Think Classical - Search Results For Richard Wagner

2022/11/8 22:26 Think Classical: Search results for Richard Wagner
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5th May 2021 Book Review: Blood and Iron by Katja Hoyer

A Review of Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire
1871–1918 by Katja Hoyer
[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M-
N9AW9SXhA/YC2twkiyhwI/AAAAAAAAC88/H7sSNorVCdgtIxXOZnx8bWA57tPE0Pm8gCPcBGAYYCw/s6
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Amazon Kindle eBook edition [https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Iron-German-Empire-

1871-1918-ebook/dp/B08R9DKRV1] (the edition used for the review)
ASIN : B08R9DKRV1
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thinkclassical.blogspot.com/search?q=Richard+Wagner 1/85
Publisher : The History Press (14 January 2021)

Think[https://www.thehistorypress.co.uk/publication/blood-and-iron/9780750996228/]
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Print length : 224 pages
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Hardcover : 256 pages
ISBN-10 : 0750996226
ISBN-13 : 978-0750996228
There is always a reason one reads a book. There is always a path that leads there and a story
behind how one set out on the journey that led you there. Readers might know I am still working
slowly on a book on Richard Wagner, written more from the perspective of historian than
musicologist, art critic, or opera enthusiast. The reason for reading Katja Hoyer's book was
simple: because it covered the historical period of Richard Wagner's lifetime (1813-1883), which
strongly overlaps with that of Bismarck (1815-1898). Even though Hoyer's book focuses on the
period from 1871-1918, a lot of the background starting around the time of the Napoleonic Wars
is deftly covered.
A basic tenet of a historian's approach is that people are the product of history and therefore to
properly understand 19th-century figures like Wagner or Bismarck, one must place them in
historical perspective. Yet for all of that, the focus of discussion tends to get dragged back to the
National Socialist era in the next century, which begs the question as to whether that is even
relevant to such 19th-century cultural figures. As previous discussions on this have pointed out,
the issue at stake in controversies around the so-call Sonderweg ("special path") concept, is
whether there is a direct causal link between German social history of the 19th-century (or
earlier) and the events of the early 20th-century.
Previous extreme versions of the Sonderweg ("special path") thesis of German exceptionalism
have argued that Martin Luther poisoned the German Mind, brainwashing it into a mindset of
universal obsequiousness towards authoritarianism and genocidal Jew-hatred, thus making the
rise of Hitler a historical inevitability. The arch of the sweep of this extreme Sonderweg was
several centuries long. This Luther-to-Hitler thesis originated in 1940s anti-Hun propaganda, and
post-war historians have altogether shunned it as being too extreme. That has not stopped pop-
historians like William Shirer and Daniel Goldhagen from writing best-sellers that sensationally
revive such theories while professional historians struggle to write rival best-sellers that
discourage the public from reading such populist narratives. Meanwhile, others have written
books that push a rival Wagner-to-Hitler Sonderweg narrative
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.html] , shortening the
arch of the Sonderweg to only the 19th-century. Despite enjoying massive street-cred, this too
enjoys precious little support among professional historians for simply being too grotesquely
reductivistic.

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McGovern's From Luther to Hitler (1941) created a straight line of a Sonderweg leading from the Reformation
to the 20th-century. Attempts to defend the Sonderweg thesis resulted in its arch being reduced from a span of
centuries to ever shorter periods of time until, eventually, there was nothing left.
Interestingly, pre-20th century British historians did not see German history as a neat teleological
straight line of a Sonderweg pointing inexorably to the rise and triumph of a Hitler. A good
example is the 1858 biography of Frederick the Great of Prussia by Thomas Carlyle. It was only
with the advent of the two world wars of the 20th-century that propagandists suddenly claimed
to be able to "see" how the peculiarities of German history "obviously" lead it down the path of
an inevitable march towards Hitler. Everything in German social and cultural history from Luther,
Frederick the Great, Hegel, Wagner, Bismarck or Nietzsche suddenly became incontrovertible
evidence of the spectacular "obviousness" that the German Mind had been brainwashed with
"proto-Nazi" ideology for generations, or even centuries before the rise of Hitler. This has cast a
long shadow over the study of German history.

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A 1933 National Socialist propaganda poster imputes that Hitler was the natural heir of Frederick the Great and
Otto von Bismarck, the giants of German history upon whose shoulders Hitler supposedly stood
It did not help that the National Socialist view of history portrayed the "Great Men" of German
history as giants upon whose shoulders they themselves stood and who helped pave the
providential "special path" (Sonderweg) towards the pinnacle of German history in the rise of
Hitler. Non-historians still uncritically accept such propaganda as gospel, and it forms the basis
of the layperson's view of German history. However, historians are downright sceptical about
such gushingly self-adulatory "Great Man" historiography. Such propagandist claims as to the
existence of a singular sweep of grand determinism spanning the centuries make historians
cringe. And the fact that the National Socialists believed it gives us precious little reason to
march blindly in their footsteps: as with all propaganda, it is just too reductivistic.
Since the late 1980s, the whole Sonderweg thesis has almost completely been discarded by
professional historians. Interestingly, the Sonderweg thesis was sunk mostly by non-German
historians and only a dwindling old-school clique of ageing German historians still clings to
increasingly watered-down vestiges of this dying thesis of German exceptionalism. For a lengthy
critique of this sort of thing I refer the reader to the discussion by Sir Richard J. Evans entitled
"Whatever Became of the Sonderweg?" in Rereading German History
[https://www.amazon.com/Rereading-German-History-Routledge-Revivals/dp/1138845604] where he
takes Hans-Ulrich Wehler (1931-2014) to task for his attempts to resuscitate the dying vestiges
of the Sonderweg concept with a desperate spin of his prayer-wheel:
What does Wehler come up with to replace Bonapartism as a

characterization of the Bismarckian regime? He turns his Weberian
prayer-wheel and comes up with a new paradigmatic super-weapon:
charisma. Bismarck, argues Wehler, was a classic example of the
charismatic leader in the Weberian sense: he was extra-historical and
unforeseeable, he depended on a ‘charismatic community’ of devoted
followers... Of course Bismarck had enormous prestige, but to describe
it as charisma elevates it to the super-historical and implies the
abandonment of a structural explanation for the Sonderweg in favour of
a personalistic one.

Evans, Richard J. Rereading German History: From Unification to

Think Classical Reunification 1800-1996 . Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
search
Katja Hoyer's Blood and Iron is by no means the first post-Sonderweg account of 19th-century
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the excellent example from David Blackbourn in his
History of Germany 1780-1918. There is also The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914
[https://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Power-Europe-1815-1914/dp/0670024570] by Sir Richard J Evans
himself. Although it submerges German history into European history, it emphasises parallels
between German and Italian unification.
To be avoided at all cost is Christopher Clark's bizarrely anachronistic Iron Kingdom. Just in its
Introduction, he resuscitates an ancient model of the Sonderweg based on an outdated
interpretation of Hegel (1770-1881) claiming that he brainwashed the German Mind with a proto-
Nazi authoritarian statist ideology by preaching that the "the state is the march of God through
the world [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2014/03/em-bloody-krauts-lie-of-hegels-march-of.html] ",
where the Prussian state was worshipped as the "Holy Grail". A digital search in Hegel's
complete works [https://www.amazon.de/Werke-Georg-Wilhelm-Friedrich-Hegel-
ebook/dp/B01ACBCNEM] finds no instance of Hegel referring to the Prussian state as the "Holy
Grail": this claim is pure fiction. The result is an extreme view, dating the origins of the
Sonderweg way back to the Kingdom of Prussia around 1820, around the publication of Hegel's
Elements of the Philosophy of Right. It is a Hegel-to-Hitler Sonderweg that looks more like
something from the 1960s than 2009 (a view that looked stale by the 1980s and positively dated
by the 1990s). Clark evinces exasperating unfamiliarity with the voluminous literature demolishing
the Sonderweg concept, not to mention the abandonment of such dated Hegel readings over
the same period (for a more modern view of Hegel see Knowles: Hegel and the Philosophy of
Right [https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Philosophy-GuideBook-to-Hegel-and-the-Philosophy-of-
Right/Knowles/p/book/9780415165785] ).
More convincing is Shelly Baranowski's study of the longue durée of German imperialism about
which Evans wrote in his review of her Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from
Bismarck to Hitler [https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/history/twentieth-century-
european-history/nazi-empire-german-colonialism-and-imperialism-bismarck-hitler?
format=PB&isbn=9780521674089] :
A few decades ago, historians searching for the longer-term roots of

Nazism’s theory and practice looked to the ruptures and discontinuities
in German history: the failed revolution of 1848; the blockage of
democratic politics after unification in 1871; the continued dominance of
aristocratic elites over a socially and politically supine middle class; the
entrenched power of the traditionally authoritarian and belligerent
Prussian military tradition—in short, everything, they argued, that had
come by the outbreak of the First World War to distinguish Germany
from other major European powers and set it on a ‘special path’
[Sonderweg] to modernity that ended not in the creation of a democratic
political system and open society to go with an industrial economy, but
in the rise and triumph of the Third Reich. Such arguments were
discredited by the 1990s, as it became clear that imperial Germany’s
middle classes had been far from supine, its political culture was active
and engaged, and its aristocratic elites had lost most of their power by
the outbreak of the First World War. [...]
But if there was no domestic ‘special path’ [Sonderweg] from unification

Think Classical to the rise of the Third Reich, where should historians look search
instead? Over
the last few years, the answer, it has become increasingly clear, can be
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viewing German history not in a
domestic context or even a European one, but in the context of global
and above all colonial developments in the Victorian era and after. This
view of German history [...] has thrown up many vital new interpretations
and generated a growing quantity of significant research that links
Germany’s relation to the world in the 19th-century with its attempt
under the Nazis to dominate it. Now this research has been brought
together in Nazi Empire (2010), a powerful and persuasive new
synthesis by Shelley Baranowski [...].
Baranowski’s story begins in the mid-1880s, when Bismarck reluctantly

agreed to the establishment of colonial protectorates in order to win the
support of National Liberals and Free Conservatives in the Reichstag.
Bismarck was wary of the financial and political commitment involved in
full colonisation, but he was soon outflanked by imperialist enthusiasts,
merchants and adventurers, and by 1890, when he was forced out of
office, Germany had a fully fledged overseas empire. It was, admittedly,
not much to write home about. The ‘scramble for Africa’ had left the
Reich with little more than leftovers after the British and the French had
taken their share [...]. A younger generation of nationalists, who did not
share Bismarck’s sense of the precariousness of the newly created
Reich, complained it was an empire [...] hardly worthy of a major
European power.
Evans, Richard J: The Third Reich in History and Memory

[https://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-History-Memory/dp/0190228393] .
Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.
It is to Hoyer's credit that this summary of Baranowski could just as equally have been a
summary of Blood and Iron, built around the same modern consensus favouring a non-
Sonderweg approach to German history.
What distinguishes Hoyer is that she belongs to a younger generation of historians for whom a
post-Sonderweg perspective of German history comes perfectly naturally and who just accepts
it as the uncontroversial norm. Nor is there any need felt to spin the Weberian prayer-wheel with
Bismarck, in order to suggest he misused his demonic charisma to lure Germany down its fateful
trajectory to the Dark Side. And nor is there any other need for lengthy and self-conscious
intellectual justifications of the kind found in early pioneers. She feels liberated from the burdens
of old-school German exceptionalism and simply gets on with the task of showing how the
modern approach is far more enlightening of history. And get on with it she does, with
breathtaking aplomb and charm, and a sparklingly captivating narrative that belies the immense
complexities of the issues underlying them.
This once more takes me back to what drew me to this book. It was this excerpt on the Amazon
website of this review by British historian, Andrew Roberts:

Katja Hoyer’s well-researched and well-written book is the best

Think Classical biography of the Second Reich in years. She cogently argues that what
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started in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors need not have ended in the disaster
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Bismarck from the ignominy of
being a forerunner of Hitler. It will undoubtedly become the essential
account of this vitally important part of European history
Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny
I thought that was a very succinct summary of the situation and note too it was written by a
British historian and Churchill biographer. Or to put it another way, historians no longer think that
the rise of National Socialism had predominantly 19th-century origins. Nor did German
unification in 1871 create a providential path that had no other possible outcome other than the
calamities of the twentieth-century. If there is any residue of any continuity (a longue durée) left
between 19th-20th century Germany, then it is only a weak secondary order of continuity in an
international colonialist-imperialist structural context. Any attempt to draw the attention back to
the peculiarities of 19th-century Germany in the hunt for the origins of National Socialism ends
up in Sonderweg territory of a kind that imagines supposedly obvious "proto-Nazisms" in just
about anything.
Hoyer rightly depicts a Bismarck who followed the principle that conservatives must make
revolution on their own terms if they are to avoid having revolution forced upon them in terms
unacceptable to them. Adam Tooze put up a Bismarck quote in his PowerPoint lecture slides on
his website [https://adamtooze.com/2018/03/18/war-germany-bismarck-austro-prussian-war-1866/] that
went: “If there is going to be revolution, it would be better to make it than to suffer it”, attributed
to "Bismarck 1866" but alas without a primary source citation. Following precisely that principle
(similarly, Benjamin Disraeli's expressed preference for "reform from above" over "revolution from
below") of revolution from above, Bismarck brought about the first German national union in
1871, creating a parliamentary monarchy with a vague semblance to the democracy that
revolutionaries in 1848 had once demanded. However, the voting system contained an inherent
bias towards the conservative landowners that continuously marginalised a growing left-wing
labour-based movement.
From the perspective of the international order, Bismarck locked the new united Germany into a
series of treatises that neutralised military threats to its precarious fledgling sovereignty. Bismarck
evinced no overarching ambition for large-scale colonialist-imperialist expansionism, nor was
there any practical reason to pursue such a policy. The idea that German history followed a
centuries-old conspiratorial Master Plan for world-domination and genocide, making the
atrocities of Hitler's regime a pre-ordained inevitability, is just far too simplistic. There is simply no
way that one can prove that events of the 19th-century rendered such an outcome a grand
metaphysical inevitability. Nor can such a diabolical Master Plan for World War and genocide be
discerned in those who immediately succeeded Bismarck as German Chancellor and whose
careers are also covered in this book. When Bismarck's system of checks and balances were
inadvertently permitted to lapse, the unintended consequence was a political destabilisation that
led to an ill-foreseen lurch of the power-wielding sleepwalkers of Europe into the abyss of World
War I.
Only with the rise of European colonialist-imperialism accompanied by the growth of the German
economy, that rapidly went through industrialisation in the late 19th-century, did the newcomer
Germany start to clash with the established colonial super-powers of Britain and France. This
lead to a so-call Thucydides clash between the incumbent British Empire and the upcoming
German Empire around the turn of the century. But only after Bismarck's death in 1898, did a
more aggressive brand of a German imperialism resentful of its playing second or third fiddle to
colonialist rivals emerge, and even then not because Luther, Frederick the Great, Hegel, Wagner
Think Classical
or Bismarck commanded it be so in exerting their diabolical charismatic influence
search on history from
beyond the grave, but due to the structural circumstances engendered by the escalating
tensions from European colonialist-imperialist geopolitical rivalries. These seething imperialist
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in a rapidly changing world would soon snowball into
World War I.
Once again, this brings me back to what led me to this book in the first place. I am doing
research into a book on Wagner, who is an important cultural figure in the historical era of the
Bismarckian Kaiserreich. If Bismarck, who held high political office, is not Hitler's immediate
predecessor—a figure who paved the path to the inexorable rise of the National Socialist regime
—then it is scarcely plausible that an opera composer of the same era, who never once held
political office, could have exerted greater influence over the course of German history going into
the next century than Bismarck did. There will naturally be those who insist that writing operas
gave Wagner magical power over the course of world history, of a kind denied to Bismarck, but
that is most improbable without spinning the Weberian prayer-wheel in imputing that Wagner
used his evil powers of musical composition to exert malign influence over the course of world
history. It is just a touch too speculative in the way it exaggerates the amount of influence a mere
composer could possibly wield over history. However, hammy accounts vilifying Wagner as a
kind of Voldemort-like Dark Lord, using his diabolical charisma to lure Germany down the path of
its Sonderweg remain amusingly popular.
Much to Hoyer's credit, the post-Sonderweg approach naturally leads to an avoidance of

Luther-to-Hitler, Hegel-to-Hitler, Wagner-to-Hitler, or for that matter, Bismarck-to-Hitler varieties
of gross reductivism. Avoidance of the Sonderweg thesis seems to result in an alleviation of any
demonic urge to find evidence of the all-pervasiveness of "proto-Nazism" in Bismarckian
Germany, one where:
Genocide was immanent in the conversation of German society. It was

immanent in its language and emotion. It was immanent in the structure
of cognition.
Daniel Goldhagen: Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1996,
p. 449
Freed of the burdens of the Sonderweg, Wagner's primary bibliographic source texts can
suddenly be read for what they are worth. That is why Hoyer feels no need to airbrush those
passages in Wagner's "What is German?" (1865/78) from history, where he expresses profound
disillusionment at the newly united Germany created by Bismarck, due to the downtrodden
status of a heavily exploited working class on the backdrop of a German industrial revolution:
"the workman hungers, and industry has fallen sick [the economy fell into recession in 1873]",
wrote Wagner. In Bismarck's new Germany, Wagner complained about "feeling odd in this new
'Reich'" and when castigated that he "must not consider" himself "sole lessee of the German
spirit" Wagner wrote "I took the hint, and surrendered the lease". So out of place (sonderbar) did
he feel that (not mentioned in Hoyer's book) Wagner tried to emigrate to America like thousands
of other German workers. For once, Wagner's primary bibliographic source references are
allowed to speak for themselves, something vanishingly rare in Wagner studies. Nor does Hoyer
feel the need to airbrush from history the simple fact that Wagner had fought behind the
barricades in 1849, musket and grenade in hand, to defend the cause of a fledgling German
democracy.
Like many '48ers, Wagner had initially supported Bismarck's unification drive around the time of
the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) as it bore a tantalising resemblance to the demands for a
democratic united Germany they had made back in 1848. Even Marx and Engels acknowledged
Think Classical
Prussia's right to wage a defensive war. After all the incumbent military search
superpower of France
under Emperor Napoleon III had initiated hostilities first by declaring war against the underdog
Prussia. Historian Jürgen Tampke paraphrases Han-Ulrich Wehler:
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Unification brought about by victory over France...led to an unparalleled
level of national celebration and enthusiasm. According to a leading
German historian [Hans-Ulrich Wehler, in his Deutsche
Gesellschaftsgeschichte], the Bildungsbürgertum (educated
bourgeoisie)—academics, lawyers ... and other university-educated
citizens—had been elevated into a ‘highly emotional state of euphoria’.
German liberals who, ten years earlier, had seen Bismarck as their arch-
foe, the reactionary personification of Prussian conservatism, now faced
about: for the first decades of the new German empire, they became his
firmest supporters in the Reichstag.
Tampke, Jürgen. A Perfidious Distortion of History: the Versailles

Peace Treaty and the success of the Nazis. Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
Kindle Edition.
But what Wehler and Tampke conveniently omit is that just as Hilary Clinton came to regret her
support for the Bush II declaration of war on Iraq (also justified as a "defensive war") so too did
liberals like Wagner come to regret their support for Bismarck during the Franco-Prussian War.
Eventually, Wagner's disillusionment with Bismarck became so total that when one of the early
members of the fringe völkisch right, Bernhard Förster, tried to court Wagner's support, he was
to tell Förster—as recorded by his second wife, Cosima, in her diaries:
Dr Förster sent us an invitation for the founding of an antisemitic

newspaper. R[ichard] recalled that he had written to him from Naples:
“You should take a look to see if you fit in Prince Bismarck’s trash
[Kram], and it looks like you fit into the trash, because you’ve adopted
his entire programme. It looks like we Bayreuthers with our ideals are
going to be very isolated”.

Dr. Förster schickte ihn einen Aufruf zur Gründung einer anti-semitischen Zeitung. R
erzählt, daß er von Neapel aus ihm geschrieben zu haben:
»Sehen Sie, ob Sie in Fürst Bismarcks Kram passen und Sie scheinen in den Kram zu
passen«, —und Sie scheinen in den Kram zu passen, denn Sie adoptieren sein ganzes
Programm. »Wir Bayreuther mit unseren Ideen werden sehr einsam bleiben”.«
Cosima Tagebuch: p672 Sonnenabend 22ten Januar 1881. My own translation.
Note that in Stefan Breuer's book, Die Völkischen in Deutschland [https://www.amazon.de/Die-V-

C3-B6lkischen-Deutschland-Kaiserreich-Weimarer-dp-3534230124/] , on the history of the völkisch
movement, much praised by Geoff Eley [https://www.amazon.com/Nazism-Fascism-Violence-
Ideology-1930-1945-ebook/dp/B00G6MP5RY] and hailed by Hans Mommsen as the standard
reference text on the subject, Dynamic
he alsoViews
acknowledges Wagner's
theme. Powered contempt towards them and
by Blogger.
quotes this same passage. Nor must it be said was the Bismarckian era German regime a
Think Classical
völkisch one. Wagner is simply being polemical when he imputes that Bismarck
same rubbish bin as the fringe early völkisch movement.
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So what then of the "infamous antisemitic polemic", which Hoyer still attributes in one passage
to Wagner? One quibble I have with it is that historians of the Shoah prefer to distinguish
between different types of antisemitism. Holocaust historian (and Holocaust survivor), Professor
Saul Friedländer, supports the interpretation [https://www.amazon.de/Richard-Wagner-Dritten-Reich-
Elmau-Symposium/dp/3406421563/] that Wagner's views on ethnicity represent a left-wing
revolutionary strand of thought identical to that found in Karl Marx. The essay On the Jewish
Question (Zur Judenfrage) [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/] was
published by Marx in 1844, at much the same time as Wagner's own 1850 Communist period
essay on the Judenfrage or Jewish Question.
For those unaccustomed to thinking of Wagner as a Communist, in 1850 he also wrote of

revolution as the "passing over of Egoism into Communism" (The Artwork of the Future
[http://users.skynet.be/johndeere/wlpdf/wlpr0062.pdf] ). Wagner always uses the term "Egoism" in
place of "Capitalism". Around the time of the Paris Commune, 1871, Wagner wrote a new
preface to this work [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/09/adorno-and-wagner.html] , in which he
reiterated that: "I do not deny ... that Communism is the antithesis of Egoism". Strange though it
may seem, Wagner was as much a thinker of The German Ideology as Marx was.
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unismus.jpg]
Wagner saw the end of capitalism as the "passing over of Egoism into Communism" (from Das Kunstwerk der
Zukunft [https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=_ecsAAAAYAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PA16] , 1850)
Only the Communist Wagner goes further than the Communist Marx in making it clear that he
Think Classical
did not condone "Medieval Jew-hatred" and making it explicit that
"assimilation" of the Jews, calling upon Jews and Gentiles to
he advocated for the
search
become "united and
undifferentiated".
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Wagner explicitly disassociated himself from "tendencies towards Medieval Jew-hatred": "mittelalterlichen
Judenhaß-Tendenz".
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Wagner called upon Jews and Gentiles to become "united and undifferentiated" (einig und ununterschieden")
through assimilation
dpbis9UGG1E/T1jTFYcBKtI/AAAAAAAAAUM/uuODwwRve14JbLpJHA6C78lM9Kw0oEZ3ACPcBGAYYC
w/s823/Wagner_Jerusalemeisches_Reich.jpg]
Wagner in 1850 welcomed the founding of a Jewish state (eines jerusalemischen Reiches or Jerusalemic
Kingdom) as an alternative to assimilation as a solution to the "Jewish problem". Images taken from original
19th-century print editions of Wagner's writing
While assimilationism is no longer considered compatible with our 21st-century post-Shoah

views on ethnicity, it once represented a liberal and revolutionary view relative to the time, and
one advocated for a long time by Theodor Herzl—a Wagnerian and the father of Zionism. Not
only that, but in 1850, Wagner even stated he had nothing against the idea of the creation of a
Jewish state (ein jerusalemisches Reich) i.e. Wagner supported the idea of Zionism half a century
before Herzl's 1896 publication of Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State), the founding article of
Zionism, subtitled by Herzl "Versuch einer modernen Lösung der Judenfrage" (an attempt at a
modern solution to the Jewish question). It is potentially misleading for authors to write about
Wagner's "infamous antisemitism" without qualification, as it tends to encourage the Wagner-to-
Hitler Sonderweg thesis locating the origins of National Socialism out of a pervasively proto-Nazi
19th-century German culture. It is thus just as misleading to talk of the "infamously antisemitic
polemicist, Wagner" as it is to talk of the "infamously antisemitic polemicist, Marx". A Wagnerian
like Theodor Herzl in 1896 would most likely have found Wagner's essay on the Jewish question
more progressive, modern, and enlightening than the one by Marx who lights no path to
salvation for Jews, condemned as capitalist "hucksters" who worship money as the jealous God
Think Classical
of Israel. search
Further unexpectedly illuminating of Wagner's later political thought, once the Communist
revolutionary
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the decades after the 1848 Revolutions, is Hoyer's

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explanation of the pre-unification customs union (Zollverein) among the splintered German
nations. Although not discussed in the Hoyer book, after becoming disillusioned with Bismarck,
Wagner came to advocate later in his life for Young Hegelian thinker, Constantin Frantz. With
Wagner living in Bavaria and patronised by the Bavarian King Ludwig, Wagner became
sympathetic towards the dissolution of the 1871 German union and Bavarian succession out of
its national union governed from Berlin, the heart of Prussia.
Hoyer's insights into the pre-history of German unification helps us to illuminate the political
theories of Frantz, as articulated by him in his Open Letter to Richard Wagner written in
response to the essay "What is German?" that Hoyer touches on. This can now be read as
advocating a return to a customs union, the Zollverein. Only this was much more radically
accompanied by the formation of a Central European federal government, with a constitution
based on that of the United States of America:
There will be no remedy except through that of a European Federal

system, one that itself can never come into existence again, unless it
arises from Germany, in which it reflects to a certain extent the different
European nations and its various original peoples, in which Germany is,
as though prefigured from the outset, for the Federation. If these natural
arrangements were further developed, the German Constitution will be
related in this regard to the North American, and we will be able to gleam
the typical expression of the New World again in North America, so that
... Germany too receptively accords to the life forms of the New World.
... Through Germany Europe has fallen, through Germany it must rise
again.
Constantin Frantz: Open Letter to Richard Wagner

[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2014/05/richard-wagner-supports-
constantin.html] , Bayreuther Blätter, June 1878 (written on invitation in
response to Wagner's "What is German?", 1878). Full original German
text of Offener Brief an Richard Wagner posted here
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2014/04/contantin-frantz-offener-brief-
richard.html]
Regions like Bavaria would undergo succession out of the 1871 German national union, into the
economic union of a federal Zollverein. Into this, nations like Poland would also be able to
belong. It is effectively a theoretical prototype for the European Union. Even today the EU
threatens classical national unities, with ethno-socially distinct regions like Scotland threatening
succession out of British union, in favour of union with the "Zollverein" of the EU. A similar
situation exists for the Catalan succession movement in Spain. Only with Frantz and Wagner, the
concept was applied to Bavaria, which later did attempt succession out of the German union
with the declaration of a Bavarian Soviet during the German Revolution of 1918-1919. Just like
the attitude of the Irish or the Scots towards London, and Catalans towards Madrid, Bavarians
have often felt uncomfortable being part of a national union dominated by Berlin. Wagner and
Frantz argued that permitting regional independence (while being allowed to join a federal union)
did greater justice to the cultural diversity found in German-speaking lands, as throughout
Europe. Wagner's acceptance Dynamic
of Zionism
Viewsistheme.
just another
Powered extension
by Blogger. of this concept, as is the
Pan-Slavic movement Bakunin had been part of just before joining Wagner in the 1849 Dresden
Think Classical
uprising. search
Hoyer's book also makes it clear how unrealistic a pipe dream these alternative visions were of
"what Germany
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of the era with the fall of the German Bund
due to Austro-German tensions and the geopolitics of the European scene. The pragmatic
politics of the Bismarckian version of Realpolitik ended up creating a quite different solution. That
is something Frantz and Wagner knew in calling their prototype of the EU, "Metapolitics", the
political dreamers' equivalent of metaphysics, contrasting with the brutally pragmatic Realpolitik
of the era. You may laugh and call us dreamers, warns Frantz in his Open Letter to Richard
Wagner, but with the growth of a military industrial complex and escalating geopolitical tensions,
wars like the Thirty-Year War and the Napoleonic War may yet recur—history will judge who was
the sleepwalker and who the nightwatchman.
Hoyer is to be further praised for not only recognising the inherent changes in policy from
different generations of German Chancellor from Bismarck onwards, amid ever-changing
geopolitical structural circumstances, but she implicitly recognises institutional change within the
cultural institution of Bayreuth from between Wagner's time and that of his successors. Hoyer
recognises that once the baton of leadership at Bayreuth had been passed on from the "Meister"
(Wagner) to his second wife, Meisterin Cosima, that a regime change had occurred. Cosima
(1837-1930) outlived Wagner (born 1813: old enough to be his second wife's father) by some
half a century, during which time the changes in Bayreuth mirrored the equally profound changes
in the structure of German society. Just as the institution of Chancellery changed, so too did the
institutional leadership in Bayreuth change with history. The result was historical discontinuity.
The Bayreuth after Wagner's death that courted first Kaiser Wilhelm II, and later Hitler, was no
longer one that rejected the völkisch movement with abject contempt, but one that openly
embraced it. Just as there was no grand sweep of a singular path of fatal continuity in the office
of Chancellery between Chancellor Bismark's time to that of Chancellor Hitler, there was likewise
no grand continuity between Bayreuth in the time of the Bayreuth Meister to that of his
successors, Meisterin Cosima or Winifred. Instead of such fatal straight lines, there are only
"twisted roads" and endless nonlinear discontinuities. History is just never that simple.
Thus, Hoyer makes no attempt to draw straight lines of continuity between Wagner's thinking
and that of the Aryan supremacist ideologue, Houston Chamberlain, a popular author during the
Wilhelmine Kaiserreich. The syphilitic Chamberlain was made Wagner's son-in-law by the pious
Cosima as a means of anointing Chamberlain's racist ideology with the Wagner family seal of
approval. The reality was that Wagner died without knowing who Chamberlain was, having never
met him.
Oliver Hilmes summarises the völkisch Wagner cult of the Wilhelmine era well in his Cosima
biography:
There is no doubt that without Cosima and her accomplices, the

occasionally bizarre cult of Wagner in Wilhelminian Germany might have
petered out in the sands of insignificance, but instead they jointly
succeeded in transforming the spirit of Bayreuth into a national and
nationalist ‘cause’. It was Cosima’s charisma as the legitimate ‘guardian
of the Grail’, her organizational skill and her ideological obstinacy that
enabled Bayreuth to prove so disastrously effective as a [völkisch]
political force in Germany.

HILMES, Oliver. Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth

Think Classical
[https://www.amazon.com/Cosima-Wagner-Bayreuth-Oliver- search
Hilmes/dp/0300170904] . Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
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One is bound to ask if all this was really undertaken ‘in the spirit of
Richard Wagner’. And the answer is that this seems unlikely. In his
disciples’ hands, Wagner’s ideas degenerated to the level of a muddy
and vulgar ideology that hailed a chauvinistic art out of touch with the
real world as if it were a substitute religion.
HILMES, Oliver. Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth. Yale University

Press. Kindle Edition.
A reading of Hoyer's book shows how this völkisch Wagner cult was the historical by-product of
Cosima and Chamberlain's structural milieu in Wilhelmine Germany. But there was no straight
line of continuity between that time and that of Wagner and Bismarck before it. And as Thomas
Weber has shown in his Becoming Hitler [https://www.amazon.com/Becoming-Hitler-Making-
Thomas-Weber/dp/0465032680] , there is not even a straight line of ideological continuity passing
from Chamberlain to Hitler, between whom a yawning gulf still existed. There is no Sonderweg.
...the radical liberalism of [Wagner's] early years was airbrushed out of

existence in his disciples’ picture of their
hero. Or, to put it another way,
Wagner was robbed of his own biography
and brought into line. And all
of this was done with constant appeals to the dead Master, who could
no longer defend himself against such an act of wholesale
misappropriation.
HILMES, Oliver. Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth

[https://www.amazon.com/Cosima-Wagner-Bayreuth-Oliver-
Hilmes/dp/0300170904] . Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.
There is one last minor quibble left to mention and that is the way Karl Marx is portrayed as a
political "extremist". More recent rereading of Marx shows that he expended much effort in the
1870s to undermine attempts by Wagner's old friend from 1848, Michael Bakunin, from pushing
the International in the direction of conspiratorial revolutionary activism. Instead, Marx rejected
insurrectionary secret societies in favour of open political parties.
There is an argument that the late Marx conceded to the Realpolitik (Hoyer teaches us that it
originally meant the post-utopian politics of moderates striving for realistic incremental progress)
of the post-1848 world to become more of an incrementalist Social Democrat than an
insurrectionary Communist. The conspiratorial extremist Marx of legend is mostly a mythical by-
product of 20th-century historical calamities, in a similar vein to the mythical völkisch Wagner.
Thus, key events of the 20th-century were not caused by ideological missteps of '48ers
disillusioned with the failure of the 1848 Revolution—with Stalin acting under orders from '48er
Marx to create gulags, and Hitler acting under orders from '48er Wagner to create concentration
camps. Once again, there is no Sonderweg—nor any other simple straight line—leading
fatalistically from the 19th-century to the unprecedented calamities of the 20th-century. It is time
we stopped trying to pin the blame for the 20th-century onto the 19th-century. Hoyer's book,
Blood and Iron, nonetheless goes a long way towards showing us why.
In conclusion, Katja Hoyer cannot be commended enough for communicating the intricacies of
these "twisted roads" of historyDynamic
with effortless aplomb.
Views theme. It reminds
Powered me of the saying that "if you
by Blogger.
cannot explain something simply, you do not understand it well enough". The counterfoil to this
Think Classical
is that "everything should be made as simple as possible but not simpler" searchand that too is
achieved. This is a book whose seeming crystalline clarity and deceptive simplicity utterly belie
the nuanced complexities it communicates with such unforced eloquence. Even more
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deftly navigates theTimeslide

middle path of indifferent neutrality between
the twin perils of apologia and finger-pointing accusation. Highly recommended.
Posted 5th May 2021 by Sator Arepo

Labels: Bismarck, book review, communism, Cosima Wagner, German history, Houston
Chamberlain, Joachim Köhler, Karl Marx, Katja Hoyer, Martin Luther, Richard J. Evans,
Sonderweg
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The Longue Durée of German Intellectual

18th February 2021
History
It's time to write something. It's a bit of recent commentary on an old post prompted by a new
comment made on Goodreads about my review of Sherratt's Hitler's Philosophers from around
2013.
[https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/982871515]
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/982871515
[https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/982871515]
The word limit is very restrictive on that site and the blog review is reduced down to the briefest
of summaries, with links to the review by Sir Richard J Evans and my original (overly lengthy)
review on this blog:
https://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2014/07/book-review-of-hitlers-philosophers-
by.html [https://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2014/07/book-review-of-hitlers-philosophers-
by.html]
Another problem with that review is that it only tells you what not to read without making it
explicit what you should be reading instead. So, I quickly put together a compilation of
alternative texts. In putting the list together, I noticed that all of them were by respected authors
in their field. All professors of history at major universities, with the only exception being Timothy
W Ryback who is director of the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation in The Hague.
The point is that one should be very wary of things dressed up as an account of German history
written by philosophers, poets, and postmodernist literary critics. Even material written by
journalists, sociologists, and political scientists needs to be approached with critical caution.
I should have mentioned that the rocky relationship between the National
Socialist regime and Dynamic
the German artsPowered
Views theme. faculties (including figures like
by Blogger.
Heidegger) is well covered by the great Cambridge Professor, Sir Richard

Think Classical J Evans in "The Third in Power" (vol 2 of the Third search Reich series).
Professor Geoff Eley wrote a couple of years ago that the Evans "Third
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text to begin reading about
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this era. Evans is always readable, though lengthy and in-depth.
For the most up-to-date study on the background of how Hitler became
the political figure he is known for, please see Professor Thomas
Weber's "Becoming Hitler" (the sequel to his "Hitler's First World War").
Extremely readable and probably the best academically credible
alternative to Sherratt, written by a recognised authority.
For a more academic and neutral study of the long-arch (longue durée)
of German imperialism from the Bismarckian-Wilhemine Germany to the
Dritte Reich also see Professor Shelley Baranowski's "Nazi Empire:
German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler". It is
devoid of the reductivistic sensationalism found in Sherratt. This makes
her study very academic but also a dry read. You have been warned! But
it remains a highly acclaimed and immensely authoritative overview. If
you manage to finish this book in one sweep, you instantly win my fullest
respect.
For another critical account (by a brilliant post-Marxist historian)

dismissive of memes like those of Sherratt that see too much of a
straight-line of simplistic continuity between pre-20th German thought
and the events of the early 20th century, see Professor Geoff Eley's
"Nazism as Fascism". Readable if you know Eley's previous works but
perhaps a bit specialised.
Lastly, the commentary by Ryback in "Hitler's Private Library" is very

good, readable, and gives glimpses into what might be traces of the
direct influences on Hitler. But Thomas Weber now says that his library is
full of books gifted to him by the predictable crowd of petty little
wannabees who were wishing to win Hitler's blessing of approval or to
win influence.
I still have misgivings about including the Baranowski, as it is such a dry academic read,
however authoritative it might be, but I couldn't put a list of books together written only by male
authors! The Baranowski shows the academic limits of how far back you can extend the long
arch of history from imperialism in the Bismarckian era to the imperialism of the Hitlerian era.
Even then she acknowledges the profound discontinuities which are not effaced by an
examination of the so-called longue durée of German imperialist history. While this book doesn't
focus on the background to what intellectual influences helped shape Hitler's world-view (as
Becoming Hitler by Thomas Weber does), the point is that trying to extend the longue durée of
the origins of NS ideology further back to the Napoleonic era of Fichte or the Enlightenment of
Kant, as Sherratt does, is really pushing it too far. Some lay historians (like William Shirer) have
attempted to create simple causal links between something Martin Luther said or did in the
Reformation to events in the Dritte Reich, but the historical distance means it really doesn't work
Think Classical
at all, and such accounts have never been taken seriously by professional search
historians.
Talking about female historians, maybe I should have also included Architects of Annihilation:
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Destruction Timeslide
by Susanne Heim and Götz Aly. But that book is
worthy only of mention in the negative in that it downplays historical ideological antecedents or
even period political philosophy in general as a prime driver of the Shoah. It is still a good
overview of how such a monstrosity came to be "rationalised". Again you can see that no
historian of the Shoah of any note believes that this happened because Kant or Heidegger said
so.
There is also a new book out of the German Second Empire ("Zweite Reich" or Kaiserreich)
entitled Blood and Iron: The Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871–1918
[https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Iron-German-Empire-1871-1918-ebook/dp/B08R9DKRV1/] , by Katja
Hoyer. Andrew Roberts in his review of Katja Hoyer's book has said that:
She cogently argues that what started in Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors need
not have ended in the disaster of the Great War, and rightly rescues
Bismarck from the ignominy of being a forerunner of Hitler.

[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M-
N9AW9SXhA/YC2twkiyhwI/AAAAAAAAC84/0SjwMXF9jfAlvUVAsdVBxixNkPvl8mNSQCLcBGAsYHQ/s600/
BloodAndIron_KatjaHoyer.jpg]
In other words, it is problematic to state that the outcomes of German history in the 20th century
were metaphysically predestined as a result of events in the 19th century (which is often
considered only to have really ended in 1914 or 1918), and that no other outcome was
conceivable right from the outset. Least of all were the events of the 20th century German
history grandly predestined by a sentence or two written by some German writer like Kant,
Fichte, Hegel, Wagner or Nietzsche in the 18th or 19th century, though that has not stopped
some retrospective prosecutors from making sensationalist proclamations to the effect that it
was "obvious" that this was the case.
The above reading list is written for both historians and non-historians, but is meant especially
for those in arts departments outside the history department wanting to write about things
related to the Dritte Reich (Third Empire) era and its relationship to pre-20th century German
philosophical thought. Too many authors assume that knowledge gleamed about the "Nazis"
from pop culture suffices as the basis of their understanding, but it is an understatement to say
how problematic that is. It is incredibly dubious to draw a simple straight line from something
that Kant said in the Enlightenment to events involving hundreds of millions of people, and vast
amounts of industrial and military infrastructure in the early 20th century. What Kant said in the
Enlightenment is only understandable on the background of the historical backdrop of the
Enlightenment. It is a touch anachronistic to assume that the historical background that best
illuminates the writings of Kant is the post-WWI era from 1918-1945. Genuine historians know
better than to try, but that won't stop non-historians blundering their way into the field writing a
polemical rant trying to conjure such straight lines out of thin air.


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Posted 18th February 2021 by Sator Arepo

Labels: German empire, German history, Katja Hoyer, longue durée, Richard Wagner, Shelly
Baranowski, Sir Richard Evans, Yvonne Sherratt
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1st January 2021 Happy New Year 2021

What a strange year 2020 was. I remember encountering the words "the past is a foreign
country" somewhere in the writings of historian Sir Richard J Evans. One day, we woke up to
find that the world we thought we knew was a foreign country. Some said that what was
happening was "unprecedented", but it was not: the Spanish Flu of 1914-15 killed between 50-
100 million people. There had been people warning that one day we would have a recurrence of
something like the Spanish Flu pandemic again, and it was a matter of not "if", but "when".
Those voices that had warned us had simply been ignored and history forgotten. These warning
came true in 2019.
History never progresses linearly but rather progress in sudden seismic shifts. The French
Revolution, WWI, these were sudden and cataclysmic changes after which the world was never
quite the same. Some might have said that about the 11th of September 2001, attack on the
New York twin towers but in retrospect that was not as big as a change. It started a Second Gulf
War and was the culmination of decades of escalating tensions between America and the
Middle East.
COVID-19, however, represents a more seismic shift because it had much wider ranging
structural impacts from a socioeconomic and geopolitical perspective. How the world will look
after COVID-19 is anyone's guess.
It seems that my last post here was in 2019 and throughout 2020 I was too dumbfounded by all
that was happening to want to blog about it all. That should change in 2021. I still owe the world
a book on Wagner and I think about it daily. I can't take this thing with me to the grave without
sharing it with everyone. But it is a book written from the point of view of a historian (and to a
lesser extent a political philosopher) rather than from that of a musicologist. So, that is why I am
again today talking about the history that is taking shape around us as we speak.
In the meanwhile, Happy New Year to all, hoping the 2020 will see more interesting blog posts.
Posted 1st January 2021 by Sator Arepo

Labels: COVID, history, socioeconomics, Spanish Flu

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22nd April 2019 Depressing History
Just a quick update. I have had to give up researching and writing for my book up for a while. I
just found it too depressing reading about the WWII era and the Shoah. Just go to the
descriptions of Treblinka concentration camp in Cesarani's Final Solution or in The Third Reich at
War by Richard J Evans. It gave me nightmares.
But things like this teach us things. The reason why I am writing my book is to ask the question
of whether there is a link between German intellectual and artistic culture prior to the early
twentieth century and the rise of the Dritte Reich. WWII war Allied war propagandists all
concluded that 'em bloody Krauts are all the same—they're all Nazis—always 'ave been
always will be. For non-historians, the only way to commemorate the two World Wars of the
twentieth century is to repeat such sentiments ad infinitum, because history can only be written
from the perspective of Nazi war propaganda or Allied war propaganda. Given how horrifying the
events of the National Socialist era were it is perhaps understandable that there should be
lingering anger towards all Germans past, present, and future. Germans love to take the side of
Allied war propaganda because it is an exculpatory experience to do so as a means of proving
they are no longer "one of the Hun". The emotions at play here are crude and primitive.
It may seem that some will insist on pointing to Wagner or Luther as definitive evidence that 'em
bloody Krauts are all the same—they're all Nazis—always 'ave been always will be: just look
at Wagner/Luther but that assumes a German exceptionalism that had eternally been written in
blood and soil long before the twentieth century. They were all born that way, all born Nazis. That
is the very nonsense that lay at the core of both National Socialist and Allied war propaganda.
Trying to reason with this sort of brutal belligerence is very tiring. I need a break.
Posted 22nd April 2019 by Sator Arepo
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The American Axis and its Influence on

10th December 2018
Hitler
As suggested in my last post, there will a resumption of regular articles that give snippets of
insight into the sort of background research that needs to go into what will eventually be a book
on Wagner's place in German history.
The following article comes from Alex Ross, who is also writing a book about Wagner.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-influenced-hitler?
mbid=social_twitter [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/30/how-american-racism-
Thinkinfluenced-hitler?mbid=social_twitter]
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search
For once something on the subject of National Socialist Germany written by a nonhistorian is
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worth reading. Sidebar
It seems Snapshot
the message Timeslide

might be getting through that if you are going to
write about this immensely complex subject, you actually have to know something about it. That
might seem glib, but there are countless speculative books by nonhistorians who blunder into
this field like so many drunken bulls staggering into a China shop, imagining that knowledge
gleaned from watching old episodes of Hogan's Heroes and 'Allo 'Allo! makes them
extraordinary experts in the field:
nykmuvtaHiU/XABvak2PipI/AAAAAAAAC0U/2RvKPo7DaswJbKexYM3ear442sa9kRUagCLcBGAs/s1600/
%2527Allo%2B%2527Allo%2521.jpg]
Book after book is fed to an insatiable and gullible public on the subject of "the Nazis". While
there are rare gems buried amongst them, the ones written by nonhistorians tend to be even
less than worthless. A couple of examples of shameless pulp fiction in the guise of history are
Hitler's Philosophers [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2014/07/book-review-of-hitlers-philosophers-
by.html] by Sherratt and Wagner's Hitler [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-
joachim-kohler-wagners.html] by Köhler. The amount of pure rubbish that gets churned out all too
often beggars belief.
So it is a relief to read Alex Ross and to see that at last someone has actually read about the
subject before writing about it. This isn't to say that I agree on every point, but then again given
that nor do historians, enlightened discussion over complex nuances is both welcome and
expected, but the importance is that where there are differences in our viewpoints they fall within
academically acceptable shades of grey. Nowhere do the old pop hits that make historians
cringe and facepalm such as a Daniel Goldhagen (see the section on Goldhagen in the Köhler
review [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.html] ) and
William Shirer (see Sir Richard J Evans critique him and how difficult it has been for historians to
get the lay public to stop pandering to Shirer [https://www.thenation.com/article/the-men-who-made-
the-third-reich/] ) get trotted out ad nauseam. Other nonhistorians naively think that dated 1960s
discussion lead by Hanna Arendt about "totalitarianism" can be taken unqualified as gospel half
a century later after being embellished with a bit of Adorno saying something like "no poetry after
Auschwitz". This is not to dismiss Arendt outright, as much of her writings have passed the test
of time, but the sprawling volume on totalitarianism is considered problematic. In the meanwhile,
the literature on this subject has exploded since the 1960s, a literature so vast that no writer can
ignore it with disdain without looking foolish.
One critical point is that there was resistance to the rise of Hitler in Germany, whose coming to
power was not the walk in the park abetted by a nation long preconditioned as "Hitler's Willing
Executioners" that retrospective speculators have written about. Hitler called his book My
Struggle for good reason rather than My Walk in the Park. If there was fierce opposition in
Germany, there were those in the US and UK who were strongly sympathetic to fascism, justified
as a lesser of two evils compared to Bolshevism. In the US, it just happened that a democratic
socialist president was firmly in power who had no sympathy for the far right: Franklin D.
Roosevelt. However, there was a strong right-wing opposition to Roosevelt more sympathetic
towards Hitler than Roosevelt:

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1600/america-first-DrSeuss.jpg]
As far as some Republicans went, any enemy of an incumbent Democrat president could only
be a friend of theirs. The fascist-sympathetic element rallied around the cry of "America First":
tFeKYAPnUjE/XAB1L777MDI/AAAAAAAAC0o/bemTqr1cNUwJ0lFKezt8KXGYrtkLemEvwCLcBGAs/s1600/
AmericaFirst-Dr-Seuss.jpg]
It is no coincidence that Donald Trump's motto is thus "America First".
That is, fascism was not a uniquely German way of thinking engendered of the "German Mind"
as inculcated into the heads of the German Volk by centuries of brain-washing by German poets
and philosophers, thus inducing the German mindset to guide its Volk down an exceptionalist
historical path (Sonderweg) different from other nations—a path long predestined, perhaps even
by centuries, to lead straight to Auschwitz. Fascism was rather a violent reaction to a particular
set of unstable post-WWI political circumstances that colluded to throw it to the forefront of
history. Outside of Germany, strains of thought had existed similar to the far right völkische
Bewegung (die Völkischen) in German-speaking countries, where it too had been long relegated
Think Classical
to the fringes of society until the massive social turmoil unleashed bysearch
Depression catapulted it to centre-stage of politics:
WWI and the Great
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Similar extremist fringe movements (e.g. the Ku Klux Klan) have existed on the desparate
outskirts of American society too. Hitler, perhaps unsurprisingly, gazed admiringly towards
American industrial development, to the anti-Semitic writings of industrialist Henry Ford's The
International Jew, and the Jim Crow laws. Nor is it a coincidence that the Trumpist America First
phenomenon has arisen at a time memories of the WWII era and the rise of fascism have begun
to recede from collective memory [https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2018/11/europe/antisemitism-
poll-2018-intl/] .
[https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9MTHVMuq69M/XAB7GvBAigI/AAAAAAAAC1A/d70kupsFPRIMfarbAOC7qIEe
POOcvqTDQCLcBGAs/s1600/EdelRodriguez-Trump.jpg]
In a sense, Donald Trump is Dynamic

the new Henry
Views Ford,
theme. bothby being
Powered Blogger.quasi-aristocratic American
populist plutocrats. It is the resurgence of a streak that had always been present in American
Think Classical
society.
search
That said, pre-WWI movements such as die Völkischen were not Nazis or fascists—even the
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of a linear teleological continuity between the pre-
WWI far right and what exploded to the forefront of history in the aftermath of WWI. Nor is the
twenty-first-century Alt-Right the same thing as twentieth-century fascism. History does not
repeat, or as Sir Richard J Evans states in this summary of his views retweeted by Evans
himself:
Authoritarian approaches and populism are rising but

this is not fascism again says Prof Evans so don’t use
20th century tools to fight 21st century autocrats.
https://twitter.com/NagyMohacsi/status/1052982719716753409
[https://twitter.com/NagyMohacsi/status/1052982719716753409]
Professor Evans (who is always worth reading) explores this idea in more depths here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/19/fascism-a-warning-madeleine-albright-the-
road-to-unfreedom-timothy-snyder-book-review
[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/19/fascism-a-warning-madeleine-albright-the-road-to-
unfreedom-timothy-snyder-book-review]
Getting back to the article by Alex Ross, while there are endless complexities raised, which we
could debate till the end of time, it is a relief that, for once, a nonhistorian has actually done
some serious study of the subject rather than merely assuming that memes about the National
Socialist era repeated in the media (social and traditional) and popular press (films, dramas,
novels etc) can be taken as gospel.
Posted 10th December 2018 by Sator Arepo

Labels: Alex Ross, American First, anti-Semitism, Donald Trump, Henry Ford, Hitler, National
Socialism, Richard J. Evans
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13th February 2018 Comment on Article by Justin Reynolds in

the New European
My book is continuing to progress. I swore I wouldn't write much on this blog as all research
efforts are going into my book, but I am going to briefly stop and write a short review of this
article in the New European [http://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/culture/how-germany-descended-into-
nazism-1-5226483] .

The article states that the author, Justin Reynolds, is a "designer and writer". He clearly has a
Think Classical
literary background, but with precious little knowledge about the history of the Dritte Reich era
search
or the Holocaust. That results in him actually taking antiquated novelistic treatments of the era
from Thomas Mann seriously while ignoring the vast modern academic literature on this period.
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so quickly, Timeslide
that even historians specialising in this field
complain that it is difficult to keep up. The flood of new works is just overwhelming. But that is
no excuse to ignore it while regressing to a perspective of the field dating from the 1940s.
I am just going to focus on a single problem phrase in the Reynolds article:
The Nazis used Wagner’s word for annihilation – Vernichtung –

to refer to the removal of the Jews.
This is an extraordinarily daring claim indeed, one, which if true, would totally and utterly overturn
the entire field of Holocaust studies as it stands today. It is so astonishing an assertion that it
demands a bibliographic citation—which, it unsurprisingly lacks. The complete Urtext of
Wagner's essay on the "Jewish Question" can be found here
[https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Das_Judenthum_in_der_Musik_(1869)] . I suggest using your word finder
to look for the word Vernichtung in German. You will not find it in there. You will instead find the
term Selbstvernichtung meaning self-annihilation. It means something entirely different.
However, the word Vernichtung can be found in the essay on the "Jewish Question" by Karl
Marx, the full text of which can be found here [http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me01/me01_347.htm] .
Use the word finder to locate the word in the essay and run it through Google translator. In both
cases, whether Marx or Wagner's, the word Vernichtung is not used to denote anything like a
call for genocide. However, an electronic word-based search through a German edition of the
complete Shakespeare [https://www.amazon.com/William-Shakespeare-Gesammelte-
S%C3%A4mtliche-Literaturbibliothek-ebook/dp/B018GXAU2A] (much celebrated in the Dritte Reich
as the creator of Shylock) also turned up 27 hits to the word Vernichtung. A digital search
through the Schlater 2000 German translation of the Bible [https://books.google.com/books?
id=erRFDwAAQBAJ] turned up 8 hits to the world Vernichtung. There are three occurrences of the
word Vernichtung in the Complete Works of Martin Luther [https://www.amazon.com/Gesammelte-
Werke-Lutherbibel-Predigten-Vollst%C3%A4ndige-ebook/dp/B00SKV8Y2W] as well as over 60 hits to
the word Ausrottung (also used in place of Vernichtung by Hitler in other speeches) e.g. this
speech on the 8th of November, 1942:
If Judaism imagines that it can bring about an international world

war to eradicate the European races, then the result will not be
the extermination [Ausrottung] of the European races, but the
extermination [Ausrottung] of Judaism in Europe. They always
laughed at me as prophets. Of those who laughed at the time,
countless people no longer laugh today. Those who are still
laughing will perhaps soon no longer laugh. This wave will
spread beyond Europe across the world. International Jewery
will be recognized in all its demonic danger.
Wenn das Judentum sich etwa einbildet, einen internationalen Weltkrieg zur
Ausrottung der europäischen Rassen herbeiführen zu können, dann wird das
Ergebnis nicht die Ausrottung der europäischen Rassen, sondern die Ausrottung
des Judentums in Europa sein. Sie haben mich immer als Propheten ausgelacht.
Think Classical Von denen, die damals lachten, lachen heute unzählige nicht mehr.search
Die jetzt noch
lachen, werden in einiger Zeit vielleicht auch nicht mehr lachen. Diese Welle wird
sich über Europa hinaus über die ganze Welt verbreiten. Das internationale
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ganzen dämonischen Gefahr erkannt werden.
Hitler, Adolf. ADOLF HITLER REDEN: 1925 - 1945 (German Edition) (Kindle
Locations 19395-19400). Kindle Edition.
Furthermore, there is no evidence that Hitler's speech given in the Reichstag on either the 30th
of January of 1939 or 8th of November 1942 contained a reference to the Bible, Shakespeare,
Marx, Luther, or Wagner. Nor does merely saying so make this true. It needs proof if such a
speculative connection is not to be laughed out of court. Here is the original 30th of
January 1939 version of the quote:
If international finance Jewry in and outside Europe should

succeed in once again plunging the nations into a world war,
then the result will not be the victory of Jewry, but rather the
annihilation [Vernichtung] of the Jewish race in Europe!
Wenn es dem internationalen Finanzjudentum in und außerhalb Europas gelingen

sollte, die Völker noch einmal in einen Weltkrieg zu stürzen, dann wird das Ergebnis
nicht der Sieg des Judentums sein, sondern die Vernichtung der jüdischen Rasse
in Europa!
Hitler: Reichstag speech, 30th of January, 1939
What Reynolds seems blissfully unaware of is that this passage has been picked over and
analysed to death by innumerable historians since 1945. I would point readers in particular to a
book by Sir Ian Kershaw Hitler's Prophecy and the Final Solution
[https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Prophecy-Final-Solution-Kershaw-ebook/dp/B007AN8J7G] that deals
almost exclusively with this quote, its meaning and its ramifications to the origins of the Final
Solution. Different interpretations of this quote proposed over the years by different historians are
all analysed in detail. And—no!—nobody has ever suggested it contains a quote from a
nineteenth-century opera composer. I would also point to two other key recent monographs on
the Final Solution that help to illuminate the quote. The first is Holocaust
[https://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Nazi-Persecution-Murder-Jews-ebook/dp/B005OQGZMM] by
Peter Longerich. The second is Final Solution [https://www.amazon.com/Final-Solution-Fate-Jews-
1933-49-ebook/dp/B00O8MGVW2] by David Cesarani.
Another source that is easy for the reader to pick through is Raul Hilberg's monumental three-
volume study, The Destruction of the European Jews:
The Destruction of the European Jews: Volume I

[https://books.google.com/books?id=HinIpmliz2MC&redir_esc=y]
The Destruction of the European Jews: Volume II

[https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Destruction_of_the_Europ
ean_Jews.html?id=vUyKlrY98dwC]
The Destruction of the European Jews: Volume III
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[https://books.google.com/books?id=HinIpmliz2MC&redir_esc=y]
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Using the links provided, you can conduct your own word-based search through each volume.
Look up the word annihilation (or synonyms) and you will simply find nothing in there about
Wagner. In fact, Wagner's name is not mentioned a single time in any of the three volumes.
Neither does the above-cited work by Kershaw mention Wagner's name—and nor does the
Cesarani or the Longerich. While Hilberg's study, the longest single-author monograph on the
Holocaust to have been published to date, is now over a decade old in its final edition, and
although, like any other work on the subject, it is not considered definitive, the very fact that the
doyen of Holocaust Studies himself treats the claims to there being an operatic link with
dismissive disdain should at least make the reader think twice about making such surprising
proclamations. It seems a fairly drastic leap to go from a stance where Wagner's name isn't even
worth even a single mention in the course of a 1388 page study of the Holocaust to which
Hilberg devoted his entire lifetime, to one where Wagner becomes the singular cause of an event
that happened over a half-century after his death.
It is not just about cherry-picking a couple of supposedly "trivial" studies by what are actually key
studies from major authorities such as Hilberg, Kershaw, Cesarani, and Longerich. I could give
the reader a list of more than fifty major historiographic studies of the Holocaust and Dritte Reich
era which further fail to corroborate the claim that the Final Solution had anything to do with a
nineteenth-century opera composer who died a half-century before the rise to power of the
National Socialist regime in 1933. Has Justin Reynolds read even a single one of these studies?
One suspects not. It is always easy to make sweeping claims writing in a vacuum about a
subject one has never properly researched. The less the knowledge, the greater the certitude.
Nor can nuance be dismissed as a form of obscurantism, because events involving many
millions of people are invariably complex and endlessly nuanced. Such events are not caused by
a single word written by an opera composer in the 1840s, and who was long dead when the
crime was committed in the 1930-40s. That is why to make the astonishingly audacious claim
that Hitler's 1939 speech contained a reference to a dead opera composer to whom he was
blindly beholden is to declare war on the entire modern academic literature on the Shoah.

ThinkSome
Classical
allege that a bellicose trumpeting of an operatic link to the Shoahsearch
is important because
millions were murdered. However, the fact that it was such a shockingly large-scale crime means
that showing respect to the victims makes it even more important to approach it in an evidence-
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is academically Timeslidecredible rather than perpetuating

and forensically
emotionally-charged hearsay and rumour in the manner of tabloid journalism. If it is true that the
reputation of a single opera composer in the face of history means absolutely nothing compared
to such events, respect for the six million murdered in the Shoah, however, does remain of
tantamount importance. For spreading emotively charged misinformation on the Shoah is the
last thing that one could call respect for its victims.
I appreciate that the trolls will soon be out in force insisting that denying that a nineteenth-
century opera composer ordered Hitler to commit genocide is "Holocaust denialism". That would
make the most respected Holocaust scholars including the Jewish scholars, Professors Raul
Hilberg and Saul Friedländer, "Holocaust deniers" who oddly write large multi-volume
monographs on the systematic murder of six million Jews. Once again, readers are asked to
read credible studies of the Shoah by respected scholars rather than sensationalised nonsense
blaming Martin Luther or Richard Wagner [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-curious-
case-of-william-shirer-was.html] . Readers are strongly encouraged to go to the Yad Vashem
Holocaust Institute website [http://www.yadvashem.org/] , which offers excellent online educational
courses on the history and origins of the Final Solution.
iC4JgfM1mWs/WEe2Knrrp8I/AAAAAAAACio/RiJa1z_vIToWnbyw0XyUQ0uTiCMws_xbgCPcBGAYYCw/s1
600/YadVashem.jpg]
The Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial
And, no, for the sake of those trolls who still insist on accusing me of Holocaust denialism, Yad
Vashem is not an institute promoting Holocaust denialism, but on the contrary, it is the most
sacred of all of the Holocaust memorial sites. Please show some respect and decency.
Post-script: For a more in-depth discussion please read my very long article analysing Joachim Köhler's book
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.html] .

Labels: Ausrottung, Hitler, Holocaust, Justin Reynolds, Karl Marx, Martin Luther, National
Socialism, Nazi, Nazism, Richard Wagner, Shoah, Vernichtung
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11th January 2018 Happy New Year
Happy New Year to all!
I hope all of my readers have had a nice little break. Naturally, I have been working away furiously
at my promised Wagner book. If not always writing, then at least doing lots of background
reading for it. The first draft of the bookViews
Dynamic is 2/3 complete
theme. and
Powered by already
Blogger. as it stands it would make
an interesting read. Yet there is still more that needs adding and revising to add yet another
Think Classical
dimension of depth to it. The range of subject covered by the book is dizzying,
searchand it is always
daunting trying to knit everything together. Wagner, was after all a polymath. That is the trouble
with polymaths in our age of ever greater specialisation. One has to be a little foolish to think one
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all the necessary Sidebar
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in trying Timeslide
to do justice to the subject.
I can't give away too much, but I will say I am very grateful to Gareth Stedman Jones. This has
also lead me to Wolfgang Eckhardt, and back to reading more of Sir Richard J. Evans. Throw in
some Frederick Beiser too.
With time all will be revealed.
Posted 11th January 2018 by Sator Arepo
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18th December 2017 Progress Report on my Wagner Book

I have half written the draft version of my Richard Wagner book. All of the chapters have had
their content planned out. I just have to fill in the gaps I have left. I know pretty much what I want
to say for each of them.
Originally my thought was to collate a lot of blog posts and synthesise them, but I am surprised
how little I am doing that. Even covering old ground again has forced me to rewrite translations
accompanied by improved commentary. A book gives me more scope to write without having to
cram it into bite sized portions.
So readers will find that the content of the book has a lot of new information in it. Some of it
comes as a huge surprise even to me. I find myself a little shocked at just how surprising it is.
Just when you thought you knew it all...
This book is pouring out me and it feels like it is writing itself. After researching this subject for 20
years, it is all coming together. Even then it will take months to write out all the chapters. There is
a huge amount of research to be done for it. I have piles and piles of books that I need to work
my way through. None of it stuff found in the blog.
Back to work for me writing.
Posted 18th December 2017 by Sator Arepo

Labels: update, Wagner book
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Did Hitler Ever Say that He Had No

12th August 2017
Forerunner Other than Richard Wagner?
In the vastly speculative Nazi opera conspiracy literature, almost entirely written by amateur
Think Classical
pseudo-historians evincing little evidence of credible qualification to write on this period of
search
history, you will often find the quote repeated that Hitler stated that he had no forerunner other
than Richard Wagner.
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Today we will examine the credibility of this alleged Hitler quote so that we can ask ourselves
whether Hitler really did state that “he had no forerunner other than Wagner”.
The source of this quote is Hermann Rauschning and his book Hitler Speaks (Gespräche mit
Hitler), 1940. The original statement goes:
Hitler recognised no forerunner. With one

exception: Richard Wagner.
Hitler erkannte keine Vorläufer an. Mit einer Ausnahme: Richard
Wagner.
Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler

[https://www.amazon.com/Gespr%C3%A4che-Hitler-German-Hermann-Rauschning-
ebook/dp/B01M3VBYRF] (German Edition) (Kindle Location 3214). Europa Verlag
GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition. All quotes from the book will come from this
source, with all English translations being henceforth my own.
It comes from the section of this book entitled Hitler, Wagner, Gobineau
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/01/wagner-and-gobineau.html] . Rauschning’s book was
published as Gespräche mit Hitler [https://www.amazon.com/Gespr%C3%A4che-Hitler-German-
Hermann-Rauschning-ebook/dp/B01M3VBYRF] , Zürich 1940. It originally appeared in the US as
The Voice of Destruction, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940; and in the UK as Hitler Speaks: A Series
of Political Conversations with Adolf Hitler on his Real Aims, Thornton Butterworth, 1940. It
became an instant worldwide best-seller.
For a while, Hermann Rauschning was a National Socialist Party member before falling out with
the regime, and fleeing abroad. Rauschning rose to the position of vice-Gauleiter and President
of the Senate of the Free City of Danzig from 1933-34, making him a minor National Socialist
Party official. Rendered desperately impecunious by his exile, Rauschning was seduced into
writing Hitler Speaks by a French publisher with an unprecedented 125,000 francs advance, but
only under the stipulation that the publisher could dictate the form that the personal caricature of
Hitler would take. The project was conceived by Hungarian-born journalist Emery Reves, who
ran a prominent anti-German propaganda agency in Paris during the 1930s. Evidence has also
emerged that the British journalist, Henry Wickham-Steele, assisted in writing the memoir.
Wickham-Steele was a close associate of Lord Robert Vansittart, a notorious anti-German
propagandist in Britain:

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Vansittart was a prominent anti-German propagandist.
Sir Richard J. Evans states that today this sort of thing “cannot really be considered serious in scholarly terms”
(Rereading German History: From Unification to Reunification 1800-1996
[https://www.amazon.com/d/Rereading-German-History-Routledge-Revivals-ebook/B00YY64QYC] , p. 126).
In the introduction to the German edition of Hitler Speaks, Marcus Pyka tells us Rauschning’s
collaborative effort with his Allied propagandist team nicely hit the mark:
The Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, spewed that

Rauschning is the “basest propagandist of the other side”. And
the ousted Danzig vice-gauleiter even appeared to him to be the
“most sophisticated and dangerous of propaganda adversaries”,
who had “very cleverly” blended together “fact and poesie” in his
book.
Goebbels geiferte, Rauschning sei der »gemeinste Propagandist auf der
Gegenseite«, ja der geschaßte Danziger Vize-Gauleiter erschien ihm nun sogar als
»raffiniertester und gefährlichster Propagandagegner«, der in seinem Buch »sehr
geschickt Wahrheit und Dichtung« miteinander verbunden habe.
Introduction by Marcus Pyka to Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler

GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition.
Pyka gives a reference in the endnotes to the Goebbels diary entries from 13.2., 18.2. and
Think Classical
14.3.1940, in Elke Fröhlich (Ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels, Teil search
I: Aufzeichnungen
1923-1941, Volume 7: July 1939—March 1940 (Ed. Elke Fröhlich), Munich 1998, p. 307, 314
und 348. Pyka adds that: “The value of Goebbels diaries, especially in this edition, is in its own
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mention can be made here to the particular critical
textural problems and the different interpretations of its ‘authenticity’ in contemporary historical
research.”
The problem today is that even if, as Goebbels acknowledged, that there was fact intermixed
with fiction, it has become rather challenging now to retrospectively distinguish what was fact
from what was poesie. That means that, if any of Rauschning’s book is to used be as a factual
historical record, it would have to be meticulously fact-checked against other more reliable
corroborative sources, and never used as primary supportive evidence on its own.
After the war, Soviet prosecutors used Rauschning’s book as evidence in the Nuremberg war
crimes trial, which prompted an objection from Hermann Göring, who asked
[http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13514710.html] : “Do you really believe that the Führer revealed
his most intimate thoughts to just any provincial politician that he ran into?” (“Glaubt man denn,
daß der Führer jedem hergelaufenen Provinzpolitiker seine geheimsten Ansichten offenbart
hätte?”). During the Nuremberg Trials, Hermann Göring recalled
[http://www.zeit.de/1985/30/kuemmerliche-notizen/komplettansicht] that he had only ever fleetingly
seen Rauschning twice (“nur zweimal ganz flüchtig gesehen”).
A whole generation of historians merrily quoted from Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks until 1983
when it was exposed by Swiss historian Wolfgang Hänel as fraudulent:
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13514710.html
[http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13514710.html]
http://www.zeit.de/1985/30/kuemmerliche-
notizen/komplettansicht [http://www.zeit.de/1985/30/kuemmerliche-
notizen/komplettansicht]
Hänel’s research might have been overlooked had it not been for an in-depth piece published in
the magazine Die Zeit [http://www.zeit.de/1985/30/kuemmerliche-notizen/komplettansicht] bringing it
to the attention of a wider readership.
Rauschning falsely claimed to have met with Hitler “more than a hundred times”. In reality,
Rauschning never met with Hitler alone, only on official duties along with a party of other state
officials. You can instantly tell that the all-too-conveniently-cute claim that Hitler revealed his
deepest most intimate thoughts in confessing to Rauschning that he had “no other forerunner
other than Richard Wagner” is nicely fabricated in a manner calculated to make Hitler look
maximally ridiculous.

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“No forerunner other than Richard Wagner”: a satirical parody nicely calculated to make Hitler look maximally
ridiculous.
Wagner has always been a favourite target of comedians and satirists
While a minority of historians like Hugh Trevor-Roper thought that Rauschning had been
dismissed outright too hastily, the overwhelming majority of serious modern historians agree that
there is sufficiently grave doubt as to Rauschning’s credibility that it is safest to just disregard him
altogether. Hugh Trevor-Roper incidentally also cheerfully “authenticated” the egregiously fake
Hitler Diaries [https://www.amazon.com/Selling-Hitler-Story-Diaries-ebook/dp/B0042JSSWC] . Thus
in the preface to volume one of his Hitler biography, Hitler 1889-1936: Nemesis
[https://www.amazon.com/Hitler-1936-1945-Nemesis-Allen-History-ebook/dp/B002RUA4MK]
(published in 1998), Sir Ian Kershaw writes:
I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning’s Hitler

Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it
is best to disregard it altogether.
Sir Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1889-1936: Nemesis [https://www.amazon.com/Hitler-1936-
1945-Nemesis-Allen-History-ebook/dp/B002RUA4MK] (1998)
ThinkSir
Classical
Richard J. Evans likewise states in his scathing review of Köhler’s 1997search
book, Wagner’ Hitler:
the Prophet and his Disciple [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-
kohler-wagners.html] :
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Nor is Köhler’s credibility helped by his reliance on dubious and
discredited sources such as Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks, a
record of interviews most of which never took place outside
Rauschning’s mind.
Sir Richard J. Evans: Journal of Contemporary History
[http://jch.sagepub.com/content/37/1/147.citation] , Vol. 37, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), p.
149.
Volker Ullrich in the first volume of his Hitler biography also states that:
[Alan] Bullock and [Joachim] Fest saw this book [Hitler Speaks]
as a major source [both prior to 1983], while Kershaw doubted
its authenticity. See Kershaw, Hitler: Hubris, p. xiv [1998]. The
present volume [of Ullrich’s own Hitler biography] also does not
use this source.
Volker Ullrich: Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889–1939 [https://www.amazon.com/Hitler-

Ascent-1889-1939-Volker-Ullrich-ebook/dp/B01C524SZS] (Kindle Location 15557).
Random House. Kindle Edition.
Interestingly, Alan Bullock’s pioneering 1952

biography of Hitler
[https://books.google.com/books/about/Hitler.html?id=3QdoAAAAMAAJ] already ignores the
Rausching quotation about Hitler having “no forerunner other than Richard Wagner’, suggesting
that Bullock sensed that it was too comically exaggerated to be taken seriously. Likewise, John
Toland in his 1976 Hitler biography also seems to have intuited that the statement was more
satire than fact and likewise ignores this Rauschning quote. However, in Joachim Fest’s 1973
Hitler biography [https://www.amazon.com/Hitler-Harvest-Book-Joachim-Fest-ebook/dp/B00BVTMT9E]
, there are 50 hits to the name of Rauschning. Here is a typical example of how Fest quoted
Rausching in 1973:
Hitler himself, in fact, later declared that with the exception of

Richard Wagner he had “no forerunners”, and by Wagner he
meant not only the composer, but Wagner the personality, “the
greatest prophetic figure the German people has had”. One of
his favorite ideas, to which he returned frequently, concerned
Wagner’s towering importance “for the development of German
man”. He admired the courage and energy with which Wagner
exerted political influence “without really wishing to be political”,
and on one occasion admitted that a “literally hysterical
excitement” overcame him when he recognized his own

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psychological kinship with this great man. search
[Citation to
Rauschning’s Gespräche pp.215f].
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After Wolfgang Hänel revealed Rauschning to be fake in 1983, Fest too promptly gives up on
quoting from Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks e.g. his Der Untergang
[https://www.amazon.com/Untergang-Hitler-Dritten-Reiches-German-ebook/dp/B072MSY5FN] (2002),
his collection of essays Nach dem Scheitern der Utopie [https://www.amazon.com/Nach-dem-
Scheitern-Utopien-Gesammelte-ebook/dp/B072MRQXGD] , Bürgerlichkeit als Lebensreform
[https://www.amazon.com/B%C3%BCrgerlichkeit-als-Lebensform-Essays-German-
ebook/dp/B071WYDGYC] , and Flüchtige Größe [https://www.amazon.com/Fl%C3%BCchtige-
Gr%C3%B6%C3%9Fe-Gesammelte-Essays-Literatur-ebook/dp/B071GF6HKQ] . Most strikingly Fest
even gives up quoting Rauschning when discussing Wagner such as in his highly critical review
of Joachim Köhler for Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled Wagner’s Willing Executioner
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2016/07/wagners-willing-executioner-joachim.html] published in
1997.
With respect to other even more major historians than Fest, neither Saul Friedländer in his two-
volume study of the Holocaust (Nazi Germany and the Jews [https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-
Germany-Jews-Persecution-1933-1939-ebook/dp/B00KAFLRV6] ; Vol. I 1997, Vol. II 2007), nor Raul
Hilberg in his three-volume study of the Holocaust (The Destruction of the European Jews
[https://www.bookdepository.com/The-Destruction-of-the-European-Jews-Raul-
Hilberg/9780300095579] , Third Edition, 2003) mention or quote from Rauschning once. Peter
Longerich does not quote Rauschning in any of his key publications (Heinrich Himmler: A Life
[https://www.amazon.com/Heinrich-Himmler-Life-Peter-Longerich-ebook/dp/B0062M9GM8] ,
Goebbels [https://www.amazon.com/Goebbels-Peter-Longerich-ebook/dp/B00NHIQXQM] ,
Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews [https://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-
Nazi-Persecution-Murder-Jews-ebook/dp/B005OQGZMM] , Wannseekonferenz: Der Weg zur
“Endlösung” [https://www.amazon.com/Wannseekonferenz-Weg-zur-Endl%C3%B6sung-German-
ebook/dp/B01G1S9WMQ] , Hitler: Biographie [https://www.amazon.com/Hitler-Biographie-German-
Peter-Longerich-ebook/dp/B00XSQC1MI] , “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!”: Die Deutschen
und die Judenverfolgung 1933-1945 [https://www.amazon.com/Davon-haben-nichts-gewusst-
Judenverfolgung-ebook/dp/B004OL2RSO] ). David Cesarani does not quote from Rauschning in
Final Solution: The Fate of the Jews 1933-49 [https://www.amazon.com/Final-Solution-Fate-Jews-
1933-49-ebook/dp/B00O8MGVW2] . Laurence Rees does not cite Rauschning in his book,
Holocaust [https://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-New-History-Laurence-Rees-ebook/dp/B01LWQ5WAN]
. Christopher Browning does not cite Rauschning in Ordinary Men
[https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Solution-ebook/dp/B01G1F0F84] ,
Remembering Survival [https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Survival-Inside-Nazi-Slave-Labor-
ebook/dp/B004G5ZTKG] , or The Origins of the Final Solution [https://www.amazon.com/Origins-
Final-Solution-1939-March-Comprehensive-ebook/dp/B00BS34NCY] . Nicholas Stargardt in The
German War [https://www.amazon.com/German-War-Nation-Under-1939-45-ebook/dp/B00X2XJZG2]
does not cite Rauschning. Mark Mazower does not cite Rauschning in Hitler’s Empire
[https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Empire-Nazis-Ruled-Europe-ebook/dp/B06XQZV2RJ] . All of these
publications date from later than 1983.
Sir Richard J. Evans is even dismissive of Rauschning’s facile analysis of the phenomenon of
National Socialism:

The conservative administrator Hermann Rauschning, who

Think Classical began by working with the Nazis but by the latesearch 1930s had
become one of their fiercest and most persistent critics,
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described [the National Socialist rise to power] as a ‘nihilist
revolution’, a ‘directionless revolution, a revolution merely for
revolution’s sake’. It destroyed all social order, all freedom, all
decency; it was, as the title of the English edition of his book
claimed, a ‘revolution of destruction’, nothing more. But in his
passionate diatribe, that ended with a clarion call for the
restoration of true conservative values, Rauschning was doing
little more than using ‘revolution’ as a rhetorical bludgeon with
which to beat the Nazis for their overturning of the order he
prized. Other revolutions, whatever Rauschning may have
thought, delivered more than mere destruction.
Sir Richard J. Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich: How the Nazis Destroyed
Democracy and Seized Power in Germany [https://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-
Reich-Destroyed-Democracy-ebook/dp/B008NBQW8C] (Kindle Locations 8351-8357).
Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Beyond this one citation to Hitler Speaks, Evans never quotes from the “conversations” that
Rauschning alleges to have had with Hitler, dismissing them as fantasies “which never took
place outside Rauschning’s mind”. Evans does not quote at all from Rauschning in The Third
Reich in Power [https://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-Power-1933-Hearts-ebook/dp/B008847OWM]
, The Third Reich at War [https://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-War-Conquest-Disaster-
ebook/dp/B0088DBOE2] , The Third Reich in History and Memory
[https://www.amazon.com/Third-Reich-History-Memory-ebook/dp/B00MFPRR40] , Rereading
German History [https://www.amazon.com/Rereading-German-History-Unification-Reunification-
ebook/dp/B000FBFJ78] , or Rethinking German History [https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-
German-History-Routledge-Revivals-ebook/dp/B013RC5RNW] . Evans cites Rauschning only once
more in Society and Politics in Wilhelmine German [https://www.amazon.com/Society-Politics-
Wilhelmine-Routledge-Revivals-ebook/dp/B00YUY7UI2] , but only to refute Rauschning’s
misogynistic claim in Hitler Speaks that Hitler was brought to power by the vote of “hysterical
women”.
What Evans exposes is that for Rauschning a key message to take away from Germany’s
experiment with democracy in the Weimar Republic was that women must never again be
allowed to vote because they always vote “hysterically” in support of shrieking fascists promising
to “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-
review-joachim-kohler-wagners.html] ”:
Hitler was discovered by women. Society women pined for

young men after the [Great] War. Well before their menfolk, the
wives of great industrialists supported him financially, secretly
donating him money or artworks during [hyper]inflation. In the
crisis, educated women turned the political prophet into a well
paid propagandist. ... They, however, were the ones who

Think Classical pampered him, who overinflated his self-esteem searchthrough
undeserved premature laurels. The enthralled devotion of

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women, to the point of pseudo-religious ecstasy, was the
indispensable stimulant for overcoming his lethargy.
Hitler, incidentally, knew what he got from these women. He

“nurtured” these relations with care and calculation. He gave his
Gauleiters the most coolly objective instructions to approach the
task of propaganda for women with exceptional diligence. In the
struggle for power, it was women who ultimately carried
Hitler to power with their votes.
Von Frauen ist Hitler entdeckt worden, Damen der Gesellschaft haben nach dem
Kriege den noch jungen Mann gefördert. Vor ihren Männern waren es die Frauen
einiger Großindustrieller, die ihn finanziell unterstützten, ihm Geld, ihm in der
Inflation Kunstgegenstände zusteckten. In einem Kreise gebildeter Frauen wurde
aus dem bezahlten Propagandisten der politische Prophet. ... Aber sie waren es,
die ihn verwöhnt, die sein Selbstgefühl durch unmäßige Vorschußlorbeeren
übersteigert haben. Die bis zur pseudo-religiösen Ekstase gesteigerte begeisterte
Hingabe der Frauen war das für ihn unentbehrliche Stimulans, um seine Lethargie
zu überwinden.
Übrigens wußte Hitler, was er an den Frauen hatte. Er »pflegte« diese Beziehungen
mit Bedacht und Berechnung. Er gab seinen Gauleitern die kühl-sachlichsten
Anweisungen, sich mit besonderem Fleiß der Propaganda unter den Frauen
anzunehmen. Im Kampf um die Macht waren es die Frauen, die mit ihrer
Stimmabgabe schließlich Hitler so hoch emportrugen.

ebook/dp/B01M3VBYRF] (German Edition) (Kindle Locations 3554-3568). Europa
Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition. My emphasis.
Finally, the often controversial historian, Götz Aly, also generally avoids quoting from Rauschning
(Endlösung [https://www.amazon.com/Endl%C3%B6sung-V%C3%B6lkerverschiebung-
europ%C3%A4ischen-Nationalsozialismus-German-ebook/dp/B0721HKYSS] , Hitler’s Beneficiaries
[https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Beneficiaries-Plunder-Racial-Welfare-ebook/dp/B01LZYIVZC] , Hitlers
Volksstaat [https://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Volksstaat-Rassenkrieg-Sozialismus-Nationalsozialismus-
ebook/dp/B072K8SDRH/] , Europa Gegen die Juden [https://www.amazon.com/Europa-gegen-die-
Juden-German-ebook/dp/B071WZHSN5/] , Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race
Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust? [https://www.amazon.com/Why-Germans-Jews-
Prehistory-Holocaust-ebook/dp/B00FOBA3CK] ), except for this one cautious use of Hitler
Speaks (citation number “2” is to Hermann Rauschning, Gespräche mit Hitler; Zurich, 1940, p.
122) in a book written in collaboration with Susanne Heim:
Rauschning documents an early example of this kind of political

consultancy in National Socialist Germany from 1934:

I reported to Hitler what I had seen of Koch’s ‘planning

Think Classical agency’ [Koch was the Gauleiter of East Prussia]. Asearch
young
academic, Professor von Grünberg, had devised all kinds of
fantastical
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for the future. He had had
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maps drawn up at his institute, marked out with lines of
communication, fields of force, lines of force, motorways,
railway lines, canal projects. The whole of the East as far as
the Black Sea, as far as the Caucasus, was divided up into
meticulously planned economic zones. These maps showed
Germany and western Russia as a single vast land mass with
integrated economic and transport systems. The whole
scheme was German-centred, of course – planned and run
by Germany, for Germany. In this ‘planned economy’ Poland
had ceased to exist, let alone Lithuania …2
Götz Aly and Susanne Heim: Architects of Annihilation: Auschwitz and the Logic
of Destruction [https://www.amazon.com/Architects-Annihilation-Auschwitz-Logic-
Destruction-ebook/dp/B012O0UVW0/] (Kindle Locations 93-100). Orion. Kindle
Edition.
Aly and Heim here have made cautious and selective use of Rauschning, avoiding any of the
alleged “conversations” he claims to have had with Hitler. Once again, this hardly proves that
Rauschning’s phoney “conversations” can now be freely quoted from by art historians. The
existence of such plans for the conquest of Eastern Europe can be independently corroborated,
and Rauschning is merely reporting plans he had plausibly been personal eyewitness to in his
role as vice-Gauleiter. It is totally different to colourful depictions of Hitler shrieking, pointing into
empty corners, becoming hysterical over Wagnerian opera, before declaring that he had no
forerunners other than Wagner:
He [Hitler] discovered with an almost hysterical excitement

that everything he read of this great spirit [Wagner] had
corresponded to his innermost, unconscious, slumbering view.
Er hätte mit einer geradezu hysterischen Erregung gefunden, daß alles, was er von
diesem großen Geist las, seiner innersten, unbewußten, schlummernden
Anschauung entsprochen habe.

Fascinatingly, the word hysteria (Hysterie) or hysterical (hysterisch) occurs 13 times in

Rauschning’s book, these invariably corresponding to the sections of in the book that stand up
least to critical fact-checking. He even repeats the now dated notion that National Socialism was
an atavistic movement [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2016/07/wagners-willing-executioner-
joachim.html] characterised by a “hysterical romanticism”, something Rauschning insinuates was
calculated to appeal maximally to hysterical women voters, thus engendering an unbroken linear
continuity between National Socialism and nineteenth romantic art. It is something modern
historians refuse to accept as it merely romanticises National Socialism, inadvertently

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perpetuating their own self-adulatory mythologizations, however, though search
form.
it may be, in negative
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Hitler shrieking:
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“There, there! in the corner! Who’s standing there?” He stamped

up and down, shrieking as was his habit. He had to be shown
that there was nothing peculiar there, and then he would
gradually calm down. Afterwards he slept for hours. And then,
for a while, things were bearable with him again.
Hysteria is contagious. Anyone who has ever seen how normal

and splendid fellows slowly and inexorably lose their
character from living together with hysterical women, will not
be surprised at the fact that the hysteria is spreading to an entire
people through the high leaders of the Reich, Gauleiters,
officials, and officers.
»Da, da! in der Ecke! Wer steht da?« Er habe aufgestampft, habe geschrieen wie
man das an ihm gewohnt sei. Man habe ihm gezeigt, daß da nichts
Ungewöhnliches sei und dann habe er sich allmählich beruhigt. Viele Stunden hätte
er danach geschlafen. Und dann sei es für eine Zeit wieder erträglich mit ihm
gewesen.
Hysterie ist ansteckend. Wer jemals gesehen hat, wie normale prächtige Burschen
im Zusammenleben mit hysterischen Frauen langsam aber unaufhaltsam ihren
Charakter verlieren, dem wird es nicht verwunderlich erscheinen, daß die Hysterie
sich über die hohen Reichsleiter, Gauleiter, Beamte, Offiziere, auf ein ganzes Volk
ausbreitet.
Hermann Rauschning: Gespräche mit Hitler (German Edition) (Kindle Locations

4026-4031). Europa Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition. My emphasis.
Passages like this can hardly be taken seriously today by historians, especially given the gross
misogyny inherent to the dated sense of humour inherent to the period satire. The idea that Hitler
had become a shrieking “hysterical woman” from excessive preoccupation with opera belongs in
the same category of dated homophobic tales such as the alleged “sexual perversion” of Hitler’s
supposed homosexuality. It simply beggars belief that ignorant musicologists and art historians
writing Nazi opera fantasies think they can ignore the example set by innumerable leading
experts in the field and continue to quote such ridiculous tall tales from Rauschning’s book ad
infinitum without the slightest credible attempt at thoroughgoing independent corroboration,
instead hoping that petulant brute repetition alone will suffice to transform fake quotes will into
Eternal Truths.
The biggest problem with Rauschning’s book is that he claims to accurately quote Hitler.
However, memoirs left by Hitler’s secretarial staff suggest that his monologues were often
interminably long and rambling. Unless it were possible to tape them or take notes, it would be
difficult to accurately put them to print from memory, especially years later. Given that there is
some suggestion that the content of Rauschning’s book might have been shaped by strong
outside editorial input from a staff keen to arraign Hitler with a portrait placing him in as
Think Classical
unflattering a light as possible, this might have further introduced retrospective
search distortion, and
what memory psychologists call “false memories”. If you read random excerpts from Mein
Kampf and Hitler speeches to a lecture theatre full of first-year history students, who were not
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hours long reading, all interspersed with random
distraction, and then participants were all asked to recall the contents of the reading years later
solely from memory, the resulting memoirs would hardly be accurate and would vary enormously
from one another.
Nor was historical documentary accuracy to posthumously aid post-war historians hardly the
chief aim of Rauschning’s French publishers, least of all musicological historiographic accuracy
with respect to some nineteenth-century composer. These people had no reason whatsoever to
have the slightest genuine academic interest in some nineteenth-century opera composer. Their
aim was quite rightly to discredit Hitler at all cost, and given how destructive his fascist regime
was, “just a little bit” of satirical distortion would have surely appeared ethically perfectly justified
by the sheer direness of the political circumstances.
However, given that Hitler’s regime stands completely and utterly discredited without having to
have even the slightest recourse to such wildly satirical wartime satirical distortions, it is neither
helpful nor necessary for historians to perpetuate antiquated Allied propaganda. Moreover, the
polemic was intended to be directed first and foremost against Hitler. It was hardly intended for
serious posthumous consumption by art historians and musicologists, nor driven by even the
slightest genuine academic interest in nineteenth-century opera. That is why on no occasion do
such wartime Hitler polemicists actually cite any of Wagner’s own remarkably voluminous body
of theoretical essays and letters in an academically or forensically credible manner. Today,
historical accuracy must be allowed to take precedence, and the colourful myths engendered by
politically motivated satirical distortions of the past put aside.
The trend in historiographic studies of the Dritte Reich era today tends towards
demythologisation. This involves the unrelenting deflation of an absurdly bloated Fürhermythus.
The biggest problem is when this Mythus is perpetuated in negative form as a means of
demonising Hitler, where it can have the effect of inadvertently perpetuating the Fürhermythus,
even inflating it grotesquely beyond what the National Socialist regime ever did. Thus the idea
that Hitler’s regime was a gargantuan exercise in Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk where Hitler
claimed that “he had no forerunner other than Richard Wagner” merely inflates the already
ridiculous Fürhermythus even further. In actuality, the term Gesamtkunstwerk does not even
originate from Wagner, and there is no recorded evidence of Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg,
Streicher, Heydrich, Speer, or Himmler ever having used this phrase either. Wagner’s own use of
the phrase Gesammtkunstwerk (his own spelling) occurs only in two Feuerbachian communist
revolutionary works [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2017/01/richard-wagner-communist-after-all.html]
, from 1849 and again in 1850, after which he never used it again.

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q108jDbMol4/Wa6uaX3rsUI/AAAAAAAACxM/kxBM4PR3liAvmAp7z4QohmSXPGbQBrM_ACPcBGAYYC
w/s1600/Egoismus%2BKommunismus%2BKunstwerk%2BZunkunft%2BWagner.jpeg]
The word Gesammtkunstwerk occurs in one of Wagner’s Communist prose works: “Only through Communism
does Egoism find itself completely satiated” (Nur im Kommunismus findet sich der Egoismus vollständig
befriedigt). The heroic grandeur of Gesammtkunstwerk represents the grandeur of socialist revolutionary art:
the artwork of the future.
From an original 1850 printing of The Artwork of the Future [https://play.google.com/books/reader?

id=_ecsAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&pg=GBS.PA48]

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[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-ZFsTmWxRXAU/WbdwIWPW7CI/AAAAAAAACx4/LXTCeEZ9KkQK7Dy1aNx-
qKUage-oIRhHwCLcBGAs/s1600/Feuerbach_Wagner_Philosophie-Kunstwerk_der_Zukunft.jpg]
The title cover of Wagner’s Artwork of the Future and socialist philosopher, Ludwig Feuerbach’s
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm] , Philosophy of the Future.
Wagner’s Music of the Future is revolutionary
Sadly, for many, the war is not yet over. The emotional traumas live on, so that the admirable and
entirely sincere desire to commemorate countrymen, friends, and family members who died
fighting the National Socialist regime, or who were victims of its unspeakable terror, becomes
conflated with a desire to keep the emotive power inherent to Allied anti-Hun propaganda alive
along with its exaggerated satirical demonization of a Hitler shrieking hysterically that “he had no
forerunner” other than a nineteenth-century opera composer. Here, the stark black-and-white
dichotomies characteristic of propaganda evinces greater sex appeal than academic shades of
grey. For the grossly Manichean reductivisms inherent to war propaganda permit greater
emotional identification with a fictionalised “heroic” depiction of history than the endlessly
nuanced shades of neutral grey found in genuine academic historiographic studies.
That is why, along with the fake quote that goes “whoever wants to understand National
Socialist Germany must know Wagner [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2014/02/did-hitler-ever-say-
whoever-wants-to.html] ”, Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks unfortunately remains one of the favourite
pieces of alleged evidence proffered to support long antiquated—though undoubtedly cute—
anti-Hun propaganda notions that National Socialism was a crackpot operatic movement
secretly based in its entirety on wacky Wagnerian principles. Quotes from Rauschning often
Think Classical
circulate around in second-hand form, divorced from their source, wheresearch each time the tale is
retold it grows to become even more exaggerated. Nazi opera fantasy writers often deliberately
eschew revealing where such supposed “quotes” come from so as to obfuscate the fact that
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demonstrated to be fake. Little surprisingly,
Rauschning’s fishy story rapidly grows in size to the point of turning into a grandiose conspiracy
theory where Hitler secretly plotted to “transform the world into a Wagnerian drama
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.html] ”.
A good example of the surreptitious use of quotes from Rauschning is found in Zalampas (1990)
buttressed by the usual run of fake quotes and empty claims to a supreme certainty expurgated
of every possibility of doubt:
[https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-0Njm3E6TDVA/UwRjT3HDvtI/AAAAAAAAByk/v34ZJd676hci3mkMfK5uBKw
_mlqh0rpOwCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/Zalampas_Wagner.jpg]
Sheree Zalampas: Adolf Hitler: A Psychological Interpretation of His Views on Architecture, Art, and Music
[https://www.amazon.com/Adolf-Hitler-Psychological-Interpretation-Architecture/dp/0879724870] (1990)
Fake Rauschning quotes are repeated ad infinitum by art historians of the likes of Zalampas
(who has a doctorate in music and art history but has no proper historiographic qualification).
Quotes such as these belong amongst a whole legion of fake “Nazi quotes” that get
repeated interminably by gullible amateur historians who are ill-trained to scrutinise the credibility
of historical source texts. Although Rausching is not credited by Zalampas as the source of the
string of quotes, all of them can be shown to originate in Hitler Speaks. Rauschning thus alleges
in the same section of Hitler Speaks entitled Hitler, Wagner, Gobineau that Hitler confessed to
him that:
“I have the most intimate familiarity with Wagner’s way of

thinking”
»Mir sind die Gedankengänge Wagners aufs innigste vertraut«

GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition. The quotation marks are Rauschning’s own.
And that:
“At every stage of my life I come back to him [i.e. Wagner]”
»Ich kehre auf jeder Stufe meines Lebens zu ihm zurück«.

Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition.
Rauschning goes on to further depict Hitler as a hysterical opera crazed madman, and a
twentieth-century mad King Ludwig II [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_II_of_Bavaria] and this

Think Classical
characterisation also quoted verbatim by Zalampas:
search
He, Hitler, had happened upon Wagner either by accident or by

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predestiny. He discovered with an almost hysterical
excitement that everything he read of this great spirit had
corresponded to his innermost, unconscious, slumbering
outlook.
Er, Hitler, sei durch Zufall oder Schickung früh auf Wagner gestoßen. Er hätte mit
einer geradezu hysterischen Erregung gefunden, daß alles, was er von diesem
großen Geist las, seiner innersten, unbewußten, schlummernden Anschauung
entsprochen habe.

Since Rauschning’s Hitler Speaks had been exposed as fraudulent in 1983, seven years before
Zalampas published her book in 1990, she obfuscates the fraud by substituting a bibliographic
citation to Gilbert instead. The bibliographic citation number “127” given to us by Zalampas as
the alleged source of the string of quotes is not to Rauschning at all, where most of them
originate, but instead to p.48 of G.M. Gilbert’s The Psychology of Dictatorship
[http://books.google.com/books?id=kjsdAAAAIAAJ] , 1950. However, neither p.48 nor the rest of the
book by Gilbert contains anything of the kind:
MlQSe4eH95E/VcxmvEO8wkI/AAAAAAAACTc/z_uZ6DW5FR8S5rFYufO1lkK9M5rGpP5qQCPcBGAYYCw/
s1600/GilberP48.jpg]
Here is a further classical example of the gross misuse of Rauschning, this time by Joachim
Köhler:
One of the few whom [Hitler] admitted into his sanctum—and

who published their discussions even before the outbreak of the
war—was Hermann Rauschning. Although Rauschning, then
President of the Danzig Senate, attributes many more
statements to the Führer in his Conversations with Hitler [Hitler
Speaks] than he can possibly heard, he must have been [no
supportive citation] an ideal person with whom to discuss
Wagner. An eloquent Classical scholar, he had also studied
music in Munich, where he got to know the Wagner epigones,
and had also attended the Bayreuth Festival. Whenever Hitler
met a connoisseur of Wagner, he abandoned his inhibitions and
talked freely [no supportive citation], so it was this shared love
of the Master, we may presume, that led Rauschning, a member

Think Classical of the Party, being admitted into the private recesses search
of Hitler’s
mind [no supportive citation]. It is hardly possible that what
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is merely the product of his
imagination—it resembles too closely the secret doctrines of the
Bayreuth inner circle.
Joachim Köhler: Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and his Disciple
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.html] ,
p238 (1997, English translation 2000)
The argument here goes that because “it is hardly possible that what Rauschning subsequently
recorded is merely the product of his imagination” that therefore Rausching’s writings must be
authentic. It is like arguing that “it is hardly possible that the idea that the moon is made of
cheese is a product of the imagination” and that therefore the moon must be made of cheese.
The lame attempt at corroborating Rausching with the so-called “secret doctrines of the
Bayreuth inner circle” is based on what historian Joachim Fest condemned in Köhler’s book
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2016/07/wagners-willing-executioner-joachim.html] as being a claim
to have deciphered a secret conspiratorial “code language or encrypted messages for the
initiated”. It is pure conspiracy theory of quasi-ufological proportions. Köhler has since retracted
his claims [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2014/07/wagners-acquittal-by-joachim-kohler.html] about
Wagner (The Wagner Journal; 8, 2, 43–51, 2014).
Notice that neither the translator nor editor for the English edition of Köhler’s book evinces the
slightest knowledge of the historiographic textural issues surrounding Rauschning so that the
German title of Gespräche mit Hitler has been translated as Conversations with Hitler. This
further functions to obfuscate the use of a text widely regarded as largely fraudulent. At no point
does the translator or editor point out that the English edition of Rauschning’s book is usually
referred to by its published title as Hitler Speaks (or less commonly, The Voice of Destruction,
based on in the US edition). It goes to show that coming from a musicological background does
not excuse authors and editors of ignorance of the vast historiographic literature on this era
when discussing Wagner’s place in the wider context of German history.
Similar repetitions of fake Hitler quotations invented by Rauschning include this recent use of
Hitler Speaks by music graduate, Carolyn Ticker
[http://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1062&context=musicalofferings] in
2016—a full 33 years after serious historians abandoned the use of Rauschning:
Wagner was his kindred spirit, his forerunner, his John the
Baptist; Wagner portrayed what he, Hitler, a greater than
Wagner, was to translate into reality.
The bibliographic citation is not to Rauschning as it ought to be, but to a dated wartime
propaganda text by Robert L. Jacobs, Wagner’s Influence on Hitler, p.82 (Music & Letters, 22,
No. 1; Oxford University, 1941). The influence of Rauschning is once more immediately
discernible. The reason for hiding behind a dated secondary source citation from the 1940s is
once again to shamelessly obfuscate the fact that the Rauschning text it is based on has long
been exposed as a fraud. It is a basic precept of academic methodology that where a subject is
controversial an author must return to credible primary bibliographic sources, and brute
repetition of antiquated second or third-hand secondary sources like Jacobs does nothing to
Think Classical
restore Rauschning’s credibility.
search
Such mindless repetition by credulous amateur pseudo-historians of long-discredited fake Nazi

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notorious of all such fake quotes is the one
oft attributed to Joseph Goebbels that goes:
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people
will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained
only for such time as the State can shield the people from the
political, economic and or military consequences of the lie. It
thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its
powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of
the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy
of the State.
From: http://bytwerk.com/gpa/falsenaziquotations.htm
[http://bytwerk.com/gpa/falsenaziquotations.htm]
Such quotes and their variants are repeated hundreds of thousands of times on the internet and
in popular publications. No credible primary source has ever been found, and they have been
shown to be fake.
Fake quotes such as these were quasi-satirical parodies concocted by Allied war propaganda
and rightfully intended to make the National Socialist regime look ridiculous. Goebbels was far
too shrewd a fox to discredit himself with such self-incriminating satirical statements, and in
actuality insisted that he stood steadfastly for the “Truth”.

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Goebbels: die Wahrheit ist immer stärker als die Lüge.
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Goebbels:
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stronger than the lie.
Far from claiming that his propaganda ministry ran on the principle that a lie repeated often
enough becomes the truth, Goebbels accused his enemies of using the technique. In a
1941 article entitled Churchill’s Lie Factory [http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-
archive/goeb29.htm] , Goebbels wrote:
One should not as a rule reveal one’s secrets, since one does
not know if and when one may need them again. The essential
English leadership secret does not depend on particular
intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-
headedness. The English follow the principle that when one
lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their
lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.
Despite this, the quote that goes “a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth” continues to
be attributed countless hundreds of thousands of times over to Goebbels on the internet. It is a
supreme irony that Goebbels has been allowed to laugh in his grave at all the gullible fools
repeating the fake quote so often that they themselves have come to believe it.
It is only when you read the works of serious academic historians that you will find that historians
are trained to screen out such fake quotations. This is why you never see such quotes being
used in genuine historiographic literature, least of all the shamelessly fake Rauschning quotations
claiming that Hitler said he had “no other forerunner other than Richard Wagner”.
Interestingly, Rauschning contradicts himself on his claim that Hitler stated that he had no other
forerunner other than Wagner. Later in his book, Rauschning states that:
Frederick of Prussia is his great model. He feels akin to him. He

confers on him the honour to be recognised as his forerunner.
Friedrich von Preußen ist sein großes Vorbild. Er fühlt sich ihm verwandt. Er läßt ihm
die Ehre angedeihen, als sein Vorläufer anerkannt zu sein.

Verlag GmbH & Co. KG. Kindle Edition.
This statement by Rauschning is actually far more credible because it can be independently
corroborated in other ways. Hitler wanted to cultivate his propaganda image so as to be
associated with Frederick the Great, as Frederick was both a great military leader, a poet, a
friend of Voltaire, who, as an accomplished flautist and composer, was also the patron of Carl
Philipp Emanuel Bach.

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[https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7bTBam_auU0/UbGzrmlQGmI/AAAAAAAACMw/AkZcfQVEOHcKNc4sUkVp
zdNE70CSoBIJwCPcBGAYYCw/s1600/Adolph_Menzel_Flo%25CC%2588tenkonzert_Friedrichs_des_Gr
o%25C3%259Fen_in_Sanssouci_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg]
Frederick the Great plays the flute with Carl Phillipp Emanuel Bach accompanying him at the keyboard
In his much-acclaimed book, The German War [https://www.amazon.com/German-War-Nation-

Under-1939-45-ebook/dp/B00X2XJZG2] , historian Nicholas Stargardt tells us:
Through films like the 1942 biopic The Great King, Germans
had been encouraged to see their Führer as the successor of
Frederick the Great. It was also a parallel which inspired Hitler,
and he sent a print of the film to Mussolini. When he returned to
Berlin on 15 January from his western headquarters, he took the
Prussian King’s portrait into his study in the bunker deep below
the Reich Chancellery.
Stargardt: The German War [https://www.amazon.com/German-War-Nation-Under-
1939-45-ebook/dp/B00X2XJZG2]

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A poster for the 1942 film biopic of Frederick the Great, The Great King depicted him as Hitler’s greatest
forerunner

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“Men make history!” (Männer machen die Geschichte!).
A National Socialist propaganda poster misrepresents history as being shaped by the Triumph of the Will of the
“Great Man”.
It unequivocally depicts Frederich the Great as Hitler’s “forerunner”.
No opera composer was ever depicted in Nazi propaganda as Hitler’s sole forerunner as it would have made
Hitler look ridiculous—that was entirely the satirical concoction of Allied war propaganda

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Himmler presents Hitler with a portrait of Frederick the Great on the occasion of Hitler’s 50th birthday, 20
April 1939.
Hitler revered Frederick so deeply that the painting was later taken down into the Führerbunker. It hung
in Hitler's study where it “entirely dominated the room, offering a constant reminder to Hitler of the
seeming rewards for holding out when all appeared lost” (Ian Kershaw: Hitler 1936-45 Nemesis).
Given that Hitler was gifted a portrait of Frederick the Great only in 1939, by which time
Rauschning had fallen out with the regime and had fled the country, it is unlikely Rauschning
would have seen the portrait of Frederick the Great even if he had visited the Reich Chancellery
on official duty. Rauschning might have seen newsreels or read newspaper accounts of such
events such as the presentation to Hitler of the portrait of Frederick the Great during the
celebration of Hitler’s 50th birthday.
Hitler himself also wrote in Mein Kampf of:
... the great fighters of this world, who, though not understood at
present, nonetheless have carried out the fight for their ideas
and ideals. Their lives and their work are then studied with
touching and grateful admiration. Especially in dark days of

Think Classical
distress, such men have the power of healing brokensearch
hearts and
elevating the despairing spirit of a people.
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To these belong not only the great statesmen but also the great
reformers. Alongside Frederick the Great stands also Martin
Luther as well as Richard Wagner.
Zu ihnen aber sind zu rechnen die großen Kämpfer auf dieser Welt, die, von der
Gegenwart nicht verstanden, dennoch den Streit um ihre Idee und Ideale
durchzufechten bereit sind. Sie sind diejenigen, die einst am meisten dem Herzen
des Volkes nahestehen werden; es scheint fast so, als fühlte jeder einzelne dann
die Pflicht, an der Vergangenheit gutzumachen, was die Gegenwart einst an den
Großen gesündigt hatte. Ihr Leben und Wirken wird in rührend dankbarer
Bewunderung verfolgt und vermag besonders in trüben Tagen gebrochene Herzen
und verzweifelnde Seelen wieder zu erheben.
Hierzu gehören aber nicht nur die wirklich großen Staatsmänner, sondern auch alle
sonstigen großen Reformatoren. Neben Friedrich dem Großen stehen hier Martin
Luther sowie Richard Wagner.
Adolf Hitler: Mein Kampf, p.232. Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Verlag Franz Eher
Nachf., G.m.b.H.; Munich, 1943. My translation.
Once again it must be remembered that Mein Kampf is a problematic text that should be read
critically. It is not to be read as a grand blueprint and decisive Master Plan premeditating all that
followed. As a rather self-adulatory quasi-autohagiographic rant, it also evinces an essential
character of National Socialist historiographic accounts of themselves in that it follows a
romanticised Great Man view of history. It is a distorted propagandist historiography that involves
much petty name-dropping, in this instance suggesting that Frederick the Great, Martin Luther,
and Richard Wagner might be seen as Great Men of German history upon whose shoulders the
National Socialist could be implied to be seen as standing.
For another example of National Socialist petty name-dropping of perceived Great Men who
might be implied to have paved the road to their greatness, the reader is directed to The Myth of
the Twentieth Century by Alfred Rosenberg. There in the course of his shameless name-
dropping exercise, Rosenberg writes endless obfuscatory and meandering prose that anticipates
the postmodernist style of writing. He mentions Shakespeare, Cervantes, Leonardo da Vinci,
Michelangelo, Rubens, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Bach, Glück, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven,
Handel, Berlioz, Meister Eckhart, Charles Dickens, Herder, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche,
Copernicus, and many others considered great “Aryan” minds. However, the historical names
dropped the most frequently of all by Rosenberg is actually Jesus Christ: with 94 hits to “Jesus”
and 57 hits just to “Christ” alone (excluding terms like “anti-Christ” in the search), making for a
total of 151 mentions. Next in frequency is Goethe, whose name appears 80 times, followed by
Meister Eckhart, the mystic theologian, who is mentioned 46 times. Martin Luther’s name
appears 40 times. Frederick the Great is mentioned 27 times. Wagner is mentioned 30 times,
but Rosenberg is often frankly dismissive of him. Beethoven’s name is mentioned 23 times.
Shakespeare is mentioned 9 times.

None of this self-aggrandizement by cheap name-dropping is at all convincing. No serious

Think Classical
historian can possibly accept such a romanticised and grossly propagandist Great Man reading
search
of the history of any nation. It implies a grand continuity between the Dritte Reich and German
histories before it, with history depicted as running along a teleological continuum of linearity
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serious historian can base their reading of
German history upon such romanticised mythical distortions without inadvertently falling prey to
a blind acceptance of the Nazi view of history with all of its false methodological assumptions.
Not even when such a Great Man view of history is accepted for polemical purposes (whether to
demonise Luther, Wagner, Frederick the Great as proto-Nazi forerunners of Hitler—or anyone
else the National Socialists listed in their name-dropping exercises) does it gain even an iota of
credibility, as it merely perpetuates the self-adulatory myths created by the National Socialist
propaganda machine in negative form. Only a systematic demythologisation can be considered
acceptable.
The odd thing about such name-dropping passages listing both Luther and Frederick is that
retrospective polemicists have largely ignored these two figures, and instead the dated
propagandist polemic is directed exclusively against Wagner. Yet never did Wagner quite feature
as prominently in the mainstream propaganda intended for the public at large, a fact that was
acknowledged by more academic Allied propagandists such as Professor William McGovern,
who published a nearly 700-page long diatribe in 1941 entitled From Luther to Hitler: The
History of Fascist-Nazi Political Philosophy:
[https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2cv9qDw-p6Y/WZOXbu8xLCI/AAAAAAAACwI/nSkRdzHgTK8AeNo-
zkrww8SQXqITEV73ACLcBGAs/s1600/Luther%2Bto%2BHilter%2BMcGovern.jpg]
Nobody quotes from it at all now, and it has rightfully lapsed into obscurity. Unlike Hermann
Rauschning’s colourful book, it has gone completely out of print and used copies are fairly
scarce. Sir Richard J. Evans tells us thatViews
Dynamic suchtheme.
booksPowered
simply by
cannot be taken seriously today:
Blogger.
... Allied wartime propaganda... cannot really be considered

Think Classical serious in scholarly terms. Books such as William search
McGovern’s
From Luther to Hitler, published in 1941..., or Rohan Butler’s
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The Roots of National Socialism, published the previous year,
trawled German writings in the past, from Novalis to Nietzsche,
not only in the search for antecedents of Nazism but also in the
attempt to prove that all German ‘ideology’ had always been
Nazi in one way or another, and that Nazism, in essence, was
not new.
Sir Richard J. Evans: Rereading German History: From Unification to
Reunification 1800-1996 [https://www.amazon.com/Rereading-German-History-
Unification-Reunification-ebook/dp/B000FBFJ78] (p. 126). Taylor and Francis. Kindle
Edition.
Yet there is no doubt that the figure of Martin Luther did feature prominently in National Socialist
propaganda:
eKy0z8uDODo/WYvse285pEI/AAAAAAAACtU/Wl2j4e9tSQYFAt0yz58M3kKHcN6SfU6NQCEwYBhgL/s16
00/Luthertag_Berlin_Nazi_1933.jpg]
Storm Troopers pose on the 450th birthday of Martin Luther day in 1933, in front of the Berlin Neuer Markt
Martin Luther Memorial built by the regime.
Published in the Bildbericht für das Deutsche Christenvolk (Illustrated Journal of the German Christian
Volk)

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Covers from the 5th of November, 1933 and 12th of November, 1933 of The Gospel in the Dritte Reich—
Sunday Paper of the German Christians.
MoQe_DoRjzg/WYvpnehK06I/AAAAAAAACtI/dhD2i0iZiEkXAHyaxLqb3Mlu0XnJXDDIgCEwYBhgL/s1600/
Luthertag_Postcard_Nazi_1933.jpg]
A postcard with a Swastika celebrating Martin Luther day on the 10th of November, 1933.
The Reich’s Church Minister, Hanns Kerrl, even proclaimed in 1935 that “ich handele wie Luther”
(I am acting as Luther would).

The National Socialist regime furthermore built the Martin Luther Memorial Church in Berlin:
[https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XSclT1GTC4Y/WYvGOOLPx5I/AAAAAAAACsg/YZEBwRIRBOEgtV1B-
rRm0fcH2CK2kYP5QCLcBGAs/s1600/DSCF0843.jpg]
Original details of the triumphal arch from Martin Luther Memorial Church, Berlin (consecrated in 1935).
The Swastikas have since been removed.

ThinkNo
Classical
such large, publicly visible monuments comparable to that of the Martin searchLuther Memorial
Church in Berlin, were erected in the centre of capital cities in honour of Wagner, visible for all the
world to see during the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
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[https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Sk5aJ5j90wE/T1cfJZyrutI/AAAAAAAAAS0/_DApS-
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Martin Luther: Concerning the Jews and their Lies
‘It was only much later that Luther did away with the “Jews and their lies”, and declared that we should have
nothing more to do with Moses’
Alfred Rosenberg: Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhundert [129], 1934
[https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-SZ-
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_Sturmer_Martin_Luther_Jew_and_their_Lies_Nazi.jpg]
The August 1935 issue of Der Stürmer—the German Weekly Newspaper Dedicated to the Struggle for the
Truth quotes the National Socialist slogan die Juden sind unsere Unglück! (the Jews are our misfortune!) on
the cover followed on the next page with a reprint of the cover of Martin Luther’s book Concerning the Jews
and their Lies.
iBoHTCwifGk/WY7j9OJpKGI/AAAAAAAACvY/ND12bjxAWn47GB5DGdscm_tleX_l1yIVgCLcBGAs/s1600/
Ewige%2BJude%2BFrederick%2Bthe%2BGreat%2BMartin%2BLuther%2BNazi.jpg]
Part of the exhibition Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew) as it appeared in Neue IZ magazine, December 1938.
The exhibition opened on November 12th, 1938 in Berlin, just a couple of days after the Kristallnacht pogrom
on the eve of Martin Luther’s birthday.
Notice that anti-Semitic quotes from Frederick the Great and Dr Martin Luther feature side by side—but there is
not the slightest mention of Richard Wagner.

ThinkLikewise,
Classical if you look at the details of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welthauptstadt_Germania] , there
Speer’s search
Germania project
was nothing Wagnerian themed
planned there at all. If Hitler were indeed a twentieth century mad King Ludwig II, who had
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“transform worldTimeslide
into a Wagnerian drama
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.html] ”, you would
have expected colossal Wagnerian monuments to have been planned, delusory
Neuschwanstein-like operatic castles-in-the-air—but nothing of the like existed in the plans. All
of this goes to show that the alleged extraordinary centrality of Wagner to National Socialist
propaganda is grossly exaggerated and originates in Allied propaganda suggesting that the
regime was a crackpot operatic movement based entirely on Wagnerian principles. One Allied
propagandist even claimed in 1942 that the German economy was being run according to
operatic principles:
...the internal economic and political structure of Nazi Germany

is almost entirely the result of the twentieth century interpretation
of Wagner’s theories.
Janet Gregory: Hitler and Wagnerism
[http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/manuscripts/vol9/iss4/15/] , Manuscripts: Vol. 9 : Iss.
4 , Article 15 (1942)
It is thus extremely telling that the right-wing Hermann Rauschning mentions Frederick the Great
and Richard Wagner in Hitler Speaks [https://www.amazon.com/Gespr%C3%A4che-Hitler-German-
Hermann-Rauschning-ebook/dp/B01M3VBYRF] , but he conveniently omits all mention of Martin
Luther.
[https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-mAAyAuAoToQ/WYv3fqP4CUI/AAAAAAAACt8/Jov7cqoz-
NE6ljycQ3Xqikxhs6ZNBN6TwCLcBGAs/s1600/NationalSynod_Lutherstad_Nazi_Martin-Luther_1933.jpg]
National Synod of the German Evangelical Church in Lutherstadt, Wittenberg. September the 27th, 1933.
Reich Bishop Ludwig Miller (first row, third from the left) can be seen with other regional bishops in front of the
Luther Memorial.

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“Luther Hitler: My beloved Germans shall I serve – for [thee] my beloved
Germans I am there”.
The Christian right has retrospectively created a myth of Wagner-Hitler

[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.html] setting up Wagner as
a scapegoat to distract attention away from the spectre of the Luther-Hitler vision that was actually
omnipresent in National Socialist propaganda.

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600/Martin%2BLuther%2BNazi%2Bantisemitic%2BDer%2BSturmer%2B1937.jpg]
Portrait of Dr Martin Luther as it appeared in a special edition of Der Stürmer, March 1937.
This issue included an article entitled “Dr Martin Luther and the Jews”.
The caption to the portrait of Martin Luther reads:
“The reformer and fighter against the Jewish spirit in the Christian church.
Dr Luther is one of the greatest antisemites of German history”.

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A 1940 National Socialist war postcard with a quote from Luther:
I seek not my own
But the fortune and salvation [Heil]
Of all of Germany
What Rauschning demonstrates is that right from the 1940’s, the Christian right were laying the
foundations for a reading of National Socialist history based on a negative Great Man caricature,
but one where the Great Man of German history whose Evil Genius lead Hitler down the path to
Auschwitz would never be allowed to be Martin Luther, and where every effort had to be made
to rewrite history so that Richard Wagner would be scapegoated as the sole villainous Great
Man directing German history to the crematoria of Auschwitz, in the manner akin to a twentieth
century Nero or Caligula. That is why Rauschning makes up the ridiculous fairy tale about how in
addition to waking at night shrieking hysterically and pointing in terror at an empty corner,
exclaiming “There, there, in the corner!”, Hitler allegedly proclaimed that he had no forerunners
other than Richard Wagner.

Of related interest is that the most widely read of all pop historiographies of the era is William
Think Classical
Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Shirer, who, as an American search
reporter, attended the
Nuremberg rallies. Shirer wrote the book after being blacklisted during the McCarthy era and
finding himself unable to find work. It is fascinating that Shirer dismissed the idea that the
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as a Wagnerian operatic movement, instead arguing that
Martin Luther was the visionary Prophet and sole forerunner of whom Hitler was the obedient
little Disciple. It is highly plausible that Shirer would have seen Luther featuring immeasurably
more prominently in Nazi public propaganda during his time spent reporting as a journalist in
Germany. Only a small portion of the public would have had much interest in opera, and Luther
would have been a much more widely recognised figure in German history amongst the general
populace.
Nonetheless, it cannot be sufficiently emphasised that modern historians simply reject the tacit
assumption pushed in pop historiographies such as those by William Shirer and Joachim Köhler
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.html] that National
Socialism was a dead poets society that ran on the fuel of inspiration bequeathed to them by
long dead “Great Men”: poet-philosophers such as Martin Luther, Frederick the Great, and
Richard Wagner. That would be to mindlessly and uncritically accept a grossly mythologised Nazi
propagandist Great Man view of history.
As always, Cambridge historian Sir Richard J. Evans puts it so very well:
Another, very different tradition of writing in broad, general terms

about German history takes its cue from literature, and depicts
German society and German values through the use of novels,
drama, poetry, autobiography and other kinds of literary
evidence. Here the stress is on the drift of the ‘German mind’
towards authoritarianism, militarism and eventually National
Socialism. Inevitably, this kind of literary social history
concentrates heavily on the small elite of well-educated people
who produced the great bulk of the literary evidence on which it
relies. Just as much as the history of high politics, it leaves the
majority of German people in the past out of the picture.
Sir Richard J. Evans: Rethinking German History

[https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-German-History-Routledge-Revivals-
ebook/dp/B013RC5RNW] , p. 1.
In this methodology, reading German history becomes a matter of reading National Socialism as
a dead poets’ society run by a cabal of long deceased German poets and philosophers. Things
become rapidly reduced to a pulp fiction whodunit in the guise of history, where the faux
historian attempts to unveil the historical German villain whose evil genius managed to brainwash
the German Mind so as to fill it with Kraut-Think: racism, genocidal anti-Semitism, rampant
militarism, lust for blood and cruelty of every kind to the point of making the rise and triumph of
Hitler a preordained historical inevitability. Methodologically, it degenerates rapidly into quotes by
long-dead poets and thinkers ripped out of historical context and presented so as to suggest
that the course of National Socialist history turned out as it did because some dead poet-
philosopher said so:

Back in the 1940s and 1950s, scholars such as Rohan Butler,

Think Classical William McGovern, Edmond Vermeil and Peter Viereck search
used to
blame Germany’s philosophers for the rise and triumph of
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quotation out of its
contemporary context, they purported to show that Nazism’s
core ideas had been held in advance by the entire German
philosophical tradition, from Novalis to Nietzsche.
Sir Richard J. Evans: Times Higher Education

[http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/hitlers-philosophers-by-yvonne-
sherratt/2001795.article]
Sadly, art and other cultural pop historians to this day love to regress to this antiquated
methodology in order to propagandise for a relapse into a reactionary romantic view of Grand Art
created by the Great Man as the fundamental driving force of history. It is pure wish fulfilment
fantasy engendered of the art historian’s megalomaniac self-aggrandisement in wanting to turn
the magic power of the word of poets and philosophers back into the central driving force of
world history—sometimes referred to euphemistically as the “linguistic turn”. Along with it comes
a repristination of the notion that the earth turns around the word of the history-making Great
Man.
Some postmodernist perspectivists would argue that the reduction of world history to art history
yields a perspective on history as valid as any other, and, that to take such a perspective is the
rightful prerogative of the art historian, but that is like arguing that the maître-fromager, in
presenting the perspective of the moon seen from the aspects of its cheesiness, has the
prerogative to be called as much an expert on the moon as any astrogeologist.
Some speculative authors like Shirer thus claim that Martin Luther brainwashed the German
Mind filling it with the Kraut-Think of genocidal Jew-hatred and blind obedience to authority.
Sensible historians have correctly pointed that:
It has been all too easy for historians to look back at the course
of German history from the vantage-point of 1933 and interpret
almost anything that happened in it as contributing to the rise
and triumph of Nazism. This has led to all kinds of distortions,
with some historians picking choice quotations from German
thinkers such as Herder, the late eighteenth-century apostle of
nationalism, or Martin Luther, the sixteenth-century founder of
Protestantism, to illustrate what they argue are ingrained
German traits of contempt for other nationalities and blind
obedience to authority within their own borders. Yet when we
look more closely at the work of thinkers such as these, we
discover that Herder preached tolerance and sympathy for other
nationalities, while Luther famously insisted on the right of the

individual conscience to rebel against spiritual and intellectual

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authority. search
Sir Richard J. Evans: The Coming of the Third Reich

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[http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Destroyed-Democracy-
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Far from brainwashing the German Mind into a mentality of blind obedience to fascist
authoritarianism, Luther taught that it was the God-given right of the individual conscience to
protest against oppressive authoritarianism. It entailed Luther risking his life in speaking out
against the overwhelming political might of Rome. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Protestant theologian,
noted in 1937 the omnipresence of Luther’s words throughout National Socialist propaganda:
Luther’s words are everywhere, but their truth perverted into self-
deception.
Überall Luthers Wort und aus der Wahrheit in Selbstbetrug verkehrt.
Chapter One, Die teure Gnade (Costly Grace) in the book Nachfolge by Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, Munich 1937, p.10. Translated as The Cost of Discipleship, New York
1959.
Bonhoeffer was banned from teaching in 1936, and he was arrested in 1943 before being
murdered at Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Similar thoughts were further echoed in the words of Pastor Martin Niemöller, who was
imprisoned in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp after falling out with the regime:
We celebrate this day in memory of the beginning of the German

Reformation, and we think today... that that 31st of October,
more than 400 years ago ... still has a message for us today and
for all time.... And this Martin Luther was a man from whom we
can learn. For one thing, this one man who possessed no great
influence—this one man, who stood up fearlessly and sincerely
for his convictions—showed courage and patience in his
struggle against powerful enemies, against the Emperor and the
Pope. He stood up strongly and passionately for his opinions. In
this respect this one man, this holy man of Wittenberg, can be
an example to us as a true German.
Martin Niemöller, 31st October, 1936. Sermon for a school service on the occasion
of the Reformation Festivity in the Jesus-Christus Church Berlin. Cited in The
Gestapo Defied: Being the Last Twenty-Eight Sermons by Martin Niemöller,
pp.10-15.
Nobody decries Luther as history’s original Nazi, and symbol of the Holocaust.
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protestors decrying him as the
original propagandist of the Holocaust. There is even a Lutheran church in Jerusalem, the
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Church of the Redeemer, yet nobody protests outside of it calling it an insult
in the Holocaust.
to those murdered
search
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further telling. He was an enlightened king who passed
laws allowing commoners to become judges and permitted complete freedom of the press.
Under the newfound freedom during Frederick’s reign in 1781, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm
published the famous text in Prussia entitled Über die bürgerliche Emanzipation der Juden,
where he argued for a granting of equal rights to Jews. After his death, Frederick’s Kingdom of
Prussia became one of the first German-speaking nations to grant emancipation to the Jews in
1812.
Finally, Richard Wagner (born in 1813) fought with musket and grenade in hand during the 1849
Dresden uprising, in order to bring democracy to the German nations. In the aftermath of the
German Revolutions of 1848-1849, he wrote essays in which he described his revolutionary
ideology as “communism [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2017/01/richard-wagner-communist-after-
all.html] ”. On the 27th of March of 1882, a year before his death, Wagner’s second wife noted in
her diary that when he was asked if he were a “liberal, democrat” he unequivocally answers,
“Ja”. Wagner’s actual words were never quoted like those of Luther’s to the point of becoming
omnipresent throughout National Socialist Germany, but a similar “perversion” of Wagner’s
thoughts into “self-deception” can be shown to have occurred, as it had with Luther’s.
Sir Richard J. Evans writes of Wagner’s role in defending a fledgeling German democracy in
1849:
... democratic deputies now formed a new Saxon government,

and revolutionaries flocked to its defence from outside the city.
Among those who mounted the barricades was the Court music
director Richard Wagner (1813-83), who had come under the
influence of the ideas of Proudhon and Feuerbach and saw
revolution as a way of creating the ideal conditions in which to
achieve his mission as a universal artistic genius. Enthused by
the uprising, he declared optimistically: ‘The old world is ruins
from which a new world will arise; for the sublime goddess
REVOLUTION comes rushing and roaring on the wings of the
storm’.
Sir Richard J. Evans: The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914
[https://www.amazon.com/Pursuit-Power-Europe-1815-1914-ebook/dp/B01HCDNPS6/] ,
p.210-211.
That means the suggestion that either Luther, Frederick, or Wagner were in any way
“forerunners” of Hitler is abject propagandist nonsense. The desire to run a wilful polemic against
any of these figures is insufficient justification to justify accepting the wanton rewriting of German
history to suit the ends of Nazi propaganda. Hitler did not stand on the shoulder of giants. On
the contrary, he was merely pushing his own petty little ideas that were the conditional by-
product of imminent sociopolitical catastrophes wrought by the death of millions in the Great
War: civil war, the unleashing of destabilising political violence on the streets
[https://www.amazon.com/Vanquished-First-World-Failed-1917-1923-ebook/dp/B01H6CT1CM] , the
humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles that instantly put the German economy into recession, after
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which hyperinflation made money worthless, before finally the roller coaster
search ride of social
destabilisation was all capped off by the coup de grace of the Great Depression.
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The Great War unleashed a whole series of socially destabilising political calamities onto the streets that had
nothing to do with long-dead poets and philosophers
In actuality, in order for the art historian to understand any work of art, the wider socio-historical
context into which the artwork was born must first be thoroughly understood. If you
misunderstand the historical context, you misunderstand the art. On the other hand, it is hardly
acceptable to rewrite world history in order to propagandise for a polemical view of an artist or
writer—whether poet, composer, dramatist, theologian, political or philosophical thinker. Yet that
is exactly what happens time and time again with Nazi opera fantasies, which do unspeakable
violence to history in maliciously rewriting it from a grossly reductivistic perspective.
Furthermore, Hitler never wished his movement to be seen as atavistic, romantic, and
backwards-looking, but rather as vigorously ultra-modern. This is reflected in the official National
Socialist Party recommended reading list, compiled by Hitler himself. Despite apocryphal quotes
claiming that Hitler stated that “whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must
know Wagner [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2014/02/did-hitler-ever-say-whoever-wants-to.html] ”,
Hitler’s officially published reading list for Party members contains nothing by dead poets and
philosophers. Neither Martin Luther nor Richard Wagner rate any mention. Instead, you find a list
by contemporary authors that includes Henry Ford’s The International Jew, volumes one and
two:

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Books that every National Socialist must know.
“The wall beside his desk in Hitler’s private office is decorated with a large picture of Henry Ford...
In the antechamber there is a large table covered with books, nearly all of which are a translation
of a book written and published by Henry Ford.” New York Times: December 1922
When, instead of writing about the authors listed by Hitler, we get endless self-serving polemics
directed against Wagner, or more rarely, against Martin Luther, it is difficult not to conclude that
going off on such irrelevant tangents merely creates pointless distractions, willfully obfuscating
the real issues at stake.

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When a journalist asked Hitler about the portrait of Ford in his office, he replied:
“I regard Ford as my inspiration”
Quoted from Forced Labor and Ford by Bill McGraw, Detroit Free Press, 1999.
The Nuremberg Laws also drew heavily from contemporary Jim Crow segregation models
[https://www.amazon.com/d/Hitlers-American-Model-United-States-ebook/B01M34L0W0]
Unfortunately, Rauschning and his colourful team of editorial assistants have done too good a
job of producing an anti-Kraut polemical piece with the sort of simplistic emotive appeal typical
of all propaganda, so that even though it has long since outlived its original utility now that the
war is over, it continues to bait gullible amateur pseudo-historians, with all their “dubious
accusatory” petulance (to borrow a phrase from Joachim Fest
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2016/07/wagners-willing-executioner-joachim.html] ) tempered by an
almost narcissistic self-righteousness. Once snared, they find themselves instantly lobotomised
of the critical faculties that might inhibit repeating Rausching’s merry WagnerHitler fabrications ad
infinitum. Alas, neutral academic critical diligence is such a rare luxury that it is unlikely that we
will see any improvement in the situation for some time to come outside of academic
historiographic circles. For such is human nature that blindly emotive expletives trounce deep
critical thought every time.
That is why many will go on insisting that Richard Wagner must continue to be “manipulated”
into a symbol of the Holocaust [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/02/ring-of-myths-by-naama-
sheffi.html] (in the words of Israeli historian, Na’ama Sheffi), as a means of keeping the flame of
the memory of its victims alive. However, to make someone symbolically guilty of a crime, in the
absence of forensically credible evidence, is to make a scapegoat out of them. A scapegoat
always serves to cleanse the accusers of their own profoundest moral failings. In this case, the
grossly reductivistic view that the Holocaust was singularly caused by some nineteenth-century
composer, who was long dead by the time the crime was committed, functions to hide the
profoundly confronting moral and intellectual dilemmas raised by the vastly complex spectre of
the Shoah. Such “gross oversimplification and distortion
[http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-kohler-wagners.html] ” (Sir Ian
Kershaw) of history serves only to obfuscate the truth, rather than to confront us with the fullest
weight of its sobering moral impact.
Posted 12th August 2017 by Sator Arepo

Labels: forerunner, Frederick the Great, Goebbels, Hermann Rauschning, history, Hitler Speaks,
Ian Kershaw, Joachim Köhler, Luther, Mein Kampf, National Socialism, Nazi, Richard J. Evans,
Richard Wagner, Wolfgang Hänel
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Is Racism Just an Instrument of Capitalist

18th February 2017
Imperialism?
If we look at nineteenth century discourse on ethnicity, of the sort we stumble across in studying
the writings of Richard Wagner [http://thinkclassical.blogspot.com/2012/04/book-review-joachim-
kohler-wagners.html] , we find that it is quite different from what we are used to in late twentieth to
early twenty first century discourse. Then as now, the subject is always highly politicised and
divisive.
It is interesting that Wagner was a proponent of Jewish assimilationism. It is an ideology that

emerged at the time of the emancipation of the Jews in the Age of Enlightenment:
In Prussia, where the small Jewish population had doubled... this

new situation produced... the first sustained non-Jewish
argument for emancipation, by Christian Dohm, a professor of
history and friend of the great exponent of Enlightened Judaism,
Moses Mendelssohn. ... Much of the case [Dohm] put forward in
On the Civic Improvement of the Jews rested upon the Jews'
capacity to become happier and more useful members of
society, once there was an end to the oppression ‘so unworthy
of our age’, which had corrupted them. The removal of legal
discrimination, he assumed, would lead to the assimilation of
Jews into Gentile society and the gradual disappearance
of a specific Jewish identity. In place of their ‘clannish
religious opinions’ they would be inspired by patriotism and love
for the state. This would occur as part of a larger transformation
of society as a whole from a hierarchy of estates into a social
structure based upon merit.
Gareth Stedman-Jones: Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
[https://www.amazon.com/Karl-Marx-Gareth-Stedman-Jones-ebook/dp/B01DVEZM04] .
My bold emphasis.
At the time of Wagner and Marx such assimilationism was still within the realms of what
constituted liberal discourse, even though today it has given way to the dominance of a
multicultural discourse of ethnic diversity and tolerance. I, like many of us, had come to accept
multiculturalism as being a priori correct, and thus an eternal truth.
The point here is that we should not discount the whole socialist assimilationist discourse of the
late nineteenth century in which intermixing would eventually result in a universally ethnically
assimilated humanity, however unfashionable that may
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line based on the French Revolution's ideals of liberté, égalité, fraternité found in Beethoven's
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Symphony: Alle Menschen werden Brüder. Make that Geschwister.
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But perhaps, the assimilationist and multicultural discourse are not necessarily mutually exclusive
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A question needs to be asked as to how we arrived at the discourse centred around

multiculturalism, in which the concept of culture itself becomes so prominent in liberal discourse.
In a former age when Marx was far more dominant, such culture-centric (superstructural)
concepts were relegated to being of secondary importance to the socio-economic
(infrastructural) one. Culture-centric discourse was more the realm of right-wing and reactionary
thought [http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/9/14543938/richard-rorty-liberalism-vietnam-
donald-trump-obama] , whereas thinkers such as Marx relegated that to one of secondary
importance.
With that, I am going to re-ask the question whether ethnicity is a fiction that is the mere
epiphenomenon of class conflict. With that, I am effectively asking if the Marxist analysis might
have been right all along. This is not necessarily a dogmatic and utopic acceptance of Marx with
respect to all things, but just with respect to the analysis of ethnicity.
Part of the reason for this is that in American politics, there is a strange emphasis on the concept
of race. Particularly bizarre are the racial lines of demarcation which includes one so-called
"Latino race". It is a racialisation that I have always found irrational and incomprehensible.
If you look at National Socialist discourse on ethnicity, they were quite happy to form strategic
alliances with Franco's Spain or Mussolini's Italy. Yet both Spaniards and Italians are Latin
people. In Spanish bread is pan, and in Italian pane—derivatives of the Latin panem. The
languages are extremely similar, and you could argue that Italians are therefore "Latinos". In
French, the word for bread is pain, as French is also a Latin language. So are the French, who
are also Latins, also Latinos?
Yet people of Italian or French origin are hardly considered Latinos in the American discourse.
That has historical origins. If you look at this quote from the frightfully racist American film, The
Birth of a Nation, you find this usage of the term Aryan:

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The Us-Them division of alterity is between the Nordic Protestant "white" American versus the
Catholic Latins of Southern-Central American. It is a division that has its origins in the hostile
imperialist rivalry between the Catholic Spanish Empire and the Protestant British Empire. The
United States of America too was once at war with Mexico during the Mexican-American war
resulting in the annexation of Texas.
Yet never during the Anglo-Spanish War (1625–1630), part of the Thirty Year War unleashed by
the new political divisions between Protestant and Catholic nations after the Reformation where
such political divisions cast in racial terms. The division of Us-Them was always a sectarian one
between Protestant and Catholic, rather than one of Nordic versus Latin "races".
With the arrival of imperialist conflict to the Americas, suddenly the Protestant-Catholic sectarian
divide came to be racialised along divisions rooted in "blood and soil" (Blut und Boden to use
the original National Socialist terminology). That also took the form of the Irish Catholics being
discriminated against by the so-called white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ("WASP") ethnic majority as
an inferior race of Celtic Catholics in a racialised continuation of age-old imperialist conflicts
between England and Ireland. To this day, only one US president has been Catholic, and that is
the Irish-American president J.F. Kennedy, in an age where the Ku Klux Klan were hostile
towards Catholics. That is why the election of Kennedy as president remains, even after all these
years, an astonishing overcoming of ethno-political and sectarian divisions inherent to American
politics.
So why did Hitler and his German Third Empire (Dritte Reich) not emphasise such Nordic-Latin
divisive racialisations in this American manner? The reason can be partly found in the fact that
Hitler was Austrian by birth. The Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Habsburgs remained
aligned with Rome during the Thirty Year War unleashed by the Reformation. Hitler remained a
tax paying member of the Catholic Church until his death. His political allegiance to fascist Italy
and Spain also precluded emphasising the old Nordic-Protestant versus Latin-Catholic lines of
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division in the American manner. To stand as Leader (Führer) over a united
searchGerman Empire,
Hitler had to try to overcome the Protestant-Catholic sectarian divide between North and South
Germany.
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That is to say, the racialised divisions (or lack thereof) strategically emphasised by National
Socialism were dictated primarily by imperialist political divides in Hitler's Central Europe. The
same can be said of the ethno-political divisions in North America with its origins in imperialist
conflicts between Protestant North America vs Catholic Latin America, leading to the polemical
exaggeration of the Nordic-Latin ethno-racial divisions of conflict between Nordic Protestant
versus Latin Catholic. The political divisions created by imperialist conflict is entirely primary, and
the ethno-racial divide is secondary and derivative. Ethnicity can thus be interpreted as being
almost entirely a fiction created by imperialist political propaganda. The "racial" divisions of
modern America are thus largely a fictional propagandist derivative of the political divisions
engendered by the Thirty Year War.
That means that Marx is right. Political rivalry for dominance is primary, and ethno-cultural divides
are secondary and derivative.
Can this analysis be extended to the black-white tensions in America? The answer is that, yes it
can. There is no such thing as a black or white person. Here is the Revlon skin colour tone chart
to prove it:
ZtPLZxsbT7w/WKNVHyGNrUI/AAAAAAAACn8/AFVVTNYS40sRErKc8y1JAMRhNASNeBZ1QCLcB/s1600/
Revolon%2BColour%2BChart.jpg]
Notice that there is no white or black in there. All human beings have skin tones in shades of
melanin, and even Revlon "ivory" is just another shade of beige. Nobody is plain black or white.
To call someone "as white as a sheet" is hardly a compliment. The starkness of the black-white
duality is entirely a social fiction creating a false dichotomy where none exists.
As for the term "African-American" that too is a social fiction. The human species evolved in
Africa, meaning that each and every one of us comes from Africa. We are all an African species
of more than slightly mad monkey. Mythical narratives that run contrary to this are all entirely
fictional, however much mythos may be the quintessential species characteristic of this strange
African beast.
At this point let us return to Wagner and his idea of the exceptional racial purity of the Jewish
people. Wagner thought that Germans were mongrels, but that only the Jews retained their
exceptional racial purity. Yet that too turns out to be a myth [https://www.amazon.com/Invention-
Jewish-People-Shlomo-Sand/dp/1844676234] :

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Modern historians have questioned the idea of a pure Jewish people from Biblical Palestine. Instead, they
descend from scattered Middle Eastern and Eastern European converts to the religion.
The notion of the "Jewish race", a racially pure breed of God's Chosen People, is just another
social fiction that does nothing to change the fact that we are all part of the same species of
African hominid. If you don't believe this, just watch Donald Trump "go ape" and my point is
proven beyond doubt.
Returning to the principal theme of this discussion, this can only mean that the multicultural ideal
of "tolerance between races" is entirely a nonsense concept. The concept of "race" is entirely a
fiction created by imperialist political conflict trying to give propagandist foundations in "blood" to
socio-political rivalries.
That means that the dualistic black-white racial divide is just a by-product of class conflict.
"Race" is largely a social fiction created by capitalist-imperialism to artificially divide between the
Master Class and the chandala Slave Class. Multi-culturalism preaching a "tolerance" between
black and white "races" only entrenches the fictional notion that such a black-and-white "racial
division" exists at all in the first place, thus helping to perpetuate the very racism that it claims to
seek to eliminate.
A further consequence is the fact that the only way to bridge so-called "racial divides" is to
eliminate the socio-economic divide between Master Class and Slave Class. Unfortunately, the
economic gap in America (and other English speaking nations that have adopted neoliberalism)
between rich and poor is only increasing exponentially. Ethno-culturally based talk of "racial
tolerance" does nothing to improve that, especially given the fact that there has always been the
argument that "race" in and of itself is a racist concept.
It is now time to bring up an unpopular theme oft raised by historians that Hitler was not the
product of everyday level racism at all. That he was a mountebank, an opportunist who
brandished a politicised racism as a cudgel to beat his enemies. As an artist, he gladly sold his
artworks almost exclusively to Jewish art dealers. As a soldier, he gladly took orders from Hugo
Gutmann, his Jewish commanding officer in his list regiment, and by whom he was awarded his
Iron Cross. As a music lover, he was mesmerised by the conducting of Gustav Mahler and
delighted in listening to the Violin Concerto by Felix Mendelssohn, a descendant of Moses
Mendelssohn. Never prior to his political
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Jews in his everyday personal life
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[http://www.porges.net/JewsInVienna/5WasYounghitlerAntiSemite.html] . In Mein
admits that:
Kampf, he even
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In my father's house, I do not recall hearing the word [Jew] at
all during my father's lifetime. I believe the old gentleman would
have seen, in the particular emphasis placed upon this term,
a cultural backwardness.
Im väterlichen Hause erinnere ich mich überhaupt nicht, zu Lebzeiten des Vaters
das Wort auch nur gehört zu haben. Ich glaube, der alte Herr würde schon in der
besonderen Betonung dieser Bezeichnung eine kulturelle Rückständigkeit erblickt
haben.
Mein Kampf: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Munich. 1943 edition; p.54. My translation
The idea that political racism is nothing more than a direct outgrowth of petty everyday racism,
existing on a direct continuity with it, seems to be so obvious to many that when historians even
remotely question this, it comes across to lay people as heresy. That the political is a result of the
everyday socio-cultural sphere seems to be an unquestionable absolute for many. The
underlying assumption is that psychology and culture is the driving force of history.
When examined more critically, the form that politicised racism took in German fascism was as
an attack on "Judeo-Bolshevism". That is to say that the opponents of the right, the Social
Democrats and the Communists, were not authentically German. They were everything that was
allegedly alien and antagonistic to national patriotic identity. The true German character was
right-wing, and left-wing Germans had been lead astray by a foreign thinking seducing Germans
away from their authentic national character written in the blood. Hence Saul Friedländer is right
in describing National Socialist ideology as a "redemptive anti-Semitism", one that constitutes a
polemical attack that aims to confer absolute alterity to anything that was left wing: socialism,
Marxism, democracy, feminism, and tolerance toward the LGBT community. If McCarthyism
attacked "pinko commies" for being "un-American" so too did Hitler attack the left for being
unGerman—hence "Jewish".
In other words, the political dimension of class conflict has primacy, and the ethno-cultural
aspect is but a derivative of that.
Hitler could hardly have incriminated German Jews like his former commander Hugo Gutmann
on the charge of being unpatriotic, but that was hardly the point since racism was but a
propagandist weapon of reaction. Indeed while Gutmann was being wounded in action during
the apocalyptic Battle of the Somme, Hitler was off in the cosy safety of a psychiatric hospital
being treated for psychogenic blindness. His later propagandist attack on the entire spectrum of
the left of politics came first and foremost, the racism being but a subordinate instrument of
belligerence wielded in that struggle. It is questionable as to whether the ills of National Socialism
can be reduced down to the single dimension of "racism" without ending up inadvertently falling
afoul of the wholesale acceptance of the very same racist obsession of placing "race" at the
epicentre of all discourse.

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[https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4fGXbVWkcM0/WKWNi9gMzsI/AAAAAAAACok/JZcozp8n3sgYL-
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"To the German Mother!
12 000 Jewish soldiers fell in the battlefield for the Fatherland
Christian and Jewish heroes have fought together and rest together on foreign soil.
12 000 Jews fell in combat!
The blind wrath of party hatreds does not stop before the graves of the dead.
German women, tolerate it not when the sufferings of the Jewish mother are derided"
A 1920 leaflet published by the Reichsbund jüdischer Frontsoldaten (German Jewish Veterans Organisation)
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uowKAJE4cgI/WKWPWznhS2I/AAAAAAAACow/0GLPhrEM4Jcj_gcE8xTnzGoww0o1-
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Classical 53DQCLcB/s1600/donald-trump-muslim-family.jpg] search
seemingly repeats as the father of a Muslim father whose son died in active service in the US military
speaks before the Democratic Party Congress. The Muslim mother on the left looks almost like the mourning
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mother inSnapshot
the 1920 German pamphlet

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In the absence of credible evidence, to rationalise their politicised racism, fascists had to resort
to cooking up fake news with a whacky conspiracy theory concocting an international Jewish
plot to take over the world under the cloak of a Marxism which had stabbed Germany in the
back causing it to lose the war:
rEEPLzwz4fk/T4uBFTyNJhI/AAAAAAAAAdU/ID6owlTriX0rU6swBIjX_JtXTdnLpuJLgCPcB/s1600/back_sta
b_Jews.jpg]
The German army is alleged to have been "stabbed in the back" during WWI by a conspiracy of "Jew-
commies"
The goal of Bolshevism is Jewish world revolution. They want to

bring chaos to the Reich and Europe, using the resulting
hopelessness and desperation to establish their international,
Bolshevist-concealed capitalist tyranny.
Goebbels in speech delivered in the Sportpalast on 18 February 1943, two weeks
after the catastrophic defeat of the German 6th Army
Fake news and right-wing pseudo-socialism is nothing new, and if a cautionary tale were to be
extracted it could just as much be one of the dangers of conspiracy theories based on gross
misinformation. Richard J. Evans draws precisely that conclusion:

The biggest threat to democracy is the use of conspiracy

theories by governments, who then try to delegitimise opposition
or any independent thought by ascribing them to conspiracies.
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Evans in an interview with the Financial Times [https://www.ft.com/content/1022a0f4-
f9dd-11e6-bd4e-68d53499ed71] .
David Cesarani, in his landmark 2016 book Final Solution [https://www.amazon.com/Final-

Solution-Fate-Jews-1933-49-ebook/dp/B00O8MGVW2] , further displaces ideology from its place of
centrality in driving genocide, by recontextualising events in the context of a vast imperialist war
of expansion, in saying that:
[B]y ignoring the war, Holocaust historians have missed the

single most important thing that determined the fate of the Jews
—more important even than Hitler's anti-Semitism. Hatred of the
Jews was essential to his self-identity, but Hitler also saw himself
as a warrior. ... [I]n his messianic quest to restore German power
he was fanatically committed to avoiding any repeat of the
conditions that engendered the country's collapse [in WWI].
These fixations guided his personal direction of the war...
Since he blamed the Jews for Germany's downfall, once the

Fatherland was again at war Hitler... removed Jews from any
function in society or the economy in which they could sabotage
the war effort or poison morale, ... expelled them from German
living space, and, when that was not possible, liquidated them.
[https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6TLL_FkK6E4/WFFBAN-
bRTI/AAAAAAAACjU/tMi3Ql8RgtIsin_DbDeM9mr8M63fSqzmgCPcB/s1600/Cesarani%2BFi
nal%2BSolution.jpg]
David Cesarani: Final Solution—The Fate of the Jews 1933-49

[https://www.amazon.com/Final-Solution-Fate-Jews-1933-49-ebook/dp/B00O8MGVW2]
Jews were considered not as civilians, but as dangerous Judeo-Bolshevik enemy combatants
and partisans who had to be preemptively taken
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back once again as they had allegedly done in WWI. This preemptive tactical strike against the
Think Classical
Jews was regarded integral to German imperialist military strategy, and the more the tide of the
search
war turned against Hitler, the more it kindled his paranoia that a vast and nebulous Jewish
conspiracy was undermining him. To him it meant that the Final Solution seemed the last
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desperate Mosaic
military trump cardSidebar

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that needed Timeslide

to be played to strategically prevent another defeat at
the hands of "backstabbing Jews".
[https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FXbtR4wf67Q/WKb-
DD7OJAI/AAAAAAAACps/-7hp5fYA5_g7SrnJORfOWL5vCwI3U9kdQCLcB/s1600/Hinter%2Bden%2BFei
nmaechten%2Bder%2BJude.jpg]
"Behind the enemy forces: the Jew"
German imperialist propaganda shows the Allied forces as puppets of the Jews
Again racial ideology alone did not suffice to catapult such pernicious thinking to centre stage of
politics, but for the radicalising effect of imperialist class conflict. Before the Great Depression,
the NSDAP polled at only 3%, but afterwards at 33-37%. It was the socially destabilising impact
of the Great Depression that propelled such monstrosities to the forefront of politics, something
that has repeated itself with the Great Recession.
One of the first things Hitler did after consolidating power was to persecute his political enemies
on the left in makeshift concentration camps: the German Communist Party, the Social
Democrats, then the trade unions. The Jews came only later, and only because they were
supposed to be a nest of Judeo-Bolshevik partisan activity:
First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out –
because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out –
Think Classical
because I was not a socialist; search
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came for the trade
Sidebar
unionists,
Snapshot
and
Timeslide I did not speak out –
because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because
I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out
for me.
Variant of a poem by Martin Niemöller: a politically conservative pastor, and ardent supporter of
the National Socialist regime until falling out of favour by arguing that baptised Jews should be
afforded protection. He was imprisoned in a concentration camp.
In the past, it was thought that the National Socialists were so obsessed with racism that they
sacrificed valuable wartime resource for the sake of an irrational genocide. Today we now know
that plundering Jews for their assets and then working them to near death in concentration
camps as a massive pool of slave labour prior to euthanasia was a vastly financially valuable
resource that helped keep the cogs of the German imperialist war machine turning. Or as
Cesarani says [https://www.amazon.com/Final-Solution-Fate-Jews-1933-49-ebook/dp/B00O8MGVW2]
"military exigencies drove anti-Jewish policies, not the other way around" for it provided another
front in the capitalist-imperialist class war between Master Class and Slave Class, however much
as this was dressed up in the phoney language of "race".
Once again, in our age neo-fascism is functioning the same way within the structures of
twentieth-first century capital, albeit in a different historical context, and in a cosmetically different
outer garb. Walter Benjamin described it perfectly:
The growing proletarianisation of modern man and the

increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same
process. Fascism attempts to organize the ... proletarian masses
without affecting the property structure which the masses strive
to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses
not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The
masses have a right to change property relations. Fascism seeks
to give them an expression while preserving property.
Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
In other words, fascism is a pseudo-socialism that gives vent to just proletarian rage but
redirects this onto minorities and immigrants, so as to preserve the inequitable structures of
capital intact. That is why Trump—the billionaire people's choice of the National Socialist
Working American's Party (NSWAmP)—comes from a real estate background. His is a
redemptive populism preaching a path to a salvation through a renewal of the nationalistic
authenticity of the Volk. It is, in other words, a völkisch pseudo-socialism—a national socialism.
With that, we have at last a translation of the word völkisch, long considered untranslatable into
Think Classical
English. Volk just means people, being related to the English word folk, and
the same way. The Latin word is populus, so völkisch just means populist.
pronounced exactly
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beiter_Erwacht_Nationalsozialismus.jpeg]
"We the workers have awoken!
Vote for the National Socialists on list 2"
In the meanwhile, the NSDAP was being bankrolled by big business as it was the only viable right-wing party
large enough to stand up to the Social Democrats and Communists on the left.
With pseudo-socialism comes pseudo-revolution, which is just a violently reactionary putschism

rebranded as a fake "revolution":
The new empire (Reich) has arisen. It will be consecrated in

blood. The work of fourteen years has been crowned in victory.
We have reached our goal. The German Revolution has begun!
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Think Classical
Goebbels calls the destruction of Weimar democracy, a “revolution” in Vom
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Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei p.254, 33rd Edition, Verlag Franz Eher, Munich 1933
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Steve Bannon even describes his "anti-elitist mission" as being "Leninist"—a mission of a
revolutionary who wants to "bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s
establishment [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/22/steve-bannon-trump-s-top-guy-told-
me-he-was-a-leninist.html] ". Bannon may have been the source of the Stalinist phrase "the enemy
of the people" used by Trump to describe the press, although it originated during the French
revolution when it came to be associated with the Reign of Terror that followed.
Michael Anton, a key intellectual figure within the Trump deep state, and follower of the right-
wing political philosopher, Leo Strauss, tells us [https://theintercept.com/2017/02/16/trump-official-
obsessed-over-nuclear-apocalypse-mens-style-fine-wines-in-40000-posts-on-fashion-site/] :
...my journey toward Trumpism was in many ways a journey

leftward, toward the center. I have jettisoned a lot of conservative
orthodoxy precisely because I think it was not working for the
bottom half, or even the bottom two thirds. It’s ironic or odd or
something that in moving to the left, I get called a fascist and
such.

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cius.jpeg]
Michael Anton: a neo-Straussian ideologue within the Trump deep state
What Anton fails to see is that this fake "journey leftward" is precisely what has engendered a
pseudo-socialist neo-Straussian ideology that represents the repristination of a modernised
fascism that eloquently intellectualises an American Realpolitik promising to "drain the swamp".
Even a former friend, Bill Kristol [https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/827560738109718528?
ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw] , has come to liken Anton to Carl Schmitt
[https://amgreatness.com/2017/02/12/decius-darkness-qa-michael-anton/] :
Well, on the one hand I’m flattered [by the comparison] because
Schmitt was a brilliant man who had the respect of Leo Strauss.
But, of course, that’s not what Bill meant. He meant to insinuate
that I am a Nazi. I’ve known Bill for more than 20 years and
always liked and respected him. That was about the lowest blow
I’ve ever taken from a “friend,” however, and I don’t know what
to make of it.
Michael Anton: quoted in Decius Out of Darkness

Think Classical
[https://amgreatness.com/2017/02/12/decius-darkness-qa-michael-anton/]
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mittLeoStrauss_Meier.jpg]
Anton has been compared to Carl Schmitt, German philosopher, jurist, political theorist,
professor of law and crown jurist of the Dritte Reich, who also gave an intellectual outer buffing
of respectability to German fascism.
It is as Michael Rosen [http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.com/2014/05/fascism-i-sometimes-fear.html]

has put it:
I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.
Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you...
It doesn't walk in saying,
"Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments,

transportations, war and persecution."

Well-meaning cultural leftists who think that the best way to counter such Alt-Right neo-
Think Classical
Straussian ideology is to continue preaching ethnocultural tolerance towards one's neighbours
search
irrespective of "race or creed", thinking this alone will suffice to oppose the Alt-Right. They are
setting themselves up for yet another crushing defeat by severely underestimating their
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not to say Sidebar
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culture-centric approach of identity politics is bad, but
rather that its excessively naive simplicity blinds us from seeing what is primary to inflaming
brutal social conflict. In fact, the rise of a new racist far right is precisely due to the catastrophic
failings of cultural liberalism that brought culture-centric ideologies like postmodernism and
identity politics to the forefront of liberal discourse, in contrast to a previous age which saw
culture-centrisms as being reactionary.
With the postmodernist "linguistic turn" it meant that if you learned to speak politically correct
language, linguistically inculcated Good-Speak and Good-Think would lead history down the
path to Utopia, since culture and language create the world: for nothing exists outside of
language. While post-modernist pseudo-liberalism busied itself with its culture-centric agenda
[http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/2/9/14543938/richard-rorty-liberalism-vietnam-donald-
trump-obama] , the right pressed forward unrelentingly with its neoliberal economic agenda
culminating in income disparities reaching levels ever more reminiscent of the age of Charles
Dickens [https://www.amazon.com/d/Capital-Twenty-First-Century-Thomas-Piketty-ebook/B00I2WNYJW]
. The left has lost its way, and this has encouraged the explosive eruption of neo-fascism.
That is why for all of the imposition of the language of politically correct Good-Speak, the cultural
left has done nothing to prevent the explosive rise of a neo-fascist far-right in America. It is not a
reflection on the specific moral character of Americans, but rather a reflection on the social
impact of the Great Recession, with its gross acceleration of the development of further inequity.
Thomas Piketty has just shown that the disparity between rich and poor has never been greater
[http://piketty.blog.lemonde.fr/2017/01/11/wid-world-a-new-approach-to-inequality/] :

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This is what is driving brutal social conflict in America (and around the world). You can preach
political correctness to thy neighbour till the cows come home and it will be to no avail, and if
this trend continues, the social conflict will soon reach a severity reminiscent of Weimar
Germany. That is why the culture-centric agenda of post-modernism—with its "linguistic turn"
spinning around itself like a dog chasing its own tail in a linguistic solipsism where "all is but mere
words"—must now be declared a minor post hoc addendum and failed byproduct of modern
capital.

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/Foucault%2Band%2BNeoliberalism.jpg]
Foucault and Neoliberalism [https://www.amazon.com/Foucault-Neoliberalism-Daniel-
Zamora/dp/1509501770]
Postmodernism not only failed to confront neoliberalism but was complicit with it
Washington has not been so politically divided since the 1860s, a period of social conflict that
culminated in the American Civil War. It is the same extreme political polarisation, leading to
extreme stress on the democratic systems of checks and balances, that caused the collapse of
Weimar democracy. Or to once again quote Sir Richard J. Evans
[https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/14/richard-evans-interview-holocaust-denial-film] :
“You can put quotes by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda

chief, about what he called the Jewish lying press and how it
would be closed down when the Nazis came to power, side by
side with quotes by team Trump and they look almost exactly
the same,” he says. Like Trump, Hitler chose to rule with a team
of close allies. The democratic roots of the Weimar Republic
were also much deeper than is often assumed, which means a
secure democracy such as America could be similarly
vulnerable. The most worrying question in America, says Evans,
is: “Are the institutions going to stand up to the assault they are
being subjected to?”
Though we truly live in terrifying times, none of what seemed to suddenly loom before us formed
overnight. It is just the emergence of a vast iceberg that has taken decades to form, of whose
which only a tip could previously be gleaned. It is the culmination of an entire epoch, and it is
difficult not to feel like we heading on the Titanic straight towards that iceberg. While nobody has
a crystal ball to foretell the future, assuming such a predetermined future even exists, if we are to
avert the worst we must anticipate the worst
[http://international.sueddeutsche.de/post/157058066625/we-have-at-most-a-year-to-defend-american] .
If we fail to expect the worst, then we will all be the foolish victims of having been too naively
optimistic [http://www.zeit.de/wissen/geschichte/2017-02/adolf-hitler-chancellor-appointment-
anniversary/komplettansicht] . ForDynamic
it was Views
the hubris of invulnerability
theme. Powered by Blogger.in the face of the looming
iceberg that sunk the Titanic.

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Labels: Mosaic
capitalism, Sidebar
class
Carl Schmitt, Snapshot
conflict, Timeslide
fascism, Final Solution, Goebbels, Hitler,
Holocaust, imperialism, Leo Strauss, Marx, Michael Anton, postmodernism, racism, Richard
Wagner, Walter Benjamin
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2022/11/8 22:26 Think Classical: Search results for Richard Wagner

Think Classical search

Amazon Kindle eBook edition [https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Iron-German-Empire-

Publisher : The History Press (14 January 2021)

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Think Classical search

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What does Wehler come up with to replace Bonapartism as a

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Evans, Richard J. Rereading German History: From Unification to

example, there isSnapshot

A few decades ago, historians searching for the longer-term roots of

But if there was no domestic ‘special path’ [Sonderweg] from unification

Baranowski’s story begins in the mid-1880s, when Bismarck reluctantly

Evans, Richard J: The Third Reich in History and Memory

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Katja Hoyer’s well-researched and well-written book is the best

the Great War, and

Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny

and geopolitical Sidebar

Much to Hoyer's credit, the post-Sonderweg approach naturally leads to an avoidance of

Genocide was immanent in the conversation of German society. It was

Tampke, Jürgen. A Perfidious Distortion of History: the Versailles

Dr Förster sent us an invitation for the founding of an antisemitic

Cosima Tagebuch: p672 Sonnenabend 22ten Januar 1881. My own translation.

Note that in Stefan Breuer's book, Die Völkischen in Deutschland [https://www.amazon.de/Die-V-

For those unaccustomed to thinking of Wagner as a Communist, in 1850 he also wrote of

While assimilationism is no longer considered compatible with our 21st-century post-Shoah

the decades after the 1848 Revolutions, is Hoyer's

There will be no remedy except through that of a European Federal

Constantin Frantz: Open Letter to Richard Wagner

the political actualitiesTimeslide

There is no doubt that without Cosima and her accomplices, the

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HILMES, Oliver. Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth

HILMES, Oliver. Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth. Yale University

...the radical liberalism of [Wagner's] early years was airbrushed out of

HILMES, Oliver. Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth

is that she Snapshot

deftly navigates theTimeslide

Posted 5th May 2021 by Sator Arepo

The Longue Durée of German Intellectual

Heidegger) is well covered by the great Cambridge Professor, Sir Richard

For another critical account (by a brilliant post-Marxist historian)

Lastly, the commentary by Ryback in "Hitler's Private Library" is very

Posted 18th February 2021 by Sator Arepo

1st January 2021 Happy New Year 2021

Posted 1st January 2021 by Sator Arepo

Labels: COVID, history, socioeconomics, Spanish Flu

22nd April 2019 Depressing History

The American Axis and its Influence on

worth reading. Sidebar

the message Timeslide

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Think Classical search

It is no coincidence that Donald Trump's motto is thus "America First".

WWI and the Great

In a sense, Donald Trump is Dynamic

term "proto-fascism" assumes Sidebar

far too much Timeslide

Authoritarian approaches and populism are rising but

Posted 10th December 2018 by Sator Arepo