Last Word on Wagner?

[Alex Jacobowitz <alexbjacobowitz...>]

B"H Munich

To paraphrase Mark Twain: Innocence is another word
for amnesia.

For all those who profess to believe
that Wagner wasn´t an anti-Semite, that
Wagner´s music has nothing to do with
Hitler and the Nazi movement, or that Wagner´s
music is only music, please know that
here in Germany, in 1999, at the
Castle Elmenau, a symposium took place
entitled: Richard Wagner and the Third Reich.
One of the main scholars to present papers
on the topic was no less than Saul Friedlander,
and all the papers presented at the symposium
were published in book form.

Is anybody - especially from this list - willing
to stand on their electronic stump to proclaim
to the world there was no need for this symposium, no
need to bother international scholars, no need
to publish? Or any of the other books on the
Wagner-Hitler continuum? Or the books by
the Wagner family?

Believe what you may, but there is a stellar
difference between a simple
anti-Semite, (take him or leave him) and someone
whose shadow actually crosses the darkest designs
of the Holocaust, and who may be seen as one of
the earliest German annihilationist (Goldhagen´s term)
anti-Semites and writers. For any of you not yet
versed in Wagner´s "Das Judenthum in Musik", there is
SOME controversy as to Wagner really wanted the
destruction of the Jewish people, or "only" that the
Jews should sacrifice everything that made them
Jewish, (clothes, language, religion, music) for the
sake of creating a new European. 

However, the final line sums it up - Wagner mentions
the Ahasvers (Ahasverosh) solution, the Untergang
(destruction) of the Jews. 

Since Purim is coming, perhaps we could do well
to remember the mitzva of remembering what Amalek
did to us, and that in every generation someone
will rise to try to destroy us.
 
Again, to paraphrase Mark Twain: 
Innocence is another word for amnesia.

A freilacher Purim, yidn!

Alex Jacobowitz



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