A Quick Update on Bernd Weikl's Book

In the last post, we welcomed the publication of the latest Nazi opera conspiracy book by Bernd Weikl calling for Wagner to be banned in Germany. It was Weikl’s great misfortune that the book’s publication was severely undermined by the simultaneous retraction of charges against Wagner of allegedly having single-handedly caused the Holocaust by Joachim Köhler.

Weikl’s book has since arrived in the mail, and a brief glance at it shows that he has credulously swallowed everything that Köhler has said in his book, quite oblivious to the fact that not even Köhler believes them any more. Köhler is in Weikl’s bibliography along with Hartmut Zelinsky and Theodor Adorno. Most importantly, Weikl goes further than any of these previous authors in saying that Hitler was Wagner. Hitler was allegedly the ‘reincarnation’ (Wiedergeburt)—sic!—of Wagner.

It also happens in the meanwhile that I am reading some of the latest books by historians studying the Holocaust. In particular, I have read Mark Roseman’s book on the Wannsee Conference and Peter Longerich’s Holocaust, updated for the English translation with the latest research driven by the opening up of ex-Soviet archives. In reading these academic historians’ writing, you find yourself in a different universe. Nobody is busy running a polemic blaming Wagner, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin or Luther for having caused the Holocaust. As explained in the last post, that sort of polemic is more a by-product of contemporary culture wars than anything genuinely illuminating about history.

However, since he had written the most cogent of all academic responses to Joachim Köhler, I thought it would be interesting to know what a major academic figure in the world of Holocaust studies would make of Bernd Weikl’s book. With that I sent an email to Professor Saul Friedländer’s academic office at UCLA University. I also sent him a copy of Joachim Köhler’s article from the July issue of The Wagner Journal. Not personally acquainted with Professor Friedländer, I was pleasantly surprised that within twenty-four hours the world famous historian had replied to my email I had sent to him out of the blue:

Many warm thanks for your message and for the reference to Mr Weikl’s writings. I will read them with much interest. 

All good wishes,
Saul Friedlander

For those from a music background, Professor Saul Friedländer is an Israeli historian and the author of a several major studies about the Holocaust. The most famous of these is Nazi Germany and the Jews:

There is both a full two-volume version and an abridged version for those who have less patience. Readers who want to learn about the Holocaust should be reading books like these, or the similar three-volume Third Reich series by Sir Richard J. Evans. For the latest research on the origins of the Final Solution, Longerich is probably the most up to date, but Browning’s study is something of a classic. However, readers should not be reading speculative books about Nazi UFOs, The Occult Reich,  Hitler’s missing testicle, or Nazi opera conspiracies.

Professor Friedländer makes it clear that Richard Wagner’s views on the Jews were never once cited by any figure in the Dritte Reich. He argues that this is because Wagner’s assimilationist views would have been considered ‘totally unacceptable’ (quoted from Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich). Historian, Professor Robert Gerwarth summarises the hostility of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the chief architects of the Final Solution, towards assimilationism:

From [Heydrich’s] vantage point, the assimilationists who refused to emigrate represented the greatest obstacle to a successful Jewish policy: ‘The assimilationists deny their Jewish origins either by claiming that they have lived in this country for generations and that they are Germans or by maintaining, after getting baptized, that they are Christians,’ thereby trying ‘to undermine Nazi principles’. [Citation to: Reinhard Heydrich’s Wandlungen unseres Kampfes; Munich and Berlin, 1936, p.10 ff]

Robert Gerwarth: Hitler’s Hangman—the Life of Heydrich; p.95

Yet Weikl makes the unsubstantiated claim that Heydrich’s term Endlösung or Final Solution, came straight from Wagner fully formed, complete with its exterminationist signification. In fact, historians think that not even Heydrich originally thought of the Final Solution in genocidal terms, the term only gradually acquiring genocidal overtones with the cumulative radicalisation of racial policy. Nor is there any evidence that the term had its origins in Luther, Wagner, or Darwin as self-serving polemicists claim. Unconvinced readers are cordially invited to read through the minutes of the Wannsee Conference to see if Heydrich ever evokes Luther, Wagner, or Darwin. It is an example of how the more carefully you examine the empirical evidence of the era, the more it becomes clear that Nazi opera conspiracy theories fail to provide a viable alternative historiography of the era.

In the forced emigration phase of Jewish policy, the National Socialist regime was quite happy to encourage emigration to Palestine, but they were never at any point anything other than violently hostile towards assimilation as a policy. In other words, Wagner’s assimilationism was worse than Zionism as far as the National Socialists were concerned—a doctrine that tries to ‘undermine Nazi principles’. It is little wonder that never at any point in the history of the Dritte Reich was Richard Wagner’s writings on the Jews officially endorsed, nor party members encouraged to read them. Professor Friedländer is correct: Richard Wagner‘s assimilationist views on the Jews would have been ‘totally unacceptable’ to the Party.

Blind Freddy can see that Richard Wagner called for the ‘Assimilation’ of the Jews.
From an original period printing of Das Judenthum in der Musik

So, as Professor Richard J. Evans states, any attempt to locate the origins of National Socialist ideology from a singular point source is doomed to failure:

No sensible historian has argued that the total package of Nazism was present in earlier social or political movements or ideologies. What historians have tried to do is to find out where the different parts of Nazi ideology came from.   

Evans: Rereading German History. My emphasis.

Singer, Bernd Weikl cannot in any way be called a ‘sensible historian’ if he regards considers Wagner and Hitler to be one and the same person. The likelihood that professors of history will agree to throw away libraries full of studies on this, one of the most intensively studied eras in all of history, to replace them with a wholesale rewriting of history by some retired opera singer are vanishingly slim. Even Peter Viereck, an early pioneer of Nazi opera conspiracy theories, agreed when he wrote in the 2006 preface of his 1941 book:

[M]y Wagner-Hitler research was greeted with general skepticism in 1941... But today the Wagner link has gone too far in the opposite direction. Countless exaggerated articles on WagnerHitler. 

Viereck: Metapolitics. 2006 edition

Weikl’s book is just another one of these “countless exaggerated articles on WagnerHitler” alleging Hitler was the ‘reincarnation’ (sic) of Wagner.

With that, it would be highly interesting to see what official statement Professor Friedänder puts out on Weikl’s book. Professor Friedänder has always shown an interest in this subject matter, and as one of the most respected of all academics in his field, his views deserve to be taken seriously.

In any case, my full review of Bernd Weikl’s book will eventually follow. The book is rather superficial, as anticipated. Although Joachim Fest praised Joachim Köhler’s ‘astonishing hard work’ in researching his book, the same cannot be said for Weikl. As predicated, Weikl has hardly gone through volumes of ex-Soviet archives looking for primary source material to support his claims. Instead, history is to be rewritten based on ever more wildly speculative inferences gleamed from reading opera libretti.