“I am the most German being. I am the German spirit.” [1] — Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner (1813–1883) is today universally celebrated as the consummate exponent of nineteenth century German opera, whose developed Romantic idiom helped to usher in the musical innovations of Modernism in the early twentieth century. Most people, besides, have a general notion that he was a controversial figure on account of his pronounced anti-Semitic views. Few, however, take care to peruse his several prose works to understand the consistent ethical system, based on Schopenhauer and Proudhon, which accompanied the great musical dramas of Wagner.
Since it is impossible to divorce the musician’s mind from his music, especially when it is the exceptionally developed one of a genius such as Wagner, it would benefit us to have a clear idea of Wagner’s racial-Christian doctrines of social and political regeneration alongside our easier appreciation of his overwhelmingly powerful music. Although there have been a few serious studies of Wagner’s political thought in recent years, these are, understandably, of varying quality.[2]
It would, in general, be advisable to avoid classifying Wagner — as well as the more rhapsodic and unsystematic Nietzsche — under any of the modern “isms,” and so I shall endeavor here to elucidate Wagner’s philosophy by merely pointing to pivotal passages in his major prose works that illuminate the religious and political dimensions of his thought.
It may at the outset be stated that Wagner considers in his work only the history and culture of the Indo-European race since he considers it to be the most highly developed spiritually. Wagner tends to relate the strength of this spiritual faculty to the dietary habits of the original stock, that is, to what he believed to have been its original vegetarianism.
In his late essay, “Religion and Art,” written in 1880 under the influence of his reading of Arthur, Comte de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (1853), Wagner traces the history of the Aryans from what he considers to have been their original home in India and posits a gradual migration westwards through Iran, Greece, and Rome. In the course of these migrations, Wagner observes that the race has undergone a weakening of its spiritual force through a gradual conversion from vegetarianism to meat-eating, which latter custom has made the western peoples increasingly more violent in their social and historical conduct.
Christianity is considered by Wagner to be a reversal of this trend in that Christ enjoined the peaceful cohabitation of peoples devoted to the cultivation of inner spirituality. Unfortunately, its intimate connection to Judaism has transformed original Christianity into a creed of belligerent rapacity and conquest which does not reflect the teachings of Christ so much as the exhortations of the old Israelite prophets to annihilate the enemies of Jehovah.
Wagner’s account of the progress of the Aryans is perhaps not entirely accurate since there is no certainty that the Aryans were first settled in India rather than in the regions around the Black Sea, along with the other branches of the Indo-Europeans.[3]
Also, he tends to interpret the peculiarities of Zoroastrian religion and Greek as being due to the sociological conditions in which the Iranians and Greeks found themselves in antiquity. For example, he explains the dualism of the Zoroastrian religion as being due to the fact that the Aryans who had moved into Iran as conquerors after having become meat-eaters on the way from the gentler climate of India, “could still express their consternation at the depths to which they had sunk” and thus developed a religion based on a vivid conscience of “sin,” which forced an opposition between “Good and Evil, Light and Darkness, Ormuzd and Ahriman.”[4] This is of course false, since all the ancient religions, including Zoroastrianism, were based on cosmological insight and were not developed to explain the historical conditions of any particular nation.
Only Judaism may be explained in such sociological terms since it represents a revolt of one particular ancient Near Eastern ethnic group – the Arameans and Hebrews — against the cosmological religion of their neighbors in Mesopotamia. This is indeed made clear in the passages in Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities I, 157, and Philo the Jew’s De mutatione nominum, 72-6, which expose the mundane materialistic and nationalistic ambitions of the Hebrew, Abraham, who instituted the tribal cult of Jehovah.
According to Wagner, the first manifestation of a recognition of the deterioration of racial strength among the western Indo-Europeans was among the Pythagoreans who founded “silent fellowships . . . remote from the turmoil of the world . . . as a sanctification from sin and misery.” The fullest exemplification of the need for world-renunciation, however, was that offered by Christ, who gave his own flesh and blood “as last and highest expiation for all the sin of outpoured blood and slaughtered flesh.”
Again, Wagner seems unaware of the fact that the Christian story itself borrows heavily from Babylonian and Dionysiac prototypes (Marduk, Dionysus) whose death and resurrection were mere mythological representations of the primal drama of the cosmic solar force that was forced into the underworld before it could be revived in our universe as the sun.[5]
Wagner understands the Christian story literally and maintains that the problems of Christianity stem from the appropriation of the administration of the rites of Communion by the priests, so that the people in general failed to understand the injunction to abstinence from all flesh contained in Christ’s offering of his own flesh and blood to his disciples. Besides, the Church as an institution could maintain itself and propagate itself politically only by supporting the violence and rapine of the emperors which contributed to the eventual ruin of the race’s inner strength. In these international adventures the Church was gradually forced to revert to its Judaic roots since
wherever Christian hosts fared forth to robbery and bloodshed, even beneath the banner of the Cross, it was not the All-Sufferer whose name was invoked, but Moses, Joshua, Gideon, and all the other captains of Jehova who fought for the people of Israel, were the names in request to fire the heart of slaughter; whereof the history of England at the time of the Puritan wars supplies a plain example, throwing a light on the Old Testament evolution of the Church.
With the adoption of this quasi-Judaic aggression, the Christian Church began to act as the herald of Judaism itself, which, though characterised by a fanatic desire to rule the world, had hitherto been forced to live an oppressed life among the other nations in which it found itself during the Diaspora:
Despised and hated equally by every race . . . without inherent productivity and only battening on the general downfall, in course of violent revolutions this folk would very probably have been extinguished as completely as the greatest and noblest stems before them; Islam in particular seemed called to carry out the act of extirpation, for it took to itself the Jewish god, as creator of heaven and earth, to raise him by fire and sword as one and only god of all that breathes. But the Jews, so it seems, could fling away all share in this world-rulership of their Jehovah, for they had won a share in a development of the Christian religion well fitted to deliver it itself into their hands in time, with all its increments of culture, sovereignty and civilization.
In Europe, the Jews as money-lenders viewed all European civilization as a mere instrument of their own gradual rise to power: “To the Jew who works the sum out, the outcome of this culture is simply the necessity of waging wars, together with greater one–of having money for them” (“Know Thyself,” supplement to Religion and Art). The undue power that the Jews have achieved as a result of this clever procedure, as well as due to their emancipation in the middle of the nineteenth century, is thus based on what Wagner considers the basis of all wars, namely “property.” Internationally, the protection of property entails the maintenance of “the weaponed host” and “the astounding success of our resident Jews in the gaining and amassing of huge store of money has always filled our Military State authorities with nothing but respect and joyful admiration.”
The socialist and democratic revolutions mounted in Germany were also inadequate solutions of the problems resulting from property since they were totally un-German imitations of Franco-Judaic upheavals. Indeed, “democracy” itself is in Germany “purely a translated thing” which exists merely in “the press” (“What is German?,” 1865). Party politics is altogether a vicious circle that obscures the real conflict between Germans and Jews under a confusion of names that are themselves wholly un-German, such as “Liberal,” “Conservative,” “Social Democrat,” and “Liberal Conservative.” Only when the “fiend who keeps those ravers in the mania of their party-strife no more can find a where or when to lurk among us, will there also be no longer — any Jews.”
What is worse is that the Jewish agitators used German nationalist catch-words such as “Deutschtum” and “German freedom” to deceive the German folk and lull it into a false sense of superiority:
Whilst Goethe and Schiller had shed the German spirit on the world without so much as talking of the ‘German’ spirit, these democratic speculators fill every book- and print-shop, every so-called joint-stock theater, with vulgar, utterly vapid dummies, forever plastered with the puff of ‘deutsch’ and ‘deutsch’ again, to decoy the easygoing crowd.
In developing the German spirit therefore one should take care to avoid the temptation of self-complacency, of believing that every German is “quite of oneself . . . something great and needs to take no sort of pains to first become it.” Indeed the fact that
Goethe and Schiller, Mozart and Beethoven have issued from the German people’s womb far too easily tempts the bulk of middling talents to consider the great minds their own by right of birth, to persuade the mass with demagogic flatulence that they themselves are Goethes and Schillers.
Wagner’s remedy to the problem of international conflicts based on Jewish finance, or rather credit — which has indeed replaced religion as “a spiritual, nay, a moral power” (“Know Thyself”) — is the reawakening of the genuinely German character. The proof of the racial strength of the Germans is the “pride of race” which, in the Middle Ages, supplied princes, kings and emperors throughout Europe and which can still be encountered in the old nobility of Germanic origin. One obvious sign of the truly German is the language itself:[6]
Do we feel our breath fast quitting us beneath the pressure of an alien civilization; do we fall into uncertainty about ourselves: we have only to dig to the roots in the true father-soil of our language to reap at once a reassuring answer on ourselves, nay on the truly human. And this possibility of always drawing from the pristine fount of our own nature that makes us feel ourselves no more a race, no mere variety of man, but one of manhood’s primal branches — tis this that ever has bestowed on us great men and spiritual heroes.
This strength of character is indeed the only defense that the Germans have against the wiles of the Jewish race, which manages to preserve its own racial character easily on account of the unique nature of its “religion,” which is indeed not a religion at all but “merely the belief in certain promises of [the Jewish god] which in nowise extend beyond this temporal life . . . , as in every true religion, but simply to this present life on earth, whereon [the Jewish] race is certainly ensured dominion over all that lives and lives not.” This inhuman ambition of the Jew is embodied in Wagner’s Parsifal by the character of Klingsor, who cuts himself off from all human love by castrating himself in order to acquire power over others. As Wagner put it, trapped in “an instinct shut against all ideality,” the Jew remains always “the plastic demon of man’s downfall.”
The liberation from the constrictions of Judaism can begin only with an effort to understand the nature of the instinctive repugnance that one feels towards the Jew’s “prime essence” in spite of his emancipation (“Jewry in Music,” 1850): “with all our speaking and writing in favour of the Jews’ emancipation, we always felt instinctively repelled by any, actual operative conduct with them.” Unlike the true poet, who gains his inspiration “from nothing but a faithful, loving contemplation of instinctive life, of that life which greets his sight amid the Folk,” the educated Jew stands “alien and apathetic . . . in the midst of a society he does not understand, with whose tastes and aspirations he does not sympathize, whose history and evolution have always been indifferent to him.”
The Jew “stands in correlation with none but those who need his money: and never yet has money thriven to the point of knitting a goodly bond ’twixt man and man.” Thus the Jew only considers art-works as so many objects to be bought and sold: “What the heroes of the arts, with untold strain consuming lief and life, have wrested from the art-fiend of two millennia of misery, today the Jew converts into an art-bazaar.” The tolerance of Jews in German society would thus mean the substitution of genuine German culture with a simulacrum.
In the “‘Appendix’ to ‘Jewry in Music’” published in 1869, Wagner adds, “Whether the downfall of our culture can be arrested by a violent ejection of the destructive foreign element, I am unable to decide, since that would require forces with whose existence I am unacquainted.” And all attempts to assimilate the Jews into German society should take care to fully appreciate the real difficulties of such an assimilation before any measures are passed that recommend it.
To those who may think that Wagner is just a Hitler in sheep’s clothing, it may indeed be surprising that he was in fact a deeply philosophical Christian, whose Christianity was infused with the spirit of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which he first read in 1852.[7] The first requisite for a true Christian, according to Wagner, is to divorce his conception of Christ from the Jehovah of the Jews. Indeed, if Jesus is proclaimed the son of Jehovah, “then every Jewish rabbi can triumphantly confute