Wagner, Parsifal and Nazism

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t is difficult to believe that the National Socialists could find any sympathy with Wagner's Parsifal, a work that tells of enlightenment through fellow-suffering. A number of writers have claimed that Parsifal found favour with the Nazis. Some Nazi ideologues expressed serious doubts about this opera but the party was led by Wagner enthusiast Adolf Hitler, who was as fanatical about Wagner's music as he was in his beliefs about Aryan superiority and his destiny to rid the world of communism.

Hitler on Parsifal

dolf Hitler first visited Haus Wahnfried in September 1923. After visiting the grave of Richard and Cosima Wagner, the future Führer said, If I should ever succeed in exerting any influence on Germany's destiny, I will see that Parsifal is given back to Bayreuth. He was referring here to the Lex Parsifal for which the Wagner family and their supporters had campaigned a decade earlier, i.e. a special copyright law that would restrict performances of Parsifal to Bayreuth. However, when German copyright law was being revised in 1934, Hitler decided that he could not honour his earlier promise to the Wagners; in November 1941 he told Goebbels that the opera was not to be reserved for Bayreuth alone.

his interpretation seems to stand Wagner's poem on its head. In Parsifal, as Hitler knew, the sick are not allowed to die. If we are to believe Rauschning's account, then Hitler's interpretation might have been based upon a misreading of Wagner's late essays on Religion and Art. However, there is no reliable evidence that Hitler had read any of Wagner's prose writings³. If he had read the late essays, then it would seem that Hitler chose to disregard Wagner's belief in the pure blood of Christ as the cure.

Footnote 1: Charles Lawrie has demonstrated that Ravenscroft's book contains not only fact but also fiction. There are elements of historical truth in his The Spear of Destiny ... but central things claimed as historically true were not. Ravenscroft's book together with Rauschning's book (see below) has been the inspiration and source for an entire literature concerning Hitler and the occult, with very little (if any) basis in historical facts.

Footnote 2: In the early 1930s Hermann Rauschning was the leader of the Nazi party in Danzig. After he defected from the party and from Germany, Rauschning claimed to have been a close personal friend of Hitler, and he wrote the book from which the above quotation has been taken. His book contains the only "record" of Hitler speaking at length about his relationship with Wagner, and the only account of Hitler discussing Wagner's ideas rather than his music. As was often the case with defectors of later decades, Hermann Rauschning tried to satisfy the curiosity of his new masters even when his information was very limited; and like other defectors, he exaggerated his own importance and the extent of his high-level contacts. In recent years it has been shown that passages in this book were compiled, by Rauschning and his ghost-writer, from Hitler's speeches or other sources; not recalled from conversations with Hitler. As far as it has been established, Rauschning only met Hitler on a few occasions at Nazi party functions and their conversations consisted of small-talk. Although there is no direct evidence that the passage quoted above is Rauschning's invention, like everything in his book that is not corroborated by other sources, it might not be genuine. The balance of probability is that this quotation (often quoted as evidence of Wagner's influence on Hitler) was made up by Rauschning. In his acclaimed biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw wrote: I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning's Hitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether.

Footnote 3: In his recent book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Frederic Spotts is sceptical concerning Kubizek's claim that the young Hitler read Wagner's prose writings and letters. Even more so concerning Joachim Fest's claim that Wagner's prose was Hitler's favourite reading matter. There is no corroborative evidence for either of these claims. Hitler never ascribed any of his views to Wagner, not in Mein Kampf, his speeches, articles or recorded private conversations... Indeed, there is no evidence that Hitler ever read Wagner's collected writings, much less that they were "his favourite reading". The origin of the myth is probably Kubizek's book [Adolf Hitler Mein Jugendfreund, 1953; translated into English as Young Hitler: The Story of Our Friendship, 1955], where the youthful Hitler was said to have read every biography, letter, essay, diary and other scrap by and about his hero that he could lay his hands on. But Kubizek himself contradicted that story in his wartime Reminiscences, which he later expanded into the more marketable, post-war book Young Hitler.

Parsifal and the Nazis

Hitler on Parsifal