A few points that may help Rachel Ehrenberg to listen to Wagner with a
clearer conscience:

Wagner can certainly be said to be the one artist most extensively co-opted
and most deeply tarnished by the Nazis.  And there's no doubt that that's
not a pure co-incidence - Wagner's works are not completely unrelated to
the fruit they have borne.  But - those parts that the Nazis could identify
with - Wagner's racism, the nostalgia for the cozy 'Volk' of Nuremburg, the
nordic mythology - while all of that is there, it is only a tiny part of
the works.  For example, the 'Ring' may be Nordic and heavily Germanic, and
the Nazis exploited that, but it is also about a multitude of political and
human issues.  If you over-emphasize those aspects which Hitler felt drawn
to or the Nazis used for propaganda purposes, you are depriving yourself of
the enjoyment of a much richer and wider and more subtle dramatic and
musical world than the Nazis themselves could ever have grasped.

As for Wagner himself, of course he was problematic and propounded
opinions and theories which are in themselves objectionable and worse,
which, because of Wagner's great authority in German culture, were very
influential on people like Hitler.  But that is a judgment in hindsight.
You have to remember that Wagner was a wildly inconsistent personality and
changed his views constantly.  He seems basically to have been a kind of
anarchist hippie who was susceptible to a great many fashionable ideas,
which included, in his later and more right-wing years, biological racism
('the Aryan race' and eugenics and all that), but also vegetarianism and
Buddhism.  And his disciples and family and the 'Wagner cult' of Bayreuth
are another story again.  As Karl Marx said: 'I am not a marxist.'

Another thought: If other people criticise you for liking Wagner, consider
that Dostoyevsky was a reactionary pan-Slavic nationalist and anti-semite,
and that T S Eliot was also anti-semitic and very conservative. In both
cases you can probably find evidence of that in their works if you scratch
hard enough, but most people would not abuse you for being interested in or
liking them.

I hope these arguments may gather more force when I add that I am myself a
German who has not had an easy time overcoming the anti-Wagner taboos. When
I first listened to the Ring (in private!) I felt as if I were smoking my
first cigar: there was something highly subversive about the affair, I was
'crossing the line'. That sounds flippant; but I did have to deal with a lot
of ideological baggage before I could listen to Wagner with any degree of
comfort. For the reasons above, however, I think you have to try to do your
best to overcome your understandable misgivings: the rewards are great and
otherwise you are doing Wagner an injustice, as well as in a sense,
confirming the Nazis in their view of him.

I have to admit that as regards German culture generally, I have not had
anything approaching the awful crises of conscience you describe in your
posting.  My family moved to New Zealand in the early '80s and we have
found it very easy to retain our German way of life here.  I have to say
I was very lucky in the environment I grew up in: my father, a Professor
of German, while a staunch post-war democrat, has always been open-minded
to strongly non-PC figures like Nietsche and Stefan George.  This is
likely to have made my acceptance of Wagner's works much easier than it
might otherwise have been.  Also, we met here in New Zealand a number of
emigrants from Nazi Germany and Austria who were nevertheless still steeped
in the old German culture and of whom one was a great Wagner admirer.  That
made a great impression on me.  Within modern Germany, because of the Nazi
caesura, much 19th- and early 20th-century German art exists in a kind of
dead, museum state, as a politically suspect anachronism seen through an
ideological lens of guilt and justification.  Here it was still alive, and
I flattered myself that the example of these people, and the fact that I
only spent the first few years of my life within Germany, somehow gave me
the opportunity and the right to look at these works 'first-hand', and
bypass the historical filter.  That's very seductive, but is it morally
self-indulgent and arrogant in the face of history? Sometimes I get the
guilty feeling that it may well be.  However, in the end, In Wagner's case
I don't think it is: as I said, the Nazi spin on Wagner's works is not a
complete re-thinking or re-interpretation of them that somehow entirely
'transforms' their quality; it's a very one-sided and crude angle which
*seems* like a re-interpretation for having been so insistently repeated.
Goebbels' dictum 'repeat a lie a thousand times and it will become a truth'
is itself false.  While Wagner's operas may appear badly tarnished, in fact
only small parts of them have suffered true damage; you should feel free to
enjoy the remainder on its own merits.

Felix Delbruck
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