The Ring of Myths: The Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis Review

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The Ring of Myths: The Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis ReviewAt a controversial Israel Festival concert on 7 July 2000, the Berlin Staatskapelle Orchestra under the baton of Daniel Barenboim played music by a passionate antisemite with Fascist tendencies.
After that they played some Wagner.
Ironies abounded that night. The concert was planned as an all-Wagner night: a Jewish conductor leading a German orchestra playing German music in Jerusalem would provide fine symbolism for a night of reconciliation. Instead rightwing Israeli politicians intervened: threats were made to Festival funding, pressure was applied. The result? The music of one antisemitic composer was replaced with the music of two antisemitic composers, Schumann and Stravinsky. Schumann, like Wagner, died long before Nazism existed. But the antisemitic Stravinsky met privately with Mussolini, calling him "the hope of Italy and of Europe", wrote to assure the Nazis that he was of pure Aryan stock, and abandoned dealings with Jewish conductors and musicians in order to conform to Nazi sensibilities. Still, it was only when Barenboim played Wagner, after the Stravinsky, that controversy erupted.
Na'ama Sheffi's _The Ring of Myths: The Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis_ provides a guide through some of these ironies and puzzles. How, for example, can politicians think that imposing political control on what artists can play is an anti-Nazi act? And why did they select a composer who died long before Nazism existed but despised Nazism's political ancestors, who became a pacifist opposing German military spending and writing that Germany loses its soul when it tries to rule other nations, who condemned slavery and the exploitation of one "race" by another, who wrote works showing that the pursuit of power leads to evil and self-destruction, whose opera _Parsifal_ was banned by the Nazis, who also asked that the _Ring_ not be performed as a cycle, and performances of whose works actually declined under the Nazis?
Sheffi reveals that the ban was a historical accident: in 1938 the Palestine Orchestra (principally made up of Jews from Eastern Europe) protested against Kristallnacht by dropping the _Meistersinger_ overture from their next concert. The gesture was hurried but not unreasonable: the Nazis used _Die Meistersinger_ for propaganda purposes, as they misappropriated other German music and art, Beethoven, Bruckner, Goethe and Rembrandt in particular. But the scheduled concert after Kristalnacht had had Wagner on the program, so it was against Wagner in particular that the gesture was made. The Palestine Orchestra played Wagner again after that one-off cancellation (though in Cairo, not Jerusalem), but with the war's end and the creation of the state of Israel, the precedent of a musical boycott had been set.
Since then, Sheffi argues, Wagner has been built, in Israel, into a symbol of the holocaust, a symbol with little relationship to the actual historical personage, who, she observes, "did not devote his life to denigrating Jews and certainly not to annihilating them." The Israeli ban endorses the Nazi's malicious misreadings of Wagner; thus it remains a homage rather than a repudiation of Nazi cultural thought. A genuine rejection of Nazi ideas necessarily involves dismissing their claim to Wagner, just as the Nazi uses and misreadings of Goethe's _Faust_ (Faust as the German soul; Mephistopheles as corrupting Jew) are now remembered only to be dismissed with contempt.
Sheffi argues that the danger in using Wagner as Holocaust symbol and shorthand for Nazism is not only that it perpetuates a falsehood. Worse, it directs attention away from the individuals, political groups and social forces that really created and operated the Holocaust. The ban on Wagner "facilitated the obliteration of the true essence of the Holocaust from the Israeli collective memory ... From a man of culture and learning, problematic though his views were, [Wagner] became a man identified with the Holocaust; whereas the real threats of the past - not only extremist nationalism, racism, and systematic murder, but the enormous inherent danger to democracy - all became slogans, at best."
The real Wagner and his works, Sheffi argues, is being inappropriately used as a weapon in a cultural war within Israel. "Eventually the musical dispute proved to be only part of the general cultural clash in Israel, a clash reflected primarily in a fierce controversy over the cultural character of the state. Certain sectors - the Orthodox and national-religious Jews - began to perceive the desire to play Wagner's music as an attempt to Westernize Israeli culture while obliterating its original Hebrew Jewish identity."
Sheffi's explication of these themes, and her tracing of the history of this debate, ranges through 60-odd years of Israeli cultural and political history, and is considerably more subtle and nuanced than this review's brief outline can reveal. Israeli politics are both labyrinth and minefield, and the clarity of Sheffi's guidance through the twists and turns is something the reader can both admire and be grateful for.
Sheffi does not know her Wagner quite as well as she knows Israel, however. For example she is too credulous in relation to the various readings of antisemitic meanings into Wagner works, the Wagnerian equivalent of proofs that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. She also commits occasional solecisms like, "Wagner had been on close terms with his son-in-law." That "son-in-law" is Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a man who once saw Wagner from a distance, but who Wagner never met or even heard of. Chamberlain's involvement with Wagner's pathetic offspring began well after Wagner's death. Here Sheffi has fallen into the trap of trusting some of the makers of the "Ring of Myths" of her title, who tend to fudge the distance between Wagner and Chamberlain because Chamberlain really did contribute to Nazi ideology, which makes it tempting to place Chamberlain, falsely, in Wagner's Bayreuth circle. Obviously Sheffi sometimes relied on secondary sources, and in Wagner studies, where certain secondary sources are not exactly committed to truth and accuracy, that's fatal.
But those are quibbles. This is a thoughtful, generally well-researched and referenced book, clearly written, and showing alertness to nuances of meaning in a field where attention to nuance is a rare commodity.
Cheers!
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