If you remember, in the last post we discussed the problems that academic historians have with an older generation of authors such as journalist William Shirer and right-wing historian Peter Viereck who liked to discover the cause of WWII and the Holocaust in German cultural influences. The problem was, in the words of Sir Richard J. Evans:
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].
You could cherry pick the target of your polemic and then pluck out some choice quotations and presto, you have a fool’s formula for trying to discredit whatever German ideological opponent you wanted to in a purely self-serving crusade. The best thing was that it saved you the effort of having to come up with a cogent argument to try to criticise your opponent, while giving the attacker the veneer of self-righteousness. In most cases, you didn’t even need to have read what the target of your polemic had written. All you needed was to quilt together some “choice quotations” with the insinuation that ‘em bloody Krauts are all the same—they’re all Nazis, always ‘ave been, always will be. There probably has scarcely been a single German language author who has not been dealt with at some time in this manner, and not even someone as hated by the fascists as Marx has been spared of this.
Walter Kaufmann was a tireless polemicist, and an extremely good “lawyer” when it came to representing the interests of those German thinkers he admired, even at the cost of blame-shifting onto those he had less interest in. The post-war rehabilitation of Nietzsche’s image from the misogynist Godfather of Fascism to a liberal thinker admired by postmodernist and feminist alike is almost entirely due to Kaufmann’s tireless efforts despite the fact that Hitler certainly did admiringly read Nietzsche’s theoretical writings, but not those of Wagner. Many have seen in Nietzsche’s Übermensch and his hearty praise of war, the foundations of a warmongering Führerprinzip. In fact, Kaufmann has probably done too good a job of rehabilitating Nietzsche, because although there is much that could be argued to be incompatible with fascism, these things are open to interpretation and far less than black and white. Nonetheless Kaufmann has contributed, often unwittingly, to a simpleton’s reductivist narrative where Nietzsche is seen as a liberal angel, and Wagner, the proto-fascist devil. As a result vanishingly few demonographies are written about Nietzsche, whereas that is about all you ever see written about Wagner.
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| Hitler admires a bust of Friedrich Nietzsche |
If you properly read both the theoretical writings of one time close friends, Wagner and Nietzsche (ignoring all the demonographies and hagiographies), it is Nietzsche who is by far and away the more difficult thinker to attempt to disassociate from National Socialism. If you actually bother to read him, you find that whereas Wagner is clearly left-wing (and remained so until the end of his days), Nietzsche took on a very reactionary right-wing outlook that wilfully inverted Wagner’s outlook following their break e.g. if The Ring was about renouncing Power for Love (culminating in the total annihilation of the warmongering Germanic gods), Nietzsche praises Power over Love—which he considers for sissies along with other virtues Wagner extolled like compassion and peace (Nietzsche wilfully turns Wagner on his head by praising pitilessness and war). You can only bemusedly admire the eloquence of Kaufmann’s excellent defences of Nietzsche, which certainly have some echo of truth in them. Kaufman is a defense lawyer of such exceptional talent that he certainly had me convinced for many years.
There are many other German writers who have been targets of polemics. Generally, the more famous a thinker, the more ideological opponents would try to capitalise on the post-war situation by launching tiresome polemical accusations of proto-Nazism. A typical example can be found in Otto Tolischus, They Wanted War (a 1941 book thoroughly plagiarised by Peter Viereck for his PhD thesis Metapolitics):
[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, p12
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| Cover of They Wanted War (1941) by journalist Otto Tolischus |
This is a truly bizarre constellation of the oddest possible bedmates who are all lumped together under the assumption that ‘em bloody Krauts are all the same. The confused “intellectual turmoil” that Tolischus mentions seems to be entirely one of his own making. For a start, Feuerbach and Wagner both belonged to a political left quite bitterly hostile to the others on the opposite side of the political fence. Although initially more Hegelian and left-wing, Frantz was won over to a more right-wing and Schellingian outlook. Wagner initially approved of Frantz, and published his Open Letter to Richard Wagner in the Bayreuther Blätter, 1878. There Frantz showed a disillusionment with the Realpolitik of the Bismarckian Reich, which he denounced as un-German, and instead advocated that politics be a Metapolitik with a more idealistic goal than raw and petty politics.
As for the relationship of Frantz to the Holy Roman Empire, Mark Berry puts it well:
Latterly claimed as a forerunner of the European ideal, Frantz was Romantically nostalgic for the Holy Roman Empire: not a state, but a set of legal institutions, through which sovereign entities, ranging from electorates to Imperial knights, might thrive, as much culturally as politically. It was Germany’s particular privilege and calling, Frantz believed, to form a living connection between state and international law in the development of continental Europe.
Berry: The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (entry under Constantin Frantz)
However, after Frantz started to turn ideologically towards Schelling, entries to the Cosima Diary under the name of Constantin (sometimes spelt Konstantin) Frantz show that Wagner developed a growing hostility to him. On the 2nd of October, 1881 Wagner says to Cosima that there would be little chance that Frantz could be led away from “philosophasters like Schelling” to Schopenhauer. Amongst the Young Hegelians such as Feuerbach, Engels and Marx, Schelling was regarded as right-wing and reactionary, and Wagner's attitude towards Frantz—whom he increasingly lumps together with Schelling—grows ever more hostile after he crosses to that side. On the 16th of December 1881, Wagner is recorded by Cosima as speaking with a “growing outrage towards Schelling’s [Philosophy of] Revelation”, and “that along with with C. Frantz, he had nothing more to say on the subject”. The one time Cosima records that Wagner—a staunch pacifist—still agreed with Frantz is when he openly criticised Moltke’s statement that “war comes from God” (15th February, 1881). As for Fichte, on 31st October 1879 Cosima records Wagner speaking of an understandable antipathy towards him, and never mentions him, to my awareness, in his published writings.
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| Engels wrote a polemic against Schelling who he called the “philosopher in Christ”. Wagner was equally as hostile to Schelling calling him a “charlatan” and “philosophaster” |
Although Tolischus throws Fichte’s name into the mix, oddly enough I doubt I have come across much of a spleen-venting polemic directed against Fichte despite Hitler’s private library containing his complete works (sumptuously bound in cream coloured vellum with gold-leaf tipping) given to him by Leni Riefenstahl:
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| Hitler's personal copy of Fichte’s complete works carries a handwritten note to him from Leni Riefenstahl |
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| Johann Gottlieb Fichte 19th May, 1762 – 27th January, 1814 |
Other sources attesting to Hitler’s interest in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are notoriously unreliable. Ernst Hanfstaengl claimed that Schopenhauer had been Hitler's “philosophical god in the old Dietrich Eckart days”—Eckart himself attributes several Schopenhauer remarks to Hitler in his “Conversation”—but that following the meeting with Nietzsche’s sister, Hitler became a convert. “From that day at Potsdam the Nietzschean catchphrases began to appear more frequently—the will to power of the Herrenvolk, slave morality, the fight for the heroic life, against reactionary education, Christian philosophy and ethics based on compassion”, Hanfstaengl confidently recalled though he mistakenly placed the encounter in Potsdam rather than Weimar. “Schopenhauer, with his almost Buddhist gentleness, was buried forever, and the Gauleiters started to take their inspiration from a savage parody of Nietzsche”.
However, when Leni Riefenstahl discussed the question of Schopenhauer vs. Nietzsche with Hitler, he still seemed to prefer Schopenhauer:
Riefenstahl provides an equally vivid but contradictory account. “I have a great deal to catch up on”, Riefenstahl recalls Hitler telling her in the book-lined comfort of his Prince Regent Square apartment. “In my youth I did not have the means or the possibility to provide myself with an adequate education. Every night I read one or two books, even when I go to bed very late”. He said that these readings were his primary source of knowledge, the grist from which he derived his public speeches. “When a person ‘gives’ he also has to ‘take’, and I take what I need from books”, he said. When Riefenstahl asked Hitler what he liked to read, he allegedly replied, “Schopenhauer”. “Not Nietzsche?” Riefenstahl asked. “No, I can’t really do much with Nietzsche”, Riefenstahl recalls Hitler telling her. “He is more an artist than a philosopher; he doesn’t have the crystal-clear understanding of Schopenhauer. Of course, I value Nietzsche as a genius. He writes possibly the most beautiful language that German literature has to offer us today, but he is not my guide”.
Ryback goes on to argue that Fichte may have been a far more prominent philosophical influence than either Schopenhauer or Nietzsche:
Though unmentioned, Johann Gottlieb Fichte was in fact the philosopher closest to Hitler and his National Socialist movement in tone, spirit, and dynamic. Unlike Schopenhauer, a brooding, bookish man, or the frail, bedridden Nietzsche, Fichte was brash and defiant. In 1808, with French troops garrisoned in Berlin, Fichte defiantly called for Germans to rise against foreign oppression in his landmark Speeches to the German Nation. On the eve of the decisive battle against Napoleon at Leipzig, Fichte appeared before his students, armed for battle. He was said to be a mesmerizing speaker who held his audiences “prisoner” with his words. “To action! To action! To action!” he once declared. “That is why we are here”.
Like Fichte, Hitler called for the “overthrow of the political elite” through a populist uprising. Fichte spoke of a Volkskrieg, a people’s war. Like Fichte, Hitler wanted to see the sundered German nation united. When Hitler denounced the political dialogue of parliamentary democracy and called for direct dialogue with the German people, he assumed a distinctly Fichtean rhetorical stance and called for “speeches to the German nation”.
Most consequentially, Fichte helped pioneer the notion of German exceptionalism. The Germans were, he claimed, unique among the peoples of Europe. Their language was rooted not in Latin but in a distinctly Teutonic tongue. Germans not only talked differently from other Europeans, but they also thought, believed, and acted differently. Fichte argued that pure German language, free from the corruption of French and other foreign influences, could give expression to pure German thought. The Nazi efforts to purge the German language of foreign elements were grounded in this Fichtean precept, which Hitler articulated when he mused on the concept of the word Fuhrer. “The title Führer is certainly the most beautiful because it emerged from our own language”, he observed, and went on to note with satisfaction that only members of the German nation could speak of “my Führer”.
Fichte was also decidedly anti-Semitic. He believed that the Jews would always remain a “state within a state” and thus a threat to a unified German nation. He proposed ridding Europe of their presence by establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. His other solution: “To cut off all their heads in one night, and set new ones on their shoulders, which should not contain a single Jewish idea”.
Of all the philosophical stars in the constellation of Nazi ideology, few blazed as intensely during the Third Reich or faded as quickly afterward as this late-eighteenth-century advocate of belligerent German nationalism. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche may have lent themselves conveniently to Nazi-era sound bites, but it was Fichte who provided the philosophical foundations for the toxic blend of Teutonic singularity and vicious nationalism. No one less than Dietrich Eckart identified Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche as the philosophical triumvirate of National Socialism. Arnold Fanck acknowledged this fact when he recommended Fichte's works as Riefenstahl’s peace offering to Hitler.
However, Ryback reminds us to take the presence of Fichte’s complete works in Hitler’s library in perspective:
Today, the Fichte volumes represent the only serious works of philosophy among Hitler’s surviving books Although there are more than a hundred pages of marginalia in the Fichte volumes, close scrutiny of several intrusions, especially the words “sehr gut” scrawled in the margin of page 594 of volume four, suggests an authorship other than Hitler’s. In addition, the potentially most revealing volume, which contains Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation as well as an essay on rhetorical technique, is missing. Despite the absence of these seminal works of German philosophy, the remnant Hitler library contains a cache of books that is almost certainly more central to the shaping of the dark core of Hitler’s worldview than the high-minded musings of Schopenhauer, Fichte, and Nietzsche: more than fifty volumes inscribed to Hitler between 1919 and 1935 by Julius Friedrich Lehmann, an individual who has the dubious double claim to being both the single most generous contributor to Hitler’s private book collection and the public architect for the Nazi pseudoscience of biological racism.
So there are no serious representations of the theoretical writings of Wagner, Nietzsche, or Schopenhauer in Hitler’s private library. There were a hoard of second rate writers pouring out malicious populist material based on perversions that were little more than a “savage parody” of the great writers as well as coming up with their own original perversions that would become National Socialist dogma. On the other hand, in contrast to the glaring absence of Nietzsche and Wagner, the complete Shakespeare and Fichte are magnificently represented in Hitler’s library. Yet curiously no books have yet been written about Shakespeare’s Hitler or Fichte’s Hitler—The Prophet and his Disciple. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to get to be entertained by a reading of Fichte’s Hitler too soon, because this type of literature is targeted towards a populist audience—an audience who would scratch their heads wondering who on earth this Fichte character was*. Or as Frank Lost puts it:
Lost tells us specifically about the Occult Reich conspiracies:
Fantasies, urban legends, literary inventions and pure lies came after the war at the beginning of ‘60s. Any book that dealt with Nazis and the occult, Satan, UFOs or secret treasures was assured to be sold at thousands of copies.
Lost tells us specifically about the Occult Reich conspiracies:
Nazi occultism is a concept where it is difficult to separate historical facts from post-war fantasies. The latter are numerous, especially from the ‘60s onward. Two books helped this surge in Nazi occultism: Pauwels and Bergier’s The Morning of the Magicians (1960) and Trevor Ravenscroft’s The Spear of Destiny (1972). After these, any book that tackled the Nazi occultism theme was sure enough to make strong sales, well above 50,000 copies for the worst among them.
The exact same thing could be said about Nazi opera conspiracies theories of the kind that Joachim Köhler kindly amuses us with.
Even Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation is republican in its ideology—one that was considered radically liberal in a monarchist age. Isaac Nakhimovsky tells in the Introduction to the translation of Fichte's addresses that:
The power dynamics of the European states system had thoroughly infected economic life and distorted market relations into what Hobbes had described as a war of all against all: everybody sought to secure their own economic welfare at everybody else’s expense. By the eighteenth century, in Fichte's analysis, this contagion was beginning to become apparent in cultural life as well—particularly in England and France, where Fichte observed that intensifying economic competition had perverted love of country into hatred of foreign competitors or patriotism into what Fichte called “national hatred” (Nationalhaß). Fichte concluded that these pathological developments foretold an apocalyptic future along the lines that Rousseau had projected in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1754). Rather than perpetual peace, Europe could expect centuries of mounting class conflict and cycles of intensifying imperialism and war. Only in the distant future, Fichte warned, would it become apparent whether the final outcome of this process would be the self-destruction of modern European civilization and a relapse into barbarism, as Rousseau and many other eighteenth-century writers had feared; or whether this conflict would turn out to be the catalyst for the founding of a more peaceful future age—one in which European states had resolved the “social question” and the rest of the world had acquired the means to end European exploitation.
Fichte concluded that the only way to provide Kant's theory of perpetual peace with a less opaque vision of a transition to a moral world was to equip it with a less morally constrained approach to practical politics. The Addresses are the outcome of Fichte’s efforts to trace a clear path to the moral transformation of a world divided into warring states.
As an Idealist philosopher, Fichte is highly underrated, and it is falsely assumed that such concepts as an eternal struggle for self-determination entered German philosophy only much later with the grossly overrated Nietzsche. Fichte’s idea of freedom posited by the self-determination of the Ego also totally takes the wind out of Jean-Paul Sartre’s sails. It is not without reason that the three Jena roommates Hegel-Schelling-Hölderlin once looked up to their senior Jena colleague, Fichte, with great esteem before eventually breaking with him, and that the next generation of thinkers after them included Hegel pupil, Ludwig Feuerbach, a thinker that Marx and Engels considered intermediary between Hegel and themselves.
So once again, I would approach any hysterical polemic against Fichte that ‘em bloody Krauts are all the same—they’re all Nazis, always ‘ave been, always will be with immense scepticism. If you were planning to write that book, you can spare us of it—unless you are desperately short of money. Likewise with German authors wanting to go on a German self-hating rant about Fichte’s Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple, where the whole of National Socialism is claimed to run solely on Fichtean philosophical principles. I have seen way too many of these cheap polemics and they are usually superficial, opportunistic and entirely self-serving. In many cases, the sorts of things claimed are totally outrageous and appalling. It is little surprising that historians who have spent a lifetime researching the Dritte Reich era ignore this sort of nonsense like they ignore Nazi UFO conspiracy theories.
One superb example of the sort of specious nonsense a post-war generation of opportunistic polemicists spouted against Hegel was thoroughly exposed by Walter Kaufmann. The sort of things said sometimes makes one’s blood boil in the petty self-serving maliciousness of it all. Kaufmann exposes a piece of complete fantasy based on the repeated quotation of a line of Hegel that allegedly goes “the state is the march of God through the world”. This allegedly proves Hegel to be a proto-fascist and belligerent Prussian militarist. The polemicist’s approach to this used to be to repeatedly quote the “march of God” line ad nauseam until in their eyes it became some sort of Eternal Truth. Kaufmann magnificently debunks it all:
One alleged quotation from Hegel that keeps cropping up in these pages is said to be found in section 258 of The Philosophy of Right. The sentence in question, however, is found only in the posthumous edition where it is clearly marked as an editorial addition, based on lecture notes. The editor, Eduard Gans, explained in his preface that in these additions “the stylistic order, the connection of the sentences, and sometimes the choice of words as well are mine”.
In German the sentence reads: “Es ist der Gang Gottes in der Welt, dass der Stadt ist”. In his Hegel Selections (1929), J. Loewenberg mistranslated these words without even indicating that they came from an "Addition," as follows: "The State is the march of God through the world." But even if the German text had das (with one s), this neuter pronoun could not possibly refer to Gang which in German is masculine. Dass is no pronoun at all but a conjunction, and the correct translation is:
“It is the way of God with [literally: in] the world that there should be [literally: is] the state”. The point is that the existence of states is no mindless accident but, metaphorically speaking, God's plan or providence, and it is the philosopher's task when discussing this institution to discover its reason, its raison d’être.
“The march of God in the world, that is what the state is”, writes Knox in his generally admirable translation, and Hook echoes this version. But this interpretation is also totally untenable; it founders on the facts already mentioned. Incidentally, gehen means go, and Gang means way; and the importation of march speaks for itself.
This misquotation is first encountered in the following pages in Carritt’s initial reply to Knox (see page 36). It is followed by several more quotations in the same paragraph, and most readers probably would not notice, and Carritt himself may have overlooked, the fact that none of these proof texts was published by Hegel himself.
Does this sort of methodology sound familiar to you? Because this “March of God” type of nonsense used to be almost ubiquitous amongst post-war literature on German thinkers. Since then Hegel’s reputation has continued to grow and grow—rightly so. You rarely encounter these tiresome “bloody Krauts” type of casual polemic any more directed against any German thinker. When you do find this older literature, one of the key features in the use of quotations is that of quilt quotations, a subject about which Kaufmann has much to say:
Quilt Quotations
This device, used by other writers, too, has not received the criticism it deserves. Sentences are picked from various contexts, often even out of different books, enclosed by a single set of quotation marks, and separated only by three dots, which are generally taken to indicate no more than the omission of a few words. Plainly, this device can be used to impute to an author views he never held.
Here, for example, is a quilt quotation about war and arson: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.... I came to cast fire upon the earth.. . . Do you think that I have come to give peace on earth? No, I tell you. . . . Let him who has no sword sell his mantle and buy one”. This is scarcely the best way to establish Jesus' views of war and arson. In the works of some philosophers, too—notably, Nietzsche—only the context can show whether a word is meant literally.
The writings of Hegel and Plato abound in admittedly one-sided statements that are clearly meant to formulate points of view that are then shown to be inadequate and are countered by another perspective. Thus an impressive quilt quotation could be patched together to convince gullible readers that Hegel was—depending on the “scholar’s” plans—either emphatically for or utterly opposed to, say, “equality”. But the understanding of Hegel would be advanced ever so much more by citing one of his remarks about equality in context, showing how it is a step in an argument that is designed to lead the reader to a better comprehension of equality and not to enlist his emotions either for it or against it.
Even those who would not reduce all philosophy to such analyses should surely grant the ambiguity of words like equality and freedom, good and God—and also that philosophers can be of service by distinguishing some of the different meanings of such terms instead of aping politicians by assuring us that they are heartily in favor of all four. Popper writes like a district attorney who wants to persuade his audience that Hegel was against God, freedom, and equality—and uses quilt quotations to convince us.
The first of these (p. 227) consists of eight fragments of which every single one is due to one of Hegel’s students and was not published by him. Although Popper scrupulously marks references to Gans’s additions to the Philosophy of Right with an “L” and invariably gives all the references for his quilt quotations—e.g., “For the eight quotations in this paragraph, cf. Selections ...”—a few readers indeed will recall when they come to the Notes at the end of the book that “the eight quotations” are the quilt quotations that they took for a single passage. And Popper advises his readers “first to read without interruption through the text of a chapter, and then to turn to the Notes”.
Kaufmann: Debating the Political Philosophy of Hegel
Did I say you never come across this any more? As you know, this isn't quite true. In fact, when it comes to the literature on Richard Wagner this sort of bizarre distortion based on quilt quotations remains the universally accepted standard modus operandi. Rather than abating, these sorts of bizarre fantasies are only growing in number. In fact, it is immeasurably worse than just the use of quilt quotations, as authors consider it perfectly fine to make up completely fictitious quotations, or to freely attribute quotations from Mein Kampf to Richard Wagner before concluding that they are saying the same thing. Kaufmann compares quilt quotations with doctored photographs:
Quilt quotations invite comparison with composite photographs. In a campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate, one such photograph was used that showed one candidate shaking hands with the head of the Communist party. It matters little whether it was labeled in fine print ‘composite photograph’.
To be sure, quotations and photographs that are not patched together may be grossly unfair. But a self-respecting candidate will not use patched-up photographs of his opponent; and a scholar should not use a quilt quotation to indict the men he criticizes.
Kaufmann: Debating the Political Philosophy of Hegel
Yet most of what you read on Wagner consists of photos of Wagner with a toothbrush moustache photoshopped into them. It is more like a comic caricature far worse than the March of God fictions that used to circulate about Hegel. It is astonishing that the childishness and dishonesty of their self-serving methods is not obvious to everyone.
I would like to draw your attention to one particular thing mentioned by Kaufmann:
The writings of Hegel and Plato abound in admittedly one-sided statements that are clearly meant to formulate points of view that are then shown to be inadequate and are countered by another perspective. Thus an impressive quilt quotation could be patched together to convince gullible readers that Hegel was—depending on the “scholar’s” plans—either emphatically for or utterly opposed to, say, “equality”. But the understanding of Hegel would be advanced ever so much more by citing one of his remarks about equality in context, showing how it is a step in an argument that is designed to lead the reader to a better comprehension of equality and not to enlist his emotions either for it or against it.
Wagner too employs this classic rhetorical technique in Heldenthum and Christenthum where he summarises a position—that of the self-styled “Count” Gobineau—only to end by emphatically demolishing it. Yet in order to discredit Wagner, wilful polemicists only quote the section where Wagner is summarising Gobineau, and then proceed to claim that Wagner is wholeheartedly agreeing with him, while totally ignoring the pitiless demolition of Gobineau that lies ahead—one in which Wagner denounces his world-order as being “totally immoral” (“eine schlechthin unmoralische Weltordnung”). Ignoring what Wagner really wrote, these polemicists triumphantly announce him to be history's great proto-Nazi after embellishing the quotation with fictional addenda, usually in the form of a quote from Mein Kampf placed in Wagner's mouth. Many books are published following this inane formula.
Authors publishing in the field of Wagner studies simply have to pull their socks up and do a better job of studying his extensive legacy of theoretical prose writings, and do so with a proper understanding of historical context, both that of Wagner's own time as well as its (mis)appropriation within another historical context of a subsequent generation. Once again, in terms of understanding how ideas are radically transformed by their historical context, it is Evans who says it best:
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.
For any aspiring musicologist, Wagner poses a truly formidable challenge, and one must take pity on those lesser minds who are reduced to taking recourse to simplistic formulae that churn out what are for all in intents and purposes populist Nazi conspiracies, sensationalist narratives fit only for consumption by a cheap pop-culture that peddles “pulp fiction in the guise of history”. Yet to truly face up to the daunting spectre of Wagner one must grapple with the anti-Napoleonic Young Germany, the 1848 German Revolution, Marx-Bakunin tensions, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, then the 1918-19 German Revolution and the rise of the Dritte Reich, along with the challenge it posed to classical Marxist historiography as seen in the writings of Adorno and Bloch of the Frankfurt School—and then there is the music, its harmonic radicality and Leitmotiv technique. That is why I write about Wagner—not because I am a blinkered Wagnerian—but because I like a daunting challenge.
Notes
* It looks like I spoke too soon. I have since had the immense misfortune to have discovered Yvonne Sherrat's book Hitler's Philosophers published by Yale Press, which is almost exactly that book in the vein of a Fichte's Hitler: the Prophet and his Disciple. It is an appalling book, that made me cringe from the very opening page of its simplistic narrativistic style, with poor bibliographic support reminiscent of populist Nazi UFO and Occult Reich pseudo-histories, which reveals it instantly to be pulp fiction in the guise of history. Fortunately, Sir Richard J. Evans was honest enough to debunk this sort of nonsense in an excellent review. Once I finish reading her book I will write an extensive review debunking this pugilistic right-wing fairytale in the guise of left-wing historiography. Shame on Yale Press for condescending to publish it.
Further Reading
For more background on the controversy surrounding Nietzsche's adoption by the National Socialists and his subsequent defence by Walter Kaufmann please see the following threads:
Wagner Contra Nietzsche Part I and Part II
Walter Kaufmann: the master blame-shifter
For a further critique of Peter Viereck's right-wing rewriting of history see my analysis of his book, Metapolitics. This is essentially a culturally determined, romantic view of history that shares much in common with with Nazi UFO conspiracies and other populist narratives about the Dritte Reich era.
Well done! I quite enjoyed this. Kaufmann served as my introduction to Nietzsche and Hegel and the reason I wrote my Masters' thesis on Hegel. It was nice to see Kaufmann's work discussed. Thank you.
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