The Wagner Clan Read online

  Not everyone shared (or shares) Stuckenschmidt’s balanced view. Indeed, with a Weimar generation increasingly drawn to the fascinating thrills and spills of new music, or at least to novel presentation of traditional opera, old-guard Wagnerians felt even more impelled to extol the ‘true German virtues’ of the music dramas and to insist on stagings exactly as the Master had specified. Bayreuth naturally became still more of a ‘fortress on the hill’ for the latter group, with Siegfried caught in the middle, under ‘moral’ pressure not to modernise from his mother and sisters as well as the Wagner societies, but knowing full well that some change was unavoidable, indeed desirable. ‘Something unbelievable has happened,’ wrote another music critic, Bernhard Diebold, within months of the above piece by his colleague Stuckenschmidt. ‘Since the war the educated public of the political right has raised Richard Wagner to its special God of art and culture. Lacking creative spirits of their own, the men of the right have chosen the revolutionary, the refugee and decades-long exile from 1848–9 to be fulfiller of their nationalistic needs.’ In Diebold’s view leftists and liberals also bore responsibility for this trend because they had shown ‘a no less fatal thoughtlessness towards the spiritual phenomenon that is Wagner’. Repelled by the reactionaries of ‘Haus Wahnfried’ and by ‘Herrn Chamberlain’, Diebold charged, the left had lost sight of the real essence of Wagner and abandoned the field without a fight.9

  The rightist embrace of Wagner did not, of course, start only after the First World War and the Master had, nolens volens, himself embraced the right when it seemed likely to back him with cash and clout. But Diebold put his finger on a key point all the same; for conservatives Wagner’s role as revolutionary was a severe embarrassment – best ignored or, failing that, explained away. Cosima and Chamberlain, prime obfuscators, showed how. For the Nazis, superficial appearances notwithstanding, the revolutionary Wagner was still more of a headache. They could and did present themselves as ‘Socialists’ of a kind, committed as the Master had been to overturning a supposedly corrupt and unjust order. But the anarchic dreams of the author of Art and Revolution were devilishly hard to square with the Nazi resolve to control and transform national life at every level. Nor did the content of most of Wagner’s music dramas offer much encouragement to the self-styled builders of a Third Reich, particularly not that of his ‘flagship’ composition, the Ring. However one interprets the latter’s fire-and-flood ending, the course of the cycle as a whole shows how disaster strikes those spurred by greed and lust for power. The truth of this ‘message’ was, indeed, never better confirmed than by the Führer and his gruesome movement, but that was surely not their intention.

  As for Tristan und Isolde, described by Hitler as the greatest Wagner opera,10 its doomed, treacherous lovers were anything but role models for a Reich urging increased production by dutiful families of bouncing (Aryan) babies. Parsifal was an even bigger headache; indeed the Nazis more or less banned it at the outbreak of war although it could sometimes be heard after that, at least in excerpt. For those who interpret Parsifal as a paean to racial purity, the quasi-suppression of it on the eve of the Holocaust must seem illogical to say the least. But then, whatever its racial content may be, the work is undeniably shot through with anguish and the Nazis may have rightly judged that the Volk would soon be getting quite enough of that anyway. Besides, Parsifal himself saves the Grail community after shunning weaponry and learning compassion, never a course associated with Nazism and particularly not after 1939. Goebbels, anyway, had always disliked the work. Parsifal, he wrote in his diary in 1936, was simply too pious. If its stage presentation were not modernised it would not, in the long run, be able to keep its place in the repertory.11

  At least, one might think, Meistersinger was tailor-made for the Reich – especially its last act with that rousing ‘Wach’ auf!’ (Awake!) chorus that so pleased Goebbels, and with Sachs’s forceful warning in the closing minutes (‘Verachtet mir die Meister nicht’ – Do not disdain the Masters) about threats from abroad. One can argue about whether the latter is the most appropriate ending and Wagner was long in two minds about it himself. But what Sachs sings is hardly bellicose – that should Germany fall under foreign rule, it would only be in art as preserved by the Masters that the true spirit of the nation could survive. As for ‘Wach’ auf!’ this could give a boost to Goebbels and his like only if ripped out of Wagner’s context. Sachs, to whom the chorus is directed, promptly responds with an admonition – that the people too easily bestow great honour on one not fit to receive it. This, the music tells us, is no show of false modesty but deadly serious. Wagner here harks back to the great ‘Wahn’ (Madness) monologue at the start of the act, in which Sachs reflects on the endless capacity of human beings to ‘torment and flay each other in useless, foolish anger’. Even when this madness seems to halt, Sachs mourns, it is only gaining new strength in sleep – and once awoken ‘then see who can master it’. If Nazi leaders had listened carefully and pondered what they heard, they would have found it hard to avoid classing Wagner’s real ‘message’ as subversive.

  Evidently few top Nazis (let alone the rank and file) were disposed to do any such thing. One interesting exception was Alfred Rosenberg, long regarded as the party’s leading ideologist, who really did know his Wagner and tied himself in knots trying to reconcile his personal doubts about it with the official, Hitler-inspired jubilation. For Rosenberg, the real Nazi model was Beethoven who ‘took fate by the throat and acknowledged force as the highest morality of man … Whoever understands the essence of our movement knows that there is a drive in us all like that which Beethoven embodied to the highest degree.’12 Rosenberg claimed that Wagner too revealed the strength of the ‘Nordic soul’ but, such party-line poppycock aside, he felt compelled to criticise the Master’s work in detail, especially the Ring. In the latter, he asserted, ‘the inner harmony between word content and physical conduct is often hindered by the music … An attempt to wed these arts forcefully destroys spiritual rhythm and prevents emotive expression.’ Rosenberg hastily added that ‘these remarks are in no way intended to denigrate Wagner’s work’, but in fact they hit at the very core of the Master’s Gesamtkunstwerk approach. For good measure, Rosenberg also charged that the stage demands in the Ring were so huge that they could never be met properly. In sum, his criticism is not so much ideological as technical – that Wagner, as he put it, ‘frequently gets in his own way’.13

  Not many of the Nazi ‘elite’ would have known or cared whether these arguments had substance. Goebbels, who saw Rosenberg as a rival and quickly outmanoeuvred him once the Nazis were in power, does seem to have had a certain affinity for Wagner. At least he claimed in his diary to have been stirred in his youth by the music and he visited Bayreuth with apparent pleasure; but he reveals no special insights on the works in his private jottings (witness that ‘Day of Potsdam’ entry), let alone in his public speeches. The similarly powerful Göring stumped along to Bayreuth when the Führer was there but there is every sign he would have preferred to go hunting instead. He did indeed pour much effort and money into bolstering Berlin’s Staatsoper, over which he jealously kept control. But that had far less to do with a love of opera, let alone Wagner, than with his fierce rivalry with Goebbels, who yearned to bring every cultural bastion, including the Staatsoper and Bayreuth, under his thumb. He never quite succeeded, but that was not for lack of trying. Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect and later also his armaments minister, was another Bayreuth regular motivated by duty rather than personal interest. The Führer, he noted in his memoirs, often discussed Wagner with Winifred and seemed to know what he was talking about. Evidently Speer himself did not know enough to be sure.14

  The truth is that many Nazis, in high and low places, were bored to tears by Wagner. There is nothing very odd about that. Lots of people past and present who may well have a certain interest in other music will run a mile to escape a seemingly interminable evening with the Master. Too few tunes, too many
scenes in which people stand about for ages apparently doing nothing much. The point is only worth stressing here because the Nazis are reputed to have had a special affinity to Wagner’s music. The evidence suggests this was simply not so. Speer is only one of those who give the ‘inside story’ on those ‘gala’ performances of Meistersinger on the sidelines of the Nuremberg rallies. In 1933 so few of the invited party ‘faithful’ were present when the work began that Hitler in fury sent out patrols to the brothels and beer gardens to round up the truants. The next year the house was well filled from the start on Hitler’s orders, but many of those present fell asleep or clapped in the wrong places. After that the Führer gave up his bid to ‘educate’ his errant flock and the performances were thrown open to Wagner fans generally (who had to pay for their seats).15 Tristan und Isolde seems to have had a similarly soporific effect on top Nazis – at least if an account by Hitler’s secretary, Traudl Junge, is to be believed. On one occasion, she recalled, a member of the Führer’s entourage was rescued in the nick of time after he nodded off and began to fall forward over the railing of his box. The rescuer himself had been asleep until a moment before. Another in the group, blissfully unaware both of the little drama nearby and the big one on the stage, simply snored his way through it all.16

  It wasn’t all Wagner, at least not quite. Hitler rarely went to concerts though he had some time for symphonies by Beethoven and, latterly, by Bruckner. But what he loved most (the Master apart) was operetta – a genre he had publicly scorned as inferior in the 1920s but which he came to adore when in power. His favourites seem to have been Die lustige Witwe (The Merry Widow) of Franz Lehár and Die Fledermaus (The Bat) of Johann Strauss, both choices that caused much head-scratching among the Reich’s guardians of ‘pure German art’. Lehár had been born in Hungary, his wife was Jewish and he had worked closely throughout his career with Jewish artists like Richard Tauber, who fled from the Nazis to London and died there. Strauss was in principle even more of a problem. After the Anschluss with Austria in 1938, the Nazis came across evidence showing the composer was of Jewish descent. Goebbels quickly had the records doctored and hushed up the whole affair. It hardly did to make a fuss about darlings of the Führer. Anyway, Goebbels himself was keen to promote ‘lighter’ music, even jazz in limited doses, if it helped raise the spirits of the Volk.

  Wagner and operetta thus emerged as the main ingredients in Hitler’s hugely indigestible ‘musical evenings’ – events dreaded by most of those forced to take part. At least the Führer’s similarly interminable ‘movie evenings’ might, amid all the sentimental dross, throw up a foreign feature of passing interest not shown in public cinemas. No such novelty could be expected on those occasions when Hitler trapped his unhappy guests around the turntable, notably at his Berghof Alpine retreat perched high above the small Bavarian town of Berchtesgaden. As one recording of the Master’s works succeeded another, the Führer would amuse himself, if no one else, by trying (usually successfully) to guess the identity of the singer. Bit by bit many of those present would tiptoe away to drink and chat in another room until, their absence noted with displeasure, they had to slink back for the rest of the programme, mainly jolly ditties by Lehár and Co. According to Frau Junge the marathon would usually be rounded off in the early hours with the ‘Donkey Serenade’ – a surprising but, all things considered, not inappropriate choice.17

  Just what was it about Wagner that so attracted Hitler? This is a simple question that, on the face of it, ought to have an easy and plausible answer. We know that from early adolescence Hitler was ‘captivated’ by the Master’s works, that he studied them voraciously and that he went to countless performances of them. Since he talked near-incessantly about almost everything under the sun including the arts, one would think that the reasons for his Wagner-mania must be exhaustively documented. Even if one discards much-touted but suspect reports of Hitler’s private remarks, like those of Kubizek or of Hermann Rauschning, a self-important and mendacious Nazi official who wrote up hobnobs he claimed to have had with the Führer, a mountain of well-authenticated material remains. Oddly enough, though, ploughing through the public and private sources for insights on the Hitler–Wagner connection yields slim pickings.

  Sticking for a moment to the sparse facts, Hitler demonstrably ‘loved the noise’ Wagner made and he was drawn irresistibly to all the visual and technical paraphernalia of theatre. He beamed while listening to Meistersinger and trembled when he heard Tristan. On one occasion he stated that the Master’s music raised people up out of the daily grind into the pure air, on another he claimed to hear in it the ‘rhythms of the primeval world’.18 Beyond such banalities he had little of substance to say about the scores themselves, though he had a good ear and could pick out – say – when an oboe was out of tune or a tenor missed a bar. Productions and staging absorbed him at least as much as the music, perhaps more – hence his special request to Winifred that his youthful idol Roller be engaged for Bayreuth. He adored going behind the scenes to view lighting and scenery, he could spew out statistics about opera houses all over Europe and he spent hours poring over stage designs of his own. Not that he was content with stage concepts alone. Aided and abetted by Speer, he went on to concoct monstrous ‘real-life’ schemes, most of them happily unrealised, for vast buildings and new cities such as the world had never seen. He thus belatedly picked up those threads of a career in the visual arts that had snapped decades before in Vienna. As Nazi leader he had near-unlimited means to do so and his abiding love of Wagner’s stage works surely spurred him on – so much so that most of his entourage, especially his general staff, came to bewail the inordinate amount of time he ‘wasted’ on art.

  Isn’t all that, though, missing the wood for the trees? For many people the explanation for the link between Führer and Master is (dangerously) obvious; that a fascist, fiercely antisemitic leader with artistic pretensions is pretty well bound to be drawn to a fascist, fiercely antisemitic composer. ‘There is much Hitler in Wagner,’ as Thomas Mann put it with, for him, rare pithiness in a letter in 1949.19 This was not the first time Mann had said something of the kind. His longstanding doubts about the composer’s work, which he could not help loving all the same, grew stronger after he went into exile in 1933 and observed Hitler’s embrace of the Master from afar. He even wrote in America in 1940 that with its ‘Wagalaweia and its alliteration, its mixture of roots-in-the-soul and eyes-toward-the future’ Wagner’s music was ‘the exact spiritual forerunner of the “metapolitical” movement today terrorizing the world.’20 Still, Mann is a dangerous witness for Wagner fans and foes alike. He frankly admitted to his ambivalence, telling a friend in 1942 that today he could write one way about the composer and tomorrow another. Sure enough in 1951, four years before his death, Mann pops up again enthusing about Meistersinger as ‘a splendid work, a festival opera if ever there was one … that awakens enthusiasm for life and art.’21

  If Wagner’s works really were ‘the exact spiritual forerunner’ of Nazism, surely the Führer of all people would have drummed that point home ad infinitum. But one looks to him in vain not only for fascist interpretation of the music dramas but, stranger still, for direct references to the theoretical writings. There is, indeed, surprisingly little evidence that Hitler read Wagner’s prose works, though he evidently did borrow some from a library before he rose to power and the wording of some of his speeches indicates that he imbibed at least Das Judentum in der Musik. Why then did he not use the Master more clearly as an ally, especially in his antisemitic cause? In Mein Kampf, for instance, he notes that his early hostility to Jews owed much to the example set by Karl Lueger, the antisemitic mayor of Vienna. He also praises Goethe for acting according to the spirit of ‘blood and reason’ in treating ‘the Jew’ as a foreign element. He pays no similar tribute to the Master, indeed he only mentions Wagner by name once in the whole book (although he refers elsewhere to the ‘Master’ of Bayreuth).

  Even when Hitler complains in
another context that allowing Jewish artists to perform in Bayreuth amounted to ‘racial desecration’, and that this had marred his first festival visit in 1925, he does not go on to say something like ‘the Master who so rightly despised the Jews must have been turning in his grave.’22 By this time, moreover, his antisemitism had become still more intense, probably because of the injuries he had suffered, especially from gas attack, in a war that he felt had been lost through ‘Marxist-Jewish’ treachery. In a chilling foretaste of the ‘final solution’, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that, ‘If at the beginning of the War and during the War twelve or fifteen thousand of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas … the sacrifice of millions at the front would not have been in vain.’23 Yet he never directly called on the Master he near-worshipped as a witness against the people he most loathed.

  The likeliest explanation for this reticence is that Hitler realised, better than Goebbels for instance, that with Wagner he was on tricky ideological ground. After all, the Master had himself engaged Levi, albeit unwillingly, to conduct Parsifal and he had had lots of Jewish friends, however badly he treated them. As for the solution he had proposed in Judentum to the ‘Jewish problem’, that amounted to total assimilation and hence could not have been further from what Hitler aimed for. It is true that in his later version of the essay Wagner raised the question of whether Jews might be expelled, thus coming closer to a stance of which Hitler would have approved; but he hardly did so with a conviction that made the comment useful for Nazi propagandists. Besides at the end of his life Wagner, twisting and turning on the issue, seemed to raise the prospect that Jews could be saved through ‘Christ’s blood’ – conversion. All in all, Hitler may have failed to cite Wagner’s prose not because he knew little of it but because he had read too much and felt it wiser to cry off.