Caught between divided loyalty towards his country and his father, the answer to Peter Viereck's personal crisis was simple: blame it all on Richard Wagner. After all, Wagner was the evil genius pulling the strings behind the veil of historical events, and making Viereck's life difficult. And by framing Wagner as the perfect embodiment of everything German that was to be dutifully hated by all true American patriots, Viereck could win accolades through his conspicuous and perfectly hysterical scapegoating of Wagner for the sins of the entire German nation. It was a circus show intended to showcase just how much of a true German-hating patriot Viereck was, thus helping to exorcise the looming threat of internment that faced many of German-American background.
Viereck's flagellation of Wagner was thus an affected public display of patriotism; a piece of anti-German war propaganda at America's gravest hour during the war. It was also the founding of a deeply personal conservative right-wing nationalism that became the defining feature of Viereck's intellectual orientation for the rest of his life.
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| Viereck helped to pioneer the Nazi opera conspiracy where National Socialism is reduced to little more than the enactment of opera on the stage of world history where Hitler merely acted as grand opera impresario |
Beyond a loyalty divided between country and family, there was a further crisis brewing here. It was a crisis of confidence in the American political Right—a crisis precipitated by not only by the looming dominance of Roosevelt's Democratic Party, but one deepened by the tarnished image of the political Right in the face of fascism. It was important that if they were to maintain credibility, the American Right simply had to valiantly dissociate itself from fascism. Even the world “conservatism” had become a dirty word, and Viereck set out to restore the tarnished image of the political conservatism he had inherited from his father.
The fourth personal crisis for Viereck was the pressure to hand in his PhD thesis. In a 1940 book entitled They Wanted War by Otto D. Tolischus, Viereck discovered the perfect scapegoat to bear the cross of the sins of fascism: Richard Wagner. For like Viereck, Tolischus was another German-American keen to prove his undying patriotism towards America through hyperbolic displays of German culture bashing. And from the same book, Viereck learned of Constantin Frantz's term, “metapolitics”, one which he borrowed for the title of his PhD thesis—but without evincing the slightest evidence of having studied Frantz's 1878 Open Letter to Richard Wagner from which the term was taken. Viereck claimed that the ideology of National Socialism constituted a form of metapolitics, with its roots in German romanticism.
Unfortunately, Viereck demonstrates evidence of only knowing of the contents of the Open Letter from secondary sources—namely from Tolischus. The volume of the Bayreuther Blätter in which the Open Letter was published was clearly unavailable in the Harvard library, and Viereck clearly could not be bothered to locate a copy in another library, nor track down other titles containing similar ideas by Frantz for study. The Open Letter is further conspicuously absent from Viereck's bibliography, a glaring omission given that Viereck had taken the title of his book from there.
Had Viereck bothered to actually read Frantz's Open Letter, he would have discovered that Frantz defined Metapolitik as the idealistic opposite of Prussian Realpolitik, and that Frantz emphatically denounced pan-Germanic militarist expansionism under the pointy tip of the Prussian sabre. Germany, wrote Frantz, must be smaller and not larger. Metapolitik, for Frantz, meant that Germany should exist only as a loose federation of central European states around a liberal constitution based on that of the American Constitution, very much like the European Union of today. Germany, wrote Frantz, must only conquer the world as the music of J. S. Bach has “conquered” the world: in an ideal and metapolitical sense, and not in a real and militaristic sense.
For Viereck to claim that such pacifist opposition to pan-Germanic expansionism constituted the ideological foundations of National Socialism is utterly laughable in its catastrophic failure to study primary source texts. Viereck's risible choice of Metapolitics for his book's title undermines every drop of credibility in his whole book.
However, there was much more that Viereck shamelessly plagiarised from Tolischus for his thesis, since the following passage from Tolischus's 1941 book is almost a perfect summary of Viereck's 1941 PhD thesis:
In each chapter of Viereck's PhD thesis, he systematically discusses almost each and every one of those names listed by Tolischus. These thinkers constitute a most curious collection of bedmates who often sat on diametrically opposite sides of the political fence. Feuerbach, for example, is one of the leading pre-Marxist generation of thinkers considered by Marx and Engels to be intermediary between Hegel of their system of thought. Here are the table of content taken from the final 2006 edition of Viereck's book:
METAPOLITICS
CHAPTER I: THE "GERMAN PROBLEM"
CHAPTER II: "ROMANTICISM" AND THE CULT OF "LIFE": AN ATTEMPT AT DEFINITION
CHAPTER III: FROM 1648 TO 1848: THE TWO SOULS IN ACTION
CHAPTER IV: FATHER JAHN, THE FIRST STORM TROOPER
CHAPTER V: SIEGFRIED: THE METAPOLITICS OF RICHARD WAGNER
CHAPTER VI: HITLER AND WAGNER
CHAPTER VII: GREENWICH VILLAGE WARRIORS
CHAPTER VIII: "O SACRED MEDITERRANEAN": SOLUTION TO THE GERMAN PROBLEM
CHAPTER IX: REALPOLITIK: FICHTE, HEGEL, TREITSCHKE, HITLER
CHAPTER X: A DIFFERENT VIEW OF THE GERMAN REPUBLIC
CHAPTER XI: PROPHET LAUREATE OF METAPOLITICS: PART I
CHAPTER XII: PROPHET LAUREATE OF METAPOLITICS: PART II
CHAPTER XIII: NAZI RELIGION VERSUS CHRISTIAN RELIGION
CHAPTER XIV: METAPOLITICS IN ACTION: THE THEOLOGY OF TERROR
BIBLIOGRAPHY: (revised 1961)
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B: For the 1965 edition: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, WAGNER'S TRANSVESTISM
In all of this, including the paranoia towards the LGBT community, you can see the polemical point of Viereck's book: to scapegoat the political left for the sins of National Socialism, while largely ignoring the hoard of right-wing writers who really did influence them. This is why the ideological influence of Martin Luther is systematically downplayed by Viereck, the Christian right-wing apologist—even though writers who focus on the cultural origins of National Socialism such as William Shirer, Robert Vansittart, Rohan Butler, and more recently Goldhagen, have unanimously pointed the finger of blame at the figure of Luther.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler actually implies that he wishes to be remembered as the successor of three great Germans before him: Frederick the Great, Richard Wagner, and Martin Luther. At which point, Viereck quickly shifts blame away from Martin Luther to set up Richard Wagner as the convenient scapegoat for the religious Right. After all, Wagner had been a follower of the proto-Marxist socialist thinker, Ludwig Feuerbach. Wagner had further been a revolutionary who fought beside Bakunin for democracy in 1849, before becoming a follower of another Left Hegelian thinker, Constantin Frantz. Viereck tells us:
The only thing was that Hitler, totally ignorant of Wagner's political prose writings, nonetheless enjoyed listening to Wagner's music. This has proven a highly convenient point for right wing polemicists, since it has opened up the opportunity to claim that National Socialism was a form of “socialism” with its intellectual origins in left wing thinkers such as Feuerbach, Bakunin, Marx, Engels or Frantz.
According to the view that Viereck took up from Tolischus, the Right had been lead down the false path of fascism by an evil wizard manipulating history from beyond the grave—Richard Wagner—who had allegedly convinced the political Right to base their political ideology purely on the romantic “metapolitics” of grand opera derived from Frantz and Feuerbach. “National Socialism” was above all to be seen as a form of romantic nationalistic form of socialism. The singular goal of German fascism was now to be seen as the enactment of Wagner's grand operatic “metapolitics” on the world's stage, and this was where fascism had lead the political Right down the wrong path by convincing it to adopt quasi-socialist ideologies. Or to quote the passage from Tolischus that Viereck plagiarised for his PhD thesis:
National Socialism was thus to be seen as an opera company disguised as a political party—one that had transformed the Reichstag into an opera house, as part of a grand opera conspiracy extolling a Germanic heroism of epic proportions. Once the root source of all that had misled the Right had been correctly identified in the form of Wagner, it could now be purged, so that the Right could venture forth once more with renewed credibility, cleansed of all defilement by Wagnerian badness.
The central theoretical tenet implicit within Viereck's Metapolitics is that of what the true underlying cause of WWII and the rise of fascism might be. At the time, in most history departments, Marxist influenced interpretations of history based on analysis of socio-economic infrastructure were prominent. When the war was over, Viereck knew that there would be an avalanche of post-Marxist historians looking at the Great Depression and hyperinflation as key driving elements that precipitated war. Viereck devotes a whole section to the subject under the title “Economic Determinism”, which, like “historical materialism”, is basically a code for Marxism. Viereck fiercely denounces the standard textbook teaching that the Great Depression had anything to do with the rise of National Socialism as a conspiracy theory based on a “economic determinism” involving a “capitalist plot” invoking what he called “the Protocol of the Elders of Wall Street”.
Never mind that economist John Maynard Keynes had predicted with chilling foresight that the severely punitive economic conditions imposed upon Germany by the treaty of Versailles would lead straight to another world war. Keynes prophetically wrote in 1919 that:
However, according to Viereck, Keynes was barking up the wrong tree by studying economic determinants of political conflict, when rather, he would have more fruitfully have spent his time devoting himself to the study of opera libretti.
The underlying implication of this is that the cultural mindset of Germany alone—especially Wagnerian opera—sufficed to explain the rise of Hitler, and any analysis of economic determinants was to be promptly dismissed as a Marxist conspiracy. Even as a student, the proto-McCarthyist Viereck was determined to replace such structural analyses with an entirely culturally based explanation for the origins of WWII. Yet at the same time, this cultural analysis had to conveniently avoid implicating the role that Christian anti-Semitism and the churches had played in the rise of National Socialism. Henceforth, history was to be explained, not by structural, socio-political and socio-economic analysis, but entirely as the end-product of the lofty flights of poetic inspiration from the Great Man whose epic literary odyssey single-handedly shaped history. Wagner fitted the bill perfectly for a scapegoat.
Now conferred the status of the sole steering hand of history, the poetic genius alone would thus be charged with the task of writing the script of history, even if that genius was an evil genius, such as that of Nero, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler—or Richard Wagner. The structuralist analysis pioneered by Marx was to be rejected outright as a left-wing conspiracy, in favour of a right-wing and romantic view of a cultural historicism shaped by romantic heroes and anti-heroes. Himself a poet, in Viereck's view, the poet in particular was viewed as having been endowed with a uniquely seminal role in single-handedly shaping world history according to an inspired vision. And Wagner was Viereck's trump card to “prove” that the demonic vision of a poet and composer could single-handedly steer the entire course of history. After all, mesmerised by Wagner, Hitler had transformed the world's stage into a gigantic opera set with by realising Wagner's romantic philosophy of “metapolitics”.
Today, much of this seems rather comical. No serious mainstream academic historian takes any of this even remotely seriously. Anyone who reads Frantz's Open Letter to Richard Wagner will also find such an emphatic denunciation of Prussian militarism and Pan-Germanism, with the term Metapolitik being systematically opposed to militant Bismarckian Realpolitik, so as to make even the most basic tenets of Viereck's book look utterly ludicrous.
Sir Richard J. Evans compared Viereck with the widely discredited Daniel Goldhagen, whose PhD thesis-come-book, Hitler's Willing Executioners became an international bestseller:
In other words, the Goldhagen hypothesis is old hat, since it just rehashes tired old ideas long ago published by the likes of Viereck who likewise reduced the origins of National Socialism to nothing more than purely cultural determinants. What Evans neglects to mention is that Viereck's Metapolitics does not originally date from the 1960s (which is merely the date of the publication of a revised edition), but was actually originally published in 1941, thus bringing Viereck much closer in spirit to other Allied propagandists of the 1940s such as Vansittart and Butler.
William Shirer was another author who tended to blindly repeat the anti-Kraut sentiments expressed by allied propagandists of the 1940s. Richard J. Evans elsewhere notes that:
To prove his view, Viereck cites a quote which he attributes to Hitler:
Viereck repeats this quote three times over without ever once giving us a credible primary source: For example:
I have done an extensive study to determine the authenticity of the oft repeated “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote, and so far, I have been unable to find a credible primary source for it: it is likely spurious. No evidence has yet come to light proving that Hitler ever said this, and not a single one of the mainstream academic historians specialising in this field quote it. The only secondary source for the quote that Viereck could muster was They Wanted War by Tolischus, who lists absolutely no source citation at all. All this merely confirms that Viereck's 1941 PhD thesis was little more than a poorly concealed plagiaristic rehash of the 1940 book by Tolischus, where the same dubious “quote” is repeated over and over until a lie becomes the truth.
As for Viereck's question left to Hitler's future biographer as “what must you know to understand Hitler?” here is what Sir Ian Kershaw—that most respected of all Hitler biographers—would write in his monumental two-volume study of Hitler:
Kershaw is talking about Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple, but Köhler's reduction of National Socialist Germany to little more than a grand operatic “vision” is actually an unoriginal rehash of what the likes of Viereck had said decades before him, albeit one taken on to “a new plane” of “overdrawn” exaggeration and “distortion”. Everything that Kershaw says about Köhler equally applies to Viereck since their basic premises about Wagner remain the same.
For a historian, Viereck is astonishingly willing to make up evidence. For example, Viereck claims to be privy to uniquely penetrating insights into Hitler's deepest emotions as well as to know with superhuman insight as to precisely what prose texts Hitler did or did not know “by heart”. Naturally, Viereck claims that Hitler knew Wagner's prose writings completely “by heart” since Viereck apparently has extraordinary access to the most intimate contents of Hitler's heart. Sadly though, Viereck gives us not the slightest shred of supportive citations to back up these bold claims to being a mind-reader, leaving us little choice but to conclude that he merely made them up, especially when you consider that Sir Ian Kershaw has said of Hitler that:
Already in 1941 Viereck had claimed to have fully solved the “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” that was Hitler, right to the point of plumbing the deepest and most intimate recesses of Hitler's mind, recesses inaccessible even to his closest political allies. Viereck thus makes the unsupported speculation that “the main source of emotion throughout Hitler's life” was Wagnerian opera. And even more remarkable was that Viereck, the PhD student, managed it all from the safety of Harvard University campus.
Viereck also makes up other fairy tales. For example Viereck claims that Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that his favourite reading consisted of the “political compositions of Richard Wagner” and he cites p.69 of the 13th edition of Mein Kampf, Munich 1934 as the source of the quote. I carefully checked the citation in Mein Kampf and Hitler says nothing of the sort either on p.69 or anywhere else in the book: Viereck totally made the quote up. Readers are all duly invited to look through any complete edition of Mein Kampf for themselves to confirm this. Sir Richard J. Evans concurs with me in stating that:
Nor does Viereck produce even the slightest scrap of evidence to support his speculation that Hitler knew “much of” the ten volumes of Wagner's prose “by heart” because absolutely no such evidence exists. So Viereck replaces evidence supporting rampant speculation with unsupported claims evincing the certainty befitting of a clairvoyant.
Viereck makes things up elsewhere too. In the preface of the 2006 digital edition, he states that:
While Wagner and Marx certainly did belong amongst the ranks of left-wing anti-Semitism (or anti-Judaism depending on how you interpret things), the claim that for Wagner it was purely racially based is unsubstantiated by readings of his late writings such as Heldenthum and Christenthum. Neither does Viereck even so much as attempt to substantiate his claim that Wagner ever read Marx's early anti-Judaic essay. Nor does Viereck give us the quote where Wagner says all races are capable of salvation “with the single exception of Jews”. Viereck is unable to give us a direct citation of Wagner saying “with the single exception of Jews” because Viereck once again just freely made those words up as it suited him. Here are the words Viereck alludes to from Wagner's Heldenthum and Christenthum:
However, to attempt to trace National Socialist genocide to Wagner and Marx is simply an attempt by the political right to shift the blame for the Holocaust onto the left. Nineteenth century left-wing anti-Semitism is of an entirely different political character and with different historical origins. Merely scapegoating either Marx or Wagner for “causing” the Holocaust does nothing to convince us of anything other than that the blame for this appalling tragedy belongs squarely with the warmongering political Right. And had Viereck been raised in Germany, a right-winger in his position would have justified voting for the National Socialists on the basis that they were protecting Germany from becoming a Bolshevik republic—just like Viereck's father.
Viereck also attempts to lump fascism and communism together by suggesting that they had common Hegelian origins:
While Martin Heidegger did proffer nazified interpretations of Hegel (see Gesamtausgabe Band 86 §29-41, §221-261), which tells us more about Heidegger than anything else, I have never come across actual historical evidence that any National Socialist party ideologue of any significance was ever directly influenced by Hegel, whom Viereck targets because he was a powerful influence on Feuerbach, Engels and Marx. Nor does Viereck substantiate the way he draws a fictitious direct lineage of intellectual influence going straight from Hegel to Hitler. He simply invents fictitious “direct” connections between National Socialism as it suits his agenda, in order to run a self-serving polemic against ideological opponents. He fails to even provide even the most meagre scrap of primary textual references to substantiate his dubious claims. Nor does our history PhD student evince the slightest evidence of any more having studied Hegel as having studied Frantz. Instead, as is standard accepted practice amongst authors of Nazi opera conspiracies, Viereck passes hearsay and speculation off as indubitable fact whenever it suits his political agenda. Viereck goes on in his self-serving polemic:
Viereck wilfully draws bold and emphatic straight lines directly connecting a proto-Marxist reading of Hegel with Rosenberg, Marx, Goethe and Wagner. The connecting lines, however, turn out once again to be little more than a fiction concocted for the sake of a self-serving polemic against the political left. Had Viereck bothered to look up primary sources, he would found the respective thinkers he insinuates are “all the same”, are in fact ideologically often violently at odds with one another. For example, in addition to hostile comments about Richard Wagner, Rosenberg also writes quite scathing things about Hegel in his Mythos of the Twentieth Century §287:
Rosenberg, for all his perversity, is educated enough to know that Marxist thinking is heavily influenced by the post-Hegelian tradition, one which he insinuates might perfectly reasonably be dubbed “Jewish”. Rosenberg is actually perfectly correct here in that Hegel's thinking is heavily influenced by the Jewish philosopher, Spinoza. “Spinoza is the high point of modern philosophy”, said Hegel, “either you are a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all” (“Spinoza ist Hauptpunkt der modernen Philosophie: entweder Spinozismus oder keine Philosophie”: Geschichte der Philosophy III, p163, Suhrkamp Verlag).
Evans goes on about Viereck:
You can see how Viereck draws a satirical caricature of Hegel with a toothpick moustache draw on purely for Viereck's own self-serving polemical purposes. In this case, Viereck fails to even bother to pluck the usual “choice quotations” from Hegel's writings, grossly misquoted out of content to try to crudely incriminate those he is to run his polemical Nazi accusation against. Once again, Viereck's witch-hunt is based on slanderous hearsay and insinuation without proper study of the primary texts of liberal thinkers he blames for causing the rise of National Socialism. You would expect of a PhD student writing a thesis arguing that National Socialism arose out of the German liberal tradition of thought, that he would have at least demonstrated proper familiarity with those thinkers he is attempting to incriminate: something which our young history PhD student has clearly failed to do because these philosophers are way too dauntingly difficult for a history major without a formal background in Continental Philosophy to read, and the young Viereck had way too little time to study them before writing up his thesis. Instead, our time-poor student is reduced to hurriedly passing sweeping judgement on the thinkers he writes out based on comical caricatures of them he has gleaned from dubious secondary sources—namely upon crude caricatures plucked from Tolischus.
The only support for his reading of Frantz that Viereck musters comes from his 2006 preface to Metapolitics, in which he states that:
This is typical of Viereck. The trouble is that during the National Socialist era, nazified interpretations of Martin Luther and of the New Testament were as proffered by the party faithful. Yet Viereck would be the first to object if anyone suggested that we should unquestioningly accept the party line hailing Luther as the original proto-Nazi, and the New Testament as the original gospel of Nazism. The point is that rather than blindly accepting nazified interpretations of either the New Testament or the pacifist writings of Frantz, a critical examination is required, thus demonstrating familiarity with the texts concerned. Viereck totally fails to do this, resulting in a catastrophic failure to maintain even the most basic of undergraduate academic standards. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever in the Open Letter to Richard Wagner by Frantz hailing a “Führer-led Volk-state” at all: these fictitious words have been maliciously made up by Viereck. Readers can examine the Open Letter all they like and all they will find are denunciations of Prussian militarism and pan-Germanism. It is typical of the sort of gutter level methodology that Viereck helped to firmly establish as standard operating procedure throughout the Nazi opera conspiracy literature.
Viereck even frankly asserts (quoting Kolnai) that “from Fichte to Hitler . . . the line runs straight”. When Viereck freely draws these bold “straight” lines as it suits him, he consistently fails to adequately substantiate them, suggesting that he feels free to draw such “straight lines” leading wherever his whims take him—or, more exactly, as it politically suits his polemical purposes. As with McCarthy, Viereck's frames anyone as a heretic and witch as it takes Monsignor Grand Inquisitor's fancy. For, while it is true that Hitler's private library does contain Fichte's complete works (but not a single volume of Wagner's prose works), the fact is completely overlooked that Fichte was a political liberal and a republican in a monarchist age, whose philosophy of a perpetual struggle for autonomous self-determination was heavily influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution (see Frederick Beiser's German Idealism).
Likewise, whereas the complete Wagner is absent from Hitler's private library, it does contain the complete works of Shakespeare. You might think Viereck would want to draw yet another "straight line” going from the creator of Shylock, who could thus be accused of having caused WWII and the Holocaust, but he does not, since that fails to suit his political agenda. Yet without doubt Hitler regarded the English as an Aryan, Nordic and Germanic people.
You can see how from the perspective of the historian specialising in National Socialist Germany, a narrative reducing their entire field to the enactment by Hitler of Wagnerian revolutionary opera on the stage of world history in order to blame shift responsibility for the ideological origins of National Socialism onto the left must seem comically preposterous. Yet in claiming that National Socialism has its origins in Wagner's support for Frantz's anti-militarist and anti-pan-Germanic concept of “metapolitics”, that is exactly what Viereck does. Such reductionism makes a mockery of academic historiography by turning it into a right-wing farce, where history is freely rewritten for the sake of self-serving political expediency. This is why I call such narratives reducing the vast complexity of history down to Wagnerian opera, Nazi opera conspiracies. These can be considered siblings of Nazi UFO conspiracies (UFOs are Nazi secret weapons made in collaboration with aliens wanting to conquer earth), and Occult Reich conspiracies (the Nazis were all evil satanists). None of these lurid populist conspiracy theories make it into serious mainstream academic studies of the Dritte Reich era written by genuine historians dedicated to studying this era in history.
Unfortunately, Viereck demonstrates evidence of only knowing of the contents of the Open Letter from secondary sources—namely from Tolischus. The volume of the Bayreuther Blätter in which the Open Letter was published was clearly unavailable in the Harvard library, and Viereck clearly could not be bothered to locate a copy in another library, nor track down other titles containing similar ideas by Frantz for study. The Open Letter is further conspicuously absent from Viereck's bibliography, a glaring omission given that Viereck had taken the title of his book from there.
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| Otto Tolischus: They Wanted War, 1940 |
Had Viereck bothered to actually read Frantz's Open Letter, he would have discovered that Frantz defined Metapolitik as the idealistic opposite of Prussian Realpolitik, and that Frantz emphatically denounced pan-Germanic militarist expansionism under the pointy tip of the Prussian sabre. Germany, wrote Frantz, must be smaller and not larger. Metapolitik, for Frantz, meant that Germany should exist only as a loose federation of central European states around a liberal constitution based on that of the American Constitution, very much like the European Union of today. Germany, wrote Frantz, must only conquer the world as the music of J. S. Bach has “conquered” the world: in an ideal and metapolitical sense, and not in a real and militaristic sense.
For Viereck to claim that such pacifist opposition to pan-Germanic expansionism constituted the ideological foundations of National Socialism is utterly laughable in its catastrophic failure to study primary source texts. Viereck's risible choice of Metapolitics for his book's title undermines every drop of credibility in his whole book.
However, there was much more that Viereck shamelessly plagiarised from Tolischus for his thesis, since the following passage from Tolischus's 1941 book is almost a perfect summary of Viereck's 1941 PhD thesis:
[Wagner] became a synthesis of the German intellectual turmoil that began to separate the German from the rest of the occident in the nineteenth century ... It was a turmoil symbolized by such names as Arndt, Fichte, [Friedrich] List, Feuerbach, Treitschke and Konstantin Frantz, whose “metapolitics” especially interested Wagner, and finally, as an extreme outsider, Nietzsche. Though these men differed in stature and ideas, the end result of this turmoil was a nostalgia for the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation”.... It marked a break with French enlightenment, universalist humanism, and Hellenistic classicism ... and led to a concentration on the Germanic mythos which found its climax in an exaltation of Germanism as the remedy for the world's ills.
Tolischus: They Wanted War, p12. My emphasis
In each chapter of Viereck's PhD thesis, he systematically discusses almost each and every one of those names listed by Tolischus. These thinkers constitute a most curious collection of bedmates who often sat on diametrically opposite sides of the political fence. Feuerbach, for example, is one of the leading pre-Marxist generation of thinkers considered by Marx and Engels to be intermediary between Hegel of their system of thought. Here are the table of content taken from the final 2006 edition of Viereck's book:
METAPOLITICS
CHAPTER I: THE "GERMAN PROBLEM"
CHAPTER II: "ROMANTICISM" AND THE CULT OF "LIFE": AN ATTEMPT AT DEFINITION
CHAPTER III: FROM 1648 TO 1848: THE TWO SOULS IN ACTION
CHAPTER IV: FATHER JAHN, THE FIRST STORM TROOPER
CHAPTER V: SIEGFRIED: THE METAPOLITICS OF RICHARD WAGNER
CHAPTER VI: HITLER AND WAGNER
CHAPTER VII: GREENWICH VILLAGE WARRIORS
CHAPTER VIII: "O SACRED MEDITERRANEAN": SOLUTION TO THE GERMAN PROBLEM
CHAPTER IX: REALPOLITIK: FICHTE, HEGEL, TREITSCHKE, HITLER
CHAPTER X: A DIFFERENT VIEW OF THE GERMAN REPUBLIC
CHAPTER XI: PROPHET LAUREATE OF METAPOLITICS: PART I
CHAPTER XII: PROPHET LAUREATE OF METAPOLITICS: PART II
CHAPTER XIII: NAZI RELIGION VERSUS CHRISTIAN RELIGION
CHAPTER XIV: METAPOLITICS IN ACTION: THE THEOLOGY OF TERROR
BIBLIOGRAPHY: (revised 1961)
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B: For the 1965 edition: ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, WAGNER'S TRANSVESTISM
All of the odd bedmates listed by Tolischus are also to be found in Viereck's book—for example Wagner, Frantz, Fichte, and Treitschke are all there. Father Jahn, Arndt, and Hegel are elsewhere singled out for mention by Tolischus, thus leaving no doubt as to where Viereck plucked his role call of curious bedmates from. Even Viereck's oddly sympathetic treatment of Nietzsche comes straight from Tolischus.
Note too the section devoted to the alleged “transvestism” of Wagner. This speculation dating back to Wagner's day surrounded little more than Wagner's commissioning of silk dressing gowns from Paris. In those days, members of the LBGT community used to be considered depraved, and the mere suggestion that Wagner or Hitler might have been bisexual or interested in cross-dressing apparently supposed to be some kind of mortal 'insult'. There was even a systematic attempt by Allied propagandists to “discredit” Hitler by “accusing” him of homosexuality. Today this sort of “accusation” would be considered utterly discriminatory and obsolescent. The fact that the 90 year-old Viereck chose to maintain this line of “attack” on Wagner for the final 2006 edition of his book goes to show how much of an antiquated right-wing curiosity he had been reduced to by the end of his life.
In all of this, including the paranoia towards the LGBT community, you can see the polemical point of Viereck's book: to scapegoat the political left for the sins of National Socialism, while largely ignoring the hoard of right-wing writers who really did influence them. This is why the ideological influence of Martin Luther is systematically downplayed by Viereck, the Christian right-wing apologist—even though writers who focus on the cultural origins of National Socialism such as William Shirer, Robert Vansittart, Rohan Butler, and more recently Goldhagen, have unanimously pointed the finger of blame at the figure of Luther.
In Mein Kampf, Hitler actually implies that he wishes to be remembered as the successor of three great Germans before him: Frederick the Great, Richard Wagner, and Martin Luther. At which point, Viereck quickly shifts blame away from Martin Luther to set up Richard Wagner as the convenient scapegoat for the religious Right. After all, Wagner had been a follower of the proto-Marxist socialist thinker, Ludwig Feuerbach. Wagner had further been a revolutionary who fought beside Bakunin for democracy in 1849, before becoming a follower of another Left Hegelian thinker, Constantin Frantz. Viereck tells us:
Steeped in what Germans call the “French ideas” of rationalism and atomistic liberalism, Wagner then called himself proudly an “anti-mystical materialist”. Philosophically he belonged to Feuerbach's “Young Hegelians”. Feuerbach, connecting link between Hegel and Marxism, preached a more materialistic and socialistic version of Hegel. Politically, Wagner sympathized with the self-styled “Young Germany” group, whose leaders (Heinrich Heine and Börne) were actually Jewish exiles in Paris. There they wittily challenged sentimental German patriotism from their more utilitarian and rationalist criteria. Among his Parisian compatriots, Wagner was influenced musically by his chief patron, the Jew Meyerbeer; intellectually, by the Jew Heine. An anti-Semite in theory, Wagner had a reputation for preferring Jews to other Germans as his intimate friends.
Viereck: Metapolitics
The only thing was that Hitler, totally ignorant of Wagner's political prose writings, nonetheless enjoyed listening to Wagner's music. This has proven a highly convenient point for right wing polemicists, since it has opened up the opportunity to claim that National Socialism was a form of “socialism” with its intellectual origins in left wing thinkers such as Feuerbach, Bakunin, Marx, Engels or Frantz.
According to the view that Viereck took up from Tolischus, the Right had been lead down the false path of fascism by an evil wizard manipulating history from beyond the grave—Richard Wagner—who had allegedly convinced the political Right to base their political ideology purely on the romantic “metapolitics” of grand opera derived from Frantz and Feuerbach. “National Socialism” was above all to be seen as a form of romantic nationalistic form of socialism. The singular goal of German fascism was now to be seen as the enactment of Wagner's grand operatic “metapolitics” on the world's stage, and this was where fascism had lead the political Right down the wrong path by convincing it to adopt quasi-socialist ideologies. Or to quote the passage from Tolischus that Viereck plagiarised for his PhD thesis:
“Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”, Adolf Hitler has often to his friends; and the whole National Socialist regime, which finds its foundation in the Germanic mythos and the cult of the heroic, is in fact unthinkable without Wagner and all he represents. In that sense the whole present war resolves itself into a super-Wagnerian opera turned into grim reality.
Tolischus: They Wanted War, p11, New York 1940
National Socialism was thus to be seen as an opera company disguised as a political party—one that had transformed the Reichstag into an opera house, as part of a grand opera conspiracy extolling a Germanic heroism of epic proportions. Once the root source of all that had misled the Right had been correctly identified in the form of Wagner, it could now be purged, so that the Right could venture forth once more with renewed credibility, cleansed of all defilement by Wagnerian badness.
The central theoretical tenet implicit within Viereck's Metapolitics is that of what the true underlying cause of WWII and the rise of fascism might be. At the time, in most history departments, Marxist influenced interpretations of history based on analysis of socio-economic infrastructure were prominent. When the war was over, Viereck knew that there would be an avalanche of post-Marxist historians looking at the Great Depression and hyperinflation as key driving elements that precipitated war. Viereck devotes a whole section to the subject under the title “Economic Determinism”, which, like “historical materialism”, is basically a code for Marxism. Viereck fiercely denounces the standard textbook teaching that the Great Depression had anything to do with the rise of National Socialism as a conspiracy theory based on a “economic determinism” involving a “capitalist plot” invoking what he called “the Protocol of the Elders of Wall Street”.
Never mind that economist John Maynard Keynes had predicted with chilling foresight that the severely punitive economic conditions imposed upon Germany by the treaty of Versailles would lead straight to another world war. Keynes prophetically wrote in 1919 that:
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)
However, according to Viereck, Keynes was barking up the wrong tree by studying economic determinants of political conflict, when rather, he would have more fruitfully have spent his time devoting himself to the study of opera libretti.
The underlying implication of this is that the cultural mindset of Germany alone—especially Wagnerian opera—sufficed to explain the rise of Hitler, and any analysis of economic determinants was to be promptly dismissed as a Marxist conspiracy. Even as a student, the proto-McCarthyist Viereck was determined to replace such structural analyses with an entirely culturally based explanation for the origins of WWII. Yet at the same time, this cultural analysis had to conveniently avoid implicating the role that Christian anti-Semitism and the churches had played in the rise of National Socialism. Henceforth, history was to be explained, not by structural, socio-political and socio-economic analysis, but entirely as the end-product of the lofty flights of poetic inspiration from the Great Man whose epic literary odyssey single-handedly shaped history. Wagner fitted the bill perfectly for a scapegoat.
Now conferred the status of the sole steering hand of history, the poetic genius alone would thus be charged with the task of writing the script of history, even if that genius was an evil genius, such as that of Nero, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Hitler—or Richard Wagner. The structuralist analysis pioneered by Marx was to be rejected outright as a left-wing conspiracy, in favour of a right-wing and romantic view of a cultural historicism shaped by romantic heroes and anti-heroes. Himself a poet, in Viereck's view, the poet in particular was viewed as having been endowed with a uniquely seminal role in single-handedly shaping world history according to an inspired vision. And Wagner was Viereck's trump card to “prove” that the demonic vision of a poet and composer could single-handedly steer the entire course of history. After all, mesmerised by Wagner, Hitler had transformed the world's stage into a gigantic opera set with by realising Wagner's romantic philosophy of “metapolitics”.
Today, much of this seems rather comical. No serious mainstream academic historian takes any of this even remotely seriously. Anyone who reads Frantz's Open Letter to Richard Wagner will also find such an emphatic denunciation of Prussian militarism and Pan-Germanism, with the term Metapolitik being systematically opposed to militant Bismarckian Realpolitik, so as to make even the most basic tenets of Viereck's book look utterly ludicrous.
Sir Richard J. Evans compared Viereck with the widely discredited Daniel Goldhagen, whose PhD thesis-come-book, Hitler's Willing Executioners became an international bestseller:
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 (pp. 31-2). Ultimately, says Goldhagen, it is this history of genocidal antisemitism that explains the German mass murder of Europe's Jews, nothing else can.
This is a bold and arresting thesis, though it is not new. Much the same was said during the Second World War by anti-German propagandists such as Robert Vansittart or Rohan Butler, who traced back German antisemitism—and much more—to Luther and beyond; a similar argument was put forward by the proponents of the notion of a German 'mind' or 'character' in the 1960s [citation to Viereck's 1960s revised edition of Metapolitics], and by William L. Shirer in his popular history of Nazism.
Goldhagen asserts that German society as a whole had been deeply antisemitic since the Middle Ages. The tradition of Christian antisemitism was reinforced by Luther, and further strengthened in the nineteenth century by the rise of German nationalism, which defined Germanness from the outset against the 'otherness' of the Jew (pp. 44-5). By the late nineteenth century, antisemitism was not only all-pervasive but also exterminatory. To be antisemitic in Germany meant to will the physical annihilation of the Jews. It was a doctrine, Goldhagen claims, that was adhered to by the vast majority of Germans throughout modern history.
Richard J. Evans: Rereading German History (13. Antisemitism). My emphasis
In other words, the Goldhagen hypothesis is old hat, since it just rehashes tired old ideas long ago published by the likes of Viereck who likewise reduced the origins of National Socialism to nothing more than purely cultural determinants. What Evans neglects to mention is that Viereck's Metapolitics does not originally date from the 1960s (which is merely the date of the publication of a revised edition), but was actually originally published in 1941, thus bringing Viereck much closer in spirit to other Allied propagandists of the 1940s such as Vansittart and Butler.
William Shirer was another author who tended to blindly repeat the anti-Kraut sentiments expressed by allied propagandists of the 1940s. Richard J. Evans elsewhere notes that:
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
All of these Allied propagandists pushed the idea that the cultural influence of the likes of Wagner or Luther was so strongly determinative in shaping the “German mind” by stirring genocidal bloodlust, that Wagner's operas are then wilfully reinterpreted to retrofit the propaganda, to make them out to be innately Kraut expressions of genocidal anti-Semitism, racism, militarism and authoritarianism. In a circular argument, this revisionist interpretation is then further presented as definitive proof for Goldhagenist type hypotheses about how pervasive proto-Nazism had become by the late nineteenth century.
In this view, Wagner set the stage to enact opera on the stage of world history, and single-handedly preconditioned the German mind in such a way as to make it inevitable that some opera impresario like Hitler would soon produce his operatic “vision” on the stage of world history, and presto, there you would have it—WWII and the Holocaust. Such events were predestined to happen, thanks to Richard Wagner, the revolutionary demonic playwright who scripted the libretto of world history. Conveniently nazified interpretations of Wagner's works are endlessly wrung out his works to retrospectively forcibly fit the equally perverse right-wing paradigm ascribing the origins of the Nazi catastrophe in German socialist thinkers—all for the sole purpose of scapegoating the political Left for the sins of the Right. In it, you see both history and Wagnerian opera being wilfully rewritten from a right-wing perspective.
In this view, Wagner set the stage to enact opera on the stage of world history, and single-handedly preconditioned the German mind in such a way as to make it inevitable that some opera impresario like Hitler would soon produce his operatic “vision” on the stage of world history, and presto, there you would have it—WWII and the Holocaust. Such events were predestined to happen, thanks to Richard Wagner, the revolutionary demonic playwright who scripted the libretto of world history. Conveniently nazified interpretations of Wagner's works are endlessly wrung out his works to retrospectively forcibly fit the equally perverse right-wing paradigm ascribing the origins of the Nazi catastrophe in German socialist thinkers—all for the sole purpose of scapegoating the political Left for the sins of the Right. In it, you see both history and Wagnerian opera being wilfully rewritten from a right-wing perspective.
To prove his view, Viereck cites a quote which he attributes to Hitler:
Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner [no citation]
— CHANCELLOR ADOLF HITLER
Viereck repeats this quote three times over without ever once giving us a credible primary source: For example:
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 [no supportive citation], a deeper emotion than with any man or woman [no supportive citations]. Already in the 1941 edition I quoted Hitler's statement that “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”. [no supportive citation]... And what must you know to understand Hitler? I leave that to the biographer...
My emphasis
I have done an extensive study to determine the authenticity of the oft repeated “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner” quote, and so far, I have been unable to find a credible primary source for it: it is likely spurious. No evidence has yet come to light proving that Hitler ever said this, and not a single one of the mainstream academic historians specialising in this field quote it. The only secondary source for the quote that Viereck could muster was They Wanted War by Tolischus, who lists absolutely no source citation at all. All this merely confirms that Viereck's 1941 PhD thesis was little more than a poorly concealed plagiaristic rehash of the 1940 book by Tolischus, where the same dubious “quote” is repeated over and over until a lie becomes the truth.
As for Viereck's question left to Hitler's future biographer as “what must you know to understand Hitler?” here is what Sir Ian Kershaw—that most respected of all Hitler biographers—would write in his monumental two-volume study of Hitler:
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 (my emphasis)
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 (my emphasis)
Kershaw is talking about Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple, but Köhler's reduction of National Socialist Germany to little more than a grand operatic “vision” is actually an unoriginal rehash of what the likes of Viereck had said decades before him, albeit one taken on to “a new plane” of “overdrawn” exaggeration and “distortion”. Everything that Kershaw says about Köhler equally applies to Viereck since their basic premises about Wagner remain the same.
For a historian, Viereck is astonishingly willing to make up evidence. For example, Viereck claims to be privy to uniquely penetrating insights into Hitler's deepest emotions as well as to know with superhuman insight as to precisely what prose texts Hitler did or did not know “by heart”. Naturally, Viereck claims that Hitler knew Wagner's prose writings completely “by heart” since Viereck apparently has extraordinary access to the most intimate contents of Hitler's heart. Sadly though, Viereck gives us not the slightest shred of supportive citations to back up these bold claims to being a mind-reader, leaving us little choice but to conclude that he merely made them up, especially when you consider that Sir Ian Kershaw has said of Hitler that:
One reason why Hitler has proved 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma' ..., is the emptiness of the private person. He was ... tantamount to an 'unperson'. ... [T]he black hole which represents the private individual derives from the fact that Hitler was highly secretive... The secrecy and detachment were features of his character, applying also to his political behaviour; they were also politically important, components of the aura of 'heroic' leadership he had consciously allowed to be built up, intensifying the mystery about himself.
Kershaw: Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (my emphasis)
Already in 1941 Viereck had claimed to have fully solved the “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” that was Hitler, right to the point of plumbing the deepest and most intimate recesses of Hitler's mind, recesses inaccessible even to his closest political allies. Viereck thus makes the unsupported speculation that “the main source of emotion throughout Hitler's life” was Wagnerian opera. And even more remarkable was that Viereck, the PhD student, managed it all from the safety of Harvard University campus.
Viereck also makes up other fairy tales. For example Viereck claims that Hitler stated in Mein Kampf that his favourite reading consisted of the “political compositions of Richard Wagner” and he cites p.69 of the 13th edition of Mein Kampf, Munich 1934 as the source of the quote. I carefully checked the citation in Mein Kampf and Hitler says nothing of the sort either on p.69 or anywhere else in the book: Viereck totally made the quote up. Readers are all duly invited to look through any complete edition of Mein Kampf for themselves to confirm this. Sir Richard J. Evans concurs with me in stating 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)
Nor does Viereck produce even the slightest scrap of evidence to support his speculation that Hitler knew “much of” the ten volumes of Wagner's prose “by heart” because absolutely no such evidence exists. So Viereck replaces evidence supporting rampant speculation with unsupported claims evincing the certainty befitting of a clairvoyant.
Viereck makes things up elsewhere too. In the preface of the 2006 digital edition, he states that:
Yet in the 1869 edition of his 1850 polemic Judaism In Music he added that his work was being persecuted by Jews. The Nazis never mentioned how much this Wagner essay owed to Karl Marx [no supportive citation], who had attacked Jews as bankers and for turning creations into commodities. The difference: Marx attacked Jews on economic grounds, Wagner increasingly on racial grounds [no supportive citation]. Thus Wagner's Heldenthum and Christenthum, 1881, called all races capable of salvation through Christ with the single exception of Jews.
My emphasis
While Wagner and Marx certainly did belong amongst the ranks of left-wing anti-Semitism (or anti-Judaism depending on how you interpret things), the claim that for Wagner it was purely racially based is unsubstantiated by readings of his late writings such as Heldenthum and Christenthum. Neither does Viereck even so much as attempt to substantiate his claim that Wagner ever read Marx's early anti-Judaic essay. Nor does Viereck give us the quote where Wagner says all races are capable of salvation “with the single exception of Jews”. Viereck is unable to give us a direct citation of Wagner saying “with the single exception of Jews” because Viereck once again just freely made those words up as it suited him. Here are the words Viereck alludes to from Wagner's Heldenthum and Christenthum:
The blood of the Saviour flowing from his head, from his wounds on the cross—who would commit such an outrage as to ask whether it might belong to the white or any other race?
Das Blut des Heilandes, von seinem Haupte, aus seinen Wunden am Kreuze fließend, — wer wollte frevelnd fragen, ob es der weißen, oder welcher Rasse sonst angehörte?
However, to attempt to trace National Socialist genocide to Wagner and Marx is simply an attempt by the political right to shift the blame for the Holocaust onto the left. Nineteenth century left-wing anti-Semitism is of an entirely different political character and with different historical origins. Merely scapegoating either Marx or Wagner for “causing” the Holocaust does nothing to convince us of anything other than that the blame for this appalling tragedy belongs squarely with the warmongering political Right. And had Viereck been raised in Germany, a right-winger in his position would have justified voting for the National Socialists on the basis that they were protecting Germany from becoming a Bolshevik republic—just like Viereck's father.
Viereck also attempts to lump fascism and communism together by suggesting that they had common Hegelian origins:
Hegel is still very much alive today, among millions of men who never heard of him, in his two rival groups of disciples of Marxists and Nazis. Marx, through Feuerbach, turned Hegel's dialectic [sic] idealism into dialectic materialism. Applied to national lines, nazism and fascism substitute the German or Italian nation for Hegel's ideal of the Prussian state. Marxism substitutes the proletariat for it and transfers bodily to class lines the doctrine of ever changing thesis-antithesis.
Viereck: Metapolitics
While Martin Heidegger did proffer nazified interpretations of Hegel (see Gesamtausgabe Band 86 §29-41, §221-261), which tells us more about Heidegger than anything else, I have never come across actual historical evidence that any National Socialist party ideologue of any significance was ever directly influenced by Hegel, whom Viereck targets because he was a powerful influence on Feuerbach, Engels and Marx. Nor does Viereck substantiate the way he draws a fictitious direct lineage of intellectual influence going straight from Hegel to Hitler. He simply invents fictitious “direct” connections between National Socialism as it suits his agenda, in order to run a self-serving polemic against ideological opponents. He fails to even provide even the most meagre scrap of primary textual references to substantiate his dubious claims. Nor does our history PhD student evince the slightest evidence of any more having studied Hegel as having studied Frantz. Instead, as is standard accepted practice amongst authors of Nazi opera conspiracies, Viereck passes hearsay and speculation off as indubitable fact whenever it suits his political agenda. Viereck goes on in his self-serving polemic:
Hegel's “state” embodied collectively and pantheistically an ever evolving, ever fluid “Idea of God”. Rosenberg keeps this Hegelian framework, substituting nation for state, race soul for Idea. Marx, too, kept the Hegelian evolutionary dialectic, substituting not nation but class for state. Beyond external or universal laws of good and evil, the nation (or class) obeys only its sacred inner dynamics, ever expanding against its antithesis, ever becoming and never being—this all sounds Faustian and very Hegelian and equally Wagnerian, and very, very German.
Viereck: Metapolitics
Viereck wilfully draws bold and emphatic straight lines directly connecting a proto-Marxist reading of Hegel with Rosenberg, Marx, Goethe and Wagner. The connecting lines, however, turn out once again to be little more than a fiction concocted for the sake of a self-serving polemic against the political left. Had Viereck bothered to look up primary sources, he would found the respective thinkers he insinuates are “all the same”, are in fact ideologically often violently at odds with one another. For example, in addition to hostile comments about Richard Wagner, Rosenberg also writes quite scathing things about Hegel in his Mythos of the Twentieth Century §287:
That was the turning away from the sun into the shadows of a forcibly rationalised doctrine. Just as the Jewish dogma dominates religion, so too does a militantly life-hating “academic” method dominate Europe. Aristotle was its schematising herald, Hegel, its last great pupil. “Logic is the science of God”, said this Hegel. That word is a punch in the face for any genuine Nordic religion that is genuinely Germanic, but also for genuine Greek science. But the word is truly Socratic, and Hegel is, together with Socrates, therefore not for nothing a saint of most of our university professors.
Das war die Wendung von der Sonne weg zum Schatten einer vernünftelnden Zwangslehre. Wie das jüdische Dogma sich über die Religion, so lagerte sich die soldatische lebenswidrige “wissenschaftliche” Methode über Europa. Aristoteles war sein schematisierender Verkünder, Hegel sein letzter großer Schüler. “Die Logik ist die Wissenschaft von Gott”, sagte diese Hegel. Das Wort ist ein Faustschlag ins Gesicht einer jeden echten nordischen Religion, einer jeden echten germanischen, aber auch echt griechischen Wissenschaft. Aber das Wort ist echt sokratisch und Hegel ist nebst Sokrates deshalb nicht umsonst ein Heiliger unserer meisten Universitätsprofessoren.
Alfred Rosenberg: Mythos des Zwanzigsten Jahrhundert (my translation from the German)
Rosenberg, for all his perversity, is educated enough to know that Marxist thinking is heavily influenced by the post-Hegelian tradition, one which he insinuates might perfectly reasonably be dubbed “Jewish”. Rosenberg is actually perfectly correct here in that Hegel's thinking is heavily influenced by the Jewish philosopher, Spinoza. “Spinoza is the high point of modern philosophy”, said Hegel, “either you are a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all” (“Spinoza ist Hauptpunkt der modernen Philosophie: entweder Spinozismus oder keine Philosophie”: Geschichte der Philosophy III, p163, Suhrkamp Verlag).
Evans goes on about Viereck:
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. Moreover, while ideas do have a power of their own, that power is always conditioned, however indirectly, by social and political circumstances, a fact that historians who generalized about the 'German character' or 'the German mind' all too often forgot [citation to Viereck's Metapolitics].
Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich
You can see how Viereck draws a satirical caricature of Hegel with a toothpick moustache draw on purely for Viereck's own self-serving polemical purposes. In this case, Viereck fails to even bother to pluck the usual “choice quotations” from Hegel's writings, grossly misquoted out of content to try to crudely incriminate those he is to run his polemical Nazi accusation against. Once again, Viereck's witch-hunt is based on slanderous hearsay and insinuation without proper study of the primary texts of liberal thinkers he blames for causing the rise of National Socialism. You would expect of a PhD student writing a thesis arguing that National Socialism arose out of the German liberal tradition of thought, that he would have at least demonstrated proper familiarity with those thinkers he is attempting to incriminate: something which our young history PhD student has clearly failed to do because these philosophers are way too dauntingly difficult for a history major without a formal background in Continental Philosophy to read, and the young Viereck had way too little time to study them before writing up his thesis. Instead, our time-poor student is reduced to hurriedly passing sweeping judgement on the thinkers he writes out based on comical caricatures of them he has gleaned from dubious secondary sources—namely upon crude caricatures plucked from Tolischus.
The only support for his reading of Frantz that Viereck musters comes from his 2006 preface to Metapolitics, in which he states that:
My 1941 edition had explained (footnote, p.4) that I took my title “metapolitics” from a letter that the anti-Semite and Wagnerian author, Constantin Frantz, wrote in June 1878, “Open Letter to Richard Wagner”. There Frantz coined the word to foretell their shared dream of a future racist and Führer-led Volk-state. In her diaries Cosima quotes Wagner, September 8, 1880 as saying, “There are only two people who seriously discuss serious questions—Constantin Frantz and I”. In 1971, imagine my surprise at reading that Kurt Waldheim had been appointed secretary general of UN. Later he was elected president of Austria. The surprising coincidence was that, during the war, Waldheim had written his Ph.D. thesis on Frantz, glorifying him as prophet of Nazism.
This is typical of Viereck. The trouble is that during the National Socialist era, nazified interpretations of Martin Luther and of the New Testament were as proffered by the party faithful. Yet Viereck would be the first to object if anyone suggested that we should unquestioningly accept the party line hailing Luther as the original proto-Nazi, and the New Testament as the original gospel of Nazism. The point is that rather than blindly accepting nazified interpretations of either the New Testament or the pacifist writings of Frantz, a critical examination is required, thus demonstrating familiarity with the texts concerned. Viereck totally fails to do this, resulting in a catastrophic failure to maintain even the most basic of undergraduate academic standards. There is absolutely nothing whatsoever in the Open Letter to Richard Wagner by Frantz hailing a “Führer-led Volk-state” at all: these fictitious words have been maliciously made up by Viereck. Readers can examine the Open Letter all they like and all they will find are denunciations of Prussian militarism and pan-Germanism. It is typical of the sort of gutter level methodology that Viereck helped to firmly establish as standard operating procedure throughout the Nazi opera conspiracy literature.
Viereck even frankly asserts (quoting Kolnai) that “from Fichte to Hitler . . . the line runs straight”. When Viereck freely draws these bold “straight” lines as it suits him, he consistently fails to adequately substantiate them, suggesting that he feels free to draw such “straight lines” leading wherever his whims take him—or, more exactly, as it politically suits his polemical purposes. As with McCarthy, Viereck's frames anyone as a heretic and witch as it takes Monsignor Grand Inquisitor's fancy. For, while it is true that Hitler's private library does contain Fichte's complete works (but not a single volume of Wagner's prose works), the fact is completely overlooked that Fichte was a political liberal and a republican in a monarchist age, whose philosophy of a perpetual struggle for autonomous self-determination was heavily influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution (see Frederick Beiser's German Idealism).
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| Hitler's private library contains the complete works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte given to him by Leni Riefenstahl who has hand written a dedication to "my dear Leader": Meinem lieben Führer Leni Riefenstahl 20 Juni 1933 |
Likewise, whereas the complete Wagner is absent from Hitler's private library, it does contain the complete works of Shakespeare. You might think Viereck would want to draw yet another "straight line” going from the creator of Shylock, who could thus be accused of having caused WWII and the Holocaust, but he does not, since that fails to suit his political agenda. Yet without doubt Hitler regarded the English as an Aryan, Nordic and Germanic people.
You can see how from the perspective of the historian specialising in National Socialist Germany, a narrative reducing their entire field to the enactment by Hitler of Wagnerian revolutionary opera on the stage of world history in order to blame shift responsibility for the ideological origins of National Socialism onto the left must seem comically preposterous. Yet in claiming that National Socialism has its origins in Wagner's support for Frantz's anti-militarist and anti-pan-Germanic concept of “metapolitics”, that is exactly what Viereck does. Such reductionism makes a mockery of academic historiography by turning it into a right-wing farce, where history is freely rewritten for the sake of self-serving political expediency. This is why I call such narratives reducing the vast complexity of history down to Wagnerian opera, Nazi opera conspiracies. These can be considered siblings of Nazi UFO conspiracies (UFOs are Nazi secret weapons made in collaboration with aliens wanting to conquer earth), and Occult Reich conspiracies (the Nazis were all evil satanists). None of these lurid populist conspiracy theories make it into serious mainstream academic studies of the Dritte Reich era written by genuine historians dedicated to studying this era in history.
Although Viereck likes to imagine “proto-Nazi strains” everywhere in Wagner, and then claims to have discovered in them the very origins of National Socialist metapolitics, it is clear he freely imagines such things anywhere it suits his political agenda. Predictably, Viereck only ever “discovers” such proto-Nazi strains in the writings of left-wing German thinkers. As Evans says, you can cherry pick “choice quotations” to argue just about anyone was a proto-Nazi as the polemical need arise, so it comes as little surprise that Viereck conveniently finds such strains exclusively in his left-wing ideological opponents. Even Shakespeare, the creator of Shylock, could similarly be targeted had Viereck so desired, since Wagner himself greatly admired Shakespeare, and the figure of Wotan is more than a little influenced by King Lear, thus creating another opportunity to invent another fictional “straight line of influence” from Shakespeare straight to Hitler and the crematoria of Auschwitz.
You could even argue that because the Swastika is used in Buddhism that Wagner's interest in Buddhism and vegetarianism were therefore “proto-Nazi”:
Even Daniel Goldhagen, himself a vegetarian, points out that the mere fact that the Nazis wore black hardly means that everyone who wears black is a Nazi. One cannot accuse Gandhi of being a Nazi on the basis that, like Hitler, he too was a vegetarian. Things are never that simple—greater nuance is always required. Sadly though, where Viereck criticises the likes of Köhler for a lack of “nuance”, it is merely a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
In the field of mainstream academic historiography, it is fortunate that this sort of drawing of straight lines of influence as it suits the writer's polemical agenda are widely ignored. Viereck's account of National Socialism based on accounts of the “German mind” is regarded by academic historians as being of historical interest only for being largely based on allied WWII propaganda of the sort that also claimed that Hitler had only one testicle or that he went mad after contracting syphilis from a gay Jewish prostitute. Viereck's right-wing attempts to locate the origins of National Socialism in the German tradition of liberal thought fails in its attempts to blind us to the obvious fact that National Socialism was precisely a violent right-wing reactionary movement against the great German liberal tradition in thought. Viereck is likewise merely the reactionary product of his personal life situation, stuck with a notorious pro-Nazi father, while still desiring to clean up the tarnished image of conservatism in the face of the rise of fascism. Viereck's views of National Socialism are now rightly classed as “populist” alongside those of journalist, William Shirer's, and understandably lumped together with a whole range of other often lurid and sensationalist populist writers in the field.
However, for all of the grand simplicities of Viereck's original thesis, Sir Richard J. Evans has noted that:
It was just such an older and wiser Viereck who returned in 2006, the final year of his life, to the 1941 doctoral thesis which had launched his career, now astonishingly demanding from the reader the exact “nuance” entirely absent from the thesis of his youth:
In his 2006 preface of Metapolitic Viereck went on to complain that the Nazi opera conspiracy theories he pioneered in his youth had now gotten completely out of hand:
The oblique reference to Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler is unmistakable, where Köhler wrote that “reality meant for [Hitler] the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama”. Yet Viereck, even while looking back at the sins of his youth in the final year of his life, astonishingly fails to see how Köhler's methodology of making things up, falsifying evidence, and systematic misuse of bibliographic citations, remains unwaveringly loyal to the gutter level methodological standards pioneered by Viereck for whenever right-wing writers speculate about Nazi opera conspiracies. Nonetheless, the addition of “nuance” to Viereck's original “firm, clear-cut views” renders matters so “fuzzy” that questions have to asked whether come 2006, anything is still left of the “grand simplicities” with which Viereck originally set out in 1941. After all National Socialism could hardly be said to have originated in a pacifist, pro-democratic, Feuerbachian socialist, Bakunian anarchist, anti-Prussian and anti-pan-Germanic ideology such as that of Frantz's metapolitics. Viereck's dismissal of Köhler's Wagner's Hitler as being an “exaggerated article on WagnerHitler” is virtually his own admission of failure.
Unfortunately, musicologists today are so extremely poorly read outside of their field that they seem to systematically ignore the vast corpus of literature that mainstream historians have compiled about National Socialist Germany in the decades since Viereck's Metapolitics. It is extraordinary that the “academic” musicologist continues to seriously entertain ideas that have all the academic credibility of populist conspiracy theories, reducing the vast complexities of National Socialist Germany, WWII and the Holocaust down to little more than grand opera. Perhaps musicologists secretly want to believe the romantic delusion that composers are so all-powerful in their influence that they steer the course of history. Little wonder then that musicologists choose to bury their heads in the sand and systematically ignore everything that their history department colleagues are writing in order to prolong their self-aggrandising romantic delusion a little longer.
You might be thinking whether academic musicologists really do subscribe to such discredited and bizarre conspiracies about WWII and the Holocaust being nothing but opera. It is understandable that some readers might refuse to believe that academics could ever subscribe to such an idea. It almost seems too comical to believe that reputedly educated human beings can believe such nonsense—tantamount to Nazi UFO conspiracies—but in the upcoming post I will expose just such an example. And it comes from a source quite different to what you might be expecting. Through it I hope to expose how pernicious Viereck's influence—discredited though he is amongst modern historians—continues to be amongst musicologists.
UPDATE: the follow up post has been written and can be found here.
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| The complete works of William Shakespeare from Hitler's private library, sumptuously leather bound with his initials adorning the spine in gold leaf |
You could even argue that because the Swastika is used in Buddhism that Wagner's interest in Buddhism and vegetarianism were therefore “proto-Nazi”:
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| A map of Taipei uses the traditional swastika to indicate a Buddhist temple |
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| A Japanese Buddhist temple showing the traditional “manji” |
Even Daniel Goldhagen, himself a vegetarian, points out that the mere fact that the Nazis wore black hardly means that everyone who wears black is a Nazi. One cannot accuse Gandhi of being a Nazi on the basis that, like Hitler, he too was a vegetarian. Things are never that simple—greater nuance is always required. Sadly though, where Viereck criticises the likes of Köhler for a lack of “nuance”, it is merely a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
In the field of mainstream academic historiography, it is fortunate that this sort of drawing of straight lines of influence as it suits the writer's polemical agenda are widely ignored. Viereck's account of National Socialism based on accounts of the “German mind” is regarded by academic historians as being of historical interest only for being largely based on allied WWII propaganda of the sort that also claimed that Hitler had only one testicle or that he went mad after contracting syphilis from a gay Jewish prostitute. Viereck's right-wing attempts to locate the origins of National Socialism in the German tradition of liberal thought fails in its attempts to blind us to the obvious fact that National Socialism was precisely a violent right-wing reactionary movement against the great German liberal tradition in thought. Viereck is likewise merely the reactionary product of his personal life situation, stuck with a notorious pro-Nazi father, while still desiring to clean up the tarnished image of conservatism in the face of the rise of fascism. Viereck's views of National Socialism are now rightly classed as “populist” alongside those of journalist, William Shirer's, and understandably lumped together with a whole range of other often lurid and sensationalist populist writers in the field.
However, for all of the grand simplicities of Viereck's original thesis, Sir Richard J. Evans has noted that:
... it has often been said that as historians get older, the firm, clear-cut views with which they begin their career become fuzzier and more complex in light of their increasing knowledge, until they are so nuanced that scarcely anything is left of the grand simplicities with which they set out.
Evans: Rereading German History. My emphasis
It was just such an older and wiser Viereck who returned in 2006, the final year of his life, to the 1941 doctoral thesis which had launched his career, now astonishingly demanding from the reader the exact “nuance” entirely absent from the thesis of his youth:
In interpreting Wagner, pro or con, nuance matters more than dogmatism because of his ambivalences.
Viereck: Metapolitics 2006 Preface. My emphasis
In his 2006 preface of Metapolitic Viereck went on to complain that the Nazi opera conspiracy theories he pioneered in his youth had now gotten completely out of hand:
[M]y Wagner-Hitler research was greeted with general skepticism in 1941. Also by economic determinists, who saw only a capitalist plot, a kind of Protocols of the Elders of Wall Street.
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) had not only major proto-Nazi strains but was influenced by totally un-Nazi strains, such as pacifism, Christianity, Feuerbach, Bakunin, Buddhism, Schopenhauer (the stress on doom, on the twilight of the gods), and a fanatic vegetarianism and anti-vivisection. The last two were shared by Hitler but not by the Party.
My emphasis
The oblique reference to Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler is unmistakable, where Köhler wrote that “reality meant for [Hitler] the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama”. Yet Viereck, even while looking back at the sins of his youth in the final year of his life, astonishingly fails to see how Köhler's methodology of making things up, falsifying evidence, and systematic misuse of bibliographic citations, remains unwaveringly loyal to the gutter level methodological standards pioneered by Viereck for whenever right-wing writers speculate about Nazi opera conspiracies. Nonetheless, the addition of “nuance” to Viereck's original “firm, clear-cut views” renders matters so “fuzzy” that questions have to asked whether come 2006, anything is still left of the “grand simplicities” with which Viereck originally set out in 1941. After all National Socialism could hardly be said to have originated in a pacifist, pro-democratic, Feuerbachian socialist, Bakunian anarchist, anti-Prussian and anti-pan-Germanic ideology such as that of Frantz's metapolitics. Viereck's dismissal of Köhler's Wagner's Hitler as being an “exaggerated article on WagnerHitler” is virtually his own admission of failure.
Unfortunately, musicologists today are so extremely poorly read outside of their field that they seem to systematically ignore the vast corpus of literature that mainstream historians have compiled about National Socialist Germany in the decades since Viereck's Metapolitics. It is extraordinary that the “academic” musicologist continues to seriously entertain ideas that have all the academic credibility of populist conspiracy theories, reducing the vast complexities of National Socialist Germany, WWII and the Holocaust down to little more than grand opera. Perhaps musicologists secretly want to believe the romantic delusion that composers are so all-powerful in their influence that they steer the course of history. Little wonder then that musicologists choose to bury their heads in the sand and systematically ignore everything that their history department colleagues are writing in order to prolong their self-aggrandising romantic delusion a little longer.
You might be thinking whether academic musicologists really do subscribe to such discredited and bizarre conspiracies about WWII and the Holocaust being nothing but opera. It is understandable that some readers might refuse to believe that academics could ever subscribe to such an idea. It almost seems too comical to believe that reputedly educated human beings can believe such nonsense—tantamount to Nazi UFO conspiracies—but in the upcoming post I will expose just such an example. And it comes from a source quite different to what you might be expecting. Through it I hope to expose how pernicious Viereck's influence—discredited though he is amongst modern historians—continues to be amongst musicologists.
UPDATE: the follow up post has been written and can be found here.
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