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The Opera Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on August 21, 2008 The Opera Quarterly 2007 23(2-3):151-183; doi:10.1093/oq/kbn029 This Article http://oq.oxfordjournals.org/misc/terms.shtml FREE Full Text (PDF) All Versions of this Article: Wagner and the Origin of Evil 23/2-3/151 most recent kbn029v1 Alert me when this article is cited Berthold Hoeckner Alert me if a correction is posted

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What's this? Prologue: the Hedgehog and the Fox TOP In a famous essay on Tolstoy's view of history, entitled "The Prologue: the Hedgehog and... Hedgehog and the Fox," Isaiah Berlin began with a fragment of Greek Part I: Intentionalism and... Part II: Wagner as...

poetry: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big Part III: the Origin... thing."1 Berlin rang a note of caution that the words of this fragment Epilogue: Foregone Conclusions NOTES "may mean no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defense," but he went on to suggest that they also may "yield a sense in which they mark one of the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general." Berlin fleshed out this difference by proposing that the hedgehogs "relate everything to a single central vision, one system less or more coherent or articulate, in terms of which they understand and feel—a single, universal, organizing principle in terms of which alone all that they are and say has

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significance." The foxes, by contrast,

pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way, for some psychological or physiological cause, related by no single moral or aesthetic principle; these last [the foxes] lead lives, perform acts, and entertain ideas that are centrifugal rather than centripetal, their thought is scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves, without, consciously or unconsciously, seeking to fit them into, or exclude them from, any one unchanging, all-embracing, sometimes self-contradictory and incomplete, at times fanatical, unitary inner vision.2

According to Berlin, Dante was a hedgehog, as were Plato, Pascal, Hegel, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Dostoevsky, and Proust. Shakespeare, however, was a fox, and so were Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, and Joyce. Berlin did not favor one or the other of these two "intellectual and artistic personalities," but saw them primarily as "rival types of knowledge." Although he admitted that the classification could become, "if pressed, artificial, scholastic, and absurd," he believed that it could nevertheless serve as "a starting point of genuine investigation"—like the one that he himself went on to conduct about Tolstoy's view of history, concluding that the Russian thinker and writer was at heart a fox, yet presented himself as a hedgehog.3

In the mid 1990s, the Canadian historian Michael Marrus wrote a review article about the historiography of the Holocaust, suggesting that the distinction between fox and hedgehog could serve not only as a way of understanding historical writing in general, but, more specifically, as a way of making sense of the historiography on the Holocaust.4 Marrus noted that "in the first two decades after the Holocaust writers were preoccupied with the search for a single key—something that would unlock the mystery of the massacre of European Jewry." But he also noticed that "historical writers today are uncomfortable with the framework they have inherited. They spend much of their time pointing to variety, paradoxes, complexities, and contradictions. Their writing is less informed by single, unitary perspectives than it was with their predecessors, and they have advanced our knowledge on many smaller fronts."5

Marrus named three areas in which historians had traditionally searched for a single cause of the Holocaust or attempted to determine its uniqueness in history: the development of anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century Germany; the machinery of destruction devised and operated by the Nazi bureaucracy; and the association of Jewish culture with the threat of modernism. According to Marrus, an increasing number of more recent studies had begun to question single-cause theories by looking, for instance, at more widespread ethnic cleansing in the East and pointing to other victims of the politics of racial purity, such as Nazi eugenics, Gypsies, or those killed through euthanasia programs. Although he concluded that the historiography of the Holocaust (including his own work) had gradually moved into the realm of the foxes, and with it into the "mainstream of historical understanding," he acknowledged that "not everyone who cares about the Holocaust feels fully at ease" with this development.6

What has all this to do with Wagner? I believe that the distinction between the hedgehog and the fox can serve not only as a starting point for investigating Wagner's view of history, but also provide a new

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perspective on history's view of Wagner—specifically, Wagner's alleged responsibility for the Holocaust. The latter point is highly contested, but instead of presenting new research on this controversial issue, I want to step back and consider it from a more fundamental angle: the interpretation of evil. In particular, I am interested in the origin of evil, that is, the origin of evil as interpreted by Wagner and its relationship to the subsequent interpretation of Wagner as the origin of evil. This double perspective is inspired by Paul Ricoeur, who considered the symbolism of evil as "the birthplace of the hermeneutic conflict."7 As one of Ricoeur's commentators put it, "in search of the meaning of life man always has practiced some hermeneutics of evil. The most primitive myth about it is already a work of interpretation."8 Put differently, the interpretation of evil is inseparable from the evils of interpretation. When trying to determine the origin of evil, it appears impossible to decide whether the interpretation of evil makes sense of a preexisting evil reality or whether the interpretation helps to constitute this reality in the first place. Such poststructuralist undecidability seems insolent, even offensive in the case of actual genocide. But the denial of the Holocaust (and other mass murder) still happens, and this has proven to be a thorny political and legal problem. In Britain, it took a concerted effort of lawyers and scholars to throw out the frivolous libel suit of the historian David Irving against the American Holocaust specialist Deborah Lipstadt, who had accused him of denying the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz and playing down the extent of the crime.9 Yet even if the reality of the Holocaust is beyond question, its historical origin has not been beyond interpretation. It is not without reason that Alain Resnais's 1955 documentary Nuit et brouillard famously ends with the unsettling questions: Who is to blame? Who is responsible?

Since some of the blame has fallen upon Richard Wagner, I will concern myself with two ways in which the composer has been held responsible: one regards Wagner as the most decisive influence on Hitler and the creation of National Socialism; the other sees him as only one such influence among many forces at work in the complex formation and implementation of fascist ideology. I will approach this divisive issue in three steps. In a first part, I will briefly review how the difference between the hedgehog and the fox can be aligned with the distinction between intentionalism and functionalism in Holocaust historiography, which is itself based on the more fundamental distinction between particularism and universalism in historical writing in general. In the second part, I will explore how these distinctions might provide a conceptual framework for understanding the starkly different views historians have taken on Wagner's influence on Hitler and his responsibility for the Holocaust. These first two parts will serve as a long upbeat to the third section, in which I will suggest that the different views on the role Wagner played in the creation of great evil correlate with his own view of the origin of evil as expressed in his chef d'oeuvre, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Wagner, I will argue, conceived the Ring not only as a modern myth about the origins of evil, but also as a parable about a historiography of evil, which surfaces in the Norns' scene at the beginning of Götterdämmerung. Indeed, a closer look at the Norns' scene will reveal how two competing versions of the origin of evil shape the Ring as a historical narrative, and how the competition between these two versions is resolved by a forcibly deterministic sense of history. Finally, in an epilogue, I will propose that Michael André Bernstein's notion of "backshadowing" may help us assess how Wagner's deterministic view of history has shaped history's view of Wagner.

Part I: Intentionalism and Functionalism

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Two years after Michael Marrus proclaimed the new age of the foxes TOP in Holocaust historiography, the hedgehogs made a spectacular return. Prologue: the Hedgehog and... Part I: Intentionalism and... When Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published his book Hitler's Willing Part II: Wagner as... Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust in 1996, he Part III: the Origin... Epilogue: Foregone Conclusions sparked off the most important controversy in Holocaust studies NOTES during the past decade.10 The study was based on records assembled by prosecutors between 1962 and 1972 during their interrogations of members of police battalions, who had taken part in the extermination of whole Jewish communities on the eastern front and who had been roughly representative of the German populace at the time. Goldhagen argued that the willingness of these ordinary Germans to participate voluntarily in most brutal acts of genocide, despite opportunities to decline participation, could only be explained by an "eliminationist anti-Semitism"—a mindset particular to German culture from the Reformation through to the Third Reich. For Jürgen Habermas, Goldhagen's "real contribution" to the historiography of the Holocaust consisted in the specificity of his claim. According to Habermas, Goldhagen was not "arguing for supposed anthropological universals or regularities to which all persons are equally subject," but his work referred to "very specific traditions and mentalities, to ways of thinking and perceiving that belong to a particular cultural context—not something unalterable to which we have been consigned by fate, but factors that can be transformed through a change of consciousness."11

The debate that ensued continued a long-standing dispute over two distinct approaches in the historiography of the Holocaust, which the late British historian Timothy Mason had termed intentionalist and functionalist (or structuralist).12 The intentionalists argued that the Holocaust could be "sufficiently explained by looking at the leading Nazis' anti-Semitic hatreds and their eventual ability to carry out plans for extermination."13 In this view, a direct line led from the virulent anti-Semitism in Hitler's early writings to the extermination camps, suggesting a causal connection between intent and result. The functionalists, by contrast, argued "that the road from ambition to execution was, in fact, so meandering ... that no easy lines can be drawn from what Hitler said he intended to what was actually accomplished."14 Since the totalitarian system was, "in reality, a motley, centrifugally disorganized, contradictory collection of competing offices, institutions and centers of power, loosely held together by their loyalty to the Führer," the extermination of the Jews was "but one among the most important examples of the regime's ambivalent process of policy making."15 The different explanations offered by intentionalists and functionalists led to starkly different conclusions, sometimes viewed as the difference between a straight path and what the Holocaust scholar Karl Schleunes famously called "the twisted road to Auschwitz."16 The dispute also overlapped with another long-standing argument over the so-called German Sonderweg ("special path") in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe. This comparative view was held by such eminent historians as Hans-Ulrich Wehler, who explained Germany's unique and eventually fatal situation in Europe during the Second Reich as a result of the discrepancy between "highly successful capitalist industrialization and socio-economic modernization" on one hand and "pre- industrial institutions, power relations, and ways of life" on the other.17

The distinction between intentionalism and functionalism also pertains to one of the most contested and vexing questions of the Holocaust. How unique was the Final Solution in light of other genocides? Or more specifically: how did its motivation, mode, organization, and historical circumstances compare with

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other mass atrocities committed in the twentieth century and in the history of humankind? Parallels have usually been drawn with the killing of Armenians by the Turkish Empire, which reached its highpoint in both scale and systematic brutality in 1915, as well as the famine that Stalin forced upon Ukraine in the 1930s.18 The Holocaust's uniqueness was at the very heart of yet another major controversy among German historians (the Historikerstreit), which took place in the late 1980s and whose central problem Charles Maier poignantly summarized thus:

If Auschwitz is admittedly dreadful, but dreadful as only one specimen of genocide—as the so-called revisionists have implied—then Germany can still aspire to reclaim a national acceptance that no one denies to perpetrators of other massacres, such as Soviet Russia. But if the Final Solution remains non-comparable—as the opposing historians have insisted—the past may never be ‘worked through,’ the future never normalized, and German nationhood may remain forever tainted, like some well forever poisoned.19

In a theoretical reflection on the Goldhagen debate, A. Dirk Moses suggested that the polarization between the intentional and functionalist approaches is as much about "the facts" as it is about a "deep structure" of "two basic narratives that constitute Western historical consciousness since the Enlightenment: a ‘particularism’ and a ‘universalism’ narrative."20 In the first case, the Holocaust is explained "by cultural factors specific to Germany, as in the classic particularist narrative running from Luther to Hitler." In the universalist narrative, on the other hand, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany is considered a typical case of any modern society. Moses suggests that most historical scholarship "is a blend of both narratives," but the investigation of human evil, which is central to understanding the Holocaust, adds a moral dimension to historical inquiry that raises the critical "question of intention and the commensurate weight accorded to human agency and structure in the explanation of events and, thus, of individual and collective responsibility for Nazi crimes."21 Since the functionalist narrative tells of a diffuse network of contradictory forces, shifting responsibilities, and multiple agents during the Third Reich and before, historical agents cannot be clearly identified (and held accountable) as bearers of intention. As a result, evil and injustice tend to become associated with general processes transferable to other comparable contexts rather than particular human actions. With this transference the specificity of intentional behavior moves into the background, as for instance in Hannah Arendt's study on the origin of totalitarianism and her controversial report on the Eichmann trial. Indeed, Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" has encapsulated the conceptual core of the functionalist narrative.22 According to Holocaust scholar Dan Diner, Arendt's work constituted "a milestone in the transition from a perspective that has its historical object anchored in the realm of individual responsibility and guilt to one that concentrates on depersonalized structures."23 This gradual dilution of intention in explanation of the Holocaust has prompted the serious charge of exculpating individual perpetrators, even the primary perpetrator, leading one scholar to ask: "Holocaust—without Hitler?"24

It should be noted that the dispute between intentionalists and functionalists has not necessarily been a question of evidence, but rather of the way this evidence is situated within a larger narrative. Goldhagen stirred up controversy because he had used the same data as Christopher Browning, a leading exponent of the functionalist school, who had published Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland in 1992.25 The two scholars disagreed sharply over the "motivation behind the

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participation and voluntarism of these [ordinary] Germans."26 For Goldhagen, a "monocausal explanation" was sufficient: "the German perpetrators, in this view, were assenting mass executioners, men and women, who, true to their own eliminationist antisemitic beliefs, faithful to their cultural antisemitic credo, considered the slaughter to be just."27 Browning countered by adducing testimonies of Jewish survivors and non-German participants in genocides, as well as accounts of German perpetrators, all of which show how victims perceived, and participants corroborated, significant differences in the perpetrators' actions. He also took issue with Goldhagen's assumption that the Nazi regime was both "dictatorial" and "consensual," and that "all expression" under the Nazi regime was "spontaneous and free."28

Apart from their disagreement over mentality and motivation, another difference between Goldhagen and Browning should be mentioned here because I will return to it when considering Wagner's Ring later on: the style of presentation. A perennial problem in Holocaust historiography has been how to render events that seem unimaginable and appear to be indescribable. Goldhagen decided to write vivid accounts of the atrocities, such as during the ghetto massacre of Jósefów, Poland, in the summer of 1942: "None of the Germans has seen fit to recount details of such killings. In all probability, a killer either shot a baby in its mother's arms, and perhaps the mother for good measure, or, as was sometimes the habit during these years, held it at arm's length by the leg, shooting it with a pistol. Perhaps the mother looked on in horror. The tiny corpse was then dropped like so much trash and left to rot. A life extinguished."29 Such evocative dramatizations risked breaching the premise of historical objectivity, but Goldhagen justified borrowing from eyewitness reports that used similar language, because "for us to comprehend the perpetrators' phenomenological world, we should describe for ourselves every gruesome image that they behold, and every cry of anguish and pain that they heard."30 With this approach, Goldhagen appealed to ordinary readers, because he offered them ways to identify with the victims. He thus lived up to Elie Wiesel's dictum that "any survivor has more to say than all the historians combined about what happened."31 Direct testimony trumps all other forms of historical writing.

Browning did not rely on evocative presentations of the kind offered by Goldhagen. His writing remained decidedly detached, like the narrative descriptions in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah compared with the dramatic depictions in Spielberg's Schindler's List. Browning's documentary distance produced a profoundly different effect on identification than Goldhagen's presentation—not only the identification with the victims, but also the identification of the perpetrators. This shift in identification was what Goldhagen responded to: his phrase "ordinary Germans" mounted an explicit critique of Browning's "ordinary men." By putting "the Germans" consistently in the subject position, Goldhagen connected agency and accountability, and resolved the question of responsibility to some form of collective guilt of the German people. Yet if Goldhagen, by settling the issue of identification, achieved a sense of closure, Browning's conclusions were perhaps more unsettling: "In every modern society, the complexity of life and the resulting bureaucratization and specialization attenuate the sense of personal responsibility of those implementing official policy. Within virtually every social collective, the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers in such circumstances, what group of men cannot?"32 Browning's question pointed to the controversial experiments conducted by the social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the early sixties at Yale, who found that ordinary New Haven residents could be induced to inflict increasingly painful

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electric shocks on subjects who gave wrong answers in a simulated test about the influence of pain on learning.33 For Browning there are enough grounds to believe that human barbarism—however administrated—is universal and has no boundaries.

This is not the place to arbitrate between Goldhagen and Browning, nor to endorse one or the other position. What matters is that their differences are to a large extent a matter of method, interpretation, and presentation, which are shaped by the intentionalist and functionalist approaches and, deeper still, by the particularizing and universalizing historical narratives behind them. Their decisions about these approaches stem ultimately from their moral investment in different conceptions of good and evil, which are motivated by personal experiences as well as competing worldviews. If Goldhagen is a hedgehog, Browning is a fox. If the former continues to believe in a single cause and single explanation theory, the latter refrains from forging the same data into what Berlin called "a unitary internal vision." These different conceptions can also be traced in the discussion about Wagner's involvement in the prehistory and history of the Holocaust.

Part II: Wagner as the Origin of Evil TOP No other composer has been accused as gravely as Wagner in laying Prologue: the Hedgehog and... the groundwork for one of humanity's most hideous crimes; and no Part I: Intentionalism and... Part II: Wagner as... other composer has seen so many attempts to indemnify his artistic Part III: the Origin... oeuvre against such charges. Varying views about Wagner's Epilogue: Foregone Conclusions NOTES responsibility and culpability are directly or indirectly related to the above categories of Holocaust historiography. For some, Wagner's works had not only a direct impact on Hitler, but were also the most important force in the dictator's intellectual development, leading directly to political action. For others, Wagner's anti-Semitism was part of a broader European discourse about race and the so-called Jewish question; his aesthetic views were too diffuse to be translated into policy, so that he could not be held responsible for their later misappropriation.

A leading intentionalist among Wagner's critics has been Paul Lawrence Rose, who concluded his 1992 book Wagner: Race and Revolution by suggesting that the ban of Wagner's music in Israel was essential for remembering what happened and why: "There was a Holocaust, and Wagner's self-righteous ravings, sublimated into his music, were one of the most potent elements in creating the mentality that made such an enormity thinkable—and performable."34 Rose has been most forceful in implicating Wagner's operas, from the "fascist" tendencies in Rienzi to the "racial politics" in Parsifal.35 In an earlier study, he had identified a specific brand of anti-Semitism that was thriving in nineteenth-century Germany (with Wagner the leading proponent) and embodied in the myth of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew, who can only be redeemed by renouncing his religion and hence must "die" to end humanity's calamity.36 For Rose, this death was not a metaphorical death synonymous with assimilation and conversion, but an example of what Goldhagen called eliminationist anti-Semitism. If, for Rose, a straight path led from Wagner's anti-Semitic essay "Das Judentum in der Musik" to Hitler's Judenvernichtung, it is hardly surprising that Marrus considered him a hedgehog, citing a critic who paraphrased Rose's position as follows: "nineteenth-century German anti-Semitism was the egg which hatched the serpent of the

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Holocaust."37

The most radical instance of intentionalism in Wagner research, however, is the 1997 book Wagner's Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple by the German journalist Joachim Köhler.38 The allusion to Vollstrecker (executioner) in the German title of Goldhagen's book is unmistakable, but whereas Goldhagen treated "the Germans" as a collective group of potential and actual executioners, Köhler focuses on the direct link from Wagner to the Führer himself. Köhler argues that Hitler understood his mission and staged his political career in terms, requisites, theatrical gestures, and dramatic acts, as well as in historical narratives and legendary myths, that were all consummately Wagnerian—not just ideas inspired by the composer's writings, but stories and characters borrowed from his operas. Evidence for this argument comes from Hitler's note about his own 1912 costume design for Siegfried, stating that "Wagner's piece showed me for the first time what the myth of blood is," and from a later reference to the composer in a letter from May 5, 1924, to Siegfried Wagner, where Richard Wagner is praised as the "‘master’ of us all" [unser aller "Meister"].39 In light of Milton Himmelfahrt's article "No Hitler, No Holocaust," one might caption the thrust of Köhler's argument as "No Wagner, No Hitler, No Holocaust."40

Several well-known incidents are usually cited to support this line of thought, and I want to recount two of them briefly because they play a central role in Köhler's argument and similar ones made by other intentionalists. The first was the Linz performance of Rienzi that Hitler experienced as a teenager; the second was a meeting with Houston Chamberlain, who recognized Hitler as the true heir of Wagner's legacy. The Linz episode is best known from the memoirs of August Kubizek, who was Hitler's friend during their youth and as much a fledgling composer as Hitler was an aspiring artist.41 After the performance, Kubizek found Hitler

in a state of complete ecstasy and rapture, in which he transferred his experience of Rienzi, without even mentioning this example or model directly, with visionary power to a different level that befitted himself, though not merely as a cheap copy of the Rienzi experience. Instead, the impression left by the opera had merely been the external impulse that had compelled him to speak. Like flood waters breaking their dykes, his words burst forth from him. He conjured up for me in grandiose, inspiring pictures his own future and that of his people.42

Kubizek then recalled how in 1939 he was the guest of the Rienzi-become-Reichskanzler in Bayreuth, and how he reminded him of their experience on the Freinberg. Much to his surprise, Hitler not only remembered every detail but also recounted the story to Winifred Wagner, concluding "solemnly: ‘In that hour it began.’"43

The anecdote has been a staple of Hitler biography.44 Although Ian Kershaw has recently noted that Kubizek's account is "highly fanciful, reading in mystical fashion back into the episode an early prophetic vision of Hitler's own future," Hitler's image of himself as Volkstribun had been firmly in place.45 Albert Speer recalled in his Spandau diaries how the Führer explained that playing the overture to Rienzi at the Nuremberg rallies was "not just a musical question," but that "listening to this blessed music as a young

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man in the theater at Linz, I had the vision that I too must someday succeed in uniting the German Empire and making it great once more."46 If Rienzi contained, as Adorno put it, all the "essential elements of fascism," it is not surprising that Rienzi became a role model for Hitler.47 But Köhler goes even further. If Wagner had once dreamed of playing Rienzi himself, the composer's wish was actually carried out sixty years later by one of his most ardent followers.48

While the performance of Rienzi was a formative moment for Hitler as a person, Köhler claims that Hitler succeeded as a politician because he was seen to fulfill (and eventually did fulfill) Wagner's legacy. Köhler relates how influential Wagnerians were actively involved in implementing Wagner's ideological objectives in the political arena by supporting the political upstart during the 1920s and making him acceptable to the conservative elite. After Hitler's failed Munich coup and subsequent imprisonment, moral and monetary assistance were forthcoming from industrialists and intellectuals associated with the Bayreuth Circle. The decisive moment of initiation took place on September 30, 1923, on the occasion of the Deutscher Tag in Bayreuth, when Hitler met Houston Chamberlain, whose book The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century had put forward the notion "that the Germanic race was engaged in a mortal struggle [with the Jews] that was to be fought not only with cannon but with every weapon of human life and society."49 Hans Conrad later recalled how Hitler had received, as it were, Wagner's spirit from Chamberlain's hand:

In the evening occurred in all quiet one of the most memorable meetings in the history of Bayreuth—and one may also say—in the history of the National Socialist movement: Adolf Hitler and Houston Chamberlain shook hands. The great thinker who had prepared the path of the Führer through his writings and created the spiritual foundation of the Nordic German world view, the ingenious seer and herald of the Third Reich felt, that in this simple man from the folk, the German fate would fulfill itself happily.50

Such stories of prophecy and fulfillment had long become an article of faith in the Nazi saga. One example is Georg Schott's anthology Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Seer of the Third Reich, which contained a letter that Wagner's ailing son-in-law (Houston had married Wagner's daughter Eva in 1908) had sent to Hitler a week after their fateful meeting. It ends with a portentous biblical reference to the old Simeon, who greeted the child Jesus in the temple: "that Germany gives birth to a Hitler in the hour of its greatest need, this testifies to its livelihood. ... I was allowed to go to sleep justly, and had no need to awaken again. God's protection be with you."51 For Joachim Fest, the eschatological allusion of Chamberlain's blessing must have sounded to Hitler like "a benediction from the Bayreuth master himself."52 In a much-quoted letter to Siegfried Wagner, Hitler wrote that "the spiritual sword which we are wielding today was forged in Bayreuth, first by the Master himself and later by Chamberlain."53 Conrad also reported how, in July 1925, Hitler had said, upon hearing the Ring, "what he confessed eight years later as the Chancellor of the Reich: ‘There is no more glorious expression of the German spirit than the immortal works of the master itself.’ And at the time, while he was still not allowed to speak in public, he remarked one evening, which he spent in the small circle at the Bayreuth Ortsgruppe, that Wagner's works contained everything that National Socialism strived for."54

Inasmuch as these two events—Hitler's personal vocation and his public calling—were mythologized by

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the Führer's followers, Wagner's influence on Hitler also dawned on the dictator's detractors. Three weeks after Hitler had been sworn into office, Carl von Ossietzky wrote that Germany was to become "for a second time a Wagner opera."55 And in 1939, Thomas Mann noted in his provocative "Brother Hitler" that the developments in Germany amounted to "a distorted phase of Wagnerism, as has been said long ago."56 Mann's idea that Hitler treated politics like an artist was a response of sorts to the philosopher and critic Ludwig Marcuse, who had asked the novelist whether Wagner's "mad-magnificent concept of aesthetic totality, which leaves no space for the real, is not a prototype of the state that stands in the same struggle with reality and can also only conquer it through the tyranny of illusion."57 A year later Marcuse suggested that "the Third Reich has no greater ancestor and no more perfect representative of its ideology" than Wagner.58 Like Adorno, who claimed in his Versuch über Wagner that the Gesamtkunstwerk was the quintessential illusion ("phantasmagoria") of mass culture in the service of fascism, Marcuse sought to come to terms with the power of Nazism through a study of the Bayreuth composer. In an excerpt published in the Pariser Tageszeitung, he suggested that "Wagner's restless spirit ... had finally come home ... at the Conventions of the NSDAP."59

Given that historians had limited access to sources and archives within Germany, this kind of analysis of culture and ideology was the primary approach to the phenomenon of Hitler at the time. A milestone publication in the English-speaking world was Peter Viereck's 1941 Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler, which traced figures like Otto Jahn, Julius Langbehn, Paul de Lagarde, Houston Chamberlain, and Alfred Rosenberg back to the nineteenth-century corruption of nationalism as a continuous flow of ideas "from a Herder to a Hitler."60 Concluding "that Wagnerian romanticism is the most important single fountainhead of Nazi ideas and ideals," Viereck noted in the second edition of his book that "Wagner's tragedy is that finally he himself became a Wagnerite."61

These sweeping assertions about the destructive role of Wagner and Wagnerism have lost some of their explanatory force in part because of their roots in the methods of Geistesgeschichte, which itself has sometimes been seen as an intellectual ferment for the formation of Nazism. But more recent, empirically based research has lent more credence to Thomas Mann's claim that "there is much Hitler in Wagner." Annette Hein located a most potent link between Wagner and Hitler in the Bayreuther Blätter, which functioned as a carrier of ideology (Ideologieträger) from its inception in 1878 until it ceased publication with the death of its sole editor, Hans von Wolzogen, in 1938.62 "Just as Wagner had been a heralding prophet of the Third Reich," wrote Arthur Prüfer on the occasion of the journal's sixtieth birthday, "so have the Bayreuther Blätter demonstrated the idea of National Socialism in Richard Wagner."63 And the historian Hermann Seeliger exulted that Wagner had not only unfolded the swastika banner in his essay "Judaism in Music," but that the one who would avow Richard Wagner would also avow the hero who unleashed Wagner's ideas: "Hitler's spirit is Wagner's spirit" [Hitlergeist ist Wagnergeist].64 If the transmission of Wagner's ideas was the journal's explicit mission, that mission had been fulfilled by the time of Wolzogen's death. Hence it is not surprising that such popular textbooks as Louis L. Snyder's 1957 Basic History of Modern Germany would later juxtapose selected quotations from Wagner and Hitler, in order to demonstrate how the former had been the latter's "spiritual master."65

If the gist of these intentionalist interpretations is expressed in the possessive genitive of Wagner's Hitler, Hans Rudolf Vaget recently countered Köhler's claim by reversing his title in an essay entitled "Hitler's

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Wagner."66 The reversal is shorthand for what might be called a methodological shift toward functionalism in Wagner scholarship. Vaget does not deny Wagner's anti-Semitism, but he places it within the broader context of the widespread discourse about class and race in the nineteenth century, in which Wagner was but one, albeit an important, player. According to Lelland Joseph Rather—who wrote two books on this subject—Wagner's contributions to discussions about race were moderate by comparison and firmly embedded in his adherence to apocalyptic visions about the future of Germany and indeed the whole of civilization.67 More important, the contextualist line in the functionalist argument would maintain that it was not Wagner's fault that Hitler absorbed and partially misunderstood the composer's ideas. Where Köhler saw Hitler putting Wagner's ideas into practice, Vaget sees them as being appropriated.68 For Vaget, therefore, the main conceptual problem in Köhler's intentionalist approach is the idea of influence: "We can no longer use the term ‘influence’ as freely and trustingly as Viereck did; influence has long since given way to notions of reception and appropriation, denoting a more complex and indirect mode of intellectual and ideological transfer, and shifting attention from the source to the recipient."69

Vaget takes Hugo von Hofmannsthal's notion of a "cultural space" [geistiger Raum] to suggest that such a space was powerfully created in Germany through music—Wagner's music—and shared by friend and foe. Wagner's works belonged to all Germans, before the National Socialists colonized the cultural space and expelled the Jews and other so-called cultural Bolsheviks from their shared heritage. Vaget notes that Hitler identified with the heroes of Wagner's music dramas—Rienzi, Siegfried, Hans Sachs, and Parsifal—precisely because they provided a model for his political dreams, not Wagner's. Thus the new Reichskanzler literally staged his awakening of Germany through the "Wach auf" chorus in the performance of Die Meistersinger. When the opera was performed in the mastersingers' native city in March 1933, "the people of Nuremberg were instructed ... to turn to Hitler's box, thereby transferring their homage from Hans Sachs to Adolf Hitler."70 If Hitler had finally reached the world's stage and taken up his role as the redeemer of evil, it was the very role in which Houston "Amfortas" Chamberlain had cast him as the Parsifal-savior who would "rid Germany of the lethal influence of Judaism."71 For Vaget, then, there is a decisive difference between usurping cultural space and becoming a product of it. Wagner's ideas provided fertile ground, but the seed that bore the evil fruit on this ground was planted by those who came after him, not by the maestro himself. Vaget's functionalism has thus a strong anti- intentionalist bent: what Wagner wanted is not the same as the vision that Hitler hijacked from the composer.

The controversy about Wagner's influence or Wagner's appropriation comes to a head in the thorny question of whether Wagner's anti-Semitic intentions were effectively voiced and transmitted in his music dramas. Right after the war, Leon Stein noted that "the Wagnerian attitude towards Jews in Germany pointed irrevocably in one direction: to Hitler, the laws of Nuremberg, the ‘science’ of Jaensch, and the ovens of Auschwitz"—but he concluded that "the greatest part of [Wagner's] art may be understood and appreciated as music rather than an expression of his racial and political thinking."72 Bracketing ideology was Bayreuth's survival strategy in the 1950s, when Wieland Wagner's abstract stage designs meant to bring out the timeless essence of Wagner's music dramas, while the slogan "Hier gilt's der Kunst" asked visitors "to refrain from political discussions on the Festival Hill."73 In this climate, the 1952 publication of Adorno's Versuch über Wagner challenged Wagnerians to treat the composer's anti-Semitism no longer

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as an aberration in his writings but as an important subtext of his music dramas. "All the rejects of Wagner's works are caricatures of Jews," wrote Adorno; "the gold-grabbing, invisible, anonymous, exploitative Alberich, the shoulder-shrugging, loquacious Mime, overflowing with self-praise and spite, the impotent intellectual critic Hanslick-Beckmesser."74 But it was not until the 1970s that Wagner's works were put, to use an expression by Barry Millington, "on trial," which was sparked off in part by the centennial Bayreuth production of the Ring by Patrice Chéreau, who sought to bring out the political messages of the cycle, including its anti-Semitic content.75 After Chéreau, Wagner's music dramas were no longer off-limits for such interpretations. If anything, the centennial Ring had made audiences aware of just how much was at stake: namely, whether the origin of evil in the Ring might have something to do with the Ring as the origin of evil.

Part III: the Origin of Evil in the Ring TOP The debate about anti-Semitic content in the Ring (and Wagner's other Prologue: the Hedgehog and... operas) revolves around three questions: (1) whether Wagner meant Part I: Intentionalism and... Part II: Wagner as... what he said in his prose works; (2) whether he said what he meant in Part III: the Origin... his music dramas; and (3) whether the two add up to the same Epilogue: Foregone Conclusions NOTES underlying goal: the elimination of Judaism. Among the prose works, the ending of "Judaism in Music" has been the touchstone. Here Wagner suggested that Jews take the Untergang [demise] of Ahasuerus as the only path to their redemption, holding up Ludwig Börne as a model of Selbstvernichtung [self-destruction]. According to Jacob Katz, in the larger context of discussions over the Jewish question during the 1840s, as well as in the specific context of the essay's ending, the composer "by no means intended" to imply the physical death of the Jews but rather their "de- Judaization—a process of radical assimilation, not indeed to the existing bourgeois world but to the new social and political creation that Wagner anticipated and imagined as a revolutionary utopia."76 Katz's concern with context is typical of a functionalist approach: Wagner did not mean what he said. But since the composer spoke about assimilation in terms of annihilation—glossing Erlösung with Untergang— intentionalists (like Rose) have seized on the sinister implications in Wagner's formulation. Since Untergang occupies the rhetorically strongest position as the essay's last word, its meaning barely masks a much darker intention. In other words, Wagner meant what he said.

In the operas, the situation is often seen to be reversed. In the Wagner Handbook, Dieter Borchmeyer asserts that Wagner never made a statement "which would entitle us to interpret any of the characters in the music dramas or any of the details of their plots in anti-Semitic terms, or even to interpret them as allusions to Jews." For Borchmeyer, any attempt to link the Nibelungs (especially Mime) with the characterization of Jews in "Judaism and Music" "is no more than an unverifiable hypothesis," and he asks "why, in spite of his violently anti-Semitic polemical writings, there is not a single trace in Wagner's music dramas of any similar tendencies (a claim which is philologically unassailable, notwithstanding speculative suggestions to the contrary)."77 Borchmeyer's sense of philology is guided not only by disgust (he "gladly" excluded Wagner's anti-Semitic and racist articles for reasons of space, aesthetic appearance, and intellectual quality from his 1983 edition of Wagner's writings for the Insel Verlag), but also by a narrow—literal—reading of Wagner's operas.78 Similarly, Daniel Barenboim defended Wagner in a

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highly publicized interview with Edward Said, suggesting that if the composer wanted to portray Jews in his operas, he would have "called a spade a spade."79

Marc Weiner has shown that claims about philological "unassailability" or similar demands for "textual evidence" proving anti-Semitic tendencies in the operas do not square well with Wagner's stated approach to aesthetic subtext.80 A burnt child from his revolutionary escapades, Wagner had become careful and canny when navigating politically treacherous ground. Thus, in response to August Röckel's criticism that the Ring was not an overt political drama, Wagner wrote that he had staved off "the urge to make everything too obvious, because it has become clear to me that too overt a disclosure of one's intention may well disturb a correct understanding."81 Wagner seems to have realized that the best way to get his message across was not to call a spade a spade. In that sense the composer acted no differently than his great colleague south of the Alps, who placed his Risorgimento plots in ancient biblical times or on the shores of distant lands. All the same, Mime's Jewish traits were readily acknowledged by Cosima, who called him ein Jüdchen [a little Jew], and they were equally obvious to Gustav Mahler, who wrote to Natalie Bauer-Lechner: "No doubt with Mime Wagner intended to ridicule the Jews (with all their characteristic traits—petty intelligence and greed—the jargon is textually and musically so cleverly suggested)."82 Music's clever potential for doublespeak was a crucial way for Wagner to communicate content—something that Shostakovich would later cultivate, paradoxically, to escape his own annihilation. Listeners looking for literalness in Wagner were deliberately put at a loss about the composer's duplicity, which—in Weiner's formulation—"needed the Jew in order to define the German," but could not "name" the Jew in the same way he would do in his writings.83 In other words, Wagner did not (need to) say what he meant.

Do Wagner's prose works and dramatic works add up to a single anti-Semitic message? If we consider Wagner's writings and operas (as Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Thomas Grey have convincingly suggested) as "interlocking texts," Borchmeyer is wrong on at least one count—and it is an important one.84 There is indeed one (and fairly well-known) instance that entitles us to interpret one of the Ring's characters and an important dimension of its plot in anti-Semitic terms, because Wagner did so himself. This occurs in "Know Thyself," one of three late essays that appeared in 1881 in the Bayreuther Blätter.85 Wagner wrote the essay as a contribution to the debate about Bernhard Förster's Antisemitenpetition, which sought to undo liberal laws that had been passed in the preceding decades and had made the emancipation of Central European Jews possible. Reluctant and too opportunistic to engage in such overt activism, Wagner suggested approaching the issue philosophically, claiming that he would go to the "root" of the problem, that is, the idea of property, the origin of money, and its relation to the origin of the state and justice:

Clever though be the many thoughts expressed ... about the invention of money and its enormous value as an omnipotent power of culture, against such praises should be set the curse to which it has always been subjected in myth and poetry. If gold here figures as the demon strangling the innocence of humanity, our great poet [Goethe] makes the invention of paper money appear through the magic of the devil. The fateful ring of the Nibelung as a stock-exchange portfolio might bring to perfection this eerie picture of a ghostly ruler of the world. ... What comes to light among the blessings of this credit, we experience today, and

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we are quite inclined to blame only the Jews for it. Admittedly, they are virtuosi where we are dilettantes: only the art of making money from nothing has been invented by our civilization, or, if the Jews are to blame for it, it is because our whole civilization is a barbaric-Judaic mix, but in no way a Christian creation.86

Wagner reads the ring of the Ring in unmistakably anti-Semitic terms: as a perfect picture of an economy controlled by big capital, for which he, fully in line with nineteenth-century anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, blamed the Jews. If Wagner echoed early nineteenth-century discussions about the origin of money by Karl Marx, Moses Hess, and, especially, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the Ring dramatized the answer Proudhon had given in his essay "What Is Property?"—namely, theft.87 Alberich's theft of the Rhinegold and his forging of the ring fits the description of the stereotype of the assimilated Western stock-exchange Jew, whose Tarnhelm, as George Bernard Shaw observed, also allows him to operate with the same invisibility as the modern shareholder.88 In that sense, property, as theft, was the origin of evil.

Already in 1856, Wagner had explained to his fellow revolutionary August Röckel that his original concern in creating the Ring was to show "how a whole world of injustice arises from the first injustice, a world which is destroyed in order - - [sic] to teach us to recognize injustice, root it out and establish a just world in its place."89 Wagner's didactic intention (fully in tune at that time with his own communist leanings) is more pronounced in a letter that he had written two years earlier to Franz Liszt, in the midst of working on the musical draft of Die Walküre: "Let us treat the world only with contempt; for it deserves no better: but let no hopes be placed in it, that our hearts be not deluded! It is evil, evil, fundamentally evil, only the heart of a friend and a woman's tears can redeem it from its curse. ... It belongs to Alberich: no one else!! Away with it!"90 Of course, there is a risk of reducing the Ring entirely to such concerns, but these statements resonate too strongly with the above excerpt from "Know Thyself" to be ignored when inquiring how Wagner's approach to the origin of the evil in the Ring might relate to the Ring as the origin of evil. Put differently: how does the Ring as the object of a historiography of evil relate to the historiography of evil in the Ring?

The place to consider this question is the Norns' scene during the prologue to Götterdämmerung. The Norns recount the history of the Ring, and their principal concern is the origin and effects of evil. There are two such origins that matter: one associated with Alberich, the other with Wotan. Alberich's theft of the Rhinegold is certainly the first evil deed we encounter in the Ring. Yet over the course of the tetralogy, we become gradually aware of another evil deed, which is fully disclosed only in the narration by the Norns at the beginning of Götterdämmerung: here we learn that Wotan drank from the Well of Wisdom, which dried up, and that he broke a branch from the World Ash Tree, which withered away. At first, Alberich's and Wotan's wrongdoings seem to be quite similar in that they both violate nature. Such violations constitute what Paul Ricoeur saw as the first symbol of evil: defilement.91 Just as the Rhine loses its light after losing its gold, the Well of Wisdom and the World Ash become lifeless. But there are also fundamental differences between Alberich's and Wotan's deeds—differences that spring from their mythical roots and result from their dramatic presentation. And these differences reveal Wagner's bias.

To begin with Alberich: at the end of the first scene of Das Rheingold, he gives up love in exchange for

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power, which would seem to be his first evil act. But Alberich acts that way because he fails to gain love; he fails to gain love because he is not likable; and he is not likable because of his appearance. "Ugh, the ugly one!" the Rhinemaidens scream when they see him. Alberich, in Adorno's words, appears as a subhuman creature [Untermensch].92 Therefore his existence poses a threat even before he enters. The very moment Flosshilde warns her sisters to guard the gold better (m. 158), the harmony changes for the first time from the seemingly unchangeable E-flat major pedal to C minor. This is a dynamic moment, and C minor will become the key in which Alberich will come to renounce love at the end of the scene. This mode shift is replicated on the dominant (from B-flat major to G minor) when Alberich actually appears (m. 182), and it becomes a powerful first example of Wagner's practice to create highly effective musical correspondences between analogous dramatic moments. What is more important in the present context is that Flosshilde's warning acknowledges a preexisting dualism between good and evil. Wagner's Scandinavian sources depicted this dualism as a conflict between black elves [Schwarzalben] and light elves [Lichtalben], personified in the Nibelungs and the gods.93 Ricoeur identified such oppositions as belonging to cosmogonies where good and evil exist side by side from the very beginning. Thus, if Alberich is black from the start, his otherness excludes him from love before he excludes himself from love. Alberich has always been evil. He has always been the enemy.

Not so Wotan. His drinking from the Well of Wisdom resembles Eve's eating from the Tree of Knowledge in Genesis. Wotan is a god with human attributes. According to Ricoeur, the parable of the Fall is the anthropological myth par excellence.94 In Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft [The Artwork of the Future], Wagner wrote (in secular terms) that this is "the moment when man perceived the difference between himself and nature ... by breaking loose from the unconsciousness of natural animal existence and passing over into conscious life." But for Wagner the first expression of consciousness was error, and hence "error is the father of knowledge," and "the history of the begetting of knowledge on error is the history of the human race, from the myth of the earliest times down to the present day."95 More important, since knowledge is the ability to distinguish between good and evil, this ability is coupled with error from the very beginning. Once Wotan drinks from the Well of Wisdom and turns the branch he broke off from the World Ash Tree into a spear, his newly gained knowledge becomes subject to error. Wotan must exchange an eye for the drink, so his vision will be restricted. Insofar as the spear stands for the laws that regulate social life—such as moral behavior or labor relations—Wotan's rule is already imbued with wrongdoing. Hence it is not surprising that Wotan experiences laws as a form of bondage. In Rousseauian terms, the fall into consciousness sets humans free, but at the same time lays them into chains.

The two different origins of evil associated with Alberich and with Wotan receive quite different treatments in the Ring, and this difference has important consequences for their place in Wagner's economy of evil. What Alberich does, we see, and see right at the beginning of the Ring. What Wotan did, we never saw, and are told about only near the end of the cycle. This difference between enactment and narration originates with the way Wagner first conceived the narrative of the Norns in Siegfrieds Tod and then expanded it into the Ring tetralogy. In Siegfrieds Tod, the Norns' scene had begun thus:

Rheingold raubte Alberich,

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schmiedete einen Ring,

band durch ihn seine Brüder.

[Alberich stole the Rheingold,

forged a ring,

and bound with it his brothers.]

In the well-known genesis of the Ring, one impetus for Wagner to expand Siegfrieds Tod to a tetralogy was to place before our eyes what Thomas Mann called "prehistories lurking about offstage." Once we had seen these prehistories, they could be recalled with the help of the composer's most powerful dramatic tool: the leitmotif. Carolyn Abbate has suggested, however, that enactment did not eliminate the need for narrative, since Wagner "came to realize only at a later time that narrative was, after all, critical to the kind of musical and literary work that he had conceived."96 For Abbate, music drama should not be reduced to the difference between enacted drama and parasitic narrative, for narrative itself was "primary" and "freed from the dualistic model that regards narrating as dependent upon an a priori set of events or actions."97

But the difference between narration and enactment does matter when comparing the two origins of evil in the Ring. Their distinctly different dramaturgy directs our attention to the different effects the two evils have over the course of the story, and these effects influence our moral assessment. A crucial example is the striking change that Wagner made when revising the Norns' scene from Siegfrieds Tod for the prologue to Götterdämmerung. The revised version placed the Alberich narrative at the end of that scene and introduced the Wotan narrative at the beginning. What matters in the present context is that the beginning of this new narrative contains a new prehistory lurking offstage for which there is no music to recall, and no dramatic situation to conjure up. What, then, was Wagner's point?

I would argue that, at this important moment in the Ring, Wagner used the prologue to throw the different origins of evil in the Ring into relief. The music he wrote for the Wotan and Alberich narratives casts them in a profoundly different light. In a recent analysis of the prologue, Patrick McCreless has shown that the Norns' scene consists of an elaborate rotational form with three rounds of narration, which are subdivided in three statements for each Norn.98 These three rounds (as well as their three subsections) are connected by a cluster of refrains, which are linked through a figure strongly evocative of the Norns' spinning their rope at the trunk of the World Ash Tree (mm. 41–45). This spinning figure pervades the opening of the prologue and is derived from the first musical ideas Wagner had sketched for this scene in Siegfrieds Tod.99 Thus the spinning motif is a kind of ur-leitmotif in the Ring, so that the triplets and sextuplets representing the waves of the Rhine from the prelude to Das Rheingold are a variant of the weaving (in the final version, of course, it appears to be the other way around). At the beginning of Götterdämmerung, therefore, the Norns surface as the narrators of the Ring. Spinning and singing are part of the same activity, and spinning is certainly a prime metaphor for storytelling. Moreover, the deep link between weaving and waves suggests that the rope is the stuff from which the Ring is made, or that the Ring is the stuff from which the rope is made. August Everding's production of the Ring (twice given at

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the Lyric Opera of Chicago during the last decade) made this powerful symbolism effectively explicit by opening Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, and Siegfried with a tableau of the Norns weaving the rope in the form of a ring. Although Wagner has the Norns appear only in the prologue to Götterdämmerung, Everding renders visible what is in the music: that they have always been there; that they have always been telling the story of the Ring.

Thus, if the Norns actually narrate the Ring, one can also think of them as the historians of the cycle. The beginning of Götterdämmerung presents itself as a moment of extraordinary narrative self-consciousness, and this kind of reflective stance constitutes an important function of a prologue (as in Goethe's Faust). By stepping forward as narrators, the Norns reveal how they are involved in the story: they are creating their historical text as a musical texture, or simply: history in music. Although the Norns appear to be omniscient, like objective historical narrators, their narration remains colored by their own perspective, like that of all seemingly objective narrators, who put their own spin on the story nevertheless. As a result, the Norns exhibit not only the bias behind their historiography but also expose its limits. One can observe this especially in the two sections that bookend their story: its very beginning in prehistoric time and the moment when the present catches up with their narration. Not surprisingly, these are also the two moments that speak of the two origins of evil in the Ring.

Consider the first section of the first round (mm. 49–100), in which the First (and oldest) Norn sings of Wotan at the World Ash Tree. This section begins and ends with the same motif and in the same key. An authentic cadence at the end of the section provides the clear sense of closure that is lacking in the remainder of the scene. Given the link between the Norns' weaving and the Rhine's waves, the key of E- flat minor parallels the E-flat major at the beginning of Das Rheingold. Their common tonic suggests that the World Ash Tree and the Rhine River have their roots in the same mythological sphere, while the sense of unspoiled nature is effectively called forth with a variant of the Freia motif, which blooms to a climax at the end of the opening period (mm. 50–64). At the same time, the initial inflection toward the minor mode expresses right away how telling of Wotan's original sin has affected the tone of the First Norn, who sums up her opening section by singing that her song has become "sad" (mm. 98–100). Indeed, one can easily hear the descending E-flat minor triad that opens and ends her "song" as an inversion of the rising E-flat major figures from the beginning of Das Rheingold.

Like other narrators in the Ring, the First Norn draws on the leitmotivic symbolism that has accrued up to this point. But since Wotan's first deeds were never presented before our eyes, she can sing of them only in terms of their later effects that we have seen. Thus, the passage about the eye that the god pays "as an eternal tribute" in exchange for knowledge resounds with the Valhalla motif (mm. 65–72). We know of course that having the castle built by the giants was the first transaction that got Wotan into trouble. Similarly, the music we hear when the First Norn tells of Wotan's breaking off of the branch from the World Ash Tree and carving from it a spear—the descending scale—has long been associated with the contracts that regulate such transactions (mm. 76–77). Thus the Norns' account of Wotan's first transgression is consistent with his portrayal over the course of the Ring: Wotan is a fallen god—and he has fallen deeply. Yet even though he violated Erda and even though his marriage is in ruins, the feelings for his offspring show that he shied away from that final step (carried out by Alberich) to forgo love entirely.

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The remainder of the Norns' scene tells the story of Wotan's decline, which runs parallel with the decay of the World Ash Tree: Wotan's reign ends when Siegfried shatters his spear, whose fragments are thrown onto the giant pile of firewood made from the tree's trunk. This process of decay and fragmentation is replicated in the Norns' music, in that the successive rounds of the narration gradually abandon their formal integrity and rush toward dissolution. They become shorter and increasingly disjointed. Similarly, the initial inflection from E-flat major toward E-flat minor in the first section resembles the searing effect of the wound on the tree. As E-flat recedes into the tonal background, the weakening tonic records the account of Wotan's weakening power.

As a result of this process, the Norns' web of Ring history is ripe and ready for its final disruption in the third round. And the Norns know it. They know that the content of the story is affecting their narration. If the First Norn told us in the first round that her song had become sad, she now tells us in the last round that she can no longer weave the threads of her narrative into a coherent texture. Compared with the extended story of Wotan, the whole Alberich narrative is compressed into a bulleted list: the theft of the Rhinegold, the ring as a product of want and envy, and the curse laid upon it (mm. 259–317). This utmost narrative concentration corresponds to its explosive content. Quickly, the texture of the narration unravels into a series of fragments, most prominently Siegfried's horn call and the curse motif, which appears at the same pitch level as its original appearance in Das Rheingold. Remarkable here is not just that the curse first cuts the Norns off by cutting through the vocal line (while they all exclaim successively "It broke!"), but that the Norns' voices align themselves, unisono, with the second statement of the curse, as if it had sworn them into the joint abdication that sends them down to their mother, Erda (mm. 285–95). Cutting through their spin, the curse makes the Norns say that they have nothing more to say: their role as historians has been terminated and past history has come to an end. And now that the Norns are done with telling the Vorgeschichte, actual history can unfold before our eyes. Now Siegfried is ready to descend from the rock of the Valkyries and participate in the affairs of the world. Finally, the past has caught up with the present.

As told by the Norns, then, the story about the two origins of evil mirrors the nature of the two evils depicted: a long story of gradual decline (Wotan), and a short story of swift destruction (Alberich). On one hand, the narrative of Wotan's fall and his evil entrapment resembles the distribution of power typical for a functionalist narrative. On the other hand, the story of Alberich's premeditated theft and curse on the ring demonstrates the powerful intensification pertinent to an intentionalist narrative. It is significant that Wotan's weakening power results partly from its lacking foundation in dramatic presentation, while the force of Alberich's curse derives in part from its origin onstage. To be sure, both Wotan's and Alberich's evils are inextricably mired in the same pursuit of power through the ring. As the representatives of a cosmic dualism—"Black Alberich" and "Light Alberich"—there is an uncanny resemblance between them, which was cleverly staged in Michael Levine's recent production of the Ring in Toronto, where, in the opening scene, a dreaming Wotan was seemingly joined at the hip with Alberich.100 This latent link between Wotan and Alberich becomes also manifest in the tonal symbolism that undergirds the Norns' narration and its place in the Ring as a whole. E-flat major (the realm of the Rhine) and B minor (the key of the curse) are, in neo-Riemannian terms, hexatonic poles. Hence, the initial inflection of the E-flat major from the beginning of Das Rheingold to the E-flat minor in the World Ash Tree narrative marks a first semitonal step toward B minor when G is lowered to G-flat, which resonates through the F-sharp

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minor that lingers in the background of the second round.101 As a result, the narrative of decline leads not only to the narrative of destruction, but also to the destruction of narrative. Since Alberich's evil waxes while Wotan's evil wanes, the evil of history can catch up with the history of evil. The Norns may root (tonally) for Wotan, but Alberich's curse uproots them. This reversal structures their historiography: Wotan is a Mensch, while Alberich is an Unmensch. Because of his fall, Wotan acquires an essential trait of humanity, and this humanity, however flawed, becomes a place for our identification with him, as a weak leader, an unfaithful husband, and a loving father. Yet inasmuch as Wotan's trials and tribulations elicit sympathy, no one will feel sorry for the sufferings of Alberich, whose repellent appearance turns him into an abject animal.

This inverse relationship between Wotan's evil and Alberich's evil may be understood through the distinction between absence and loss, which Dominick LaCapra has proposed as a way of approaching narrative responses to the traumatic experience of genocide. "Absence," writes LaCapra, "appears in all societies or cultures" and "applies to ultimate foundations in general, notably to metaphysical grounds (including the human being as origin of meaning and value)."102 While absence belongs to a transhistorical level, "loss is situated on a historical level and is the consequence of particular events."103 Problems arise from the frequent narrativization of absence, whereby it is converted into loss.104 This conversion "gives rise to both Christian and oedipal stories," which speak of a Fall or a primal crime and thereby try to explain the origin of guilt and allow for a redemptive return to plenitude and healing.105 Clearly, the narrative conversion of absence into loss marks the birthplace of the hermeneutic conflict— the very moment the interpretation of evil coincides with the evil of interpretation. This happens in the case of genocide when the conversion of absence into loss leads to understanding a specific historical trauma (which pertains only to those affected) entirely in terms of structural trauma (which pertains to everyone): it is then that the crucial distinction among victims, perpetrators, and bystanders is lost.106 Moreover, when the absolute uniqueness of a historical trauma acquires the "epiphanous, sublime, or sacral quality" of structural trauma, the specific historical event turns into a founding trauma "that typically plays a tendentious ideological role, for example, in terms of the concept of a chosen people or a belief in one's privileged status as a victim."107

The two versions of the origin of evil in the Ring thus constitute a conversion of absence into loss and a conversion of loss into absence. Wotan's fall and Alberich's theft are represented in ways that reveal an inverse relation to structural and historical trauma, and thereby fulfill different ideological functions. As narrated by the Norns, Wotan's deeds at the Well of Wisdom and the World Ash Tree invoke the religious archetype of the Fall and thus offer a version of evil close to a structural trauma that pertains to all people. But since Wotan's first crime (and his other transgressions, including his violation of Erda) are never prominently presented onstage, they do not acquire the status of a historical event. When Wotan first appears in Das Rheingold, he is already entangled in a web of wrongdoings that appear to be not entirely his own fault, since he has been listening, however eagerly, to Loge's advice. The rules of the blame game are already firmly in place. Indeed, even when the Norns finally reveal Wotan's first fall, they are already partial to the story of the god's decline. In other words, as the historians of the Ring, the Norns seek to explain how the structural trauma of Wotan's evil has almost imperceptibly turned into a historical trauma. The Wotan narrative is a gradual conversion of absence into loss.

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By contrast, Alberich's evil is presented from the start as a specific historical event. In his case, the conversion of absence into loss (or Alberich's unchanging otherness into action) takes place right away as a conversion into drama rather than narration. It is a conversion into concrete deeds everyone will witness: intentional theft, premeditated abandonment of love in exchange for power, and a curse that will do damage until it is broken. Since we see Alberich do wrong on his own accord before our own eyes, the ongoing efficacy of his evil deeds derives from their dramatic enactment. The devastating power of the curse becomes immediately apparent when the giants' fight over the ring has a fatal outcome. Performance thus turns Alberich's evil into a founding trauma, whose remembrance (or reenactment) will rupture the story of Ring again and again. While Wotan's structural trauma becomes a historical trauma through narration, Alberich's historical trauma becomes a structural trauma through dramatic performance.

If these two processes seem to cross each other in the Norns' scene, they do not work at cross-purposes but complement each other to create a powerful message about the origin and nature of evil. As inverse developments they are central to the way Wagner enlists the Norns to elicit or block identification with the two main opponents of the Ring. While the Norns present their story of Wotan as a conversion of absence into loss, the conversion of loss into absence is confirmed by their horrid vision [wüstes Gesicht] of Alberich. In that sense, the narrative of the Norns effectively recapitulates the two trajectories of evil in the Ring: Wotan turns from perpetrator into victim, whereas Alberich turns from victim into perpetrator. These two processes are not symmetrically inverted, but rather reciprocal. Wotan only gradually becomes enmeshed in the complicated world of competing agendas, while Alberich quickly turns on those who tease or trick him. While Wotan's story resembles a functionalist narrative, Alberich's story is akin to an intentionalist account. If Wotan's fallen humanity aligns itself with an underlying universalism, Alberich's subhuman appearance is pointedly particularistic. If Wotan's story is that of a fox, while Alberich's is that of a hedgehog, this may mean, in Isaiah Berlin's words, "no more than that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defense." But it also may mean no less, for it might also mean that this defeat of the fox by the hedgehog is the inevitable outcome of a battle between competing worldviews based on a greater and a lesser evil. The way Wagner's Norns tell it, the lesser evil becomes less, and the greater evil becomes greater.

But is this outcome inevitable? Or rather, does the inevitability with which Wagner presents it to us justify treating the origin of evil in the Ring as the origin of evil outside of the Ring?

Epilogue: Foregone Conclusions TOP The conclusion of "Know Thyself" echoes the ending of "Judaism in Prologue: the Hedgehog and... Music" in that it conjures up a vision of Judaism's end. Although Part I: Intentionalism and... Part II: Wagner as...

Wagner claimed to remain above petty politics, his caveat only makes Part III: the Origin... explicit the political agenda behind the aesthetic concerns dominating Epilogue: Foregone Conclusions NOTES the earlier essay:108

What "Conservatives," "Liberals," and "Conservative-Liberals," and finally "Democrats,"

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"Socialists," and even "Social Democrats" etc. have lately uttered on the Jewish Question must seem to us a trifle foolish; for none of these parties would think of testing that "Know Thyself" upon themselves. ... But only when the demon that keeps these ravers in the mania of their party-strife will no longer find ... shelter among us, then there will be no Jew anymore.

And precisely the very stimulus of the present movement, which was in turn only thinkable among us, might bring this great solution within reach of us Germans, rather than any other nation, as soon as we, without fear, carry out that "Know Thyself" through the innermost core of our existence. ...109

It is difficult not to hear the resonances between Wagner's "great solution" and Hitler's Final Solution, both of which envisioned that "there will be no Jew anymore." Of course, the exact nature of this resonance is precisely what matters. We know that Wagner spoke only metaphorically when he said about the conductor Hermann Levi, whose "goodness" is repeatedly praised in Cosima's Diaries: "as a Jew, all he has to learn to do is to die."110 We also know that Wagner did not speak metaphorically when suggesting "in a violent joke that all Jews should be burned at a performance of Lessing's Nathan the Wise."111 But do we know whether Wagner's private jokes revealed the intentions behind his public pronouncements, that is, whether his assimilationist idea of the end of Judaism only masked an eliminationist goal? "Context is all," John Weiss has argued in connection with Wagner, suggesting that his "racist subtext resonates only with an audience for whom anti-Semitism is commonplace; we do not sense it now. But after all they had read and heard, his German audience then could hardly miss the message."112 If Wagner called for the destruction of the Jews, Weiss notes, "today his defenders, incapable of such hatred, insist he did not mean it literally. But we cannot know, nor is it relevant. It is enough for such an influential genius to have said it repeatedly, as the immense homage given him by anti-Semites shows."113

In his study of Hitler and the Final Solution, the historian Gerald Fleming has argued that "the line that leads from these early manifestations"—the young Hitler's "personal anti-Semitism" and "his congenital hatred for the Jews"—"to the liquidation orders that Hitler personally issued during the war ... is a direct one."114 Although Gordon A. Craig has suggested that Fleming's documentation "should finally lay to rest David Irving's provocative theory that Hitler neither ordered nor wished the destruction of the Jewish people," Saul Friedländer notes in his preface to Fleming's book that "few historians, even among the staunchest intentionalists, would accept such a linear thesis."115 And yet Friedländer continues: "even if the intermediary stages between Hitler's early anti-Semitism and his final policies toward the Jews were numerous and complex, Fleming's position is helpful on one essential point: it reminds us of the implacable aspect of Hitler's anti-Semitism, of its deep and early roots, as well as of its obsessional character. To deny that it was a factor in the later extermination policies needs more explanation than to declare it a major impetus."116 Adopting that stance, one could say that to deny that Wagner's obsessional anti-Semitism was a factor in Hitler's eliminationist policies needs more explanation than to declare it a major impetus. But there is more at stake. If the Führer maintained at the pinnacle of his power that he had possessed no precursors with the exception of Wagner, Hitler himself had declared Wagner the major impetus.

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In his book Forgone Conclusions, Michael André Bernstein notes that "Hitler could not have been taken seriously as a political leader without a history of anti-Semitic völkisch demagogues like [Georg Ritter von] Schönerer to prepare the ground, but the path from one to the other was not foreseeable, let alone inevitable."117 Bernstein insists that even if Schönerer was one of Hitler's acknowledged heroes, "to deny any link between Schönerer and Hitler is as dubious a move as to see them in a deterministic continuum."118 He notes that in historical novels about the Shoah, especially, "the intrusion of foreshadowing, the network of portentous signs that signal the future of the characters and their world, is particularly deceptive because it is based upon the shared familiarity of a known outcome."119 Bernstein warns that, in the case of apocalyptic events such as the Holocaust, historians have been particularly prone to surrender to the dangers of "backshadowing," that is, to writing history in the way in which novelists present earlier events in order to foreshadow future events, suggesting that these events were inevitable. Bernstein questions Jürgen Habermas's notion that historians must write with the benefit of knowledge that goes beyond the horizon of historical actors in order to present a coherent story. He notes that "the particular flourishing of historical consciousness that began in the nineteenth century ended up by making the historian, or at least the thinker as historical system builder [like Hegel, Marx, or Spengler] seem the one best equipped to interpret the world. But these kinds of historical analyses, especially when they are part of a larger philosophical vision, tend to legislate the future, as well as to explain the present and past, in terms of a single, coherent system whose laws the philosopher-historian has uncovered."120

Clearly, Wagner was (or wanted to be) one of these system builders. He was ambitious enough to construct a teleological history of the German people out of its mythical origins in his Wibelungen essay, and audacious enough to write himself into music history as the one destined to fulfill the legacy of Beethoven. Wagner's historical determinism also shaped his music dramas, especially the Ring, which he forged with the help of leitmotifs into that "network of portentous signs that signal the future of the characters and their world." If Wagner's inclination toward foreshadowing and backshadowing is evident in both his prose works and in his music, it is not surprising that his deterministic sense of history was picked up by his followers and would impress the young Hitler, who foreshadowed (and later backshadowed) his own mission in terms of Wagner's Rienzi: "At that hour it began."

Yet it is not certain whether the undeniable link between Wagner's and Hitler's stories of single cause and single outcome should be explained through a history of single cause and single outcome. Against the pervasive habits of foreshadowing among historians, Bernstein puts forward the strategy of "sideshadowing," which "champions the incommensurability of the concrete moment and refuses the tyranny of all synthetic master-schemes; it rejects the conviction that a particular code, law, or pattern exists, waiting to be uncovered beneath the heterogeneity of human existence. ... Sideshadowing stresses the significance of random, haphazard, and unassimilable contingencies, and instead of the power of a system to uncover an otherwise unfathomable truth, it expresses the ever-changing nature of that truth and the absence of any predictive certainties in human affairs."121

Sideshadowing, then, belongs to the realm of the foxes and the functionalists. In the case of Wagner's anti-Semitism, sideshadowing would mean that his notion of assimilation need not automatically be interpreted as elimination (even in hindsight), or that his public utterances in "Know Thyself" were necessarily contingent on his private remarks. Yet one may also ask whether the strategy of

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sideshadowing is strong enough to help historians counter the persistent power of back- and foreshadowing, which comes from historical events and artworks that seem to make an inexorable run toward their catastrophic end. Indeed, it is worth keeping in mind that Marrus's prediction about the new age of the foxes in Holocaust historiography has been proven wrong by the appearance and the appeal of Goldhagen's and Köhler's books—or even the most recent study by Götz Aly, who argues that Hitler succeeded for so long because the German populace directly benefited from the Nazis' confiscation of Jewish property.122 Although historians need not be hedgehogs in order to write a hedgehog's history, they often are, for better or worse, because they try to meet their subject on its own terms. In that sense, we may be struck by the fact that Berlin's initial interpretation of Herodotus's fragment—"that the fox, for all his cunning, is defeated by the hedgehog's one defense"—already formulates a foregone conclusion. But, of course, this was merely his point of departure.

NOTES TOP Berthold Hoeckner teaches music history at the University of Chicago. Prologue: the Hedgehog and... He specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century music, and his Part I: Intentionalism and... Part II: Wagner as...

research interests include aesthetics, music and visual culture, and the Part III: the Origin... psychology and neuroscience of music. He has received Humboldt Epilogue: Foregone Conclusions NOTES Research and Mellon New Directions fellowships. An associate editor of 19th-Century Music, he is the author of Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton University Press, 2002) and editor of Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music (Routledge, 2005).

1 Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History, with an introduction by Michael Walzer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 1.

2 Ibid., 1–2.

3 Ibid., 2 and 77. See also 36–37: "His [Tolstoy's] genius lay in the perception of specific properties, the almost inexpressible individual quality in virtue of which the given object is uniquely different from all others. Nevertheless he longed for a universal explanatory principle; that is the perception of resemblances or common origins, or single purpose, or unity in the apparent variety of the mutually exclusive bits and pieces which composed the furniture of the world."

4 Michael Marrus, "Reflections on the Historiography of the Holocaust," Journal of Modern History 66 (1994): 92–116.

5 Ibid., 93.

6 Ibid., 115. See Michael R. Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press, 1987).

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7 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 40. The statement is programmatic, as Ricoeur's lifelong study of the hermeneutics of myth, religion, and culture originated with his early investigation, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967).

8 Theodoor Marius van Leeuwen, The Surplus of Meaning: Ontology and Eschatology in the Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981), 134.

9 Paragraph 130 of the German Strafgesetzbuch, which prohibits the Verleumdung von Volksgruppen [the slander of ethnic groups], can be used to prosecute the so-called Auschwitz-Lüge [the denial of Auschwitz]. For an assessment of the outcome of the legal battle between Lipstadt and Irving and its implications for the relationship between historians and the law, see Wendie Ellen Schneider, "Past Imperfect: Irving v. Penguin Books Ltd., No. 1996-I-1113, 2000 WL 362478 (Q. B. Apr. 11), appeal denied (Dec. 18, 2000)," Yale Law Journal 110, no. 8 (June 2001): 1531–45. Schneider suggests that the concept of the "conscientious historian" is more useful than the idea of the "objective historian"; see ibid., 1541–45.

10 Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).

11 Jürgen Habermas, "Goldhagen and the Public Use of History: Why a Democracy Prize for Daniel Goldhagen?" in Unwilling Germans? The Goldhagen Debate, ed. Robert R. Shandley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 272. See also Julius H. Schoeps, ed., Ein Volk von Mördern: Die Dokumentation zur Goldhagen-Kontroverse um die Rolle der Deutschen im Holocaust (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1996).

12 See Timothy Mason, "Intention and Explanation: A Current Controversy about the Interpretation of National Socialism," in Der "Führerstaat," Mythos und Realität: Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reiches [The "Führer State," Myth and Reality: Studies on the Structure and Politics of the Third Reich], ed. Gerhard Hirschfeld and Lothar Kettenacker (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981), 23–40.

13 Peter Baldwin, ed., Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 11.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Karl A. Schleunes, The Twisted Road to Auschwitz: Nazi Policy toward German Jews, 1933–1939 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970).

17 Jürgen Kocka, "German Identity and Historical Comparison: After the Historikerstreit," in Baldwin, Reworking the Past, 284. See also Helga Grebing, Der "deutsche Sonderweg" in Europa, 1806–1945: Eine Kritik (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1986).

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18 See, for instance, Alan S. Rosenbaum, ed., Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996).

19 Charles S. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1. An English translation of the historians' debate has been issued as Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993). See also Baldwin, Reworking the Past.

20 A. D. Moses, "Structure and Agency in the Holocaust: Daniel J. Goldhagen and His Critics," History and Theory 37 (1998): 198.

21 Ibid., 199–200.

22 See the preface by Hans Mommsen to Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: Ein Bericht von der Banalität des Bösen (Munich: Piper, 1986), i–xxxvii.

23 Dan Diner, "Hannah Arendt Reconsidered: On the Banal and the Evil in the Holocaust Narrative," New German Critique 71 (1997): 184–85. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Meridian Books, 1958), and idem, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1964).

24 Karl Dietrich Bracher, "Holocaust—ohne Hitler?" Die Politische Meinung (February 1997), 45–46.

25 Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992).

26 Christopher R. Browning, "Ordinary Men or Ordinary Germans," in Shandley, Unwilling Germans? 55–56.

27 Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 392–93.

28 Browning, "Ordinary Men or Ordinary Germans," 65.

29 Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 216.

30 Ibid., 22.

31 Harry J. Cargas, "An Interview with Elie Wiesel," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 1 (1986): 5.

32 Browning, Ordinary Men, 189.

33 On Milgram's and other experiments, see Thomas Blass, "Psychological Perspectives on the

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Perpetrators of the Holocaust: The Role of Situational Pressures, Personal Dispositions, and Their Interactions," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 7 (1993): 30–50.

34 Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 192.

35 Ibid., 25 and 163ff.

36 See Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany from Kant to Wagner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).

37 Marrus, "Reflections," 96. See also Hans Rudolf Vaget, "Wagner, Anti-Semitism, and Mr. Rose: Merkwürd'ger Fall!" German Quarterly 66 (1993): 222–36, and William Rasch and Marc A. Weiner, "A Response to Hans Rudolf Vaget's ‘Wagner, Anti-Semitism, and Mr. Rose,’" German Quarterly 67 (1994): 400–408.

38 Joachim Köhler, Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker (Munich: Karl Blessing, 1997), translated as Wagner's Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple, trans. Ronald Taylor (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000). The English translation obviously avoids the verbal link to Goldhagen's book, which appeared in German under the title Hitlers willige Vollstrecker: ganz gewöhnliche Deutsche und der Holocaust, trans. Klaus Kochmann (Berlin: Siedler 1996).

39 Adolf Hitler, Sämtliche Aufzeichnungen: 1905–1924, ed. Eberhard Jäckel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), 53 and 1232; the latter is cited in Köhler, Wagners Hitler, 242.

40 Milton Himmelfahrt, "No Hitler, No Holocaust," Commentary 77 (1984): 37–43.

41 August Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, mein Jugendfreund (Graz: L. Stocker, 1953), translated as The Young Hitler I Knew, trans. E. V. Anderson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1955).

42 Kubizek, Adolf Hitler, 140. Cf. the rather free translation in The Young Hitler I Knew, 100 (translation modified). See 343ff. for Kubizek's second description of the Bayreuth visit and the encounter with Winifred Wagner.

43 Ibid., 142; cf. The Young Hitler I Knew, 101 (translation modified).

44 See, for example, the popular biography by Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Adolph Hitler (New York: Praeger, 1973), 52–53, or more specialized works such as Charles Bracelen Flood, Hitler: The Path to Power (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 8.

45 Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 610. Although Kubizek had received help from a "skilled editor," and despite the widespread lack of corroboration and the tendency to suppress evidence harmful to himself, his status as a witness has been rehabilitated. See Brigitte Hamann, Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship, trans. Thomas Thornton (New York:

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Oxford University Press, 1999), 52–59, esp. 56.

46 Hitler, speaking in a conversation with Robert Ley; see Albert Speer, Spandau: The Secret Diaries, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Macmillan, 1976), 88. Hitler's self-mythologization is finally corroborated by Henry Picker, who recalled how, in a conversation in the Führer's headquarters, Hitler mentioned that "the thought to be such a Volkstribun or politician had come to him for the first time during a performance of Rienzi in Linz." Henry Picker, ed., Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier: Mit bisher unbekannten Selbstzeugnissen Adolf Hitlers, Abbildungen, Augenzeugenberichten und Erläuterungen des Autors: Hitler, wie er wirklich war, 3rd ed. (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1976), 95. See Köhler, Wagners Hitler, 35. It is not clear from Picker whether the remark was made in 1942.

47 Adorno entitled the relevant chapter of his Versuch "Rienzi und die Existentialien des Faschismus." See Theodor W. Adorno, Versuch über Wagner, in Gesammelte Schriften 13 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1971), 13.

48 Köhler, Wagners Hitler, 41, 49. Speer notes that the Führer reconnected with this sense of vocation and destiny when visiting the Linz Landestheater in 1943. The tragic denouement of the opera may have dawned on Hitler, having just lost the battle of Stalingrad and showing "with visible emotion ... the cheap seat in the top gallery from which he had first seen Lohengrin, Rienzi and other operas, and then indicated by a slight gesture that he wanted to be alone. For some time he gazed dreamily into space, his eyes absent, his features slack." Speer, Spandau, 173.

49 George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1964), 96. See Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1899).

50 In a propagandistic article, "Der Führer und Bayreuth," for the July 1936 Sonderbeilage of the Nazi paper Bayerische Ostmark, Bamberger Tageblatt. See Michael Karbaum, Studien zur Geschichte der Bayreuther Festspiele (1876–1976), part 2 (Regensburg: Bosse, 1976), 68–69.

51 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, der Seher des Dritten Reichesa: Das Vermächtnis Houston Stewart Chamberlains an das deutsche Volk, in einer Auslese aus seinen Werken, ed. Georg Schott (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1934), 13: "Daß Deutschland in der Stunde seiner höchsten Not sich einen Hitler gebiert, das bezeugt sein Lebendigsein. ... Ich durfte billig einschlafen und hätte auch nicht nötig gehabt, wieder zu erwachen. Gottes Schutz sei bei Ihnen!"

52 Joachim Fest, Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), 181. See Köhler, Wagners Hitler, 241. On Fest's changing positions, see Hans Rudolf Vaget, "Hitler's Wagner: Musical Discourse as Cultural Space," in Music and Nazism: Art under Tyranny, 1933–1945, ed. Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber: Laaber, 2003)," 19.

53 "Stolze Freude faßte mich, als ich den völkischen Sieg gerade in der Stadt sah, in der, erst durch den

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Meister und dann durch Chamberlain, das geistige Schwert geschmiedet wurde mit dem wir heute fechten." Quoted in Karbaum, Studien zur Geschichte der Bayreuther Festspiele, 66.

54 Ibid., 69.

55 Carl von Ossietzky, "Richard Wagner," in Richard Wagner, Das Betroffensein der Nachwelt: Beiträge zur Wirkungsgeschichte, ed. Dietrich Mack (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984), 168. Von Ossietzky was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. He died a year later after having served time in the Papenburg concentration camp.

56 "Brother Hitler," in Thomas Mann, Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, Agnes Elizabeth Ernst Meyer, and Eric Sutton (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), 156. The essay was written for the Paris journal Das neue Tagebuch.

57 Letter from April 12, 1937. See Ludwig Marcuse, Briefe von und an Ludwig Marcuse, ed. Harold von Hofe (Zurich: Diogenes, 1975), 25: "Und ist dieser verrückt-großartige Plan der ästhetischen Totalität, die keinen Platz mehr läßt für Wirkliches, nicht die Vorform des Staates, der im selben Kampf mit der Wirklichkeit steht und auch nur mit ihr fertigwerden kann durch eine Diktatur des Scheins?"

58 Internationale Literatur, vol. 8 (1938), Heft 6, 156, cited in Klaus-Uwe Fischer, "Von Wagner zu Hitler," in Richard Wagner: Wie antisemitisch darf ein Künstler sein? Musik-Konzepte 5, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger (Munich: Edition Text und Kritik, 1978), 34.

59 Ludwig Marcuse, Das denkwürdige Leben des Richard Wagner (Munich: Szczesny, 1963), 291: "Wagnerisch, auf der Stufe der Verhunzung, ist das Ganze, man hat es längst bemerkt und kennt die gutbegründete, wenn auch wieder ein bißchen unerlaubte Verehrung, die der politische Wundermann dem künstlerischen Bezauberer Europas widmet, welchen noch Gottfried Keller ‘Friseur und Charlatan’ nannte." Rejected by the exile publisher Querido in Amsterdam, Marcuse's book eventually appeared revised and shortened in 1963, but compared with Adorno's Versuch its lack of close reading and stringent reasoning hardly helped his case for a cultural connection between Wagner and Hitler. Marcuse's original idea survived in the above quoted passage from Mann's "Bruder Hitler" that Marcuse chose as the epigraph for his last chapter, "Von Bayreuth nach Nürnberg." See Joachim Radkau, "Richard Wagners Erlösung vom Faschismus durch Emigration," Exilforschung 3 (1985): 82.

60 Peter Viereck, Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 52. The book was preceded by Viereck's 1939 article "Hitler and Richard Wagner" for the New York-based journal Common Sense 8 (1939): 3–6, which exposed the discrepancy between the popularity of Wagner's work in America and the fact that National Socialism was based on the composer's syncretistic mélange of völkisch ideology and communism.

61 Ibid., 315 and 130. Pointing to Chamberlain's letter to Hitler, Viereck confused John the Baptist with the old Simeon, "who could die in peace now that he had found the Saviour he had always sought." Ibid., 148. Viereck's book may have left a mark on Konrad Heiden's 1944 account of Hitler's rise to power,

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which was remarkably well-documented given the limited access to sources about the actual logistics of Hitler's party apparatus and its connections with the chain of command in the government and military. While Wagner had played only a small role in Heiden's earlier biography from 1936, the later study included a separate chapter that situated Wagner's participation in the 1849 Dresden revolution and his anti-Semitism within a wider context of German nationalism, and followed up its influence on Chamberlain's racial theory. See Konrad Heiden, Hitler: A Biography, trans. Winifred Ray (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936); and Heiden, Der Fuehrer: Hitler's Rise to Power, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1944), esp. 409–47.

62 Annette Hein, "Es ist viel Hitler in Wagner": Rassismus und antisemitische Deutschtumsideologie in den "Bayreuther Blättern" (1878–1938) (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1996).

63 Quoted in ibid., 183.

64 Hermann Seeliger, "Der deutsche Seher: Die nationalsozialistische Idee bei Richard Wagner," Bayreuther Blätter 57 (1934): 147 and 159–60. See Hein, "Es ist viel Hitler in Wagner," 181–82.

65 Louis Leo Snyder, Basic History of Modern Germany (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand, 1957), 169–71. See also George G. Windell, "Hitler, National Socialism, and Richard Wagner," in Penetrating Wagner's Ring: An Anthology, ed. John Louis DiGaetani (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), 220–21 and 233–34. Windell's article was first published in the Journal of Central European Affairs 22 (1963): 479–97.

66 Vaget, "Hitler's Wagner," 15–31.

67 Lelland Joseph Rather, The Dream of Self-Destruction: Wagner's Ring and the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979). Rather's last book, however, has clear nonintentionalist traits, offering at times less an explanation than an apology for Wagner's behavior. See Reading Wagner: A Study in the History of Ideas (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990).

68 Hans Rudolf Vaget, "Poisoned Arrows: Wagner, Hitler, ‘und kein Ende,’" Journal of the American Musicological Society 54 (2001): 668.

69 Vaget, "Hitler's Wagner," 21.

70 Ibid., 26–27.

71 See Chamberlain's letters to Hitler from January 1, 1924, cited in Hartmut Zelinksy, Richard Wagner: Ein deutsches Thema (Frankfurt: Zweitausendeins, 1976), 170. See also Vaget, "Hitler's Wagner," 28.

72 Leon Stein, The Racial Thinking of Richard Wagner (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), 176 and 233.

73 The flyer is reprinted in Zelinsky, Richard Wagner, 251.

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74 Adorno, Versuch, 21. Translated into English as In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: NLB, 1981), 23.

75 See Barry Millington, "The Nuremberg Trial: Is There Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger?" Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991): 247–60. Robert W. Gutman openly and critically discussed how Wagner's racial theory and attitude to the "Jewish question" eventually led to "moral collapse" that became manifest in Parsifal; see Richard Wagner: The Man, His Mind, and His Music (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968), 421–40. Zelinsky's Richard Wagner is still an indispensable documentation of material; see also his article "Die ‘feuerkur’ des Richard Wagner oder die ‘neue religion’ der ‘Erlösung’ durch ‘Vernichtung,’" in Metzger, Richard Wagner: Wie antisemitisch darf ein Künstler sein? 79–112. See also Peter Wapnewski, Der traurige Gott: Richard Wagner in seinen Helden (Munich: Beck, 1978), 65–67; Joachim Kaiser, "Hat Zelinsky recht gegen Wagners Parsifal?" in Parsifal: Texte, Materialien, Kommentare, ed. Attila Csampai and Dietmar Holland (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984), 257–59; and Carl Dahlhaus, "Erlösung dem Erlöser," ibid., 262–69. About Rose's books cited in notes 33 and 35 above, see Vaget, "Wagner, Anti-Semitism, and Mr. Rose," and Rasch and Weiner, "A Response." See also Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).

76 Jacob Katz, The Darker Side of Genius: Richard Wagner's Anti-Semitism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press: 1986), 125.

77 Dieter Borchmeyer, "The Question of Anti-Semitism," in Wagner Handbook, ed. Ulrich Müller, Peter Wapnewski, and John Deathridge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 183–84. See also Borchmeyer's afterword to his Richard Wagner: Theory and Theatre, trans. Stewart Spencer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 404–10, and Deryck Cooke, I Saw the World End: A Study of Wagner's Ring (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 264: "we should be eternally grateful that Wagner, with the supreme artist's infallible intuition, never intruded his racialist theories into his works of art."

78 Dieter Borchmeyer, "Nachwort," in Richard Wagner: Dichtungen und Schriften, vol. 10, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer (Frankfurt: Insel, 1983), 185.

79 "Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said: A Conversation," Raritan 18 (1998): 18.

80 Marc A. Weiner, "Reading the Ideal," New German Critique 69 (1996): 58. In his review of Weiner's Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, Vaget had noted that "while the alleged Jewish figures in Wagner may have a certain contextual existence, they have, strictly speaking, no textual existence." Hans Rudolf Vaget, "Imaginings," Wagner Notes 18 (December 1995): 5. See also the expanded version of Weiner's "Reading the Ideal," which was published as "Wagner and the Perils of Reading," Wagner 18 (1997): 59–82.

81 Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Briefe, vol. 6 (Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik, 1986), 68–69. Cited in Weiner, "Reading the Ideal," 61.

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82 Weiner, "Reading the Ideal," 80.

83 Ibid., 81.

84 Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Wagner Androgyne: A Study in Interpretation, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 8; Thomas S. Grey, Wagner's Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

85 This is the last of Wagner's late essays, which appeared as "Ausführungen zu Religion und Kunst" in the Bayreuther Blätter; see Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10 (Leipzig: Fritsch, 1888), 263–74.

86 Ibid., 268.

87 Rather, Reading Wagner, 248ff. See also Neil K. Friedman, "Gold Rules: The Politics of Wagner's Ring," in Inside the Ring: Essays on Wagner's Opera Cycle, ed. John Louis DiGaetani (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 72–73.

88 Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, 144. Although not mentioned here, Mime, who fails to forge the sword, fulfills the other stereotype: the Eastern "ghetto" Jew. See also Adorno, Versuch, 16ff.

89 Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 357. The continuation of this passage is important for Wagner's shift toward Schopenhauer, which he sought to explain and justify in the letter to Röckel: "Well, I scarcely noticed how, in working out this plan, nay, basically even in its very design, I was unconsciously following a quite different, and much more profound, intuition, and that, instead of a single phase in the world's evolution, what I had glimpsed was the essence of the world itself in all its conceivable phases, and that I had thereby recognized its nothingness."

90 Letter of October 7, 1854, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, 319; original emphasis.

91 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 25ff.

92 Adorno, Versuch, 19.

93 See Wagner's essay "Die Wibelungen," Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, 132.

94 Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 233.

95 Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, 43; translation in Cooke, I Saw the World End, 250.

96 Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 167.

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97 Ibid., 170.

98 For two recent and more analytical accounts of the Norns' scene, see Patrick McCreless, "Schenker and the Norns," in Analyzing Opera: Verdi and Wagner, ed. Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 276–97, and Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 490–539.

99 See Robert Bailey, "Wagner's Musical Sketches for Siegfrieds Tod," in Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. Harold Powers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 459–94. Bailey notes that Wagner was "evidently planning already at this early stage to have similar openings for the first and the fourth operas of the cycle" (473). Originally, the scene was to end on an E-flat major instrumental epilogue, which makes sense in light of the positive ending. The variant of the spinning motif recurs at the beginning of the composition sketch for Das Rheingold three years after Siegfrieds Tod. As Warren Darcy put it, Wagner decided to "replace the string figuration" and to "transform the entire Prelude from a simple depiction of the depth of the Rhine into an orchestral metaphor for the creation of the world. These two decisions went hand in hand and originated in the composition of the Erda scene: if the inverted descending form of Erda's motif symbolized the end of the world (Weltuntergang), then the original, ascending form could logically be associated with its beginning. Furthermore, the fundamental nature of Erda's theme—an ascending triad—could easily suggest a primordial beginning, while its ‘Norns’ figurations could represent flowing water in general and the aquatic activities of the Rhine daughters in particular." Warren Darcy, Wagner's Das Rheingold (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 70; see also 65.

100 As Barry Millington puts it in his review, "The ‘Ring’ in Toronto," in the inaugural issue of the Wagner Journal 1 (2007): "A black figure symbiotically attached to Alberich, squatting at the rear, is revealed to be Wotan, his alter ego" (83).

101 Richard Cohn, "Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age," Journal of the American Musicological Society 57 (2004): 285–323.

102 Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma, Absence, Loss," Critical Inquiry 25 (1996): 701.

103 Ibid., 712.

104 Ibid., 722.

105 See ibid., 702.

106 Cf. ibid., 723.

107 Ibid., 724.

108 See David J. Levin, Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, and the Nibelungen: The Dramaturgy of Disavowal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 88.

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109 "Was ‘Konservative,’ ‘Liberale’ und ‘Konservativ-Liberale,’ endlich ‘Demokraten,’ ‘Sozialisten,’ oder auch ‘Sozial-Demokraten’ u.s.w. gegenwärtig in der Judenfrage hervorgebracht haben, muß uns ziemlich eitel erscheinen, denn das ‘Erkenne-dich-selbst’ wollte keine dieser Parteien an sich erprüfen. ... Nur aber, wann der Dämon, der jene Rasenden im Wahnsinne des Parteikampfes um sich erhält, kein Wo und Wann zu seiner Bergung unter uns mehr aufzufinden vermag, wird es auch—keine Juden mehr geben.

"Uns Deutschen könnte, gerade aus der Veranlassung der gegenwärtigen, nur eben unter uns wiederum denkbar gewesenen Bewegung, diese große Lösung eher als jeder anderen Nation ermöglicht sein, sobald wir ohne Scheu, bis auf das innerste Mark unseres Verstehens, das ‘Erkenne-Dich-Selbst’ durchführten. Daß wir, dringen wir hiermit nur tief genug vor, nach der Überwindung aller falschen Scham, die letzte Erkenntnis nicht zu scheuen haben würden, sollte mit dem Voranstehenden dem Ahnungsvollen angedeutet sein." Wagner, "Erkenne dich selbst," Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 10, 274 (translation modified from Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution, 154).

110 Cosima Wagner, Tagebücher, vol. 2, ed. Dietrich Mack and Martin Gregor-Dellin (Munich: Piper, 1976–77), 620. From November 12, 1880: "er—als Jude—habe nur zu lernen zu sterben." See also Peter Gay, "Hermann Levi: A Study in Service and Self-Hatred," in Freud, Jews, and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 189–230, and Laurence Dreyfus, "Hermann Levi's Shame and Parsifal's Guilt: A Critique of Essentialism in Biography and Criticism," Cambridge Opera Journal 6 (1994): 125–45.

111 Cosima Wagner, Tagebücher, 852. From December 18, 1881, where Wagner "im heftigen Scherz sagt, es sollten alle Juden in einer Aufführung des ‘Nathan’ verbrennen." There is also the report from Nietzsche's publisher Fritz Schmeitzner, who reported to Peter Gast such "rantings about the Jews" in Wahnfried: "there are bugs, there are lice. Well they are there! But one burns them out! The people who don't do this are pigs!" Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Einzelbänden, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 15 (Munich: DTV / de Gruyter, 1988), 84– 85. See also Adorno, Versuch, 21–25.

112 John Weiss, Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), 141.

113 Ibid.

114 Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 2.

115 Saul Friedländer, "Introduction," in Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution, xi. See Gordon A. Craig, "Hitler without His Diaries," New York Review of Books 30, no. 12 (July 21, 1983), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/6138 (accessed February 11, 2007).

116 Friedländer, "Introduction," xi–xii.

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117 Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusion: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 31.

118 Ibid.

119 Ibid., 30.

120 Ibid., 28.

121 Ibid., 3–4.

122 Götz Aly, Hitler's Beneficiaries: Plunder, Race War, and the Nazi Welfare State, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan, 2007).

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