Richard Wagner's Anti-Semitism Richard Wagner, one of the nineteenth century’s most influential anti-Semites, made Jew hatred culturally respectable. Judaism, he argued, was inherently alien and inferior, an insinuating, degenerative force that could not but corrupt Europe. In “Das Judentum in der Musik” (1850), an article he published anonymously (under the pen name “Freigedank”) in Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik, part of the extensive archives of the Leo Baeck Institute, he identifies the “spirit of Judaism” with decadent modernity and artistic decline.
Joseph Reich, trustee of the Center for Jewish History, discovered that Wagner’s screed against the Jews was a contributing factor in the immigration to the United States from the Pfalz (Palatinate) region of Germany of his ancestor, Marx Klein, a Civil War veteran who fought with General George Custer.
As a young man, Wagner had benefited from the help of Jewish artists and musicians but then turned viciously against them. In 1839 Giacomo Meyerbeer, the Berlin-born composer of spectacular operas and the son of Jacob Herz Beer, a prominent banker, made the acquaintance of Wagner and assisted him in his attempts to have his operas produced in Paris. He warmly recommended Wagner’s opera “Rienzi” for production in Dresden and during his period as royal director of opera in Berlin (1842-47), introduced “The Flying Dutchman” into the repertoire. Heinrich Heine, the German poet, also provided essential assistance in the early years of Wagner’s budding career.
In “Das Judentum in der Musik”, Wagner, denied in principle Jewish cultural creativity-- musical originality remaining totally inaccessible to the Jew. The composers Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn were incapable of profundity, but only of sweet and tinkling melodies, piquant diversions, a charge Wagner repeated in 1862 in “Oper und Drama.” While Felix Mendelssohn, whom he once revered, may at times have seduced the German whimsical imagination, he could never sound “the deep and genuine feelings of the human heart.”
Wagner’s aversion to Jews went deeper than that of most of his contemporaries. He pronounced Jewry’s entry into modern society as the very undoing of German and European culture. Yiddish, “a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle,” provoked his ire and the Volk’s “instinctive antipathy,” representing the quintessential corruption of German language and culture. However, Wagner gives no quarter to the modern assimilated Jew either, who remains “the most heartless of all human beings,” alien and pathetic in the midst of a society he cannot understand, whose history and evolution are foreign to him. The Jew, he continues, is wholly divorced from the Volksgeist, lacks passion, soul, any “inner capacity for life.” True music is beyond the likes of Meyerbeer and Mendelssohn, the former dismissed out of hand and the latter taken severely to task for his limitations, his inability to go beyond Beethoven. Everything Mendelssohn, who presumably lacked the Teutonic folk soul, wrote must, by necessity, lack passion, warmth and ethical depth arising from good German stock.
Wagner similarly dismissed the literature of Jewish born Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Borne as wan, bloodless, sarcastic and self-negating. Although Wagner was one of the first to set Heine’s “Two Grendadiers” to music, he later wrote of the German Jewish poet as consumed by a “remorseless demon of denial” that duped him into thinking he was a poet.
Europe’s redemption from this curse of sterility lies, in Wagner’s estimation, in the Untergang of Jewry, its complete disappearance, which cannot but serve Europe as well as its Jews, as a colossal benefit. In this respect, Wagner shares Karl Marx’s view that Jews incarnated the evil of commercialism and turned art into a commodity. For Marx in “The Jewish Question”, “the social emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of society from Judaism.” Comparably, for Wagner, “To become a human being together with us means for the Jew…first of all ceasing to be a Jew.”
Under his own name, Wagner republished his notoriously venomous article as a separate pamphlet entitled “Enlightenment on Jewry in Music” in 1869, blaming his current problems on alleged Jewish control of the press, theater and cultural life. Identifying modern materialism with Jewish influence, he envisaged its forced removal from cultural life. Two years earlier in 1867, in a series of articles entitled “German Art and Politics” in the semi-official Bavarian Suddeutsche Presse, Wagner expounded his ideas of the pure-blooded German mission opposed to “alien” French and Jewish materialism.
Wagner offered German anti-Semitism a faux aesthetic rationale and a pseudo-metaphysics. The later Wagner, influenced by the racist philosophy of the French diplomat and historian Comte de Gobineau, whom he personally befriended, is already a theorist of blood purity, insisting on the need to cleanse European civilization from the spiritual and physical pollution of the Jews. De Gobineau’s work was not well received at first in France, where the values of the Revolution, such as human equality, were still influential, but in Germany it became all the rage.
By 1881, Wagner’s racist strain had intensified to the point that he could write to Ludwig II of Bavaria, in a further and more pernicious echoing of his opinions of 1850: “I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it. It is certain that it is running us Germans to the ground, and I am perhaps the last German who knows how to hold himself upright in the face of Judaism, which already rules everything.”
Thus, Wagner offered no hope for a viable Jewish life in Germany ever, but only the prospect of its eventual elimination. A Jew could drop his mannerisms, change his dress and bearing, engage in the most accepted of professions, be baptized and adopt Christianity with the fervor of the most devout, but to Wagner he would still be a Jew. So would his children and grandchildren, whatever their religious practice. The Jew must like Alberich in the Ring cycle be inherently alien and inferior, an insinuating, degenerative force intent on corrupting the world.
Small wonder that Joseph Reich’s forbear, Marx Klein, and thousands upon thousands of other German Jews left for America in the nineteenth century. Would that more, many more, had followed in his footsteps and avoided the dire consequences of Wagner’s ingratitude and malediction!
written by Dr. Kenneth Libo Ph.D and Michael Skakun
made possible by a generous grant from the Smart Family Foundation
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