Some readers will be left wondering why it is that I keep writing about Nazi opera conspiracy theories. The answer is that it opens up a lot of philosophical and political questions that have nothing to do with Wagner at all. These have to do with questions about the relationship between culture and history, as well as critical methodological questions about how history is to be interpreted. In particular, it raises the question as to the historical origins of World War II and the Holocaust. Were these events caused by nineteenth-century poets and philosophers?
In the last post, we also explored the political dimensions of the implication of the widespread acceptance of Nazi opera conspiracy theories amongst average Israelis—in stark contrast to Israeli academic historians such as Na'ama Sheffi and Saul Friedländer who regard them as being ridiculous.
I have summarised many of the issues raised by the problems inherent to Nazi opera conspiracy theories in my key post containing a critical analysis of Joachim Köhler's book, Wagner's Hitler. It has been some three years since this was first posted, and in the time since its initial appearance, I have sequentially added more and more pieces of supportive evidence to that essay. The bibliography appears inline in the form of links to the book on Google books or Amazon, where full details of each bibliographic reference can be found. However, the problem is that the sequential addition of more and more information has made the essay rather long and unwieldy.
I suspect that unless you have a solid background in Holocaust studies at a tertiary academic level, you may find that the arguments in that essay will start to lose a lot of readers here, who tend to come from a music background (professional or enthusiast). As with the massive weight of scientific evidence discrediting climate change denialists, at a certain point, the data overload causes many lay people start to switch off and take to more simplistic emotive arguments from the climate change denialist camp. Suddenly, less is more.
A more purely academic discussion of the analysis of philosophical issues related to how history is to be interpreted (the philosophy of history) can be found in my critical and in-depth analysis of Sherratt's book, Hitler's Philosophers. I do warn readers that it is a much more advanced academic analysis than my somewhat more imminently readable analysis of Köhler's book, with the blog post discussing him now having been read well over seven thousand times.
The subject of Nazi opera conspiracy theories and the way they continue to grip the general public continues to disturb and fascinate me, so in order to help readers who may have found my analysis a rather daunting read, I have decided to start a series of shorter explanatory studies looking at some of the key concepts jammed into this key post discussing Köhler's book.
Today, I thought I would focus on just one particular phrase. In Wagner's Hitler, Köhler states on p88 of the hardcover edition of the English translation that:
[Hitler] knew every word of Wagner’s essay [Judaism in Music]
This statement carries no bibliographic citation at all and cannot be independently verified. It comes to us in a dogmatic ex-cathedra way, and we are expected to unquestioningly believe it in a "just so" manner.
In fact, Köhler is not the only author to state things to this effect. For example, Sherree Zalampas also boldly proclaims with complete and utter certainty that:
Sherree Owens Zalampas: Adolf Hitler. A Pyschological Interpretation of His Views on Architecture and Music, p.60, Popular Press, 1990 (ISBN-10: 0879724889, ISBN-13: 978-0879724887)
The sole supportive bibliographic citation vouching for the veracity of this string of alleged quotes is to citation number 127, which contains a secondary reference to p.48 of G.M. Gilbert’s The Psychology of Dictatorship, 1950, who according to Zalampas allegedly "cited Hans Frank as noting these statements of Hitler":
Mistakes happen, so I went through Gilbert's entire book carefully looking through any references to Richard Wagner. I also checked Zalampas's bibliographic citations innumerable times to check that reference 127 really was to this book. However, Gilbert's book contains nothing to this effect at all. I went to the trouble of obtaining a used copy of Gilbert's book, but nowhere in the book is Wagner even once mentioned either on p.48 or elsewhere. Here is the entirety of p.48 of Gilbert's book:
The claim for example that Hitler "boasted that he had read everything the master had written" carries no specific source citation. There is no primary bibliographic source citation for the reader to look up. The quote has neither date nor place associated with it, nor a person who noted them—important given that many sources such as Strasser, Hanfstaengl and Rauschning have turned out to be extremely unreliable. If these "quotes" show a nineteenth-century opera composer was so "supremely important" to the genesis of his thought, then why do none of the three landmark biographies of Hitler (Toland, Fest, and Kershaw) ever once repeat any of them? Nor are these "quotes" repeated in any other Nazi opera conspiracy book.
As for the "quote" that goes "whoever wants to understand National Socialism must first know Richard Wagner" no credible primary source citation has ever emerged for this oft-repeated alleged quote, which first appeared in the English language in 1940, with German versions likely being translations from the original English. No major modern academic historian specialising in the Dritte Reich era or the Holocaust ever cites this alleged "quote" today, which was likely a concoction of the Allied propaganda machine trying to make Hitler look ridiculous, just as it made claims to him having a missing testicle, or to a latent homosexuality.
A vastly more credible modern expert, Sir Richard J. Evans, on the contrary states that:
[Wagner’s] influence on Hitler has often been exaggerated. Hitler never referred to Wagner as a source of his own antisemitism, and there is no evidence that he actually read any of Wagner’s writings.
Sir Richard J. Evans: The Third Reich in Power (my emphasis)
The repeated claim is nonetheless made to the effect that Hitler had read every one of Wagner's theoretical writings to the point that he "knew every word". Yet no copy of any of Wagner's theoretical writings exists in Hitler's private library, and he never publically quoted from Wagner's theoretical corpus.
This sort of thing illustrates how in the Nazi opera conspiracy literature, less evidence is considered more, and a complete lack of evidence confers "supreme" certainty especially when the writer reassures the reader as does Zalampas that "there can be little doubt" (sic) of it. It is precisely as the famous historian and Hitler biographer, Joachim Fest, noted of Köhler's methodology in his review of Wagner's Hitler for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
Köhler... writes “without doubt”, where considerable doubt has been raised, and “certainly” exactly where no certainty exists.
Köhler ... schreibt “zweifelsfrei”, wo erhebliche Zweifel angezeigt sind, und “sicher”, wo es gerade keine Sicherheit gibt.
Joachim Fest: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 1997. My translation.
Best of all is when evidence is completely made up, and totally fictional—then it becomes the Eternal Truth and a quasi-religious dogma.
What we have seen today is that this methodology of claiming absolute certitude where none exists is hardly unique to Köhler, but is standard modus operandi for the entire Nazi opera conspiracy literature. Whereas modern historians have concluded that there is no evidence that Hitler had actually read even a single one of Wagner's theoretical writings, Nazi opera conspiracists falsely reassure the reader by making sweeping statements alleging to have proven in one foul sweep that not only had Hitler "read everything the master had written" but that "without doubt" he "certainly" also "knew every single word".
The methodology is simple: if you claim certainty this makes anything you say a certainty. For example "there can be little doubt that the moon is made of cheese", or "without doubt, there are certainly fairies at the bottom of the garden", enter bibliographic citation number 127 to page 48 of Gilbert, or better still no citation at all. That is, any nonsense can be passed off as The Truth: all you have to do is just say so with an air of supreme self-certainty, and an endless number of gullible lemmings will unquestioningly believe you.
When all else fails you can always proclaim that it would be a grave insult to the victims of the Nazis to expose your nonsense for the abject lie that it is, thereby using emotional blackmail to turn fairy tales into an untouchable sacred-cow dogma.
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