Joachim Fest on Richard Wagner

In a previous thread, I discussed Saul Friedländer's interpretation of Wagner's Judaism in Music in the book  Richard Wagner im Dritte Reich (Richard Wagner in the Third Empire), edited by Saul Friedländer:

In that post, I showed how no less an authority than Saul Friedländer completely agreed with my interpretation of the essay as a liberal, pro-assimilationist document.

Today, I thought I would take it one step further by showing you that none other than Joachim Fest seconds Friedländer's interpretation, so that I have not one, but two immensely respected scholars on this period of history fully agreeing with me. My cup overfloweth.

Joachim Fest

Fest first complains of an "almost grotesque misunderstanding in the divide between the significance of a work and its actual impact on social history" (ein geradezu grotesk anmutenden Mißverständnis zwischen Werkdeutung und gesellschaftlicher Wirchungsgeschichte). The implication it is utter comical to suggest that Wagner had such a gargantuan impact on National Socialist that the whole regime functioned exclusively on Wagner's theoretical works. He dismisses Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler outright as being little more than a "polemic", along with the wildly "accusatory" writings by Gottfried Wagner and Hartmut Zelinsky.

Fest goes on:

Even the famous sentence about the Redemption of Ahasvar that concludes the essay about "Judaism in Music" means nothing less than the annulment [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 without difference" 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. 

Selbst der berühmte Satz von der „Erlösung Ahasavars“, mit dem der Essay über „Das judentum in der Musik“ schließt, meint nichts anderes als die Aufhebung der gesellschaftlichen Sonderrolle der Juden durch die Umgestaltung der Verhältnisse: Erst die Revolution hebt die Gegensätze von juden und Nichtjuden in der künftigen ästhetischen Weltordnung“ auf, aus der die einen wie die anderen ,,einig und ununterschieden“, wie es heißt, hervorgehen werden. Von diesem Ausgangspunkt her hat er im Jüdischen überwiegend eine Sache des vorrevolutionären Denkens gesehen, gewiß jedenfalls nicht ein biologisches Faktum, sondern ein Krankheitssymptom der materiellen Zivilisation; erst wenn sie überwunden sei, verliere das Judentum seine dämonische, zum Untergang treibende Kraft. Ganz anders Hitler. Er betrachtete alles Jüdische als ein unverlierbar an Herkunft und Blut gebundenes Stigma, von dem es kein Loskommen gab.

This is the same attitude accepted by other liberals, including assimilationist turned Zionist, Theodor Herzl. That is, that centuries of mistreated had caused the character of the Jews to "degenerate", but that either full cultural assimilation or nationhood could liberate the Jews from this. This is an attitude that could even be found amongst German military officers during World War One:

‘Jews on the eastern front fled from the ravages of the Russian Army to the civilized embrace of Austria or Germany.’ The German armed forces went so far as to tell their soldiers that if some of the Eastern European Jews they encountered appeared dirty or behaved as crooks, they should know that this was only a result of having lived under Russian occupation for so long. As two articles from the army newspaper of the 10th Army told its readers in early 1916, at their core the Jews of Eastern Europe had kept a ‘truly astounding vitality and moral fortitude’, ‘a strong and selfless idealism', and ‘a deep and honest thirst for knowledge and education driven by great intelligence, sobriety, temperance, thrift, and a goodness of character’. Furthermore, the Jews' ‘adherence to the German language' was another indicator that Jews and Germans ultimately had interchangeable characteristics and values. All it needed for Eastern European Jews to lose any negative traits they might possess, the articles concluded, was for the Germans ‘to free the captives from their chains’. In short, Germany's mission in the war was to liberate the Jews of Eastern Europe, to ‘bring freedom and light to millions of unfortunate people.’

Thomas Weber. Hitler's First World War p194

Even Hitler's Iron Cross First Class was conferred on his by his Jewish senior officer, Hugo Gutmann. Many Jews volunteered for service in the hope of fighting on the Eastern front against the Russians as vengeance against the mistreatment of Jews through their pogroms. In likewise fashion, Wagner too saw his ideal Germany as a liberating force that embraced the Jews in the brotherhood of man.






For my translation of the famous Holocaust era historian, Saul Friedländer's account of Wagner's Das Judentum in der Musik please see this thread.