Originally posted by acctjm:
he passed away in 1883. acctjm
Sorry acctjm - you're right -- what I should have said is that Hitler was a great admirer of Wagner and that his compositions were used heavily in the thrid reich.
Wagner himself was a great antisemite and there is debate within Jews on whether or not to separate him from his music (ie: to enjoy his music even though he was a Jew hater.) But amongst the holocaust generation there is no debate.
"If anyone doubts the extent of his anti-Semitism, a few quotes from his infamous tract, "The Jews in Music," should be sufficient. On Jews' response to German culture he writes:
"Our whole European art and civilization, however, have remained to the Jew a foreign tongue; for, just as he has taken no part in the evolution of the one, so has he taken none in that of the other; but at most the homeless wight has been a cold, nay more, a hostile looker-on. In this speech, this art, the Jew can only after-speak and after-patch, not truly make a poem of his words, an artwork of his doings."
On Jewish culture itself he is, if possible, even more vicious. "Who has not had occasion to convince himself of the travesty of a divine service of song, presented in a real folk synagogue? Who has not been seized with a feeling of the greatest revulsion, of horror mingled with the absurd, at hearing that sense-and-sound-confounding gurgle, yodel, and cackle ("zischend, schrillend, summsend, mucksend"), which no intentional caricature can make more repugnant than as offered here in full, in naive seriousness?"
Wagner's Jew is a creature without passion, incapable of artistic or cultural production, whose "attempts at making art must necessarily bear the attributes of coldness and indifference." In other places Wagner claimed that the Jew's outstanding and exclusive genius lay in his ability to make money, a conviction that allowed him to blame the Jewish bourgeoisie first for the rise, then for the evils of capitalism. In some of his remarks to Cosima, which she noted in her diary, he referred to the Jews as: "Rats and parasites living off the bodies of other people." He compared them to cockroaches and nasty flies.
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