Wagner prisms: Romanticism/Modernism, Fascism/Nazism/Communism
Laon
that Romanticism is a direct ancestor of Nazism. I probably went into
Mosse's argument in more detail than was entertaining, but it's
generally agreed, by other writers promoting this idea, that Mosse's
case was the strongest and most convincing in this line. And it struck
me, as I went through his proffered evidence, how remarkably flimsy it
really was.
I'll just add two other points before leaving Mosse. First, it's worth
considering how he fitted Wagner into his framework. On page 101 of
Mosse's _Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism_
(Howard Fertig, New York, 1978) Mosse said that Wagner was more racist
than Paul de Lagarde, and added that Wagner "stressed the Aryan blood
strain". This seems odd, because the word "Aryan" only occurred twice
in the eight volumes of Wagner's complete essays, in both cases used
correctly about a language group and never about a supposed Aryan
"race". Nor did Wagner think that Germans were a race, or stress ideas
about "blood". Mosse's claim was pure fantasy.
Mosse then claimed that _Das Judentum_ had argued that "Jewish blood
was inherently incapable of plumbing the depth of the Aryan soul".
Here the idea seems to be that since the essay is indefensible, it's
okay to make up any old claim about what it said. The essay is indeed
indefensible, but it never mentioned Jewish "blood", and it said that
Jews could and should become part of mainstream culture. Nor did
Wagner say anything in that essay, or anywhere else in his work, about
the "Aryan soul".
Mosse's discussion of Wagner continued in that vein, either with a
fantastic disregard for accuracy, or an intention to mislead. On page
103 he wrote:
"_Lohengrin_ and _Parsifal_ are both based upon the myth of the Holy
Grail - the vessel that caught drops of Christ's blood as he died on
the Cross. The "holy blood" of Christ, which constitutes a central
element in the Easter myth, is in the custody of German knights. They
guard it with their swords and through their moral purity. The blood
myth was old, and, as we shall see, had been used against the Jews in
accusations of ritual murder. Here it was used positively to
demonstrate that the German had inherited the mantle of Christ. The
Saviour was indeed severed from his historical Jewish origins and
entrusted to the custody of the superior race. The mythology of race
had been fused with Christianity in order to define the eternal
property of the German nation, its purity of blood."
Two things strike me about this passage. The obvious one is the fact
that Mosse clearly doesn't know anything about either _Parsifal_ or
_Lohengrin_. For example, what "German knights"? What "superior race"?
What "purity of blood"? What "German nation"? Montsalvat is a
community in Spain, that seems to contain some chaps from Cornwall, a
bloke from Arabia, and probably a lot of Spaniards. There may be some
Germans in Montsalvat, since the community seems to take people from
all over, but if so Wagner didn't bother to mention them. There is
indeed a "mythology of race" at work here, but it's Mosse's myth, not
Wagner's.
The second thing that struck me is Mosse's jump from the myth that
Jesus's blood was caught in the Grail cup to "the blood myth". The
"blood myth" is an antisemitic Medieval (and regrettably current)
excuse for hatred, extending to murder, of Jews. The myth of Jesus
bleeding on the Cross, and some of his blood being caught in the
Grail, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any form of the
"blood myth". Mosse's conflation of the two was an excuse to
rhetorically link the "blood myth" with _Parsifal_, though Mosse made
a show of reasonableness by suggesting that Wagner was using the
"blood myth" in a merely "positive" racial-supremacist sense rather
than an actually murderous sense. Mosse's convenient confusion is
either extraordinarily careless or mischievously dishonest.
My final comment on Mosse's treatment of the idea that Romanticism is
a major contributor to the development of Nazism, is to observe that
Mosse revisited this issue more recently, in his _The Fascist
Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism_, Howard Fertig, 1999.
In this book (page 23), Mosse noted that more recent accounts of
fascism and Nazism have stressed its eclectic, opportunistic nature,
but still defended his earlier theory of romanticism as a root of
Nazism. Though he was by then describing it as the Nazis having
coopted aspects of Romanticism rather than Romanticism having formed
Nazism, which is a significant rhetorical step back from the position
he set out in _The Crisis of German Ideology_, back in 1964.
Anyway, the other interesting thing about this later, considerably
more defensive, discussion of Romanticism as a source of Nazism, is
that Mosse now gave only one example of a "Romantic artist" who
influenced the Nazis: Karl May, a writer of pulp fiction, mostly
Westerns, who died in 1912. So that clarifies things. By "the
romantics", we seem to mean things like early twentieth century horse
opera: oh, _that_ Romantic period.
As I say, the thing that has struck me, in going to the sources of the
meme that Romanticism contained the roots of Nazism, is how extremely
flimsy the case turns out to be, on closer inspection.
And that brings me to the end of one part of this topic. Hopefully the
longest section. Anyway, I'll sum up the grounds of the attack on
Romanticism in my next post on this thread.
Cheers!
Laon
Laon
Rempel, of Western New England College. Rempel's argument has the
virtue of making its case clearly and against an identifiable group,
the early German Romantics.
Rempel wrote:
"German Romanticism was different from most of the others. [...] It
was used as a weapon against Napoleonic and French rationalism, as
well as against the revolutionary spirit in general. [...] It became
identified with political reaction and conservative nationalism. [...]
In the German version of Romanticism there was always hostility to the
democratic and republican ideology."
"The organismic theory of the state, which the Romantics developed
[and which Rempel attributed to Schleiermacher in particular], rejects
natural rights and the social contract."
"Novalis in fact developed a 'law of polarity' which found a
combination of monarchy and republic possible. This contradictory
notion was propounded because Navalis [sic] felt there was a great
need for an absolute center of gravity. Monarchy was such a center of
gravity since the king was a being who belonged to humanity and not
the state. This seems to be almost an anticipation of Hitler's
Führerprinzip or leadership principle."
"The German Romanticists developed the cult of aestheticism which was
at once a rejection of reason and an attempt to apprehend unity and
immediacy in one instantaneous act. In this theory the poetical was
the absolutely real. The state was thought of as a work of art. This
notion eventually supplied legitimacy for the acts of a dictator -
particularly a dictator who thought of himself as an artist."
Source: "Reform, Liberation and Romanticism in Prussia", from the
Western New England College Website. The URL is:
http://mars.acnet.wnec.edu/~grempel/courses/germany/lectures/07reform.html
Comment:
The refreshing this about Rempel's piece is that I don't need to make
any specific comments about it. I think that what Rempel said about
German Romanticism in general, and about individual Romantics like
Novalis and Schleiermacher, is far from accurate, but Rempel didn't
tell lies, provide faked or misleading quotations, or any of those
things which till now have turned out to be almost standard practice.
Where people supported their arguments with faked quotes, misleading
citations, flat out falsehoods, and other kinds of shonkiness, I've
commented on this immediately after outlining that person's case. This
is because those things only affect the credibility of that specific
commentator, and not the truth or untruth of the case against
Romanticism as a whole. Therefore we got a lot of discussion of Peter
Viereck, for example.
The amount of discussion also reflects the importance of the
individual's contribution, of course. I'm afraid my opinion of George
Mosse went down as I read more of him, but he's never simply a faker
of quotes and a changer of texts like Viereck. I spent more time on
Mosse than on Viereck because Mosse is more important.
Interim summary
So I'm now in a position to attempt a summary of the case against
Romanticism. The "case", essentially, is the claim that Romanticism
lead to or significantly contributed to the development of Nazism, or
helped to shape the form that Nazism took or its doctrines, or
prepared the way for its rise to power.
I believe that I have convincingly demonstrated that many people
arguing this case have done so in a shonky way. In this summing up I'd
go further, and say that my observation has been that _most_ people
who have made this claim about Romanticism have presented shonky
arguments. Remarkable errors of fact and citation, or apparent
dishonesty, have not been exceptional but rather the norm. Why this
should be so I have no idea; but it is so.
What I want to do now is work out what parts of the case against
Romanticism survive the rebuttal of this or that claim by one
commentator or another, and genuinely need to be addressed. Then I'll
look at the best way to explore those issues.
I started by dividing the case into four categories. The first
category was simple statements that Romanticism was proto-Nazism,
without argument or evidence.
Here I cited two examples from arts catalogues (not a random choice;
I'll discuss why I thought this arts content was significant later). I
also cited examples from the US Right, for example Michael Lind
writing in _Prospect_, a US conservative magazine. Other citations
were provided from the further fringes of the US Christian Right.
I cited a paper by Pat Duffy Hutcheon, presented to the International
Sociological Association in 1996. Hutcheon outlined what he said were
the views of Hannah Arendt. By the way I said that if Hutcheon had
reported Arendt accurately, then Arendt had said some untrue things,
for example claiming that Gobineau had said that Jews were "the lowest
of sub-races". I've since looked up Arendt's discussion of Gobineau,
and she said no such thing in writing. I'm inclined to doubt that she
said any such thing in a lecture either, despite Hutcheon's report. So
it seems that Hutcheon invented the quote, and that's hardly Arendt's
fault. (I'm still no great admirer of Arendt, but I like to keep these
things accurate.)
The second category was fringe whackos. I set up this category not
only for entertainment's sake, but because it's interesting to see how
this meme has spread and become part of the mental furniture for a
number of paranoid worldviews. In this category I cited proclamations
by Lyndon Larouche, an Islamic writer called Harun Yahya, and a sci-fi
hack called David Brin.
The third category involved the assumption that there was such a thing
as a single movement called "Romanticism", a "unitary" Romanticism,
which was a false assumption, but at least tried to indicate what it
was about Romanticism that the commentator thought was somehow
proto-Nazi. Here the selected examples involved conservative
intellectual Isaiah Berlin, historian J G Stern, and theologian Paul
Tillich, giving particular attention to Tillich.
Discussion: The imagined "unitary" Romanticism as proto-Nazi movement
The case against "Romanticism" argued by Tillich, Berlin, Stern and
many others can be summed up as the claim that Romanticism was a
rejection of reason, an embrace of nationalism and authoritarianism,
and a hearkening back to an imagined Medieval past. Nazism was these
things too. Therefore Romanticism paved the way for Nazism.
This form of the attack on Romanticism can be dismissed fairly easily,
for two reasons. First, this form of the case against Romanticism
presumes that there is a single phenomenon called "Romanticism", all
or most of whose members share philosophical and political ideas to
such an extent that any such generalisation can be made. This
presumption is false.
Second, although there is no such thing as one "Romantic politics",
there were many individual political views held, with varying degrees
of enthusiasm, by the actual real Romantics who wrote, painted or
composed in the real world. As opposed to the nameless, faceless,
communal and essentially imaginary Romantics of this formulation.
So for the reason indicated above, it cannot be generalised that
"Romanticism" was proto-Nazi, but it also cannot be generalised that
it was inherently pro-democratic, pro-freedom and so on, either.
However, you can usefully consider the Romantics one by one, taking
the real individuals who were Romantics in one period or other, in one
country or other, on a case by case basis. And if you take the
Romantics on a case by case basis, you will certainly find that more
Romantics endorsed some version of freedom, democracy and
"brotherhood", than endorsed any form of anti-democratic, antirational
Medieval nationalism. I've already provided several lists of actual
Romantics, to illustrate this point. Another list goes: Degas, Burns,
Felicia Hemans, Weber, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Novalis, Stendahl,
Chateaubriand, de Musset, Manzoni, Friedrich, Runge, Marie Corelli.
The fourth version of the case that Romanticism was a proto-Nazi
movement recognises that there was not a unitary thing called
"Romanticism". People with this more sophisticated approach focus
instead on the early German Romantics in particular, and claim that
while the Romantics as a whole may have been enlightened and
Enlightened people, on the other hand the early German Romantics
rejected reason, embraced nationalism and authoritarianism, and
hearkened back to an imagined Medieval past. Here I cited Iam Buruma,
eric Brown, Peter Viereck, George Mosse, and Gerhard Rempel.
This more sophisticated version of the supposed proto-Nazi nature of
Romanticism is the part of the allegation that is actually worthy of a
closer look.
And with that I've come to the end of Part 1 of my survey, which I
announced would be an overview of the claims being made about
Romanticism, and the assumptions about the nature of Romanticism, and
the philosophical and political ideas associated with Romanticism,
that underlie these claims.
The next steps I proposed are:
Step 2: Who makes these claims about Romanticism?
I think I've already given a sort of answer to this question, through
the citations I've presented so far. And I'll give a further summary
when I address Step 4 (see below). So I propose to skip this step, and
proceed directly to Step 3.
Step 3: To what extent are these claims true?
I propose to investigate that question in two ways.
First, to look at the political and "philosophical" writings of key
Nazis like Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg and others, and see to what
extent, if any, the ideas of specific Romantics or Romanticism in
general seem to have influenced their thinking. The measure I intend
to use is a cold, hard, objective one: an analysis of the number of
mentions of individual Romantics, or of Romanticism, and what is said
on each of those mentions. Compared to, for example, Enlightenment
figures, and perhaps also (for realism's sake) to people who were not
artistic or philosophical at all, but who were acknowledged as
influences by senior Nazi figures.
Second, to investigate and set out the basic political views of the
individual early German Romantics, and see whether any of them offered
much that was even potentially of use to Nazi antidemocratic
authoritarianism.
That second part of the project will be of more direct relevance to
Wagner, because it will, I expect, be interesting to see which ideas
found in Wagner can credibly be traced back to the likes of Tieck,
Schleiermacher, Novalis, Schlegel and Schlegel, and so on.
Step 4: What's the agenda?
Finally, we'll look at what interests are served by the idea of
Romanticism as a proto-Nazism. After all this is an idea that has both
right and left-wing backing (though perhaps more from the right); it
is an idea that religious conservatives like, and also people who
think of themselves as avant-garde in the arts. This would seem to be
a rather disparate group. So what's in it for them?
So, the next post in this thread will address Step 3 (To what extent,
if any, are these claims true?) and investigate references to
Romantics and Romanticism in Nazi literature.
Cheers!
Laon
Tauser
When is this entire piece going to be in book form??? I think there is a large
group out here waiting for this with great interest.
Tauser