The Rienzi Effect
Hans Rudolf Vaget Joachim Köhler, in his Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker, goes so far as to suggest that the German dictator was “merely” the executioner of Wagner’s ideas. Köhler argues that Hitler’s entire political program was essentially an attempt to turn the mythologically coded world of Wagnerian opera into a social and political reality. “The achievement of the Wagnerian world of the ‘work of art of the future’.” In everything he did, Hitler acted as the “agent” of the Bayreuth Circle, accomplishing the task originally set by that great prophet of the Third Reich and of the Holocaust: Richard Wagner. Recently, Frederic Spotts, the author of a fine history of the Bayreuth Festival, took up the whole vexed matter and re-examined Hitler’s multifarious meddling with the arts – primarily architecture and music. In a thought-provoking and useful new study, boldly entitled Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Spotts laudably ignores those endless speculations about psychic and sexual abnormalities – the most eagerly pursued red herrings in Hitler studies – and proposes instead that the Führer’s social, racial, and geopolitical agenda was ancillary and subordinate to the realization of what was fundamentally an aesthetic project, namely, to create “the greatest culture state since ancient times, or perhaps of all time.” What was the role of aesthetic experience in general and of Wagnerian opera in particular in the identity formation of Adolf Hitler? For the conscientious historian, however, the task is not to construct “Wagner’s Hitler”, despite that clever titular reversal, but rather to reconstruct Hitler’s Wagner. This is a far more difficult matter. Some of the difficulties were duly noted by Joachim Fest in his 1973 biography. Striking as the affinities between Hitler and Wagner may at first sight appear – the outsider’s resentment against the bourgeoisie; the bohemian affect of an artistic existence; the basically non-political relationship to the world; the uncertainty about their ancestry; the morbid hatred of Jews – none can be simply attributed to the so-called influence of a widely idolized cultural figure. Much of what we find in young Hitler represents a constellation of phenomena perfectly typical of the era in which he grew up. The most characteristic elements of his Weltanschauung – nationalism, Darwinism, anti-Semitism – were in the air in Vienna at the time, which he could not help but breathe. Still, in Fest’s view, the Meister emerges both as the young man’s ideological mentor and as Hitler’s great exemplar. Fest’s own assessment of the matter, though, is not free from contradiction. On the one hand he argues correctly that no direct succession from Wagner to Hitler can be established; on the other, he identifies Wagner as the Führer’s decisive teacher. He disputes the claim that Hitler’s murderous anti-Semitism can and must be traced back to Wagner: the Führer’s racial anti-Semitism was uncompromising, he argues, whereas Wagner’s hostility towards Jews was selective and inconsistent. Saul Friedländer, who noted (at the Schloss Elmau Symposium of 1999 on Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich) that Hitler, in all his speechmaking, never once invoked Wagner’s well-known hostility towards das Judentum. Why not? He could easily have argued that if the great Richard Wagner called for the elimination of Jews from German culture, then how could our current anti-Jewish laws and policies be wrong? We are simply carrying out what Wagner intended. But Hitler never said anything of the sort. Friedländer offers two explanations. First, perhaps Hitler considered Wagner’s position insufficiently radical since both Das Judentum in der Musik and Parsifal leave open the possibility that Jews can find redemption by shedding their Jewish identity, as Ludwig Börne had done, and as the figure of Kundry implies. Second, perhaps the Führer’s very adulation of Wagner simply “did not allow for any disclaimers or any ambiguity”, so as not to call into question the lofty standing of Richard Wagner as one of the patron saints of the Third Reich. Third, if we may add a reason of our own, perhaps Hitler was astute enough to realize that mining Wagner for proto-Nazi ideas, and exploiting Wagner for crude propaganda, might have diminished his standing as the supreme example of the creator of an art that was thoroughly German, heroic, sublime, and highly auratic. A non political cult could be more effective than any propagandist exploitation. This, then, throws into relief the crucial methodological problem and underlines the need for a new way of looking at the entire Hitler-Wagner complex. The crux of the matter, it seems to me, lies in the fixation of historians on the notion of influence. We can no longer use this term as trustingly as Viereck, Fest, Köhler, and a host of others have done. In reception theory, “influence” has given way to notions of reception and appropriation, denoting a more complex and indirect mode of intellectual transfer, and shifting attention from the source to the recipient. Thus, what may look to the untrained eye like a direct line from Wagner to Hitler could in fact be an optical illusion – the result of multiple refractions. For what we call influence accrues from an entire constellation of factors involving language, media, cultural practices of remembering, and the various ways in which these factors interact within a sharply defined historical space. As in all cases of intellectual precursorship, the basic tenet of reception theory fully applies to the case of Hitler and Wagner: a tradition does not perpetuate itself; rather, it is appropriated and adapted to the needs of the recipient and, in the process, bent and deformed. As with “influence”, then, the very notion of mentor seems incongruous with Hitler’s study habits, which were those of an autodidact and dilettante. Furthermore, from what we know about young Hitler, the experience of Lohengrin and of Rienzi preceded his reading of Wagner’s prose tracts. And that adolescent aesthetic experience – more irrational and thus more idiosyncratically formative than the traditional master-disciple relationship – was by no means solitary or unique: Hitler shared it with