The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Jews were not specifically mentioned, which helps explain why the move caused little public fuss at the time. Besides, in preceding decades German Jewry had moved step by painful step towards full civic equality, so that the new law simply removed the remaining restrictions, in the north at least. Two years later, after Prussia’s victory over France, the northern states as well as the southern ones like Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg were absorbed into the newly proclaimed Reich and the 1869 law became valid throughout Germany. Thanks to the flourish of a pen combined with Bismarck’s drive for national unity all ‘Jews in Germany’ thus became, on paper, fully fledged ‘German citizens of Jewish faith.’ Thousands of them had, in fact, already had the ‘privilege’ of serving in the war against France, just as, some four decades later, tens of thousands more would march off to fight for Kaiser und Vaterland in the First World War. German Jews and Gentiles, it seemed, could now die and live together on an equal footing. ‘There is’, declared the noted Jewish writer and lawyer Isidor Kaim in 1869 with misplaced optimism, ‘no longer any Jewish question.’1

  This is no place to attempt a thorough account of the age-old hostility to Jews, but without offering at least a background sketch the tale told here would lack perspective. Like a killer whale, antisemitism rears up and sinks from view in the Wagner family saga but it is rarely far away. Were the Wagners in general and Richard in particular specially responsible for the events that led to the Holocaust? Should one speak of ‘Wagner’s Hitler’, the title of a fairly recent German book,2 as though the Führer’s drive to destroy the Jews was a largely inevitable product of the Master’s antisemitism? Or can one fairly talk only of ‘Hitler’s Wagner’, implying that because he loved Wagnerian music drama the Führer was instinctively drawn to the family and the Bayreuth festival, no less but no more? Although the Wagners’ involvement with Hitler belongs to later chapters, it is high time to look more closely at the hostility Richard and Cosima felt for Jews long before the Führer was born. Where did it come from? What caused it? How ‘special’ was it?

  Already in pre-Christian times Jews were pilloried by Greeks, among others, for believing in one God. With the rise of the church, they were branded all but indelibly with the stigma of Christ’s crucifixion. The diaspora, in which Jews became dispersed far beyond Palestine, was interpreted as a sign of divine punishment, fulfilling the Biblical prophecy that ‘the Lord will scatter you from one end of the earth to the other … and among those nations you shall find no rest.’ In Europe even Jews sometimes found rest, but never for long. They were routinely massacred by crusaders travelling east to ‘liberate’ the Holy Land; like other ‘heretics’ they were tortured by the Inquisition; and they were expelled from (but later usually readmitted to) one country after another. Forbidden to own land or join craft guilds, they struggled to survive by begging, trading and especially by lending money at interest, an activity banned to Christians. Most had to live in ghettos, and as early as the thirteenth century many were forced to wear a yellow star, one of the vile traditions the Nazis revived.

  That the Jews survived at all seems amazing. Some survived well – court Jews, for instance, whose skills in finance and organisation European rulers keen to raise armies or build palaces could ill afford to shun. These privileged Jews in turn often helped win better conditions for their less fortunate brethren. A long and faltering ‘march out of the ghettos’ began, not just physically but mentally, as Jews, egged on by intellectuals like Moses Mendelssohn in Germany, began to explore the broader culture on whose fringes they had subsisted for so long. All that was under way when the 1789 French Revolution with its ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ ideals gave a mighty boost to the cause of Jewish emancipation, first in France and then further afield as Napoleon brought one part of Europe after another under his control. In Germany many ghetto walls were literally hammered down by French forces, but that alone did not bring German Jews equality, let alone fraternity with other Germans. Emancipation was only won bit by bit, and was often accompanied by a violent backlash.

  The process of emancipation coincided with two other huge upheavals: the drive for a united Germany and the industrial revolution. The latter brought particular benefits to many Jews (though far from all). It is easy to see why. For generations they had had to be quick-witted, daring and adaptable to survive. The financial, trading and entrepreneurial skills they had honed were just the ones now most needed in a German economy growing and changing with bewildering speed. Traditionally excluded from the craft guilds, Jews were mainly insulated from sectors that now had the biggest problems to adapt. Concentrated in towns and cities because they had been banned from owning land, they were now at the heart of the action. They thus seemed peculiarly representative of all that was ‘modern’ – in the sense of rootless, flashy, ‘on the make’ – to Germans who had lost out from the new economy or who still lived from the soil. This perception was not changed by that formal step to full emancipation that emerged in 1869. If anything, resentment of Jewish success became more intense, and this in turn coincided with a surge of national pride over the birth of a united Germany. No matter that Jews, through business and on the battlefield, had helped bring the new Reich about. For many Germans they remained outsiders who had somehow managed to win a place on the inside track.

  Suppose that after unity the economy had steadily done well and prosperity, flanked by the social security measures that Bismarck introduced, had spread to most Germans. Might the hostility to Jews have faded, or might future catastrophe at least have been avoided? In 1871 the number of Jews in the Reich totalled only 512,000, just 1.25 per cent of the population. Although the numerical figure steadily rose (to a peak of well over 600,000 before the First World War), the overall number of Germans grew faster still, so that the proportion of the population who were Jewish dropped to less than one per cent and stayed there. Reason suggests that the Jews were far from becoming an unmanageable minority, especially since they were now citizens with full rights and duties, but then reason plays little role in this tale. It was not statistical evidence that bothered those with fears and grudges back in 1871, let alone later. It was the prominence of Jews in influential fields, especially finance, trading and the press, against an age-old background of religious bigotry and superstition.

  For two years after unification the economy boomed unhealthily, fuelled by ‘the sky’s the limit’ euphoria and by five billion francs in war indemnity extracted from the French. Then in 1873 the stock market crashed and the country plunged into recession. A scapegoat was sought and easily found in the Jews – or rather, in international Jewry, which the Prussian historian Heinrich von Treitschke claimed had gained a stranglehold on Germany without having any real stake in the nation’s future. Treitschke’s nationalist, authoritarian theses, presented in undeniably elegant prose, had a special appeal to intellectuals who claimed to despise rabble-rousers. Wilhelm Marr, on the other hand, prided himself on touching the nerve of the masses. A journalist and troublemaker generally held to have coined the word ‘antisemitism’, Marr published his influential Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum (The Victory of Jewishness over Germanism) in 1869 and simultaneously founded a movement called the Antisemiten Liga (League of Antisemites). A year earlier Adolf Stöcker, the eloquent Protestant chaplain at the Imperial Court, had formed a Christlich-soziale Arbeiterpartei (Christian-Social Workers’ Party), intended mainly to woo support away from the growing ranks of the newly founded Social Democrats. Stöcker failed in that aim, but he gained broader backing when his speeches became overtly antisemitic. A petition organised in 1880 by one of his allies, Bernhard Foerster, urging that the influence of Jews in Germany be curtailed and Jewish immigration restricted, quickly won 225,000 signatures. One of those pressed to sign was Wagner. That he refused has since been widely counted in his favour, and even interpreted as a sign that in his last years the Master was becoming less intensely antisemitic. The matter is not as straightforward as that, a
s we shall see.

  Treitschke, Marr and Stöcker were just three of the prominent Germans fanning hostility to Jews in the new empire. Scores of other writers and agitators joined in, often flaunting the pseudo-science of racial degeneration set out most thoroughly back in the 1850s by the French diplomat and ethnologist, Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau, in his four-volume Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races). Gobineau himself did not despise Jews but, despite the impact of post-revolutionary emancipation, many of his countrymen did – including some of the most prominent ones. A historic strain of French intellectual antisemitism included such famous figures as Voltaire and Diderot, just as a German one covered Fichte and Kant. Similarly, antisemitism stayed rife throughout the Habsburg empire despite laws in the mid-nineteenth century giving Jews greater rights. In the Russian empire (which included much of Poland), repeated pogroms forced some million and a half Jews to flee for their lives between 1880 and 1914 alone, many to America. Compared to the ever-threatened Ostjuden (Jews in the east), most German Jews felt fairly secure. It is easy in retrospect to see how false that feeling was. But despite the hostile clamour, differences between and within the German antisemitic parties helped ensure that before the First World War no laws were passed to repeal Jewish emancipation. Many Jews thought that with time the sound and fury would blow itself out.

  On the face of it that judgement was rational, but it was made in relation to a scourge that, whatever the modish scientific jargon being used to justify it, was irrational through and through. Jews who for centuries had mainly been viewed as inferior if not subhuman suddenly came to be regarded as creatures of infinite cunning, pulling all manner of international strings behind the scenes. If they stuck together they were held to be clannish, if they tried to assimilate they were accused of unhealthy infiltration. If they took insults quietly they were said to grovel, if they stood up for themselves they were ‘getting too big for their boots’.

  This inconsistency was served by an imprecise vocabulary. Marr came up with the word Antisemitismus because it had a scientific ring likely to be more widely acceptable than the old-fashioned but far more explicit Judenhass (hatred of Jews). Strictly speaking, his choice of word was inaccurate, since Arabs as well as Jews are Semites and Arabs were surely not the intended target. This imprecision did not stop the word catching on so far beyond its inventor’s wildest dreams that it has become virtually impossible to avoid using it. Something of the same goes for Arier and Arisch (Aryan). Thanks to misappropriation by racists the words have become widely identified with Nordic supermen, rather than with their correct meaning of a prehistoric people (and group of languages) originating in Persia and northern India.

  Even the word Jew is subject to manifold definition, ensuring that it is often unclear just who is meant. Karl Lueger, the antisemitic mayor of Vienna in the late nineteenth century, famously solved the problem to his own satisfaction. ‘Wer Jude ist bestimme ich’ (I decide who is a Jew), he declared. That is clear, at least. The Nazis took much the same line, although in doing so they put up a thicker smokescreen of pseudo-science. Under their Nuremberg racial laws of 1935 (and subsequent ‘clarifications’) they claimed to have identified degrees of Jewishness mainly according to blood heritage. People with at least three ‘fully Jewish’ grandparents, for instance, were regarded as undilutedly Jewish and therefore a particular danger to the ‘pure German race’; those with one Jewish grandparent as less harmful Mischlinge (hybrids) of the second degree. But how were ‘fully Jewish’ grandparents to be defined? Lamely, the Nazis here felt forced to abandon their sham precision on blood and race, identifying these forebears simply by their membership of the Jewish religious community.

  So it was that when Wagner first went public (albeit under the pseudonym K. Freigedank) with his Das Judentum in der Musik in 1850,3 he was working within an ancient and pernicious tradition. Even the specific application of antisemitism to music, rather than to religion or politics, was not unheard of. At the very start of his article in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (New Journal for Music), Wagner noted that there had recently been a set-to over a piece in the same periodical mentioning ‘Hebraic artistic taste’. He now proposed to get to the root of the matter. There followed a stream of unproven statements, non sequiturs and insults. Wagner stated flatly that any contact with Jews brought ‘instinctive repulsion’, that Jewish speech sounded like a ‘creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle’ and that the only music Jews could offer, that of the synagogue, was characterised by ‘gurgle, yodel and cackle’. Taking a backhanded swipe at Heine, whose work and ideas he had once seen as a model, Wagner grandly but vacuously claimed that the poet (long since a convert to Protestantism) was ‘the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the evil conscience of our civilisation’.

  Buried among the vituperation, though, lurked one point of substance: that since Jews had so long lived only on the fringes of other cultures, they had been unable to produce music (or indeed any art) that tapped and reflected those cultures at the deepest level. It is of course true that no Beethoven or Goethe had emerged directly from the ghettos, but beyond that insight Wagner got onto shakier ground. Citing the case of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (Moses Mendelssohn’s grandson), he sought to show that even converted Jews of real talent and taste could at best produce only well-finished, diverting work, not great art. This amounts to a racist argument in embryo. although Wagner did not identify it as such.

  One can argue about Mendelssohn’s artistic stature, even about Heine’s. But that aside, it evidently did not strike Wagner that the freeing of Jews from their age-old ghetto restrictions might, and indeed soon did, bring an upsurge in the arts and sciences (from Mahler to Freud, Schoenberg to Einstein) all but unmatched in history. He did get as far as charging that Jews, backed by their kind in finance and the press, were becoming increasingly dominant in music; but that, he explained, was because the art of music itself had been in a parlous state since Beethoven. Naturally Wagner exempted his own music from this charge; indeed, it was precisely his kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that he believed would reverse the decline. Meanwhile, though, Jews had won success by purporting to slake the thirst of bored audiences with ‘sips of Art’, and one famous opera ‘tone-setter’ had made this stultifying process the task of his life. Wagner disdainfully (or diplomatically?) gave no name, but his readers easily guessed who was meant – the Master’s erstwhile mentor Meyerbeer.

  After this doom-ridden onslaught, it comes as a shock when in a last brief paragraph Wagner suggests there is hope after all. Like a conjurer drawing a rabbit from a hat, he produces the writer Ludwig Börne (born Löb Baruch in Frankfurt in 1786), a converted Jew who played a key role in that revolutionary Junges Deutschland movement that had influenced the young Wagner. The final passage, often partly or even wrongly quoted, needs giving in full with Wagner’s own italics:

  From out of his isolation as a Jew, [Börne] came among us in search of redemption: he failed to find it and was forced to realise that he would only do so when we ourselves were redeemed as true human beings. But for the Jew to become human with us is tantamount to his ceasing to be a Jew. This Börne achieved. But Börne in particular teaches us that this redemption cannot be achieved in ease and cold, indifferent complacency but costs – as costs it must for us – sweat, want, anguish, and an abundance of suffering and pain. Join unreservedly in this self-destructive and bloody battle, and we shall all be united and indivisible. But remember that one thing alone can redeem you from the curse which weighs upon you: the redemption of Ahasverus – going under!

  The word Wagner actually uses at the very end is Untergang, which is often rendered into English here as destruction. It can mean that at a pinch, but tends to imply a more gradual process, like the sinking of the sun or the decline of the West. If Wagner had wanted a still more drastic last word he had plenty of options. Even leaving that point aside those last two lines can bring a chill to the spine, especial
ly after the Holocaust; but are they really as savage as they at first seem? Wagner himself had second thoughts about the penultimate one and in his reissued version of 1869 he dropped the reference to a bloody battle, one of the few places in the whole article where he softened the original text. The later passage reads ‘Join unreservedly in this work of redemption that you may be reborn through the process of self-annihilation.’ That is still a repulsive statement, but it does suggest that the ‘going under’ Wagner refers to is of the kind he claims Börne went through by blotting out all in himself that was Jewish. Given the context it is hard to argue convincingly, although some scholars do try, that Wagner is here calling for the physical annihilation of the Jews.

  It is not only the Jews who, according to Wagner, have hard work to do. He emphasises this with his italicised ‘when we ourselves were redeemed as true human beings’ and his later reference to ‘as costs it must for us’. What he seems to have in mind (‘seems’ is a word much needed in connection with Wagner’s prose) is some kind of transformation of the whole of humankind, presumably within a new society in which his own art would play a major role. This transformation, he indicates, is hard enough for Gentiles to achieve but it is still tougher for Jews, who are coming, as it were, from further behind. But he evidently believes it is feasible all the same. It is worth stressing that Judentum was one of those works Wagner wrote just after he fled Germany into exile. Despite the failure of the Dresden uprising, he still firmly believed at that stage that revolution was possible in art, politics and society. Seen in that context, his Judentum tract might almost be construed as pointing the stony way to the brotherhood of man.

  Almost but not quite. That last nebulous paragraph about redemption is too flimsy to counterbalance all the spite that has preceded it. After the salvos of animosity, the final lines have about them the air of an afterthought. Nor is it clear just what Wagner thinks Jews must do to ensure their Jewishness is wiped out, and the reference to Börne does not help. If Börne is considered by Wagner to be saved why not the now-slighted Heine? Apparently conversion alone is not enough. Besides, when Wagner republished the article as a pamphlet nearly two decades later, he included with it a text called Aufklärungen über das Judentum in der Musik (Some Explanations about Jewishness in Music) in the guise of an open letter. Here assimilation is only one conceivable solution he mentions to ‘the Jewish problem’. He writes that ‘Whether the downfall of our Culture can be arrested by a violent ejection of the destructive foreign element I am unable to decide, since that would require forces with whose existence I am unacquainted.’4 He does not say he is against violent ejection, just that he does not know how it could be done. Would he prefer that solution to ‘redemption through assimilation’ if it were possible? He does not say.