Hitler made Wagner central to the Nazis’ aestheticising of politics as one element in his treatment of Germany as a stage-set for rallies. By contrast, Wagner had contributed next-to-nothing towards making Hitler and the Nazis central to inter-war Germany. Many times more potent were military defeat, a bourgeoisie distraught from inflation and propertied classes terrified by Bolshevism, which Hitler identified with Hebraic Marxism. Weighed against those three onslaughts, any influence of Wagner on the creation of willing executioners was minimal.

An effort has been made to read Wagner’s poems for Der Ring backwards from the Holocaust to forge a chain of causes for Nazism from within the German psyche. The U.S. Occupation was on firmer ground in 1945-46 when it banned Grimm’s fairy tales because they were so violent. Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel (1893) presented the ideal type of Aryan children, who push an old lady with a large nose into an oven.

Wagner’s anti-Semitism is no longer denied or welcomed, at least not publicly. Rather, efforts are made to contain its significance. Equally misguided is a determination to extract “the Jew” from every crevice of Wagner’s creativity, as Loge does Alberich as toad.

In particular, no one has identified anti-Semitism in the score of Der Ring. No Jewish melodies are parodied. How was it then that Wagner’s swelling obsession did not break through his greatest creation? It did, but as an affirmation, not an accusation. The vocal line affirmed what Wagner believed the Jew could not do.

The exact setting of Wagner’s mother tongue is central to his music of the future. The rightness of speech was at the heart of his 1850 protest about “Judaism in Music”. Australian critic Neil Levi has examined Wagner’s fear that the assimilated Jew inflected, and thus infected, German speech and song with an alien mimicry.

The Jew could distract the Germans more than the French because Germany’s national culture was as weak as the German state was fragmented. Berlioz, by contrast, could create in a French language established by the Academy as part of a centralised state. Germany remained a patchwork of principalities, with the start of a customs union but no unified Reich until the drive from Prussia after 1860. Wagner was caught up in the making of this Germany, concluding Die Meistersinger von Nürnburg with a chorus in praise of the German Masters. His ambition for “Our sacred German Art!”, as Hans Sachs proclaims, was for a German bel canto to rival Bellini’s.

The interest now is on the causes of Wagner’s prejudice. How did his attitudes arise, and develop over forty years? His anti-Semitism voiced a new alarm. He did not proclaim a blood-debt to be exacted from the Jews as Christ killers. That prejudice is not significant, even in Parsifal. Rather, Wagner reacted against “rich urbanised Jews as the advance agents of Modernity”, as Fritz Stern observed in The Politics of Cultural Despair (1961). The enemy had become the assimilated Jew, not the Ghetto. The links between Jewish bankers and German industrialists fed another fear that makes Wagner our contemporary through the rape of the natural world. As he worked on Der Ring, industry was destroying the forests and polluting the streams, severing the connections between blood and soil.

Today’s anti-Semitism in the Muslim world owes nothing to Western high culture in the nineteenth century, instead drawing almost everything from recent Middle Eastern politics. There, the alarm at modernity is once again focused on the Jew as its bearer, albeit in alliance with the US as protector of Israel. Meanwhile in the de-industrialising West, anti-Semitism has revived as one more superstition in reaction to the latest round of modernisation, known as globalisation.

 

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