Did he really say it? And even if he did, so what? – Part two

In the previous entry I argued that the much-used quote attributed to Hitler „Whoever wants to understand national-socialism must first understand Wagner“ is of dubious authenticity. Nobody who has recorded it has actually himself heard Hitler say it. The quote does not appear in any Hitler’s speech or writing that is known of nor does it show up in any nazi publication of relevance.

Let us, however, assume, for the sake of argument, that Hitler really did say that „in order to understand national-socialism one must understand Wagner“. My answer to this is: so what? Followed by this question: just because Hitler says so, does it mean it is true?

It is rather amazing, in the worst sort of way, that 70 years after the Third Reich has been polverized into oblivion Hitler’s words are taken at face value, without even basic critical scrutiny usually awarded to such blanket assertions made by other historical personalities. Wagner studies are the only field of life where the views of Adolf Hitler are not only considered legitimate, but also mainstream and by some people even as the only correct views. In this entry I will at least partially try to correct this and in fact show that far from being the truth, the assertion that „to understand national-socialism one must understand Wagner“ could not be further from it and is merely yet another one of Hitler’s delusions(assuming, I repeat, he said that at all).

To start I will re-quote on the matter William Shirer’s book „Rise and fall of the Third Reich“, page 104/105 of the fiftieth anniversary edition of the book:

It was not his(Wagner’s: my emphasis) political writings, however, but his towering operas, recalling so vividly the world of German antiquity with its heroic myths, its fighting pagan gods and heroes, its demons and dragons, its blood feuds and primitive tribal codes, its sense of destiny, of the splendor of love and life and the nobility of death, which inspired the myths of modern Germany and gave it a Germanic Weltanschauung which Hitler and the Nazis, with some justification, took over as their own.

Shirer clearly says that, in his view, Wagner’s politics did not inspire Hitler but rather his musical works. In this paragraph Shirer makes two crucial mistakes. First, he equated the medium and the message. He believed that the ancient Germanic gods and the values they espoused were the message of Wagner’s works and not mere means, tools to convey the real message. There is nothing to suggest, even in sources available to Shirer at the time his book was written(early 1960-ties), that Wagner cared for the ancient Germanic gods as such and even less in the sources that were revealed afterwards. To him, they were merely characters of a plot. Shirer also omits the fact that when the „Ring of the Nibelung“ was first concieved Wagner was under the strong influence of Ludwig Feuerbach and his views on religion which argued that god (or gods) are in fact a creation of the archetypal in the man and which are at the core atheist. Wagner’s atheism, notwithstanding occasional lapses into some kind of religiosity, continued even after his „conversion“ to Schopenhauer right up until his death. It is inconcievable that such a person would argue a return to ancient pagan religion. Shirer clearly had little background knowledge on Wagner, far too little for his interpretation of the „Ring“ to be credible. The whole thing looks even more apalling when you consider that a couple of paragraphs later Shirer did in fact get Wagner’s true message:

Wagner, a man of staggering genius, an artist of incredible magnitude, stood for much more than has been set down here. The conflict in the Ring operas often revolves around the theme of greed for gold, which the composer equated with the ”tragedy of modern capitalism,” and which he saw, with horror, wiping out the old virtues which had come down from an earlier day. Despite all his pagan heroes he did not entirely despair of Christianity, as Nietzsche did. And he had great compassion for the erring, warring human race. But Hitler was not entirely wrong in saying that to understand Nazism one must first know Wagner.

The last sentence of this paragraph simply can not logically follow from those before it. Shirer, however, suspends logic and known facts in favour his own personal impressions, essentially inadvertantly doing a leap of faith into nazi interpretations of Wagner’s works.

The other mistake Shirer makes is not elaborating further his original assertion that „it was not Wagner’s political writings that inspired nazis“. Again, I acknowledge the fact that Shirer’s book is more of a personal account, a memoir, then a work of history per se. Nevertheless, it is inexcusable that Shirer doesn’t bother one least bit to explain how could it be that, in his view, Hitler was not inspired by the politics of someone who just in the previous paragraph he described as a person who „harbored a fanatical hatred,as Hitler did, for the Jews, who he was convinced were out to dominate the world with their money, and … scorned parliaments and democracy and the materialism and mediocrity of the bourgeoisie“.

(Digression: one must, in spite of everything, give credit to Shirer that he, unlike many so-called scholars of today, does not make pretenses that Hitler’s interpretation of Wagner is the whole truth and strongly allows the possibility of it being a misinterpretation.)

Perhaps the answer lies in the one single quote from Richard Wagner’s prose works that is actually recorded to have been used by the nazis(you’d think that there would be slightly more from someone who is according to Hitler himself the key to understanding nazi ideology). It is a sentence, or rather, an excerpt from Wagner’s late essay „Know thyself“(„Erkenne dich Selbst“) which calls Jews „plastic demon of man’s fall“. Goebbels used it in a speech he made in 1933. and it was used during the narration of nazi propaganda documentary „Eternal Jew“(„Der ewige Jude“). Do these words really support the notion that Wagner is at the core of understanding of nazism?

One of the characteristics of both Wagner’s musical and prose works is that you can not take a stanza, a monlogue, a soundbite, or a single sentence, even a paragraph and present it as standalone to make a case. This is the original mistake in analysing Wagner. Indeed, one must look at the adjacent sentences, paragraphs, even to the work  as a whole to understand what was meant by this particular part. Hence the same with Wagner’s assertion that „the Jew is the plastic demon of the fall of man“. Here I will give a couple of paragraphs preceding the infamous quote as well as the one following it, with my commentary. Translation is still by William Ashton Ellis, until I can figure out my own…

Q sudX}�8ߗg nazi ideology). It is a sentence, or rather, an excerpt from Wagner’s late essay „Know thyself“(„Erkenne dich Selbst“) which calls Jews „plastic demon of man’s fall“. Goebbels used it in a speech he made in 1933. and it was used during the narration of nazi propaganda documentary „Eternal Jew“(„Der ewige Jude“). Do these words really support the notion that Wagner is at the core of understanding of nazism?

Clever though be the many thoughts expressed by mouth or pen about the invention of money and its enormous value as a civiliser, against such praises should be set the curse to which it has always been doomed in song and legend. If gold here figures as the demon strangling manhood’s innocence, our greatest poet shews at last the goblin’s game of paper money. The Nibelung’s fateful ring become a pocket-book, might well complete the eerie picture of the spectral world-controller. By the advocates of our Progressive Civilisation this rulership is indeed regarded as a spiritual, nay, a moral power; for vanished Faith is now replaced by “Credit,” that fiction of our mutual honesty kept upright by the most elaborate safeguards against loss and trickery. What comes to pass beneath the benedictions of this Credit we now are witnessing, and seem inclined to lay all blame upon the Jews. They certainly are virtuosi in an art which we but bungle: only, the coinage of money out of nil was invented by our Civilisation itself; or if the Jews are blamable for that, it is because our entire civilisation is a barbaro-judaic medley, in nowise a Christian creation. [269] A little self-knowledge on this point, methinks, would not come amiss to the representatives of the Church themselves, particularly when combating the seed of Abraham, in whose name they still go on to claim fulfilment of certain promises of his Jehova. A Christianity which has accommodated itself to the brute violence of every ruling power in the world might find itself when turning from the raging to the reckoning beast of prey, outmatched in cleverness and cunning by its foe; wherefore there is little present hope of special welfare from the support of either our Church or our State authorities.

Here, Wagner argues that the source of the man’s downfall is it’s sinking into base materialism and obsession of property. However, he rejects that the notion that the Jews are to blame for this . Their current, as he saw it, dominant position is a symptom, a result, not a cause of German’s problems. The blame, according to Wagner, lays squarely at the door of Germans themselves. They invented money and credit and then to wash their hands of it they gave the handling of it to the Jews who then achieved mastery over that(„They certainly are virtuosi in an art which we but bungle“. The whole argument is more elaborated in „Jewishness in Music“) . Wagner continues:

However, an inner motive plainly lies at bottom of the present movement, little as it may be evinced by the behaviour of its leaders so far. We expressed our belief, above, that this motive was the re-awakening of an instinct lost to the German nation. People speak of an antagonism of races. In this sense we should have fresh cause for self-inspection, as it would necessitate our defining the relation of certain given breeds of man to one another. Here it would probably have to be recognised at the outset that, in talking of a German “race,” it would be very difficult, nay, wellnigh impossible to compare it with a race so strongly pronounced, and still unaltered, as the Jewish. When learned men debate the relative value of mixed or pure-bred races, for the evolution of mankind, the decision must surely hinge on what we mean by man’s developmental progress. The so-called Romanic nations, and the English too, are praised as hybrid stocks that obviously surpass in Culture-progress the peoples of a haply pure Germanic breed. On the other hand, if one declines to be blinded by the glamour of this culture and civilisation, and seeks the welfare of mankind in its bringing-to-birth of great characters, one finds that these far rather come to light—nay, almost solely—in pure-bred races; where it seems that the still unbroken nature-force of Race at first makes up for every higher human virtue yet unformed, and only to be won through life’s sore trials, by that of pride. This peculiar pride of race, that still gave us in the [270] Middle Ages such towering characters as Princes, Kings and Kaisers, may be met even to-day in the old nobility of German origin, although in unmistakable degeneration; and that degeneration we should have to take seriously into account if we wished to explain the fall of the German Folk, now exposed defenceless to the inroads of the Jews. For this, the proper course might be to first recall the unexampled devastation which Germany suffered through the Thirty Years War: after by far the greatest part of the male population had been rooted out of town and country, while the female had been violated to no less a degree by Walloons, Croats, Spaniards, French and Swedes, the relatively little-injured nobles may scarcely have felt themselves one racial body with the remnant of this decimated people. That feeling of community we still find markedly expressed in many a preceding epoch; and then it was the true patrician families, that contrived to re-illume the proper spirit after serious diminution of the nation’s substance. This we may see in the revival of Germanic races by new offshoots from the parent stock, when tribal migration had robbed the home-stayers of their first heroic clans; we see it in the resuscitation of the German language by patrician poets of the Hohenstaufen era, after monkish Latin had become the only medium of gentility, whereas the spirit of their poetry thrust down to the peasant’s hut and shaped one wholly equal speech for Folk alike and Noble; and once again we see it in the stand against the outrage foisted on the Germans by the Church of Rome, when the example of its lords and princes led the Folk to stout defence. ‘Twas otherwise after the Thirty Years War: the nobles found no nation left, to which to feel their kinship; the great monarchic powers shifted from the stricter seat of Germany towards the Slavic east: degenerate Slays, decadent Germans, form the soil of the eighteenth century’s history, a soil to which the Jew might confidently migrate from a Poland and a Hungary sucked dry, since even prince and noble durst no longer be ashamed of doing business with him; for—Pride [271] itself had just been pledged already, exchanged for vanity and greed.

Wagner asserts here that since the Thirty Years War and the depopulation and desolation it has brought to Germany on can no longer speak of a „German race“, let alone of the „pure German race“. In fact, he argues, if one uses the criteria of racial antisemites themselves, the Jews are in fact a far „purer“ race then the Germans, who are, save a thin royal/aristocratic class(which, one has to say, Wagner despised), a mixture of various Germanic, Romanic and Slavic people that have passed through the land during that war. This is in complete, stark contrast with nazi ideology. Now comes the above mentioned quote, in context:

Though in recent days we see these last two traits of character adopted by the Folk itself—our ancient relatives the Swiss can think of us no otherwise!—and though the title “German” has thus been almost coined anew, yet this new-birth still lacks too much, to constitute a real rebirth of racial feeling, a thing that always finds its first expression in a settled instinct. Our nation, one may say, has not the natural instinct for that which suits it, for what becomes it, helps and furthers it; estranged from itself, it dabbles in foreign manners. On none other have great and original spirits been bestowed, as on it, without its having known in time to treasure them: yet if the silliest news-writer or political cheap-jack but brazens out his lying phrases, it chooses him to represent its weightiest interests; whilst if the Jew comes tinkling with his bell of paper, it throws its savings at his feet, and makes him in one night a millionaire.

The Jew, on the contrary, is the most astounding instance of racial congruence ever offered by world-history. Without a fatherland, a mother-tongue midst every people’s land and tongue he finds himself again, in virtue of the unfailing instinct of his absolute and indelible idiosyncrasy: even commixture of blood does not hurt him; let Jew or Jewess intermarry with the most distinct of races, a Jew will always come to birth. Not into the remotest contact is he brought with the religion of any of the civilised (gesittete) nations; for in truth he has no religion at all—merely the belief in certain promises of his god which in nowise extend to a life beyond this temporal life of his, as in every true religion, but simply to this present life on earth, whereon his race is certainly ensured dominion over all that lives and lives not. Thus the Jew has need to neither think nor chatter, not even to calculate, for the hardest calculation lies all cut and dried for him in an instinct shut against all ideality. A wonderful, unparalleled phenomenon: the plastic dæmon of man’s [272] downfall in triumphant surety; and German citizen of State, to boot, with a Mosaic confession; the darling of Liberal princes, and warrant of our national unity!—

d bee9 �oaX}�8ߗ less a degree by Walloons, Croats, Spaniards, French and Swedes, the relatively little-injured nobles may scarcely have felt themselves one racial body with the remnant of this decimated people. That feeling of community we still find markedly expressed in many a preceding epoch; and then it was the true patrician families, that contrived to re-illume the proper spirit after serious diminution of the nation’s substance. This we may see in the revival of Germanic races by new offshoots from the parent stock, when tribal migration had robbed the home-stayers of their first heroic clans; we see it in the resuscitation of the German language by patrician poets of the Hohenstaufen era, after monkish Latin had become the only medium of gentility, whereas the spirit of their poetry thrust down to the peasant’s hut and shaped one wholly equal speech for Folk alike and Noble; and once again we see it in the stand against the outrage foisted on the Germans by the Church of Rome, when the example of its lords and princes led the Folk to stout defence. ‘Twas otherwise after the Thirty Years War: the nobles found no nation left, to which to feel their kinship; the great monarchic powers shifted from the stricter seat of Germany towards the Slavic east: degenerate Slays, decadent Germans, form the soil of the eighteenth century’s history, a soil to which the Jew might confidently migrate from a Poland and a Hungary sucked dry, since even prince and noble durst no longer be ashamed of doing business with him; for—Pride [271] itself had just been pledged already, exchanged for vanity and greed.

Here Wagner claims that such a mixture of different people’s that the Germans have themselves become has a certain identity crisis, an inability to grasp the German spirit it has inherited through German language. Thus it proclaims material values as the highest on Earth and as such is ripe for being dominated over by „the Jews“. While re-asserting that, according to then-fashionable race theories, the Jews are an exceptionally „pure“ race, in complete contrast to the Germans, Wagner is afterwards, it has to be said, polemical against Judaism as a religion claiming that it inherently promotes worldly materialism. This materialism, however, simply converges with the already existing German decline into this same materialism and thus „the Jew“ merely takes advantage of the situation and becomes a convenient excuse for the German downfall. Hence the expression „plastic demon of man’s downfall“. It seems clear now that the nazis quoted the excerpt out of context and that the essay „Know Thyself“ has far more differences then similarities with the nazi ideology. This becomes even more obvious when one looks at the paragraphs that follow:

Despite the enormous disadvantage at which the German race (if so we still may call it) appears to stand against the Jewish, we yet have ventured to suggest the re-awakening of a German instinct as one factor in the present agitation. As, however, we have been obliged to discard all idea of its being a purely racial instinct, we perhaps might search for something higher: a bent that, merely vaguely (wahnvoll) felt by the Folk of to-day, would at first appear indeed as instinct, though really of far nobler origin and loftier aim, and which might haply be defined as the spirit of the purely-Human.

From the Cosmopolitan proper, if such a man exists in fact, we probably should have little to expect for the solution of our problem. ‘Tis no small thing, to run through the history of the world and yet preserve love for the human species. Here nothing but a rooted feeling of kinship with the immediate nation whence we sprang, can serve to re-knit the strand dissevered by a survey of the whole: here operates the thing we feel ourselves to be; we pity, and strive our best to hope, as for the future of our nearer family. Fatherland, mother-tongue: woe to the man bereft of these! But what unmeasured happiness, to recognise in one’s mother-tongue the speech of one’s ure-fathers! Through such a tongue our feelings and beholdings stretch right back to early Man himself; no fence and pale there hedge our nobles in, and far beyond the fatherland at last assigned us, beyond the landmarks of historic knowledge and all our outer trappings thence derived, we feel ourselves one kin with pristine Man’s creative beauty. Such is our German language, the only heritage retained intact from our forefathers. Do we feel our breath fast quitting us, beneath the pressure of an alien civilisation; do we fall into uncertainty about ourselves: we have only to dig to the roots in the true father-soil of our language, to reap at once a reassuring [273]answer on ourselves, nay, on the truly Human. And this possibility, of always drawing from the pristine fount of our own nature, that makes us feel ourselves no more a race, no mere variety of man, but one of Manhood’s primal branches,—’tis this that ever has bestowed on us great men and spiritual heroes, as to whom we have no need to trouble whether fashioners of foreign fatherless civilisations are able to understand and prize them; whilst we again, inspired by the deeds and gifts of our forefathers, and gazing with unclouded eye, are able to rightly estimate those foreigners, and value them according to the spirit of pure Humanity indwelling in their work. For the sterling German instinct asks and seeks for nothing but this Purely-Human, and through that search alone can it be helpful—not merely to itself, but to all that shews the pure and genuine under never so great disguise.

Whom could it escape, that, suffering from the inability to truly manifest itself in either national or church-religious life, this noble instinct could but lead a feeble, indistinct, misunderstandable and scamped existence hitherto? In not one of those parties which aspire to guide the movements of our political or our intellectual national life, especially at the present day, does it seem to us, alas! to find a voice; even the names they take proclaim them not of German origin, still less inspired by German instinct. What “Conservatives,” “Liberals” and “Conservative-liberals,” and finally “Democrats,” “Socialists,” or even “Social-democrats” etc., have lately uttered on the Jewish Question, must seem to us a trifle foolish; for none of these parties would think of testing that “Know thyself” upon themselves, not even the most indefinite and therefore the only one that styles itself in German, the “Progress”-party. There we see nothing but a clash of interests, whose object is common to all the disputants, common and ignoble: plainly the side most strongly organised, i.e. the most unscrupulous, will bear away the prize.

In short: (1) Wagner utterly rejects the „racial“ aspect of the Jewish problem. (2) Instead of looking to „racial instincts“ one should seek for the spritual in the man, the „purely Human“, which was inherent in the Germans of old. (3) The Germans of old no longer exist. What remained of them is the German spirit transmitted through Geman language. The Germans of today should re-claim that lost spirit. (4) This reclaiming can not be obtained through political movements and parties since ultimately all they are interested in is power which is merely another form of materialism. Rather Germans as individuals and a collective should engage in continual introspection in order to remove their own shortcomings and stop blaming „foreigners“ for their misfortune.

Rejection of German „racial purity“, even denial of the existence of „German race“ itself, as well as admonishment against blaming the Jews for the miseries the Germans inflicted upon themselves…It is by now transparent that even this one Wagner prose excerpt the nazis used in their propaganda is quoted out of context. „Know thyself“ is as a whole a rejection of then nascent racial antisemitism, which came to be the hallmark of the nazi ideology.

Think for a moment, if this one quote had to be used out of context to conform to the nazi ideology, what of the other Wagner prose, even „Jewishness in music“, that the nazis did not use? Do you think it could possibly moulded into what the nazis preached? The only logical answer could be „no“. Far from needing to understand Wagner to understand nazism, the truth is exactly the opposite: if you truly undestood Wagner, you couldn’t possibly accept the nazi ideology!