Re: Wagner and friends

[Alex Jacobowitz <alexbjacobowitz...>]

B"H Munich

Structure is behind everything important in a society.
Religion fills one structure, politics another.
Musical tonality is a form of structure, of
convention, of language, and the precise moment at
which tonal innovation becomes anti-structural,
or anti-social, must remain nebulous.

German nationalism, in itself, wasn´t so
different from the nationalism of the surrounding
countries. But what Wagner proposed wasn´t
"what´s mine is mine and what´s yours is yours",
but rather "what´s mine is better than yours -
therefore mine should exist and yours shouldn´t."

We applaud the creation of molds in the case
of Bach, and are appreciative of his contributions
to structure. There are some who find Bach the
most structured man in the universe. Keep in mind
his close relation to his religion.

Now, we also applaud the breaking of molds in the
case of Beethoven, while at the same time we
notice his increasing isolation from society,
and from organized religion.

By the time of Wagner, Europe already experienced
the French Revolution, the Napoleanic wars,
the Industrial Revolution and the rise of Romanticism.
Judaism experienced what is commonly referred to
as its Enlightenment, the Haskala. Yet one thread
seems to flow through - in order to build the
new European structure, its visionaries 
needed to attack Judaism, set to the side, made
irrelevant.

Political suppression of European Jews was a
fact of everyday life. Restructuring Europe meant
finding a different way: limiting powers of the
church, giving rights to the middle class, and of
accepting Jews as citizens, inventing a place for them
in the new society. 

Jews finally received their full civil
rights in Germany in 1871 (the Franco-Prussion war),
though Wagner stood against it. His concept of
nationalism was based on a certain German purity,
which took on horrific exaggeration at the hands of
politico-racists just a few years later.

Hitler was born just a few years after Wagner´s
passing, and it took the loss of WWI, the
Depression and terrible inflation, but the
German people were finally ready to see that
other structures, systems weren´t working. They
were ready to try more extreme options.

In short, the Holocaust, or a World War, needs
many people involved at different levels. Wagner
was an artist, Hitler a politician. But they
were both articulating, in their own ways, the
same basic philosophy - that removal of the Jews
cleared the way for building their new structures.

Alex Jacobowitz

Most of life is building houses against chaos - Nietzsche

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