Re: Nazis and music

[Alex Jacobowitz <alexbjacobowitz...>]

B"H Munich
 
> > Draw your lines where you see fit. But if anyone
 in
> > the whole world deserves to get the hobbled boot,
> > it´s Richard Wagner.
> > 
> 
> 
> why him? why not any of the others??

Is this a trick question?
Simply put, there are different levels of culpability.
Would you agree? Being a German citizen doesn´t
make them anti-Semitic. Being a Nazi makes
one culpable morally, though not yet legally.
But what we have in Wagner is prototypical anti-
Semitism, an artistic model for annihilistic
persecution. The first anti-Semitic political party
was created just about the same year Wagner died.
Wagner incriminated himself with his "Das Judenthum
in Musik", and Hitler credited him in "Mein Kampf".
I mean, it´s universal knowledge (isn´t it?) that
Winnifred Wagner smuggled the paper into prison for
Hitler to write it, that they most likely had an
affair, that her two children had a most notorious
"Uncle Wolf" - Adolf Hitler, that Cosima Wagner was
even more outspoken against Jews than Richard, and
she worked with professional propagandist
anti-Semites. For crying out loud, what about the
Nazi pageantry,  taken directly out of Meistersinger?
The expression in German is that Wagner was a
"Seelischer Brandstifter", a conceptual arsonist.

Everyone else - Strauss, Orff, etc - were small fry.
Peons. Artists who wanted to get ahead, or stay ahead.
Reprehensible as that may be, they weren´t architects
of the Final Solution. Wagner was, though he
would never have dared to dirty his hands with the
murderous work personally.

Alex Jacobowitz
 avi

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