The Ban on Parsifal

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The Gospel of National Socialism

ccording to the controversial biography of Wagner by Robert W. Gutman ¹, Parsifal, more than the Ring, was the gospel of National Socialism. Gutman interpreted this work in terms of Wagner's later writings, the so-called regeneration essays. He writes, surveying the world from the heights of Monsalvat, the Grail community in Parsifal was alarmed to observe natural selection working against its distinctive Aryanism... The knights were confronted with an enemy gaining upon them every day. Here was the decisive racial crisis that grew into an uncompromising struggle for power.... Parsifal is an enactment of the Aryan's plight, struggle and hope for redemption...

utman probably found the clue to this analysis in the writings of Theodor Adorno ², who also saw in Parsifal a master-race agenda. As members of the "Bayreuth Circle" ³ had done in the 1880s and 1890s, Adorno saw the work in the context set by Wagner's regeneration essays, as published in the Bayreuther Blätter ⁴. Gutman might also have been influenced by the claim that Adolf Hitler took a very narrow view of the work in terms of blood, regeneration and selective compassion (see Rauschning's Conversations with Adolf Hitler or Gespräche mit Hitler, 1939, while keeping in mind that modern historians, such as Hitler's biographer Ian Kershaw, regard this book as unreliable).

Objections to Gutman's Interpretation

Chronology

he first problem with Gutman's interpretation that has been pointed out in the wake of his book, and in the venomous debate surrounding the subsequent articles by Hartmut Zelinsky and books by his followers such as Marc Weiner, is the lengthy gestation of the work. The story of Parsifal was worked out in detail already in the Prose Draft of 1865. This was thirteen years before the appearance of the first of the so-called "regeneration" articles (Religion and Art). Although we can speculate that some of Wagner's ideas about regeneration and blood had begun to form before 1865, these speculations cannot be proven; although there is a clear development in Wagner's thought from an emphasis on redemption, as evidenced in his earlier operas and associated prose writings, to an emphasis on regeneration in the articles that he wrote during his last years, which the "Bayreuth Circle" related (in various ways) to his last opera. It is hard to find any specific evidence of ideas about regeneration, rather than redemption, in the Prose Draft, and it is unlikely that anyone could have predicted the regeneration essays, or indeed anything that Wagner would be writing in the late 1870's, on the basis of what he wrote in the 1860's. Consistency was not one of Wagner's characteristics and his views on many subjects changed, and some of his attitudes softened, during his last decades.

nlike the Bayreuth circle of the 1880s, today we are not compelled to see the work in terms of the regeneration essays. In the perspective of knowing the development of the work, from its genesis in the 1850's to the completion of the poem (libretto) on 19 April 1877, it seems unlikely that the influences that Wagner absorbed, digested and finally presented in the essays of his last years, were significant in determining the ideal content of the work, which had been almost entirely defined by August 1865. For example, Wagner first met Count Gobineau in 1876 (Cosima's Diary, entry for 30 November) and only after meeting Gobineau again in 1880 did Wagner begin to study his writings⁵. Therefore it is not possible, as Gutman asserted, that Gobineau's racist ideas could have influenced Wagner before he wrote the detailed Prose Draft of 1865, or even the second one of 1877. Nor is it likely that Wagner had independently developed ideas similar to those of Count Gobineau, since there is evidence both in Cosima's Diaries and in her correspondence with Gobineau, that Wagner had violently disagreed with his racial theories.

Rejection by the Nazi Regime

he second problem is the ban on Parsifal during the 3rd Reich. If as Gutman asserts, this work was the gospel of National Socialism, why should it have been suppressed by the Nazi's? Was it because the ideologues of the Nazi party did not share Hitler's highly selective view of the work? Or was it perhaps that they found messages in the work that they disliked, and this dislike outweighed the regeneration message that recently (1937) had been abhorred by their opponent Adorno?

ncidentally, it was another work entirely that the Völkischer Beobachter had hailed as the gospel of the Nazi movement: the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1897-98) by Houston Stewart Chamberlain — at that time a central figure in the "Bayreuth Circle" during its second (Wilhelminist) stage, who married Eva Wagner in 1907, thus becoming the posthumous son-in-law of Richard. (H.S. Chamberlain never met Richard Wagner; the nearest he came was to see Wagner across a Bayreuth restaurant).

Possible Ideological Objections to the Opera

Unacceptable Content

o what are the messages carried by Wagner's opera that might have led to the 1939 ban on performances of Parsifal in the 3rd Reich, and even from Hitler's Bayreuth? Which of these messages was the real problem, and which secondary objections? It is even possible that the arguments with which the Nazi ideologues persuaded Hitler, were not necessarily the real reasons for wishing to forbid performances of this work. In a paper delivered at the Wagner symposium in Adelaide last year ⁶, Robert R. Gibson suggested the following.

Underlying Message of Pacifism

irstly, although it portrays a warrior caste of Grail Knights, there is in Parsifal an underlying message of pacifism. At key moments in the work, the protagonist is disarmed. In the first act, Parsifal is upbraided for killing a swan, and as a sign of his growing awareness, breaks his bow and throws away his arrows. In the third act, he arrives as an armed knight, but allows his armour to be removed, to be replaced by the mantle of the Grail brotherhood, on which appears the emblem of the dove, a symbol of peace. Only then can he return to the shrine of Monsalvat.

ven in the second act, which ends in a violent conflict between Parsifal and the domain of Klingsor, the only destructive act in that conflict on the part of the hero, is to grasp the spear and to make the sign of the cross. (In fact, his passivity throughout the opera does not commend him as an Aryan hero — in contrast to Siegfried). The spear itself, a holy relic, will not allow itself to be used as a weapon: when Klingsor throws it at Parsifal, the spear pauses above his head. Parsifal then shows himself more worthy than Amfortas to be guardian of the holy relic by not bearing it as a weapon (denn nicht ihn selberdurft' ich führen im Streite). This pacifist message alone would be sufficient reason, the Nazi ideologues could have argued, to suppress the work at least until the end of the war.

Dominant Theme of Compassion

econdly, the primary message of the opera is about compassion, scarcely an element of Nazi ideology. It has been regarded as a feminine attribute, not as belonging to the masculine ideal of the Aryan male. One of principal ideologues of the Nazi movement, Alfred Rosenberg, compared Wagner's works as follows:

The essence of all Nordic western art has been revealed in Richard Wagner. It shows that the Nordic soul is not contemplative, that it does not lose itself in an individualistic psychology. Rather, it experiences the willed, cosmic, spiritual laws, and shapes our art spiritually and architectonically. Richard Wagner is one of those artists in whom three factors coincide, each of which form a part of our entire artistic life: the Nordic ideal of beauty as it appears outwardly in Lohengrin and Siegfried, linked to deepest feeling for nature; the inner will of man in Tristan und Isolde; and the struggle for the highest value of Nordic western man: heroic honour, linked with inner truthfulness. This inner ideal of beauty is realised in Wotan, in King Mark and in Hans Sachs. Conversely, Parsifal is a strongly emphasized weakening of the will in favour of an adoptive value.

Role Models for the Reich

hirdly, the women portrayed in the opera are no better role models for the women of the 3rd Reich, than Parsifal is exemplary of the Aryan male ideal. His mother Herzeleide is a war widow who attempts to shield her son from weapons and fighting, and dies of a broken heart when he leaves her in pursuit of a band of knights. Kundry is obviously a foreign element but (despite the subsequent analysis of Weiner in which she becomes an anti-Semitic stereotype), Wagner's sympathetic treatment of this degenerate, predatory female might not have appealed to the ideologues.

Campaigns Against Homosexuals and the Church

ourthly, the ban occurred at a time when the National Socialist party was attempting to suppress homosexuality. The SS were forbidden to touch one another, but in the opera we see a community of male warriors who embrace during their ceremonies.

rom 1934 to 1937 there was a series of cloister trials in which the monks of German monasteries were tried for alleged homosexual activities. In a broadcast speech in May 1937, Joseph Goebbels denounced the unnatural life of unmarried priests and monks, and he described monasteries as breeding places of vile homosexuality. Given the Nazi campaign against the Church and in particular the attempts to discredit monasteries and other religious communities, it is not surprising that an opera in which an all-male religious community triumphs over adversity through the recovery of a phallic symbol would be unwanted.

The Antithesis of Totalitarian Art

inally, although Parsifal is less complex than the Ring, it is still a multilayered, multidimensional, opaque work that allows of many different interpretations. In that respect, it is the antithesis of totalitarian art. The latter is characterized by simple messages, unambiguous images and uncomplicated archetypes. Even if Parsifal can be interpreted as a homage to Aryan supremacy, this objective is obscured by other, more obvious messages that would have disturbed Nazi ideologues. We see a youth destroy his weapons, renounce sexual union with a woman and join an enclosed, all-male, religious community. In short, doing everything that a good Aryan youth of the 1930's was not supposed to do.