The Narcissism of Major Differences: Richard Wagner and the Peculiarities of German Antisemitism

With a focus on the unique combustibility of German antisemitism, this essay asks whether the road to the Nazi genocide can be understood in terms of a displacement onto the Jews of intra-Christian, Protestant-Catholic enmity and anxiety, and thus as a narcissism of major differences. Did the "othering" of Jews displace intra-Christian differences that had divided Germany since the Reformation and Thirty Years' War? Did hospitality and its successor paradigms occlude the aporias of Heimat? Via a deep dive into Wagner's nineteenth-century imposition of a new national mythology onto the peculiarities of cultural fragmentation, the essay finds elements of the political libido that ultimately sustained the cultural hatred capable of genocide.