The Case for Wagner in Israel

[king ubu]

I heard Max Roach beat Abbey Lincoln.

She still couldn't sing.

[Stefan Wood]

Allen, doesn't sound much different than the incidents of kids being "under the influence" of heavy metal music and committing violent crimes. Should I blame Metallica/Slayer/etc. for those things?

it's nutty to say that the guy who helped develop an intellectual rationale for anti-semitism, in the country of the Holocaust, bears great responsibility for that Holocaust?

certainly I've said crazier things than that. Give me a few minutes.

look, here's from an article in something called The Telegraph:

"1:32PM BST 25 Jul 2011

• Hitler wrote in his first volume of his book Mein Kampf: "At the age of twelve, I saw ... the first opera of my life, Lohengrin. In one instant I was addicted. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew no bounds." • Aged 16, Hitler quit school and spent the next three years being idle. He is said to have spent a tidy proportion of his pocket money on going to the opera. He became passionate about Wagner.

• Wagner's anti-Semitic and fervently nationalistic writings are thought to have had a quasi-religious effect on Hitler. His theories of racial purity were partly drawn from Wagner. According to Wagner: "The Volk has always been the essence of all the individuals who constituted a commonality. In the beginning, it was the family and the races; then the races united through linguistic equality as a nation."

• On January 13, 1933 the newly-elected National Socialist Party celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Wagner's death by staging a grandiose memorial ceremony in Leipzig, the composer's birthplace. Adolf Hitler invited Siegfried Wagner's widow, the English-born Winifred, and her son Wieland to be guests of honor at this event.

• Each summer, from 1933 to 1939, Hitler attended the Bayreuth Festival, and he made the Wagner estate, Wahnfried, his second home.

• Hitler reinterpreted the story of Wagner's final opera Parsifal to fit his own ideological vision. The story carries elements of Buddhist renunciation suggested by Wagner's readings of Schopenhauer. However, Hitler wrote of it: "What is celebrated is not the Christian Schopenhauerian [sic] religion of compassion, but pure and noble blood, blood whose purity the brotherhood of initiates has come together to guard.

• "Wagner's line of thought is intimately familiar to me", Hitler once said. "At every stage of my life I come back to him."

• The Wagner family and their supporters had campaigned in the early 20th Century for a special copyright law that would restrict performances of Wagner's opera 'Parsifal' to Bayreuth. In 1923 Hitler visited Wagner's grave and reportedly promised: "If I should ever succeed in exerting any influence on Germany's destiny, I will see that Parsifal is given back to Bayreuth". He did not fulfill this.

• A recent documentary, The Wagner Family, alleged that the Wagner family knowingly aligned itself with Hitler’s movement from the beginning.

[Mark Stryker]

Larry -- thanks for fuller explanation, though I remain unconvinced and agree with Big Wheel's 2:46 a.m. post.

Allen -- suggest rereading Ross' piece, especially the last three paragraphs as they relate to Wagner's influence on Hitler and the historical record. No one is arguing that Hitler didn't love Wagner, but to draw a direct line between Wagner and the Holocaust is in effect to argue "No Wagner=no Holocaust." Is that your position? I don't believe that for a minute. There was virulent anti-semitism in Germany before Wagner and the intellectual justification that evolved for Nazism came from many sources.

Edited September 27, 2012 by Mark Stryker

[Dave James]

• A recent documentary, The Wagner Family, alleged that the Wagner family knowingly aligned itself with Hitler’s movement from the beginning.

Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner's British born daughter-in-law, was an ardent supporter of Hitler. Allegedly, he proposed marriage to her on two different occasions.

[robertoart]

And their were any number of Brits who shared the views espoused by Hitler and Wagner etc. all. Including the abdicating King and Mrs Simpson. It wasn't just isolated to the Germanic thing.

There was also the emergent Vitalist movement that was popular in certain circles across the Western world during the rise of the Nazi Party, which also had affinities with Fascist ideas of 'the body'. And was probably also connected in some way to antisemitism.

[Larry Kart]

Larry -- thanks for fuller explanation, though I remain unconvinced and agree with Big Wheel's 2:46 a.m. post.

Allen -- suggest rereading Ross' piece, especially the last three paragraphs as they relate to Wagner's influence on Hitler and the historical record. No one is arguing that Hitler didn't love Wagner, but to draw a direct line between Wagner and the Holocaust is in effect to argue "No Wagner=no Holocaust." Is that your position? I don't believe that for a minute. There was virulent anti-semitism in Germany before Wagner and the intellectual justification that evolved for Nazism from many sources.

Mark -- Yes, "there was virulent anti-semitism in Germany before Wagner" and throughout much of Europe as well. But Wagner's particular contribution to the stream (and though it was not exclusively is, his formulations of it were to a fair degree his own and profoundly influential) was this: That there was a political/moral fracture in German society and the German soul, that the presence in German society of the Jews and their influence was the source of this fracture, and that both the solution to and the redemption of Germany's society and soul could come only through the purgation of that Jewish influence. Such thinking, once it entered the stream, gave a peculiar force to German anti-Semitism because its premise was that the volk as a whole were diseased and profoundly threatened by the almost literal bacillus of Jewry (viz. the Nazi's frequent image of the Jews as vermin), and that the only cure for this disease of the German volk was not merely the lessening of the Jews' pernicously un-German influence on the volk but a revolutionary elimination of the Jews. To repeat -- Wagner's strain of anti-Semitism was marked by a belief in the inherently diseased state of Germany's society and soul and that this disease could be cured only by revolutionary means. This was a new flavor, and one that was more or less unique to Germany (other major European and Eastern European nations did not have identities that were anywhere near as fractured along these lines as 18th and 19th Century Germany's was), and it was very influential.

As for Wagner's numerous Jewish friends and associates, I've dealt with that before -- Wagner was for himself in addition to everything else and was inclined to look with favor on those who also were fervently for him.

[AllenLowe]

Stefan - read Larry's post above; says it much better than I have.

[Larry Kart]

But if the analogy doesn't help, I simply meant that while Wagnerism (the music, the syncretic concept of the arts that underpinned it, etc., etc.) was tremendously influential on Western culture in the late 19th Century, the breadth of that influence didn't mean that most Wagnerians of all the various stripes of Wagnerians there were at the time were well-informed about Wagner's dark view of the Jews -- views that again were to be profoundly influential on those who were inclined to be influenced by them. Thus that latter-day virtuous and/or anomalous person X was a devout Wagnerian doesn't normalize Wagner's anti-Semitism; and to suggest that it does, a la Ross, seems disingenuous to me.

I don't read Ross as "normalizing" anything, especially not Wagner's views on Jews. He's pointing out the irony that even the grandfather of the Jewish state drew great inspiration from Wagner's work, yet it's still off-limits in Israel. Your last two sentences appear to be suggesting that Herzl, who was 23 when Wagner died, couldn't have possibly been aware that Wagner was, personally, a raging anti-semite. That appears to be very much false:

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/12/19/opinion/editorial-notebook-wagner-israel-and-herzl.html?pagewanted=2&src=pm

Herzl was fully aware of Wagner's bigotry. Indeed his first brush with anti-Semitism occurred during student demonstrations prompted by the composer's death.

I stand corrected, in part:

"Herzl admired Wagner's music but abhorred his racist opinions."

http://www.herzl.org/english/Article.aspx?Item=515&Section=491

[Larry Kart]

The wisest man in this field IMO is the historian Saul Freidlander, author of "Nazi Germany and the Jews, Vols. 1 &2." In the name of fairness, I'm linking to a passage in which Friendlander both supports and steps away from my previously stated views on Wagner's anti-Semitism:

http://www.zupdom.com/icons-multimedia/ClientsArea/HoH/LIBARC/LIBRARY/Themes/Policy/Friedl2A.html

"Whereas ordinary racial anti-Semitism is one element within a wider racist world view, in redemptive anti-Semitism the struggle against the Jews is the dominant aspect of a world view in which other racist themes are but secondary appendages.

"Redemptive anti-Semitism was born from the fear of racial degeneration and the religious belief in redemption. The main cause of degeneration was the penetration of the Jews into the German body politic, into German society, and into the German bloodstream. Germanhood and the Aryan world were on the path to perdition if the struggle against the Jews was not joined; this was to be a struggle to the death. Redemption would come as liberation from the Jews -- as their expulsion, possibly their annihilation....

"Various themes of redemptive anti-Semitism can be found in voelkisch ideology in general, but the run-of-the-mill voelkisch obsessions were usually too down-to-earth in their goals to belong to the redemptive sphere. Among the voelkisch ideologues, only the philosopher Eugen Duehring and the biblical scholar Paul de Lagarde came close to this sort of anti-Semitic eschatological worldview. The source of the new trend has to be sought elsewhere, in that meeting point of German Christianity, neromanticism, the mystical cult of sacred Aryan blood, and ultraconservative nationalism: the Bayreuth circle.

"I intentionally single out the Bayreuth circle rather than Richard Wagner himself. Although redemptive anti-Semitism derived its impact from the spirit of Bayreuth, and the spirit of Bayreuth would have been non-existent without Richard Wagner, the depth of his personal commitment to this brand of apocalyptic anti-Semitism remains somewhat contradictory. That Wagner's anti-Semitism was a constant and growing obsession after the 1851 publication of his Das Judentum in der Musik ( Judaism in Music ) is unquestionable. That the maestro saw Jewish machinations hidden in every nook and cranny of the new German Reich is notorious. That the redemption theme became the leitmotiv of Wagner's ideology and work during the last years of his life is no less generally accepted. Finally, that the disappearance of the Jews was one of the central elements of his vision of redemption seems also well established. But what, in Wagner's message, was the concrete meaning of such a disappearance? Did it mean the abolition of the Jewish spirit, the vanishing of the Jews as a separate and identifiable cultural and ethnic group, or did redemption imply the actual physical elimination of the Jews?" Etc. [My emphasis]

[Dave James]

It's a shame that the music can't be separated from the politics.

[Christiern]

Should we remain seated as others Lindy Hop? Never drive a Ford? Throw Ezra Pound's work in the dumper? Clean our windows with Chanel No. 5?

As someone pointed out, the roots of the holocaust in question (sadly, it is but one of several) were deep and numerous, stretching way beyond Wagner's life on earth.

Pardon me while I don't watch "Jack in Paris," it's that outrageous episode of the Jack Benny Show in which Maurice Chevalier is guest.

Ridiculous!

[Larry Kart]

Let's get Lee Konitz a gig in Saudia Arabia! And Harold Danko, too!

[Son-of-a-Weizen]

Wouldn't his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain (I don't think you can make up that last name in relation to this up.) be a better choice if you're going to bring up anything Wagner related?

True, his book, published in 1900, did sell 100,000 copies by 1915 and was lauded by Rosenberg. Of course, Chamberlain basically picked up on all that had been said previously (re: Aryan superiority and the decadence of the Semitic race) by Gustave Klemm in the 1840's as well as French scholar Ernest Renan and Swiss philologist Adolphe Pictet back in the late 1850's. Speaking of Switzerland, did you know that HSC first heard Wagner's name during a boat trip on Lake Lucerne in 1870? Just a little fun fact.

[AllenLowe]

1) interesting this: "But what, in Wagner's message, was the concrete meaning of such a disappearance? Did it mean the abolition of the Jewish spirit, the vanishing of the Jews as a separate and identifiable cultural and ethnic group, or did redemption imply the actual physical elimination of the Jews?"

one could argue that it did not matter - because ultimately it led to the same thing -

2) but my position is NOT that we should not listen to Wagner; but that we need to respect and understand those to whom his memory evokes obscene levels of violence. If they chose not to listen, that's fine. We should not criticize them or think them petty, because the holocaust was on such a level as to completely warp normal levels of logic and civilization.

it really is NOT the same as, say, Sinatra's stupidity and violence, Max and Miles' violence toward women, Ben Webster's violence, or Stan Getz's sociopathy, or whatever perversions we can come up with.

As to public performance, I would not ban him - though I might preface any performance with an explanation of his political viewpoints.

Edited September 27, 2012 by AllenLowe

[Blue Train]

Wouldn't his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain (I don't think you can make up that last name in relation to this up.) be a better choice if you're going to bring up anything Wagner related?

True, his book, published in 1900, did sell 100,000 copies by 1915 and was lauded by Rosenberg. Of course, Chamberlain basically picked up on all that had been said previously (re: Aryan superiority and the decadence of the Semitic race) by Gustave Klemm in the 1840's as well as French scholar Ernest Renan and Swiss philologist Adolphe Pictet back in the late 1850's. Speaking of Switzerland, did you know that HSC first heard Wagner's name during a boat trip on Lake Lucerne in 1870? Just a little fun fact.

No, I didn't now that much about him. How about Arthur de Gobineau? He wasn't even an anti-Semite....and his writings had probably had a greater effect on the Nazi party than Wagner.

I will ask again. Just how much music would anyone be listening to based on the musicians/composers behavior/writings/sayings?

[Blue Train]

1) interesting this: "But what, in Wagner's message, was the concrete meaning of such a disappearance? Did it mean the abolition of the Jewish spirit, the vanishing of the Jews as a separate and identifiable cultural and ethnic group, or did redemption imply the actual physical elimination of the Jews?"

one could argue that it did not matter - because ultimately it led to the same thing -

2) but my position is NOT that we should not listen to Wagner; but that we need to respect and understand those to whom his memory evokes obscene levels of violence. If they chose not to listen, that's fine. We should not criticize them or think them petty, because the holocaust was on such a level as to completely warp normal levels of logic and civilization.

it really is NOT the same as, say, Sinatra's stupidity and violence, Max and Miles' violence toward women, Ben Webster's violence, or Stan Getz's sociopathy, or whatever perversions we can come up with.

As to public performance, I would not ban him - though I might preface any performance with an explanation of his political viewpoints.

I have no problem with most of this....and already pointed out #2.

My comment was in response to calling Wagner a leading theoretician of the Holocaust. Even Friedlander didn't think Hitler had a "master plan" at the time of Mein Kampf. The "Final Solution" didn't start until 1942 with Operation Reinhard. They had killed hundreds of thousands if not a million before.....but it was now an official "Solution" to the "Jewish Problem." The Posen Conference made it really official what was to happen to anyone who was Jewish in 1943.

Allen, doesn't sound much different than the incidents of kids being "under the influence" of heavy metal music and committing violent crimes. Should I blame Metallica/Slayer/etc. for those things?

it's nutty to say that the guy who helped develop an intellectual rationale for anti-semitism, in the country of the Holocaust, bears great responsibility for that Holocaust?

certainly I've said crazier things than that. Give me a few minutes.

look, here's from an article in something called The Telegraph:

"1:32PM BST 25 Jul 2011

• Hitler wrote in his first volume of his book Mein Kampf: "At the age of twelve, I saw ... the first opera of my life, Lohengrin. In one instant I was addicted. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth Master knew no bounds." • Aged 16, Hitler quit school and spent the next three years being idle. He is said to have spent a tidy proportion of his pocket money on going to the opera. He became passionate about Wagner.

• Wagner's anti-Semitic and fervently nationalistic writings are thought to have had a quasi-religious effect on Hitler. His theories of racial purity were partly drawn from Wagner. According to Wagner: "The Volk has always been the essence of all the individuals who constituted a commonality. In the beginning, it was the family and the races; then the races united through linguistic equality as a nation."

• On January 13, 1933 the newly-elected National Socialist Party celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Wagner's death by staging a grandiose memorial ceremony in Leipzig, the composer's birthplace. Adolf Hitler invited Siegfried Wagner's widow, the English-born Winifred, and her son Wieland to be guests of honor at this event.

• Each summer, from 1933 to 1939, Hitler attended the Bayreuth Festival, and he made the Wagner estate, Wahnfried, his second home.

• Hitler reinterpreted the story of Wagner's final opera Parsifal to fit his own ideological vision. The story carries elements of Buddhist renunciation suggested by Wagner's readings of Schopenhauer. However, Hitler wrote of it: "What is celebrated is not the Christian Schopenhauerian [sic] religion of compassion, but pure and noble blood, blood whose purity the brotherhood of initiates has come together to guard.

• "Wagner's line of thought is intimately familiar to me", Hitler once said. "At every stage of my life I come back to him."

• The Wagner family and their supporters had campaigned in the early 20th Century for a special copyright law that would restrict performances of Wagner's opera 'Parsifal' to Bayreuth. In 1923 Hitler visited Wagner's grave and reportedly promised: "If I should ever succeed in exerting any influence on Germany's destiny, I will see that Parsifal is given back to Bayreuth". He did not fulfill this.

• A recent documentary, The Wagner Family, alleged that the Wagner family knowingly aligned itself with Hitler’s movement from the beginning.

If it's not the music. It's the video games they're playing. If not that. It's the movies they're watching....or a combination of them.

Edited September 27, 2012 by Blue Train

[Blue Train]

At one point Hitler would have been happy to just have everyone who was "considered" Jewish to leave. Is Wagner to blame for the Évian Conference?

"I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals [Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships."

- Hitler

They even waited almost four years later for the Wannsee Conference to make a "final decision".

[AllenLowe]

the reason it is not the same as worrying about kids listening to metal, or playing video games is that we are talking about something else - I'm not worried that Wagner will turn people into chromatically-harmonized skinheads - I am only reserving the right of anyone to tell Wagner to place his scores where the son has, historically, never shone.

[Dave James]

At one point Hitler would have been happy to just have everyone who was "considered" Jewish to leave. Is Wagner to blame for the Évian Conference?

"I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals [Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships."

- Hitler

They even waited almost four years later for the Wannsee Conference to make a "final decision".

No offense, but Hitler is probably the last person in the history of the world who could be taken at his word. His hatred for the Jews was so visceral and all encompassing that the idea of letting them just pick up and leave is absurd.

[Christiern]

Of course, people should not be force fed Wagner's music. or any other form of artistic expression. When I played it on the radio, I did not preface it with a "don't touch that dial" command—didn't even click my heels. Perhaps I should have had them stick a label on my Bessie Smith biography.

[Blue Train]

At one point Hitler would have been happy to just have everyone who was "considered" Jewish to leave. Is Wagner to blame for the Évian Conference?

"I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals [Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships."

- Hitler

They even waited almost four years later for the Wannsee Conference to make a "final decision".

No offense, but Hitler is probably the last person in the history of the world who could be taken at his word. His hatred for the Jews was so visceral and all encompassing that the idea of letting them just pick up and leave is absurd.

No offense taken.

Sorry they only stopped allowing them to leave in Oct. 1941. The killing didn't first start until pogroms and such in 1941. Even after the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935 they were allowed to leave. He hated them and wanted them gone. No one is disputing that. Hundreds of thousands emigrated and he didn't do anything to stop it from the time it started until it became illegal for them in Oct. 1941. Of course, all those hundreds of thousands lead to the Évian Conference which happened in 1938.

http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005468

Edited September 27, 2012 by Blue Train

[Big Wheel]

At one point Hitler would have been happy to just have everyone who was "considered" Jewish to leave. Is Wagner to blame for the Évian Conference?

"I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals [Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships."

- Hitler

They even waited almost four years later for the Wannsee Conference to make a "final decision".

No offense, but Hitler is probably the last person in the history of the world who could be taken at his word. His hatred for the Jews was so visceral and all encompassing that the idea of letting them just pick up and leave is absurd.

This argument sounds apppealing, but it's wrong. The Nazis formulated plans before the Holocaust for mass deportation without extermination, eg to Madagascar. None of which is to deny the evils of Nazism, just pointing out that history is always weirder and more nuanced than "they were the bad guys and always had a secret master plan to do bad stuff."

[Dave James]

The killing didn't first start until pogroms and such in 1941. Even after the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935 they were allowed to leave. He hated them and wanted them gone. No one is disputing that. Hundreds of thousands emigrated and he didn't do anything to stop it from the time it started until it became illegal for them in Oct. 1941. Of course, all those hundreds of thousands lead to the Évian Conference which happened in 1938.

I think 1941 is generous. Kristallnacht took place in November of 1938, three months after the Evian Conference. Quite a number of Jews were killed during the two nights of rioting and some 30,000 were arrested and hauled off to Dachau. If not 1938, then 1939 at the latest with the ghettoization of Polish Jews. While that may not be a death camp in the true sense of that disgusting term, for all intents and purposes, that's exactly what it was.

[Blue Train]

The killing didn't first start until pogroms and such in 1941. Even after the Nuremberg Laws were passed in 1935 they were allowed to leave. He hated them and wanted them gone. No one is disputing that. Hundreds of thousands emigrated and he didn't do anything to stop it from the time it started until it became illegal for them in Oct. 1941. Of course, all those hundreds of thousands lead to the Évian Conference which happened in 1938.

I think 1941 is generous. Kristallnacht took place in November of 1938, three months after the Evian Conference. Quite a number of Jews were killed during the two nights of rioting and some 30,000 were arrested and hauled off to Dachau. If not 1938, then 1939 at the latest with the ghettoization of Polish Jews. While that may not be a death camp in the true sense of that disgusting term, for all intents and purposes, that's exactly what it was.

Sorry for not being clear. I meant large-scale killing of thousands and than hundred of thousands, which started around the time it was no longer legal for them to leave in 1941. Even then the Évian Conference happened 4 months before even Kristallnacht.

Edited September 28, 2012 by Blue Train

[Blue Train]

At one point Hitler would have been happy to just have everyone who was "considered" Jewish to leave. Is Wagner to blame for the Évian Conference?

"I can only hope and expect that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals [Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships."

- Hitler

They even waited almost four years later for the Wannsee Conference to make a "final decision".

No offense, but Hitler is probably the last person in the history of the world who could be taken at his word. His hatred for the Jews was so visceral and all encompassing that the idea of letting them just pick up and leave is absurd.

This argument sounds apppealing, but it's wrong. The Nazis formulated plans before the Holocaust for mass deportation without extermination, eg to Madagascar. None of which is to deny the evils of Nazism, just pointing out that history is always weirder and more nuanced than "they were the bad guys and always had a secret master plan to do bad stuff."

Forgot about Madagascar. The planning started in 1938 a few months before Évian.