The Final Post: Understanding and Forgiveness for All

I began this blog a year ago with the aim of resolving the cognitive dissonance between my love of Wagner’s music with his reputation as a monster. I started the process of thinking this through years ago as I recounted in my introduction here.  I sought as much understanding as possible. I don’t mean just of Wagner and his times, but also of myself and human nature itself.  My conclusion: He reflected both the worst and the best in people – though, granted, in a much more spectacular manner than the average person. He was not a monster, which implies only negative came from him. But he was a colossus, a human being writ large, but with flaws no different in kind than those of most every human being.

This post is the culmination of my year – the 200th anniversary of his birth – of thinking pretty much every single day about Wagner. This whole blog, and this post in particular, is in many ways a values clarification exercise, and expresses my feelings not just about Wagner, but also about being human, particularly the pitfalls of our nature.

The Difficulties of Understanding Wagner

“[There is] an inconsistency in my nature which, to my great regret, has existed for as long as I can remember.” – Wagner 

How do we solve a problem like Wagner? (Yes, do sing that to yourself.)

I feel I understand him better than any figure outside of my life and time, but I can’t claim my understanding is correct, as he is truly an enigma. Wagner created a dense and widely—and wildly—diverse body of work, within both his prose and music dramas, as well as his letters and diaries. Add to this the diaries of Cosima Wagner and the testimony of those who knew him well, and the amount of information about the man is formidable. Because of this reality, people can – and have – created a medley of competing and contradictory narratives.  Conversely, it is virtually impossible to create a narrative which definitively describes Wagner; he was much too contradictory and multiplicitous for that. He changed both over time and, frequently, within an evening. 

I will give just one example of the problem of trying to characterize his beliefs.

Was he a Christian, an anti-Christian, a pagan, a Buddhist, an atheist? I have read articles and books that have argued all those positions. Every single one of them has documentary evidence, and a “fair” argument has been made for each case, but only if you exclude contrary evidence. My summation of his beliefs: I think it is fairly clear that he hated the modern Christian church, though loved some of its rituals, but nonetheless believed himself a true Christian, which was a melding, in his mind, of Christian ritual tradition and Buddhist beliefs (but with no belief in a literal God). This is not a common religious viewpoint, and resists any normal categorization.

And so it was with virtually all his beliefs. Even with something as historically commonplace as his anti-Semitism, his version of this ancient prejudice was completely unique, in ways that both exculpate and condemn him.  

The contradictions in his beliefs are very hard to resolve. I have yet to read a good synthesis of them anywhere, and I am not even sure it can be done. In this blog, I have tried to focus on the overarching themes that were consistent throughout his life.

The easier synthesis is, perhaps, the contradictions within Wagner’s personality. This can be partially solved by the realization that human attributes are often two-sided. Here is a list of his positive traits: courage, optimism, passion, motivation, initiative, persistence, vision, resilience, energy, self-knowledge and talent. The flip side of those traits was his arrogance, self-absorption, fanaticism, and stubbornness. They traits do not exist independently of each other, but are melded together.

I do want to point out one particularly unfair characterization of him, which is that he was only interested in his personal fame, wealth and glory. This is clearly untrue. If he primarily wanted fame, wealth and glory, he would have used his prodigious musical talents to compromise his vision and toss off audience-pleasing operas. Yet he did not replicate his big hit, Rienzi, but turned away from it. Until very late in his life, his operas were mostly unproduced and his music unknown except for short orchestral excerpts. His motivation, passion and goals were for art and humanity, not himself. He, of course, did want acknowledgement of his talent and a good living so he could write. But there can be no doubt that personal fame was not his central concern.

His driving passion in life was, instead, to regenerate the German volk and ennoble human beings through his music dramas. He intended to create a path away from our base instincts and illusions, to become “fully human.” I believe his intentions were deeply good; he truly felt he was doing a service for mankind.

The Pitfalls of Progress: Let Us Become Wise

“Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.” G.B. Shaw

Hippocrates’ dictum for physicians was: “First, do no harm.” I have a lot of sympathy for that dictum in a larger societal context. I was an activist when I was younger, and later realized that I did do harm, though unintentionally. My passion to right the wrongs of society led to a kind of blindness and consequential “blowback.”  However, there is a dilemma with the no-harm dictum, in that there is no way to advance society (or medicine) without trying to solve the problems of the present, and unintended harm is always a possibility. One can rationalize passivity by that dictum, but one of the lessons of the Nazi era is that passivity itself can be a form of evil.

Better to be passive?

My point: Wagner tried to make the world a better place, but in so doing, he caused harm. Would it have been truly better if he hadn’t tried? Are those who do little or nothing to try to better life for other humans really in a position to judge?

So how, you may be asking, could it be right that his intentions were good when he had so many prejudices? I think there are a couple of explanations.

The first one has to do with a dark side of empathy. I am referring to having such a great empathy for those suffering that the result is to have a corresponding lack of empathy for those perceived to be the cause.  Just think of the 9/11 terrorists; they had great empathy for their people’s suffering, but none for their “enemies.” This is the sort of process that happened with Wagner. I wrote about that in in my series about his anti-Semitism here, but suffice it to say that the process that led to his vilification of the Jews started with his empathy for the masses and identification with them.

The second reason is simply that Wagner thought his beliefs were absolutely true, backward as they may seem. I will use one example parallel to Wagner’s beliefs about the Jews to make my point. Many Christians believe that homosexuality is wrong, and they would like the people who are gay to stop being so. Therefore, many Christians support conversion therapy, counseling, and family and church pressure to gays in their midst. I believe many – probably most – of those people are trying to be moral, loving and kind people. They do not see that they are doing anything wrong in their anti-gay belief. They are trying to create the society that they consider morally correct and Godly, both for their children and for the future. 

This was the case with Wagner; he truly thought Jews, who were then universally considered a “foreign” element in Germany, were incompatible with Germans finding their way as a people. Wagner expressed the following sentiment more than once late in his life: “If I ever were to write again about the Jews, I should say I have nothing against them, it is just that they descended on us Germans too soon and we were not yet ready enough to absorb them.”¹ It was that deep feeling, that Jews were making it impossible for German regeneration, that was always at the heart of his animus.

Whether it be about gays, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, or pick your group, I have tried to show in this post on stereotyping and this post on tribalism that to “other” a group, and see them in much less empathic ways then your own, is absolutely the norm in the world, and part of our human make-up. We close off emotionally to those we oppose, and are often blind to their humanity. This is just a bad part – I think the worst part – of being human, and certainly the part we need to constantly struggle against within ourselves.

Even amongst friends, these judgements are often made. I remember talking with a Jewish friend about the Holocaust. I pointed out that while Jews were certainly the primary victims, that gays were targeted too. His response was, “yeah, but there’s nothing wrong with being Jewish.” Ouch! My friend was in a position analogous to Wagner’s vis-à-vis his Jewish friends: offering friendship but still thinking there was something wrong with them.

Certainly, as a lesbian who lived during the period when that viewpoint – that there was something wrong with loving someone of your own sex – was the norm, I think I know something about universal prejudice, which is what anti-Semitism was in Wagner’s day. It’s been fascinating to experience, in fact, what has happened to my friends and colleagues as this prejudice morphed away within the “blue state” culture. Former bigots develop amnesia! They think they were always progressive about the issue, and the truth is, very few people were. I have a lot of close friends and family who meet this description – any gay person does – and I get that it was just the zeitgeist of the time, and I forgive their former selves easily and gladly. And now many of these amnesiac former homophobes are at the forefront of those who accuse Christians of homophobia.

Given the current reality of immense progress of society on this issue, I believe it is far better to try to understand and have dialogue with those who still feel homosexuality is immoral. I absolutely don’t want to demonize them as Wagner demonized the Jews, and as some Christians demonize gays.  

This sort of amnesia is not just personal, but cultural, too. It’s related to the a-historicity that condemns Wagner. He is denounced based on today’s perspective, not from the context of his times – his influences and the cultural milieu that existed then. Moreover, he is scapegoated while virtually everyone else from that era is let off the hook. If we want to condemn Wagner for his prejudices, and assume he was somehow a monster because of them, we must also condemn virtually everyone in history for theirs.

I wrote about the historical context of Wagner’s anti-Semitism and the broader brutality of the 19^th century in these posts, so I won’t repeat those arguments. However, I would like to elaborate on one point about history. Competition for land and resources has, since time immemorial, led to absolute brutality and acts that we all believe are immoral.  We now enjoy – particularly in the West – the poisonous fruits resulting from the acts of our ancestors and our countrymen.  And we have to make peace with it. I believe we should forgive our ancestors for their brutality, but not forget the past or repeat their crimes. Instead, we need to find a way better way forward. 

Our ability to do horrific things not only for survival but just for improvement of our lives is a part of our DNA. We also – thanks to evolution – have the capacity for cooperation and empathy. Which part has the upper hand is on-going little war within us all. Should we be selfish, thinking only of what will help ourselves and our close family and friends (or country), or be generous and actually give up things that we want in order to help the greater good and people we don’t even know? Every single day of our lives, we make a decision about that, either consciously or unconsciously. We need to choose wisely.

During the 19^th century when all manner of horrific things were happening, Wagner was not picking up a gun or sword, but just trying to make the world a better place through art. He was critiquing the ills of  “civilization” in his time, and arguing for art, love, compassion and community in its stead. He persevered even during stretches of horrible health, mental exhaustion, and poverty. Though he had his flaws and prejudices, I think in the grand scheme of things, it is proper and right to celebrate him for his life and artistic legacy.

This does not mean, however, that this should come without acknowledgement of his harmful flaws and the costs of those.  I will turn to that now.

Utopian Poison

[Wagner] was earnest, and that is, and was, the cause of his greatness – Ferdinand Praeger in his remembrance of Wagner

A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal – Oscar Wilde

Wagner was the most sincere of men, with an absolute conviction that he saw the grand truths of all humankind. The downside to his sincerity was, of course, that he was a “true believer,” with no doubt in the rightness of his beliefs. To me, such a person is a potential danger to the degree they try to impose their “truth” on others or society at large. Obviously, this is particularly so in the sphere of politics. If a “true believer” – whether religious, political or utopian – gains power, history has shown that mass murders are likely to follow.

Wagner, of course, didn’t tried to impose his beliefs through politics after the failed revolution of 1848. Instead he tried to spark the revolution through much more benign means: an artistic movement. While I certainly sympathize with his belief that society was (and is) corrupted by money, his program for a cure – art leading the way to German social regeneration – was in la-la land.  While his views about art were influential, very few thought it was going to create a revolution in all of society, as he did.  What was harmful in his view – a long-acting poison, in fact – was that he had targeted the cultural enemy of his utopia, the Jews.

He lived in a bubble of his own making, where only those who served his vision and needs were allowed in and dissent wasn’t an option. He consciously engendered a cult around him and his works, and it was within this cult that the poison flowed through the generations.

For years, though, the Wagner cult seemed relatively harmless, and much wonderful art emerged from its influence throughout the Western world, and it remained so in most parts of the world. (See these posts of his influence on our culture.) However, at Bayreuth, he had left – without a will or a conscious plan to do so – Cosima in charge, and an anti-Semitic editor at the helm of his journal, the Bayreuther Blätter. I have already written about the disaster of Bayreuth here, so I don’t want to repeat it, but Wagner had absolutely no blood or personal connection with the two people who forged the direct link to Hitler – Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Winifred Wagner – though Cosima Wagner did. His blame is, rather, that he let loose the poison through engendering his Utopian cult, and his anti-Semitism was then ripe for melding with Hitler’s own horrific version.

Humiliation, Meanness and Revenge

Wagner’s life was one of frequent humiliation. He would throw himself into endeavors with a sincerity and intensity that left him vulnerable to mocking and scorn, which came his way throughout his life. While he developed an ever thicker skin to protect himself from people who doubted and derided him, he also developed a mean streak and a lust for revenge. As I wrote here, it is not his prejudices per se that I think deserve particular condemnation; it is the way he acted on those prejudices that does.

And though I hate those aspects of Wagner’s character, I believe they are built into our genetic make-up. In his book The Ethics of Memory, Avishai Margalit makes the case that we have what he calls “moral emotions,” which motivate human ethical and moral conduct. He cites humiliation as being a model case, saying: “The memory of humiliation is the bleeding scar of reliving it …. Humiliation, I believe, is not just another experience in our life, like, say, an embarrassment. It is a formative experience. It forms the way we view ourselves as humiliated persons.” 

In this review of the book, Jonathan Lear summarizes an essential point about humiliation, using an example of the Islamist terrorist’s feelings of humiliation:

In contrast to guilt [another moral emotion], memories of humiliation make people feel entitled to discharge aggression in destructive acts. On the surface, the terrorist will think it is because of his people’s humiliation that he is justified in this acts; just under the surface, the situation is the reverse: because he enjoys destructive hatred, he has become attached to his sense of humiliation. He is trapped in a peculiar kind of motivated irrationality. Consciously and sincerely, he hates his sense of humiliation; unconsciously, he is holding onto it with all his might.

In this New York Times article, the science writer Benedict Carey points to a number of studies that show that taking revenge is biologically rooted – functioning in the brain in a way similar to appetite – and serves a social function to curb unwanted behavior. He quotes psychologist Michael McCullough: “The best way to understand revenge is not as some disease or moral failing or crime but a a deeply human and functional behavior.”

Basically, then, the argument is that the living memory of humiliation taps a deep need to settle the score, to get revenge. I think this pretty well accords with Wagner’s biography, and what went wrong with him. Every biographer who has studied his life points to the three-year period in Paris, when he was poor and felt continually humiliated, as the turning point of his life. His humiliation was particularly attached to the Jewish composer Meyerbeer, but also to the Jewish lenders and publishers who he felt exploited him in his need. Thus, Judaism in Music was his revenge. Very ugly, but very human. Later, he felt the sting of negative assault on his music and plans, and through his paranoia (see here), always saw Jews behind these continual humiliations, thus his anti-Semitism – and desire for revenge – continued throughout the rest of his life, though in fits and starts.

The Upside of His Downside

As I wrote about here and here, Wagner was a deeply sensitive and emotional man, and he exhibited the full range of human emotions, both good and bad. He could be, and often was, deeply empathic, generous and kind. He could also be vengeful, mean and arrogant. All that was reflected in his life and art. At the same time he was extraordinarily volatile and intense. It was as if all his emotions were amplified from the norm and poured out of him like lava from a volcano — sometimes in great eruptions, other times in bubbling spurts, sometimes in a regular flow.

Wagner was very aware of his negative traits, and apologized frequently for them in his letters –and presumably – in person. But he was also aware that he could use his amplified emotions in a unique way: to write these emotions into his music dramas to express “the fully human,” for better and worse. Bryan Magee, in his book Aspects of Wagner, says of his music: “The most important things in life, namely its psycho-emotional fundamentals as inwardly experienced are articulated here [in his music], as they never can be in words, or on the state, or in any other outward terms.”  That is, Wagner gets to the very essence of humanity in his music: the emotions that drive us as human beings.

Wagner was the perfect vessel for writing about humankind; his very flaws make him so. He was both light and dark, and had a deep psychological understanding of human aspirations, and the negative and positive that flow from it. 

Phillip Hensler, in this talk says a similar thing:

One of the things he gained from not being a very nice person was he understood what lay behind people behaving badly... There is no doubt he understands very well why an Alberich would behave like that, why a Meme would behave like that. He has a great deal of sympathy and understanding for the very worst of his characters. They remain very convincing... His nature might have been very bad for his friends, his family, his patrons, but it is very good for posterity.

Most Wagner critics give him full credit for anything they perceive in his music that might be considered negative in some way, such as the alleged bombastic or anti-Semitic qualities of some of his music. But, quite unfairly, they give him no credit for all that is beautiful, loving, uplifting and redemptive in his music – which describes the vast majority of his work. Instead, this music (and the drama that is entwined with the music) is somehow seen as an accidental result of his genius, not because he actually felt, and lived, those feelings of empathy and love that dominate his music. This, of course, is nonsense, and they can’t have it both ways. Clearly, his music reflected his feelings; they came from his heart, both the good and the bad.

The Apologist Accusation

With Wagner – almost singularly among artists and even most political figures – any defense of him is called an apology. Any good things he did, and there were many, are called self-serving. His admirable traits are dismissed or ignored. Given the fact that his critics have created this monster, it is certainly easy to see why they are puzzled at the wonder and beauty of his music. The question is often asked, “How could such a horrible man make such beautiful, sensitive music?” The answer is simply that he wasn’t a horrible man, though he certainly had horrible aspects of his character.

Just to give some needed perspective, think of one of the most famous egoists of our time, Bill Clinton. We all know he has deep flaws, many that he shares with Wagner in fact. Yet, we see him in his complexity because we know he meant well, wanted to do good. His ego got in his way many times, and almost rendered him a completely tragic character. But his force of will, his refusal to back down, ultimately triumphed. We see him in his full humanity. At least, I do. Wagner has been given such a bum rap in this day and age that we no longer can understand him like we do Clinton. I’ve tried to give a more nuanced view of Wagner throughout this blog, and I hope I have succeeded.

As far as I am concerned, those who damn Wagner are replicating him at his worse. He was intolerant, so they must match him, becoming an imitation of him at his worst. They irrationally blame him, as he irrationally blamed Jews, for the ills that they suffered. They write incendiary, illogical and unfair attacks upon him, as he wrote about the Jews. On some level, of course, it is his just desserts. But it doesn’t hurt him at all as he is dead; their revenge instead strikes at people like me, who love his music.  As I reject the meanness of Wagner, I reject it as much in his critics. This is not the way to move forward.

Moving Forward: Forgiveness

The quality of mercy is not strain’d, 
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven 
Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless’d; 
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes –Shakespeare

When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free. – Catherine Ponder

Yes, I believe the way forward is through forgiveness. And I don’t mean that just for Wagner, though I certainly include him. I mean it for humanity. I am a huge believer in forgiveness as a way of life. The act of forgiving and being forgiven is an amazing, liberating feeling.

Often the place to start is with yourself. If you can’t forgive yourself for the things for which you are most ashamed, you will find it very hard to atone for the wrongs you have done, and ask for forgiveness for those transgressions, and move on. Beyond that, you will find it very hard to forgive others.  Conversely, you must forgive others if you expect to be forgiven yourself.

In my life, I have done a number of things that I now regret – politically, socially, morally. I have spent a lot of time thinking about why and how I took those paths, and most importantly, how to move forward and not repeat them. I succeed many times; I don’t others. I continue to try. In this quest to improve as a human being, Wagner has helped me immensely in this process.  His music dramas are – again to quote Bryan Magee – “of the deepest psychological penetration, inexhaustible in [their] insight into the human condition.” The insight comes, though, primarily through emotion, and as I have made clear elsewhere, the insight has led me to ever more compassion for humanity. 

No transgression can ever be resolved without forgiveness. Wagner did real harm. Some of it was intentional, some not. He needs to be forgiven for both. Wagner cannot ask for forgiveness. But fans of his music can, and I do ask for that. I ask not just for him, but also for the good of those who continue to resent him and want revenge upon him. I carry around in my wallet something Carrie Fisher said (attributed to others as well) that I think is wise: “Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” The poison of resentment pulls anyone who is trapped by it into a the dark place that has no beauty or light. Removing the venom through forgiveness is the only way out of that trap.

I believe that, above all else, his works redeem him.

There are those, of course, who don’t feel this at all (and perhaps a lot of this is because they don’t even know his works.) This is particularly true in Israel, where Wagner is now more myth than real, and the enmity is particularly strong, but often devoid of either fairness or perspective.

I think one of the key reasons for the continued enmity of many Jews – particularly in Israel – to Wagner is the feeling that the ancestors of Wagner haven’t ever really apologized for the legacy of Wagner via the catastrophe of Bayreuth, in which Hitler and Wagner’s heirs became completely intertwined. The good news is that the people now in control of Bayreuth, his great-granddaughters Katerina and Eva, are finally making moves to correct this reality and own up to the past. 

My feeling, though, is that to truly make amends, Bayreuth must redress the harm caused by Wagner and Bayreuth. There is no better place to start than with the man who was most victimized by Richard Wagner: Giacomo Meyerbeer, whose works vanished from the opera stage in the wake of Wagner’s mean-spirited attack upon him. (Edited addition: As I said here, French grand opera was dying for other reasons, but I believe that Wagner's attacks – along with his subsequent massive influence on the direction of opera – were the final blow. It was indirect, and not any sort of  campaign against Meyerbeer.  See comment section below.) If Bayreuth truly wants to make amends, this is where to start: revive the work of Meyerbeer. If this happens, the door to forgiveness will be opened.

A Final Note to Lovers of Wagner’s Music

I call on all lovers of Wagner’s music to do so guilt-free and without animus to Wagner. His deeply powerful music is a window not only to his soul, but to humanity itself. If Wagner hadn’t been the man he was, had the life he had, felt the things he did, he wouldn’t have created the music we love.

One of Wagner’s great gifts is that he created characters of complexity and depth. No one is simply evil or simply good. His villains are all abused in one way or another so that we have an understanding why they act the way they do. His heroes are all deeply flawed, containing the same human impulses that do continual harm in our own lives: cruelty, greed, arrogance, and the lust for power, prestige and revenge. It is incumbent upon us to give the same consideration to Wagner himself: to understand him as a complex man, not as a caricature.

Certainly, we should acknowledge his flaws and grave mistakes, as I have done in this post and throughout the blog. But if you enjoy the fruits of his labor, which emerged from his deepest feelings and came at a real cost in his life, and at the same time condemn him for his flawed humanity, I believe that is both hypocritical and unjust.

To repeat, how do you solve a problem like Wagner?  The same exact way we can solve many of our world's most intractable problems – through understanding, compassion and, most importantly, forgiveness.

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End Notes

This whole blog is basically a rough draft, which I am planning to edit, rework, and put out in the future, perhaps as as different blog, perhaps as an e-book.  I am not sure.  But it will stay in this form for a while while I enjoy my 2014.  That said, I will be going back in and fixing things in this blog, creating cross-links, etc., over time.

Also, I want to thank my wife Leslie for her continual support and help with my blog.  I doubt if I would have done it without her encouragement and prodding (not during this year, but to start it). She has edited all the posts so, believe me, mistakes were minimized.  She now gets to return her focus totally to her own writing, where I plan to be as helpful to her as she has been to me (if possible).  Read about her plans at her blog here.

Bye, for now.  

Me and my Wagner heads.  It's an accidental collection.  Photo by Leslie Karst

1 As quoted in Brener, Wagner and the Jews, 244

Wagner's anti-Semitism, Part 6 — Stereotyping

Short Intro

In my last post, I said that Wagner’s critique of Jews had rationality; that it wasn’t just a non-sensical dislike, though it did have irrational and paranoid aspects to it. In saying that it was rational, I recognize that I am crossing what might be considered a line of accepting certain Jewish stereotypes as, more or less, true. But, bear with me here. I want to address what I think is clearly true—and not true—about those particular stereotypes later on, but first I want to look at the whole concept of stereotypes in a larger context.

An important note: When I refer to Jews or the Jewish culture, I obviously include any person who is religiously Jewish, but if someone is born into a Jewish family but doesn't practice Judaism, I’m going with Woody Allen who said “I’m not a real Jew but Jew-ish.” Thus, when I refer to Jews I mean both real Jews and the Jew-ish.

Stereotypes

The word "stereotype" was coined by the writer Walter Lippman in the 1922 book Public Opinion (text here).  In describing stereotypes as a basic way we organize our world, he counseled “to hold them lightly, to modify them gladly.” Ironically, he didn’t do this at all with his own cultural group, Jews. Throughout his life he distanced himself from them, particularly the nouveau riche Jews.  Lippmann described them in a 1922 article as the “real fountain of anti-Semitism,” because “they rush about in super-automobiles, bejeweled and furred and painted and over-barbered...they stir up the latent hatred against crude wealth in the hands of shallow people.”¹

Lippmann's failure to hold stereotypes lightly is instructive: it might not be an easy thing for our brains to do. 

The fact is that while stereotypes are seen as a negative, they are inevitable and unavoidable. In this article on Finnish culture, Jaakko Jyväskylä author summarizes this point: 

Often, stereotypes are understood to be detrimental to intercultural communication and the elimination of stereotypes was believed to be a prerequisite for any successful intercultural exchange.... However, eliminating stereotypes is not possible, or, if it were done, it would be detrimental to human cognition. Stereotypes, as such, are cognitive schemata, typical of the human cognitive system, which assigns a set of characteristics to all members of a given social group, and serves as a reference when assigning significance to observations and experiences in social interactions. They are mental structures, which simplify the complex stimuli from one's environment and facilitate their comprehension. 

Tribalism and cultural stereotyping fit tightly together. Recognizing human behavior patterns that are different from our own helps us sort friend from foe, danger from safety—probably way more than we need in the modern world, though. But we still need to read people to negotiate the world, and stereotyping helps that process. That stereotyping along with tribal tendencies often team to create havoc is the problem of our age, and all ages.  But the solution is not to pretend we can and should stop our categorizing.  It's what we do as humans.

It is also an automatic process. While we can think and reflect on stereotypes we have consciously, the norm is that we do not. This article summarizes the research: 

The findings of this experiment [outlined within the article] provided confirmation that stereotypes can facilitate cognitive processing by conserving and economizing cognitive resources. Additional studies by the same researchers (Macrae, Milne & Modenhausen, 1994) indicate that the process of using stereotypes operates in an unintentional manner without the perceiver’s awareness.... The presence of stereotypes does not mean that the person gives up all conscious, voluntary and reasoned control of cognition. A person may choose to give up the advantages and savings associated with stereotypes to engage in an active, more complicated mode to cognitive processes in certain circumstances. There is no doubt that stereotypical thinking can lead to negative, prejudicial and discriminatory beliefs, especially because of the automatic, default nature of the operation.

Our ability to perceive stereotypes—patterns—is what makes us smart, makes us survive.  The negative is that they can easily lead to prejudice.  One has to negotiate that line. But the first thing we need to do is get our own stereotypes out of the automated mode, and actually think about them.

Humor and Stereotypes

I just want to give a plug for comedy as one of the best, and most enjoyable, ways to bring us out of this automated process. Through using stereotypes in jokes, we are forced into conscious awareness of them.

Yanko Tsvetkov, aka alphadesigner, has made a career of mapping stereotypes such as the ones below. 

He is Bulgarian by birth, but is European by life history. See all his maps here. An article about the project is here. 

It is clear that he is trying to make us laugh—mostly at ourselves—and think. I love the way the maps stereotype the mentality of the particular group—in this case Americans—via his projected view of their stereotypes about other cultures.

I also think The Onion article “Study: Majority Of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens,” which was written in the wake of the Boston bombings, is close to comic genius in satirizing American ignorance, sociological research and our use of stereotyping to make sense of the world. 

Obviously, there are lots of jokes that use stereotypes directly (i.e. dumb blond jokes, lightbulb jokes, etc.) My favorite—which pokes fun at one of my groups: Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Answer: That’s not funny. I’ve known plenty of feminists who have met that stereotype, so I get it; it is funny. And effective in making me think about the extent and ways it is true or not.

More sophisticated comedy uses stereotypes via cognitive incongruity, with I think some potentially positive effects. Our expectations are, in some way, twisted. A great example of that is Sarah Silverman’s very compact joke that even feminists laugh at, or at least this feminist: “I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.” A taboo joke subject meets a stereotype and our brain comes alive, waking up the cognitive recesses of our mind, creating an opportunity for thought and reflection.

Wagner and the cultural stereotyping of Jews

Moving on to that thought and reflection, the question becomes, do our brains get it right? Generally, are our stereotypes basically true?

I believe that they usually are; our brains are very adept at perceiving patterns. The trouble is not that we perceive a stereotype, the problem is what we do with it. Stereotypes are only true about a culture—or segments of the culture—in aggregate, but they say much less, sometimes nothing, about individuals in the culture. If we assume that what is a tendency or trait in aggregate will also be so in each individual in the group, that is pre-judging, i.e. prejudice. Prejudice, of course, has historically led to anti-social behavior against members of the groups, discriminatory laws, etc. Wagner absolutely took that step from stereotyping to prejudice, believing that all Jews shared traits in common that he felt were harmful to the German culture. And, for that, he has little excuse except that it was a near universal tendency in his time to leap from stereotype to prejudice.

What is very striking, and different, about his prejudice, though, is that he had so many close Jewish friends all his life and, particularly, towards the end of his life when he was considered to be the most anti-Semitic. As recorded in Cosima’s diary, he had on-going contact with a large number of male Jews, who all said wonderful things about him as a human being. These men weren’t incidental, but an integral part of his daily life. I am going to discuss this in the next post a little bit more, but it is something that is fairly unique given his prejudices, and needs a little exploration.

For a recap, Wagner’s formula wasn’t: Germans are good; Jews are bad; if the Jews weren’t here everything would be peachy. Wagner’s formula was instead: capitalism (the economy organized around a profit motive) is bad, Germans are bad, French are very bad, the Christian church is awful, particularly the Catholics, and Jews are the worst.

Now why did he think the Jews were the worst? Because he felt they were the best at capitalism, so they would have the means via the power of money to promulgate their own cultural agenda. They were not—could not as they were foreign to the culture—create German art for spiritual and cultural regeneration, which was his goal, but they could only create mass entertainment. Wagner wanted art to replace religion; most Jews, except perhaps for the few Wagnerian ones mentioned above, did not have that agenda. For Marx, religion was the opiate of the masses; for Wagner, it was entertainment.

I will discuss Wagner’s idea—art in place of religion—in a future post, but I do think he is right, and that the stereotype is true, that Jewish men—occasionally women— have been in the forefront of creating mass entertainment in the modern world, and many Jewish men have gotten extremely rich in the process. That is to say, I do believe there is something about the history and culture of the Jews in general that has led many individual Jews into success in this cultural realm, and in many other realms. Beyond entertainment, Jews have been successful, far beyond their percentage of the population, in banking and finance, law, medicine, science, the clothing trade, journalism and more.

I do think I should mention that historically many Jews turned away from capitalism and joined the socialist or communist movement and, here too, they were often found in disproportionate numbers in the leadership. They have, therefore, been seen simultaneously, and quite illogically if “all Jews” share the same traits, both as greedy capitalists and the anti-capitalist revolutionaries. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.

My view is that Jews come from a hyper-competent culture and the lion’s share of Jewish individuals will do well or, quite frequently, fantastic in whatever realms they decide to pursue. The reasons for this hyper-competency have been studied with several theories, mostly revolving around some combination of history, literacy and education, and cultural expectation. But the fact of it is, I think, impossible to dispute.²

Their competence and success is a point of pride to Jews, but simultaneously a point of attack by anti-Semites. To reference Jewish historical out-performance in relationship to other groups is considered to be dangerous, giving fuel to the fire of those who are not happy about the Jews’ great success as a culture. In fact, if you google articles about Jewish success in America, the results will just as likely be from a neo-Nazi or Christian site than from a Jewish or mainstream site.³ 

But, come on. They had—continue to have—incredible success. This should be celebrated, and I don’t believe we should shy from that just because of what neo-Nazis will say about it, or that they will use this celebration to make their perverted points.⁴ We need to answer those neo-Nazis with “more and better speech,” as the great constitutional scholar Gerald Gunther put it in his influential essay “Freedom for the Thought We Hate.”⁵ 

I described in the last post the rise of the Jewish culture that happened in Germany in the 19^th century. The same rise, of course, happened to Jewish immigrants in American culture in the 20^th century. I believe the latter rise—which I know much more intimately the the German one—is instructive and I will focus on their rise with regard to Wagner’s chief area of concern, art. 

To say that Jews—2% of America’s population—are overrepresented in the field of entertainment, and particularly the power-broker side of the field, is to vastly understate the fact. While it is not true that “Jews control Hollywood,” as an anti-Semite would state it, it is true that a number of Jewish immigrants did, in fact, create and control the vast majority of what became known as Hollywood for many years, before the rise of modern conglomerate corporations. Not that there is anything wrong with that. Here are the names associated with early Hollywood: Mayer, Goldwyn, Fox, the four Warner brothers, Zukor, Lammele, Loew, Harry Cohn, Disney and Zanuck. Only the latter two weren’t Jewish. 

And that’s just the Hollywood moguls; Jews have also been far over-represented as writers, directors, actors, etc. in movies and TV. See here or here to get a sense of this. They are also over-represented in the theater and in music, for example Tin Pan Alley and classical music.

In this tongue-in-cheek—but truthful—column in the Los Angeles Times, Joel Stein argued that Jews do control Hollywood, but talked to Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, for his chance to rebut and gave this report:

“That's a very dangerous phrase, ‘Jews control Hollywood.’ What is true is that there are a lot of Jews in Hollywood,” he said. Instead of ‘control,’ Foxman would prefer people say that many executives in the industry “happen to be Jewish,” as in “all eight major film studios are run by men who happen to be Jewish.”

Just “happens to be Jewish.” Ha! To claim it is some sort of random event is totally disingenuous, and the ADL should be ashamed of pushing that nonsense, which they know full well to be incorrect. The Times article makes that point well. For the early history of Hollywood, read the book An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.

It is important to mention that the moguls, who were all “Jew-ish,” went out of their way to put nothing remotely Jewish in most films, to the point it had problematic aspects itself, but that is a long story and you can read about it in the book referenced above if interested.

I am incredibly happy about their great abilities and success in the cultural realm; I can’t imagine America—and don’t want to—without Jewish participation. I am, in fact, bitterly disappointed that we didn’t throw our borders open to Jews during the Nazi era so that we would have had more Jewish immigration, and saved many Jews from the Holocaust. It’s a gift indeed that so many in the Jewish culture are inclined to the arts; a large share of my favorite works—yes, very disproportionately —were created by Jews.⁶   

Clearly, I don't agree with Wagner on this issue, but given what I outlined above, if Wagner came back today and surveyed the entertainment industry, he would say: “See, I was right.” Wagner did, in fact, perceive something that was true in the Jewish culture—what I summarized as hyper-competence. He was right that a large sub-group of Jews had both the ability and inclination to develop mass entertainment. He was right that, per capita, they were better at —or more inclined to pursue it—than other groups.

However, I think Wagner’s central ideas about art, while passionately held and with some wonderful results in his music, were half-baked. Even if Jews hadn’t been a part of Germany, his vision was a pipe dream. Mass entertainment would have come, with or without Jews, because that is what people want. It may well have been quite different, but I am pretty confident that whatever form it took, Wagner would have hated it. Just as Marx’s fatal flaw in analyzing capitalism is not understanding how much people like stuff, Wagner’s fatal flaw was not understanding how much people like to be entertained. There was no way, no how—and I am happy about this as much as I love his music—his vision was going to happen.

My bottom-line argument is, given what his very passionate beliefs were, his anti-Semitism was inevitable and had logic. That said, the logic was twisted by prejudice, paranoia and his mean streak. However, that isn’t the end of the story. He had a wonderful, kind and generous side, too.  That part of him wanted his art to be redemptive to all humanity, Jews included. This never-resolved tension between his good-side universalism and his bad-side anti-Semitism will be taken up later.

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End Notes

1 As quoted in Steele, Ronald, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 191-192 

2 You can find different theories of Jewish success by just going through these links.

3 Google has obviously been contacted about this problem, so they have created this by way of explanation.

4 If you say that Jews have had great success, neo-Nazis will say that this was done by a variety of illegitimate means.  If you discuss the history of pogroms, expulsions, etc, they will say this proves everybody hates Jews.  And so forth. There is NOTHING that one can say about Jews, good or bad, that won't be used in a twisted way against them on these sites. I trust Americans on this one to not go down that road. That said, I do think that anti-Semitism in the Middle East is an alarming threat, but way too complicated to discuss here.  

5 Gerry Gunther, who was a family friend, wrote this piece to argue against hate speech codes at the university, in this case Stanford. I couldn't find a full version of it on the Internet, but this link gives you the beginning of it, and you can follow the steps to read the whole thing if so inclined. 

6 As I was writing this, just as an interesting exercise, I found a couple of lists I wrote of my 10 favorite TV shows and favorite movies. Then I researched the creator(s) of them.

My favorite TV shows in historical order: Superman, Leave it to Beaver, Dick Van Dyke, Twilight Zone, Bewitched, That Girl, Mary Tyler Moore, the original Bob Newhart Show, Family, L.A. Law, Cheers, Frasier, Seinfeld, Alias, Once and Again, Sopranos, Six Feet Under, The Wire. Of those, only four were not created by Jews (in the case of Leave it to Beaver, in partnership with a non-Jew). The non-Jewish created shows: That Girl, Sopranos, Six Feet Under and, maybe, Frasier.

My favorite movies: Groundhog Day, Fargo, Best in Show, American President, All about Eve, The Empire Strikes Back, The Wizard of Oz, Special Bulletin, Modern Romance, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Of those, only three weren’t created by Jews: Mr Smith, Empire Strikes Back, Wizard of Oz.

Wagner's Anti-Semitism - Part 5: Beyond the Pale

We all know that there are a vast number of cultures and subcultures in the world. We are all human, of course, but within our “tribes” there are real differences. The fields of anthropology and sociology study both the differences and our shared humanity in these cultures: what is true of all human cultures, and what is unique to each culture. In general, people talk freely about the differences between cultures, even the things that might be considered negative qualities in a culture. I can say what I like and dislike in, for instance, the American or French or Italian culture without much worry that I will be accused of being anti-American, French or Italian.

This is not true of the Jewish culture at this point in time. If one says something negative about the culture now or in the past, it is often dismissed—at least by a very vocal sub-group of Jews and non-Jews alike—as anti-Semitism. And the person who says or writes this negative thing will be under a cloud of suspicion that they are, in fact, anti-Semitic. 

I get the reasons for this. The sensitivity, of course, is related to the long history of anti-Semitic thought and action, with its horrible culmination in the Holocaust. It’s a very rational sensitivity. But I do believe that academic discussion has been chilled by it. This is certainly true amongst those who write about Wagner. If you defend his views in any way, you are an “apologist” at best. Therefore, everyone—those who seek to defend him in any way or those on the attack—tend towards hyperbole about his anti-Semitism, just to distance themselves from the charge of anti-Semitism. This subject will be a more detailed post later, but I wanted to raise it as I am going against that grain in this post, and throughout my blog.

There is a widely held—though by no means universal—academic view that anti-Semitism is unrelated to actual, real Jews, their actions, or their culture. The author of the popular, but deeply flawed, book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Daniel Goldhagen, puts it this way in his book: “All antisemitism is fundamentally ‘abstract,’ in the sense of not being derived from actual qualities of the Jews.” And a few pages later he writes: “...anti-Semitism has fundamentally nothing to do with an antisemite’s knowledge of the real nature of Jews.”¹ The author of Christian Anti-Semitism, William Nicholls, states it this way: “Causeless hatred for Jews came first, and conscious reasons for the hatred were always rationalizations.”²

This view tends to stop any kind of reasonable discussion as to what, if anything, may or may not be true in whole or part in Wagner’s views of Jewish culture (or anyone else’s for that matter.) If anti-Semitism is seen as solely irrational, just a learned hatred and can’t be anything but rationalizing, well then, that kills any sort of historical analysis, doesn’t it? 

The problem with discussing what is true or not true about Jewish culture extends to saying things about that culture that are positive, as well. For instance, Joe Biden was accused of accidentally fueling anti-Semitism in this speech to honor Jewish American History last month. In the talk, Biden praised the “outsized influence per capita” of Jews, which he then went on to list. Johnathan Chait wrote about his speech:

It’s obviously true that Jews have flourished in the United States and, as Biden says, have achieved massively disproportionate representation in fields like science, culture, politics, academia, and so on. Jews regard this fact with a mixture of pride and neurosis. The neurosis is a fear that our success will be seen as a kind of invidious control, that the broader society will at some point say, no, you have too much.

I say, neurosis be damned. Facts are facts, and it is simply impossible to reasonably address modern anti-Semitism without at least knowing about the incredible rise of the Jews post-Englightenment—specifically Ashkenazi Jews—even if just to argue that it had nothing to do with later developments.

There are scholars, of course, who do connect the quick advancement of the Jews with the rise of modern anti-Semitism. Historian Arthur Lindemann, for example, argues in his book Esau’s Tears that “the most obvious material factor to take into consideration in trying to account for the growth of modern anti-Semitism – though not of course its deepest origins – is the rise of the Jews. It is not a fantasy but rather a perfectly real, measurable, and understandable development.”³

I would like to give a quick summary of that rise, before turning to Wagner’s position. While some of this will be repetitive, I am a Wagnerian and that’s what we do! (For those who don’t get the joke, the great comedian Anna Russell’s tour de force Ring lecture here will enlighten you.) 

The Jews lived in Europe without controlling any land for hundreds of years, and this put them in a very precarious position indeed (which led to multiple expulsions). Traditionally, the Jews had some—if obviously limited—protection given that, as George Fredrickson puts it in his book Racism, a Short History, “the existence of Jews must be tolerated because their ultimate conversion was essential to God’s plan for the salvation of the world.”⁴ Post-enlightenment, when religious reasons had lost their sway, the Jews' historical protection no longer existed as it had. The question in Germany became, again summarized by Fredrickson:

How Jews would fit in when cultural and linguistic identity became the basis of citizenship...[and it] could be answered in only one of two ways. Either Jews had to surrender their Jewishness and become good Germans or there would be no place for them. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, a liberal assimilation's perspective was ascendant in German thought, but beneath it lurked a deep intolerance of the Jew who remained distinctive.⁵

You can condemn Germans for having the above view, but then virtually all cultures in all times must be equally condemned. That is certainly true of the United States which—I have already pointed out here—was far worse to our “others” than Germans were to Jews at this point, and that certainly includes Wagner. 

What is a fact is that Jews were different: they were foreign, they spoke a different language, they had a different history, and they were disliked or distrusted fairly universally in Germany for a variety of religious and cultural reasons. Therefore, virtually no one wanted them as part of Germany as they were.

It was in this fraught context—post-Enlightenment—that the rise of the Jews in Germany began. According to Peter Pulzer, “[u]p to the end of the eighteenth century, the great majority of Jews of the German states lived lives that were marginal to the economy and the rest of society, engaged in peddling or begging at a near destitute level.”⁶ These poor Jews were the ones seen invariably as backward and vulgar, by non-Jews and the small sub-group of Westernized Jews alike.

Given the “choice,” many Germans Jews quickly made the move away from that past, leaving the country for towns and cities, replacing religious Orthodoxy with a more secular viewpoint, dropping Yiddish and speaking only Hochdeutsch.  Along with it, they distanced themselves from other Jews, particularly Ostjuden (Eastern European Jews). According to Lindemann, “[t]he reactions of the overwhelming majority of western-educated German Jews to Yiddish paralleled and indeed epitomized their attitudes to the Ostjuden. Yiddish was, as one assimilated Jew typically put it, a “barbarous mishmash” and “an insult against all languages which it wrenches and destroys, monstrous in form and shocking in tone.”⁷

Thus, by rejecting their Eastern brethren, these Westernized Jews were attempting to show their assimilation, their essential Germanness. They were keeping the enlightenment bargain, and, therefore, they argued that they deserved full citizenship.

To fast forward, full citizenship came with the birth of the nation-state in 1871. By that point, the German Jews' rise had become stunningly obvious. As reported by Fredrickson:

The opportunities in commerce that opened up in the first half of the century became the launching pad that enabled the next generation to go to the university (admission was not restricted) and achieve success in the ‘free professions’ of law and medicine. Jews also found opportunities in the arts and journalism, while continuing to be prominent in the business world, not only in banking and finance but also in retail trade and light manufacturing. ‘By 1871,’ according to David Sorkin, ‘fully 80% of German Jewry qualified as bourgeois.’”⁸

It was this rise that Wagner was forever bitching about. Essentially, his argument was that Jewish culture was way more together than the German culture, and the Germans could not get it together with Jews in the mix. He argued that Jews would easily dominate the backward German people. His entire program was, of course, to regenerate the German people and culture, so this was a huge threat to his life's work. He believed that the rise of capitalism gave Jews the means of economic and, therefore, cultural ascendancy, in that they were given the reins of capitalism via their domination of banking and financing. Wagner acknowledges—and blames—the Christians who put Jews in this role in the first place as part of a subjugation process, but also argued that, with the rise of capitalism, the Jews, who had both an intelligence and experience and who were the “virtuosi in an art which we bungle,” were now in control, and he believed that those who controlled the money ruled in the modern world.⁹

He further argued that German culture had degenerated and into this void, Jews brought entertainment for profit, which he called “art-commodity-exchange.” His life was devoted to regenerating German art. He hated art for profit; he hated art as mere entertainment. He believed art was sacred, so the Jewish cultural relationship to art was a direct threat to his life work and plan.

I would argue that Wagner's views—whatever you think of his argument—had an internal consistency that was rational. Those who assert that there can be no rationality in anti-Semitism, of course, won’t agree. (Obviously, his views were based on cultural stereotypes, but this post has gone on much too long to take up that issue now. I will do that next time.) Bottom-line: I don’t buy anything Wagner is selling in his argument, but I also don’t think it was morally wrong in and of itself to have his opinions and make his case. I don’t think his arguments are solely a product of irrational prejudice and paranoia.

Cultures are very often in conflict and that is just part of life, part of the human condition. This was a real, not illusory, conflict, with a mix of rational and irrational. I, to give a modern example, am in a real conflict with evangelic Christian culture: I argue against it; I think it is extremely damaging to the sort of society I want to live in; I think they are dead wrong. That said, I do not begrudge a Christian making the case that I am wrong, including saying that my “lifestyle” of being a lesbian is wrong, that my atheism is morally bankrupt, etc. That is what they honestly think, and I believe that anyone should be able to voice their beliefs in a civilized way. 

Given that Wagner lived in a time when almost every German shared his general beliefs about Jewish culture, and given that he devoted his entire life to his beliefs about art and spirituality, I absolutely think both his anti-Semitic beliefs and his public polemics about it were not beyond the pale of that day.

But here is the rub: He had a mean streak and liked to get revenge when he felt wounded. And this mean streak came out in his writings, in his public life and in his private life. As I have mentioned previously, everyone who has studied his life has come to the conclusion that the major point of Wagner's article “Judaism in Music” was to get revenge on Giacomo Meyerbeer who he was convinced, via a paranoid delusion, had plotted against him, as well as to distance himself from Meyerbeer, whom he had groveled to. Although there is much in this article that could be defended, it is impossible to actually do so because of the meanness that inundates the piece. It is truly hard to quote a sentence that doesn’t have a dig, or several, in it.

Giacamo Meyerbeer, the object of Wagner's scorn

One of Wagner’s key points in the article was to argue that since Jews had a different language and culture, they couldn’t write authentic German music. That argument does not, in itself, seem anti-Semitic. People have argued that only someone from Appalachia can play true hillbilly music and only a Black person can really play the blues or gospel. Other people argue against that. Whatever. I am agnostic on this issue. But, on the face of it, it’s not considered a racist thing to say.

The problem is that Wagner makes his argument in a obnoxious, cruel way. I will re-quote one sentence of his essay as an example:

The first thing that strikes our ear as quite outlandish and unpleasant, in the Jew's speech, is a creaking, squeaking, buzzing snuffle: add thereto an employment of words in a sense quite foreign to our nation's tongue, and an arbitrary twisting of the structure of our phrases—and this mode of speaking acquires at once the character of an intolerably jumbled blabber; so that when we hear this Jewish talk, our attention dwells involuntarily on its repulsive how, rather than on any meaning of its intrinsic what.

(What he was describing here was, of course, an Eastern European Jew speaking Yiddish.)

As I noted above, German Jews were at this time trying to distance themselves from their Eastern brethren. Meyerbeer, Wagner's target, was a German (and French)-speaking Jew and could not be described at all by this description. So, by making that link, he was trying to keep tied together what German Jews were trying to sever. Wagner was making the argument that they shared the same “essence” of Jewishness, which they could not escape, whatever distinctions German Jews wanted to make. He was tweaking Meyerbeer, and all assimilated German Jews, with sentences such as this: “Although the peculiarities of the Jewish mode of speaking and singing come out the most glaringly in the commoner class of Jew, who has remained faithful to his father's stock, and though the cultured son of Jewry takes untold pains to strip them off, nevertheless they show an impertinent obstinence in cleaving to him.” This is a typical Wagner sentence, malevolent in many different ways.

You can spin it—he tried to do so—that he was an objective observer simply telling it like it was. But it just comes out malicious. In this area, there really is only one reaction any decent human being can have: What a jerk! I strongly believe it is legitimate to have contrary viewpoints, but to just be mean, to try to hurt someone and a whole people by being intentionally spiteful—now, that is beyond the pale. That was the dark part of his soul. It is this aspect of his character that I find the most difficult to forgive.

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End notes

In terms of the subtitle of this blog, of course I mean "beyond the pale" figuratively, as it is used in this post as a figure of speech.  But I think the literal meaning of "beyond the pale" has some aptness as well.  If you don't know the literal meaning, see here.

By the way, when Disney put in the Ostjuden caricature of the wolf in the original Three Little Pigs as I mentioned in this post, I think he was being mean in exactly the same way. According to this, “[i]n their book, Cartoon Confidential (Malibu Graphics Pub., 1991) authors Jim Korkis and John Cawley describe how Disney fired back at his tormentors [Jewish movie moguls] every time the opportunity arose. He would purposely inject anti-Semitic scenes in his cartoons, well aware they made Jews squirm.”

1 Goldhagen, Daniel, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, 34, 41 The quotes are out of context, but I think it is a fair summary of his thesis.

2 Nicholls, William, Christian Anti-Semitism, page 313 

3 Lindemann,Albert, Esau’s Tears, 536-37.  Of course, this book was attacked by some for being anti-Semitic; see here. 

4 Fredrickson, George, Racism-A Short History, 21

5 Ibid, 71

6 Pulzer, Peter, Jews and the German State, 1848-1933, 69 

7 Wistrich, Socialism and the Jews, 142. What schmucks! For the record, I love Yiddish. I’ve stolen more words from Yiddish than any other language by far. 

8 Op. cit., Frederickson, 78; the David Sorkin quote comes from The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780-1840, page 173.  One should not think that formal legal equality actually led to real equality; just as barriers existed for Blacks in the United States long after formal equality, so too did multiple barriers remain against Jews.

9 Summary of Wagner's views came from these writings: Judaism in Music, What is German, Modern, Know Thyself. All can be downloaded here. The quote comes from Know Thyself.