From My 'Commonplace Book,' No. 9: Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner, and Adolf Hitler

There's nothing like a look back at Germany in the 1930s to help us appreciate that things are not as bad as they could be

In  February 1933, just a few weeks after Adolf Hitler was named Chancellor of Germany, the novelist Thomas Mann gave a lecture at the University of Munich on "The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner" (based on an essay of the same name that was to appear shortly thereafter in a Berlin arts journal).[FN1]  Mann, who was by then a major figure – possibly the major figure – in the German arts and literature community (and winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature), adored Wagner's operas, as the essay makes abundantly clear:

"A passion for Wagner's enchanted oeuvre has been a part of my life ever since I first became aware of it and set out to invest it with understanding. What it has given me in terms of enjoyment and understanding I can never forget . . . My curiosity about it has never flagged, and I never tire of listening to it, admiring it, following it . . ."

Much of the essay is similarly admiring, if not downright adulatory: Wagner's work was "elevated . . . far above the intellectual level of all previous forms of music drama"; his operas were "brilliant accomplishments .  . . never before had such complex thoughts, such convoluted emotions, been sung or put into singable form"; Wagner was "one of those musicians who can persuade even the unmusical to listen to music . . . the man who redeemed opera through myth, without peer in his mental affinity with this other world of images and ideas, without peer in his ability to evoke myth and infuse it with new life"; his music "is, in a word, heavenly – and one uses the word without embarrassment, gushing though it may be, in the knowledge that music alone can elicit such an epithet . . . Music such as that which accompanies Siegfried's Rhine Journey, or the lament for the slain hero [in Wagner's Ring of the Nibelungen] had never before been heard. . . .  It is hard to speak of these things when words are all one has to evoke them . . ."

Admiring and adulatory, but not, in Munich in 1933, admiring and adulatory enough.

Mann had dared to include some (gentle) criticism – "misgivings" he called them – regarding Wagner's works.  "What I objected to, right from the beginning – or rather, what left me totally indifferent – was Wagner's theory," i.e., his views, expressed in dozens of prose works, on everything from the nature of artistic creation to the relationship between myth and human psychology, the role of religion in the State, "Jewish music," the essence of socialism, Greek drama, and his own role in perfecting the "Art Work of the Future."  Not to mention a liberal sprinkling of truly repellant anti-Semitism.

There was, as Mann correctly pointed out, a great deal of utter nonsense in all of it; "I cannot understand," he wrote, "how anyone could take it seriously."

And he also pointed out – again, correctly, and insightfully – that Wagner's operas, with all their eroticism and incestuous longings and Oedipal conflicts and death wishes, were "fertile ground for Freudian psychoanalysis, even going so far as to suggest a "most extraordinary intuitive affinity" between Wagner and  "that other characteristic son of the nineteenth century, Sigmund Freud."

This was dangerous stuff in Munich at the dawn of the thousand-year Reich.  Wagner, of course, was already known to be a particular favorite of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime, and his music was already becoming an integral part of the soundtrack of the New Germany. Hitler was fond of saying "Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner," and Joseph Goebbels, another devoted Wagnerian who reportedly had seen over 100 performances of Wagner's Die Meistersinger, made sure that excerpts from Wagner's operas were played over the loudspeakers to the adoring crowds at Hitler's annual Nuremburg rallies and at other gatherings of the faithful.

So for Mann to even hint at an affinity between Wagner and a Jew like Siegmund Freud, or to suggest that the new "Jew science" of psychoanalysis could provide insights into Wagner's operas, was not a viewpoint in synch with the new cultural climate in Munich in 1933.

Virtually every leading figure in the entire artistic and intellectual community of Munich joined together in an Open Letter published on the front page of a Munich newspaper (entitled "A Protest from Richard Wagner's Own City of Munich") attacking Mann for his "aestheticism" and "cosmopolitanism" in having defamed, in their view, the "great embodiment of the German spirit":

"Now that the uprising of Germany as a nation has assumed stable institutional form [sic], it can no longer be regarded as an unwarranted diversion if we now address the public at large in order to protect the memory of that great German Master, Richard Wagner, against defamation.  We regard Wagner as the musical-dramatic embodiment of the deepest German sensibilities, which we will not permit to be insulted by the kind of aestheticizing snobbery that finds such arrogant and pretentious expression in the  addresses delivered by Herr Thomas Mann."[FN2]

Mann, who was out of the country on a lecture tour when the "Protest" was published, received multiple warnings from his children and friends back in Munich: "It is not safe for you here." Heeding their warnings, he stayed in exile abroad; though he lived for another two decades, he never set foot on German soil again.

In 1937 he returned to "the Wagner question" in a speech in Zurich, Switzerland commemorating the 50th anniversary of Wagner's death and a new production of Wagner's complete Ring of the Nibelungen operatic tetralogy at the Zurich Opera.

Mann's speech is one of the saddest and most poignant things I've ever read. By 1937 it had become clear to Mann, as to others, that 1933 had been just the beginning of something ghastly, and that Germany was in the grip of some evil madness of a kind never before seen. Germany! The very pinnacle of Western science and culture! The Germany of Beethoven and Goethe and Hegel, Kant and Heine, Schiller and Schopenhauer and Mendelssohn and Brahms, the Germany whose world-renowned universities were filled with dozens of great scientists and philosophers and thinkers – how could this Germany, Mann's Germany, have gone so terribly – so murderously – wrong?

And to make it all worse, the lunatics in charge of it all claimed that they were taking their cues from Wagner, that they were the inheritors of Wagner's torch, that Wagner and his legacy belonged to them.

 It must have been excruciatingly painful for Mann, who was as German as German could be, to be driven from his home just as the madness was beginning, and to have to watch it happen.

In his speech, Mann insists that Wagner was part of his Germany, not theirs. He derived the true greatness of Germany from what he called the "coming together of the two mighty and contradictory manifestations of the eclectic German spirit," Wagner and Goethe:

"… the Nordic-musical versus the Mediterranean-sculptural, the lowering-moralistic versus the European. Germany as all-powerful feeling and Germany as mind and civilization perfected.  For we, of course, are both: Wagner and Goethe, Germany is both of these.  They are the ultimate names for the two souls within our breast. . ."

He did not have to spell out for his listeners that the Nazis, in their devotion to their version of Wagner-ism, had destroyed the balance by throwing Goethe and that side of the German character completely overboard.

And their version of Wagner was, in any event, a "despicable plagiarism"; they had missed the whole point:

"When I spoke at the beginning [of my talk] of the mischievous abuse to which the great phenomenon of Wagner lends itself, I knew that I would have to come back to this at some stage; for it is impossible to speak of Wagner today without voicing a protest against such abuse.  Wagner as the artistic prophet of a political present that would like to mirror itself in him?  Well, more than one prophet has turned away in horror when he saw his prophecies come true, choosing to die in self-imposed exile rather than be buried in the place where his predictions were realized….

But it would be an affront to the best that is in us to countenance any talk here of 'realization', even in a grotesquely caricatured form.  Volk and sword and myth and Nordic hero-worship: on certain lips these are despicable plagiarisms, purloined from the vocabulary of Wagner's artistic idiom.  By his creation of an art intoxicated with the past and the future, the author of the Ring did not transcend the age of bourgeois culture in order to exchange bourgeois values for a totalitarianism that destroys mind and spirit.  The German spirit signified everything to him, the German state nothing. . .

In the Ring he shows us the evil power of gold, and he leads the lust for power to the point where it turns and renounces its way, so that it cannot choose but to love the free spirit that destroys it.  His true prophecy is … the heavenly melody that rises from the burning citadel of worldly dominion at the end of Gotterdammerung  …"

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One final thought.

To avoid any possibility of misunderstanding, let me make it as clear as I can: I do not think that Donald Trump is Adolf Hitler, or that the Republican Party is dominated by Nazis.  I am aware that 2025 is not 1933. I am not, obviously, Thomas Mann, nor do I have any reason to believe that I will be driven into exile any time soon.

But Mann's predicament, and his response to his predicament, moved me much more than I had expected, resonating far more deeply with me than it would have 10 or 20 years ago. I suspect that is because his situation bears at least a structural similarity to where I find myself these days.

As it happens, I'm writing these words at the very moment the U.S. Senate is - seriously - considering the nomination of a B-List television celebrity to oversee our nation's mighty military armada and nuclear arsenal.  There is a craziness afoot – how else can one explain it?  Our country – the very pinnacle of Western science and culture! – appears to have gone off the rails, to have lost its balance.  It looks, as it looked to Mann, as though one side of what we might call our "national character," one "grotesquely caricatured" version of who we are and what we stand for and why we were great in the first place, has taken power, and views this as an opportunity to rampage through and destroy as many of the pre-existing institutions as they can.  what was a more-or-less well-balanced social order.

I don't know about you, but it certainly makes me think about what the world looked like to people in 1933. And to wonder: What will this moment look like to us three or four years down the road, as we look backwards to 2025? Not, surely, as grim as what Mann was looking at in 1937 - but how close will we be?

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Footnote 1

The essay, and the other writings referenced in this posting, are reprinted in "Thomas Mann: Pro and Contra Wagner" (U Chicago Press 1985).

Footnote 2

The "Open Letter" had over 50 signatories, including Munich's two most celebrated musicians, the composers Richard Strauss and Hans Pfizner; the Musical Directors of the Munich State Opera, the Bavarian State Opera, the Munich Orchestra, and the Munich State Theater;  several government ministers and members of the Reichstag; the President of the Academy of Fine Arts; the publishers of several of Munich's leading newspapers; and dozens of professors at the University of Munich.

And the reference to Wagner's "Richard Wagner's Own City of Munich" is an unintendedly ironic touch. It is true that Wagner spent a considerable amount of time in Munich, largely because it was the seat of Wagner's great patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria.  But in spite (or because?) of that, he detested the city, and the feeling was, for the most part, mutual. The Munich Establishment has always had a very powerful Roman Catholic cast, and they were unified in their disapproval of Wagner's scandalous behavior – which included, for most of the time that Wagner was in Munich, openly cohabiting with Cosima von Bulow, the then-wife of Hans von Bulow, one of Germany's leading orchestra conductors and a man with whom Wagner frequently worked.  Wagner was twice driven out of Munich – once by a coordinated press campaign attacking his extravagant use of public funds, once by angry creditors who had obtained a writ of attachment on his personal property in the city and were seeking an arrest warrant. Wagner, for his part, thought the Münchners small-minded and provincial, unappreciative of his genius; it was why he maneuvered for 20 years or so to ensure that his great Festival would not be held, as the King had hoped, in Munich but in Bayreuth.