I have been spending days revising my review of Joachim Köhler’s book:
http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.html
The main insight is that despite the fact that his Fatherland Union Paper (upon which the warrant for his arrest for participating in the 1848 Revolution was issued) publicly supports democratic socialism, I have dug up innumerable citations that show that in private Wagner was, and remained throughout his life, supportive of “communism”. Wagner never refers to Karl Marx, so what this phrase actually means is a matter for debate. It should not be assumed automatically to have the same meaning as in a Marxist-Leninist interpretation.
Most controversially, I have found evidence that this sympathy for communism penetrates deeply and profoundly into his Schopenhauerian period. Wagner, from the outset, thought that the Schopenhauerian vision of his Ring had always been there, well before he had discovered Schopenhauer, despite having completed the text to The Ring long before reading him.
There is a reason for all of this, and it links in to the concept of “communism” as the negation of egoism. The Negation of the Will, and the negation (Aufhebung) of egoism become one and the same concept, thus seamlessly uniting the Feuerbachian and Schopenhauerian periods into one, akin to the two sides of one coin. Even the Knights of the Holy Grail end up as something like comrades in a primordial regenerationist communist party. Strange though that may seem, it is an unavoidable conclusion.
Read and be astonished.
Search for the terms “communism” and “Aufhebung” to skip to the revised parts of the essay. Numerous supportive primary source citations are included.