The source of this publication is Musical Offerings, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 55–66. ISSN 2330-8206 (print); ISSN 2167-3799 (online). The full text can be found at the following link:
http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1062&context=musicalofferings
The author, at the time of publication, appears to have been an undergraduate doing a Bachelor of Arts in music degree at the Cedarville University Music & Worship Department:
http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1155&context=junior_and_senior_recitals
In the past, I have written some scathing reviews of senior authors, so being an undergraduate, I think it is fair to go easy on the young Carolyn Ticker, who at least tries to avoid polemical exaggeration so gross as to instantly disqualify her. I would certainly be inclined to praise and thank her for that.
The reason I think it is worthwhile spending time critiquing this undergraduate work is since it does, at least, make an attempt at academic balanced neutrality, as evinced by the concluding paragraph:
It is difficult to ignore both Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitic views and the many ties between him and Adolf Hitler. Through his political writings and his operas, it is made clear that Wagner desired a pure German race and thought less of the Jews. Furthermore, several memoirs show that Hitler did not only love Wagner’s music, but he also had a strong connection with Wagner’s immediate family while in political office. These things arguably helped form many of his opinions and political ideologies. With this in mind, the association between Wagner and the Holocaust is difficult to deny. Even though Hitler had many influences, the evidence is clear: Wagner’s ideas helped inform and shape Hitler’s views, thereby playing a role, albeit a small one, in the Holocaust.
Notice in particular the avoidance of the overblown exaggerations found in Joachim Köhler implying “that Hitler based his entire philosophy and the whole Nazi apparatus on ideas explicitly drawn from Wagner’s writings and operas” (Midget: New York Times, 2001). Köhler himself was even more bombastic, pronouncing with complete certainty that “[r]eality meant for [Hitler] the task of transforming the world into a Wagnerian drama”.
So the question being posed here is whether even if the comically overblown version of the thesis of the monocausal operatic origins of National Socialism and the Final Solution is to be dismissed, a more moderate version of the same thesis might still be salvageable out of the wreckage. Sir Ian Kershaw on Köhler:
It is nevertheless a gross oversimplification and distortion to reduce the Third Reich to the outcome of Hitler’s alleged mission to fulfil Wagner’s vision, as does Köhler, in Wagners Hitler.Sir Richard J. Evans also wrote of Köhler that “none of this is remotely persuasive”. The source citation for both quotes can be found in my review of Joachim Köhler’s book (which has been substantially revised and expanded).
So if the rise of Hitler was not in toto caused singularly by a nineteenth century composer, could Wagner still have played “a role, albeit a small one, in the Holocaust”?
Today we will go through the difficulties in entertaining such a causal link, however diluted down to seeming moderate reasonableness it might be, thus giving it an air of apparent academic credibility.
Background Literature
Every piece of writing is born into a pre-existing literature. No writing appears in a complete vacuum. You can tell what the background literature that gave impetus to any writing is just by looking at the bibliography, which, in the case of this piece by Ms Ticker, is as follows:
Applegate, Celia, and Pamela Potter, eds. Music and German National
Identity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Brustein, William I. Roots of Hate: Anti-Semitism in Europe before the
Holocaust. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Evans, Joan. “Stravinsky’s Music in Hitler’s Germany.” Journal of the
American Musicological Society 56, no. 3 (2003): 525–594.
Gilbert, Shirli. Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi
Ghettos and Camps. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Haas, Michael. Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by
the Nazis. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013.
Hamann, Brigitte. Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s
Bayreuth. Translated by Alan Bance. Orlando: Harcourt, 2005.
Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf: The Official 1939 Edition. Translated by
James Murphy. Warwickshire, UK: Coda, 2011.
Jacobs, Robert L. Wagner’s Influence on Hitler. Music & Letters
(Oxford University) 22, no. 1 (1941): 81-83.
Jacobson, Joshua R. Music of the Jewish People. Choral Journal 55,
no. 2 (2014): 67–69.
Kater, Michael H. Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
———. The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third
Reich. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Köhler, Joachim. Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple.
Translated by Ronald Taylor. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.
Levi, Erik. Music in the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994.
Lo, Patrick. ‘The Most German of All German Operas’: An Analysis
of Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger and its Influence on
Hitler's Nazi Ideology.” International Journal of the Humanities 7, no. 9 (2009): 71–102.
Loeffler, James. “Richard Wagner’s ‘Jewish Music’: Antisemitism and
Aesthetics in Modern Jewish Culture.” Jewish Social Studies
(Indiana University) 15, no. 2 (2009): 2–36.
Ludwig, Mark. “Silenced Voices: Music in the Third Reich.” Religion
and the Arts (Boston College) 4, no. 1 (2000): 96–112.
Meyer, Michael. The Politics of Music in the Third Reich. New York:
Peter Lang, 1991.
Of these, only a minority of authors are professional historians: Na’ama Sheffi, Michael Meyer, William Brustein, Brigitte Hamann, Shirli Gilbert, Michael Kater, and Celia Applegate. Interestingly, these historians are not the dominant intellectual influences, and Na’ama Sheffi’s views have been most strikingly ignored or overridden. William Brustein’s book is very anti-Goldhagenist, yet the tone of Ticker’s essay is implicitly Goldhagenist. For a critical discussion of Daniel Goldhagen please refer to the relevant sections of my Köhler book review.
It should also be noted that Brigitte Hamann’s biography of Winifred Wagner has been condemned by at least one author as being little more than just another hagiography of the Bayreuth Nazi circle that formed after Wagner’s death.
What is much more striking is the fact there is not a single reference to any of the major studies of the history and origins of the Final Solution. Absent are Saul Friedländer, Raul Hilberg, Christopher Browning to name a few. Ian Kershaw is totally absent, as is Richard J. Evans, Peter Longerich, Hans Mommsen, Joachim Fest etc. It is not possible to write about the Dritte Reich or the Final Solution without first engaging with this formidable literature.
The trouble is that Ms Ticker’s supervisors (assuming there were any) in a musicology department would probably not know much about the massive historiographic literature dealing with the Dritte Reich era. Unfortunately, it is not possible to collapse world history down to operatic history, and reading nineteenth century opera libretti makes nobody an expert on massive events in the twentieth century. On the contrary, opera is written in a wider socio-political context, and to grasp the significance of the art, it is necessary to understand its wider historical backgrounds.
I have already put together an annotated bibliography of the literature any musicologist must first come to grips with before writing about the history of the Dritte Reich era and the Final Solution:
Ticker cannot ignore this literature without ending up sounding like an undergraduate lecturing seasoned professional historians on how they are to rewrite the history of the Dritte Reich and Final Solution based on speculations gleaned from speculative readings of nineteenth century opera libretti.
Importance of Primary Literature
The most important thing when a subject is controversial—and Wagner is always controversial—is that it makes it imperative that authors return to primary source literature. Wagner left behind a ten volume legacy of complete published works. In addition to these volumes, the Breitkopf & Härtel complete letters is now up to volume 24, and there are plenty more volumes still to come. If an author’s view is under critical examination, it becomes critical to refer to the wider context of that author’s primary literature. The Cosima diaries constitute secondary literature, and should be used cautiously with corroborative support wherever possible.
Ticker shows no engagement with this enormous body of primary literature, and is thus forced to depend entirely on secondary literature. Or else there are neither primary nor secondary supportive citations at all. For example, Ticker states that “Wagner’s political musings and his music display his strong desire for a pure German race, free from any other ethnicity”. While I appreciate that this is standard practice when writing all sorts of inflammatory nonsense about Wagner, it needs a primary source citation. For Wagner thought that as a result of the Thirty Year War, Germans were mongrels, and only the Jews were a pure breed.
Here it must first be recognised that it is, by comparison, very difficult, if at all possible to specify with certainty whether we can speak of a German race, one very distinctly preserved and unchanged, like that of the Jewish race.Hier müsste denn wohl zunächst erkannt werden, dass, wenn wir von einer deutschen Rasse reden wollten, diese mit einer so ungemein ausgesprochen und unverändert erhaltenen, wie der jüdischen, verglichen, sehr schwer, ja fast kaum, mit Bestimmtheit zu spezifizieren sei.
Erkenne dich selbst. Bayreuther Blätter, February-March issue, 1881
The only Wagnerian myth of racial purity worth debunking, however, is that of the Wagnerian myth of Jewish racial purity. He was an ethnic assimilationist who believed that through intermixing (“Vermischung”) everyone will eventually end up racially homogeneous and undifferentiated (“ununterschieden”). For the primary supportive statements see my review of Joachim Köhler, along with my analysis of Judaism in Music, especially the final paragraph.
Most of the Wagner controversies are tiresome storms in a teacup created when speculative writers peddle salacious scandal involving the misdeeds of WagnerHitler (these being the same person) based on hearsay from secondary literature that also relies on other speculative secondary sources, going around in around in circles whipping themselves into hysteria as they make the story bigger and bigger every time it repeats. It is hardly better than tabloid journalism.
Need for Academic Neutrality
Joachim Fest criticised Joachim Köhler for taking an approach devoid of all academic neutrality. His polemic took the form of what Fest described as a “petulant prosecution”. This is no way to read history in a credible and academic fashion. Fest recommended that writers always attempt to take into consideration diametrically opposite viewpoints. Unfortunately, Ticker shows the overwhelming influence of Köhler’s petulant and grossly one-side approach. Polemic must not be mistaken for historiography. Likewise, late in his life, American historian Peter Viereck decided he had quite enough of the “countless exaggerated articles on WagnerHitler”, to which he added that “today what is overlooked is the crucial differences between the two” because “we need nuance”. Once again, Ms Ticker lacks nuance and lapsing into merely repeating tire old myths about WagnerHitler while using fake evidence to support it.
Textural Problems with National Socialist Era Sources
Roman historians left records claiming that Carthaginians performed infanticidal rituals. Today this is thought to be Roman propaganda in the wake of the Carthaginian Wars, and that in an age of high infant mortality, they merely had special rituals to commemorate the death of infants. Likewise, there are lots of spurious quotations attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte. Unsurprising, there are lots of fake quotes attributed to Hitler and other leading Party members. Many of these were intended to make them look ridiculous such as Goebbels allegedly saying “truth is the greatest enemy of the state”. This means that with any quote, it is important to return to primary source quotations so that their veracity can be independently confirmed.
Whole books of conversations with Hitler, such as Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, have been proven to be forgeries, just like the Hitler Diaries. You cannot use these spurious sources as supportive evidence. Yet this is exactly what Ticker does in relying on Rauschning in attempting to run her petulant prosecution. All she proves is that it is easy to prove anyone guilty using fake evidence. In doing so she instantly shoots herself in the foot, and destroys any chance of credible academic neutrality however much the angry mob of populist masses agree with her. I should mention that the “in that hour, it all began” quote is from Kubizek, although, in typical fashion, Ticker gives us a secondary source citation to Vaget. For a discussion of Sir Ian Kershaw’s critique of Kubizek and the kitschy propaganda story culminating in the “in that hour, it all began” outburst, see my Köhler review.
With Kubizek, great care needs to be taken to read him critically, as his book was originally commissioned as a propaganda piece by the National Socialist Party, and there is much left in there that is glowingly adulatory. Taking such adulation literally, even for the sake of polemic is simply not an acceptable white lie, but blatant intellectual dishonesty. In my review of Köhler, I discuss how modern historian critically approach Kubizek and Rauschning. In another analysis, I further discuss fake Nazi opera conspiracy quotations, and although the primary emphasis is on Tolischus, please also take note of the extensive analysis of Rauschning.
Sadly, few supervisors in the music department would be familiar enough with these textural issues to be able to critically tackle the question of reliability with respect to historiography of this era in the course of supervising an undergraduate pupil’s work. However, it would be immeasurably more difficult to sneak the use of fake textual sources past a history department supervisor, who would simply not have accepted a thesis like that of Ticker’s so uncritically dependent on Rauschning and Kubizek.
So once again, we find that when examining the storm in the teacup more critically we find the same old fake quotes going around and around, while the credulous masses react with hysterically self-righteous moral indignation. As least Ticker has the sense not to rely on the old chestnut that goes “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner”. Another small sign of progress perhaps.
False Assumptions of Historical Continuity
This is important as authors like Köhler and Michael Haas (also found in Ticker’s bibliography) like to indulge in assumptions of a transcendental historical continuity. Often the 1848 pro-democracy revolution ends up becoming a practice run for Hitler’s 1923 beer hall putsch (as it does with both Köhler and Haas), as disparate historical events are forced to conform to a grossly reductivistic teleological paradigm where the entire history of the German speaking world ends up a prelude to the rise of fascism.
Further assumptions of transcendental continuity are made when the likes of Siegfried Wagner, Cosima Wagner, and Houston Chamberlain are made out to be the clones of Richard Wagner. It is simply accepted a priori that these latter characters were devoid of any historically contingent self-interest and were merely selfless servants of the dead Wagner’s will. The fact is clear evidence exists that after Wagner’s death there occurred a regime change in Bayreuth, and the political orientation was steered by Cosima from radical left to extreme right. There is no doubt that those in the new regime are guilty of having given great support to Hitler and his regime, but unlike in the Middle Ages we no longer automatically convict a father of the crimes of his children and in-laws, especially when the crime was committed after the father was long dead.
I quote from an excellent paraphrase of Friedländer found on the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial website of Professor Saul Friedländer, one of the greatest of all Holocaust scholars, both of whose parents were murdered by the regime:
Friedländer emphasizes in this context the special role played by the Bayreuth circle, though not by Richard Wagner himself, in the transmutation of the struggle against the Jews into “the central theme of world history” (p. 89). According to his analysis, Wagner’s anti-Semitism, ... had a profoundly ambivalent quality insofar as no fanatical anti-Semite would have allowed the presence of such close Jewish workers amongst his inner entourage.
Friedländer’s position on this matter is one that is so authoritative, carefully researched, and academically nuanced in its neutrality as to be nearly definitive. Key amongst these in the Bayreuth circle was the English born Houston Chamberlain. Though he is always introduced as “Wagner’s son-in-law” keep in mind that Wagner never met him, nor knew of his existence. Cosima discovered him writing on Wagner in French journals, only after Wagner’s death, and in him found she the perfect propagandist to create the myth of the right-wing Wagner who allegedly vindicated her views, all dressed up as an exercise in selfless devotion to a mythical spectre of her late husband that was entirely her own self-serving creation.
As for the assumption of linear continuity in the political character of both German nationalism and anti-Semitism please read this essay.
There is plenty of evidence that Wagner was, and remained throughout his life, a radical left-wing political thinker. Much of this evidence is examined in my review of Köhler. What damns Cosima most is that she herself noted a good deal of this down in her diaries, and despite this, replaced such ideals with her own extreme right wing prejudices born of being raised a virtual orphan with small minded French Catholic religious piety brutally instilled in her by her carers. It was little wonder that she got on with Hitler at a time he was a minor regional political rabble rouser, for he too was raised a small minded country Catholic. The French Cosima, the English Chamberlain and Winifred, and the Austrian Hitler, all had in common that they were non-Germans who were trying to be more German than any German by overcompensating for their outsider status with exaggerated expressions of German hypernationalism accompanied by redirection of xenophobia towards Jews.
In this process of creating the myth of the right-wing Wagner, the historical Wagner came to be entirely overwritten. Yet this is what one of the greatest of all historians of our age, Sir Richard J. Evans, has just published based on the actual historical records of Wagner’s role in the 1848-49 pro-democracy uprisings:
... democratic deputies now formed a new Saxon government, and revolutionaries flocked to its defence from outside the city. Among those who mounted the barricades was the Court music director Richard Wagner (1813-83), who had come under the influence of the ideas of Proudhon and Feuerbach and saw revolution as a way of creating the ideal conditions in which to achieve his mission as a universal artistic genius. Enthused by the uprising, he declared optimistically: ‘The old world is in ruins from which a new world will arise; for the sublime goddess REVOLUTION comes rushing and roaring on the wings of the storm’. More radical still was the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. He had arrived in Dresden in March 1849 after ... telling the delegates at the Pan-Slav Congress in Prague in June that they should ‘overthrow from top to bottom this effete social world which has become impotent and sterile’.
While Wagner busied himself making hand grenades and looking out for the Prussian army from the top of the Frauenkirche, Bakunin helped build the barricades. It was all to no avail. The Prussian government acted with lightning rapidity, sending its troops to the Saxon capital by train. Some 5,000 Prussian and Saxon soldiers marched in on 9 May 1849; demolished the barricades, and overcame the resistance of the 3,000 poorly organized revolutionaries defending them; 250 of the insurgents were killed in the action, 400 were wounded, and 869 others were arrested. ... Nearly 2,000 insurgents fled to Switzerland, among them Wagner.
Richard J. Evans: The Pursuit of Power Europe, 1815-1914, p.210-211
You can see the historical Wagner who explodes off the pages of the historical records bears not the slightest resemble to the mythical Wagner worshipped by the Bayreuth circle long after his death. Here is what Wagner’s Jewish friend Ferdinand Praeger wrote in 1892:
His temperament, all who have come into contact with him well know, was very excitable, and under such a strain as he then endured it was at fever pitch. Hainberger related to me a dramatic episode which thrilled Wagners frame and stirred the whole of the eye-witnesses. I recounted it subsequently to Wagner, and he agreed entirely as to the truth of Hainberger’s recital. It was in the morning about eight o’clock, the barricade at which Wagner and Hainberger were stationed was about to receive such morning meal as had been prepared, the outposts being kept by a few men and women. Amongst the latter was a young girl of eighteen, the daughter of a baker belonging to this particular barricade. She stood in sight of all, when to their amazement a shot was suddenly heard, a piercing shriek, followed by the fall of the girlish patriot. The miscreant Prussian soldier, one of a detachment in the neighbourhood, was caught redhanded and hurried to the barricade. Wagner seized a musket and mounting a cart called out aloud to all, “Men, will you see your wives and daughters fall in the cause of our beloved country, and not avenge their cowardly murder? All who have hearts, all who have the blood and spirit of their forefathers, and love their country follow me, and death to the tyrant.” So saying he seized a musket, and heading the barricade they came quickly upon the few Prussians who had strayed too far into the town, and who, perceiving they were outnumbered, gave themselves up as prisoners. This is but one of those many examples of what a timid man will do under excitement, for I give it as my decided opinion, and I have no fear of lack of corroboration, that Richard Wagner was not personally brave.
Praeger: Wagner as I Knew Him
It is thought that Praeger wrote this book to counter the usurpation of the historical Wagner by a new mythical right-wing imposter that bore no resemblance to the man Praeger knew—and the new Bayreuth circle were most incensed by him. Houston Chamberlain complained that Praeger’s book completely lacked any primary quotations from Wagner even though Praeger had reprinted an entire essay by Wagner in his memoire in a meticulously prepared English translation of a quality still unrivalled in Wagner English translations after over a hundred years.
Contrary to what the new Bayreuth circle may have led others to believe, the posthumous mythical Wagner was concocted, not to honour Wagner, but to sanctify his family’s own self-serving agenda. It is certainly true that this mythical Wagner did aid and abet the rise of fascism, but that was scarcely the fault of the historical Wagner, an historical figure who was not only long dead, but whose true revolutionary legacy had been deleted from history, and then brutally written over. Those of us, like Richard J. Evans, trying to rediscover the historical Wagner still keep struggling because we keep finding well-meaning but misguided polemicists wanting to eternally resurrect the phony Wagner myth. That bloated mythical Doppelgänger needs to be deflated and then definitively killed off with the intellectual equivalent of a stake through the heart. With the excavation of the long buried historical Wagner of documented archival evidence, we see now a portrait emerging that is frightfully unfamiliar, of someone who more resembles Che Guevara than Adolf Hitler.
As for the question as to whether Wagner later turned his back on his liberal ideals, sometimes all one has to do is ask him, for Cosima condemns herself before the judgement of history by recording that when on the 27th of March 1882 (a year before his death) Wagner is asked if he is a "liberal, democrat", he answers with an unequivocal "yes". And there is plenty else to corroborate this.
Use of Dated and Discredited Literature
The biggest mistake in Ticker’s article is that:
This primary source [i.e. Mein Kampf, a grossly propagandist autohagiography of questionable accuracy] supports the truthfulness of secondary accounts written by men such as Köhler and Kater.
She seems to be oblivious to the fact that Köhler has distanced himself from the views in his book that she uses as supportive secondary literature. It is almost embarrassing to read so blatant an error, as a quick Google search should quickly bring up my review of his book. As for Kater, as you would expect from a professional historian, at least his critique of Bayreuth apologists has more than a little ring of truth to it, since fascist figures from Cosima, Siegfried, Winifred, to Wolfgang have been mostly subject to endless obsequious hagiographies—amongst them by Hamann. Kater seems plainly oblivious to the degree to which he too is being twisted and manipulated by propaganda as he writes:
In the decades since the German catastrophe of 1945, apologists for Wagner and the Bayreuth Festival have attempted to whitewash the reputation of the composer and his oeuvre by emphasizing the aesthetic integrity that Bayreuth has always stood for and stressing the differences between the original phenomenon and anything that smacked of National Socialism. Hence, it has been claimed that Wagner's Judeophobia, if subjected to careful qualification, proves less than virulent. The hypernationalism with which Bayreuth came to be identified in the chauvinistic era before World War I, it is implied, originated after Wagner’s death and was the product of unconscionable manipulators of the master’s heritage. According to this carefully crafted legend, it was the Nazis, especially Hitler himself, who grafted the evils of fascism, extreme nationalism, and antiSemitism onto the Wagner-Bayreuth legacy. Hence, these issues did not originate with Wagner himself but with National Socialists guilty of improper historical judgment and manipulative abuse. Moreover, Wagner’s heirs—namely his son Siegfried and Siegfried’s English- born wife, Winifred (nee Williams)—have been portrayed as innately innocent and gentle souls.
Michael Kater: The Twisted Muse
Yet nothing makes them all look more ridiculous than comparison with the historical Wagner, after the explosion of the mythical Wagner they cynically overwrote him with, and of which they rendered themselves oblivious to. In fact, the Wagner descendents are such a dreadful lot that Bayreuth needs rather to be blown up in Boulezian fashion to start again afresh: Sprengt die Opernhäuser in die Luft!
Conflation of Different Varieties of Anti-Semitism
We have seen time and again that Wagner’s nationalism and anti-Semitism arose from a different historical ground, one discontinuous to those of the later Bayreuth circle after his death. There are different varieties of anti-Semitism. One of these is Christian anti-Semitism. If we entertain the thesis that:
Wagner’s ideas helped inform and shape Hitler’s views, thereby playing a role, albeit a small one, in the Holocaust.
If also means that we have to equally ask what role the Christian anti-Semitism of the churches played. I do note again that Carolyn Ticker is publishing in the Department of Music and Worship, Cedarville University—an independent Baptist religious school.
 |
| There is a growing polemical literature insinuating that Christianity is a form of proto-Nazism |
If we are to characterise Wagner’s own left-wing anti-Semitism as proto-Nazi, why should we not call the anti-Semitism of the New Testament the forerunner of Mein Kampf or call Christianity itself a form of proto-Nazism? It opens up a huge can of worms. Yet to say that traditional Christian anti-Semitism is a key contributor to the Holocaust can be dangerously polemical in a way that equally risks losing sight of academic neutrality. Certainly, Wagner’s friend, the socialist anarchist, Mikhail Bakunin, just like other socialists of his age, including Marx, did make anti-Judaic statements. Yet it would be even more inflammatory and polemical to exaggerate the historical influence of the left-wing anti-Semitism of a Wagner, Bakunin, Proudhon, Feuerbach, Marr, Marx, and culminating in its most extreme expression from Eugen Dühring, in allegedly shaping National Socialist ideology. We know from Cosima that she may have tried to interest Wagner in the growing right-wing völkisch anti-Semitism that first arose towards the end of his life. She hardly found much sympathy, as she noted in her diary:
Dr Förster sent us an invitation for the founding of an anti-Semitic newspaper. R[ichard] recalled that had written to him from Naples:
“You should take a look to see if you fit in Prince Bismarck’s trash [Kram], and it looks like you fit into the trash, because you’ve adopted his entire programme. It looks like we Bayreuthers with our ideals are going to be very isolated”.
Dr. Förster schickte ihn einen Aufruf zur Gründung einer anti-semitischen Zeitung. R erzählt, daß er von Neapel aus ihm geschrieben zu haben:
»Sehen Sie, ob Sie in Fürst Bismarcks Kram passen und Sie scheinen in den Kram zu passen«, —und Sie scheinen in den Kram zu passen, denn Sie adoptieren sein ganzes Programm. »Wir Bayreuther mit unseren Ideen werden sehr einsam bleiben”.«
Cosima Tagebuch: p672 Sonnenabend 22ten Januar 1881. My own translation
She had to wait until Wagner was dead and out of the way before she could fling the doors of Bayreuth open to Bernard Förster’s völkisch successors, while using Wagner’s by then rapidly growing posthumous celebrity status to give it a phony stamp of endorsement. Bayreuth was to remain “isolated” from such völkisch monstrosities no longer. Meanwhile Wagner’s growing fame after his death made millionaires out his heirs, for his inherited legacy was no longer that of the struggling revolutionary avant garde composer of his own lifetime, making it necessary for his heirs to abruptly sever themselves from history by pretending that Wagner had actually never been a radical at all, but had always been part of the petit bourgeois status quo to which these nouveau riche millionaires themselves now comfortably belonged. The curse of the Wagner clan, like that of the Nibelungs’ ring, is the curse of money and power.
The danger with exaggerated Wagner polemics is that they often smack of attempts to draw away attention from a more diverse range of socio-historical sources of origin nurturing the rise of National Socialism. Yet if the ideological origins of its historical rise is to be regarded as taking primacy, then the ideological role of Christian anti-Semitism must also be raised. The problem once again is the assumption of grand historical continuity between either left-wing or Christian anti-Semitism and that of National Socialism. There is no simple, linear continuity of escalating degrees of ideological severity starting in the age of Roman Empire, passing through the Middle Ages, being reignited by Luther in the Reformation, before culminating in the Shoah, and sensible historians like Saul Friedländer will have no truck with such assumptions of linear continuity even while emphasising the centrality of ideology in driving the Holocaust. Much more important is the catastrophic discontinuity introduced by the Great War, followed by the Treaty of Versailles, traumatic social changes from the German Revolution, and topped off by hyperinflation and the Great Depression. These are the more relevant radicalising socio-political factors aggressively fanning the flames of tumultuous social conflict—that is to say—class conflict. History engenders ideology as much as ideology engenders history, and even then the expression of that ideology is fundamentally conditioned by the conflicts inherent to its immediately contingent historical context.
So once again Joachim Fest turns out to have been vindicated:
... an unbroken line from the pamphlet "Judaism in Music" to Auschwitz can be drawn only with difficulty. Whatever happened was not only Wagner succession, but always also Wagner abuse, and whoever speaks of "Wagner's Hitler", should also speak of Hitler's Wagner.
You cannot draw such unbroken lines, not even a faint one, from the time of Wagner to Hitler without doing violence to history. For what characterises these disparate epochs is more their catastrophic discontinuities rather than any imagined transcendental continuity and direct lines of unbroken lineage. The end result is that the hypothesis positing a weak line going from Wagner-Hitler invariably disintegrates in the face of historical evidence as quickly as does the extreme thesis positing an equally mythical WagnerHitler.