Satoshi Akima <[log in to unmask]> writes:

>Hitler as a kind of Siegfried and Eva Braun a kind of Bruennhilde.  It
>does make sense.  It is a theory that will do much to help keep Hitler
>alive as the currently most deeply respected interpreter of Wagner, when
>really this should be evidence of how ridiculous the National Socialist
>interpretation was.

Forgive me, but I get the feeling in the reading this that much too
much Wagner is being read into Hitler.  Part of the German heritage
that informed Hitler in his formative period, notably the ones spent in
Vienna before WW I, was certainly provided by Wagner's operas.  But it
was emotional rapture that Hitler derived from them; ideological guidance
and rationale, such as it was, came much more massively from elsewhere.
For instance from Guido von List, a Vienna writer in Hitler's time there,
really more of pamphleteer and guru, who preached the paramountcy of
the German race for its Aryan purity.  But Hitler came to List from a
predisposition for the mystique of German legend that he brought with him
from the equivalent of high school and which only then then was reinforced
in his Vienna days by such literary faraggo as List's Das Geheimnis der
Runen (The Secret of the Runes).

I may well have missed something but I've never seen a claim that Hitler
read massively in Wagner's literary works which I think fill ten volumes in
all, at least the German version that I'm (lightly) acquainted with.  These
works are various but they do include a good deal of violent diatribe, that
quite decidedly relegates Wagner as a cultured thinker in a league much
inferior to,say, Schopenhauer, whose influence on Wagner Mr.  Akima seems
to rate so highly.  (If Hitler was ever influenced by Schopenhauer, I#ll
warrant6z you it would have been via a secondary source, probably some
incendiary pamphlet composed by a Vienna _Spinner_.)

As far as I'm concerned Herr und Frau Hitler's passing contained not the
stuff of Wagnerian epic.  It was more the banal ending to a global
nightmare.

Denis Fodor