Download Richard Wagner`s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Nazi

Luke Brian Berryman
Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Nazi
Propaganda
Thesis submitted for the Ph.D in Music Research
King’s College, London
2014
1
Abstract
This thesis is about the use of Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in
Nazi propaganda. It unfolds from a single question: why did Adolf Hitler’s Party
make such exhaustive use of this opera? My answer hinges on an adaptation of Jean
Baudrillard’s critical theory. His ideas are not universal, especially as he concerned
himself almost exclusively with the digital age; and he is routinely overlooked and
even derided in English-speaking academia. For these reasons, I subject his work to
extensive reconsideration and adaptation across the project. My updated versions of
his theories cast fresh light on the machinations of Nazi Germany, and provide a
means of penetrating the myths that have engulfed the relationship between Wagner
and the Third Reich since 1945. The idea of appealing to Baudrillard came from my
treatment of Nazism as a malignant manifestation of modernism: malignant because
of its destructive ideology of racial supremacy; and modern because of the way it
fused art, entertainment, and technology for the purposes of simulating cultural life. I
begin by seeking out the historical strands that connect Die Meistersinger to
twentieth-century ideologies. I then examine the opera’s place in the mass media of
Nazi Germany. In the final chapter I turn to the so-called ‘War Festivals’ held in
Bayreuth, where in 1943 and 1944 Die Meistersinger was the only work to be
performed. I conclude that the Nazis’ use of this opera was part of a much wider
tendency to make propaganda by subjecting historical and cultural artefacts to
processes of simulation.
2
Table of contents
Front Matter
Title page … 1
Abstract … 2
Table of contents … 3
List of illustrations and musical examples … 6
Acknowledgements … 8
A word on terminology … 11
Wagner and Nazism Today
Five Sketches
A television show … 14
A magazine … 15
The Internet … 18
The concert hall … 20
A phantom Goebbels quotation … 22
Chapter One
Toward a Theory of Die Meistersinger in Nazi Propaganda
1.1 Introduction … 25
1.2 Baudrillard, Nietzsche, and Simulation
1.2.1 Nietzsche and the emergence of simulation … 30
1.2.2 Baudrillard and the development of simulation … 32
1.3 Baudrillard: Four Key Concepts
1.3.1 Advertising … 38
1.3.2 Film … 41
1.3.3 Deterrence … 49
1.3.4 The precession of simulacra … 54
1.4 Baudrillard, Wagner, and the Nazis
1.4.1 Simulation in Nazi Germany … 57
1.4.2 Simulation in Die Meistersinger … 60
Chapter Two
Die Meistersinger and Race in the Third Reich
2.1 Introduction
2.1.1 Anti-Semitism and Nazi interpretations of Die Meistersinger … 67
2.1.2 Wagner’s anti-Semitism and historical consciousness … 74
3
2.2 Das Judentum and Die Meistersinger
2.2.1 The shared historical location … 77
2.2.2 The shared themes … 82
2.3 Die Meistersinger in Nazi Racial Ideology
2.3.1 Propaganda beyond direct citation … 86
2.3.2 Nature, humour, history … 88
2.3.3 From humiliation to expulsion … 96
2.3.4 Wagner’s ‘Jewish taint’ and the importance of his ‘Germanness’ to the
Nazis … 99
2.3.5 Bringing race into everyday life … 104
Chapter Three
Wagner and Die Meistersinger in the Nazi Mass Media
3.1 Introduction
3.1.1 ‘…innere Beziehung zur Zeit haben…’ … 106
3.2 Wagner and Die Meistersinger in the Nazi Press, Radio, and Cinema
3.2.1 A newspaper feature: 12 February 1933 … 113
3.2.2 Die Meistersinger on the radio: 21 March 1933 … 120
3.2.3 Die Meistersinger on the radio: 7 August 1933 … 127
3.2.4 Wagner and Die Meistersinger in four films … 136
3.3 Die Meistersinger as an Advertisement in Nazi Germany
3.3.1 Uniqueness of the Nazi mass media … 155
3.3.2 Die Meistersinger, Nazism, and immersion … 158
Chapter Four
Die Meistersinger in the 1943 and 1944 Bayreuth War Festivals
4.1 Introduction
4.1.1 Bayreuth between 1943 and 1945: the state of research … 162
4.2 The Strange Case of Richard Wilhelm Stock
4.2.1 Stock in current Wagner scholarship … 165
4.2.2 Richard Wagner und Seine Meistersinger … 172
4.2.3 Wagenseil, Wagner, and Stock … 174
4.2.4 Comparing the 1938 and 1943 versions … 179
4.2.5 ‘“Die Meistersinger” als Kriegsfestspiele 1943’ … 181
4.3 Bayreuth and the Propaganda of Deterrence … 184
4.4 Wagner and the Twilight of the Nazis
4.4.1 ‘Rhetoric and reality’ … 190
4.4.2 Hitler’s skull, the score of Rienzi, and the desert of the real … 194
4
Reflections on Wagner and Simulation Today
A response to Daniel Barenboim … 198
End matter
Appendix: translation of Joseph Goebbels’ newspaper article, ‘Richard Wagner
and the Spirit of Art in Our Time’ … 207
List of Abbreviations … 214
Bibliography … 217
5
List of illustrations and musical examples
1. Still from the opening scene of Hitler: The Rise of Evil … 14
2. The logo of the ‘Secret Hitler Files’ from the magazine series, Hitler’s Third
Reich: Witness the Terrible Secrets of Germany’s Evil Empire … 16
3. An example of the imagery in Hitler’s Third Reich … 16
4. A screenshot of the Wikipedia article on Parsifal … 18
5. A screenshot of the Guardian review of Hitler’s Children … 19
6. A screenshot of a comment on the Guardian review of Hitler’s Children … 20
7. A screenshot of a reply on the Guardian review of Hitler’s Children … 20
8. Evgeny Nikitin’s swastika tattoo … 21
9. An RAD parade in 1934 … 48
10. An extract from Act I scene 2 of Die Meistersinger (‘die Schreibpapier –,
Schwartztintenweis’’) … 90
11. An extract from Act I scene 2 of Die Meistersinger (‘der rote, blau’ und grüne
Ton’) … 91
12. An extract from Act I scene 2 of Die Meistersinger (‘der kurzen Liebe, der
vergess’ne Ton’) … 91
13. The playing board of Juden Raus! … 97
14. The image accompanying ‘How the Jews Came to Us’ in Der Giftpilz … 98
15. An extract from Act I scene 1 of Die Meistersinger (‘Da zu dir der Heiland kam’)
… 118
16. An extract from Act III scene 5 of Die Meistersinger (‘Hört ihr es? Wen lud er
ein?’) … 125
17. An extract from Act III scene 5 of Die Meistersinger (‘Das ist was andres, wer
hätt’s gedacht’) … 125
18. Hitler posing with Hindenburg in 1933 … 131
19. A still of a map of Stuttgart from Jud Sü … 138
20. A still of Jews singing in Jud Sü … 138
21. A still of Dorothea Sturm (Kristina Soderbaum) singing in Jud Sü … 139
6
22. Stills of Bayreuth from Bayreuth bereitet die Festspiele vor … 140
23. A still of a smoking chimney in Bayreuth bereitet die Festspiele vor … 140
24. A still of a rehearsal with Max Lorenz from Bayreuth bereitet die Festspiele vor
… 141
25. Stills of a crowd gathering by a window during a rehearsal with Karl Elmendorff
from Bayreuth bereitet die Festspiele vor … 142
26. An extract from the Prelude to Act III of Die Meistersinger … 144
27. A still of a smoking chimney in Der Triumph des Willens … 145
28. A still of three smoking chimneys in a 1942 performance of the Prelude to Act I
of Die Meistersinger … 148
29. Extract from bb. 41–58 of the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger … 149
30. Stills of factory machinery in a 1942 performance of the Prelude to Act I of Die
Meistersinger … 151
31. A still of injured soldiers among the audience in a 1942 performance of the
Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger … 151
32. The ‘apprentice’ motif from the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger … 152
33. Extract from the Quintet in Act III scene 4 of Die Meistersinger … 160
34. Richard Wilhelm Stock wearing a Golden Party Badge … 168
35. An extract from Wagenseil’s Buch von der Meister-Singer Holdseligen Kunst
(1697), as reprinted in Stock’s Richard Wagner und Seine Meistersinger … 175
36. The first of the vier gekrönte Töne by Heinrich Mügling … 176
37. An extract from the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger … 177
38. ‘Unexpected Meeting in Bayreuth’, a photograph from Stock’s Richard Wagner
und Seine Meistersinger … 183
7
Acknowledgements
‘Wagner is actually an understudied composer’: the ominous words with which John
Deathridge concluded our first meeting in September 2009. His efforts to steer me
toward the era of the Third Reich, the work of Jean Baudrillard, and the problems
surrounding Die Meistersinger began soon after. These topics ultimately became the
three pillars of this thesis. John brought structure to the shapeless bundle of ideas
with which I arrived at King’s College, London, always with patience and good
humour. He has become something of a personal Hans Sachs, for which I am deeply
grateful. Michael Fend also played a pivotal role in this project’s development. He
gave me invaluable feedback, guidance, and motivation throughout, and during the
last year in particular. I dread to think of how much harder it would have been to
cross the finish line without him – it was he who ensured this did not turn into a
PhDämmerung. As an institution, KCL has been unwavering in its support, by
awarding me a generous scholarship, and twice financing research trips to Germany.
Debts of gratitude are owed to the many others who read my work and
pointed me in new directions too. Chief among them are Michael Berkowitz,
Laurence Dreyfus, Gundula Kreuzer, Erik Levi, Thomas Peattie, Joshua Rifkin, Toby
Thacker, and David Trippett. Andrew Shenton’s assistance in clearing any number of
hurdles was too generous, as always. The archivists in the Bundesarchiv, particularly
Kristin Hartisch and Torsten Zarwel, always dealt kindly with my obscure inquiries.
David Skinner and Max Beber gave me my first real teaching opportunities at Sidney
Sussex, Cambridge; and Roger Parker rescued my sanity on more than one occasion.
Indeed, his generosity of time, spirit, and patience always went far beyond the call of
duty.
8
I could not have done without the help of other students whom I am lucky to
count as friends and colleagues, particularly at KCL and Cambridge. Foremost
among them are Tamsin Alexander, Harriet Boyd, Kate Guthrie, Katherine
Hambridge, Hugo Shirley, and Flora Willson. They all read my work at various
stages, and listened sympathetically to the gripes that inevitably accompany a PhD as
well. I am grateful to Phillip Anderson, Evan and Deinera Cortens, and Andrew and
Grace Shryock for their friendship and support; and to Hanns Hagen Goetze and
Phillipe Roesle for helping to improve my German translations. Meanwhile the music
making of Ashley Fripp, Paul Jacobs, Rob Keeley, and Ben Schoeman was always a
welcome reminder of the perpetuity of art’s beauty compared to the transience of
political ideology.
Barbara Moss in Boston and Franco Urlini in Melbourne were both kind
enough to supply me with literature on Wagner. In many ways, Barbara’s gift of the
Robert Gutman biography in the summer of ’09 was the catalyst that began this
project. Ryan Leonard’s friendship was unwavering, he was a sounding board for
many of the ideas in this thesis, and he assisted me in carving a personal Monsalvat
from WTs snooker club in Cambridge. With its dim lighting and blacked-out
windows that completely prevent the entry of any sunshine, its absurd eighteen-hour
opening times, and its extraordinarily cheap beer, this is the one place of which it can
be truly said, without any sense of ambiguity: ‘du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird
hier die Zeit’.
In March 2009, Jonathan Gilbert, a partner of Willmett & Co., the Berkshirebased legal firm with whom my Dad was also a partner, went on the run after it was
discovered that he had committed mortgage fraud. Willmett’s went under soon after.
Nearly one hundred people, my Dad among them, lost their job. As time went by,
9
more information about Jonathan’s dealings came to light. The figures involved
spiralled from an initial estimate of £1.35 million to an eye-watering £50 million. In
March 2011, the Law Society struck off Jonathan, and concluded the case was ‘one of
the worst to ever come before it’. He and his two accomplices, Mark Entwistle and
George Tilemachou, in addition to various others, were charged in 2011. Even at the
time of writing, the case is still unfolding in court. The past five years have been
enormously difficult for my family, my Dad in particular. I am incredibly proud of
him and my Mum for pulling through it in the way they have. More remarkable still
is that their support of my own esoteric endeavours has never been anything but total.
By way of gratitude, this project is dedicated to them. I should also like to thank
everyone else in my family for their encouragement and patience – Paul and Louise,
and my grandparents, Audrey and Brian, and Merle. Sadly my grandfather Sam did
not live to see this particular piece of work, but his love of music and spirit of enquiry
is here on every page.
Oxford
Easter 2014
10
A word on terminology
Throughout this thesis, I refer to the ideology created by Adolf Hitler as ‘Nazism’. I
do not use Nationalsozialistisch or its English translation, ‘National Socialist’, which
was coined by the Nazis themselves. I have also elected to refer to ‘Jews’, rather than
‘the Jews’. This too stems from a desire to reject entirely the Nazis’ own terminology
regarding race, religion, and ethnicity. The chosen terminology of the scholars whose
work I cite appears unaltered, and without judgement. Unless stated otherwise, all
translations from German cited in this thesis are my own.
11
Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Nazi Propaganda
for my parents
~Tessa and Melvin~
12
König: Kennen ja meine Meinung, Gneisenau. Sie sind ein Phantast, Poet, deutscher
Träumer. Wirklichkeit sieht anders aus, Gneisenau.
V. Gneisenau: Ich kenne die Wirklichkeit, Majestät.
Kolberg (1945)
13
Wagner and Nazism Today
Five Sketches
I A television show
In 2003, the American television network CBS premiered a miniseries called Hitler:
The Rise of Evil.1 It begins with a schoolteacher, whose face is adorned with a beard
fit for a cartoon devil, whispering a single word to the young Adolf Hitler: ‘Parsifal’.
He simultaneously places a gramophone needle onto a record of Richard Wagner’s
last opera. As the music begins, he tells the boy, ‘Parsifal is the German ideal: a
combination of strength, determination, and purity’.2
Figure 1 – The opening scene of The Rise of Evil
The earliest recordings of Parsifal were not made until Hitler was already well into
his twenties, however. Ian Kershaw worked as the show’s historical consultant during
its early stages, so the programme makers were almost certainly aware of the
anachronism – but it was one of several that made it to the final cut. 3 Kershaw
The quotation at the head of this project comes from the Nazi movie Kolberg. It reads, ‘King: “You
know my opinion, Gneisenau. You’re a fantasist, a poet, a German dreamer. Reality is different,
Gneisenau”. Gneisenau: “I know reality, Majesty”’. For more on Kolberg, see fn. 460.
2
The Rise of Evil, dir. by Christian Duguay (Alliance Atlantis, 2003), 00:00.20–00:00.35.
3
It is unsurprising that the programme makers selected Parsifal for this particular moment, as it has
long been identified as one of Wagner’s most problematic operas where matters of race and nation are
concerned. For more on this topic, see John Deathridge, ‘Strange Love, Or, How We Learned to Stop
1
14
ultimately resigned because of such attempts to make Hitler ‘less boring’. 4 This thesis
is not about Parsifal, but its use in The Rise of Evil does offer a good place at which
to begin thinking about the role of Wagner as propaganda in the Third Reich. Its
privileging of myth over historical accuracy is symptomatic of the way that he has
become bound up with Nazism since 1945.
II A magazine
In popular culture particularly, the supposed relationship between composer and
regime is often characterised by heavily concentrated versions of historical arguments
juxtaposed with half-truth and falsehood. The typical end product is a salacious
version of history which ‘tends towards the one-dimensional, a flattening out […] at
the level of the “now” and the simultaneous’. 5 One noticeably bald example is an
article called ‘Hitler and Wagner’, from the series of popular history magazines,
Hitler’s Third Reich: Witness the Terrible Secrets of Germany’s Evil Empire. 6 It
featured in a regular column called ‘Secret Hitler Files’, the title of which appeared in
a quasi-Fraktur font above the image of a swastika clutched in an eagle’s talons.
Figure 2 – The logo of the ‘Secret Hitler Files’
Worrying and Love Parsifal’, in Wagner Beyond Good and Evil (Berkley: University of California
Press, 2008), pp. 159–77.
4
For a full report on Kershaw’s resignation, see Emma Hartley, ‘Historian quits as American TV tries
to make Hitler “less boring”’, Telegraph, 16 March 2003.
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/4792985/Historian-quits-as-American-TV-tries-to-makeHitler-less-boring.html> [accessed 10 May 2010].
5
John Deathridge, ‘Wagner and the Post-Modern’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (1992), 143–61 (p.
144).
6
Hitler’s Third Reich, 16 (1999), 1–5. These magazines were published on a monthly basis for two
years between 1998 and 2000. As with all articles that appeared in Hitler’s Third Reich, the author of
this particular piece is not named.
15
The piece is five pages long, and it is interspersed with a mixture of black-and-white
and sepia photographs, some of which are overlaid with words in sinister red
lettering.
Figure 3 – An example of the imagery in Hitler’s Third Reich
The caption for a photograph of a War-era staging of Die Meistersinger reads: ‘the
Nazis considered this opera to be a classic statement of Teutonic Aryan supremacy.
This work ends with the humiliation of the Jewish pseudo-artist Beckmesser’ – an
assertion which is hardly accurate, but not entirely incorrect either.7 This is history
being ‘flattened out’, a version of a familiar argument presented ‘one dimensionally’.
Fact sits alongside rumour and unreliable sources in the body of the article itself. A
passage that discusses the personal significance of Wagner’s early opera Rienzi to
Hitler reads as follows:
7
‘Hitler and Wagner’ (p. 3).
16
On first seeing the opera Hitler took [August] Kubizek on a long nocturnal
climb up the Feinberg [sic] and, in a state of near ecstasy, lectured him on
what they had just seen.8
This well-known anecdote is taken from Kubizek’s book, The Young Hitler I Knew.9
Kubizek was a childhood friend of Hitler’s. In 1938, he wrote two pamphlets
recounting their relationship at the Party’s request. The Young Hitler I Knew,
published in 1953, was based on these pamphlets. At least one historian has urged
caution with the book, as it has ‘more than an air of fabrication’ about it.10 In a recent
study of early twentieth-century performance records, Jonas Karlsson established that
Hitler and Kubizek could not have heard Rienzi together during the 1900s.11 This
famous midnight, mountaintop-lecture was an invention.
When Hitler was reminded of this occasion by Kubizek on a visit to
Bayreuth in 1939, Hitler said to the assembly: ‘in that hour it began’.
Whether Hitler actually said this is doubtful. The remark is supposed to have been
made to Winifred Wagner, the head of the Bayreuth Festival between 1930 and 1945,
yet the only account of the meeting is in The Young Hitler I Knew. Even if Kubizek’s
memory was accurate on this occasion, Kershaw has pointed out that it would only
amount to Hitler ‘showing off his “prophetic qualities” to an important admirer’.12 In
other words, it would be a mistake to take the statement at face value.
Kubizek, an accomplished musician, wrote of young Adolf’s determination
to write an opera himself. This project was to be called ‘Wieland the Smith’.
This and the quotations that follow all come from ‘Hitler and Wagner’, 2–4. The author(s) mean the
Frein Mountain. ‘Feinberg’, ironically, is a fairly common Jewish surname.
9
For Kubizek’s full story about Rienzi, see ‘Die Vision’, pp. 127–35 of the original publication, Adolf
Hitler, mein Jugendfreund, 3rd edn (Stuttgart: Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1966).
10
Ian Kershaw, ‘Introduction’, The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. by Lionel Leventhal (London:
Greenhill Books, 2006), p. 12.
11
‘“In that Hour it Began”? Hitler, Rienzi and the Trustworthiness of Kubizek’s The Young Hitler I
Knew’, The Wagner Journal, 6 (2012), 33–47. Many have wrongly taken Kubizek’s story at face
value. For one significant example, see Brigitte Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a
Young Man, foreword by Hanns Mommsen (London: Tauris Parke, 2010), p. 24.
12
Kershaw, ‘Introduction’, The Young Hitler, p. 12.
8
17
This, on the other hand, almost certainly did happen. If Hitler and his censors allowed
such an embarrassing story of dilettantish failure to pass, then there is little reason for
today’s historians to doubt it. The rest of the article unfolds in similar fashion. It is a
strange potpourri of fact and myth.
III The Internet
In 2011 I made a small edit to the Wikipedia article on Parsifal, by removing the old
myth that the Nazis banned the work during the War because its pacifist elements
conflicted with the aggression of their ideology. I underlined the absence of evidence
to support the ‘ban’ argument; and added that Joseph Goebbels, who adored Parsifal,
described seeing it for the first time as ‘his greatest operatic experience’.13 Another
user of Wikipedia responded angrily to these changes. He or she deleted them, and
said ‘let’s keep it NPOV [neutral point of view]’ – implying that any attempt to show
the Nazis did not ban Parsifal, or indeed appreciated the opera, belied a lack of
neutrality.
Figure 4 – ‘Let’s keep it NPOV’
A year later, I came across another online disagreement involving the Nazis. This
time it was on the website of the Guardian newspaper, in the comments section for
their review of Hitler’s Children. This television documentary aired in the spring of
2012. It told the life story of the grandson of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of
Auschwitz. The Guardian made an error of fact in the caption of the photograph that
13
TBJG, 12 August 1928, T1, 1/iii, p. 66.
18
accompanied the article. They used an image of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels
sitting alongside Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s personal deputy.14
Figure 5 – Hess mistaken for Höss
One reader had pointed out the error in the comments section:
For a biography of Hess, see Kurt Pätzold and Manfred Weissbecker, Rudolf He. Der Mann an
Hitlers Seite, with contributions from Ted Harrison, Peter A. Schupljak, and Robert G. Waite (Leipzig:
Militzke, 1999). Today Hess is best remembered for his bizarre one-man peace mission to Scotland in
1941. For a recent study of this event and its place in the history of World War Two, see Jo Fox,
‘Propaganda and the Flight of Rudolf Hess, 1941–45’, The Journal of Modern History, 83 (2011), 78–
110.
14
19
Figure 6 – The mistake is spotted
To which a second reader had responded:
Figure 7 – ‘They’re all Nazis’
‘They’re all Nazis, right’. That, presumably, is to say, ‘these people all believed the
same thing and performed the same role, so it does not matter who is in the
photograph. Even if they are not the man Rudolf Höss, they all represent his crimes’.
IV The concert hall
This polarisation of opinion is not restricted to the faceless world of the Internet. In
today’s musical world there are those who, like the Wikipedia editor, consider any
association between Wagner and Nazism to be erroneous. On the other hand, some,
like the second Guardian reader, see guilt for Nazi crimes as transferable to
individuals besides the actual perpetrators. In the summer of 2012, Evgeny Nikitin,
the Russian bass-baritone, was scheduled to make his debut in Bayreuth singing the
title role in Der fliegende Holländer. On 20 July however, just days before the
Festival began, the German news agency ZDF published a damaging photograph of
20
him. The image in question was a ‘screen grab’ from a music video that showed
Nikitin playing the drums while topless, sporting what appeared to be a large
swastika tattoo on the right-hand side of his upper chest.15
Figure 8 – Evgeny Nikitin’s swastika tattoo
The singer came to opera via an unusual path that began with heavy metal, and is
well known for having many tattoos from his time in a band. The picture was several
years old, and Nikitin had since covered the swastika with a newer, larger tattoo – an
innocuous coat-of-arms with an eight-pointed star in the background. Yet such was
the furor around the revelation that he agreed to pull out of the Festival almost
immediately. Nikitin composed a curt press release that appeared on Bayreuth’s
website the day after the ZDF story was published:
I’m being confronted with questions about my tattoos, which I’ve had for
quite some time – particularly regarding their significance and background.
I had them done in my youth. It was a big mistake in my life, and I wish that
I’d never have done it. I wasn’t aware of the extent of the irritation and
offence that these signs and symbols would cause, particularly in Bayreuth,
‘Bayreuther Festspiele “Holländer”-Sänger reist wegen Nazi-Tattoo ab’, Der Spiegel Online, 21 July
2012 <http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/musik/bayreuther-festspiele-evgeny-nikitin-reist-wegen-nazitattoo-ab-a-845689.html> [accessed 7 August 2012].
15
21
given the context of the Festival’s history. Therefore I have decided to
abandon my appearance in the Bayreuth Festival.16
Bayreuth evidently feels that it cannot afford any association with Nazi Germany, and
it will not tolerate any connections between Wagner and that period of the nation’s
history. This suggests that the organisation’s place in the Third Reich was down to
mistakes on the part of the managers, rather than anything intrinsic to the operas.
One month later, a scheduled performance of Wagner’s music in the
University of Tel-Aviv, arranged by the Israel Wagner Society, was cancelled in light
of the protests growing around it.17 Their back-up venue, the Tel-Aviv Hilton Hotel,
followed suit a few days later when they broke a contractual agreement because of
the controversy at the University. 18 This attempt to mount a performance was the
latest in a long line of efforts to breach the unofficial ban on Wagner’s music in
Israel, almost all of which have been unsuccessful. 19 The University’s recoil was
similar to the one seen in Bayreuth, albeit with the opposite reasoning. For this
organisation, Wagner’s works are so evocative of Nazi Germany that the very idea of
performing them is unthinkable.
V A phantom Goebbels quotation
The issues that surround the use of Wagner’s music in the Third Reich appeal to the
popular press and the academic world in equal measure. More unique to this field of
study is the extent to which these worlds have become interconnected. For example,
during the course of my research, I came across the following quotation, attributed to
‘Erklärung von Evgeny Nikitin’, Bayreuther Festspiele website, 21 July 2012
<http://www.bayreuther-festspiele.de/news/123/details_44.htm> [accessed 7 August 2012].
Nikitin backtracked soon after by claiming the tattoo was not in fact a swastika. See Evgeny Nikitin,
Benjamin Bidden, and Joachim Kronsbein, ‘Mein letztes Interview’, Der Spiegel, 6 August 2012.
17
Harriet Sherwood, ‘Tel Aviv Wagner concert cancelled after wave of protest’, Guardian, 5 June
2012.
18
Noam Ben Zeev, ‘Tel Aviv Hitlon cancels Wagner performance despite signing contract’, Haaretz,
11 June 2012.
19
For a detailed study of Wagner in Israel, see Na’ama Sheffi, The Ring of Myths: the Israelis, Wagner
and the Nazis (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2001).
16
22
Goebbels, in Joachim Köhler’s book, Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and His
Disciple:
We have learned what the Jew is from Richard Wagner. Let us pay heed to
him – we who have at last freed ourselves through the words and deeds of
Adolf Hitler from slavery at the hands of a subhuman race. Wagner tells us
all we need to know, both through his writings and through his music, every
note of which breathes the purest German spirit!20
Köhler names his source as ‘[Berndt W.] Wessling (ed.), Bayreuth im Dritten Reich,
p. 13 (Völkischer Beobachter, 24. Juli 1937)’. 21 At first it was surprising that so
extraordinary a statement had not come to occupy a more prominent place in the
literature. More unsettling was that it simply did not sound like Goebbels. Rarely did
he write so directly, especially in anything composed for the public. His sentences are
usually lengthy and characterised by elaborate, floral metaphors – perhaps a hangover
from his failure as a fiction writer.
Wessling’s book does not contain the complete article by Goebbels. There is
only this single paragraph, which Köhler reproduces in its entirety. The edition of the
Völkischer Beobachter that came out on the date Wessling specified contains nothing
by Goebbels or any article on Wagner and anti-Semitism. At first I assumed that I had
made a mistake, or perhaps there was a typographical error in Bayreuth im Dritten
Reich. As well as retracing my own steps, I began studying the career of Wessling,
who died in 2000. An alarming portrait of a corrupt historian came into view almost
immediately. He was accused of historical falsification throughout his career, and on
at least one occasion he was charged with inventing quotations.22 It remains possible
Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple, trans. and introduced by Ronald Taylor (Oxford:
Polity Press, 2000), p. 252.
21
Wagner’s Hitler, p. 347.
22
Wessling was also tied up in the scandal of Julie Schrader, a long-deceased relative who he claimed
was a poet. He was accused of writing most of the poetry himself. See Klaus Pokatsky, ‘Der falsche
Schwan’, Die Zeit, 20 October 1989. Werner Fuld wrote that ‘in his biographies, Wessling often
invented not only the sources of his quotes, but the quotes themselves’. See Das Lexikon der
Fälschungen. Fälschungen, Lügen und Verschwörungen aus Kunst, Historie, Wissenschaft und
Literatur (Frankfurt a.M.: Eichborn, 1999), p. 236.
20
23
that he did not fabricate this particular statement, and that he simply gave the wrong
date for the Beobachter article. However it would take years, if not decades, to go
through every edition of the paper with a fine toothcomb. For the time being then, the
existing circumstances ought to encourage a cautious approach to his sourcebook.
For Köhler to have made use of Bayreuth im Dritten Reich is not wholly
surprising, given that he is a journalist and not an academic. However, Reinhold
Brinkmann also reproduced the phantom Goebbels quotation in an essay entitled
‘Wagners
Aktualität
für
den
Nationalsozialismus.
Fragmente
eine
Bestandsaufnahme’, published in 2000.23 Brinkmann concluded that the quote reveals
‘a quite typical mode of thought from a defensive position [...] a self-affirmation of
aggressive negation which is found again and again when National Socialist
ideologues attempt to define their own position’.24 He gives Wagner’s Hitler as his
source: ‘Völkischer Beobachter vom 24 Juli 1937. Zitiert nach Köhler, a. a. O., S.
360’. 25 In other words, the quotation cited by Wessling in 1983 appears in
Brinkmann’s work as a quotation of a quotation of a quotation that in all probability
was the invention of a discredited historian.
This is one example of the journalistic, the academic, and the purely
mythological bleeding into one another in the study of Wagner in the Third Reich.
There is surely no other composer whose historical legacy and widespread popularity
have combined with such problematic results. This thesis will attempt to clarify and
expand upon the efforts that have already been made to address these problems –
principally by reference to the work of the controversial post-structuralist theorist,
Jean Baudrillard.
‘Wagners Aktualität für den Nationalsozialismus. Fragmente eine Bestandsaufnahme’, in Richard
Wagner im Dritten Reich, pp. 109–41.
24
‘Wagners Aktualität’, p. 130.
25
‘Wagners Aktualität’, p. 140.
23
24
Chapter One
Toward a Theory of Die Meistersinger in Nazi Propaganda
Doch wie wollt’ ich auch fassen,
was unermesslich mir schien?
Act II scene 3
I
Introduction
The purpose of this thesis is to understand how and why the Nazi Party used
Wagner’s music, writing, and image in their propaganda, particularly his opera Die
Meistersinger von Nürnberg.26 Was there something intrinsic to the compositional
techniques in this work that resulted in it being employed to the extent that it was?
Why did the Nazis never suggest in print that the opera contained anti-Semitic
caricatures? Why were Wagner’s anti-Semitic writings never quoted at length in their
propaganda? And why did they privilege him over every other nineteenth-century
German composer?27
The theoretical concepts steering my approach to these questions are
introduced in this chapter. In the second chapter, I examine the place of Die
Meistersinger in the racial universe of Nazism. In the third chapter, I consider
instances of the composer and this opera being used in the Nazi mass media. In the
The quotation at the head of this chapter, which comes from Die Meistersinger, reads, ‘But then,
how should I grasp | What seemed to me immeasurable?’ All translations of the libretto in this thesis
come from the version by Fabrizio Calzaretti, available on <www.http://www.rwagner.net>. This is
more up to date than, say, the version by Frederick Jameson, rev. by Gordon Kember and Norman
Feasey (London: John Calder, 1983), and it also has the advantage of not being a performance version
that attempts to preserve the original rhyme scheme.
27
David B. Dennis observed that, in many cultural articles of the Völkischer Beobachter newspaper,
‘the culminating example was Richard Wagner’, adding that ‘the extent to which he was discussed in
the paper confirms the composer’s enormous stature in National Socialist culture’. See Inhumanities:
Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 6. The
Nazis hardly restricted their repertoire to his music alone, however. For the use of other composers in
Third Reich propaganda, see David B. Dennis, Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Albrecht Dümling, ‘Der deutsche Michel erwacht. Zur
Bruckner-Rezeption im NS-Staat’, Bruckner-Probleme, ed. by Albrecht Riethmüller, Archiv für
Musikwissenschaft, 45 (1996), 192–201; Benjamin Marcus Korstvedt, ‘Anton Bruckner in the Third
Reich and After: An Essay on Ideology and Bruckner Reception’, Musical Quarterly, 80 (1996), 132–
60; and Erik Levi, Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2011).
26
25
fourth chapter, I interrogate the so-called ‘War Festivals’ that took place in Bayreuth
in the summers of 1943 and 1944. Finally, I summarise my findings in a short
response to Daniel Barenboim.
The Nazis treated Die Meistersinger as an artistic symbol for their movement.
Some of the reasons for this are immediately obvious. Wagner had a preexisting
reputation as a nationalist and as an anti-Semite; as he was already dead, he could be
idolised in a way that a living composer could not; and, despite the length of his
operas, a number of short extracts had splintered away from his oeuvre and become
‘popular classics’ by the time the Party came to power. Moreover, some surface
details of Die Meistersinger had specifically proto-Nazi characteristics that made it
suitable for the purpose of propaganda in Hitler’s Germany. The plot hinges on a
widely disliked individual becoming increasingly isolated from the community; the
hero, Hans Sachs, is a national icon, an artist, and a manual labourer; it is set in an
iconic, medieval German city; and it celebrates the idea of a homogenous Germanic
community.
Die Meistersinger was not universally enjoyed in Germany between 1933 and
1945, however. Hitler’s love of it, and other operas by Wagner, was certainly genuine
– but the majority of Party members did not share his enthusiasm. 28 Albert Speer
described a farce that unfolded around a 1933 performance of Die Meistersinger in
Nuremberg, when Hitler entered the Opera House to find that it was ‘almost empty’:
he reacted with intense vexation. Nothing, he said, was so unsettling and so
difficult for an artist as playing to an empty house. He ordered patrols sent
out to bring the high party functionaries from their quarters, beer halls and
cafés to the opera house; but even so the seats could not be filled. The
following day many jokes were told about where and how the missing
leaders had been picked up. Next year Hitler explicitly ordered the Party
chiefs to attend the festival performance. They showed their boredom; many
While discussing great historical figures, Hitler remarked that ‘beside Frederic the Great we have
men like Martin Luther and Richard Wagner’. See MK, p. 171.
28
26
were visibly overpowered by sleep. Moreover, to Hitler’s mind the sparse
applause did not do justice to the brilliant performance. From 1935 on,
therefore, the indifferent Party audience was replaced by members of the
public who had to buy their tickets for hard cash. Only then was the
‘atmosphere’ as encouraging and the applause as hearty as Hitler required.29
Hitler’s passion for the composer was a crucial component of his ‘Führer’ persona,
and it never diminished. As late as the summer of 1944, by which time the Allied
Forces had landed in France, he was still giving Bayreuth enough funding to keep the
Festival afloat.30
A reliable and complete record of every opera performance in the Third Reich
does not exist. The surviving statistics regarding Wagner and the Nazis must
therefore be treated with caution. Where Patrick Carnegy used them to claim that
‘Wagner remained the most popular composer right through into the 1930s’, for
example, Gundula Kreuzer wrote on the basis of a similar investigation that ‘Verdi
[had risen] to the top of opera programmes shortly before the National-Socialist
takeover’. 31 However, it can be observed that clusters of Die Meistersinger
performances occurred when the Nazis first came to power, and later when the War
turned against them. It was given eight times in Bayreuth in 1933. In prior years, it
had not received more than five outings in a single season. It was performed again in
1934, on four occasions. A similar glut occurred in the Oldenburg State Theatre at the
beginning of Hitler’s reign, where it was staged eight times in the 1932–33 season.32
Goebbels attended ten complete productions of Die Meistersinger between 22 April
29
Inside the Third Reich, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston, with an introduction by Eugene
Davidson (London: Phoenix, 1995), pp. 103–04.
30
The Allied Forces landed in France on 6 June 1944 in the operation commonly known as ‘D-Day’.
The Bayreuth Festival took place between 17 July and 9 August of that year.
31
Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 235 and the
corresponding endnote on p. 412; and Kreuzer, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third
Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 203–04. Both conclusions were based on
the statistics in Franz-Heinz Köhler, Die Struktur der Spielpläne deutschsprachiger Opernbühnen von
1896 bis 1966 (Koblenz: Verband Dt. Städtestatistiker, 1968).
32
Christian Krüger, Geschichte der Oper am Landestheater in Oldenburg 1921–1938. Ein Beitrag zur
Musikgeschichte der Stadt Oldenburg vor dem Hintergrund der sozialen und der politischen
Entwicklung dieser Epoch (Oldenburg: Heinz Holzberg Verlag, 1984), p. 242.
27
1930 and 18 September 1933, in addition to seeing the Third Act by itself on 2
September 1933 – an average of nearly one performance every four months.33
Bayreuth then omitted Die Meistersinger from every Festival between 1936
and 1942. The staples during these years were Parsifal, performed thirty-one times
between 1933 and 1939; Der fliegende Holländer, given twenty-seven times between
1939 and 1942; and Der Ring des Nibelungen, the one work heard at every Festival
between 1933 and 1942. Die Meistersinger only returned in 1943, when it was the
sole opera of the season. There were sixteen performances in total, and it was done
twelve times the following summer too. 34 Similarly, when the Berlin State Opera
reopened on 12 December 1942 having been destroyed by Allied bombing on 18
April the previous year, it was to a performance of Die Meistersinger. The ensemble
that evening included Wilhelm Furtwängler, Heinz Tietjen, and Emil Preetorius.35
Evidently, for the Nazis, this particular opera was tied up with victory and celebration
on the one hand, and with defiance on the other.
Two key misconceptions have orbited the topics in this thesis since 1945.
They are, first, that Hitler favoured the operas because they contained anti-Semitic
portrayals of Jews; and second, that the dictator drew his most important political
33
TBJG, 22 April 1930, T1, 2/i, p. 139; 6 April 1931, T1, 2/i, p. 379; 2 August 1931, T1, 2/ii, p. 331;
23 November 1932, T1, 2/iii, p. 66; 27 December 1932, T1, 2/iii, p. 91; 16 January 1933, T1, 2/iii, p.
107; 23 March 1933, T1, 2/iii, p. 153; 13 May 1933, T1, 2/iii, p. 185; 22 July 1933, T1, 2/iii, p. 232; 2
September 1933, T1, 2/iii, p. 259; and 18 September 1933, T1, 2/iii, p. 270. His diaries also make it
clear that he had a genuine enthusiasm for Wagner that predated his relationship with Hitler. For
example, he read the composer’s biography, Mein Leben, in July 1924; and described him during his
time in Paris as a ‘German genius financially enslaved (Lohnsklaverei) to a greasy Jew’. See TBJG,
T1, 1/i, p. 178. This casts doubt on Frederic Spotts’ claim that ‘Goebbels himself was no Wagner fan’.
See Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 165.
34
These statistics come from Michael Karbaum, Studien zur Geschichte der Bayreuther Festspiele
(1876–1976), vol. 3 of Arbeitsgemeinschaft 100 Jahre Bayreuther Festspiele, in 13 vols. (Regensburg:
Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1971–76), pp. 149–55.
35
See Werner Otto, Die Lindenoper. Ein Streifzug durch ihre Geschichte (Berlin: Henschelverlag,
1985), p. 307.
28
policies from Wagner’s music and writing. 36 These have long existed alongside
criticism for being sensationalist and repetitious. For example, Richard J. Evans
censured Köhler’s book, Wagner’s Hitler, because
to make Wagner directly responsible for the Nazi extermination of the Jews,
as [he] does, is hardly plausible. Köhler achieves this only by erecting
dizzying and unstable structures of inference and correspondence, in which
phrases and quotations are time and again ripped from their context in the
writings or sayings of Hitler and Wagner and made to look as if they are
saying the same thing. None of this is remotely persuasive.37
The types of claim exemplified by Wagner’s Hitler have been under scrutiny since at
least the 1970s, but they have survived comfortably into the twenty-first century.38
This is because they amount to more than mere mistakes. They are myths. One recent
study usefully defined mythmaking as ‘a struggle to assert some meanings over
others, which covers its tracks all the better to make some meanings seem “natural”
or self-evident […] myth is precisely a strategy for concealing power, for masking
ideology at work in popular culture’.39 This process has bled into the field of Wagner
studies itself, where the normal conventions of scholarly research frequently fall
victim to a desire to assert one ideology over another.
For a broader study of myths about music in Nazi era, see Pamela M. Potter, ‘Music in the Third
Reich: The Complex Task of “Germanization”’, in The Arts in Nazi Germany: Continuity, Conformity,
Change, ed. by Jonathan Huener (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), pp. 85–110.
37
‘New Perspectives on Hitler [review article]’, Journal of Contemporary History, 37 (2002), 147–52
(p. 149.)
38
I am thinking particularly of Susan Sontag’s seminal article of 1974, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, which
originally appeared in the New York Review of Books and was later republished as an essay in Under
the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980), pp. 73–105.
39
Neil Campbell, Jude Davies, and George McKay, ‘Introduction: Issues in Americanisation and
Culture’, Issues in Americanisation and Culture, ed. by Campbell, Davies, and McKay (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 16.
36
29
II
Baudrillard, Nietzsche, and Simulation
Nietzsche and the emergence of simulation
Mary Fulbrook has convincingly argued that ‘“empirical evidence” can only be
captured through certain conceptual nets which must themselves be the object of
analysis and critique’.40 Given the delicacy of her negotiation between ‘evidence’ and
theory, and her observation that all history is a fundamentally theoretical exercise
anyway, it may seem ungainly to trumpet the use of the latter. There is good reason
for discussing it in plain terms here, however: the insistence of some Wagner scholars
that their driving principle is ‘radical historicism’ – that is, privileging citation of
musical and documentary evidence over and above an explicit theoretical
methodology.41 It is precisely this type of approach that I intend to challenge. This is
not least because, in this thesis, the use of Die Meistersinger in Nazi propaganda will
be framed within wider cultural shifts in Europe that began during the late nineteenth
century.
Friedrich Nietzsche documented many of these shifts in his writing. One
example is his work on the so-called ‘Death of God’. He introduced this concept in
his 1882 publication The Gay Science, and developed it through the decade in Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and The Antichrist. The aphorism in
which the notion was first put forward reads as follows:
After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for
centuriesa tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way
people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his
shadow.And wewe must still defeat his shadow as well!42
40
Historical Theory (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 29.
Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2012), p. xii. For one illustrative account of the relationship between musicology and theory, see
Roger Parker, ‘On Reaching the Beguiled Shore’, in Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 3–19.
42
GS, p. 109.
41
30
Nietzsche’s chief purpose was to undermine Christianity and the systems of morality
rooted in it. For him, these had lost their authority in the wake of scientific and social
advances. More relevant here is that the ‘Death of God’ destabilised the ancient idea
that the world was an imperfect reflection of a perfect, external order. This notion is a
cornerstone of Judeo-Christian faith. Consider the account of creation in the Book of
Genesis, for example: ‘so God created man in his own image, in the image of God
created he him’.43
Nietzsche predicted that religious practices would continue to exist in society
long after the ‘Death of God’. People would unwittingly transfer them to other areas
of life, rather than abandoning them altogether. This fear, which has been described
as a theme running through the whole of The Gay Science, is apparent in his question,
‘what festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for
ourselves?’44 To imagine how the public displays of devotion shown in a religious
service might shift elsewhere is easy enough.45 But what of a comparatively esoteric
part of theological doctrine, such as man being made in God’s image? For Nietzsche,
the cadaver of the world-as-reflection concept would eventually dislodge the public’s
surety of the reality of the world around them. People would see their lives as having
the quality of a reflection, even after science had shown that they reflected nothing.
The ultimate expression of this theory came in one of his final works, the
Twilight of the Idols, in the famous aphorism, ‘How the “True World” finally became
43
Genesis 1:27.
GS, p. 120. For Nietzsche’s ‘fear’ of the survival of religious practice after the ‘Death of God’, see
Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins, ‘Nietzsche’s Works and their Themes’, in The Cambridge
Companion to Nietzsche, ed. by Magnus and Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
p. 36.
45
The rise of sport in the twentieth century is sometimes offered as an example of this. Nietzsche was
concerned throughout his career with ‘the regeneration of the spirit of community thanks to its
members being united in a common ecstasy’; one such ‘community of spectators’ might be ‘a
contemporary football crowd’. See Michael Tanner, ‘Nietzsche’, in Christopher Janaway, Roger
Scruton, Peter Singer, and Michael Tanner, German Philosophers: Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and
Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 339–435 (p. 358).
44
31
a fable: the history of an error’.46 He divided this aphorism into six stages, which are
given in an abbreviated form here:
1. The true world attainable for a man who is wise, pious, virtuous – he lives
in it, he is it.
2. The true world, unattainable for now, but promised to the man who is
wise, pious, virtuous (‘to the sinner who repents’).
3. The true world, unattainable, unprovable, unpromisable, but the very
thought of it a consolation, an obligation, an imperative.
4. The true world – unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And as unattained
also unknown. Consequently not consoling, redeeming, obligating either:
how could we have obligations to something unknown?
5. The ‘true world’ – an idea that is of no further use, not even as an
obligation – now an obsolete, superfluous idea, consequently a refuted idea!
let’s get rid of it!
6. The true world is gone: which world is left? The illusory one, perhaps? …
But no! we got rid of the illusory world along with the true one!
For Nietzsche then, the abolition of the idea of a perfect, external order of which our
own world was just a reflection would take the concept of illusion with it.47 This
decaying relationship – between illusions and the ‘realities’ they were taken to
represent – became the foundation stone of concepts of simulation, which began
developing in the later twentieth century.
Baudrillard and the development of simulation
Many twentieth-century theorists, such as Roland Barthes, Guy Debord, and Marshall
McLuhan, wrote about simulation.48 But throughout this thesis I will call principally
46
AC, p. 171. The emphases are all original.
For one other interpretation of this aphorism, see Richard Schacht, Making Sense of Nietzsche:
Reflections Timely and Untimely (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), p. 48.
48
A full account of simulation as a topic in twentieth-century philosophy is beyond the remit of this
thesis. Important works relevant to the matter include Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. by Andrew
Leak (London: Grant and Cutler, 1994); Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Donald
Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone Books, 1994); and Comments on the Society of the Spectacle,
trans. by Malcolm Imrie (London: Verso, 1998); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The
Extensions of Man, introduced by Lewis H. Lapham (London: Routledge, 2001); and McLuhan and
Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Random House, 1976). The Frankfurt School
also made significant contributions to ideas about simulation. See, for example, Theodor W. Adorno
and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997);
Adorno, Essays on Music, ed. by Richard Leppert and trans. by Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002); In Search of Wagner, trans. by Rodney Livingstone with an
introduction by Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2005); and Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler:
A Psychological History of the German Film, ed. and introduced by Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton:
47
32
upon the works of Jean Baudrillard, because he, ‘more so than any other social critic,
has identified [simulation] as central to the late modern condition’.49
Baudrillard gave many interrelated definitions of ‘simulation’ throughout his
career. He called it ‘the generation by models of a real without origin or reality’, ‘the
lack of a distinction between True and False’, or, more obliquely, the ‘state in which
we are obliged to replay all scenarios precisely because they have all taken place
already, whether actually or potentially’.
50
It is a ‘gigantic enterprise of
disillusionment’ in which ‘the illusion of the world [is put] to death, to leave an
absolutely real world in its stead’.51 The dilemma caused by simulation he poses as a
question: ‘what if the sign did not relate either to the object or to meaning, but to the
promotion of the sign as sign?’52
For the purposes of this thesis, simulation will be treated as a cultural and
social process. This process begins with the detachment of words, images, or objects
from whatever they once symbolised. Once detachment is complete, the words,
images, or objects no longer point toward an external object or meaning, but take the
place of that external object or meaning. In rejecting its status as a sign, the sign does
not destroy reality, but rather takes on the semblance of reality. For this reason, in the
public imagination, the end products of simulation eventually eclipse the originals on
which they were based. Simulation originated principally in the upheaval caused by
the widespread abandonment of religious beliefs in the nineteenth century. As we saw
Princeton University Press, 2004); Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, trans. with an
introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and The Mass
Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans., ed. and introduced by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1995).
49
James Der Derian, ‘Simulation: The Highest Stage of Capitalism?’, in Baudrillard: A Critical
Reader, ed. by Douglas Kellner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 189–208 (p. 194). For a full survey of
Baudrillard’s philosophical lineage, William Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical
Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), pp. 10–27. My appeal to Baudrillard’s work rests on the
interpretation of Nazism as a malignant manifestation of modernism.
50
See, respectively, SaS, p. 1; IE, p. 94; and TE, p. 4.
51
PC, p. 16.
52
ScO, p. 188.
33
above, Nietzsche documented this abandonment in his ‘Death of God’ concept. In the
absence of divine, transcendent meaning, the world is without ‘causal explanation’, ‘a
meaning’ or ‘a definitive reason’.
53
For Baudrillard, this made the world
‘unbearable’. 54 In part, simulation is a consiliatory mechanism, for we use it to
‘mask’ the absence of transcendent meaning, and ‘protect [ourselves] from it’.55 But
Baudrillard also believed that simulation was fundamentally malevolent, because it
serves to hide ‘the absence of truth’. 56 He was not alone in this regard. William
Merrin has noted that
the image has always been conceived of as powerful, as possessing a
remarkable hold on our hearts and minds and as having the power to assume
for us, in that moment, the force of that which it represents, to become the
reality and erase therein the distinction of original and image. In the west
this power has long been interpreted as a moral threat to the real and as a
demonic force, with every effort being made to domesticate the image again
as a copy and banish its evil demon.57
Simulation can remove people from the reality of their surroundings, and immerse
them instead in alternative, fantasy worlds. For this reason, it is embued with an
overwhelming, intoxicating power.58
Theories based on the concept of simulation filtered into every aspect of
Baudrillard’s
oeuvre,
but
most
commonly
he
used
them
to
elucidate
contemporaneous ‘media events’. Perhaps the most famous example is his
provocative set of essays on the Gulf War.59 He described this conflict as a product of
simulation, a ‘virtual event which is less the representation of real war than a
53
IoE, p. 24.
Ibid.
55
Ibid.
56
Ibid.
57
Merrin, Baudrillard and the Media, 30.
58
In this regard, Baudrillard again echoes Nietzsche. In the 89th aphorism of Book Two of The Gay
Science, Nietzsche wrote that, today, ‘one uses artworks to lure poor, exhausted, and sick human
beings to the side of humanity’s road of suffering for a short lascivious moment; one offers them a
little intoxication and madness’. See GS, p. 89.
59
See GW.
54
34
spectacle’; and he claimed that this virtual event malevolently served ‘a variety of
political and strategic purposes on all sides’.60
It must be noted that Baudrillard’s ideas about simulation are not universal,
especially as he concerned himself almost exclusively with the digital age. Moreover,
he is still overlooked and even derided in English-speaking academia.61 There are at
least five reasons for this. In the 1980s and ’90s, his writing was often labelled with
the umbrella term ‘postmodernism’, despite it not providing a particularly accurate
description of its content.62 He fell prey to the criticisms commonly levelled at this
movement, most of which relate to intelligibility. Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont
wondered, ‘what would be left of Baudrillard’s thought if the verbal veneer covering
it were stripped away’? 63 Second, he is assumed to have had a suspiciously close
relationship with popular culture. One British journalist memorably described him as
the ‘David Bowie of philosophy’.64 To a large extent, this misconception hinges on
the use of his book Simulacra and Simulation in The Matrix, a blockbuster movie
released in 1999. 65 The film’s use of his work was flawed, however. Baudrillard
criticised the directors for misunderstanding his work, and insisted they owed more to
Paul Patton, ‘Introduction’, in GW, p. 10.
Nick Cohen, for example, described Baudrillard as ‘an overrated French theorist’. See The Jean
Baudrillard Reader, ed. by Steve Redhead (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), p. 4. See
also fn. 63.
62
Merrin has written passionately against the association of Baudrillard with postmodernism: ‘the
popular association of Baudrillard with postmodernism has survived, due largely to the term’s
usefulness in allowing a simple positioning in the field and in textbooks and to the failure of
commentators and casual readers to follow developments in both Baudrillard’s own work and in the
secondary literature [...] hence my rejection of Baudrillard’s positioning as a postmodernist. The term
adds nothing to related theoretical movements such as poststructuralism, its ideas are now dated and
overly simplistic, and its popular success and take-up has come at the price of declining academic
interest in its debates’. See Baudrillard and the Media, pp. 6–7.
63
Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998), p.
143. For a detailed analysis of and response to this attack, see Mike Gane, Baudrillard in Radical
Uncertainty (London: Pluto Press), pp. 46–57. They also branded Baudrillard a ‘political idiot’, a
‘philosopher clown’, and an ‘intellectual imposter’. See The Jean Baudrillard Reader, p. 4.
64
See Steven Poole, ‘Meet the David Bowie of Philosophy’, Guardian, 14 March 2000.
65
There are several philosophical analyses of this film. See, for example, Catherine Constable,
Adapting Philosophy: Jean Baudrillard and the Matrix Trilogy (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2009); David J. Gunkel, ‘The Virtual Dialectic: Rethinking The Matrix and its Significance’,
Configurations, 14 (2006), 193–215; and The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the
Real, ed. by William Irwin (Peru, IL: Carus Publishing Company, 2002).
60
61
35
Plato than to him. 66 Third, his reputation has been damaged by his occasionally
conservative, elitist, and outmoded views. He made misguided attempts to reclaim
terms such as ‘the masses’, for example, and was accused of sexism and racism.67 His
defenders have tried to excuse these shortcomings, but there is no escaping the most
outrageous of his comments. 68 Douglas Kellner rightly observed that, in his later
writings especially, ‘Baudrillard falls prey to a mode of thinking based on cultural
stereotypes and bordering on racism’.69 He cites a line from America as an example:
‘as is well known, the Americans are fascinated by the yellow-skinned peoples in
whom they sense a superior form of cunning’.70 Fourth, many readers turn away from
his sometimes contradictory and even nonsensical style of writing. Merrin
summarised Baudrillard’s desire to remain forever outside the academic mainstream,
which he saw as just another system of simulacra:
Baudrillard must reject any simple, empirical methodology. Instead his
theory explicitly proceeds in opposition to its assumptions and project of
materialising the real. His aim is not for theory to be true, as, in passively
Richard G. Smith agreed, observing that the film, ‘through a visual reference to one of Baudrillard’s
books, sought to align itself to his philosophy when in fact the twist of the film – that The Matrix
masks the “real” – is one that owes its debt to Plato (just like so many other movies: The Truman
Show, eXistenZ, Total Recall, Surrogates and so on), rather than poststructuralism and the
disappearance of illusion’. See ‘The Words of Jean Baudrillard’, introduction to The Baudrillard
Dictionary, ed. by Smith (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 1. Baudrillard quipped
that ‘The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to
produce’. See Aude Lancelin, ‘The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur interview with Jean
Baudrillard’, trans. by Gary Genosko and Adam Bryx, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies,
vol. 1 no. 2 (2004), <http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1_2/genosko.htm> [accessed 12
September 2010].
67
For a discussion of sexism in Baudrillard, see Jane Gallop, ‘French Theory and the Seduction of
Feminism’, in Men in Feminism, ed. by Alice Jardine and Paul Smith (London: Routledge, 1987), pp.
111–15. For an examination of racism in Baudrillard and postmodernism in general, see Leonard
Harris, ‘Postmodernism and Utopia: An Unholy Alliance’, in Racism, the City and the State, ed. by
Malcolm Cross and Michael Keith (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 31–44.
68
In particular feminist scholars have recently begun to reconsider the merits of Baudrillard’s work.
For one example, see Victoria Grace, Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading (London:
Routledge, 2009). Some scholars attribute Baudrillard’s more provocative statements to his dark sense
of humour, and there is little doubt that wit does form an important part of his writing style. For more
on this topic, see Mike Gane, ‘Baudrillard’s Sense of Humour’, in Jean Baudrillard: Fatal Theories,
ed. by David B. Clarke, Marcus A. Doel, William Merrin, and Richard G. Smith (London: Routledge,
2009), pp. 165–80.
69
Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern
(London: Routledge, 1995), p. 319. See also the accompanying endnote on p. 330.
70
Kellner took this comment from A, p. 85.
66
36
reflecting the real, it would thereby be reduced to banality and obviousness,
but rather, he says, theory should not be true [...] it should constitute a
symbolic challenge, provoking an agonistic opposition, defying the world to
escalate to its own position.71
These desires manifest in Baudrillard’s habit of undermining his own process of
argumentation with examples that are inflammatory or absurd. Consider his
discussion of ‘symbolic mortification’.72 This is a fascinating study of the modern
tendency to replace the lost idea of a religious ‘destiny’ with ‘technical simulation[s]
of pain and sacrifice’, such as mountain climbing or cave spelunking. 73 In his
concluding thoughts, though, he casually quips: ‘Stephen Hawking, brain of a genius
in a fallen body: the ideal mannequin of superscience’.74
Finally, Baudrillard has been criticised for his perceived pessimism and
nihilism, although his defenders are quick to refute the latter in particular.75 These
issues aside, it cannot be denied that he proposes few solutions to the problems he
identifies, and his prose can be frustratingly ambiguous. He rarely gives clear
definitions of precisely what the recurring terms in his phraseology actually mean,
such as ‘culture’ or ‘the real’. He does not speculate on what a world without
simulation would look like, neither does he ponder whether such a scenario would be
possible or desirable. There is also little clarity on where, if at all, ‘reality’ and
simulation separate from one another. For all these reasons, as William Pawlett has
71
Baudrillard and the Media, p. 43. This is another way in which Baudrillard relates to Nietzsche, a
philosopher for whom ‘“to understand” means, “to stand under” and so to become a “subject”, a stance
which this very “author” rejected’. See Daniel R. White and Gert Hellerich, ‘Nietzsche at the Altar:
Situating the Devotee’, in Postmodern Culture, 6 (September, 1995)
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v006/6.1white.html> [accessed 28 December 2013].
72
IE, p. 49.
73
Ibid.
74
Ibid.
75
Merrin, for example, wrote that ‘the great paradox of [Baudrillard’s] career is its eclipse by the
popular assumption of his nihilism. For many the stylistic power and insight of his description of our
nihilistic world overshadows his own critical position, leading to the common belief in his hyperbolic
celebration of contemporary phenomena and his pessimistic rejection of all forms of resistance or hope
or means of transformation. Though erroneous, these claims are in part productions of Baudrillard’s
symbolic challenge’. See Baudrillard and the Media, p. 98.
37
observed, ‘the name “Baudrillard” continues to provoke suspicion, fear, resentment
and ridicule: discussion of his ideas is omitted or reduced to absurdity by hostile
readers’.76
While his oeuvre certainly requires considerable adaptation for the present
study, then, it would be a serious mistake to reject it altogether. I will now examine
four of the key topics in his writing. Each of them is central to my study of Die
Meistersinger in Nazi propaganda, and they are all infused with his ideas about
simulation. They are advertising, film, ‘deterrence’, and ‘the precession of
simulacra’.
III
Baudrillard: Four Key Concepts
Advertising
Advertising is a core idea in The System of Objects, one of Baudrillard’s earliest
publications, and it remained central to his thinking thereafter. 77 In this book, he
wrote that
advertising in its entirety constitutes a useless and unnecessary universe. It
is pure connotation. It contributes nothing to production or to the direct
practical application of things, yet it plays an integral part in the system of
objects, not merely because it relates to consumption but also because it
itself becomes an object to be consumed […] a clear distinction must be
drawn in connection with advertising’s dual status as a discourse on the
object and as an object in its own right. It is as a useless, unnecessary
discourse that it comes to be consumable as a cultural object.78
76
Jean Baudrillard (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 3.
For other studies of advertising, see works such as Kellner, Media Culture (London: Routledge,
1995), pp. 231–59; Advertising in Modern Societies: Perspectives Toward Understanding, ed. by Kim
B. Rotzoll and James E. Haefner, with Steven R. Hall (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1996);
and Pamela Odih, Advertising and Cultural Politics in Global Times (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010).
78
This, and all quotations on the pages that follow, are taken from SO, p. 164.
77
38
Baudrillard admitted, rightly, that the supply of ‘information about particular
products and promoting their sale’ is always the fundamental function of advertising.
However, he also suggested that ‘information’ has given way to ‘persuasion’. He was
careful to underline that the persuasive power of advertising is not as strong as might
be assumed: ‘consumers, though not entirely immune, appear to exercise a good deal
of discretion when it comes to the advertising message’. If an advert fails to persuade
the public to purchase a product, it may still persuade them of something else, for
which brand names are simply a ‘cover’. He called this something else ‘a confused
process of integration’. In other words, the public is susceptible to advertising
because it treats the ‘actual existence’ of adverts ‘as a product to be consumed at a
secondary level’; and because it holds advertising to be ‘the clear expression of a
culture’. He concluded that
it is in this sense that we do indeed ‘believe’ in advertising: what we
consume in this way is the luxury of a society that projects itself as an
agency for disposing goods and ‘transcends itself’ in a culture. We are thus
taken over at one and the same time by an established agency and by that
agency’s self-image.79
These ideas are easily transposed to the use of Die Meistersinger in Nazi propaganda.
For example, if appearances of the opera in the mass media were considered as
advertisements for the Party, the work itself could be seen as the ‘product’. To
‘purchase’ the product might mean, for example, sitting quietly in front of the radio to
listen to the opera from start to finish, or going to lengths to learn more about the
composer. 80 Such activities would not be necessary for members of the public to
consume the advert itself, however. By simply being aware of a performance of Die
Meistersinger, whether by listening to part of a broadcast, coming across it in a film,
or hearing about it later in conversation or in reviews, the public would be invited to
79
80
SO, pp. 165–66.
See fn. 298.
39
enjoy ‘the luxury of a society that projects itself as an agency for disposing goods’.
Except in this context, instead of consumer products, ideological concepts of
nationalism and racial supremacy were being dispensed. These formed the Party’s
‘self-image’. In most modern societies, as Baudrillard concluded, advertising
constitutes
a permanent display of the buying power, be it real or virtual, of society
overall. Whether we partake of it personally or not, we all live and breathe
this buying power.
Exchange his term ‘buying power’ for one more appropriate to the malignant context
of the Third Reich – such as ‘racial purity’ or ‘national unity’ – and the use of all
types of classical music in the mass media of Hitler’s Germany comes into sharper
focus.81
It certainly would have been possible for the German public to be susceptible
to an advert and simultaneously disinterested in the ‘product’. Advertisements sway
us, Baudrillard claimed
by the fact that ‘they’ are sufficiently concerned to want to address us, to
show us things, to take an interest in us […] individuals are gradually
conditioned by their ceaseless consumption – at once gratifying and
frustrating, glorious and guilt-inducing – of the social body in its totality
[…] what advertising bestows upon objects, the quality without which ‘they
would not be what they are’, is ‘warmth’ […] objects are hot or cold, that is
to say, indifferent and hostile, or spontaneous, sincere and communicative –
in a word, they are ‘personalised’ [… objects] no longer present themselves
as appropriate to some strictly circumscribed task – a crude and outdated
practice; instead they submit themselves to us, they seek us out, surround us,
and prove their existence to us by virtue of their effusiveness. We are taken
as the object’s aims, and the object loves us. And because we are loved, we
feel that we exist: we are ‘personalised’. This is the essential thing – the
actual purchase of objects is secondary. The abundance of products puts an
end to scarcity; the abundance of advertising puts an end to insecurity.82
As is the case with all advertising, the Nazis’ use of Die Meistersinger in propaganda
bestowed ‘warmth’ on the object by making the Party seem ‘spontaneous, sincere and
81
82
SO, p. 172.
SO, p. 170–71. The emphases are all original.
40
communicative’. Appearances of this work in the mass media served to assure
individual members of the public of their place in a homogenous, unified, and racially
supreme German national community. They also implied that the Nazis were an
organisation of artist-intellectuals. Just as Baudrillard says that ‘the actual purchase of
objects is secondary’, so no member of the public would need to engage with the
whole of Die Meistersinger for such an advertisement to be effective. Simply by
being portrayed as the ‘aim’ of Wagner’s opera, the individual listener was invited to
feel ‘personalised’. ‘The object loves us. And because we are loved, we feel that we’
– and, in this case, the ideal Nazi state – ‘exist’.
Film
It is not only because Nazi cinematographers used Wagner and Die Meistersinger that
film is significant for this thesis. Many historians have identified an elusive quality
about the Third Reich itself that is best described in filmic terms. Eric Rentschler
painted Hitler and Goebbels as ‘calculating metteurs-en-scène’, for example, because
they employed state-of-the-art technology in a profusion of celebrations,
light shows, and mass extravaganzas. Hitler’s regime can be seen as a
sustained cinematic event […] if the Nazis were movie mad, then the Third
Reich was movie made.83
Similarly, Klaus Kreimeier wrote that a ‘movie atmosphere’ was
pervading Germany’s real world in 1944–45. With disaster looming before
them, disaster they had themselves created, the Nazi leaders, and Goebbels
in particular, gave themselves up to a delirium of preening, and they called
upon reality to abdicate to aesthetics, as it were, to disappear in a tableaux,
in poses, in stage sets […] a most unusual exoticism – a mad notion that one
could ban reality from history and put illusion in its place.84
Anton Kaes applied cinematic metaphors more liberally still. In an analysis of the
movie Kolberg (1945), he memorably described the Third Reich itself ‘as film’:
83
Ministry of Illusion, p. 1.
The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Corporation, 1918–1945, trans. by Robert
and Rita Kimber (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996), p. 350.
84
41
Germany as the location, Hitler as the producer, Goebbels and his officers as
directors and stars, Albert Speer as set designer, and the rest of the
population as extras. Some of the lesser actors may have wondered what
film they were really playing in, but most did not see the light until the film
ripped. They had received too many promises and made too may sacrifices,
had already paid too high a price, to sneak out before the end, even if they
could have. The more questionable the staging of Germany’s struggle and
power became, the more dependent people grew on the deceitful images
produced by Goebbels’s propaganda machinery, which dangled the promise
of German victories and triumphs before their eyes up to the very last day
before capitulation.85
There is something inadequate about these analogies, however. While they unfold the
semiotic relationship between the Third Reich and film with admirable imagination,
they do little to explain why it existed.
Baudrillard’s work can resolve this problem. He never wrote a treatise on
film, but the medium was always central to his thinking. 86 His theory of images
focuses on the separation between ‘reality’ and representations of it. According to his
terms, film belongs to the third of four ‘orders’ of the image. Each order is affiliated
with an historical era:
it [the image] is the reflection of a profound reality;
it masks and denatures a profound reality;
it masks the absence of a profound reality;
it is no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.87
Baudrillard called the first order, wherein the image is known to represent something
else, ‘good’. It was embodied by religious iconography in the pre-technological
world, which aimed to represent something while remaining unmistakably separate
from it. He located a schism between the first order and the remaining three, all of
which he implies to have come after the Industrial Revolution. Baudrillard’s claim
that in the second order, ‘there is no longer a God to recognise his own [image], no
85
From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1989), p. 4.
86
He once described himself as ‘an unrestrained film buff’. See ‘The Evil Demon of Images’, in The
Jean Baudrillard Reader, pp. 83–98 (p. 94).
87
SaS, p. 6. Original emphasis.
42
longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true’, mirrors Nietzsche’s
‘Death of God’ concept. The second order is ‘maleficent’, and the third, in which the
image plays at being an appearance, is described as being ‘of the order of sorcery’.
The fourth and final order is ‘simulation’.88
Baudrillard placed film in the ‘third order’, because the images of which it
consists reject illusion in order to make it seem that events are being presented as
they actually took place, and that characters are being shown as if they actually
existed. For him, as with all products of simulation, this made the medium ‘immoral’
and diabolical’. He fleshed out this position in his 1987 talk, ‘The Evil Demon of
Images’:
it is in its resemblance, not only analogical but technological, that the image
is most immoral and perverse […] the immense majority of present day
photographic, cinematic and television images are thought to bear witness to
the world with a naïve resemblance and a touching fidelity. We have
spontaneous confidence in their realism. We are wrong. They only seem to
resemble things, to resemble reality, events, faces. Or rather, they really do
conform, but their conformity is itself diabolical.89
This may sound unduly puritan, especially as Baudrillard’s conclusion initially seems
directed at films that make heavy use of special effects. However, even if his
judgemental terminology is rejected, the idea of filmic imagery coming too close to
the appearance of actual everyday life, actual society, and actual people remains
intriguing.
Baudrillard’s brief but extraordinary essay ‘Screened Out’, which appears in a
collection of the same title, enables a move from the use of cinematic metaphors to
describe the Third Reich, toward the bigger problem of how the medium functioned
in Nazi propaganda.90 In many ways, ‘Screened Out’ is a typically eccentric piece,
and at least a few aspects of it can be abandoned altogether. The author’s transparent
88
Ibid.
‘The Evil Demon of Images’, p. 84.
90
See ScO, pp. 176–80.
89
43
technophobia, for example, sometimes leads to generalisations offered from positions
of ignorance; and he insists that his theories about the computer screen or the ‘video
image’ could not apply to the cinematic screen.91 The difference between computer
screens, ‘video images’, and the cinema, he suggests, is that where the latter has ‘a
scene and a gaze’, the former two ‘induce a kind of immersion, a sort of umbilical
relation, of “tactile” interaction’.92 Nevertheless, many of Baudrillard’s claims about
computer screens and ‘video images’ are indeed relevant to film, or at least to those
that will come under consideration in this project. He opens the essay in trademark
provocative fashion:
video, interactive screens, multimedia, the Internet, virtual reality – we are
threatened on all sides by interactivity. What was separated in the past is
now everywhere merged; distance is abolished in all things: between sexes,
between opposite poles, between stage and auditorium, between the
protagonists of action, between subject and object, between the real and its
double.93
He is being unapologetically nostalgic here; his mourning of ‘distance’ being
abolished between the sexes is unacceptable; and his reference to the ‘real and its
double’ is wilfully oblique. However, the idea of the screen as an agent that dissolves
the distance between ‘stage’ and ‘auditorium’ – or more loosely, the distance
separating the audience’s actual cultural practice from what is being shown on the
screen – is worth pursuing. ‘This confusion of terms, this collusion of poles’,
Baudrillard continues,
means that nowhere – in art, morality or politics – is there now any
possibility of a moral judgement […] wherever a mingling of this kind – a
collision of poles – occurs, then the vital tension is discharged.94
Exactly what Baudrillard meant by ‘video image’ is unclear, although it was not television. I suspect
that it may simply be a catchall term for computerised screens of any kind.
92
ScO, p. 177.
93
ScO, p. 176.
94
Ibid.
91
44
The ‘threat’ of interactivity is that it has an innate potential to erode the distance
between stage and auditorium. This erosion impinges on the public’s capacity for
critical reaction, which leads to widespread inertia. Interactivity makes the world, as
Baudrillard puts it, ‘undecidable’.95 When there is no separation between ‘stage’ and
‘auditorium’, people will ‘enter the screen and the visual image unhindered […] you
move as you like, you make of the interactive image what you will, but immersion is
the price to pay for this infinite availability’.96 As forms of interactive entertainment
become more freely available in any society, the amount of time that individuals are
exposed to the products of simulation increases. An example from the twenty-first
century is the computer game, which, according to a number of studies, has an
‘addictive quality’ because of its ‘immersion of players in an exciting and vicariously
satisfying fantasy world’.97 Baudrillard outlines the consequences of ‘immersion’ for
society in the conclusion to the opening portion of ‘Screened Out’:
The apogee of the spectator or his/her end? When all are actors, there is no
action any longer, no scene. The end of the aesthetic illusion.98
If we are constantly immersed in a fantasy world, then we eventually behave as if we
were actually in that fantasy world. For Baudrillard, the dissolution of space between
‘stage’ and ‘auditorium’ changes the status of the audience from witnesses to people
who are in a constant state of performance. They are, in a sense, actors, involved in
the performance of society itself. It is at this moment of complete saturation, when
‘art’ is everywhere, that the creation of artistic illusions ceases to be possible.
Terms like ‘user-friendly’ and ‘interactive’ imply that these phenomena
belong to the digital age. But a common goal of all Third Reich propaganda was
95
Ibid.
ScO, p. 177.
97
Arthur Asa Berger, Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon (New Brunswick: Transaction
Publishers, 2002), p. 63.
98
ScO, p. 177.
96
45
precisely to render it impossible for the public to identify illusions as illusions; or, in
Baudrillard’s terms, to abolish the separation between stage and auditorium. Their
propaganda was directed toward making people actors rather than audience. It was
through this transformation that the Party immersed the public in the ‘fantasy world’
of Nazism. Individuals were consequently encouraged to perform Nazi ideology in
their everyday lives. Evidence of how far this phenomenon reached into German
society between 1933 and 1945 can be found in a range of diaries and memoirs.
Victor Klemperer, for example, wrote that:
recently Heckmann, the gardener, and today Vogel, the grocer, in complete
unanimity: ‘I have no idea what’s happening, I don’t read a newspaper’. In
addition Vogel said: ‘It all seems like cinema to me’. People simply regard
it all as a theatrical sham, take nothing seriously and will be very surprised
when the theatre turns into bloody reality one day.99
Another oddity: the National Socialists have always talked about World
Jewry; it was an idée fixe and a phantom. They have gone on talking about
this phantom for so long until it has become reality.100
And, even more tellingly:
Vogel, the father, goes into raptures about German organisation and power.
England will be destroyed in a few days, ‘out of the question, that there will
still be war by winter! But we are prepared for everything. There is an
unimaginable number of pigs stored in the Felsenkeller!’ At the same time,
the wife of Janik the butcher explains: ‘so much livestock has been brought
to Dresden, because everything has been moved here from Hamburg’. Cf.
the non-military damage by air attack. Cf. the new deterrent sentences for
‘moral traitors’ who listen to foreign broadcasting stations – eight years
imprisonment, whole families in prison. – I should note all these details and
moods of everyday life (or what is called everyday life now). It always
makes me feel sick.101
Raimund Pretzel, the German journalist who fled Hitler’s Germany to write in
England under the pseudonym Sebastian Haffner, made similar observations in his
memoirs:
99
I Will Bear Witness, 25 May 1938, p. 248.
15 December 1938, p. 270.
101
6 July 1940, p. 331.
100
46
the longer this summer of 1933 lasted, the more unreal everything became.
Things gradually lost their substance, changed into bizarre dreams. I began
to live in a state like that of a mild fever, pleasantly limp, slightly dazed and
free of all responsibilities.102
And, later,
it is said that the Germans are subjugated. That is only half true. They are
also something else, something worse, for which there is no word: they are
‘comraded’, a dreadfully dangerous condition. They are under a spell. They
live a drugged life in a dream world […] they think they are scaling high
mountains, when in reality they are crawling through a swamp. As long as
the spell lasts, there is almost no antidote.103
The American journalist John McCutcheon Raleigh, who was working in the Third
Reich when Poland was invaded, remembered that
one day, returning from the Rundfunkhaus after a broadcast, I saw a group
of Hitler Youth posing with shovels and picks for an official cameraman.
They shovelled industriously while the camera whirred. When the
cameraman had sufficient material the group formed into squads and
marched off, singing in unison. Later in the week I saw the same pictures
released for propaganda in the current newsreels. The commentator proudly
announced that the Hitler-Jugend was bending its back to clear away the
snow. All the winter this was the only time I saw youths in Hitler-Jugend
uniforms wielding shovels.104
Siegfried Knappe discussed another type of simulacral social practice involving
shovels in his memoirs. He was a Wehrmacht officer whose war finished in Berlin in
the Führerbunker. The first part of his book, which deals with the years between
1936 and 1939, is entitled ‘Sunny Times’. In this section, Knappe recalls a briefing
upon joining the Reich Labour Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst, or RAD), shortly after
being given his shovel:
‘Men’, [the squad leader] began, ‘this is the Labour Service, and this spade
is the symbol of work and toil. The spade you now hold will never touch
dirt; it will be used strictly for exercise and parades. At all times, your spade
102
Defying Hitler: A Memoir, ed. by Sarah Haffner, trans. with an afterword by Oliver Pretzel
(London: Orion Books, 2003), p. 195.
103
Defying Hitler, p. 236.
104
Behind the Nazi Front, with a foreword by F. A. Voigt (London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd.,
1941), pp. 247–48.
47
must sparkle as if it were made of chrome. Since they are steel and not
chrome, they will rust easily’.105
Figure 9 – An RAD parade in 1934, with ‘symbolic’ spades that ‘will never touch dirt’
Kim Toffoletti’s excellent study Baudrillard Reframed is the only booklength interrogation of Baudrillard’s writing on film.106 She noted that his ideas about
cinema are inseparable from the bigger topic of consumption. In modern societies,
goods of all varieties are consumed as images.107 Objects ‘don’t have to be useful’,
they just have to ‘signify usefulness through their design’.
108
She describes
consumption itself as ‘another kind of code or language’, which individuals use to
‘communicate messages to each other about themselves and their world’.
Consumption therefore ‘plays an important part in the construction of collective and
individual identity’. 109 This is as true for Nazi Germany as it is for any modern
Western society. For cinematographers of the Third Reich, Wagner could be
105
Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936–1949 (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1993), p. 81.
Baudrillard Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), p. 104.
107
Baudrillard Reframed, pp. 68–69. Tofoletti was writing here about Louis Vuitton luggage and a
‘Rolling Stones’ live stadium show.
108
Baudrillard Reframed, p. 75.
109
Baudrillard Reframed, p. 76.
106
48
accommodated in films as a Nazified cultural object, and this meant that he could be
consumed in the form of an image.
Deterrence
It is surprising that Baudrillard has been called upon so little in studies of
propaganda, given the amount he wrote about the topic. 110 He attempted to
differentiate between propaganda in its so-called ‘classical age’, which he implies to
be the era of European totalitarianism, and in the digital era. This division was
unsound, however, and many of his observations regarding the latter are in fact
applicable to the Third Reich. This is especially true for the concept of ‘deterrence’,
which first appeared in ‘The Precession of Simulacra’.111 The term became central to
his philosophical lexicon, and to his analyses of propaganda in particular, yet it
remains widely misunderstood.112 He believed that propaganda in its ‘classical age’
had operated by ‘persuasion’. It had the straightforward purpose of convincing
members of the public to do, accept, or believe something. The famous poster for the
110
To the best of my knowledge, the only work on propaganda to make any use of Baudrillard is Paul
Rutherford, Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2000), pp. 230–36.
111
For other discussions of propaganda in Baudrillard’s work, see Cool Memories IV: 1995–2000,
trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2003), p. 33; ‘Mass (Sociology Of)’ in The Uncollected
Baudrillard, introduced, trans., and ed. by Gary Genosko (London: Sage, 2001), pp. 70–75; and TE, p.
46.
112
For example, Paul Hegarty was mistaken to claim that Baudrillard named his concept of deterrence
after the idea of ‘nuclear deterrence’, or the ‘mutually-assured destruction’ doctrine of the Cold War.
This mistake is perhaps what gives rise to his overly complicated prose. ‘Nuclear deterrence takes the
place of war’, he wrote, adding that ‘it is not destruction that “paralyses” us, but deterrence, which is
“the neutral implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution”. However, it does not
seem to have stopped a continuous succession of wars around the “un-deterred” world’. See Live
Theory, p. 62. This error may have come about because, throughout his writing, Baudrillard used the
term ‘deterrence’ to refer to both his unique employment of the concept and the more general idea of
nuclear deterrence interchangeably. In GW, for example, almost all uses of the word ‘deterrence’ refer
to the latter phenomenon, not the former. Victoria Grace offered a more satisfactory but still
incomplete definition of deterrence as a concept: it ‘is the term Baudrillard uses to connote a process
ensuring that the fiction of political stakes continues to animate the social. Unlike surveillance, or
ideology, deterrence is void of any notion of agent, class, manipulator, interest, it operates precisely to
activate these concepts in simulated form to conjure their (apparent) reality (who can say they are not
real when they are simulated?)’. See Baudrillard’s Challenge, p. 87. That Baudrillard himself
illustrated the concept first with a television show and second with a theme park, as we will see in this
section, surely evidences that he did not envisage it as a purely political term.
49
British First World War recruitment campaign that displayed Earl Kitchener’s image
above the caption, ‘your country needs YOU!’, is a well-known example. 113
Deterrence is a different phenomenon altogether, and for Baudrillard it belonged
exclusively to the age of ‘hyperrealism’. He used An American Family, a television
documentary that aired in early 1973 and followed the fortunes of the Loud family
from Oregon, to demonstrate how it works.114 ‘The distinction between the passive
and the active is abolished’, he wrote,
there is no longer any imperative of submission to the model, or to the gaze
‘YOU are the model!’ ‘YOU are the majority!’ Such is the watershed of a
hyperreal sociality, in which the real is confused with the model, as in the
statistical operation, or with the medium, as in the Louds’ operation. Such is
the last stage of the social relation, ours, which is no longer one of
persuasion (the classical age of propaganda, of ideology, of publicity, etc.)
but one of deterrence: ‘YOU are the information, you are the social, you are
the event, you are involved, you have the word, etc’. An about-face through
which it becomes impossible to locate one instance of the model, of power,
of the gaze, of the medium itself, because you are always already on the
other side. No more subject, no more focal point, no more center or
periphery: pure flexion or circular inflexion.115
In its simplest sense then, ‘deterrence’ is a mode of mass communication unique to
large companies or governing political powers. It aims to absorb members of the
public into processes of simulation. By virtue of being so immersed in these
processes, individuals are deterred from engaging critically with anything in their
113
For more on this iconic image and others from First World War propaganda, see Picture This:
World War I Posters and Visual Culture, ed. with an introduction by Pearl James (Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 2009).
114
This show was filmed between May and December 1971. Over three hundred hours of footage was
then edited down to twelve hour-long episodes. It was originally intended to be a chronicle of
everyday, upper middle-class American life; but it became a document of the family’s disintegration
when Bill and Pat Loud filed for divorce during the course of filming. An American Family is now
associated with questions about communication, mediation, and authenticity in the digital age. For
detailed studies of the programme and its legacy, see Laurie Rupert and Sayanti Ganguly Puckett,
‘Disillusionment, Divorce, and the Destruction of the American Dream: An American Family and the
Rise of Reality TV’, in The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV and History, ed. by Julie Anne Taddeo and
Ken Dvorak (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010), pp. 83–97; and Jeffrey Ruoff, An
American Family: A Televised Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
115
SaS, p. 29.
50
actual surroundings.116 Baudrillard illustrated these ideas with an examination of the
Disneyland theme park. He called the resort a ‘deterrence machine set up in order to
rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp’, and argued that the open
abundance of fantasy inside should be seen, first and foremost, as an attempt to
conceal ‘the fact that true childishness is everywhere’.117 This is a classic example of
the author at his most provocative and least persuasive. As is true for so many
moments in his writing though, the basic premise behind the eccentric outburst
remains compelling.118
Baudrillard unfolded the concept more convincingly in ‘The Beauborg Effect:
Implosion and Deterrence’. This caustic essay on the Pompidou Centre appears in
Simulacra and Simulation. The Pompidou opened in the Beauborg area of Paris in
1977. It is an enormous building that houses a public library; the Musée National
d’Art Moderne, one of the largest museums of modern art in Europe; and IRCAM,
the centre for music research.119 Baudrillard claimed that the Pompidou was ‘nothing
but a huge effort’ to transmute a ‘famous traditional culture of meaning into the
aleatory order of signs’.120 According to him,
it is in order to prepare the masses for this new semiurgic order that one
brings them together here – with the opposite pretext of acculturating them
Thus William Pawlett observed of reality television that ‘the democratic political system benefits
from such popular distractions: for example, allowing it to pursue undemocratic wars relatively
unnoticed’, while Victoria Grace wrote that Baudrillard’s ‘performance principle’ means that
‘communication is now about creating speech (“making people speak”) rather than a matter of
speaking; information is “about making people know” rather than about knowledge; participation is
about mechanistically inducing response, engagement: about operations rather than actions’. See
Baudrillard, p. 83; and Baudrillard’s Challenge, p. 124 respectively. I believe that more convincing
case studies for these two defining characteristics of deterrence can be found in the era of the Third
Reich.
117
SaS, p. 13.
118
For a detailed discussion of the significance of Disneyland to Baudrillard’s concept of simulation,
see Stanley Raffel, ‘Baudrillard on Simulations: An Exegesis and a Critique’, Social Research Online,
9 (2004) <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/9/2/raffel.html> [accessed 28 May 2011].
119
For critical introductions to the Pompidou Centre, see Nathan Silver, The Making of Beauborg: A
Building Biography of the Centre Pompidou, Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); and Monique
Yaari, Rethinking the French City: Architecture, Dwelling, and Display After 1968 (New York:
Rodopi, 2008), pp. 189–272.
120
BE, p. 65.
116
51
to meaning and depth. One must thus start with this axiom: Beaubourg is a
monument of cultural deterrence. Within a museal scenario that only serves
to keep up the humanist fiction of culture, it is a veritable fashioning of the
death of culture that takes place, and it is a veritable cultural mourning for
which the masses are joyously gathered.121
In Baudrillard’s view, the Pompidou Centre encourages the public to congregate with
the promise of exposure to culture. However, it only uses the appearance of culture;
a hollow version of a culture that used to exist, and which gave society meaning. It
does this in order to further indoctrinate the public into the ‘new semiurgic order’, or
society as it actually is in the digital age. For this reason, the Pompidou is guilty of
claiming to promote culture on the one hand, while simultaneously veiling its
absence on the other. This is why he accuses it of ‘flagrantly contradict[ing] its
explicit objectives’.122
It is not just the Pompidou that comes in for criticism, though – the essay is
coloured by a scathing attitude toward the public. The ‘masses’ throw themselves at
the Pompidou, Baudrillard claims, ‘not because they salivate for that culture which
they have been denied for centuries, but because they have for the first time the
opportunity to massively participate in this great mourning of a culture that, in the
end, they have always detested’. 123 Elitist statements such as this must simply be
discarded in favour of his eventual conclusion. ‘It has never been so clear that the
content – here, culture, elsewhere, information or commodities – is nothing but the
phantom support for the operation of the medium itself’.124 That is to say, in some
Ibid. ‘Semiurgic’ has been used in postmodern philosophy in conjunction with the more common
term, ‘semiology’. Where the latter refers to the study of signs, the former refers to their creation. See
Gary Genosko, McLuhan and Baudrillard: Masters of Implosion (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 74.
Baudrillard often used semiurgy in opposition to metallurgy as a means of illustrating the difference
between the modern era and the centuries of history preceding it.
122
BE, p. 62.
123
BE, p. 65.
124
BE, p. 67.
121
52
circumstances, the process of an organisation disseminating the end products of
simulation to the public might be the very thing that makes the organisation function.
These ideas can be augmented with the addition of Baudrillard’s earlier
definition of deterrence as a state of being in which there is ‘no more center or
periphery: pure flexion or circular inflexion’.125 As with many of the terms that give
his prose its unique flavour, ‘flexion’ and ‘inflexion’ are borrowed from science. The
former refers to the action of bending something, while the latter designates a curve
that bends backwards toward its starting point. This is most easily envisaged as the
direction of a line as it forms a circle. 126 Baudrillard’s use of such language in
relation to deterrence does not, pace Sokal and Bricmont, Gross and Levitt, et al,
constitute a foolhardy attempt to transfer mathematical principles directly to
sociology. 127 Rather, he uses it to shape evocative metaphors that cast light on
otherwise nebulous theoretical concepts. It can be deduced from ‘flexion’ and
‘inflexion’ that deterrence is partly characterised by the increasing difficulty
125
SaS, p. 29.
Baudrillard’s description of a world in which flexion and inflexion have become ‘pure’ or
‘circular’, and to a world in which there is ‘no more center or periphery’, invokes the Möbius Strip.
This ‘one-sided shape’ has neither an outside or inside, and it was one of his favourite scientific
phenomena. Indeed, it has been used as a metaphorical tool across postmodern theory. Frederic
Jameson, for example, described it as the ‘structuralist emblem par excellence’, because it ‘succeeds in
peeling itself off its referent altogether and thus achieves a free-floating closure in the void, a kind of
absolute self-referentiality and autocirculatory from which all remaining traces of reference, or of any
externality, have triumphantly been effaced’. See ‘Periodising the 60s’, in The Ideologies of Theory:
Essays 1971–1986 Volume 2, Syntax of History (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 178–210 (p. 197). For
one other example of the use of this ‘mathematical concept that creates the illusion of a dimensionality
where it is in effect nonexistent’, see Jonathan D. Amith, The Möbius Strip: A Spatial History of
Colonial Society in Guerrero, Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 27. For direct
references to the Möbius Strip in Baudrillard’s own writing, see SaS, pp. 17, 64, and 152; IE, p. 21;
and ‘The Masses’, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. and introduced by Mark Poster, trans.
by Jacques Mourrain and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 221.
127
Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt described Baudrillard’s analysis of the Möbius Strip in TE as
being ‘as pompous as it is meaningless; but it is well contrived to impress readers whose knowledge of
mathematics is superficial or nonexistent’. See Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its
Quarrels With Science (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994), p. 80. Bricmont and Sokal,
meanwhile, concluded that ‘one finds in Baudrillard’s works a profusion of scientific terms, used with
total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in a context where they are manifestly irrelevant.
Whether or not one interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could play, except to
give an appearance of profundity to trite observations about sociology or history’. See Fashionable
Nonsense, p. 153.
126
53
members of the public have distinguishing the products of simulation from what is
being simulated, and telling whether they are involved in the process of simulation or
not.
These ideas can offer a fresh perspective on the propaganda created during
the final years of Hitler’s rule in particular. Germany’s lightning victories against
France and Poland between 1939 and 1941 resulted in a close proximity between the
content of propaganda and actual social practice in Hitler’s empire. But the defeats
the Nazis suffered between 1943 and 1945 pushed the two apart. This could only
have been undone by a reversal of fortunes on the battlefield. In the face of
successive defeats, the Party could do little more than attempt to veil the gap with
propaganda that relied ever more heavily on the technique that Baudrillard described
as deterrence. Where Kitchener had once told the British public ‘your country needs
YOU!’, from 1943 onward, the Nazis were telling the German public, ‘YOU are
your country!’128
The precession of simulacra
Baudrillard first put forward the ‘precession of simulacra’ in an essay of that title. It
appears in the book Simulacra and Simulation, and opens with an allusion to a short
fable by Luis Borges, On Exactitude in Science. In this story, the cartographers of an
empire draw up a map so large and detailed that it eventually covers the whole of
their territory.129 Future generations then leave it to ruin, although fragments of it are
still found in the deserts. Baudrillard argues that, in order to have a chance of being
relevant for society after the 1970s, the parable has to be inverted: ‘the territory no
Hence, perhaps, Victor Klemperer’s observation that ‘the fact that this movement [of the German
army] was constantly backwards was never said in so many words, the fact was covered up with veil
after veil; the words Niederlage [defeat] and Rückzug [retreat], and above all Flucht [flight] remain
unspoken’. See Language of the Third Reich, p. 212.
129
Baudrillard does not quote the whole fable, however. For the full text, see Jorge Luis Borges,
Collected Fictions, trans. by Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), p. 325.
128
54
longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is […] the map that precedes the
territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory whose shreds slowly
rot across the extent of the map’.130
The enigmatic phrase ‘precession of simulacra’ is too often explained away
with the common but essentially meaningless epithet, ‘a copy without an original’.131
The terms of which it consists are crucial to Baudrillard’s work: ‘precession’ and
‘simulacrum’. I deal with them here in reverse order. ‘Simulacrum’ describes an
individual product of a process of simulation. It dates back to at least the sixteenth
century, and the concept itself is considerably older. Baudrillard absorbed it into his
work on simulation, as did many other philosophers during the twentieth century.132
For him, ‘simulacrum’ refers specifically to a sign whose ‘essential function’ is ‘to
make reality disappear and at the same time to mask that disappearance’. 133
Simulacra have a strange, ‘neither fiction nor non-fiction’ character that he illustrated
with the example of two patients, one pretending to be ill, and the other simulating
illness.134 Whereas the former maintains the barrier between health and illness, the
latter actually takes on symptoms of the illness being simulated. The second patient is
technically neither ‘ill’ nor ‘not ill’, but is instead exhibiting a model, or simulacrum,
of true illness.135 ‘Precession’ is too often confused with ‘procession’, that is, the act
SaS, p. 1. For a detailed discussion of this fable and Baudrillard’s use of it, see Paul Hegarty, Jean
Baudrillard: Live Theory (Continuum: London, 2004), pp. 57–59.
131
SaS, p. 6. For use of the phrase ‘a copy without an original’, see N. Katherine Hayles, ‘Embodied
Virtuality: How to Put Bodies Back into the Picture’, in Immersed in Technology: Art and Virtual
Environments, ed. by Mary Anne Moser with Douglas MacLeod (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 1996), p. 9; and Michael Worton and Judith Still, ‘Introduction’,
Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, ed. Worton and Still (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1990), p. 14.
132
For one study of the simulacrum in postmodern philosophy, see Scott Durham, Phantom
Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of Postmodernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1998).
133
ScO, p. 115.
134
Ibid.
135
Baudrillard’s term ‘hyperreal’ will also be important for this project. ‘Hyperreal’ has been defined
elsewhere as ‘not a heightening or distortion of the real, but a “meticulous reduplication”, executed
with such “macroscopic hyperfidelity” as to efface all signs of its counterfeit status’; and as ‘the
130
55
of moving in orderly succession.136 The two terms mean something very different.
Baudrillard borrowed ‘precession’ from astronomy. The Oxford English Dictionary
defines it as ‘the slow retrograde motion of the equinoctial points along the ecliptic’.
This is most easily envisaged as the wobble of a spinning top as it gradually slows
down. The concept of the ‘precession of simulacra’ therefore describes the expanding
orbit of chains of interrelated simulacra around a central point to which they are
attracted, which is the actual word, object, or image on which they were all based.
They pull away from it and each other over time.
The documentary about Theresienstadt, Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem
jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (A Documentary Film from the Jewish Settlement Area), is
one example of a simulacrum made in Nazi Germany. 137 In June 1944, the
International Red Cross visited Theresienstadt to examine its living conditions. The
Nazis planned the route to be taken by Maurice Rossell, the inspector, and put
condition whereby imitations or reproductions of reality acquire more legitimacy, value, and power
than the originals themselves’. See Paul Sheehan, ‘Postmodernism and Philosophy’, in The Cambridge
Companion to Postmodernism, ed. by Steven Connor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
p. 31; and The Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, ed. by Victoria E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist
(Routledge: London, 2001), pp. 182–83 respectively. This is not without some justification, as both
definitions are inspired by Baudrillard’s own terminology. Greater clarity is desirable, however,
otherwise the concept becomes indistinguishable from the fourth stage of the image, which Baudrillard
also described as having ‘no relation to any reality whatsoever’. See SaS, p. 6. For the purposes of this
project, ‘hyperreal’ is taken to describe any construction built from simulacra. The Walt Disney theme
parks were a favourite ‘hyperreality’ of Baudrillard’s, and they have since become a core topic of
twenty-first century sociology in their own right. See David Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in
Postmodern Times (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); and Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The
Manufacture of Fantasy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).
136
For the mistaken use of the phrase ‘procession of simulacra’, see Azade Seyhan, ‘Allegories of
History’, in Image and Ideology in Modern/Postmodern Discourse, ed. by David B. Downing and
Susan Bazargan (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991), pp. 231–48 (p. 245); Paul C. Adams, The Boundless
Self: Communication in Physical and Virtual Spaces (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005), p.
84; and Julian Wolfreys, Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2004), p. 227.
137
In English this film is more commonly known by its post-War epithet, The Führer Gives the Jews a
City. For more on this concentration camp, see Norbert Troller, Theresienstadt: Hitler’s Gift to the
Jews, trans. by Susan E. Cernyak-Spatz, ed. by Joel Shatzky with Richard Ives and Doris Rauch
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); and Hans Günther Adler, Theresienstadt,
1941–1945. Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft: Gechichte, Soziologie, Psychologie (Tubingen: J.
C. B. Mohr, 1960).
56
considerable effort into beautifying what he would see.138 The end products of this
process of simulation successfully duped Rossell into believing that the camp was a
functioning town, and he signed a report to approve the treatment that Jews received
there. Following this, the Nazis reawakened plans to make a documentary about life
in Theresienstadt for general distribution in the cinema. The surviving fragment of
Ein Dokumentarfilm lasts about twenty-five minutes. The ghetto that appears on
screen is not an illusion of a ghetto that actually existed, but a simulacrum of a ghetto
that never existed. Among its chief purposes was to deter the public from engaging
critically with the question of where the Jews in the Third Reich had gone, and so at
least one of the film’s goals was specifically malevolent in nature. For all these
reasons, it can be described, in Baudrillard’s terms, as a simulacrum.
The concluding section of this chapter will examine the potential utility of the
four topics outlined above for musicology, and specifically the issues under
consideration in this thesis, in more detail.
IV
Baudrillard, Wagner, and the Nazis
Simulation in Nazi Germany
Baudrillard never applied his theories to Nazism, but historians and other scholars are
increasingly willing to reconsider the era through theoretical lenses. Alain Badiou’s
book, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, is one notable example – but
while he does employ the term ‘simulacrum’, he uses it in a rather different sense
For more on this visit, see Brad Preger, ‘Interpreting the Visible Traces of Theresienstadt’, Journal
of Modern Jewish Studies, 7 (2008), 175–94.
138
57
from Baudrillard. 139 He begins by rejecting the possibility of a universal and
unchanging set of ethics, in favour of assessing ‘singular situations’ according to their
particular ethical demands.140 In his analysis of Nazi Germany, he aims to situate the
Holocaust as a ‘singularity’ in something more concrete than ‘radical evil’, a term of
which he is highly critical.141 For him, a simulacrum, which he does still describe as
‘evil’, is a ‘terrorising follower of a false event’, and it arises from the misguided
belief that an event convokes the plenitude of an earlier situation rather than its
void.142 Badiou illustrates this through a discussion of Haydn’s impact on the history
of music. His emergence was an ‘event’ for the Baroque ‘situation’, and
at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a
‘situated’ void, around which is organised the plenitude (or the stable
multiples) of a genuine conception of musical architectonics. The Haydnevent occurs as a kind of ‘naming’ of this absence […] precisely what, from
within the baroque style, could not be perceived.143
Badiou describes Nazi Germany as a ‘simulacrum of truth’ because the Party’s
coming to power was ‘distinguished by a vocabulary of plenitude’. That is to say,
rather than name the void of the earlier situation, they spoke of ‘carrying a particular
community, the German people, towards its true destiny, which is a destiny of
universal domination’.144 He adds that the ‘void’ is always destined to return if left
unaddressed, and in Nazism it did so under the name ‘Jew’, which served
to designate those people whose disappearance created, around that
presumed German substance promoted by the ‘National Socialist
revolution’ simulacrum, a void that would suffice to identify the
substance.145
139
Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. and introduced by Peter Hallward (London:
Verso, 2002).
140
Ethics, p. 16.
141
Ethics, pp. 64–65.
142
Ethics, p. 91 and 71 respectively.
143
Ethics, pp. 68–69.
144
Ethics, p. 73.
145
Ethics, p. 75.
58
Zachary Braiterman has also appealed to the idea of simulacra, and to the work of
Baudrillard specifically, in his essay, ‘Against Holocaust Sublime’.146 Although the
title of Ian Kershaw’s book The Hitler Myth: Image and Reality in the Third Reich
sounds strikingly Baudrillardian, he does not discuss simulation.147
It is now generally accepted that public opinion in Germany between 1933
and 1945 can only be grasped in isolated fragments.148 On the other hand, the Party’s
propagandistic efforts to convince the German public, as well as powers abroad, that
an ideal Nazi society had come into existence in 1933 are altogether easier to access.
This imaginative world was built first and foremost according to the content of
Hitler’s ideological statements. He communicated these in Mein Kampf and in his
speeches. The subset of ideologies created by those immediately beneath him; the
works of nationalist icons from previous generations, such as Wagner and Houston
Stewart Chamberlain; and actual historical events from Germany’s past, were also
important.149
‘Against Holocaust Sublime: Naïve Reference and the Generation of Memory’, History and
Memory, 12 (2000), 7–28.
147
The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
148
For example, Ian Kershaw has noted, ‘even several years after the war, around half of West
Germans had positive memories of the pre-war years. Without this backing, much of what transpired
in the Third Reich seems barely explicable. It does, however, raise the question of how it is possible to
gauge approval in conditions where expression of oppositional opinion was dangerous and where
“public” opinion was solely that of the regime. Once pluralistic elections ceased in March 1933, this
can only be done impressionistically, and through drawing on sources which are extraordinarily
difficult to evaluate’. See ‘Consensus, Coercion and Popular Opinion in the Third Reich: Some
Reflections’, in Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism, ed. by Paul
Corner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 33–48 (p. 38).
149
Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born in 1855 in Hampshire, and died a German citizen in the
town of Wagner’s opera house in 1927. He achieved considerable fame with his book The Foundations
of the Nineteenth Century (London: John Lane, 1911). This history of Western civilization told
through the lens of race was an important precursor of Nazi ideology, and it was widely read across the
continent during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Chamberlain never met Wagner,
though he was technically the composer’s son-in-law, having married his daughter Eva in 1908. He
was a member of the so-called ‘Bayreuth Circle’. Other important figures in this group included Hans
von Wolzogen, the editor of the Bayreuther Blätter, and Ludwig Schemann, the founder of the German
Gobineau Society. It should be kept in mind that ‘Bayreuth Circle’ is a contested term, given that the
group to which it refers never actually used it; and the extent to which they nourished Nazi ideology is
also debated. For two studies of the ‘Bayreuth Circle’, see Wolfgang Altgeld, ‘Wagner, der Bayreuther
Kreis und die Entwicklung des völkischen Denkens’, in Richard Wagner 1883-1983. Die Rezeption im
19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Gesammelte Beiträge des Salzberger Symposions, ed. by Ursula Müller
146
59
Some broad observations about the use of music as propaganda in the Third
Reich based on Baudrillard’s theories that will inform later chapters of this thesis can
be made here. First, it was almost always the idea of a composition or composer that
was most important to the Nazi Party. For them to make propaganda from a piece of
music, it was best if the composer was deceased and rooted in German history, not
least because it enabled them to appeal to an idealised past. The Party never required
the public to have a detailed knowledge of composers or their works, let alone engage
in any kind of critical deconstruction of them. They only needed to be familiar with a
small selection of themes that the Party believed to be enjoyable and recognisable.
Lastly, the need to convince both the German public and the world that Nazi ideology
had turned into actual social practice increased over time, especially once the War
had begun. For this reason, the precession of Nazi propaganda was inclined to move
ever further away from the models it was orbiting.
Simulation in Die Meistersinger
Throughout this thesis, I will argue that the chief characteristic that determined the
special place of Die Meistersinger in the Nazi imagination was Wagner’s use of
simulation in the composition itself. Whether the Party had consciously realised it or
not, much about this particular opera reflected the construction of the cultural, social,
and political entity they called the Third Reich. That Die Meistersinger hinges on
(Stuttgart: Heinz, 1984); and Spotts, Bayreuth, pp. 113–22. Through the 1920s, Chamberlain became
increasingly involved with Hitler and the Nazi Party, even after the failed ‘Beer Hall Putsch’ of 1923.
His approval undoubtedly boosted the public credibility of their movement. For a detailed
investigation of the importance of Chamberlain’s ideology to the Nazi era, see Anja LobensteinReichmann, Houston Stewart Chamberlain – zur textlichen Konstruktion einer Weltanschauung. Eine
sprach-, diskurs- und ideologiegeschichtliche Analyse (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008). For
Chamberlain’s relationship to Wagner, see Roger Allen, ‘Die Weihe des Hauses: Houston Stewart
Chamberlain and the Early Reception of Parsifal’, in A Companion to Wagner’s Parsifal, ed. by
William Kinderman and Katherine R. Syer (New York: Camden House, 2006), pp. 245–76; as well as
‘From Critical Tool to Political Metaphor: Thoughts on the Writings of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain’, in Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany: 1848 to the Third Reich, ed. by Nikolaus
Bacht (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 79–92.
60
simulation can partly be discerned from Wagner’s thoughts about his use of history in
general in this work, which he recorded in his autobiography, Mein Leben. In one
well-known passage, he wrote that, ‘owing to some comments I had read in
Gervinus’s History of German Literature’,
I had formed a particularly vivid picture of Hans Sachs and the
mastersingers of Nuremberg. I was especially intrigued by the institution of
the marker and his function in rating master-songs. Without as yet knowing
anything more about Sachs and his poetic contemporaries, I conceived
during a walk a comic scene in which the popular artisan-poet, by
hammering upon his cobbler’s last, gives the marker, who is obliged by
circumstances to sing in his presence, his come-uppance for previous
pedantic misdeeds during official singing contests, by inflicting upon him a
lesson of his own […] to this picture I now added a narrow, twisting
Nuremberg alley, with neighbours, uproar and a street-fight to close the
second act – and suddenly my whole mastersingers comedy stood before
me.150
Mary A. Cicora has described Wagner’s use of history in Die Meistersinger as
‘stylised, metaphoricised [and] “mythologised”’; while as early as 1949, Ernest
Newman had advised that ‘the opera-goer without any first-hand knowledge of the
German Mastersingers must not take them at Wagner’s valuation […] he exercised to
the full the comic dramatist’s or novelist’s right to use only so much of the historical
material lying to his hand as suits his purpose’.151
Wagner’s historical facts are freely detached from their original contexts and
meanings. His idealisation of the burgher is one case in point. In the sixteenth
century, ‘burgher’ referred to a class of artisans: craftsmen and tradespeople. By the
time Die Meistersinger was being composed, the term was generally associated with
the newly emerging bourgeois class that was thriving during a time of great economic
change. Come the final decades of the nineteenth century though, the burgher class
150
My Life, trans. by Andrew Gray, ed. by Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1983), p. 303.
151
See, Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions: Hermeneutic Approaches to Wagner’s Music
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000), p. 146; and Wagner Nights (London: The Bodley Head, 1949,
new edn, 1988) p. 296, respectively.
61
had nearly disappeared, and only a handful of the remainder could properly be
described as bourgeois. Workers in craft and trade had for the most part merged into
the Volk; that is to say, the proletariat – the lower rural and working classes. The
‘cultivated’ bourgeoisie, on the other hand, with their aspirations to nobility, defined
themselves by education (Bildung). 152 Wagner’s championing of sixteenth-century
burghers in Die Meistersinger is both patronising and nostalgic then, a late
nineteenth-century bourgeois idealisation of the country’s bürgerlich past. The same
attitude is evident in one of his shorter essays, ‘Shall We Hope?’ (‘Wollen Wir
Hoffen?’) of 1879, in which he said that his creation of Die Meistersinger was
‘governed by the idea of offering the German public a picture of its own true nature,
so botched for it before; and I nursed the hope of winning from the nobler, stouter
class of German burghers a hearty counter-greeting’.153 Newman confirms that the
figures included in Wagner’s dramatis personae
were probably not artisans, in the sense in which Wagner employs that term,
but well-to-do business men; for Nuremberg was a rich and handsome city,
and there was a great demand in it for good building materials, fine metal
work, handsome furniture, artistic pottery and so on. Wagner’s ‘tinsmith’,
‘coppersmith’, ‘tailor’, ‘stocking weaver’ etc. are pure fancy.154
Wagner was not alone in this madcap idealisation of the vanished burgher class. The
historian Eda Sagarra recorded that, during the latter half of the nineteenth century,
the way of life of the artisan and his culture was invested with moral values
by those who did not belong to his social stratum, and it became fashionable
to contrast these values with the materialism and the disharmony of present
society. The nostalgia for that happy state, that golden age, when the artisan
was master in his house, was exploited by writers and publishers. Novels
and tales of medieval and early modern guildsmen, and of small town life,
Jurgen Habermas records that ‘the bourgeois belong[ed] to the cultivated classes – businessmen and
university-trained men (scholars, ministers, officials, physicians, judges, and teachers)’. This comes
from a detailed analysis of the transformation of the burgher that is important to this passage. See
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of
Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 72.
153
‘Shall We Hope?’, in Religion and Art, trans. by William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 111–30 (p. 114).
154
Wagner Nights, p. 301.
152
62
enjoyed very considerable popularity […] to an increasing number of
Germans, disorientated by the speed of change, the artisan was a symbol of
belonging, to a community, to a regional world. 155
In Act I scene 3 of Die Meistersinger, the mastersinger Veit Pogner describes his
travels across the country. It has vexed him, he says, that ‘people honour the burgher
so little, call him stingy and secretive (karg and verschlossen): at courts and in
meaner places I grew tired of the bitter reproach that only in usury and money was
the burgher interested’. He then outlines his intention for the restoration of the
burgher’s reputation.
We [the burghers] alone in the broad German empire still cherish Art – by
that they set little store: but how this may redound to our honour, and that
with high resolve we treasure what is beautiful and good, the value of Art,
what it is worth (gilt), this I became resolved to show the world.
Pogner and his fellow mastersingers are characterised by the education and cultural
aspirations of the late-nineteenth century German bourgeoisie, and by the patriotism
and naivety that Wagner wishfully ascribes to sixteenth-century burghers. His
mastersingers are cobblers and poets.
Wagner’s approach to historical facts in Die Meistersinger amounted to
simulation specifically, rather than mere nostalgia or imaginative representation.
Evidence for this can be found in Cosima’s diaries, where she discussed both the
compositional procedures and the emotional impact of the opera. On 18 December
1878, for example, she recorded that
when today’s six [Preludes and Fugues from Bach’s Das Wohltemperierte
Klavier] have been played, [Wagner] exclaims, ‘That is music in its true
essence; everything we compose is applied music – a rondo by Hummel, for
instance, is Bach diluted so-and-so many times, in the way one dilutes
essence of roses so-and-so many times to obtain the familiar fragrance’. ‘To
give continuity to a dance melody – that is what he has succeeded in doing
here; later one used figurations to isolate, to link’. – He explains to the
children (Lusch and Boni) what a fugue is. Then he says, ‘Let us now play
155
A Social History of Germany, 1648–1914, new edn (London: Transaction Publishers, 2003), pp.
327–28.
63
some applied Bach’, and takes out the piano-duet arrangement of the Ms.
Prelude.156
Wagner’s analysis of music history, and especially his use of the word ‘dilution’,
aligns remarkably well with Baudrillard’s critical theories: there is an original on
which future creations are modelled, and they gradually pull away from it over time.
The reason that he chose the Prelude of Die Meistersinger as an example of ‘applied’
Bach was surely because of the extent to which he had used counterpoint, stretto, and
other baroque ‘gestures’ to create the appearance (or, in his terms, the ‘fragrance’) of
antiquity in this opera.
Cosima also understood that Die Meistersinger had been modelled on actual
facts about historical figures, and that these models had been stripped of their original
meanings, so that Wagner could create an idealised version of sixteenth-century
Germany. For instance, on 16 March 1873, she wrote that
at lunch Herr Zumpe relates that the musicians in Leipzig always used the
quarrel motive in Die Meistersinger as a signal, and that brings us to this
work, ‘the most optimistic of my works’, says R. ‘This is the form in which
I visualised Germans in their true character, their best light’.157
And on the evening of 9 August 1879, Wagner
gets Herr Rub. to play the 3rd act of Die Meistersinger; blissful delight –
what nation ever had its great men so ideally restored to it as with Sachs,
Wolfram, Heinrich?158
And, most tellingly, her entry on 25 June 1880 says
in the evening the Eumenides; a glorious conclusion to the day, arousing
wide-ranging thoughts and comparisons. I exclaim to R., ‘Do you know in
which work I see a link between the ideal and the real world, reminding me
of the institution of the Areopagus? In Die Meistersinger – Sachs’s address
at the end’, ‘I was just about the say the same thing’, R. replies – and, tired
but exalted, we go off to bed.159
156
Cosima, Diaries, v. 2, p. 232.
Cosima, Diaries, v. 1, pp. 608–09.
158
Cosima, Diaries, v. 2, p. 352.
159
Cosima, Diaries, v. 2, p. 497.
157
64
Eumenides is the final play in Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy of tragedies. Today it is
widely regarded as being ‘in many senses a troublesome work’; it is the shortest of
the extant corpus of Greek tragedies; and ‘it fails to adhere to the basic unities of
time and place that Aristotle demanded of the ideal tragedy’. 160 These issues can be
put aside here, because it was the Areopagus that drew Cosima’s attention. In the
play, the Areopagus is a court in which a mortal jury is invited to preside over a case
of matricide among the gods. There was indeed an actual location named Areopagus
that served as a courthouse in ancient Greece. It was this relationship that reminded
Cosima of Die Meistersinger. The plot unfolds in a geographical location that
actually exists in Germany, but Wagner presents an idealised version of it. Moreover,
she identifies his Sachs explicitly as a God-like figure. For her, and apparently for
Wagner as well, it was this placement of quasi-Gods in an actual location that
engendered a unique link between the ‘real’ and the ‘ideal’ worlds in Die
Meistersinger.
Wagner’s compositional techniques in Die Meistersinger are also shot
through with processes of simulation. This too has not gone unobserved by
musicologists. Carl Dahlhaus wrote that ‘nowhere, not even in Parsifal, that troubled
masterpiece of his old age, is Wagner’s music more artificial than in the semblance of
simplicity that surrounds it in the Meistersinger’.161 He described the opera as having
a unique ‘tone’, which infuses the score ‘down to its remotest details’. 162 The
composer’s use of diatonicism, for example, was ‘in a spirit less of restoration than of
reconstruction’. 163 This forms a striking musical parallel with Wagner’s desire to
160
For this, and a detailed analysis of Eumenides, see Theodore Ziolkowski, The Mirror of Justice:
Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 33.
161
Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. by J. Bradford Robinson (Berkley: University of
California Press, 1989), p. 75.
162
Ibid.
163
Ibid.
65
build a three-dimensional church on stage. More recently, Roger Parker and Carolyn
Abbate wrote that Die Meistersinger is ‘a self-conscious reversion to musical
formality […] [it] is conventional in the sense that its old-fashioned operatic numbers
are marked and symbolic rather than simply a compositional given’. 164 Throughout
this thesis, I will analyse specific moments from the score through a Baudrillardian
lens. For now, it can be said that the various processes of simulation in Wagner’s
Meistersinger combine to create a powerful simulacrum of an ideal, nationalised
German community. This renders it unique among his output, and indeed among the
operatic repertoire as a whole.
164
Roger Parker and Carolyn Abbate, Opera: The Last 400 Years (London: Allen Lane, 2012).
66
Chapter Two
Die Meistersinger and Race in the Third Reich
Glaubt, wie mich’s freut!
Die alte Zeit dünkt mich erneut
Act I scene 3
I
Introduction
Anti-Semitism and Nazi interpretations of Die Meistersinger
It has been argued that Die Meistersinger was at least partly informed by Wagner’s
anti-Semitic beliefs. 165 Yet nothing written in Germany between 1933 and 1945
describes the opera as depicting Jews in a manner consistent with the Party’s ideas
about race. 166 This has, on occasion, confounded expectations. 167 For example,
Thomas S. Grey wondered that
at least some considerable portion of Nazi-era writers, critics, and directors,
must have been well aware of the tradition connecting Beckmesser with
Wagner’s anti-Semitism began to be scrutinised in academia in the decades after the War. The
accompanying debates came to a peak between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s. The most
contentious piece from this period is Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic
Imagination (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1995). Other important works from the time
include Jacob Katz, The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s Anti-Semitism (Hanover, NH:
University of New England Press, 1982); Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution
(London: Faber, 1992); and Richard Wagner. Wie antisemitisch darf ein Künstler sein?, ed. by HeinzKlaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, Musik-Konzepte, 5 (1978). Today there surely remain few
musicologists who would seriously contend that race plays no role whatsoever in Wagner’s musical
universe. Dieter Borchmeyer did once claim that ‘there are no Jewish characters in [Wagner’s] music
dramas, still less any anti-Semitic tendencies. His hatred of the Jews was excluded from the inner
sanctum of his artistic personality’. See ‘A Note on Wagner’s Anti-Semitism’, in Richard Wagner:
Theory and Theatre, trans. by Stewart Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 404–10
(p. 408). It is also worth noting that Borchmeyer omitted the Judentum essays from his centennial
edition of Wagner’s writings. See Richard Wagner Dichtungen und Schriften, in 10 vols. (Frankfurt
a.M.: Insel Verlag, 1983). Bryan Magee is one scholar who has continued to defend such views into
the twenty-first century. The quotation at the head of this chapter, which is from Die Meistersinger,
reads ‘Believe me, how glad I am!The old days seem to have returned’.
166
David B. Dennis convincingly established this with a thorough examination of a multitude of
sources in his article, ‘Die Meistersinger Through the Lens of the Third Reich’. My own research has
produced nothing to question his findings.
167
Consider the following for example, all of which discuss Wagner and Jews, but do not interpret any
of his characters as Jewish: Richard Wagner. Die Hauptschriften, ed. by Ernst Bücken (Leipzig: A.
Kröner Verlag, 1937); Ganzer, Wagner und das Judenthum; Alfred Lorenz, ‘Wortes des Sehers. Aus
Richard Wagners Schriften und Briefen’, Zeitschrift für Musik (1938); ‘Moll’ [Michael Alt], ‘Richard
Wagner – nationalsozialistisch gesehen’, Die Musik (1936); Friedrich Pöschl, ‘Richard Wagner und
das Judentum’, Deutsche Sängerbundes-Zeitung (1938); Otto Strobel, ‘Richard Wagner, der Mensch,
der Künstler, der Deutsche’, VB, 12 Feburary 1933; and Stock, Wagner und die Stadt der
Meistersinger.
165
67
Eduard Hanslick (going back to Wagner’s own prose drafts of 1862, with
the Marker named ‘Veit Hanslich’) and the fact that Wagner considered
Hanslick to be Jewish. Yet even with the factors of such an equation so
readily available, no one seems to have formulated it explicitly, either in
writing or on the stage.168
For some, the absence of this ‘formulation’ is reason enough to doubt that the
privileged position held by Die Meistersinger under Hitler owed anything to racial
matters.169 One purpose of this thesis is to contest such assumptions, and to clarify
how and why the opera fitted into the Nazis’ racial universe.
Grey is certainly right that there is no written evidence to suggest the Nazis
considered Beckmesser a Jew. But the very premise that they might somewhere have
drawn an explicit parallel between their anti-Semitism and the characters in Die
Meistersinger is flawed. It rests on misunderstandings of academia and opera as they
were practiced in the Third Reich. Hitler’s veneration elevated Wagner’s music to a
status where academics of all fields were reluctant to subject it to critical
examination. A tellingly low number of doctoral dissertations were written on his
work in Germany between 1933 and 1945. 170 The articles on the composer that
Thomas S. Grey, ‘Wagner’s Die Meistersinger as National Opera (1868–1945)’, in Music and
German National Identity, ed. by Celia Applegate and Pamela M. Potter (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002) pp. 78–104 (pp. 98–99).
169
Consider, for example, Grey’s idea that ‘Wagner’s cultural chauvinism – his antagonism toward the
French and the Jews, grounded in a paranoid persecution complex – leaves only a faint imprint on [Die
Meistersinger] […] it is a product of the national consciousness directly antecedent to National
Socialism, but no more so than a work like Brahms’ Triumphlied’. See ‘Die Meistersinger as National
Opera’, p. 100. It is also worth noting Bryan Magee’s suggestion that ‘when we consider Wagner’s
posthumous relationship with the Nazis we need to draw a clear distinction between Hitler as a person
and the Third Reich as a society. Hitler was unquestionably a devotee of some (not all) of Wagner’s
operas, and ordered performances of them for special occasions; and he also cited the composer’s antiSemitism with approval. Wagner was one of the small handful of his cultural heroes. But this was
something personal to him. It was not the case that the Nazi regime in general was devoted to Wagner,
or did anything to promote his works’. See The Tristan Chord, pp. 364–65.
170
Titles of accepted doctoral dissertations were sometimes announced in the AMf. One of the few that
comes remotely close to the topic under consideration here is Erwin Falkenberg, Die Bedeutung des
Lichtes und der Farben im Gesamtkunstwerk Richard Wagners (Rostock, 1939). Another dissertation
on Wagner from the era of the Third Reich is Karl Richard Ganzer, Richard Wagner, der Revolutionär
gegen das 19. Jahrhundert (1933), BA R1/84. Pamela Potter confirms that, in the Third Reich,
‘musicologists [were] relatively reticent on Wagner’. See Most German of the Arts, p. 261. This
sparsity suggests that the few outright attacks on Wagner’s music made in Germany between 1933 and
1945 were the exception to the rule, and may have been motivated by concerns outside of music
criticism.
168
68
appeared in the Archiv für Musikforschung, a journal with transparent ideological
leanings that was in print from 1936 until 1943, were not noticeably higher than any
other. The total number of pieces on Wagner, thirty-three, with a further eight in 1938
dedicated solely to Tristan, does not outweigh those written about any other
composer. He was just one of several whose music enjoyed a particular appeal in the
‘cultural climate’ of the Third Reich.171
Such lightweight engagement was fairly typical of academia in Germany
between 1933 and 1945. Richard J. Evans has rightly noted the precarious position of
universities, adding that anyone in the Third Reich who had read Mein Kampf would
be aware of Hitler’s
contempt for intellectuals, whom he blamed in large part for the disaster of
1918. This inevitably had the effect of producing disillusion amongst
academics and a reluctance to enroll amongst potential students. In
Germany before 1933, a university degree had been the way to social
prestige and professional success. Now, for many, it was no longer. Under
the Third Reich, there could be no doubt that Germany’s universities were
in decline.172
Wagner was even overlooked in attempts to fuse musicology with Rassenkunde
(‘racial science’). This may at first seem surprising, given the position that race
For example, Praetorious was also the subject of thirty-three articles in the AMf. The term ‘cultural
climate’ is Bettina Varwig’s, and she coined it in her analysis of Heinrich Schutz’s popularity in the
Third Reich. See Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 56.
A lone piece of work concerning the historical figure Hans Sachs was the closest that the journal ever
came to publishing anything on Die Meistersinger. See Wilhelm Heinitz, ‘Ein Homogenitätsstudie an
Hans Sachsens Überlangton und Herimans Salve Regina’, AMf, 3 (1937), 257–72. Siegfried Braungart
also wrote a dissertation on music in reformation Nuremberg, Die Verbreitung des reformatorischen
Liedes in Nürnberg in der Zeit von 1525 bis 1570 (Erlangen, 1939).
172
The Third Reich in Power: 1933–1939 (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 298–99. Pamela Potter notes
that ‘the antiintellectual stand of the Nazi Party, evident in the early writings of Hitler and Rosenberg,
persisted throughout the Third Reich. The university as an autonomous entity would undermine the
principle of a total state, academicians were suspected of opposing a National Socialist victory, and
academic disciplines were regarded as overspecialised and irrelevant’. See Most German of the Arts, p.
109. Hitler made it clear that intellectual instruction should not be the main focus of education: ‘in
every branch of our education the day’s curriculum must be arranged so as to occupy a boy’s free time
in profitable development of his physical powers. He has no right in those years to loaf about,
becoming a nuisance in public streets and in cinemas; but when his day’s work is done he ought to
harden his young body so that his strength may not be found wanting when the occasion arises. To
prepare for this and to carry it out should be the function of our educational system and not exclusively
to pump in knowledge or wisdom’. See MK, p. 452.
171
69
occupies in his writing. As Potter has observed though, the efforts to racialise
musicology in the Third Reich were only tentative. 173 This was partly due to the
unstable nature of racial science itself. Rassenkunde had grown out of the nineteenthcentury völkisch movement.174 Völkisch cannot be adequately translated into a single
English word. It signifies a deep, instinctive feeling that something is right or natural,
and has at its core a belief in a truth that transcends the need for factual evidence. Yet
the ‘science’ aspect of Rassenkunde belonged to the older German tradition of the
wissenschaftlich. This word is also without a satisfactory English translation. It can
denote science in particular as well as academia and scholarship in general, and
implies the establishment of truth through the objective examination of what can be
empirically verified. These two modes of thought, the völkisch and the
wissenschaftlich, are by their nature completely incompatible. For this reason,
Rassenkunde as a whole was characterised by specious reasoning that did not make
use of research. Indeed it would have been out of place for anyone in this field to
analyse Wagner’s verbose essays.
As for opera in the Third Reich, to claim that any work contained depictions
of Jews would have contradicted the essence of the medium. High art was considered
the clearest marker of cultural supremacy, and its principal purpose was to express
the emotions. 175 Christopher Browning has aptly described anti-Semitism in Nazi
Germany as an emotional type of belief in which the ideological intersected with the
political:
173
Most German of the Arts, pp. 176–91.
By virtue of its concentration on ethnicity and nationalism, the völkisch movement had always been
closely associated with right-wing politics. For a recent history of its role in German academia, see
Bernard Mees, The Science of the Swastika (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008).
175
For example, Hitler asked, ‘how many of [the masses] understand that their natural pride in being
members of so favoured a nation arises from the innumerable succession of instances they have
encountered which remind them of the greatness of the Fatherland and the Nation in all spheres of
artistic and cultural life? How many of them realise that pride in the Fatherland is largely dependent on
knowledge of its greatness in all those spheres?’ See MK, p. 36.
174
70
the emotional and ideological priority of Hitler’s anti-Semitism and the
wider understanding of history as racial struggle in which it was embedded
were shared by much of the Nazi leadership and party. They defined and
gave meaning to the politics of the Third Reich. They also provided the
regime with a spur and a direction for ceaseless dynamism and
movement.176
Indeed, in the Third Reich, politics, ideology, and art were intended to blend
seamlessly into one another as part of people’s normal routines. Richard Evans, for
example, wrote that
Nazism aestheticised politics; but it also politicised the arts […] Nazi
emblems, signs, words and concepts permeated everyday life […] not only
were film, radio, newspapers, magazines, scultpures, painting, literature,
poetry, architecture, music and high culture increasingly informed by Nazi
ideals, or confined within the boundaries they set, but everyday culture was
as well.177
Crudely transparent caricatures of Jews on the operatic stage would surely have been
seen as too unsubtle for high art, and as degrading the racial purity of opera itself.
Hitler’s own paintings and drawings offer some support for this analysis. He never
used the canvas to communicate anti-Semitism. 178 For him, art was a means of
displaying the intellectual authority and emotional depth of its creator through the
realistic capture of buildings, scenes from nature, and still life.179 Moreover, the Party
had made its opposition to Judaism within German society clear from the earliest
176
Christopher Browning, with contributions by Jürgen Mätthaus, The Origins of the Final Solution:
The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March 1942 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004), p.
10.
177
The Third Reich in Power, p. 211.
178
A small selection of Hitler’s paintings can be found in Adolf Hitler. Bilder aus dem Leben des
Führers (Hamburg: Herausgegeben vom Cigaretten Bilderdienst, 1936).
179
Here it is worth recalling that in the 1934 programme for the Bayreuth production of Die
Meistersinger, the audiences found a card reading: ‘The Führer wishes to see an end to the singing of
“Deutschland über Alles” or the “Horst Wessel Lied” and similar demonstrations at the close of
performances. There is no finer expression of the German spirit than the immortal works of the Master
himself’. This leaves little doubt that Hitler preferred the practice of art to be devoid of overt political
sentiment. See Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of Theatre, p. 278.
71
stage of its existence.180 To identify any of Wagner’s characters as Jewish would only
have served to immortalise Jews in the music of a Nazi cultural icon.
It should also be kept in mind that race laws in the Third Reich constantly
changed in ways that were rarely predictable.181 The highest-ranking members of the
Party had differing opinions about the ‘Jewish question’. They did not reach anything
approaching a consensus until the beginning of Operation Barbarossa in 1941, and
their differences of opinion continued once this conflict in the East was underway.
Peter Longerich notes, for example, that
from the middle of 1944 onwards Himmler had been making various
attempts to offer the Allies Jews who were in his power in exchange for
foreign currencies or materials important for the war, presumably with the
primary purpose of putting out feelers to probe the possibility of separate
peace negotiations with the western powers […] we cannot be absolutely
certain whether he or Hitler would actually have been prepared to release a
large number of Jewish prisoners in exchange for some suitable trade-off.182
Even when Auschwitz was fully operational during the latter stages of the War, some
Party members were prepared to stall the extermination programme by way of
bargaining.183 In 1944 for example, in the so-called ‘Blood for Goods’ case, Adolf
See ‘The Programme of the National-Socialist (Nazi) German Workers’ Party’, in Documents on
the Holocaust, pp. 15–18. Points 4 and 5 specified that, ‘only Nationals (Volksgenossen) can be
Citizens of the State. Only persons of German blood can be Nationals, regardless of religious
affiliation. No Jew can therefore be a German National’, and ‘any person who is not a Citizen will be
able to live in Germany only as a guest and must be subject to legislation for Aliens’. Point 24 declared
that the Party ‘fights against the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us’ (original italics). This
sentiment is an almost-exact echo of one of Wagner’s essays, in which he suggests that ‘cultured Jews’
had ‘made up their minds to live not only with us, but in us’. See DJiM, pp. 75–122 (p. 120).
181
In the past it has been contested that Hitler had planned the Holocaust already at the end of World
War One. Lucy Dawidowicz gave perhaps the best-known example of this when she asserted that he
conceived a plan to kill the world’s Jews in the immediate aftermath of Germany’s defeat. Most
historians now regard such extreme ‘intentionalist’ standpoints as outmoded and untenable. See The
War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1975). For criticisms of
Dawidowicz’s hypothesis, see Christopher R. Browning, ‘Ordinary Germans or Ordinary Men? A
Reply to the Critics’, in The Holocaust and History: The Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the
Reexamined, ed. by Michael Berenbaum and Abraham J. Peck (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1998), pp. 252–65.
182
Heinrich Himmler, trans. by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), p. 707.
183
A full history of the increasing sanctions against Jews in the Third Reich would be beyond the remit
of this thesis, not least because there is still disagreement among historians as to the date on which
Hitler ordered the physical extermination of all Jews in his empire. For an informative overview of
180
72
Eichmann offered Jews based in Palestine the lives of one million Hungarian Jews in
exchange for ten thousand trucks and other munitions.184 It would have been difficult
then, and perhaps even dangerous, to make definite pronouncements about the racial
meaning of Wagner’s works at any stage between 1933 and 1945. Yet some post-War
scholars have implied that unambiguous connections between the composer and race
did exist during these years. One example is the tendency to bring together the
Holocaust and Wagner’s essay Das Judentum in der Musik. I will discuss this
infamous piece of writing in more detail below. For now, it can briefly be noted that,
in his closing line, Wagner claims the only ‘cure’ for Judaism is that of Ahasuerus –
‘der Untergang!’ (‘going under!’). 185 Joachim Köhler suggests that this ‘bald
statement, breathtaking in its ruthlessness, marks a new, violent phase in the
development of anti-Semitism in Germany’.186 His conclusion is further emphasised
in the English edition by the misleading translation of Untergang as ‘annihilation’ – a
reckless attempt to merge Wagner’s essay with events in the twentieth century. Jens
Malte-Fischer has rightly reminded that for the composer the meaning of ‘Untergang’
would have been situated in a Romantic, quasi-religious concept of redemption.187
Besides which, to envision the technology required for the mechanised, en masse
destruction of Jews across the continent would surely have been beyond all powers of
imagination in the 1870s.
debates on this matter, see The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath, ed. by Omer Bartov
(Oxford: Routledge, 2000).
184
Adolf Eichmann joined the SS in 1932 and had been promoted to the post of Obersturmbannführer
by 1938. He worked with Richard Heydrich and others to coordinate the mass deportation of European
Jews to ghettos and death camps during the 1940s, and fled to Argentina after the War. He lived and
worked there under a false identity until 1960, when Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, captured
and deported him. His trial is discussed below. For more on the ‘Blood for Goods’ case, see Monty
Noam Penkower, The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 186.
185
DJiM, p. 132.
186
Wagner’s Hitler, p. 88.
187
Richard Wagners ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 2000), pp. 85–87.
73
Wagner’s anti-Semitism and historical consciousness
Once all of the above is taken into account, the search for a discussion of the antiSemitic elements in Die Meistersinger during the Nazi period begins to seem
anachronistic. The question of how the composer’s anti-Semitism influenced German
politics in the first half of the twentieth century only rose to the level of historical
consciousness in the 1960s. This happened alongside efforts to bring the former Party
members most closely associated with the Holocaust to justice. Eichmann was tried
in Israel in 1961 and was executed the following year, and the Frankfurt Auschwitz
Trials (der Auschwitz-Prozess) took place between 1963 and 1965. 188 These cases
forced detailed images and accounts of Nazi atrocities before the public eye, as did
books such as Gerhard Schoenberner’s Der Gelbe Stern and films like Erwin Leiser’s
Mein Kampf.189 Later in the same decade, social upheaval spread across America and
Europe when students’ and workers’ protests arose on both continents in 1968.190 It
has been observed of the ‘1968 Generation’ in Germany that ‘if ever there was a
generation whose rebellion really was grounded in the rejection of everything their
parents represented – everything: national pride, Nazism, money, the West, peace,
Eichmann’s trial has been the basis of several studies, of which the most famous is Hannah Arendt,
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1963). A more
recent investigation is Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann vor Jerusalem. Das unbehelligte Leben eines
Massenmörders (Arche: Zürich, 2011). In 2011 Yad Vashem, the World Centre for Holocaust
Research in Israel, made a video of Eichmann’s trial in its entirety available on YouTube. See
<http://www.youtube.com/user/EichmannTrialEN?blend=2&ob=video-mustangbase>. For more on
the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials, see David O. Pendas, The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965:
Genocide, History, and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and
Rebecca Wittmann, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2005).
189
Gerhard Schoenberner, Der Gelbe Stern. Die Judenverfolgung in Europa 1933 bis 1945 (Hamburg:
Rütten und Loening, 1960). This book contains photographs revealing the brutality of the Holocaust.
For an informative overview of the impact of this publication on the West German public, see Robert
Sackett, ‘Pictures of Atrocity: Public Discussion of Der Gelbe Stern in Early 1960s West Germany’,
German History, 24 (2006), 526–61.
190
The 1968 protests were caused by numerous social and political factors, which are too complex to
treat in any detail here. For a useful overview, see George N. Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New
Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1987). For more on the movement
as it existed in Germany, see Peter Dohms and Johann Paul, Die Studentenbewegung von 1968 in
Nordrhein-Westfalen (Siegburg: Rheinlandia, 2008); and 1968. Ein Handbuch zur Kultur- und
Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung, ed. by Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart:
Metzler, 2007).
188
74
stability, law and democracy – it was “Hitler’s children”, the West German radicals
of the Sixties’. 191 It is unsurprising that the reevaluation of Wagner’s place in
European history began during these years. Robert Gutman published his
controversial biography of the composer in 1968, and it became a cornerstone for
many similar works that followed between then and the late 1990s.192
The one notable precursor to this trend is Theodor Adorno’s seminal book,
Versuch über Wagner (In Search of Wagner). The Versuch was first published in
1952, and expanded on four essays that had appeared in the Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung as early as 1939. He gave them the collective title ‘Fragments on
Wagner’, and they later became the first, sixth, and final two chapters of his book.193
They are the only pre-War writings that draw an explicit connection between the
composer’s anti-Semitic beliefs and the content of his operas. To make sense of this
historical anomaly we must begin with John Deathridge’s observation that, even
though an open discussion of a fascist aesthetic is eschewed in the Versuch,
the implied connection between Wagner and the propaganda techniques of
the Nazi regime is perfectly obvious, as is [Adorno’s] ready assumption that
there is such a thing as an aesthetic that can be associated specifically with a
fascist mind […] Yet given the pragmatic opportunism and randomness of
nearly all functionaries involved with cultural matters in totalitarian
regimes, it is exactly this assumption that seems most dubious when the
issue is looked at more closely.194
These claims are supported by Adorno’s own admission that the collection had been
inspired by his opposition to Nazism:
the Versuch über Wagner belongs to those works put out by the Institute for
Social Research that set themselves the task of maintaining the opposition to
191
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2010), p. 417.
Richard Wagner: The Man, The Mind, and His Music (London: Secker and Warburg, 1968). For a
comment on Wagner’s place in the eyes of the ‘1968 Generation’, see Second Generation Voices:
Reflections by Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators, ed. by Allan L. Berger and Naomi
Berger (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), p. 4.
193
Theodor Adorno, ‘Fragmente über Wagner’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 8 (1939–40), 1–48.
194
Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, p. 150.
192
75
National Socialism, not by fruitless indignation, but by standing up to it in
an informed way.195
The Versuch is therefore a protest piece in which Nazism is cast, albeit in absentia,
into a critical, dialectical relationship with one of its cultural icons. Adorno’s goal
was to retrieve as much of Wagner’s music as possible from the ‘primeval landscape
of fascism’, and that which was beyond salvage ultimately descended to the ‘most
barbaric recesses of the twentieth [century]’.196 This casts some of the most notable
claims in the Versuch regarding Wagner’s anti-Semitism – the ‘rejects’ of his works
being Jewish, or the idea that the composer ‘had even conceived the notion of the
annihilation of the Jews’ – in an interesting light. 197 These virtuosic rhetorical
flourishes portray Wagner’s anti-Semitism as a product of the failed bourgeois era,
and simultaneously condemn those who admired the ‘fascist’ aspects of his works in
the twentieth century. The Versuch is firmly rooted in the social context in which it
was written then, and its most arresting aperçus did not come from detailed score
studies. Instead they hinge on ideas about fascist aesthetics, in which Adorno
believed ‘spirit was merely the means to an end’. 198 Today these ideas can seem
rather misguided. Whether the Versuch provides a stable enough foundation for
studying the relationship between Wagner’s music and Nazi racial ideology in the
twenty-first century should therefore be doubted. Yet several of those aperçus have
splintered away from the context of the essay to take on ‘a life of [their] own’.199 This
Translation quoted in Nicholas Baragwanath, ‘Musicology and Critical Theory: The Case of
Wagner, Adorno, and Horkheimer’, Music and Letters, 87 (2005), 52–71 (p. 55).
196
John Deathridge, ‘In Search of Wagner by Theodor Adorno; Rodney Livingstone [review article]’,
19th-Century Music, 7 (1983), 81–85 (p. 82).
197
In Search of Wagner, pp. 13 and 16 respectively.
198
Aesthetic Theory, ed. by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor
(London: Continuum, 1997), p. 72. Reinhold Brinkmann went still further and spoke of a coherent,
albeit mutated, system of ‘National Socialist aesthetics of the sublime’. See ‘The Distorted Sublime:
Music and National Socialist Ideology – A Sketch’, in Music and Nazism, ed. by Kater and
Riethmüller, pp. 43–63 (p. 43).
199
Hans Rudolf Vaget, ‘“Du warst mein Feind von je”: The Beckmesser Controversy Revisited’, in
Wagner’s Meistersinger, pp. 190–208 (p. 192).
195
76
uncritical treatment is probably owed to the extent to which Adorno’s writings are
still approached as sacrosanct and quasi-a priori in musicology. 200 Ironically, he
surely would have been the first to bemoan this state of affairs:
to speak seriously of [the] work can mean nothing less than, in Brecht’s
terms, to alienate it; to break through the aura of irrelevant worship which
protectively surrounds it and thereby perhaps to contribute something to an
authentic aesthetic experience of it beyond the paralysing respect of the
academic sphere. This attempt necessarily requires criticism as its
medium.201
II
Das Judentum and Die Meistersinger
The shared historical location
No study of race in Die Meistersinger can afford to overlook Das Judentum in der
Musik.202 How best to translate its title is contested; ‘Jewishness in Music’ remains
the most common English version, though it is not wholly satisfactory. 203 The 1850
200
Admittedly this has begun to change since the turn of the millenium, thanks to Richard Taruskin,
who has mocked Adorno for sitting in a ‘delphic armchair’, and accused him of being ‘preposterously
overrated’ by musicologists in the 1980s and ’90s. See ‘The Musical Mystique: Defending Classical
Music Against its Devotees’, in The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkley:
University of California Press, 2009), pp. 330–53 (p. 345); and The Oxford History of Western Music,
in 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), vol. 1, p. xxv.
201
Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, Fragments and Texts, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by
Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), pp. 569–70. Adorno was speaking here specifically
of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis.
202
In addition to DJiM, Wagner’s later writings, which are often described collectively as the
‘regeneration’ essays, are preoccupied with Jews and the idea of race in general. See the five pieces
written between 1880 and 1881, the years in which he was completing the score of Parsifal: Religion
and Art and ‘What Boots This Knowledge?’ (both 1880); and Know Thyself, Introduction to a Work of
Count Gobineau’s, and Herodom and Christendom (all 1881). See Religion and Art, trans. by William
Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), pp. 38–40 and pp. 211–84. Wagner
also made use of the ‘Wandering Jew’ myth, which was popular in nineteenth-century Europe, in both
Der fliegende Holländer (1843) and Parsifal (1882).
203
This is because, in the nineteenth century, the German word ‘Judentum’ carried negative
connotations and encapsulated ‘religion, nationality and disposition’. None of this is properly
communicated by the English word ‘Jewishness’; and less still by the word ‘Judaism’, which Ashton
Ellis used in his publication. See Jay Geller, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and
Making Sense of Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), p. 2.
77
edition appeared under the pseudonym ‘K. Freigedank’. 204 When the essay was
republished in 1869, it was under Wagner’s real name, and it came with a lengthy
second instalment.205 He became increasingly obsessed with Judaism after 1849, the
year in which he was expelled from Germany for his modest part in the so-called
‘May Uprising’ in Dresden. This was one of the last in a series of revolutionary
events across Germany that had erupted the previous year.206 He began work on Die
Meistersinger in 1845 and completed it over twenty years later in 1867, and so the
two portions of Das Judentum frame the years in which the opera was written. In the
1869 Judentum, Wagner attempted to conceal his motives for republishing the
original essay, for writing another piece on the same theme, and for revealing his
name in the process. ‘What I may have proposed to effect’, he wrote in the
conclusion of the second article,
I should be unable to clearly state, wherefore I fall back on the plea that an
insight into the inevitable downfall of our musical affairs imposed on me the
inner compulsion to trace the causes of that fall.207
This professed uncertainty was disingenuous, however. As will be seen in this
section, there is sufficient reason to suspect that the 1869 publication may have been
linked to his latest opera.
The goal of the 1850 essay was to explain ‘that unconscious feeling which
proclaims itself among the people as a rooted dislike of the Jewish nature’, as it
That is, ‘Free Thought’.
William Ashton Ellis and others since have described the second article as an ‘appendix’. This is a
misleading epithet, given that the two have little in common save the naked anti-Semitism that runs
through both.
206
This revolutionary movement was borne by widespread discontent with autocratic politics in the
German states. For more on this event, see The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to
Reaction, ed. by R. J. W. Evans and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001); Hans J. Hahn, The 1848 Revolutions in German-Speaking Europe (Harlow: Longman,
2001); and Wolfgang J. Mommsen, 1848. Die ungewollte Revolution (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer
Taschenbuch, 2000).
207
DJiM, p. 119.
204
205
78
applied to musical matters in particular. 208 This anti-Semitism clouds an argument
about the twin emergence of commercialism and pastiche in composition in the wake
of Beethoven’s death that would otherwise have been remarkably sophisticated for its
time.209 Wagner’s desire to ‘emancipate’ Germans from Jews leads to a discussion in
which he employs a number of anti-Semitic stereotypes in relation to the musical
world.210 Two of his suggestions in particular must be underlined. They are that it is
impossible to represent Jews in art, and that Jews are not capable of representing
anything artistically themselves. To this Wagner adds that no one can create poetry in
a foreign language. This rule he holds to be particularly problematic for Jews
because, he says, all languages are foreign to them save their own dialect. These
factors combine to make Jewish song the ‘climax of distastefulness’.211 But in spite of
this, he writes, Jews have come to rule the musical inclinations of the public for two
reasons. First, modern culture has become ruled by money divorced from nobility,
which allowed them to purchase their way into Germany’s cultural sphere. Second,
the decay of art after Beethoven’s death into pastiche on the one hand and
commercialism on the other made conditions ripe for Jews to flourish in music – just
as worms devour a corpse.212 The pastiche element of this equation he illustrates with
Mendelssohn, commercialism with Meyerbeer.
By 1869 Wagner had developed a persecution complex. The essay published
in this year is not a catalogue of crude physical stereotypes, as was its predecessor.
Instead it documents the hostility the composer felt he encountered in all corners of
208
DJiM, p. 79.
Deathridge, for example, has underlined that in Wagner’s terms even DJiM is actually, in spite of
its racism, ‘a seminal essay about music’. See Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, p. 230.
210
The gradual emancipation of the Jews across Germany forms a backdrop to the publication of both
essays. For more on this topic, see Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a
Minority, 1848–1933 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
211
DJiM, pp. 84 and 86 respectively.
212
This simile is Wagner’s own. See DJiM, p. 99.
209
79
his career. He lays the blame for this at the feet of the European press, which he
believes to be under the control of Jews.213 Their attack on his work, he argues, is
double pronged. On the one hand, they have wrongly applied their own interpretation
of Zukunftsmusik to his compositions.214 They did this to scare the public away from
performances of his latest works:
since such nonsensical theories could be attributed to me, naturally the
musical works which thence had sprung must be also of the most offensive
character: let their success be what it might, the press still held its ground
that my music must be as abominable as my theory. 215
At the same time, the press deliberately overlooked his real art theories in favour of
praising Eduard Hanslick’s study, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Beautiful in
Music), published in 1854. This book, he argues, is the work of a Jew, apparently
revealed by the author’s use of dialectical reasoning and his praise of Mendelssohn.
In this instance, the intention of the press was to turn Viennese intellectuals against
him. The jealousy ignited in Wagner by the success of Hanslick’s work is quite clear:
I told how, at first – before the commencement of this so expertly mantled
agitation of the Jews against myself – there had been shewn beginnings of
an honourably German treatment and discussion of the views I had laid
down in my writings upon Art.216
He also contends the 1850 Das Judentum essay did not receive the critical attention it
deserved. This is explained with the suggestion that Jewish journalists were so
frightened that they stifled all discussion of art theories published by him in the
213
DJiM, p. 77.
Deathridge records that although Wagner hated the term Zukunftsmusik, he unwittingly encouraged
its use through the stylisation of himself as a progressive artist. See Wagner Beyond Good and Evil,
pp. 43–44. The term was born in the 1850s as a pejorative, but several composers, including Liszt,
Cornelius and Draeseke, soon adopted it as a badge of progressiveness. In 1860 Wagner published an
article entitled ‘Zukunftsmusik’, apparently to introduce his theories to France prior to performances of
his works in the country. The inverted commas are indicative of the problematic relationship that he
had with the term. For more on this topic, see Carolyn Abbate, ‘Opera as Symphony, A Wagnerian
Myth’, in Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner, ed. by Abbate and Roger Parker (Berkley: University
of California Press, 1989) pp. 92–124; and Herbert Schneider, ‘Wagner, Berlioz und die
Zukunftsmusik’, in Liszt und die Neudeutsche Schule, ed. by Detlef Altenburg (Weimar: Laaber,
2006), pp. 77–96.
215
DJiM, p. 104.
216
DJiM, p. 101.
214
80
following years. It was this suppression that laid the ground for Hanslick’s
undeserved success. Wagner also issues a number of personal broadsides. Liszt, for
example, is said to have inadvertently played into Jewish hands by accepting the
epithet Zukunftsmusiker too willingly, while Schumann is criticised for having
allowed himself to be overwhelmed by Jewish influence in the second half of his
career as a consequence of being the editor of a leading journal. Adolf Stahr and
Robert Franz, two journalists who actually praised Wagner’s music, are berated for
having not praised it enough.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Judentum essays is Wagner’s
consistent description of Judaism as a force that exists in opposition to Germany.
This can be seen in his use of metaphors associated with war and fighting:
In the ‘Neue Zeitschrift für Musik’ not long ago, mention was made of an
‘Hebraic art-taste’: an attack and a defense of that expression neither did,
nor could, stay lacking.217
It is much rather we [i.e., Germans] who are shifted into the necessity of
fighting for emancipation from the Jews.218
Hitherto, at any rate, only the clumsier artillery of Judaism had been brought
into the field against my article: no attempt had been made to bring about a
rejoinder in any intelligent, nay even any decent fashion.219
[I] was met not only with the natural obstacles which uprear themselves in
every age, but also with a fully-organised Opposition.220
In this sense the essays are related to a broader trend of thought in nineteenth-century
Germany.221 Cosima Wagner, the composer’s second wife, documented in her diaries
the various responses to both Das Judentum and Die Meistersinger during the early
months of 1869. She rarely spoke by name of individuals she believed to be both
217
DJiM, p. 79.
DJiM, p. 81.
219
DJiM, p. 102.
220
DJiM, p. 114.
221
Jacob Katz records that the belief Jews’ ‘self-exclusion from the common ideals of mankind led to
social aloofness and this, in its turn, to an ethical indifference toward the rest of society’ was common
in nineteenth-century Germany. See From Prejudice to Destruction, p. 150.
218
81
Jewish and sabotaging her husband. Rather, she too characterised Judaism as one of
several impersonal agencies attempting to impede the opera’s success. For example,
on Wednesday, 20 January 1869, she recorded that
after lunch a letter arrives from Esser, the musical director in Vienna, saying
that the management there intends to stage Die Meistersinger in October of
next year, that is to say, in two years’ time!! Yet Dingelstedt had been in a
great hurry with his contract, in which R. was to undertake not to let any
fragments from his work be played in Vienna and also to give no other
theatre besides the Court theatre the right to produce the opera. So the
intention was to suppress Die Msinger entirely. Luckily R. was suspicious
and did not accept the clause. – We are quite appalled at this new example
of unworthiness. Here probably everything is working hand in hand –
bureaucracy, Judaism, theatre management (Dingelstedt), and perhaps even
the Court.222
And on Wednesday, 14 April 1869, Cosima even drew a direct correlation between
the reception of Das Judentum and a displeased audience, writing ‘in Mannheim Die
Msinger has been hissed on account of the pamphlet’.223
The shared themes
At least three themes connect the Judentum essays with Wagner’s new composition:
publicity, politics, and race. First, he wished to distance himself from the
Zukunftsmusik slogan in order to convince the public that it had not informed his
latest opera. Second, the twin arrival of essay and opera made for an aggressive
attempt to establish the supremacy of a type of art that he considered both rooted in
the Volk and truly post-Beethovenian, as opposed to decaying in the form of pastiche,
commerce, or empty intellectualism. Both the Judentum essays and Die Meistersinger
were parts of an ongoing project to divide what was truly German from the potpourri
of commercial and pastiche art that he labelled as Jewish.224 Third, the character of
222
Cosima Wagner, Diaries, in 2 vols, ed. and annotated by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack,
trans. with an introduction by Geoffrey Skelton (London: William Collins, 1978), vol. 1, p. 44.
223
Diaries, vol. 1, p. 86.
224
Wagner was therefore being disingenuous when he certified ‘the total victory of Judaism on every
side; and if now once more I raise my voice against it, it certainly is from no idea that I can reduce by
82
Beckmesser was at least partly informed by the stereotypes of Jews that Wagner
propounded in the essays. By itself, the simultaneous arrival of these two works
across Germany raises the possibility that Die Meistersinger may have been
connected to his developing ideas about Jews.225 For example, Beckmesser clearly
embodies two of the arguments in the Judentum essays; namely that Jews were
incapable of writing poetry or singing music, as was claimed in 1850; and that overly
critical thinking and dialectal reasoning were hallmarks of the Jewish understanding
of beauty, as was written in 1869.
Beckmesser’s Jewish characteristics have already been debated at length, and
Barry Millington was the first to discuss the relationship between opera and essay in
his article, ‘Nuremberg Trial: Is There Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger?’226 As
with the description of Jews in Das Judentum, Millington argued, Beckmesser ‘lacks
artistic sensitivity and is profoundly unmusical: both in his serenade in Act II and in
his rendition of the borrowed song in the contest in Act III, he shows himself utterly
incapable of matching the text to appropriate musical phrases’.227 While this much is
certainly true, the article has been criticised for being overly reductive.228 Wagner’s
employment of Jewish stereotypes ‘does not preclude the presence, and indeed the
one iota the fullness of that victory’ – as this implies he had given up on attempting to separate Jewish
identity from German identity. See DJiM, p. 119.
225
Although it was premiered on 21 June 1868 in Munich, Die Meistersinger was not performed for
the first time in Mannheim and several other cities until 1869.
226
‘Nuremberg Trial: Is There Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger?’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 3
(1991), 21–41.
227
‘Nuremberg Trial’, p. 251.
228
Though these ideas are still not accepted across Wagner studies. Scholars who have contested
Millington directly include Lawrence Kramer, who suggested ‘the presence or absence of antiSemitism in Wagner’s operas is no more “provable” than any interpretation. Which is to say, it is not
provable at all, and the fact doesn’t matter. For the whole issue here is wrongly framed. Wagner’s
operas cannot be isolated like specimens on a microscopic slide’. See Opera and Modern Culture:
Wagner and Strauss (Berkley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 72. Peter Kivy has made
similar claims: ‘the origin of Beckmesser’s character in Jewish caricatures provides no evidence that
Beckmesser, the character in Wagner’s opera, is a Jewish caricature’. See Music, Language and
Cognition, and Other Essays in the Aesthetics of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), p. 46.
83
interchangeability, of a larger repertoire of “foreign” stereotypes’.229 As is the case
with Alberich, Kundry, and other contentious Wagnerian characters, it is unhelpful to
imply that Beckmesser is an out-and-out Jewish caricature. He is more usefully
described as an outsider characterised by his ‘radical difference’, a non-specific
composite of racial and social stereotypes.230 For example, it has been suggested that
his use of coloratura is a stab at the old Italian ‘Bel Canto’ as much as it is a
caricature of Jewish cantorial style. Beckmesser also gave Wagner an opportunity for
target practice against critics he felt to be so swamped in rules and regulations that
they had lost sight of ‘true’ art – Hanslick being only the most prominent of many.231
This idea of a Beckmesser-as-composite aligns with Wagner’s beliefs about
the impossibility of representing Jews on stage:
passing over the moral side, in effect of this in itself unpleasant freak of
Nature [i.e., a Jew], and coming to its bearings upon Art, we here will
merely observe that to us this exterior can never be thinkable as a subject for
the art of re-presentment: if plastic art wants to present us with a Jew, it
mostly takes its model from sheer phantasy, with a prudent ennobling, or
entire omission, of just everything that characterises for us in common life
the Jew’s appearance.232
It is also worth noting Wagner’s claim that the very idea of a Jewish caricature is
flawed, given that nothing could be worse than a real Jew:
who has not been seized with a feeling of the greatest revulsion, of horror
mingled with the absurd, at hearing that sense-and-sound-confounding
gurgle, jodle and cackle, which no intentional caricature can make more
repugnant than as offered here in full, in naïve seriousness?233
229
Michael P. Steinberg, Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity and Nineteenth-Century Music
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), p. 160.
230
This useful term is borrowed from John Deathridge, who used it to describe Kundry. See Wagner
Beyond Good and Evil, p. 168.
231
See, for example, David J. Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and Zemlinsky
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 218. It is well known that, in an early draft of Die
Meistersinger, Wagner referred to the character that eventually became Beckmesser as ‘Hanslich’. For
a thorough account of the exchanges about Judaism and Das Judentum between Hanslick and Wagner,
see Thomas S. Grey, ‘Masters and their Critics: Wagner, Hanslick and Beckmesser, and Die
Meistersinger’, in Wagner’s Meistersinger, pp. 165–89.
232
DJiM, p. 83.
233
DJiM, p. 91.
84
There is no need for a detailed textual analysis of how Wagner’s belief about Jews’
inability to interpret true art made its way into the score of Die Meistersinger, given
that several impressive studies have already been conducted at length elsewhere.234
If there is anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger, Millington concludes, then ‘the
implications for our understanding of the opera are profound’.235 Why this is so is left
unclear. It was perhaps this type of claim that Laurence Dreyfus had in mind when he
observed that while composers such as Wagner can be censured for their ‘selfcentered nastiness and their noxious political views […] critics have rarely staked out
a coherent ethical position from which to throw stones’.236 Indeed, all concern about
Beckmesser being an anti-Semitic caricature impacting present-day understandings of
Die Meistersinger seems to stem, consciously or otherwise, from the position held by
the opera in the Third Reich: a form of guilt-by-association. After all, Wagner never
wrote anything as transparently racist as Modest Musorgsky’s ‘Two Jews: One Rich,
One Poor’. 237 Yet Pictures at an Exhibition, the concert work to which this
movement belongs, occupies an apparently unquestioned place in today’s popular
repertoire. 238 Evidence for guilt-by-association is even present in the title of
Millington’s article. The term ‘Nuremberg Trial’ invokes Nazi Germany, and
specifically the worst of its crimes. Yet he never actually discusses the Third Reich in
the essay.
These have focussed principally on Beckmesser’s distortion of Walther’s prize-song. For one
analysis of this scene, see Weiner, Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, pp. 67–70.
235
‘Nuremberg Trial’, p. 247.
236
Wagner and the Erotic Impulse, p. 220.
237
Moreover, while Wagner may have been alone in writing out his beliefs at great length, he was
hardly the only anti-Semitic composer of the nineteenth century. Jonathan Bellman notes that Chopin,
for example, ‘could sound viciously anti-Semitic in correspondence, generally in complaining about
publishers’ business practices’. See Chopin’s Polish Ballade: Op. 38 as Narrative of National
Martyrdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 140.
238
Weiner has analysed Musorgsky’s caricature of Jews in Pictures at an Exhibition in detail. See
Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, pp. 143–47. Richard Taruskin has described Musorgsky as
‘Russia’s most conspicuously anti-Semitic composer’. See Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 383.
234
85
III
Die Meistersinger in Nazi Racial Ideology
Propaganda beyond direct citation
Not least with this in mind, it is important to understand exactly how and why Die
Meistersinger complemented the racial aspects of Nazi propaganda. I am unaware of
any instances in which the Party quoted directly from Das Judentum or any other of
Wagner’s essays. This is readily explained, however. For one thing, much of Das
Judentum would have contradicted Nazi ideology in spite of its anti-Semitism. In the
1869 instalment, for instance, Wagner attempted to separate himself from the
violence of medieval Judaeophobia, which he described as ‘shameful for our own
enlightened times’. 239 He also mocked the music critic Ludwig Bischoff for
‘twist[ing] my idea of an “Artwork of the Future” into the absurd pretension of a
“Music of the Future” (Zukunftsmusik), a music, forsooth, which would haply sound
quite well in course of time, however ill it might sound now’.240 As will be seen in
the next chapter, the position that Wagner ascribes to Bischoff was precisely the same
as that taken by Goebbels in a 1933 radio talk on Die Meistersinger. Moreover,
Wagner wrote that
only in St Petersburg and Moscow did I find the terrain of the musical press
still overlooked by Jewry: there I lived to see a miracle – for the first time in
my life, was I taken up by the newspapers quite as much as by the public.241
This would hardly have sat well alongside one of the staple myths of Nazi
propaganda, that in the east Judaism and Bolshevism had been knotted together for
239
DJiM, p. 102.
DJiM, p. 103.
241
DJiM, p. 110.
240
86
generations.242 In the conclusion to the 1869 essay, Wagner acknowledged his Jewish
friendships and professional relationships:
just as humane friends of the Church have deemed possible its salutary
reform through an appeal to the downtrod nether clergy, so also did I take in
eye the great gifts of heart, as well as mind, which, to my genuine
refreshment, had greeted me from out the sphere of Jew society itself.243
No matter how insincere this admission seems today, it would certainly have caused
the Nazis some embarrassment.
But the most obvious explanation for the large absence of Wagner’s Judentum
essays from Nazi propaganda is the complexity of their prose. 244 As early as 1925,
Hitler himself had specified that the best propaganda would ‘always address itself to
the broad masses of the people’.245 He made several similar statements along these
lines in Mein Kampf, a small selection of which are worth quoting here.
All propaganda must be presented in a popular form and must fix its
intellectual level so as not to be above the heads of the least intellectual of
those to whom it is directed. Thus its purely intellectual level will have to
be that of the lowest mental common denominator among the public it is
desired to reach. When there is question of bringing a whole nation within
the circle of its influence, as happens in the case of war propaganda, then
too much attention cannot be paid to the necessity of avoiding a high level,
which presupposes a relatively high degree of intelligence among the
public.246
The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their
understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being
the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials
and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas.
These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual
has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.247
André Gerrits has stated that ‘few historians would deny that “Jewish Communism”, a variant of
the “Jewish World Conspiracy”, has been one of the most powerful and destructive political myths in
early-20th century Europe’. See The Myth of Jewish Communism: A Historical Interpretation
(Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009), p. 9.
243
DJiM, p. 120. For one detailed study of Wagner’s working relationship with a Jewish conductor,
see Laurence Dreyfus, ‘Hermann Levi’s Shame and Parsifal’s Guilt: A Critique of Essentialism in
Biography and Criticism’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 6 (1994), 125–45.
244
This perhaps explains why Das Judentum underwent only two reprints in the era of the Third Reich,
one in 1934 (Berlin, Steegemann Verlag) and another in 1939 (Leipzig, Breitkopf and Härtel).
245
MK, p. 147.
246
MK, pp. 147–48.
247
MK, p. 148.
242
87
The very first condition which has to be fulfilled in every kind of
propaganda[:] namely, a systematically one-sided attitude towards every
problem that has to be dealt with.248
It would hardly have been feasible for the Nazis to quote straight from Das Judentum
in propaganda made according to these guidelines. Similarly, a highbrow medium
such as opera would not have been simplistic enough for conveying unambiguous
racial messages to the public. For these reasons, the Nazis only ever appealed to the
idea of Wagner in their propaganda. He was just one in a vast matrix of symbols,
simulacra, and images, as was Die Meistersinger. This opera was called upon in the
Hitler era not because the Party expected it to popularise Nazi racial ideology
directly. Instead it could be held up as a ‘great’ German artwork that reflected, and
thus granted some degree of historical and cultural credibility to, the anti-Semitic
spirit of their movement.
Nature, humour, history
Reflections of their racial beliefs that the Nazis may have seen in Die Meistersinger
can be found principally in Wagner’s treatment of nature, humour, and history. The
Nazis often depicted racial purity with images from nature, such as landscapes, and
occasionally with buildings. This was partly informed by practical considerations. In
glorifying the countryside, they could appeal to the rural population.249 But they were
motivated principally by deeply seated ideological convictions. The Party had always
associated its beliefs about race with Natur. It is unlikely to be coincidence, for
example, that the Reich Nature Protection Law and the Nuremberg Laws came into
248
MK, p. 149.
For more on this matter, see Clifford R. Lovin, ‘Blut und Boden: The Ideological Basis of the Nazi
Agricultural Progamme’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (1967), 279–88 (p. 279).
249
88
practice in the same year.250 Similar overlaps can be seen across the Hitler era. For
example, Richard Walther Darré was well known as both the creator of the ‘Blood
and Soil’ campaign, and as the head of the SS-Race and Settlement Main Office
(Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt-SS, or RuSHa). 251 Thomas M. Lekan has already
observed the nineteenth-century roots of the equation between race and nature, noting
that
preservationists interpreted Nazi appeals to Blood and Soil as an affirmation
of the Heimat tradition, an updated version of the Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl’s
appeal to Land und Leute that recognised landscape protection’s role in
fortifying German national identity and reestablishing it on a natural
basis.252
Die Meistersinger is saturated with evocative descriptions of scenes from nature, and
of structures in medieval Nuremberg. David’s long list of the sensuously entitled
melodies sung by the Masters, which appears in Act I scene 2, is one such example:
Hawthorn, Straw and Fennel melodies; the Tender, the Sweet, the Rose
tones; the Rosemary and Wall-Flower melodies; the Rainbow and
Nightingale melodies; the Pewter and Cinnamon-Stick melodies; Fresh
Orange, Green Lime Blossom melodies; the Frog, the Calf, the Goldfinch
melodies; the Departed Glutton melody; the Lark, the Snail, the Barker
tones; the Little Balm-Mint, the Marjioram melodies.253
That is, 1935. Charles E. Clossman was right to claim that the Nazi conservationists ‘effectively
infused ideological content into a law that otherwise looked “remarkably unideological”’. See
‘Legalising a Volksgemeinschaft: Nazi Germany’s Reich Nature Protection Law of 1935’, in How
Green Were the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich, ed. by Franz-Joseph
Brüggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005), p. 20.
251
Darré offered his resignation as the head of RuSHa in February 1938, which Himmler accepted. He
became unpopular for his long-winded speeches and his bent toward complex ideology, both of which
clouded his position on agricultural policy. Although Himmler ultimately came to view Darré’s ideas
on settlement as not radical enough, there is no doubt that he contributed a great deal to the eventual
form of Nazi eugenics and genocide. For more on their relationship, see Longerich, Himmler, pp. 415–
17. For more on the connection between race and agricultural life in the Third Reich, in addition to
Lekan, and Brüggemeier, Cioc, and Zeller, see Anna Bramwell, Blood and Soil: Richard Walther
Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’ (Bourne End: Kensal, 1985); Gustavo Corni and Horst Gies, ‘Blut
und Boden’: Rassenideologie und Agrarpolitik im Staat Hitlers (Idstein: Schulz-Kirchner, 1994); and
John Farquharson, The Plough and the Swastika: The NSDAP and Agriculture in Germany, 1928–
1945 (London: Sage Publications, 1976). See also Richard Walther Darré’s original pamphlet on
‘Blood and Soil’, Blut und Boden. Grundgedanke des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Verlag Volksbuch,
1936).
252
Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 154.
253
Adorno rightly points out that the ‘romantic charm’ of such smells and sights would have been
totally alien to a sixteenth-century citizen of Nuremberg. See Wagner, p. 110.
250
89
Wagner employs a variety of compositional means to separate the groups of melodies
named by David from one another. They include constant fluctuations in tempo,
double bar lines, and occasional changes of time signature. At first glance, the score
for this section may appear rather disjunct. Consider, for example, the juxtaposition
between the music for the ‘writing paper and black ink’ melodies, and the ‘red, blue,
and green tones’. The orchestral accompaniment of the former has an officious
sound: the vocal line is backed with forte bassoons, clarinets, horns, and oboes. A
single, forte quaver pizzicato chord in the strings separates the ‘writing paper’ from
the ‘black ink’. The distinctive rhythmic pattern of the Prelude’s opening bar is
clearly present in these two bars. The vocal line is declamatory and is characterised
by its descending leaps, first of a fourth, then a seventh.
Figure 10 – ‘die Schreibpapier’
After a pause, a double bar-line, and a change of time signature, there follow the ‘red,
blue, and green tones’. These feature altogether richer orchestral writing. The short
passage is underpinned by the ’cellos; they and the rest of the strings are now playing
90
with their bows; and when the horns and clarinets do enter, they are marked dolce.
The vocal line has now taken on a much more melodic character. It is uninterrupted
and decorated with grace notes.
Figure 11 – ‘rote, blau und grüne Ton’
Both of these sections can be compared with the cold world of ‘the short love and the
forgotten melody’, where only solitary chords in the violins and violas accompany
David’s stammering line.
Figure 11 – ‘der kurzen Liebe’
The effect of all this – allowing each batch of melodies in the libretto to occupy a
distinctive sound world of its own – serves to heighten the fantastical nature of the
text. Later, in Act I scene 3, the festival of St John’s day takes place on the ‘green
91
meadow’ by the ‘flowery grove’. At the beginning of Act II scene 1, Wagner lays out
a detailed vision of houses on the crooked streets of Nuremberg on the eve of St
John’s Day. Over the duration of this scene, a beautiful summer dusk gradually
descends into night. The final scene of Act III, in which the stage shows the open
meadow by the River Pegnitz with the city visible in the background, is yet another
example. In Wagner’s Nuremberg, even the weather is always perfect. When Eva
asks Pogner in Act II scene 2, ‘won’t it be too cool [outside]?’, he replies, ‘no, no, it’s
mild and refreshing; it’s a delightful balmy evening (lieblich lind der Abend)’. The
city’s natural beauty is an outward manifestation of its inhabitants’ inner social
purity.
Another characteristic feature of the Nazi movement was a brand of humour
in which comedy was used to neutralise violence done to the Other.254 In his history
of racist humour, Simon Weaver wrote that
race science came to focus on the ‘other’ as representative of degeneration
and the ‘self’ as representative of purity, which encouraged and excused the
manipulation of the degenerative ‘other’. An ostensive expression of this
tendency appeared in the race science of Nazi Germany.255
Drawing on the terminology of Zigmunt Bauman, he went on to describe Jews, in
Nazi eyes, as ‘ambivalence incarnate’, and genocide as the most extreme possible
form of ‘ambivalence removal’. In his conclusion, he adds that
racism, ideas of racial purity and degeneration, in their many forms, will
also demand other more banal, acceptable, less extreme, or more day-to-day
methods of ambivalence removal […] racist reality can be ‘redefined’ in
humour through the fantasy of extermination.256
254
The role of humour as a medium of opposition in Nazi Germany has been discussed extensively.
See, for example, F. K. M. Hillenbrand, Underground Humour in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (London:
Routledge, 1995). For a study of humour in the opera, see Klaus Van Den Berg, ‘Die Meistersinger as
Comedy: The Performative and Social Signification of Drama’, in Wagner’s Meistersinger, ed. by
Vazsonyi, pp. 145–64.
255
The Rhetoric of Racist Humour: US, UK and Global Race Joking (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), p.
49.
256
The Rhetoric of Racist Humour, p. 50.
92
Very little has been written on the utilisation of humour for easing the promulgation
of racial ideology in the Third Reich, but there is sufficient fragmentary evidence to
suspect that it did become a tool for such ends. For example, Victor Klemperer wrote
that the Nazis’ ‘conscious humour is spite against the defenseless’, and he made
several telling records of how it entered into everyday life. 257 On 28 August 1933, for
example, he described an anecdote that he heard while on a ‘mystery tour’ of Lübau,
and the way in which it was received:
then [the compère] tells a story of what apparently happened to him at the
hairdresser’s. A Jewish woman wants to have her hair crimped. ‘I regret
madam that I am not allowed to’. – ‘You are not allowed to?’ ‘Impossible!
The Führer solemnly promised on the occasion of the boycott of the Jews –
and, despite all horror stories to the contrary, it remains true right up to the
present day – that no one is to harm a hair on a Jew’s head’. This was
followed by laughing and clapping which lasted several minutes.258
The Nazis often portrayed the humiliation of Jews as a source of amusement. This
can be seen in photographs of Jewish men having their beards violently removed by
soldiers. Goebbels gave special attention to comedy in Die Meistersinger, describing
it as ‘that German humour, of which one says “it smiles with one eye and cries with
the other”’. 259 Obviously he had something complimentary in mind here, but my
interest lies in his identification of the opera’s comic aspects as specifically German.
Anti-Semitism had often taken a jocular form in Germany long before the
Nazis came to power. Adorno, who suggested that the Brothers Grimm fairytale
about the Jew in the thorns was a forerunner of the humour that appears in Wagner’s
music, concluded that, for the composer’s villains,
257
I Will Bear Witness 1933–1941: A Diary of the Nazi Years, trans. with a preface and notes by
Martin Chalmers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1998), 1 March 1938, p. 251.
258
The Language of the Third Reich, trans. by Martin Brady (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 30.
259
VB, 8 August 1933.
93
the comedy of their suffering not only gives pleasure to whoever inflicts it;
it also stifles any questions about its justifications and tacitly presents itself
as the ultimate authority.260
Beckmesser is an isolated figure in Die Meistersinger, and the community takes
pleasure in mocking him in the process of bringing him down from his post. This
happens in the opera’s final scene, when the antagonism that has built toward him
through the whole work is released during his attempt to sing the prize song. The
assembled crowd greets his failure with raucous derision. Wagner instructs that
‘during the procession and ever since [Beckmesser] has been continually taking the
poem out of his pocket trying to commit it to memory, and constantly wiping the
perspiration from his brow in despair’. When it comes to singing, Beckmesser is
unable to keep a steady foot on the podium, much to the amusement of the boys who
have fashioned it. ‘The apprentices lead Beckmesser to a little mound of turf which
they have beaten solid and richly bestrewn with flowers’, Wagner instructs, and
‘Beckmesser stumbles up it, treads uncertainly and totters, and the boys snigger and
vigorously beat the turf’. After he has been humiliated at length, ‘all burst into a peal
of loud laughter. Beckmesser descending the mound angrily and hastening to Sachs
[…] He rushes away furiously and disappears in the crowd (verliert sich unter dem
Volke)’. At one point during Beckmesser’s song, the people even remonstrate one
another for laughing at him: ‘Be quiet! He’s a very able Master! Quiet! Stop joking!’
Their collective amusement masks the cruelty with which their victim has been
treated.
Adorno, Wagner, p. 11. See the Brothers Grimm, ‘Der Jude im Dorn’. In this fairytale, a Jewish
man becomes trapped in a thorn bush. A young German realises that he can make the Jew dance
against his will, thereby increasing his pain, by performing to him on the violin. In his discussion of
humour in Die Meistersinger, Adorno focuses on the riot scene in Act II rather than Beckmesser’s
eventual demise. In a recent article, Timothy McFarland suggested it was too reductive to focus on this
tale alone, and assessed the connections between the opera and other areas of the Grimms’ output. See
‘The Humiliation of Beckmesser: “Der Jude im Dorn” and the Authority of Jacob Grimm in Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’, Oxford German Studies, 41 (2012), 197–212.
260
94
It is widely accepted that, for the Nazis, there was a significant intersection
between history and race:
race was decisive in the realm of history because of the manner in which
peoples apprehended, assimilated, and preserved knowledge. And because
he saw culture as a racial creation, Hitler’s view of history could be called
ethnic-biological, as opposed to the Marxist view, which was socialeconomic.261
Die Meistersinger would surely have accorded with the Nazi belief that in order to
unfold the country’s future, the people should restore the ideal state in which
Germany had supposedly existed in the past. This idea was not Wagner’s invention.
Nostalgic fetishisation of Nuremberg, and particularly of the guilds of Mastersingers,
is a trope of German nationalism that dates back to at least the mid-nineteenth
century. It can be seen in Albert Lortzing’s opera Hans Sachs of 1840, and Johann
Ludwig Deinhardstein’s 1827 play of the same title on which Lortzing based his
composition. Even a work as early as E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Serapion Brethren, a
collection of short stories published between 1819 and 1821, includes romanticised
visions of Nuremberg and the arts in Germany in the tale of ‘Master Martin’. In Die
Meistersinger, Wagner’s longing for an ideal past is articulated most plainly by Hans
Sachs. In Act II scene 3, he describes Walter’s song as having ‘sounded so old’ and
yet also being ‘so new’. It is often observed that this remark relates to Wagner’s own
techniques of composition; but, more importantly for my purposes, it also implies
that the most compelling form of ‘the new’ is to be found in a perfected form of ‘the
old’.262 One of the most cited lines in the whole opera, Sachs’ instruction to ‘honour
your German Masters’, which appears in his final soliloquy in Act III, is a plea for the
nation to revere its canon of great artists. These observations all support Arthur
261
Gilmer W. Blackburn, Education in the Third Reich: Race and History in Nazi Textbooks (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1985), p. 51.
262
Perhaps the best-known exposition of this argument is found in Carl Dahlhaus, Richard Wagner’s
Music Dramas, trans. by Mary Whittall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 72–73.
95
Groos’ compelling argument that the sixteenth-century setting of Die Meistersinger
represents ‘a fulfillment anticipated by the Biblical age, a “paradise” and a “promised
land” in the geographic and spiritual centre of Germany’, while also ‘containing the
contemporary nineteenth century it is designed to anticipate’.263
From humiliation to expulsion
By isolating the portion of Die Meistersinger in which Beckmesser is humiliated
before the community, and pinpointing the manifestation of a similar trope in the
1930s, we may gain a clearer understanding of how the Nazis transposed this opera
into their racial universe. Wagner implies that if the real Nuremberg is to become as
beautiful as it once was, then the Volk must unite against their enemies within. This
idea of ridding an ideal German town of anything unwanted may have been inspired
by actual historical events, such as the Hep Hep riots in the early nineteenth
century.264 By the time of Hitler’s rule, this aspect of nationalist fantasies had become
more explicitly about expulsion, and had taken on transparently anti-Semitic
connotations. The Party often placed crude caricatures of Jews in its own simulacra of
medieval towns, for example, where they were taken as symbols for the nation’s state
of racial degeneration.
Consider the children’s books and toys produced during the Hitler era. The
board game Juden Raus! depicts a generic medieval town, filled with stores and
outlined by a brick wall complete with garrisons and turrets. 265 This imagery amounts
‘Constructing Nuremberg: Typological and Proleptic Communities in Die Meistersinger’, 19thCentury Music, 16 (1992), 18–34 (p. 26).
264
For more on these riots, see Katz, Prejudice to Destruction, pp. 92–106.
265
The infamous game was made in 1938 by Günther & Co., Dresden, and was distributed by Rudolf
Fabricius at Bad Neusalza-Spremberg. Despite its notoriety, the game has been subject to only a
handful of scholarly examinations. One of the most recent is by Andrew Morris-Friedman and Ulrich
Sändler, ‘“Juden Raus!” (‘Jews Out!’) – History’s Most Infamous Board Game’, Board Game Studies,
6 (2003), 47–58. The authors claim that only two copies of Juden Raus! survived the War – one being
held in the Wiener Library, London, and the other in the Museum of Jewish Heritage, New York.
263
96
to more than mere representation. It is clearly based on places that actually existed –
Nuremberg was one city to have built such a construction around its perimeter in the
Middle Ages – but its models have been concentrated into a heavily idealised form,
and they have been stripped from their original contexts in order to be repurposed for
twentieth-century concerns.266 It is, in Baudrillard’s terms, a simulacrum.
Figure 13 – The playing board of Juden Raus!
The object of Juden Raus! is to capture and remove six Jewish figures from the city,
thereby restoring it to the state in which it had been before they invaded. Ernst
Heimer’s book The Poisonous Mushroom (Der Giftpilz) offers a similar example.267
However, in private correspondence Michael Berkowitz has informed me that many more copies
survived without being given over to the care of museums or archives.
266
For more on Nuremberg’s city wall, see Stephen Brockmann, Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital
(Woodbridge: Camden House, 2006), p. 13.
267
Ernst Heimer, Der Giftpilz (Nuremberg: Stürmer Verlag, 1938). At least one anti-Semitic children’s
tale was published for use in schools before Hitler came to power, but Der Giftpilz was radically
different from what had preceded it. Katharine Kennedy recorded that, before 1933, ‘elementary
schoolbooks rarely defined Germanness in terms of hostile “un-Germans” within. Rather, the more
usual pattern was for textbooks published by and for majority populations to ignore those on the
margins, promoting an imaginary vision of a homogenous, harmonious Germany, which could vary
97
It is a collection of seventeen short stories, the first of which lends its title to the
volume as a whole. The illustration accompanying the story ‘How the Jews Came to
Us’ (‘Wie die Juden zu uns gekommen sind’) is particularly noteworthy. It depicts a
picturesque old town whose cobbled streets are populated by blonde children. A
horse-drawn cart is in the background. The beauty of the town is another example of
a society’s inner racial purity manifested outwardly as physical beauty. Three male
Jews with large beards and black kaftans stand in the foreground. They are huddled in
discussion and have mysterious bags, bundles and leaves of paper about them. These
are the outward manifestations of their inner degeneracy.
Figure 14 – The image accompanying the story ‘How the Jews Came to Us’ in Der Giftpilz
from book to book according to the regional and religious population for whom it was primarily
intended’. See ‘“Black-Red-Gold Enemies”: Catholics, Socialists and Jews in Elementary Schoolbooks
from Kaiserreich to Third Reich’, in German History from the Margins, ed. by Neil Gregor, Nils
Roemer and Mark Roseman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 146–64 (p. 146).
98
These childrens’ products find their equivalent for adults in propaganda rags like Der
Stürmer. No character in Die Meistersinger could ever be made to appear so onedimensional and unambiguous, but these broad connections between the opera and
Nazism do reveal that both belong on the same historical continuum. This enabled the
Nazis to make use of Wagner’s image in their propaganda. They did so in abundance
because, as a well-known cultural figure, he gave some semblance of credibility to
their own simulacra. That they had some comprehension of this is apparent from their
writing about him, both musicological and journalistic. A particularly good example
can be found in Karl Richard Ganzer’s pamphlet, Wagner und das Judentum. He
concluded that
clearly, Wagner was not in a position to indicate specific measures for how
one could dispose of the Jew. But in his warnings and in his wishes, he laid
a finger on the true secret of every solution to the Jewish question, that we
ourselves have seen to become historical reality (geschichtliche
Wirklichkeit): the renewal of the people, the compression of their energies,
the concern for a new health, which causes the death (stirbt) of the
parasite.268
The idea that Wagner lent a sense of vague historical authority to the Nazis’ own
anti-Semitism could scarcely have been expressed more plainly than this.
Wagner’s ‘Jewish taint’ and the importance of his ‘Germanness’ to the Nazis
The importance of Wagner’s image to Nazi racial policy is underlined by the vigour
with which they defended his ‘Germanness’. Consider the court martial of Karl
Schwander, a member of the SS, which took place in the summer of 1942. He was
tried for making public allegations about the racial purity of the Wagner family. 269
Schwander was born around 1895 and lived in Würzberg. At the time of his trial he
268
Wagner und das Judentum, p. 34.
BA NS19/3318. To the best of my knowledge, this case and its implications for the study of
Wagner in the Third Reich have not yet been analysed. The punishment that Schwander received for
his misdemeanour is unclear, although it is likely to have been minor.
269
99
was an SS-Untersturmführer in the Reserve Sturmbahn, Eighty-First Standard, which
was then based in Oslo. On 26 August that year, he was brought before a tribunal in a
military court (SS- und Polizeigericht IX). He was summoned in relation to fears that
the SS in Würzberg had been teaching new recruits that the Wagner family was
racially impure and that Bayreuth was a ‘Jewish affair’ (jüdische Angelegenheit).
Schwander admitted to alleging that Wagner’s grandchildren had inherited a ‘Jewish
element’ (ein jüdischer Einschlag) from their mother’s side of the family. He claimed
in his defence that he merely repeated what he had been told by a friend, a man that
he names as Dr Hadlich from Würzburg, during a casual discussion among work
colleagues. Schwander’s confession records how he was caught:
I was in [Dr Hadlich’s] Party office among the closest circle of colleagues,
and when the conversation turned to the Jews, I told what Dr. Hadlich had
imparted to me – to my astonishment: that a Jewish trait was present in the
Wagner family. The sister of G[auo]bmannes and Miss Beatrix Reinhardt,
who was employed by the Party in Ursburg, were both present. She was
very agitated by this information and reckoned that it could in no way be
true, particularly as the work of Richard Wagner is so supported by the
Party and the Führer. I explained to her that I myself would never have
heard it from another source, and would not like a word of it mentioned in
our training courses. The whole thing was an entirely in-house conversation
among members of the Party or employees of the office. Otherwise, I have
not spoken about this matter in public at all. I only suspect that his
declaration has moved into further circles because Ms. Reinhardt may
already have put it in writing to Bayreuth.270
Schwander’s fear that his comments had moved into further circles was correct. His
allegations were communicated to Bayreuth in a letter dated 8 April 1942. Winifred
quickly relayed this missive, which had presumably been written by Schwander’s
colleague Beatrix Reinhardt, to Hitler’s Headquarters. Himmler himself then
requested that RuSHa investigate the matter. Otto Hofmann was head of the
organisation at the time Schwander’s comments came to its attention. As such he was
one of the attendees of the infamous Wannsee Conference, which had taken place in
270
BA NS19/3318.
100
January that year.271 Ever since the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, RuSHa had
been the driving force behind the Nazi effort to ‘Germanise’ all their captured Eastern
territories. In 1942 then, the organisation was dealing primarily with the deportation
and extermination of Jews, as well as issues such as the contravening of racial laws
by SS members, the selection of children from the occupied territories that were fit
for ‘Germanisation’ – and a rumour about racial impurity in the Wagner family that
was circulating in Würzburg.
The letter sent to Winifred Wagner apparently contained the following
paragraph:
This [presumably Schwander’s] conduct can be explained by an SS racialpolitical training course (rassenpolitische Schulung der SS) in Würzburg, in
which a lecture on ‘The Jewish Taint (jüdische Versippung) in the Wagner
Family’ has been held. In Würzburg ever since, Bayreuth has been spoken
of in the most important Party circles as a ‘Jewish affair’.272
This seems likely to have been an exaggeration, however. The SS found no evidence
to show that such a lecture had ever been given. Winifred was nevertheless keen to
make sure that Himmler understood that the supposed Judaism of the Wagner family
was not to be discussed. She assured him that evidence
appears in brief a book about the genealogy of Richard Wagner, ‘Truth and
Legend About Richard Wagner’s Genealogy’, published by the Director of
the R. Wagner Research Facility, which adduces irrefutable evidence that he
was a pure Aryan. We hope that this lie put forward by the Jews has been
finished off once and for all. You will have our gratitude, esteemed Herr
Himmler, when you indicate to the SS that your racial political lectures
should not concentrate on Richard Wagner in this sense.273
271
It was at this infamous conference that Reinhard Heydrich and fourteen colleagues, including
Hofmann, drew up detailed arrangements for the extermination of Jews, including the decision to
execute by pouring Zyklon B crystals into sealable chambers. For full accounts of the event, see Peter
Longerich, Die Wannsee-Konferenz vom 20 Januar 1942. Planung und Beginn des Genozids an den
europaischen Juden (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1998); and Mark Roseman, The Villa, the Lake, the
Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution (London: Penguin, 2003).
272
BA NS19/3318.
273
Ibid.
101
The director of the Bayreuth Research Facility in 1942 was Otto Strobel, whom
Deathridge has described as ‘an inconspicuous figure’ in the history of Wagner
studies. 274 Winifred may simply have invented this book title to get her message
across, or it may have been left unfinished. Either way it was never published. I have
emphasised her use of the words ‘in this sense’ (in diesem Sinne), as the phrase
implies her consent for Wagner to be used in RuSHa lectures on Nazi racial ideology,
so long as it did not entail his own origins being questioned.
Schwander’s court martial relates back to scandals about Wagner that had
circulated during the composer’s own lifetime. Rumours about him being Jewish had
long since become commonplace, and they were discussed elsewhere in the Third
Reich too. Ganzer, for example, insisted that
today the legend of Wagner’s Jewish ancestry is clearly disproved.
Wagner’s maternal line is pure Aryan, like his father’s. The thesis that
Wagner’s real father was the actor and painter Geyer lacks any probability
(entbehrt jeder Wahrscheinlichkeit); and in any case on both his father’s and
his mother’s side, Geyer is also of pure Aryan descent.275
Wagner’s contemporaries had not held back from using these rumours as a source of
inspiration for satire. This can be seen in the collection of caricatures gathered
together by Eduard Fuchs and Ernest Kreowski in their 1907 book, Richard Wagner
in der Karikatur, for example.276 Nietzsche’s quip about the uncertainty of Wagner’s
parentage in a note to the postscript of his critique of the composer is particularly
well known:
was Wagner a German at all? There are some reasons for this question. It is
difficult to find any German trait in him. Being a great learner, he learned to
imitate much that was Germanthat’s all. His own nature contradicts that
which has hitherto been felt to be Germannot to speak of a German
musician.His father was an actor by the name of Geyer. A Geyer [vulture]
‘The Nomenclature of Wagner’s Sketches’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, 101
(1974–75), 75–83 (p. 75). We will encounter Strobel again in chapters three and four of this thesis.
275
Wagner und das Judentum, p. 36.
276
Eduard Fuchs and Ernest Kreowski, Richard Wagner in der Karikatur (Berlin: Behrs Verlag,
1907). Weiner has analysed some of these sketches in Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, p. 9.
274
102
is practically an Adler [eagle].What has hitherto circulated as ‘Wagner’s
Life’ is a fable convenue, if not worse.277
Nietzsche implies that Wagner was a Jew with recourse to the myth of Jews as mere
imitators of the culture in which they are living. Wagner himself had touted this idea
in Das Judentum, in which the basis of physique as a marker of difference becomes a
central point of discussion:
the Jew – who, as everyone knows, has a God all to himself – in ordinary
life strikes us primarily by his outward appearance, which, no matter to
what European nationality we belong, has something disagreeably foreign to
that nationality: instinctively we wish to have nothing in common with a
man who looks like that.278
And this same myth was later employed some five decades later in Der Giftpilz. In
the story ‘How the Jews Came to Us’, it is said that:
in Germany [Jews] speak German and behave as though they were
Germans. In France they speak French and act as Frenchmen. In Italy they
want to be Italians; in Holland, Dutch; in America, Americans; and so on.
So they carry on throughout the whole world. Fritz [the main character of
the story] laughs at this and says anyhow they can always be recognised as
Jews.279
There are crucial differences in tone and purpose, of course. Nietzsche was being
satirical; Wagner and Heimer were both Jew-baiting; Ganzer was attempting to write
serious scholarship; and Schwander, meanwhile, was spreading gossip that was
especially salacious given the elevation of anti-Semitism to government policy in the
context of the Third Reich. Yet these diverse incidents are all related by their
treatment of Judaism as the irreconcilable Other of Germany. As we have seen in this
chapter, this was just one of the trends dating back to the nineteenth century that
ultimately became characteristic of Nazism.
‘The Case of Wagner’, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, ed. and trans. with a
commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 182. The pun refers to
Ludwig Geyer, a Jewish man who was the second husband of Wagner’s mother.
278
DJiM, pp. 82–83.
279
Der Giftpilz, p. 15.
277
103
Bringing race into everyday life
In the Third Reich, cultural practice was gradually altered to make the racial ideology
at the core of Nazism an ordinary part of daily life.280 The Party could codify this
ideology with edicts such as the Nuremberg Laws. 281 But bringing it into actual
cultural practice was less straightforward, not least because doing so hinged on the
manipulation of public opinion. A vast range of staged events, from violent pogroms
to evenings at the opera, was designed with this in mind.282 The Nazi fascination with
Nuremberg was rooted in a long-standing tendency of German nationalists to
fantasise about and construct simulacra of medieval towns, particularly as a means of
depicting a lost purity that could one day be recaptured. For this reason Die
Meistersinger, which is ‘without a trace of vulnerability on its golden surface’, and
which was itself a nationalist simulacrum of a medieval German town, made for an
ideal addition to their web of racial symbols and images.283 Under Hitler’s rule, the
motif of degrading or deposing deviant Others, which in the opera was directed
against Beckmesser, a composite of outsiders, became explicitly and transparently
anti-Semitic. Wagner’s complaints about the close proximity of the Hans Sachs statue
Hitler himself stressed that an education ‘cannot be secured by theoretical instruction, appeals and
exhortations, but through the struggles of daily life (den Kampf des täglichen Lebens)’. See MK, p.
457.
281
Actually translating vague ideology into concrete policy proved impossible. The Nuremberg Laws
(Nürnberger Gesetze) claimed to enable a peaceable co-existence between Germans and Jews. They
came into effect on 15 September 1935. Article 4 of the ‘Nuremberg Law for the Protection of German
Blood and German Honour’ safeguarded the Jewish right to display ‘Jewish colours’ as an alternative
to flying the swastika banner, while Article 2.1 of the ‘Reich Citizenship Law’ effectively deprived
Jews of their citizenship. For the full text of the Laws, see Documents on the Holocaust, pp. 77–79.
Making Judaism visible with items such as the yellow Star of David, on the other hand, was
comparatively easy. From 1 September 1941, Jews were forbidden from appearing in public without a
yellow star (Judenstern) on their clothing.
282
The Party’s involvement with these events could be anything from publicly self-congratulatory to
wholly covert. Consider, for example, its management of the Kristallnacht pogrom on 9 and 10
November 1938. Goebbels is recorded as having instructed an assembled group of Party leaders that
riots ‘were not to be prepared or organised by Party, [but] insofar as they originated spontaneously,
were not to be interfered with’. Those present then had to memorise Goebbels’ instructions as best
they could and verbally pass them on to their immediate subordinates, who would in turn pass them on
to their subordinates. See Alan Steinweis, Kristallnacht 1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009), pp. 47–48.
283
Deathridge, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, p. x.
280
104
to the Jewish synagogue can therefore be seen as part of the same discourse as the
Streicher-led destruction of the latter in August 1938.284 Both incidents were partly
provoked by anger at the discord between social reality and the nationalist fantasy
after which the perpetrators were pining.
To draw conclusions about the place of Die Meistersinger in the Third Reich
on the basis of the language used by the Nazis is ill advised, and yet it remains
common practice in Wagner scholarship. Frederic Spotts simply sounds naïve when
explaining the Nazi use of Wagner’s opera by claiming that Goebbels heard in it
the sound of the party’s triumph. So he proceeded to turn the entire opera
into a Nazi anthem […] thus it came about that a work of profound warmth,
joy and humanity, a work Shaw depicted as ‘a treasure of everything lovely
and happy in music’, was shamelessly traduced in one of the great cultural
crimes of the Third Reich.285
Indeed, the relationship of Die Meistersinger to Nazi racial ideology is far more
problematic than both Wagner’s defenders and detractors are generally willing to
acknowledge.
Wagner bemoaned that ‘opposite the statue of Hans Sachs in Nuremberg there rose a sumptuous
synagogue of purest Oriental style’. See ‘Shall We Hope?’, p. 115. For more on Julius Streicher, see
fn. 432.
285
Bayreuth, p. 165.
284
105
Chapter Three
Wagner and Die Meistersinger in the Nazi Mass Media
wir schätzen, was schön und gut,
was wert die Kunst, und was sie gilt,
das ward ich der Welt zu zeigen gewillt
Act I scene 3
I
Introduction
‘…innere Beziehung zur Zeit haben…’
The tenth annual Berlin Radio Show (Internationale Funkausstellung Berlin, or IFA)
opened on 18 August 1933.286 In a speech given to mark this occasion, Goebbels told
attendees that ‘we do not intend to use the radio only for our partisan purposes. We
want room for entertainment, popular arts, games, jokes, and music. But everything
should have an intrinsic connection to the times (innere Beziehung zur Zeit
haben)’.287 The instruction that every aspect of the mass media, regardless of how
apolitical it may have seemed, should reinforce the ideals of the Third Reich, points
to one of the principal goals of the Nazi mass media: to immerse audiences in a
fantasy world of German nationalism. Indeed, as late as 22 January 1945, by which
time the War was all but lost, Goebbels was writing in his diary that he spent the
afternoon ‘listening to part of the Eroica broadcast over the radio with Furtwängler
and the Vienna Philharmonic. What a world that opened up before my ears! How
beautiful and invigorating it is to sink into this world (in diese Welt zu versenken)!’288
In this chapter, I will examine the use of Wagner and Die Meistersinger in the three
286
The Berlin Radio Show had showcased the latest developments in home entertainment since the
1920s. For a brief history of it, see Heidi Riedel, Siebzig Jahre Funkausstellung. Politik, Wirtschaft,
Programm (Berlin: Vistas, 1994). The quote at the head of this chapter, which is from Die
Meistersinger, reads ‘we treasure what is beautiful and good,the value of Art, what it is worth,this I
became resolved to show the world’.
287
Joseph Goebbels, ‘Der Rundfunk als achte Großmacht’, in Signale der neuen Zeit. 25 ausgewählte
Reden von Dr. Joseph Goebbels (Munich: Franz Eher Verlag, 1940), pp. 197–207 (p. 205).
288
TBJG, 22 January 1945, T2, 15, p. 180. Emphasis added.
106
most important arms of the Nazi mass media; namely, the printed press, the radio,
and the cinema. 289 This introductory section includes a brief overview of each. In
tandem with this, I will suggest that Wagner sought to immerse the audience in a
fantasy world of German nationalism in Die Meistersinger through a variety of
means, and will explore how this aligned the work with the machinations of the Nazi
mass media.
David Welch has observed that the Nazis were aware ‘that their success had
been due more to the spoken than to the printed word’, and indeed, the Party never
had an easy relationship with the printed press.290 It offered a less immediate way of
communicating with the public than either the radio or the cinema. In Mein Kampf,
Hitler voiced suspicions about newspapers’ ability to boost the Party’s popularity, as
he saw them as having little reach beyond those who had already joined. He also
believed that
289
If their use of his image in the mass media has yet to be properly explored, then it may be because
radio remains the neglected younger sibling of cinema. This is particularly true for scholarship on the
Third Reich and Germany after 1945. For example, Karl Christian Führer wrote that ‘astonishingly
little attention has been focused on the wireless in generalised writings about German culture. If
broadcasting is mentioned at all it is referred to in passing as part of a new “mass culture” that
allegedly bridged the social and cultural gaps between diverse strata and milieus of German society’.
See ‘A Medium of Modernity? Broadcasting in Weimar Germany, 1923–32’, The Journal of Modern
History, 69 (1997), 722–53 (p. 723). Important studies of Nazi radio include Horst J. P. Bergmeier and
Rainer E. Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda
Swing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Carolyn Birdsall, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound,
Technology and Urban Space in Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press,
2012); Max Bonacker, Goebbels’ Mann beim Radio. Der NS-Propagandist Hans Fritzsche, 1900–
1953 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2007); Brüninghaus, Unterhaltungsmusik, pp. 40–
44; Florian Cebulla, Rundfunk und Ländliche Gesellschaft, 1924–1945 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht, 2004); Brian Currid, A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi
Germany (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Nanny Drechsler, Die Funktion der
Musik im deutschen Rundfunk 1933–1945 (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus Verlagsgesellschaft, 1988); Levi,
Music in the Third Reich, pp. 124–46; Corey Ross, ‘Radio, Film and Morale: Wartime Entertainment
between Mobilization and Distraction’, in Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany, ed. by Pamela E.
Swett, Corey Ross, and Fabrice d’Almeida (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 154–76; and
Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany, ed. by Karl Christian Führer and
Corey Ross (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). The emerging discipline of sound studies
encourages scholars to consider listening to the radio as a form of social practice. This has influenced
my take on the subject in this chapter. See, for example, collections such as Germany in the Loud
Twentieth Century: An Introduction, ed. by Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012); The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. by Trevor Pinch and
Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); or The Sound Studies Reader, ed. by
Jonathan Sterne (Oxford: Routledge, 2012).
290
Politics and Propaganda, p. 44.
107
the general picture given by a single issue of a newspaper is so confused and
produces such a fragmentary impression that it really does not influence the
occasional reader. And where a man has to count his pennies it cannot be
assumed that, exclusively for the purpose of being objectively informed, he
will become a regular reader or subscriber to a paper that opposes his
views.291
This was in 1926 though, long before he could have envisaged being in a position of
absolute power. In addition, from the detail with which he analyses the machinations
of the printed press in other sections of Mein Kampf, he obviously read newspapers
himself. It is therefore unsurprising that, even with their misgivings, the Nazis
invested in an assortment of newspapers before 1933. Chief among them were Der
Angriff, Der Stürmer, and the Völkischer Beobachter. Goebbels edited Der Angriff. It
began as a weekly publication in 1927, became a daily in 1930, and ran until 1945.
Streicher headed Der Stürmer, which was best known for its virulent anti-Semitism
and scandal stories, and appeared weekly between 1923 and 1945. The Völkischer
Beobachter was the Party’s first official paper. It ran on a weekly basis from 1920,
and became a daily on 8 February 1923, the year in which Alfred Rosenberg was
made editor. The Beobachter remained in press as late as April 1945.
The Nazis inherited a national radio broadcast system that had already been
operational for a decade when they came to power in 1933.292 The innovations for
which they were responsible were the design and distribution of affordable sets and,
to a lesser extent, the unification of the nine regional stations that had existed since
MK, p. 370. I have made a small alteration to the translation. The original reads ‘a single number of
a newspaper’, but the word Nummer – as in Zeitungsnummer – means ‘issue’ here.
292
Radio broadcasting began in Germany in October 1923. There is space in this chapter for only the
briefest introduction to the state of the industry in Germany prior to the Nazi takeover. For studies of
the radio in the 1920s, see Bergmeier and Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves, pp. 1–21; Konrad Dussel, Deutsche
Rundfunkgeschichte (Konstanz: UVK Verlag, 2004); Karl Christian Führer, Wirtschaftsgeschichte des
Rundfunks in der Weimarer Republik (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1997), in addition to
‘A Medium of Modernity?’; Christopher Hailey, ‘Rethinking Sound: Music and Radio in Weimar
Germany’, in Music and Performance During the Weimar Republic, ed. by Bryan Randolph Gilliam
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 13–36; Hans-Jürgen Koch and Hermann Glaser,
Ganz Ohr. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Radios in Deutschland (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2005); Heinz
Pohle, Der Rundfunk als Instrument der Politik. Zur Geschichte des deutschen Rundfunks von 1923–38
(Hamburg: Hans-Bredow-Institut, 1955); and Welch, Politics and Propaganda, pp. 38–42.
291
108
the 1920s. Live opera programmes were common. According to Hans-Jürgen Glaser
and Hermann Koch, no fewer than four hundred operas aired on German radio in
1930 alone. 293 When Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted Tristan in Bayreuth on 18
August 1931, it was the first opera performance to be broadcast by 200 stations
worldwide.294 The Nazis continued airing classical music long after their first year in
power. In 1934, a live performance of Der Ring was transmitted from Bayreuth, as
part of a Wagner-Schiller-Chamberlain cycle. In the same year, a twelve-day
Beethoven cycle, which included Fidelio and the nine symphonies, was broadcast.
Cycles of music by Schubert and Mozart were given between 1935 and 1937, and
extracts from Wagner’s operas besides Die Meistersinger were heard regularly. The
Rienzi overture was used in the opening ceremonies of Parteitag rallies; Siegfried’s
‘Forging Song’ (Schmiedelied) for Hitler’s birthday; the Prelude to Act III of Die
Walküre for footage of air raids in newsreels; and Siegfried’s Trauermarsch for
memorials. 295 Even the announcement of Hitler’s death was accompanied by
Wagner’s music – an extract from Götterdämmerung.296
In his diary entry on 24 December 1941, Goebbels recorded that
Tobis has a plan to shoot an epic (großen) film about Richard Wagner. Frau
Wagner writes me a letter, in which she begs that this film is released not in
one, but rather in two portions. I think this would be a good idea, since
Richard Wagner is one of our greatest cultural possessions. To portray him
293
Ganz Ohr, p. 31.
Hamann, Winifred, p. 158.
295
See, respectively, Scott D. Paulin, ‘Piercing Wagner: The Ring in Golden Earrings’, in Wagner and
the Cinema, ed. by Jeongwon Joe and Sander L. Gilman (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press,
2010), pp. 253–72 (p. 228); Brinkmann, ‘Wagners Akualität’, p. 127; Ulrich Fröschle and Helmut
Mottel, ‘Medientheoretische und mentalitätsgeschichtliche Probleme fimhistorischer Untersuchungen.
Fallbeispiel: “Apocalypse Now”’, in Krieg und Militär im Film des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. by Bernhard
Chiari, Matthias Rogg and Wolfgang Schmidt (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003) pp. 107–40 (p.
120); and Welch, Politics and Propaganda, p. 42. One other extensive discussion of Wagner in the
Nazi press can be found in the July 1933 edition of the Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, which
featured essays on the composer by Hans Schilling, Otto Strobel, Karl Vogel, and Alfred Rosenberg.
296
See Guido Knopp, Hitler’s Women (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 202.
294
109
to the world in the proper artistic fashion through cinema is a crucial task of
our future music films.297
Mercifully this plan never came to fruition. Wagner’s music, literature, and image did
appear in many Nazi films, however. Cinema in the Third Reich has been studied
exhaustively, especially in its role as a propaganda instrument, and there already
exists a considerable volume of literature on Wagner and cinema too – yet the
composer’s place in German films made between 1933 and 1945 has barely been
examined.298 In the few studies of the topic that have been written, a single film or
director is commonly isolated for close scrutiny.299 Only a handful of musicologists
have analysed the scores of Nazi films, and assessments of the influence that Wagner
may have had on them are more rare still.300
297
TBJG, 24 December 1941, T2, 2, p. 573. Tobis was a German film company. It was founded in
1928 and folded in 1962, and was at the height of its powers between 1933 and 1945, during which
time it produced over one hundred movies. For more on the company’s history, see Die Tobis. 1928–
1945. Eine kommentierte Filmografie, ed. by Hans-Michael Bock, Wiebke Annkatrin Mosel, and
Ingrun Spazier (Munich: Edition Text+Kritik, 2003).
298
Some recent studies of Wagner and film include Carolyn Abbate, ‘Wagner, Cinema, and
Redemptive Glee’, The Opera Quarterly, 21 (2005), 597–611; Christoph Henzel, ‘Wagner und die
Filmmusik’, Acta Musicologica, 76 (2004), 89–115; Wagner and Cinema; and David J. Levin, Richard
Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1998). In Wagner and Cinema, for example, a collection that is over four hundred
pages long, the composer’s place in Nazi film is mentioned only in passing. Even the section on
‘Wagner in German Cinema’ contains nothing dealing with the Third Reich. Some recent studies of
Nazi cinema propaganda include Lutz Koepnick, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler
and Hollywood (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002); Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of
Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996); Linda
Schulte-Sasse, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi Cinema (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1996); Sonja M. Schultz, Der Nationalsozialismus im Film. Vom Triumph des
Willens bis Inglourious Basterds (Berlin: Bertz and Fischer, 2012); Susan Tegel, Nazis and the
Cinema (Continuum: London, 2011); Karsten Witte, ‘Film in Nationalsozialismus. Blendung und
Überblendung’, in Geschichte des Deutschen Films, ed. by Wolfgang Jacobsen, Anton Kaes, and Hans
Helmut Prinzler (Stuggart: J. B. Metzler, 2004), pp. 117–66; and ‘“Drittes Reich”: 1933–1945’, ed. by
Peter Zimmerman and Kay Hoffmann, vol. 3 of Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in
Deutschland, in 3 vols (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2005). An older but still indispensable study is
David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945, rev. edn (London: I. B. Tauris,
2001). Wagner scholars working in this area tend to focus on the extent to which his music and visual
effects can be considered cinematic. For example, one of the most common questions is whether film
constitutes ‘the ultimate fulfilment of the Gesamtkunstwerk’. See Jeongwon Joe, ‘Why Wagner and
Cinema? Tolkien Was Wrong’, in Wagner and Cinema, pp. 1–26 (p. 1).
299
One example is Celia Applegate, ‘To Be or Not to Be Wagnerian: Music in Riefenstahl’s Nazi-era
Films’, in Riefenstahl Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism, ed. by Neil Christian Pages, Mary
Rhiel, and Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 179–201. I discuss this article in
more detail below.
300
The two most detailed studies of Nazi film composers of which I am aware are Christine Raber,
Der Filmkomponist Wolfgang Zeller. Propagandistische Funktionen seiner Filmmusik im Dritten
110
A full survey of cinema before the Nazis came to power is not possible here,
but it is worth underlining that racial themes were common in German and Austrian
films of the 1920s.301 They tend to negotiate between justifying anti-Semitism on the
one hand, and considering the merits of Jewish assimilation on the other. Joseph
Delmont’s Der Ritualmord (Ritual Murder, 1920), for example, apparently attempted
to dispel the myth that Jews partook in human sacrifice. 302 The tone of Paul
Wegener’s Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem – How He Came into the
World, also 1920), which uses a number of Jewish stereotypes without being openly
racist, is altogether more ambiguous.303 For the purposes of this project, whether the
portrayal of Jews in films such as Der Golem foreshadowed, or even contributed to,
the development of anti-Semitism in the 1930s is beside the point. What should be
Reich (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 2005); and Reimar Volker, ‘“Von oben sehr erwünscht”. Die
Filmmusik Herbert Windts im NS-Propagandafilm (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003).
Volker’s essay ‘Herbert Windt’s Film Music to Triumph of the Will: Ersatz-Wagner or Incidental
Music to the Ultimate Nazi-Gesamtkunstwerk?’, in Composing for the Screen in Germany and the
USSR, ed. by Robyn J. Stilwell and Phil Powrie (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), pp.
39–53, is one notable example of a Nazi film composer’s music being scoured for Wagnerian
influences.
301
Cynthia Walk observed that many of them explored the taboo topic of Jewish-Gentile relationships,
a trend that she described as a ‘cinematic intervention in the ongoing German debate about die
Judenfrage’. See ‘Romeo with Sidelocks: Jewish-Gentile Romance in E. A. Dupont’s Das alte Gesetz
(1923) and Other Early Weimar Assimilation Films’, in The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema:
Rediscovering Germany’s Filmic Legacy, ed. by Christian Rogowski (Woodbridge: Camden House,
2010), pp. 84–102 (p. 85).
302
Der Ritualmord has been lost, and perhaps as a result it has been scarcely discussed in scholarship.
Walk manages to tentatively reconstruct the plot from surviving reviews.
303
Other interpretations of this film can be found in Omer Bartov, The ‘Jew’ in Cinema: From The
Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005) pp. 1–6; Frances
Guerin, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minnesota: University of
Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 109–153; Isenberg, ‘Of Monsters and Magicians’, in Weimar Cinema, pp.
33–54; and Elfriede Ledig, Paul Wegeners Golem-Filme im Kontext fantastischer Literatur.
Grundfragen zur Gattungsproblematik fantastischen Erzählens (Munich: Verlegergemeinschaft
Schaudig, Bauer, Ledig, 1989). Scholars disagree on the extent to which films as early as these should
be dragged for anti-Semitic motifs at all. Siegbert Salomon Prawer complained, for example, that ‘a
little historical imagination should see the picturesque where post-Shoah critics see the degraded and
oppressed, and the winsome where they see the aggressively “Aryan”’. See Between Two Worlds:
Jewish Presences in German and Austrian Film, 1910–1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005), p.
35.
111
noted is that the use of cinema as a discursive medium for unfolding responses to the
‘Jewish question’ predated Hitler’s rule.304
Eric Rentschler has described how visits to the cinema constituted a form of
social practice in Nazi Germany. ‘Viewers witnessed a colourful evening’, he wrote,
a veritable audiovisual variety show: advertisements (both slides and filmed
commercials); a newsreel (generally more overtly ideological, although
even here one finds a variety of offerings from the silly to the solemn); in
fancier cinemas, a live stage show; a documentary short subject
(Kulturfilm); and, finally, the main feature […] the mix made for an
affective smorgasbord.305
Of the 1094 feature films made in the Third Reich era, forty-eight per cent were
comedies, twenty-seven per cent were melodramas, and eleven per cent were action
films.306 Transparently propagandistic productions accounted for only fourteen per
cent of them. In the year 1932–33, 238.4 million cinema tickets were sold, and the
industry grossed 176.4 million Reichsmarks.307 These figures had risen considerably
by 1937–38. By then an impressive 396.4 million tickets were being sold, and the
industry’s total profit reached 309.2 million Reichsmarks. The average number of
times that an individual visited the cinema each year had also gone up, from 4.0 in
1932–33 to 7.6 in 1937–38. This pattern of growth was a significant departure from
the period between 1928 and 1932. The film industry made nearly 275 million
Reichsmarks in 1928, but this was dropping by millions each year. Similarly, the
number of attendees went down annually from the 352.5 million recorded in 1928.
Only once the Nazis were in power did the industry begin to reverse its decline.
Other Weimar films that famously deal with the ‘Jewish question’ include Erwald André Dupont’s
Das alte Gesetze, (Ancient Law, 1923), and Hans Karl Breslauer’s Die Stadt ohne Juden (The City
Without Jews, 1924).
305
Ministry of Illusion, pp. 20–21.
306
Witte calculated these percentages in ‘Film in Nationalsozialismus’, p. 155.
307
This figure and all that follow in this paragraph were sourced in Jürgen Spiker, ‘Film und Kapital.
Der Weg des deutschen Filmwirtschaft zum nationalsozialistischen Einheitskonzern’, vol. 2 of Zur
politischen Ökonomie des NS-Films, in 2 vols (Berlin: Volker Spiess, 1975), p. 55.
304
112
II
Wagner and Die Meistersinger in the Nazi press, radio, and cinema
A newspaper feature: 12 February 1933
The readership of the Beobachter must have represented a small portion Germany
overall, but the newspaper’s 12 February 1933 feature on Wagner still makes for a
useful introduction to the employment of the composer and his work in the Nazi mass
media.308 It consists of four separate articles, in addition to a selection of extracts
from Rosenberg’s Der Mythus. The authors were Hermann Seeliger, Josef StolzingCerny, Otto Strobel, and Hanz von Wolzogen. The latter’s piece, ‘Genius and
History’, is a series of quasi-philosophical thoughts on genius and exactly what
triggers its emergence in society:
you can admire the phenomenon of electricity; science clarifies it for you;
but what is the agent? ‘Electricity’, you say. One uses the word ‘genius’ in
the same way. The soul – is it the product of the bodily? Or does the soul
build the body? This great, fundamental question, in which science and
religion – naturalism and idealism – themselves collide and part, recurs
from reflection on genius and history.
Wolzogen goes on to project the story of Hitler’s rise to power onto Wagner’s own
biography. Cerny’s article, ‘Wagner and Us’, does something similar. He begins by
observing that
the history of the world works in categories, where the life of the individual
is measured in such a short span of days on earth – as though one wanted to
bring it into relation with cosmic events. Therefore, we should not regard
the events as they occur in the course of history as the products of sudden
flashes of power, or even as coincidences – but as the results of causes that
already go back who knows how far.
308
However, David B. Dennis and Detlef Mühlberger both cite Hitler as having described the printed
press as the most ‘potent weapon’ of Völkish propaganda, and the Beobachter itself as the Party’s ‘best
weapon’. In each case though, the source for the quotation appears to be an article written for the
Beobachter itself. As such it surely warrants a more critical treatment. See Dennis, Inhumanities, p. 4;
and Mühlberger, The Völkischer Beobachter: Hitler’s Voice, 1920–1933, in 2 vols (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2004), vol. 1, p. 20. David Welch records that the Beobachter had a circulation of 26,715
readers in 1929. See Politics and Propaganda, p. 12.
113
By treating history as a succession of events in which each event fits into an infinitely
long chain of causality, Cerny is able to portray Wagner as the predecessor of Hitler:
if a German today should still incredulously question how he now, fifty
years after Wagner’s death, should relate to him, he needs only to focus his
sight on the demons of hatred (Dämonen des Hasses) that directed their rage
at Bayreuth after the World War. Those same demons of hatred and
darkness drooled with almost infernal fury while going against our Führer
and our movement, and still they could not prevent Adolf Hitler from
ultimately coming to power! The Bayreuth Master drew them in the shapes
of Alberich, Mime, and Klingsor.
His conclusion shows that while the Nazis certainly recognised the villains in
Wagner’s music, they did not associate them with Judaism exclusively. Cerny sees
Alberich, Mime, and Klingsor as non-specific enemies, ‘demons of hatred’ who could
be construed as any opponent of Germany after 1918, and of Nazism in particular.
This would have included everyone from the League of Nations to Jews, from the
KPD to Gregor Strasser.
The final subsection of Strobel’s column, entitled ‘The Poet and Politician’, is
an overview of Wagner’s position on the ‘Jewish question’. It begins:
Richard Wagner never made a secret of his völkisch convictions, not only as
an artist, but also as a thinker and politician. Yes, he must be regarded as
one of the few who clearly identified the cultural dangers of Judaism early
on; and, without any concern for his own person, engaged it in steady and
unswerving combat. In the last years of his life especially, Wagner – in view
of the prevalence of Jewish influences in all branches of public life – looked
with growing concern at Germany’s future, which to him sometimes
appeared very black.
Like the other columnists in this feature, Strobel simply aimed to establish Wagner as
the most significant predecessor of Nazism.
Seeliger’s contribution to the feature, ‘The German Visionary’, is a potpourri
of Wagner’s own writing. It includes portions from ‘Art and Politics’, ‘The Artwork
114
of the Future’, ‘What is German?’, and ‘Public and Popularity’.309 A paragraph from
one of the composer’s 1850 letters appears, as does his description of Jews as the
‘plastic demon of man’s downfall’.310 Chamberlain, Goethe, and Gobineau are also
mentioned, and a substantial portion of the piece deals with Wagner’s beliefs about
race. For the composer, Seeliger claimed, this was the bigger topic to which the
‘Jewish problem’ belonged:
if Wagner treats Jewishness, ‘the plastic demon of downfall’, in tightest
connection with the problem of racial degradation, it is done from the higher
outlook of a psychological assessment of the Jewish question – that is, of
the demoralising influence of Jewishess on the gentile people. Moreover,
when he acknowledges as crucial the influence of Jews on our spiritual life
– as it manifests itself in distraction from and falsification of our highest
cultural tendencies – he summarises the whole question in its central issue.
(‘Clarification of “Judaism in Music”’, 1869).
This inaccurate summary of the second instalment of Das Judentum is a microcosm
of the article’s character and methodology as a whole. Seeliger takes extracts from
the composer’s literary works and intersperses them with snippets from his biography
and occasional historical facts and figures. Each of these ingredients is thoroughly
removed from its original context and left to orbit its historical origin in precession.
This process of simulation ultimately creates a simulacrum of Wagner, in which he
becomes an historical nationalist figure whose principal achievement was to pave
309
Seeliger is an obscure figure in Wagner history. He authored a number of books on music, and was
a vociferous opponent of Schoenbergian atonality. For an analysis of his work and the social context in
which it was written, see Amaury du Closel, Erstickte Stimmen. ‘Entartete Musik’ im Dritten Reich
(Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2010), pp. 91–100. Among Seeliger’s own works are Die Loreleysage in
Dichtung und Musik (1898) (Whitefish: Kessinger, 2009); and Antike Tragodien im Gewande
Moderner Musik (1905) (Whitefish: Kessinger, 2010).
310
The full life of this infamous line in Third Reich propaganda remains a long way from being
properly established. Christian Barth has done perhaps the most detailed research on the matter to date,
in Goebbels und die Juden (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003), p. 61. He traced the quotation as far back as
‘Why Are We Enemies of the Jews?’ (‘Warum Sind Wir Judengegner?’), a short article that appeared
in Der Angriff on 30 July 1928. Goebbels then transposed a significant portion of this article into his
early novel, Michael, pp. 57–58. Perhaps his most famous usage of it was in the notorious speech
‘Now People Arise, and Let the Storm Break Loose!’ (‘Nun, Volk steh’ auf, und Sturm brich los!’),
delivered in Berlin on 18 February 1943. A transcription of this speech appears in Goebbels, Der steile
Aufstieg. Reden und Aufsätze aus den Jahren 1942–43, von Joseph Goebbels (Munich: Franz Eher
Verlag, 1944), pp. 167–204 (the quote in question appears on p. 178).
115
directly the way for the emergence of Nazism in the twentieth century. For this
reason, the simulacrum could be fairly described as ‘Wagner-as-Nazi’.
The feature as a whole bears the imprint of Hitlerian thought. In Mein Kampf,
Hitler wrote that the educated man who finds fault with propaganda’s content
only shows himself completely incapable of rightly judging the situation
and therewith proves that he can be of no use in the new movement. Only
intellectuals can be of use to a movement who understand its mission and its
aims so well that they have learned to judge our methods of propaganda
exclusively by the success obtained and never by the impression which
those methods made on the intellectuals themselves.311
Each article in this feature is given the appearance of wissenschaft, by quotations
from and references to Wagner’s work, and by the broaching of matters like the
nature of history itself. At the same time, they remain accessible to a wide audience
by avoiding detailed analyses of the subjects in question. This explains why
Rosenberg, easily the most famous of the contributors, is allotted relatively little
column space: the prose of Der Mythus would have been too dense for its purposes.
The authors’ references to Wagner’s operas, writing, and biography are all tokenistic
– but the feature is not really about him. Instead, it invokes the idea of the composer
as a means of glorifying the Nazi Party as a cultured organisation; congratulates the
readers on being part of the ideal German society that Hitler had brought into being;
and makes the musicological profession a part of Nazism.312 Similar methodologies
and aims will be seen in the use of Wagner and Die Meistersinger across the Nazi
mass media.
Nationalist efforts to glorify Germany as uniquely cultured, and to bathe an
audience in the depiction of an ideal Germanic society, did not begin in the 1930s and
311
MK, p. 269.
Indeed, the feature is a good demonstration of the efforts of discursive elites ‘to inscribe themselves
into the ideological framework from their respective standpoints’. See Moritz Föllmer, ‘Was Nazi
Germany Collectivistic? Redefining the Individual in Berlin, 1930–1945’, The Journal of Modern
History, 82 (2010), 61–100 (p. 67).
312
116
’40s, of course. Consider Wagner’s use of chorale in the opening of Act I scene 1 of
Die Meisteringer. In the sixteenth century, Lutheran chorales served a variety of
practical purposes, from creating a sense of unity among congregations, to making
scripture comprehensible to a wider portion of the community.313 They also acted as
sonic symbols for the actual presence of God. In the opening moments of Act I of Die
Meistersinger, Wagner strips the chorale of these roles. This is partly evident in his
careful alterations to the text of ‘Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam’, the sixteenthcentury chorale on which his own is based, and which he may have know through
Bach’s setting in the Cantata BWV 7. The original reads:
Christ unser Herr zum Jordan kam
Nach seines Vaters Willen,
Von Sankt Johanns die Taufe nahm,
Sein Werk und Amt zu erfüllen;
Da wollt er stiften uns ein Bad,
Zu waschen uns von Sünden,
Ersäufen auch den bittern Tod
Durch sein selbst Blut und Wunden;
Es galt ein neues Leben.314
Which Wagner adapted as follows:
Da zu dir der Heiland kam
willig seine Taufe nahm
weihte sich dem Opfertod
gab er uns des Heils Gebot:
das wir durch sein’ Tauf’ uns weihn,
seines Opfers wert zu sein.
Edler Täufer!
Christs Vorläufer!
Nimm uns gnädig an,
dort am Fluss Jordan!315
313
For more on the Lutheran chorale, and music in Reformation Germany, see Carter Lindberg, The
European Reformations (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, 2nd edn, 2010), pp. 372–73.
314
‘Christ our Lord came to the Jordan | According to His Father’s will, | Was baptised by Saint John, |
To fulfill his work and destiny; | Thus He instituted for us a bath, | To wash us from sins, | And to
drown bitter death | Through His own Blood and Wounds; | It effected a new life’. Translation taken
from Alfred Dürr, The Cantatas of J. S. Bach, trans. by Richard D. P. Jones (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), pp. 684–85.
315
‘When the Redeemer came to thee, | Gladly took thy baptism, | Dedicated himself to the sacrifice of
death, | He gave us salvation’s commandment: | That we dedicate ourselves through your baptism, | To
be worthy of His sacrifice. | Noble Baptist! | Christ’s predecessor! | Receive us mercifully, | There at
the River Jordan!’ Translation taken from Groos, ‘Constructing Nuremberg’, 21–23.
117
In the composer’s version, Christ is only named in reference to St John, and St John
is not named at all. Luther’s phrase ‘his father’s will’ is also scrapped. Wagner’s
musical setting of the chorale is homophonic, and is written in traditional four-part
harmony. It is even accompanied by an organ.
Figure 15 – ‘Da zu dir der Heiland kam’
The chorale is interspersed with a duet for viola and cello that creates a musical
representation of the flirtatious glances between Walther and Eva. With its taut
harmony, expressive intervals – particularly the flattened fifth in the viola – and
interweaving melodic lines, this passage is clearly written according to the aesthetics
of the nineteenth century. Many scholars have already suggested that the duet is a
musical representation of the wordless exchanges between the two lovers, and that it
draws audience attention to their concentration on one another rather than the
service. 316 To this I would add that the way in which Wagner combines the
compositional style of his own era with that of Lutheran times also gives the
impression that he is himself gazing longly toward the congregation – the idealised
Gemeinde of his own creation.
316
See, for example, Groos, ‘Constructing Nuremberg’, p. 22.
118
The chorale that opens Act I of Die Meistersinger retains the surface
appearance of the type of composition on which it is modelled, while discarding all
the functions of the original. Wagner’s version serves instead to indicate the social
purity and moral innocence of the community singing it. This simultaneous retention
of surface appearance and substitution of function conceals the fact that communities
as depicted in this scene never actually existed. The scene is idealised. In
Baudrillard’s terms, then, Wagner’s chorale veils the absence of truth. Even the idea
of a mid-sixteenth century congregation being accompanied with full, fortissimo
organ of nineteenth-century strength is surely a fanciful enlargement of the original
sonic proportions. By virtue of features such as this, it would have served as an
invitation – for nineteenth-century audiences at least – to become immersed in a
fantasy world of German nationalism. The fantasy aspect was underlined by the
opera’s entire sound world, which offered respite from the increasing prevalence of
chromaticism in contemporaneous composition. This was embodied at that time by
no work more than Tristan, which is of course quoted in Die Meistersinger. All of
this would have combined to make an unusually intoxicating effect on an audience.
Nietzsche was usually thinking about Wagner when he wrote about music; perhaps he
had the chorale in Act I of Die Meistersinger in mind when he said that
this day I had strong and elevated feelings again, and if on its eve I could
have music and art, I know very well what music and art I would not like to
have, namely, the kind that tries to intoxicate its audience and drive it to the
height of a moment of strong and elevated feelings – an art for those
everyday souls who in the evening look not like victors on triumphal
chariots but rather like tired mules who have been whipped somewhat too
often by life.317
And Adorno did describe Die Meistersinger specifically as an ‘almost irresistible but
contaminated attempt to invent a mythological recent past for the German people, on
317
GS, p. 86. Original emphasis.
119
which they could then become intoxicated’. 318 For all these reasons, the best term
with which to describe the chorale at the opening of Act I of Die Meistersinger is
simulacrum. This word can indeed be applied to many scenes in the opera, a proposal
that will be explored in more detail across the rest of this chapter.
Die Meistersinger on the radio: 21 March 1933
Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. He was inaugurated to the
position on 21 March, and the day was filled with public celebrations. The last of
them was a performance of Die Meistersinger in the Berlin State Opera. Act III was
broadcast live over national radio. Today this performance is chiefly remembered for
an aspect of the staging. During the ‘Wach’ auf!’ chorus, the musicians playing the
people of Nuremberg turned to the audience and faced Hitler rather than the bass
singing Hans Sachs. This moment has been called one that ‘transform[ed] Wagner’s
fiction into political reality’, and that transferred the Nazi homage ‘from Wagner’s
fictitious Hans Sachs to Germany’s real Adolf Hitler’.319 The event as a whole has
been described as a ‘parallel, artistic campaign (künstlerische Parallelaktion) to the
ceremonial act of the Reichstag’s opening with Hitler as Reich Chancellor’.320 On the
basis of this and other stagings of Die Meistersinger in 1933, one writer concluded
that the Nazis crowned the opera ‘as the supreme expression of the Third Reich’.321
The day’s radio broadcasts on 21 March lend little support to such proposals,
however.322 Their contents were listed in the Völkischer Beobachter, which was not
‘Wagner’s Relevance for Today’, trans. by Susan H. Gillespie, Grand Street, 44 (1993), 32–59
(57). Emphasis added.
319
See, respectively, Brockmann, Nuremberg, p. 134; and Grey, ‘Beckmesser Controversy’, p. 207.
320
Brinkmann, ‘Wagners Akualität’, p. 127.
321
Köhler, Wagner’s Hitler, p. 252.
322
Consider, for example, Hugo Rasch’s review of the performance, which appeared in the VB the
following day. David B. Dennis noted that Rasch ‘covered the evening rhapsodically. In his eyes, this
was a scene of “German worthiness”, unforgettable for one like him, who “never lost his feeling for
the German Gemeinschaft, even during the last few decades of confusion”. German women “dressed
tastefully – not decorated with jewels or erotic makeup”; men wore tuxedos or “dress brown
318
120
the newspaper’s ordinary practice. The production of a single nationwide show that
lasted a whole day was equally rare. Classical music featured prominently, but only a
handful of works were played in their entirety. Preference was given to extracts, short
movements, and military marches. The few complete works that were played came
almost exclusively from the eighteenth century. The concert between 10:30am and
11:00am, conducted by Hans von Benda, is a good representative of what was on
offer. It was entitled ‘Music for Frederick the Great’. The programme included an
Adagio from a ‘Concerto for Flute and String Orchestra’ by Johann Quantz, a
‘Concerto for Violin and String Orchestra by Franz Benda’, and other forgettable
Baroque works. The listing for this concert in the Beobachter is markedly vague.
Quantz wrote hundreds of flute concerti, and there are at least fifteen violin concerti
by Benda. A Wagner programme aired between 2:30pm and 3:20pm. This consisted
almost entirely of well-known snippets from the operas. It began with the overture to
Rienzi and was followed by the ‘Solemn Process to the Cathedral’ from Act II scene
5 of Lohengrin; the ‘Entry of the Guests on the Wartburg’ from Act II of Tannhäuser;
‘Siegfried’s Rhine Journey’ from scene 2 of the Prologue to Götterdämmerung; and
the obscure Imperial March. It ended with ‘Heil dir, Sonne!’ from Act III scene 3 of
Siegfried. These concerts were interspersed with reportage journalism. At 10:15am,
Baldur von Schirach gave an account of the ‘festive mood’ (Feststimmung) in
uniforms”. The spirit of a “great community of fate, always present in even the least meeting of our
storm troopers, lived just as much here”, despite social differences among the audience members.
Gratitude rose from formerly heavy hearts toward their “saviour”, who followed the opera “with that
unique light in his eyes and his penetrating comprehension of the performance”. Whoever noticed
how, during the third act, “the Volk of Nuremberg instinctively turned toward the Führer, sitting in the
royal seats” and then how “the eternally beautiful Wach auf, es nahet gen den Tag emerged from the
choir to touch each and every heart”, sensed that the “moment of Germany’s transformation” had
arrived. A worthier conclusion to the symbolic festivities of the day was “inconceivable”’. See ‘Die
Meistersinger Through the Lens of the Third Reich’, pp. 107–08.
121
Potsdam.323 Then, at 11:30am, there was a running commentary on the train to the
Garrison Church and the scene (Bild) there. Between 8:00pm and 8:55pm, live
coverage of the Berlin torch-lit parade of the SS, SA, and other nationalist
organisations was heard. Each portion of the day’s programming came from a
different radio station: Berlin, Königsberg, Hamburg, Leipzig, and Munich
respectively. This constant shifting of location was presumably meant to demonstrate
the Party’s creation of social unity, as well as its fusion of technology and the arts;
and the spoken-word features would have created a sense of communal experience.324
The transmission of Die Meistersinger, which began at 10:05pm, occupied the final
slot of the day.
The contents of the classical music broadcasts that preceded this transmission
require further interrogation in order for the latter to be properly contextualised. In
2002 Julian Johnson argued, not without controversy, that whereas classical music
used to be underwritten by claims of intellectual or spiritual content, today it
is far more likely to be legitimated by claims of its new popularity and thus
commercial value. The older claims, based on Enlightenment ideals of
freedom, self-expression, and genius, are preserved as a veneer but are
increasingly seen as insufficient justification in themselves.325
Johnson was here discussing the state of classical music in the twenty-first century.
He identified this time as still belonging to the modern era though, so his ideas are
readily transposed to the Third Reich. On the ‘Day of Potsdam’, the classical music
shows on the radio consisted almost entirely of single movements, famous extracts,
and Baroque works. This formatting reverberates with Johnson’s observation that
323
Schirach was the head of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth) between 1933 and 1940. For a detailed
biographical portrait of this figure, see Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2004), pp. 13–69.
324
Indeed, Carolyn Birdsall notes that, in the 1920s and ’30s, listening to the radio was generally a
communal experience: ‘the audience gathered around the radio, centrally placed in the household, and
listened in “rapt attention” to mediated sound’. See Nazi Soundscapes, p. 23.
325
Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002), p. 31. For a stern rebuttal to this book, see Richard Taruskin, ‘The Musical Mystique:
Defending Classical Music Against its Devotees’, in The Danger of Music, pp. 330–54.
122
music which ‘tends to create one mood or emotion by doing one main thing’, such as
the ‘movements of Baroque concertos’, is usually chosen for the purpose of
entertainment. 326 The use of classical music on 21 March 1933 is certainly not
compatible with what Johnson calls its ‘discursive’ aspect. By this he means the
enactment of ‘a process’ in which the ‘narrative sense’ of music is privileged by
giving it ‘concentrated attention from start to finish’. 327 The Nazi Party was only
preserving classical music’s older ‘ideals of freedom, self-expression, and genius’ as
a ‘veneer’.328 Unlike twenty-first century corporations, on which Johnson based his
arguments, their reasons for treating music in this way were not commercial but
ideological. They were striving to convince the listening public that they were an
artistic movement catering to an intrinsically artistic population. In part, broadcasts of
live classical music contributed toward this goal.
The idea that collective musical taste might be indicative of a public’s cultural
worth was not a creation of the Third Reich era. Neither were Nazis responsible for
the invention of a specific type of relationship between public and composer, in
which the latter provides the former with what it instinctively knows to be superior
composition. Such themes can be traced back to at least the later decades of
nineteenth-century Europe, and they are two of the principal themes in Die
Meistersinger. The opera as a whole, and particularly the song contest, revolve
around the notion that ‘public art still expresses the natural spirit’; and it asks
‘whether the master’s songs are still in touch with the popular and thus own the
ability of bonding minds and emotions’.329 It has also been observed that Hans Sachs’
‘primary function is to ensure that cultural expressions continue to provide something
326
Who Needs Classical Music?, p 35.
Who Needs Classical Music?, pp. 9 and 35.
328
Who Needs Classical Music?, p. 31.
329
Lutz Koepnick, ‘Stereoscopic Vision: Sight and Community in Die Meistersinger’, in Wagner’s
Meistersinger, ed. by Vazonsyi, pp. 73–97 (p. 91–92).
327
123
for everyone’.330 Nicholas Vazsonyi has conducted some of the most provocative
research in this area, and went as far as to describe Die Meistersinger as an
advertisement for Wagner’s own compositional techniques:
unlike [Tannhäuser], Die Meistersinger makes aesthetics – Wagner’s as
well as those of his opponents – its central concern. The work also presents
the people of Nuremberg as a test audience to demonstrate for the theatre
audience how Wagner is ideally to be experienced. In Die Meistersinger, the
theatre audience sees itself – albeit idealised – mirrored on stage.331
It is worth fleshing out this interesting proposal in more detail. When Walther’s prize
song is finally performed in the song contest, having been constructed principally
over the course of Act III scene 2, it is interspersed with commentary from the
watching public (das Volk). Their response to Beckmesser’s version of this piece is
fragmented and angular, a discordant chatter that reflects the low quality of the
performance. It is shot through with intervals of semitones and tritones; many of their
entries are off the beat; and individual voices leap out of the crowd before quickly
vanishing back into it. Beckmesser’s shambolic singing results in a state of public
disunity.
Figure 16 – ‘Hört ihr es? Wen lud er ein?’
Walther’s version of the Prize Song, by contrast, brings a degree of coherence to the
words of the people. Their commentary on his work is almost reminiscent of the
Koepnick, ‘Stereoscopic Vision’, p. 92.
Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), p. 128.
330
331
124
opening chorale. It is firmly rooted in C major, with only a passing glow of E major
that does not threaten the stability of the tonic. Indeed, this seamless shift to chord III,
a ‘purple-colour chord of romantic introspection’, is a microcosm of the integration
of new and old that has been a central concern of the entire work.332 Wagner again
depicts the relationship between composer and public as being reflexive, but this time
with a more pleasing result. The latter is instinctively aware of the intrinsic value of
the former’s work, and these instincts are refined still further by the artistic creation
to which they are being exposed.
Figure 17 – ‘Das ist was andres, wer hätt’s gedacht’
Vazsonyi concluded that
the Festival meadow replicates the conditions of modern consumer culture,
and employs tactics now common to advertisers. The competing product is
presented in a poor light, while the advertised product is shown under the
most favourable conditions.333
It is this kind of projection of twentieth-century critical theory onto nineteenthcentury matters, with little adaptation of the theories concerned, that led some
scholars to criticise Vazsonyi for dealing in rather laboured anachronisms throughout
332
This memorable phrase comes from Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History, vol. 3, p. 92. He was
here speaking of Schubert’s use of flat VI in Schubert’s Moment Musicaux no. 6, D780.
333
Vazsonyi, Brand, p. 164.
125
his book.334 But the core of his argument – that the culmination of Die Meistersinger
is in many regards about Wagner’s own methods of composition, and how he saw his
own relationship with the public – is compelling nevertheless. This insight can be
transposed to shed further light on the privileged position of Die Meistersinger in
Nazi propaganda. In terms of both its plot and its music, the work as a whole aligned
closely with the Party’s attitude toward the place of classical music in public life.
They could present the opera as serving a triple purpose: to be a product, an arbiter,
and a stimulant of the inherent artistic tendencies of the Volk.
None of this is to to say that musical life in the Third Reich was ever
straightforward, of course. The Nazis were well aware that classical music’s actual
currency as entertainment was low. They also knew that many popular classical
works could be conceived as baldly contradicting their ideology. These schisms –
between ideological goals and actual listening habits, and between Nazi beliefs and
the works they used to promote their own movement – came to characterise radio in
the Third Reich. They also created the backdrop against which Act III of Die
Meistersinger was used on the ‘Day of Potsdam’. This broadcast was preceded,
between 9:00pm and 10:00pm, by another offering of popular classics. Hans von
Winter conducted the Radio Orchestra in a programme that included the Overture to
Weber’s Oberon, Elisabeth’s ‘Dich, teure Halle’ Aria from Tannhäuser, and extracts
from an unspecified ballet suite by Gluck. It concluded with Beethoven’s Egmont
Overture. The placement of Die Meistersinger in a later slot, in favour of Winter’s
concert, was not accidental. The Nazis exercised complete control over the media by
this stage, and could have aired the opera earlier, or even given the entire work had
334
David Larkin, for example, criticised him for creating a text that is occasionally anachronistic to the
point of being ‘somewhat disingenuous’. He went on to describe Vazsonyi’s use of the following
terms and symbols as ‘gratuitous’: ‘music drama®: made in Germany, for world-wide distribution’;
‘Wagner®’; and ‘Leitmotif™’. See ‘Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand
[review article]’, Notes, 68 (2012), 802–04 (p. 804).
126
they wished. Considerable thought must have been given to the content of every radio
programme on the 21st, given the meticulous ‘stage management’ that characterised
the day as a whole.335 Already it seems inaccurate to describe this performance as the
moment in which Wagner’s ‘fiction was transformed into political reality’, given that
the Party itself did not give it full priority on the radio.336
When the opera was broadcast to the nation again on 7 August, from the
annual Bayreuth Festival, it was given in its entirety. However, as we will see in the
following section, the content of the speech that Goebbels delivered as part of this
broadcast only provides further evidence of the schisms identified here.
Die Meistersinger on the radio: 7 August 1933
The fiftieth anniversary of Wagner’s death fell in 1933, so the year was already
special for the Bayreuth Festival. Hitler’s accession to the Chancellorship provided a
second reason for celebrating with a new production of Die Meistersinger. As part of
the live broadcast of the opera that went out on 7 August, Goebbels gave a short talk
for the listening audience. He believed the programme would be strong enough to be
received across Europe and even in America.337 To the best of my knowledge, this
was the only discussion he ever dedicated solely to the composer, although he did
mention his work on at least one other occasion.338 He arrived in Bayreuth for the
Ian Kershaw, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989), p. 55.
336
See fn. 319.
337
TBJG, 5 August 1933, T1, 2/iii, p. 209. The quotations that follow are all taken from the version of
this speech that appeared in the VB on 8 August 1933. Mine is the only complete English translation of
this article, and it can be found in the Appendix to this thesis.
338
Goebbels’ cited DJiM as a reference in his ‘Ten Principles of German Musical Creativity’ (Zehn
Grundsätze deutschen Musikschaffens). This piece was delivered as a speech on 28 May 1938 at the
first of the ‘Reich Music Days’ (Reichsmusiktage). For a brief analysis of it, see Peter Longerich,
Joseph Goebbels. Biographie (Siedler Verlag: Munich, 2010), p. 351. Richard Taylor has rightly
underlined the importance of Goebbels’ speeches, noting that ‘they represent a direct and living
contact, indeed the only direct and living contact, between the Propaganda Minister and his audience:
they are themselves examples of propaganda in action and at first hand and they therefore constitute a
fusion of both the theory and practice of propaganda’. See ‘Goebbels and the Function of Propaganda’,
in Nazi Propaganda, ed. by Welch, pp. 29–44 (p. 32).
335
127
opening of the 1933 Festival on 21 July, and stayed for a week before heading to
Stuttgart on 29 July to resume everyday Party duties. He saw Die Meistersinger on
the 21st, in addition to Parsifal and a complete Ring cycle later in the week. The
speech under consideration here was apparently pre-recorded on 4 August, which
may account for its uncharacteristically lacklustre delivery.339 While he was absent
from the performance in question, the one that he did see made a lasting impression
on him. The note from his diaries that day reads:
Afternoon. Meistersinger. Solemn moment at the reception. Winifred
Wagner was quite touched. A superb (ganz große) performance. Story,
image, and music from the highest plane. Bokelmann [sic] as Sachs
acclaimed, a triumph. Likewise, Maria Müller as Eva. Whole story full of
life. A masterpiece. The last act gorgeous, especially in the choruses.
Everyone here in a festive mood. Hitler is celebrated.340
The summer of 1933 was packed with political engagements for Goebbels, and the
little free time he did have was occupied with the composition of a new novel.341 His
main concern with this broadcast was the number of listeners that he had addressed –
he estimated that there were fifty million in the audience, surely an overly optimistic
figure.342 Nowhere in his diaries does he mention the talk’s content.
‘Richard Wagner and the Artistic Spirit of Our Time’ has three central themes.
First, that the spirit of Die Meistersinger reflects the spirit of the Nazi Party: ‘there is
probably no work in the entire musical literature of the German people that so closely
relates to their psychological and spiritual energy (Spannung), and our times, as
Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger’. This connection between work and Party was on
display for Europe and the rest of the world too, as the broadcast was powerful enough
On Saturday 5 August 1933, Goebbels recorded that the day before he had ‘wrought a speech
concerning Bayreuth for all European and American transmitters. In the morning it goes to the whole
world’. See TBJG, T1, 2/iii, p. 241.
340
TBJG, 22 July 1933, T1, 2/iii, p. 232. Goebbels means Rudolf Bockelmann.
341
See the diary entries for the summer. This book was published the following year. See Das
erwachende Berlin (Munich: Franz Eher Verlag, 1934).
342
‘Saturday: discussed the record for Bayreuth at the airport. Goes on Sunday in a world broadcast to
50 million listeners’. See TBJG, [Monday] 7 August 1933, T1, 2/iii, p. 241.
339
128
to be received outside Germany. Second, because this opera reflected the Nazi
movement, anyone who enjoyed it was capable of identifying with their ideology. This
explains the degree of care Goebbels took in addressing the international audience.
‘Richard Wagner would want his art to be handed over to the whole nation and all
across the borders for all who have an open heart and ear for German music’, he
claimed. Finally, he stressed the Party was a modern organisation.343 This was proven
by their promotion of Wagner, whom he portrayed as a neglected creator of modern
art. ‘Today’, he said, Wagner ‘is still as modern as he was when his music dramas,
which unleashed an impassioned debate across the entire world, were first unveiled to
the public’. He also announced that by offering a ‘most perfect performance’ of Die
Meistersinger ‘over the ether to the whole people’, Bayreuth ‘honours itself and in the
best sense fulfills the will of the master’. Put another way, Goebbels believed that Nazi
mastery of technology had enabled the Party to meet an imperative laid down by their
iconic predecessor.
Goebbels barely mentions the dramatic and musical content of Wagner’s
opera. On the occasions that he does touch upon such issues, it is in the scantest of
detail. He gets over halfway through before mentioning a composition. His only
comment on Der Ring is that Wagner’s ‘eternally repeating themes’ are ‘always
newly varied and never tedious or even boring’ (‘niemals ermüdend oder gar
langweilend’). Wagner ranks above Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, he suggests,
because he joined ‘the craft of artistic pathos with inventiveness of melody, clarity of
voice-leading, and vigour of dramatic construction’. He concludes that ‘even without
his dramatic work Richard Wagner would still have been one of the greatest
343
In his youth, Goebbels was fond of much modern art that would later be condemned by the regime,
and his own literary works from the 1920s display a number of typically modernist traits. For more on
this topic, see David Barnett, ‘Joseph Goebbels: Expressionist Dramatist as Nazi Minister of Culture’,
New Theatre Quarterly, 17 (2001), 161–69.
129
musicians, and without his music he would still have been one of the greatest
playwrights of all times’.
The talk’s final segment includes the pronouncement that ‘of all [Wagner’s]
music dramas, Die Meistersinger will always be preeminent as the most German. The
mastersingers are the quintessential incarnation of our nationality’. Goebbels then
finishes with a quote from Hans Sachs’ monologue in Act III. This last segment of
his speech has been discussed extensively in Wagner scholarship. 344 However, the
broader context in which the Propaganda Minister framed Sachs’ lines remains
overlooked. The overall topic of his speech is less Wagner’s music than Hitler’s spirit
of ‘awe for the greats of the nation’. Goebbels described this ‘awe’ as the best
response to the ‘demand’ made by Wagner at the end of Die Meistersinger. For this
reason, the talk does not provide evidence of the supposed Nazi infatuation with this
opera. Rather, it was an attempt to prove that Hitler’s actions were motivated by
obedience to the will of German history, not mere than self-interest. On this occasion
the former was symbolised by Wagner’s music. In a sense then, this broadcast was
simply a sonic equivalent of the famous photograph of Hitler posing with Hindenburg
on 21 March that year.345
For an example, see, in addition to David B. Dennis, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, ‘Reworking History:
Wagner’s German Myth of Nuremberg’, in Re-Reading Wagner, ed. by Reinhold Grimm and Jost
Hermand (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), pp. 39–60.
345
BA-DBa Bild 183-S38324.
344
130
Figure 18 – Hitler posing with Hindenburg in 1933
Goebbels was not trying to cow the public into submission before their new leader,
and neither was he discussing his own fondness for Wagner’s music. Instead he was
casting the idealisation of Hitler as the most cultured member of an instinctively
cultured Volk onto the landscape of Die Meistersinger.
Like other broadcasts of ‘Germanic’ works by German composers, the two
under consideration here were clearly intended to stoke nationalist sentiments. As far
as this goal was concerned, the Nazis’ selection of Die Meistersinger was logical
enough. Its association with nationalism long predated the Party’s rise to power. Áine
Sheil recorded that it had been invoked in the name of different political causes in
Germany since the end of the First World War, but almost all of them had tied it to
the issue of national identity. 346 The differences between the left- and right-wing
receptions were rooted in other topics, such as the extent to which it might support
the newly formed democratic system, or the degree to which it could be seen as
völkisch.347 The prominence it enjoyed on the airwaves in the Third Reich was not
Áine Sheil, ‘A Question of Identity: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Weimar Germany’, in
Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany, ed. by Bacht, pp. 93–112 (p. 112). See also Sheil’s The
Politics of Reception: Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Weimar Germany
(unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 2004).
347
Concerns such as this can be seen in, for example, Arthur Moeller-Bruck, Das Dritte Reich (Berlin,
1926); Franz von Papen, ‘Deutsche Kulturpolitik’, originally published in Der Türmer, 5 (1932), 1–3,
republished in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), ed.
by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, pp. 377–78.
346
131
based on its pre-existing reputation as a particularly nationalist work alone, however.
If the Party’s aims extended no further than heating the crucible of nationalism
through live radio broadcasts, then we could reasonably expect the music they used to
mark important public occasions to rotate at least a little. Time and again though, for
the biggest events in their calendar, they turned to Die Meistersinger.348
A conclusion about the opera’s function on the Nazi radio cannot be reached
without first acknowledging the Party’s unpredictable handling of classical music in
general. This probably owed to the difficulty of applying oblique ideological edicts to
music and the technology being used to disseminate it. For example, one persistent
problem was that members of the public and the Party alike were not afraid to voice a
preference for ‘entertainment music’ (Unterhaltungsmusik) on the radio, even though
it was officially considered ‘degenerate’.349 By the summer of 1940, even SD officials
were admitting that
it would be appreciated, if in the ‘breathing space’ until the end of the
struggle against England, the musical programmes in radio broadcasting
would loosen up a little. One does not wish for dance music; but, looking
forward – after much ‘heavy classical music’ – for more overtures and
lighter musical fare.350
As Germany’s fortunes in the War continued to decline, the willingness of listeners to
rally behind entertainment music increased still further. On 8 June 1944, the Radio
Command Centre (Rundfunkkommandostelle) sent a circular to members of the
Wehrmacht, polling their opinions on soldiers’ favourite radio broadcasts. 351 Only
348
In 1935, Hitler ordered that Die Meistersinger be performed as part of the annual Parteitag rallies
in Nuremberg. Dennis noted that this, more than anything else, cemented the work’s position as ‘the
“official” opera’ of the Third Reich. See ‘Die Meistersinger Through the Lens of the Third Reich’, p.
110.
349
Erik Levi, for example, confirms that ‘of all the principal styles of modernism which were attacked
by Nazi propaganda, there can be no doubt that jazz remained at the forefront during the Third Reich’.
See Music in the Third Reich, p. 119.
350
SD, 1 July 1940, vol. 4, p. 1325. The emphasis, on musical broadcasting loosening up a little (das
musikalische Programm etwas auflockert), is original.
351
All the responses to this document, a selection of which is discussed below, were discovered in BA
R55/557.
132
five assessed classical music programmes positively. Nine rejected them altogether.
The remaining three acknowledged their merits, but insisted that light music should
be privileged. On 21 June, Obergefreiter Robert Pollatz replied, confirming that his
men, ‘without a doubt’, named ‘good dance and entertainment music’ (Tanz- und
Unterhaltungsmusik) as their favourite. Wilhelm Stuckart responded on 22 June, and
said that the soldier valued ‘beautiful, easy and relaxing entertainment music’
(‘schöne, leichte und entspannende Unterhaltungsmusik’), while on the other hand he
does not love ‘so-called “heavy music”’ (‘sogenannte “schwere Musik” liebt er
nicht’). Herbert Adam wrote back on 28 June, and dismissively noted that ‘the soldier
who is fighting at the battle-front wants light music, dance, and jazz’.
Initially it may seem reasonable to relate this outspokenness to Germany’s
increasingly desperate military situation, but the sentiments expressed can be traced
back to times of stability. The Nazis had always found that, in both live performances
and radio broadcasts, the public tended to think of ‘classical’ and ‘entertainment’
music as antithetical forces. As early as 1938, debates about the relationship between
the two were already considered passé:
in connection with the problem of light dance music versus music of greater
artistic value, a question which has been widely discussed by radio listeners,
Reich Superintendent Glasmeier declared that the radio broadcasting system
has held to a healthy middle course, which it would continue to follow in the
future.352
And by the 1940s, the SD had accepted that
the opinions and wishes of particular social and professional classes diverge
into two parts. From the current reports from various territories, it can be
deduced that musical composition cannot be reduced to a common interest.
There is an overwhelming wish in the working class for pure entertainment
music. If a lighter evening is given on the radio, one sees – for example, in
the reports from Schleswig – in individual factories, how a following of
members is excited and entertained by it. Then they say, over and again:
‘Fundamental Features of Radio Programming’, National Zeitung, 10 August 1938, cited in George
L. Mosse, Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Social and Cultural Life in the Third Reich, trans. by Salvator
Attanasio and others (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), pp. 192–94 (p. 193).
352
133
‘they should be given more often’. Military music, folksongs, melodies from
popular operas and operettas are generally heard willingly, as is apparent in
many reports – for example, from Halle, Frankfurt, Lüneberg and Innsbruck.
It has proven extremely fruitful if, during the playing of serious and more
sophisticated (schwerere und anspruchsvollere) programmes, short,
thought-through and generally understandable words of introduction are
said first.353
There were additional difficulties associated with classical music specifically. The
Nazis always wanted pieces to be conceived as complementary to present military
and social circumstances, for example. This led to a constantly morphing repertoire in
which few works were truly secure. In the autumn of 1941, for example, Goebbels
ordered a stop to broadcasts of Mozart’s Requiem on the grounds that its ‘bleakness’
could have ‘psychological repercussions’ (psychologische Auswirkungen) during the
approaching winter. 354 At the same time, the Party had to ensure that all classical
works they broadcast could be considered compatible with, if not complementary to,
their ideology. This was particularly burdensome. On 4 July 1944, Hermann Hronek
wrote to Alfred Ingemar Berndt to complain about Eva, an operetta by Franz Lehár,
being aired on the radio.355 Hronek bemoaned the libretto, saying that it sounded like
the work of ‘Jewish salon literati’ (jüdischen Salonliteraten). He also attacked the
plot, condemning it as Jewish, erotic-saccharine drivel (erotisch-süßliches Gewäsch).
His complaint received a reply signed by both Dr Schönicke and Ministerial Director
Fritzsche. They wrote to him on 17 July 1944, and explained that although Lehár had
collaborated with a ‘non-Ayran’ (Nichtarier), his operettas were protected by a
special decree from Hitler himself (Führerentscheid).356 This exchange echoed the
353
SD, 9 May 1940, vol. 4, p. 1118.
BA NS18/334.
355
BA R55/557.
356
This unlikely protection of Lehár is corroborated by the memoires of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s
secretary in the Führerbunker during the final stages of the war. She recorded that his ‘musical
evenings’ almost always featured the same repertoire: ‘Lehár’s operettas, songs by Richard Strauss,
Hugo Wolf and Richard Wagner. The only pop music he would let us play was the “Donkey
Serenade”. It usually formed the conclusion of the concert’. See Until the Final Hour, ed. by Melissa
Muller, trans. by Anthea Bell (London: Phoenix, 2004), pp. 80–81.
354
134
content of a circular letter sent by Martin Bormann in 1943, regarding alterations to
the texts of operas and oratorios that were apparently being made across Germany.357
He remarked that ‘large sections of our people believe these works must be disowned
thanks to the texts, which contradict their ideological views; whereas the musical
merits are not called into doubt’. This, he complained, had led to plot and libretto
alterations which were more ‘ridiculous and harmful’ than simply purging the work
altogether. He cited with disapproval a performance of Mascagni’s Cavalleria
Rusticana from which the church had been removed. Still more bizarre is his
description of a performance of Tannhäuser in which the chorus of pilgrims was
substituted with a chorus of farmers, and which left Elisabeth to hug a tree stump
rather than visit a shrine. Bormann rightly deemed such adaptations to be farcical, an
opinion which almost certainly came from Hitler himself. Despite this outright
condemnation of current attempts to better align operatic works with Nazi ideology,
he offered little suggestion as to how classical musicians should proceed in the future.
‘After the War’, he wrote, ‘the Führer will decide to what extent textual alterations
will be worked out’. Nazi discourse about music and radio was characterised by the
haphazard negotiation of bald contradictions – between Nazi ideology, which held the
German public to instinctively understand and enjoy highbrow classical music, and
the actual musical tastes of this public; and between Nazi religious and racial policy,
and works of music which involved the Christian tradition or, worse still, had been
created by Jews.
There is nothing to indicate that there was ever a serious public demand for
the radio broadcast of classical music while the Nazis were in power. But the Party
357
Martin Bormann was the personal secretary of Rudolf Hess, but when Hess defected he became
Hitler’s personal secretary – a position of considerable power. For a short biographical portrait of
Bormann, see Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 237–39. His circular from which the following quotations are taken
was found in BA NS18/304.
135
pursued projects along these lines regardless. This was partly because, in so doing,
they could ‘prove’ that their ideology had been realised in actual social practice.
Hitler portrayed the German population as intrinsically artistic; Party members acted
on these ideas by writing articles on Wagner or broadcasting Die Meistersinger; and
the printed press recounted the public’s grateful reception of their efforts.358 That the
opera was already, in its own way, a simulacrum, opened the way for the Nazis to
absorb it into their own processes of simulation. Further evidence for this claim can
be found in their use of the opera in the cinema.
Wagner and Die Meistersinger in four films
In October 1938, the Party ordered every German film company to produce a feature
about Jews. Jud Süß, a costume drama and a racial morality tale, was the most
popular of them. It was based on the life of an actual historical figure – Joseph Süß
Oppenheimer (1698–1738).359 He was employed in Stuttgart as a financial advisor
and ‘court Jew’ to Karl Alexander, Duke of the Kingdom of Württemberg between
1734 and 1737. 360 He came from a wealthy family, and took on a wide range of
political responsibility in the court. When the Duke died suddenly in 1737,
Oppenheimer’s enemies quickly moved against him. After a short trial he was
executed and gibbeted in the town.361 His story had been a source of dramatic fiction
Here it may be worth recalling Alexander Rehding’s observation that ‘the National Socialist mantra
that the Volk was the ultimate arbiter’ in cultural matters was always hindered by the problem that ‘the
crucial facet whether what mattered was what the Volk wanted, or what it ought to want, remained
tantalizingly vague’. See Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in NineteenthCentury Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 180.
359
See Susan Tegel, Jew Süss: His Life and Afterlife in Legend, Literature and Film (Continuum:
London, 2011), p. 151.
360
Court Jews were common in European courts from the early medieval period onward. For more
information on this topic, see Werner J. Cahnman, ‘Pariahs, Strangers and Court Jews’ in German
Jewry: Its History and Sociology, ed. with an introduction by Joseph B. Maier, Judith Marcus, and
Zoltán Tarr (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1989), pp. 15–28.
361
The most exhaustive study of Oppenheimer’s life and subsequent appearances in literature and film
is Tegel, Jew Süss. See also its most notable predecessor, Helmut Haasis, Joseph Süß Oppenheimer
genannt Jud Süß. Finanzier, Freidenker, Justizopfer (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1998); in addition to Haasis’
more recent work, Totengedenkbuch für Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (Worms: Worms Verlag, 2012).
358
136
from the early nineteenth century, and had been rendered cinematically in England
before the Nazis harnessed it for their own purposes.362 Jud Süß does not reference
Wagner directly, but it does belong to the same historical discourse as Die
Meistersinger, for at least three reasons. First, the story unfolds within an idealised
vision of an old German town. Second, Harlan’s Stuttgart and Wagner’s Nuremberg
are both marked by the presence of a ‘deviant other’ who is ‘erod[ing] the
community from within’, and whose deviancy must be addressed in order for the
town to reach its ideal state.363 Finally, and perhaps most glaring, Harlan juxtaposes
raucous, tuneless Jewish singing in the synagogue with a delicate lied performed at
the piano by Dorothea Sturm, a naïve young woman played by Kristina
Söderbaum. 364 The scene is highly reminiscent of Wagner’s discussion about the
differences between Jewish and German song in Das Judentum in der Musik.365 All
of this gives some indication of just how pervasive the themes that Wagner adopted
in Die Meistersinger became in the German mass media, and especially the cinema,
during the 1930s and ’40s.
362
See Jew Suss, dir. by Lothar Mendes (Associated British Picture Coporation, 1934).
For these descriptions of Harlan’s Oppenheimer, see Christiane Schönfeld, ‘Lion Feuchtwanger,
Jud Süß and the Nazis’, in Aesthetics and Politics in Modern German Culture: Festschrift In Honour
of Rhys W. Williams, ed. by Brigid Haines, Stephen Parker and Colin Riordan (Bern: Peter Lang,
2010), pp. 39–52 (p. 47).
364
Jud Süß, 1:04:10–07:45. Söderbaum was married to Veit Harlan, and was derisively nicknamed the
Reichswasserleiche (‘Floating Corpse of the Reich’). See Jo Fox, Filming Women in the Third Reich
(Oxford: Berg, 2000), p. 165. This epithet referred to the watery fates of Dorothea and Anna, the latter
a character in Die goldene Stadt (1941). Both drown themselves after being sexually violated by an
Untermensch. This pattern bears some comparison with John Deathridge’s analysis of Isolde’s
Liebestod and its relationship with the Third Reich: she ‘gradually sinks lifeless into the world of the
absolute’. See Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, p. 139. For more on Söderbaum, see, in addition to Fox,
Antje Ascheid, Hitler’s Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema (Ambler: Temple
University Press, 2003), pp. 42–97.
365
For the makers of Jud Süß, this distinction was evidently a necessary one to make. Indeed, Susan
Tegel observed that, in this film, ‘music was extremely important in driving home the point that the
Jew was not a German’. She even noted that Harlan’s extras ‘had been sought not so much for their
physiognomy, though that could have been a factor, but for their music and knowledge of religious
ritual’. See Jew Süss, p. 172 and p. 166 respectively.
363
137
Figure 19 – The opening of Jud Süß, a saccharine image of eighteenth-century Stuggart, the capital city of
Württemberg, prior to Oppenheimer’s penetration of the city walls
Figure 20 – The raucous singing of Jews in the synagogue, which is juxtaposed with Figure 21 (below)
138
Figure 21 – Dorothea Sturm (Kristina Söderbaum) looking sorrowful as she accompanies herself at the
piano
A number of films made during the Third Reich era did reference Wagner and Die
Meistersinger specifically. One of them is Bayreuth bereitet die Festspiele vor, a
black-and-white Ufa Kulturfilm about the Festival, which was made in 1934.366 The
music at the opening comes from the first two bars of the Prelude to Act I of Die
Bayreuth bereitet die Festspiele vor, BA-FA B 114875-1. Kulturfilms were short ‘infomercials’
generally shown in the cinema before or after a feature film. Two of the most exhaustive studies of the
Ufa Kulturfilm are Kulturfilm im ‘Dritten Reich’, ed. by Ramón Reichert (Vienna: Synema, 2006); and
‘Kulturfilm und Wochenschau im Kino’, part three of ‘“Drittes Reich”: 1933–1945’, Geschichte des
dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, pp. 103–230. Particulars such as when and where Bayreuth
bereitet was shown for the first time, and on how many occasions it was screened, have to the best of
my knowledge been lost. Moreover, as far as I am aware, it has been hitherto overlooked in both
musicology and film studies. It is certainly not accounted for in any of the following: Geschichte des
Deutschen Films, ed. by Jacobsen, Kaes and Prinzler; Die Einübung des dokumentarischen Blicks.
Fiction Film und Non Fiction Film zwischen Wahrheitsanspruch und expressiver Sachlichkeit 1895–
1945, ed. by Ursula von Keitz and Kay Hoffmann (Marburg: Schüren Pressverlag, 2001); Kulturfilm,
ed. by Reichert; and Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films, ed. by Zimmerman and Hoffmann.
Rudolf Schaad, an obscure figure who created only a handful of movies during the Hitler era, directed
Bayreuth bereitet; Hans Lebede, an academic who authored books as well as film scripts on a number
of topics, wrote the script; and the narrator is named as ‘Dr. Ph. Manning’. Walter Tjaden is credited as
the sound technician, but whether he composed the original music is unclear. The title plates also
record the collaboration of Winifred Wagner and Heinz Tietjen in the documentary’s creation. Both
make brief appearances on screen. Bayreuth bereitet lasts about twenty-seven minutes. Schaad worked
as director on at least three other short films; Ufa-Märchen (1934), Artisten der Arbeit (1938), and
Pirsch unter Wasser (1942). He was also a co-director on Der Schritt vom Wege (1938) and So gefällst
du mir (1941). His principal role, however, was as an editor. He continued to work in this occupation
after the War. Among Hans Lebede’s body of publications is a general history of music co-authored
with Walter Kühn, Von Musikern und Musik. Von der Meistersingerzeit bis zu Richard Strauss (Berlin:
Verlag G. Freytag, 1938).
366
139
Meistersinger. Wagner’s richly orchestrated fanfare is reduced to a single melodic
line played by high brass instruments. This lends the quotation a distinctly militarised
sound. The documentary’s opening scenes luxuriate in shots of smoking chimneys,
quaint rooftops, and tall bell towers. 367 These all serve to symbolise Bayreuth’s
antiquity and homeliness. Indeed, smoking chimneys were an important, recurring
visual symbol in Nazi film, as we will see below.
Figure 22 – The camera gazes at the towers of Bayreuth
Figure 23 – Smoking chimneys in Bayreuth
367
The resemblance between this sequence and the depiction of Nuremberg in Der Triumph des
Willens, which is analysed below, is striking. Schaad did work with Leni Riefenstahl on at least one
occasion – he was in charge of technical collaboration and organisation on Olympia (1938). See Rainer
Rother, Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius, trans. by Martin H. Bott (London: Continuum,
2002), p. 239.
140
Equally idyllic internal and external shots of Wahnfried, Wagner’s house, follow
soon after. The camera shifts its focus from the composer’s library, to a massive
portrait of Cosima in another room, to his grave in the garden. The narrator gives a
brief history of the town as this unfolds, and explains the various sights around the
home.
The film is meant, at least in part, to offer a window into the process of
preparing Wagner’s operas for performance. The first work we see being rehearsed is
Walther’s Prize Song from Act III scene 5 of Die Meistersinger.368 The members of
the chorus have been organised into an ‘SATB’ formation, and the front of the hall is
populated entirely by women. They look on at Max Lorenz, the soloist, with intense
admiration – almost as if his singing has cast them into a trance. Hugo Rüdel,
Bayreuth’s elderly chorus director who is coaching the session, listens with
approval.369
Figure 24 – Lorenz’s entranced (female) admirers
368
04:35–05:55.
Rüdel is an obscure figure in the history of Bayreuth. He was born in Halvelberg in 1868, where his
father was a Kapellmeister. Although he went on to study horn at the Berlin Hochschule and also had
some skill as a pianist, he made his career as a choral director. Rüdel self-identified as a preußischer
Wagnerianer, and even named his son Siegfried. From 1899 he worked simultaneously as the director
of the Berlin Opera chorus and, at the Hochschule, a teacher of natural horn. See Dietmar Schenk, Die
Hochschule für Musik zu Berlin. Preußens Konservatorium zwischen romantischem Klassizismus und
Neuer Musik, 1869–1932/33 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004), p. 141. For an entertaining
account of working with Rüdel, see Fritz Busch, Pages From a Musician’s Life, trans. by Marjorie
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 158–60.
369
141
The next work is the Prelude to Act II of Die Walküre, under the baton of Karl
Elmendorff. As the piece unfolds, a crowd of people gathers outside the window. The
initial shots of this group are taken from inside the hall. They appear to be drawn to
Wagner’s music on some instinctive level. More and more of them cluster around the
windows, until a shot from outside the building shows so many straining to see inside
that they are almost clambering over one another. As the women of the chorus stared
intently at Lorenz, so this assembly is utterly transfixed by Wagner’s music.
Figure 25 – A crowd gathers by the window during Elmendorff’s rehearsal
Midway through the Prelude, Elmendorff stops proceedings to remind the players that
the ‘Valkyrie’ motif must sound clearly in the trumpets from the very first note. The
brass section is then asked to go through this motif by itself before Elmendorff reruns the section with full orchestra. These moments reveal the extent to which the
rehearsals in Bayreuth bereitet were staged for the documentary. This is also true of
the sessions that follow, first with Rüdel again, and then with Carl Kittel in his office.
142
Ultimately the music being practiced in this Kulturfilm is blurred with the music of
the documentary’s soundtrack, during a full stage rehearsal of Act I of
Götterdämmerung. As the scenery is dismantled, the orchestra plays through
‘Siegfried’s Rhine Journey’, a popular excerpt from Der Ring. The documentary
provided cinema-going audiences with a taste of the best-known moments in
Wagner’s operas, and during this scene one of these moments transforms into a sonic
symbol for Bayreuth itself.
The end of the documentary coincides with Hitler’s arrival in Bayreuth, and
with the beginning of the Festival. A great sense of excitement builds toward this
moment. A flag with a large, Fraktur ‘W’ emblazoned across it is raised while the
trumpets reprise their reduction of the opening melody of Die Meistersinger. They
are calling out to Germany, and Hitler dutifully responds. Thronging crowds line the
roadsides. We are told that the whole of Bayreuth has come to see the guests arrive.
The cameras are positioned in such a way as to make the viewer feel that they are
struggling to see Hitler. The shots begin at the back of the crowd, and give only a
brief glimpse of his car as it flashes past. The tension finally breaks when he is seen
up close, exiting the vehicle to greet Winifred and enter the opera house.370
Der Triumph des Willens (The Triumph of the Will), an epic that lasts for one
hour and forty-five minutes, also features music from Die Meistersinger. It has been
described, without exaggeration, as ‘the most significant representative document of
Hitler’s rule, the film that was to bear witness to his triumph for all time’.371 The third
Bayreuth bereitet, 25:01–25:13. Schaad’s directorial techniques again foreshadow those employed
by Riefenstahl to generate a sense of public devotion in Der Triumph.
371
Jürgen Trimborn, Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, trans. by Edna McCown (New York: Faber, 2002), p.
106. It is a mistake, in my view, to claim that Der Triumph is ‘masterful’ in terms of its film
techniques in spite of its political messages. This idea is an old cliché, propagated not least by
Riefenstahl herself, and it overlooks many of the film’s flaws. Consider the shoddy camerawork during
the scene down the River Pegnitz in Nuremberg, for example, in which the film crew’s shadows are
clearly visible. For one description of Der Triumph as ‘masterful’, see Mary Devereaux, ‘Beauty and
Evil: The Case of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will’, in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the
370
143
scene, an idyllic tableau of a Nuremberg summer morning, is accompanied by part of
the Prelude to Act III. 372 Once again though, the passage in question is not taken
directly from the opera. It is an arrangement for brass ensemble written by Herbert
Windt, who composed the rest of the film’s score. The harmony of his version is less
intricate than the original, and so the melodic line is all the more pronounced. This is
the only section of Der Triumph that contains any of Wagner’s music.
The passage of the Prelude from which Windt extracted this music contains
the material that will become the ‘Wach’ auf!’ chorus, as can be seen in bb. 5–8 of
the following example:
Figure 26 – An extract from the Prelude to Act III of Die Meistersinger
Intersection, ed. by Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 227–57 (p.
227).
372
Der Triumph, 12:01–13:56. The first scene shows Hitler arriving in Nuremberg, and the second
shows a torch-lit night parade through the streets of the town. For confirmation that the Prelude to Act
III was Windt’s source, see Stefan Strötgen, ‘“Ich komponiere den Parteitag…”. Zur Rolle der Musik
in Leni Riefenstahls Triumph des Willens’, in Von Schlachthymnen und Protestsongs. Zur
Kulturgeschichte des Verhältnisses von Musik und Krieg, ed. by Annemarie Firme and Ramona
Hocker (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2006), pp. 139–58 (p. 146).
144
It is another chorale-simulacrum, and of course the text with which it is associated
was almost certainly inspired by another of Bach’s Cantatas – BWV 140, ‘Wachet
auf’. In the film, the music serves principally to convey the community’s purity. This
theme is encapsulated in a range of visual symbols, including, once again, smoking
chimney tops.
Figure 27 – A smoking chimney in Der Triumph des Willens
But it should also be noted that this moment in the Prelude serves to foreshadow the
later and much more famous appearance of this music in the final scene of Act III.
Michael Puri has aptly described the Prelude as ‘a skeleton key to the opera’:
within [Die Meistersinger], it is a psychological portrait of the protagonist,
Hans Sachs. The standard-bearer for the Protestant Reformation, Sachs must
surrender his personal claims on Eva in order to shepherd his flock, the
stratified citizenry of Nuremberg, into a state of peaceful equilibrium. At the
beginning of Act III, however, Sachs has not assumed his destiny. The
Prelude finds Sachs deeply conflicted, caught at the crux of several
dichotomies: the Ideal and the Real, Redemption and Renunciation, and the
New and the Old.373
Michael Puri, ‘The Ecstasy and the Agony: Exploring the Nexus of Music and Message in the Act
III Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’, in 19th-Century Music, 25 (Fall/Spring 2001–02),
212–236 (214). Although Puri makes use of Baudrillardian terms, such as ‘ideal’ and ‘real’, he does
not refer to him in the article.
373
145
Put another way, in its appearance in this Prelude, the ‘Wach’ auf!’ music is still just
dormant potential awaiting its realisation. This sheds further light on why this
particular moment of the opera is used in Der Triumph des Willens. Obviously, the
later appearance of the ‘Wach’ auf!’ chorus, which harnesses a massed choir, would
simply have been too loud to be an appropriate accompaniment to the images that
appear on the screen. But whether Windt and the filmmakers were consciously aware
of it or not, Wagner’s use of the theme in the Prelude to express the coming
realisation of inherent potential married perfectly with one of the goals of Der
Triumph – that is, to contribute to the construction of the ideal Nazi state now that the
Party found themselves in a position of power.
According to an old myth, Die Meistersinger and other of the composer’s
works appear through the whole film.374 This has now been debunked so many times
that dismissals of it are themselves in danger of become clichéd.375 The issue is only
raised again here because there is still confusion as to the origin of the quotation,
even in the work of those who seek to criticise the myth. Reimar Volker, for example,
wrongly identified Windt’s source as the ‘Wach’ auf!’ chorus at the end of Act III.
On the basis of this case of mistaken identity, he concluded the ‘replacement’ of
Wagner’s original choir to some extent softens what might have seemed like
a rather blunt and acoustic duplication of the Nuremberg awakening to the
call of Wagner’s ‘Wach’ Auf, es nahet gen den Tag’ […] a direct quotation
might well have seemed an artistic solution unworthy of any serious film
composer, because it is too blatant.376
374
For example, both Witte and Welch wrongly identified the portion of Die Meistersinger quoted in
Der Triumph as the ‘Overture’ – presumably meaning the Prelude to Act I. See Welch, German
Cinema, p. 129; and Witte, ‘Film in Nationalsozialismus’, p. 126. Na’ama Sheffi, meanwhile, was
unacceptably vague in her description of ‘concert interludes’ of Die Meistersinger appearing in Der
Triumph. See The Ring of Myths, p. 48.
375
For a critique of the myth about large portions of Die Meistersinger being used in the film see
Dennis, ‘Die Meistersinger Through the Lens of the Third Reich’, pp. 98–99.
376
‘Herbert Windt’s Film Music to Triumph of the Will’, p. 43.
146
This essay became a source for Celia Applegate in her own study of Der Triumph.377
Her conclusion was far more emphatic. For her, Wagner’s ‘Wach’ auf!’ chorus is ‘a
veritable shout’ that reverberates ‘from the assembled people of Nuremberg’. There
follow some wholly misleading claims about the nature of Windt’s arrangement:
the entire quotation radically reduces the volume of the Wagner original,
including the bold two-note opening of the ‘Wach auf’ chorus […] in
Windt’s version, these notes barely register, emerging gradually out of the
near silence as the quietest of a two-note phrase from the horns. In it, and in
the brief passage that follows, Windt also slows down the tempo to match
the movement of the camera over waking Nuremberg.378
This precession is an unsettling example of a basic mistake not just entering but
evolving in Wagner scholarship. Susan Tegel has also suggested that ‘by substituting
a brass arrangement for the original, [Windt] made the quotation less obvious’. 379
Surely it is precisely the opposite that is the case. Windt’s version made the presence
of Wagner’s opera as obvious as possible. His reduced scoring simplifies the
harmony and heightens the distinctiveness of the melody, and this makes it easier to
identify the music as Die Meistersinger than the actual portion of the opera on which
it is based.
On 26 February 1942, Furtwängler conducted a Berlin Philharmonic
performance of the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger.380 It was an NS-Werkpause
concert, arranged by the Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength Through Joy’) organisation,
and given in the Berlin AEG factory.381 As such it would have been broadcast over
the radio. The event was also filmed for inclusion in Die Deutsche Wochenschau. The
‘Music in Riefenstahl’s Nazi-era Films’, p. 189.
Ibid.
379
Nazis and the Cinema, p. 86.
380
BA-FA K 20221-2, Die Deutsche Wochenschau nr. 606, 4 April 1942. The film is also available in
DVD format, ‘The Reichsorchester: The Berlin Philharmonic and the Third Reich’, dir. by Enrique
Sánchez Lansch (Arthaus Musik, 2007).
381
The KdF was a leisure and tourism organisation that first offered entertainment activities to the
public in 1933, and continued operations even once the War began. For more on the KdF, see, in
addition to fn. 385, Daniela Liebscher, Freude und Arbeit. Zur internationalen Freizeit- und
Sozialpolitik des faschistischen Italien und des NS-Regimes (Cologne: SH-Verlag, 2009).
377
378
147
movie begins with the familiar ‘Zeit im Bild’ title plate, which is accompanied by a
short soundtrack consisting of trumpet fanfares. With its large-scale brass ensemble,
dotted rhythms, and clashing cymbals, the character is not dissimilar from the
opening of the Prelude itself. This sonic introduction serves as a set of musical
quotation marks, framing the piece about to be performed, thereby underscoring the
Nazi Party’s preservation of cultural German artefacts. The first images show three of
the AEG factory’s chimneys. The camera gazes upward, from a vantage point on the
ground, at the smoke emerging from the chimney tops. It then pans down slowly,
conveying a sense of awe at the chimneys’ size and height. This constitutes a modern
take on the chimney tops seen in Bayreuth Bereitet and Der Triumph des Willens. A
familiar trope is here recast to emphasise the strength of German industry, as well as
the Nazi mastery of it.
Figure 28 – Three smoking chimneys
The camera then draws level with the ground to show groups of labourers, dressed in
their overalls, walking toward the entrance of the factory. As they make their way
through the grounds, they pass larges piles of wood, metal, and sandbags. As with the
recasting of the chimneys, these people and their industrial surroundings make for a
modern take on the idealised communities shown in Die Meistersinger. As Wagner
148
depicted cobblers who were also poets, so this film portrays the factory employees as
workers with an innate love of German classical music.
A narrator explains the context of the concert, and introduces the work to be
played before the music begins. The sound of the performance itself has a rather
distinctive character among recordings of Die Meistersinger. Consider the treatment
of the passage between the upbeat to bar 41 and bar 58, for example.
Figure 29 – An extract from bb. 41–58 of the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger
The dotted rhythms of this motif, sometimes known as the ‘banner’, because of its
association with the guilds of Nuremberg, are played quickly and crisply. The
crotchet chords are markedly detached from one another. In the score, this section
comes with the instruction sehr gehalten – sometimes translated to the more familiar
149
Italian term molto sostenuto. 382 However, if anything, Furtwängler increases the
tempo in these bars and pushes through them. 383 It must also be noted that his
ensemble appears to be a significant expansion on the forces specified in the score. It
would be impossible to document completely the number of players in his orchestra,
but the film clearly shows two harps on stage, and three bassoons. 384 The score only
calls for one of the latter, and two of the former. This kind of reinforcement was
presumably meant to increase the might of the sound world of Die Meistersinger.
Indeed, the full recording of Furtwängler’s 1943 performance in Bayreuth has an
equally massive sound about it. Overall, the combination of tempo, articulation, and
instrumental forces in this film lead to a rendition of the Prelude that has a distinctly
militarised character.
Throughout the performance, the attention of the cameras switches between
performers and audience. Members of the audience are often shown perched on
factory equipment, and the orchestra is also framed by it. This serves to animate the
machinery, almost as if it were a sentient member of the Nazi community.
382
See, for example, Norman Del Mar, Conducting Favourite Concert Pieces, ed. by Jonathan Del
Mar (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 236. Wagner’s own Faust Overture contains both markings,
so it seems reasonable to assume that he intended the tempo to slow with the words ‘sehr gehalten’.
383
Compare this, for example, with recordings made by Herbert von Karajan and James Levine.
Furtwängler takes just 38 seconds to perform this passage, whereas Karan takes 42 seconds, and
Levine takes 43. See, respectively, Die Meisteringer von Nürnberg: Live Recording in Mono from
Festspielhaus Bayreuth, 1943, Chor und Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele, cond. by Wilhelm
Furtwängler (Grammofono, AB 78602/05, 2000); Die Meisteringer von Nürnberg: Studio Recording
in Stereo, Staatskapelle Dresden, Chor des Dresdener Staatsoper, Chor des Leipziger Rundfunks, cond.
by Herbert von Karajan (EMI, CDS 7 49683 2, 1970); and Die Meisteringer von Nürnberg, The
Metropolitan Opera and Chorus, cond. by James Levine (Deutsche Grammophon, 2 DVD-VIDEO
NTSC 0440 073 0949 GH 2, 2004).
384
Information about Furtwängler’s orchestral forces in this performance could not be found in either
of the two most important texts on the Berlin Philharmonic during the Third Reich era. See Fred K.
Prieberg, Trial of Strength: Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Third Reich, trans. by Christopher Dolan
(London: Quartet, 1991); and Misha Aster, The Third Reich’s Orchestra: The Berlin Philharmonic,
1933–1945 (London: Souvenir, 2010).
150
Figure 30 – The place of machinery in the community
Portions of the audience have been arranged to make it clear that everyone from
manual labourers in their overalls, to office workers in their suits, have been brought
together by the chance to hear this concert. Injured soldiers are given particularly
prominent positions in among the crowd, perhaps foreshadowing the Bayreuth War
Festivals that would begin the following year.
Figure 31 – Injured soldiers placed conspicuously among the crowd
During the fugato section of the Prelude, we hear for the first time a motif sometimes
called the ‘apprentice’, because of its association with David and the other prentices.
151
Figure 32 – The ‘apprentice’ motif from the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger
In this portion of the performance, the camera pays particularly close attention to the
audience. Indeed, the gaze turns away from the orchestra for a full thirty-five
seconds. A direct connection between the content of the opera and the circumstances
of the concert could not have been made more explicitly. The watching audience is
meant to see these factory workers as the modern, aspiring cobbler-poets of the new
Germany.
This performance was by no means an isolated occurrence. Shelley
Baranowski has already pointed out that, for the KdF movement,
arranging cultural events on the shop floor became essential to
demonstrating the ‘joy’ of work. By joining the ‘creativity’ embedded in
industrial production with the creativity of cultural production, culture in the
workplace became visual and aural evidence of the compatibility between
work and leisure. The infusions of German culture tempered the harshness
of industrial civilisation.385
I would suggest, however, that there was a specific reason that the Prelude to Act I of
Die Meistersinger was chosen for this particular documentary. The workers’ strength
comes from the joy of knowing that they are fulfilling the vision that Wagner laid out
in this opera; and, of course, the audience is being invited to identify with them. In
385
Shelley Baranowski, Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the Third Reich
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 86.
152
Baudrillard’s terms then, this film turns the actual audience into the ‘aim’ of Die
Meistersinger, and they are invited to feel ‘personalised’ through Wagner’s music.
The event of the performance and its subsequent dissemination as a film therefore
served to reinforce the existence of the ideal Nazi state.
The whole concert takes place beneath the watchful eye of three enormous
swastika banners, which are draped behind the orchestra. They mirror the three
chimneys seen at the beginning of the film, and they underline that the music is being
played and heard in service of Nazism. This makes clear for the viewers that the
Nazis saw themselves as having one foot in the old Germany and one foot in the
new. The documentary therefore embodies Nietzsche’s conclusion about the Prelude
to Act I of Die Meistersinger itself: ‘this type of music best expresses what I think
about the Germans: they are from the day before yesterday and the day after
tomorrow, – they still have no today’.386
To the best of my knowledge, the extent to which these three films make use
of Wagner and particularly Die Meistersinger is unique. 387 They should not be
studied in complete isolation from one another, or from other Nazi movies, however.
For example, it is important to underline that the Party had made its annual rally the
386
BGE, p. 132.
Other important Nazi films that include Wagner but not Die Meistersinger are Der ewige Jude and
Stukas. Der ewige Jude was made to look like a documentary film, but it was constructed largely from
staged scenes and falsified quotations. Fritz Hippler was the director, and Goebbels had an active role
in its production too. Eberhard Taubert is credited in the film’s opening sequence as having conceived
its idea, and is thought to have written the script. The male narrator is not named. Susan Tegel’s
exhaustive study of the film establishes that it was in preparation from at least November 1938. The
accompanying advertising campaign began in February 1940, even though the movie itself was still
incomplete. In spite of its postwar notoriety, and the great effort that went into making it, Der ewige
Jude was a commercial flop when it was released. The film is fewer than three minutes old when
Wagner is mentioned. The narrator claims that the composer ‘once said: “The Jew is the plastic demon
of the decay of humanity”’ (‘Der Jude ist der plastische Dämon des Verfalls der Menschheit’). The
audience is not told where this quote comes from, however. The line as it is given here is actually an
arrangement, a reduction made by Goebbels from Wagner’s essay Know Thyself (1881). For more on
this, see fn. 310. For more on the making of Der ewige Jude, see, for example, Richard S. Levy, AntiSemitism: A Historical Encyclopaedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio,
2005), p. 229; Tegel, Nazi Cinema, p. 151; and Witte, ‘Film in Nationalsozialismus’, p. 119. For more
on Stukas, see fn. 389.
387
153
subject of a film in 1927, and again 1929. Riefenstahl herself had directed a featurelength production about it in 1933, Der Sieg des Glaubens (The Victory of Faith).
Der Triumph was not the last time that she would document the occasion either. She
directed another movie, Tag der Freiheit! – Unsere Wehrmacht!, the following
year. 388 An analysis of the many threads connecting the films of the Nuremberg
rallies between 1927 and 1935 would necessitate a separate project. Here it can be
recorded that the opening scene of Der Sieg is almost identical to the third scene of
Der Triumph, and is accompanied by the same brass arrangement of the Prelude to
Act III of Die Meistersinger. From the earliest stages, the annual rally was conceived
of as an event to be filmed; and the use of Die Meistersinger in the soundtrack of this
universe was carefully considered. Jud Süß drew on a number of pre-existing
versions of a nineteenth-century story, and in 1940, after Bayreuth bereitet, the
Wagner Festival was again idealised on the Nazi screen in Karl Ritter’s Luftwaffebased action movie, Stukas.389 Finally, Bayreuth bereitet also shows that the episode
388
This film was much shorter than her earlier Nuremberg efforts, and it lacks the grandeur of both
Der Sieg and Der Triumph. There is a noticeable absence of public devotion to Hitler, and with its
intense focus on the human form at the expense of architecture and landscape, Tag der Freiheit! feels
almost abstract – ‘an unavoidable duty, an intermezzo on the way to greater things’. See Rother,
Riefenstahl, p. 76.
389
Indeed, the precession of which Harlan’s Jud Süß was a part has continued into the twenty-first
century. The latest installment is Jud Süss. Film Ohne Gewissen, released in 2010. This movie,
directed by Oskar Roehler, tells the story of the 1940 film being made. It caused a good deal of
controversy upon its release, and was widely criticised in the German media for falsifying facts and
mythmaking. Stukas tells the story of three Luftwaffe Ju-87 squadrons during the Nazi invasion of
France, and concludes with the start of the Battle of Britain. The plot rests on the ebullient
Oberleutnant Hans Wilde (played by Hannes Stelzer) being taken to military hospital after crashing a
plane and suffering serious injuries. His wounds heal soon enough, but he is left with a depression that
medicine cannot cure. As a final resort a nurse takes him to Bayreuth for the annual Wagner Festival.
One hearing of Götterdämmerung is all that is needed to send Wilde rushing back to his fellow pilots.
He rejoins them just in time to take part in the Battle of Britain. Stukas was premiered as late as 27
June 1941 though, by which time Operation Barbarossa had already begun and Operation Sea Lion had
been postponed indefinitely. In at least one instance, even the Nazi press questioned the medicinal
power that the film attributes to Bayreuth. Rainer Rother recorded the reaction of the Film-Kurier in
his authoritative essay on Stukas: ‘the twist in the plot – that this officer only needs to experience a
Bayreuth performance, and after one sitting comes back to his comrades with his usual temperament –
is not completely explained (nicht ganz geklärt)’. See Georg Herzberg, ‘Stukas [review article]’, FilmKurier, 28 June 1941, cited in ‘Zeitnaher Film unter Kriegsbedingungen’, in Krieg und Militar des 20.
Jahrhunderts, ed. by Berhard Chiari, Matthias Rogg and Wolfgang Schmidt (Munich: R. Oldenbourg,
2003), pp. 349–70 (p. 358).
154
of ‘Zeit im Bild’ that documented Furtwängler’s performance of Die Meistersinger in
the Berlin AEG factory was not the only short propaganda film about classical music
made in the Third Reich. The existence of these connections suggests that the three
case studies in this section amount to a mere glimpse of a much larger web of
simulacra in Nazi cinema.
III
Die Meistersinger as an Advertisement in Nazi Germany
Uniqueness of the Nazi mass media
The mass media in the Third Reich was set apart from other nations and contexts by
three characteristics. First, members of the public tuned into radio programmes with a
Volksempfänger device.390 These were sold as an easily affordable way of listening to
state-approved stations; but they were poorly made, unreliable, and could be used to
390
Although it should be remembered that radio broadcasting has characteristics that are as applicable
to Hitler’s Germany as to any other society. For example, speeches delivered by Hitler at meetings,
conferences, and rallies were often broadcast to the entire nation, but radio addresses by political
leaders were standard in the Allied nations between 1933 and 1945 too. See, for example, D. J.
Wenden, ‘Churchill, Radio and Cinema’, in Churchill, ed. by Robert Blake and William Roger Louis
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 215–40; Robert J. Brown, Manipulating the Ether: The
Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties America (London: McFarland, 1998); or Gerd Horten, Radio
Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During World War Two (Berkley: University of
California Press, 2002). Indeed, for all societies in the 1930s and ’40s, the radio was the first device
capable of instantaneously reaching individuals in the privacy of their homes. Although John Logie
Baird had developed a working television system by 1926, and a regular service of programmes had
been introduced in Germany by the mid-1930s, John Sandford records that Nazi plans to incorporate
the device into their mass media were never realised. This was owed to the outbreak of the War, and to
radios being cheaper to make and distribute than televisions. Nevertheless, transmissions to Germany’s
500 television sets, most of which were located in public places, continued until 1944. See Sandford,
‘Television in Germany’, in Television in Europe, ed. by James A. Coleman and Brigitte Rollet
(Exeter: Intellect Books, 1997), pp. 49–60. Michele Hilmes has suggested that the close proximity of
the advent of television to that of the radio is the main reason that a critical body of study on the radio
in Western society has begun to emerge only recently. See ‘Rethinking Radio’, in Radio Reader:
Essays in the Cultural History of Radio, ed. by Michele Hilmes and Jason Loviglio (London:
Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–20. Other general studies of the radio’s place in modern society include
Andrew Crisell, Understanding Radio, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1994); and Communities of the
Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture, ed. by Susan Merrill Squier (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003).
155
hear foreign broadcasts.391 Second, the state in question was preoccupied by the idea
of a national community united by racial homogeneity. This fed into every branch of
the media. Finally, the Party was unusually fixated with entertaining its audiences.
Goebbels had realised, while the regime was still in its infancy, that political material
could be made more appealing by punctuating it with lighter fare. 392 Broadcast
schedules were structured according to this principle, and this encouraged members
of the public to keep their radios switched on throughout the day. 393 Entertainment
programmes served to do more than assemble audiences for political broadcasts,
however. Their content could be harnessed to exercise influence on the listeners’
opinion of the characteristics and intentions of the Nazi Party. This would help
gradually to change the public’s political instincts. For example, if the majority of
those listening to the radio could be convinced that the Party was a noble and
patriotic organisation, then any rumour of its brutality was less likely to be widely
believed. 394 All broadcasts in Hitler’s Germany contributed to these continuous
efforts to alter social practice. Das Wunschkonzert, for example, a popular show that
aired between 1939 and 1941, consisted of requests sent in by members of the
391
See Currid, A National Acoustics, p. 27.
For example, Glenn R. Cuomo recorded that, ‘from 1 March 1933, when Goebbels assumed control
of the medium, right up through the war years, his diary comments reveal one central consistency in
broadcasting policy, a recurring call for Auflockerung (relaxation) of the broadcast programme […]
contrary to Leonard Doob’s postwar claim that the Nazi authorities had made “a consistent effort to
keep entertainment at a minimum”, Goebbels waged an ongoing campaign to make the programme
more appealing to the largest segment of the audience, the uneducated masses […] of course, in his
efforts at mass marketing, Goebbels did not altogether relinquish a propagandistic thrust to his radio
policy. With such comments as “not so much persuasion. Work in disguise”, and “not so much
obtrusive politics. Operate more with the appearance of having no intention” (14 July 1933; 27
November 1935), he recorded quite candidly his plan for subtle manipulation of the listening
audience’. See ‘The Diaries of Joseph Goebbels as a Source for the Understanding of National
Socialist Cultural Politics’, in National Socialist Cultural Policy, ed. by Cuomo (New York: St
Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 197–245 (p. 217).
393
Welch, Politics and Propaganda, p. 43. Welch records that by 1942, seventy per cent of all radio
broadcasts in the Third Reich were ostensibly entertainment programmes.
394
For example, the Nazis kept the working methods of extermination centres from the German public.
Kershaw notes that even in underground resistance circles, although Auschwitz was widely rumoured
to be a particularly prolific death camp, the use of gas chambers was unknown. See Kershaw, The
Final Solution, p. 143.
392
156
public.395 At first glance it may seem politically benign; but, on closer inspection, it
clearly aided the process of simulating a national community that was structured
according to a particularly aggressive ideology.396
The mass media could also be used to align public opinion with Nazi ideas of
artistic merit. As with any modern society, the variety of music being consumed in
the Third Reich, whether in performance, via radio or recording, or in the press,
created hierarchies of taste. Such hierarchies are usually said to divide between social
strata, thanks to the associations of different musics with age, levels of education, and
societal status.397 In Hitler’s Germany these divisions would have gone against the
Volksgemeinschaft principle. They were used instead to delineate between the ‘races’.
These delineations did not always serve the desired purpose, however. While the
broadcast of light or entertainment music may have risked provoking anger among a
minority of Party ideologues, it seems that the majority of listeners actually received
it enthusiastically.
During this period, any broadcast of classical music in any country would
have constituted a combination of high art with the latest technology. But it was only
in the Third Reich that this combination was seen as embodying the country’s
governing power. Party members portrayed Nazism as a bridge connecting the
cultural achievements in Germany’s past with the technological advances of the
395
One example of a radio request programme outside of the Third Reich and predating Das
Wunschkonzert is The Ovaltineys’ Concert Party, which began in England in 1934 and enjoyed
immense popularity. See Seán Street, A Concise History of British Radio, with a preface by Piers
Plowright (Devon: Kelly Publications, 2002), p. 48. Das Wunschkonzert proved so popular that it was
later used as the basis for a film, which further underlined the idea of the national community
simulated by the radio programme. For a recent study of this film, see Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, Nazi
Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich (Woodbridge: Camden
House, 2004), pp. 121–50.
396
For a full study of this radio programme, see Hans-Jörg Koch, Das Wunschkonzert im NSRundfunk, with a foreword by Hans-Ulrich Wehler (Köln: Böhlau, 2003); in addition to David
Bathrick, ‘Making a National Family With the Radio: The Nazi Wunschkonzert’,
Modernism/Modernity, 4 (1997), 115–27.
397
See, for example, Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
by Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984), p. 86.
157
twentieth century. By virtue of taking place in public, or at least being made known
to the public, these events could be documented by the media, and then distributed in
the form of news via the radio, cinema, and newspapers. This process transformed
what might otherwise have been philanthropic events into propagandistic material.
Therefore the arts enabled the Party to attempt to convince the public that it was a
learned organisation.398 In the concluding section of this chapter, I will suggest that
the best way to describe this incorporation of Wagner in the Nazi mass media
machine is as a type of advertising.
Die Meistersinger, Nazism, and immersion
Consumption was not driven by capitalist economics in the Third Reich. Objects
were consumed principally on the basis of their political capital; that is, the extent to
which they could be construed as reinforcing Nazi ideology. Die Meistersinger, as a
musical object, offered a good deal of this capital to the Nazi mass media. A German
composer beloved by Hitler had written it, and so its cultural value was already
unparalleled. Wagner’s renown as an anti-Semite increased this value still further. As
has been seen in this chapter, most references to the man and his music in the Third
Reich media were generalisations with little regard for historical accuracy. These
were not overlooked out of laziness or ignorance, but were purposefully simplified as
part of an effort to better enable the consumption of Wagner’s music as adverts for
Nazism itself.
Baudrillard saw immersion – that is, becoming swamped in a fantasy world or
alternate reality – as one of the end products of adverts. This was because of their
398
In his speech at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition on 19 July 1937, for example,
Hitler stressed that ‘the new German Reich will bring about a tremendous blossoming in German art,
for never before has it been assigned more gigantic tasks than is the case in this Reich today and will
be the case in the future. And never before have the funds thus required been appropriated more
generously than in National Socialist Germany’. See Domarus, The Essential Hitler, p. 494.
158
sheer multiplicity, and because we consume them at a ‘secondary level’ as ‘the clear
expression of a culture’.399 This may provide further explanation for the special place
of Die Meistersinger in the Nazi mass media, because the opera itself aimed to
immerse audiences in a nationalist fantasy world. Consider, for example, the role of
Walther’s ‘morning dream’ in Act III.400 He tells Sachs that he had a beautiful dream,
and Sachs encourages him to share and interpret it as a means of forging a song. The
end product is so spellbinding that the people around them are left unsure if they are
awake or asleep. Walther’s dream performs a role that is roughly comparable to that
of the mass media in Germany between 1933 and 1945. In both cases, a fantasy world
– the unconscious realm of dreams on the one hand, and the escapist nature of the
products of the printed press, the radio, and the cinema on the other – becomes so
immersive an experience that it is confused with actual practice in the waking world.
Take some of the libretto during the famous quintet in Act III scene 4, for example:
Eva: Ob es nur ein Morgentraum?Selig deut’ ich mir es kaum.
Magdalena and David: Wach’ oder träum’ ich schon so früh’?Das zu erklären
macht mir Müh’:’s ist wohl nur ein Morgentraum?Was ich seh’, begreif’ ich
kaum!
Sachs: ’s war ein schöner Abendtraum;d’ran zu denken wag’ ich kaum.401
Edward Lipmann succinctly concluded that Wagner here uses ‘the dream concept
[…] in application to the whole present situation rather than to Walther’s song’, and
each person ‘confesses not to be able to interpret or explain what is happening’. 402 In
other words, there is something specific to the situation and Walther’s music that has
399
See fn. 79.
For more on Wagner and dreams, see Eric Chafe, The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical
Revolution of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 3–48.
401
Eva: ‘Is it only a morning dream?In my bliss, I can scarcely interpret it myself’. Magdalena and
David: ‘Do I wake or dream so early?To explain it gives me trouble:is it only a morning
dream?What I see I scarcely grasp!’ Sachs: ‘It was a beautiful evening-dream;I scarcely dare think
of it’.
402
Edward Lipmann, Philosophy and Aesthetics of Music, with an introduction by Christopher Hatch
(Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 220.
400
159
led each character to become immersed in a dream world. Wagner conveys this to the
audience through a number of compositional means. They include the rapid
transposition from C major to G-flat major, after a lengthy dominant pedal in the
latter, which marks the beginning of the Quintet; the proclivity of ascending scales
with chromatic inflections in the melodic lines, especially expressive scale degrees
such as natural-4̂, natural-5̂, and 7̂; the continued use of otherworldly transpositions,
such as the move from A major to D-flat major (the latter should be understood as a
respelling of B-double-flat major, or flat VI of D-flat – tertiary relationships being
consistently present wherever the Morgentraum is discussed, and which can be seen
in Figure 33); ethereally high violin writing; and the concluding transposition to E
major, via the respelling of G-flat as F-sharp. These features, and others besides,
combine to make the Quintet a heady and particularly ‘sublime’ moment.403 Or, in
Baudrillard’s terms, the compositional mechanisms ‘submit themselves to us, they
seek us out, surround us, and prove their existence to us by virtue of their
effusiveness’. 404
Figure 33 – An extract from the Quintet in Act III scene 4 of Die Meistersinger
Klaus van den Berg, ‘Die Meistersinger as Comedy: The Performative and Social Signification of
Genre’, in Wagner’s Meistersinger, ed. by Vazsonyi, pp. 145–164 (p. 162).
404
See fn. 82.
403
160
This brief analysis complements the comments that other musicologists have made on
the Quintet, and the Morgentraum in particular. Nicolas Vazsonyi noted that, during
the passages related to it, Wagner delved into an ‘unconscious realm’ to an unusual
extent – even by his standards: the world ‘into which Isolde sinks, never again to be
seen, is the same dream world from which Walther draws his inspiration, but which
he brings forth to share with the rest of us’.405 Paul Robinson wrote more admiringly,
saying that
once the other four voices have joined Eva’s, not a word is intelligible.
Instead we hear a long musical structure of exceptional complexity and
beauty, in which the voices weave in and out of the orchestral fabric until
they reach a brilliantly unanimous G-flat major resolution. The opera’s
generally realistic temporal continuum is interrupted here as nowhere
else.406
What matters here is that Wagner’s desire to immerse both characters and audience in
a dream world aligns with what the Nazi Party was attempting to achieve with much
of its propaganda. In the opening chapter of this thesis, we saw that commentators
such as Pretzel, Klemperer, Knappe, and Raleigh made a number of remarks
regarding processes of simulation reaching into everyday life in Nazi Germany:
‘things gradually lost their substance, changed into bizarre dreams. I began to live in
a state like that of a mild fever, pleasantly limp, slightly dazed and free of all
responsibilities’. 407 Die Meistersinger did not merely echo the sentiments that the
Nazi mass media was attempting to convey, then. It also, in a sense, mirrored the very
means by which it was conveying them.
405
Vazsonyi, Brand, p. 151.
Paul A. Robinson, Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (London: Harper and Row, 1985), p.
217.
407
See fn. 102.
406
161
Chapter Four
Die Meistersinger in the 1943 and 1944 Bayreuth War Festivals
zerging’ in Dunst das heil’ge röm’sche Reich,
uns bliebe gleich die heil’ge deutsche Kunst!
Act III scene 5
I
Introduction
Bayreuth between 1943 and 1945: the state of research
On 8 November 1943, Hitler delivered his annual address to those who had marched
with him in the 1923 putsch.408 He appeared in the Munich Löwenbräukeller wearing
a suit with no swastika armband, and although he received several rounds of
applause, he was visibly less animated than he had been in earlier years. 409 The
impending defeat to the Allies in the Second Battle of El Alamein was not mentioned
in his speech.410 Ian Kershaw observed that Hitler
had been a compelling speaker when he had been able to twist reality in
plausible fashion for his audience. But now, he was ignoring unpalatable
facts, or turning them on their head. The gap between rhetoric and reality
had become too wide.411
The idea of a widening gap between Nazi ‘rhetoric’ and the ‘reality’ of the Third
Reich during the final stages of the War has been a theme in historical scholarship
since the late 1940s.412 However, what caused the gap to come into being, the nature
The quote at the head of this chapter, which is from Die Meistersinger, reads ‘even if the Holy
Roman Empire should dissolve in mist,For us there would yet remain holy German Art!’
409
For a short amount of video footage of this speech, see BA-FA K 20221-2, Die Deutsche
Wochenschau nr. 689, 17 November 1943.
410
For more on this battle, see Fred Majdalany, The Battle of El Alamein: Fortress in the Sand, new
edn (Philadelphia: University of Pennslvania Press, 2003).
411
Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: Allen Lane, 2000), p. 540.
412
For example, Hugh Trevor-Roper, one of the first historians to write detailed studies of the Third
Reich, said of Hitler at his conference table during the final days of the War that he ‘was still there,
still the central figure, still the ultimate authority; but a Chinese wall separated him from the outer
world of reality’. See The Last Days of Hitler (1947), 7th edn (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 211.
Later, Alan Bullock wrote that, in the end, Hitler’s belief in his own infallibility ‘destroyed all power
of self-criticism and cut him off from all contact with reality’. See Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (London:
Penguin, 1962), p. 669. More recently, in addition to Kershaw, Richard Evans has observed of the
propaganda advertising the Volkssturm that ‘the reality fell far short of the rhetoric’, and concluded
408
162
of its impact on everyday life, and its effects on the content of propaganda are matters
that have yet to be properly explored. It is therefore unsurprising that so little has
been written about the Bayreuth War Festivals. 413 In musicology the genesis and
purpose of these events are treated as almost self-explanatory. They are taken as
proof that Hitler was personally devoted to the composer, and that he coerced the
public into listening to the operas.414 On some occasions, the programming of Die
Meistersinger alone in 1943 and ’44 has been offered, reductio ad absurdum, as
evidence that the Nazis banned Parsifal. 415 These premises all lead to the same
conclusion, expressed with varying degrees of conviction: that Wagner should be
absolved from the use of his music in the Third Reich, because its special place was
owed to chance – the erratic whim of Hitler himself.416 One purpose of this project is
to offer a fresh critical view of the propagandistic function of the Bayreuth War
Festivals, in 1943 and 1944 in particular. This chapter begins with an examination of
that by 1945, ‘Hitler was now living a life almost entirely removed from reality’. See The Third Reich
at War: 1939–1945 (London: Penguin, 2009), p. 720.
413
To the best of my knowledge, the only book-length publication on the Bayreuth War Festivals is by
the German journalist Bernd Mayer, ‘Die hau’n unser Städta z’samm’. Bayreuth, April 1945. Über
Kriegs-Festspiele, Luftangriffe und den Alltag in Ruinen (Wartberg: Gudensberg-Gleichen, 2004).
Other important secondary literature on the topic includes Dennis, Inhumanities, pp. 425–30; and
Spotts, Bayreuth, pp. 189–98. See also fn. 417.
414
For example, Spotts described the War Festivals as ‘the innocent folly’ of Hitler, concluding that
‘the guests of the Führer – those who attended were constantly reminded that such was their status –
were in reality a captive audience. They had no choice but to attend and, as it were, to enjoy
themselves like it or not […] the ideological manipulation of the audience was horrifying’. See
Bayreuth, pp. 190–92. I discuss the work of Pamela Potter and Thomas Grey on the Festivals in detail
below.
415
According to this preposterous reasoning it would be possible to suggest that all of Wagner’s
operas, save Die Meistersinger, were banned in Germany after 1943. An examination of the supposed
ban of Parsifal would constitute a separate project, suffice to say here that the theory has now been
unequivocally disproved. Deathridge recorded that ‘the index to Magee’s book [The Tristan Chord]
has an entry “Parsifal: Hitler dislikes”, and Spotts states categorically [in Bayreuth] that in a
conversation with Goebbels in the winter of 1941 in Berlin Hitler declared that “After the war, he
would see to it either that religion was banished from Parsifal or that Parsifal was banished from the
stage” [… but] a ban did not exist’. See Wagner Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 173–74. For one
particularly misguided claim about a de facto Nazi ban on Parsifal during the War, see Robert R.
Gibson, ‘Problematic Propaganda: Parsifal as Forbidden Opera’, The Journal of The London Wagner
Society, 20 (1999), 78–87.
416
Magee, for example, insisted that ‘there was no special relationship between Wagner and the Third
Reich. And even Hitler’s love of Wagner had a special personal focus, to do with Bayreuth. The
special relationship of Bayreuth to Nazism was of an entirely different kind from what is usually
implied, and was founded on a personal relationship between Adolf Hitler and Winifred Wagner’. See
The Tristan Chord, pp. 366–67.
163
the life and work of Richard Wilhelm Stock, a Nazi journalist who made a significant
contribution to the Festivals with his writing on Die Meistersinger. German
propaganda from the period between 1943 and 1945, especially the Festivals, is then
reconsidered through the lens of Baudrillard’s concept of ‘deterrence’. Finally we
return to Kershaw’s idea of a widening gap between ‘rhetoric’ and ‘reality’, to make
some tentative suggestions as to its appearance, and to discuss how it may be able to
shed light on other issues. These include the question of why Hitler’s rule went all but
unchallenged by the German public, even once defeat had become inevitable.
Hamann’s biography of Winifred Wagner contains one of the most thorough
accounts of the War Festivals.417 Only a brief summary of her findings is necessary
here. After the outbreak of War in September 1939, the Wagner family assumed there
would be no Festival the following summer. On 7 April 1940 though, Hitler suddenly
decided that he did not want the event to be cancelled. ‘He had in mind the miserable
state of Bayreuth between 1914 and 1918’, Hamann suggests, ‘and not only
guaranteed adequate funding, but also complete artistic freedom’.418 When Winifred
expressed a concern there would be no audience, as men had been called up and
women had been required to fill their working roles in Germany,
Hitler soon came up with the solution. The National Socialist KdF
organisation, through its Department of Travel and Rambling, that is, Bodo
Lafferentz, would supply audiences, especially from the ranks of the
wounded with their nursing attendants, and the munitions workers.
Everyone who had rendered good service would be rewarded with free
travel, accommodation, meals and opera tickets.419
Hamann also records that Hitler selected the season’s programme, and that his choice
of Der fliegende Holländer was informed by a connection with the War. On 9 April
1940 German troops had invaded Denmark and Norway by sea. The Festival was
417
See Winifred, pp. 315–401.
Winifred, p. 322.
419
Winifred, p. 323.
418
164
now ‘totally dependent on Hitler and the Party’, and he even attended that summer.420
It would prove to be his last visit to the town of Wagner. One of the most important
surviving contemporary documents from these Festivals is Richard Wilhelm Stock’s
1943 revision of his booklet on Die Meistersinger, the original having been written in
1938.421
II
The Strange Case of Richard Wilhelm Stock
Stock in current Wagner scholarship
Stock’s works are hardly new discoveries. Stephen Brockmann, David Dennis,
Thomas Grey, Brigitte Hamann, Annette Hein, and others have all referred to
them.422 The two versions have never been compared though, and information about
the author himself is completely absent from musicological literature. As a result, the
booklets are treated as reductive symbols for Nazi musical opinion, as if they were
created ex nihilo, while Stock himself has become a generic figure without identity.
Brockmann casually described him as ‘the Nazi Wagnerian’, for example. 423 Such
tendencies are symptomatic of the shortcomings in current Wagner scholarship. One
purpose of this chapter is to set about reassessing Stock’s work, precisely because it
reveals more about the role of Die Meistersinger in Nazi Germany than is generally
assumed.
420
Ibid.
For details of Stock’s booklets on Die Meistersinger, see fn. 44. His other publications include the
pamphlet Nürnberger Volksfest (1937), and the vast Die Judenfrage durch fünf Jahrhunderte
(Nuremberg: Sturmer Verlag, 1938), which was based on his doctoral thesis.
422
See Brockmann, Nuremberg, p. 133; Dennis, ‘Die Meistersinger Through the Lens of the Third
Reich’, pp. 102 – 04; Grey, ‘Die Meistersinger as National Opera’, pp. 97–99; Hamann, Winifred, p.
368 and corresponding endnote on p. 543; and Hein, ‘Es ist viel Hitler in Wagner’: Rassismus und
antisemitische Deutschtumsideologie in den Bayreuther Blättern (1878–1938) (Tübingen: M.
Niemeyer, 1996), p. 178.
423
The Imaginary Capital, p. 133.
421
165
To the best of my knowledge, Himmlers Dienstkalender 1941/42 is the only
publication containing any biographical information about Stock. 424 This book is
formed from a transcription of Himmler’s office diary over a period of twenty-four
months. The editors record that he held a meeting with Martin Tondock, an SSOberführer, at 11:30am on 17 March 1941, to discuss ‘the case of Dr Stock from
Nuremberg’. 425 In a footnote, they give Stock’s date of birth, 8 May 1897, his
profession as head of the press office in Nuremberg, and a very short overview of his
association with the Party. He joined the SA in 1923, the Party in 1925, and the SS in
1934. They also note that he was expelled from the SS on the 3 July 1940 for his
‘partisan involvement’ in the scandal of the ‘wildcat Aryanisation’ (wilde
Arisierungen) of Nuremberg.
By examining afresh the archival documents from which this information was
taken, I have been able to flesh out Stock’s life in more detail.426 One of the most
important of them is the Lebenslauf sent to Georg Gradl, the Gaurichter of
Nuremberg, on 26 March 1935. In this curriculum vita, Stock claims to have studied
at the humanistische Gymnasium in Bamberg from 1909. 427 The First World War
interrupted his education. Between 1916 and the end of the conflict he fought in
Romania, and later he moved westward with a Bavarian infantry regiment. On 28
December 1918 he founded a student movement called ‘Siegfried’. Its purpose, he
424
Heinrich Himmler, Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42, ed. with introduction and
commentary by Andrej Angrick, Christoph Dieckmann, Christian Gerlach, Peter Klein, Dieter Pohl,
Martina Voigt, Michael Wildt, and Peter Witte (Hamburg: Christians, 1999).
425
Ibid., p. 133.
426
See BDC Akte aus dem Bereich SS-Offiziere; Akte aus dem Bereich Parteikorrespondenz; Akte des
Obersten Parteigerichts; and BA NS 19/828. All quotations that follow come from documents in these
collections.
427
The Gymnasium were selective schools in which the majority of subjects were taught in Latin. For
this reason, Stock also offers a problematic example of how highly educated Germans bought into
Nazism. There is no space to explore this issue here, suffice to say that this part of Stock’s biography
puts paid to Grey’s insistence that his ‘is clearly not a subtle mind, nor a particularly educated one’
(despite the ubiquitous doctorate)’. See ‘Die Meistersinger as National Opera’, p. 97. For one recent
study relevant to this topic see Lisa Pine, Education in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2010).
166
wrote, was to fight against Jews and the ‘criminality’ of November 1918. The group’s
name was not necessarily an explicit reference to Wagner’s Ring. George S.
Williamson wrote that Siegfried was one of the four key themes and motives in the
‘national mythology’ that arose in Germany during the nineteenth century, all of
which ‘would eventually join such bourgeois culture heroes as Luther, Beethoven,
Schiller, and Goethe in the canon of German literature’.428 However, given Stock’s
affinity with the composer, it is at least possible that he was attempting to persuade
Gradl that, for him, an association between Wagner, German nationalism, and antiSemitism had crystallised before the Party had even formed. In early 1919 he joined
the Freikorps Epp of Munich. Here he may have crossed paths with two other notable
members of the militia organisation, Ernst Röhm and Rudolf Höss. He left in
September 1919 to take up studies at the Friedrich Alexander University of ErlangenNuremberg, and had his first involvement with the Party the following year. In 1922,
he took part in the violent march on Coburg with Hitler, which earned him a Coburg
badge. This was one of the most prestigious awards in the Third Reich. From January
1923 he was a Company Führer in the SA, and in February 1925 he joined the Party.
His number was 3906. As it was low and therefore synonymous with early
membership, it later entitled him to a Golden Party Badge.
428
George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from
Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 73.
167
Figure 34 – Richard Wilhelm Stock wearing a Golden Party Badge
This too was one of the most prized decorations in Nazi Germany. In January 1926,
Stock claims to have secured the approval of Hitler himself to found a newspaper
entitled The Flame (Die Flamme). 429 At some stage, presumably after starting his
degree in 1919, he became close friends with Julius Streicher, the Gauleiter of
Franconia. By 1933 Stock had settled in Nuremberg. Here, among other things, he
helped found another newspaper, the Franconian Daily (Fränkische Tageszeitung).
Stock was involved with the Party from its earliest stages then, and may even
have known Hitler personally. The bizarre events surrounding his expulsion from the
SS offer a unique insight into the places of Nuremberg and Bayreuth in the Nazi
imagination. According to the letter that Himmler sent to Stock on 3 July 1940, the
official reason for his dismissal was a false claim that his application to become a
Reserve Führer in the Waffen-SS had been personally endorsed by an SSObergruppenführer.
Himmler’s
letter
concludes,
in
typical
Sprache
des
429
Although it should be noted that no copies of this newspaper, if it existed, survived the War.
Personal correspondence with Torsten Zarwel (archivist, BA), 13 December 2012.
168
Nationalsozialismus, that this ‘attempt to gain personal advantage by lying to an SS
office by abusing the name of a higher SS officer is irreconcilable with the expected
fortitude of character in an SS-Führer’. Over the course of the next two years, Stock
fought to overturn the conviction. In 1942, another letter sent by Himmler reveals that
he finally agreed the original sentence could not be upheld. But, he continued, ‘you
acted in an uncomradely fashion when – because a position at the front was not an
option – you tried to obtain the post of Welfare Officer at the Main SS Senior
District, which was already occupied by SS-Hauptsturmführer Jochem’. In any case,
this new verdict was irrelevant, as Stock was by this stage facing a second set of
disciplinary charges. On 10 January 1941, he was informed that because of the
abusive
use
of
an
automobile,
which
was
a
‘war
economy offence’
(Kriegswirtschaftsvergehens), he either had to pay a fine of 450 Reichsmarks or
spend forty-five days in prison. This referred to an incident involving Stock and
Christian Hering, a local factory owner in Nuremberg. The two were accused of
neglecting Party duties to go on a fishing trip that involved underage secretaries and
large quantities of alcohol. The catalyst behind this second case was not Himmler, but
Willy Liebel – the Mayor of Nuremberg between 1933 and 1945. The small amount
of literature on the subject suggests that expulsion from the SS was a rare punishment
usually reserved for breaches of Nazi racial or criminal law. 430 None of the
For example, Helmut Langerbein observed that, in the early stages of the SS, ‘all marriages had to
be approved by the SS Race and Resettlement Main Office and members were expelled from the SS if
they had married an unsuitable woman’. See Hitler’s Death Squads: The Logic of Mass Murder
(Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2003), p. 19. Similarly, Charles W. Sydnor recorded that ‘in a
report written in November 1940, the judge advocate of the SS Totenkopf division revealed that the
division’s courts-martial had dealt with 137 cases since the end of June. Although most of the cases
reported concerned serious traffic accidents involving death, injury, or property damage, in 37
instances the charges had involved criminal activity. These were mostly cases of plundering, larceny,
rape (or attempted rape), and insubordination – crimes for which a prison sentence and expulsion from
the SS was the punishment’. See Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933–1945
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 124.
430
169
accusations levelled at Stock between 1940 and 1942 fits into either of these
categories, however.
It is generally accepted among historians that Julius Streicher was one of the
least popular members of the Party. 431 Willy Liebel, assisted by Benno Martin, a
member of the SS and Nuremberg’s chief of police, had been plotting to oust him
from his seat in Nuremberg since at least 1938.432 In 1940, they had him tried for
corrupting the process of the town’s ‘Aryanisation’. This term, like many others
coined by the Party, was just a euphemism for their lawless activity. According to
Frank Bajohr, the process of ‘Aryanisation’, which he defined as the ‘liquidation of
Jewish enterprises’, was ‘one of the biggest transfers of property in contemporary
German history’.
433
Officially the Party intended to seize Jewish assets for
redistribution among the German Volk, but Liebel and Martin were apparently able to
prove that Streicher had used the policy to line his own pockets. After being found
guilty he was exiled from Nuremberg, though he was allowed to continue producing
and editing Der Stürmer. 434 We saw above, by examining Stock’s biography and
publications in closer detail, that he never made a secret of his friendship with
Streicher.435 The most likely explanation for his expulsion from the SS is that it was
For example, after their very first meeting, Goebbels described Streicher in his diaries as ‘der
typische bayerische Steißtrommler’. ‘Steißtrommler’ is a word of Goebbels’ own invention. It
translates literally as ‘arse-drummer’, by which he presumably means one who communicates to the
world through their backside. See TBJG, 24 October 1925, T1, 1/i, p. 232.
432
For a fuller account of Streicher’s corruption trial, see Randall L. Bytwerk, Julius Streicher: Nazi
Editor of the Notorious anti-Semitic Newspaper Der Stürmer (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001),
pp. 37–42.
433
‘Aryanisation’ in Hamburg: The Economic Exclusion of the Jews and the Confiscation of Their
Property in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), p. 1.
434
David Biale records that ‘Hitler’s lingering loyalty from the Kampfzeit’ was the only thing that
spared Streicher from a worse fate after his downfall in 1940. See Biale, Blood and Belief: The
Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians (Berkley: University of California Press, 2007),
p. 124.
435
In addition to the comments that Stock made in his Lebenslauf, the dedication of Die Judenfrage
reads: ‘for the Führer of Franconia, Julius Streicher, with gratitude and veneration’ (‘Frankenführer
Julius Streicher in Dankbarkeit und Verehrung gewidmet’), unnumbered page.
431
170
the outcome of having aligned himself too closely with the hated editor of Der
Stürmer. When Streicher finally foundered, his hangers-on sank with him.436
After suffering the disgrace of losing his place in Nazi Germany’s most elite
organisation, it would be reasonable to expect Stock to have faded into obscurity, or
worse. However, Fritz Wächtler, the Gauleiter of Bayreuth, salvaged his career. A
memorandum sent to the town bursary on 3 September 1942 shows that Stock was
employed in Bayreuth as ‘special consultant to the Gauleiter’. He was also to assist
with the construction of the Gau’s Bund, in addition to taking on duties with the Nazi
League of Teachers (Nationalsozialistischer Lehrerbund, or NSLB). The first
paragraph of this note reads:
the Gauleiter intends to take on Party Member Dr Richard Wilhelm Stock,
the author of various superb works, such as The Jewish Question in Five
Centuries [sic!] and Richard Wagner and the Town of the Meistersingers, in
the full-time services of the Party. Dr Stock will be integrated into the
Office of Racial Policy; and moreover, given his special talents as a writer,
he will take charge of the Gau press office for the duration of the War.
Stock’s employment here was one of the many changes that resulted from the
renaming of the Gau Bayerische Ostmark after Bayreuth, its capital, in the early
1940s. The Gau took this new title for both practical and ideological reasons.
Following the outbreak of War in the East, it was no longer a border region.437 More
significantly though, the letter to the town bursary makes it plain that Stock was hired
specifically because ‘there are particular tasks [following the Gau’s renaming] that
require a force that knows the cultural issues involved’. With this comment in mind,
it seems reasonable to suggest that, because of Wagner’s opera house and its
436
Karl Holz, who was born and lived in Nuremberg, was another Streicher disciple compromised by
the Liebel-Martin allegations in 1940. He was temporarily removed from office, but eventually
reemerged as the Gauleiter of Franconia in 1944. For more on his life and career, see Ernst Klee, Das
Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2003),
p. 268.
437
See Walter Ziegler, ‘Bayern – ein Land, sechs Gaue’, in Die NS-Gaue. Regionale Mittelinstanzen
im zentralistischen ‘Führerstaat’, ed. by Jürgen John, Horst Möller, and Thomas Schaarschmidt
(Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2007), pp. 254–62 (p. 258).
171
association with German nationalism, the name ‘Bayreuth’ may have been felt to
invoke Nazi ideals in a way that ‘Bayerische Ostmark’ did not.
This was the background against which the second version of Stock’s booklet
on Die Meistersinger was published. Three important conclusions can be drawn
directly. First, far from being a nonspecific voice on music from the Hitler era, Stock
was a highly educated Wagnerian who was also a devout Nazi ideologue. Second,
Wächtler made use of this disgraced SS-Mann in 1942 precisely because of his
‘special talents as a writer’, and so the Party in Bayreuth recognised the potential of a
study of Wagner to be used as a tool for propagating Nazi ideology. Finally, the
nature of Stock’s downfall – having become caught in the rivalry between Streicher
and Liebel – gives an idea of just how far removed the practice of Nazi politics in
Nuremberg and the idealised communities they had always associated with the town
actually were.
Richard Wagner und Seine Meistersinger
Stock begins the 1943 version of his text by quoting the words of Hitler:
only a divinely gifted few have at all times surrendered to the mission of
Providence: to restyle the truly immortal. Thus, these are but the signposts
for a long future, and it belongs with the education of a nation to teach the
people the necessary, deep respect of these greats; because they are the
incarnation of the highest worth of a people.438
He concludes that ‘these words of the Führer, from his speech about culture at the
“Victory of Faith” Reichsparteitag, capture so perfectly the creative work of the great
genius of Bayreuth, Richard Wagner’. 439 This opening gambit encapsulates the
booklet’s entire methodology. Stock’s purpose is to examine Die Meistersinger
through a Hitlerian lens, and for him the opera’s principal message is that the German
438
439
Meistersinger (1943), p. 5.
Meistersinger (1943), p. 5.
172
people must revere the ‘greats’ of German history for the good of the nation. He is
quite clear that his text is not intended to be a work of Musikwissenschaft. It will be
particularly important to keep the following statement in mind during my analysis of
the latter stages of the booklet:
my work shall not add to the existing, rich Wagner literature, or be another
work of the same or similar kind. It is also not written only for scholars or
musicians, but rather is a people’s book (Volksbuch) for every German. It
depicts the human, artistic, and ideological bonds of the Bayreuth Master
with the cultural will of National Socialist Germany.440
Insofar as the way in which it unfolds, Stock’s booklet is remarkably similar to the
radio talk on Die Meistersinger that Goebbels delivered in 1933. The whole study is a
Nazified examination of Wagner’s opera, in which various aspects of the piece are
measured against the tenents of Hitlerian ideology. Hence claims such as ‘the work of
this German master is grown completely out of the blood and life of the German
Volk’, or that Wagner considered the Nuremberg of Hans Sachs and Albrecht Dürer
‘a monumental bulwark against Jewish parasitism and Jewish mercantilism’.441
Stock greatly exaggerates the role of Cosima in the creation of Die
Meistersinger. ‘In the history of geniuses’, he wrote, ‘no personality was revealed to
us as “activator” (“Reger”) of the genius to such an extent as it was with Cosima for
Richard Wagner’.442 It has already been noted that the booklet also contains a chapter
on Jewish musicians and their ‘quibbles’ with Die Meistersinger. This consists
almost entirely of extracts from newspapers and journals in which the opera was
attacked. Stock does not give any references though, and neither does he offer any
proof of the authors being Jewish. For him, their criticisms of the work seem to
render their Jewishness self-evident.
440
Meistersinger (1943), pp. 8–9.
Meistersinger (1943), pp. 5 and 6 respectively.
442
Meistersinger (1943), p. 59.
441
173
The historical overview of Wagner’s relationship with Nuremberg, entitled
‘History, Development, and Composition of Die Meistersinger’, is over thirty pages
long. Stock recounts every visit the composer made to the town, and cites from his
essays, and particularly his letters, at considerable length. This time he provides
sources in the body of the text itself. He acknowledges the works of art that inspired
Die Meistersinger, including Johann Ludwig Deinhardstein’s Hans Sachs, Lortzing’s
opera of the same title based on Deinhardstein’s text, and Hoffmann’s The Serapion
Brethren. He even mentions the obscure figure Adalbert Gyrowetz, who wrote an
opera entitled Hans Sachs im vorgerückten Alter in 1834. Indeed, large portions of
Stock’s booklet are undeniably thoroughly researched, and he even appears to have
done some archival work. He is aware, for example, that Wagner called the marker
‘Hanslich’ in an early draft of Die Meistersinger – although he does not stop to
analyse this discovery.443 Throughout the booklet, there are photographs of important
Wagnerians, such as Wolzogen, Wieland, and Siegfried, in addition to many images
of Bayreuth and facsimiles of sixteenth-century mastersongs. The inclusion of the
latter demands closer inspection, especially in light of Stock’s claim that the booklet
was not intended for ‘scholars or musicians’, but was rather a Volksbuch.
Wagenseil, Wagner, and Stock
A facsimile from Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s chronicle of the actual
mastersingers’ rules, melodies, and texts, Buch von der Meister-Singer Holdseligen
Kunst (1697) occupies nine pages of Stock’s text.444
443
Meistersinger (1943), p. 40.
The original is available in an edition; see Buch von der Meister-Singer Holdseligen Kunst, ed. by
Horst Brunner (Göppingen: A. Kümmerle, 1975).
444
174
Figure 35 – An extract from Wagenseil’s Buch von der Meister-Singer Holdseligen Kunst (1697), as
reprinted in Stock’s Richard Wagner und Seine Meistersinger
It has been known since the nineteenth century that Wagner used Wagenseil’s
chronicle as a source of inspiration for Die Meistersinger. On 6 January 1873, after
hearing him read the rules of the mastersingers’ art as laid down in Wagenseil’s
publication, Cosima recorded in her diaries that it was ‘remarkable how R. extracted
all the essence for his own work, leaving out the peculiarities and using only what
was most characteristic’.445 John Warrack has written one of the most comprehensive
studies of the ways in which Wagner mapped Wagenseil’s text onto the opera. He
concluded that, in the first act of Die Meistersinger in particular, the detail with
which Wagenseil describes the actual guilds of mastersingers
445
Cosima, Diaries, vol. 2, p. 580.
175
provides factual circumstance, with an intricacy of reference in a setting that
rings vividly true even for audiences with no knowledge of the
Mastersingers’ authentic practices. There is created an atmosphere of
sustaining tradition that is at the same time humourously restrictive; and it is
enlivened by Wagner’s skillfully affectionate deployment of the detail,
coupled with the varying responses to it of David, Walther, Pogner,
Beckmesser and Sachs, as well as the corporate confusion of the other
Mastersingers. It is by these means that Wagner ensures that it has taken
sufficiently deep root in our minds for Sach’s final defence of the
Mastersong to have authority over Walther’s rejection.446
However, there is reason to doubt the amount of musical influence that the contents
of Wagenseil’s book had on Wagner’s compositional process in this piece.
Warrack does suggest that the ‘fanfaring theme associated with the
Mastersingers near the start of his Prelude’ was taken from the vier gekrönte Töne by
Heinrich Mügling (or Mögeling).447 While the melodic contours are undeniably the
same, this sole shared phrase of five notes hardly makes for a convincing connection
between the score and the source. The rhythmic and harmonic identity of the version
in Die Meistersinger are of the composer’s own invention, and it could be argued that
the most distinctive aspect of his motif is actually the upbeat.
Figure 36 – The first of the vier gekrönte Töne by Heinrich Mügling
446
John Warrack, Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), p. 65.
447
Warrack, Die Meistersinger, pp. 63–64.
176
Figure 37 – An extract from the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger
As Egon Voss has argued, surely what Wagner took from Wagenseil was principally
textual:
on the level of the text, Wagner’s approach to tradition shows a pronounced
tendency toward historical accuracy aimed at the greatest possible
authenticity, alongside a poetic freedom that approaches tradition within the
spirit of that freedom. On the level of the music, by contrast, there is no
question of this kind of historical accuracy.448
This difference between text and musical content is the difference, in Baudrillardian
terms, between the simulacral play of surface appearances, and the ‘real’ – that is to
say, the model on which the simulacrum was based. Textual references to Wagenseil
Egon Voss,‘Wagner und kein Ende’: Betrachtungen und Studien (Zurich: Atlantis MusikbuchVerlag 1996), p. 154, translation taken from Dieter Borchmeyer, Drama and the World of Richard
Wagner, trans. by Daphne Ellis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003) p. 357.
448
177
in the plot were among the means by which Wagner gave his opera the appearance of
sixteenth-century Germany. This is even evident in his portrayal of Hans Sachs.
The historical figure Hans Sachs lived between 1496 and 1576. He was both a
poet and a cobbler, and spent the majority of his adult life in Nuremberg where he
was a ‘Mastersinger’. The Mastersingers were burghers, guilds of urban craftsmen
who came together to practice the arts of poetry and music. This is where the
similarities with Wagner’s incarnation end, however.
449
The Mastersingers’
movement emerged from the older ‘Minnesang’ tradition. ‘Minne’ is a term for
‘courtly love’, and the Minnesingers were German equivalents of the Troubadours
and Trouvères in France. Among the most famous works from this era are Wolfram
von Eschenbach’s Parzival, and the Nibelunglied by an unnamed author. Both of
these inspired other works by Wagner, of course. Sachs wrote at least sixteen
volumes of Gesangbücher containing 4275 Meistergesänge, and eighteen volumes of
Spruchbücher holding a further 1700 poems, of which more than 200 were plays.450
In their song contests, Mastersingers like Sachs would judge an individual for their
ability to conform to the rules of a Minnesang – although they had actually codified
this set of rules themselves. The Mastersingers were fundamentally conservative, and
did not share the spirit of the Renaissance as it existed in some other parts of the
continent. James Overfield concluded that their works ‘show only the most
superficial impact of German humanism or the Italian Renaissance, and today they
have relatively few readers’.451
For one recent study of Hans Sachs’ life and music, see Julia-Maria Heinzmann, Die Buhllieder des
Hans Sachs. Form, Gehalt, Funktion und sozialhistorischer Ort (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag,
2001).
450
These figures are quoted from James Overfield, ‘Germany’, in The Renaissance in National
Context, ed. by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp.
92–122 (p. 99).
451
Ibid.
449
178
Die Meistersinger is shot through with what may, at first glance, appear to be
historical inaccuracies. Eschenbach and Sachs are depicted as contemporaries, for
example, despite having lived centuries apart from one another. Wagner’s Sachs
sings about a single German nation, an idea that would have been nonsensical to a
figure that lived three centuries before unification took place. As we have seen in
previous chapters, examinations of the musical content of Die Meistersinger confirms
that Wagner’s references to sixteenth-century Germany amounted to stripping
symbols of their original contents and repurposing them according to nineteenth
century ideals.
My contention is that Stock used sixteenth-century tablature facsimiles in his
1938 and 1943 publications for roughly the same reasons that Wagner appealed to
Wagenseil in the first place: ‘the tradition of mastersinging secures the triadic unity
of the “Christian”, “German”, and “Musical” spirits’.452 They are included in these
booklets as part of a precession of simulacra; Wagner idealised sixteenth-century
Germany in his opera; and the Nazis in turn idealised his opera, in order to convey
certain messages about the society that their Party had brought into being.
Comparing the 1938 and 1943 versions
The exact circumstances surrounding the commission of Stock’s two booklets on Die
Meistersinger are unknown, but he was evidently well connected in Bayreuth. What
can be said with certainty is that, even as objects, the publications are inscribed with
the eventual fate of the Third Reich. The 1938 version is printed on glossy paper with
229 numbered pages, over fifty of which are reproductions of black-and-white
photographs, facsimile scores, and various artworks. It is an ostentatious display of
452
Lydia Goehr, The Quest for Voice: On Music Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy. The 1997
Ernest Bloch Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 54.
179
wealth and power. The second booklet has a similar number of reproductions, but
only 203 numbered pages. It is of a markedly lower quality than its predecessor. The
pages are smaller, the binding cardboard is significantly thinner, and the paper is not
glossy. The second version is a poorly made simulacrum of the first, perhaps
designed to remind of better days. Even so, as paper was rationed during the War, it
would probably have constituted a greater expense than the original.453
In terms of their content, the two texts are very similar. In the 1943 version,
some sections have been removed. On occasion the reasoning behind a cut is obvious.
For example, in 1938 Stock included a chapter on the celebrations of Cosima’s
centenary, which had fallen the previous year. Other reductions are subtler. Both
booklets contain the chapter entitled ‘Jewish Quibblers (Kritikaster) on Die
Meistersinger’. In the first booklet, it begins with the following paragraph:
many will ask the question: what do the following criticisms of Die
Meistersinger have to do with the title of this book? Actually, a good deal:
they concern the work that binds Richard Wagner and his renown (Ruhme)
to the city of Nuremberg for all time.454
However, the 1943 version of this chapter opens with what was the second paragraph
in the original. ‘From the day of its premiere’, it reads,
this quintessentially German work was in the fiercest and dirtiest combat
with Judaism and its hangers-on, an inevitable consequence of the inherent
hatred of this rootless race for the private lives and work of the people.455
This minor alteration gives an insight into the shifting Nazi attitudes toward Jews
between 1938 and 1943: at the time of the first booklet’s publication, the inclusion of
an anti-Semitic chapter in a study of Wagner required clarification. By 1943 this was
no longer the case. It should also be noted that, by the summer of 1943, the word
453
See Welch, The Power and the Limitations, p. 134. In addition, Hamann records that by 1942,
because of paper rationing, the weekend edition of the Bayerische Ostmark had been reduced to a mere
eight pages. See Winifred, p. 350.
454
Meistersinger (1938), p. 110.
455
Meistersinger (1943), p. 105.
180
Judengegner (‘enemy of the Jews’) was generally preferred to Antisemit. Stock used
the former for his second booklet, and the latter for the first. The alteration originated
in foreign policy. On 17 May 1943, Hans Hagemeyer, the head of the Reich Office
for the Promotion of German Literature (Reichsstelle zur Forderung des deutschen
Schrifttums), wrote a letter to Werner Koeppen, Rosenberg’s liason in the Führer
Headquarters. Hagemeyer informed him that Rosenberg had recently met with the
Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. The Mufti had apparently expressed concern at the Third
Reich’s use of the term Antisemitismus in their press publications, as it ‘threw Jews
and Arabs into the same pot’ (‘die Araber mit den Juden in einen Topf werfen’). This
concerned the Mufti, because, according to him, the ‘Arabic world’ was
‘overwhelmingly pro-German’ (‘überwiegend deutschfreundlich’). 456 As Stock was
principally a journalist by trade, the change from Antisemit to Judengegner may have
quickly become habitual for him. Even if this were the case, it is still indicative of a
wider refusal or plain inability to acknowledge Germany’s situation during the final
years of Hitler’s rule. The odds of his work being read anywhere beyond the borders
of Bayreuth when it was first published would have been close to zero, and the idea
of the 1943 Festival attracting visitors from the Middle East is obviously absurd.
‘“Die Meistersinger” als Kriegsfestspiele 1943’
Most of the changes between the two publications were of a similar colour. The main
difference between them is the completely new chapter on Die Meistersinger and the
Bayreuth War Festivals that was added in 1943. It offers a prime example of how the
456
A copy of this letter can be found in Léon Poliakov and Josef Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und die
Juden. Dokumente und Aufsätze (Arani: Berlin-Grunewald, 1955), p. 369. Further discussions of the
order and its implications can be found in Gregory Paul Wegner, Anti-Semitism and Schooling Under
the Third Reich (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 38; and Cornelia Schmitz-Berning, Vokabular des
Nationalsozialismus (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2007), pp. 38–39. For more on the Reich Office for
the Promotion of German Literature, see Jan-Pieter Barbian, The Politics of Literature in Nazi
Germany: Books in the Media Dictatorship, trans. by Kate Sturge (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), esp.
pp. 115–41.
181
Nazis used Die Meistersinger in propaganda during the final stages of the War. It
opens with the following statement:
thirty thousand soldiers from the front and armaments workers will
experience sixteen performances of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as
Guests of the Führer at the fourth War Festival in Bayreuth. Probably no
work by the great music dramatist would have symbolised the brave fighters
from the front and their faithful comrades from the Reich armories, or
precisely guided the deep sense and the ultimate purpose (Endzweck) of
their heroic mission for the future of our people, than the holy song
(Hohelied) ‘Honour your German Masters’. With his invitation to the War
Festival, the Führer has been made the mouthpiece of the entire people
(Dolmetsch des ganzen Volkes).
This opening gambit summarises the nature of the connections between the content of
Wagner’s opera and the Nazi war effort in Stock’s rhetoric. They exist only on the
most superficial level. In 1933, Goebbels had focussed on the ‘Wach’ Auf!’ chorus,
describing it as a ‘tangible symbol of the reawakening of the German Volk from the
deep political and spiritual narcosis that ha[d] been felt since November 1918’. 457
Although different aspects of the opera drew Stock’s attention, his methodology was
fundamentally the same. Both men stripped the piece of its content and repurposed it
for a new context, just as Wagner had done with Wagenseil’s chronicle.
Thomas Grey has already written a useful analysis of the ‘mailbag’ format
that dominates the bulk of Stock’s chapter on the ‘War Festivals’, which consists of
excerpts from letters supposedly sent in by attendees. These excerpts were intended,
Grey wrote,
to demonstrate the success of this effort to instill the troops with loving
respect for the culture they were called to defend. Whether genuine or not,
these responses only exposed the forced and artificial character of the whole
enterprise.458
Grey is certainly right to suggest that, in 1943 and ’44 especially, the Festival was
about rallying soldiers into a type of fighting community. This presumably served to
457
458
Goebbels, ‘Richard Wagner and the Spirit of Art in Our Time’.
‘Die Meistersinger as National Opera’, p. 97.
182
deflect attention from the failings of the German army, and to draw their minds away
from actual events toward nebulous ideology. A photograph in this chapter, whose
caption reads ‘Unexpected Meeting in Bayreuth’, summarises the mood.459
Figure 38 – ‘Unexpected Meeting in Bayreuth’
It shows two soldiers being reunited. These men embody the fighting community of
the Third Reich, and their coming together takes attention away from the losses
ravaging the Wehrmacht. It is implied that the old friends owe their finding one
another to Hitler, and his invitation to Bayreuth was founded on the cultural sanctity
of Wagner’s music. Stock turns the town of the composer into a joyful space in which
old comrades are reunited.
This much may be obvious; but, as Kershaw’s observation of the widening
gap between ‘rhetoric and reality’ during the final stages of the War implies, there
was also a process of simulation at work in the Bayreuth War Festivals. This process
was designed to create simulacra of an ideal German society, functioning according
459
Meistersinger (1943), p. 165.
183
to the principles of Nazism. These simulacra were not being made for the benefit of
the wounded soldiers on whom they depended, but for the wider German public, to
whom they were distributed as a type of propaganda via the mass media. I will argue
that this type of propaganda was unique to Nazi Germany, because of the extent to
which it involved diverting financial and material resources; and because it used
actual soldiers during an actual, and an increasingly desperate, war-time situation.460
The best term with which to describe this type of propaganda is to be found in
Baudrillard’s lexicon: deterrence.
III
Bayreuth and the Propaganda of Deterrence
The Bayreuth War Festivals do share at least a few broad characteristics with other
propagandistic events staged by other dictatorial regimes during the twentieth
460
Kolberg shares in common some of these features, and so it bears some comparison with the
Bayreuth War Festivals. The film is set in 1813, in the last period of the Napoleonic Wars. It begins
with Count August von Gneisenau (1760–1831) pressuring King Frederick William III of Prussia
(1770–1840) to capitalise on Napoleon’s weakness following his defeat in Russia. He urges the King
to complement the regular military with a citizen’s army and openly declare war on France. In the
course of his protestations, Gneisenau recounts how Napolean ultimately capitulated in the Siege of
Kolberg in 1807. This event, which constitutes the bulk of the film, was part of the War of the Fourth
Coalition. In truth the French only ceased their attack before receiving surrender because the town held
out until the signing of the Peace of Tilset, the Prusso-French agreement, on 2 July 1807. As part of
this treaty the defeated German forces became allied to France. In Harlan’s film, this outcome is recast
as a total victory brought about by citizens and soldiers fighting alongside one another against the
invaders. Three observations about the movie recur on a regular basis in film studies: that its
production and distribution took precedence over Germany’s actual fate; that its content was designed
to preempt events on the battlefield; and that there was a complete dislocation between the plot and the
current state of the Third Reich. David Culbert, for example, wrote that Goebbels found the succession
of defeats in the early months of 1945 problematic because they contradicted the message of this
extravagant feature film. ‘[He] could not bear the thought of surrender when his new film showed that
victory could be achieved against hopeless odds’, he noted, adding that ‘dying to maintain the integrity
of a feature film’s propaganda message is an unusual definition of patriotism’. Peter Paret, meanwhile,
observed that although Kolberg ‘was conceived, written and partly shot in 1943, [it] closely fit the
conditions and expressed certain attitudes of the early months of 1945’. See ‘Kolberg: The Goebbels
Diaries and Poland’s Kołobrzeg Today’, in World War II, Film, and History, ed. by Chambers and
Culbert, pp. 66–77 (p. 74); and ‘Kolberg: As Historical Film and Historical Document’, in World War
II, Film, and History, ed. by John Whiteclay Chambers II and David Culbert (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), pp. 47–66 (p. 49). As with the Bayreuth War Festivals, there was also a
degree of extravagance involved in making Kolberg that is highly surprising, given the state of
Germany’s war efforts. Linda Schulte-Sasse records that Goebbels spent 8.5 million Reichsmarks on
it, ‘twice the normal even for a major film production’. See Entertaining the Third Reich, p. 32.
184
century. For example, it is often said that they were meant, at least in part, to take
soldiers’ minds off the dire state of the country’s War efforts. Clearly there is some
truth in this. These men were being whisked away from their ordeals on the front to
an environment of comparative luxury. The reasons that Die Meistersinger was the
sole work performed at the War Festivals also seem reasonably obvious. With its
overt nationalism, particularly Sachs’ monologue in Act III, the opera could easily be
presented as an unambiguous symbol of German indestructability. Moreover it is
ostensibly a comedy, whereas Tristan, Der Ring, and Parsifal all deal with themes of
suffering, death, and ruin – hardly appropriate topics for a war-wounded audience.
Indeed, because Die Meistersinger is set in a specific historical time and place, it was
resistant to being reinterpreted in the context of the conflict in a way that Wagner’s
mythical works were not. It is also widely recognised that Hitler was a driving force
behind the Festivals, particularly in the War years. For this reason, it is commonly
asserted of the soldiers who were asked to attend that ‘surely few of them would have
had much interest in Wagner’s work even under the best of circumstances’, and that
‘none of [them] had much choice in the matter’.461
But whether these men were willing participants is actually irrelevant. Each
visitor had been brought there principally to partake in a large-scale process of
simulation. For this reason, Stock’s 1943 publication, and the Bayreuth War Festivals
for which it was written, were, in Baudrillard’s terms, forms of deterrence. The image
of the two men in the photograph shown in Figure 38, for example, serves to further
the ideas being promulgated by the event of the Festival itself. This kind of
confusion, which Baudrillard described when he called deterrence a system of ‘pure
flexion or circular inflexion’, is evident in the War Festivals and in Stock’s text. The
461
See Grey, ‘National Opera’, p. 96; and Potter, ‘Music in the Third Reich’, p. 88 respectively.
185
‘mailbag’ format of his chapter on these events may expose ‘the artificiality of the
enterprise’, but the Festivals cannot be reductively explained as ‘effort[s] to instill the
troops with loving respect for the culture they were called to defend’. 462 Rather, they
point to the bigger problem of the extent to which simulacra, their original models,
and the stages of simulation became confused in the last years of Hitler’s Germany –
evidenced by the continued impossibility of telling whether Stock’s letters came from
actual soldiers.
In 1943 and ’44 then, just as Baudrillard wrote of the Pompidou Centre,
German soldiers were being gathered in Bayreuth in order to bring both them and the
wider German public into a ‘new semiurgic order […] with the opposite pretext of
acculturating them to meaning and depth’. His description of the Pompidou’s
operation can readily be transferred to Bayreuth in the final years of the War.
Wagner’s opera house had evolved into ‘a monument of cultural deterrence’. The
Festival became a mode of mass communication between the Nazi Party and the
public, and it absorbed members of the public into a process of simulation. The end
product was a distinctive simulacrum of better, more stable times in an idealised Nazi
state. That this involved actual operas being performed by actual musicians of worldclass standing, and that there were actual injured soldiers in the audience, makes the
use of Baudrillard’s terminology still more appropriate. These were precisely the kind
of characteristics that created confusion between the simulacra and what was being
simulated. As we have seen, in systems of deterrence, it is this confusion that
disengages the public from engaging critically with their surroundings. This was
another chief purpose of the Bayreuth War Festivals.
462
Grey, ‘National Opera’, p. 96.
186
The events were not borne by a naïve desire on Hitler’s part to keep the
composer’s annual Festival afloat, then. Neither was it an effort to simply refresh the
war-weary with music; and the Festivals cannot be taken as unassailable evidence of
Hitler’s love for the composer, as is too often assumed.463 They were part of the effort
to maintain the Party’s power at a time when the country’s military situation had
become dire. The recruitment of Stock after his expulsion from the SS confirms that
the Gau of Bayreuth, far from being a passive Nazi plaything, was an active
participant in this process. By approaching the matter through the concept of
deterrence, we are able to glimpse the intensity of Hitler’s desire to maintain the
image of a Germany built on the principles of Nazism for as long as possible. The
War Festivals did not have the museal quality of the Pompidou Centre, where
according to Baudrillard a dead culture was being masqueraded as a living one. Their
purpose was altogether more sinister, and ironically more Baudrillardian: they were
being used to create a simulacrum of a culture that had never existed at all.
With this in mind, I would suggest one principal reason that Hitler and
Winifred selected Die Meistersinger alone for the 1943 and ’44 Festivals: it too
presents a vision of an ideal world, while seeking to bring the audience into the
performance of the simulation that it disseminates. For example, musicologists have
long recognised the unusual instructions for the staging of the 1868 premiere of Die
Meistersinger.464 Patrick Carnegy observed that, ‘at Wagner’s insistence, the setting
was, contra Ludwig, not an exact replica of St Catherine’s but a fictitious amalgam of
Consider, for example, Spotts’ argument that ‘Hitler’s determination to keep the country’s opera
houses and theatres open was meant to demonstrate the Third Reich’s undiminished dedication to
culture. But in the case of Bayreuth, he had a very special reason. At last he would be able to indulge
his passion for having others – now tens of thousands of others – attend Wagner’s operas’. See
Bayreuth, p. 189.
464
See Spencer, ‘Wagner’s Nuremberg’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (1992), 21–41 (p. 33); and
Carnegy, Wagner and the Art of Theatre, pp. 60–63.
463
187
features copied from a number of churches in Nuremberg’.465 This insistence is one
example of a process of simulation in action. Wagner wanted the staging of Die
Meistersinger to represent buildings that actually existed. He detached them from
what they represented, however, because he preferred their models to be captured
inexactly. In rejecting the staging’s status as a symbol, he enabled it to take on a
significance of its own. Lutz Koepnick’s insightful summary of the premiere
underscores this analysis:
privileging spatial depth and three-dimensional configurations over painted
backdrops and perspectivalist foreshortenings, Wagner required the majority
of sets and buildings to be praktikabel. According to Wagner’s requests, the
Munich premiere was meant to reembody rather than merely represent
historical Nuremberg, to cast an imagined past into tangible forms and
invite projective forms of spectatorship. Rather than merely enabling
passive acts of reception, the set design was to allow the viewer to entertain
active bodily relationships to the events of stage, to enter and activate what
otherwise would remain void of form, affect, and meaning [...] In the eyes of
many reviewers, the set design offered a self-contained space of artifice and
simulation powerful enough to trigger in the audience overwhelming
experiences of empathetic transport and projective immersion.466
Koepnick’s remark that Wagner privileged neither ‘painted backdrops’ nor
‘perspectivalist foreshortenings’ (that is, images designed to appear threedimensional from certain angles), but required his sets to be praktikabel, is of special
interest here. Praktikabel could be translated as ‘workable’ or ‘usable’ – or perhaps,
in Baudrillard’s phraseology, ‘real’. For the composer, any church appearing on stage
had to seem like an actual building. This reveals a desire to transform the operatic
stage from a platform for artistic illusion into a space of alternate reality. As a result,
his audiences would be abnormally immersed in a fantasy world.
The process of simulation that drove the 1943 and 1944 War Festivals did not
go unnoticed by the visitors, some of whom complained that
465
Wagner and the Art of Theatre, p. 62.
Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2007), pp. 78–79. Despite using key terms such as ‘simulation’ and ‘immersion’, Koepnick does
not make reference to Baudrillard anywhere in this study.
466
188
it was hardly appropriate in total warfare to impose this mass transportation
of about 30,000 people on a railway system that was already overstretched.
Was it acceptable that the majority of these national comrades were being
taken out of some armaments factory for at least five days? In other parts of
the Reich, national comrades’ property and lives were being destroyed by
bombing, while a ‘state entertainment’ was being laid on in Bayreuth.467
Hamann records the 1943 programme stated, ‘in addition to the chorus, also
appearing on the Festival meadow are members of the Hitler Youth and German Girls
League, and men of the SS Viking Standard’. 468 She goes on to observe that,
‘resentment was caused by the fact that both Festival visitors and artists enjoyed, in
contrast to the locals, what was said to be “almost a peace-time level of catering”’,
and during the second interval in the Bayreuth performance of Die Meistersinger on
20 July 1944, there was a ‘tense period of waiting’ as rumours spread about the
assassination attempt on Hitler. 469 These fragments of evidence give some idea of
how simulation and actual practice were overlapping during these events, and of the
extent to which they clashed with one another. They may also help us to explain the
absence of Die Meistersinger from the Bayreuth stage between 1936 and 1942.
During the Third Reich’s strongest years, when Hitler was at the height of his
popularity and his Party exercised complete control over all of Germany and much of
Europe, there was little call for simulacra that assisted the construction of the ideal
Nazi state. These were the years when they were in a position to attempt to build that
state in the real world. Only once the War had turned against them did they again
resort to sinking into fantasy and alternative reality.
None of this is to say that the Party’s use of Bayreuth in 1943 and ’44 was a
complete betrayal of the venue’s original purposes. Had this opera house not always
been, in a sense, about cultural deterrence? A full, critical account of its founding is
467
SD, 27 September 1943, vol. 15, p. 5807. Translation quoted in Hamann, Winifred, p. 368.
Winifred, p. 367.
469
Winifred, pp. 368 and 376 respectively.
468
189
beyond the remit of the present project.470 Here it is worth citing Nicholas Vazsonyi’s
insightful analysis of Wagner’s own descriptions of Bayreuth after it was opened:
blurring the distinction between fiction and reality, Wagner borrowed words
he had put in the mouth of Hans Sachs to now describe Bayreuth, instead of
Nuremberg, as ‘Deutschlands Mitte’ (Germany’s center). If Wagner’s
fictionalised Nuremberg in Die Meistersinger had functioned as a
synecdoche for Germany, his rhetorical makeover was turning the real
Bayreuth into nothing less […] Just as Bayreuth represents Germany,
Wagner’s ‘provisional’ theatre reminds us of the German state which has
also always been provisional’.471
Vazsonyi convincingly proposes that Bayreuth was, from the moment that it was
founded in the late nineteenth century, geared toward delivering idealised images of
German society to the public. The Nazis did not simply hijack this space or these
works for their own ends, then. In the radically new political environment that existed
between 1933 and 1945, they simply exaggerated the preexisting characteristics that
had always defined Wagner’s opera house – whose construction was located on the
same historical continuum as their own movement.
IV
Wagner and the Twilight of the Nazis
‘Rhetoric and reality’
The principal cause of the ‘growing gap between rhetoric and reality’ that
characterised the Third Reich toward the end of the War was the regime’s increased
use of deterrence. Propaganda of persuasion maintains a separation between
organisation and individual, because the latter is always being petitioned to serve the
Nietzsche was one of the first to write a critical study of Bayreuth’s founding. See ‘Richard Wagner
in Bayreuth’, in Untimely Meditations, ed. by Daniel Breazeale, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 195–270. This piece seems eulogistic when
compared to the later Case of Wagner. For one other critical-theoretical study of the founding of
Bayreuth see Wilson-Smith, The Total Work of Art, pp. 22–47.
471
The Making of a Brand, p. 174.
470
190
former. This rule does not apply to deterrence. One of its main purposes is precisely
to instill in members of the public confusion about what separates the organisation
from the individual, and vice versa. In Nazi Germany, in the final stages of the War,
the Propaganda Ministry set about this task this in two ways. First, it deterred the
public from thinking about impending defeat with fantastical simulacra. These spread
images of a stable Nazi society, unaffected by the onslight of the Allies, and of
Germany’s cultural superiority. This superiority would eventually result in victory, no
matter how unlikely current events made that seem. Second, it involved the public in
the processes of simulation that engendered these simulacra. For this reason the
boundary between propaganda and everyday social practice – the two poles that
Kershaw described as ‘rhetoric and reality’ – was slowly eroded in the final stages of
the Third Reich. Put another way, thanks to the Party’s actions, Germany had by
1945 become a society of ‘pure inflexion’ with ‘no centre or periphery’.
There are few more arresting demonstrations of this than the Bayreuth War
Festivals. They realised the first criteria in a particularly bald fashion: attention was
drawn away from the country’s impending defeat by doling out opera tickets to
legions of wounded soldiers. The soldiers at this event were being involved in the
process of simulation itself. Simply by inhabiting Bayreuth and filling the seats in the
opera house, they were contributing to Hitler’s construction of a simulacrum of
Nazified Germany, whether they liked it or not. The content of Stock’s texts on Die
Meistersinger further underlines the simulacral nature of these events.
This analysis of the War Festivals provides a template for approaching other
topics in the period between 1943 and 1945, not least the question of why Germany
continued fighting even when defeat was plainly inevitable. Kershaw’s The End:
Hitler’s Germany, 1944–45 is one of the most recent and comprehensive studies of
191
this matter. He begins by recounting the death of Robert Limpert, a nineteen-year old
theology student summarily executed in Ansbach on 18 April 1945 for sabotage. He
was hanged just hours before the town capitulated to the Allies. Kershaw presents this
event as a puzzle which catalyses his study as a whole, and he seeks to explain ‘why
and how Hitler’s Reich kept on functioning till the bitter end’. 472 For him, the most
probable answer is that, by 1944, ‘the mindset of the ruling elite had attuned to the
character of charismatic domination and underpinned the structural determinants
preventing any challenge to Hitler’. 473 That is to say, the machinations of Hitler’s
personal brand of governance were so deeply embedded in the national psyche that
they continued to govern actions long after he was drained of meaningful power.
Kershaw mentions several other factors, but all are said to be subordinate to this main
point. They include lingering public loyalty to Hitler, which enjoyed a renewal after
the failed attempt on his life in 1944; the threat of punishments for deserters and other
Wehrkraftzersetzer, which must have been in the minds of even those most inclined
to rebel; and the state’s consistent emphasis on an Endsieg against all the odds. The
collective memory of national humiliation in 1918, coupled with the fear of reprisals
at the hands of liberated Jews and Soviets, must also have played their part. But does
any of this really account for Kershaw’s own harrowing description of Limpert’s
end?
As a noose is placed round his neck at the town hall gate, Limpert manages
to struggle free and make a run for it, but within a hundred metres is caught
by police, kicked and pulled by the hair before being hauled back
screaming. No one in the assembled crowd stirs to help him. Some in fact
also punch and kick him. Even now his misery is not over. The noose is
again put round his neck and he is hanged. But the rope breaks, and he falls
to the ground. The noose is once more put round his neck, and he is finally
hoisted to his death in the town hall square. The commandant orders the
472
473
The End, p. 6.
The End, p. 399.
192
body to be left hanging ‘until it stinks’. Shortly afterwards he apparently
requisitions a bicycle and immediately flees the town.474
This may be more satisfactorily explained by appealing to the effect of the state’s
excessive use of deterrence on everyday social practice during the last two-and-a-half
years of its existence.475
Kershaw’s account of Limpert’s execution is worded so as to emphasise its
decisiveness. For him, the question is why the executioners went through with the
hanging so close to the town’s surrender, and having had at least two opportunities to
back down. Surely the behaviour of the people concerned is more interesting: the
members of the crowd who stepped forward and beat the prisoner when they could
just as easily have been impassive bystanders; the commandant’s instructions, issued
in typical Sprache des Nationalsozialismus after Limpert’s death; the symbolic
placement of the gallows next to the town hall. These actions surely had less to do
with the execution than with bringing Nazi ideology into actual social practice. To be
sure, Limpert’s demise was an act of pure barbarism. But no matter how distantly it
may be removed from them, it does still belong on the same spectrum as the Bayreuth
War Festivals, and the 1943 version of Stock’s Die Meistersinger. Far from being
benign musical occasions, these were precisely the kind of propagandistic products
that encouraged members of the public to perform the ideals of Nazism in everyday
life. They were the kind of events that made the German public, to reuse Pretzel’s
distinctive term, ‘comraded’.476 The blurring between the simulated, ideal state and
actual society in Germany between 1943 and 1945 engendered a situation in which
violent actions were no longer considered as crimes committed by an individual.
474
The End, p. 4.
Indeed, the book has been criticised because the author’s ‘competent storytelling’ is not ‘matched
by any great analytical insights. Strangely, Kershaw does not explore issues raised by his own
material’. See the review article of this book by Ben Shephard, Observer, 21 August 2011.
476
See fn. 103.
475
193
They were seen instead as events to be absorbed into the performance that constituted
Nazism itself. Come the spring of 1945, by which time almost all German territories
had been lost, simulacra were all that remained of the Third Reich. During this final
phase, it could be considered, in Baudrillard’s terms, a gigantic hyperreality.
Hitler’s skull, Wagner’s manuscripts, and the desert of the real
Peter Longerich’s recent biography of Himmler was one of the books that provided
the historical scaffolding for this thesis. It begins by examining his suicide.477 The
contradictory aspects of this event are said to characterise Himmler’s life as a whole.
He did not kill himself immediately, but only once he was in the hands of the Allies.
He was initially collegial with his captors and freely answered their questions, but
was dead with little warning soon after. Similarly, the details of Hitler’s suicide can
almost stand as a parable for his relationship with Wagner. It is well known that he
retained several of the composer’s original manuscripts, despite pleas from the family
to have them returned to Bayreuth and safely stored in the archives. 478 He ended his
life on 30 April 1945, with a single gunshot to the head, and the devotees who had
stayed with him torched his remains in a shallow crater nearby the Führerbunker.479
In the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it emerged the Red Army had
discovered an upper cranium and jawbone amid the ruins of Berlin. They believed
them to be Hitler’s, and took them back to Russia as trophies. In 2009 though, DNA
testing revealed that these skull fragments belonged to a woman under the age of
477
Himmler, pp. 1–7.
Spotts recorded that, toward the end of the War, Wieland had pleaded with Hitler to return to
Bayreuth for safekeeping ‘a cache of Wagner manuscripts that had been presented to him on his
fiftieth birthday in 1939 by a group of industrialists, who had purchased them from the descendants of
King Ludwig. These were the original scores of Die Feen, Die Liebesverbot and Rienzi, original copies
of Rhinegold and Walküre and the orchestral sketches of Der fliegende Holländer, Götterdämmerung
and the third act of Siegfried. Hitler refused to give them up, insisting they were safe where he had
hidden them’. See Bayreuth, p. 198.
479
One of the most detailed studies of Hitler’s final days is Joachim Fest, Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The
Last Days of the Third Reich, trans. by Margot Bettauer Dembo (London: Macmillan, 2004).
478
194
forty.480 The dictator’s charred remains are presumably still buried beneath layers of
earth somewhere in Berlin. His collection of Wagner manuscripts was likewise never
recovered. In 2013, nearly seventy years after the end of the War, it can only be
assumed that his body and Wagner’s pages are permanently lost. The same is true of
the reasons that a relationship formed between the Nazi movement and Wagner’s
operas. The possibility of unveiling any ultimate truth about the place of the
composer’s music in the Third Reich, if it ever existed, has gone.
How then are we to move forward from the myths about Wagner’s position in
the Third Reich in the twenty-first century? Carl Dahlhaus’ work on the Beethoven
myth offers a possible starting point. The Nazis’ use of and writing about Wagner and
Die Meistersinger in their propaganda cannot be written off as ‘a mere falsification of
history, as though it could be refuted by documents’.481 Their web of myths about the
composer is ‘separated from empirical [history] by a chasm that represents something
more than a simple opposition of truth and falsehood’.482 We saw in this thesis that
Karl Richard Ganzer claimed that Wagner ‘laid a finger upon the basic secret of
every solution to the Jewish question’. 483 The connection he perceived between
composer and Nazism should not be dealt with by proving him factually incorrect.
Indeed, attempts of this nature to separate Wagner from Hitler have already led to
angry and inadvertently insensitive outbursts in the composer’s defence:
Wagner’s works have nothing whatever to do with blonde Aryans,
jackboots, or the gassing of Jews, and to suppose that they have is to accept
the perverse interpretation of them propagated by the Nazis.484
See Uki Goñi, ‘Tests on Skull Fragment Cast Doubt on Adolf Hitler Suicide Story’, Observer, 27
September 2009.
481
Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. by J. Bradford Robinson (Berkley: University of
California Press, 1989), p. 75.
482
Ibid., 75–76. Here I have substituted ‘biography’, the term in Dahlhaus’ original discussion, for
‘history’, which is more applicable to this context.
483
See fn. 256.
484
Bryan Magee, Aspects of Wagner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1988), p. 44.
480
195
Efforts to condemn Wagner outright by reifying his place in the Third Reich are just
as likely to offend. A particularly thoughtless example recently occurred in the
Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf, in Burkhard Kosminski’s staging of
Tannhäuser. He set the opera in a Nazi concentration camp and included scenes that
alluded to the execution of Jews in gas chambers. The title character even killed
deportees with a handgun while wearing a swastika armband. Future performances
were deservedly cancelled soon after the premiere.485 Ironically, overly conservative
and radical reactions to the Wagner-Hitler problem are cut from the same cloth. In
each case the issues are greatly oversimplified; the former because it wants to ignore
the problem, the latter because it seeks to create a straightforward equation in which
composer and dictator are interchangeable.
A better solution would be to improve our understanding of how and why the
Nazis forged so many myths about the relationship of Wagner to their own movement
in the first place. This would require a more critical-theoretical approach to their use
of language in relation to music and the arts. It simply would not make sense, for
example, to critique a product like Stock’s Wagner und Seine Meistersinger
according to the criteria of modern-day musicology. Once this is acknowledged, there
is no longer anything puzzling about his discussion not including the composer’s use
of Jewish stereotypes, or the absence of references in the chapter on Jewish
Kritikaster. A search for such features would neglect the more important question of
how and why the book functioned in Nazi propaganda. We have seen throughout this
thesis that the principal appeal of Die Meistersinger was Wagner’s employment of
simulation to offer an idealised vision of Germany itself. His nationalist vision of
sixteenth-century Nuremberg in the opera accorded with Nazi ideals. Perhaps more
See Kate Connolly, ‘German Nazi-themed Opera Cancelled After Deluge of Complaints’,
Guardian, 9 May 2013.
485
196
significantly, the very use of simulation reverberated with the ways in which they
were structuring their own society. For the Nazis, the particular style in which
Wagner manufactured nationalist fantasy was what made him their great predecessor.
Stock suggested as much in his introduction, in which he wrote of
the infinite power, essence and heroism of the German spirit [that] emanates
from the works of Wagner. But none of the awe-inspiring creations
(gewaltigen Schöpfungen) of this master breathes the disposition (Gemüt)
and upright spirit of the people as much as his Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
In this work sound and poetry are united in delightful harmony, into a
gigantic tableau of the German people (gigantischen Gemälde des
deutschen Menschen).486
And when discussing the influence of Hoffmann’s ‘Master Martin’ on Die
Meistersinger, Stock spoke specifically of the composer’s ‘dream images’
(‘Traumbilder’).487
Musicologists and musicians in the twenty-first century should not attempt to
‘save’ the composer from his historical legacy then, and neither should they strive to
attribute responsibility to him for the crimes of Hitler’s reign. Their efforts would be
more usefully directed toward digging through the layers of myth under which the
entire matter has become buried since at least 1945. We must learn to work with
whatever shreds of it can be recovered – those ‘shreds, still discernible in the deserts
[…] the desert of the real’.488
486
Meistersinger (1943), pp. 5–6. Emphasis added.
Meistersinger (1943), p. 37. The inverted commas around ‘dream images’ are Stock’s own.
488
SaS, p. 1. Original emphasis.
487
197
Reflections on Wagner and Simulation Today
A response to Daniel Barenboim
At the beginning of this project, it was observed that the role of Wagner’s music,
literature, and image in the Third Reich is oversimplified in both popular and
academic discourse today. To revisit the terms borrowed from John Deathridge, the
topic is ‘flattened out’ into a ‘one dimensional version’ of history.489 The pianist and
conductor Daniel Barenboim, who often talks about Wagner and Jews in the media,
has made significant contributions to this phenomenon. This short concluding section
will reflect on some of the claims he made about Wagner and Jews in 2013, the
composer’s bicentenary year. In particular I will focus on an article that appeared in
the New York Review of Books, and a short interview published in the Independent.490
The aim is to continue adapting Baudrillard’s ideas about simulation, and to glimpse
the ways in which processes of simulation have become part of how Wagner is
performed, listened to, and studied in the twenty-first century.
In one sense, Barenboim is outspoken in his condemnation of the composer’s
anti-Semitism. He describes it as ‘abhorrent’, ‘notorious’, and ‘unacceptable’.491 But
there are at least three aspects of his arguments indicative of an underlying belief that
this racism can be excused. First, he attempts to normalise Wagner’s anti-Semitism
by encasing it in the context of nineteenth-century Germany:
the anti-Semitism of his era had been a widespread illness since time
immemorial, even if Jews were accepted, respected, and even honoured in
certain circles of German society. A considerable measure of anti-Semitism
was an unquestioned component of the nationalistic movements in latenineteenth-century Europe. It was nothing extraordinary to blame the Jews
for all current problems, whether political, economical, or cultural. In
489
See fn. 5.
Daniel Barenboim, ‘Wagner and the Jews’, New York Review of Books, 20 June 2013; and
Barenboim and James Legge, ‘Proms 2013: Jewish Conductor Daniel Barenboim Defends
Performance of anti-Semitic Wagner’s Ring Cycle’, Independent, 16 July 2013.
491
‘Wagner and the Jews’.
490
198
addition to the age-old hatred that had previously been directed against the
Jewish religion, the anti-Semitism of the late nineteenth century was also
justified by criteria of ‘ancestry’ and ‘race’ and was directed against the now
largely emancipated and assimilated European Jewry.492
Much of what Barenboim says here is correct, but the attempt to make Wagner’s antiSemitism appear average by the standards of his own time is flawed. He was
markedly more radical than most of his contemporaries.493 Second, Barenboim uses
the word ‘misfortune’ when discussing Wagner’s status as Hitler’s favourite
composer.494 This wrongly implies his problematic place in history is the result of
one person’s taste. Finally, Barenboim suggests Wagner’s anti-Semitic statements
were the product of jealousy toward Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn.495 However, the
publication of Das Judentum under his own name – by far his most public antiSemitic gesture – was in 1869, long after he had secured a position on the
international stage and eclipsed these figures. There is also little in Das Judentum to
suggest he was jealous of either composer. He was certainly envious of Hanslick’s
success as a writer, as we saw in the second chapter of this project. Meyerbeer and
Mendelssohn, on the other hand, were only roped into the essay as examples to
illustrate bigger arguments about Jewish musicians.
Barenboim translates the final line of the first Das Judentum essay, ‘der
Untergang!’, as ‘sinking’.496 Ordinarily the word is only understood this way if the
context in which it is used is nautical. He then draws an equation between ‘sinking’
and emigration, and claims that Wagner, like Theodor Herzl, who wrote Der
‘Wagner and the Jews’.
For example, Taruskin reminds that original DJiM essay sat alongside a fierce rebuttal by Eduard
Bernsdorf. See The Oxford History, vol. 3, p. 228. On 6 February 1883 Liszt wrote an angry letter to
the editor of the Gazzette de Hongrie, refuting his ‘alleged hostility to the Israelites’, and declaring his
friendship with Meyerbeer and Heine (both of whom Wagner had attacked in DJiM). He also spoke of
his ‘active loyalty’ to many other Jewish artists. See Franz Liszt: Selected Letters, ed. and trans. by
Adrian Williams (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 897.
494
‘Proms 2013’.
495
‘Wagner and the Jews’.
496
Ibid.
492
493
199
Judenstaat and is widely considered the father of modern Israel, simply wanted Jews
to leave Germany.497 The passage in question is worth quoting at length:
Herzl’s choice of words was not fundamentally different from Wagner’s in
describing the situation of Jews in German society. In 1893 he wrote that ‘to
cure the evil’ the Jews would have to ‘rid themselves of the peculiarities for
which they are rightly reproached’. One would have to ‘baptize the
Jewboys’ in order to spare them excessively difficult lives. ‘Untertauchen
im Volk!’ – disappear among the people – was his appeal to the Jewish
population. Richard Wagner also spoke of Untergang, or sinking: ‘consider
that only one thing can be the deliverance from the curse that weighs on
you: the deliverance of Ahasver, – sinking [der Untergang]!’ Wagner’s
conclusion about the Jewish problem was not only verbally similar to
Herzl’s; both Wagner and Herzl favored the emigration of the German
Jews.498
No real evidence is offered to support this claim, and I am unaware of Wagner ever
having expressed a desire for Jews to emigrate. Indeed, it makes little sense to assume
the idea of mass emigration came about any earlier than Germany’s unification in
1870.499 Barenboim then compares Wagner’s supposed desire for Jewish emigration
and the policy of aggressive isolation pursued by Israel since 1945. The implication is
that the composer only wanted Jews to leave Europe and establish a country of their
own, which did eventually happen and which Israelis still fight for today – so both
parties are unwittingly of one mind.
Barenboim takes a sympathetic view of the unofficial ban on performing
Wagner in Israel, and says it was engendered ‘when it became known that Jews had
been sent to the gas chambers to the accompaniment of certain of Wagner’s works
[…] out of respect for survivors and the relatives of victims’.500 Some prisoners were
497
For one recent study of Herzl, see Steven Beller, Herzl (London: Peter Halban, 1991). Wagner
would have been unaware of him, given Herzl was only twenty-three years old, at which point he had
not yet published anything, when the composer died.
498
‘Wagner and the Jews’.
499
The Nazis’ plan to deport Jews to Madagascar is often traced back to the nineteenth-century
German writer Paul de Lagarde, who began formulating ideas about mass Jewish emigration in the
mid-1880s. See Saul Issroff and Moshe Silberhaft, ‘Jews in Africa’, in the Encyclopedia of the Jewish
Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture, ed. by Mark Avrum Ehrlich, in 3 vols (Santa Barbara:
ABC-CLIO, 2009), vol. 2, pp. 449–53 (p. 452).
500
‘Wagner and the Jews’.
200
certainly coerced into performing music in Auschwitz; but there is no evidence to
show that Wagner was heard around the gas chambers, and it is hard to think of a
reason that the Nazis would use his works in these circumstances. 501 They knew
prisoners were more likely to comply if they thought they were going through
standard entrance procedures before becoming workers in a labour camp. An obvious
example of them acting on this belief is their use of dummy showerheads in the
chambers. Ceremonial performances of Wagner would only have shattered the
illusion of normality; and, as the Nazis held Jews to be irredeemably inferior, they
would surely have seen little point in forcing them to listen to his compositions. We
have also noted the unpopularity of Wagner and classical music in general among the
Nazi soldiery and the German public. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is
unreasonable to suggest that anyone in the SS would have taken Wagner recordings
to a death camp. The more closely one examines this old myth, the more absurd it
seems.
But Barenboim touts it and similar others whenever he discusses Wagner’s
place in the Third Reich. He claims, for example, that Hitler called the composer ‘the
greatest prophet ever possessed by the German people’.502 I have not been able to
find this quotation in print anywhere other than this interview, and it hardly sounds
like the vague comments the dictator usually made about art and music.503 Barenboim
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist in the Auschwitz orchestra, recorded that ‘our main function was
to go to the Main Gate every morning and every evening and play marches for the thousands of
prisoners who worked outside the camp, at places like I. G. Farben, inter alia. It was imperative that
these columns of prisoners should march neatly and in step, and we provided the music to achieve this.
We sat out there in all weathers, sometimes in subzero temperatures, scantily dressed, and we played’.
See Lasker-Wallfisch, with a preface by Sir Martin Gilbert, Inherit the Truth 1939–1945 (London:
Giles de la Mare Publishers, 1996), p. 76.
502
‘Wagner and the Jews’.
503
The idea that Hitler may have seen Wagner as a ‘prophet’ is probably a remnant of Hermann
Rauschning’s book, Hitler Speaks. This spurious text continues to hold a place in academia as well as
popular discourse. Hans Rudolf Vaget, for example, claimed that Hitler described Wagner as ‘the only
precursor he ever had’. In the accompanying footnote, he notes that while the book’s authenticity ‘has
been questioned’, but ‘not really refuted’. Rauschning’s work has actually been under attack since at
501
201
also asserts that Hitler ‘took on Wagner’s mythology as a component of Nazi
ideology’, and that he ‘saw in [Wagner] – and in his anti-Semitism – a prophet and it
is Wagner’s greatest misfortune that he became Hitler’s favourite composer. That was
not Wagner’s fault’.504 It is true that Hitler had a deeply personal attachment to the
operas. The Nazis’ propagandistic use of Wagner was not the result of his direct
instruction though, and the findings of this thesis lead me to believe the regime would
have used Die Meistersinger in much the same way even if Hitler had not been an
ardent Wagnerite.
Barenboim also insists that Wagner’s operas ‘don’t deal with the anti-Semitic
questions. If they did, I don’t think I would be able to perform them’.505 He added
specifically of Die Meistersinger that ‘if Beckmesser’s awkward melodies resemble
synagogue chant, then this is a parody of Jewish song and not a racist attack’.506 This
position is hardly tenable in light of musicological research conducted since the
1980s. Scholars may no longer be as reductive about characters such as Beckmesser
as they once were, but there is little doubt that racial matters are a core component of
the composer’s musical universe. Barenboim embodies the contradictions embedded
in both Wagner scholarship and appreciation today. He acknowledges the composer’s
reputation as an anti-Semite, and expresses a desire to rescue his music from it; but at
the same time he maintains this reputation is undeserved. His position brings together
elements of radical conservatism with radical revisionism – an unlikely and selfcontradictory fusion of Dieter Borchmeyer and Joachim Köhler.
least 1983, when Wolfgang Hänel declared it a fraud. In his biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw wrote
that ‘I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to
have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether’. See, respectively, Vaget, ‘Hitler’s
Wagner’, in Music and Nazism, ed. by Kater and Riethmüller, pp. 15 and 29 respectively; Kershaw,
Hubris, p. xiv; and Rauschning, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler
on his Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1940).
504
‘Proms 2013’.
505
Ibid.
506
Ibid.
202
In all Western societies, the public expression of racist sentiments has
gradually become less acceptable since 1945. This is in no small part a lesson learned
from the experience of Nazism. The construction of alternative fantasy worlds
through processes of simulation, on the other hand, which was so characteristic of
twentieth-century fascism and which the Nazis mastered so thoroughly, has continued
to expand unabated. The case of Wagner is no exception. Today he has the status of a
‘problem’ composer. Barenboim and others promote him, on a superficial level, as a
challenging artist who needs to be rescued from the talons of history. But it seems to
me that the ‘problems’ surrounding him are not supposed to be solved. They have in
fact become part of what makes him one of classical music’s most marketable assets.
They are part of a brand. The first step toward adapting Wagner for the new
millenium is not to strive for some staged reconciliation between Jews and his music,
as Barenboim seems to believe. Rather this ‘problem’ status must cease to be used as
a commodity. There is nothing new about this position. Nietzsche had already
expressed misgivings about the ways in which Wagner was sold to his audience by
the 1880s. The composer did not belong to the history of music, he argued; but he did
signify the emergence of ‘the actor’ in music.507 Even in the nineteenth century then,
for some thinkers, Wagner’s reputation rested principally on the way that the public
perceived him, and this perception was not necessarily related to knowledge of the
music. After 1945, as the world attempted to come to terms with the legacy of
Nazism, the Wagner brand mutated and grew out of control.
The treatment of historical problems as commodities reveals something about
the situation of Wagner’s music today. There are few clearer examples of this than
‘semi-staged’ versions of his operas, which have enjoyed a remarkable upsurge
507
See The Case of Wagner, pp. 178–79.
203
during recent years at the BBC Proms. This type of performance, which scales down
dramatic action but may still include costumes, backdrops, and some acting, has
existed since at least the nineteenth century.508 Semi-stagings were originally a result
of necessity. They cost much less than a full staging, allow the work to fit into
smaller venues, and involve fewer performers. But for Wagner at least, semi-stagings
are now showing signs of becoming a genre in their own right. Semi-staged versions
of Tannhäuser, Tristan, Parsifal, and a complete Ring cycle were all given in the
Royal Albert Hall as part of the 2013 BBC Proms. This series followed a successful
semi-staged version of Die Meistersinger in the same venue in 2010. In most cases
these performances were not true semi-stagings, as they involved no costume or
dramatic interaction whatsoever. ‘Concert stagings’ would be a more accurate
description. It should also be noted that popular extracts from the composer’s mature
works have become increasingly common in the Proms. The combination of the
Prelude to Act I and the Liebestod from Tristan, for example, was omitted from only
two seasons between 2000 and 2009. The pairing, first offered at the Proms on 30
August 1897, has been popular for over a century, but the concentration in recent
times is unprecedented. If, as Lutz Koepnick has suggested, Wagner conceived his
stage as ‘a window frame, as a semi-transparent screen of different attractions’, and if
he sought to ‘modernise the stage and […] rattle the foundation of the fourth wall’,
then how have these popular excerpts and ‘concert stagings’ come to occupy so
central a place in Proms programming?509
508
Heath Lees recorded that a semi-staged production of Lohengrin took place in the Eden-Théâtre in
1887, for example. See Mallarmé and Wagner: Music and Poetic Language (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2007), p. xiv.
509
Framing Attention, pp. 63–64 and p. 88 respectively. Compare the status of Wagner in the BBC
Proms to that of Verdi: his bicentenary also fell in 2013, but none of his operas were given in complete
‘concert staged’ versions at the Proms that year. For the last time that happened, we have to go back to
the 2010 performance of Simon Boccanegra.
204
Part of the answer lies in the manner in which much of classical music is
listened to today. In 1974, Richard Sennett had already observed that the public’s
ready access to recorded, ‘perfect’ versions of classical music had altered the ways in
which they interact with it:
under the most casual circumstances at home, brushing one’s hair or doing a
crossword puzzle, one’s ear becomes accustomed to listening to music of
absolute polish […] recordings put additional demands on the performer to
shock the listener who has bestirred himself to go to the concert hall into
paying attention, through an extraordinary performance, because the listener
is so familiar with an impossibly finished standard.510
Forty years later, the public’s interaction with recorded music is beginning to have an
impact on live performances of all descriptions. Digital devices like the iPhone make
it possible to carry an enormous musical library everywhere, and it is easier than ever
for people to construct personal soundtracks for everyday life. For Wagner’s operas,
this trend is especially damaging. The BBC’s ‘concert stagings’ completely strip
them of their narrative and dramatic tension. Even though they are live performances
then, they immerse the audience in a world of decontextualised sound in the manner
of a recording. It is not coincidence that one journalist and Wagner scholar noted
admiringly of Barenboim’s 2013 performance of Das Rheingold that ‘the duration
(two hours, 29 minutes) match[ed] precisely that of his classic Bayreuth recording of
1991’.511
But a more compelling explanation for the rise in the number of Wagner
concert stagings might be our failure to deal properly with his historical legacy. For
the 2010 performance of Die Meistersinger at the BBC Proms, soloists and orchestra
alike were dressed in uniform black, as if to erase all traces of dramatic identity
completely. Stagings of this work have become increasingly problematic since 1945.
510
The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin, 1974) pp. 291–92.
Barry Millington, ‘Proms 2013: Das Rheingold (Wagner’s Ring Cycle), Royal Albert Hall’,
Evening Standard, 23 July 2013.
511
205
In 2011, Glyndebourne took up David McVicar’s pointless transportation of
Nuremberg to the nineteenth-century; and in the same year, Covent Garden employed
Graham Vick’s cartoonish interpretation of Die Meistersinger, which exaggerates and
misunderstands its comic aspects. In some senses the two productions are very
different from one another, but they share in common a failure to engage properly
with the opera’s problematic historical legacy. The BBC’s ‘concert stagings’ sidestep
that issue entirely, by virtue of removing the music from any setting or context
whatsoever. The audiences are invited to simply luxuriate in pure sound.
As seen above though, in the twenty-first century, the classical music industry
has not discarded Wagner’s anti-Semitism and his place in the Third Reich
altogether. These issues have instead been reduced to commodities that are used to
add zest to programme notes and pre-performance interviews: discussion of them
lends the semblance of meaning to modes of performing and listening that have
become almost completely disengaged from the many historical issues surrounding
the composer. In Nazi Germany, processes of simulation were used to drive
audiences toward the nationalist aspects of his work. In the twenty-first century, these
processes still exist; they have simply been reversed. Today, simulation is harnessed
as a means of driving audiences further and further away from meaningful
engagement with dramatic content and historical context. For this reason, simulation
surely continues to be as dangerous a phenomenon as Baudrillard always feared.
206
Appendix
Richard Wagner and the Perception of Art in Our Time
Radio speech by Reichsminister Dr Goebbels512
During the first interval in yesterday’s worldwide broadcast of Meistersinger
from Bayreuth, Dr Goebbels gave the following speech:
There is probably no work in the entire musical literature of the German people
that so closely relates to their psychological and spiritual energy (Spannung), and our
times, as Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger. As often in recent years, the
mastersingers’ rousing mass chorus, ‘Wacht auf, es nahe gen den Tag’, 513 has been
perceived by the longing and faithful German people as a tangible symbol of the
reawakening of the German Volk from the deep political and spiritual narcosis that
has been felt since November 1918; and how instinctively arises the parallel between
our time and a glittering historical background, before which the melancholic singer
unfolds the serious, yet also charming and cheerful play of the Meistersinger.
Revolution and expansion
The course of the German revolution, which has yielded groundbreaking results
in all areas of public life, could of course not carelessly pass by the intellectual and
cultural assets of the German nation. It is simply a revolution in the best sense of the
word, namely insofar as it not only changes the people, but also their perspective and
their relationship to matters and conditions, as well as the perspective under which
This article, which was a transcription of a speech that Goebbels’ delivered as part of the Bayreuth
Festival, appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter on 8 August 1933. In this translation, I have preserved
the article’s original layout.
513
Note the typographical errors in this quotation: the text in the score of Die Meistersinger actually
reads ‘Wach’ auf! es nahet gen den Tag’.
512
207
the total being (gesamte Dasein) tends to unfold for them in all its reflections and
intricacies (Spiegelungen und Schattierungen). To spell out the essence of this
revolution means to replace the boundless individualism of the last century, which
had been developed to the point of excess, for a thinking and feeling that is tied up
with the people, and which does not regard the individual as the centre of all matters
and conditions – but the people, with their majestic and imperious demands for the
omnipotence of life, as a whole.
The German revolution leads a misguided political and spiritual
development back to the traditions of the nation itself, and gives it a
secure and unshakable native soil, out of which the revolution, strongly
rooted in its soil, can make the flowers of our cultural and creative urges
sprout once more.
It is a people’s revolution in the best sense of the word, a revolution which is
based on the people and which will be the core of all future developments.
Revolution as the renewal of art
That in itself means a groundbreaking renewal of our entire cultural and
artistic life. Today it can no longer be doubted that the spiritual development that
started in November 1918, visible for everybody’s eye in Germany, was at heart
unhealthy and sick, and therefore was inevitably bound to yield those degenerate
results – which it has indeed produced. Art that no longer has its origins in the
people (Volk) finds no way to return to the people. Through more and more
rarified examples, it seeks to balance the harsh and sometimes crass but more
208
popular forms produced by an art which is rooted among the people and which
recognises the popular as the ground of all creative forces.
Every great art is tied to the people; should she lose her tie to the people, then
the path inevitably points to a bloodless and non-native artistry, and then she ends
in the position of l’art pour l’art, which wants to accept the people as consumers
of art, but without wanting to acknowledge the people as the co-producer of art.
Every art that is tied to the people is deeply rooted, and out of these roots,
alone it will bring the beautiful buds of its creative powers. The internationalism
of artistic creation is determined by its attachment to the soil. In other words, as
Adolf Hitler once put it: ‘the deeper a tree sinks its roots into the native soil, the
greater its shadow will be, which it casts across the borders’.
Germany is the classical land of music. Here, melody appears to be innate
to every man.
Out of the entire race’s joyful making music has arisen its great artistic
geniuses, in the class of
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Richard Wagner;
they represent the highest peak of musical-artistic genius that ever there was.
Even among them, Richard Wagner is something unique. He joins the power
of artistic pathos with inventiveness of melody, clarity of voice-leading, and
vigour of dramatic construction. Even without his dramatic work Richard Wagner
would still have been one of the greatest musicians, and without his music he
would still have been one of the greatest dramatists of all time. His artistic talent
is sealed by the fact that he succeeded in condensing the gigantically epic Tristan
in three very precise and concise acts, and places him alongside just a few from
the world’s entire literature. But the fact that he composed the tetralogy Der Ring
209
with his eternally repeating themes, always newly varied and never tedious or
even boring (‘niemals ermüdend oder gar langweilend’), alike raises him, so to
speak, to the peak of all musically creative people. An unparalleled, Godly
inspiration prevails over his art; his hand received the blessing from Genius.
Wagner’s immortality
Today he is still as modern as he was when his music dramas, which
unleashed an impassioned debate across the entire world, were first unveiled to
the public. All those today who in their unartistic arrogance (nichtkönnerischen
Überheblichkeit) consider him ‘done with’ and antiquated and want to forget him
like yesterday’s news, 514 will always, despite their contemporary routine, be
inferior due to Wagner’s skill in instrumentation and voice-leading of the melody;
comparing them with his artistic intuition must be felt as downright absurd and
offensive.
That Wagner’s art could breed such shocking documents of creativity is
mainly due to the fact that this artistic genius, which always wanted to increase
even the highest level of creative joyfulness (Höhe der Schaffensfreudigkeit),
never lost his deep roots in the earth of national traditions. Richard Wagner in fact
creates from the people for the people; none of his works is written for this or that
social strata. All appeal to the people, all search for the people, and all eventually
find the people again.
German music
514
Literally, ‘want to discard him like old iron’.
210
If Richard Wagner’s music conquered the whole world, then it was because
he was consciously and unreservedly German, and never even tried to be
something else. It was not for nothing that he spoke the words, ‘to be German is
to have to do a thing for its own sake’.515 Here lies, so to speak, the Leitmotiv of
his whole creative output.
Of all his music dramas, the Meistersinger will always be preeminent as the
most German. The mastersingers are the quintessential incarnation of our national
customs. Die Meistersinger contains all that marks and fills the German cultural
soul. The Mastersingers are an ingenious union of German melancholia and
romance, of German pride and German industriousness, of that German humour
of which one says, it smiles with one eye and cries with the other. They are an
image of the full-blooded and life-affirming German Renaissance, moving in its
bitter, chaste tragedy to jubilant musical triumphs, set in the resounding pathos of
public festivals. Never before has the perfume of a German June night been so
softly and soul-stirringly pictured in music, as in the second act of Meistersinger.
Never before has the aging man’s smiling melancholy and the tragedy of giving
up love found such transfigured expression as in Hans Sachs’ ‘Wahn’ monologue.
Never before has the relieved outcry of a people sounded so glittering and
captivating as in the first, victorious chords of the ‘Wake Up!’ chorus.
Art for the people
Richard Wagner would want his art to be handed over to the whole nation and all
across the borders for all who have an open heart and ear for German music.
‘Deutsch sein, heiße, eine Sache um ihrer selbst willen tuen’. Goebbels is quoting from Wagner’s
essay, Deutsche Kunst und Deutsche Politik.
515
211
It is written for the people, it gives the people comfort in affliction and
strength in sorrow. It is refreshing for grief- and pain-suffused souls; an art
which in its innermost being is so healthy because it makes the people well again,
and leads them back to the original source (ursprünglichen Quellen) of their own
being.
When Bayreuth, the purest place of Wagnerian works and the Wagnerian
artistic principle (Wagnerischer Kunstgestaltung), this afternoon and evening
offers his most German work in the most perfect performance over the ether to
the whole people and far beyond Germany’s borders out to the whole cultural
world, in the humblest service to the work but also with full pride for the
greatness of a never-ending tradition – which connects Bayreuth to the master and
his works, and which will never be demolished – it then honours itself and in the
best sense fulfils the will of the master.
Many decades had to pass before an entire people found its way back to Richard
Wagner.
His struggle was not finished at his death;
his descendants had to keep going and assert themselves against envy,
jealousy, critical arrogance and boastfulness. The heirs of Richard Wagner can
today rest assured that the Master and his work are safe and secure in the shelter
and care of a government and a people,
whose Führer in the very first years of the German revolution dwelt
at the site of Wagnerian creativity, to pay humble homage at the feet
of the greatest musical genius of all time.
212
May the German people never lose the spirit of this awe for the greats of the
nation! May Germany not only in works of physical labour (Werken der Arbeit),
but also in works of the spirit and artistic creativity (Werken des Geistes) show
the world that it merits a place in the circle of nations! This will be all the easier
for Germany, the more it reminds itself of its own powers and recognises itself as
the real roots of its health and its unconquerable will to live. Then it will in the
best sense do justice for Richard Wagner’s demand, which in the concluding
speech of this, the most German of all German operas, he placed in the mouth of
Hans Sachs:
‘Therefore I say to you:
honour your German Masters,
then you will conjure up good spirits!
Even if the Holy Roman Empire
should dissolve in mist,
for us there would yet remain
holy German Art!’
213
List of Abbreviations
Archive sources
BA
Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde
BA-FA
Bundesarchiv–Filmarchiv, Berlin
BA-DBa
Bundesarchiv – Das Digitale Bildarchiv des Bundesarchivs
[http://www.bild.bundesarchiv.de/]
BDC
Berlin Document Centre
IWM
Imperial War Museum, London
Published sources
AMf
Archiv für Musikforschung
DJiM
Richard Wagner, ‘Judaism in Music’, in Judaism in Music and Other Essays, trans.
by William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), pp 75–
123. For the original, see See K. Freigedank [Wagner], Das Judentum in der Musik,
in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 33 (1850)
MK
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. by James Murphy (London: Hurst and Blackett,
1939)
Mein Kampf is available in several translations. Perhaps the
version by Ralph Manheim. Nevertheless I prefer to use the
James Murphy, because the Nazis themselves approved it. The
Eher Verlag first published the two instalments of the original
1926.
most famous is the
older translation by
Munich-based Franz
version in 1925 and
SD
Meldungen aus dem Reich, 1938–1945. Die geheimen Lageberichte des
Sicherheitsdienstes der SS, ed. with an introduction by Heinz Boberach, in 17 vols.
(Pawlak: Verlag Herrsching, 1984)
214
TBJG
Joseph Goebbels, ed. by Elke Fröhlich, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, in 2
bands, Teil I, ‘Aufzeichnung’, 1923–41; and Teil II, ‘Diktate’, 1941–45, (Munich:
Saur, 1995–2008)
VB
Volkischer Beobachter
The works of Baudrillard
A
America (1986), trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988)
BE
‘The Beauborg Effect: Implosion and Deterrence’, in SaS, pp. 61–73
GW
The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991), trans. with an introduction by Paul Patton
(Sydney: Power Publications, 1995)
IE
The Impossible Exchange (1999), trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2001)
PC
The Perfect Crime (1995), trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996)
SaS
Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Shelia Faria Glaser (Ann Arbour: University of
Michigan Press, 1994)
ScO
Screened Out (2000), trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002)
SO
The System of Objects (1976), trans. by James Benedict (London: Verso, 2005)
TE
The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (1990), trans. by James
Benedict (London: Verso, 1993)
The works of Nietzsche
AC
The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. by Aaron
Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. by Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005)
215
BGE
Beyond Good and Evil: A Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. by Rolf-Peter
Horstmann and Judith Norman, trans. by Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002)
GS
The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, ed.
by Bernard Williams, trans. by Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001)
Z
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. by Adrian Del Caro and
Robert B. Pippin, trans. by Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
216
Bibliography
Unpublished material
Text
BA NS18, 304 (Musikpflege und Musikveranstaltungen) and 334 (Musik im
Rundfunk)
BA NS19, 828 (SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Hanns Stock, Rechtsanwalt – Eheweihe mit
Verleihung des Ehrendegens der SS, Entlassung aus der SS) and 3318
(Winifred Wagner. Gerüchte in der SS über eine angebliche ‘jüdische
Versippung’ der Familie Richard Wagners von Seiten Cosima Wagners)
BA R1, 84 (Karl Richard Ganzer, Richard Wagner, der Revolutionär gegen das 19.
Jahrhundert, 1933)
BA R55, 557 (Kritik von Parteidienststellen und Rundfunkhören am Programm,
1944)
BDC,
Akte aus dem Bereich SS-Offiziere; Akte
Parteikorrespondenz; Akte des Obersten Parteigerichts
aus
dem
Bereich
Film
BA-FA
K 210648-1 Die Deutsche Wochenschau, 606, 4 April 1942
K 20221-2 Die Deutsche Wochenschau, 689, 17 November 1943
B 114875-1, Bayreuth bereitet die Festspiele vor
IWM
GWY 518, Stukas
Image
BA-DBa
Bild 183-S38324, ‘Reichspräsident von Hindenburg und Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler
am Tage von Potsdam (21. März 1933)’
Bild 102-04015A, ‘Parteitag der NSDAP in Nürnberg 1934. Arbeitsmänner auf dem
Marsch durch die Straßen Nürnbergs’
217
Bild 119-04-29-36, ‘München. – Ausstellung “Der ewige Jude” im Deutschen
Museum, 7–8.11.1937. Innenraum’
Scores
Wagner, Richard, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Complete Vocal and Orchestral
Score (New York: Dover Publications, 1976)
, ed. by Egon Voss, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: New Urtext Edition
(London: Eulenberg, 2000)
Published source material (books)
Arad, Yitzhak, Israel Gutman, and Abraham Margaliot, eds, Documents on the
Holocaust: Selected Sources on the Destruction of the Jews of Germany and
Austria, Poland, and the Soviet Union, trans. by Lea Ben Dor and introduced
by Steven T. Katz (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999)
Boberach, Heinz, Meldungen aus dem Reich, 1938–1945. Die geheimen Lageberichte
des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS, in 17 vols (Pawlak: Verlag Herrsching, 1984)
Bücken, Ernst, ed., Richard Wagner. Die Hauptschriften. Herausgegeben und
eingeleitet von Ernst Bücken (Leipzig: A. Kröner Verlag, 1937)
Busch, Fritz, Aus dem Lebens eines Musikers (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1951)
, Pages From a Musician’s Life, trans. by Marjorie Strachey (London:
Hogarth Press, 1953)
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts
(Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1899)
, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (London: John Lane, 1911)
Dimendberg, Edward, Anton Kaes and Martin Jay, eds, The Weimar Republic
Sourcebook (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994)
Fuchs, Eduard, and Ernest Kreowski, Richard Wagner in der Karikatur (Berlin: B.
Behr’s Verlag, 1907)
Ganzer, Karl Richard, Richard Wagner und das Judentum (Hamburg: Verlag
Hanseat, 1938)
Goebbels, Joseph, Das erwachende Berlin (Munich: Franz Eher Verlag, 1934)
, Michael. Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern (Munich: Franz Eher
Verlag, 1928)
218
, Signale der neuen Zeit. 25 ausgewählte Reden von Dr. Joseph Goebbels
(Munich: Franz Eher Verlag, 1940)
, Der steile aufstieg. Reden und aufsatze aus den jahren 1942–43, von Joseph
Goebbels (Munich: Franz Eher Verlag, 1944)
, ed. by Elke Fröhlich, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, in 2 bands, Teil
I, ‘Aufzeichnung’, 1923–41; and Teil II, ‘Diktate’, 1941–45 (Munich: K. G.
Saur, 1995–2008)
Haffner, Sebastian, Geschichte eines Deutschen. Die Erinnerungen 1914–1933
(Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2000)
, ed. by Sarah Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, trans. with an afterword by
Oliver Pretzel (London: Orion Books, 2003)
Heimer, Ernst, Der Giftpilz (Nuremberg: Stürmer Verlag, 1938)
Himmler, Heinrich, ed. and introduced by Andrej Angrick, Christoph Dieckmann,
Christian Gerlach, Peter Klein, Dieter Pohl, Martina Voigt, Michael Wildt and
Peter Witte, Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/42 (Hamburg:
Christians, 1999)
Hitler, Adolf, Adolf Hitler. Bilder aus dem Leben des Führers (Hamburg:
Herausgegeben vom Cigaretten Bilderdienst, 1936)
, Mein Kampf, (Munich: Franz Eher Verlag, 1925-26)
, Mein Kampf, trans. by James Murphy (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939)
, ed. by Patrick Romane, The Essential Hitler: Speeches and Commentary,
trans. with an introduction by Max Domarus (Wauconda: Bolchazy-Carducci,
2007)
Junge, Traudl, ed. by Melissa Müller, Bis zur letzten Stunde. Hitlers Sekretärin
erzählt ihr Leben (Munich: Claassen, 2002)
, ed. by Melissa Müller, Until the Final Hour, trans. by Anthea Bell (London:
Phoenix, 2004)
Karbaum, Michael, Studien zur Geschichte der Bayreuther Festspiele (1876–1976)
(Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1976)
Köhler, Franz-Heinz, Die Struktur der Spielpläne deutschsprachiger Opernbühnen
von 1896 bis 1966 (Koblenz: Verband Dt. Städtestatistiker, 1968)
Klemperer, Victor, ed. by Walter Nowojski, with assistance from Hadwig Klemperer,
‘Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten’. Tagebücher 1933–1945, in 8 vols
(Berlin: Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999)
219
, I Will Bear Witness 1933–1941: A Diary of the Nazi Years, trans. with a
preface and notes by Martin Chalmers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson,
1998)
, Die unbewältigte Sprache. Aus dem Notizbuch eines Philologen ‘Lingua
Tertii Imperii’ (Darmstadt. J. Melzer, 1966)
, The Language of the Third Reich, trans. by Martin Brady (London:
Continuum, 2009)
Knappe, Siegfried, with Ted Brusaw, Soldat: Reflections of a German Soldier, 1936–
1949 (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1993)
Kubizek, August, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund (Stuttgart: Leopold Stocker
Verlag, 1966, 3rd edn)
, trans. by Lionel Leventhal and introduced by Ian Kershaw, The Young Hitler
I Knew (London: Greenhill Books, 2006)
Kühn, Walter, and Hans Lebede, Von Musikern und Musik. Von der Meistersingerzeit
bis zu Richard Strauss (Berlin: Verlag G. Freytag, 1938)
Liszt, Franz, ed. and trans. by Adrian Williams, Franz Liszt: Selected Letters
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
McCutcheon Raleigh, John, Behind the Nazi Front, with a foreword by F. A. Voigt
(London: George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1941)
Mosse, George L., Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Social and Cultural Life in the Third
Reich, trans. by Salvator Attanasio and others (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1966)
Poliakov, Léon, and Josef Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und die Juden. Dokumente und
Aufsätze (Berlin-Grunewald: Arani, 1955)
, eds, Das Dritte Reich und seine Denker. Dokumente (Berlin-Grunewald:
Arani, 1959)
Rauschning, Hermann, Gespräche mit Hitler (New York: Europa Verlag, 1940)
, Hitler Speaks: A Series of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his
Real Aims (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1940)
Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen
Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (Munich: Franz Eher Verlag, 1930)
Seeliger, Hermann, Die Loreleysage in Dichtung und Musik (1898) (Whitefish:
Kessinger, 2009)
220
, Antike Tragodien im Gewande Moderner Musik (1905) (Whitefish:
Kessinger, 2010)
Speer, Albert, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1970)
, Inside the Third Reich, trans. by Richard and Clara Winston, with an
introduction by Eugene Davidson (London: Phoenix, 1995)
Stock, Richard Wilhelm, Die Judenfrage durch fünf Jahrhunderte (Nuremberg:
Sturmer Verlag, 1938)
, Richard Wagner und die Stadt der Meistersinger (Nuremberg: Karl Ulrich,
1938)
, Richard Wagner und seine Meistersinger. Eine Erinnerungsgabe zu den
Bayreuther Kriegsfestspielen (Nuremberg: Karl Ulrich, 1943)
Wagenseil, Johann Christoph, ed. by Horst Brunner, Buch von der Meister-Singer
Holdseligen Kunst (Göppingen: A. Kümmerle, 1975)
Wagner, Cosima, ed. and annotated by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, Die
Tagebücher, in 2 vols (Munich: Piper, 1976–77)
, ed. and annotated by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, Diaries,
trans. with an introduction by Geoffrey Skelton, in 2 vols (London: William
Collins, 1978)
Wagner, Richard, ed. by Dieter Borchmeyer, Richard Wagner Dichtungen und
Schriften, in 10 vols (Frankfurt a.M.: Insel Verlag, 1983)
, ‘Judaism in Music’, in Judaism in Music and Other Essays, trans. by
William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995)
, ed. by Mary Whittall, My Life, trans. by Andrew Gray (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983)
, Religion and Art, trans. by William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln, NE: University of
Nebraska Press, 1994)
Lasker-Wallfisch, Anita, with a preface by Sir Martin Gilbert, Inherit the Truth
1939–1945 (London: Giles de la Mare Publishers, 1996)
Zelinsky, Hartmut, Richard Wagner – ein deutsches Thema. Eine Dokumentation zur
Wirkungsgeschichte Richard Wagners, 1876–1976 (Frankfurt a.M.:
Zweitausendeins, 1976)
221
Published source material (journals, newspapers, theses &c.)
Alt, Michael [‘Moll’] ‘Richard Wagner – nationalsozialistisch gesehen’, Die Musik
(August, 1936)
Braungart, Siegfried, Die Verbreitung des reformatorischen Liedes in Nürnberg in
der Zeit von 1525 bis 1570 (Erlangen, 1939)
Darré, Richard Walther, Blut und Boden. Grundgedanke des Nationalsozialismus
(Berlin: Verlag Volksbuch, 1936)
Falkenberg, Erwin Die Bedeutung des Lichtes und der Farben in Gesamtkunstwerk
Richard Wagners (Rostock, 1939)
Goebbels, Joseph, ‘Warum Sind Wir Judengegner?’, Der Angriff, 30 July 1928
Heinitz, Wilhelm, ‘Ein Homogenitätsstudie an Hans Sachsens Überlangton und
Herimans Salve Regina’, AMf, 3 (1937), 257–72
Lorenz, Alfred, ‘Wortes des Sehers. Aus Richard Wagners Schriften und Briefen’,
Zeitschrift für Musik (July, 1938)
Pöschl, Friedrich, ‘Richard Wagner und das Judentum’, Deutsche SängerbundesZeitung (May-June, 1938)
Strobel, Otto, ‘Richard Wagner, der Mensch, der Künstler, der Deutsche’, VB (12
Feburary 1933)
Wagner, Richard, [K. Freigedank], Das Judentum in der Musik, Neue Zeitschrift für
Musik, 33 (September 1850)
Archiv für Musikforschung
Der Angriff
Frankfurter Zeitung
Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte
Der Stürmer
Völkischer Beobachter
Critical-theoretical, sociological, and philosophical texts
Adorno, Theodor W., ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music,
Fragments and Texts, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity Press,
2002)
222
, ed. with an introduction by J. M. Bernstein, The Culture Industry: Selected
Essays on Mass Culture (London: Routledge, 2001)
, ed. by Richard Leppert, Essays on Music, trans. by Susan H. Gillespie
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002)
, ‘Fragmente über Wagner’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 8 (1939–40), 1–
48
, In Search of Wagner, trans. by Rodney Livingstone with an introduction by
Slavoj Zizek (London: Verso, 2005)
, ‘Wagner’s Relevance for Today’, trans. by Susan Gillespie, Grand Street, 44
(1993), 32–59
, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming
(London: Verso, 1997)
Badiou, Alain, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. and introduced
by Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2002)
Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. by Andrew Leak (London: Grant and Cutler,
1994)
Baudrillard, Jean, America, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1988 [1986])
, Cool Memories IV: 1995–2000, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2003
[2000])
, ed. by Steve Redhead, The Jean Baudrillard Reader (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2008)
, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. with an introduction by Paul Patton
(Sydney: Power Publications, 1995 [1991])
, ed. and introduced by Mark Poster, Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings,
trans. by Jacques Mourrain and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2001)
, The Impossible Exchange, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2001
[1999])
, The Perfect Crime, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1996 [1995])
, Screened Out, trans. by Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2002 [2000])
, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. by Shelia Faria Glaser (Ann Arbour:
University of Michigan Press, 1994 [1981])
223
, The System of Objects, trans. by James Benedict (London: Verso, 2005
[1976])
, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. by James
Benedict (London: Verso, 1993 [1990])
, The Uncollected Baudrillard, introduced, trans. and ed. by Gary Genosko
(London: Sage, 2001)
, and Aude Lancelin, ‘The Matrix Decoded: Le Nouvel Observateur interview
with Jean Baudrillard’, trans. by Gary Genosko and Adam Bryx, International
Journal of Baudrillard Studies, vol. 1 no. 2 (July, 2004),
<http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol1_2/genosko.htm>.
Borges, Jorge Luis, Collected Fictions, trans. by Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin
Books, 1999)
Bourdieu, Pierre, Logic of Practice, trans. by Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1990 [1980])
, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. by Richard
Nice (London: Routledge, 1984)
Calhoun, Craig, and Richard Sennett, eds, Practicing Culture (London: Routledge,
2007)
Dubord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New
York: Zone Books, 1994)
, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, trans. by Malcolm Imrie (London:
Verso, 1998)
Durkheim, Émile, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. by W. D. Hall
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984 [1893])
Eisner, Lotte H., The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in German Cinema and the
Influence of Max Reinhardt, trans. from French by Roger Greaves (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1969)
Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. by Thomas Burger (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1989)
Jameson, Frederic, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986 Volume 2, Syntax of
History (London: Routledge, 1988)
Kracauer, Siegfried, ed. and introduced by Leonardo Quaresima, From Caligari to
Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2004)
224
, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans., ed. and introduced by Thomas
Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)
, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, trans. with an
introduction by Miriam Bratu Hansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1997)
Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. by Ben Fowkes with an
introduction by Ernest Mandel (London: Penguin, 1990 [1867])
McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, introduced by
Lewis H. Lapham (London: Routledge, 2001)
, and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (New York: Random House,
1976)
Nietzsche, Friedrich, ed. by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, The Anti-Christ, Ecce
Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, trans. by Judith Norman
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
, ed. by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman, Beyond Good and Evil: A
Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. by Judith Norman (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002)
, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, ed. and trans. with a
commentary by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967)
, ed. by Bernard Williams, The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German
Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. by Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian
Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)
, ed. by Daniel Breazeale, Untimely Meditations, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
, ed. by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A
Book for All and None, trans. by Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006)
Plato, The Republic, trans. with an introduction by R. E. Allen (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006)
Sartre, Jean-Paul, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, trans.
by George J. Becker with a preface by Michael Walzer (New York: Schocken
Books, 1976, new edn, 1995)
Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man (London: Penguin Books, 1974)
Weber, Max, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, ed., trans. and
introduced by Stephen Kalberg (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002 [1905])
225
Secondary literature
Abbate, Carolyn, and Roger Parker, eds, Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner
(Berkley: University of California Press, 1989)
Adams, Paul C., The Boundless Self: Communication in Physical and Virtual Spaces
(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2005)
Adler,
Hans Günther, Theresienstadt, 1941–1945. Das Antlitz einer
Zwangsgemeinschaft: Gechichte, Soziologie, Psychologie (Tubingen: J. C. B.
Mohr, 1960)
Altenburg, Detlef, Liszt und die Neudeutsche Schule (Weimar: Laaber, 2006)
Amith, Jonathan D., The Möbius Strip: A Spatial History of Colonial Society in
Guerrero, Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)
Andics, Hellmut, Der ewige Jude. Ursachen und Geschichte des Antisemitismus
(Vienna: Verlag Fritz Molden, 1965)
Applegate, Celia, and Pamela M. Potter, eds, Music and German National Identity
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New
York: Penguin Books, 1963)
Arnold, Klaus, and Christoph Classen, Zwischen Pop und Propaganda: Radio in der
DDR (Berlin: C.H. Links, 2004)
Ascheid, Antje, Hitler’s Heroines: Stardom and Womanhood in Nazi Cinema
(Ambler: Temple University Press, 2003)
Aster, Misha, The Third Reich’s Orchestra: The Berlin Philharmonic, 1933–1945
(London: Souvenir, 2010)
Bacht, Nikolaus, ed., Music, Theatre and Politics in Germany: 1848 to the Third
Reich (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006)
Bajohr, Frank, ‘Aryanisation’ in Hamburg: The Economic Exclusion of the Jews and
the Confiscation of Their Property in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berghahn
Books, 2002)
, Parvenüs und Profiteure. Korruption in der NS-Zeit (Frankfurt: S. Fischer,
2001)
Baranowski, Shelley, Strength Through Joy: Consumerism and Mass Tourism in the
Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)
226
Barnouw, Dagmar, Critical Realism: History, Photography, and the Work of
Siegfried Kracauer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)
Barnouw, E., G. Gerber, W. Schramm, T. L. Worth and L. Gross, eds, International
Encyclopedia of Communications, in 12 vols (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1989)
Barth, Christian, Goebbels und die Juden (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2003)
Bartov, Omer, ed., The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (London:
Routledge, 2000)
, The ‘Jew’ in Cinema: From The Golem to Don’t Touch My Holocaust
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005)
Bauman, Zygmunt, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989)
Bellman, Jonathan, Chopin’s Polish Ballade: Op. 38 as Narrative of National
Martyrdom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
Beller, Steven, Herzl (London: Peter Halban, 1991)
Berenbaum, Michael, and Abraham J. Peck, eds, The Holocaust and History: The
Known, the Unknown, the Disputed and the Reexamined (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1998)
Berger, Allan L., and Naomi Berger, eds, Second Generation Voices: Reflections by
Children of Holocaust Survivors and Perpetrators (Syracuse: Syracuse
University Press, 2001)
Berger, Arthur Asa. Video Games: A Popular Culture Phenomenon (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 2002)
Berger, Stefan, Germany: Inventing the Nation (London: Hodder Arnold, 2004)
Bergmeier, Horst J. P., and Rainer E. Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of
Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997)
Berry, David, Revisiting the Frankfurt School: Essays on Culture, Media and Theory
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011)
Bessel, Richard, ed., Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Biale, David, Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and
Christians (Berkley: University of California Press, 2007)
Birdsall, Carolyn, Nazi Soundscapes: Sound, Technology and Urban Space in
Germany, 1933–1945 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012)
227
Blackbourn, David, History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2003)
, and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984)
Blake, Robert, and William Roger Louis, eds, Churchill (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002)
Bock, Hans-Michael, Wiebke Annkatrin Mosel und Ingrun Spazier, eds, Die Tobis.
1928–1945. Eine kommentierte Filmografie (Munich: Edition Text+Kritik,
2003)
Bonacker, Max, Goebbels’ Mann beim Radio. Der NS-Propagandist Hans Fritzsche,
1900–1953 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2007)
Borchmeyer, Dieter, Drama and the World of Richard Wagner, trans. by Daphne
Ellis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)
, Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, trans. by Stewart Spencer (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1991)
, ed., Richard Wagner und Die Juden (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000)
Bramwell, Anna, Blood and Soil: Richard Walther Darré and Hitler’s ‘Green Party’
(Bourne End: Kensal, 1985)
Brockmann, Stephen, Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital (Woodbridge: Camden
House, 2006)
, A Critical History of German Film (Woodbridge: Camden House, 2010)
Brown, Robert J., Manipulating the Ether: The Power of Broadcast Radio in Thirties
America (London: McFarland, 1998)
Browning, Christopher, with contributions by Jürgen Mätthaus, The Origins of the
Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939–March
1942 (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2004)
Bruendel, Steffen, Volksgemeinschaft oder Volkstaat. Die ‘Ideen von 1914’ und die
Neuordnung Deutschlands im Ersten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Akademie Verlag,
2003)
Brüggemeier, Franz-Joseph, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller, eds, How Green Were
the Nazis?: Nature, Environment, and Nation in the Third Reich (Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press, 2005)
Brüninghaus, Marc, Unterhaltungsmusik im Dritte Reich (Hamburg: Diplomica
Verlag, 2010)
228
Bullock, Alan, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (London: Penguin, 1962)
Bytwerk, Randall L., Julius Streicher: Nazi Editor of the Notorious anti-Semitic
Newspaper Der Stürmer (New York: Cooper Square Press, 2001)
Cahnman, Werner J., ed. with an introduction by Joseph B. Maier, Judith Marcus and
Zoltán Tarr, German Jewry: Its History and Sociology (New Brunswick:
Transaction Publishers, 1989)
Calhoun, Craig, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1992)
Campbell, Neil, Jude Davies and George McKay, eds, Issues in Americanisation and
Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004)
Carel, Havi, and Greg Tuck, New Takes in Film-Philosophy (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2011)
Carnegy, Patrick, Wagner and the Art of Theatre (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2006)
Carr, Jonathan, The Wagner Clan: The Saga of Germany’s Most Illustrious and
Infamous Family (London: Faber, 2007)
Cebulla, Florian, Rundfunk und Ländlich Gesellschaft, 1924–1945 (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2004)
Chafe, Eric, The Tragic and the Ecstatic: The Musical Revolution of Wagner’s
Tristan and Isolde (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005)
Chambers II, John Whiteclay, and David Culbert, eds, World War II, Film, and
History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
Chiari, Bernhard, Matthias Rogg and Wolfgang Schmidt, eds, Krieg und Militär im
Film des 20. Jahrhunderts (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2003)
Cicora, Mary A., Modern Myths and Wagnerian Deconstructions: Hermeneutic
Approaches to Wagner’s Music (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000)
Clarke, David B., Marcus A. Doel, William Merrin and Richard G. Smith, eds, Jean
Baudrillard: Fatal Theories (London: Routledge, 2009)
Closel, Amaury du, Erstickte Stimmen. ‘Entartete Musik’ im Dritten Reich (Vienna:
Böhlau Verlag, 2010)
Coleman, James A., and Brigitte Rollet, eds, Television in Europe (Exeter: Intellect
Books, 1997)
229
Connor, Steven, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004)
Constable, Catherine, Adapting Philosophy: Jean Baudrillard and the Matrix Trilogy
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)
Corner, Paul, ed., Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism,
Communism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
Corni, Gustavo, and Horst Gies, ‘Blut und Boden’: Rassenideologie und Agrarpolitik
im Staat Hitlers (Idstein: Schulz-Kirchner, 1994)
Crisell, Andrew, Understanding Radio (London: Routledge, 2nd edn, 1994)
Cross, Malcolm, and Michael Keith Racism, the City and the State (London:
Routledge, 1993)
Crossley, Nick, and John Michael Roberts, eds, After Habermas: New Perspectives
on the Public Sphere (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004)
Cuomo, Glenn R., ed., National Socialist Cultural Policy (New York: St Martin’s
Press, 1994)
Currid, Brian, A National Acoustics: Music and Mass Publicity in Weimar and Nazi
Germany (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)
Dahlhaus, Carl, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. by J. Bradford Robinson (Berkley:
University of California Press, 1989)
, Richard Wagner’s Music Dramas, trans. by Mary Whittall (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1979)
Dawidowicz, Lucy, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1975)
Deathridge, John, Wagner Beyond Good and Evil (Berkley: University of California
Press, 2008)
Del Mar, Norman, ed. by Jonathan Del Mar, Conducting Favourite Concert Pieces
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
Dennis, David B., Beethoven in German Politics, 1870–1989 (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1996)
, Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012)
Diefendorf, Jeffrey M., ed., Lessons and Legacies VI: New Currents in Holocaust
Research (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004)
230
Dohms, Peter, and Johann Paul, Die Studentenbewegung von 1968 in NordrheinWestfalen (Siegburg: Rheinlandia, 2008)
Downing, David B., and Susan Bazargan, eds, Image and Ideology in
Modern/Postmodern Discourse (Albany: SUNY Press, 1991)
Drechsler, Nanny, Die Funktion der Musik im deutschen Rundfunk 1933–1945
(Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1988)
Dreyfus, Laurence, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2012)
Duffy, Christopher, Red Storm on the Reich: The Soviet March on Germany, 1945
(London: Routledge, 1991)
Durham, Scott, Phantom Communities: The Simulacrum and the Limits of
Postmodernism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998)
Dürr, Alfred, The Cantatas of J. S. Bach, trans. by Richard D. P. Jones (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005)
Dussel, Konrad, Deutsche Rundfunkgeschichte (Konstanz: UVK Verlag, 2004)
Ehrlich, Mark Avrum, ed., Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins,
Experiences, and Culture, in 3 vols (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2009)
Eley, Geoff, ed., The Goldhagen Effect: History, Memory, Nazism – Facing the
German Past (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000)
Evans, Richard J., The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Penguin, 2004)
, The Third Reich in Power: 1933–1939 (London: Penguin, 2006)
, The Third Reich at War: 1939–1945 (London: Penguin, 2009)
Evans, Robert J. W., and Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, eds, The Revolutions in
Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2001)
Falzon, Christopher, Philosophy Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy
(London: Routledge, 2007)
Farquharson, John, The Plough and the Swastika: The NSDAP and Agriculture in
Germany, 1928–1945 (London: Sage Publications, 1976)
Farrell, Joseph P., The SS Brotherhood of the Bell: The Nazis’ Incredible Secret
Technology (Kempton: Adventures Unlimited Press, 2006)
Feiereisen, Florence, and Alexandra Merley Hill, eds, Germany in the Loud
Twentieth Century: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
231
Fest, Joachim, Inside Hitler’s Bunker: The Last Days of the Third Reich, trans. by
Margot Bettauer Dembo (London: Macmillan, 2004)
Finkelstein, Norman, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitations of
Jewish Suffering (London: Verso, 2000, 2nd edn)
, and Ruth B. Birn, A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical
Truth (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998)
Firme, Annemarie, and Ramona Hocker, eds, Von Schlachthymnen und Protestsongs.
Zur Kulturgeschichte des Verhältnisses von Musik und Krieg (Bielefeld:
Transcript Verlag, 2006)
Fischer, Jens Malte, Richard Wagners ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’ (Frankfurt: Insel
Verlag, 2000)
Foerster, Isolde von, Christoph Hust and Christoph-Hellmut Mahling, eds,
Musikforschung, Faschismus, Nationalsozialismus. Referate der Tagung
Schloss Engers, 8. bis 11. März 2000 (Mainz: Are Musik, 2004)
Fox, Jo, Filming Women in the Third Reich (Oxford: Berg, 2000)
Freedman, Jean R., Whistling in the Dark: Memory and Culture in Wartime London
(Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2009)
Freeland, Cynthia A., and Thomas E. Wartenberg, eds, Philosophy and Film
(London: Routledge, 1995)
Friedlander, Henry, The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final
Solution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995)
Friedländer, Saul, and Jörn Rüssen, eds, Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich. Ein
Schloss-Elmau-Symposion (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000)
Fulbrook, Mary, Historical Theory (London: Routledge, 2002)
Führer, Karl Christian, Wirtschaftsgeschichte des Rundfunks in der Weimarer
Republik (Potsdam: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 1997)
, and Corey Ross, eds, Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century
Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006)
Fuld,
Werner, Das Lexikon der Fälschungen. Fälschungen, Lügen und
Verschwörungen aus Kunst, Historie, Wissenschaft und Literatur (Frankfurt
a.M.: Eichborn, 1999)
Gane, Mike, Baudrillard in Radical Uncertainty (London: Pluto Press, 2000)
232
Gathmann, Peter, and Martina Paul, Narziss Goebbels. Eine Biografie (Vienna:
Böhlau Verlag, 2009)
Geller, Jay, The Other Jewish Question: Identifying the Jew and Making Sense of
Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011)
Gemünden, Gerd, and Johannes von Moltke, eds, Culture in the Anteroom: The
Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2012)
Genosko, Gary, McLuhan and Baudrillard: Masters of Implosion (London:
Routledge, 1999)
Gerrits, André, The Myth of Jewish Communism: A Historical Interpretation
(Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009)
Gilbert, Martin, Kristallnacht: Prelude to Destruction (London: Harper Perennial,
2007)
Giliotti, Simone, The Train Journey: Transit, Captivity, and Witnessing in the
Holocaust (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009)
Gilliam, Bryan Randolph, ed., Music and Performance During the Weimar Republic
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Gloning, Thomas, and Christopher Young, A History of the Germany Language
Through Texts (London: Routledge, 2004)
Goehr, Lydia, The Quest for Voice: On Music Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy.
The 1997 Ernest Bloch Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the
Holocaust (London: Abacus, 1997)
Grace, Victoria, Baudrillard’s Challenge: A Feminist Reading (London: Routledge,
2009)
Gregor, Neil, Nils Roemer and Mark Roseman, eds, German History from the
Margins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006)
Grimm, Reinhold, and Jost Hermand, eds, Re-Reading Wagner (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1993)
Gross, Paul R., and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its
Quarrels With Science (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1994)
Guerin, Frances, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany
(Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)
233
Gutman, Robert, Richard Wagner: The Man, The Mind, and His Music (London:
Secker and Warburg, 1968)
Haasis, Helmut, Joseph Süß Oppenheimer genannt Jud Süß: Finanzier, Freidenker,
Justizopfer (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1998)
, Totengedenkbuch für Joseph Süß Oppenheimer (Worms: Worms Verlag,
2012)
Haefner, James E., and Kim B. Rotzoll, eds, with Steven R. Hall, Advertising in
Modern Societies: Perspectives Toward Understanding (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 1996)
Hahn, Hans J., The 1848 Revolutions in German-Speaking Europe (Harlow:
Longman, 2001)
Haines, Brigid, Stephen Parker and Colin Riordan, eds, Aesthetics and Politics in
Modern German Culture: Festschrift In Honour of Rhys W. Williams (Bern:
Peter Lang, 2010)
Hamann, Brigitte, with a foreword by Hanns Mommsen, Hitler’s Vienna: A Portrait
of the Tyrant as a Young Man, (London: Tauris Parke, 2010)
, Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth, trans. by Alan
Bance (London: Granta Books, 2005)
Hannay, Alastair, On the Public (London: Routledge, 2005)
Hansen, Miriam, Cinema and Experience: Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and
Theodor W. Adorno (Berkley: University of California Press, 2012)
Hasan-Rokem, Galit, and Alan Dundes, The Wandering Jew: Essays in the
Interpretation of a Christian Legend (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1986)
Hegarty, Paul, Jean Baudrillard: Live Theory (London: Continuum, 2004)
Heinzmann, Julia-Maria, Die Buhllieder des Hans Sachs. Form Gehalt, Funktion und
sozialhistorischer Ort (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2001)
Hillenbrand, F. K. M., Underground Humour in Nazi Germany, 1933–1945 (London:
Routledge, 1995)
Hilmes, Michele, and Jason Loviglio, eds, Radio Reader: Essays in the Cultural
History of Radio (London: Routledge, 2002)
Hinze, Werner, Lili Marleen. Ein Lied zwischen Soldatenromantik und Propaganda
(Hamburg: Tonsplitter, 2004)
234
Hoffmann, Hilmar, The Triumph of Propaganda: Film and National Socialism,
1933–1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 1996)
Horne, Alistair, How Far From Austerlitz? Napoleon 1805–1815 (London:
Macmillan, 1998)
Horten, Gerd, Radio Goes to War: The Cultural Politics of Propaganda During
World War Two (Berkley: University of California Press, 2002)
Huener, Jonathan, ed., The Arts in Nazi Germany: Continuity, Conformity, Change,
(New York: Berghahn Books, 2006)
Irwin, William, The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the Desert of the Real (Peru,
IL: Carus Publishing Company, 2002)
Jacobsen, Wolfgang, Anton Kaes and Hans Helmut Prinzler Geschichte des
Deutschen Films (Stuggart: J. B. Metzler, 2004)
James, Pearl, ed., Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture (Lincoln,
NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009)
Jardine, Alice, and Paul Smith, eds, Men in Feminism (London: Routledge, 1987)
Janaway, Christopher, Roger Scruton, Peter Singer and Michael Tanner, German
Philosophers: Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997)
Joe, Jeongwon, and Sander L. Gilman, Wagner and the Cinema (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 2010)
John, Jürgen, Horst Möller and Thomas Schaarschmidt, eds, Die NS-Gaue. Regionale
Mittelinstanzen im zentralistischen ‘Führerstaat’ (Munich: Oldenbourg
Wissenschaftsverlag, 2007)
Johnson, Julian, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002)
Jones, David Wayne, Reforming the Morality of Usury: A Study of the Differences
that Separated the Protestant Reformers (Lanham: University Press of
America, 2004)
Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion (London:
Sage Publications, 2006, 4th edn)
Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2010)
Kaes, Anton, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History as Film (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)
235
Karbaum, Michael, Studien zur Geschichte der Bayreuther Festspiele (1876–1976),
vol. 3 of Arbeitsgemeinschaft 100 Jahre Bayreuther Festspiele, in 13 vols
(Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1971–76)
Karina, Lilian, and Marion Kant, eds., Hitler’s Dancers: German Modern Dance and
the Third Reich (New York: Berghan Books)
Kater, Michael H., Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)
, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004)
, and Albrecht Riethmüller, eds, Music and Nazism: Art Under Tyranny
(Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 2003)
Katsiaficas, George N., The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968
(Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1987)
Katz, Jacob, The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner’s anti-Semitism (Hanover,
NH: University of New England Press, 1982)
Keitz, Ursula von, and Kay Hoffmann, eds, Die Einübung des dokumentarischen
Blicks. Fiction Film und Non Fiction Film zwischen Wahrheitsanspruch und
expressiver Sachlichkeit 1895–1945 (Marburg: Schüren Pressverlag, 2001)
Kellner, Douglas, ed., Baudrillard: A Critical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994)
, Media Culture: Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the
Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1995)
Kershaw, Ian, The End: Hitler’s Germany, 1944–45 (London: Penguin, 2011)
, Hitler, The Germans and the Final Solution (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2008)
, The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987)
, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998)
, Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis (London: Allen Lane, 2000)
Klee, Ernst, ‘Euthanasie’ im NS-Staat. Die ‘Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens’
(Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1983)
, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945
(Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 2003)
Klimke, Martin, and Joachim Scharloth, eds, 1968. Ein Handbuch zur Kultur- und
Mediengeschichte der Studentenbewegung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007)
236
Kinderman, William, and Katherine R. Syer, eds, A Companion to Wagner’s Parsifal
(New York: Camden House, 2006)
Kivy, Peter, Music, Language and Cognition, and Other Essays in the Aesthetics of
Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007)
Knopp, Guido, Hitler’s Women (London: Routledge, 2003)
Koch, Gertrud, Siegfried Kracauer: An Introduction, trans. by Jeremy Ganes
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000)
Koch, Hans-Jürgen, and Hermann Glaser, Ganz Ohr. Eine Kulturgeschichte des
Radios in Deutschland (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2005)
, Das Wunschkonzert im NS-Rundfunk, with a foreword by Hans-Ulrich
Wehler (Köln: Böhlau, 2003)
Koepnick, Lutz, The Dark Mirror: German Cinema Between Hitler and Hollywood
(Berkley: University of California Press, 2002)
, Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2007)
Köhler, Joachim, Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple, trans. and
introduced by Ronald Taylor (Oxford: Polity Press, 2000)
Köppen, Manuel, Das Entsetzen des Beobachters. Krieg und Medien im 19.und 20.
Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2005)
Koss, Juliet, Modernism After Wagner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2010)
Kramer, Lawrence, Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (Berkley:
University of California Press, 2004)
Kreimeier, Klaus, The Ufa Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film
Corporation, 1918–1945, trans. by Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Hill
and Wang, 1996)
Kreuzer, Gundula, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
Krüger, Christian, Geschichte der Oper am Landestheater in Oldenburg 1921–1938.
Ein Beitrag zur Musikgeschichte der Stadt Oldenburg vor dem Hintergrund
der sozialen und der politischen Entwicklung dieser Epoch (Oldenburg: Heinz
Holzberg Verlag, 1984)
Langerbein, Helmut, Hitler’s Death Squads: The Logic of Mass Murder (Texas:
Texas A&M University Press, 2003)
237
Langewiesche, Dieter, Nation, Nationalismus, Nationalstaat in Deutschland und
Europa (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000)
Ledig, Elfriede, Paul Wegeners Golem-Filme im Kontext fantastischer Literatur.
Grundfragen zur Gattungsproblematik fantastischen Erzählens (Munich:
Verlegergemeinschaft Schaudig, Bauer, Ledig, 1989)
Lees, Heath, Mallarmé and Wagner: Music and Poetic Language (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007)
Leibovitz, Liel, and Matthew Miller, Lili Marlene: The Soldiers’ Song of World War
II (London: W.W. Norton, 2009)
Leiser, Erwin, Deutschland Erwache: Nazi Cinema, trans. by Gertrude Mander and
David Wilson (London: Secker and Warburg, 1974)
Lekan, Thomas M., Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and
German Identity, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2004)
Levi, Erik, Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon, (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2011)
, Music in the Third Reich (London: Macmillan, 1994)
Levin, David J., Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy
of Disavowal (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner and Zemlinsky (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007)
Levinson, Jerrold, Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998)
Levy, Richard S., Anti-Semitism: A Historical Encyclopaedia of Prejudice and
Persecution (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005)
Liebscher, Daniela, Freude und Arbeit. Zur internationalen Freizeit- und
Sozialpolitik des faschistischen Italien und des NS-Regimes (Cologne: SHVerlag, 2009)
Lindberg, Carter, The European Reformations (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996, 2nd
edn, 2010)
Lipmann, Edward, with an introduction by Christopher Hatch, Philosophy and
Aesthetics of Music (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999)
Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
238
Lobenstein-Reichmann, Anja, Houston Stewart Chamberlain – zur textlichen
Konstruktion einer Weltanschauung. Eine sprach-, diskurs- und
ideologiegeschichtliche Analyse (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008)
Longerich, Peter, Heinrich Himmler, trans. by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
, Joseph Goebbels. Biographie (Munich: Siedler Verlag, 2010)
, Die Wannsee-Konferenz vom 20 Januar 1942. Planung und Beginn des
Genozids an den europaischen Juden (Berlin: Edition Hentrich, 1998)
Lyon, David, Jesus in Disneyland: Religion in Postmodern Times (Cambridge: Polity
Press, 2000)
Mackensen, Rainer, Jürgen Reulecke and Josef Ehmer, eds, Ursprünge, Arten und
Folgen des Konstrukts ‘Bevölkerung’ vor, im und nach dem ‘Dritten Reich’.
Zur Geschichte der deutschen Bevölkerungswissenschaft (Wiesbaden: Verlag
für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009)
Magee, Bryan, Aspects of Wagner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1988)
, The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy (New York: Henry Holt, 2000)
Magnus, Bernd, and Kathleen M. Higgins, eds, The Cambridge Companion to
Nietzsche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Maier, Christoph T., Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the
Preaching Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
Majdalany, Fred, The Battle of El Alamein: Fortress in the Sand (Philadelphia:
University of Pennslvania Press, new edn, 2003)
Mammach, Klaus, Der Volkssturm. Bestandteil des totalen Kriegseinsatzes der
deutschen Bevölkerung 1944/45 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1981)
Mayer, Bernd, ‘Die hau’n unser Städta z’samm’. Bayreuth, April 1945. Über KriegsFestspiele, Luftangriffe und den Alltag in Ruinen (Wartberg: GudensbergGleichen, 2004)
Mees, Bernard, The Science of the Swastika (Budapest: Central European University
Press, 2008)
Merrin, William, Baudrillard and the Media: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2005)
Millington, Barry, The Sorcerer of Bayreuth: Richard Wagner, His Work and His
World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
239
Mommsen, Wolfgang J., 1848. Die ungewollte Revolution (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer
Taschenbuch, 2000)
Moser, Mary Anne, ed., with Douglas MacLeod, Immersed in Technology: Art and
Virtual Environments (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996)
Mösch, Stephan, Weihe, Werkstatt, Wirklichkeit. Parsifal in Bayreuth 1882–1933
(Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 2009)
Mühlberger, Detlef, The Völkischer Beobachter: Hitler’s Voice, 1920–1933, in 2 vols
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004)
Müller, Ursula, ed., Richard Wagner 1883-1983. Die Rezeption im 19. und 20.
Jahrhundert. Gesammelte Beiträge des Salzberger Symposions (Stuttgart:
Heinz, 1984)
Newman, Ernest, Wagner Nights (London: The Bodley Head, 1949, new edn, 1988)
Nicholson, Christopher, Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler
to Commit the Holocaust? (Jerusalem: Green Publishing House, 2007)
O’Brien, Mary-Elizabeth, Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of
Entertainment in the Third Reich (Woodbridge: Camden House, 2004)
Otto, Werner, Die Lindenoper. Ein Streifzug durch ihre Geschichte (Berlin:
Henschelverlag, 1985)
Owens Zalampas, Sherree, Adolf Hitler: A Psychological Interpretation of his Views
on Architecture, Art and Music (Ohio: Bowling Green State University
Popular Press, 1990)
Pages, Neil Christian, Mary Rhiel and Ingeborg Majer-O’Sickey, eds, Riefenstahl
Screened: An Anthology of New Criticism (London: Continuum, 2008)
Painter, Karen, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007)
Parker, Roger, Leonora’s Last Act: Essays in Verdian Discourse (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1997)
Pawlett, William, Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality (London: Routledge, 2007)
Pendas, David O., The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial, 1963–1965: Genocide, History,
and the Limits of the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Penkower, Monty Noam, The Jews Were Expendable: Free World Diplomacy and
the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983)
Petropoulos, Jonathan, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1996)
240
Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
Pine, Lisa, Education in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Berg, 2010)
Piper, Ernst, Alfred Rosenberg. Hitlers Chefideologe (Munich: Karl Blessing Verlag,
2005)
Pohle, Heinz, Der Rundfunk als Instrument der Politik. Zur Geschichte des deutschen
Rundfunks von 1923–38 (Hamburg: Universität Hamburg, 1955)
Porter, Roy, and Mikulas Teich, The Renaissance in National Context (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Potter, Pamela, The Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the
Weimar Republic to Hitler’s Third Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998)
Prawer, Siegbert Salomon, Between Two Worlds: Jewish Presences in German and
Austrian Film, 1910–1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005)
Prieberg, Fred K., trans. by Christopher Dolan, Trial of Strength: Wilhelm
Furtwängler and the Third Reich (London: Quartet, 1991)
Pulzer, Peter, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–
1933 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)
Raber,
Christine, Der Filmkomponist Wolfgang Zeller. Propagandistische
Funktionen seiner Filmmusik im Dritten Reich (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 2005)
Reichert, Ramón, Kulturfilm im ‘Dritten Reich’ (Vienna: Synema, 2006)
Rehding, Alexander, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment
in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
Reimer, Robert C., Cultural History Through A National Socialist Lens: Essays on
the Cinema of the Third Reich (Woodbridge: Camden House, 2000)
Rentschler, Eric, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)
Riedel, Heidi, Siebzig Jahre Funkausstellung. Politik, Wirtschaft, Programm (Berlin:
Vistas, 1994)
Robinson, Paul A., Opera and Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss (London: Harper and
Row, 1985)
Rogowski, Christian, ed., The Many Faces of Weimar Cinema: Rediscovering
Germany’s Filmic Legacy (Woodbridge: Camden House, 2010),
241
Rose, Paul Lawrence, Wagner: Race and Revolution (London: Faber, 1992)
Roseman, Mark, The Villa, the Lake, the Meeting: Wannsee and the Final Solution
(London: Penguin, 2003)
Ross, Alex, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London: Harper
Perennial, 2009)
Rother, Rainer, Leni Riefenstahl: The Seduction of Genius, trans. by Martin H. Bott
(London: Continuum, 2002)
Ruault, Franco, Tödliche Maskeraden: Julius Streicher und die ‘Lösung der
Judenfrage’ (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2009)
Ruoff, Jeffrey, An American Family: A Televised Life (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2002)
Rutherford, Paul, Endless Propaganda: The Advertising of Public Goods (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 2000)
Salmons, Joseph, A History of German: What the Past Reveals About Today’s
Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)
Sagarra, Eda, A Social History of Germany, 1648–1914 (London: Transaction
Publishers, new edn, 2003)
Schacht, Richard, Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995)
Schenk, Dietmar, Die Hochschule für Musik zu Berlin. Preußens Konservatorium
zwischen romantischem Klassizismus und Neuer Musik, 1869–1932/33
(Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004)
Schoenberner, Gerhard, Der Gelbe Stern. Die Judenverfolgung in Europa 1933 bis
1945 (Hamburg: Rütten und Loening, 1960)
Scholl, Inge, The White Rose: Munich, 1942–43, trans. by Dorothee Sölle
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1983)
Schulte-Sasse, Linda, Entertaining the Third Reich: Illusions of Wholeness in Nazi
Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996)
Schultz, Sonja M., Der Nationalsozialismus im Film. Vom Triumph des Willens bis
Inglourious Basterds (Berlin: Bertz and Fischer, 2012)
Sheffi, Na’ama, The Ring of Myths: the Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis (Brighton:
Sussex Academic Press, 2001)
242
Sheil, Áine, The Politics of Reception: Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von
Nürnberg in Weimar Germany (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of
London, 2004)
Shirer, William L., The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
(London: Pan Books, 1960)
Short, Kenneth R. M., Film and Radio Propaganda in World War Two (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1983)
Siebenborn, Kerstin, Der Volkssturm in Süden Hamburgs 1944/45 (Hamburg: Verein
fur Hamburgische Geschichte, 1988)
Silver, Nathan, The Making of Beauborg: A Building Biography of the Centre
Pompidou, Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994)
Smith, Matthew Wilson, The Total Work of Art: From Bayreuth to Cyberspace
(London: Routledge, 2007)
Smith, Richard G., The Baudrillard Dictionary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 2010)
Sokal, Alan, and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’
Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998)
Sontag, Susan, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1980)
Spiker, Jürgen, Zur politischen Ökonomie des NS-Films, in 2 vols (Berlin: Volker
Spiess, 1975)
Spitz, Vivien, Doctors from Hell: The Horrific Account of Nazi Experiments on
Humans (Boulder: Sentient Publications, 2005)
Spotts, Frederic, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994)
, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson, 2001)
Squier, Susan Merrill, ed., Communities of the Air: Radio Century, Radio Culture
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)
Stangneth, Bettina, Eichmann vor Jerusalem. Das unbehelligte Leben eines
Massenmörders (Zürich: Arche, 2011)
Steinberg, Michael P., Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity and NineteenthCentury Music (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)
Steinweis, Alan, Kristallnacht 1938 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2009)
243
Sterne, Jonathan, ed., The Sound Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2012)
Stilwell, Robyn J., and Phil Powrie, Composing for the Screen in Germany and the
USSR (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008)
Street, Seán, A Concise History of British Radio, with a preface by Piers Plowright
(Devon: Kelly Publications, 2002)
Swain, Carol M., and Russ Nieli, eds, Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in
America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Swett, Pamela E., Corey Ross and Fabrice d’Almeida, eds, Pleasure and Power in
Nazi Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
Sydnor, Charles W., Soldiers of Destruction: The SS Death’s Head Division, 1933–
1945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)
Taddeo, Julie Anne, and Ken Dvorak, eds, The Tube Has Spoken: Reality TV and
History (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2010)
Taruskin, Richard, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkley:
University of California Press, 2009)
, Musorgsky: Eight Essays and an Epilogue (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1993)
, The Oxford History of Western Music, in 5 vols (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005)
Tambling, Jeremy, Opera and the Culture of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996)
Taylor, A. J. P., The Course of German History: A Survey of the Development of
Germany Since 1815 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945)
Taylor, Victoria E., and Charles E. Winquist, eds, The Encyclopedia of
Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2001)
Tegel, Susan, Jew Süss: His Life and Afterlife in Legend, Literature and Film
(London: Continuum, 2011)
, Nazis and the Cinema (London: Continuum, 2011)
Thacker, Toby, Joseph Goebbels: Life and Death (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan,
2009)
Toffoletti, Kim, Baudrillard Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts
(London: I. B. Tauris, 2011)
Trevor-Roper, Hugh The Last Days of Hitler (London: Macmillan, 7th edn, 1995)
244
Trimborn, Jürgen, Leni Riefenstahl: A Life, trans. by Edna McCown (New York:
Faber, 2002)
Troller, Norbert, ed. by Joel Shatzky with Richard Ives and Doris Rauch,
Theresienstadt: Hitler’s Gift to the Jews, trans. by Susan E. Cernyak-Spatz
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)
Vaninskaya, Anna, William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History
and Propaganda, 1880–1914 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010)
Varwig, Bettina, Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2011)
Vazsonyi, Nicholas, Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)
, ed., Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation (New
York: University of Rochester Press, 2003)
Virilio, Paul, trans. by Patrick Camiller, War and Cinema: The Logistics of
Perception (London: Verso, 1989)
Volker, Reimar, ‘“Von oben sehr erwünscht”. Die Filmmusik Herbert Windts im NSPropagandafilm (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2003)
Voss, Egon,‘Wagner und kein Ende’: Betrachtungen und Studien (Zurich: Atlantis
Musikbuch-Verlag 1996)
Waite, G. L., The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: Basic Books, 1977)
Walser Smith, Helmut, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and
Race Across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2008)
John Warrack, Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994)
Wasko, Janet, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2001)
Weaver, Simon, The Rhetoric of Racist Humour: US, UK and Global Race Joking
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011)
Wegner, Gregory Paul, Anti-Semitism and Schooling Under the Third Reich (London:
Routledge, 2002)
Weiner, Marc A., Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Nebraska:
University of Nebraska Press, 1995)
245
Welch, David, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (London: Routledge, 2nd
edn, 2002)
, ed., Nazi Propaganda: The Power and the Limitations (Kent: Croom Helm
Ltd, 1983)
, Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 (London: I. B. Tauris,
revised edn, 2001)
, ed., Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia from
1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2003)
Williamson, George S., The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic
Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004)
Winkler, Heinrich August, Der lange Weg nach Westen. Deutsche Geschichte vom
Ende des Alten Reiches bis zum Untergang der Weimarer Republik, in 2 vols.
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000)
Wittmann, Rebecca, Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2005)
Wolfreys, Julian, Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)
Worton, Michael, and Judith Still, eds, Intertextuality: Theories and Practices
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990)
Yannes, James A., Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich (Bloomington: Trafford
Publishing, 2009)
Yelton, David, Hitler’s Volkssturm: The Nazi Militia and the Fall of Germany, 1944–
1945 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002)
Zimmerman, Peter, ed., Geschichte des dokumentarischen Films in Deutschland, in 3
vols (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2005)
Zwerin, Michael, La Tristesse de Saint Louis: Swing Under the Nazis (London:
Quartet, 1985)
Journal articles
Abbate, Carolyn, ‘Wagner, Cinema, and Redemptive Glee’, The Opera Quarterly, 21
(2005), 597–611
Baragwanath, Nicholas, ‘Musicology and Critical Theory: The Case of Wagner,
Adorno, and Horkheimer’, Music and Letters, 87 (2005), 52–71
246
Barnett, David, ‘Joseph Goebbels: Expressionist Dramatist as Nazi Minister of
Culture’, New Theatre Quarterly, 17 (2001), 161–69
Bathrick, David, ‘Making a National Family With the Radio: The Nazi
Wunschkonzert’, Modernism/Modernity, 4 (1997), 115–27
Bauer, Karin, ‘Adorno’s Wagner: History and the Potential of the Artwork’, Cultural
Critique, 60 (2005), 68–91
Deathridge, John, ‘In Search of Wagner by Theodor Adorno; Rodney Livingstone
[review article]’, 19th-Century Music, 7 (1983), 81–85
, ‘The Nomenclature of Wagner’s Sketches’, Proceedings of the Royal
Musical Association, 101 (1974–75), 75–83
Dreyfus, Laurence, ‘Hermann Levi’s Shame and Parsifal’s Guilt: A Critique of
Essentialism in Biography and Criticism’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 6
(1994), 125–45
Evans, Richard J., ‘New Perspectives on Hitler [review article]’, Journal of
Contemporary History, 37 (2002), 147–52
Föllmer, Moritz, ‘Was Nazi Germany Collectivistic? Redefining the Individual in
Berlin, 1930–1945’, The Journal of Modern History, 82 (2010), 61–100
Fox, Jo, ‘Propaganda and the Flight of Rudolf Hess, 1941–45’, The Journal of
Modern History, 83 (2011), 78–110
Führer, Karl Christian, ‘A Medium of Modernity? Broadcasting in Weimar Germany,
1923–32’, The Journal of Modern History, 69 (1997), 722–53
Frei, Norbert, ‘Wie modern war der Nationalsozialismus?’, Geschichte und
Gesellschaft, 19 (1993), 367–87
Fritzsche, Peter, ‘Nazi Modern’, Modernism/Modernity, 3 (1996), 1–22
Gibson, Robert R., ‘Problematic Propaganda: Parsifal as Forbidden Opera’, The
Journal of The London Wagner Society, 20 (1999), 78–87
Groos, Arthur, ‘Constructing Nuremberg: Typological and Proleptic Communities in
Die Meistersinger’, 19th-Century Music, 16 (1992), 18–34
Gunkel, David J., ‘The Virtual Dialectic: Rethinking The Matrix and its
Significance’, Configurations, 14 (2006), 193–215
Hampicke, Evelyn, and Hanno Loewy, ‘Juden Ohne Maske. Vorläufige
Bemerkungen zur Geschichte eines Kompilationsfilmes’, The Fritz Bauer
Institut 1998/99 Yearbook of the History and Impact of the Holocaust
(Frankfurt a.M.: Campus Verlag, 1999)
247
Henzel, Christoph, ‘Wagner und die Filmmusik’, Acta Musicologica, 76 (2004), 89–
115
Karlsson, Jonas, ‘“In that Hour it Began”? Hitler, Rienzi and the Trustworthiness of
Kubizek’s The Young Hitler I Knew’, The Wagner Journal, 6 (2012), 33–47
Kershaw, Ian, ‘Hitler and the Uniqueness of Nazism’, Journal of Contemporary
History, 39 (2004), 239–54
Korstvedt, Benjamin Marcus, ‘Anton Bruckner in the Third Reich and After: An
Essay on Ideology and Bruckner Reception’, Musical Quarterly, 80 (1996),
132–60
Larkin, David, ‘Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand [review
article]’, Notes, 68 (2012), 802–04
Lovin, Clifford R., ‘Blut und Boden: The Ideological Basis of the Nazi Agricultural
Progamme’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 28 (1967), 279–88
McFarland, Timothy, ‘The Humiliation of Beckmesser: “Der Jude im Dorn” and the
Authority of Jacob Grimm in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’,
Oxford German Studies, 41 (2012), 197–212
Metzger, Heinz-Klaus, and Rainer Riehn, eds., Richard Wagner. Wie antisemitisch
darf ein Künstler sein?, Musik-Konzepte, 5 (1978)
Millington, Barry, ‘Nuremberg Trial: Is There Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger?’,
Cambridge Opera Journal, 3 (1991), 21–41
Morris-Friedman, Andrew, and Ulrich Sändler, ‘“Juden Raus!” (‘Jews Out!’) –
History’s Most Infamous Board Game’, Board Game Studies, 6 (2003), 47–58
Preger, Brad, ‘Interpreting the Visible Traces of Theresienstadt’, Journal of Modern
Jewish Studies, 7 (2008), 175–94
Puri, Michael, ‘The Ecstasy and the Agony: Exploring the Nexus of Music and
Message in the Act III Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’, in 19thCentury Music, 25 (Fall/Spring 2001–02), 212–236
Raffel, Stanley, ‘Baudrillard on Simulations: An Exegesis and a Critique’, Social
Research Online, 9 (2004), <http://www.socresonline.org.uk/9/2/raffel.html>
Riethmüller, Albrecht, ed., Bruckner-Probleme, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 45,
(1996)
Sackett, Robert, ‘Pictures of Atrocity: Public Discussion of Der Gelbe Stern in Early
1960s West Germany’, German History, 24 (2006), 526–61
Spencer, Stewart, ‘Wagner’s Nuremberg’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 4 (1992), 21–
41
248
Sponheuer, Bernd, ‘Musik, Faschismus, Ideologie: Heuristische Überlegungen’, Die
Musikforschung, 46 (1993), 241–53
Trippett, David, ‘Wagner Studies and the “parallactic drift” [review article]’,
Cambridge Opera Journal, 22 (2010), 235–55
Vaget, Hans Rudolf, ‘“Operation Walküre”: The Movie and the History’, Wagner
Journal, 5 (2011), 4–16
Walser Smith, Helmut, ‘When the Sonderweg Debate Left Us’, German Studies
Review, 31 (2008), 225–40
White, Daniel R., and Gert Hellerich, ‘Nietzsche at the Altar: Situating the Devotee’,
Postmodern Culture, 6 (September, 1995)
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v006/6.1white.html>
Whittall, Arnold, ‘Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation
[review article]’, Music and Letters, 85 (2004), 315–17
Žižek, Slavoj, ‘Hallucination as Ideology in Cinema’, Theory and Event, 6 (2002),
<https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v006/6.1zizek.html>
Magazines and newspaper articles
Bishop, Chris, ed., Hitler’s Third Reich: Witness the Terrible Secrets of Germany’s
Evil Empire
Barenboim, Daniel, Wagner and the Jews’, New York Review of Books, 20 June 2013
, and James Legge, ‘Proms 2013: Jewish Conductor Daniel Barenboim
Defends Performance of anti-Semitic Wagner’s Ring Cycle’, Independent, 16
July 2013
Connolly, Kate, ‘German Nazi-themed Opera Cancelled After Deluge of
Complaints’, Guardian, 9 May 2013
Goñi, Uki, ‘Tests on Skull Fragment Cast Doubt on Adolf Hitler Suicide Story’
Observer, 27 September 2009
Hartley, Emma. ‘Historian quits as American TV tries to make Hitler “less boring”’,
Telegraph, 16 March 2003
Millington, Barry, ‘Proms 2013: Das Rheingold (Wagner’s Ring Cycle), Royal Albert
Hall’, Evening Standard, 23 July 2013
Moss, Stephen, ‘Dance With the Devil: An Israeli Orchestra in Bayreuth’, Guardian,
26 July 2011
249
Nikitin, Evgeny, Benjamin Bidden and Joachim Kronsbein, ‘Mein letztes Interview’,
Der Spiegel, 6 August 2012
Pokatsky, Klaus, ‘Der falsche Schwan’, Die Zeit, 20 October 1989
Poole, Steven, ‘Meet the David Bowie of Philosophy’, Guardian, 14 March 2000
Shephard, Ben, ‘Ian Kershaw, The End [review article]’, Observer, 21 August 2011
Sherwood, Harriet, ‘Tel Aviv Wagner concert cancelled after wave of protest’,
Guardian, 5 June 2012
Zeev, Noam Ben. ‘Tel Aviv Hitlon cancels Wagner performance despite signing
contract’, Haaretz, 11 June 2012
‘Bayreuther Festspiele “Holländer”-Sänger reist wegen Nazi-Tattoo ab’, Der Spiegel
Online
<http://www.spiegel.de/kultur/musik/bayreuther-festspiele-evgenynikitin-reist-wegen-nazi-tattoo-ab-a-845689.html>, accessed 7 August 2012.
‘Erklärung von Evgeny Nikitin’, Bayreuther Festspiele website
<http://www.bayreuther-festspiele.de/news/123/details_44.htm>, 21 July
2012, accessed 7 August 2012.
Websites
The trial of Adolf Eichmann:
<http://www.youtube.com/user/EichmannTrialEN?blend=2&ob=videomustangbase>
Fabrizio Calzaretti’s translation of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg:
< http://www.rwagner.net/libretti/meisters/e-t-meisters.html>
Discography
Wagner, Richard, Die Meisteringer von Nürnberg: Live Recording in Mono from
Festspielhaus Bayreuth, 1943, Chor und Orchester der Bayreuther Festspiele,
cond. by Wilhelm Furtwängler (Grammofono, AB 78602/05, 2000)
, Die Meisteringer von Nürnberg: Studio Recording in Stereo, Staatskapelle
Dresden, Chor des Dresdener Staatsoper, Chor des Leipziger Rundfunks,
cond. by Herbert von Karajan (EMI, CDS 7 49683 2, 1970)
, Die Meisteringer von Nürnberg, The Metropolitan Opera and Chorus, cond.
by James Levine (Deutsche Grammophon, 2 DVD-VIDEO NTSC 0440 073
0949 GH 2, 2004)
250
Filmography
Most of the films referenced in this thesis are freely available on DVD or YouTube
Das alte Gesetze, dir. by E. A. Dupont (Comedia-Film, 1923)
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam, dir. by Paul Wegener (Projektions-AG Union,
1920)
Hitler: The Rise of Evil, dir. by Christoph Duguay (Alliance Atlantis, 2003)
Iron Sky, dir. by Timo Vuorensola (Blind Spot Pictures, 2012)
Jud Süß, dir. by Veit Harlan (UFA, 1940)
Jud Süß. Film Ohne Gewissen, dir. by Oskar Roehler (Novotny & Novotny, 2010)
Kolberg, dir. by Veit Harlan (UFA, 1945)
Olympia, dir. by Leni Riefenstahl (UFA, 1938)
The Reichsorchester: The Berlin Philharmonic and the Third Reich, dir. by Enrique
Sánchez Lansch (Arthaus Musik, 2007)
Die Stadt ohne Juden, dir. by Hans Karl Breslauer (Walterskirchen und Bittner, 1924)
Der Triumph des Willens, dir. by Leni Riefenstahl (UFA, 1934)
Valkyrie, dir. by Bryan Singer (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 2008)
251