Mann and Wagner, Art and Culture

I was intrigued by a recent essay by Wolfgang Schneider on Sign and Sight, “Mann and his Musical Demons.” The following is a quotation from Schneider’s essay:

“Nazism used the dominant Wagnerian culture as a gateway into the educated bourgeois classes. Thomas Mann's major essay "The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner" was an attempt to offer an alternative to the official Bayreuth version of Wagner – as "patron saint of the what-is-German solipsism." Mann tried to take an artistic, psychological, cosmopolitan view of the composer.
“Words like "dilettantism" were enough to shake up the Wagner establishment. In March 1933, there was a "Protest of the Wagner City Munich" in which Thomas Mann was accused of muddying the reputation of "upright German cultural giants." It was initiated by Bruno Walter's successor Hans Knappertsbuch and was signed – among others – by Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss. It was Munich's cultural bourgeois and not the Nazi authorities that drove Thomas Mann out of Germany (and that in the name of Wagner!) The Nazis praise the "folk's will" with sardonic joy. The "national Ex-communication" was a mortifying trauma, the worst that the writer ever experienced from the German public, and, like the story of Bruno Walter, a significant motivation for "Doctor Faustus," the novel on the connection between music and politics.
“Music, more than any other art form, served the cultural image of the Nazis. The Bayreuth Festival was a showcase for the Third Reich. Concerts by Wilhelm Furtwängler reached listeners all over the world. Even Thomas Mann the emigrant clung to his radio although not without qualms: "we shouldn't have listened, shouldn't have loaned our ears to the swindle," he wrote in his journal after a broadcast of "Lohengrin" in 1936. For him, Wilhelm Furtwängler was the most powerful example of an artist who thought he could maintain his culture in a political vacuum. And the embodiment of German musical arrogance, expressed in comments such as "a real symphony" has "never been written by a non-German."”

The addendum I would add is this. While music (Wagner in particular) and culture may be inextricably linked for German culture, at least through the Nazi era, as Mann is essentially arguing, though he seems to want that to not be the case, the same need not be and is not true for others.

For Germans in the 1930s and 1940s, Wagner may well have been inextricably tied to a whole slew of associations now viewed as unpalatable by most (and viewed so by at least some Germans like Mann at the time), but as something with its own objective qualities that can be experienced in any number of sociohistorical contexts (and so independently of any specific context), art is not determined forever by a specific context of its creation (the mid-to-late19th century for Wagner) and/or use (the Nazi use of Wagner).

I’m aware of Wagner’s anti-Semitism, aware of Nazism’s primitivism and use of Wagner, Orff, and other composers’ music to help ground an aural image of German nationality, aware of the potential for the Nibelungen to serve as a cipher for Jews, but my awareness of these things is an awareness of the historical contexts of 19th and early-to-mid 20th century Germany. They’re not part of my experiential repertoire when experiencing the Ring operas, but more something I’m aware of at an historical distance.

For me, or for anyone else without the direct cultural ties of Wagner’s era or the Nazi era, it’s a story about a ring, love, heroes, redemption, and dwarves with a weakness for gold and power. These are things that are not inherently anti-Semitic or inherently fascist. For example, all these things are pretty similarly presented in Tolkien’s Ring series.

It’s one thing to say that Wagner clearly intended the Nibelungen to serve as cipher for Jews (or that the Nazis utilized certain musical works in effective ways to present and ground certain conceptions of the nation). It’s quite another to say that the Nibelungen are clearly a cipher for Jews (or that the music of Wagner, Orff, Strauss, etc., is inevitably tied to fascist conceptions of the nation). I see no reason to allow Wagner (much less the Nazis) to determine the ultimate meaning of the operas just because he wrote them. Once created, a work of art has a concrete existence as independent of its creator as of any other individual. Wagner was a brilliant composer, but otherwise a repulsive individual with repulsive views not worth being taken seriously.

Ironically, to insist too hard on the anti-Semitism of the Ring operas is to unwittingly slip into anti-Semitism in the guise of combating it. It’s worth remembering that the Nibelungen could serve as cipher for Jews in certain cultural and historical contexts, as well as the other unsavory associations with Wagner’s music that held in certain specific contexts. But for any variety of other contexts, the only way it can be clearly the case that the Nibelungen are a stand-in for Jews and that the Ring is anti-Semitic is by assuming that Jews really are driven by lust for gold and power.

Racism and Free Speech: Part II

Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Denial Laws

Denying or minimizing the significance of the Holocaust is one contemporary form of Anti-Semitic speech, often coupled with other Anti-Semitic expression. (See the following link for an overview of Holocaust Denial:

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/denial.html )

A number of countries, mostly in Europe (and also Israel), have laws against denying the Holocaust. (See the following article on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_denial#Laws_against_Holocaust_denial.

As with all content on Wikipedia, use caution, but this article seems to have good content [at least at the time I wrote this].)

The Wikipedia article points out that most countries with Holocaust Denial laws also have other laws slightly abridging free speech by banning speech that incites racial hatred or intolerance. A number of other countries, including Canada and the UK, have such laws banning incitement of racial hatred and sometimes use such laws to prosecute Holocaust Denial, without having specific Holocaust Denial laws.

The article has this to say about countries with Holocaust Denial laws:

“In the words of D. Guttenplan, this is a split between the "common law countries of the US, England and Wales, and former British colonies from the civil law countries of continental Europe and Scotland. In civil law countries the law is generally more proscriptive. Also under the civil law regime the judge acts more as an inquisitor, gathering and presenting evidence as well as interpreting it"[64]

This is an interesting argument, and an accurate one with regard specifically to Holocaust Denial laws, but given laws banning incitement of racial hatred in places like Canada and the UK, there seem to be at least two contrasts at play – one between common and civil law countries, and another between some common law countries (e.g. England or Canada) and others (e.g. the United States). (There is another contrast as well, also pointed out in the article – many of the countries with Holocaust Denial laws have some direct tie to the Holocaust, e.g. Israel, Germany, Austria.)

The law systems of all western nations embody a valuation of freedom, but we see in the reactions to Denial of the Holocaust somewhat different emphases on Enlightenment values stemming from the different strains of Enlightenment thought. It seems to me that the French and other continental traditions, while highly valuing liberty or freedom, have more emphasized the other two components of the revolutionary triad of liberty, equality, fraternity (hence the banning of Muslim head scarves in some public contexts). The English-speaking Enlightenment traditions have emphasized individual liberty to a somewhat greater extent, with this markedly so in the U.S. (where equality has often gotten short shrift, and fraternity never had the sort of resonance it did in France), stemming probably from the experiments with partially democratic self-government in the North American colonies, the American revolutionary experience, and the specifically American variety of Enlightenment thinking (embodied by writers like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, thoroughly grounded in the English-speaking tradition [especially influenced by John Locke], but nonetheless distinct).

Against Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Denial Laws

I’m obviously against Holocaust Denial. It’s one of the most repellent and repugnant forms of contemporary racist thought and expression.

I’m also against Holocaust Denial laws, though, or any other laws that make any political or social commentary illegal. As offensive and contrary to fact as Holocaust Denial might be, the speech act alone doesn’t significantly harm anyone nor infringe on others’ freedoms. (If Holocaust Denial is used in conjunction with or as a form of threat or harassment – that’s different, but it’s the threat or harassment, and not the offensive content, that would make such instances acts that I don’t think should be protected or allowed.)

I sympathize with the supporters of Holocaust Denial laws (especially in countries like Germany and Austria where there is a clear relationship between the nation-state and the Holocaust). I just think that restrictions on speech are not a good strategy (pragmatically or in terms of protecting free action) for combating Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism.

I’m aware also that my own simultaneous opposition to Holocaust Denial and Holocaust Denial laws is probably largely the result of the grounding of my own thinking in North American traditions of thinking about politics and culture. (Though such an awareness really says little about the merits of any arguments I might make; it’s simply a contextualization – and likewise with recognition that Holocaust Denial laws themselves are grounded in other varieties of Enlightenment thought.)

Why is Freedom of Expression Important even for Racist Speech?

As I argued in my previous post, freedom of expression should not be abridged lightly. Denying the Holocaust is seriously offensive and repulsive to most people. I don’t think this is sufficient to make illegal such denials. (I understand why others disagree, and even sympathize.) Protecting freedom of expression seems to me more important than protection from offense.

There are pragmatic reasons too to maintain freedom of speech even in the face of high offense. (Again, when speech also constitutes slander, direct harm, assault, or harassment, this changes things.)

Restrictions on speech drive those with offensive ideas completely out of the mainstream and contribute to the sense of persecution and martyrdom common among the racist fringe. On the other hand, allowing the free expression of even offensive ideas allows for engagement. Truly hardcore bigots are typically not open to reasoning, but more run of the mill racists, or the person who might be prone to occasional racist thinking (perhaps without even realizing it) might be. In open discussion, most can clearly see how counter-factual the sort of conspiracy theorizing typical of racist thinking is. But for engagement to happen, free speech has to be protected even at the risk of being highly offended.