As many readers will already know, the latest news in Wagner studies is the publication in the July, 2014 edition of The Wagner Journal of an article entitled Wagner’s Acquittal written by none other than Joachim Köhler, author of Wagner’s Hitler—The Prophet and his Disciple. In this book, Köhler acted as chief prosecutor pressing trumped up charges of having single-handedly caused World War II and the Holocaust. It represents something of a dramatic and rather astonishing complete about-turn from Köhler, who has now officially dropped charges:
Anti-Semitism, allegedly Wagner’s most important concern, did not stand at the centre of his life. As deduced from his dramas and voluminous writings, his main interests were theatre and philosophy. In both his most significant literary works, Oper und Drama and Mein Leben, anti-Semitism plays practically no role. If at all, it is found in the philosophical works, and there, too, it is never pivotal. ... No, anti-Semitism was not the theme of his life, as the prosecution claims. It was one theme among indescribably many, including an avowed liking for Jewish friends and associates.
The Wagner Journal (8, 2, 43–51)
Even more remarkable is that Köhler not only takes into account many of the objections raised by myself and many others, including Joachim Fest, Saul Friedländer, Sir Richard J. Evans, Sir Ian Kershaw, Reinhold Brinkmann, David B. Dennis, Dieter David Scholtz, and Dieter Borchmeyer, but surprisingly manages to go a tad further in his insights. Above all is the acceptance of the importance of reading Richard Wagner in context—most importantly in historical context:
The magic bullet always chosen by Wagner’s prosecutors is to quote relevant ‘passages’ from his books. Simply quoting is good enough for writing new books, but it is not sufficient to establish whether a defendant has actually committed the crime with which he has been charged. No phrase is intelligible by itself. It changes its meaning depending on the context in which it was spoken or written.
In order to be able to understand Wagner, it is not enough to quote short extracts from his books or tendentious diary entries penned by his anti-Jewish wife. You must know Wagner’s context. But it should also be evident that one cannot speak about a single context. There is, to name just a few, the artistic, the philosophical, the political, the financial, also the private context.
Köhler: The Wagner Journal (8, 2, 43–51)
Köhler also correctly identifies the twisting of the image of Wagner from a liberal prophet of Young Germany in the image of Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx, into the prophet of a reactionary right-wing pan-Germanism, as having taken place after Wagner’s death at the hands of Cosima Wagner and Houston Chamberlain. Towards the end of Wagner’s life, his growing popularity lead opposing sides of politics to attempt to claim Wagner as their very own. For example, Charles Bernard advocated on behalf of the Feuerbachian Wagner to Marx and Engels:
A socialist of the Marxian school ... [Charles Bernard] was artistically educated, at the same time an ardent admirer of Richard Wagner, and pilgrimaged almost regularly to Bayreuth for the festival there. He was a dear friend to us, and it would go without saying that he would sing German or French songs for us on Sunday evenings at Engels’s place, which was always received with great debt of gratitude; for he had a very sonorous baritone voice, presenting the songs with a great understanding of art. Between him and Engels the subject of Wagner gave some cause for dispute ...
“Sozialist der Marxschen Schule, . . . war dieser künstlerisch gebildete Mann [Charles Bonnier, also known as, “Charles Bernard”] zugleich ein leidenschaftlicher Verehrer Richard Wagners und pilgerte fast regelmässig nach Bayreuth zu den dortigen Festspielen. Er war uns ein lieber Freund, und wenn er an den Sonntagabenden bei Engels sich dazu verstand, uns deutsch oder französische Lieder vorzusingen, war das stets mit grossem Dank entgegengenommen; denn er hatte eine sehr klangvolle Baritonstimme und trug die Lieder mit grossem Kunstverständnis vor. Zwischen ihm und Engels gab das Thema Wagner manchen Anlass zum Disput ...”
Eduard Bernstein, Erinnerungen eines Sozialisten, i, Aus den Jahren meines Exils (Völker zu Hause) (Berlin, 1915), p. 230-31.
See also:
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1915/exile/ch09.htm
Even Zionists such as Theodor Herzl claimed Richard Wagner for their cause. Zionist congresses opened with Wagner’s music. This is something that has been noted in numerous biographies of Herzl, the Father of modern Israel. For example, Shlomo Avineri puts it beautifully in his 2008 bibliography of Herzl:
Herzl’s favorite opera was Wagner’s Tannhäuser. ... Herzl’s taste for Wagner, Tannhäuser in particular, may seem surprising in light of the later association of Wagner with the racist ideology of the Nazis. Perhaps even more surprising is the fact that Herzl had the overture to Tannhäuser played at the opening of the Second Zionist Congress in 1898. But the Nazis adopted as their own most of the great figures of German culture, including enlightened and liberal ones like Schiller, Goethe, and Beethoven. True, Wagner, unlike these others, also wrote an anti-Semitic pamphlet, Judaism in Music, but the fact is that his music was central to the intellectual world of the late nineteenth century, especially in the German-speaking sphere, Jews included.
Herzl’s admiration for Wagner has to be seen in context. Wagner began his career as a young artistic and political radical, an associate of both the poet Heinrich Heine and of Friedrich Engels. With their musical and dramatic innovation and their proclamation of a new cultural and social age, his operas appealed to a broad range of people. They were swept away by his musical genius and by the liberating messages it conveyed. It was Wagner who turned opera from mere entertainment, an art form that often deteriorated into cheap sentimentality and even kitsch, into a comprehensive cultural experience. Audiences of the late Romantic nineteenth century were in particular enthralled by his heroes, men who sought redemption and liberation from social mores and constrictions. While their quests had a religious cast, they did not fall under the rubric of a specific faith—one reason why Wagner gained so many admirers among Central Europe’s middle-class and educated Jews. He proved that sublime and emotionally charged music bearing profound moral content did not have to come in the form of Christian masses, oratorios, cantatas, and requiems.
Shlomo Avineri: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State
Jacques Kornberg comes to similar conclusions in his Herzl biography. I have even previously argued that Herzl may have gotten the idea of Zionism off Wagner—in which case, Wagner would count as the Spiritual Father of Israel. Indeed, when the day comes for Wagner to be officially played in Israel there is absolutely no doubt as to what the work that must be played should be: Tannhäuser. It was Herzl’s favourite work, one which Wagner based upon a poem by Heinrich Heine of the same title.
It should not be forgotten that Cosima Wagner was young enough to be Wagner’s daughter. Cosima outlived Wagner by 47 years—Wagner died in 1883 whereas Cosima died in 1930. As a result of fathering children only later in his life, Richard Wagner did not witness the marriage of his children, or meet his children-in-law. Wagner certainly never met Houston Chamberlain as is almost incessantly repeated in the Nazi opera conspiracy literature—repeated so often that this lie has now become “The Truth”. However, after Richard Wagner’s death, the world was Cosima’s oyster—as Meisterin of Bayreuth, to her was bequeathed the power to lend the Wagnerian stamp of approval to whatever side of politics she chose to confer her blessing. And what side did she choose? The proto-Nazi far right, of course, who then welcomed Hitler to Bayreuth with open arms. Thus Cosima sealed the fate of Wagner’s reception by future generations. Cosima became to Richard Wagner what Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was to Friedrich Nietzsche, only far worse. In this way, the revolutionary hero of 1848, fearlessly fighting for democracy with musket in hand alongside his socialist anarchist friend, Mikhail Bakunin, was maliciously transformed by Cosima into the phoney “Prophet” of National Socialism.
Perhaps Köhler’s most notable insight is that of Wagner’s relationship to Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach and Marx:
The definition of Jewry as a bygone stage of existence in which exploitation and self-interest ruled derives from Karl Marx, himself a Jew. Also a student of Hegel’s, Marx viewed history as the progress from oppression to liberation, and he identified the Jewish essence with everything that, for him, belonged to an obsolete world: servitude under the law, exploitation and the egoism of the rich.
...
Wagner’s vision of the future culminates in the notion that the Jews reach true liberty – called redemption – only if they become free human beings released from their chains. This can succeed collectively only with the non-Jews, who must pass through the same process of revolutionary conquest of the self. Wagner here adopts Marx’s thinking and summarises Marx in his words addressed to the Jews: ‘take part […] in this work of redemption, this rebirth through self-destruction’ [nehmt … an diesem, durch Selbstvernichtung wiedergebärenden Erlösungswerk teil], then we shall be ‘united and indistinguishable’ [‘united and without difference’ in my own translation].
...
... it sounds like an incitement to mass suicide and the Holocaust, but it means something completely different. The ‘work of redemption’, the ‘rebirth through self-destruction’, as already in Marx’s case, is a declaration of Hegel’s ‘Aufhebung’ or ‘overcoming’. The modern world calls it ‘revolution’.
Köhler: The Wagner Journal (8, 2, 43–51)
In these passages you sense the direct influence of Joachim Fest and Saul Friedländer. The great Israeli Holocaust scholar, Professor Saul Friedländer—himself a Holocaust survivor—wrote:
However, on the previous page, in which Wagner calls upon the Jews to follow the example of Börne in order to give up for the sake of “the redemption into genuine human beings”, he clearly says that the vanishing of their social, cultural, and religious idiosyncrasies will restore them into a universal and redeemed humanity. In this interpretation of redemption there still echoes Wagner’s revolutionary ideals of his age. One can interpret Wagner’s first anti-Judaic pamphlet not as a call for the annihilation of the Jews, but rather read it as the appeal for the elevation of Judaism as a culture, in order to remove the “Jewish spirit” ... Can the Jews be liberated of their “Jewish spirit” like Börne? To Hitler it must have all seemed ideologically unacceptable.
Saul Friedländer: Hitler und Wagner. My translation from the published German version. My emphasis.
Joachim Fest wrote, in response to Köhler’s book:
Even the famous sentence about the Redemption of Ahasvar that concludes the essay about “Judaism in Music” means nothing less than the sublation [Aufhebung] of the peculiar role of the Jews in society through the transformation of their relationship. First through revolution, the opposites of Jew and non-Jew are annulled in an aesthetic world-order, where they will emerge “united and without difference” from one another. Seen from the standpoint of predominantly pre-revolutionary thinking, he saw in the Jews, not a biological element, but rather a symptom of the illness of a materialist civilisation, where once it has been overcome, the Jews are freed of the daemonic power that drives civilisation to its decay. With Hitler it is totally different. He thought of all Jews as being undeliverable from the stigma bound to their ancestry and blood, from which they could never get away.
From Joachim Fest’s essay in Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich. My translation.
One particular insight worthy of mention divulged in Köhler’s essay in The Wagner Journal is that of the indebtedness of Wagner’s Judaism in Music to Robert Schumann and Heinrich Heine—particularly to the latter:
As much as Heine—a [Christian] convert—strove to return to his roots, he was still convinced that Jews were in need of redemption. In his poem about the new Israelite hospital in Hamburg—which his philanthropic uncle Salomon Heine had founded—he gave expression to the suffering of the Jews, also described as a ‘curse’. Worse than any ailment, he wrote, was the ‘thousand-year-old family curse’. ... Their ‘dark pain’ can only be ‘made extinct’ by time. Wagner adopted these ideas about the ‘extinction’ of suffering, thus ‘redemption’, in his ‘[Judaism] in Music’...
Köhler: The Wagner Journal (8, 2, 43–51)
Heine was, of course, of Jewish heritage, and, in the assimilationist mood of his time, took up a similarly anti-Judaic rhetoric like Marx and Börne. Both Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne are held up in Judaism in Music as examples of liberal-minded assimilated Jews—heralds of the idealistic Young Germany. Not only had Heine and Börne become true Germans, but were also shining examples of what all Germans should aspire to be: liberal-minded and emancipated to a “pure humanity”.
The meeting between Heinrich Heine and Richard Wagner, after being introduced by a mutual acquaintance, the revolutionary in Parisian exile, Heinrich Laube, is described by Ferdinand Praeger:
[Laube was] a strange contrast to the handsome, regular-featured, soft-spoken Heine; and then the pale, slim, young Wagner, short in stature, but with piercing eyes and voluble speech which surprised and amazed the cynical Heine. When Heinrich Heine heard that Meyerbeer had given Wagner introductions, he doubted the abilities of the newcomer. Heine was strongly biased against Meyerbeer and distrusted his sincerity.
Ferdinand Praeger: Wagner as I Knew Him, p.90
Despite Heine’s initial suspicion being roused by someone who had been given introductions by Meyerbeer, by the end of their meeting, Heine was won over by Wagner. Heine said of Wagner:
I cannot help feeling a lively interest in Wagner. He is endowed with an inexhaustible, productive mind, kept almost uninterruptedly in activity by a vivacious temperament. From an individuality so replete with modern culture, it is possible to expect the development of a solid and powerful modern music.
Ferdinand Praeger: Wagner as I Knew Him, p.92
Köhler is correct too in identifying Heinrich Heine as the principal source of Wagner’s contempt for Meyerbeer as later expressed in Judaism in Music, where Wagner holds up Heine together with Börne at the very end as shining examples of assimilated Jews. Amongst other visitors to the Heine household in Paris included the exiled Karl Marx.
On the subject of Ludwig Börne, Köhler tells us:
Generally, the term ‘Jewry’ was not understood as referring to the sum total of Jewish persons, as is taken for granted today, but rather to the alleged ‘Jewish essence’—that is, egoism and greed—with which, of course, non-Jews could also be imbued. Vice versa, Jews infected by the Christian ideal of love could become free human beings—what Wagner believed to have discovered in the case of Ludwig Börne, for instance.
Köhler: The Wagner Journal (8, 2, 43–51)
Once again, comparison should be made with Saul Friedländer’s interpretation of Wagner’s essay Judaism in Music. Köhler has essentially fallen into line with the great Holocaust scholar’s interpretation.
However, there is one major thing that I have to take issue with, and that is the idea that Wagner has had an acquittal. Far from it, however harshly dismissive major academics specialising in the field have been of Köhler, in the kangaroo court of populist opinion Wagner stands accused as before. Populist Occult Reich conspiracy pseudo-histories are now replete with statements like this:
Wagner described the Jews as ‘the devil incarnate of human decadence’ [no bibliographic citation] and called for ‘a Final Solution’ to ‘the Jewish problem’ [no bibliographic citation].
From section entitled Pagan Revivalism and Völkisch Christianity in The Nazi Occult War: Hitler’s Compact with the Forces of Evil by Michael Fitzgerald (Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2013).
No supportive citations are given because these statements are completely fictitious, as to be expected from Occult Reich literature. Another kitschy populist Occult Reich book states that:
Wagner provided the musical setting for Hitler’s vision of German global domination. His epic melodramas are a granite monument in music to the grandeur of Aryan superiority and sacrifice. Without Wagner’s Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) tempered with pastoral interludes, Nazism would not have acquired its mythic undertones.
From The Nazis and the Occult: The Dark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich by Paul Roland.
Wagner is not usually even considered a prime example of German Sturm und Drang proto-Romanticism, which is arguably more something that expressed itself in the music world through the compositions of Carl Phillipp Emanuel Bach, who worked in the court of Frederick the Great, a Prussian monarch much admired by Hitler. A great deal of the storminess in C.P.E. Bach music probably also reflects the influence of Antonio Vivaldi—for example the storm concluding his Four Seasons, a work which also contains pastoral scenes as depicted in the accompanying stanzas:
Vivaldi Spring: Largo
On the flower-strewn meadow, with leafy branches rustling overhead, the goat-herd sleeps, his faithful dog beside him.
E quindi sul fiorito ameno prato
Al caro mormorio di fronde e piante
Dorme 'l Caprar col fido can' à lato.
Vivaldi Spring: Allegro
Led by the festive sound of rustic bagpipes, nymphs and shepherds lightly dance beneath the brilliant canopy of spring.
Di pastoral Zampogna al suon festante
Danzan Ninfe e Pastor nel tetto amato
Di primavera all' apparir brillante.
The depictions of storms and pastoral scenes is a centuries old tradition in Western art, well predating both Vivaldi and Wagner.
Many of the multiple keyboard transcriptions of Vivaldi works were likely intended to be played by Johann Sebastian Bach together with his sons—including Carl Phillipp Emanuel. The persistence of C.P.E. Bach’s influence is felt in some of Joseph Haydn’s earlier so-called Sturm und Drang symphonies. Some of the ongoing influence of the proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang movement can be felt in Beethoven, an admirer of C.P.E. Bach. As for a work that has both “pastoral interludes” as well as storms, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony is another prime example. Beethoven was also a great favourite of Hitler—along with Shakespeare, another of Hitler’s favourites, in whose works there can also be found both pastoral scenes and storms. If references to storms and pastoral scenes makes a Nazi then just about any artist could be made out to be a Nazi. Thus, on closer examination, the inferences made about the alleged origins of National Socialism in Sturm und Drang Romanticism turn to out to be so utterly vague and nebulous that they rapidly start to evaporate.
Paul Roland goes on:
Both Theodor Reuss, a practitioner of Tantric sex magick [sic], and Sar Peladan, the French writer on the occult, believe that Wagner was an intuitive magician.
From The Nazis and the Occult: The Dark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich by Paul Roland.
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| The Nazis and the Occult: The Dark Forces Unleashed by the Third Reich by Paul Roland |
The titillating sensationalism of these sorts of unstable structures built up on vague and incohesive inferences turn out to be unsustainable the moment they are subjected to closer scrutiny—even if, rather sadly, the average reader still gets tricked into accepting this sort of kitschy pseudo-history as “The Truth”. In Köhler’s case, the inherent instability of such inferential structures appears to have been the very key to the future collapse of confidence in the dizzyingly grandiose arguments that he himself had so precariously built up like an enormous house of cards. In the words of Sir Richard J. Evans:
Köhler achieves [his ends] only by erecting dizzying and unstable structures of inference and correspondence...
Evans: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), p. 149
It is precisely the same criticism that Sir Ian Kershaw levels against other grandly reductionistic Hitlerisms that reduce the vast complexities of World War II and the Holocaust down to just a single one-dimensional variable such as to a secret compact with Satan, a missing testicle, tertiary syphilis, Wagnerian opera etc.:
The ‘Hitlerism’ argument will not go away.... In each case, one or two bits of dubious hearsay evidence are surrounded by much inference, speculation and guesswork to come up with a case for world history shaped fatefully and decisively by Hitler’s ‘dark secret’.
Kershaw: Hitler, the Germans and the Final Solution (my emphasis)
In the case of Nazi opera conspiracies, Hitler’s “dark secret” becomes his diabolical plan to surreptitiously transform the world into a giant opera production. The trouble is that these sorts of “unstable structures of inference” really only work when they are deliberately kept vague, while skipping over inconvenient details. The vast nebulousness of the insinuations permit the reader’s imagination to fill in where accuracy and clarity are lacking. Köhler, on the other hand, has been praised by Joachim Fest for his “astonishing hard work” (“erstaunenswerten Fleiß”) in compiling his Nazi opera conspiracy book. Köhler’s very tendency towards obsessive meticulousness seems to have been his own undoing, as it is exactly on more careful examination of the facts that these “unstable structures of inference” start to rapidly disintegrate and collapse in upon themselves—so much so that not even Köhler could continue to sustain a belief in their legitimacy.
Unfortunately, Köhler is now going to find out that even though he has made a dramatic about-turn on his position on Wagner, nobody other than a small community of academic historians and liberal-minded Wagner enthusiasts (one shudders to admit that there are a group of neo-Nazi Wagnerians who read Köhler’s book with glowing enthusiasm) is going to believe a single word of what he says. Köhler is going to find that he was the apple in the eye of the broader public only when he was demonising Wagner, but now Köhler has admitted he was wrong, everything he says will henceforth fall on deaf ears. After all, who is going to read this astonishingly brief article of nine pages in length in some obscure journal, compared to the 378 page demonisation of Wagner in Köhler’s Wagner’s Hitler—The Prophet and his Disciple? Let us be honest with ourselves: nobody is going to read this obscure little journal article by Köhler, which will get buried amongst the endlessly exaggerated polemical and hysterical rhetoric about Wagner.
There is thus much pertinence in this case in what Roland Barthes said about “the death of the author”. For that is precisely the fate that will sadly befall Köhler. The retraction of charges by the prosecution comes simply too little too late, since Köhler was the darling of the masses only in so far he was affirming the populist Goldhagenist paradigm, exactly as the angry, stone throwing mob wanted to hear. Köhler’s The Last of the Titans was even predictably published by the malicious right-wing publishing house of Yale Press. Köhler’s Wagner’s Hitler—The Prophet and his Disciple was bigger than Köhler in that it was received with open arms in the English speaking world as the supreme historical culmination and apotheosis of the Nazi opera conspiracy literature going back to the 1940s, one taken onto “a new plane” of exaggeration, to use Sir Ian Kershaw’s words. Whether Köhler likes it or not, now he has let the genie out of the bottle, however much he may impotently rage to turn back the clock, Köhler is going to find that the genie simply will not fit back in. What Köhler has unleashed is bigger than he is, and he will simply have to learn that he is sadly utterly powerless to undo what he has done. All Köhler did, after all, in his 1997 book was to take what Tolischus said in his 1940 book literally:
“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 (my emphasis)
Köhler merely argued that the singular diabolical aim of Hitler and his Party was quite literally to resolve the world “into a super-Wagnerian opera turned into grim reality”. Never mind that Alfred Rosenberg, the author of a propagandist book about the Nazi “mythos”, held Wagner in little more than utter contempt—precisely for his failure to express anything like völkisch nationalistic heroism.
Nazi opera conspiracies existed long before Köhler, and the mythic appeal of its grand simplicities will continue to live on without him with totally undiminished vigour. Nazi opera conspiracies further have a substantial survival advantage over missing testicle theories, as well as Nazi UFO and Occult Reich conspiracies, in having an added modicum of apparent academic respectability—a seeming lacking sensationalism, while permitting the author to exude a phoney air of erudition in talking about opera, a subject devoid of flagrantly risible detractions such as UFOs, devil-worship, and missing testicles. That is why all the arguments presented in Wagner’s Hitler will continue to survive with undiminished vigour, and be repeated unabated in books and on the internet as though they were “The Truth”: as eternally unfalsifiable, unquestionable, and infallible as they are infinitely nebulous. Let nobody delude themselves into thinking that with Köhler’s retraction of charges, Nazi opera conspiracies can now be considered dead and buried.
This latest article in The Wagnerian thus represents not only la mort de l’auteur—the Death of the Author—for Joachim Köhler, but his suicide, where he will be faced with the harsh reality of the fact that nobody other than the most abject of fools wants to hear the truth, and that anyone foolish enough to utter it will be left out in the cold. My advice to Köhler is turn back before it is too late, and to return to writing one-sided populist Wagner demonographies—if he knows what is good for him and his all-important bank account.
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