Germany's mythic titans
It is a brave novelist who attempts to convey how Wagnerian intensity led to Nazi catastrophe
Hywel Williams
Thursday September 13, 2007
The Guardian
Conventional political history, with its story of elections won and lost, struggles to explain what happened to Germany between the unification of 1871 and the nemesis of 1945. Here we are at the furthermost limits of the usefulness of "facts". The consequences of nazism were so catastrophic that there is a gap of historical explanation that might link the possible factual causes with that final Götterdämmerung effect. This remains a mysterious question and it explains why the history of the Third Reich remains big business: a teasing psychodrama as well as a consuming Holocaust. It's at this point that the historian needs an artist's imagination.
Article continues
Other novelists before AN Wilson - whose fictional take on Adolf and the Wagners, Winnie and Wolf, was a surprise omission last week from the Man Booker shortlist - have tried their hand at a fictional account of Hitler. Beryl Bainbridge brought a quizzical genius to her picture of a gauche outsider in Young Adolf. Richard Hughes and George Steiner described a mysterious demon. But Wilson presents a more plausible figure by placing him firmly in the Wagnerian aesthetic while building on what we know of his affection for Winifred Wagner, the composer's daughter-in-law and director of the Bayreuth festival in the 1930s. It was the artist in Hitler who succumbed to that cult of Nordic self-realisation and ensured subsidies for the Festspielhaus, while the politician in him saw exactly why Richard Wagner's reinvention of medieval mythology appealed to German audiences.
The Ring of the Nibelung, a powerful indictment of materialism, shows how those who wish to love must give up power. It is the renunciation of the will - not its triumph - that is basic to Wagner's art. But to the original audiences of the late 19th century, just as for Hitler, it was the energy of a truly German art that was the real message. Those mythic titans on the Bayreuth stage were all too easily equated with the Promethean energy of a country that became an economic superpower in the 1880s.
But there was a gap between this material success and Germany's political status. After so many centuries as a collection of small states, this newly unified country was neurotic about its relationship with the great powers of Britain, France and Russia. This sense of fragility accounts for the common emphasis on the holiness of the homeland - a Heimat that needed defending against sacrilege. If this was true at the end of the 19th century, it was doubly so in the misery of the 1920s, a time of national humiliation with the French occupation of the Rhineland.
It is a brave novelist who tackles these giant themes. The historical novel that mingles fact with invented incident is a tricky genre and the novel of ideas, although a German tradition, is hardly an English one. But Wilson's achievement is startling, the product of profound immersion in the German intellectual journey from a 19th-century crisis of religious faith to a 20th-century collapse into nihilism. Most contemporary English fiction looks rather etiolated and pointless by comparison.
As Wilson's narrator says in his story there was an aesthetic cost, as well as personal suffering, involved in national socialism. Because the Nazis had appropriated so much of German art, literature, music and religion, it became necessary to "cleanse" much that was good as well as bad during the denazification process. That "Gothic" or medievalising element in German culture - seen in the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich as well as heard in Wagner's music - simply disappeared. Awareness of complexity and avoidance of simple moralism are the signs of a great artist; 21st-century historians will need the same gifts to unravel the causes of Germany's 20th-century tragedy.
Hywel Williams
Thursday September 13, 2007
The Guardian
Conventional political history, with its story of elections won and lost, struggles to explain what happened to Germany between the unification of 1871 and the nemesis of 1945. Here we are at the furthermost limits of the usefulness of "facts". The consequences of nazism were so catastrophic that there is a gap of historical explanation that might link the possible factual causes with that final Götterdämmerung effect. This remains a mysterious question and it explains why the history of the Third Reich remains big business: a teasing psychodrama as well as a consuming Holocaust. It's at this point that the historian needs an artist's imagination.
Article continues
Other novelists before AN Wilson - whose fictional take on Adolf and the Wagners, Winnie and Wolf, was a surprise omission last week from the Man Booker shortlist - have tried their hand at a fictional account of Hitler. Beryl Bainbridge brought a quizzical genius to her picture of a gauche outsider in Young Adolf. Richard Hughes and George Steiner described a mysterious demon. But Wilson presents a more plausible figure by placing him firmly in the Wagnerian aesthetic while building on what we know of his affection for Winifred Wagner, the composer's daughter-in-law and director of the Bayreuth festival in the 1930s. It was the artist in Hitler who succumbed to that cult of Nordic self-realisation and ensured subsidies for the Festspielhaus, while the politician in him saw exactly why Richard Wagner's reinvention of medieval mythology appealed to German audiences.
The Ring of the Nibelung, a powerful indictment of materialism, shows how those who wish to love must give up power. It is the renunciation of the will - not its triumph - that is basic to Wagner's art. But to the original audiences of the late 19th century, just as for Hitler, it was the energy of a truly German art that was the real message. Those mythic titans on the Bayreuth stage were all too easily equated with the Promethean energy of a country that became an economic superpower in the 1880s.
But there was a gap between this material success and Germany's political status. After so many centuries as a collection of small states, this newly unified country was neurotic about its relationship with the great powers of Britain, France and Russia. This sense of fragility accounts for the common emphasis on the holiness of the homeland - a Heimat that needed defending against sacrilege. If this was true at the end of the 19th century, it was doubly so in the misery of the 1920s, a time of national humiliation with the French occupation of the Rhineland.
It is a brave novelist who tackles these giant themes. The historical novel that mingles fact with invented incident is a tricky genre and the novel of ideas, although a German tradition, is hardly an English one. But Wilson's achievement is startling, the product of profound immersion in the German intellectual journey from a 19th-century crisis of religious faith to a 20th-century collapse into nihilism. Most contemporary English fiction looks rather etiolated and pointless by comparison.
As Wilson's narrator says in his story there was an aesthetic cost, as well as personal suffering, involved in national socialism. Because the Nazis had appropriated so much of German art, literature, music and religion, it became necessary to "cleanse" much that was good as well as bad during the denazification process. That "Gothic" or medievalising element in German culture - seen in the canvases of Caspar David Friedrich as well as heard in Wagner's music - simply disappeared. Awareness of complexity and avoidance of simple moralism are the signs of a great artist; 21st-century historians will need the same gifts to unravel the causes of Germany's 20th-century tragedy.
posted by judy j at 6:50 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home