A Critique of "Wagner and the Jews" by Nathan Shield

A recent essay by Nathan Shields that I saw republished on The Wagnerian caught my attention enough that I thought I would comment on it, as part of this series of study posts discussing the main post on this blog, the critical analysis of Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler.

Wagner and the Jews by Nathan Shield 

This somewhat confused essay in Mosaic Magazine does at least show evidence that the tide of popular opinion may be slowly beginning to turn, but there remain some immense problems as well.

Firstly, I can see to his credit that the author has been reading Alex Ross, music writer for the New Yorker. From personal communication I know that Alex Ross is a reader of my blog. Thank you, Mr Ross. It may be immodest of me, but I can see that some of the ideas discussed throughout this blog are trickling through. For example, I have previously critically discussed the concept of the "teleological approach" to German history, a term I have taken from Sir Richard J. Evans. In this model, the entirety of German history for centuries before the 1930s is seen as following a straight line of a fatal continuum inexorably moving towards the rise of the Dritte Reich. Sir Richard J. Evans argues that in actuality the historical background giving rise to, for example, the Bismarckian era German Empire was quite different to that which gave rise to Hitler's Empire (Reich), and it is simply inadmissible to talk about these two empires as though they were the same thing.

The big problem with the essay is once again a glaring lack of knowledge about history. Simply having a musical doctorate from the Julliard School, does not make someone a qualified historian. While it is commendable that the author has conceded the point made by Sir Richard J. Evans about the problems with the teleological approach to reading German history, one is left feeling that no alternative methodology is allowed to replace it, and that strong elements of a persistent cultural historicism are allowed to linger in which the thoughts of dead poets and philosophers drive history.

The next major problem is a superficial understanding of the history of anti-Semitism, taking on the assumption that all anti-Semitisms are the same—all Nazi. Professor Saul Friedländer, the famous Holocaust scholar, puts emphasis on the fact that there are quite different forms of anti-Semitism, which must not be conflated with each other for polemical effect:

Saul Friedländer ... admitted he could not subscribe to Goldhagen's thesis that German society was already permeated by antisemitism before 1933. It was 'much too sweeping', blurred crucial distinctions between different types and degrees of antisemitism, and ignored the effects of events such as the First World War, the collapse of the German Empire, and the world economic crisis of 1929-33, in radicalizing and spreading antisemitic views. As a political scientist, said Friedländer, Goldhagen ignored the discontinuities and changes in German history over the period in question. 

Sir Richard J. Evans: Rereading German History, p.170 (my emphasis)

Amongst the different varieties of anti-Semitism, for a start there is Christian anti-Semitism, one of the original forms of it. Admittedly, there is such a thing as left-wing anti-Semitism, and you can find examples of this in Marx, Feuerbach, Fichte, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Bakunin, and Wagner. Some of these writers were themselves assimilated liberal Jews, or part Jewish by birth. However, there is also right-wing anti-Semitism, including right-wing racial anti-Semitism.

Curiously though, racial anti-Semitism in Germany began as a left-wing ideology coming from the pen of Social Democrat, Eugen Dühring, a contemporary of Wagner. As usual, it will be asserted with the usual absolute certitude that Wagner must have supported Dühring's racial anti-Semitism, but rather on the contrary, Wagner utterly despised Dühring, even calling his ideas repulsive. Dühring, in return, wrote quite aggressive polemics expressing abject contempt for Wagner.

The big question is why anyone would even focus exclusively on left wing "anti-Semitism" to the point that its significance is blown all out of proportion. Shields refers to "the anti-Semitic German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte" for example. Why not use the figure of Shylock to talk about the "Nazi approved anti-Semitic writer William Shakespeare"? And to use that phrase every time Shakespeare's name was uttered. Hitler incidentally also owned the complete Shakespeare—though not the complete Wagner, whose writings are completely absent from his library. As for Fichte, despite admiration by Hitler, who owned the complete Fichte given to him as a present by Leni Riefenstahl, Fichte was a supporter of the French Revolution, and in his own time very much regarded as a liberal. Keep in mind that Goebbels boasted that with the coming to power of the National Socialists in 1933 that "the year 1789 has been expunged from the records of history".

The problem is that when you take a huge magnifying glass to zoom in exclusively on left wing anti-Semitism, then it gives the grossly distorted impression that National Socialist anti-Semitism was an outgrowth of left-wing anti-Semitism, rather than an outgrowth of, for example, Christian religious anti-Semitism, or far more importantly right-wing political anti-Semitism. The motivation for doing this and writing about "the anti-Semitic Marx", "the anti-Semite Feuerbach" etc can only be polemical, and a way of shifting blame for the rise of National Socialism onto the German liberal tradition of thought.

As to the historical development of German anti-Semitic movements in the half century or more before the rise of National Socialism, as always, it is a historian who gives us the best account of this. In this case, I will quote from historian Peter Longerich's excellent book Holocaust:

By gradually removing the citizenship rights of German Jews the Nazis were fulfilling one of the principal demands that radical anti-Semites had been making since the 1870s. It is possible to trace a line of development that began with anti-Jewish agitation in the context of the so-called 'Gründerkrach' of 1873 (the stock-market crash that ended the period known as the 'Foundation Years') and continues in the anti-Semites' petition of 1880/1 and in successful political candidatures from anti-Semitic parties from the 1890s onwards. It was also manifested in strongly anti-Semitic agitation on the part of large professional interest groups at that period. 

Longerich: Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, p.10 

As usual, it is assumed a priori that Wagner "certainly and without doubt" must have unequivocally supported this type of right-wing anti-Semitism. These right-wing anti-Semites, such as Adolf Stoecker and Bernard Förster, did try to get Wagner to support them in the 1880s, but to his immense credit, Wagner refused point blank to have anything to do with them. It is as simple as that: Wagner wanted nothing to do with right-wing anti-Semitic movements. I have written in more detail on this subject recently, but I will repeat some of what I wrote.

Towards the end of Richard Wagner's life, right-wing movements did arise that claimed him as the symbolic figurehead of their militant, völkisch, and anti-Semitic Germanic movement. Alarmed by such claims, Wagner's Jewish friend, Angelo Neumann recalls how he wrote to him to clarify his position on this matter:

A strong anti-Semitic party in Berlin had loudly proclaimed Wagner as their chief apostle; which moved George Davidsohn (a well-known political writer and friend of Wagner) to write, calling my attention to the risk we ran in our Berlin enterprises if the rumour spread that Wagner was a member of this society. I wrote to Mme. Cosima asking if this were true, and received the following reply from Richard Wagner. Dear Friend and Benefactor:- 

Nothing is further from my thoughts than this same “Anti-Semitic” movement;  see the Bayreuth papers for my article which will prove this so conclusively that people of sense will find it impossible to connect me with the cause. 

Richard Wagner

Bayreuth, February, 1881. 

From Personal Recollections of Wagner by Angelo Neumann.

The Berlin anti-Semitic unrest of 1879-81 is mentioned in Know Thyself published in February of 1881, where Wagner dismisses it as "dunkel und Wahnvoll"—"sinister and steeped in delusion". Wagner also obliquely mentions an anti-Semitic pastor referred to only as "unsere Herren Geistlichen ... in ihrer Agitation gegen die Juden" (our dear clergymen in the agitation against the Jews). He was referring to pastor Adolf Stoecker who founded a party called the Christian-Social Workers Party, later renamed the Christian Social Party (see p. 259 of Stefanie Hein's Richard Wagners Kunstprogramm im nationalkuturellen Kontext). Cosima records Wagner's reaction in her diary on the 14th of November, 1879 to a sermon by Adolf Stoecker:

A second sermon from Pastor Stoecker brought R[ichard] to exclaim: Alas! Not just the Jews, but every creature seeks to further their own interest. It is us, we of the state, who condone such things. So too the stock exchange, in the beginning a free, decent institute—what have we permitted to become of that? And he spoke of the current debts that the states gets into and how that once again only drives the evil speculative spirits!

Eine zweite Rede vom Pfarrer Stoecker bringt R. darauf, aufzurufen: Ach! Nicht die Juden sind es, ein jedes Wesen sucht sein Interesse zu fördern, wir sind es: wir der Staat, die wir solches gestatten. So auch die Börse, anfänglich eine freie gute Institution, was haben wir daraus werden lassen. Und er erzählt von der jetzigen Anleihe, welche der Staat macht und die wiederum nur ein Vorschub diesem bösen spekulativen Geiste leistet!

However, Cosima also records on 28th of October, 1881 that while Wagner did suggest that he did have some passing sympathy for Adolf Stoecker's anti-Semitic views, he gravely laments that anything like this should ever come from the conservative side of politics—the side that "stood against progress (Fortschritt)". Wagner clearly intensely disliked the notion of a right-wing anti-Semitic movement, and staunchly refused to have anything to do with it.

Adolf Stoecker represents the first example of a belligerently populist right-wing brand of anti-Semitism entering into German politics. Stoecker represents a prime example of proto-National Socialism. Likewise, Cosima records on the 6th of July, 1880, when another proto-National Socialist right-wing anti-Semite, Bernard Förster (who married Nietzsche's sister), tried to get Wagner to sign a petition to Bismarck urging him to side against the Jews, Wagner refused to do so point blank: "I am meant to sign that?" he exclaimed while abruptly losing all trace of his usual joviality. Wagner remained true to what he said to Angelo Neumann in that he simply refused to support the right-wing anti-Semitic side in the so-called Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (Berlin antisemitic agitation).

When Bernard Förster tried to get Wagner's support to start a völkisch anti-Semitic newspaper, he was told in no uncertain terms that he was unwelcome:

Dr Förster send us an invitation for the founding of an anti-Semitic newspaper. R recalled that had written to him from Naples:  

"You should take a look to see if you fit into Prince Bismarck's junkyard [Kram], and it looks like you fit into the junkyard, because you've adopted his entire programme. It looks like we Bayreuthers are going to be very isolated". 

Dr. Förster schickte ihn einen Aufruf zur Gründung einer anti-semitischen Zeitung. R erzählt, daß er von Neapel aus ihm geschrieben zu haben:  

„Sehen Sie, ob Sie in Fürst Bismarcks Kram passen und Sie scheinen in den Kram zu passen, denn Sie adoptieren sein ganzes Programm. Wir Bayreuther mit unseren Ideen werden sehr einsam bleiben”. 

Like Friedländer, Longerich does well to caution us against trying to infer too much of a direct continuity between these nineteenth century right-wing anti-Semitic movements and the rise of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP) in the twentieth century:

The line could be traced further within the right-wing, ethnic nationalist movement known as the 'völkische Bewegung' that formed after the turn of the century and was highly charged with anti-Semitic sentiments, or with the simultaneous breakthrough of a biological-determinist concept of race in various branches of science, which lent spurious respectability to the nonsense talked about the Jewish 'race'. One could argue, too, that this line was continued in the anti-Semitic agitation at the end of the First World War 2 and in the wave of anti-Semitic hate campaigns and violence in the immediate post-war period, until it culminates in the anti-Semitism of the NSDAP. In this manner a picture could be painted of a virtually constant stream of radical anti-Semitic movements that led inexorably to the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazis.  

Longerich: Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, p.10. My emphasis

However, the historical background to these movement were quite different to what gave rise to National Socialism. While we can agree with Shield that there is no teleological direct path of a linearly escalating continuity towards the rise of the Dritte Reich, it remains problematic to write on without fully casting off Goldhagenist cultural historicist assumptions by adoption of a more academic methodology of reading history. Shield makes absolutist statements like this without the slightest attempt at justification:

Wagner’s anti-Semitic writings are only a symptom of a culture-wide anti-Semitism...

The implication is that an "eliminationist anti-Semitism", to use Goldhagen's terminology, was all-pervasive in German society, with Wagner only being a "symptom" of this. All this does is lapse into the idea that Wagner's art devoted itself to turning "Jew hatred into an aesthetic experience". An all consuming Jew hatred that lay at the heart of The German Mind, the psychopathies of which expressed itself in both German art and politics, which, Shield alleges are thus inseparable, but without any attempt to support his surprising claim.

Longerich goes on to similarly dismiss such teleological readings of German history:

However, this image of a clear, uninterrupted line of anti-Semitism in Germany is the result only of a superficial examination of history. It is important, too, to consider the political contexts in which such radically anti-Semitic movements developed. Despite its prominence in Imperial Germany, radical anti-Semitism was only a splinter-group and had no decisive influence on the political course of the German state. In comparison with contemporary manifestations of anti-Semitism in other European countries (such as Austria, Hungary, France, or Russia) it by no means represented a vibrant political force. The tide of anti-Semitic action was stemmed by the fact that whilst the political establishment—above all the power base in the Conservative Party—certainly cultivated anti-Semitism, it also resisted the repeal of Jewish emancipation: from a conservative perspective the emancipation of the Jews was a component of the compromise that lay at the foundation of the Empire and could not simply be ignored.  

Longerich: Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, p.10. My emphasis

It should also be remembered that at this time point, Germans were not noted for their anti-Semitism. The kingdom of Prussia belonged amongst the first modern European states to grant emancipation to the Jews, exactly a year before Wagner was born. Later radical anti-Semitisms were born not of persistent psychopathologies inherent to The German Mind, but of radical changes in socio-historical circumstance, the most critical one being the change induced by the Great War and its aftermaths.

Due to the Dreyfus affair, the French had gained much more notoriety for their anti-Semitism prior to WWII. Note too that in his letter, Neumann uses the address "Mme. Cosima". The right-wing Cosima was born and raised French. In the three decades after Wagner's death, it was she who gave her blessing to the nazification of Bayreuth, alongside her English völkisch propagandist, Chamberlain. Cosima forced the gay Siegfried to marry Winifred, an Englishwoman, who proceeded to have an affair with Hitler. It was "Mme. Cosima" who opened the doors of Bayreuth to the anti-Semitic right who had been attempting to claim Wagner as their "apostle" from the time before his death. Cosima was only too pleased to greet throngs of them coming to hail Wagner as the apostle and prophet of their völkisch movement. Cosima granted them the imprimatur of cultural legitimacy for which they craved. Although used as evidence in favour of the thesis of "the Germans" all being "Hitler's willing executioners", the nazification of Bayreuth after Wagner's death was actually a curiously Anglo-French affair.

Russians too were far more notorious for their anti-Semitism. Historian, Thomas Weber, tells us that:

Jews on the eastern front fled from the ravages of the Russian Army to the civilized embrace of Austria or Germany. The German armed forces went so far as to tell their soldiers that if some of the Eastern European Jews they encountered appeared dirty or behaved as crooks, they should know that this was only a result of having lived under Russian occupation for so long. As two articles from the army newspaper of the 10th Army told its readers in early 1916, at their core the Jews of Eastern Europe had kept a ‘truly astounding vitality and moral fortitude’, ‘a strong and selfless idealism', and ‘a deep and honest thirst for knowledge and education driven by great intelligence, sobriety, temperance, thrift, and a goodness of character’. Furthermore, the Jews' ‘adherence to the German language' was another indicator that Jews and Germans ultimately had interchangeable characteristics and values. All it needed for Eastern European Jews to lose any negative traits they might possess, the articles concluded, was for the Germans ‘to free the captives from their chains’. In short, Germany's mission in the war was to liberate the Jews of Eastern Europe, to ‘bring freedom and light to millions of unfortunate people.’ 

Thomas Weber. Hitler's First World War p.194. Notice the ideas found here are fundamentally similar to those expressed by Wagner about the Jews.

The Goldhagen thesis of the Germans always having been "Hitler's Willing Executioners" consumed with a psychopathic culture of genocidal anti-Semitism that permeated German art and politics thus simply fails to hold. The radicalisation of German right-wing political anti-Semitism needed a totally different historical context to that of Wagner's lifetime, one that was only provided by the industrial scale apocalypse of the Great War, the social upheaval of the German Revolution of 1918-19, followed by humiliation by the Treaty of Versailles, then rampant hyperinflation, before the roller coaster ride towards gross political destabilisation was finally topped off by the Great Depression:

With the end of the First World War, however, the context in which the nationalist radical anti-Semitic movement was to operate changed fundamentally. These new conditions for a breakthrough in radical anti-Semitism in Germany are much more important than the anti-Semitic tradition that can be traced back to the early years of the Second Empire. Two points are decisive with respect to the changed conditions that the end of the First World War brought about. 

The first is the completely new status that the radical anti-Semitic movement gained by virtue of a need to renew the basis of nationalism in Germany after its military defeat and the end of the Empire. It was clear that the institutions of the Empire that had collapsed in 1918 (the monarchy, the Imperial government, and the army) could not represent German nationalism any longer and the 'kleindeutsch', Prussian-German interpretation of German history lost conviction with the end of Bismarck's Empire. It was just as obvious that the old hierarchical structures of the Empire, the class society and the nation's religious divide, were obstacles that would have to be comprehensively surmounted if national regeneration were to be possible. 

The various attempts to found a new German identity in place of imperial nationalism and create a strong enough sense of nation to overcome the traumatic defeat of 1918 shared one common element: a reversion to the idea of the people as the real source of national energy—or an attempt to found a new nation by regenerating the people and the ideas of nationhood that lay dormant in them. This regeneration could be directly linked to the recent experience of war by suggesting that it was in the trenches of the First World War that class boundaries had been dissolved and the nation reborn.  

Longerich: Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, p.11 (emphasis mine)

The socio-political background that gave rise to this frightful new radicalisation was nothing like anything Wagner saw in his life, and the notion of a fateful line of seamless continuity here is a myth. In any case, Wagner had longed washed his hands of involvement with right-wing anti-Semitic movements anyway, so it becomes rather pointless in dragging out overblown discussions about "the Nazi approved anti-Semite Wagner", just as it is pointless to do so with Shakespeare. 

Finally, I take grave issue with this statement by Nathan Shields:

...the music of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg is not only incidentally but necessarily innocent of the uses to which it was put. This in turn would mean that Wagner’s music, by virtue of its beauty, transcends all politics, even his own. Such a line of defense, however, is closed to us. It is Wagner himself who has closed it.

How Wagner closed such a line of defense is left unclear, and no primary source citation from Wagner himself is provided to substantiate this speculation. This leads us to conclude it is Shields himself who is closing it, not Wagner. Given the seriousness of the allegation, such claims demand quality primary source citations, not speculation passed off as certitude, as is usual in the Nazi opera conspiracy literature.  

Those that defend Christianity against the charge that Christian religious anti-Semitism gave rise to the Holocaust will tell us that just because Goebbels, for example, wrote "Christ: the principle of love. Marx: the principle of hate" that it does not mean that just because Christianity is abused to give credence to tyrants that this means that Christianity itself is evil—or "not...innocent of the uses to which it was put" to use Shield's own words. Although none of Wagner's characters were ever referred to even once as being Jewish by the National Socialists, their propaganda frequently makes reference to Shylock. Does that make Shakespeare, regarded by the Nazis as a Nordic-Germanic Aryan artist, "not...innocent of the uses to which it was put", and hence guilty of inciting the Holocaust? Are we really willing to accept that both Christianity and Shakespeare are thus "not...innocent of the uses to which it was put", all because Wagner allegedly said so. That is the slippery slope that Shields is taking us down. 

The French Shylock in the Ruhr district.
Germania is stabbed in the back by Shylock
From the National Socialist party mouthpiece, the Völkischer Beobachter

Nathan Shields seems so obsessed with discussing "Wagner's anti-Semitism" that he is blinded to almost everything else. One never sees this obsession with Shakespeare, and it must be asked why it must always be so with Wagner. As for what Wagner's views on the Jewish question might have been, these are well summarised by historians Joachim Fest and Saul Friedländer whose views are presented in extended quotations included in my critical analysis of Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler. It also shows how relevant that main post on this blog remains despite Köhler's retraction of charges against Wagner, since the analysis of the broad methodological problems found there remain as crucial as ever.

It seems a shame that I have to ask readers to ignore much of the literature on Wagner written by musicologists and other non-historians (Köhler, Gutman, Rose et alia), to the point that virtually only historians can be relied on to give a credible account of the matter, but to understand Wagner one must first understand the historical background to the discussion. If that is distorted, everything will be distorted.

Once again, I will repeat my plea that writers who want to write on the Wagner controversy need to get to know their history extremely well. They need to know their primary source documents, as well being thoroughly versed in the secondary academic historiographic literature about the historical background to German politics in the 19th century (Young Germany movement, 1848-49 revolution, unification, right-wing anti-Semitic movements such as the Antisemitismusstreit), as well as the German revolution of 1918-19, the Dritte Reich era, and what modern historians think about the origins of the Final Solution. They need a credible methodology for reading history, rather than presumptuously embracing a cultural historicism positing some Great Man or The German Mind as the driving force of German history. I appreciate that this is an extremely difficult demand, but ill informed speculation merely encourages the wanton propagation of "gross exaggeration and distortion" about history. It is little more than a demand for rigorous academic methodology to examine the furious controversies that surround Wagner, all fuelled by unnecessary amateurish speculation. It is high time all this changed.