From My ‘Commonplace Book,’ No. 9: Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner, and Adolf Hitler
In February 1933, just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, the novelist Thomas Mann gave a lecture at the University of Munich on “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner” (based on an essay of the same name that was to appear shortly thereafter in a Berlin arts journal).[FN1] Mann, who was by then a major figure – possibly the major figure – in the German arts and literature community (and winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature), adored Wagner’s operas, as the essay makes abundantly clear:
“A passion for Wagner’s enchanted oeuvre has been a part of my life ever since I first became aware of it and set out to invest it with understanding. What it has given me in terms of enjoyment and understanding I can never forget . . . My curiosity about it has never flagged, and I never tire of listening to it, admiring it, following it . . .”
Much of the essay is similarly admiring, if not downright adulatory: Wagner’s work was “elevated . . . far above the intellectual level of all previous forms of music drama”; his operas were “brilliant accomplishments . . . never before had such complex thoughts, such convoluted emotions, been sung or put into singable form”; Wagner was “one of those musicians who can persuade even the unmusical to listen to music . . . the man who redeemed opera through myth, without peer in his mental affinity with this other world of images and ideas, without peer in his ability to evoke myth and infuse it with new life”; his music “is, in a word, heavenly – and one uses the word without embarrassment, gushing though it may be, in the knowledge that music alone can elicit such an epithet . . . Music such as that which accompanies Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, or the lament for the slain hero [in Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelungen] had never before been heard. . . . It is hard to speak of these things when words are all one has to evoke them . . .”
Admiring and adulatory, but not, in Munich in 1933, admiring and adulatory enough.
Mann had dared to include some (gentle) criticism – “misgivings” he called them – regarding Wagner’s works. “What I objected to, right from the beginning – or rather, what left me totally indifferent – was Wagner’s theory,” i.e., his views, expressed in dozens of prose works, on everything from the nature of artistic creation to the relationship between myth and human psychology, the role of religion in the State, “Jewish music,” the essence of socialism, Greek drama, and his own role in perfecting the “Art Work of the Future.” Not to mention a liberal sprinkling of truly repellant anti-Semitism.
There was, as Mann correctly pointed out, a great deal of utter nonsense in all of it; “I cannot understand,” he wrote, “how anyone could take it seriously.”
And he also pointed out – again, correctly, and insightfully – that Wagner’s operas, with all their eroticism and incestuous longings and Oedipal conflicts and death wishes, were “fertile ground for Freudian psychoanalysis, even going so far as to suggest a “most extraordinary intuitive affinity” between Wagner and “that other characteristic son of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud.”
This was dangerous stuff in Munich at the dawn of the thousand-year Reich. Wagner, of course, was already known to be a particular favorite of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, and his music was already becoming an integral part of the soundtrack of the New Germany. Hitler was fond of saying “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner,” and Joseph Goeb
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