Wagner's Willing Executioner: Joachim Fest Reviews Köhler's "Hitler's Wagner"

I thought it is about time that the English language speaking world have full access to Joachim Fest's 1997 review of Joachim Köhler's Wagner's Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple, published in the centre-right German newspaper, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for which Fest once worked as editor. Fest is generally regarded as one of the major historians who has published on the subject of the history of the Dritte Reich. Perhaps best remembered for his biography of Hitler, Fest is generally known for having a centre-right bias, and during the famous Historikerstreit (historians' debate) once found himself being accused by Hans Mommsen of rewriting history from a right-wing perspective.

Another major review of the same book by Köhler was published by Sir Richard J. Evans, whose critical review is quoted extensively in my own review of Köhler's book. Comments by Sir Ian Kershaw on Köhler's book can be found in the footnotes to his landmark biography of Hitler, and which are also quoted in my review. Further commentary on Köhler's book from Professor Saul Friedländer and Joachim Fest can be found in their essays published in the book Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich (sadly in German only). Extensive quotations from these historians in English translation can be found in my comprehensive review of Köhler's book. Comments critical of Köhler from right-wing American historian, Peter Viereck, writing at the end of his life are also quoted in my review. Usually a divisive subject area, Köhler managed the remarkable feat of uniting historians from left and right across the globe into an uncommonly harmonious choir of dissent towards his book.

The title of Fest's review Wagner's Willing Executioner is a reference to Daniel Goldhagen's widely criticised book Hitler's Willing Executioners. I have discussed the parallels between Köhler and Goldhagen at great length in my own review of Köhler's book, so I will not repeat them here.

It should be noted that Joachim Köhler, to his credit, has taken aboard much of these criticisms and has now distanced himself from his previous claims. I refer interested readers to his highly recommendable article entitled Wagner's Acquittal, published in the July, 2014 edition of The Wagner Journal. Nonetheless, the views contained in his previously published book remain wildly popular, and for that reason, an extended analysis of the reasons why his original thesis remains problematic remains highly instructive and illuminating. Illuminating, not merely in its attempts to understand just one nineteenth-century opera composer, but in trying to understand the history of the seminal event in twentieth-century history, one that retains its immediacy of relevance to us today. As it turns out, the history of Germany from 1848 till unification in 1871 is not the same history as that of the era of the Dritte Reich, and the biographies of two people from each era likewise represent disparate biographies: in both instances, simplistic lines cannot be drawn from A to B.

Since Fest wrote his review, ideas about the history and origins of National Socialism have further evolved. Fest makes the claim that it was principally a backward-looking atavistic ideology, one counter to modernism, based on romanticism and Medieval mythology. However, these ideas have since been strongly questioned, and it would be better to call them dated assumptions that have now been overthrown. Sir Richard J. Evans in the fourth part of his superb Third Reich series, The Third Reich in History and Memory, tells us:

When he came to power, Hitler was determined to bring Germany up to what he thought of as the level of modernity common in other advanced economies like Britain and America (Rieger's account is another nail in the coffin of the old interpretation of Nazism as a backward-looking, atavistic sociopolitical force).  

Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory. 12. The People's Car (my emphasis)

The Dritte Reich becomes more of a by-product of modernity:

Thus seen in a longer historical perspective, the confinement, sterilisation and extermination of social outsiders in Nazi Germany were the products of modernity, of political mobilisation and of scientific advance, or what was held to be such, in the half-century from around 1890 to 1940. ... Thinking of Nazi extermination instead as an aspect of the Janus-faced phenomenon of modernity involves recognising that there could be a dark side to modernisation, that—as Marx and Engels saw long ago—modernisation could have its victims as well as its beneficiaries. 

Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory. 6. Social Outsiders

On the other hand, it could be pointed out that Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century differs from Hitler's ideology in presenting a quasi-mystical view of National Socialism, reflecting Rosenberg's membership of the theosophical Thule Society. It was a view that Hitler rejected, and he refused to give Rosenberg's Myth an official party blessing—National Socialism, said Hitler, was about science, not "myth". Despite this, Rosenberg's book was included in the school curriculum. Yet, for all his emphasis on myth, ironically it was Rosenberg rather than Hitler who was overtly hostile towards Wagner, with Rosenberg unleashing unbridled contempt in his Myth for Wagner's overtly mythical Ring. It goes to show that National Socialism was often both politically and ideologically a "polycratic jungle", a haphazard bricolage of elements where clerico-fascism jostled for hegemony with neopaganism and pseudo-scientific racism, forming a hydra where some heads loomed bigger than others.

For all of his assertions to being modern, Hitler hated any art that struck him as aggressively modernist, an irony given the radically ultra-modernist implications of Wagner's tonal instabilities. In fact, Wagner comes so close to atonality that he makes contemporary popular music seem awfully conservative by comparison. Wagner was such a radical progressive that it was not until the decades after his death that his Zukunftsmusik (music of the future) gained wider social acceptance.

By way of contrast to beer-hall rabble-rouser, Hitler, the better educated Goebbels (who had an arts PhD) was slightly more open-minded, and had once hailed Paul Hindemith in 1934 as "unquestionably... one of the most important talents in the younger generation of composers" before capitulating that same year to Hitler's personal dislike of Hindemith in condemning him as an "atonal noisemaker", an irony indeed, reflecting a gross lack of musicological insight, given that Hindemith is only marginally more atonal than Wagner himself.

In 1934, Der Angriff, the paper founded by Goebbels, denounced Hindemith
as "music without resonance in the Volk" and "cultural Bolshevism"

In this regard, it should be noted that the somewhat bemused Arnold Schoenberg noted that a propagandist in the form of Paul von Klenau had attempted to justify the twelve-tone composition method by comparing the dominance of the tone row in pervading the structure of a composition to that of the Führer in Dritte Reich politics. Needless to say, the music of the Jewish Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School were banned in the Dritte Reich as being degenerate music (entartete Musik) and cultural Bolshevism (Kulturbolschewismus).

While Hitler wanted to be seen to be publicly associated with great German art such as Wagner, his real tastes tended far more towards those of the syrupy popular music of his era such as the operettas of Franz Lehár. For example, one of his personal bodyguards, Rochus Misch recalled:

After the altercation between Hitler and the Wehrmacht command staff... I noticed loud music coming from Hitler's study: 'Dein ist mein ganzes Herz, wo du nicht bist, kann ich nicht sein . . .' —Joseph Schmidt was a very well-known Jewish chamber music singer of the time. As I heard this beautiful song, from outside I looked in disbelief through the open window into Hitler's room. 

Rochus Misch: Hitler's Last Witness

This is the very 1929 recording Misch refers to:

Hitler's secretary, Traudl Junge, whose memoirs published as Until the Final Hour formed the basis of the film Downfall, also recalled that concerts from his gramophone collection culminated in a climactic rendition of the Donkey Serenade, which "usually formed the conclusion of the concert".

Frederic Spotts tells us that:

[Hitler] never missed a production of either [Lehár's The Merry Widow] or Johann Strauss's Fledermaus and drew large sums from his private account for lavish new stagings. Speer even claimed that he considered these works, as well as Carl Zeller's Der Vogelhändler and Strauss's Der Zigeunerbaron, as sacred parts of the German cultural heritage and the equal of Wagner.

Spotts: Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, p233

Further confirming that the music of the Dritte Reich was far more petty bourgeois and populist is the testimony of Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz, who says that she still turns off the radio whenever she hears Johann Strauss. At Auschwitz, the popular music of "Strauss waltzes, Suppé overtures, operetta arias, marches, and the like, prevailed at camp concerts and blared from loudspeakers". Even the Vienna Philharmonic New Year's concert of Strauss waltzes started in 1939 to raise money for the National Socialist Party's Winter Relief charity. The dollop of tritsch-trasch kitsch proved so popular that in the following year, it was moved to New Year's Day, and broadcast across the entire Empire (Reich).

Historians early on tended to be misled by Party propaganda that painted a romanticised picture of Hitler as a Great Man who was natural heir to the throne of all that was great in German culture, but more recent studies have come to sorely debunk this. Sir Ian Kershaw tells us in his Hitler biography:

Kubizek’s later claim that Hitler had read an impressive list of classics—including Goethe, Schiller, Dante, Herder, Ibsen, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche—has to be treated with a large pinch of salt. Whatever Hitler read during his Vienna years—and apart from a number of newspapers mentioned in Mein Kampf we cannot be sure what that was—it was probably far less elevated than the works of such literary luminaries.

Kershaw: Hitler—Hubris 1889–1936

Richard J. Evans tells us:

As a young man, Adolf Hitler became a devotee of the music-dramas of Richard Wagner... Historians have spent a good deal of energy trying to trace the effects of this youthful passion on the later dictator's ideas and beliefs. But he had another enthusiasm, too, less commented on, and cheaper to pursue: the pulp novels of Karl May, set in the Wild West and featuring cowboys, mostly of German descent, like Old Shatterhand, whose name refers to the power of his punch... . Even during the Second World War, he was still recommending May's novels to his generals and ordered 200,000 copies to be printed for the troops.

Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory. 23. Empire, Race and War

The exaggerated emphasis on high culture in shaping Hitler previously overshadowed the far greater influence of a mendacious pop culture on him. Inherent to the pulp westerns of May was a genocidal racism and expansionist lust for Lebensraum: 

...racists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century looked enviously across the Atlantic to the United States, where millions of European colonists had trekked westwards to form a new, prosperous and powerful society, displacing, marginalising and killing the continent's native inhabitants in the process, until the vast majority of them had perished from disease or starvation. Racial superiority, they thought, destined the European settlers to mastery...

Evans: The Third Reich in History and Memory. 23. Empire, Race and War

Or as Timothy Ryback put it:

Hitler’s essential core ... was less a distillation of the philosophies of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche than a dime-store theory cobbled together from cheap, tendentious paperbacks and esoteric hardcovers, which provided the justification for a thin, calculating, bullying mendacity.

Timothy Ryback: Hitler’s Private Library, p175

Behind the thin propagandist facade of a bloated Wagner caricature—a strategically placed fig leaf calculated to present an outer crust of cultural respectability—there lay an ill-disguised core of populist beer-hall tritsch-trash. In cultural terms, Hitler—painter of kitsch post-cards—was always more about petit bourgeois commodity art and its cheap, tendentious paperbacks, soapy operetta, and the Donkey Serenade, climaxing in the Horst-Wessel-Lied. It seems that Marxist philosopher, Ernst Bloch was on the right track after all when he wrote:

The music of the Nazis is not the Prelude to Die Meistersinger, but rather the Horst-Wessel-Lied; they deserve credit for nothing else, and no more can or should be given to them. 

Ernst Bloch: Über Wuzerln des Nazismus (1939). In the Suhrkamp Verlag edition of his works: Politische Messungen, Pestzeit, Vormärz, p.319-320. 

Even then it is as equally facile to discover the cause of the disasters of National Socialism in a petty bourgeois pop culture. Ultimately, Hitler and the National Socialists themselves, propelled onto the world stage by socio-economic circumstance, are to blame. After the catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad, the music fell silent, and the soirées culminating in the Donkey Serenade ceased. Personal secretary to Hitler, Christa Schroeder tells us:

After Stalingrad, Hitler could no longer relax to music. Then we spent the evenings listening to his monologues. These were invariable: his youth in Vienna, the years of struggle, the history of humanity, macrocosmos–microcosmos and so on. On most topics we knew what was coming next and so the evenings required endurance. 

Christa Schroeder: He Was My Chief

In the end, Hitler came to prefer the dulcet tones of his own voice to that of any music. The final voice of the Dritte Reich was not that of Lehár, Johann Strauss, or Wagner, but ultimately that of Hitler himself, and his endurance testing repetitive vexations. Even Hitler's death was far less gushingly romantic than the sentimental picture Fest paints. Far from an operatic immolation of histrionic kitsch value, Hitler's order that the bodies of he and his mistress be burnt with petrol was merely to avert the humiliation of being captured, shot, and having their bodies strung up on public display like those of Mussolini and his mistress for passers-by to spit and urinate on.

There are also problems with the book by Annette Heins that Fest refers to. It is really scarcely any better than Köhler's Wagner's Hitler, and all it is does is indulge in willfully selective quotation from editions of the Bayreuther Blätter in order to aggressively defend a brutally nazified propagandist interpretation of Wagner. In this regard the objections of the almost 90-year-old Peter Viereck in 2006 remain of utmost pertinence:

[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. ... [T]he 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.

Peter Viereck: Metapolitics (preface to 2006 edition)

The book by Heins is completely lacking in even an iota of the nuance that Viereck called for. Heins chooses to systematically overlook the discussions on animal rights, Buddhist and Vedantic philosophy, Schopenhauer, and the impassioned anti-militarist outcries that find their way into the journal. Nor does she really distinguish between the journal before and after Wagner's death, with the posthumous transformation of Bayreuth under Cosima and Houston Chamberlain into the centre of an aggressively right-wing populist (völkisch) cult. It seems that whenever Wagner is discussed, all possibility of nuance flies out the window, and nothing seems to be able to stem the flood of "countless exaggerated articles on WagnerHitler" coming from the pen of ignorant faux historians who feel fit to ignore all contemporary historiographic research on the Dritte Reich era in order to overwrite it with bombastic opera-centric narratives of history. In the end, it matters little how much of an expert one is on nineteenth-century opera, this alone qualifies nobody to be a historian of world events in the next century.

Despite the fact that the article by Joachim Fest was published way back in 1997, many of the points made by him remain of active contemporary interest, and should be duly noted. In particular, like Peter Viereck, Joachim Fest calls for the replacement of bombastic proclamations of absolute certainty where none exist with academic nuance. Nonetheless, I would take great issue with the right-wing cultural historicism implicit in Joachim Fest's review, claiming that National Socialist could rightly be seen as an atavistic cultural and artistic phenomenon firmly rooted in nineteenth-century romanticism. It assumes too much of a linear historical continuity with the nineteenth-century, and ignores the abrupt discontinuities engendered by the apocalyptic calamities of WWI and its political aftershocks. It is as though, like Viereck, Fest badly wants to believe that the course of history is wrought by the flights of fancy of dead poets and philosophers, but when Köhler takes him at his word and drives this romantic right-wing methodology to its logical conclusion, even Fest can see that all it produces is wanton absurdity. Fest knows too much about history for that, and shirks the invitation to leap into the romantic abyss hand in hand with Köhler. There in the abyss lurks the murky spectre of a seamless merger of romantico-operatic historicism with lurid Occult Reich speculations on Nazi satanism which often effortlessly blend into speculations on Nazi UFOs. Too many have seen the "WagnerHitler" route as the royal road to establishing the transcendental certainty of the romantic-atavistic cultural historicist path of interpreting the history of the Dritte Reich, but it is high time this path be well and truly declared a dead end.

Lastly, I should note that Fest is a difficult writer to translate. I wish he had the illuminating lucidity of Hans Mommsen (who also notes that after his death Wagner societies were turned into centres where the Völkisch right congregated—quite against Wagner's own wishes, it must be added). Instead, Fest writes in a faintly modernised version of nineteenth-century academic German prose recalling that of Wagner himself (this is not intended as praise). Meandering sentences are coupled with a tendency within phrases to write what almost seems like curtailed shorthand. This makes it even more important to attempt to translate the meaning rather than sticking too literally to the words themselves, and emphasising the reordering of the gross proliferation of subclauses into a more recognisably English sentence structure (following the example of Macquarrie & Robinson in their translation of Sein und Zeit).

Wagner's Willing Executioner
by Joachim Fest

Where he imagines primary sources, there Köhler hangs his hat: in his double biography he talks about Wagner's Hitler, rather than Hitler's Wagner 

Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 18.07.1997 

To the strangely neglected subject of politico-cultural history includes that of the role and the influence Richard Wagner has exercised over generations. The background story has been defined not only by the literally overwhelming amount of work, but also by Bayreuth's persistent coverup strategy that everywhere has its helpers. With his essayistic works, the composer belongs amongst the great ideologues of the nineteenth century, who, as re-envisaged by endless intermediaries, shaped the political-apolitical image inventory of the Germans, their ongoing affair with tragic entanglements and great sunsets, and which, not coincidentally, attained in Nazism, its hour upon the stage. Many of the questions that arise from all this have thus far been scarcely or insufficiently discussed.

There are signs, after all, that the wall of silence is beginning to crumble. Some, like the study by Annette Heins of the ideology of the "Bayreuther Blätter", has been released, and another is in preparation. Among the signs of that this interest is at last awakening also include Joachim Köhler's work on "Wagner's Hitler".

The title already points to the thesis of the book, according to which Hitler was nothing more than the willing executioner of the ideology developed in the music and writing of the Bayreuth master. Wagner's affections against the world—his retaliatory fantasies of salvation delusion which dominated him, and especially his anti-Semitism—found in Hitler a politically qualified disciple. Moreover the catastrophe delivered under his regime, which attempted to relive the operatic thrill—as for the first time with standing tickets in Linz, then in Vienna, Munich and elsewhere—that he craved like an addict over and over again on a gigantically enlarged stage.

These thoughts are not entirely new and have been imposed by many an observer. New, however, is the meticulous zeal with which Köhler collates the evidence. With an astonishing diligence he has brought sometimes disparate sources together as it supports his viewpoint, and basically what he presents is less an investigation than a petulant prosecution. In a sort of loosely linked double biography he connects the culture of resentment [Ressentimentbildungen] of one with those of the other, demonstrating parallels and comparable impulses.

That this can succeed, despite the almost eighty years that separate the two biographies, demonstrates once again, that despite all the modernity that he held to good stead, how deeply Hitler remained rooted in the nineteenth century, and how stale the ideological armamentarium was upon which he fell back. Naturally Gobineau is a key figure, but Köhler also draws in measurable width from Wagner's son-in-law, perhaps the most influential popular philosopher of the Wilhelmine era, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and also the members of the Wagner clan, the Festival leaders of the twenties, one of Hitler's early confidents, Kurt Luedecke, secretaries, aides, and many others. They all prove not only Hitler's obsessive Wagner-dependence, but also the fatal influence of Bayreuth on Nazi ideology, which was according to a remark by Wagner's grandson Franz Wilhelm Beidler in fact "a frighteningly large part of the Bayreuth ethos". 

This is the most obvious strength of the book. More broadly so than elsewhere, the reader is placed in the picture, of how Hitler framed all policies in mythic terms and understood himself not only as a "Wagnerian hero", but as the most faithful disciple of the admired man. The evidence is overabundant. Thus the famous resolution from "Mein Kampf", which records Hitler's "decision" to become a politician, is followed on with a sentence from Wagner: "I decided to become a musician".

But he also imitated the uninhibited Wagnerian resonances in his writings, whose analogies overarching space and time together with the preferred designs of the Meister, his will to annihilation, his cravings for grand "fiery remedies" that would scorch away everything old and degenerate, or for atavistic [atavistische] scenery with dragons, elves or luminaries—all this climaxing in rapturously celebratory twilights. Even the double suicide in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery following a preset that Wagner played out not only in several operas, but had considered several times for himself and Cosima.

But the citation mania of the author, by which all of this is attested to, is also a weakness of the book. There are paragraphs of a few lines, whose claim is supported by three or four quotes. Such a method not only frequently produces an effect of long winded ponderousness, but also gets in the way of the development of ideas. In addition, it unavoidably results in redundancy, as though the gaudy display of index cards would mean that not a word would be wasted. 

The dubious accusatory character of the book renders any nuanced differentiation an impossibility. According to Köhler everything ideological is already prefigured in Wagner: the hatred of the Jews, the eternal exterminationist rage, and the system of elaborate justifications. Only the question of "how"—"of its technical feasibility"—as he calls it, was still left open, a vacancy that Hitler reputedly filled. What he saw as his historic mission, was nothing more than the actualisation of Wagnerian postulates with Hitler thus merely the political executioner thereof.

The thesis diminishes the primacy of Hitler's criminality just as it blows Wagner's choleric, often seemingly merely peevish, anti-Semitism out of proportion until it attains the prominence of a cohesive ideology. Also the author reads pervasive anti-Judaic tendencies into his works, not restricted to the "Ring" or "Parsifal". Beckmesser for example appears to him as the caricature of a scheming Jew; he notes that the debate around this has been conducted for years, but takes no heed of counterarguments. Köhler alleges that the encounter, which Hitler had in September 1923, in Bayreuth with the terminally ill Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a few weeks before the failed Munich putsch, was of decisive importance to the "Final Solution", to which he can only furnish conjecture. He writes of Hitler's "explosive heightening of confidence" from being bequeathed this mission supposedly originating from Wagner himself. But still months later he saw himself, as historians know, merely as a "drum beater" and "St John figure" who would prepare the way for the expected Redeemer.

When Nietzsche says in that sense, that the ethos of academic work is to withhold nothing that could be counted against one's own thoughts, Köhler by contrast writes "beyond doubt", where serious doubt has been raised, and "certainly" precisely where no certainty exists. And yet for all his effort to wring anti-Semitic interpretations out of every Wagner utterance, the sources render nothing, so he speaks about a "code language" or encrypted messages for the initiated. However, sometimes something innocent is really just something innocent. And what remains precisely completely disregarded in the Case of Wagner is the obvious consideration that the progenitor of such complex works, permeated by contradictions, can not be reduced to a unitary delusional idea without doing him violence. 

Generally the book struggles to draw out distinctions. Wagner's anti-Semitism is undeniable. But you can also not overlook the remarkable attraction that he exercised both as a person and as a musician over Jews. He did not merely demonise them, but they were so increasingly drawn into his private circle that he once joked that Wahnfried was turning to a synagogue. And another time, overwhelmingly throwing out all prejudices he proclaimed: the Jews are in the end "the noblest of them all". Particularly at such points of fracture every delineation should be recognised. In addition, one must also distinguish between Wagner and the Bayreuth spawn that coarsened his legacy and radicalized it into a volkish mindset. 

Certainly much came to the fore in Hitler's rule which can be attributed to Wagner, not only in peacetime but also in time of war and destruction. But an unbroken line from the pamphlet "Judaism in Music" to Auschwitz can be drawn only with difficulty. Whatever happened was not only Wagner succession, but always also Wagner abuse, and whoever speaks of "Wagner's Hitler", should also speak of Hitler's Wagner. The task of uncovering this minute yet vast difference, a question which concerns all intellectual authorships, remains a still unresolved task. 

Joachim Fest 

Joachim Köhler: "Wagner's Hitler". The Prophet and his Executioner. Blessing Verlag, Berlin 1997. 512 pp, hardcover 49,80 DM.