Bodies of Evidence

Richard Wagner made no secret of his antipathy for the Jews as a social body, regardless of how he might have felt about individuals. From around 1850 to the end of his life he constandy reiterated, both in public and in private, his conviction that 'the Jews' were responsible for all manner of ills afflicting modern European society and culture, above all in Germany. By the time of Parsifal (in the years around 1880) there is ample evidence that Wagner's anti-Semitism had assumed a distincdy racial as well as social dimension, reflecting a similar turn in German anti-Semitism at large. It is quite plausible, in fact, that some racial component had always been present in Wagner's thought (the 1850 essay Judaism in Music certainly suggests as much), while only with the rise, across the latter half of the century, of various new anthropological, biological, evolutionary and historical-demographic theories would this 'innate' racial bias acquire the means of articulating itself more fully. As an outspoken anti-Semite and Germany's most visible cultural figure in the later nineteenth century, Wagner undoubtedly exercised a very real and baleful influence on subsequent generations — and the number of generations dividing Wagner's old age from the rise of German fascism in the 1920s and '30s is very small indeed. Did Wagner's principal legacy — the operas and 'music dramas' — also play a role in the fatal genealogy of modern German anti-Semitism? Do the works 'secredy' enunciate the anti-Semitic agenda so openly and vocally espoused by their author? Despite the Nazis' wholesale appropriation of Wagner's works as centrepieces of fascist culture, their ideological complicity in that culture has been a point of contention; so far, the balance of opinion has tilted in favour of their (relative) innocence. Even among those who have taken it upon themselves to write the history of Wagner's anti-Semitic ideas, some — Leon Stein and Jacob Katz, for example have concluded that this thought left no palpable traces in the dramas or their music. On the other hand, while post-war musicology and criticism were generally eager to rehabilitate the works, if not necessarily the man, Theodor Adorno's Versuch u'ber Wagner (written in the late 1930s and first published in 1952) sowed some seeds of doubt regarding the ideological innocence of Wagner's dramas, drawing attention to elements of anti-Semitic caricature in the roles of Mime and Beckmesser, with their characteristic blend of petty villainy, scheming ambition, self-delusion, highly-strung and generally ludicrous behaviour. (Both characters are ultimately made to pay for these multiple character flaws, either by literal or symbolic execution.) Since then, a number of writers, notably Robert Gutman, Hartmut Zelinsky, and most recendy Paul Lawrence Rose, have pointed to a more pervasive, more sinister element of racist allegory in Parsifal, an allegory supported by the obscurely racist rantings that Wagner appended to his late essay 'Religion and Art' ('Know Thyself and 'Heroism and Christianity', both 1881). Obviously our perception of racist or proto-fascist motifs in the dramas is indelibly coloured by the history of the Third Reich. The images of a pugnacious Teutonic super-hero destined to 'save' the world, volkisch Nuremberg rallies celebrating the heritage of German Kultur, or a quasimonastic Aryan blood-brotherhood dedicated to the preservation of communal purity and