Richard and Adolf: Did Richard Wagner Incite Adolf Hitler to Commit the Holocaust? (review)

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 178-181
Author(s):  
Susan M. Filler
Author(s):  
Na'ama Sheffi

This chapter examines the controversy surrounding the Wagner affair in Israel: the ban on composer Richard Wagner (1813–1883) by Israeli authorities following Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom that took place in Germany in November 1938. After the State of Israel was created in 1948, Wagner became identified with the racist views of National Socialism and vicious anti-Semitism and his work emerged as one of the explicit symbols of the Holocaust and its atrocities. This chapter considers the fundamental reasons for the opposition to performing Wagner’s work in Israel within a broad cultural and political context, suggesting that his music served as a stark reminder in Israel of the Holocaust of European Jews. It also discusses the cultural, historical, and educational implications of the ban on Wagner.


2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 195-212
Author(s):  
Susan Power Bratton

AbstractFrom the Iron Age to the modern period, authors have repeatedly restructured the ecomythology of the Siegfried saga. Fritz Lang's Weimar film production (released in 1924-1925) of Die Nibelungen presents an ascendant humanist Siegfried, who dominates over nature in his dragon slaying. Lang removes the strong family relationships typical of earlier versions, and portrays Siegfried as a son of the German landscape rather than of an aristocratic, human lineage. Unlike The Saga of the Volsungs, which casts the dwarf Andvari as a shape-shifting fish, and thereby indistinguishable from productive, living nature, both Richard Wagner and Lang create dwarves who live in subterranean or inorganic habitats, and use environmental ideals to convey anti-Semitic images, including negative contrasts between Jewish stereotypes and healthy or organic nature. Lang's Siegfried is a technocrat, who, rather than receiving a magic sword from mystic sources, begins the film by fashioning his own. Admired by Adolf Hitler, Die Nibelungen idealizes the material and the organic in a way that allows the modern ''hero'' to romanticize himself and, without the aid of deities, to become superhuman.


This chapter reviews the book A Perfect Storm: Antisemitism in South Africa 1930–1948 (2015), by Milton Shain. A Perfect Storm explores antisemitism in South Africa at its peak, from 1930 to the National Party (NP) victory in 1948 that ushered in the apartheid era. The book traces the campaign that began with quasi-fascist extremist groups such as the Greyshirts and Blackshirts, which soon infected the main white opposition party, Daniel Malan’s “Purified” NP, and even some in J.B.M. Hertzog and Jan Smuts’ ruling United Party. When Adolf Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and Hertzog and Malan’s “Reunited” NP were founded several months later, antisemites blamed Jews for the war. The extremists were hardly affected by Hitler’s defeat and even the revelation of the Holocaust. Shain examines the extent to which mainstream Nationalists, especially Malan, may have been driven in large part by economic concerns or political opportunism.


2005 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 412-414
Author(s):  
Sandy Macleod

Objective: The doctor who attended the mother of Adolf Hitler in her terminal illness has been blamed as a cause of the Holocaust. The medical details recorded of this professional relationship are presented and discussed. Conclusions: Dr Bloch's medical care of Mrs Hitler was consistent with the prevailing medical practice of the management of fungating breast carcinoma. Indeed, the general practitioner's care and attention of the family appear to have been astute and supportive. There is nothing to suggest that Dr Bloch's medical care was other than competent. Doctors who have the (mis)fortune to professionally attend major figures of history may be unfairly viewed, despite their appropriate and adequate care.


2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 477-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew P. Fitzpatrick

In chapter eleven ofMein Kampf, Adolf Hitler, having constructed aneal type “culture-bearing” Aryan race,1came to elucidate his views on the history of Jews within Germany. Until the time of Frederick the Great, he argued, “it still entered no one's head to regard the Jews as anything else but a ‘foreign’ people.”2Thereafter, he asserted, came a period of transition wherein Jews had “the effrontery to turn Germanic.”3The rest of the chapter, for Hitler, was an attempt to reverse this putative historical mistake, and presents the reader with a vitriolic casting out of Jews, described as “parasites” and a “noxious bacillus,” from the German body politic.4The aim of this textual expulsion, Hitler explained, was to ensure that the Germans would not be destroyed from within, as had “all great cultures of the past.”5To Hitler, Jews were what Julia Kristeva has called “the abject”6—that which is simultaneously part of the self but radically rejected by the self. In seeking to expel the “Germanic Jews” from theVolkskörper, Hitler sought to expel that part of the German self that, in his view, was a source of weakness and taint.7


2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francis Hueffer
Keyword(s):  

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