Daniel Goldhagen: Why Nazi Opera Conspiracy Theories Refuse to Die After Köhler

After my last post, I mentioned in my comments that I had tweeted links to the discussion at Anne Midgette (who now works for the Washington Post as a music critic), as well as to Sir Richard J. Evans. 

@TheWagnerian Readers please ask Anne Midgette @classicalbeat & Prof Evans @RichardEvans36 to comment

I do sincerely thank Ms Midgette for taking the time to reply. Her response is as follows:

@ThinkClassical @TheWagnerian Book argues thesis persuasively - doesnt mean thesis is right. Read article for context http://nyti.ms/1LeFm9c 

The reader is cordially invited to follow her request to read the original context that the quote was taken from. I have always tended to take the words "persuasive" and "chilling" to be suggest endorsement of the veracity of the book's arguments. If you look at the Amazon listing for Köhler's book, you will find that it quotes Anne Midgette's description of the book as "chilling" and "persuasive":

Amazon is where I first encountered the quote published from the New York Times, where they are presented as an endorsement for the book. I see no point in getting into a debate over whether Ms Midgette is being quoted out of context by the Amazon editorial review, and that just because she finds it "persuasive" it does not necessarily follow that she is saying it is "right". Please read the original context of the quote and decide for yourself.

The implication from her Twitter response is that today Ms Midgette finds Köhler's manner of writing "persuasive", but that despite this she disagrees with his conclusions. In response, I tweeted back a quote from Sir Richard J. Evans writing on Joachim Köhler's book: "None of this is remotely persuasive".

The full context out of which this has been taken is this passage:

Yet to make Wagner directly responsible for the nazi extermination of the Jews, as Köhler does, is hardly plausible. Köhler achieves this only by erecting dizzying and unstable structures of inference and correspondence, in which phrases and quotations are time and again ripped from their context in the writings or sayings of Hitler and Wagner and made to look as if they are saying the same thing. None of this is remotely persuasive.  

Evans: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), p. 149. 

The simple reason Sir Richard Evans found Köhler not even remotely persuasive is because he has such a powerful grasp of the modern state of the research on the rise of the Dritte Reich and the origins of the Final Solution. Proper education is the only way readers who are non-historians can be inoculated against the influence of "persuasive" charlatans pushing a view of history that Sir Ian Kershaw condemned as a "gross exaggeration and distortion".

Once again, I can only plead with writers, irrespective of whether they are music critics or writers specialising in any other field, that if they are going to write about the origins of the Holocaust then they should read credible literature about it first, written by respected academic historians specialising in the field. If you are ever tempted to write about the alleged operatic origins of WWII and the Holocaust, you are plunging headlong into writing about the history of an immensely complex event, where familiarity with nineteenth century opera libretti alone fails to suffice.

Before embarking on such speculation, I implore readers to first familiarise themselves with the background to intentionalist and functionalist-structuralist debates and how this lead to the evolution of the current state of the academic peer reviewed literature, but also to take into account the universal dismissal by academics around the world of Daniel Goldhagen's thesis about how Germans had always been destined throughout history to be "Hitler's Willing Executioners".

As for the suggestion that I am merely beating a dead horse now that Joachim Köhler has retracted his claims against Wagner alleging he single handedly caused the Holocaust, I should remind the reader how Köhler's thinking is merely a logical extension of the Goldhagen thesis. The fundamental idea of Goldhagen's book is that:

Genocide was immanent in the conversation of German society. It was immanent in its language and emotion. It was immanent in the structure of cognition. 

Goldhagen: Hitler's Willing Executioners, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1996, p. 449

All Köhler did was to extend this argument that genocide was "immanent" in the "language and emotion" to the sphere of Wagner's operas. Another author, Yvonne Sherratt, who does not cite Köhler says something similar:

The great composer and philosophical essayist Richard Wagner, born in Leipzig in 1813, was perhaps the most virulent anti-Semite of all. In some of his operas he turned Jew hatred into an aesthetic experience.   

Sherratt: Hitler's Philosophers, p.43

In other words, genocide was so immanent to the "language and emotion" of "The German Mind", that it had become deeply integral to its very "structure of cognition" to the extent that Wagner could transform the killing of Jews into a fun filled "aesthetic experience", thus helping to brainwash anyone who enjoyed Wagner into becoming another one of "Hitler's willing executioners". Richard J. Evans summarises Goldhagen well:

Goldhagen argues that Germans killed Jews in their millions because they enjoyed doing it, and they enjoyed doing it because their minds and emotions were eaten up by a murderous, all-consuming hatred of Jews that had been pervasive in German political culture for decades, even centuries past. Ultimately, says Goldhagen, it is this history of genocidal antisemitism that explains the German mass murder of Europe’s Jews, nothing else can.    

Sir Richard J. Evans: Rereading German History. My emphasis.

Unlike Köhler, Daniel Goldhagen has never retracted his views. On the contrary, Goldhagen regards his thesis as "incontestable"—the tendency to write "without doubt" where considerable doubt has been raised, and "certainly" where no certainty exists being methodological habits that Köhler inherited from him. Richard J. Evans complained that "this was the language of dogmatism, not scholarship" (p.164 Rereading German History). The great Holocaust scholar, Raul Hilberg, dismissed the Goldhagen thesis as being "worthless". Astonishingly, for all of the unanimous condemnation of his books from Holocaust historians coming as wide afield as Cambridge to Tel Aviv to Australia, Goldhagen earned himself a professorial position at Harvard University from which he actively taught his "incontestable" ideas to pupils. Sherratt, who is heavily influenced by Goldhagen, also uses her book as the basis to teach a masters programme at university level.

Even without Köhler, the Goldhagenism which breathed life into his ideas lives on, though it should not be be forgotten that Sir Richard J. Evans tells us that Goldhagen's ideas were nothing original. An older generation of writers from the 1940-60s also attempted to argue that Germans had always been Nazis, and had ripped quote after quote out of context to prove that just about any German writer in history had been a proto-Nazi: "once a German, always a German". These ideas have been discredited by modern historians, but the anti-Hun propagandist wartime sentiments that gave birth to them frequently reignite, and reappear, especially when it comes to Wagner, who is perpetually framed as history's archetypal Hun.

This is why, following Roland Barthes, I called Köhler's retraction of his charges against Wagner, "the death of the author". Köhler's baby will live on after him, as books and ideas take on a life of their own beyond their authors, in a way that virtually negates the very being of their author. Nazi opera conspiracy theories existed before him, and, sadly they will live on virulently without him long after "the death of the author". Their "incontestable" Eternal Truths, occupying as they do a seductive world of comforting absolute certainties from which all disquieting doubt has been expurgated, simply cannot be so readily extinguished.