In the vastly speculative Nazi opera conspiracy literature, almost entirely written by amateur pseudo-historians evincing little evidence of credible qualification to write on this period of history, you will often find the quote repeated that Hitler stated that he had no forerunner other than Richard Wagner.
Today we will examine the credibility of this alleged Hitler quote so that we can ask ourselves whether Hitler really did state that “he had no forerunner other than Wagner”.
The source of this quote is Hermann Rauschning and his book Hitler Speaks (Gespräche mit Hitler), 1940. The original statement goes:
Hitler recognised no forerunner. With one exception: Richard Wagner.
Hitler erkannte keine Vorläufer an. Mit einer Ausnahme: Richard Wagner.
Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler (German Edition) (Kindle Location 3214). Europa Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition. All quotes from the book will come from this source, with all English translations being henceforth my own.
It comes from the section of this book entitled Hitler, Wagner, Gobineau. Rauschning’s book was published as Gespräche mit Hitler, Zürich 1940. It originally appeared in the US as The Voice of Destruction, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940; and in the UK as Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims, Thornton Butterworth, 1940. It became an instant worldwide best-seller.
For a while, Hermann Rauschning was a National Socialist Party member before falling out with the regime, and fleeing abroad. Rauschning rose to the position of vice-Gauleiter and President of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig from 1933-34, making him a minor National Socialist Party official. Rendered desperately impecunious by his exile, Rauschning was seduced into writing Hitler Speaks by a French publisher with an unprecedented 125,000 francs advance, but only under the stipulation that the publisher could dictate the form that the personal caricature of Hitler would take. The project was conceived by Hungarian-born journalist Emery Reves, who ran a prominent anti-German propaganda agency in Paris during the 1930s. Evidence has also emerged that the British journalist, Henry Wickham-Steele, assisted in writing the memoir. Wickham-Steele was a close associate of Lord Robert Vansittart, a notorious anti-German propagandist in Britain:
In the introduction to the German edition of Hitler Speaks, Marcus Pyka tells us Rauschning’s collaborative effort with his Allied propagandist team nicely hit the mark:
The problem today is that even if, as Goebbels acknowledged, that there was fact intermixed with fiction, it has become rather challenging now to retrospectively distinguish what was fact from what was poesie. That means that, if any of Rauschning’s book is to used be as a factual historical record, it would have to be meticulously fact-checked against other more reliable corroborative sources, and never used as primary supportive evidence on its own.
After the war, Soviet prosecutors used Rauschning’s book as evidence in the Nuremberg war crimes trial, which prompted an objection from Hermann Göring, who asked: “Do you really believe that the Führer revealed his most intimate thoughts to just any provincial politician that he ran into?” (“Glaubt man denn, daß der Führer jedem hergelaufenen Provinzpolitiker seine geheimsten Ansichten offenbart hätte?”). During the Nuremberg Trials, Hermann Göring recalled that he had only ever fleetingly seen Rauschning twice (“nur zweimal ganz flüchtig gesehen”).
A whole generation of historians merrily quoted from Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks until 1983 when it was exposed by Swiss historian Wolfgang Hänel as fraudulent:
Hänel’s research might have been overlooked had it not been for an in-depth piece published in the magazine Die Zeit bringing it to the attention of a wider readership.
Rauschning falsely claimed to have met with Hitler “more than a hundred times”. In reality, Rauschning never met with Hitler alone, only on official duties along with a party of other state officials. You can instantly tell that the all-too-conveniently-cute claim that Hitler revealed his deepest most intimate thoughts in confessing to Rauschning that he had “no other forerunner other than Richard Wagner” is nicely fabricated in a manner calculated to make Hitler look maximally ridiculous.
Volker Ullrich in the first volume of his Hitler biography also states that:
Interestingly, Alan Bullock’s pioneering 1952 biography of Hitler already ignores the Rausching quotation about Hitler having “no forerunner other than Richard Wagner’, suggesting that Bullock sensed that it was too comically exaggerated to be taken seriously. Likewise, John Toland in his 1976 Hitler biography also seems to have intuited that the statement was more satire than fact and likewise ignores this Rauschning quote. However, in Joachim Fest’s 1973 Hitler biography, there are 50 hits to the name of Rauschning. Here is a typical example of how Fest quoted Rausching in 1973:
After Wolfgang Hänel revealed Rauschning to be fake in 1983, Fest too promptly gives up on quoting from Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks e.g. his Der Untergang (2002), his collection of essays Nach dem Scheitern der Utopie, Bürgerlichkeit als Lebensreform, and Flüchtige Größe. Most strikingly Fest even gives up quoting Rauschning when discussing Wagner such as in his highly critical review of Joachim Köhler for Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled Wagner’s Willing Executioner published in 1997.
Beyond this one citation to Hitler Speaks, Evans never quotes from the “conversations” that Rauschning alleges to have had with Hitler, dismissing them as fantasies “which never took place outside Rauschning’s mind”. Evans does not quote at all from Rauschning in The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War, The Third Reich in History and Memory, Rereading German History, or Rethinking German History. Evans cites Rauschning only once more in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine German, but only to refute Rauschning’s misogynistic claim in Hitler Speaks that Hitler was brought to power by the vote of “hysterical women”.
What Evans exposes is that for Rauschning a key message to take away from Germany’s experiment with democracy in the Weimar Republic was that women must never again be allowed to vote because they always vote “hysterically” in support of shrieking fascists promising to “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama”:
Finally, the often controversial historian, Götz Aly, also generally avoids quoting from Rauschning (Endlösung, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, Hitlers Volksstaat, Europa Gegen die Juden, Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust?), except for this one cautious use of Hitler Speaks (citation number “2” is to Hermann Rauschning, Gespräche mit Hitler; Zurich, 1940, p. 122) in a book written in collaboration with Susanne Heim:
Aly and Heim here have made cautious and selective use of Rauschning, avoiding any of the alleged “conversations” he claims to have had with Hitler. Once again, this hardly proves that Rauschning’s phoney “conversations” can now be freely quoted from by art historians. The existence of such plans for the conquest of Eastern Europe can be independently corroborated, and Rauschning is merely reporting plans he had plausibly been personal eyewitness to in his role as vice-Gauleiter. It is totally different to colourful depictions of Hitler shrieking, pointing into empty corners, becoming hysterical over Wagnerian opera, before declaring that he had no forerunners other than Wagner:
Fascinatingly, the word hysteria (Hysterie) or hysterical (hysterisch) occurs 13 times in Rauschning’s book, these invariably corresponding to the sections of in the book that stand up least to critical fact-checking. He even repeats the now dated notion that National Socialism was an atavistic movement characterised by a “hysterical romanticism”, something Rauschning insinuates was calculated to appeal maximally to hysterical women voters, thus engendering an unbroken linear continuity between National Socialism and nineteenth romantic art. It is something modern historians refuse to accept as it merely romanticises National Socialism, inadvertently perpetuating their own self-adulatory mythologizations, however, though it may be, in negative form.
Here is the satirical scene depicting Hitler shrieking:
Passages like this can hardly be taken seriously today by historians, especially given the gross misogyny inherent to the dated sense of humour inherent to the period satire. The idea that Hitler had become a shrieking “hysterical woman” from excessive preoccupation with opera belongs in the same category of dated homophobic tales such as the alleged “sexual perversion” of Hitler’s supposed homosexuality. It simply beggars belief that ignorant musicologists and art historians writing Nazi opera fantasies think they can ignore the example set by innumerable leading experts in the field and continue to quote such ridiculous tall tales from Rauschning’s book ad infinitum without the slightest credible attempt at thoroughgoing independent corroboration, instead hoping that petulant brute repetition alone will suffice to transform fake quotes will into Eternal Truths.
Sadly, for many, the war is not yet over. The emotional traumas live on, so that the admirable and entirely sincere desire to commemorate countrymen, friends, and family members who died fighting the National Socialist regime, or who were victims of its unspeakable terror, becomes conflated with a desire to keep the emotive power inherent to Allied anti-Hun propaganda alive along with its exaggerated satirical demonization of a Hitler shrieking hysterically that “he had no forerunner” other than a nineteenth-century opera composer. Here, the stark black-and-white dichotomies characteristic of propaganda evinces greater sex appeal than academic shades of grey. For the grossly Manichean reductivisms inherent to war propaganda permit greater emotional identification with a fictionalised “heroic” depiction of history than the endlessly nuanced shades of neutral grey found in genuine academic historiographic studies.
For a while, Hermann Rauschning was a National Socialist Party member before falling out with the regime, and fleeing abroad. Rauschning rose to the position of vice-Gauleiter and President of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig from 1933-34, making him a minor National Socialist Party official. Rendered desperately impecunious by his exile, Rauschning was seduced into writing Hitler Speaks by a French publisher with an unprecedented 125,000 francs advance, but only under the stipulation that the publisher could dictate the form that the personal caricature of Hitler would take. The project was conceived by Hungarian-born journalist Emery Reves, who ran a prominent anti-German propaganda agency in Paris during the 1930s. Evidence has also emerged that the British journalist, Henry Wickham-Steele, assisted in writing the memoir. Wickham-Steele was a close associate of Lord Robert Vansittart, a notorious anti-German propagandist in Britain:
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| Vansittart was a prominent anti-German propagandist. Sir Richard J. Evans states that today this sort of thing “cannot really be considered serious in scholarly terms” (Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification 1800-1996, p. 126). |
In the introduction to the German edition of Hitler Speaks, Marcus Pyka tells us Rauschning’s collaborative effort with his Allied propagandist team nicely hit the mark:
The Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, spewed that Rauschning is the “basest propagandist of the other side”. And the ousted Danzig vice-gauleiter even appeared to him to be the “most sophisticated and dangerous of propaganda adversaries”, who had “very cleverly” blended together “fact and poesie” in his book.
Goebbels geiferte, Rauschning sei der »gemeinste Propagandist auf der Gegenseite«, ja der geschaßte Danziger Vize-Gauleiter erschien ihm nun sogar als »raffiniertester und gefährlichster Propagandagegner«, der in seinem Buch »sehr geschickt Wahrheit und Dichtung« miteinander verbunden habe.
Introduction by Marcus Pyka to Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler (German Edition) (Kindle Location 111). Europa Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition.
Pyka gives a reference in the endnotes to the Goebbels diary entries from 13.2., 18.2. and 14.3.1940, in Elke Fröhlich (Ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil I: Aufzeichnungen 1923-1941, Volume 7: July 1939—March 1940 (Ed. Elke Fröhlich), Munich 1998, p. 307, 314 und 348. Pyka adds that: “The value of Goebbels diaries, especially in this edition, is in its own right ultimately controversial. Only brief mention can be made here to the particular critical textural problems and the different interpretations of its ‘authenticity’ in contemporary historical research.”
The problem today is that even if, as Goebbels acknowledged, that there was fact intermixed with fiction, it has become rather challenging now to retrospectively distinguish what was fact from what was poesie. That means that, if any of Rauschning’s book is to used be as a factual historical record, it would have to be meticulously fact-checked against other more reliable corroborative sources, and never used as primary supportive evidence on its own.
After the war, Soviet prosecutors used Rauschning’s book as evidence in the Nuremberg war crimes trial, which prompted an objection from Hermann Göring, who asked: “Do you really believe that the Führer revealed his most intimate thoughts to just any provincial politician that he ran into?” (“Glaubt man denn, daß der Führer jedem hergelaufenen Provinzpolitiker seine geheimsten Ansichten offenbart hätte?”). During the Nuremberg Trials, Hermann Göring recalled that he had only ever fleetingly seen Rauschning twice (“nur zweimal ganz flüchtig gesehen”).
A whole generation of historians merrily quoted from Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks until 1983 when it was exposed by Swiss historian Wolfgang Hänel as fraudulent:
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13514710.html
http://www.zeit.de/1985/30/kuemmerliche-notizen/komplettansicht
Hänel’s research might have been overlooked had it not been for an in-depth piece published in the magazine Die Zeit bringing it to the attention of a wider readership.
Rauschning falsely claimed to have met with Hitler “more than a hundred times”. In reality, Rauschning never met with Hitler alone, only on official duties along with a party of other state officials. You can instantly tell that the all-too-conveniently-cute claim that Hitler revealed his deepest most intimate thoughts in confessing to Rauschning that he had “no other forerunner other than Richard Wagner” is nicely fabricated in a manner calculated to make Hitler look maximally ridiculous.
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| “No forerunner other than Richard Wagner”: a satirical parody nicely calculated to make Hitler look maximally ridiculous. Wagner has always been a favourite target of comedians and satirists |
While a minority of historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper thought that Rauschning had been dismissed outright too hastily, the overwhelming majority of serious modern historians agree that there is sufficiently grave doubt as to Rauschning’s credibility that it is safest to just disregard him altogether. Hugh Trevor-Roper incidentally also cheerfully “authenticated” the egregiously fake Hitler Diaries. Thus in the preface to volume one of his Hitler biography, Hitler 1889-1936: Nemesis (published in 1998), Sir Ian Kershaw writes:
Sir Richard J. Evans likewise states in his scathing review of Köhler’s 1997 book, Wagner’ Hitler: the Prophet and his Disciple:
I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether.
Sir Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1889-1936: Nemesis (1998)
Sir Richard J. Evans likewise states in his scathing review of Köhler’s 1997 book, Wagner’ Hitler: the Prophet and his Disciple:
Nor is Köhler’s credibility helped by his reliance on dubious and discredited sources such as Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, a record of interviews most of which never took place outside Rauschning’s mind.
Sir Richard J. Evans: Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), p. 149.
Volker Ullrich in the first volume of his Hitler biography also states that:
[Alan] Bullock and [Joachim] Fest saw this book [Hitler Speaks] as a major source [both prior to 1983], while Kershaw doubted its authenticity. See Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, p. xiv [1998]. The present volume [of Ullrich’s own Hitler biography] also does not use this source.
Volker Ullrich: Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889–1939 (Kindle Location 15557). Random House. Kindle Edition.
Interestingly, Alan Bullock’s pioneering 1952 biography of Hitler already ignores the Rausching quotation about Hitler having “no forerunner other than Richard Wagner’, suggesting that Bullock sensed that it was too comically exaggerated to be taken seriously. Likewise, John Toland in his 1976 Hitler biography also seems to have intuited that the statement was more satire than fact and likewise ignores this Rauschning quote. However, in Joachim Fest’s 1973 Hitler biography, there are 50 hits to the name of Rauschning. Here is a typical example of how Fest quoted Rausching in 1973:
Hitler himself, in fact, later declared that with the exception of Richard Wagner he had “no forerunners”, and by Wagner he meant not only the composer, but Wagner the personality, “the greatest prophetic figure the German people has had”. One of his favorite ideas, to which he returned frequently, concerned Wagner’s towering importance “for the development of German man”. He admired the courage and energy with which Wagner exerted political influence “without really wishing to be political”, and on one occasion admitted that a “literally hysterical excitement” overcame him when he recognized his own psychological kinship with this great man. [Citation to Rauschning’s Gespräche pp.215f].
After Wolfgang Hänel revealed Rauschning to be fake in 1983, Fest too promptly gives up on quoting from Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks e.g. his Der Untergang (2002), his collection of essays Nach dem Scheitern der Utopie, Bürgerlichkeit als Lebensreform, and Flüchtige Größe. Most strikingly Fest even gives up quoting Rauschning when discussing Wagner such as in his highly critical review of Joachim Köhler for Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled Wagner’s Willing Executioner published in 1997.
With respect to other even more major historians than Fest, neither Saul Friedländer in his two-volume study of the Holocaust (Nazi Germany and the Jews; Vol. I 1997, Vol. II 2007), nor Raul Hilberg in his three-volume study of the Holocaust (The Destruction of the European Jews, Third Edition, 2003) mention or quote from Rauschning once. Peter Longerich does not quote Rauschning in any of his key publications (Heinrich Himmler: A Life, Goebbels, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Wannseekonferenz: Der Weg zur “Endlösung”, Hitler: Biographie, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!”: Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933-1945). David Cesarani does not quote from Rauschning in Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-49. Laurence Rees does not cite Rauschning in his book, Holocaust. Christopher Browning does not cite Rauschning in Ordinary Men, Remembering Survival, or The Origins of the Final Solution. Nicholas Stargardt in The German War does not cite Rauschning. Mark Mazower does not cite Rauschning in Hitler’s Empire. All of these publications date from later than 1983.
Sir Richard J. Evans is even dismissive of Rauschning’s facile analysis of the phenomenon of National Socialism:
Sir Richard J. Evans is even dismissive of Rauschning’s facile analysis of the phenomenon of National Socialism:
The conservative administrator Hermann Rauschning, who began by working with the Nazis but by the late 1930s had become one of their fiercest and most persistent critics, described [the National Socialist rise to power] as a ‘nihilist revolution’, a ‘directionless revolution, a revolution merely for revolution’s sake’. It destroyed all social order, all freedom, all decency; it was, as the title of the English edition of his book claimed, a ‘revolution of destruction’, nothing more. But in his passionate diatribe, that ended with a clarion call for the restoration of true conservative values, Rauschning was doing little more than using ‘revolution’ as a rhetorical bludgeon with which to beat the Nazis for their overturning of the order he prized. Other revolutions, whatever Rauschning may have thought, delivered more than mere destruction.
Sir Richard J. Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany (Kindle Locations 8351-8357). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Beyond this one citation to Hitler Speaks, Evans never quotes from the “conversations” that Rauschning alleges to have had with Hitler, dismissing them as fantasies “which never took place outside Rauschning’s mind”. Evans does not quote at all from Rauschning in The Third Reich in Power, The Third Reich at War, The Third Reich in History and Memory, Rereading German History, or Rethinking German History. Evans cites Rauschning only once more in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine German, but only to refute Rauschning’s misogynistic claim in Hitler Speaks that Hitler was brought to power by the vote of “hysterical women”.
What Evans exposes is that for Rauschning a key message to take away from Germany’s experiment with democracy in the Weimar Republic was that women must never again be allowed to vote because they always vote “hysterically” in support of shrieking fascists promising to “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama”:
Hitler was discovered by women. Society women pined for young men after the [Great] War. Well before their menfolk, the wives of great industrialists supported him financially, secretly donating him money or artworks during [hyper]inflation. In the crisis, educated women turned the political prophet into a well paid propagandist. ... They, however, were the ones who pampered him, who overinflated his self-esteem through undeserved premature laurels. The enthralled devotion of women, to the point of pseudo-religious ecstasy, was the indispensable stimulant for overcoming his lethargy.
Hitler, incidentally, knew what he got from these women. He “nurtured” these relations with care and calculation. He gave his Gauleiters the most coolly objective instructions to approach the task of propaganda for women with exceptional diligence. In the struggle for power, it was women who ultimately carried Hitler to power with their votes.
Von Frauen ist Hitler entdeckt worden, Damen der Gesellschaft haben nach dem Kriege den noch jungen Mann gefördert. Vor ihren Männern waren es die Frauen einiger Großindustrieller, die ihn finanziell unterstützten, ihm Geld, ihm in der Inflation Kunstgegenstände zusteckten. In einem Kreise gebildeter Frauen wurde aus dem bezahlten Propagandisten der politische Prophet. ... Aber sie waren es, die ihn verwöhnt, die sein Selbstgefühl durch unmäßige Vorschußlorbeeren übersteigert haben. Die bis zur pseudo-religiösen Ekstase gesteigerte begeisterte Hingabe der Frauen war das für ihn unentbehrliche Stimulans, um seine Lethargie zu überwinden.
Übrigens wußte Hitler, was er an den Frauen hatte. Er »pflegte« diese Beziehungen mit Bedacht und Berechnung. Er gab seinen Gauleitern die kühl-sachlichsten Anweisungen, sich mit besonderem Fleiß der Propaganda unter den Frauen anzunehmen. Im Kampf um die Macht waren es die Frauen, die mit ihrer Stimmabgabe schließlich Hitler so hoch emportrugen.
Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler (German Edition) (Kindle Locations 3554-3568). Europa Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition. My emphasis.
Finally, the often controversial historian, Götz Aly, also generally avoids quoting from Rauschning (Endlösung, Hitler’s Beneficiaries, Hitlers Volksstaat, Europa Gegen die Juden, Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust?), except for this one cautious use of Hitler Speaks (citation number “2” is to Hermann Rauschning, Gespräche mit Hitler; Zurich, 1940, p. 122) in a book written in collaboration with Susanne Heim:
Rauschning documents an early example of this kind of political consultancy in National Socialist Germany from 1934:
I reported to Hitler what I had seen of Koch’s ‘planning agency’ [Koch was the Gauleiter of East Prussia]. A young academic, Professor von Grünberg, had devised all kinds of fantastical ‘model landscapes’ for the future. He had had maps drawn up at his institute, marked out with lines of communication, fields of force, lines of force, motorways, railway lines, canal projects. The whole of the East as far as the Black Sea, as far as the Caucasus, was divided up into meticulously planned economic zones. These maps showed Germany and western Russia as a single vast land mass with integrated economic and transport systems. The whole scheme was German-centred, of course – planned and run by Germany, for Germany. In this ‘planned economy’ Poland had ceased to exist, let alone Lithuania …2Götz Aly and Susanne Heim: Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic of Destruction (Kindle Locations 93-100). Orion. Kindle Edition.
Aly and Heim here have made cautious and selective use of Rauschning, avoiding any of the alleged “conversations” he claims to have had with Hitler. Once again, this hardly proves that Rauschning’s phoney “conversations” can now be freely quoted from by art historians. The existence of such plans for the conquest of Eastern Europe can be independently corroborated, and Rauschning is merely reporting plans he had plausibly been personal eyewitness to in his role as vice-Gauleiter. It is totally different to colourful depictions of Hitler shrieking, pointing into empty corners, becoming hysterical over Wagnerian opera, before declaring that he had no forerunners other than Wagner:
He [Hitler] discovered with an almost hysterical excitement that everything he read of this great spirit [Wagner] had corresponded to his innermost, unconscious, slumbering view.
Er hätte mit einer geradezu hysterischen Erregung gefunden, daß alles, was er von diesem großen Geist las, seiner innersten, unbewußten, schlummernden Anschauung entsprochen habe.
Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler (German Edition) (Kindle Locations 3225-3226). Europa Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition. My emphasis.
Fascinatingly, the word hysteria (Hysterie) or hysterical (hysterisch) occurs 13 times in Rauschning’s book, these invariably corresponding to the sections of in the book that stand up least to critical fact-checking. He even repeats the now dated notion that National Socialism was an atavistic movement characterised by a “hysterical romanticism”, something Rauschning insinuates was calculated to appeal maximally to hysterical women voters, thus engendering an unbroken linear continuity between National Socialism and nineteenth romantic art. It is something modern historians refuse to accept as it merely romanticises National Socialism, inadvertently perpetuating their own self-adulatory mythologizations, however, though it may be, in negative form.
Here is the satirical scene depicting Hitler shrieking:
“There, there! in the corner! Who’s standing there?” He stamped up and down, shrieking as was his habit. He had to be shown that there was nothing peculiar there, and then he would gradually calm down. Afterwards he slept for hours. And then, for a while, things were bearable with him again.
Hysteria is contagious. Anyone who has ever seen how normal and splendid fellows slowly and inexorably lose their character from living together with hysterical women, will not be surprised at the fact that the hysteria is spreading to an entire people through the high leaders of the Reich, Gauleiters, officials, and officers.
»Da, da! in der Ecke! Wer steht da?« Er habe aufgestampft, habe geschrieen wie man das an ihm gewohnt sei. Man habe ihm gezeigt, daß da nichts Ungewöhnliches sei und dann habe er sich allmählich beruhigt. Viele Stunden hätte er danach geschlafen. Und dann sei es für eine Zeit wieder erträglich mit ihm gewesen.
Hysterie ist ansteckend. Wer jemals gesehen hat, wie normale prächtige Burschen im Zusammenleben mit hysterischen Frauen langsam aber unaufhaltsam ihren Charakter verlieren, dem wird es nicht verwunderlich erscheinen, daß die Hysterie sich über die hohen Reichsleiter, Gauleiter, Beamte, Offiziere, auf ein ganzes Volk ausbreitet.
Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler (German Edition) (Kindle Locations 4026-4031). Europa Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition. My emphasis.
Passages like this can hardly be taken seriously today by historians, especially given the gross misogyny inherent to the dated sense of humour inherent to the period satire. The idea that Hitler had become a shrieking “hysterical woman” from excessive preoccupation with opera belongs in the same category of dated homophobic tales such as the alleged “sexual perversion” of Hitler’s supposed homosexuality. It simply beggars belief that ignorant musicologists and art historians writing Nazi opera fantasies think they can ignore the example set by innumerable leading experts in the field and continue to quote such ridiculous tall tales from Rauschning’s book ad infinitum without the slightest credible attempt at thoroughgoing independent corroboration, instead hoping that petulant brute repetition alone will suffice to transform fake quotes will into Eternal Truths.
The biggest problem with Rauschning’s book is that he claims to accurately quote Hitler. However, memoirs left by Hitler’s secretarial staff suggest that his monologues were often interminably long and rambling. Unless it were possible to tape them or take notes, it would be difficult to accurately put them to print from memory, especially years later. Given that there is some suggestion that the content of Rauschning’s book might have been shaped by strong outside editorial input from a staff keen to arraign Hitler with a portrait placing him in as unflattering a light as possible, this might have further introduced retrospective distortion, and what memory psychologists call “false memories”. If you read random excerpts from Mein Kampf and Hitler speeches to a lecture theatre full of first-year history students, who were not permitted to take notes or record the several hours long reading, all interspersed with random distraction, and then participants were all asked to recall the contents of the reading years later solely from memory, the resulting memoirs would hardly be accurate and would vary enormously from one another.
Nor was historical documentary accuracy to posthumously aid post-war historians hardly the chief aim of Rauschning’s French publishers, least of all musicological historiographic accuracy with respect to some nineteenth-century composer. These people had no reason whatsoever to have the slightest genuine academic interest in some nineteenth-century opera composer. Their aim was quite rightly to discredit Hitler at all cost, and given how destructive his fascist regime was, “just a little bit” of satirical distortion would have surely appeared ethically perfectly justified by the sheer direness of the political circumstances.
However, given that Hitler’s regime stands completely and utterly discredited without having to have even the slightest recourse to such wildly satirical wartime satirical distortions, it is neither helpful nor necessary for historians to perpetuate antiquated Allied propaganda. Moreover, the polemic was intended to be directed first and foremost against Hitler. It was hardly intended for serious posthumous consumption by art historians and musicologists, nor driven by even the slightest genuine academic interest in nineteenth-century opera. That is why on no occasion do such wartime Hitler polemicists actually cite any of Wagner’s own remarkably voluminous body of theoretical essays and letters in an academically or forensically credible manner. Today, historical accuracy must be allowed to take precedence, and the colourful myths engendered by politically motivated satirical distortions of the past put aside.
The trend in historiographic studies of the Dritte Reich era today tends towards demythologisation. This involves the unrelenting deflation of an absurdly bloated Fürhermythus. The biggest problem is when this Mythus is perpetuated in negative form as a means of demonising Hitler, where it can have the effect of inadvertently perpetuating the Fürhermythus, even inflating it grotesquely beyond what the National Socialist regime ever did. Thus the idea that Hitler’s regime was a gargantuan exercise in Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk where Hitler claimed that “he had no forerunner other than Richard Wagner” merely inflates the already ridiculous Fürhermythus even further. In actuality, the term Gesamtkunstwerk does not even originate from Wagner, and there is no recorded evidence of Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, Streicher, Heydrich, Speer, or Himmler ever having used this phrase either. Wagner’s own use of the phrase Gesammtkunstwerk (his own spelling) occurs only in two Feuerbachian communist revolutionary works, from 1849 and again in 1850, after which he never used it again.
The trend in historiographic studies of the Dritte Reich era today tends towards demythologisation. This involves the unrelenting deflation of an absurdly bloated Fürhermythus. The biggest problem is when this Mythus is perpetuated in negative form as a means of demonising Hitler, where it can have the effect of inadvertently perpetuating the Fürhermythus, even inflating it grotesquely beyond what the National Socialist regime ever did. Thus the idea that Hitler’s regime was a gargantuan exercise in Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk where Hitler claimed that “he had no forerunner other than Richard Wagner” merely inflates the already ridiculous Fürhermythus even further. In actuality, the term Gesamtkunstwerk does not even originate from Wagner, and there is no recorded evidence of Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, Streicher, Heydrich, Speer, or Himmler ever having used this phrase either. Wagner’s own use of the phrase Gesammtkunstwerk (his own spelling) occurs only in two Feuerbachian communist revolutionary works, from 1849 and again in 1850, after which he never used it again.
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| The word Gesammtkunstwerk occurs in one of Wagner’s Communist prose works: “Only through Communism does Egoism find itself completely satiated” (Nur im Kommunismus findet sich der Egoismus vollständig befriedigt). The heroic grandeur of Gesammtkunstwerk represents the grandeur of socialist revolutionary art: the artwork of the future. From an original 1850 printing of The Artwork of the Future |
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| The title cover of Wagner’s Artwork of the Future and socialist philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach’s, Philosophy of the Future. Wagner’s Music of the Future is revolutionary |
Sadly, for many, the war is not yet over. The emotional traumas live on, so that the admirable and entirely sincere desire to commemorate countrymen, friends, and family members who died fighting the National Socialist regime, or who were victims of its unspeakable terror, becomes conflated with a desire to keep the emotive power inherent to Allied anti-Hun propaganda alive along with its exaggerated satirical demonization of a Hitler shrieking hysterically that “he had no forerunner” other than a nineteenth-century opera composer. Here, the stark black-and-white dichotomies characteristic of propaganda evinces greater sex appeal than academic shades of grey. For the grossly Manichean reductivisms inherent to war propaganda permit greater emotional identification with a fictionalised “heroic” depiction of history than the endlessly nuanced shades of neutral grey found in genuine academic historiographic studies.
That is why, along with the fake quote that goes “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”, Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks unfortunately remains one of the favourite pieces of alleged evidence proffered to support long antiquated—though undoubtedly cute—anti-Hun propaganda notions that National Socialism was a crackpot operatic movement secretly based in its entirety on wacky Wagnerian principles. Quotes from Rauschning often circulate around in second-hand form, divorced from their source, where each time the tale is retold it grows to become even more exaggerated. Nazi opera fantasy writers often deliberately eschew revealing where such supposed “quotes” come from so as to obfuscate the fact that they originate from a source that has long been demonstrated to be fake. Little surprisingly, Rauschning’s fishy story rapidly grows in size to the point of turning into a grandiose conspiracy theory where Hitler secretly plotted to “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama”.
A good example of the surreptitious use of quotes from Rauschning is found in Zalampas (1990) buttressed by the usual run of fake quotes and empty claims to a supreme certainty expurgated of every possibility of doubt:
A good example of the surreptitious use of quotes from Rauschning is found in Zalampas (1990) buttressed by the usual run of fake quotes and empty claims to a supreme certainty expurgated of every possibility of doubt:
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| Sheree Zalampas: Adolf Hitler: A Psychological Interpretation of His Views on Architecture, Art, and Music (1990) |
Fake Rauschning quotes are repeated ad infinitum by art historians of the likes of Zalampas (who has a doctorate in music and art history but has no proper historiographic qualification). Quotes such as these belong amongst a whole legion of fake “Nazi quotes” that get repeated interminably by gullible amateur historians who are ill-trained to scrutinise the credibility of historical source texts. Although Rausching is not credited by Zalampas as the source of the string of quotes, all of them can be shown to originate in Hitler Speaks. Rauschning thus alleges in the same section of Hitler Speaks entitled Hitler, Wagner, Gobineau that Hitler confessed to him that:
Rauschning goes on to further depict Hitler as a hysterical opera crazed madman, and a twentieth-century mad King Ludwig II and this characterisation also quoted verbatim by Zalampas:
Since Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks had been exposed as fraudulent in 1983, seven years before Zalampas published her book in 1990, she obfuscates the fraud by substituting a bibliographic citation to Gilbert instead. The bibliographic citation number “127” given to us by Zalampas as the alleged source of the string of quotes is not to Rauschning at all, where most of them originate, but instead to p.48 of G.M. Gilbert’s The Psychology of Dictatorship, 1950. However, neither p.48 nor the rest of the book by Gilbert contains anything of the kind:
Here is a further classical example of the gross misuse of Rauschning, this time by Joachim Köhler:
Notice that neither the translator nor editor for the English edition of Köhler’s book evinces the slightest knowledge of the historiographic textural issues surrounding Rauschning so that the German title of Gespräche mit Hitler has been translated as Conversations with Hitler. This further functions to obfuscate the use of a text widely regarded as largely fraudulent. At no point does the translator or editor point out that the English edition of Rauschning’s book is usually referred to by its published title as Hitler Speaks (or less commonly, The Voice of Destruction, based on in the US edition). It goes to show that coming from a musicological background does not excuse authors and editors of ignorance of the vast historiographic literature on this era when discussing Wagner’s place in the wider context of German history.
Similar repetitions of fake Hitler quotations invented by Rauschning include this recent use of Hitler Speaks by music graduate, Carolyn Ticker in 2016—a full 33 years after serious historians abandoned the use of Rauschning:
The bibliographic citation is not to Rauschning as it ought to be, but to a dated wartime propaganda text by Robert L. Jacobs, Wagner’s Influence on Hitler, p.82 (Music & Letters, 22, No. 1; Oxford University, 1941). The influence of Rauschning is once more immediately discernible. The reason for hiding behind a dated secondary source citation from the 1940s is once again to shamelessly obfuscate the fact that the Rauschning text it is based on has long been exposed as a fraud. It is a basic precept of academic methodology that where a subject is controversial an author must return to credible primary bibliographic sources, and brute repetition of antiquated second or third-hand secondary sources like Jacobs does nothing to restore Rauschning’s credibility.
Such mindless repetition by credulous amateur pseudo-historians of long-discredited fake Nazi quotations is a common beginner’s error. The most notorious of all such fake quotes is the one oft attributed to Joseph Goebbels that goes:
“I have the most intimate familiarity with Wagner’s way of thinking”»Mir sind die Gedankengänge Wagners aufs innigste vertraut«Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler (German Edition) (Kindle Location 3239). Europa Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition. The quotation marks are Rauschning’s own.
And that:
“At every stage of my life I come back to him [i.e. Wagner]”»Ich kehre auf jeder Stufe meines Lebens zu ihm zurück«.Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler (German Edition) (Kindle Locations 3239-3240). Europa Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition.
Rauschning goes on to further depict Hitler as a hysterical opera crazed madman, and a twentieth-century mad King Ludwig II and this characterisation also quoted verbatim by Zalampas:
He, Hitler, had happened upon Wagner either by accident or by predestiny. He discovered with an almost hysterical excitement that everything he read of this great spirit had corresponded to his innermost, unconscious, slumbering outlook.Er, Hitler, sei durch Zufall oder Schickung früh auf Wagner gestoßen. Er hätte mit einer geradezu hysterischen Erregung gefunden, daß alles, was er von diesem großen Geist las, seiner innersten, unbewußten, schlummernden Anschauung entsprochen habe.
Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler (German Edition) (Kindle Locations 3225-3226). Europa Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition. My emphasis.
Here is a further classical example of the gross misuse of Rauschning, this time by Joachim Köhler:
One of the few whom [Hitler] admitted into his sanctum—and who published their discussions even before the outbreak of the war—was Hermann Rauschning. Although Rauschning, then President of the Danzig Senate, attributes many more statements to the Führer in his Conversations with Hitler [Hitler Speaks] than he can possibly heard, he must have been [no supportive citation] an ideal person with whom to discuss Wagner. An eloquent Classical scholar, he had also studied music in Munich, where he got to know the Wagner epigones, and had also attended the Bayreuth Festival. Whenever Hitler met a connoisseur of Wagner, he abandoned his inhibitions and talked freely [no supportive citation], so it was this shared love of the Master, we may presume, that led Rauschning, a member of the Party, being admitted into the private recesses of Hitler’s mind [no supportive citation]. It is hardly possible that what Rauschning subsequently recorded is merely the product of his imagination—it resembles too closely the secret doctrines of the Bayreuth inner circle.
Joachim Köhler: Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple, p238 (1997, English translation 2000)
The argument here goes that because “it is hardly possible that what Rauschning subsequently recorded is merely the product of his imagination” that therefore Rausching’s writings must be authentic. It is like arguing that “it is hardly possible that the idea that the moon is made of cheese is a product of the imagination” and that therefore the moon must be made of cheese. The lame attempt at corroborating Rausching with the so-called “secret doctrines of the Bayreuth inner circle” is based on what historian Joachim Fest condemned in Köhler’s book as being a claim to have deciphered a secret conspiratorial “code language or encrypted messages for the initiated”. It is pure conspiracy theory of quasi-ufological proportions. Köhler has since retracted his claims about Wagner (The Wagner Journal; 8, 2, 43–51, 2014).
Similar repetitions of fake Hitler quotations invented by Rauschning include this recent use of Hitler Speaks by music graduate, Carolyn Ticker in 2016—a full 33 years after serious historians abandoned the use of Rauschning:
Wagner was his kindred spirit, his forerunner, his John the Baptist; Wagner portrayed what he, Hitler, a greater than Wagner, was to translate into reality.
The bibliographic citation is not to Rauschning as it ought to be, but to a dated wartime propaganda text by Robert L. Jacobs, Wagner’s Influence on Hitler, p.82 (Music & Letters, 22, No. 1; Oxford University, 1941). The influence of Rauschning is once more immediately discernible. The reason for hiding behind a dated secondary source citation from the 1940s is once again to shamelessly obfuscate the fact that the Rauschning text it is based on has long been exposed as a fraud. It is a basic precept of academic methodology that where a subject is controversial an author must return to credible primary bibliographic sources, and brute repetition of antiquated second or third-hand secondary sources like Jacobs does nothing to restore Rauschning’s credibility.
Such mindless repetition by credulous amateur pseudo-historians of long-discredited fake Nazi quotations is a common beginner’s error. The most notorious of all such fake quotes is the one oft attributed to Joseph Goebbels that goes:
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
Such quotes and their variants are repeated hundreds of thousands of times on the internet and in popular publications. No credible primary source has ever been found, and they have been shown to be fake.
Fake quotes such as these were quasi-satirical parodies concocted by Allied war propaganda and rightfully intended to make the National Socialist regime look ridiculous. Goebbels was far too shrewd a fox to discredit himself with such self-incriminating satirical statements, and in actuality insisted that he stood steadfastly for the “Truth”.
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| Goebbels: die Wahrheit ist immer stärker als die Lüge. Goebbels: the truth is always stronger than the lie. |
Far from claiming that his propaganda ministry ran on the principle that a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth, Goebbels accused his enemies of using the technique. In a 1941 article entitled Churchill’s Lie Factory, Goebbels wrote:
One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does not know if and when one may need them again. The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
Despite this, the quote that goes “a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth” continues to be attributed countless hundreds of thousands of times over to Goebbels on the internet. It is a supreme irony that Goebbels has been allowed to laugh in his grave at all the gullible fools repeating the fake quote so often that they themselves have come to believe it.
It is only when you read the works of serious academic historians that you will find that historians are trained to screen out such fake quotations. This is why you never see such quotes being used in genuine historiographic literature, least of all the shamelessly fake Rauschning quotations claiming that Hitler said he had “no other forerunner other than Richard Wagner”.
Interestingly, Rauschning contradicts himself on his claim that Hitler stated that he had no other forerunner other than Wagner. Later in his book, Rauschning states that:
Frederick of Prussia is his great model. He feels akin to him. He confers on him the honour to be recognised as his forerunner.Friedrich von Preußen ist sein großes Vorbild. Er fühlt sich ihm verwandt. Er läßt ihm die Ehre angedeihen, als sein Vorläufer anerkannt zu sein.
Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler (German Edition) (Kindle Locations 4115-4116). Europa Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition.
This statement by Rauschning is actually far more credible because it can be independently corroborated in other ways. Hitler wanted to cultivate his propaganda image so as to be associated with Frederick the Great, as Frederick was both a great military leader, a poet, a friend of Voltaire, who, as an accomplished flautist and composer, was also the patron of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.
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| Frederick the Great plays the flute with Carl Phillipp Emanuel Bach accompanying him at the keyboard |
In his much-acclaimed book, The German War, historian Nicholas Stargardt tells us:
Through films like the 1942 biopic The Great King, Germans had been encouraged to see their Führer as the successor of Frederick the Great. It was also a parallel which inspired Hitler, and he sent a print of the film to Mussolini. When he returned to Berlin on 15 January from his western headquarters, he took the Prussian King’s portrait into his study in the bunker deep below the Reich Chancellery.
Stargardt: The German War
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| A poster for the 1942 film biopic of Frederick the Great, The Great King depicted him as Hitler’s greatest forerunner |
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| “Men make history!” (Männer machen die Geschichte!). A National Socialist propaganda poster misrepresents history as being shaped by the Triumph of the Will of the “Great Man”. It unequivocally depicts Frederich the Great as Hitler’s “forerunner”. No opera composer was ever depicted in Nazi propaganda as Hitler’s sole forerunner as it would have made Hitler look ridiculous—that was entirely the satirical concoction of Allied war propaganda |
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| Himmler presents Hitler with a portrait of Frederick the Great on the occasion of Hitler’s 50th birthday, 20 April 1939. Hitler revered Frederick so deeply that the painting was later taken down into the Führerbunker. It hung in Hitler's study where it “entirely dominated the room, offering a constant reminder to Hitler of the seeming rewards for holding out when all appeared lost” (Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1936-45 Nemesis). |
Given that Hitler was gifted a portrait of Frederick the Great only in 1939, by which time Rauschning had fallen out with the regime and had fled the country, it is unlikely Rauschning would have seen the portrait of Frederick the Great even if he had visited the Reich Chancellery on official duty. Rauschning might have seen newsreels or read newspaper accounts of such events such as the presentation to Hitler of the portrait of Frederick the Great during the celebration of Hitler’s 50th birthday.
Hitler himself also wrote in Mein Kampf of:
... the great fighters of this world, who, though not understood at present, nonetheless have carried out the fight for their ideas and ideals. Their lives and their work are then studied with touching and grateful admiration. Especially in dark days of distress, such men have the power of healing broken hearts and elevating the despairing spirit of a people.
To these belong not only the great statesmen but also the great reformers. Alongside Frederick the Great stands also Martin Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
Zu ihnen aber sind zu rechnen die großen Kämpfer auf dieser Welt, die, von der Gegenwart nicht verstanden, dennoch den Streit um ihre Idee und Ideale durchzufechten bereit sind. Sie sind diejenigen, die einst am meisten dem Herzen des Volkes nahestehen werden; es scheint fast so, als fühlte jeder einzelne dann die Pflicht, an der Vergangenheit gutzumachen, was die Gegenwart einst an den Großen gesündigt hatte. Ihr Leben und Wirken wird in rührend dankbarer Bewunderung verfolgt und vermag besonders in trüben Tagen gebrochene Herzen und verzweifelnde Seelen wieder zu erheben.Hierzu gehören aber nicht nur die wirklich großen Staatsmänner, sondern auch alle sonstigen großen Reformatoren. Neben Friedrich dem Großen stehen hier Martin Luther sowie Richard Wagner.
Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, p.232. Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Verlag Franz Eher Nachf., G.m.b.H.; Munich, 1943. My translation.
Once again it must be remembered that Mein Kampf is a problematic text that should be read critically. It is not to be read as a grand blueprint and decisive Master Plan premeditating all that followed. As a rather self-adulatory quasi-autohagiographic rant, it also evinces an essential character of National Socialist historiographic accounts of themselves in that it follows a romanticised Great Man view of history. It is a distorted propagandist historiography that involves much petty name-dropping, in this instance suggesting that Frederick the Great, Martin Luther, and Richard Wagner might be seen as Great Men of German history upon whose shoulders the National Socialist could be implied to be seen as standing.
For another example of National Socialist petty name-dropping of perceived Great Men who might be implied to have paved the road to their greatness, the reader is directed to The Myth of the Twentieth Century by Alfred Rosenberg. There in the course of his shameless name-dropping exercise, Rosenberg writes endless obfuscatory and meandering prose that anticipates the postmodernist style of writing. He mentions Shakespeare, Cervantes, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Bach, Glück, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Handel, Berlioz, Meister Eckhart, Charles Dickens, Herder, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Copernicus, and many others considered great “Aryan” minds. However, the historical names dropped the most frequently of all by Rosenberg is actually Jesus Christ: with 94 hits to “Jesus” and 57 hits just to “Christ” alone (excluding terms like “anti-Christ” in the search), making for a total of 151 mentions. Next in frequency is Goethe, whose name appears 80 times, followed by Meister Eckhart, the mystic theologian, who is mentioned 46 times. Martin Luther’s name appears 40 times. Frederick the Great is mentioned 27 times. Wagner is mentioned 30 times, but Rosenberg is often frankly dismissive of him. Beethoven’s name is mentioned 23 times. Shakespeare is mentioned 9 times.
None of this self-aggrandizement by cheap name-dropping is at all convincing. No serious historian can possibly accept such a romanticised and grossly propagandist Great Man reading of the history of any nation. It implies a grand continuity between the Dritte Reich and German histories before it, with history depicted as running along a teleological continuum of linearity culminating in the Dritte Reich. Least of all, no serious historian can base their reading of German history upon such romanticised mythical distortions without inadvertently falling prey to a blind acceptance of the Nazi view of history with all of its false methodological assumptions. Not even when such a Great Man view of history is accepted for polemical purposes (whether to demonise Luther, Wagner, Frederick the Great as proto-Nazi forerunners of Hitler—or anyone else the National Socialists listed in their name-dropping exercises) does it gain even an iota of credibility, as it merely perpetuates the self-adulatory myths created by the National Socialist propaganda machine in negative form. Only a systematic demythologisation can be considered acceptable.
The odd thing about such name-dropping passages listing both Luther and Frederick is that retrospective polemicists have largely ignored these two figures, and instead the dated propagandist polemic is directed exclusively against Wagner. Yet never did Wagner quite feature as prominently in the mainstream propaganda intended for the public at large, a fact that was acknowledged by more academic Allied propagandists such as Professor William McGovern, who published a nearly 700-page long diatribe in 1941 entitled From Luther to Hitler: The History of Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy:
Nobody quotes from it at all now, and it has rightfully lapsed into obscurity. Unlike Hermann Rauschning’s colourful book, it has gone completely out of print and used copies are fairly scarce. Sir Richard J. Evans tells us that such books simply cannot be taken seriously today:
Yet there is no doubt that the figure of Martin Luther did feature prominently in National Socialist propaganda:
... Allied wartime propaganda... cannot really be considered serious in scholarly terms. Books such as William McGovern’s From Luther to Hitler, published in 1941..., or Rohan Butler’s The Roots of National Socialism, published the previous year, trawled German writings in the past, from Novalis to Nietzsche, not only in the search for antecedents of Nazism but also in the attempt to prove that all German ‘ideology’ had always been Nazi in one way or another, and that Nazism, in essence, was not new.
Sir Richard J. Evans: Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification 1800-1996 (p. 126). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
Yet there is no doubt that the figure of Martin Luther did feature prominently in National Socialist propaganda:
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| Storm Troopers pose on the 450th birthday of Martin Luther day in 1933, in front of the Berlin Neuer Markt Martin Luther Memorial built by the regime. Published in the Bildbericht für das Deutsche Christenvolk (Illustrated Journal of the German Christian Volk) |
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| Covers from the 5th of November, 1933 and 12th of November, 1933 of The Gospel in the Dritte Reich—Sunday Paper of the German Christians. |
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| A postcard with a Swastika celebrating Martin Luther day on the 10th of November, 1933. |
The Reich’s Church Minister, Hanns Kerrl, even proclaimed in 1935 that “ich handele wie Luther” (I am acting as Luther would).
The National Socialist regime furthermore built the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin:
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| Original details of the triumphal arch from Martin Luther Memorial Church, Berlin (consecrated in 1935). The Swastikas have since been removed. |
No such large, publicly visible monuments comparable to that of the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin, were erected in the centre of capital cities in honour of Wagner, visible for all the world to see during the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
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| Martin Luther: Concerning the Jews and their Lies ‘It was only much later that Luther did away with the “Jews and their lies”, and declared that we should have nothing more to do with Moses’ Alfred Rosenberg: Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhundert [129], 1934 |
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| The August 1935 issue of Der Stürmer—the German Weekly Newspaper Dedicated to the Struggle for the Truth quotes the National Socialist slogan die Juden sind unsere Unglück! (the Jews are our misfortune!) on the cover followed on the next page with a reprint of the cover of Martin Luther’s book Concerning the Jews and their Lies. |
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| Part of the exhibition Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) as it appeared in Neue IZ magazine, December 1938. The exhibition opened on November 12th, 1938 in Berlin, just a couple of days after the Kristallnacht pogrom on the eve of Martin Luther’s birthday. Notice that anti-Semitic quotes from Frederick the Great and Dr Martin Luther feature side by side—but there is not the slightest mention of Richard Wagner. |
Likewise, if you look at the details of Speer’s Germania project, there was nothing Wagnerian themed planned there at all. If Hitler were indeed a twentieth century mad King Ludwig II, who had decided to “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama”, you would have expected colossal Wagnerian monuments to have been planned, delusory Neuschwanstein-like operatic castles-in-the-air—but nothing of the like existed in the plans. All of this goes to show that the alleged extraordinary centrality of Wagner to National Socialist propaganda is grossly exaggerated and originates in Allied propaganda suggesting that the regime was a crackpot operatic movement based entirely on Wagnerian principles. One Allied propagandist even claimed in 1942 that the German economy was being run according to operatic principles:
...the internal economic and political structure of Nazi Germany is almost entirely the result of the twentieth century interpretation of Wagner’s theories.
Janet Gregory: Hitler and Wagnerism, Manuscripts: Vol. 9 : Iss. 4 , Article 15 (1942)
It is thus extremely telling that the right-wing Hermann Rauschning mentions Frederick the Great and Richard Wagner in Hitler Speaks, but he conveniently omits all mention of Martin Luther.
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| National Synod of the German Evangelical Church in Lutherstadt, Wittenberg. September the 27th, 1933. Reich Bishop Ludwig Miller (first row, third from the left) can be seen with other regional bishops in front of the Luther Memorial. |
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| “Luther Hitler: My beloved Germans shall I serve – for [thee] my beloved Germans I am there”. The Christian right has retrospectively created a myth of Wagner-Hitler setting up Wagner as a scapegoat to distract attention away from the spectre of the Luther-Hitler vision that was actually omnipresent in National Socialist propaganda. |
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| Portrait of Dr Martin Luther as it appeared in a special edition of Der Stürmer, March 1937. This issue included an article entitled “Dr Martin Luther and the Jews”. The caption to the portrait of Martin Luther reads: “The reformer and fighter against the Jewish spirit in the Christian church. Dr Luther is one of the greatest antisemites of German history”. |
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| A 1940 National Socialist war postcard with a quote from Luther: I seek not my own But the fortune and salvation [Heil] Of all of Germany |
What Rauschning demonstrates is that right from the 1940’s, the Christian right were laying the foundations for a reading of National Socialist history based on a negative Great Man caricature, but one where the Great Man of German history whose Evil Genius lead Hitler down the path to Auschwitz would never be allowed to be Martin Luther, and where every effort had to be made to rewrite history so that Richard Wagner would be scapegoated as the sole villainous Great Man directing German history to the crematoria of Auschwitz, in the manner akin to a twentieth century Nero or Caligula. That is why Rauschning makes up the ridiculous fairy tale about how in addition to waking at night shrieking hysterically and pointing in terror at an empty corner, exclaiming “There, there, in the corner!”, Hitler allegedly proclaimed that he had no forerunners other than Richard Wagner.
Of related interest is that the most widely read of all pop historiographies of the era is William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer, who, as an American reporter, attended the Nuremberg rallies. Shirer wrote the book after being blacklisted during the McCarthy era and finding himself unable to find work. It is fascinating that Shirer dismissed the idea that the National Socialist regime could be seen as a Wagnerian operatic movement, instead arguing that Martin Luther was the visionary Prophet and sole forerunner of whom Hitler was the obedient little Disciple. It is highly plausible that Shirer would have seen Luther featuring immeasurably more prominently in Nazi public propaganda during his time spent reporting as a journalist in Germany. Only a small portion of the public would have had much interest in opera, and Luther would have been a much more widely recognised figure in German history amongst the general populace.
Nonetheless, it cannot be sufficiently emphasised that modern historians simply reject the tacit assumption pushed in pop historiographies such as those by William Shirer and Joachim Köhler that National Socialism was a dead poets society that ran on the fuel of inspiration bequeathed to them by long dead “Great Men”: poet-philosophers such as Martin Luther, Frederick the Great, and Richard Wagner. That would be to mindlessly and uncritically accept a grossly mythologised Nazi propagandist Great Man view of history.
As always, Cambridge historian Sir Richard J. Evans puts it so very well:
In this methodology, reading German history becomes a matter of reading National Socialism as a dead poets’ society run by a cabal of long deceased German poets and philosophers. Things become rapidly reduced to a pulp fiction whodunit in the guise of history, where the faux historian attempts to unveil the historical German villain whose evil genius managed to brainwash the German Mind so as to fill it with Kraut-Think: racism, genocidal anti-Semitism, rampant militarism, lust for blood and cruelty of every kind to the point of making the rise and triumph of Hitler a preordained historical inevitability. Methodologically, it degenerates rapidly into quotes by long-dead poets and thinkers ripped out of historical context and presented so as to suggest that the course of National Socialist history turned out as it did because some dead poet-philosopher said so:
Sadly, art and other cultural pop historians to this day love to regress to this antiquated methodology in order to propagandise for a relapse into a reactionary romantic view of Grand Art created by the Great Man as the fundamental driving force of history. It is pure wish fulfilment fantasy engendered of the art historian’s megalomaniac self-aggrandisement in wanting to turn the magic power of the word of poets and philosophers back into the central driving force of world history—sometimes referred to euphemistically as the “linguistic turn”. Along with it comes a repristination of the notion that the earth turns around the word of the history-making Great Man.
Some postmodernist perspectivists would argue that the reduction of world history to art history yields a perspective on history as valid as any other, and, that to take such a perspective is the rightful prerogative of the art historian, but that is like arguing that the maître-fromager, in presenting the perspective of the moon seen from the aspects of its cheesiness, has the prerogative to be called as much an expert on the moon as any astrogeologist.
Some speculative authors like Shirer thus claim that Martin Luther brainwashed the German Mind filling it with the Kraut-Think of genocidal Jew-hatred and blind obedience to authority. Sensible historians have correctly pointed that:
Nonetheless, it cannot be sufficiently emphasised that modern historians simply reject the tacit assumption pushed in pop historiographies such as those by William Shirer and Joachim Köhler that National Socialism was a dead poets society that ran on the fuel of inspiration bequeathed to them by long dead “Great Men”: poet-philosophers such as Martin Luther, Frederick the Great, and Richard Wagner. That would be to mindlessly and uncritically accept a grossly mythologised Nazi propagandist Great Man view of history.
As always, Cambridge historian Sir Richard J. Evans puts it so very well:
Another, very different tradition of writing in broad, general terms about German history takes its cue from literature, and depicts German society and German values through the use of novels, drama, poetry, autobiography and other kinds of literary evidence. Here the stress is on the drift of the ‘German mind’ towards authoritarianism, militarism and eventually National Socialism. Inevitably, this kind of literary social history concentrates heavily on the small elite of well-educated people who produced the great bulk of the literary evidence on which it relies. Just as much as the history of high politics, it leaves the majority of German people in the past out of the picture.
Sir Richard J. Evans: Rethinking German History, p. 1.
In this methodology, reading German history becomes a matter of reading National Socialism as a dead poets’ society run by a cabal of long deceased German poets and philosophers. Things become rapidly reduced to a pulp fiction whodunit in the guise of history, where the faux historian attempts to unveil the historical German villain whose evil genius managed to brainwash the German Mind so as to fill it with Kraut-Think: racism, genocidal anti-Semitism, rampant militarism, lust for blood and cruelty of every kind to the point of making the rise and triumph of Hitler a preordained historical inevitability. Methodologically, it degenerates rapidly into quotes by long-dead poets and thinkers ripped out of historical context and presented so as to suggest that the course of National Socialist history turned out as it did because some dead poet-philosopher said so:
Back in the 1940s and 1950s, scholars such as Rohan Butler, William McGovern, Edmond Vermeil and Peter Viereck used to blame Germany’s philosophers for the rise and triumph of Nazism. Ripping quotation after quotation out of its contemporary context, they purported to show that Nazism’s core ideas had been held in advance by the entire German philosophical tradition, from Novalis to Nietzsche.
Sir Richard J. Evans: Times Higher Education
Sadly, art and other cultural pop historians to this day love to regress to this antiquated methodology in order to propagandise for a relapse into a reactionary romantic view of Grand Art created by the Great Man as the fundamental driving force of history. It is pure wish fulfilment fantasy engendered of the art historian’s megalomaniac self-aggrandisement in wanting to turn the magic power of the word of poets and philosophers back into the central driving force of world history—sometimes referred to euphemistically as the “linguistic turn”. Along with it comes a repristination of the notion that the earth turns around the word of the history-making Great Man.
Some postmodernist perspectivists would argue that the reduction of world history to art history yields a perspective on history as valid as any other, and, that to take such a perspective is the rightful prerogative of the art historian, but that is like arguing that the maître-fromager, in presenting the perspective of the moon seen from the aspects of its cheesiness, has the prerogative to be called as much an expert on the moon as any astrogeologist.
Some speculative authors like Shirer thus claim that Martin Luther brainwashed the German Mind filling it with the Kraut-Think of genocidal Jew-hatred and blind obedience to authority. Sensible historians have correctly pointed that:
It has been all too easy for historians to look back at the course of German history from the vantage-point of 1933 and interpret almost anything that happened in it as contributing to the rise and triumph of Nazism. This has led to all kinds of distortions, with some historians picking choice quotations from German thinkers such as Herder, the late eighteenth-century apostle of nationalism, or Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century founder of Protestantism, to illustrate what they argue are ingrained German traits of contempt for other nationalities and blind obedience to authority within their own borders. Yet when we look more closely at the work of thinkers such as these, we discover that Herder preached tolerance and sympathy for other nationalities, while Luther famously insisted on the right of the individual conscience to rebel against spiritual and intellectual authority.
Sir Richard J. Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich
Far from brainwashing the German Mind into a mentality of blind obedience to fascist authoritarianism, Luther taught that it was the God-given right of the individual conscience to protest against oppressive authoritarianism. It entailed Luther risking his life in speaking out against the overwhelming political might of Rome. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Protestant theologian, noted in 1937 the omnipresence of Luther’s words throughout National Socialist propaganda:
Bonhoeffer was banned from teaching in 1936, and he was arrested in 1943 before being murdered at Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Similar thoughts were further echoed in the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller, who was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp after falling out with the regime:
Luther’s words are everywhere, but their truth perverted into self-deception.
Überall Luthers Wort und aus der Wahrheit in Selbstbetrug verkehrt.Chapter One, Die teure Gnade (Costly Grace) in the book Nachfolge by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Munich 1937, p.10. Translated as The Cost of Discipleship, New York 1959.
Bonhoeffer was banned from teaching in 1936, and he was arrested in 1943 before being murdered at Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Similar thoughts were further echoed in the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller, who was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp after falling out with the regime:
We celebrate this day in memory of the beginning of the German Reformation, and we think today... that that 31st of October, more than 400 years ago ... still has a message for us today and for all time.... And this Martin Luther was a man from whom we can learn. For one thing, this one man who possessed no great influence—this one man, who stood up fearlessly and sincerely for his convictions—showed courage and patience in his struggle against powerful enemies, against the Emperor and the Pope. He stood up strongly and passionately for his opinions. In this respect this one man, this holy man of Wittenberg, can be an example to us as a true German.
Martin Niemöller, 31st October, 1936. Sermon for a school service on the occasion of the Reformation Festivity in the Jesus-Christus Church Berlin. Cited in The Gestapo Defied: Being the Last Twenty-Eight Sermons by Martin Niemöller, pp.10-15.
Nobody decries Luther as history’s original Nazi, and symbol of the Holocaust. Commemorations of Luther occur in public undisturbed by protestors decrying him as the original propagandist of the Holocaust. There is even a Lutheran church in Jerusalem, the Church of the Redeemer, yet nobody protests outside of it calling it an insult to those murdered in the Holocaust.
The example of Frederick the Great is further telling. He was an enlightened king who passed laws allowing commoners to become judges and permitted complete freedom of the press. Under the newfound freedom during Frederick’s reign in 1781, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm published the famous text in Prussia entitled Über die bürgerliche Emanzipation der Juden, where he argued for a granting of equal rights to Jews. After his death, Frederick’s Kingdom of Prussia became one of the first German-speaking nations to grant emancipation to the Jews in 1812.
Finally, Richard Wagner (born in 1813) fought with musket and grenade in hand during the 1849 Dresden uprising, in order to bring democracy to the German nations. In the aftermath of the German Revolutions of 1848-1849, he wrote essays in which he described his revolutionary ideology as “communism”. On the 27th of March of 1882, a year before his death, Wagner’s second wife noted in her diary that when he was asked if he were a “liberal, democrat” he unequivocally answers, “Ja”. Wagner’s actual words were never quoted like those of Luther’s to the point of becoming omnipresent throughout National Socialist Germany, but a similar “perversion” of Wagner’s thoughts into “self-deception” can be shown to have occurred, as it had with Luther’s.
Sir Richard J. Evans writes of Wagner’s role in defending a fledgeling German democracy in 1849:
... 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 ruins from which a new world will arise; for the sublime goddess REVOLUTION comes rushing and roaring on the wings of the storm’.
Sir Richard J. Evans: The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914, p.210-211.
That means the suggestion that either Luther, Frederick, or Wagner were in any way “forerunners” of Hitler is abject propagandist nonsense. The desire to run a wilful polemic against any of these figures is insufficient justification to justify accepting the wanton rewriting of German history to suit the ends of Nazi propaganda. Hitler did not stand on the shoulder of giants. On the contrary, he was merely pushing his own petty little ideas that were the conditional by-product of imminent sociopolitical catastrophes wrought by the death of millions in the Great War: civil war, the unleashing of destabilising political violence on the streets, the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles that instantly put the German economy into recession, after which hyperinflation made money worthless, before finally the roller coaster ride of social destabilisation was all capped off by the coup de grace of the Great Depression.
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| The Great War unleashed a whole series of socially destabilising political calamities onto the streets that had nothing to do with long-dead poets and philosophers |
In actuality, in order for the art historian to understand any work of art, the wider socio-historical context into which the artwork was born must first be thoroughly understood. If you misunderstand the historical context, you misunderstand the art. On the other hand, it is hardly acceptable to rewrite world history in order to propagandise for a polemical view of an artist or writer—whether poet, composer, dramatist, theologian, political or philosophical thinker. Yet that is exactly what happens time and time again with Nazi opera fantasies, which do unspeakable violence to history in maliciously rewriting it from a grossly reductivistic perspective.
Furthermore, Hitler never wished his movement to be seen as atavistic, romantic, and backwards-looking, but rather as vigorously ultra-modern. This is reflected in the official National Socialist Party recommended reading list, compiled by Hitler himself. Despite apocryphal quotes claiming that Hitler stated that “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”, Hitler’s officially published reading list for Party members contains nothing by dead poets and philosophers. Neither Martin Luther nor Richard Wagner rate any mention. Instead, you find a list by contemporary authors that includes Henry Ford’s The International Jew, volumes one and two:
Books that every National Socialist must know.
“The wall beside his desk in Hitler’s private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford... In the antechamber there is a large table covered with books, nearly all of which are a translation of a book written and published by Henry Ford.” New York Times: December 1922
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| When a journalist asked Hitler about the portrait of Ford in his office, he replied: “I regard Ford as my inspiration” Quoted from Forced Labor and Ford by Bill McGraw, Detroit Free Press, 1999. The Nuremberg Laws also drew heavily from contemporary Jim Crow segregation models |
Unfortunately, Rauschning and his colourful team of editorial assistants have done too good a job of producing an anti-Kraut polemical piece with the sort of simplistic emotive appeal typical of all propaganda, so that even though it has long since outlived its original utility now that the war is over, it continues to bait gullible amateur pseudo-historians, with all their “dubious accusatory” petulance (to borrow a phrase from Joachim Fest) tempered by an almost narcissistic self-righteousness. Once snared, they find themselves instantly lobotomised of the critical faculties that might inhibit repeating Rausching’s merry WagnerHitler fabrications ad infinitum. Alas, neutral academic critical diligence is such a rare luxury that it is unlikely that we will see any improvement in the situation for some time to come outside of academic historiographic circles. For such is human nature that blindly emotive expletives trounce deep critical thought every time.
That is why many will go on insisting that Richard Wagner must continue to be “manipulated” into a symbol of the Holocaust (in the words of Israeli historian, Na’ama Sheffi), as a means of keeping the flame of the memory of its victims alive. However, to make someone symbolically guilty of a crime, in the absence of forensically credible evidence, is to make a scapegoat out of them. A scapegoat always serves to cleanse the accusers of their own profoundest moral failings. In this case, the grossly reductivistic view that the Holocaust was singularly caused by some nineteenth-century composer, who was long dead by the time the crime was committed, functions to hide the profoundly confronting moral and intellectual dilemmas raised by the vastly complex spectre of the Shoah. Such “gross oversimplification and distortion” (Sir Ian Kershaw) of history serves only to obfuscate the truth, rather than to confront us with the fullest weight of its sobering moral impact.
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