Wagner, Hitler, Und Kein Ende

8/18/2019 Wagner, Hitler, Und Kein Ende

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Review: Poisoned Arrows: Wagner, Hitler, "und kein Ende"

Reviewed Work(s):

Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation by Joachim Köhler; Ronald Taylor

Hans R. Vaget

Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 54, No. 3. (Autumn, 2001), pp. 661-677.

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eviews 661

need not always move this way. And not unlike Kramer, Cone proposes two

different ways of interpreting the Lied in performance. In the first reading,

he writes, the music, by suggesting correspondence between the two halves

of the poem, modified our interpretation of its content. In the new reading

the influence moves in the opposite direction: the poetic narrative, separating

past from present, reshapes the music. Unlike Kramer in his exegesis of

Erster Verlust, however, Cone does not maintain that only one explication

need win out: One can imagine a performance embodying the one or the

other. More interesting, however, would be a performance making use of

bo th analyses and enabling the listener to com prehend the song as a structure

that is not a fixed, quasi-spatial entity but one that forms and re-forms itself as

it progresses in time (p . 123).

Cone's formulation-alone wor th the steep price of Newbould's book-

strikes me as an infinitely beneficial way t o com bat w hat Kramer describes s

the trouble in which classical music currently finds itself. Just as it disputes

what Kramer has denounced as the disaffection that can result fi-om the search

for autonomous artistic greatness, Cone's method is premised on involving

performers, listeners, and scholars alike in a creative exchange. In a sense, the

give-and-take I have in mind is not unlike Barbara H errnstein Smith's above-

mentioned view of open-ended poems that stake out their lack of resolution

in

such a way that the reader must participate in them . O ne of these books may

value facts not enough, the other may value them to o m uch. Bu t if at some

poin t, musicology is able t o embrace a greater reciprocity between b oth posi-

tions, then perhaps, as

McClary has observed, we might discover tha t

Schubert was even more innovative and visionary than we had previously

thought.

JAMES PARSONS

Poisoned Arrows: Wagner, Hitler, und kein Ende

Nietwche and Wagner:A Leson in Subjugation,by Joachim Kohler. Translated

by Ronald Taylor. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. vi

186 pp.

Wagner s Hitter: The Prophet and His Disciple, by Joachim Ghler. Translated

by Ronald Taylor. Cambridge: Polity Press,

2000.

vi,

378

pp.

Richard Wagners DasJudentum in er Musikn:Eine kritische Dokumentation

ah Beitrag zur Geschichte des Antisemitinnus,

by Jens Malte Fischer. FrankfUrt

am Main: Insel Verlag, 2000. 380 pp.

The Ring of Myths: The Imaelis, Wagner, and the Nazis,

by Na'ama Sheffi.

Translated from the Hebrew by Martha Grenzeback. Brighton: Sussex

Academic Press, 2001. x, 182 pp.


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Inevitably linked as it is to the name of Adolf Hider, th e year 1 933 looms

large in our present historical consciousness as fatell and ill-starred.

p

pointed chancellor on January 30, Hider p roceeded t o consolidate his power

and--contrary to the expectations of most contem porary observers-to ex-

pand it step by step through a combination of demagoguery and terror,

greatly aided by a deeply rooted collective expectation that his was the figure

of a long-awaited redeemer. In the span of a mere twelve years he led Germany

through the most destructive and barbaric war

in

the history of mankind '

to a military defeat and a moral catastrophe, the implications of which are

pondered to this day

with

an urgency that shows n o signs of abatement.

I t is usually overlooked that Hider's com ing to power in 193 3 coincided

with an event that, at the time, struck many Germ ans as far more s ip f i can t

than the formation of yet another coalition government in Berlin (th e third

n

little more than six months): the commemoration only two weeks later of the

fiftieth anniversary of the death of Richard Wagner. O ne has to w onder: Were

the gods in an especially mischievous mood when they eng ineered this coinci-

dence? O r is there

n

fic t a certain hidden logic between the tw o events?

However one may wish to gloss the historical conjunction, the empirical

evidence for a metapolitical-that is, ideological-nexus between Hitler and

Wagner speaks loud and clear.2

As

early as 1923 the Bayreuth establishment,

headed by Housto n Stewart Chamberlain and Whiii-ed Wagner, had forged

close ties to the political dark horse who was then the duty-four-year-old

ture Fiihrer. An ardent but uncritical Wagner enthusiast, like untold numbers

of

his

contemporaries, Hitler had internalized Wagner's operas. As Chamber-

lain must have sensed when he received

him,

Hitler idolized Wagner to the

point where one can legitimately speak of a case of Wagnerian self-fashioning,

harboring very real h t a s i e s of one day becoming-in the manner of Wag-

ner's Cola di henzi-the dictatorial tribune of the Germ an people. Most

crucially, though, f i d e r convinced his hosts at Haus W M e d hat he was

prepared t o d o som ething abou t the one problem that they considered to be

the greatest threat t o German culture: the b a le ll influence of the Jews.

In

all

likelihood, he had this matter in mind when he wrote to Sie gh ed W agner o n

5

May 19 24 that the spiritual sword Hitler wielded was forged in Bayreuth

first by Richard Wagner, then by Cham berlain.

Th ere is, then, very palpable pri m a facie evidence that ties Hitler t o

Wagner. In Israel, as Na'ama Sheffi shows in her detailed and absorbing social

history of the opposition to W agner (The R in g

o

Mphs: The Israelis, Wagneer,

a n d the Nazis), tha t nexus is felt to be so firm and so self-evident that it is suffi-

cient reason alone to maintain a ban o n Wagner as one form of comm emorat-

ing the Holocaust. In light of such grievous ramifications, the place of

antisemitism in Wagner's intellectual orbit and artistic practice has become of

1

Ian Kmhaw, H i t b 1936-4 5: Nemesis (New York: Norton, 2000), 388

2. See Hans RudolfVaget, The 'Metapolitics' of Die Meiseninger:Wagner's Nuremberg as

Imagined Community, in

Searching for Common Ground: Diskwrse zu r deutschen Identita t

1750-1871

ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cologne: Biihlau Verlag, 2000), 269-82.


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66

paramount concern to the cultural historian. This compels us to take another

look at the pamphlet

Das Judentum in der Musilz,

the most poisonous and

consequential of Wagner's innumerable extramusical pronouncements. Jens

Malte Fischer's critical documentationn offers an excellent occasion to do so.

Once the Nazis attained government control, they lost no time

in

laying

claim to the legacy of Wagner, thereby legitimating their stdl tenuous hold on

power. Almost all the Wagnerians greeted the new regime with unbridled en-

thusiasm, and, fiom the top brass of German

Musi&wissenschaf13

to the lowli-

est provincial hacks, they proclaimed in

a flood of gushing declarations that

the new Germany was the one of which Wagner had dreamed-that, as the

Bayreuther Blatter put it, Hitlergeist ist Wagnergei~t. ~ompared to many

of these panegyrics, Joseph Goebbels's appropriation of Wagner

n

his radio

address fiom the

933

Bayreuth Festival sounds downright restrained.5

But the Wagnerian chorus greeting Hitler was not without its conscien-

tious objectors, the most notable of whom was the eminent Wagnerian

Thomas Mann. Indeed, Mann's commemorative address at the University of

Munich, an abbreviated version of his justly admired essay Sorrows and

Grandeur of Richard Wagner,led directly to his exile and, as it turned out, his

permanent separation fiom Germany. Characteristically, it was not the Nazi

leadership that attacked

im

first; for even though Mann, Germany's most

fi

mous writer and a recent Nobel laureate, had openly opposed the Nazis, he

represented a potentially considerable cultural capital for the new regime. It

was rather the Munich Wagnerians, in concert with some local Nazi bigwigs,

who fired the opening salvo when they published the infamous Protest der

Richard-Wagner-Stadt Miinchen against Mann's views of Wagner6-a

shabby, opportunistic denunciation, which Mann viewed as an act of national

3.

Among them, most notably, Alfred Lorenz, author of

Das Geheimnis der Fwm bei Richard

Wagner,

3

vols. (Berlin: M. Hesse,

1924-30;

reprint, Tutzing: Hans Schneider,

1966 ,

who in

1933

was the most prominent contributor ( Richard Wagners 'Parsifal' und der National-

sozialismus ) to the first (and only) issue of the enthusiastically pro-Nazi Deutsches Wesen:

Nationahozialistische Monatsrchnj? w it B il dm , ed. Otto Strobel,

6-8.

See

also

Pamela M. Potter,

Most Gevman of the Avts: Musicology and Societyfrom the Weimav Republic t the End of Hitlers

Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1998 ,

xvii,

113-14.

4.

Quoted

in

Annette Hein,

l3 st

vie1 'Hitler' in Wagnev : Ram'nnus und antisem itishe

D e u t s c h t ~ ~ d e o h ~ i en den Bayeuther Bliittem 1878-1938 (Tiibiigen: Niemeyer,

1996 , 182.

5.

Joseph Goebbels, Signale der neuen Bi t : 25 augewahlte Reden (Miinchen: Zenaalverlag

der NSDAP,

1934 , 191-96.

6.

For an Enghsh translation of the Protest by the Munich Wagnerians, see Thomas Mann,

Pro and Contra Wagnev, trans. Allan Blunden, with an introduction by Erich Heller (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press,

1985 , 149-51.

The action against Mann was initiated and orches-

trated by Hans Knappertsbusch, Generalmusikdirektor of the Bayerische Staatsoper and coinci-

dentally Mann's neighbor

in

Munich, and by Hans Pfitzner, whose Palem'na Mann had praised

generously and lavishly when it was premiered in

1917.

See Hans RudolfVaget, The Wagner

Celebration of

1933

and the 'National Excommunication' of Thomas Mann, Wagner

16

(May

1995 : 51-60.

For a more complete documentation of the entire matter, see Hans RudolfVaget,

ed., Im Schatten Wagners: Thomas Mann iiber Wagner. T&e und Zeugnirre 1895-1955 (Frankfurt

am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag,

1999 ,229-61,297-300,

and

325-28.


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excommunication 7 and which he never forgot or forgave.

Mann

knew that

he would have to work through the political and personal trauma of 1933

and someday write abou t it. In the immediate aftermath of the

affair,

he con-

sidered writing a historical novel about the sphere of Wagner-Liszt-Cosiia-

Nietzsche, as we know from his diary

1

September 1 93 3) . In the end,

Mann chose a different em plounent for the peculiarly Germ an entanglement

of music with politics, turning to an earlier plan involving the quintessentially

German myth of Faust, and writing, with the expert help of Theodor W

Adorno, the biography of a fictional modern composer-his

Doctm Faustus?

Recently, Joachm Kohler has taken up the subject of Nietzsche and

Wagner-unaware, apparently, that ann had toyed with the same idea as a

subject for fictional elaboration. Aside i?om the two protagonists, the dram a

of the Nietzsche-Wagner friendship featured in crucial supporting roles such

c o lo r l l figures as Cosima, Wagner's second wife; her father, Franz Liszt; her

first husband, Hans von Biilow, who conducted the premieres of Tristan und

Isolde and Die Meistersinger; and last bu t n ot least King Ludwig I1 of Bavaria,

Wagner's most important benefactor. The tales of their tempestuous relations

have been told in countless biographies, novels, and films. Was it all simply

a farce with a first-class cast, as Martin Gregor-Dellin suggested in his

biography of Wagner?

The story that Joachirn Kohler tells

in Nietvche and Wagner: Lesson in

Subjugation differs in sigmficant respects from the commonly accepted ac-

count. The fi-esh accents and new angles he develops are drawn in the main

from Nietzsche's volum inous notes, which have only recently become acces-

sible in their entirety in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe

and-in on e crucial detail

-from

the Begegnungen mit Nietwche.10 Nietzsche's notes confirm that the

rift with Wagner began to appear much earlier than has long been assumed

and that their relationship on the whole was more deeply troubled than their

public pronouncements would lead one to believe. Kohler goes so

r

as to use

quota tion marks when referring to the principals' fi-iendship, leaving n o

doubt about the demythologizing bent of his project. What's more, he ap-

proaches his subject

with

the vaguely political agenda of attempting to un-

cover in Wagner's behavior toward Nietzsche certain psychological and

ideological prefigurations of the Nazi mentality. Specifically, he searches for

poisoned arrows in bo th of their critical arsenals; invariably, he

fin s

hem in

7 . Mann Pro and Contra Wagnw 166.

8. Nonetheless, the genealogical

ink

between Doctm Fauarrsturand the briefly considered novel

about Wagner, Cosima, and Nietzsche is dearly discernible in the intellectual milieu of Mann's

novel, which is largely set in Richard Wagner's own city of Munich, and in the calamitous

tr

jectory o f the career of

his

hero, which

is

modeled o n the biography of Nietzsche.

9 . Richard Wagner:His

ife

His Wmb His Century tr ns J Maxwell Brownjohn (New

York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 198 3) , 33 5.

10. Sander L Gilman and Ingeborg Reichenbach, eds., Begegnunpz mit Nietuche (Bonn:

Bouvier,

1985 .


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66

Wagner's own quiver (p . 9 5 ) . Kijhler never reflects on the question-hardly

unim portant in the present context-f whether Nazi weltanschauung owed

as much to Wagner as to Nietzsche; he seems unfamiliar with Steven

E.

Aschheim's book o n the Nietzsche heritage and its role in National

Socialism.ll His eagerness to scapegoat Wagner, which he shares with several

other recent cornmentators,l2 has the force of an

i d h e w .

Kijhler takes as his starting point the crazed letters and notes Nietzsche

wrote just before and immediately after the outbreak of

his

insanity, which

occurred in

Turin

on

3

January 1889. These reveal, as do his posthumous

Dithyrambs of Dzonysus

an extravagant mythological fsntasy in which Cosima

is cast as Ariadne and W agner as the dangerous Minotaur, reserving the role of

Dionysus ( to whom Princess Ariadne w ll eventually have to submit) for

himself

It was early on in the halcyon days of the Wagners' famous Swiss idyll

at Tribschen that Nietzsche fell under the spell of Cosima- the most won-

derfid woman I have met in my life, as he wrote to Malwida von Meysenbug

on 1 4 January 1880.13 Nietzsche was twenty-five, a bookish, awkward aca-

demic who had never encountered so refined and cosmopolitan a woman as

Cosima. She was seven years his senior but much closer in age to him than t o

Wagner,

with

whom she was then living in an illicit liaison that scandalized

their fiiends and the world. More importantly, both Cosima and Nietzsche

had spectacularly dysfunctional family backgrounds that rendered them partic-

ularly vulnerable, as Kijhler argues, to the wiles of so overpowering a personal-

ity as Wagner. Both found themselves drawn into a great Wagnerian labyrinth,

however much Nietzsche himself may have sought t o create a labyrinth of his

own in his philosophizing about

art

and culture.

Kohler traces the lines of this extraordinary triangle with a sharp eye for the

telling detail. H e offers engag ing chapters on the Tribschen years (1869-72),

when Nietzsche would regularly come li-om Base1 to visit the Wagners (chap-

ters

3

and 4 ); on the publication of

Birth of Tragedy

and its turbulent after-

math (chapter 6) ;on Nietzsche's participation in and then disenchantment

with Wagner's Bayreuth project (chapter 7); and on their last, tension-filled

sojourn at Sorrento, where the Wagners' resen tment of Nietzsche's fiiendship

11. The Nietzrche Le~acy n Germany, 1890-1 990 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of

California Press, 1992).

12. See Paul Lawrence

Rose

Wgner: Race and Revolutim

(N ew Haven: Yale University

Press, 1992); and Marc

A

Weiner,

W w e r and the Anti-Semitic Imqination

(Lincoln:Univer-

sity of Nebraska Press, 1995). In Germany, Kiihler's position is closest to that of Hartrnut

Zelinsky, who, among other things, has compiled an indispensable anthology documenting

Wagner's ideological impact

in

Wilhelminian and

Nazi

Germany: Richard W w - n deutschar

Themu: Eine Dobumtation zur Wirbun~geschichte ichard Wagners 1876-1976

(FrankfUrt am

Main: Verlag Zweitausendeins, 1976).

13

Die sympathischste Frau, der ich im Leben begegnet bin (Friedrich Nietzsch e,

Smtliche Brrefe: Kritische Studienausgabe in

8

& den, ed. Giorgio

CoUi

and Mazzino Montinari

[Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1 986], 6 ).


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Journal of the American Musicological Society

with Paul Ree, who was Jewish, injected a dose of venom that made it impos-

sible to maintain even

pro mm

fiiendly relations (chapter

8). In

chapter 9,

entitled

A

Mortal Insult, Kohler sheds new light on the reasons for

Nietzsche's break with Wagner, which involve Nietzsche's personal physician,

Dr. Otto Eiser, an admirer of both men, who happened to be the founder of

the

FrankfUrt Wagner Verein.

In a flagrant act of professional indiscretion,

Eiser revealed to his patient what Wagner had confidentially suggested (in a

letter to Eiser) was the cause of Nietzsche's eye problems and chronic head-

aches: his habitual masturbation-a sexual practice which at the time was

shrouded in secrecy and superstition, even in the medical profession.14 Like

other writers before him, Kohler dismisses as a deliberately misleading smoke

screen Nietzsche's own explanation that Wagner's return to Christianity in

Pamifa1

had triggered the break.

Kohler makes a number of points that

w ll

have to be considered in any

ture engagement with the Nietzsche-Wagner matter. He makes a good case

for biographical readings of Nietzsche's fragments for a play on the subject of

Empedocles and of his notes of

1887

for a satyr play (chapter

5 ,

for both pro-

jects may be viewed as poetic refractions

of Nietzsche's relationship to Wagner

and to Cosima. He argues, boldly, that it was

Richard Wagner in Bayreuth

commonly considered to be Nietzsche's culminating effort on behalf of the

Wagnerian cause, and not

Human All

Too

Human

as is generally assumed,

that convinced Wagner of Nietzsche's betrayal. Kohler is probably correct,

too, in arguing that Wagner,

mindful

of Nietzsche's attachments to Erwin

Rohde and Paul Ree, actually meant to brand him a homosexual by character-

izing him, in his letter to Eiser, as an onanist. But Kijhler goes too

f r

when

he writes that Wagner had thereby issued a veiled suggestion to Nietzsche that

he, like Hermann Levi, 'being a Jew,' had to learn how to die

(p. 139Fthat is, commit suicide. There is no evidence that Wagner intended

Nietzsche to become aware of the contents of his letter to Eiser. Here,

Kohler's zealous efforts to paint Wagner as a thoroughly nasty personality, as a

purveyor of poison, get the better of him.

Indeed, Kohler has a tendency to exaggerate, to load the dice, by privileg-

ing evidence for the prosecution and ignoring evidence for the defense. He se-

riously underrepresents Nietzsche's sincere

youthll enthusiasm for the

Wagnerian cause. The author's attempt to shape the utterly absorbing story of

the Nietzsche-Wagner fiendship-a landmark, after all, in nineteenth-century

intellectual history-into a banal object lesson in subjugation

w ll

scarcely con-

vince anyone. Even at the height of his idamation Nietzsche was never the

dupe that Kijhler makes him out to be. Similarly, Kijhler systematically under-

plays the indispensable comments by Nietzsche on

T h a n

on

Parsifl

on

Wagner as a person, and on their stellar fi iendshi~omments ating fiom

14.

This indiscretion

is

confirmed

n

a document published in Gilman and Reichenbach

eds.

Bedegnungen mit Nietuche 345.


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Reviews 7

the same

period

as his ferocious critique of Wagner and demonstrating tha t his

love of Wagner's music rem ained basically unchanged.15 Kohler prefers to

ignore these documents, or, incredibly, simply to dismiss them by assigning

them to a no-man 's land between sanity and madness (p .

36).

O ne looks

here in vain for a sense of the epochal sig dic ance that Nietzsche's writings on

Wagner were to have not only within the discourse on Wagner, but also, as

Thomas

Mann never tired of pointing out, in the larger context of modern

theorizing about art and the artist.

In Wagner's

itler

Kohler engages with what may well be the Mount

Everest of modern German cultural historiography: the task of disentanghg

the multiple strands that

l nk

Hitler and Wagner. H e does so with a g ood deal

of iconoclastic fervor that is crystallized in pungent journalistic pronounce-

ments: the rebirth of National Socialism &om the spirit of music took

place [in

19241

in the Fenspielhausin Bayreuth (p .

191);

the indelible mark

that Wagner's Parszifal has left on history is the Holocaust (p .

241).

His argu-

ment, briefly, is this. Hider's entire political program was essentially an attempt

to turn the mythologically coded world of Wagnerian opera into a social and

political reality.

All

of Hider's major undertakings-the takeover and shaping

of the Nazi Party, the establishment of the Nazi state, the waging of World

War

11,

and the perpetration of the Holocaust-merely served as the political

means to an ultimately aesthetic end: the achievement of the Wagnerian

world of the 'work of art of the future' (p .

285).In

everydung he did, Hitler

merely acted as the agent (p . 270)of the Bayreuth circle, accomplishing the

task orignally set by the great prophet of the Third Reich and of the

Holocaust: Richard Wagner.

n

recent years, as the debate about the Holocaust has evolved and intensi-

fied, it has become customary to regard Hitler as the ultimate standard of

evil, against which all degrees of evil may be measured. l6 The implications

of this premise for the study of Germ an culture and music are fir-reaching, for

everydung that Hitler touched comes to bear an indelible stain and is ren-

dered suspect, nothing more so than what was closest to his heart: the work o f

Wagner. But Kohler takes this premise a step further. Claiming that H itler was

the true and real heir (p .

196)

to Wagner, the modern political executor of

the composer's innermost desires, he attempts to shift that ultimate standard

of evil &om Hider to Wagner. The obvious question-whether this move im -

plicitly diminishes the crimes of Hider-is never addressed.

Kohler designed this book as a kind of

twin

portrait of H ider and Wagner,

with the lines between them constantly blurred. His double takes are designed

15. See especially Dieter Borchmeyer s afterword in

Nietuche und Wagner: Stationen einer

epochalen Begegnung

ed. Dieter Borchmeyer and Jorg Salaquarda (FrankfUrt m Main: Insel

Verlag, 1994), 2:1271-386.

16. Saul Friedlhder,

Nazi Germany and thefews vol

1 n 3e

Tearsof Pmecution

1933-1 939

(New York: HarperCollins 1997), 1.


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Journal of the

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to throw into relief a host of common features from the mvial to the momen-

tous. We are told that Hider's becoming a vegetarian was chiefly due to

Wagner (p.

265 ,

and that he loved dogs and opposed vivisection for the

same reason. Of ll the arrows he took from Wagner's quiver, his hatred of

Jews, of course, proved to be the most poisonous by far.

Despite the counterintuitive tide of his book, Kohler is primarily concerned

with Wagner's influence on Hitler, which he claims was far more pervasive

and profound than anyone has hitherto realized.

In

fact, however, Kohler sim-

ply confirms what Peter Viereck had argued as early as 1941, namely that

Wagner was the politically most influential artist of modern times and the

most important single fountainhead of . . .

Nazi ideology. 17 Evidently Kohler

has use neither for Viereck's work nor for any non-German literature on the

matter. To his credit, though, it must be acknowledged that-drawing on

Hitler's speeches, letters, and conversations; on documents pertaining to

Hitler's relationship to the Wagner family; and on reminiscences by Hitler's

associates and contemporaries-he offers a great deal more evidence than

Viereck or any other writer on the case of Hitler and Wagner. It is all the more

distressing, therefore, to see that he acts rather like an amateur historian by

giving equal credence to reliable and unreliable sources. Kohler is on safe

ground when he turns the spotlight on Hitler's first visit to W M e d n

1923, which led to his anointment by Chamberlain as the new

arsifal

and

ture savior of Germany. This is indeed a crucial event in the history of German

Wagnerianism and in the career of Hider as well. On the other hand, Kohler

relies on crassly anecdotal stories, uncorroborated by other sources, when

he claims that Hitler's

ein

campf was actually proofread in Wahnfiied

(p. 208). He neglects to mention, though, that Cosima was virtually blind;

that her son, Siegfhed, had amorous interests of a sort which the Nazis consid-

ered unpalatable; that Chamberlain was gravely ill; and that neither Eva

(Chamberlain's wife) nor W d e d (Sieghed's wife) had the intellectual au-

thority to proofread anythmg.

At the bottom of Kohler's project and many others like it lurks a larger

methodological problem-that of the notion of influence itself. Most histori-

ans rely on some idea of influence to elucidate the connection between

Hitler and Wagner. We all use the term loosely as shorthand for what we know

is in fact a complicated historical transaction. The dimculty is that influence

unduly privileges the source over the recipient.

As

in all cases of intellectual

precursorship, the basic tenet of reception theory M y applies to Hitler and

Wagner: a tradition does not perpetuate itself; rather, it is appropriated and

adapted to the needs of the recipient and, in the process, deformed. How else

can we possibly explain the enormously diverse appeal of Wagner to liberals,

conservatives, socialists, Jews, and other Germans, to say nothing of Euro-

peans and others around the world? There simply is no sound and logical rea-

17. Viereck, Hitler

and

Wagner,

Common Sense

(November 1939): 3-6, at

4; and

Viereck,

Metapolitics From the Romantics to H i t h

(New York: Knopf, 1941

,

91.


10/18

eviews 9

son to hold Wagner responsible for everydung that H itler and others read into

his work.

Positing influence is the chief operation by which Kohler

l nks

Wagner

to the Holocaust. The prime source of Hider's anti-Semitism, he claims, was

Wagner, specifically

Der Ring des Nibelungen,

because here, for the first time,

the unthinkable was made concrete in the figure of Mime. I t was Wag-

ner's

Rin

Kohler argues, that set Hitler on his road to the crime of the

century (p . 175) . This presupposes, of course, that

The Ring

is in fact anti-

semitically coded and actually advocates the unthinkable (p . 17 4), all of

which is a matter of considerable debate am ong Wagner scholars. Kohler, on a

prosecutorial roll throughout, does not bo ther with opposing arguments. Nor

does he ponder the fact that Hitler never once invoked the name of Wagner

to j u s e his hatred or t o legitimate Nazi policy toward the Jews.'* Why he

never Qd so remains an enigrna.19 N o one doubts that antisemitism was a cru-

cial factor in Hider's cult of Wagner and in Chamberlain's blessing of the

political upstart, but it seems utterly simplistic to explain their judeophobia

solely by reference to Wagner's influence in general and to that of the

Ring

in p a r t i ~ u l a r . ~ ~

Regrettably,

Wagner's Hitler

is marred by a number of factual errors and

mist ran slat ion^.^^

I leave aside Kohler's often aston ishing takes on

Die

Meistersinger, Der Ring des Nibelungen,

and

Parsifal,

which rival in capricious-

ness Hitler's own. But even some of his biographical facts are open to chal-

lenge. We do not know precisely when Hider first saw

Rienzi,

for instance,

the opera which, ironically, triggered his Wagnerian epiphany and of which

he later said: In that hour it all began. 22 Kohler asserts that it was in

November 1906 (p . 25)-an extrapolation fiom the memoir of Hider's

18. This was pointed out by Dina Porat,

'Zum

Raum

wird her die Zeit': Richard Wagners

Bedeutung

r

Adolf Hitler und die nationalsozialistischeFiihrung, in

Richard Wagner und die

Juden,

ed. Dieter Borchrneyer, Ami Maayani, and Susanne Vill (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000),

207-22; and by Saul Friedlinder, Hitler und Wagner, in

Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich,

ed.

Saul Friedlinder and

Jorn

b e n Munich: Beck, 2000), 165-78.

19. For confirmation of this point, see Ian Kershaw,

Hith)

1889-1936:

Hubrls

(New York:

Norton, 1999), 60-67,604-5; and Brigitte Hamann,

Hith's Eenna: A Dictator's Apprentice-

ship)

trans. Thomas Thornton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 347-48.

20. I cite two of many examples: Because his enemies were in fact Nibelungen, Hitler had to

become a Siegfried (p . 205); His campaign to exterminate the Jews was part of his love for

Wagner. He had to hate the Jews because he loved the man who hated them (p. 293).

21. A few examples w ll have to suffice. Ostjuden are referred to as Sephardic Jews, but

in fact they are the Ashkenazi (p.

58); s Judentum in der Musib)

admittedly a c u l t o translate,

is surely not Music and the Jews (passim); and the translation of the notorious last word of that

essay, Untergang, as annihilation (p.64) is without philological foundation and tips the scale

in favor of the prosecution.

22. The irony being, of course, that Hider owed his Wagnerian awakening to the one opera

that has often been characterized (by Hans von Biilow, for instance) as the most Meyerbeerian of

all

of Wagner's works for the stage. The source for this h o u s autobiographical confession is

August Kubizek,

Tt5e Young Hitler Knew)

trans. E

V.

Anderson, with an introduction by H. R

Trevor-Roper (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1955), 101.


11/18

67 Journal of the American Musicological Society

boyhood h e n d , August Kubizek. H ad he actually checked the records of the

Linzer Landestheater, he would have discovered that Rienzi was given only

five times, in January and February o f 19 05 . At that time, Hitler was fifteen,

not, as Kohler assumes, seventeen. Kijhler takes at face value Hitler's various

remarks about his opera-going habits, which, particularly in light of Brigitte

Harnann's authoritative study,

HitlerJs Vienna: A Dictator s Apprenticeship,

look suspect. Th us it sounds rather unlikely that he stood night afier night

at the Hofoper (p . 53 ), or that he knew entire scores by heart (p . 52 ).

Another curious detail is Kohler's accoun t of Hitler's very decision, mytho lo-

gized by himself, to become a politician. For Kohler, this career move, too,

was modeled o n W agner: Hitler resolved to enter politics because he felt chal-

lenged by the magnitude of the task he sought to set himself (p . 20 5) ,

namely the task of saving Germ any and the Aryan race. Kohler would have us

believe that this decision was parallel to Wagner's resolve to become a musi-

cian, for Wagner, too , felt challenged by th e sheer magnitude o f the task he set

himself, that of becom ing a com poser. But Wagner's Autobiographische

Skizze of 1 84 2, on whlch this construction is based, tells a somewhat differ-

en t story. It was essentially the challenge provided by Beethoven that inspired

Wagner to become a composer. In any case, Kohler's accoun t of Hider's fate-

fid decision strikes one as fancifd in light of more sober-m inded explanations

based o n archival research.23

By far the most objectionable point in Kohler's argument is his assumption,

from beginning to end, that Hitler was Wagner's true heir; that Hider's

Wagner was, and is, the true W agner. Nowhere in this book d o we find ac-

knowledgment of the existence of the liberal-cosmopolitan tradition of

Wagner exegesis (inspired by Baudelaire and Nietzsche) or of the socialist

tradition (inaugura ted by

G.

B. Shaw ); nor d o we find acknowledgment that

the

volkisch

and specifically Hiderian appropriation of Wagner proved t o be

merely one episode in the history of Wagner reception-a terrible one , to be

sure, but no t the only one .

Kohler m ust be given credit for assembling most o f the evidence and for

choosing an attention-grabbing tide that seems both to turn the common wis-

do m on its head and to force us-in the words of Thomas Mann-to look ou t

for the H itler in W a ~ e r . ~ 4ut it must also be stated that the subject of this

23. See especially Anton Joachimsthaler,

Kowektur einer Biographie: AdoLj Hztler

1908 1920

(Munich: Herbig, 1989),65-66.

24. See Thomas Mann's letter to Emil Preetorius (6 December 1949), stage designer at

Bayreuth &om 1933 to 1939 and author of an apologetic essay on Wagner

(Wagner:Bild und

Virion

[1942; Berlin: Verlag Helmut Kiipper, 1949]), to which Mann's letter is a response:

"There is, in Wagner's bragging, his endless holding-forth,

his

passion for monologue,

is

insis-

tence on having a say in everydung, an unspeakable arrogance that prefigures Hitler-h yes,

there's a good deal of 'Hitler' in Wagner, and you've left that part out, as of course you had to:

how could you be expected to associate the name of Hider with the work that you wish to serve "

(Proand Contra Wagner,

210).


12/18

Reviews 671

book is

to o consequential for Wagner scholars, historians, and also the general

public to

be

left where Kiihler has taken it.

more focused approach to the Hider-Wagner problem is offered by Jens

Malte Fischer, who explicitly distances himself fiom Kohler's no tion of a rela-

tionship between prophet and disciple (or "executioner," as the German ver-

sion has

it25 in an allusion to Daniel J. Goldhagen's controversial book26)--a

no tion Fischer characterizes as simplistic and sensationalist (p . 1 31). Fischer's

book has three parts: a lucid, contextualized analysis of Wagner's essay Das

Judentum in der Musik, including its publication history and its long-term ef-

fects; a reprint of the enlarged 1869 version of this notorious text; and a gen-

erous documentation of the contemporary reception of Wagner's pamphlet

that comprises twenty-four rejoinders. I t can be safely predicted that this doc-

umentation concerning the most poisonous of all of Wagner's arrows w ll

prove indispensable to any future engagement with the problem of Wagner's

antisemitism.

Fischer reminds us, to begin with that Wagner's Judentum essay did not

appear out of the blue; rather, it represents a summary of and intervention

into what was an ongoing debate

in

the pages of the Neue Z e i t s c h p f i r

Musik concerning "Hebraic taste in music." That debate, w h c h can be traced

back to Rober t Schumann's 183 7 review of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots re-

ceived its first major impetus fiom an even more hostile 1850 review of Le

Propbete by Theodor Uhlig, one of Wagner's earliest propagandists. Fischer

argues that Wagner appropriated much of Uhlig's criticism and that Uhlig

must therefore be regarded as the actual instigator of the campaign against

"das Judenturn

in der Musik." (This, however, did no t prevent Wagner fiom

boasting that it was he who had initiated the debate ) The anonymous 18 50

publication of Wagner's essay did no t trigger much controversy, but f iom the

little there was, Wagner must have deduced that he had made what Fischer

term s a "tactical mistake" by having attacked no t only Meyerbeer, whose fab-

ulous success in

Paris

made him an easy and safe target for home consurnp-

tion, but also Mendelssohn, who was widely respected and generally well liked

throughout Germany.

Both in Germany and in the English-speaking world, Wagner's anti-

semitism has over the last years or so been the focus of heated debate.

Not by accident has that debate dovetailed with the gradual intensification of

the discourse around the Holocaust. What has become evident is that the

legacy of Wagner, like the legacy of Nietzsche, represents some of the most

contested terrain

in

ll

of G erman cultural history. Fischer is aware of but does

not revisit the controversy. His book may be read as an attem pt t o narrow the

gap between the w arring camps and t o broaden the areas in which they can,

and should, agree.

25 . Wagners Hitler: Dm Prophet und sein b treckerMunich:Karl l ssingVerlag, 1997).

26. Goldhagen, Hitlw's Willing Executioners: Ordinary

Germans

and the Holocaust

New

York: Knopf, 1996).


13/18

672

Journal of the American Musicological Society

According t o Fischer, the seeds of Wagner's antisemitism were sown during

his years in Paris (18 39-42) , or, rather, in the period following his return to

Germany, when he began to process the failure of his Parisian endeavors and

his gnawing sense of hurmliation. H e blamed it ll o n the corruption of cul-

tural life in Paris, of which Meyerbeer and, to a lesser degree, the music pu b-

lisher Maurice Schlesinger were obvious representatives. Meyerbeer em erged

as the chief target of his growing resentment and animosity for two reasons: he

enjoyed the hegemony to which Wagner himself aspired, and he exuded kind-

ness and generosity. But to Wagner, apparently, the thought of owing grati-

tude to a man whose work he despised became more and more unbearable.

Ind eed, in on e of his fancier critical moves, Fischer interprets Wagner's charac-

ter assassination of M eyerbeer as an act o f patricide that foreshadows the slay-

ing of Mime by hls foster child, Siegfked.

Fischer makes no claims for th e originality of Wagner's arguments, ll of

which had been articulated in one form or another in both German and

French musical discourse. Wagner merely blended them into a brew of novel

and poisonous potency. Unlike Dieter Borchmeyer and o thers, who read the

1850 essay less as a document of antisemitism in the racial and political sense,

and more as an expression of a traditional form of anti-Judaism,27 Fischer

stresses its proto-racial

drift.

Such racial dunking is evident in Wagner's ob-

sessive emphasis o n what he claims is an instinctive revulsion against the ap-

pearance, the speech, the music, and the character of Jews. Fischer refuses to

attribute to the essay's last word, Untergang, the sinister sense of physical

destruction, but he readily concedes that the discrepancy between Wagner's

woolly rhetoric of redemption and his language of unvarnished Jew-hatred is

deeply tro ub h g.

Fischer's main quarrel is with those who, at the expense of the more conse-

quential second edition of Da sJudentum, focus exclusively on the first version

of the essay and align it, usually with exculpatory intent, w ith Wagner's con-

temporary Ziirich writings on operatic reform (Die Kunst und die Revolution;

Das ICunstwerk der Zukunfi; Oper und D ra m a). T o Fischer, Wagner's actual

fall from grace is the republication of the essay in 1 869, outfitted as it is with

a phony dedication to Marie Muchanoff and a lengthy postscript that irn-

parted to his essay of 1850 (reprinted essentially unchanged) a new dimension

of aggressiveness. Here, for the first time and without provocation, Wagner

crossed a h e ine when he speculated that the ejection by force of the corro-

sive foreign element ( die gewaltsame Auswerfung des zersetzenden fremden

Elementes ) might be the best way to halt the deche of culture (p. 108).

Again, Fischer resists reading into this and similarly oracular utterances in

27. Borchmeyer, Wagner Theory and Theatre

trans

Stewart Spencer (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1991), 404-10; and Udo Bermbach,

Das 'dsthetische Motiv in Wagners Antisemitismus:

Das

'Judentum in der Musk' im Kontext der Ziircher Kunstschriften, in Richard Wagner und

die Juden ed. Borchmeyer et al., 55-76.


14/18

Reviews

67

Wagner s late essays any suggestion of rhe genocide that was t o come. H e em-

phasizes, however, that the grow ing element of violence in Wagner s language

did open the door to political appropriations of a far more radical sort.

In the absence of a particular provocation, what was it that prompted

Wagner to renew his an ti-Jewish campaign at a time when German- ewish re-

lations had entered a relatively

peaceful phase? Fischer plausibly suggests that it

was the cumulative effect of a number of factors: the disastrous reception of

the Paris Tannhauser in 1861 , for wh ch Wagner blamed the pro-Meyerbeer

Parisian press; the accelerated pace of Jewish emancipation throughout the

Germ an lands in the

1860s, which fueled h s paranoid fears of a Jewish con-

spiracy; the failure of his Munich projects and King Ludwig s concomitant

overtures to the Jewish community of Bavaria, which bolstered his theory of

tha t conspiracy; and finally Eduard Hanslick s hostile review of Die

Meistersinger

which may have been the straw that broke the camel s back.

O f the twenty-four reactions to Das Judentum presented here, six pertain

to the original publication of 18 50 . The rest reveal a surprise, for ll but two

are m ore or less critical of Wagner s views. Is this in fact an accurate picture?

We cannot be sure, as Fischer admits, because publicly voiced opposition is

not an infallible indicator of the sentiments of the silent majority. Another sur-

prise is that Wagner s poisoned arrows reached

f r

beyond the G erman bor-

ders. The first French translation of the essay appeared as early as 1850 , in

Brussels and Paris, and the version published in La France musicale even

went beyond the original by nam ing the unnamed target ofW agner s attack-

Meyerbeer. Th e republication of th e essay in 18 69 immediately triggered

another French translation in Brussels.

Judaisme dans

l

musique

was sub-

sequently included in the

Oeuvres en prose de Richard Wagner

I t appears that

in France, too, there was no exception to the entanglement of the Wagner

movement with antisemitism. The first Italian translation appeared in 1897,

and in England and America, four M e r e n t translations appeared fiom 189 2

to 1988.

And what about Hitler? Did Wagner s

Judentum

pamphlet play a direct

role in the form ation of his weltanschauung?Fischer is able to offer a hereto-

fore overlooked piece of evidence fiom a speech in 1929 in whlch Hid er agi-

tates against the M unich city council s proposal t o have Max R einhardt

superintend a festival then under discussion. Hider s arguments against that

plan turn o n the lack of the Jewish people s Kunstwillen (p . 130) , clearly echo-

ing Wagner s pam phlet to th e point of paraphrase. But still, here, as later when

speaking as the Fihrer about the anti-Jewish laws and policies of the Third

Reich, Wagner s nam e is no t mentioned. I t is probable Hitler realized that

Wagner s hostility toward the Jews, closely examined, was somewhat equivo-

cal and n ot sufficiently radical for his taste. For as Hitler well knew, Wagner

never let

his

prejudice stand in the way of working with Jewish musicians and

maintaining personal relations, as is clearly borne o u t by th e examples of Carl

Tausig, Anton Rubinstein, Angelo Neurnann, and Herm ann Levi. Hide r may


15/18

674

Journal

o the

American Musicological Society

also have sensed that Wagner's antisemitic pronouncements-appalling as

they sound to us-were tied to a vague metapolitical and transracial utopian

agenda that made them too slippery for ideological comfort. Perhaps

Wagner's lack of radical fervor is best gleaned fiom a comment

in

1878

recorded by Cosima: If I ever were to write again about the Jews, I should

say that I have nothing against them, it is just that they descended on us

Germans too soon, we were no t yet steady enough to absorb them. 28Fischer

cites this passage with no exculpatory innuendo, nor does he grant any miti-

gating circumstances in assessing Wagner's @t and responsibility. Richard

Wagner could not know, he writes in conclusion, that Adolf Hitler would

become a Wagnerian and the m an chiefly responsible for the mass murder of

the Jews of Europe. But an artist of his rank who intervened in so many things

beyond

his

metier as a musician cannot be fieed fiom all responsibility for

the uses to which his provocative pronouncements might be put (p . 13 1) .

That Wagner was to some extent responsible for Hitler and the Holo-

caust is the h d a m e n ta l premise that underlies the boycott of his music in

Israel-a story that has now been reconstructed in detail by Na'ama Sheffi, a

historian at the University of Tel Aviv. Regrettably, her book is far &om flaw-

less. The author's command of music history and German history leaves

something to be desired; her first m o chapters, apparently written for a non-

specialist and unschooled audience, are unessential; and her laudable larger

purpose is ill-served by this translation. I hasten t o add, however, that Sheffi's

work is indispensable to the historian of Wagnerianism because it offers the

first comprehensive and assiduously researched account of the Wagner boycott

in Israel fiom 19 38 to the present. I t lays bare the embeddedness of the oppo-

sition to Wagner in Israeli foreign and domestic policy, and i t probes deeply

into the psychological and political layers of the entire m atter.

This story began in November 1938 , when Artu ro Toscanini, leading the

fledgltng Palestine Symphony Orchestra, quietly substituted Weber's Oberon

Overture for the originally scheduled prelude to

Die Meistersinjer.

H e did so

at the urging of Moshe Shlush, a member of the orchestra's board of direc-

tors, who felt that it would be inappropriate, three days after Kristallnacht to

play the music of the Nazis' favorite composer before an audience, of whom

many had relatives and fien ds in Germany. Nothing major or lasting was in-

tended by this gesture.

In

fact, a few weeks later, whde on tou r in Egypt, the

orchestra felt no compunction about playlng excerpts from

Lohengrin

and

Tannhauser. This was entirely in line with previous practice. Prior to

Kristallnacht

the orchestra, founded in 19 36 , had played Wagner under

Toscanini, Jasha Horenstein, and Bronislaw Szulk, ostensibly in defiance of

the official German claim to privileged and exclusive access to Wagner's music.

28. Entry of 22 November 1878, in onmu Wagner s

Diaries,

ed. and annotated by Martin

Gregor-Dellinand Dietrich Mack,

mans.

with an introduction, postscript, and additional notes

y

Geofiey Skelton New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 2:207.


16/18

Reviews

67

In

the wake of the Holocaust and the foundation of the state of Israel, the

situation changed completely. Little by little, over a series of increasingly emo-

tional clashes, Wagner was transform ed into a symbol of Nazism

(p.

48).

The crucial inducem ent came fiom survivor testimony that Jews had been

marched off to the gas chambers to the strains of Wagner's music (p . 5 1 ).

Sheffi observes that

t is claim has never been substantiated (p . 51) . Th e

most frequently played music in the camps, it seems, was rather that of Johann

Strauss. But that did not matter.

In

due course, when Wagner's antisemitic

writings were made widely known-which, assuming tha t Sheffi is correct, did

no t happen until 1981-the murdered Jews were referred to in the press as

the indw ea victims of Wagnerism (p . 1 ). From the beginning, the associ-

ation of Wagner with the Holocaust carried so much prim f cie plausibility

and emotional weight that the boycott of Wagner's music by the publicly

funded Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IP O ) became institutionalized, with

spirited arguments on both sides continuing to be voiced down to the p resent.

The desire to inculcate the collective memory with a moral ob ligation to boy-

cott Wagner carried the day.

Ironically, what may initially have tipped the scales in favor of the boycott

was the opening in 1951 of negotiations between Israel and the Federal

Republic of G ermany about payment o f reparations. To many irate Israelis,

this smacked of normalization and kindled panicked fears that the Holocaust

itself could be normalized, and thus also forgotten. Under these circum-

stances, boycotting the music most strongly associatedwith Hitler and through

him with the Holocaust was considered to be a simple act of piety. All argu-

ments in favor of lifting the ban merely strengthened the resolve of those who

would preserve it as a token of respect. In the absence at that time of a public

debate about the Holocaust, even in Israel, banning Nazi music took on a

compensatory function. Subsequent generations of Israelis, with n o firsthand

experience of Nazi persecution-r of Wagner, for that matter-incorporated

the ban on Wagner into their proud, nationalist world view as a matter of

Jewish patriotic solidarity (p . 96). That this practice entailed som e contra-

dictions and even a measure of hypocrisy was pointed out by, among others,

Uri Toeplitz, principal flutist of the IPO:

Why should we go on denying ourselves some of the greatest music by forbid-

ding the playing of Wagner, a loss that cannot be replaced by the works of any

other composer, while a mere convenience like the German Volkswagen,

with

ll

its associations kom the Hitler era, is allowed to crowd our streets? (p. 73

Attempts to lift the boycott have been undertaken by scholars, by mem bers

of the IPO , and by em inent conductors, among them Igor Markevitch, Zubin

Mehta, and Daniel Barenboim. In an effort to assuage t is awkward state of

afhirs, a symposium entitled Richard Wagner un d die Juden was held at

Bayreuth in the summer of 19 98 . Participants fiom Israel, Sheffi among them,

were duly denounced in the press back home. N ot surprisingly, it seems that a


17/18

7

Journal of the merican Musicological Society

blow-up conkrence that w s to take place on Israeli

soil

has-as of t is writing-

been shelved indefinitely. Opponents of these efforts painted the Bayreuth

symposium as merely a wdy move on the part of Wolfgang Wagner, the

cur

rent hector of the Bayreuth Festival, to whitewash Wagner and the thor-

oughly brown history of Bayreuth itself-ven though the symposium was

in fact initiated by the Israeli composerArni Maayani, author of the first biog-

raphy of Wagner in Hebrew.Z9

The issue of playing Wagner in Israel became thornier still when it was real-

ized that the arguments against Wagner applied to other composers as well,

above all to Richard Strauss, who for two years served as president of the

Reichsmusikkammer, and to a lesser degree to Carl Orffand Franz LehL And

since the emotions aroused by Wagner extended to the German language, the

performance of German vocal music-Schubert Lieder, Mahler syrnphonies-

also became an issue. Thus, in 1952, for a performance of Mahler's Das Lied

von der Erde under Leonard Bernstein, Jenny Tourel needed special permis-

sion to sing her part in the original language, while Ernest Garay, the baritone,

sang his part in Hebrew. Growing hstrated, musicians would increasingly re-

sort to subterfuge in order to play the forbidden music. In 1952, Jasha

Heifetz refused to be intimidated and played Richard Strauss, for which he

was duly vilified, even physically assaulted.

In

1981 Zubin Mehta, having been

rebuffed on previous occasions, played the

Liebestod

as an encore. During the

performance, which had been properly advertised as potentially hurtlid to

some, a survivor went up to the stage to bare his scarred body; the perfor-

mance ended in tumult. m e r this incident, even Mehta, generally popular in

Israel and holder of a

Hetime appointment with the IPO, became the target of

massive xenophobic slurs. In

1988, the pianist Gilead Mishory made h~story

(p. 120) of sorts when he slyly programmed Franz Liszt's transcription of the

Liebestod

without advemsing Wagner's original authorship. And in the follow-

ing year, Daniel Barenboim, a vocal opponent of the boycott, indulged his

musicians by leading them in excerpts £i-om Tristan and Gotte~dammerung-

but only in rehearsal. Barenboim's most recent attempt this past summer to

program Wagner in Israel was again thwarted. He was to lead the Staatskapelle

Berlin in what was billed as the concluding event of this year's Israel Festival:

a concert performance of act of

Die Walkiire.

The program had to be

changed, whereupon the conductor resorted to a mck. He engaged the audi-

ence in a discussion about Wagner, allowed all conscientious objectors to leave

the hall, and played the Tristan prelude as an encore.30 Predictably, he was

vilified for his deviousness and lack of respect.

29. For a detailed report on this matter, see the preface by Dieter Borchmeyer in Richard

Wagner und die Juden.

30 . See Anthony Tomm asini, A

Cultural

Disconnect on Wagner, New

York Times 5

August 200 1, sec. 2, pp. 2 7 ,3 3 .


18/18

Reviews

677

Sheffi points ou t that the boycott of Wagner by state-supported institutions

such as the IP O has never been challenged in co urt. Th e Israeli government

routinely declares that it does not exercise censorship. And indeed, private

radio and television stations have in recent years increasingly been playing

Wagner, without apparent incident. Eventually, the issue

w ll

have to be de-

cided in the court of public opinion. After half a century of battles and skir-

mishes in the diverse and con tentious Israeli press, a general weariness

(p.

130

seems to be taking hold, along

wit

the realization, admittedly reluc-

tant, that the obligation to honor the victims and commemorate the

Holocaust should not be accomplishedwith the wrong tools (p. 93 . In the

near k tu re , with most of the survivors gone, the stiffest opposition to lifting

the boycott is likely to come, Sheffi tells us, fiom the ultra-orthodox segm ent

of Israeli society, whose members oppose Wagner as part of a general resis-

tance to Western influences o n Jewish Me. They may well find support fiom

an unlikely source: historians who work for the express purpose of maintaining

the ban as a preem inent rite for warding off the dissolution of one of the core

experiences of Jewish history and memory. 31

Although Sheffi does not address this aspect of the prob lem, her book of-

fers sufficient evidence to show that the role Wagner has played in Israel-

irony of ironies-bears a striking resemblance to the role he played in the

Third Reich: he was turned in to a symbol and became an instrument o f

cultural manipulation (p . ;he served as an instantly recognizable point of

reference in defining national identity; he became the rallying point in the

sm ggle for the soul of the nation; and he exerted in all of this an extraordi-

nary em otional hold over Germans and Jews alike. The fact that in one case

the overmastering emotion was love, in the other, hate, seems almost a minor

point of divergence.

Frederic Spotts's observation, at the outset of his

Bayreuth:

History of the

Wagner Festival tha t Richard Wagner is the most controversial artistic figure

of all time, has, over and over again, proven to be a ~ t . 3 ~t seems safe t o pre-

dict that as long as Wagner is held captive as a symbol in the deep realm of

memory he w ll continue to be controversial; many more arrows

w ll

be shot,

but none

w ll

kiU the controversy.

H NS R

VAGET

31. ose Wagnev:Race and Repolution 192.

32. Bayreuth:A istory of the W a ~n erestival

N e w Hav en: Yale University Press,

1994 ,

vii

Documents

Wagner, Hitler, Und Kein Ende