Wagner: Race and Revolution
By Paul Lawrence Rose
Faber & Faber, 1996. 246 pp., $24.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
Hitler was a fan of Richard Wagner, always opening the Nuremberg rallies with the overture to Wagner's "Rienzi" opera. Does this mean that we should write off Wagner as an artist or, as in Israel, ban his music? Will listening to "Ride of the Valkyries" turn us into apologists for the Holocaust?
Paul Rose is the latest to tackle the relation of Wagner's anti-semitism to his art, and to his role as a revolutionary.
Wagner was a contemporary of Marx, Engels and Bakunin. In 1848 he stood, with them, on the barricades during the revolutionary uprisings and believed in, amongst other Bolshy things, "the universal republic of freedom, the reign of love and the abolition of private property". His aim, he wrote, was "to destroy the existing order of things" which divides humanity into "hostile nations, into powerful and weak, privileged and outcast, rich and poor". After the collapse of the revolt, he was forced into an 11-year exile, a fugitive with a price on his head.
Unfortunately, he also fled from what he termed the "crude socialism" of Marxist revolution. He found, in a big way, "revolution" through German nationalism and virulent anti-semitism. Semi-mystic nationalism, based on German mythology, infused his politics and operas, with the German Aryan "race" representing "the highest ideals of freedom, justice and humanity". Jews, he spluttered, were the greatest obstacle to realising these ideals because they were the agents and symbol of "greed, egoism and lust for domination of others and nature". The violent anti-semitic pogroms in Russia in 1881 were applauded by Wagner with fervour.
While most Wagner commentators agree on the political trajectory of Wagner from quasi-socialist to precursor of fascism, Rose takes the view that there was in fact no qualitative shift in Wagner's politics. Rose argues that Wagner's "anti-semitism was central to his revolutionary art and philosophy", and, moreover, that all German "revolutionism" contained a racial and anti-semitic core — from Marx to Hitler (it is a mistake, he says, to believe that "revolution" is left-wing and "race" right-wing).
Rose's thematic train begins plausibly enough with the person of Wagner, but leaves the tracks badly the further he develops it.
To begin with Wagner, yes there was always an anti-semitic core to his beliefs, but it took the failure of the German revolution to dislodge from Wagner's ambivalent cocktail of ideologies a rabid anti-semitic "socialism of fools" — anti-capitalist feelings directed against Jewish financiers and all Jews.
The young, radical Wagner always had a dash of the "utopian, spiritual and purely moral" about his socialism which, in the face of the failure of a real revolution, sent him looking for the quick fix, impatient, short-cut and elitist strategy for change, and a scapegoat enemy.
Any old strongman would do: German Kings (Ludwig of Bavaria), Kaisers (Bismarck) and Wagner himself in the artistic sphere all served at times to represent the true German essence and true German greatness.
All of this has a political logic about it that explains much of the volatile political meandering of middle-class intellectuals like Wagner at the time (and later). When Rose, however, seeks to apply the meshing of anti-semitism and "revolutionism" in Wagner to all the revolutionary German left (and Hitler), he draws a long bow that starts to snap under the strain of historical inaccuracy and political axe-grinding.
Karl Marx, Moses Hess, Heinrich Heine and sundry other Young Hegelians and communists all possessed, says Rose, an "anti-semitic tendency". They not only used the Jews' historical economic role as a metaphor for trade-grubbing, profit-worshipping capitalism, but confused this with Jews as the practical, flesh-and-blood agents of capitalism, thus becoming party to racial anti-semitism. The only figure from this milieu to redeem himself in Rose's eyes is Marx's one-time follower, Moses Hess, who, according to Rose, destroyed the foundations of revolutionary anti-semitism in 1862 with the world's first Zionist manifesto!
Now, let us agree that many amongst the anti-capitalist forces in mid-19th century Europe were tainted to varying degrees by anti-semitism, particularly those who rejected the communism of Marx such as Moses Hess and anarchists like Bakunin and Proudhon. Let us also accept that Marx's 1844 essay, On The Jewish Question, which Rose, like countless other Marxologists, employs to "prove" Marx's anti-semitism, uses the common linguistic coin of the time in describing capitalism in "Jewish" metaphors.
But what the Bakunins of the world show, and what a superficial reading of On the Jewish Question obfuscates in the hands of willing anti-Marxists, is that it was the politics of Marx and his political descendants, many of them Jewish, in the revolutionary socialist left which alone offered a way to political and human liberation for Jews from the oppression of anti-semitism as a major plank in a broader class struggle for human liberation.
Marx criticised "Jewishness" on the metaphorical and political level in his critique of capitalism. His rivals had an anti-Jewishness that was based on personal prejudices and which politically supported direct attacks on Jews. Bakunin foams with personal revulsion against Jews, Wagner's later writings slink into taunts about the speech and "foreign" appearance of Jewish people.
All of this is important because Rose's analysis of Wagner sinks or swims in his bigger thematic ocean. If anti-semitism is inherent in "revolutionism", then Wagner was always fatally flawed. His music, art and politics, from beginning to last, are fatally compromised by anti-semitism. This conclusion does not follow because the premise is wrong.
Wagner did change dramatically from worthy quasi-socialist to a vulgar anti-semite. The further he departed from Marx, the worse he got. His "revolutionism" was not the same as Marx's. Their "anti-semitism" was not the same.
Rose, too, is compelled by his theme to degrade Wagner's stature as artist by playing up his music's anti-semitism. Rose over-elaborates the "indirect" and "hidden" anti-semitism of Wagner's operas, while dismissing with brevity their thematic critique of the lust for wealth, power and domination which is hardly compatible with Nazism.
Rose's thematic bow strings whine loudly again, too, when he argues that Wagner's music, minus the libretto, is anti-semitic. Dark yes, powerful yes, angry yes, revolutionary yes, but an anti-semitic arrangement of crotchets and semi-quavers? The snap!, ping! and pop! of long bows being drawn by Rose and breaking under the strain reaches symphonic proportions at times.
There is more to Wagner the artist than anti-semitism and German mytho-nationalism. Despite much scholarship, Rose's particular thematic fetish is unable to do the contradictions of Wagner the artist proper justice.