Monsalvat: the Parsifal home page | Parsifal and the Nazis | The 1939 Ban on Parsifal
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Monsalvat: the Parsifal home page | Parsifal and the Nazis | The 1939 Ban on Parsifal
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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).
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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