13 - Specters of Nazism

Summary

The specters of Nazism and the Holocaust loom over Wagner’s Ring cycle. In the first half of this chapter, I consider whether Wagner’s anti-Semitism is present in the Ring – whether the Nibelung dwarves Alberich and Mime are meant to be caricatures of Jews. I conclude that the Nibelungs’ physical appearance, behavior, language and music took on aspects that Wagner found repellent about Jews, but that our deep unease about the relationship between the Germanic hero Siegfried and the dwarf Mime has much to do with our post-Holocaust symbolic landscape. In the second half of the chapter, I examine the Ring’s broader role in the Third Reich. Hitler was a committed Wagnerite, and the Nazi regime made plentiful use of Wagnerian music, motifs and stagecraft, but the connections between Wagner, Hitler, and Nazism are not straightforward, and must be traced back to the Wagner cult amongst German speakers at the turn of the twentieth century. Wagner’s Ring was not the ideological wellspring of Nazism, yet I argue that the impact of the composer’s work on Hitler did play a role in shaping the Führer’s – and thus Germany’s – political destiny.