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The German Romantics had wished to found with their art a new communal vision to offset the social divisions of economic utilitarianism and individualism. Wagner inherited this ambition, along with their Teutonic legends and mythologies, and then inflated them into a magnificent vision of Germany’s spiritual and cultural regeneration. He mixed art with politics to devastating effect, decades before D’Annunzio, and came to embody the Romantic Revolution at its most prophetic – and megalomaniacal – in his attempt to replace God with modern man.
The process inaugurated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – whereby man replaces God as the centre of existence and becomes the master and possessor of nature by the application of a new science and technology – had reached a climax by the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The view of God as only an idealized projection of human beings rather than a Creator had taken hold among the European and Russian intelligentsia well before 1848. Among writers and artists trying to create new values without the guidance of religion, Wagner loomed largest in his attempt to construct a new mythos for human beings.
In these gigantic projects, Wagner gave his art a starring role. In his view, the artist, degraded by capitalism and bourgeois philistines, ought to be the high priest of the nation. Instead he was producing ‘entertainment for the masses, luxurious self-indulgence for the rich’. A new social bond was needed among the masses, and between the masses and the poet. Between 1848 and 1874, Wagner achieved a synthesis of theory and practice in writing the libretto and music for The Ring of the Nibelung, which was performed in full two years later at the opening of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth (where one of the attendees was Nietzsche).
The Italian Futurist Marinetti, who hated the ‘insupportable platitudes’ of Puccini’s operas, called Wagner ‘the greatest decadent genius and therefore the most appropriate artist for our modern souls’. The cult of Wagner was pan-European, cutting across national and ideological lines. Hitler claimed that he got his Weltanschauung from his early exposure to Wagner’s Rienzi: ‘It began at that hour.’ Herzl wrote his groundbreaking manifesto of Zionism, The Jewish State (1895), in constant proximity in Paris to the anti-Semite’s music, confessing that ‘only on those nights when no Wagner was performed did I have any doubts about the correctness of my idea’. Marinetti claimed that Wagner ‘stirs up the delirious heat in my blood and is such a friend of my nerves that willingly, out of love, I would lay myself down with him on a bed of clouds’.
Wagner’s European eminence signified the much-awaited triumph of German spiritual culture over its old materialistic and corrupt bourgeois adversary, the French. However, the man himself, at the height of his fame, was still tormented by his humiliation in Paris, where the fascination of this provincial with luxurious metropolitan life had ended in partial success and scandal. He wrote an ode while German armies were encircling Paris in 1871, and a one-act play when they conquered and occupied the city. Soon he was verifying Heine’s fear that Francophobia’s flip side is anti-Semitism.
Meyerbeer, his rival in Paris, seemed to Wagner proof that the moneymaking Jew had infected the cultural realm: ‘In the present state of the world the Jew is already more than emancipated: he rules, and will rule as long as money remains the power that saps all our acts and undertakings of their vigour.’ It was essential, Wagner wrote in his essay ‘Know Thyself’, that German folk achieve self-knowledge, for then ‘there will be no more Jews. We Germans could … effect this great solution better than any other nation.’
Nietzsche famously broke with Wagner over the latter’s progressively demagogic nationalism. In his earliest writings, Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche had criticized the Bildungsphilister, the cultivated philistine, the embodiment of the narrow-minded intellectuals and educated nationalists rising to the fore in the new Germany. He had attacked, too, the popular culture and literature that had started to cater to the ‘desperate adolescents’ of Young Germany.
The spectacle at Bayreuth of the great composer administering musical thrills to the Bildungsphilister by celebrating the pompous, nationalistic Reich eventually repelled Nietzsche (so much so that he fled from the assembled Wagnerians to a nearby village). In Nietzsche’s view, materialism and loss of faith were generating a bogus mysticism of the state and nation, and dreams of utopia. Describing Bismarck as a ‘fraternity student’, he lamented ‘Germany’s increasing stupidity’ as it descended into ‘political and nationalistic madness’. He also used the Germans to indict a broader complacency in Europe: its investment in liberal democracy, socialist revolution and nationalism. Nietzsche kept insisting until his lapse into insanity that his peers – the thinkers and doers of his time – had failed to recognize the consequences of the ‘death of God’: ‘There will be,’ he warned, ‘wars the like of which have never been seen on earth before.’ Nietzsche’s hero, Heine, had even fewer illusions about his compatriots. He wrote the most prophetic words of the nineteenth century: ‘A play will be performed in Germany which will make the French Revolution look like an innocent idyll.’
The Identity Politics of the Elite
Heine believed that ‘Teutomania’ had irrevocably blighted Germany’s political and intellectual culture; he died too early to see that the German habit of idealizing one’s country for its own sake would afflict educated minorities everywhere.
Unlike in France and England, where political citizenship and civil nationalism were the norm, the Germans had upheld immersion in the Volksgeist. The long years of political disunity had made a shared culture seem the matrix for a future nation. For young men elsewhere lacking both a state and a nation, this primarily cultural definition of nationality, and promise of a spiritual community, came to be deeply seductive. It flourished among them since it was not only able to fill an aching inner emptiness; it could also give actual employment and status to an educated but isolated class.