Today, I thought I would go through and highlight a bitesize portion of the information crammed into the main essay on this blog, which is now a bit overfull.
Many Nazi opera conspiracies theories that "reduce the Third Reich to the outcome of Hitler’s alleged [secret] mission to fulfil Wagner’s vision", claim that "Hitler came to see it as his life’s work to fulfil Wagner’s visions and put his ideas into practice" (both quotes from Sir Ian Kershaw). It has even been asserted that Hitler was on a secret mission to "transform the world into a Wagnerian drama". It is claimed that the Hitler and National Socialist Party were involved in a grand conspiracy to hide its occult origins in nineteenth century opera, and that Nazism had hidden nineteenth century origins because "Wagner was a prominent forerunner" of Party ideology. Since neither Hitler nor any leading party member ever stated such a thing, it is only possible to pursue the argument through a purported existence of a secret plot to run Dritte Reich policy on operatic principles: it is, in short, a conspiracy theory.
The problem about this is that it simply runs totally counter to what modern historians think about the history of the Dritte Reich and the Holocaust (Shoah). Most historian reject the notion that Party ideology can be traced back to either Reformation or nineteenth century Romantic roots, and argue that doing so merely dilutes down both the primacy of National Socialist responsibility as well as the startling originality of their crimes. German history is not be read in toto as one continuous history driven by a linear escalation of degrees of proto-Nazi ideology passing from Luther to Wagner culminating in the Dritte Reich. It is just not that simple, and moreover it results in reading history backwards, retrospectively forcing everything to fit that one-dimensional teleological narrative.
Today I am going to point readers towards the literature they should be reading, and I will let other authors speak for themselves. Readers familiar only with Nazi opera conspiracy literature will find that in entering the world of serious academic historiography, they will feel like climate change denialists amongst climatologist. One of the most important messages to take away is that you should only read thoroughly nuanced academically credible material on the history of the Dritte Reich written by respected historians. There is a huge speculative literature out there by writers who profiteer off the endless interest in this subject by writing grossly reductivistic pop narratives of base emotive appeal, or worse still kitschy speculative nonsense about Nazi UFOs, satanism, werewolves, secret antarctic bases, the missing testicle, great escapes from the bunker to Argentina etc etc. You should not waste your time reading this nonsense. The Nazi opera conspiracy theory stuff also belongs in the same rubbish bin along with Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners and Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.
I thought I would introduce some of the key authors I would recommend reading in place of Nazi opera conspiracy literature and other pieces of pop kitsch. This is not an all inclusive list of key literature on the subject matter, but it will help put the reader on the track to a more nuanced and insightful understanding than reading any speculative conspiracy book.
Sir Richard J. Evans
The writings of the famous Cambridge historian always make for gripping reading. His Third Reich series started when acting as an expert witness in the David Irving trial, Professor Evans found that there were no books he could recommend, in which current academic understanding of the era were adequately summarised. My favourite book is actually a summary of essays looking at the methodological approaches to reading German history (and history in general) entitled Rereading German History. I can't count how often I have read that book. Also look out for talks given by Sir Richard on youtube, and make sure you follow him on Twitter.
A good introduction to Evans would be to watch this talk on Youtube:
The Four Volumes of his Third Reich Series:
The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed Democracy and Seized Power in Germany
The Third Reich in Power, 1933 - 1939: How the Nazis Won Over the Hearts and Minds of a Nation
The Third Reich at War: How the Nazis Led Germany from Conquest to Disaster
The Third Reich in History and MemoryYes, Professor Evans does mention Wagner en passant but never identifies him as the comic book villain secretly manipulating the events of world history.
Sir Ian Kershaw
Known principally for his two-volume Hitler biography, Professor Kershaw takes a synthetic view that blends the functionalist and structuralist antitheses of historical debate on methodology. A good summary of Kershaw's view of the origins of the Final Solution can be found on the Yad Vashem website, and makes compelling reading. Once again no mention of any nineteenth century opera.
I would also point out the discussion on Daniel Goldhagen's book, Hitler's Willing Executioners (also discussed by Evans in Rereading German History) in Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution. In chapter 12, Kershaw also discusses Finkelstein and Birn in A Nation on Trial, which is worth reading at the same time.
Hitler biography: Part I Hubris and Part II Nemesis. Once again, Wagner's name is mentioned en passant, but is never identified the cause of events over a half century after his death. As for the suggestion that Hitler could be simply explained by his Grand Mission to "transform the world into a Wagnerian drama", Kershaw scoffs and dismisses this as a "gross oversimplification and distortion".
Thomas Weber
A younger historian who is Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen. I would recommend his book Hitler's First War as a necessary supplement to the Kershaw two-volume biography. Weber focuses in detail on a much narrower formative period in Hitler's life, and it is immensely informative. Otherwise, it can be read on its own, where it would still be an excellent introduction to the field of study. Richard J. Evans commended the book for how it systematically demythologizes Hitler.
Raul Hilberg
At the time of his death many considered him to be the greatest of all Holocaust historians. He is best known for his monumental three-volume study The Destruction of the European Jews, which has served for a long time as the standard text on the subject. Hilberg does not even mention Richard Wagner in over 1500 pages of the three volumes let alone entertaining the thesis of the operatic origins of the Holocaust. Hilberg effectively devotes the same amount of space to a discussion of Wagner as he does to the discussion of Nazi UFOs—in both instances the number of words devoted to such speculative subjects is zero! The attitude is clear: such rubbish isn't even worth mentioning.
Raul Hilberg's highly insightful critique of Daniel Goldhagen is also available for free. A similar and complementary discussion of the ideas from David Bankier can be freely downloaded from the Yad Vashem website.
Saul Friedländer
Himself a Holocaust survivor, Professor Friedländer is the author of a comprehensive two volume study, Nazi Germany and the Jews. There is also some perceptive and insightful commentary on Wagner in the two volume version. The condensed one volume version is also worth looking at in that many may find it less daunting a read than the full version. The following statement on Wagner is found in the one volume version but not in the full version interestingly enough:
...despite the attachment of German Jews to the works of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, these composers were not to be performed by Jews. Beethoven was forbidden in 1937, but Mozart had to wait until the next year, after the Anschluss.
Nazi Germany and the Jews: 1933-1945In the book Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich (ed. Friedländer) containing essays from a number of authors including Saul Friedländer and Joachim Fest, Professor Friedländer cleanly debunks the idea that the Dritte Reich and the Holocaust had operatic origins. It desperately needs an English language version to be published.
The remarkable thing is that Friedländer stresses the concept of "redemptive anti-Semitism" and emphasises the role of ideology in driving genocide. Yet for all of that he reads no operatic grand narrative into that ideology.
Full two volume version of Nazi Germany and the Jews:
Nazi Germany And The Jews: The Years Of Persecution: 1933-1939
Nazi Germany And the Jews: The Years Of Extermination: 1939-1945
Christopher Browning
Another highly respected and oft cited academic. The most important study by Professor Browning, a historian at the University of North Carolina, is The Origins of the Final Solution. It is one of the classical texts on the history of the Holocaust. Wagner's name once more rates exactly the same number of mentions as Nazi UFOs or satanism. It is not too long, and, although it is getting a bit old, some might still consider it the first place to start when it comes to books on the subject.
Another study worth mentioning is Ordinary Men, which also enjoys classical status. It strongly questions whether anti-Semitism is sufficient ground to explain how ordinary men turned into killers.
Peter Longerich
Longerich's book on the Holocaust is highly recommended. New York Books has a good review and summary of Longerich's synthetic approach:
It has been recently updated for the revised English language edition, and arguably better summarises current academic understanding of the subject than many others slightly older texts, including Browning. Once again, Richard Wagner gets the same number of mentions as being a principal cause or "Prophet" of the Final Solution as either Martin Luther, or for that matter, the aliens. Or to put it another way there is no "novelistic climax" engendered by everything being scripted according to a Masterplan predestining everything as "inevitable" right from 1933—let alone from the nineteenth century.The emerging image of a Holocaust resulting from political motives denies Longerich’s readers the expected moment of doom at the bottom of a descending narrative arc. More obstinately than almost all other historians, Longerich resists the temptation to insert a novelistic climax into the history of the extermination of the Jews. Yet nothing about Longerich’s account questions the importance of the Führer and his ideology. ... Longerich unites ideology and institutions within an interpretation sufficiently flexible to connect Nazi aspirations to Nazi policies. He thereby avoids both extremes of the debates about timing: the popular assumption that after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 everything was inevitable, and the scholarly search for a particular moment in 1941 when the definitive decision was made.
David Cesarani
I have yet to study his final monumental study, Final Solution thoroughly. What I have quickly read of it looks very promising indeed. Cesarani regards Longerich's synthetic approach favourably, but thinks even he somewhat over-emphasises the role of planned human agency, replacing it with a "cock-up theory" of how history devolves. However, Richard J. Evans recommends it so I think it is has to be included. It is the latest large study of the Holocaust, and even more recent than the Longerich.
Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-49 (2015)
Once again a 1056 page academic study fails to come to the conclusion that the Holocaust happened because Hitler was under instructions to carry out the Final Solution by enacting the Masterplan of a historic Mission conferred on him by either Martin Luther or Richard Wagner.
I quote a warning written by Cesarani from the introduction to the book:
I could hardly agree more.However there is a yawning gulf between popular understanding of this history and current scholarship on the subject. This is hardly surprising given that most people acquire their knowledge of the Nazi past and the fate of the Jews through novels, films, or earnest but ill-informed lessons at school, which frequently rely on novels for young adults or their filmic versions. Misconceptions are reinforced by the edited and instrumentalized versions purveyed by campaigning bodies and the constellation of organizations devoted to education and commemoration.
Nicholas Stargardt
I cannot recommend his book The German War highly enough. It is immensely readable and difficult to put down. Highly praised by Richard J. Evans, the overall framework of the book is highly neutral and academic, but it is brought to life with a huge number of personal accounts, many taken from surviving letters and diaries of ordinary people who lived through the war. Once again it is devoid of bombastic speculation about grand plots to transform the world according to an operatic vision. It is as far as you can get from that sort of nonsense.
Adam Tooze
I am going to include The Wages of Destruction in this reading list as it gives a contrasting socio-economic analysis of the Dritte Reich. It stands in contrast to the gross cultural reductivism that seeks to find the origins of the Dritte Reich exclusively in nineteenth century opera.
Zara Steiner
These two volumes on the origins of WWII are so highly regarded I feel compelled to include them. They were keenly anticipated and much praised.
The Lights that Failed
The Triumph of the DarkOnce again we have a key Cambridge historian of our times who fails to even so much as once mention Richard Wagner's name anywhere in the two volumes of this seminal modern study of the epoch.
Hans Mommsen
Many probably know of Mommsen mostly from the pivotal role he played in the functionalist/structural vs intentionalist debates of the 1970s, with Mommsen as the key exponent of the functionalist camp. Subsequently historians have come to prefer a synthetic approach combining the two antithesis. As a result, his views naturally evolved with the times, as you can see from this interview with Mommsen published on the Yad Vashem website. If you read German however, I would also recommend that you follow up by reading his final and most recent views on the Holocaust in his book, Das NS-Regime und die Auslöschung des Judentums in Europa. I hope an English version will soon appear.
The Nazi Opera Conspiracy Literature
Some will point out that the Nazi opera conspiracy literature is also very large. However, quantity does not imply quality:
Hartmut Zelinsky
It is striking that almost none of these authors are historians with any background in the study of the history of the Dritte Reich or the Holocaust. Viereck is the one exception, in a wartime book based on his PhD from the 1940s, but I would recommend you read my discussion of him. Most of this literature is also beginning to look frightfully dated.
The trouble with pointing out the size of the opera conspiracy literature as evidence of its credibility is that the Nazi satanist (Occult Reich) literature is just as large. Once again, quantity does not imply quality:
Roland
Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier
It is hardly more possible to argue for the credibility of the Nazi opera conspiracy literature than it is to for the Occult Reich literature based on quantity alone. There is plenty of non-academic rubbish out there: in the bin it all goes.
Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier
It is hardly more possible to argue for the credibility of the Nazi opera conspiracy literature than it is to for the Occult Reich literature based on quantity alone. There is plenty of non-academic rubbish out there: in the bin it all goes.
It is interesting that the Occult Reich literature, the Nazi opera conspiracy literature, and the Nazi UFO literature almost seamlessly merge into one another, feeding off one another, and perpetuating their existence along the same speculative continuum. For example take a look at this speculative post linking UFOs with Nazi satanism:
For more details on how Nazi opera conspiracy literature and the Occult Reich literature feed off each other see my analysis of Joachim Köhler's opera conspiracy book. It seems that speculation breeds speculation ad infinitum. Fairy tales beget fairy tales. Worse still, this feeds into and actively encourages a mythologised occultist version of Nazism that circulates around neo-Nazi circles.
While on the subject of books to avoid, I would also include The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Shirer says that Hitler wasn't acting on Wagner's orders at all, but was instead Martin Luther's stooge. I have dealt with Shirer previously. While the literature pushing the Luther hypothesis caricaturing him as the comic book villain responsible for WWII and the Holocaust is tiny compared to the opera conspiracy literature, Shirer's book has probably outsold all of the opera conspiracy books combined. The sheer quantity of books sold does nothing to convince modern historians of its quality.
While on the subject of books to avoid, I would also include The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer. Shirer says that Hitler wasn't acting on Wagner's orders at all, but was instead Martin Luther's stooge. I have dealt with Shirer previously. While the literature pushing the Luther hypothesis caricaturing him as the comic book villain responsible for WWII and the Holocaust is tiny compared to the opera conspiracy literature, Shirer's book has probably outsold all of the opera conspiracy books combined. The sheer quantity of books sold does nothing to convince modern historians of its quality.
Serious historians no more cite the Nazi opera conspiracy literature than they do the Occult Reich or Nazi UFO literature. After all, the best way to look at any serious book is to look at the bibliography. If the bibliography contains a reference to any of these speculative conspiracy books (other than to quickly debunk them), then you can guarantee that it is total nonsense. None of the above books in my suggested reading list refers to any of the Nazi opera conspiracy literature other than to debunk it on rare occasion with peevish comments relegated to the footnotes. In general, authors can no more be bothered discussing the opera conspiracy than they can be discussing the weaknesses of the Nazi UFO literature.
Some better educated readers will find all of this so obvious that it hardly needs stating. Certainly, if you have studied history at university, or taken a course on the history of the Holocaust from somewhere like the Yad Vashem Institute, I won't be saying anything new. However, this is far from the case amongst the general populace. I recently got trolled by someone claiming I am a "Holocaust denialist" because I rejected Nazi opera conspiracies. After all it was just "obvious" that the Holocaust had operatic origins. If that were the case, then a Jewish Holocaust historian like Raul Hilberg would be a Holocaust denialist. His 1500 page book on the Holocaust detailing the murder of six million in vast detail from a structuralist perspective would constitute a Holocaust denialist thesis merely because Hilberg will have no truck with the claim that it was "obviously" caused by a nineteenth century opera composer. By promoting the work of authors like Hilberg, Kershaw, Mommsen, and Longerich, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Institute in Israel would be a Holocaust denialist institute. Yet that sort of thinking, however grossly absurd, is so utterly pervasive and emotionally deep-seated as to be impossible to unseat. There is indeed a truly frightful "yawning gulf" between serious historiography and pop history.
It seems nonetheless that for some the categorical imperative of historiography is to prove the "obvious" truth of Nazi opera conspiracies or be damned as a Holocaust denialist ripe to hang on the same gallows as Eichmann. I am reminded of Hegel being dumbfounded and unable to argue against the cleaning lady who says to him that "it always rains when we eat fish"—true, you're wasting your time arguing with that! The only way to prevent this sort of mind-numbing myopia is through promotion of quality education on the subject, open-minded academic discussion, and discouragement of wanton speculation devoid of a quality evidence base.
Some better educated readers will find all of this so obvious that it hardly needs stating. Certainly, if you have studied history at university, or taken a course on the history of the Holocaust from somewhere like the Yad Vashem Institute, I won't be saying anything new. However, this is far from the case amongst the general populace. I recently got trolled by someone claiming I am a "Holocaust denialist" because I rejected Nazi opera conspiracies. After all it was just "obvious" that the Holocaust had operatic origins. If that were the case, then a Jewish Holocaust historian like Raul Hilberg would be a Holocaust denialist. His 1500 page book on the Holocaust detailing the murder of six million in vast detail from a structuralist perspective would constitute a Holocaust denialist thesis merely because Hilberg will have no truck with the claim that it was "obviously" caused by a nineteenth century opera composer. By promoting the work of authors like Hilberg, Kershaw, Mommsen, and Longerich, the Yad Vashem Holocaust Institute in Israel would be a Holocaust denialist institute. Yet that sort of thinking, however grossly absurd, is so utterly pervasive and emotionally deep-seated as to be impossible to unseat. There is indeed a truly frightful "yawning gulf" between serious historiography and pop history.
It seems nonetheless that for some the categorical imperative of historiography is to prove the "obvious" truth of Nazi opera conspiracies or be damned as a Holocaust denialist ripe to hang on the same gallows as Eichmann. I am reminded of Hegel being dumbfounded and unable to argue against the cleaning lady who says to him that "it always rains when we eat fish"—true, you're wasting your time arguing with that! The only way to prevent this sort of mind-numbing myopia is through promotion of quality education on the subject, open-minded academic discussion, and discouragement of wanton speculation devoid of a quality evidence base.