Think Classical: Shakespeare's Hitler: the Prophet and his Disciple

In his book Wagner and Philosophy (also published under the title The Tristan Chord), Brian Magee asks the following question:

In this particular case it also seems to assume that a bad man like Hitler cannot like good music. How would we feel, I wonder, if he had had a passion for Shakespeare? Would it have made us think there must be something radically wrong with Shakespeare’s work, something inherently evil about his plays? The case would be every bit as easy to argue with Shakespeare as it is with Wagner.

My emphasis

Magee goes on to remind us that Shakespeare is the creator of Shylock:

To this day the most notorious anti-semitic portrait in the whole of world drama remains the character of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. And so on and so forth: a powerful case could he made that Shakespeare’s work, in one or other of its aspects, is chauvinistic, jingoistic, and anti-semitic, replete with representations of violence and evil.

Here are the notorious lines Shakespeare gives Shylock:

In such a place, such sum or sums as are

Express’d in the condition, let the forfeit

Be nominated for an equal pound

Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken

In what part of your body pleaseth me.

The fact is that Hitler did indeed have a passion for Shakespeare. Timothy Ryback tells us that:

[Hitler] also owned the collected works of William Shakespeare, published in German translation in 1925 by Georg Müller as part of a series intended to make great literature available to the general public. Volume six includes As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, and Troilus and Cressida. The entire set is bound in hand-tooled Moroccan leather with a gold-embossed eagle flanked by his initials on the spine.

He considered Shakespeare superior to Goethe and Schiller in every respect. Why was it, he wondered, the German Enlightenment produced Nathan the Wise, the story of the rabbi who reconciles Christians, Muslims and Jews, while it had been left to Shakespeare to give the world The Merchant of Venice and Shylock?

The citation for the statement that Hitler regarded Shakespeare more highly than even Goethe or Schiller is given as the personal diaries of Goebbels: Ralf George Reuth, ed., Joseph Goebbels Tagebücher, band 3, 1935-1939 (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1999). This would appear to thus be a highly reputable and verifiable primary source. No evidence appears to exist of Hitler having owned a similar collected edition of Wagner’s complete works.

Hitler’s admiration for Shakespeare, right to the point of elevating him above Goethe and Schiller, is part and parcel of his admiration in general for the English, whom he considered to be of the same Nordic-Germanic pure racial stock as the Germans. Hitler was something of a minor Anglophile, who was known to have had relationships with two English women, Unity Mitford and Winifred Wagner. Hitler felt that the English should join the Germans in forming an immovable bulwark against the invasion of Europe by an “un-German” Asiatic Judeo-Bolshevism brewing in Russia. Hitler and the National Socialists tended to speak of Soviets as the “asian hordes” (die asiatische Behörde).

"Der französische Shylock"
The 5th April 1923 edition of the National Socialist Party official newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, depicted the "French Shylock" stabbing Germania in the back

Unlike with any of Wagner’s characters there is no need to embark on fantastic speculation that some villain might be Jewish based on little more than they are the villain of the story. The tautology goes that since a character is the villain, they must be Jewish—even where absolutely nothing of the like is ever once implied—and this therefore proves that Wagner's operas attack Jews by villainizing them. Everything that Wagner writes is thus considered to be a priori an anti-Semitic attack. By way of contrast, in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare relieves us of all need to second guess, or read with such rampant speculation between the lines, as is standard practice with Wagner, since Shakespeare makes it plainly obvious that Shylock is Jewish, as he demands his “pound of flesh”. As far as the National Socialist propaganda machine was concerned they owned Shakespeare:

Jews leaving England in 1290 after the Edict of Expulsion by Edward I banned Jews from England until the law was repealed by Oliver Cromwell in 1657, thus forming a historical precedent for Nazi persecution by forced emigration.

Alfred Rosenberg writes about Shylock in his Myth of the Twentieth Century:

The figure of Shylock cannot please us as such since the thought of him contradicts our spiritual precepts. Seldom does a creation impress us in the same degree as this figure, because it is racially spiritually perfect in itself. It is outwardly conditioned, encompassing all Jewish racial features from the rock pictures of Egypt up to Trotsky. Spiritually, Shylock portrays the essence of the old testament ideal—as well as the essence of the figures from the Talmud—up to the modern Wall Street banker. This thousand year old organism represented in Shylock is also the new creation of the Jewish essence... Shylock acts as he must; once brought forward he necessarily has an effect on us as a further evidence of the aesthetic will of the artist. The surmise by Schiller, that in great criminals we are impressed by the strength which, in its magnitude, reveals the possibility of a sudden alteration of character, is thus at fault here. Shylock can never transform himself. His body follows a commandment which, in the unalterability of his nature, has a similar effect as the law which prescribes his course. Shylock is thus both an individual as well as a type, both a Jew and Jewry as a whole.

Die Gestalt des Shylock kann uns als solche nicht “gefallen”, auch ihr Denken widerspricht unseren Seelengeboten in allen stücken. Und trotzdem ergreift selten eine Schöpfung in dem Maße wie diese Gestalt: weil sie in sich rassisch-seelisch vollendet ist. Äußerlich bedingt ist sie durch alle jüdischen Rassenzüge von den Felsbildern Ägyptens bis zu Trotzki, seelisch zeigt Shylock das Wesen vom alttestamentlichen Ideal, über Talmud, Schulchan-Aruch bis zum modernen Bankier der Wallstreet. Dieses jahrtausendalte Wesen wurde im Shylock Neuschöpfung des Jüdischen... Shylock handelt wie er muß; einmal hingestellt, wirkt er sich notwendig aus als ein weiteres Zeugnis für den aesthetischen Künstlerwillen. Die Vermutung Schillers, beim großen Verbrecher imponiere uns die Kraft, welche durch ihre Größe die Möglichkeit einer plötzlichen Umstellung offenbare, geht hier also fehl. Shylock kann sich nie und nimmer umstellen, sein Körper folgt einem Gebot, das in der Unabänderlichkeit seines Wesens ähnlich wirkt wie das Gesetz, das den Sternen ihren Kreislauf vorschreibt. Shylock ist also sowohl Einzelmensch wie Typus, ein Jude sowohl wie das Judentum.

Alfred Rosenberg: The Myth of the Twentieth Century

On the other hand, the great Jewish conductor-pianist Daniel Barenboim rightly reminds us that taken at face value, there is not a single “Shylock” in the whole of Wagner's oeuvre. In an interview in 1995, Barenboim stated that Wagner “calls the child by its name”. In other words, if you take the evidence squarely at face value, without indulging in endless speculation, there is not a single clearly Jewish figure in any of Wagner's works. Marc Weiner, and others have been dismissive of Barenboim. Yet they can produce no evidence to prove him wrong, relying instead on endless speculation presented as absolute fact. The Latin word evidens means clear. Once you start to read all sorts of elaborate murky messages encrypted deep between the lines of the evidence, then it starts to rapidly smack of a fairy tale, a nutty conspiracy theory—or perhaps even an alien abduction fantasy. In other words, it ceases to be something based on evidence, instead being based on imaginary concoctions.

So where are the endless volumes of book speculating that every other villain in every Shakespeare play must therefore be Jewish as well? Is the monster, Caliban, Jewish? Could every Shakespeare villain be a Jew in disguise? After all, why else would Hitler have such a profound interest in Shakespeare? More importantly why is Shakespeare not banned in Israel? Why is everyone who dares criticise such a nazified Shakespeare interpretation as absurd not dismissed as some nutty Shakespeare fanatic, hell bent on defending him at all cost, despite the “Eternal Truth” of a nazified interpretation being “obvious to anyone”? Is anyone who denies that Shakespeare incited Hitler to genocide just in denial of what any fool can see?

We can perhaps soon expect more never ending weighty tomes by Herr Köhler harping on at us about Shakespeare’s Hitler—The Prophet and his Disciple where every aspect of the Dritte Reich is explained as Hitler's enactment of Shakespearean drama on the world stage? Indeed, it was Shakespeare who said that “all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players”. Perhaps we will be told how Hitler decided to take those words literally in realising his histrionics on the stage of the globe’s history:

Hitler was particularly fond of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In a 1926 sketchbook Hitler even drew detailed designs for the staging of the first act. This clearly goes hand in hand with Hitler’s fondness for Roman Imperial styled pomp – complete with the fascist salute, mistakenly called the “Roman salute”:

Even National Socialist banners were based on Imperial Roman ones, only with “SPQR” replaced with “NSDAP”:

The architecture of this regime also had a neoclassical Roman imperialist feeling to it:

Little wonder Julius Caesar appealed to Hitler so much.

Hamlet too was a favourite of Hitler’s. The phrases “to be or not to be” and “it is Hecuba to me” frequently rolled off his lips. So is the phrase “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” then to be interpreted as meaning that there are too many scheming Jews, and that they—the rot—must be exterminated lest they extract their “pound of flesh”? Perhaps it was to Hamlet that Hitler likened himself in his final moment inside his Berlin bunker. Perhaps, it was the monologue “to be or not to be” (Sein oder Nichtsein) that he repeated for the last time before he bit on his cyanide capsule and blew his brains out with a pistol:

Sein oder Nichtsein; das ist hier die Frage:
Obs edler im Gemüt, die Pfeil und Schleudern
Des wütenden Geschicks erdulden oder,
Sich waffnend gegen eine See von Plagen,
Durch Widerstand sie enden? Sterben – schlafen –
Nichts weiter! Und zu wissen, daß ein Schlaf
Das Herzweh und die tausend Stöße endet,
Die unsers Fleisches Erbteil, ’s ist ein Ziel,
Aufs innigste zu wünschen. Sterben – schlafen –
Schlafen! Vielleicht auch träumen! Ja, da liegts:
Was in dem Schlaf für Träume kommen mögen,
Wenn wir die irdische Verstrickung lösten,
Das zwingt uns stillzustehn

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer
The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,
Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep
No more; and by a sleep, to say we end
The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

You could go on endlessly with such wild flights of speculative fantasy about the whole of the Second World War and the Holocaust being Hitler’s enactment of Shakespeare on the world's stage. If you had enough of an obsession you could write several books expounding out such fantasies, as Shakespeare’s plays brim with material you could richly expand on in such manner. Magee goes on to rightly tell us:

Shakespeare’s plays are replete with murder, torture, and horrific violence of every kind, such as people having their eyes gouged out on the stage; nor does the author go in for sentimental consolation about such things. Human wickedness in all its manifestations is relentlessly, and by no means always unsympathetically, presented; for instance there is always a certain respect if not admiration for adroit Machiavellianism, no matter how psychopathic and bloodthirsty. Militarism and nationalism are given their heads in such plays as Henry V, parts of which express the crudest drum-banging jingoism.

We may not have long to wait before the likes of Köhler are lecturing us about the total impossibility of anything other than a Nazi interpretation of Shakespeare, and its Absolute and Unquestionable Supremacy. Shakespeare must be a powerful symbol of the supremacy of National Socialism, or else cease to exist at all—with Hitler as the new Shakespearean bard of the tempests unleashed by Blitzkrieg, and its Jew-hating poetry of wrath. It might not be long before we could be seeing settings of Shakespeare in Nazi uniforms.

The problem is that you would likely be ridiculed and dismissed as being stark raving mad if you made claims to the absolute supremacy of a nazified interpretation of Shakespeare, compared to which all other views are supposed to be dismissed as absurd. Why then does anyone take similar such fantastic flights of fancy about Wagner, from the likes of Joachim Köhler (so fantastically speculatory as to reach ufological proportions), in the slightest bit seriously? That is, why is this sort of complete and utter nonsense universally tolerated when discussing Wagner, but not when discussing the creator of Shylock? If truth be known this sort of musicological quackery should rightly be greeted with gales of derisive laughter. For writers of Köhler’s ilk are fools of Shakespearean proportion.

Think Classical

Monday, July 2, 2012

Shakespeare's Hitler: the Prophet and his Disciple

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