Books on Wagner that Needs Translating into English

Today, I decided I compile a wishlist of books that desperately need to be translated into English. So for those of you involved in Wagner societies etc who might want to try to organise for something like this to happen please consider these titles.

1. Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich (Richard Wagner in the Dritte Reich/Third Empire):

• Paperback: 373 pages

• Publisher: C.H.Beck; Edition: 1 (29. June 2000)

• Language: Deutsch/German

• ISBN-10: 3406421563

• ISBN-13: 978-3406421563

Israeli historian, Saul Friedländer is one of the truly great scholars specialising in the Holocaust. Himself a Holocaust survivor, he is professor of history at UCLA and author of the seminal two volume study of the Holocaust: Nazi Germany and the Jews, which also contains some excellent critiques of Nazi opera conspiracies, but unfortunately predates the publication of Köhler's book in English.

Professor Saul Friedländer

The book Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich is the result of a conference that Saul Friedländer himself called for, probably in response to the publication of the English translation of Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple. Key participants in the conference were then invited to contribute essays which were published in this book. The two most important essays in the book are contributed by historians Saul Friedländer and Joachim Fest. Fest is the author of a major biography of Hitler along with several other extremely well known books on the era.

Joachim Fest is one of Hitler's major biographers

Needless to say, the depth of their knowledge and authority when it comes to this period of history make their critiques devastating in the way they systematically take journalist Köhler's Nazi opera conspiracy apart, while calling for genuine academic research into the subject matter that might supercede the current lot of distorted Wagner demonologies.

I have already given readers a bit of a preview of what Friedländer and Fest argue in their contributions in the form of English translations of snippets I have translated myself from the German. You can find them in my review of Wagner's Hitler—the Prophet and his Disciple. That should be enough to convince you of the importance of these essays. All in all the towering intellectual figure of Friedländer is the most authoritative figure to have written on this subject and his critique of Köhler is as devastating as it is matter of fact and academically watertight.

However, there are other contrarian contributors of note. These include key Nazi opera conspiracy theorists Paul Lawrence Rose, Hartmut Zelinsky, and Marc Weiner, whose views are allowed to contrast to those of Friedländer and Fest. Under Friedländer's powerful influence even Paul Rose considerably softens his formerly more polemical stance. These non-historians and cultural critics lacking the professional authority to make sweeping statements about the political influences on Hitler and on the intellectual climate of the Dritte Reich end up looking generally rather pale before their historian colleagues. Other voices able to give us less hysteria driven insight into Wagner include that of Dieter Borchmeyer.

The book gives us a balance of views between the Nazi opera conspiracy camp on the one side, and, on the other side, the towering authority of genuine experts in the field, Friedländer and Fest, with their outright rejection of Köhler's views on the Dritte Reich as an institution with no other object than to become a gigantic opera production to realise Wagner's "vision".

The end result is the most up-to-date and scholarly review of the Wagner controversy dominated by leading experts in historical studies of the Dritte Reich era qualified to talk about the area. The presence of balancing views means there can be no question of this being able to be lightly dismissed as a one-sided biased Wagner apology. Yet the non-German speaking world is hopelessly impoverished by a lack of access to this book, which is all the more ironic when you consider that many of the essays are translations into German from the English.

So please, if there is anyone out there in the position to lead a project of getting this book out in an English language edition please consider this book. And make sure all of the essays are included so as to avoid accusations of bias and lack of balance. I would also like to read the original English versions of some of these essays.


2. Anything by Dieter David Scholz

Scholz writes in a lucid and matter of fact style that is quite the antithesis of the emotive hysteria standard amongst Nazi opera conspiracists. A journalist, his books are always well bibliographed and you can chase his citations up in ways that are always illuminating. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Scholz for his insights, and most of the Wagner related posts in this blog are in some way influenced by these books:

A German Misunderstanding:
Richard Wagner Between the Barricades and Valhalla

Publisher: Parthas (1997)

ISBN-10: 3932529138

ISBN-13: 978-3932529139

Richard Wagner: A European Biography

Publisher: Parthas; 

Edition: 1., Aufl. (31. July 2006)

ISBN-10: 3866017901

ISBN-13: 978-3866017900

Wagner's Anti-Semitism

Publisher: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (15. January 2013)

ISBN-10: 3534258029

ISBN-13: 978-3534258024

It's a bit hard to pick between these three books. Perhaps the last of the three would be most likely to sell just because of its title and subject matter.