Wagner and the Origin of Evil -- Hoeckner 23 (23): 151 -- The Opera Quarterly Page 1 of 35 The Opera Quarterly z Oxford Journals z Humanities z Opera Quarterly z Volume 23, Number 2-3 z Pp. 151-183 Previous Article | Next Article 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 Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to My Personal Archive Download to citation manager Request Permissions Google Scholar Articles by Hoeckner, B. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking 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 file://C:\Documents and Settings\Ronit Seter.RONIT-27E2EF491\My Documents\Diss-b... 30/01/2009 Wagner and the Origin of Evil -- Hoeckner 23 (23): 151 -- The Opera Quarterly Page 2 of 35 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 file://C:\Documents and Settings\Ronit Seter.RONIT-27E2EF491\My Documents\Diss-b... 30/01/2009 Wagner and the Origin of Evil -- Hoeckner 23 (23): 151 -- The Opera Quarterly Page 3 of 35 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.