With Nietzsche and Wagner we have the stories of two one-time close friends whose fates posthumously become closely associated with the Dritte Reich. In the post-war era, apologists found it far easier to defend Nietzsche from charges of proto-Nazism. The ease was related in no small part to the fact that the industry that focused on nazifying his memory was largely a one-woman show run by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. She and her brother had been estranged, but with Nietzsche's posthumous fame, she suddenly appeared after his death claiming to be his key interpreter. She did a bad enough a job of things it has backfired so severely that apologists feel free to ignore the grossly classist, sexist, anti-egalitarian, anti-pacifist, anti-socialist, and anti-democratic themes in Nietzsche's writing, convincing themselves that his tiresome anti-religious polemics alone suffice in securing his place as a liberal thinker. His latter anti-religious tirades are a telltale symptom of a draconian religious upbringing—a polemic that seems rather comically overblown and increasingly irrelevant to those nonreligious amongst us today raised without such a religious brainwashing.
 |
| Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche is enthusiastically greeted by Adolf Hitler |
...perhaps the young stock-exchange Jew is the most disgusting ever invention of humankind. Nonetheless I would like to know how much a complete settlement must be reached with a people, who, not out of their own fault, has experienced the greatest suffering amongst all people and whom we owe for having produced the most noble man (Christ), the purest sage (Spinoza), the most powerful book and the most effective moral laws in the world.
...vielleicht ist der jugendliche Börsen-Jude die widerlichste Erfindung des Menschengeschlechtes überhaupt. Trotzdem möchte ich wissen, wie viel man bei einer Gesammtabrechnung einem Volke nachsehen muss, welches, nicht ohne unser Aller Schuld, die leidvollste Geschichte unter allen Völkern gehabt hat und dem man den edelsten Menschen (Christus), den reinsten Weisen (Spinoza), das mächtigste Buch und das wirkungsvollste Sittengesetz der Welt verdankt.
Nietzsche: Human All Too Human
 |
| It has been suggested that Nietzsche is the Godfather of Fascism |
Things have proven far more complex with Richard Wagner. Not even his direct involvement with musket in hand in support of democracy in 1849 during the Dresden uprising, European constitutional federalism, nor his lifelong socialist pacifism has spared him the claim to being Hitler's sole ideological predecessor. It all seems rather strange until you realise the degree to which Bayreuth functioned as a much larger institute than the one-woman show of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, an institute devoted to the systematic manufacture of a large body of proto-Nazi and then flagrantly pro-Nazi propaganda, all allegedly in the name of Richard Wagner.
An implicit misogyny amongst Nietzscheans may also be contributing here, in their use of Wagner as a scapegoat in suggesting that Nietzsche's deeply personally motivated Wagner polemics constitute a de facto anti-fascism—that Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche was "merely" a woman, easily ignored, whereas the key house-propagandist for Bayreuth was a man, namely Houston Chamberlain, who by the mere fact of the anatomy of his genitalia, is reputedly supposed to be taken seriously. However, the reason for Chamberlain being in Bayreuth in the first place reflected the direction that Bayreuth was being steered by Cosima, who was not some estranged relative that had appeared out of nowhere like Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche after her brother's death, but Wagner's spouse.
This has engendered an endless amount of confusion, as many have credulously accepted the attribution of Houston Chamberlain's ideas to Wagner himself. Yet in every instance, a review of the primary literature—that written by Wagner himself—fails to support these claims. It is merely a case of Chamberlain and Cosima using Wagner's posthumous fame to give credence to their own right-wing völkisch ideology. The end result is that the large body of secondary Wagner literature must now be read with enormous skepticism given that it has hitherto blindly accepted prima facie everything that Chamberlain ever said as a perfectly substitute for Wagner, to the point they have come to be regarded a priori as being the same person. It is high time that Wagner studies return to the primary source literature, currently largely ignored in favour of a highly dubious secondary literature. In other words Wagner studies must return to the primary source text of the ten volumes of his prose writing plus countless volumes of letters left behind by him. Also problematic is the widespread replacement of Wagner's own voluminous writings with the Cosima diaries under the assumption that she is a perfectly neutral fly on the wall, when in fact it is impossible to determine to what extent the future chief nazifier of Bayreuth after Wagner's death coloured the account with her own personal biases projected onto Wagner.
From a point of view of textural interpretation, several academic principles should be applied to the use of secondary texts as an adjunct to aspects of extant Wagner primary Urtexts. These principles are the classic scholarly principles of textural interpretation applied to ancient texts:
1. The Principle of Independent Attestation
If multiple texts independently corroborate an attestation it increases its credibility, whereas if a claim is only found in a singular source, and it cannot be elsewhere corroborated, then it diminishes the credibility of the source. For example, Kubizek claimed that the 17 year old Hitler read Wagner's Feuerbachian socialist work Art and Revolution, but there are no corroborative supportive sources to attest to this.2. The Criterion of Dissimilarity
If the attestation of a source is counter to its own self-interests then it increases the likely that it is credible, whereas if a claim can be explained as being motivated purely by the source's self-interests, then it decreases the credibility of the source. If Cosima reports that Wagner spurned a völkisch anti-Semite like Bernard Förster then it is counter to her self-interest, and increases its credibility.3. The Criterion of Contextual Credibility
If an attestation about Wagner makes sense in historical context, then it increases its credibility. Many things asserted about Wagner, such as by Joachim Köhler, actually only makes sense in a post-WWI Weimar context, which is impossibly anachronistic since Wagner died in the early 1880s.
Yet none of this must be allowed to detract from the fact it is unjustified to ignore primary texts emanating from Wagner himself in favour of the exclusive use of secondary texts, as is currently standard practice in Wagner studies. No other composer in musical history left such an extensive body of prose writings, thus making the virtually exclusive reliance on secondary literature unnecessary. Nonetheless, supportive secondary literature can be useful as a corroborative adjunct to the primary literature, even if it cannot under any circumstance be permitted to replace it.
 |
| Richard Wagner's complete works span ten volumes making the current dependency on secondary literature questionable |
Unfortunately, at the moment, the current standard methodology in Wagner studies involves brute repetition of grossly unsupported speculation and hearsay unto it transforms it into The Truth. Often quite fantastic structures of unstable inference are built out of this sort of speculation. Standard academic methodology has been allowed to be subverted by the sheer mass of propaganda generated by the hysterically emotive politicisation of the subject matter. The end result is that the Wagner studies literature more closely resembles Occult Reich Nazi satanist, and Nazi UFO speculative pop literature than anything even remotely academically credible.
Of further methodological difficulty is the need to treat Wagner as a historical figure as well as a composer, a dramatist, a political theorist, a political activist, and philosopher all at once. Musicologists as a species generally exhibit a gross lack of education outside of musical theory. In the case of Wagner, his entanglements in the politics of his own time, and that after his death means any writer who tackles him must have read a vast amount about both nineteenth century and twentieth century political history to a degree that even historians would find taxing. Subjects that need to be grasped in full academic detail include:
1. Young Germany movement and early German nationalism after Napoleon
2. The 1848 Revolution and its impact on central European political theory, including its relationship to the German 1918-19 Revolution
3. German unification under Bismarck and impact on central european political thought
4. The anti-Semitic agitations of 1879-81 and rise of the völkisch movement
5. Discourses on ethnicity in the 19th century in social and historical context e.g. Jewish emancipation and increasingly assimilation
6. The relationship of 19th century discourse on ethnicity and its continuity (or lack thereof) to early twentieth century discourses on ethnicity
7. Early twentieth century central European völkisch and Pan-Germanic movements and their relationship to early Germany nationalism (or lack thereof)
8. History and origin of National Socialist ideology, and the political rise of the Dritte Reich
9. The history and origin of the Final Solution (encompassing questions as to whether it emerged out a continuum going back to nineteenth century völkisch movements; criticisms of the Goldhagen thesis; and taking in the intentionalist vs functional debates)
10. Methodological problems arising from the teleological method of reading history according to a cultural historicism drawing alleged "straight lines" of influence from the nineteenth century leading directly to National Socialism
11. Implicits strains of sexual revolution and proto-feminism in Wagner and its subsequent relationship to the 20th century sexual revolution and feminist movement
There is a dissertation to be written on each of these subjects with respect to Richard Wagner. Yet even that remains grossly insufficient as it is equally necessary to look further into the history of political theory:
1. The relationships between the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels versus the anarchist socialism of Bakunin (and arguably also Wagner), and its influence on the communism versus socialist democracy debate, plus its practical impact on history (e.g. conflict between the Social Democrats versus the Communists during the 1918-19 Revolution)
2. The impact on Wagner of the early socialist theories of Proudhon and Feuerbach, and its subsequent relationship to scientific and anarchistic socialism
3. The relationship between socialist philosophy to German philosophy (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and Engels, Adorno).
4. The history and origins of the political theory of European constitutional federalism in Fichte and Constantin Frantz
Once again, each of these subject entails a dissertation in its own right. The reason that Wagner still poses such difficulties today is that he was too much of a polymath for his own good. This has allowed Wagner studies to be dominated by the crude oversimplifications arising from the "beerhall philosophy" of "half-educated know-alls" grotesquely inflated to the status of Eternal Truths.
From a methodological perspective, it would further be highly insightful to explain the institutional allegiance of Bayreuth with the Dritte Reich according to a more structuralist approach that would treat Bayreuth as just another institution within the wider social-political milieu in the organisational structures within the Dritte Reich. Many institutions fell into line with the rise of the National Socialist Third Empire, including corporations from Krupps to Bosch to Hugo Boss, for example, but also the German churches. Football teams lost their association with workers' unions, aligned as they had been with the SPD and KPD, and became reorganised into the wider social structure of the Third Empire. Even the Olympic games were to fall into line with the Dritte Reich as an institutional organ of its propaganda machine. However, it is often said that after the abdication of the German Kaiser during the German Revolution of 1918-19, that the Wagner family in Bayreuth have become ersatz royal family. It was thus of critical importance from a propaganda point-of-view that the key cultural institution of Bayreuth be seen to fall in line with that of the Dritte Reich as a whole. It was crucial that the National Socialist regime be seen as the rightful heirs to German culture in order to give credence to the myth of National Socialist cultural legitimacy. So it made perfect sense for the National Socialists to court Bayreuth for their propaganda purposes.
There are limitations with this structural framework of systemic academic analysis, in that there is a far more complex personal dimension whose richness is not entirely captured by such methodology. Moreover, Bayreuth's institutional swing to the far right began much earlier when National Socialism was still a minor fringe movement of insignificant political influence. There is little doubt as to where this trend originated, and that is with Cosima Wagner. It was she, in the decades after Wagner's death, who had steered Bayreuth down the dark path to the far right of politics:
If Bayreuth became a magnet for the ultra-right in the early years of the twentieth Century, this was because of a shift in political emphasis in the reception of Wagner's works. And it was Cosima who determined the direction that this development took, so that the cult of Wagner became the cult of an aggressive German nationalism. To that extent neither anti-Semitism nor Hitler nor all that he stood for came out of the blue in the Bayreuth of the 1920s.
Oliver Hilmes: Cosima Wagner—The Lady of Bayreuth
The far-right years of Bayreuth inaugurated by Cosima have been described as "night over Bayreuth" (Nacht über Bayreuth), and there is no doubt who the darkest Queen of the Night was: Meisterin Cosima. Needless to say, Nietzsche unsurprisingly remained besotted with Cosima till the very end, when he started to write mad love letters to her, and never once had an unkind word to say about her following his break with Wagner. On the other hand, in his increasingly hysterical polemics against him, Nietzsche did take to "accusing" Wagner of being a revolutionary and pro-feminist.
Cosima's right-wing tendencies can already be glimpsed during Wagner's lifetime. Her first husband, Hans von Bülow, politically, if not temperamentally a better match for her, later delivered a speech at the start of a concert in 1892, during which he denounced the French revolutionary ideals of "liberté, égalité, fraternité", and claimed they should be replaced with those of "infantry, artillery, and cavalry". Towards the end of his life, after spending a lifetime as a struggling left-wing artist, Wagner had started to become ever more widely acclaimed, leading some right-wing groups to adopt the increasingly famous composer as the symbolic figurehead of their anti-Semitic and völkisch Pan-Germanic nationalist movement. Around the time of the Berlin anti-Semitic strife—in which the early völkisch right-wing ideologue, Adolf Stöcker, played a major part—Wagner's Jewish friend, Angelo Neumann, alarmed by rumours that Wagner supported such völkisch right-wing movements, 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 WagnerBayreuth, February, 1881.
From Personal Recollections of Wagner by Angelo Neumann.
The original German version: Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner.
The upcoming article in the Bayreuther Blätter he referred to was Erkenne dich selbst, which contains the only line that was publically quoted by a major National Socialist party member, when Goebbels quoted the description of the Jews as ‘the graphic demon of the degeneration of humanity’ [der plastische Dämon des Verfalls der Menschheit].
What had happened? The original version of the article had been intercepted by Cosima. It was possibly Cosima who turned an overt denunciation of the right-wing anti-Semitic agitations in Berlin into the most blatantly anti-Semitic article Wagner ever wrote. Obviously tongue lashed by Cosima, Wagner admitted to her "you're totally right, everything that I have written—the whole article is complete nonsense" (Cosima diaries Friday, 11th February, 1881). It was an alarming symptom of the direction that Cosima would steer Bayreuth after her philandering husband was out of her way. It is possible that somewhere in Bayreuth, the original draught of the manuscript might have survived. Yet, even then there remain traces of the original denunciation of the Berlin anti-Semitic agitations in that paper, with Wagner rejecting as myth the notion of German pure-bloodedness, ascribing that trait only to the Jew, even questioning the very existence of a "German race". Wagner hints at the notion that the attack on the Jews in the völkisch Berlin anti-Semitic agitation was "dark and delusory" [dunkel und wahnvoll], citing the Schopenhauerian maxim that to attack another was to attack oneself.
However, in the typical speculative methodology standard to the Wagner literature Oliver Hilmes claims to have discovered something bizarrely anachronistically in the vein of Oswald Spengler's 1918 book The Decline of the West in Know Thyself:
[Wagner] formulated the idea that 'antagonism between the races' was responsible for cultural decline...
Oliver Hilmes: Cosima Wagner—The Lady of Bayreuth
There is nothing in any of Wagner's late regeneration essays about "cultural decline", and nor is Hilmes capable of producing a primary bibliographic citation to support of this reading—which demands that Hilmes devote at least several pages towards justifying it. Instead a grossly unsupported speculative statement is declaimed in an ex cathedra manner and allowed to pass as The Eternal Truth based on nothing other than that Hilmes said so.
Yet Cosima herself still noted Wagner's reaction in her diary on the 14th of November, 1879 to a sermon by early völkisch agitator, Pastor Adolf Stöcker:
A second sermon from Pastor [Adolf] Stöcker [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!
Cosima Tagebuch: 14th of November, 1879. My own translation
Another early right-wing völkisch anti-Semite, Bernard Förster, also approached Wagner to start an anti-Semitic newspaper:
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«, —und Sie scheinen in den Kram zu passen, denn Sie adoptieren sein ganzes Programm. »Wir Bayreuther mit unseren Ideen werden sehr einsam bleiben.«
Cosima Tagebuch: p672 Sonnenabend 22ten Januar 1881. My own translation
Cosima was Richard Wagner's second wife, and was young enough to be his daughter. As a result. she outlived him by almost a half century. Those decades after Wagner's death, where Cosima reigned supreme as the Meisterin of Bayreuth, saw inclusion into the Bayreuth circle of her ideological minions, first of Houston Chamberlain, and then Winifred Wagner. The most radically pro-Nazi elements gathered around Bayreuth under Cosima's reign. Nor should it be forgotten that although it is constantly pointed out that Houston Chamberlain was Wagner's son-in-law, since Wagner fathered children later in life, he never met any of his children-in-law. And if Wagner were indeed responsible for the misdeeds of those who only became in-laws after his death, then this would make each and every of us responsible for the actions and utterances of our in-laws (or, in this case, "out-laws") even long after our deaths: a responsibility only an abject fool would relish.
 |
| Winifred Wagner with Adolf Hitler |
If Wagner had been a struggling left-wing revolutionary artist all his life, albeit one with extravagant champagne socialist tastes, after his death came fame and fortune. The Wagners were now millionaires many times over:
The world was now Cosima's oyster, and with fame and fortune came power and prestige. As in Wagner's Nibelung saga, the lust for power was all-corrupting. All sides of politics would have gladly courted Bayreuth, with even Zionists like Theodor Herzl devoted Wagnerians. Queen Cosima could have lent the imprimatur of Bayreuth's blessing to whatever side of politics she wished. And choose she did: the völkisch and anti-Semitic extreme right of German politics, well before it rose to the status of a mainstream movement. Wagner had shunned the völkish right even if that would lead to "Bayreuthers" being left out in the cold—but Cosima made sure that would never happen. The far-right, on whom whom Wagner had soundly slammed the gates shut, were now welcomed by Cosima with open arms, and Bayreuth's darkest night was ushered in.
It was all about money, of course. In 1909 Cosima and Siegfried appeared in a Who's Who of German millionaires, and by the beginning of 1913 the family fortune had risen to the dizzying heights of 6 million marks. Two sets of figures make it clear just how wealthy the family was. In 1913 the average annual income of a public employee was some 1,200 marks, so that 6 million marks represents around 5,000 annual incomes. At today's prices, this amounts to some 27 million euros.
Oliver Hilmes: Cosima Wagner—The Lady of Bayreuth
The world was now Cosima's oyster, and with fame and fortune came power and prestige. As in Wagner's Nibelung saga, the lust for power was all-corrupting. All sides of politics would have gladly courted Bayreuth, with even Zionists like Theodor Herzl devoted Wagnerians. Queen Cosima could have lent the imprimatur of Bayreuth's blessing to whatever side of politics she wished. And choose she did: the völkisch and anti-Semitic extreme right of German politics, well before it rose to the status of a mainstream movement. Wagner had shunned the völkish right even if that would lead to "Bayreuthers" being left out in the cold—but Cosima made sure that would never happen. The far-right, on whom whom Wagner had soundly slammed the gates shut, were now welcomed by Cosima with open arms, and Bayreuth's darkest night was ushered in.
Bayreuth during the Dritte Reich is often pointed out to be case in point proving that "The Germans" (whatever that may mean) were always "Hitler's willing executioners", brainwashed by a centuries long entrenched culture of German racial eliminationist anti-Semitism, which had poisoned "The German Mind", making the rise of Hitler inevitable. However, as the English translator of Angelo Neumann's book points out in addressing her as "Mme. Cosima": she was born and raised French. Chamberlain was born British, but he first made his impression on Cosima through his writings published in French in la Revue wagnérienne, a journal of which he was a patron. However, the worst of them all was arguably the figure of the likewise British born Winifred Wagner. The nazification of Bayreuth, far from being the echt deutsch pure-German business, run by Hitler's willing German executioners, as it is universally assumed to be, was a strikingly Anglo-French affair.
Brian Magee vividly tells us the story of Winifred openly expressing her undying love for Hitler:
[Winifred] was in love with Hitler. She had fallen in love with him when he had been an obscure young political agitator in the early 1920s; and it was she who, when he was imprisoned in 1923, had taken to him in prison the writing materials with which he wrote Mein Kampf. When her husband [Siegfried Wagner] died in 1930 she wanted to marry Hitler, but he, while continuing to maintain an unusually close relationship with her, understood how important it was for his public image not to marry, and declined to do so. I have heard the whole story directly from her lips; and independent documentation fully bears it out on essential points. I am not suggesting that what Winifred Wagner told me constituted in any way an exculpatory story: on the contrary, it was unsparingly frank, a characteristic for which she was famous, not to say notorious. She made no pretence of not having been a Nazi; she did not hide her anti-semitism; she did not soft-pedal her devotion to Hitler or the fact that she was still, after his death, in love with him, and wished that they had married; indeed, she told me how she had pressed him to marry her, but been refused...
Brian Magee: Wagner and Philosophy
It seems that for Winifred, Love Conquers All—reason and humanity included. Here is what Heinz Linge, Hitler's personal valet, noted in his personal memoirs:
At Bayreuth, Hitler belonged to the Wagner family, and many onlookers looking in from behind the hedges suspected that Hitler's dealings with Winifred Wagner concealed a secret love affair. Whoever saw the pair of them walking hand in hand or arm in arm in the Villa Wahnfried parkland might have taken them for a married couple, and it certainly looked that way.
Heinz Linge: With Hitler to the End: The Memoirs of Adolf Hitler's Valet
This was the Winifred who now reigned as the Queen of Bayreuth—Queen Winnie walking arm in arm with King Wolf. Far from it being a businesslike institutional arrangement with Hitler, the reigning Queen of Bayreuth had surrendered her heart completely unto him forever and all eternity. Winifred held the Wagner royal seal and was willing to fawningly lend her stamp of approval to anything Hitler put in front of her. She may have claimed to act in the name of Richard Wagner, whom she had never met, as he was long since dead and buried before she had ever stepped one foot in Bayreuth, but the reigning Queen of Bayreuth gave away her heart entirely out of the dictates of her own conscience. She placed her cultural kingdom at the service of her heart's Lord and Master entirely of her own accord. After the war, Winifred claimed, as Nazis always did, to be "apolitical",—an almost certain sign that she was trying to hide the guilt of her political past.
It is quite typical that despite all of the damning evidence against Winifred, even that was to do little to stop Brigitte Hamann from only recently writing a biography that was condemned as nothing but an amateurishly researched hagiography of Winifred Wagner. Even today, Cosima's neonazi hoard are not lacking their bootlicking sycophants who wish to retain Bayreuth as the shrine of their right-wing beerhall ideology.
Cosima was an extreme reactionary inclined towards being scathing towards any tendency in her daughters and granddaughters that seemed anything remotely feminist. The dreaded matriarch insisted on absolute servitude to patriarchal dominance. When her daughter, Daniela, asked to have visiting cards printed, Cosima replied:
If you have visiting cards, then you're emancipated, like an ugly 30-year-old woman.
Cosima quoted in Eva Rieger: Friedelind Wagner
This feigned subservience, however, was little more than a sheepish cloak for her own domineering influence in steering Bayreuth down the path towards National Socialism, allegedly out of obsequious submissiveness to her late husband, but in reality out of a manipulative and draconian right-wing Machiavellianism that was entirely hers and her alone.
Once Cosima accumulated a sufficiently large clique of proto-Nazi sycophants around her to do her bidding, each deluding themselves into believing that they were humbles servants of the Will of their Meister, this set into train a self-perpetuating train of right-wing ideological group-think within Bayreuth. It was an exercise in group-think that parallelled that within the National Socialist Party itself with its own tendency towards "cumulative radicalisation" of members "working towards the Führer", only in Bayreuth's case they convinced themselves they were selflessly "working towards the Meister". It was here that the myth of Wagner as the great Prophet of National Socialism was born, as Bayreuth started to function as key propaganda institute within the greater socio-political structure of the Dritte Reich.
It is nonetheless perfectly understandable that the institutional changes that occurred in Bayreuth in the half century after Wagner's death are blamed on him. The reason for this is that after his death those who ran Bayreuth tended to claim slavish devotion to their Meister in whose name they swore they were acting in his absence, when in actual fact they were acting entirely of their own accord, using Wagner's posthumous fame as a stamp of legitimacy for their own self-serving ambitions and ideologies. The Meister they were worshipping was their own mythical construct, manufactured in their own image, after the genuine historical figure of Wagner had been buried and his original ideas cynically erased from history. One of the great sources of confusion surrounding Wagner is that too many authors credulously accept the claims by Cosima's Nazi hoard to being selfless and devout vassals of their Meister's Will rather than confronting the fact that they were using Wagner's posthumous fame as a means to give themselves a much desired stamp of validation for their own petty self-interests. It is time that due academic methodology is employed in the systematic deconstruction of their Wagner myth that has been allowed to stand unquestioned for so long.
Nor has Bayreuth institutionally done much to show the slightest of remorse for having both created and perpetuated this perverse myth after Wagner's death. In fact, it has done close to nothing to remind the world of just how much Wagner risked his life to fight with musket in hand for the cause of socialist democracy, and Bayreuth's silence on the matter has been a tacit approval of the wiping of Wagner's liberal ideals from the face of history. Although Winifred Wagner was banned from having any formal involvement in the running of Bayreuth, she remained an ever present figure behind the scenes. Those members of the Wagner family who had emigrated in protest against the nazification of Bayreuth were skilfully maneuvered out of having any major influence by Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner, both of whom were devoted to the National Socialist political cause to the very end, just as their mother had been. Wieland had been employed at concentration camp Flossenbürg, admittedly though only in designing sets for stage, and it does appears to have "merely" been a forced labour camp rather than an extermination camp. Wagner societies tended to be points where former Nazis and their sympathisers congregated—and probably still do. In short, a whole industry continues to exist to perpetuate the beerhall fairy tale that even though Hitler is dead, he secretly lives on in Wagner's music.
Another reason why this massive cover-up has taken so long to expose is simply because Bayreuth has been complicit in hiding the extent of the sheer rot. Historian Joachim Fest complained of the restricted access of historians to archival material when he wrote of "Bayreuth's persistent coverup strategy that everywhere has its helpers" (die stete Bayreuther Vertuschungsstrategie, die überall ihre Helfer hat). Since Fest wrote that, the situation has improved little in Bayreuth. It is a coverup that has suited the Wagner family, for whom Richard Wagner has proven a convenient scapegoat in being the alleged Prophet who had allegedly forced his Disciples down the road to Hitler, when in reality they all gleefully followed Hitler down the road to Auschwitz entirely out of their own volition, while cynically deleting Wagner's inconveniently liberal thoughts from the annals of history.
Oliver Hilmes noted the difficulties with trying to conduct independent academic research on Bayreuth:
Those writers who attempted the earliest biographies during the 1920s and 1930s were generally able to publish only what the Wagner family permitted. At this date there were still no critical editions, and Cosima's papers were not available to independent scholars. True, the family's privileged writers were granted access to the archives, but this access was entirely arbitrary. It is also true, of course, that these authors were not interested in a balanced account of Cosima's life but were concerned, rather, to glorify the family. The result was a series of biographies notable for their sycophantic, hagiographic tone.
Oliver Hilmes: Cosima Wagner—The Lady of Bayreuth
Hilmes took particular note of conditional access to the Bayreuth archives:
During the decades following the end of the Second World War, the situation regarding the Bayreuth sources remained frustrating for journalists and scholars like. Anyone wanting to conduct research in the Bayreuth archives had to establish a good working relationship with the Wagner family and in particular with the much-feared Wahnfried archivist Gertrud Strobel. Even as late as the early 1970s a French musicologist was sent packing with the message that he need not return until Alsace-Lorraine was once again a part of Germany. This German National attitude slowly began to change only when, in April 1973, Winifred Wagner ceded the Festspielhaus, Wahnfried and the Wagner Archives to the city of Bayreuth.
Oliver Hilmes: Cosima Wagner—The Lady of Bayreuth
Another independent researcher also noted, when she approached Neill Thornborrow for access to Friedelind Wagner's documents:
[There would be] no access to [Thornborrow's] archives. In any case, not for me. That access had already been granted to a colleague, Eva Rieger, whom he fully supported. This response failed to scare me off because I certainly knew that source would prove a difficult one, whether with or without Neill Thornborrow, a problem that Oliver Hilmes, Brigitte Hamann and others had to struggle with, one which the Wagner family had interfered in because their family letters are scattered amongst different "clans", nearly all of whom are hostile towards one another, and who only permitted their own viewpoints on the matter. Thus Brigitte Hamann in the postscript to her nearly 700 page long Winifred Wagner biography that she was permitted "neither access to Winifred's legacy nor to that of her husband Siegfried's".Kein Zugang zu seinem Archiv. Jedenfalls nicht für mich. Den Zugang habe schon eine Kollegin, Eva Rieger, die er voll unterstütze. Diese Reaktion erschreckte mich nicht, denn ich wusste ja, dass die Quellenlage schwierig sein würde, ob mit oder ohne Neill Thornborrow, ein Problem, mit dem auch Oliver Hilmes, Brigitte Hamann und andere zu kämpfen hatten, die sich mit der Familie Wagner befasst haben, denn die Familienbriefe sind über die verschiedenen »Stämme« verstreut, die fast alle miteinander verfeindet sind und nur ihre Sicht der Dinge zulassen. So schreibt Brigitte Hamann im Nachwort zu ihrer fast 700 Seiten langen Winifred-Wagner-Biographie, dass sie »weder Zugang zu Winifreds Nachlass noch zu dem ihres Mannes Siegfrieds bekommen« habe.
Eva Weissweiler: Erbin des Feuers (my translation from the Preface)
In light of this behaviour from the family one can better sympathise with the knee-jerk reaction of Gottfried Wagner to his family:
[Gottfried] too had long been arguing in favour of acknowledging the guilt of the Wagner family and the politicization of the Festival during the Nazi era. He was irritated that whenever he visited his grandmother's house, where a large painting of the 'Führer' still hung, he was not allowed to read Hitler's letters that Winifred kept in careful chronological order from 1923 onwards. When Gottfried wanted to look at them, she rang Wolfgang to ask him - and he forbade it.
Eva Rieger: Friedelind Wagner
It is easy to ridicule Gottfried's hyperbolic condemnation of his entire family as does right-wing historian, Peter Viereck, in the 2006 preface to his 1941 book, Metapolitics:
One book (by the rebel great-grandson Gottfried Wagner) even declares that there is not a single line in Mein Kampf that doesn't derive from Wagner. Mein Kampf has major sources unconnected with Wagner, such as the lost war, German humiliation by Versailles, and the Free Corps of 1919-1920. In turn, the complicated Wagner (again, we need nuance) had not only major proto-Nazi strains but was influenced by totally un-Nazi strains, such as pacifism, Christianity, Feuerbach, Bakunin, Buddhism, Schopenhauer (the stress on doom, on the twilight of the gods), and a fanatic vegetarianism and anti-vivisection. The last two were shared by Hitler but not by the Party.
While the criticisms of historians like Viereck are perfectly justified based on our current academic understanding of the history and origins of the Third Empire, however, in the context of Gottfried's personal family circumstances, his reaction is far better understandable. Those, like Franz Beidler, along with Gottfried and Friedelind Wagner have been too long branded as "rebels" and as "black sheep" for deploring their family member's associations with Hitler, when in reality it is they who are the true keepers of the flame. The post-war era catastrophically missed a major opportunity to denazify Bayreuth by stripping its appalling Nazi sympathisers of power and handing over control of Bayreuth back to its rightful liberal heirs.
The problem is compounded by the fact that it is grossly unhelpful in regaining meaningful insight on the matter by demonising Richard Wagner as history's greatest Nazi like Gottfried does, thus merely granting further validation to his family's nazified interpretations of Wagner, when the correct target of his ire should really be his family who so ruthlessly nazified Bayreuth in constructing that ridiculous Wagner myth. It also merely encourages the old habit of turning Wagner societies into de facto neonazi organisations under the smug assumption of the eternal validity of the Wagner myth. It is far more helpful in undermining the Wagner family and their neonazi followers by adopting the standard academic methodology in returning to primary source literature in the public domain, namely to Richard Wagner's own writings. When all hitherto accepted myths are deconstructed through systematic academic methodology, this consistently demonstrates that these right-wing extremists are rather ironically extolling the virtues of their worst ideological enemy in Wagner. These fascist extremists have every reason to return the debate to one dominated by blind hysteria and propaganda, as they become increasingly anxious that they will soon be scandalised by the revelation of an enemy in their midst, and he whom they foolishly extol as their völkisch ideological Prophet is actually their gravest foe. The twilight for all nazified interpretations of Wagner is nigh, but there are more twists and turns to the machinations on the road to the finale than there are in Götterdämmerung.
Attempts to return Wagner to his rightful home on the left of politics are nothing new. Come the centenary Ring production by the Chéreau-Boulez team, Winifred Wagner, and others fascists who tend to congregate around Wagner societies, were horrified:
Well-known directors such as Joachim Herz and Götz Friedrich had already endeavoured to tease out the [socialist] political implications of Wagner's works in their own productions, and now Chéreau did the same. Pierre Boulez conducted. They were heavily criticized. 'Boulez/Chéreau are the instigators of this first attack of the Vandals', wrote one member of the audience. They had 'broken her heart' with their 'blasphemous' production, she said. One letter to the editor of the Nordbayerischer Kurier wrote of an 'experiment with a sledgehammer'. 'To take a well-known legend and stamp it with the mark of our own times is something that only the unimaginative bigots of this young group can achieve'.
Eva Rieger: Friedelind Wagner
In reality all they were doing is reinstating the original Feuerbachian and Bakunian socialist implications of The Ring, inconvenient truths deemed "blasphemous" and long deleted from history by the self-serving machinations of the Wagner family with their fawning servitude to Hitler. Sometimes, one simply has to understand that a man cannot choose his family—all the more so when he is dead.
With this I hope the reader can see why I keep writing about the Wagner controversies on this blog. It is an issue much larger than just one nineteenth century opera composer, and the Nibelung saga of the petty family in-fighting amongst his descendents. Wagner remains a significant figure in world history, and the ideological battle to claim Wagner for the left or the right is one that remains relevant to all of us. What you read on these pages is a declaration of war against all right-wing interpretations of Wagner, whose Götterdämmerung awaits them. It is nothing less than the battlefield of class warfare itself, in which the reader has no choice but to take a conscionable stance, and where there is no room for lilly livered fence sitting. The struggle has only just begun.
No comments:
Post a Comment