Richard Wagner: Supreme Annihilator of the German War Gods

In particular, it is noteworthy that Magee accurately emphasises how both nationalism and anti-Semitism were predominantly left-wing causes in the nineteenth century.

Nationalism was about declaring one's allegiance to country rather than to the monarch. That was certainly the case starting with French republican nationalism, as it later became the case with both German and Italian nationalism.

Revolutionary nationalism that flew a tricolour flag was originally a liberal cause

The republican nationalist Garibaldi, founder of the League of Democracy, is greeted by crowds waving the revolutionary flag, Il Tricolore

German nationalism during the 1848 pro-democracy uprising was also a liberal movement. Here liberals, like Wagner, waved the revolutionary tricolour flag from behind the barricades

The Spanish red-yellow-purple flag ("la tricolor") still carries powerfully emotive revolutionary connotations

In the nineteenth century, the majority of European states were totalitarian regimes ruled by monarchs:

The typical characteristic of political life throughout Europe at the beginning of the 1840s was a negative one: the lack of republicanism and democracy. In an audacious outburst of experiment, late eighteenth-century revolutionaries had suggested that large, complex states could be ruled without a king and the years around 1800 had seen republican government at its greatest extent since classical antiquity. While a half-century later, this experiment continued in the Americas, in Europe it seemed to have been given up.  

Jonathan Sperber: The European Revolutions, 1848-1851 (Second Ed.). Cambridge Press, 2005.

In 1848 a republican pro-democratic revolution erupted in Germany. In Frankfurt, a provisional people's parliament was set up in a church. Inside this church hung Veit's painting Germania, in which she is depicted carrying the republican and pro-democratic union tricolour flag in her left hand, but in the right hand she carries the avenging sword of revolutionary justice adorned with the olive branch of peace.

The Frankfurt Parliament, 1848: Germany's first idealistic experiment in democracy

Veit's Germania carries the revolutionary pro-democracy flag, and a sword of justice adorned with olive branches in her right hand. Broken lie the chains of servitude at her feet as a new dawn rises.

The following year, in 1849, Richard Wagner, alongside his friend, Mikhail Bakunin (a key founder of Socialist Anarchism), took up arms in the Dresden pro-democracy revolutionary uprising. Wagner fought with musket in hand behind the barricades alongside Bakunin. Later George Bernard Shaw was to hail the figure of Siegfried in Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung as Siegfried Bakunin. For Siegfried is the anarchist who shows not the slightest respect for either the traditional social order (l'ancien regime), let alone for the religious order of the Gods. The sword that Siegfried brandishes is the sword of justice borrowed directly from Germania.

'Wagner seized a musket and called aloud... "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"' A contemporary eyewitness report on Richard Wagner behind the barricades, 1849

The revolutionary movement of 1848 failed, despite the valiant rallying of the revolutionary forces armed with muskets behind barricades in the streets. Mark Berry tells us that:

Wagner probably ordered hand-grenades; he certainly served on the barricades and acted as look-out, observing street-fighting from the Kreuzkirche tower, whilst engaging in animated politico-philosophical discussion. 

The Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia entry under Dresden uprising (May 1849).

As reactionary forces overwhelmed the revolutionaries, Wagner was forced to flee into exile with a warrant out for his arrest and the threat of a death sentence hanging over his head. Friedrich Engels later explained the futility of a civilian lead revolution:

Rebellion in the old style, street fighting with barricades, which decided the issue everywhere up to 1848, had become largely outdated. Let us have no illusions about it: a real victory of insurrection over the military in street fighting, a victory as between two armies, is one of the rarest exceptions. And the insurgents counted on it just as rarely. For them it was solely a question of making the troops yield to moral influences which, in a fight between the armies of two warring countries, do not come into play at all or do so to a much smaller extent. If they succeed in this, the troops fail to respond, or the commanding officers lose their heads, and the insurrection wins. If they do not succeed in this, then, even where the military are in the minority, the superiority of better equipment and training, of uniform leadership, of the planned employment of the military forces and of discipline makes itself felt.

Engels Introduction to Marx's The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 

Later on in life, Wagner openly denounced Bismarckian imperialist expansionism. Wagner became an admirer of Constantin Frantz's views on European federalism, with independent nation states loosely united under a constitution based on that of America. Wagner published an essay by Frantz in the July 1879 edition of the Bayreuther Blätter harshly criticising a Germany united under the "pointy tip of the Prussian sabre".

Even as a late in his life as 1880 Wagner can still be seen to be writing favourably about socialism thus putting complete lie to the myth of a late turn around in his political outlook:

. . . one might even view. . . the present-day socialism as being a quite remarkable, seen from the side of our state society, as long as. . . vegetarians, animal rights activists, and moderationists, march in genuine and inner union.  

Wagner: my translation from Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Band X, p240. 

The reason that we keep finding these insinuations that German nationalism had always been a proto-Nazi right-wing movement is because of the blindly unquestioning acceptance of Nazi propaganda, which claimed that their movement was the culmination and pinnacle of the entirety of German history: Germans throughout all of history had it in their Blood and Destiny to be Nazis. To be a true German was to be a born Nazi, and to be a Nazi was to be German. A German who was not a Nazi, but instead a socialist, a pacifist, gay, a feminist, pro-democratic, or at all left-wing was, therefore, was not a German at all—but a Jew or one of their Judeo-Bolshevik co-conspirators.

This question of German national identity is one that is eloquently tackled by Sir Richard J. Evans in this highly recommended talk:


The view of Wagner as a German nationalist must also be tempered by a study of what Wagner actually wrote on the subject, even well after the 1848 revolutions. Long after the failure of the 1848 pro-democracy uprisings, since he only ever saw revolution end in failure, or even reversed under counter-revolutionaries like Louis Napoleon, Wagner had clearly grown weary of the idea of armed revolution. Under the influence of the Buddhist influenced Schopenhauer, he later became staunchly pacifist, an anti-vivisectionist vegetarian, while remaining a socialist who overtly denounced blatant nationalistic patriotism until the very end. This might come as a surprise to those used to the cartoon caricatures of Wagner that are stock-standard, but Wagner writes an essay entitled Concerning the State and Religion (1864) dedicated to King Ludwig of Bavarian, in which Wagner goes on something of a Wahn monologue of his own. Wagner writes:

In political life, delusion [Wahn] expresses itself namely as patriotism. 

Im politischen Leben äußert dieser Wahn sich nämlich als Patriotismus. 

Über Staat und Religion, p.12: In Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen von Richard Wagner. Dritte Auflage. Volume VIII. C.F.W Siegel edition. Leipzig, 1871.

The full text of this essay in the 1873 Fritzsch edition of the Gesammelte Schriften is available online 

Wagner continues on in the essay to aggressively assert that "Patriotismus"—namely chauvinistic nationalistic patriotism—is not only utter "Wahn" but pure "Egoismus" (egoism). As anyone familiar with Hans Sachs's Wahn monologue will know, Wahn means "madness", "insanity", or "delusion". Wagner relentlessly repeats this phrase over and over, and even writes unequivocally of a "patriotische Wahn" (patriotic insanity). Within the space of around four pages, Wagner raves on seemingly interminably about the complete and utter folly of "blind" nationalistic patriotism. Wagner unashamedly repeats the Schopenhauerian word "Wahn" no less than twelve times to decry the insanity of chauvinistic right-wing nationalism. The gravest delusion, in Wagner's view, is when calls for patriotism are used as a banner to rally behind in the justification of the madness of war.

At this point, we should return to the final part of the quote from Bryan Magee that started this discussion:

So while it is true that Wagner was always a German nationalist, it is not true that German nationalism was at that time a right-wing cause. Similarly with anti-semitism.  

Wagner and Philosophy. Chapter Five: Wagner's Misleading Reputation

Just as nationalism was a revolutionary movement in the nineteenth century, liberal anti-Semitism was something that was anti-capitalist, as well as anti-religious, and pro-assimilationist. During the nineteenth century, left-wing views about the Jews similar to those from Wagner were also expressed by other socialists such as Marx, Proudhon, Feuerbach, Bakunin, as well as by the Feuerbachian socialist Wilhelm Marr, before reaching its crescendo with the extreme views of Social Democrat thinker Eugen Dühring. However, just as Dühring's racist views were fiercely denounced by Marx and Engels, there is evidence that Wagner sided with with Marx and Engels, in that Cosima records Wagner as having considered Dühring's views to be "horrifying".  Historian, Professor Mark Roseman, further puts it well when he writes that:

Some authors have argued that there is therefore a continuity of intent stretching from writers such as Wilhelm Marr, Eugen Dühring and de Lagarde through to the Holocaust, but it seems extremely unlikely that Hitler's precursors really conceived of the mass biological destruction of hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals. 

Mark Roseman: The Villa, The Lake, The Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution, p8

Note that, as often outside of Nazi opera conspiracy literature (and the Occult Reich literature that has openly embraced it), Wagner's name fails to even so much as rate a single mention. Both Wilhelm Marr and Eugen Dühring, however, belonged on the wrong side of politics from where National Socialist right-wing anti-Semitism eventually arose. Wagner not only completely rejected Dühring, but Dühring was in turn immensely hostile to Wagner, virtually accusing him of preaching a fake anti-Semitism that was a front to hide that fact that Bayreuth ran on money from his many Jewish admirers, as well as being full to the brim with talented Jewish artists. Interestingly, the National Socialists were also surprisingly hostile towards Eugen Dühring, despite his extreme brand of racial left-wing anti-Semitism.

Towards the end of Richard Wagner's life, right-wing movements did arise that claimed him as the symbolic figurehead of their militant and anti-Semitic Germanic movement. Alarmed by such claims, Wagner's Jewish friend, Angelo Neumann recalls how he wrote to him to clarify his position on this matter:

A strong anti-Semitic party in Berlin had loudly proclaimed Wagner as their chief apostle; which moved George Davidsohn (a well-known political writer and friend of Wagner) to write, calling my attention to the risk we ran in our Berlin enterprises if the rumour spread that Wagner was a member of this society. I wrote to Mme. Cosima asking if this were true, and received the following reply from Richard Wagner. Dear Friend and Benefactor:- 

Nothing is further from my thoughts than this same “Anti-Semitic” movement;  see the Bayreuth papers for my article which will prove this so conclusively that people of sense will find it impossible to connect me with the cause. 

Richard Wagner

Bayreuth, February, 1881. 

From Personal Recollections of Wagner by Angelo Neumann.

The Berlin anti-Semitic unrest of 1879-81 is mentioned in Know Thyself published in February of 1881, where Wagner dismisses it as "dunkel und Wahnvoll"—"sinister and steeped in delusion". Wagner also obliquely mentions an anti-Semitic pastor referred to only as "unsere Herren Geistlichen ... in ihrer Agitation gegen die Juden" (our dear clergymen in the agitation against the Jews). He was referring to pastor Adolf Stöcker who founded a party called the Christian-Social Workers Party, later renamed the Christian Social Party (see p. 259 of Stefanie Hein's Richard Wagners Kunstprogramm im nationalkuturellen Kontext). Cosima records Wagner's reaction in her diary on the 14th of November, 1879 to a sermon by Adolf Stöcker:

A second sermon from Pastor Stoecker brought R[ichard] to exclaim: Alas! Not just the Jews, but every creature seeks to further their own interest. It is us, we of the state, who condone such things. So too the stock exchange, in the beginning a free, decent institute—what have we permitted to become of that? And he spoke of the current debts that the states gets into and how that once again only drives the evil speculative spirits!

Eine zweite Rede vom Pfarrer Stoecker bringt R. darauf, aufzurufen: Ach! Nicht die Juden sind es, ein jedes Wesen sucht sein Interesse zu fördern, wir sind es: wir der Staat, die wir solches gestatten. So auch die Börse, anfänglich eine freie gute Institution, was haben wir daraus werden lassen. Und er erzählt von der jetzigen Anleihe, welche der Staat macht und die wiederum nur ein Vorschub diesem bösen spekulativen Geiste leistet!

However, Cosima also records on 28th of October, 1881 that while Wagner did suggest that he did some have passing sympathy for Adolf Stöcker's anti-Semitic views, he gravely laments that anything like this should ever come from the conservative side of politics—the side that "stood against progress (Fortschritt)". Wagner clearly intensely disliked the notion of a right-wing anti-Semitic movement, and staunchly refused to have anything to do with it.

Adolf Stöcker represents the first example of a belligerently populist right-wing brand of anti-Semitism entering into German politics. Stöcker represents a prime example of proto-National Socialism. Likewise, Cosima records on the 6th of July, 1880, when another proto-National Socialist right-wing anti-Semite, Bernard Förster (who married Nietzsche's sister), tried to get Wagner to sign a petition to Bismarck urging him to side against the Jews, Wagner refused to do so point blank: "I am meant to sign that?" he exclaimed while abruptly losing all trace of his usual joviality. Wagner remained true to what he said to Angelo Neumann in that he simply refused to support the right-wing anti-Semitic side in the so-called Berliner Antisemitismusstreit(Berlin antisemitic agitation).

On Richard Wagner's death, a pivotal life event occurred that was to forever change the thinking of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism. Jacques Kornberg describes how the seminal event which drove Theodor Herzl to resign his membership from the nationalist student association, Albia, was a Viennese memorial on 5 March 1883, organised to commemorate the recent death of Richard Wagner:

The Wagner memorial was a well-orchestrated German nationalist demonstration with fully four thousand in attendance. The assembly hall was decorated with a gigantic German flag and the coat of arms of the Reich. . . . With the onset of ceremonies the orchestra played Wagner's music, then the audience was summoned to sing Deutschland Über Alles. Speaker after speaker extolled German nationality and the Reich, some in near-treasonous terms. . . . The Note Freie Presse reported that several speakers gave vent to "coarse antisemitic utterances". Finally, it was Hermann Bahr's turn to speak. . . . Bahr praised Wagner's Germanic ideology. He then called Austro-Germans a penitent Kundry awaiting salvation from the German Reich . . . Reacting to these treasonous utterances, the police stepped forward and forbade any more speeches. At that Schonerer rushed to the platform and called for resistance, shouting: "Long Live Our Bismarck!" The police then cleared the hall. 

Herzl was so appalled by it that he resigned his membership from Albia immediately. However, Herzl remained a devoted lifelong Wagnerian well after that episode—because, like Neumann, he almost certainly objected to the gross misappropriation of Wagner by the extreme right rather than because he held Wagner responsible for the ideology of such extremists.

The symbol of the sword carried by Germania here has contributed to the ongoing misappropriation of Wagner by the far right in the decades subsequent to his death. Joachim Köhler staunchly argues that the appropriation of Wagner by the far right was absolutely correct, and writes:

The sword, a symbol recalling for Wagner the 1848 Revolution, in which everything that runs counter to mankind's pursuit of freedom had to be destroyed, symbolizes the awakening spirit of nationalism. Like Nothung, the [Third] Reich would arise from the shattered fragments and resume the struggle until victory was achieved.

The insinuation is that fascism was a left-wing revolutionary movement that had its origins in the spirit of the pro-democracy movements of 1848, one which Köhler alleges "runs counter to mankind's pursuit of freedom". Köhler gives us no reason whatsoever to think there was any grounds to condemn the 1848 pro-democracy movement in this way. Köhler will have us believe that nineteenth century left-wing pro-democratic revolutionary movements are to be demonised as being the very root cause of the rise of German fascism in the twentieth century. Unfortunately, this attempt to blame the left for the sins of the right remains utterly unconvincing.

Unfortunately, Köhler's right-wing and reactionary world-view shares a great many more of the features of the reactionary world-view that engendered fascism, and it is perverse indeed that the right today have taken to accusing the left of being "Nazis". It is bizarre that Köhler denounces the 1848 pro-democracy movements as being counter to freedom, and as laying down the foundations of the Dritte Reich. As usual, when critically examining the way Nazi opera conspiracy theorists rewrite history from a right-wing perspective, one uncovers a revisionist narrative of history that is completely at variance with anything any respected academic historian has ever said about German history. Köhler's sole "proof" to support a thesis locating the origins of National Socialism in the 1848 pro-democracy movement is in the willingness of 1848 revolutionaries to use the symbol of Germania's revolutionary sword. According to Köhler, the left is brandishing the very symbol of fascist militant chauvinism. In actuality, Wagner's sword is the revolutionary sword of justice, adorned with olive leaves, which he brandishes against tyrants.

Nor is Köhler unique in locating the origins of the rise of German fascism in the twentieth century in the 1848 pro-democracy uprisings. In Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis, the author Michael Haas (a non-historian) spends a considerable amount of time outlining his view of the historical background to the rise of Hitler. The 1848 pro-democracy revolution, especially Richard Wagner's participation in it, is all he talks about, and at interminable length, thereby insinuating that Wagner was the singular cause of the rise of German fascism in the next century. On the other hand, WWI, the German 1918 Revolution, the Treaty of Versailles, hyperinflation, and the Great Depression astonishingly rate no mention whatsoever, implying that they are utterly irrelevant to any discussion of the historical background to the rise of German fascism.

Some historians, such as Hans Mommsen, certainly do think that the failure of the 1848 revolution to establish democracy set Germany down what is often referred to as the Sonderweg—a long and painful path before universal democracy was established in Germany and Austria. Nonetheless, the concept of the German Sonderweg remains a highly controversial one that does not enjoy universal acceptance amongst contemporary historians. However, to single-handedly place the blame for the failure of the 1848 revolution in the lap of just one opera composer is the height of comical absurdity. Even the minority of professional historians who still entertain the concept of the Sonderweg would never accept that Germany was singlehandedly set down the path of the Sonderweg by a single nineteenth century opera composer, or that German history from 1848 to 1945 merely followed a predetermined operatic script. I would defy the reader to find a single mainstream academic historian willing to state that the rise of National Socialism was the fault of an opera composer who must be demonised for having failed to single-handedly bring democracy to Germany, while steering his nation down the Sonderweg leading straight to the crematoria of Auschwitz. I would likewise utterly defy any reader to find a single mainstream academic historian who would argue that the German 1848 pro-democracy movement was a proto-Nazi movement.

There is worse to come for Köhler, since as the Red Army tanks rolled into Berlin in 1945 to crush the last vestiges of the Wehrmacht, it was the Soviet Rodina—the symbol of the Russian Motherland who was to brandish her sword of justice against the fascists to bring about a Götterdämmerung for the Wehrmacht:

The Soviet Rodina (Motherland) brandishes her avenging sword of justice against the fascist invaders

It was a sword she had borrowed directly from Siegfried Bakunin, the socialist anarchist who brandished Nothung to shatter Wotan's spear, upon which the oaths that held humanity captive to the Law of the Gods and of l'ancien régime were carved.

Little surprising, too, that one book which discusses the failure of the German military command leading to the total collapse of the German military is entitled The Twilight of the Gods:



It is the same apocalyptic annihilation of the warmongering Germanic Gods who ruled as theocratic dictators over humanity that Wagner celebrated. It is Wagner who gives the torch to Brünnhilde—according to Wagner the very embodiment of the Eternal Feminine—to consume Valhalla in the liberating flames of human love. Götterdämmerung is the ultimate anti-war statement, and the fact that the German military far-right were stupid enough to ever adopt the supreme annihilator of the German War Gods as their apostle is high irony indeed.

Not only that, but the great Israeli Holocaust scholar Saul Friedländer (both of whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust) notes the extreme irony of Hitler's identification with the figures of Rienzi and Barbarossa. Rienzi is the principal character of an opera by Wagner of the same title. Barbarossa is a figure featured in Wagner's incomplete sketches to an opera called the Wibelungen. Köhler alleges, as usual without proof, that the choice of the name operation Barbarossa for the invasion of the Soviet Union had Wagnerian roots. However, Friedländer notes that even if true, the choice here is as much of a Nazi death wish as the folly of their embracement of die Götterdämmerung:

Why Hitler chose the name of an emperor [Barbarossa] whose Crusade failed when he drowned in the Saleph River in Asia Minor is as mysterious as his predilection for Wagner’s opera Rienzi, telling the story of a late-medieval Roman tribune whose rebellion in the name of the people was crushed and who died a violent death in a fire set to his palace.

Saul Friedländer: Nazi Germany and the Jews. Vol 2. The Years of Extermination.

Rather amusingly, Hitler seems to have tempted fate on more than one count. It simply goes to show how hopelessly unreliable a Wagner interpreter our art school reject turns out to be. This is why it is important to place little credence on the views of some "beer-hall philosopher" and "half-educated know-all":

Hitler’s scene was less high-flying. His milieu was that of the beer-table philosophers and corner-cafe improvers of the world, the cranks and half-educated know-alls.  

Sir Ian Kershaw: Hitler—Hubris 1889–1936

Sir Ian Kershaw rightly tells us in his acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitler that:

Hitler, the nonentity, the mediocrity, the failure, wanted to live like a Wagnerian hero. He wanted to become himself a new Wagner—the philosopher-king, the genius, the supreme artist. In Hitler’s mounting identity crisis following his rejection at the Academy of Arts, Wagner was for Hitler the artistic giant he had dreamed of becoming but knew he could never emulate, the incarnation of the triumph of aesthetics and the supremacy of art.  

Kershaw: Hitler—Hubris 1889–1936