When, in 1985, the Richard Wagner Museum in Bayreuth, Germany, opened an exhibition entitled "Wagner and the Jews," its organizer, museum director Manfred Eger, said it was a plea not for Wagner but for the truth. The truth is that some Germans, like many Israelis, still cannot "digest" Wagner, and that the antisemitic composer continues to be an issue - lukewarm in Germany, hot in Israel.
"Richard Wagner's antisemitism throws a considerable shadow over his person and his work," Eger states in his introduction to the exhibition: "There are expressions used by him which could have been attributed to the National Socialist violently anti-Semitic Der Stürmer and which are used today to brand him as a proponent of the Holocaust. But there are also remarks in which he retracts some of his earlier pronouncements. Moreover, several of his colleagues and friends were Jews." (One cannot help recalling the quotation attributed to Field Marshall Göring "It is I who determines who is a Jew.")
The fact that an exhibition of this nature was organized on Wagner's home ground is an indication that even there Wagner is still highly controversial.
While Richard Wagner lived decades before the birth of Nazism, his influence on the National Socialist movement and especially on its leader was enormous. In a tractate, Das Judenthum in der Musik, first published in 1850 under a pseudonym in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Wagner wrote that Jewish music is bereft of all expression, characterized by coldness and indifference, triviality and nonsense. The Jew, he claimed, has no true passion to impel him to artistic creation. The Jewish composer, according to Wagner, makes a confused heap of the forms and styles of all ages and masters. To admit a Jew into the world of art results in pernicious consequences. In Deutsche Kunst und Deutsche Politik, Wagner spoke of the "harmful influence of Jewry on the morality of the nation," adding that the subversive power of Jewry stands in contrast to the German psyche.
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