Jewishness in Music
I was recently engaged in a discussion about Wagner's antisemitism and whether or not it had anything to do with the rise of the Nazis. Could it be said that Wagner, in some way, paved the way for the horrors of Auschwitz or Treblinka?
My personal view is that Wagner's music is sublime, but he was a rotten person -and his declared and un-repented antisemitism will forever tarnish his name and make those who admire his music regret his personality a lot. But no: he drank from the same stream of antisemitism that Hitler later did, but there is no Wagnerite ideology that Wagner developed as a coherent philosophy of anti-Jewishness, and neither did he manage to convey an ideology to Hitler or any other Nazi of the 20th Century by any means whatsoever. So no, in short: Wagner didn't give rise to Nazis, or offer them any philosophical or ideological underpinning at all. [...]