Time to Deny the Nazis their One Last Victory

The conductor Daniel Barenboim (who is also Jewish) is famous for saying that it is important that Wagner be played in Israel to deny the Nazis their "one last victory".

Today, it occurred to me that many people are driven by purely emotive arguments to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive by dutifully hating Wagner for allegedly inciting genocide or even of single-handedly causing the Holocaust. Parents teach their children how important it is pay respect to the victims of the National Socialists by hating Wagner. Hate makes the world a better place, they are taught. This is the supposed road to Utopia.

Here is a typically blindly emotive patriotic incitement of Wagner hatred:

Certainly, there is every urgent reason to respect the sensibilities of survivors who have been forced to know Wagner through the Nazi's propagandistic use of him. It is understandable that many people (but by no means all) who heard him played in the death camps, or may have been forced to play him there, would not want to listen to his music. That he cannot be performed in concert halls in Israel, where people are free to go or not, raises a different set of questions: Can Wagner the artist be separated from Wagner the anti-Semite and favorite of Hitler? Can a man who hated Jews have written operas in which this hatred is not represented? 

Wagner was known during his lifetime as a liar, a cheat, a man who ran up debts he had no intention to repay, a revolutionary who hated capitalism but was himself addicted to luxury, a composer who curried favor with the rich and famous (Meyerbeer) whom he later viciously attacked. He betrayed his first wife (Mina) and seduced his second (Cosima) away from his closest friend and colleague (von Büloh [sic]). Wagner was also a very great anti-Semite. If anyone doubts the extent of that anti-Semitism, a few quotes from his infamous tract, "The Jews in Music," should be sufficient. 

From Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial: Shekinah, Wagner, and the Politics of the Small by Kim Chernin

In actual fact, selective quotation from Judaism in Music for polemical purposes is far from sufficient evidence to convict Wagner of genocide when it is properly understood in terms of the overall message of the essay, delivered in a different historical context. It is a gross distortion to read the essay in the historical context of a century after its publication. The sort of message in the essay about the Jews having "degenerated" through centuries of persecution rendering them in need of "redemption" to a higher humanity can also be found in the writings of Theodor Herzl, which, taken out of context could likewise be twisted to accuse the founder of Zionism of being a Nazi, along with his favourite composer, Richard Wagner.

Nor does having an extramarital affair make anyone a Nazi. It does not help one bit when no actual examples of Wagner as "liar" and a "cheat" are actually given, thus reducing such accusations to the status of blindly emotive insults. In addition to having never told a lie in her life, or ever having had an extramarital affair, I hope Chernin is free of all debts to banks and credit card companies: let (s)he who is without sin, cast the first stone. And the accusation of genocide is an extremely serious one, so let whoever casts that stone present proper evidence convicting Wagner of this crime—extramarital affairs not counting as proper evidence.

Finally, the story about Wagner's music being played as Jews were marched to their deaths in concentration camps is a myth. In the words of Israeli historian Na'ama Sheffi:

Another substantial change in the attitude to German culture stemmed from reports by refugees and concentration camp survivors that Jews had been marched off to the gas chambers to the strains of Wagner's music (among others). The undeniable evidence of Wagner's sweeping popularity among members of the Nazi Party [as amongst German Jews] was now bolstered by other indictments. In the absence of any firm documentation—scarcely surprising—the story that Wagner's works had been played in the camps had never been substantiated by research. In accounts of the camp orchestras, specific references to Wagner are difficult to find. Even Moshe Hoch, one of the fiercest opponents of public performances of Wagnerian music in Israel, did not mention Wagner in the bleak description he set down in his book: "The members of the Jewish orchestra played mainly Viennese waltzes, and sometimes we would hear the music in the distance [...] They collected the best artists, violinists, pianists, actors, and others, and housed them in a separate building. They would give daily lectures and concerts for the Germans to amuse them." 

Fania Fenelon, one such performer, said nothing in her own book about playing music by Wagner, but mentioned music by other composers who were never banned in Israel, such as Franz Liszt and Ludwig van Beethoven. In the first days of the controversy over Wagner and Strauss in Israel at the beginning of the 1950s, former inmates of Auschwitz also testified that the camp orchestra had never played works by Wagner to those marching to their death. 

The Ring of Myths: The Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis by Na'ama Sheffi (my emphasis)

As for Franz Liszt here is how Reichsrundfunk (German Imperial Radio) broadcasts started—with his Les Préludes:

So why is it that the music of Liszt is not banned in Israel?

The other question that must be asked is that as to what an anti-Semite is. When the term "anti-Semite" is applied to Wagner, it is automatically assumed that because Hitler was "also" an anti-Semite, that their thinking was the same. Yet Sir Richard J. Evans tells us that:

[Hitler's] antisemitism had very different roots and was of a very different kind from that of Wagner. 

Evans: Review Article: New Perspectives on Hitler

Yet you could also say that the views held by Herzl about Jews having "degenerated" through centuries of "predatory bestiality" that had held them oppressed and forced them into work such as money lending is equally "anti-Semitic". You could label anyone who rejects religious observance of the last word of the Torah, does not accept that Yahweh Elohim created the world in seven days, does not attend synagogue or keep a kosher house, as being "anti-Semitic" since they deny the religious dogma of Judaism. That would make me a Nazi, fit to hang on the same gallows as Eichmann. To remove all nuance in the definition of what anti-Semitism is, by lumping targets of a polemic as being anti-Semitic Nazi monsters ripe for extermination is appalling behaviour that must be condemned as being ethically totally unacceptable.

In contrast to such emotive and irrational outbursts against Wagner, what could more undermine any last vestige of Nazi credibility than to completely take apart their Wagner interpretation and to show that Hitler was so abjectively foolish as to have adopted a proto-Marxist and Bakunian socialist-anarchist as an icon of his movement? There could be little that could possibly more profoundly embarrass Hitler than this. Not only that, but this involves a rigorous academic study of Wagner's extensive written oeuvre and which utterly demolishes this final vestige of Nazi propaganda. Truly this is the sweetest of victories over Hitler and National Socialism.

Sadly, it is an insult against the intelligence of the Nazis that few people want. Instead they convince themselves that validating Nazi propaganda with violently emotive invectives against Wagner based on grotesquely nazified Wagner interpretations presented as though they were some sort of Eternal Truth. The reality is that the greatest weapon against the National Socialists is the honest truth backed up by scrupulous academic research.

Further Reading:

For a more detailed study of this topic please read the in-depth analysis and review of Joachim Köhler's book Wagner's Hitler.