard J. Evans: The Pursuit of Power Europe, 1815-1914, p.210-211. My emphasis.
Notice how the metaphor of left-wing revolution as a “storm” (“REVOLUTION comes rushing and roaring on the wings of the storm”) that would blow away the ancient regime has, like the symbolism of the liberal sword of justice entwined with the olive branch of peace, been usurped by the reactionary far-right (eg “Storm Troopers”, “Der Stürmer”) so as to come to mean the very opposite of what Wagner intended. It is the same twentieth-century fascist ideological usurpation with systematic inversion of the meaning of iconically left-wing terms, so that “socialism” becomes National “Socialism”, Franco’s putsch against the Republicans in Spain being called a “revolution”, and with Goebbels and Hitler deeming the annihilation of Weimar democracy a “German revolution”.
On hearing the news that his revolutionary friends Mikhail Bakunin and August Röckel had received the death sentence, Wagner wrote to his imprisoned brothers-in-arm in 1850, making the true meaning of Wagnerian heroism in the face of dire necessity, Noth, abundantly clear:
Never had I wished to write to you both [Euch] to give solace, because I had always known you needed no consolation. Now I learn that the King of S[axony] has bestowed the death sentence upon you both: now I would like to bring you joy by sending you both my most faithful brotherly greetings. But I am far away from you: I almost despair over whether these lines will reach you, and hope that they meet you.
...
Be proud of yourselves! Dear brothers! That which seemed to us supremely necessary to see human beings transformed into true human beings? —That they were driven by need [noth as in Nothung] to become heroic. We now see two heroes, who have sprung from the sacred need [Noth] of love of mankind, compelled to grow into joyous heroes: be greeted, you dearest ones! You show us what we can all become. So die happy in the joy of the high values of which you know for us!
Nie wollte ich Euch schreiben um Euch zu trösten, weil ich wußte, Ihr bedürftet keines trostes. Jetzt erfahre ich, daß der König v.S. das todesurtheil über Euch beide bestätigt hat: nun möchte ich Euch eine freude machen, indem ich Euch meinen treuesten brudergruß bringe. Doch ich bin weit von Euch entfernt: fast muß ich verzweiflen, daß diese zeilen Euch noch zukommen, und somit kann ich nur wünschen, sie möchten Euch noch treffen.
Seid denn stolz auf Euch! Liebe brüder! was schien uns das nothwendigste, um die menschen zu wahren menschen umgeschaffen zu sehen? – Daß sie durch noth getrieben würden, helden zu werden. Zwei helden sehen wir nun vor uns, die von der heiligen noth der liebe zu den menschen gedrängt zu freudigen helden erwuchsen: seid uns gegrüßt, Ihr theuren! Ihr zeigt uns was wir alle werden können. So sterbet denn glücklich in der freude des hohen werthes, von dem Ihr Euch für uns wisset!
Wagner: Letter to Michail Bakunin and August Röckel, Königstein, 1850. Wagner-SB Bd. 3, 270, Digitale Bibliothek 107. My translation.
Straight after the 1848 revolution, Richard Wagner started on his Ring of the Nibelungs about the apocalyptic annihilation of the barbaric ancient regime and its theocratic imperialism sanctioned by the Gods of War, writing in 1851 that the work would “hand to the people of the Revolution the significance of that Revolution in its noblest sense”, and that it should only be performed to celebrate the success of the “next revolution”. Those pushing the populist view claiming that Wagner’s direct ideological influence on history steered Germany down its historical Sonderweg to fascism, should hang their heads in ruddy shame. For the historical Wagner makes his latter-day critics with all of their phoney certitudes look rather hypocritical as they issue petty accusations from the comfort of their armchairs, never having suffered so much as a flea bite fighting for liberty in their lives.
Joachim Fest finishes his critique of Köhler by reminding us that the name of the assassination plot to kill Hitler was none other than “Operation Valkyrie”, invoking the name of the mythic Germanic angels of death, who were to be visited upon the Führer:
The fact that the highly respected Joachim Fest has publicly dissociated himself from Köhler represents a historic turning point. Köhler has shot himself in the foot. Until then, the post-war German right had always preferred Nazified interpretations of Wagner, albeit for polemical purposes, rather than admit that Wagner was a liberal revolutionary who fought with musket and grenade in hand to bring socialist democracy to Germany.
In his biography of Hitler’s arch-nemesis, Vladimir Lenin, Robert Service writes:
Lenin was a passionate admirer of Richard Wagner ... He went to hear renditions of his operas as an active listener; he could not bear to sit passively and let the music wash through him: sometimes the effort disturbed him emotionally to such an extent that he walked out after the first act.
Robert Service: Lenin p.100 of eBook edition.
As for another of history’s great Wagnerians, there is also Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. Ever since Wagner’s own time, there has been a constant struggle for different sides of politics—the left, the right, and even Zionists—to claim Wagner for their side. It is a struggle that is far from over. For now, the political right seems to have claimed victory, as they assert the supremacy of their Nazified interpretations of Wagner, and arrogantly mock any possibility of evidence-based alternative views as they disparage the centenary Boulez-Chéreau Marxist Ring cycle as “blasphemy”.
This helps us appreciate why Köhler gets so touchy on the subject of the complicity of the Churches with the National Socialist regime. Both the Catholic Church as well as the Protestant Church have been implicated. On this point, Köhler becomes unusually anxious to shift all blame to Wagner. I have studied numerous books on the relationship between the Church and National Socialism, yet not a single one of these mentions Wagner, let alone accepting Köhler’s claim that National Socialist theology was based on Parsifal:
The religious trappings of National Socialism were largely derived from the dramaturgy of the Bayreuth Parsifal [no supportive citation].
Köhler, p.221
As usual, Köhler provides not the slightest scrap of evidence for his sweeping ex-cathedra pronouncements evincing such certitude. Once again, I found myself forced to search for corroboratory evidence in literature exploring the relationship of the churches with fascism including titles by Daniel Goldhagen, John Cornwell, Richard Steigmann-Gall, Ericksen & Heschel, Derek Hastings, Guenter Lewy, Karp & Köhler, Rainer Brendel, Karlheinz Deschner, Anthony Sciolino, David Cymet, Christopher J. Probst, Uriel Tal, Paul C. Hinlicky, Peter Longerich, Gabriel Wilensky, Manfred Gailus, Rainer Bucher, Olaf Blaschke, Philipp Thul (ed.), Denzler/Frabricius, Sibylle Biermann-Rau,
Bernd Heim, and Matthew Hockenos. None of these 25 studies even once mention either Wagner’s name or Parsifal in this connection. While this is not an exhaustive bibliography of writings on this topic, but a search through thousands of pages of writings has failed to turn up evidence corroborating Köhler’s claims, leaving one bewildered as to where he got such ideas from.
It seems that our “good” Christian, Köhler, becomes even more acutely sensitive in relation to Wagner’s polemics against the Catholic Church:
The Master, on the point of founding his own quasi-religion, hated the Catholic Church as much as his heroes Rienzi and Tannhäuser, both of whom had been excommunicated by the Pope. ‘The Church of Rome’, he once said to his wife, who had been raised in the strict Catholic tradition, ‘is a universal pestilence’. ‘It is a scandal that it still exists’. . . . The Church, together with the total victory of Judaism which it had helped to bring about, was, concluded Wagner, ‘the most terrible thing that had ever happened in history’ . . .
Only with the publication of Cosima’s diaries . . . did the extent of Wagner’s anti-Catholicism become known.
Köhler, p.215-216
This almost certainly constitutes Köhler’s central motive for devoting himself to writing such tiresome polemics against Wagner with such tenacity: Köhler is on a crusade for God and Pope. Köhler’s wildly trumped-up accusation of exterminationist anti-Semitism against Wagner are his rhetorical weapon to extract revenge for Wagner’s tirades against Roman Catholicism. The Catholic Church played a key role in crushing the 1848 revolutionaries, just as it provided “ratlines” to help Nazis escape prosecution. The foreword to Karlheinz Deschner’s remarkable book God and the Fascists puts it succinctly:
[A]t the end of the book, Karlheinz Deschner says, in 1965, “If one considers the attitude of Eugenio Pacelli to the politics of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Pavelic, it hardly seems an exaggeration to say: Pius XII is probably more incriminated than any other pope has been for centuries. He is so obviously involved in the most hideous atrocities of the Fascist era, and therefore of history itself, both directly and indirectly, that it would not be surprising, given the tactics of the Roman Church, if he were to be canonized”. And now the beatification is already under way, less than fifty years later!
If Hitler had won the war, one may wish to add, then he would presumably have long since attained the same Catholic honours.
It would hardly be damaging to point out Wagner’s hatred of the Catholic Church, so instead, Köhler petulantly trumps up charges of exterminationist anti-Semitism, so as to misuse the Holocaust as a rhetorical weapon to bash Wagner with, in a self-serving crusade of vengeance. The last thing that motivates Köhler is an empathy for victims of the Holocaust. Köhler makes false pretensions to being a conscientious Nazi hunter trying to expose Germany’s dark past. In reality, by scapegoating Wagner, Köhler only whitewashes the whole situation. Köhler ends up achieving the exact opposite of what he pretends to be doing. However, that is precisely Köhler’s aim: to cleanse the Deutsche Volk, Martin Luther, and the Church of the defilement brought upon them by Hitler. Out, damned spot!
Meanwhile, the perpetually inflammatory Goldhagen goes on his own petulant polemic about the complicity between the Catholic Church and the National Socialist regime. Pope Pius XII has even been called Hitler’s Pope:
Perhaps someone will soon follow Köhler’s pioneering example in entertaining us with an equally grotesquely exaggerated polemic entitled The Pope’s Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple, invoking a grand conspiracy where Hitler is portrayed as a puppet of the Vatican driving a secret war of extermination against the “Godless Communists” and “the Spawn of Judas”:
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| A period cartoon depicting National Socialism as a puppet of the Pope in another ludicrous conspiracy theory evoking an equally facile “Prophet and Disciple” polemic |
It is little surprise that Köhler becomes so explosively touchy about the role of the Catholic Church during the National Socialist period. It is enough to drive Köhler into a frenzy to beat his scapegoat, Wagner, into a pulp to cleanse the Church and the Christian right of its sins. Köhler manages to totally avoid all mention of the fact that Hitler was born into the Catholic Church, where he was indoctrinated with Christian anti-Semitism from a young age:
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| Hitler told General Gerhard Engel in 1941 Hitler that: “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so”. John Toland: Adolf Hitler—the Definitive Biography p.507 |
By scapegoating Wagner to bear the sins of the Church, which failed to exercise its moral influence by objecting to genocide while it knew the Holocaust was underway, this helps those on the Christian right to sleep better at night and attend mass with a shining good conscience.
Köhler also used the book Hitler’s Table Talk to claim that Hitler later changed his position to become vehemently anti-Christian. This is another source that Kershaw considers potentially problematic and warns that it be “treated with due caution” (Preface to Hitler 1889-1936 Nemesis), although Professor Evans often quotes from it. In the same source, Hitler also expresses frustration at his failure to unify the Protestant Churches in Germany. Hitler continued to hold Jesus in high esteem, and considered him an Aryan fighter who struggled against Jewry. Hitler possibly dreamt of creating an ultramontane Reichskirche—a united Christian Church of which he would be the Prophet, a Reich’s Pope, and new Holy Roman Emperor holier than the Roman one. Europe would be spiritually and politically united as in the Middle Ages, thus reversing the split engendered by the Reformation (denounced as the away-from-Rome movement in Mein Kampf). Even the phrase the Dritte Reich (Third Empire) was originally a reference to the third kingdom of heaven mentioned by the Apostle Paul.
In essence, the Christian right in Germany have turned from the post-war position of blaming the Jews for the Holocaust to blaming Wagner. The German Evangelical Council of Darmstadt after the war called the Holocaust a “divine visitation and called upon Jews to stop rejecting and crucifying Christ” (see Bart Ehrman, p.36 and Erikson & Heschel, p.19). Pastor Denkhaus, a member of the regional council of Bremen said that it was the Church’s job after the war to make the Jews repentant for causing the Holocaust, which was divine retribution for persecuting Christ, and that “whoever helps to rebuild a synagogue helps bring about damnation” (Matthew Hockenos, p121). Since scapegoating the Jews for causing the Holocaust looks rather poor form, the Christian right have chosen a new scapegoat: Wagner. Hitler and the Christian right are innocent because they were “forced” to commit atrocities by puppet master Wagner (“He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named”) who controlled them using Tantric sex magick from beyond the grave.
Better still, Köhler’s polemic against Wagner allows him to go on a crusade to purge the German Christian right of the weighty burden of its guilty conscience by surreptitiously shifting responsibility for the Holocaust onto the political left. National “Socialism” becomes, in Köhler’s view, entirely the responsibility of the radical socialist political Left starting with Wagner. World War II and the Holocaust were caused by a left-wing “socialist” movement that was born of the revolutionary 1848 pro-democracy movement that Wagner and Bakunin boldly championed—literally with musket and grenade in hand. Köhler even condemns Wagner’s 1849 pro-democratic political activism as a “barbaric act” (p.46), the very model of monstrous barbarism that spawned National Socialism by pushing Germany down the path to its supposed Sonderweg. This allows Köhler to trace the origins of exterminationist anti-Semitism to left-wing politics, thus indirectly also implicating Marx, whose utterances on the Jews are virtually identical to those of Wagner, Feuerbach, Proudhon, and Bakunin. That is why Köhler simultaneously accused Wagner of being both a Communist and a National “Socialist”. For Köhler, following in the footsteps of his fascist apologist mentor Ernst Nolte, these are conflated as being the exact same thing. Köhler even called communism “that crude and savage perversion of the Christian doctrine that screams with thinly disguised greed ‘what is yours, is mine!’” In this way, Köhler’s runs his Christian-right crusade against the whole of the political Left. Gott mit uns is the motto of the Christian-right’s evangelical mission:
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| “Gott mit uns” “With God on our side” “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 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.” Mein Kampf: Marxism as the Destroyer of Culture |
Unfortunately for Köhler, there is a long tradition amongst Jews of free-spirited, liberal and critical thinking, of the sort that will eventually see through the tricks of imposters. That is why Hitler vilified the entire Left as being “Judeo-Bolshevik” conspirators scheming to take over the world, who had to be preemptively destroyed lest they succeed. And that is why so many of Wagner’s friends were liberal Jews.
Academic historians have long ago seen through Köhler’s right-wing game of grossly distorting and misrepresenting history for his own political ends. Köhler probably secretly gloats in triumph at the fact that, even after retracting his claims, he has built up a semi-religious cult which regards his thesis as “obvious” and “incontestable”. Despite the huge obstacle to the widespread acceptance of credible academic readings of history Köhler has erected, it can only be hoped that the tide of critical opinion will eventually turn. It must not be forgotten that the great Jewish Holocaust writers have always stressed the power of truth and justice over petty vengeance and scapegoating as the ultimate form of anti-Nazism. One can only hope that this noble tradition will be kept alive.
Given the long tradition of both liberal thought and Wagnerianism amongst enlightened Jews, educated Jews everywhere will be intelligent enough not to allow themselves to be duped by charlatans who abuse the memory of the Holocaust to their own political ends. Above all, what is really at stake here is something immeasurably more important than Richard Wagner, either the man or his music. It was George Orwell who wrote in 1984 that “who controls the past controls the future”. So what truly matters is truth and honesty in academic historiographic methodology, and ultimately that is always far more important than all else, for whoever opens the door to any form of self-serving right-wing revisionist pseudo-history is well on the slippery slope towards opening the door to that most sinister sibling of kitsch Occult Reich and Nazi UFO fantasies—Holocaust denialism.
Postscript and Further Reading
The news as of July 2014 is that Joachim Köhler has officially retracted his charges against Wagner in an essay entitled Wagner’s Acquittal—acquittal, that is, of the charge of inciting or causing genocide. This retraction of charges was published in The Wagner Journal in the July, 2014 (8, 2, 43–51) issue. However, Köhler’s book, Wagner’s Hitler, remains in print, and as far as the general public is concerned World War II and the Holocaust were certainly and without doubt caused by an opera composer. Nor will Wagner’s Hitler be the last word in Nazi opera conspiracy theories, which will remain alive as long as Goldhagenism maintains its populist emotional appeal, irrespective of whatever retraction Köhler has made.
The Nazi opera conspiracy literature was born in the 1940’s, and Köhler is only one amongst many authors who have sequentially built on the body of literature, and it can be guaranteed that the same old arguments will continue to be repeated until they become “The Truth”. Meanwhile, with every year our understanding of the structural intricacies of the so-called “twisted road to Auschwitz” leading to the Holocaust improves. With it, the complexity of the picture grows, and the more simpletons will prefer to grasp at simplistic single-shot, monocausal explanations devoid of complexity and nuance. Yet every few months or so another “academic” publication appears from non-historians that take Nazi opera conspiracies seriously. That makes it all the more important that such simplistic monocausal and culture-centric explanations continue to be systematically debunked, since Nazi opera conspiracies, and their kin, are only likely to explode in popularity, propelled by the power of the internet until the voice of academic historians can no longer be heard beneath their din.
For a review of Köhler’s sequel to Wagner’s Hitler, entitled Richard Wagner—The Last of the Titans, see the thread posted here. In any case, whoever said that Wagner was the last of the Titans? For an alternative view on that subject, see this thread.
Readers may be interested to know that right-wing writers like Joachim Köhler merely plagiarise the writings of Theodor Adorno, which they misuse to further their own petty political agendas. I have critically reviewed Adorno’s essay on Wagner here.
For a detailed study of Wagner’s pacifist and anti-pan-Germanic views advocating European federalism, see this post on Constantin Frantz’s Open Letter to Richard Wagner.
Now that we have had Wagner’s Hitler, some of us may also might be holding our breaths to see a book from Köhler entitled “Shakespeare’s Hitler” as well. The National Socialists tried to reinterpret not only Wagner, but a whole series of other artists as forerunners and cultural prophets of their ideology. These included Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dürer, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven along with Shakespeare and Wagner. The struggle to claim Beethoven for the left or the right of politics has a long history. Likewise, the struggle to appropriate Wagner for both the political left or right, and even for Zionism, goes back almost as long. Köhler has declared his political colours by putting the weight of his support behind the Nazis, as the only possible victors in this long struggle to claim Wagner and the whole of Western culture for themselves. The struggle of different political groups to claim Wagner for themselves is discussed in this post.
For a detailed commentary on Richard Wagner’s Judaism in Music please see this post. For an even more detailed word-by-word analysis of the oft-misquoted final paragraph see this post. A careful study of this essay shows that the usual tedious clichés about Wagner “the terrible Nazi who composed beautiful operas” are hopelessly superficial and misinformed.
For a scholarly review full of useful bibliographic citations dealing with the problems with Köhler’s use of Rauschning and Kubizek to support his speculations this study by Derrick Everett is essential reading.
Another aspect of National Socialist theology is that they wished to do away with the Old Testament for being too Jewish. Some might point out that Wagner too was extremely anti-Yahwistic. The polemic is going to run that, ergo, the theology in Parsifal is the “same thing” as National Socialist theology. Disliking the Old Testament in itself does not a Nazi make. Wagner’s reason for disliking the Old Testament is because Yahweh is originally the Jewish tribal God of war and storms—exactly as Wotan is the Germanic tribal God of war and storms. Wagner dislikes the anthropomorphic war-mongering God-King, a view common to a lot of liberals in the 18th and 19th century. Wagner’s hostility to Old Testament theology actually stems from his pacifism. This is why he brings about the Untergang of the Yahwistic war God. In Parsifal, God is never evoked as a source of salvation by Parsifal. Others who do evoke God are left in a state of futility “waiting for Godot”, and when salvation arrives it comes of humanistic compassion. Wagner preferred the humanistic aspects of the New Testament: the divinity of man redeemed by compassion. This is discussed in another thread: Wotan—the Wandering Jew—and his Untergang. The Ring is about The Death of God.
Also worthwhile reading is my research on Eugene Dühring and his relationship with Wagner. I highly recommend reading it and the false associations that Köhler tries to create between Wagner and Dühring. Much of the original source material is unavailable in English, and cannot be found anywhere else. I have internet links there to full original texts in German, which I then translate into English. Dühring is considered the father of racial anti-Semitism, but he was actually a Social Democrat. This placed him on the wrong side of German politics from the National Socialists, who disliked him immensely. Dühring actually accuses Wagner of being a philo-Semite because Bayreuth was replete with Jewish artists and patrons.
For a discussion on the similarities and parallels between what Marx wrote about the so-called Jewish question and what Wagner wrote, see this post. There is no doubt that hostility towards the Jews was found on both sides of the political fence. However, there can be little doubt that the National Socialist party formed the right-wing of the Weimar Reichstag parliament in opposition to the SPD and KPD. Genocidal anti-Semitism originates firmly from the right of politics. It is highly disingenuous indeed to blame either Marx, Feuerbach or Wagner for Hitler on the basis that National Socialism is just another form of “socialism”.
For a discussion on Theodor Herzl and Wagner, I also recommend this post. It is extremely illuminating to understand the relationship between Wagner and the father of Zionism, who was a lifelong passionate Wagnerian. Herzl even likened the grand project of the founding of the state of Israel to a staging of Wagnerian opera. It is even possible that Herzl may have partly got the idea of Zionism from Wagner. This thought is further explored in this post.
For a review of a book by a highly respected Israeli historian who comes to very similar conclusions about Wagner as those presented here, I would recommend this post. Those of you who think that Köhler is “simply right” and that all views to the contrary must, for the sake of all that is decent, be summarily dismissed as extremist, fanatic, and apologist should read Na’ama Sheffi. She is the editor of Zmanim (Time), the historical quarterly of Tel Aviv University.
For a discussion of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde see this post. For a discussion of die Meistersinger von Nürnberg see this post. I have tried to show that Wagner suddenly makes a whole lot more sense when he is interpreted from the perspective of Feuerbachian socialism and Bakunian socialist anarchism.
A post that is a further commentary and provides extra discussion on subjects touched on here can be found in the post discussing Saul Friedländer’s views on Wagner published in his monumental two-volume study of the Holocaust.
One of the earliest pioneers of the Nazi opera conspiracy was right-wing historian Peter Viereck. For a study tracing the origins of how the political right made a scapegoat out of Wagner see my review of Viereck’s Metapolitics.
For a scholarly review full of useful bibliographic citations dealing with the problems with Köhler’s use of Rauschning and Kubizek to support his speculations this study by Derrick Everett is essential reading.
Another aspect of National Socialist theology is that they wished to do away with the Old Testament for being too Jewish. Some might point out that Wagner too was extremely anti-Yahwistic. The polemic is going to run that, ergo, the theology in Parsifal is the “same thing” as National Socialist theology. Disliking the Old Testament in itself does not a Nazi make. Wagner’s reason for disliking the Old Testament is because Yahweh is originally the Jewish tribal God of war and storms—exactly as Wotan is the Germanic tribal God of war and storms. Wagner dislikes the anthropomorphic war-mongering God-King, a view common to a lot of liberals in the 18th and 19th century. Wagner’s hostility to Old Testament theology actually stems from his pacifism. This is why he brings about the Untergang of the Yahwistic war God. In Parsifal, God is never evoked as a source of salvation by Parsifal. Others who do evoke God are left in a state of futility “waiting for Godot”, and when salvation arrives it comes of humanistic compassion. Wagner preferred the humanistic aspects of the New Testament: the divinity of man redeemed by compassion. This is discussed in another thread: Wotan—the Wandering Jew—and his Untergang. The Ring is about The Death of God.
Also worthwhile reading is my research on Eugene Dühring and his relationship with Wagner. I highly recommend reading it and the false associations that Köhler tries to create between Wagner and Dühring. Much of the original source material is unavailable in English, and cannot be found anywhere else. I have internet links there to full original texts in German, which I then translate into English. Dühring is considered the father of racial anti-Semitism, but he was actually a Social Democrat. This placed him on the wrong side of German politics from the National Socialists, who disliked him immensely. Dühring actually accuses Wagner of being a philo-Semite because Bayreuth was replete with Jewish artists and patrons.
For a discussion on the similarities and parallels between what Marx wrote about the so-called Jewish question and what Wagner wrote, see this post. There is no doubt that hostility towards the Jews was found on both sides of the political fence. However, there can be little doubt that the National Socialist party formed the right-wing of the Weimar Reichstag parliament in opposition to the SPD and KPD. Genocidal anti-Semitism originates firmly from the right of politics. It is highly disingenuous indeed to blame either Marx, Feuerbach or Wagner for Hitler on the basis that National Socialism is just another form of “socialism”.
For a discussion on Theodor Herzl and Wagner, I also recommend this post. It is extremely illuminating to understand the relationship between Wagner and the father of Zionism, who was a lifelong passionate Wagnerian. Herzl even likened the grand project of the founding of the state of Israel to a staging of Wagnerian opera. It is even possible that Herzl may have partly got the idea of Zionism from Wagner. This thought is further explored in this post.
For a review of a book by a highly respected Israeli historian who comes to very similar conclusions about Wagner as those presented here, I would recommend this post. Those of you who think that Köhler is “simply right” and that all views to the contrary must, for the sake of all that is decent, be summarily dismissed as extremist, fanatic, and apologist should read Na’ama Sheffi. She is the editor of Zmanim (Time), the historical quarterly of Tel Aviv University.
For a discussion of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde see this post. For a discussion of die Meistersinger von Nürnberg see this post. I have tried to show that Wagner suddenly makes a whole lot more sense when he is interpreted from the perspective of Feuerbachian socialism and Bakunian socialist anarchism.
A post that is a further commentary and provides extra discussion on subjects touched on here can be found in the post discussing Saul Friedländer’s views on Wagner published in his monumental two-volume study of the Holocaust.
One of the earliest pioneers of the Nazi opera conspiracy was right-wing historian Peter Viereck. For a study tracing the origins of how the political right made a scapegoat out of Wagner see my review of Viereck’s Metapolitics.
Elly Dlin
Wow! And I thought Laon on Amazon was thourough and damning in his review! Kohler's book is truly worse then useless. I'd like to emphasise these points:
ReplyDelete1) Anyone who actually read Mein Kampf propably threw Kohler's work straight in the bin whenhe read the lie about Hitler's discussing Beckmesser as a Jewish stereotype in it.
2) The paragraph by David B.Dennis should be THE rebuttal to the "Beckmesser is an allegory of the Jews" fantasy. I mean, how absurd can an antisemitic theory or interpretation be when even the nazis don't buy it? It's the racist intellectual equivalent of not being able to give away for free bottles of water in the middle of a desert. In an ideal situstion the Marc Weiners, Paul Lawrence Roses and Barry Millingtons of this world would have quite a few eggs on their faces.
3) Richard J. Evans' dismissal is about as close to eternal academic damnation on the subject of Hitler as it could possibly get. Evans is not just any prominent historian on the subjects of WWII, Third Reich, nazism and Holocaust, he was the expert witness for Deborah Lipstadt in the Irving vs. Lipstadt libel trial in which he exposed David Irving as a fraud. So there is no way anyone can character assasinate him as a "Wagner/Hitler apologist".
4) The "hidden aliens" part is eerily similar to some fo the "logic" antisemites use when they try to document their delusions. When on exposes their arguments as fabrications they insist the other side uses some "sanitized versions of Jewish texts meant for Gentiles to decieve them" whereas they have obtained "the real top secret version meant for Jews".
Cheers.
Hi! Thanks for your kind words and comments. I seriously worked hard and burned the midnight oil on this one. Just as I published my review, I re-read Laon's excellent review and was surprised how the overall gist of his review was similar. It honestly wasn't my intention but it just worked out that way. I believe the alien abduction metaphor was also his. I've seen it quoted before so I thought I would reinforce it by supporting it further with lots and lots of solid evidence.
DeleteI've been working on this review for months now. I had ordered the complete works of Wagner from Germany to look up more citations in the book. I am still waiting for them to arrive (they must have sent it via surface mail). While waiting I looked up other citations, until I realised I already had enough material. I could scrutinise every bibliographic citations till the cows home, but it was obvious that it wasn't necessary. I still have a few more citations marked out to look up. Every citation I have looked up fails to support his case, so I have few doubts that when the complete works arrive I will have a field day. The problem is that this review will become too long and overloaded with material. Longer is not always better.
I hope that work I put in makes a difference.
A few more comments to add.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree that Evan's review is crucial "expert testimony". I only obtained the full text of his review yesterday and it was the key piece that made me decide it was time to bite the bullet - finalise and publish the draft version of the review I had been working on. I also agree that David Dennis has done a great job of researching the archives. I felt sorry for him for having had to plough through so much dreck. I felt exhausted just typing out the list of primary sources he'd gone through.
I am also incredibly glad I brought "Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich". I cannot thank Saul Friedländer enough for writing what he did. To have such an incredibly famous Holocaust expert give testimony on "Judaism in Music" as being an assimilationist document, was an incredible relief. Friedländer's original essay was in English and was translated into German for the book. I don't think it's been published in its original English version, which is such a shame. Then, when Joachim Fest backed Friedländer, and did an about turn in his attitude to Wagner, it felt like an even more major breakthrough. Between Friedländer, Fest and Evans, I could see a revolution in the understanding of Wagner coming. In the meanwhile, Dieter David Scholtz has been crying in the wilderness, singing that tune all along. I can't thank Scholtz enough either. His books on Wagner have sadly never made it to the English language market and his German editions have all gone out of print – a sure sign they haven't really sold well. But Köhler, who published at the same time, is still in print both in English as well as German. Scandal sells.
As for Marc Weiner and Paul Rose, they were also invited to contribute essays to "Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich". Again, their contributions appear in German translation only. However, following their participation in the symposium lead by Saul Friedländer, they have mellowed considerably in their attitude towards Wagner. Marc Weiner is almost apologetic in his essay, though he still manages to slip in a touch of his old rhetoric. Paul Rose evens writes:
'What did Wagner mean by "Untergang"? Is he speaking metaphorically? Or did he mean a physical "Untergang"? I tend towards the opinion that Wagner thought in 1850 in the first line of a self-destruction of the Jewish identity and less of a physical destruction through violence.'
My, my – what an admission that was. I would add that this aim of the disappearance of Jewish identity through assimilation was considered an enlightened and progressive ideal in those days. Even Theodor Herzl believed in it for much of his life – right down to the disappearance of Jewish identity in Gentile culture. Marx continued to believe in it in a more universal and international way. If you are going to call Wagner a Nazi for subscribing to Enlightenment era assimilationist ideals then you should also do the same with Herzl. And, if he were here, Herzl would have agreed with me!
It's obvious that both Rose and Weiner have enormous respect for Saul Friedländer, as a famous elderly statesman of Holocaust research, himself a Holocaust survivor. This is in contrast to Hartmut Zelinsky, who isn't Jewish. He is the only one left amongst the book's contributors still keeping up his unrelentingly hardline rhetoric. Hardliners like Köhler and Zelinsky are becoming increasingly isolated. This is why I think that Saul Friedländer's essay in this book probably carries the greatest impact of them all. It just needs to be published in the original English version . . .
I don't know if you've seen Stephen Fry's "Wagner and me". It's available on Youtube. Kohler appears in it and makes an impression of being a serious academic, none of this fiction stuff that appears in the book. The end is very nice and is just what you've been saying here on this blog: we must not surrender Wagner to Hitler.(Sorry about the spoiler)
DeleteAs for Weiner and Rose, I take a bit more cynical view on their apparent change of heart. What else could they do? Their backs were against the wall! They could not refute Friedlander with facts since they are firmly on the latter's side, and they could not employ character assasination(although I heard that Rose did actually make an attempt but it backfired badly, as you might imagine) because of Friedlanders reputation, past and, I do dare say, etnhicity. In the interest of truth, however, I have to say that I did read a report of Weiner participating in a symposium in LA where he dismissed the notion of Wagner being a proto-nazi as "historically unfounded".
The worst of all has to be Gottfried Wagner. The man belongs in a lunatic asylum, plain ans simple. You know that among many absurd claims he makes about Wagner's musical dramas he once stated that they are "anti-feminist because all lead female characters die in them"? Facepalm stuff, really...What is interesting is that he visited Israel in 1990 and sang a completely different tune.
I know of Stephen Fry. He is Jewish too. I'll take a look at the video, as I haven't seen it. Thanks for the heads up.
DeleteYes, it's pretty hard to shoot down Friedländer, who is an author of numerous authoritative volumes on the Holocaust. When you add in the fact that he is a Holocaust survivor, then his word carries more weight than that of Weiner or Rose, who are both younger and nowhere near as widely read, published or respected in the field of Jewish studies overall. Go into any bookstore and you are like to find a book by Friedländer – but not by Weiner or Rose. I saw one book by Friedländer while browsing on the weekend. It was a pretty mainstream shop too, a cosy little one. I noticed that Friedländer mentioned that Wagner was popular amongst Jews and that banning them from performing Wagner was part of the Nazi terror campaign. Norman Finkelstein notes in his critiques of Goldhagen that it is precisely the post-Holocaust generation of Jewish writers who are the worst when it comes to writing polemical, hateful and inflammatory things about the Holocaust. The old ethical code of refusing to sink to the level of the Nazis by writing equally hate-filled anti-German tirades is slowly being broken down. Wagner, as the elected Father of the Sonderweg, is always the first victim to be summoned for a beating.
As for Gottfried, Joachim Fest summarily dismisses him in the same sentence he dismisses Köhler. Gottfried is the sad product a victim of a dysfunctional family. There is also a bit of German guilt and self-hate going on here too. However, they are soul-searching in the wrong place, so it ends up being a scapegoating exercise with the opposite effect. Sometimes I think I should write out a translation of Fest's essay. It's a hell of a lot of work though. It seems a bit silly translating the German translation of Friedländer's essay back into English. Someone needs to the publish an English version of the damned book. A quarter of the essays were originally in English anyway.
I also noticed that one of the essayists, Gudrun Schwarz, takes a shot at Wagner from a feminist angle. But she seems to know absolutely nothing about Wagner and writes on the unproven assumption that Wagner is the source of the use of Germanic myth in the National Socialist era to perpetuate oppression of women by Nordic-barbaric Waffen SS Helden types. In the meanwhile the misogynist Nietzsche goes on in his polemics accusing Wagner of being a feminist sympathiser sissy. I've been thinking of writing more on this issue too.
A couple of comments I've been itching to add. Firstly, this post has been revised several times since its initial publication. I have one or two further improvements in mind too.
ReplyDeleteNext, a little more on Richard J. Evans. Evans is particularly famous for his testimony as an expert witness in the Irving vs Lipstadt case. David Irving had sued Lipstadt after she dismissed him as a "Holocaust denier". Evans testified to the effect that Irving had used forged documents, had ignored contrary evidence, quoted documents out of context, and misquoted historical records – a lot like Joachim Köhler actually. The testimony given by Evans was regarded as being particularly devastating to Irving's case. However, in the case of his damning review of Köhler, Evans is equally devastating to Köhler credibility. Köhler and Irving sadly belong in the same category of charlatans who misuse history for their own narrow minded ends.
Hey, long time no see. I thought you might be interested in these:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/news/israeli-orchestra-strikes-note-of-controversy-with-wagner-work-7804991.html
http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2012/05/rub-your-eyes-a-jewish-ornchestra-has-been-invited-to-open-the-new-wagner-museum.html
I am Gurnemanz in the comments section in the latter article, BTW. As for the former, I find it amusing that the reporter has the same name as the famous Wagnerian baritone.
Cheers. Virtually every internet music discussion site has one of these sorts of Wagner discussions. I have been involved in these in the past. It's temping to jump into the fist fight, but I've kind of been-there-done-that once too often.
ReplyDeleteIt's typical that you get these wild unsubstantiated stereotypes repeated as fact eg "Wagner is a nasty anti-Semite". What Wagner said about Jews is hardly different to what Karl Marx said (I have a whole thread on this topic comparing Wagner and Marx's statements on the so-called "Judenfrage"). Yet nobody says "oh, Marx that nasty anti-Semite" the moment you mention his name. Why should it be the case, then, with Wagner?
The answer comes "because he was Hitler's favourite composer". Hitler's favourite was probably actually Franz Lehár. When his back was against the wall in the Berlin bunker (ie desert island), that's about all Hitler listened to - and never to Wagner. In desperate time he showed his true colours.
This attempt to link Hitler and Wagner was probably little more than Nazi propaganda. Hitler chose Wagner because he thought it was good for his political image as a cultivated art lover. And he was generally a music lover. Kubizek mentions that Hitler also liked Beethoven, and would never miss an opportunity to hear certain of his works. Bizarrely, Kubizek also mentions Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto as one his favourites too. Yet these have never lead to the formation of "rubber ducky" type associations, nor do they routinely rate a mention every time these composer's name comes up. Why is that? The answer to that is: because people uncritically swallow everything the Nazi propaganda machine feeds to them as though it were gospel.
BTW when I finished this review of Köhler's first book on Wagner, I had planned to launch into his second book. However, the thought of dredging through all of that schlock made me gag a bit. I needed a bit of a rest before I could stand to read such utterly fictitious rubbish. The level of intellectual dishonesty is hardly better than David Irving. Both are fairy tale and alien abduction fantasists when it comes to writing on the Holocaust: fiction writers posing as historians. If you believe one's fairy tales you might as well go the whole hog and believe the other's.
ReplyDeleteI really wish someone would approach his Titan book. I have always thought of Kohler as simply "amusing" and felt at leaving it at that - but then he has been given - I believe unintentionally - "credence" in popular culture by appearing in Fry's "Wagner and Me". And perhaps not just there. Having pulled my copy down from a very high self and blown some dust from it, I note that it claims Barry Millington had this to say about it: "The most stimulating study of Wagner to have been published for years. An enthralling read. “The book is undoubtedly a landmark in Wagner studies.”
DeleteNow, in its defense it is certainly nowhere near as bad as his first book - but he still has an "imaginative" reading of events that people do seem to taking as "fact" - whatever that might be.
There is also of course, his usual "trick" of being aware that if he cites a piece of evidence no one will check it to see if it does say what he says. But we can hardly blame him for either peoples laziness or using a very old academic "trick".
I am working towards that. It took months of preparation before I was ready to write this review. It will take months more to review his Titan book. I will need to analyse it and check his often extensive bibliographic references to see if it says what he says it does (it usually doesn't). My background about Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche etc, means that I relish the thought of carving his book up.
DeleteIn the meantime, there are parts of "Wagner's HItler" I am preparing to examine in more detail (thread in draught stage) to give an example of a particularly gross misuse of a bibliographic citation. So it looks like it will take me a while before I write my final review of the Titan book. Possibly not this year. However, you'll gradually see increasing snatches of references to the book building up to the final critical review. Or else you might see teasers like this leading up to it:
http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/03/mein-mein-or-more-musicological.html
The Jewish mother censoring Wagner is not because of a wish to keep the lessons of the holocaust in mind. It has usually been because they were alive when his music was adopted by Hitler and it is part of their own choldhood memory. The fact of Wagner's antisemitism adds fuel to their emotion. (This is certainly the case with my mother)..
ReplyDeleteHowever, as a composer and musician myself, it is not difficult to appreciate the extraordinary creativity of Wagner, the composer. As an historian (history is what I studied in Cambridge), Kohler's theirising can be seen as an interesting historiographic phenomenon just as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are. Unfortunately, as consipiracy theories have become more attractive, so have both of these.
Thank you for your comments. While the emotional trauma engendered by memories of this era must be respected, historians have often noted that decades old memories are often conditioned by the sheer turmoil of the events of the time. When they have actually gone back to actually look at the objective evidence they have found it distorted by the lens of memory and emotion. Actual reports of Wagner being played in concentration camps are virtually non-existent. Israeli historian Na'ama Sheffi tells us:
Delete"Another substantial change in the attitude to German culture stemmed from reports by refugees and concentration camp survivors that Jews had been marched off to the gas chambers to the strains of Wagner's music (among others). The undeniable evidence of Wagner's sweeping popularity among members of the Nazi Party [as amongst German Jews] was now bolstered by other indictments. In the absence of any firm documentation—scarcely surprising—the story that Wagner's works had been played in the camps had never been substantiated by research. In accounts of the camp orchestras, specific references to Wagner are difficult to find. Even Moshe Hoch, one of the fiercest opponents of public performances of Wagnerian music in Israel, did not mention Wagner in the bleak description he set down in his book: "The members of the Jewish orchestra played mainly Viennese waltzes, and sometimes we would hear the music in the distance [...]". ... Fania Fenelon, one such performer, said nothing in her own book about playing music by Wagner, but mentioned music by other composers who were never banned in Israel, such as Franz Liszt and Ludwig van Beethoven. In the first days of the controversy over Wagner and Strauss in Israel at the beginning of the 1950s, former inmates of Auschwitz also testified that the camp orchestra had never played works by Wagner to those marching to their death." Sheffi: "The Ring of Myths: The Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis"
According to the New Yorker:
"Two survivors recall hearing strains of 'Lohengrin' at Auschwitz, but the vast majority of eyewitnesses make no mention of Wagner: instead, they agree that light music, such as Strauss waltzes, Suppé overtures, operetta arias, marches, and the like, prevailed at camp concerts and blared from loudspeakers. The Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz says that she still turns off the radio when she hears Johann Strauss."
Posmysz told the New Yorker in an interview that:
"In Auschwitz ... [t]here were concerts in the female camp. Bach was not played, his music was not allowed. All we heard were operettas, over and over again, especially Johann Strauss. I turn off the radio, whenever I hear his music, I can’t stand it. At the time my musical knowledge was rather limited. It was in Auschwitz that I got to know some masterpieces, like the famous quartet from “Rigoletto.” After the war I was very surprised when I learned that it was not a piece for four female voices; that is what we had in the concentration camp, four very good female singers. I was a strong girl, yet I remember how this music made me cry."
The idea that Wagner is being manipulated as a symbol of the Holocaust comes from Sheffi (see her interview with Die Zeit, 2001):
http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/02/ring-of-myths-by-naama-sheffi.html
Norman Finckelstein thinks there is something of a "Holocaust industry" that keeps the emotional fires burning, with good intention, but there is a great danger that it can degenerate into simple emotional messages that represent gross distortions of history e.g. thou shalt hate Wagner.
Post revised...yet again. The edits this time are substantial. The original version focussed on inaccuracies in interpreting what Wagner had said. The new version focuses increasingly on how accepting Köhler's thesis would result in a grossly distorted biographical understanding of Hitler as well as of this entire period of history. It means that I have had to include an overview of theoretical paradigms for understanding the origins of the Final Solution. It makes it somewhat more academic and Holocaust historiography oriented. It also means that the critique of Köhler becomes more two pronged in tackling him both from a Wagner scholarship perspective as well as a Dritte Reich scholarship perspective. The book is after all, a double biography that attempts to link two distinct historical figures together and by showing how he fails to accurately account for either, let alone succeeding in link them, this makes the critique all the more cogent.
ReplyDelete