The role of Wangerism in German Culture in the Third Reich

‘The herald of National Socialism’. One of the common misconceptions of Wagner is the idea that he was a spiritual precursor of Hitler. The poet Peter Viereck wrote an essay in 1939 entitled “Hitler and Richard Wagner� in which he argues that ‘“this warped genius� [Wagner] was “perhaps the most important single fountainhead of Nazi ideology”’#. Rohan d’O. Butler, Edmond Vermeil and William Shirer have also written essays on how Wagner ‘featured.... prominently among a kind of antipantheon of German racists, militarists and totalitarian philosophers who allegedly made Hitler possible’#. In this essay I shall attempt to shed light on this misconception, showing how Wagner compiled his vast varying legacy and how this legacy was abused by his disciples for their own work. I shall then show how his work made its way into Nazi ideology through these disciples and how Wagner’s music and the Bayreuth Festival became part of Nazi propaganda. I will also be examining the relationship between Winifred Wagner and Hitler.
Richard Wagner had many followers during his lifetime and after his death, but it wasn’t the vast majority of these who used his legacy and his work and in the process have done damage to h

When Siegfried Wagner died in August 1930, the responsibilities of Bayreuth passed not to his son Wieland, but to his wife Winifred. Winifred Wagner was very loyal to Hitler, after the failed Putsch of November the ninth Winifred wrote and open letter in support of Hitler. This loyalty to him during this period in his life affirmed a close friendship that was to last until the end of the Third Reich.

Wagner took from all of the people he read from what he needed to justify his ideals at the time of their conception. In turn his disciples have exploited his work and taken what they needed to justify their own ideals, as with the Nazi party. When Wagner’s disciples used his work they would mostly take from his prose works rather than his musical works, causing a great injustice to Wagner because ‘it neglected what was truly great in the Wagnerian legacy for what was often bombastic, mean-spirited, and ugly. The disciples took these ideas and made into the central components of what came to be known as “the Bayreuth Idea”’#. This was problematic because of Wagner’s own discrepancies within his work. The Nazi’s used some of his writings (that needed little editing to make them useful to their cause), and “the Bayreuth Idea” as an aesthetic and cultural cover for some of the absolute monstrosities committed by the Third Reich.