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  • Richard Wagners “Das Judentum in der Musik”: Eine kritische Dokumentation als Beitrag zur Geschichte Antisemitismus
  • Dieter Borchmeyer
    Translated by Joseph Haberer
Richard Wagners “Das Judentum in der Musik”: Eine kritische Dokumentation als Beitrag zur Geschichte Antisemitismus, by Jens Malte Fischer. Frankfurt a.M. Insel Verlag, 2000. 380 pp. DM 19.90.

Richard Wagner’s antisemitism is undeniable, even though many of those who admire and love his music would prefer to hide or hush up this fact. Is this antisemitism understandable in psychological terms? According to Otto Weiniger’s Geschlecht und Charakter (1903), hate like love is a form of projection: [End Page 192]

Whoever hates the Jewish nature hates it first of all in himself; he persecutes it in others primarily in an effort to disconnect himself from this Jewishness. In this way, for at least a while, by locating it in another human being, he believes he is free of it.

According to Weiniger, this projection applies in no small measure to Wagner. It turns out that Wagner’s contemporaries accused him—particularly through caricature and satire—of a putative racial (blutmässiges) or spiritual closeness to Jewishness. Through his Jew-hatred Wagner thus tried to ward off these accusations. Gustav Freytag in his work Der Streit um das Judentum in der Musik (1869) maintains that if one examines the inner meaning of Wagner’s pamphlet—Das Judentum in der Musik—in the period from 1850 through 1869, he himself comes across as “the biggest Jew.”

From a critical viewpoint Freytag’s work is quite opposed to Wagner and far removed from any tinge of antisemitism. It is one of the many contemporary documents—most of which are not easily accessible—now reprinted in Jens Malte Fischer’s collection. Fischer’s aim is to make a “contribution to the history of antisemitism.”

In a comprehensive and down-to-earth fashion he examines first of all the sources of the pamphlet. In 1850, spurred on by friend Theodor Uhlig, Wagner started a campaign directed against Meyerbeer, one which reflected current controversies. Fischer considers this an early antisemitic phase, one that still excluded a fully formed racial premise in its arguments, but one ready to utilize commonly held perceptions of Jewishness.

Fischer judges the anonymous first edition of Wagner’s pamphlet with a notable mildness, especially because he only utilizes arguments that were widespread through the political spectrum of his time. The “actual fall” (into racial antisemitism) Fischer notes first in Wagner’s persecution mania and conspiracy phobia that characterized the second edition of his anti-Jewish polemic. In 1869 this piece burst maliciously into a situation where the development of Jews in Germany had been relatively peaceful. In contrast to the almost ineffectual first edition, this one had disastrous consequences.

Fischer’s “critical documentation” is not likely to produce much sympathy in either the pro or anti Wagnerian camps. His critique of Wagner as ideologue does not include an “apology for” or a “glossing over” his antisemitism. Nor does he push Wagner into positions that his text does not support. The perception that he seriously, or at least in terms of consequences, argued for the physical extermination of Jews is rejected. Rather Fischer emphasizes the metaphorical character of the supposed extermination vocabulary used by Wagner, whose purpose was to do away with the alien self-destruction of all that which was specifically and characteristically Jewish. This applies especially to the famous or infamous final appeal to the Jews: they should undertake a “self-annihilating reborn work of deliverance” so as to “become fully human in joining our community” and to “become one and undifferentiated from us.” On the basis of Fischer’s articulated philological evidence those anti-Wagnerian polemicists, to whom the murder of the Jewish people is seen as the secret animating telos of his work, will [End Page 193] gnash their teeth precisely because they will find it very difficult to attribute to Fischer any sympathy for Wagner’s antisemitism.

Fischer is convinced that an obsession of such magnitude as that attributed to Wagner’s hatred of Jews would have had to have a precipitous expression in his musical dramas. The compelling proof of this...

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