25. Bayreuther Kreis

The Program

The work of Wagner’s friend Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 – 1900) was frequently published in Pan-German newspapers. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche introduces one of his most controversial images, the “blond beast”—the Aryan race—which he compares to a “beast of prey,” impelled by a “good,” which is an irresistible instinct for mastery over others. It was through his formulation of an idea related to the blond beast, the Übermensch (“Superman”), that Nietzsche inspired the fascist ideal of the New Man, with an excessive emphasis on male virility. Nietzsche’s revolutionary New Man of the future, the Übermensch or “Superman,” must strip away all values of conventional weak morality, including equality, justice and humility. We must have an Umwertung aller Werte, the “revaluation of all values.” The man of the future must be a beast of prey, an “artist of violence’’ creating new myths, new states based upon the essence of human nature, which Nietzsche identifies as Wille zur Macht, the “Will to Power” being a “a will to war and domination.”

In 1870, Nietzsche hoped to appeal to the anti-Semitism of his idol, the composer Richard Wagner, and his wife Cosima, when he delivered a lecture on “Socrates and Tragedy,” in which he insisted that the “Jewish press” would have a corrupting effect on German art in the same way that the influence Socrates destroyed authentic Greek tragedy. On the contrary, the Wagners felt that Nietzsche had gone too far. While agreeing with the main point he was making, Cosima wrote to Nietzsche that his lecture was “much too new to be understood by the audience” and that it could jeopardize their entire “program.”[1] That “program” appears to have to have been a diabolical ploy, the ultimate chutzpah, to exploit patriotic feelings and foment a German nationalism, that would result in a violent response to contribute to the expulsion of Jews from Europe, and their emigration to Palestine, in service of the Zionist plot to fulfill their interpretation of End Times prophecies of the regathering of the Jews in the Promised Land, in expectation of the return of their “messiah.”

Meyerbeer and Wagner’s relationship was to have major repercussions for the careers and reputations of both. At their first meeting, Wagner read to Meyerbeer from the libretto of Rienzi, which Meyerbeer subsequently recommended for performance at Dresden. However, Wagner turned against Meyerbeer, and his vitriolic campaign against him was to a large extent responsible for the decline of Meyerbeer’s popularity. In reaction, Wagner published Das Judenthum in der Musik (“Jewishness in Music”), published in 1869, which attacks Jews in general and the composers Giacomo Meyerbeer and Felix Mendelssohn in particular. Wagner, however, wrote that Heine “was the conscience of Judaism, just as Judaism is the bad conscience of our modern civilization.” About Börne, in typical Frankist fashion, Wagner explained:

But Börne also teaches how this redemption cannot be achieved in comfort and with indifferent, cold complacence. Rather it teaches us that, as it does for us, it costs sweat, anguish, fears and an abundance of suffering and pain. If you take part ruthlessly in this work of redemption, which regenerates through self-annihilation, we will be united and undifferentiated! But remember that only one thing can be your redemption from the curse that weighs on you: the redemption of the Wandering Jew—downfall! [or “destruction!”][2]

Malwida von Meysenbug—who maintained a network of friends in London belonging to the Carbonari and the Forty-Eighters, and who moved to Bayreuth in 1870 to join the Wagners—invited Nietzsche and his Jewish friend Paul Rée (1849 – 1901) to Sorrento, Italy, in the autumn of 1876. Paul was a second cousin of Anton Rée, the director of the Israelite Free School, led for a time by Eduard Kley of the Hamburg Temple. Although he exercised a formative influence on Nietzsche, Rée is primarily known through his friendship with Nietzsche, rather than as an important philosopher in his own right. According to Theodor Lessing, Rée is a tragic example of the self-hating Jew:

Rée belonged to the wondrous kind of young Jews (very common in those pre-Zionist years) completely dissociated from their rites and heritage, guarding the consciousness of their Jewish origin like a secret affliction, a mark of Cain or disfiguring birthmark. On the other hand, they were too refined to endure the taint of their birth without effects on their psyche.[3]

In Sorrento, Rée wrote The Origins of Moral Sensations, and Nietzsche began Human, All Too Human.[4] Rée rejected metaphysical explanations of good and evil, opting instead for a Darwinian explanation, and argued that our moral sentiments were the result of evolutionary changes that had occurred over the course of many generations. Like Lamarck, Rée argued that acquired habits could be inherited as innate characteristics by later generations. Such an acquired habit, was altruistic behavior, which was so beneficial, Rée claimed, that it came to be praised unconditionally, as something good in itself, apart from its outcomes.

By his own admission, Nietzsche’s religious thought was influenced by “Heraclitus, Empedocles, Spinoza, Goethe.”[5] Robert C. Holub, in Nietzsche’s Jewish Problem: Between Anti-Semitism and Anti-Judaism, has highlighted Nietzsche’s problematic opinion of the Jews, despite numerous efforts to the contrary by Walter Kaufmann, Henning Ottmann, R. J. Hollingdale, Weaver Santaniello, and others. For example, Nietzsche praises the Jews in The Antichrist as “a people gifted with the very strongest vitality,” but criticizes them “evil-smelling mess of Jewish rabbinism and superstition” only a few pages later. The basis of Nietzsche’s philosophy, as outlined in The Antichrist, is to purge the world of Christian values and return to one in which “natural.” “Christian[ity],” he writes, “is all hatred of the intellect, of pride, of courage, of freedom, of intellectual libertinage; Christian[ity] is all hatred of the senses, of joy in the senses, of joy in general.” Christianity, though, originated in Judaism, the “soil from which it sprung.” As Benjamin Silver summarizes, “Biblical Judaism, according to Nietzsche, slowly developed ‘slavish’ values and, in so doing, eventually launched a Christian revolution. For him, Christianity is the ‘one great curse’ visited upon humanity, and it was visited upon humanity by the Jews.”[6] Rée’s friendship with Nietzsche disintegrated in the fall of 1882 due to complications from their mutual involvement with Lou Andreas-Salomé.

Nietzsche, however, having published his eulogistic essay “Richard Wagner in Bayreuth” before the Bayreuth Festival, as part of his Untimely Meditations, was disappointed by what he saw as Wagner’s pandering to growing German nationalism.[7] Nietzsche had been a member of Wagner’s inner circle during the early 1870s, and his first published work, The Birth of Tragedy (1972), proposed Wagner’s music as the Dionysian “rebirth” of European culture in opposition to Apollonian rationalist “decadence.” However, Nietzsche broke with Wagner following the first Bayreuth Festival, expressing his displeasure in “The Case of Wagner” and “Nietzsche contra Wagner.” Nietzsche thought Wagner had become too involved in the Völkisch movement and antisemitism. Although Wagner expressed anti-Semitic views in Jewishness in Music, he had Jewish friends, colleagues and supporters throughout his life. Later in life, in the course of preparing his autobiography, Mein Leben, Wagner received a cache of letters from his sister Caecilie written by his step-father, that him to believe that Geyer was his biological father, and possibly Jewish, a fact hinted at by Nietzsche in 1888, in the afterword to “The Case of Wagner.”[8]

 

Bayreuth Festival

In 1871, Wagner decided to move to Bayreuth, which was to be the location of his new opera house. After having been temporarily banished from immediate contact with Ludwig II at the end of 1865, Wager switched his attention from Munich to Nuremberg, which he saw as especially appropriate for the performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which Hannu Salmi has described as “the most openly and clearly political of all Wagner’s operas.”[9] Nuremberg, however, was abandoned when Wagner he was told by Hans Richter (1843 – 1916) that Bayreuth featured an excellent opera house. Bayreuth experienced its Golden Age during the reign Frederick, Margrave of Brandenburg-Bayreuth (1735 – 1763) and Margravine Wilhelmina of Bayreuth, the favourite sister of Frederick the Great. Like her famous brother, Wilhelmina was an enthusiastic composer, had the Margravial Opera House built in Bayreuth, completed in 1747. Their daughter, Princess Elisabeth Friederike Sophie of Brandenburg-Bayreuth, was described by Casanova as “the most beautiful princess in Germany.”

In 1759, after Wilhelmine’s death, Frederick married Princess Sophie Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who was a patron of a young Benjamin Constant, before he met Madame de Stäel and was received in Weimar by her sister, Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, the mother of Illuminatus Karl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach.[10] The abdication of the last Margrave, Alexander, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach (1736 – 1806), the Prussian Minister Hardenberg took over the administration of the principalities of Ansbach and Bayreuth at the beginning of 1792. In 1804, the Romantic poet Jean Paul moved from Coburg to Bayreuth, where he lived until his death in 1825.

During the opening ceremonies of the Bayreuth Festival on August 13, 1876, Wagner was able to state Germany now had her national theatre. The Festival consisted of three operas of The Ring of the Nibelung cycle, under the direction of Hans Richter. The Bayreuth Festival was a unique cultural event in Germany, even honored by the presence of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Bismarck, however, refused to attend. All of Wagner’s most ardent supporters came to the festival, including Nietzsche, Wilhelm Tappert, Ludwig Nohl, Richard Pohl, Gottfried Semper, and Karl Klindworth, the nephew of Georg Klindworth. Professional musicians came from all over the world, the most famous of them being Edvard Grieg from Norway, who thought the work “divinely composed,” and Tchaikovsky from Russia.

A surprise guest to the Festival of 1876 was Emperor Pedro II of Brazil (1825 – 1891), a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece and Knight of Malta, who was touring Europe at the time.[11] Pedro II’s mother was Empress Dona Maria Leopoldina, the daughter of Francis II, Holy Roman Emperor, the grandson of Empress Maria Theresa, who protected Jacob Frank, and the sister of Joseph II, who reported had an affair with Frank’s daughter Eve. Dona Maria Leopoldina. Maria Leopoldina’s mother, Maria Ludovika of Austria-Este, was the sister of Maria Theresa of Austria-Este, who married Victor Emmanuel I of Savoy (1802 – 1821). As a descendant of Henrietta of England, the daughter of Charles I of England, Victor Emmanuel I carried the Jacobite claim to the thrones of England and Scotland. Their sister, Archduchess Maria Leopoldine of Austria-Este, was the wife of Charles Theodore, Elector of Bavaria, who had the Illuminati lodge Charles Theodore of Good Counsel named after him.

Through his father, Pedro I of Brazil (1798 – 1834), thus a member of the Brazilian branch of the House of Braganza, established by his ancestor John IV of Portugal, the grandson of Manuel I of Portugal, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece and Grand Master of the Order of Christ. Manuel I’s uncle was Afonso V of Portugal, a knight of the Order of the Garter, who employed Isaac Abarbanel as his treasurer. John IV married Luisa de Guzmán, who was from the ducal house of Medina-Sidonia of allegedly crypto-Jewish background.[12] Their daughter Catherine of Braganza married Charles II of England, the son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria, the daughter of Henry IV of France and Marie de Medici.

Pedro I’s second wife was Amélie of Leuchtenberg, the daughter of Napoleon’s stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, and Princess Augusta of Bavaria, the granddaughter of Maximilian I Joseph of Bavaria, and the great-aunt King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Her aunt, Princess Ludovika of Bavaria, married Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria (1808 – 1888), and was introduced to Wagner through his cousin Ludwig II and became his patron.[13] Ludovika and Maximilian were the parents of the famous Empress Elisabeth of Austria, popularly known as Sisi, the wife of Franz Joseph I of Austria. Sisi’s sister Duchess Sophie Charlotte in Bavaria had been for a time engaged to Ludwig II, but eventually married Prince Ferdinand, Duke of Alençon (1844 – 1910), the grandson of Louis Philippe I, the son of Illuminatus Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, Philippe Égalité. Prince Ferdinand’s brother, Gaston, Count of Eu (1842 – 1922), married Pedro II’s daughter, Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil. Isabel’s sister, Princess Leopoldina of Brazil, married Prince Ludwig August of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1845 – 1907), a first cousin of Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert.

Inequality of Human Races

Pedro II was a close friend of the French aristocrat Joseph-Arthur, comte de Gobineau (1816 – 1882), as Wagner had read his An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, where Gobineau expounded the theory of or Aryan master-race and that the people who had best preserved Aryan or Nordic “blood” were the Germans.[14] Shocked by the Revolution of 1848, Gobineau first expressed his racial theories in his 1848 epic poem Manfredine, in which he revealed his fear of the aristocratic Europe being replaced by common rabble of lesser breeding. He wrote:

And the Germanic People, displaying the blond hair of their ancestors, emerged to rule in every corner of the world. Neptune and his trident serve the Anglo-Saxon, their last descendant, and the peopled deserts of young America know the strength of this heroic people. But as to the Romans, Germans, Gauls, [...] to put it briefly, those who are not German are created to serve.[15]

 

One hypothesis put forward by a German author in 1926 suggested that Gobineau was initiated into the mysteries of race by Benjamin D’Israeli during meetings they might have had in Paris.[16] Gobineau came to believe race determined culture. His primary thesis, corresponding to the hypothesis of an ancient Indo-European culture, was that European civilization flowed from Greece to Rome, and then to Germanic and contemporary civilization.[17] Of the three races—“black,” “white,” and “yellow”—whites, he argued, were alone capable of intelligent thought, creating beauty and were the most beautiful.[18] “The white race originally possessed the monopoly of beauty, intelligence and strength” he wrote, and any positive qualities the Asians and blacks possessed was due to subsequent miscegenation.[19]

In 1841, Gobineau scored his first major success when an article he submitted to Revue des deux Mondes (“Review of the Two Worlds”) a monthly French-language literary, cultural and current affairs magazine that has been published in Paris since 1829. At the time, the journal was one of the most prestigious journals in Paris, and also published George Sand the Symbolist Théophile Gautier, who was widely esteemed by writers as disparate as Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, James, Proust and Wilde. Heinrich Heine first published an essay in three parts in 1834, De l'Allemagne depuis Luther, a history of emancipation in Germany beginning with the Reformation. Stendhal published his novella Mina de Vinghel in the magazine. George Sand also serialized her novel Mauprat in the magazine in 1837. Gobineau struck up a friendship and had voluminous correspondence with Alexis de Tocqueville (1805 – 1859), best known for his works Democracy in America. Tocqueville praised Gobineau in a letter: “You have wide knowledge, much intelligence, and the best of manners.”[20] While serving as foreign minister during the Second Republic of France, Tocqueville later gave Gobineau an appointment in the Quai d’Orsay, the French foreign ministry.

In 1869, Gobineau was appointed the French minister to Brazil, where he befriended Emperor Pedro II. A savant in his own right, the Pedro II established a reputation as a sponsor of learning, culture, and the sciences, and won the respect and admiration of people such as Charles Darwin, Victor Hugo, and Nietzsche, and was a friend to Louis Pasteur, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, among others. In 1876, Pedro II accompanied Gobineau on his trip to Russia, Greece and the Ottoman Empire, who introduced him to both Tsar Alexander II and Sultan Abdul Hamid II. After leaving Pedro II in Istanbul, Gobineau traveled to Rome for a private audience with Pope Pius IX.[21] During his visit to Rome, Gobineau met and befriended the Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima.[22]

Following the first Bayreuth Festival, Wagner began work on Parsifal, his final opera. Commentators have recognized Cosima as the principal inspiration for his later works, particularly Parsifal. It has been suggested that Wagner’s Parsifal was written in support of the racist ideas of Gobineau.[23] Following the first Bayreuth Festival, Wagner began work on Parsifal, his final opera. Wagner’s Jewish friend Hermann Levi conducted the first performance of Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1882, even though Wagner initially objected to this and was quoted as saying that Levi should be baptized before conducting it.[24] Levi regarded Wagner “the best and noblest of men.”[25] Nevertheless, Parsifal is proposed as the “pure-blooded” (i.e. Aryan) hero who overcomes Klingsor, who is perceived as a Jewish stereotype, particularly since he opposes the purportedly Christian Knights of the Grail.[26]

In view of the Masonic aspects of his Parsifal, it is speculated that Wagner learned much of Masonic ritual and ideas from his father-in-law Oswarld Marbach.[27] Similarities between Parzifal and Mozart’s Masonic opera The Magic Flute have also been noted.[28] Another great Mason friend of Wagner was the banker, Friedrich Feustel (1824 – 1891), who from 1863-69 was master of the lodge Zur Sonne in Bayreuth. In 1847, Feustel proposed that the lodge abolish the restrictions on non-Christians becoming members.[29] Feustel would become a member of the Reichstag as a candidate for the National Liberal Party from 1877 until his death.[30] When Wagner and Cosima founded the Bayreuth Festival in 1877, it was supported both financially and socially by Feustel. His son-in-law Adolf von Gross became the festival’s financial manager for years.[31] After the death of Ludwig II in 1886, Gross traveled to Munich to retrieve the funds for the festival that the king had promised.[32]

Bayreuther Blätter 

The philosophy of Gobineau, has been described as “undoubtedly the most influential academic racist of the nineteenth century,”[33] becoming “cult-like”[34] among “racial aristocracy,” and strongly influential with Wagner, Nietzsche and with the proponents of the pan-German movement.[35] Largely ignored when the Essay was published in France, it was in Germany that Gobineau’s theories aroused the most interest, introduced by Wagner in his review Bayreuther Blätter. In 1878, Wagner founded the Bayreuther Blätter (“Bayreuth pages”), a monthly journal primarily for visitors to the Bayreuth Festival. The journal was edited by Hans von Wolzogen (1848 – 1938) whose mother was a daughter of the famous architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781 – 1841). Schinkel collaborated in architectural projects with Jewish Prussian architect Salomo Sachs (1772 – 1855), who was a neighbor of Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy, who married Lea Salomon, a granddaughter of Daniel Itzig.[36] Their son was Felix Mendelssohn. Wagner published “Religion and Art” (1880) and “Heroism and Christianity” (1881) in the journal. Wagner’s sudden interest in Christianity, which infused Parsifal, was in line with his increasing alignment with German nationalism, and required on his part, and the part of his associates, “the rewriting of some recent Wagnerian history,” so as to represent, for example, The Ring of the Nibelung as a work reflecting Christian ideals.[37] Many of these later articles, including “What is German?” (1878), repeated Wagner’s antisemitic sentiments. And yet, from 1880 to 1896 the journal carried extracts from the detailed recollections of Wagner’s rehearsal and staging techniques by Heinrich Porges 1837 – 1900) a Czech-Austrian choirmaster, music critic and writer of Jewish descent.[38]

Gobineau in turn  became a member of the Bayreuther Kreis (“Bayreuth Circle”), which included Wagner’s son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who was particularly influenced by the racial theories of Gobineau. Chamberlain was born in Hampshire, England, and emigrated to Dresden in adulthood out of a veneration for Wagner, and was later naturalized as a German citizen.  He married Wagner’s daughter Eva von Bülow. Although he never met Wagner, it was at the age of twenty three in 1878, that Chamberlain first heard his music, which struck him with all the force of a religious revelation, after which he also became an ardently pro-German and anti-French. Chamberlain founded the first Wagner society in Paris and often contributed articles to the Revue wagnérienne, the first journal in France devoted to Wagner studies. He immersed himself in philosophical writings, and became a Völkisch author, as evidenced by his huge treatise on Kant, and in which is demonstrated his and knowledge of Nietzsche. In 1888, Chamberlain wrote to his family proclaiming his joy at the death of the Friedrich III, a strong opponent of anti-Semitism, whom he called a “Jewish liberal,” and rejoicing at the accession of his anti-Semitic son Wilhelm II.[39] Chamberlain best-known book, the two-volume Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (“The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century”), published 1899, became highly influential in the pan-Germanic Völkisch movements. In fact, Chamberlain has been referred to as “Hitler’s John the Baptist.”[40]

In the spirit of the “denial of the will to live,” a concept championed by Schopenhauer, völkisch theorists such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain sought German religious redemption.[41] In his work Richard Wagner, Chamberlain summarized many of his father-in-law’s views and asserted that Wagner had traced the fundamental causes of human decadence to the “deterioration of the blood” and to the “demoralizing influence of the Jews.” He summed up Wagner’s doctrine of regeneration as the belief, “Out of the inner negation of the world the affirmation of redemption will be born.”[42] Schopenhauer also maintained a marked metaphysical and political anti-Judaism, considering that Christianity constituted a revolt against what he styled the materialistic basis of Judaism, which is, he wrote, “the crudest and poorest of all religions and consists merely in an absurd and revolting theism.”[43] Wagner’s turn to Christianity was influenced by his reading of Schopenhauer, from whom he adopted, according to David Ian Hall, “the argument that art, and specifically music, was a refuge from the world and a source of redemption and rebirth.”[44] As noted by Frank Turner, although Schopenhauer was a contemporary of Hegel, and had published his most important work The World as Will and Idea in 1818, “during the 1850s there took place a Schopenhauer revival in Europe and his philosophy enjoyed a very considerable vogue that lasted until at least the 1920s.”[45]

In the third edition of The World as Will and Representation (1859), Schopenhauer added an untitled appendix to the second volume, “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love,” where he remarks that pederasty is a “misguided instinct.” However, he notes that this tendency appears in either adolescents or old men, who are either too young or too old to reproduce. Therefore, by directing sexual impulse away from procreation, the “unnatural” natural tendency helps preserve the human species, by preventing the creation of weak, deformed, and short-lived offspring.[46] Schopenhauer noted that “the vice we are considering appears to work directly against the aims and ends of nature, and that in a matter that is all important and of the greatest concern to her it must in fact serve these very aims, although only indirectly, as a means for preventing greater evils.”[47] Schopenhauer ends the appendix by stating that “by expounding these paradoxical ideas, I wanted to grant to the professors of philosophy a small favour. I have done so by giving them the opportunity of slandering me by saying that I defend and commend pederasty.”[48]

Pan-Germanism

In the Bayreuther Blätter, writers also expressed support for Otto von Bismarck and the German Empire. Although Otto von Bismarck had excluded Austria and the German Austrians from his creation of the Kleindeutschland state in 1871, integrating the German Austrians nevertheless remained a strong desire for many people of both Austria and Germany behind the Pan-German movement. Although Bismarck had excluded Austria and the German Austrians from his creation of the Kleindeutschland state in 1871, integrating the German Austrians nevertheless remained a strong desire for many people of both Austria and Germany behind the Pan-German movement. Pan-Germanists originally sought to unify the Germans of the Second Reich with the other Germanic-speaking peoples into a single nation-state known as Großdeutschland, under the leadership of the German Austrians from the Austrian Empire.

As explained by Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, the pan-German movement originated among the fraternities of Vienna, Graz, and Prague during the 1860s. Initially formed in the 1840s, these Austrian fraternities were modelled on the German Burschenschaften, drawing inspiration from the teachings of Father Jahn.[49] During the Wars of Liberation, Father Jahn had called for the creation of a greater Germany including Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Prussia and Austria.[50] Agitated by the problem of German nationality in the Austrian state after 1866, certain fraternities began advocating for a Kleindeutschland, that is, incorporation of German-Austria into the German Reich. They glorified Bismarck, praised the Prussian army and Kaiser Wilhelm I, and Bismarck’s ideology of Blut und Eisen (“Blood and Iron”).[51] The phrase was derived from a patriotic poem written during the Napoleonic Wars by Max von Schenkendorf (1783 – 1817), a volunteer in the 1813 War of Liberation who was commissioned to compose patriotic songs together with Ernst Moritz Arndt and Theodor Körner.[52] In his poem “The Iron Cross,” Schenkendorf wrote that “only iron can save us, only blood can redeem us from the sins of heavy chains, from the pride of evil doers.” The phrase became symbolic of Bismarckian Machtpolitik (“Power politics”) after his famous speech of September 20, 1862, after he became Minister President:

The position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power […] Prussia must concentrate its strength and hold it for the favourable moment, which has already come and gone several times. Since the treaties of Vienna, our frontiers have been ill-designed for a healthy body politic. Not through speeches and majority decisions will the great questions of the day be decided—that was the great mistake of 1848 and 1849—but by iron and blood (Eisen und Blut).[53]

Völkisch Pan-Germanism began as the ideology of the small minority of Germans in Austria who refused to accept their permanent separation from the rest of Germany after 1866, which they determined to repair through the Anschluss of what they called German-Austria. Vienna, capital of the multinational Hapsburg Empire, rivaled Paris as Europe’s cultural center. Less than half of Vienna’s two million residents were Austrian, while about a quarter came from Bohemia and Moravia—the strongholds of the Sabbateans sect—so that Czech was often spoken alongside German.[54] However, although an extensive religious literature was still in the possession of Frankists in Moravia and Bohemia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, their descendants tried to obliterate any shred of evidence of their ancestors’ beliefs and practices. Nevertheless, most of the families once associated with the Sabbateanism in Western and Central Europe continued to remain afterward within the fold of Judaism, and many of their descendants, particularly in Austria, rose to positions of importance during the nineteenth century as prominent intellectuals, great financiers, and men of high political connections.[55] It was reported in the 1840s that Jews professing Christianity were found filling the offices of the ministry, and that Frankists had been discovered and probably existed among the Catholic and Protestant church dignitaries of Russia, Austria and Poland.[56]

Wagner inspired Georg von Schönerer (1842 – 1921), a member of the Viennese Burschenschaft and the most influential pan-German in Austria, who exerted a significant influence on young Hitler.[57] Schönerer’s father, Mathias, a railroad contractor in the employ of the Rothschilds, left him a large fortune. His wife was a great-granddaughter of Rabbi Samuel Löb Kohen, who died at Pohrlitz, South Moravia, in 1832.[58] Like many other Austrian pan-Germans, Schönerer hoped for the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and an Anschluss with Germany. Schönerer’s movement only allowed its members to be Germans and none of the members could have relatives or friends that were Jews or Slavs, and before any member could get married they had to prove “Aryan” descent and have their health checked for any potential defects.[59] Schönerer, who had adopted the swastika as a völkisch symbol, would go on to exercise a great influence on Hitler and the Nazi Party as a whole. Schönerer’s efforts were also reflected in the founding of the Neuen Richard-Wagner-Vereins (“New Richard Wagner Association”) to “free German art from adulteration and Judaization.”[60]


[1] Benjamin Silver. “Twilight of the Anti-Semites.” Jewish Review of Books (Winter 2017). Retrieved from https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2397/twilight-of-the-anti-semites/#

[2] Richard Wagner. “Jewishness in Music by Richard Wagner.” (trans.) Howard Rogers (September 6, 2020), p. 14. Retrieved from https://de.wikisource.org/ wiki/Das_Judenthum_in_der_Musik_(1869)

[3] Theodor Lessing. Jewish Self-Hate (New York: Berghahn Books), p. 40.

[4] Marion Faber. Human All Too Human (Penguin Classics), Introduction p. x.

[5] Friedrich Nietzsche. Nachlass Fragments, 1884.

[6] Benjamin Silver. “Twilight of the Anti-Semites.” Jewish Review of Books (Winter 2017). Retrieved from https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/2397/twilight-of-the-anti-semites/#

[7] Newman. The Life of Richard Wagner, pp. 517–539.

[8] David Conway. “‘A Vulture is Almost an Eagle’… The Jewishness of Richard Wagner.” Jewry in Music. Retrieved from https://web.archive.org/web/20121203090712/http://www.smerus.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/vulture_.htm; Robert W. Gutman. Richard Wagner: The Man, his Mind and his Music (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1990).

[9] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 55.

[10] Elizabeth W. Schermerhorn. Benjamin Constant: His Private Life and His Contribution of the Cause of Liberal Government in France, 1767–1830 (New York: Haskel House, 1970), p. 87.

[11] Salmi. Imagined Germany, p. 177.

[12] Edward Gelles. The Jewish Journey: A Passage through European History (The Radcliffe Press, 2016), p. 154.

[13] Aloys Dreyer. Herzog Maximilian in Bayern, der erlauchte Freund und Förderer des Zitherspiels und der Gebirgspoesie (Munich: Lindauer, 1909).

[14] Theodor Adorno. In Search of Wagner (Verso, 1952); John Deathridge. “Strange love” in Western music and race (Cambridge UP, 2007).

[15] Michael D. Biddiss. Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (Littlehampton Book Services Ltd., 1970), pp. 65–66.

[16] Karl Koehne. “Untersuchungen über Vorläufer und Quellen der Rassen-theorie des Grafen Gobineau.” Archiv fur Rassen-und Gesellschaftsbiologie, XVllI (1926), pp. 369-96; cited in Poliakov. The Aryan Myth, p. 233.

[17] J. P. Mallory. In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Culture and Myth (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), p. 125.

[18] Gregory Blue. “Gobineau on China: Race Theory, the ‘Yellow Peril’ and the Critique of Modernity.” Journal of World History, 10: 1 (1999), p. 100.

[19] Ibid., p. 101.

[20] Michael D. Biddiss. Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (Littlehampton Book Services Ltd., 1970), p. 47.

[21] Gregory Blue. “Gobineau on China: Race Theory, the ‘Yellow Peril’ and the Critique of Modernity.” Journal of World History, 10: 1 (1999), pp. 96–7.

[22] Ibid., p. 115.

[23] Theodor Adorno. In Search of Wagner (Verso, 1952); John Deathridge. “Strange love” in Western music and race (Cambridge UP, 2007).

[24] Köhler. Richard Wagner, p. 480.

[25] Derek Strahan. “Was Wagner Jewish?” Limelight (February 2012), p. 59; cited in David Ian Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War.” War in History, 24:2 (April 2017), p. 158.

[26] Dieter Borchmeyer. Drama and the World of Richard Wagner (Princeton University Press, 2003).

[27] “Richard Wagner.” Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon. Retrieved from https://freemasonry.bcy.ca/biography/wannabe/wagner_r.html

[28] “Richard Wagner – sein Leben und seine Werke.”

[29] “Richard Wagner.” Grand Lodge of British Columbia and Yukon.

[30] Fritz Specht & Paul Schwabe. Die Reichstagswahlen von 1867 bis 1903. Eine Statistik der Reichstagswahlen nebst den Programmen der Parteien und einem Verzeichnis der gewählten Abgeordneten. Second Edition (Verlag Carl Heymann, Berlin 1904), p. 202.

[31] Newman. The Life of Richard Wagner.

[32] “Festspiele vor dem Ertrinken gerettet.” Nordbayerischer Kurier (March 25, 2020, p. 12.

[33] Stephen Jay Gould. The Mismeasure of Man (W. W. Norton & Company, 1996), p. 359.

[34] Ernest R. Trattner. Architects of Ideas: The Story of the World's Great Thinkers (New Home Library, 1942), p. 359.

[35] Margaret Crossland. Simone De Beauvoir: The Woman and Her Work (Arrow, 1992), p. 15.

[36] L. Violinist. History of the Jews in Berlin, Volume 2, pp. 194–197.

[37] Glenn Stanley. “Parsifal: redemption and Kunstreligion.” In Thomas S. Grey, (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 154–156.

[38] “Family of Simon Porges.” All about the Porges families. Retrieved from http://www.porges.net/FamilyTreesBiographies/SimonPorges1801-1869.html#hp

[39] Geoffrey G. Field. Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 90.

[40] James D.Forman. Nazism (New York, 1978), p. 14; cited in Samuel W. Jr. Mitcham. Why Hitler?: The Genesis of the Nazi Reich (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1996), p. 82.

[41] Michael Kellogg. The Russian Roots of Nazism (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 18.

[42] Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Richard Wagner. trans. G. Ainslie Hight (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1900), pp. 171, 182, 387.

[43] “Fragments for the History of Philosophy.” Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume I, trans. Payne. p. 126.

[44] Hall. “Wagner, Hitler, and Germany's Rebirth after the First War,” p. 159.

[45] Turner. European Intellectual History, p. 202.

[46] David E. Cartwright. “Pederasty.” Historical Dictionary of Schopenhauer's Philosophy (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), p. 190.

[47] Arthur Schopenhauer. E.F.J. Payne (ed.). The World as Will and Representation. Vol. II (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), p. 566.

[48] Ibid., p. 567.

[49] Goodrick-Clarke. Occult Roots of Nazism, p. 10.

[50] Kohn. “Father Jahn’s Nationalism,” p. 431.

[51] Ibid.

[52] H.T. Peck & F.M. Colby (ed.). New International Encyclopedia, 1st edition (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905).

[53] German History in Documents and Images: Excerpt from Bismarck’s “Blood and Iron” Speech (1862). Retrieved from http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=250&language=english

[54] Andy Walker. “1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place.” BBC Magazine (April 18, 2013).

[55] Gershom Scholem. “Redemption Through Sin,” The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays, pp. 78–141.

[56] Duker. “Polish Frankism’s Duration,” p. 292.

[57] Bojoan Bujic. “Language and Identity: Wagner and Some Dilemmas of Early Modernism.” The Musical Times 155, no. 1926 (2014), p. 30. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24615702

[58] Joseph Jacobs & S. Mannheimer. “Schönerer, Georg von.” Jewish Encyclopedia (1906).

[59] Brigitte Hamann. Hitler’s Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man (Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2010), p. 244.

[60] Ibid., p. 48.

Zionism