Barenboim: Wolfgang Wagner showed me where Hitler wept
NewsThere were two shafts of insight in Blakeway Productions’s extended interview with Daniel Barenboim for BBC4.
The first was his reflection on growing up in Buenos Aires in the 1940s, where Nazis and Jews performed together. Barenboim does not pause to elaborate or analyse this memory.
Nor does he say much about his personal conclusions when Wolfgang Wagner offered to show him the exact point in Lonhengrin where Hitler wept. Barenboim says: ‘For days I couldn’t stop thinking, how is it possible to murder six million Jews with the coldness this decision requires and be in a position where you can be moved by music and be moved to tears. How can somebody who murders millions have this kind of humanity? This is a subject that really preoccupies me very often.’
But how? Wolfgang clearly thought Hitler’s emotion was significant – to himself, to Bayreuth and to Wagner, a part of the legend. I find it troubling that Barenboim did not challenge Wolfgang on what the episode meant to him, and that he does not explain its lasting concern. There are no followup questions in the film. The ambivalence is left hanging in the ether.
If you are in the UK, you can watch the documentary here.
One of the most fundamental characteristics of psychopaths is that they have difficulty feeling emotions–mostly due to a profound lack of empathy. The worst cases feel none at all. They learn, however, to feign emotions in order to appear normal and use them to manipulate people. Hitler is a classic example.
Strangely, the vacuum created by a lack of emotions increases their capacity for self-absorbed sentimentality. They can drown in their own sentimental self-preoccupation exactly because they feel no empathy for others. What Wolfgang Wagner witnessed was likely Hitler’s self-absorbed sentimentality evoked by his hallucinogenic, nationalistic, and racist reactions to Wagner. Hitler’s mission and possible Gotterdammerung were probably already in his mind’s eye, and their is evidence that he read this into Wagner’s work.
It’s a little reminder that if Georg Elser’s 1939 assassination attempt had been successful, it would have saved 50 million human lives.
Is it the inability to feel emotions that characterizes psychopaths or their ability to compartmentalize them? As for Barenboim, at what point does one conclude that in music and life things he is a classic example of wanting your cake and eating it too? He seems to be one of those people who will rationalize everything to serve his own purposes.
Compartimentalization of emotions are a common capacity in all humans, it is a safety measure, and part of the balance we need to get everything more or less in the right place – true sadness when a friend gets under a bus but sentimental weeping when watching a Spanish soap. With psychopaths, it seems that they can compartimentalize emotions to an absurd degree, with dehumanizing effects.
It is puffickly possible that Hitler genuinely wept over a passage in Lohengrin (I bet it was the arrival of the swan with the knight), and merely felt a burning (genuine) hatred for what he imagined were Jews, their imagined ‘threat’ to the ‘purity’ of the ‘German race’, and them not being really human so it was easy to not feel anything at all. Probably he felt genuinely happy with the prospect of murdering them all, being a psychopath, and thus having his human faculties totally displaced, disfigured, eroded, twisted, etc. etc. Let us not forget that psychopathy is something that everybody, in theory, could visit.
I sometimes wonder, reading about such idiocy, how Hitler when a todler, did his potty training, and whether he was cuddled by his mother, and how he made friends in first grade.
I think you are right, that the ability to murder many people seemingly unaffected, starts with the process of dehumanizing them, objectifying and demonizing them.
Such people can still have human emotional capabilities for empathetic experiences.
Contrary to that are psychopaths, who directly feel deranged joy from actively killing other humans.
Possibly Hitler wouldn’t even have been able to kill another person with his own hands.
Surely if that had been the foundation of his perversion, we would have reports of him doing so, simply because he easily could have?
To compartmentalize something as massive as the Holocaust is just another form of psychopathy. It helps to understand that psychopathy can take many forms and be manifested, for example, as much by con men as by murderers. Psychopathy isn’t all or nothing. It manifests in varying degrees of intensity from individual to individual. Studies have found that, “Roughly 4% to as high as 12% of CEOs exhibit psychopathic traits, according to some expert estimates, many times more than the 1% rate found in the general population and more in line with the 15% rate found in prisons.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-psychopathic-ceo/
Some types of psychopaths can and do learn to insulate themselves from circumstances that might weaken their special nature. In some circumstances, such as war, society can even esteem psychopathy in its soldiers and leaders. War provides a forum for psychopaths which might help explain their evolutionary biology and why those traits persist in human populations.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6682913
From the bestial perspectives of Darwinism, an element of psychopathy seems an essential part of society.
Due to the power they wield, political leaders who are psychopaths are the most dangerous. I think Americans have had a little taste of that recently. It might also be that as societies collapse, psychopaths are the most likely to rise to the top.
I agree with all of this.
It is one of the saddest aspects of the human condition.
I always assumed it was the scene change chorus in Act III. Very Nürnberg rally, that.
(But it might have been the dawn chorus in Act Ii, the one where half the Met chorus men used to sing “In France, we fuck ’em on the roof, Garfield Garfield Garfield Garfield!”)
I highly doubt it was the playout after the Elsa-Ortrud duet, or “Mein lieber Schwan.”
Yale historian Timothy Snyder has explained the insane reasoning for Adolf Hitler wanting to remove Jewish people from the planet is because he absurdly believed we were not human, not subhuman, but rather a parahuman race who brought new ideas into the world that disturbed the natural order of life, examples being figures like Jesus Christ, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, etc. In terms of his emotions, there are reliable accounts of Hitler throwing himself to the floor and actually chewing the carpet when in a rage. Wagner was Hitler’s hero and guiding light, of course, with some arguing that in his twisted subconscious mind, Hitler viewed the Third Reich as a gargantuan staged opera complete with carefully designed costumes, including death skulls, for performing their animalistic butchery upon defenseless woman and children in addition to men and soldiers.
http://azuremilesrecords.com/Land_of_Pancakes_Walking_Miracle_Mile_and_More.html
Let’s not forget that crazy cranks like Hitler misunderstood Wagner, and that both Theodore Herzl (the father of Zionism) and Hitler visited the same production at Linz where Hitler got his idea of his nazi thing and Herzl his vision of a homeland for the Jews. Who ‘understood’ Lohengrin best?
And then, there is no other body of important artistic work that lends itself better to misunderstanding and misrepresentation than Wagner operas, because their complexities, ambiguities and inner contradictions (and often plain messiness) offer a plate for anybody’s helping.
It seems centrally important to differentiate how Herzl was apparently inspired by the earlier operas, and most definitely not by the writings of Wagner, which were central to Hitler’s orientation, including how Wagner concluded his infamous anti-Semetic essay by calling for the destruction of the Jewish people: “But bethink ye, that one only thing can redeem you from the burden of your curse: the redemption of Ahasuerus—Going under!” To cite another among myriad examples readily available, upon learning of a fire in a Jewish section of Vienna that killed 416 Jews, Richard Wagner ‘s recorded response was “All Jews should be burned during a performance of “Nathan the Wise!” (This is a famous 18th century play promoting religious tolerance.) When Hitler stated, “Whoever wants to understand. National Socialistic Germany must know Wagner,” he was referring to both the totality of the music and Wagner’s writings and recorded statements.
http://azuremilesrecords.com/soundsfromsilence.html
Indeed, but we should not forget the context in which such antisemitic fanatism erupted: the first wave of industrial revolution where wild capitalism, with its disruptive effects, appeared to threaten culture and civilised values, and seemed to be a lethal threat to the ‘most gifted people in Europe: the Germans’, who had already suffered so much on the hands of foreigners: the French during the Napoleanic wars.
In this industrial and capitalist wave there were many brilliant and enterprising people from Jewish descent, and Wagner (like many of his contemporaries) connected this background to all kinds of destructive trends of industrialisation. In W’s time Jewishness was seen by some intellectuals as a world view, incompatible with European cultural identity, and later in the age some twisted Darwinism was added. W campaigned from an imagined position of victimhood, feeling himself representing German culture and its pinnacle of music. He was ‘fighting’ an imaginary enemy from an imagined position of being overruled by ‘Jewishness’. With the 20C catastrophe all of this changed and W’s crazy fulminations seemed to ‘prepare’ for Hitler. But given the circumstances, he was definitely not guilty of nazism, WW II, and Hitler’s insanity. He made a grave thinking mistake like thinking – after having seen many communists with red hair – that communism is produced by red hair. (Scientific research has demonstrated that hair colour has nothing to do with communism.)
So, Hitler was an evil man – hardly a revelatory comment – but he was democratically voted to power – he could not have killed millions of people all on his own. How he did so is a question no historian has ever adequately answered.
“How he did so is a question no historian has ever adequately answered.”
He had help. There you go.
There’s a book you might look into from nearly 25 years ago by historian Daniel Goldhagen, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners.” But be warned: In turn it spurred a massive, universal backlash by historians of Germany history who basically treated it as a book-length undergraduate paper which took several hundred pages to say just this — Hitler had Help. Serious historians regarded it without any merit; as the dean of Holocaust historians Raul Hilberg said, it’s “worthless” as an attempt to actually make sense of how or why What Happened actually Happened. Barenboim doesn’t seem interested in anything more than the offhand question-raising which is fine — he does plenty of serious cultural analyses on other matters (like his work with Said). But not on this one. Christopher Browning’s “Ordinary Men” is far better if you actually want to read something on this topic (I’d recommend it to Barenboim or anyone else) — it actually does some real history rather than just pontificating and stating the obvious over and over while selling a mountain of books.
Hitler was NOT “democratically elected to power”. In the first round of the 1932 elections, he won 30% of the vote, vs. 49% for Hindenburg. No majority, so there was a runoff, in which Hindenburg won 53% and Hitler 37%. The aging and exhausted Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor, and shortly thereafter the Nazi’s used the Reichstag fire as a pretext to suspend the democracy.
Which is not to say that a critical mass of Germans were not also culpable in what ensued.
True!
No, totally wrong, utter nonsense. Hindeburg didn’t even run. Hindenburg was Reichspräsident.
Hitler’s party was – by far – the strongest party in the 1932 November elections. And while not gaining an absolute majority, since the two strongest left opposition parties, social democrates and communists, refused to collaborate to prevent Hitler, Hindenburg as Reichspräsident had no choice but to ask Hitler to build the post election government.
This is most basic German history folks. Know your wiki URL at least!
Hitler never got more than 37% of the vote before he became Chancellor. Actually when he was appointed the Nazi Party had only gotten 33% in a disappointing result in November 1932. After he came to power , he suppressed all other parties. Neither the Communists in Russia nor the Nazis got a majority of voters .
Myths abound, and it is nice to read some actual statistics, for a change. And, there are examples of minority political “wins” in recent years in the Western world, if one remembers, correctly. Oh, and with terrible results to society and general culture. Some return of classical music performance (on a mass media scale) to the general culture would be so welcome right now. (Just remembering how musicians such as Heifitz were household names in my youth.)
Us vs them. If you can propegate and popularise the idea that “the other” are not like “us” then the usual morality and ethics that apply to our fellow human beings no longer apply to “them” and atrocities can be commited by ordinary people.
The old wizard himself (R Wagner) displayed similar qualities. Great understanding of and empathy for his operatic characters, and his dogs. People, not so much. To wit, ‘rewarding’ H v Bulow for his Herculean efforts in bringing Tristan and Meistersinger to life by stealing his wife, Cosima. Demanding that Hermann Levi be baptised (!) before conducting the premiere of Parsifal. Not paying people back what they were owed. You get the picture. The difference, however, is that Wagner left the world with some of mankind’s very greatest artistic creations. Hitler, genocide.
Full agreement with your major thrust, but is the Levi baptism story confirmed? I have heard serious doubt expressed on its authenticity.
I don’t think an actual baptismal certificate has been produced. King Ludwig objected to Wagner’s request and this carried some weight with Wagner.
In reality, Wagner asked Ludwig to demand Levi’s Christian baptism, but Ludwig flatly refused – he never took W’s antisemitism seriously and fiercily disagreed with him on the matter, in spite of his infatuation. W could get the Court Orchestra for Parsifal with its MD Levi, or no orchestra at all, so in the end W simply had to accept. The whole story is tragic-comical.
Here we go again with mythology.
There are lots of witness reports of the time which show W often had an overflowing sympathy for people he liked, and went to extravagant lengths to shower them with gifts, for instance. Some women were al too prepared to elope with him, to escape an unhappy marriage (being unhappily married himself, W understood this very well). Musicians loved him (apart from the father of R Strauss who blew the horn in the munich orchestra) as did singers. He did not ‘steal’ Bulow’s wife: they had a miserable marriage which had already gone down the drains years before W appeared in their lives. The Bavarian King Ludwig who saved W from definite bankruptcy pratically was in love with W and risked his throne while wanting to serve him. Thinking that his Parsifal was some sort of replacement of Christianity, saturated with spiritual and erotic symbolism, and having the best singers and players of the time, having them led by an ostentatiously non-Christian, Jewish conductor, the son of a rabbi, turned for W the première into a ‘blemished’ occasion. Levi himself eventually totally excused W for his misconceptions (as appeared from his letters to his rabbi father). For W, Jewishness was a world view, expressed in racial terms, and representing everything that appeared to destroy culture and spirituality (in short: modernity as driven by the industrial revolution). This was all confused thinking and stupid reasoning, but that did not make him responsible for the Holocaust. Etc. etc…
There is no artist in Western history who has become so enwrapped in false myths and misconceptions. His flaws merely serve for critics to feel morally good about themselves.
The person described as “the old wizard himself,” Richard Wagner, including the banal criticism of “Not paying people back what they were owed,” was the historic figure who first made anti-Semitism acceptable in German society, advocating and wishing for the very things the Nazis went on to do, including being by far the person who most influenced Adolf Hitler. Like a number of others, I have enjoyed the overtures of Wagner, while having difficulty with the operas, finding myself unable with to get with the program.
http://www.azuremilesrecords.com/opposingtheabsenceofalternatives.html
Wager definitely was not as bad a person as so many people like to make him:
https://johnborstlap.com/was-wagner-a-bad-person/
I asked 2009 Barenboim the same question and this was his answer: You cannot connect these things.
“Hitler went to a performance of Lohengrin, he went to many performances of Lohengrin, and he is meant to have gone to a performance of Lohengrin in Bayreuth in 1936 conducted by Furtwängler, which I am sure was so wonderful, and he was moved to tears by it. How do you put together the fact that you can be moved to tears by music, and then murder millions of people? Or Stalin, whose favourite piece of music was the D minor Concerto of Mozart, probably was also moved to tears by it, and 20 million people were murdered by him. How is this possible? You cannot connect these things. That’s why I keep repeating the same phrase, ‘the music is larger than all of this.’ “
Maybe it is entirely irrelevant?
Not sure if or when I will have access to this piece. But from what you say, there is something not too attractive about Barenboim’s psyche, too — and/or perhaps a dippy interviewer, as I don’t know how the film was structured.
But any journalist worth his salt would certainly have pursued that question regarding Buenos Aires, and the comment about Hitler from Wolfgang Wagner. Perhaps there wasn’t one — none is credited — and DB simply talked. Either he has an astounding lack of intellectual, and emotional, curiosity or he is concealing his real feelings, which begs the question as to why he did this piece.
Is it part of his quest to be absolved of blame for having an affair as his first wife was declining? It’s not pretty, but it’s hard to blame him, and I doubt many have for decades. He did not have an easy time, and people know that, and he did try to protect her from the knowledge.
Or is he winding down, and this is a sort of coda?
I don’t believe that Wolfgang Wagner would share his memories of his ‘Uncle Wolf’ with anyone.
Mythomania?
Agreed. Wolfgang was toughened up by his Wehrmacht service, and after the war he and Wieland both deployed Omerta (unlike their mother), where their Nazi past was concerned. I find it almost implausible he’d have shared that detail with anyone, much less Barenboim. And btw, H. Levi himself refused W’s absurd request. His father was a rabbi, for heaven’s sake.
I peg the decline of classical music’s stature in our culture to the modern realization that all that classical music Hitler loved and that his government promoted didn’t do much to avert any horrors.
For decades classical music had been held up as a civilizing influence in society. Elevating, uplifting!
Nope.
It has turned out to be just another entertainment and business with participants who comport themselves in an only slightly more dignified fashion than professional wrestlers.
A ridiculous, populist comment, far beneath contempt.
That so many people don’t understand where classical music, as a genre, stands for, is in itself bad enough. But that they are incapable of making any distinction between an art form and a suggested category of its practitioners, show them up as illiterati.
Classical music is an ‘art-form’ that depends entirely on its practitioners, and it cannot be denied that some practitioners and auditors even today (many judging by the majority tone of commenters on this site) are not elevated or uplifted morally or intellectually by the music they play and hear.
Indeed. But that does not mean it is just another cheap entertainment industry. That is, with all due respect, a very stupid generalization.
Since (alas) the chorus sings “Sieg! Heil!” in Lohengrin I rather imagine that made him verklempt. Not to mention the last thing Lohengrin says, “Zum Führer sei er euch ernannt!” (The F word often changed since!)
What about ‘Reiseführer’? (travel guide)
Words do not carry responsibility for how they are employed.
“I find it troubling that Barenboim did not challenge Wolfgang on what the episode meant to him, and that he does not explain its lasting concern.” . . . . Why? What would be the point? Clearly Barenboim was needing to process his own feelings on this horrific event in history.
I too found Barenboim’s response odd.
You need licence to watch this-even after subscribing.They don’t tell you in advance.WHy pay to watch ONE item??
This will surely appear on YT one day!
Hitler is the most important figure in the 20th century.
Absolutely no doubt about that.
Whatever you think you known about Hitler, don’t pull him in like that.
It’s unfair for everybody: Yourself, people involved, Germans, Jews, Hitler himself, …, simply everybody.
We are in no way ready to speak about Hitler.
(That’s not meant as censorship: go ahead and say whatever you want about him. But my sentence holds true).
I haven’t a clue what all of this means but I love it!
Sally
There are, in Life, sometime, simply unanswerable questions. Barenboim’s question is a rhetorical one. There is no answer.
Hitler was irrational, ignorant, and a psychopath. And Wagner was seriously challenged, morally. Two imperfect human beings: one, a monster, the other, a brilliant, revolutionary composer. They were not equals in any sense of the word.
Don’t conflate any of this by making a personal attack on Barenboim for your perception of his human frailties.
While admiring him as a pianist I didn’t greatly care for Barenboim’s personality before seeing this documentary, and I think even less of it now. Classic bully.
The problem of such performers is that they identify so much with the greatness of most of the music they perform, that they confuse their own, recreative authority with the creative one of the composers. And then they begin to see the works as vehicles fo their own imagined greatness, instead of understanding their serving role for the creation of someone else who has done all the substantial work for them. It is a form of parasitism.
I know nothing of his personality, but the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a thoroughly admirable achievement.
The only flaw is the initial collaboration of Edward Said, the anthropologist who was heralded by leftwing suicidal woke warriors for his entirely misconceived conclusions of Western interests in the cultures of ‘the East’, painting in gross generalizations all of Western cultural studies of ‘the East’ as wrong projections of imperialist intentions, with ‘othering’ the easterner and never understanding him, thereby showing that he had hardly read the body of work that has been painstakingly produced over the ages by Western authors. Said appeared to loathe ‘the West’ while happily gathering its fruits. If you read his ‘Musical Elaborations’, his essays about music, you get sick of the pretentiousness combined with superficiality and lack of substance. His fame is entirely the product of Western woke.
We are not interested in the supposed Hitler “emotions”, and his “supposed” murderers or even the violinist Heydrich who actually put policies into practice.
Milgram had far better analysis.
It concluded it was people who followed orders that were to blame for the (scape goating) results of Mass hypnosis and Mass Psychosis.
We are following exactly the same dangerous path today with the AGW “climate emergency” psychosis, and the “covid” mass fear dystopia.
Why anyone could take seriously this Barenboim in his very amateur attempts at psychoanalysis beats me.
ie. Barenboim is a nutcase & understands nothing.
Talking about ‘upside down logic’….
Comparing the Holocaust, which rested evidently upon paranoia, with climate change and a global pandemic (which have been scientifically proven to exist), is an indication of either a psychopathic condition or the lack of any IQ.
Hitler was a great actor too, just as Trump is.
Curiously, these people have no difficulty with playing themselves. They actually believe they are themselves.
Why tie those two events?
To discredit Barenboim?
Enough of that.
Music goes in everyone’s mind.
“I find it troubling that Barenboim did not challenge Wolfgang on what the episode meant to him, and that he does not explain its lasting concern.”
…this may say more about you than it does about Barenboim…
Well said.
barenboim showed in many ways that music was to be played no matter who listens to it-a)remember the Orchestra he founded:Arabs AND Jews…
b)The speeches he gave all around the world asking for peace.
I did not know what to make of this film . Barenboim did not come well out of it , and his behaviour whilst rehearsing with an orchestra ( admittedly when he was much younger although that does not excuse it ) was nothing short of disgraceful bullying . He comes across now as a tired old man whose conceit is increasing palpably, and why he should have chosen to have himself portrayed as such is something of a mystery
Wagner produced some beautiful music and was a loathsome man. Human beings are complex creatures. Barenboim is a musician not a sage.
To utter his name in any context is disrespectful to the millions killed. To see his name in a headline, uttered by a great pianist and argued in these comments is humiliating. Please stop. Who cares who he was. Who effing cares. Let him burn in eternity. He was deranged and should have been killed as a soldier fighting in World War I.