The source of this publication is Musical Offerings, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 55–66. ISSN 2330-8206 (print); ISSN 2167-3799 (online). The full text can be found at the following link:
http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1062&context=musicalofferings
The author, at the time of publication, appears to have been an undergraduate doing a Bachelor of Arts in music degree at the Cedarville University Music & Worship Department:
http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1155&context=junior_and_senior_recitals
In the past, I have written some scathing reviews of senior authors, so being an undergraduate, I think it is fair to go easy on the young Carolyn Ticker, who at least tries to avoid polemical exaggeration so gross as to instantly disqualify her. I would certainly be inclined to praise and thank her for that.
The reason I think it is worthwhile spending time critiquing this undergraduate work is since it does, at least, make a half-hearted attempt at academic balanced neutrality, as evinced by the concluding paragraph:
It is difficult to ignore both Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitic views and the many ties between him and Adolf Hitler. Through his political writings and his operas, it is made clear that Wagner desired a pure German race and thought less of the Jews. Furthermore, several memoirs show that Hitler did not only love Wagner’s music, but he also had a strong connection with Wagner’s immediate family while in political office. These things arguably helped form many of his opinions and political ideologies. With this in mind, the association between Wagner and the Holocaust is difficult to deny. Even though Hitler had many influences, the evidence is clear: Wagner’s ideas helped inform and shape Hitler’s views, thereby playing a role, albeit a small one, in the Holocaust.
Notice in particular the avoidance of the overblown exaggerations found in Joachim Köhler implying “that Hitler based his entire philosophy and the whole Nazi apparatus on ideas explicitly drawn from Wagner’s writings and operas” (Midget: New York Times, 2001). Köhler himself was even more bombastic, pronouncing with complete certainty that “[r]eality meant for [Hitler] the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama”.
Sir Ian Kershaw wrote about Köhler:
It is nevertheless a gross oversimplification and distortion to reduce the Third Reich to the outcome of Hitler’s alleged mission to fulfil Wagner’s vision, as does Köhler, in Wagners Hitler.Sir Richard J. Evans also wrote of Köhler that “none of this is remotely persuasive”. The source citation for both quotes can be found in my review of Joachim Köhler’s book (which has been substantially revised and expanded).
So the question being posed here is whether even if the comically overblown version of the thesis of the monocausal origins of National Socialism and the Final Solution out of nineteenth-century opera is to be laughed out of court, a moderate version of the same thesis might still be salvageable out of the wreckage. If the rise of Hitler was not in toto caused singularly by a nineteenth-century composer, could the long-dead Wagner (1813-1883) still have played “a role, albeit a small one, in the Holocaust”?
Today we will go through the difficulties in entertaining such a causal link, however, diluted down to seeming moderate reasonableness it might be, thus giving it an air of apparent academic credibility. This simply illustrates the fact that just because the extreme version of the thesis has been discredited, that repackaging the thesis in “moderate” form does nothing to improve its credibility. For example, just because the idea that “all Muslims are terrorists” is discredited, it hardly follows that a “moderate” form of the same statement in the form of the statement “a significant proportion of Muslims are terrorists” is any better. That is like accepting that the Apollo mission to the moon found rocks and minerals on the moon disproving the thesis that the moon is made of cheese, but attempting to salvage the theory by claiming that it follows that a “moderate” version of the thesis is plausible claiming that surface of the moon is made of mineral is but the core is made of delicious molten mozzarella cheese.
Wider Background Literature
Every piece of writing is born into a pre-existing literature. No writing appears in a complete vacuum. You can tell what the background literature that gave impetus to any writing is just by looking at the bibliography, which, in the case of this piece by Ms Ticker, is as follows:
Brustein, William I. Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Evans, Joan. Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’s Germany. Journal of the American Musicological Society 56, no. 3 (2003): 525–594.
Gilbert, Shirli. Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Haas, Michael. Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
Hamann, Brigitte. Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth. Translated by Alan Bance. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005.
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf: The Official 1939 Edition. Translated by James Murphy. Warwickshire, UK: Coda, 2011.
Jacobs, Robert L. Wagner’s Influence on Hitler. Music & Letters (Oxford University) 22, no. 1 (1941): 81-83.
Jacobson, Joshua R. Music of the Jewish People. Choral Journal 55, no. 2 (2014): 67–69.
Kater, Michael H. Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
———. The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Köhler, Joachim. Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple. Translated by Ronald Taylor. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.
Levi, Erik. Music in the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Lo, Patrick. ‘The Most German of All German Operas’: An Analysis of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger and its Influence on Hitler's Nazi Ideology. International Journal of the Humanities 7, no. 9 (2009): 71–102.
Loeffler, James. Richard Wagner’s ‘Jewish Music’: Antisemitism and Aesthetics in Modern Jewish Culture. Jewish Social Studies (Indiana University) 15, no. 2 (2009): 2–36.
Ludwig, Mark. Silenced Voices: Music in the Third Reich. Religion and the Arts (Boston College) 4, no. 1 (2000): 96–112.
Meyer, Michael. The Politics of Music in the Third Reich. New York: Peter Lang, 1991.
Of these, only a minority of authors are professional historians: Na’ama Sheffi, Michael Meyer, William Brustein, Brigitte Hamann, Shirli Gilbert, Michael Kater, and Celia Applegate. Interestingly, these historians are not the dominant intellectual influences, and Na’ama Sheffi’s views have been most strikingly ignored or overridden. William Brustein’s book is very anti-Goldhagenist, yet the tone of Ticker’s essay is implicitly Goldhagenist. For a critical discussion of Daniel Goldhagen please refer to the relevant sections of my Köhler book review.
What is much more striking is the fact there is not a single reference to any of the major studies of the history and origins of the Final Solution. Absent are Saul Friedländer, Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning, Peter Longerich just to name a few. Sir Ian Kershaw is totally absent, as is Sir Richard J. Evans, Peter Longerich, Hans Mommsen, Joachim Fest etc. It is not possible to write about the Dritte Reich or the Final Solution without first engaging with this formidable body of academic literature. Those from a musicology background might feel daunted by the sheer amount of background reading this entails, to the point of rivalling a professional historian, but that is no excuse to ignore or brutally overwrite it without first critically engaging with it. If you wish to write on a subject, you must know something about it, otherwise, you will make a fool of yourself.
The trouble is that the most respected studies on the history of the Dritte Reich and Holocaust written by historians specialising in this field simply reject outright the notion that it had anything to do with some nineteenth-century opera composer. For example, Raul Hilberg’s monumental three-volume study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews does not even so much as mention Wagner’s name once, let alone partitioning blame to him. The reader is invited to do a word-based search of all three volumes:
The trouble is that the most respected studies on the history of the Dritte Reich and Holocaust written by historians specialising in this field simply reject outright the notion that it had anything to do with some nineteenth-century opera composer. For example, Raul Hilberg’s monumental three-volume study of the Holocaust, The Destruction of the European Jews does not even so much as mention Wagner’s name once, let alone partitioning blame to him. The reader is invited to do a word-based search of all three volumes:
The Destruction of the European Jews: Volume I
The Destruction of the European Jews: Volume II
The Destruction of the European Jews: Volume III
The same could be said for the four volumes Third Reich series by Sir Richard J. Evans, and the two-volume Hitler biography by Sir Ian Kershaw, where Wagner’s name may be mentioned en passant but that is about all.
The trouble is that Ms Ticker’s supervisors (assuming there were any) in a musicology department would probably lack familiarity with the massive historiographic literature dealing with the Dritte Reich era. Unfortunately, it is not possible to collapse twentieth-century world history down to nineteenth-century operatic history, and reading nineteenth-century opera libretti makes nobody an expert on massive events in the next century affecting hundreds of millions of people across multiple continents. The trouble is that when you are a hammer everything looks like a nail, and when you are a musicologist, everything about world history starts to look like musicological history, so that musicologists think they can ignore the vast historiographical literature on the Dritte Reich and the Final Solution. Being a musicologist no more automatically makes one an expert on Hitler, the Dritte Reich, or the Holocaust than being a maître fromager automatically makes one an expert on the moon.
On the contrary, opera is written in a wider socio-political context, and to grasp the significance of the art, it is necessary to have a thoroughgoing understanding of the wider historical backgrounds that gave rise to it—backgrounds in the plural because the historical backgrounds that gave rise to a Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and an Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) are so disparate that it is impossible to collapse their respective epochs into one to form WagnerHitler without doing immense violence to history.
On the contrary, opera is written in a wider socio-political context, and to grasp the significance of the art, it is necessary to have a thoroughgoing understanding of the wider historical backgrounds that gave rise to it—backgrounds in the plural because the historical backgrounds that gave rise to a Richard Wagner (1813-1883) and an Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) are so disparate that it is impossible to collapse their respective epochs into one to form WagnerHitler without doing immense violence to history.
I have already put together an annotated bibliography of the literature any musicologist must first come to grips with before writing about the history of the Dritte Reich era and the Final Solution:
Ticker cannot ignore this vast literature without ending up sounding like a music undergraduate going on a rant lecturing seasoned professional historians on how they are to rewrite the history of the Dritte Reich and Final Solution based on rampant speculations gleaned from fanciful readings of nineteenth-century opera libretti.
Importance of Primary Literature
The most important thing when a subject is controversial—and Wagner is always controversial—is that it makes it imperative that authors return to primary source literature. Wagner left behind a ten-volume legacy of complete published works. In addition to these volumes, the Breitkopf & Härtel complete letters is now up to volume 24, and there are plenty more volumes still to come. If an author’s view is under critical examination, it becomes crucial to refer to the wider context of that author’s primary literature. Incidentally, the Cosima diaries constitute secondary literature, and should be used cautiously with corroborative support wherever possible.
Ticker shows no engagement with this enormous body of primary literature, and is thus forced to depend entirely on secondary literature. Or else there are neither primary nor secondary supportive citations at all. For example, Ticker states that “Wagner’s political musings and his music display his strong desire for a pure German race, free from any other ethnicity”. While I appreciate that this sort of thing repeating rumour and hearsay until it becomes The Truth is standard practice when writing all sorts of inflammatory nonsense about Wagner, such statements need a primary source citation. For Wagner thought that as a result of the Thirty Year War, Germans were mongrels, and only the Jews were a pure breed.
Here it must first be recognised that it is, by comparison, very difficult, if at all possible to specify with certainty whether we can speak of a German race, one very distinctly preserved and unchanged, like that of the Jewish race.
Hier müsste denn wohl zunächst erkannt werden, dass, wenn wir von einer deutschen Rasse reden wollten, diese mit einer so ungemein ausgesprochen und unverändert erhaltenen, wie der jüdischen, verglichen, sehr schwer, ja fast kaum, mit Bestimmtheit zu spezifizieren sei.
Erkenne dich selbst. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March issue, 1881
The only Wagnerian myth of racial purity worth debunking, however, is that of the Wagnerian myth of Jewish racial purity. He was an ethnic assimilationist who believed that through intermixing (“Vermischung”) everyone will eventually end up racially homogeneous and undifferentiated (“ununterschieden”). For the primary supportive citations for these statements see my review of Joachim Köhler, along with my analysis of Judaism in Music, especially the final paragraph.
Most of the Wagner controversies are tiresome storms in a teacup created when speculative writers peddle salacious scandal involving the misdeeds of WagnerHitler (these being the same person) based on hearsay from secondary literature that also relies on other speculative secondary sources, going around in around in circles whipping themselves into hysteria as they make the fishy story bigger and bigger every time it repeats. It is hardly better than tabloid journalism.
Need for Academic Neutrality
Joachim Fest criticised Joachim Köhler for taking an approach devoid of all academic neutrality. His polemic took the form of what Fest described as a “petulant prosecution”. This is no way to read history in a credible and academic fashion. Fest recommended that writers always attempt to take into consideration diametrically opposite viewpoints such as in the debate over the intended ethnicity of Beckmesser. Unfortunately, Ticker shows the overwhelming influence of Köhler’s petulant and dubiously accusatory approach. Polemic must not be mistaken for historiography, and while nobody is required to like Wagner’s music, it is unnecessary to rewrite world history to justify one’s personal musical tastes. Likewise, late in his life, American historian Peter Viereck decided he had quite enough of the “countless exaggerated articles on WagnerHitler”, to which he added that “today what is overlooked is the crucial differences between the two” because “we need nuance”. Once again, Ms Ticker lacks nuance and she lapses into merely repeating tired old myths about WagnerHitler while using the usual run of fake evidence circulating endlessly in secondary bibliographic sources to support it.
Textural Problems with National Socialist Era Sources
Roman historians left records claiming that Carthaginians performed infanticidal rituals. Today this is thought to be Roman propaganda in the wake of the Carthaginian Wars, and that in an age of high infant mortality, Carthaginians merely had special rituals to commemorate the death of infants. Likewise, there are lots of spurious quotations attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.
Unsurprising, there are lots of fake quotes attributed to Hitler and other leading Party members. Many of these were concocted by Allied war propagandists to make them look ridiculous such as Goebbels allegedly saying “truth is the greatest enemy of the state”. He was far too shrewd a fox to ever have said anything so blatantly self-incriminating. Hitler certainly never also said “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”, as it likewise makes him look ridiculous. This means that with any quote, it is important to return to primary source quotations so that their veracity can be independently confirmed.
Unsurprising, there are lots of fake quotes attributed to Hitler and other leading Party members. Many of these were concocted by Allied war propagandists to make them look ridiculous such as Goebbels allegedly saying “truth is the greatest enemy of the state”. He was far too shrewd a fox to ever have said anything so blatantly self-incriminating. Hitler certainly never also said “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”, as it likewise makes him look ridiculous. This means that with any quote, it is important to return to primary source quotations so that their veracity can be independently confirmed.
Whole books of conversations with Hitler, such as Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, have been proven to be forgeries, just like the Hitler Diaries. You cannot use these fake sources as supportive evidence. Yet this is exactly what Ticker does in relying on Rauschning in attempting to run her polemic. The quote alleging that Hitler said that he had “no other forerunner than Wagner” comes from Rauschning. Ticker tellingly fails to credit the quote to Rauschning, instead citing a secondary bibliographic source for the quote, as though to obfuscate the forgery. Hitler would never have said anything that made himself look so ridiculous in the manner that the Allied war propaganda machine wished, by conceding National Socialism was a comical operatic movement based on Wagnerian principles. While that is certainly a brilliant witticism concocted to satirise Hitler, it is important not to be so humourless as to take the joke too seriously. Historical accuracy may have been the last thing that mattered in the fog of war, but given that the war is now over, historical accuracy and neutrality must be permitted to take precedence over colourful polemic and satire. In The Journal of Historical Review, Mark Weber wrote of Rauschning:
Another misleading use of secondary sources, where any author discussing an area of controversy should return to credible primary sources, is when Ticker makes the statement:
It is typical that Ticker is so unfamiliar with the history of this era that she refers to Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, as just “one of his architects”. Speer left memoirs published in English as Inside the Third Reich. The reader is invited to do a Google word-based search of the entire book, but nowhere does Speer state that “theatre was the vein that ran through [Hitler’s] entire life”, and certainly not in reference to Wagner. No bibliographic source citation is given for the quote, suggesting it has been made up and then attributed to Speer. Neither a search through Speer: Hitler’s Architect by Martin Kitchen, nor Albert Speer: Eine deutsche Karriere by Magnus Brechtken—both highly extensive studies of Speer—was helpful in tracking down the source of this alleged “quotation”. A search through transcripts of Speer’s testimony during the Nurnberg trials and a published interview from 1971 likewise failed to find the source of the “quotation”. The statement that Speer stated that “Wagner’s music was the cause that inspired him to unite the German nation” is not found in her secondary reference to Taylor, nor anywhere in Speer’s memoirs, interviews, or testimonials. That “quotation” too has been completely made up, and falsely attributed to Speer.
It should be mentioned that the “in that hour, it all began” quote is from Kubizek, although, in typical fashion, Ticker gives us a secondary source citation to Vaget. For a discussion of Sir Ian Kershaw’s critique of Kubizek and the kitschy propaganda story culminating in the comical “in that hour, it all began” outburst, see my Köhler review.
Swiss historian Wolfgang Haenel spent five years diligently investigating the memoir before announcing his findings in 1983 ... . The renowned Conversations with Hitler [Hitler Speaks], he declared are a total fraud. The book has no value “except as a document of Allied war propaganda”.
Haenel was able to conclusively establish that Rausching’s claim to have met with Hitler “more than a hundred times” is a lie. The two actually met only four times, and never alone. The words attributed to Hitler, he showed, were simply invented or lifted from many different sources, including writings by Juenger and Friedrich Nietzsche. An account of Hitler hearing voices, waking at night with convulsive shrieks and pointing in terror at an empty corner while shouting “There, there, in the corner!” was taken from a short story by French writer Guy de Maupassant.
Mark Weber: The Journal of Historical Review, Winter 1985-86 (Vol. 6, No. 4), pp. 499-500.Sadly, it is all too easy to prove anyone guilty using fake evidence, and most lay writers outside of professional historiographic fields of research believe Rauschning unquestioningly—especially where it suits a polemical end. In relying on fake quotations from Rauschning, Ticker automatically discredits herself, and destroys any chance of credible academic neutrality however much the angry mob of ignorant populist masses agree with her.
Another misleading use of secondary sources, where any author discussing an area of controversy should return to credible primary sources, is when Ticker makes the statement:
[Hitler], apparently, told one of his architects that Wagner’s music was the cause that inspired him to unite the German nation.A bibliographic source citation refers the reader to page 3 of the translator, Ronald Taylor’s, foreword to the English version of Köhler’s book Wagner’s Hitler. On looking up the reference we find that the translator has written:
‘Theatre was the vein that ran through [Hitler’s] entire life,’ said Speer.
It is typical that Ticker is so unfamiliar with the history of this era that she refers to Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect, as just “one of his architects”. Speer left memoirs published in English as Inside the Third Reich. The reader is invited to do a Google word-based search of the entire book, but nowhere does Speer state that “theatre was the vein that ran through [Hitler’s] entire life”, and certainly not in reference to Wagner. No bibliographic source citation is given for the quote, suggesting it has been made up and then attributed to Speer. Neither a search through Speer: Hitler’s Architect by Martin Kitchen, nor Albert Speer: Eine deutsche Karriere by Magnus Brechtken—both highly extensive studies of Speer—was helpful in tracking down the source of this alleged “quotation”. A search through transcripts of Speer’s testimony during the Nurnberg trials and a published interview from 1971 likewise failed to find the source of the “quotation”. The statement that Speer stated that “Wagner’s music was the cause that inspired him to unite the German nation” is not found in her secondary reference to Taylor, nor anywhere in Speer’s memoirs, interviews, or testimonials. That “quotation” too has been completely made up, and falsely attributed to Speer.
It should be mentioned that the “in that hour, it all began” quote is from Kubizek, although, in typical fashion, Ticker gives us a secondary source citation to Vaget. For a discussion of Sir Ian Kershaw’s critique of Kubizek and the kitschy propaganda story culminating in the comical “in that hour, it all began” outburst, see my Köhler review.
With Kubizek, great care needs to be taken to read him critically, as his book was originally commissioned as a propaganda piece by the National Socialist Party, and there is much left in there that is glowingly adulatory. Taking such adulation literally—especially for the sake of polemic—is simply not an acceptable white lie, but blatant intellectual dishonesty. In my review of Köhler, I discuss how modern historians critically approach Kubizek and Rauschning. In another analysis, I extensively discuss fake Nazi opera conspiracy quotations, and although the primary emphasis is on Tolischus, please also take note of the extensive analysis of Rauschning.
The key primary source Ticker uses is that of Mein Kampf. Once again, Ticker seems unaware of the grave concerns over the credibility of this text as a primary source. Some historians have come to discount it as lacking even an ounce of credibility. It has been revealed to contain countless propagandist distortions to the point that it is little more than a bloated autohagiography. It is simply impossible to use it in isolation without recourse to the large body of critical literature surrounding it. So when Hitler talks of his early teenage infatuation with Wagner in the manner of modern teenager’s enthusiasm for a rock star, Ticker fails to elucidate the fact that neither Hitler’s early musical interests have never been shown to have had any more influence on his political outlook than his fascination with Disney animations. Again there are plenty of more academically neutral works that do look at the early genesis of Hitler’s political thought such as Thomas Weber’s Hitler’s First War and Brigitte Hamann’s Hitler’s Vienna.
The key primary source Ticker uses is that of Mein Kampf. Once again, Ticker seems unaware of the grave concerns over the credibility of this text as a primary source. Some historians have come to discount it as lacking even an ounce of credibility. It has been revealed to contain countless propagandist distortions to the point that it is little more than a bloated autohagiography. It is simply impossible to use it in isolation without recourse to the large body of critical literature surrounding it. So when Hitler talks of his early teenage infatuation with Wagner in the manner of modern teenager’s enthusiasm for a rock star, Ticker fails to elucidate the fact that neither Hitler’s early musical interests have never been shown to have had any more influence on his political outlook than his fascination with Disney animations. Again there are plenty of more academically neutral works that do look at the early genesis of Hitler’s political thought such as Thomas Weber’s Hitler’s First War and Brigitte Hamann’s Hitler’s Vienna.
Sadly, few supervisors in the music department would be familiar enough with these textural issues to be able to critically tackle the question of reliability with respect to the historiography of this era in the course of supervising an undergraduate pupil’s work. However, it would be immeasurably more difficult to sneak the use of fake textual sources past a history department supervisor specialising in the era, who would simply not have accepted a thesis like that of Ticker’s so uncritically dependent on Rauschning and Kubizek.
So once again, we find that when examining the storm in the teacup more critically we find the same old fake quotes going around and around, while the credulous masses react with hysterically self-righteous moral indignation over the misdeeds of WagnerHitler. At least Ticker has the sense not to rely on the tired old chestnut that goes “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”. Another small sign of progress perhaps.
False Assumptions of Historical Continuity
This is important as authors like Köhler and Michael Haas (also found in Ticker’s bibliography) like to indulge in assumptions of a transcendental historical continuity between German history before and after 1914. Often the German 1848 pro-democracy revolution ends up becoming reduced to a practice run for Hitler’s fascist 1923 beer hall putsch (as it does with both Köhler and Haas), as disparate historical events are forced to conform to a grossly reductivistic teleological paradigm where the entire history of the German-speaking world ends up a prelude to the rise of fascism. Proof that the 1848 revolution was a proto-fascist putsch is that Wagner supported it, and proof that Wagner was a proto-fascist is that he supported the 1848 revolution. Meanwhile, serious historians only think of the 1848 revolution as a pro-democracy movement, and if Wagner supported totalitarianism he need not have participated in a revolution since the German states were already under the rule of hereditary dictatorships.
Further assumptions of transcendental continuity between nineteenth and twentieth German history are made when the likes of Siegfried Wagner, Cosima Wagner, and Houston Chamberlain are made out to be the clones of Richard Wagner. It is simply accepted a priori that these latter characters were devoid of any historically contingent self-interest and were merely selfless servants of the dead Wagner’s will, rather than being independent self-interested agents in a different age acting entirely out of their own historically contingent motives. Not even Cosima can be assumed a priori to be the same person as Richard Wagner. They are two people from two different generations, for Wagner’s second wife was young enough to be his daughter, and she outlived him by a good half a century. Wagner only had children late in his life (he had no children to his first marriage to Minna), and he died when his eldest child Siegfried was only 13 years old.
The fact is clear evidence exists that after Wagner’s death there occurred a regime change in Bayreuth, and the political orientation was steered by his second wife from radical left to extreme right. There is no doubt that those in the new Bayreuth order are guilty of having given great support to Hitler and his regime, but unlike in the Middle Ages we no longer automatically convict a father of the crimes of his children and in-laws, especially when the crime was committed after the father was long dead, often by in-laws who became in-laws only after Wagner’s death. Yet part of the crime of the descendants is that they so thoroughly betrayed Wagner’s liberal ideals.
The fact is clear evidence exists that after Wagner’s death there occurred a regime change in Bayreuth, and the political orientation was steered by his second wife from radical left to extreme right. There is no doubt that those in the new Bayreuth order are guilty of having given great support to Hitler and his regime, but unlike in the Middle Ages we no longer automatically convict a father of the crimes of his children and in-laws, especially when the crime was committed after the father was long dead, often by in-laws who became in-laws only after Wagner’s death. Yet part of the crime of the descendants is that they so thoroughly betrayed Wagner’s liberal ideals.
I quote from an excellent paraphrase of Friedländer found on the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial website of Professor Saul Friedländer, one of the greatest of all Holocaust scholars, both of whose parents were murdered by the regime:
Friedländer emphasizes in this context the special role played by the Bayreuth circle, though not by Richard Wagner himself, in the transmutation of the struggle against the Jews into “the central theme of world history” (p. 89). According to his analysis, Wagner’s anti-Semitism, ... had a profoundly ambivalent quality insofar as no fanatical anti-Semite would have allowed the presence of such close Jewish workers amongst his inner entourage.
Friedländer’s position on this matter is one that is so authoritative, carefully researched, and academically nuanced in its neutrality as to be nearly definitive. Key amongst these in the Bayreuth circle was the English born Houston Chamberlain. Though he is always introduced as “Wagner’s son-in-law”, keep in mind that Wagner never met him, nor knew of his existence. Cosima discovered him writing on Wagner in French journals, well after Wagner’s death, and in him found she the perfect propagandist to create the myth of the right-wing Wagner who allegedly vindicated her own views, all dressed up as an exercise in selfless devotion to a mythical spectre of her late husband that was entirely her own self-serving creation.
As for the assumption of linear continuity in the political character of both German nationalism and anti-Semitism please read this essay.
There is plenty of evidence that Wagner was, and remained throughout his life, a radical left-wing political thinker. Much of this evidence is examined in my review of Köhler. What damns Cosima most is that she herself noted a good deal of this down in her diaries, and despite this, replaced such ideals with her own extreme right-wing prejudices born of being raised a virtual orphan with small-minded French Catholic religious piety brutally instilled in her by her carers, in an age where the French were more notorious for their anti-Semitism than the Germans (for example in the Dreyfus affair). It was little wonder that she got on with Hitler at a time he was a minor regional political rabble-rouser, for he too was raised a small-minded Austrian village Catholic, raised with the view that the Jews were the murderers of God. The French Cosima, the English Chamberlain and Winifred, and the Austrian Hitler, all had in common that they were non-Germans who were trying to be more German than any German by overcompensating for their outsider status with exaggerated expressions of German hypernationalism accompanied by redirection of xenophobia towards Jews.
As a brief aside before we return later to the subject of varieties of anti-Semitism, to nip any suggestion in the bud of running an anti-Catholic polemic, I urge readers to keep in mind that even Catholic authors accept that at the foundation of the National Socialist Party in Catholic Bavaria, it had an ultra-Catholic character similar to the clerico-fascism of the Croatian Ustaše (note that Croatia was long part of Catholic Austria):
As a brief aside before we return later to the subject of varieties of anti-Semitism, to nip any suggestion in the bud of running an anti-Catholic polemic, I urge readers to keep in mind that even Catholic authors accept that at the foundation of the National Socialist Party in Catholic Bavaria, it had an ultra-Catholic character similar to the clerico-fascism of the Croatian Ustaše (note that Croatia was long part of Catholic Austria):
 |
| Catholicism and the Roots of Nazism: Religious Identity and National Socialism |
As the movement moved to the Protestant north, it shed its Catholic clerico-fascist character, as its base became Protestant. Catholics abandoned support, and many like Joachim Fest’s father were often immensely hostile towards the National Socialists. Nonetheless, it is as much a gross reductivism to call the Party a Protestant clerico-fascist movement based on the teachings of Martin Luther as some polemicists have suggested, as it is to call it an operatic movement based on the teachings of Richard Wagner.
However, in this process of manufacturing the myth of the right-wing Wagner, the historical Wagner had to be systematically overwritten. This is what one of the greatest of all historians of our age, Sir Richard J. Evans, has just published based on the actual historical records of Wagner’s role in the 1848-49 pro-democracy uprisings:
... democratic deputies now formed a new Saxon government, and revolutionaries flocked to its defence from outside the city. Among those who mounted the barricades was the Court music director Richard Wagner (1813-83), who had come under the influence of the ideas of Proudhon and Feuerbach and saw revolution as a way of creating the ideal conditions in which to achieve his mission as a universal artistic genius. Enthused by the uprising, he declared optimistically: ‘The old world is in ruins from which a new world will arise; for the sublime goddess REVOLUTION comes rushing and roaring on the wings of the storm’. More radical still was the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. He had arrived in Dresden in March 1849 after ... telling the delegates at the Pan-Slav Congress in Prague in June that they should ‘overthrow from top to bottom this effete social world which has become impotent and sterile’.
While Wagner busied himself making hand grenades and looking out for the Prussian army from the top of the Frauenkirche, Bakunin helped build the barricades. It was all to no avail. The Prussian government acted with lightning rapidity, sending its troops to the Saxon capital by train. Some 5,000 Prussian and Saxon soldiers marched in on 9 May 1849; demolished the barricades, and overcame the resistance of the 3,000 poorly organized revolutionaries defending them; 250 of the insurgents were killed in the action, 400 were wounded, and 869 others were arrested. ... Nearly 2,000 insurgents fled to Switzerland, among them Wagner.
Richard J. Evans: The Pursuit of Power Europe, 1815-1914, p.210-211
The historical Wagner who explodes off the pages of the historical records bears no resemblance to the mythical Wagner worshipped by the Bayreuth circle long after his death. Here is what Wagner’s Jewish friend Ferdinand Praeger wrote in 1892:
His temperament, all who have come into contact with him well know, was very excitable, and under such a strain as he then endured it was at fever pitch. Hainberger related to me a dramatic episode which thrilled Wagners frame and stirred the whole of the eye-witnesses. I recounted it subsequently to Wagner, and he agreed entirely as to the truth of Hainberger’s recital. It was in the morning about eight o’clock, the barricade at which Wagner and Hainberger were stationed was about to receive such morning meal as had been prepared, the outposts being kept by a few men and women. Amongst the latter was a young girl of eighteen, the daughter of a baker belonging to this particular barricade. She stood in sight of all, when to their amazement a shot was suddenly heard, a piercing shriek, followed by the fall of the girlish patriot. The miscreant Prussian soldier, one of a detachment in the neighbourhood, was caught redhanded and hurried to the barricade. Wagner seized a musket and mounting a cart called out aloud to all, “Men, will you see your wives and daughters fall in the cause of our beloved country, and not avenge their cowardly murder? All who have hearts, all who have the blood and spirit of their forefathers, and love their country follow me, and death to the tyrant.” So saying he seized a musket, and heading the barricade they came quickly upon the few Prussians who had strayed too far into the town, and who, perceiving they were outnumbered, gave themselves up as prisoners. This is but one of those many examples of what a timid man will do under excitement, for I give it as my decided opinion, and I have no fear of lack of corroboration, that Richard Wagner was not personally brave.
Praeger: Wagner as I Knew Him
It is thought that Praeger, one of many of Wagner’s Jewish friends, wrote this book to counter the systematic replacement of the historical Wagner by a mythical right-wing imposter that bore not the slightest resemblance to the man Praeger knew—and the new Bayreuth circle were most incensed by him, doubly so since Praeger had the grave impertinence to point out that the majority of Wagner’s works were completed during his marriage to his first wife, Minna, whom Praeger remembered fondly. Houston Chamberlain complained that Praeger’s book completely lacked any primary supportive quotations from Wagner even though Praeger had reprinted an entire essay by Wagner in his memoirs, in a meticulously prepared English translation of a quality still unrivalled in Wagner English translations after over a hundred years. On the contrary, it is Chamberlain’s book on Wagner, which, by comparison, lacks primary quotations from Wagner.
Contrary to what the new Bayreuth circle may have led others to believe, the posthumous mythical Wagner was concocted, not to honour Wagner, but to sanctify his family’s own self-serving agenda. It is certainly true that this mythical Wagner did aid and abet the rise of fascism, but that was scarcely the fault of the historical Wagner, a figure who was not only long dead, but whose true revolutionary legacy had been deleted from history and then brutally written over. Those of us, like Richard J. Evans, trying to rediscover the historical Wagner still keep struggling because we keep finding well-meaning but misguided polemicists wanting to eternally resurrect the phoney Wagner myth. That bloated mythical Doppelgänger needs to be deflated and then definitively killed off with the intellectual equivalent of a stake through the heart. With the excavation of the long-buried historical Wagner of documented archival evidence, we see now a portrait emerging that is frightfully unfamiliar, of someone who more resembles Che Guevara than Adolf Hitler.
As for the question as to whether Wagner later turned his back on his liberal ideals, sometimes all one has to do is ask him, for Cosima condemns herself before the judgement of history by recording that when on the 27th of March 1882 (a year before his death) Wagner is asked if he is a “liberal, democrat”, he answers with an unequivocal “yes”. And there is plenty else to corroborate this.
Use of Dated and Discredited Literature
The biggest mistake in Ticker’s article is that:
This primary source [i.e. Mein Kampf, a grossly propagandist autohagiography of questionable accuracy] supports the truthfulness of secondary accounts written by men such as Köhler and Kater.
Mein Kampf says nothing about the ideological influence of opera composers, and the treatment of this early rant as a Grand Master Plan is a problematic position that Ticker fails to justify. And Ticker seems to be oblivious to the fact that Köhler has distanced himself from the views in his earlier book that she uses as supportive secondary literature. It is almost embarrassing to read so blatant an error, as a quick Google search should quickly bring up my review of his book (which brims with primary supportive citations backed up by secondary supportive citations from super heavyweight experts on the era such as Friedländer, Evans, Fest, and Kershaw). As for Kater, as you would expect from a professional historian, at least his critique of Bayreuth apologists has more than a little ring of truth to it, since fascist figures from Cosima, Siegfried, Winifred, to Wolfgang have been mostly subject to endless sycophantic hagiographies—amongst them by Hamann—while all Wagner gets is endless demonography. Justice is only served when blame is apportioned where it is deserved. Kater seems plainly oblivious to the degree to which he too is being twisted and manipulated by propaganda as he writes:
In the decades since the German catastrophe of 1945, apologists for Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival have attempted to whitewash the reputation of the composer and his oeuvre by emphasizing the aesthetic integrity that Bayreuth has always stood for and stressing the differences between the original phenomenon and anything that smacked of National Socialism. Hence, it has been claimed that Wagner’s Judeophobia, if subjected to careful qualification, proves less than virulent. The hypernationalism with which Bayreuth came to be identified in the chauvinistic era before World War I, it is implied, originated after Wagner’s death and was the product of unconscionable manipulators of the master’s heritage. According to this carefully crafted legend, it was the Nazis, especially Hitler himself, who grafted the evils of fascism, extreme nationalism, and antiSemitism onto the Wagner-Bayreuth legacy. Hence, these issues did not originate with Wagner himself but with National Socialists guilty of improper historical judgment and manipulative abuse. Moreover, Wagner’s heirs—namely his son Siegfried and Siegfried’s English- born wife, Winifred (nee Williams)—have been portrayed as innately innocent and gentle souls.
Michael Kater: The Twisted Muse
Yet nothing makes the latter Bayreuth circle look more ridiculous than comparison with the historical Wagner, after the explosion of the mythical Wagner they cynically overwrote him with, and of which they rendered memory oblivious to. In fact, the Wagner descendants are such a dreadful lot that Bayreuth needs rather be blown up in Boulezian fashion to start again afresh: Sprengt die Opernhäuser in die Luft!
Blind Acceptance of the Myth of “Acting Under Orders”
One of the major things to come out of the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem on the charge of enacting genocide was the lameness of the defence that he was merely “acting under orders”. Eichmann claimed he was merely forced into carrying out a grand Hitler Order (Führerbefehl) issued to a minor bureaucrat such as he, coming like a lightning bolt from high above. Historians largely agree that Eichmann made the notion of a Hitler Order up. He changed the date that this order was allegedly issued during the course of interrogation and cross-examination, and other testimonies contradict him. It is more likely that Eichmann was acting on his own agency and powers in ordering mass murder, “working towards the Führer” by anticipating and second-guessing what he thought was expected of him to advance his career. No evidence exists that anything like a decisive “Führerbefehl” was ever issued. An excellent analysis can be found in Longerich’s book, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews.
Oddly, a whole industry has sprung up creating similarly lame excuses of “acting under orders” for other National Socialists. It is claimed that Hitler (the little disciple) was merely an innocent victim forced by Wagner (the Great Prophet) to issue a decisive order for genocide, a secret Meisterbefehl handed down to Hitler through Chamberlain as he lay on his deathbed. Like Eichmann, we are lead to believe that Hitler too was a poor innocent forced into “acting under orders” from his Meister—“for only he who gave this task can release me from it” (sic). Likewise, the whole of the Bayreuth circle are let off the hook because their cumulative radicalisation towards a startlingly original völkisch anti-Semitism, violently discontinuous in its socio-political character from anything in the past, was not engendered of their own self-interested initiatives since they too were merely “acting under orders” from Wagner, to whose Meisterbefehl the poor innocents were forced to be blindly subservient. It is a gross exercise in systematic exculpation of those who do not deserve it in the slightest bit.
One of the major things to come out of the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem on the charge of enacting genocide was the lameness of the defence that he was merely “acting under orders”. Eichmann claimed he was merely forced into carrying out a grand Hitler Order (Führerbefehl) issued to a minor bureaucrat such as he, coming like a lightning bolt from high above. Historians largely agree that Eichmann made the notion of a Hitler Order up. He changed the date that this order was allegedly issued during the course of interrogation and cross-examination, and other testimonies contradict him. It is more likely that Eichmann was acting on his own agency and powers in ordering mass murder, “working towards the Führer” by anticipating and second-guessing what he thought was expected of him to advance his career. No evidence exists that anything like a decisive “Führerbefehl” was ever issued. An excellent analysis can be found in Longerich’s book, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews.
Oddly, a whole industry has sprung up creating similarly lame excuses of “acting under orders” for other National Socialists. It is claimed that Hitler (the little disciple) was merely an innocent victim forced by Wagner (the Great Prophet) to issue a decisive order for genocide, a secret Meisterbefehl handed down to Hitler through Chamberlain as he lay on his deathbed. Like Eichmann, we are lead to believe that Hitler too was a poor innocent forced into “acting under orders” from his Meister—“for only he who gave this task can release me from it” (sic). Likewise, the whole of the Bayreuth circle are let off the hook because their cumulative radicalisation towards a startlingly original völkisch anti-Semitism, violently discontinuous in its socio-political character from anything in the past, was not engendered of their own self-interested initiatives since they too were merely “acting under orders” from Wagner, to whose Meisterbefehl the poor innocents were forced to be blindly subservient. It is a gross exercise in systematic exculpation of those who do not deserve it in the slightest bit.
Conflation of Different Varieties of Anti-Semitism
We have seen time and again that Wagner’s left-wing nationalism and anti-Semitism arose from a different historical ground, one discontinuous to those of the later Bayreuth circle after his death. Jewish historians such as Saul Friedländer today recognise are different varieties of anti-Semitism, which must not be assumed to be all the same. One of these is Christian anti-Semitism. If we entertain Ticker’s thesis that:
Wagner’s ideas helped inform and shape Hitler’s views, thereby playing a role, albeit a small one, in the Holocaust.
It also means that we have to equally ask what role the Christian anti-Semitism of the churches played. I do note again that Carolyn Ticker is publishing in the Department of Music and Worship, Cedarville University—an independent Baptist religious school.
 |
| There is a growing polemical literature insinuating that Christianity is a form of proto-Nazism |
If we are to characterise Wagner’s own left-wing anti-Semitism as proto-Nazi, why should we not call the anti-Semitism of the New Testament the forerunner of Mein Kampf or call Christianity itself a form of proto-Nazism? It opens up a huge can of worms. Yet to say that traditional Christian anti-Semitism is the key contributor to the Holocaust can be dangerously polemical in a way that equally risks losing sight of academic neutrality.
The problem once again is the assumption of grand historical continuity between either left-wing or Christian anti-Semitism and that of National Socialism. There is no simple, linear continuity of escalating degrees of ideological severities of proto-Nazi Christian anti-Semitisms starting in the age of Roman Empire, escalating with Medieval Jew hatred, being radicalised by Luther in the Reformation, before ultimately culminating in the Shoah, and sensible historians like Saul Friedländer will have no truck with such assumptions of linear continuity even while emphasising the centrality of ideology in driving the Holocaust.
More important than fictional linear continuities heading straight to Auschwitz from whatever variety of anti-Semitism you choose, is the catastrophic discontinuity introduced by the Great War, followed by the Treaty of Versailles, traumatic social changes from the German Revolution, and topped off by hyperinflation and the Great Depression. These are the more relevant radicalising socio-political factors aggressively fanning the violent flames of tumultuous social conflict—that is to say—class conflict. History engenders ideology as much as ideology engenders history, and even then the expression of that ideology is fundamentally conditioned by the conflicts inherent to its immanent historical context.
So if you come from the Christian-right, and you decide to pick on left-wing anti-Semitism for the origin of the Final Solution, you could point out that Wagner’s friend, the socialist anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, just like other socialists of his age, including Marx, did make anti-Judaic statements. Yet it would as polemical to exaggerate the historical influence of the left-wing anti-Semitism of a Wagner, Bakunin, Proudhon, Feuerbach, Marr, Marx, and culminating in its most extreme expression from Eugen Dühring, in allegedly shaping National Socialist ideology in toto, as it would be to point the finger of blame at Christian anti-Semitism. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
This is what Jewish conductor Hermann Levi had to say about his friendship with Wagner:
It is often said that Jewish Wagnerians like Hermann Levi, Ferdinand Praeger, and Theodor Herzl (founder of Zionism) were “self-hating Jews” who were drawn to Wagner by the thrilling promise of extermination in concentration camps. That, however, is even less probable than the claims by the Bayreuth circle of unselfish eternal fidelity to Wagner, and it is more likely that the likes of Levi recognised Wagner’s views were more akin to the left-wing anti-Semitism of the likes found in a Karl Marx or a Proudhon, calling for Jew and German to become “united and undifferentiated” through assimilation rather than being of the right-wing Christian variety of the likes of Pastor Adolf Stöcker (Stoecker).
We know from Cosima that she may have tried to interest Wagner in the growing right-wing völkisch anti-Semitism of the likes of Stöcker that first arose towards the end of his life. She hardly found much sympathy, as she noted in her diary:
The problem once again is the assumption of grand historical continuity between either left-wing or Christian anti-Semitism and that of National Socialism. There is no simple, linear continuity of escalating degrees of ideological severities of proto-Nazi Christian anti-Semitisms starting in the age of Roman Empire, escalating with Medieval Jew hatred, being radicalised by Luther in the Reformation, before ultimately culminating in the Shoah, and sensible historians like Saul Friedländer will have no truck with such assumptions of linear continuity even while emphasising the centrality of ideology in driving the Holocaust.
More important than fictional linear continuities heading straight to Auschwitz from whatever variety of anti-Semitism you choose, is the catastrophic discontinuity introduced by the Great War, followed by the Treaty of Versailles, traumatic social changes from the German Revolution, and topped off by hyperinflation and the Great Depression. These are the more relevant radicalising socio-political factors aggressively fanning the violent flames of tumultuous social conflict—that is to say—class conflict. History engenders ideology as much as ideology engenders history, and even then the expression of that ideology is fundamentally conditioned by the conflicts inherent to its immanent historical context.
So if you come from the Christian-right, and you decide to pick on left-wing anti-Semitism for the origin of the Final Solution, you could point out that Wagner’s friend, the socialist anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, just like other socialists of his age, including Marx, did make anti-Judaic statements. Yet it would as polemical to exaggerate the historical influence of the left-wing anti-Semitism of a Wagner, Bakunin, Proudhon, Feuerbach, Marr, Marx, and culminating in its most extreme expression from Eugen Dühring, in allegedly shaping National Socialist ideology in toto, as it would be to point the finger of blame at Christian anti-Semitism. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
This is what Jewish conductor Hermann Levi had to say about his friendship with Wagner:
Even his fight against what he calls “Jewishness” in music and in modern literature springs from the noblest motives. That he harbors no petty anti-Semitism like some country squire or Protestant bigot, is shown by his behavior toward me, toward Joseph Rubinstein, and by his former relationship with Tausig, whom he loved dearly.
Levi: letter to his father, 1882 (quoted from Milton Brener)
It is often said that Jewish Wagnerians like Hermann Levi, Ferdinand Praeger, and Theodor Herzl (founder of Zionism) were “self-hating Jews” who were drawn to Wagner by the thrilling promise of extermination in concentration camps. That, however, is even less probable than the claims by the Bayreuth circle of unselfish eternal fidelity to Wagner, and it is more likely that the likes of Levi recognised Wagner’s views were more akin to the left-wing anti-Semitism of the likes found in a Karl Marx or a Proudhon, calling for Jew and German to become “united and undifferentiated” through assimilation rather than being of the right-wing Christian variety of the likes of Pastor Adolf Stöcker (Stoecker).
We know from Cosima that she may have tried to interest Wagner in the growing right-wing völkisch anti-Semitism of the likes of Stöcker that first arose towards the end of his life. She hardly found much sympathy, as she noted in her diary:
Dr Förster sent us an invitation for the founding of an anti-Semitic newspaper. R[ichard] recalled that he had written to him from Naples:
“You should take a look to see if you fit in Prince Bismarck’s trash [Kram], and it looks like you fit into the trash, because you’ve adopted his entire programme. It looks like we Bayreuthers with our ideals 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
She had to wait until Wagner was dead and out of the way before she could gleefully fling the doors of Bayreuth open to Bernard Förster’s völkisch successors, while using Wagner’s by then rapidly growing posthumous celebrity status to give it her phoney stamp of endorsement. Bayreuth was to remain “isolated” from such völkisch monstrosities no longer, but instead, be made synonymous with it. Incidentally, Cosima did make contact with Adolf Stöcker, only to be disappointed in him because his Christian anti-Semitism was not radical enough for her—Cosima could not accept the notion that Jews could be redeemed by conversion.
Meanwhile Wagner’s growing fame after his death made millionaires out his heirs, for his inherited legacy was no longer that of the struggling revolutionary proto-atonal avant-garde composer of his own lifetime, making it necessary for his heirs to abruptly sever themselves from history by pretending that Wagner had actually never been a radical left-wing revolutionary at all, but had always been part of the petit bourgeois status quo to which these nouveau riche millionaires themselves now comfortably belonged. The curse of the Wagner clan, like that of the Nibelung ring, is the curse of money and power.
So with that we see that the discontinuity of Bayreuth as an institution between Wagner’s lifetime and that after his death are engendered by the Wagner family’s dramatic change in socio-economic circumstance, accompanied by equally abrupt changes in the wider context of German socio-political and economic circumstance, with the most dramatic discontinuity being engendered by the apocalypse of World War I. Any attempt to support a romanticised myth of a grand cultural continuity between nineteenth romanticism of the sort found in Wagner and National Socialist mythology merely romanticises Nazism as a grand movement supposedly arising out of the finest traditions of German art. It represents a craven surrender to Nazi propaganda.
Meanwhile Wagner’s growing fame after his death made millionaires out his heirs, for his inherited legacy was no longer that of the struggling revolutionary proto-atonal avant-garde composer of his own lifetime, making it necessary for his heirs to abruptly sever themselves from history by pretending that Wagner had actually never been a radical left-wing revolutionary at all, but had always been part of the petit bourgeois status quo to which these nouveau riche millionaires themselves now comfortably belonged. The curse of the Wagner clan, like that of the Nibelung ring, is the curse of money and power.
So with that we see that the discontinuity of Bayreuth as an institution between Wagner’s lifetime and that after his death are engendered by the Wagner family’s dramatic change in socio-economic circumstance, accompanied by equally abrupt changes in the wider context of German socio-political and economic circumstance, with the most dramatic discontinuity being engendered by the apocalypse of World War I. Any attempt to support a romanticised myth of a grand cultural continuity between nineteenth romanticism of the sort found in Wagner and National Socialist mythology merely romanticises Nazism as a grand movement supposedly arising out of the finest traditions of German art. It represents a craven surrender to Nazi propaganda.
So once again Joachim Fest turns out to have been vindicated:
... 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.
You cannot draw such unbroken lines, not even faint ones, from the time of Wagner to Hitler without doing immense violence to history. For what characterises these disparate epochs is more their catastrophic discontinuities rather than any imagined transcendental continuity and direct lines of unbroken lineage. The end result is that the hypothesis positing a weak line going from Wagner-Hitler invariably disintegrates in the face of historical evidence as quickly as does the extreme thesis positing an equally mythical WagnerHitler. For both Wagner-Hitler and WagnerHitler are based on the a priori presupposition of the grand simplicity of an overarching socio-political continuity between the time periods of these two disparate historical figures, a grand presupposition that simply fails to hold.
No comments:
Post a Comment