Forbidden Music (33 page)
Authors: Michael Haas
Empirical scientific investigations did not pretend to provide all of the answers to nature's great mysteries, but the better scientists already knew what they didn't know and were confident that they could carry on finding things out without recourse to religion or philosophy, and increasingly without recourse to ethics, as witnessed by the use of U-boats on civilian passenger liners and poison gas on the battle-field. By 1923, Felix Salten, with his story of Bambi, and Leoš Janáček, with his opera
The Cunning Little Vixen
, presented children with very secular views of reproduction, life and death as part of the natural order. Animals are anthropomorphised into sentient, thinking humans, while their nature and the world in which they live remain both ruthless and savage. At the same time, Adolf Hitler would begin writing
Mein Kampf
, in which he interpreted the ‘natural order’ as the subjugation of the weak by the strong. This extrapolation of pseudo-Darwinian concepts meant that arguments that had previously denied Jews German identity because they were not in possession of the German spirit were now replaced with the view that Jews, Slavs and others were inferior biological ‘races’, subject to annihilation by the more powerful Aryans who were, by some as yet unexplained ‘scientific’ logic, the natural conquerors of all others. Thus post-Wagnerian Romantics could continue their anti-Semitism unimpeded, firm in the belief that science provided their validation of racism as effectively being the law of the jungle. Where this would lead is related by Victor Klemperer 10 years later in his diary on 10 April, 1933: ‘It's like Spain in the 15th Century, but in those days, it was only a question of religious beliefs. Today it's all about zoology.‘
1
Houston Stewart Chamberlain
One of the most notorious manifestations of this wilful and opportunistic misunderstanding of Darwinism was to be found in the writings of Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, the English-born son-in-law of Richard Wagner. The theories set out in his seminal work
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
(1899) are examined in a series of four lengthy articles in the
Neue Freie Presse
from 1905 by the Jewish philosopher and theologian Ludwig Stein, who declares Chamberlain's racial theories to be a manifestation of the Romantic movement and refers to him as ‘the troubadour of racial imperialism’.
2
He compares two English Chamberlains, Houston Stewart and the unrelated Joseph, by noting that Joseph Chamberlain's enemies were specifically the Boers and anyone else who got in the way of British imperial ambitions, whereas Houston Stewart's enemies were anyone and anything resembling a mixed race: the Semitic races in general and, specifically, the Jews. Joseph Chamberlain, according to Stein, was the ‘national imperialist’, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the ‘racial imperialist’.
3
The latter's views on Teutonic racial imperialism led to a close relationship between him and Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was captivated by Chamberlain's ideas. The Kaiser's approval confirmed Chamberlain as a major figure in Germany (he was actually living in Austria at the time of writing
The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
) despite devastating reviews in many scientific journals. One that is quoted by Stein offers a summary of how pseudo-scientists of the day, such as Chamberlain, were presenting themselves: ‘In short, this is an extremely bad book, unclear and illogical in its development of ideas and written in an un-gratifying style, full of false modesty and genuine arrogance; full of genuine ignorance and false scholarship.‘
4
On the other hand, Stein goes on to quote Karl Joël, the Basel University rector who was ‘among the leading experts of the Philosophy of Romanticism’, and wrote of Chamberlain's
Foundations of the Nineteenth Century
: ‘The book lives and inflames with passion, it incites feelings of the most objectionable hatred while eliciting enthusiasm through its own conviction. It is at once so gloriously bold, so presumptuous in offering up uncensored ideas, so refreshingly irreverent, gleeful, free and so contradictory that it has more of the characteristics of a person than a book.‘
5
Stein then brings up a compilation of essays and articles by the sociologist Friedrich Otto Hertz,
Modern Racial Theory
(later published as
Race and Culture
), as a total rejection of Chamberlain's work. Hertz takes apart the contradictions and inaccuracies in Chamberlain's book. Yet, according to Stein, ‘Chamberlain's response would only be a smiled, “But dear sir, I'm merely a dilettante – as I expressly explain in the foreword of the fourth edition of my book.”’ Stein goes on: ‘In order to disprove Chamberlain, it is necessary to offer psychological explanations of the man himself. Chamberlain speaks to the tendencies of our time. Let us say this very clearly, he speaks to
the deepest responses that reside in people's soul. Everyone knows that “feelings” are not things that can be disproved – at best, they can only be analysed and thus laid bare so that at least the more irrational of the components may be disproved.‘
6
In fact, Chamberlain admitted in a letter to Stein that what he felt distinguished
The Foundation of the Nineteenth Century
‘is its total lack of caution’.
7
He goes on to state that he has not written a new theory of race, nor has he updated the widely admired theories of Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, the aristocratic father of the theory of ‘race as a determinant of culture’ and a great influence on Richard Wagner's thinking. Chamberlain continues his explanation to Stein:
Race is to the collective what personality is to the individual. […] One can in any case only define ideas, not things – race as well – it's equally impossible to define the colour blue or green. […] One need only note the establishment in 1904 of the ‘Racial Archive’ by professors Plate, Ploetz and Nordenholtz – men who are not by any stretch of the imagination fantasists. Indeed, it is an archive that has had numerous contributions made by such distinguished scientists as the zoologists Ziegler, Ratzler, Hueppe, etc. It only proves where science is trying to lead us and gives us an indication as to which path is the correct one to follow – as such, one is able to dismiss the journalist and feuilletonist who attack research on race as a legitimate concern. Such is scientific research: a search for truth, against ignorance. […] Yet one must be prepared to carry on and not be frightened of discovering the truth. As I myself am a man with the deepest respect for science, I totally reject the pure speculative hypotheses of Gobineau […] rather, my views are based on those that can be inferred by Darwin's own writings on race and its origins.
8
Stein then lays out the arguments surrounding Chamberlain's ‘subjective conviction’ and, in sentences that recall Schoenberg, he writes that he is merely ‘listening to his inner voice, regardless of the consequences’. Chamberlain's arguments regarding race are ‘race is a fact. Everyone is aware of it.’ But as Stein points out, he is oblivious to the possible findings of future evaluations of a not-yet-understood science: ‘Yet his belief that believing is all that matters flies in the face of the many things we have believed in the past and have had to reject as evidence came to light that disproved that which we had known “deep in our hearts” to be true.‘
9
In placing the Romantics in opposition to the Enlightenment, Stein writes that ‘irrationality is not to be countered by rationality’ and quotes another
review of Chamberlain's book by the Viennese psychiatrist Otto Pötzl, who wrote: ‘Chamberlain's “Teutonic races” are a purely intuitive, artificial and personal concept. His thoughts regarding “race” are equally part of his intuition and must thus be ascribed to his personal domain. The idea behind race breeds further ideas regarding race which inevitably lead directly back to [Chamberlain's] original idea. As a result, it turns itself into a circle of definitions which removes intuition itself from being subject to definition.‘
10
Ratio intuitiva
(intuitive reasoning), Stein argues, is the most defining element of artistic natures and this is what he ascribes to Chamberlain – as with the philosophers René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza and Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘Such mystics see no higher judge of truth than the certainty that comes from their inner voice and their inner self.’ Stein continues: ‘[A] scholar such as Chamberlain who as a philosophical historian sees race as the key to all life on earth […] should not be implementing such fundamentally mystical concepts as “racial purity”, something he describes as “an amusing mind-game” [“lustiges Gedankending”]: racial purity inhibits rather than expands such explanations. His references to ‘the sacredness of racial purity’ are not ideas that can be brought to empirical tests if they are to be thought of merely as “amusing mind-games”.‘
11
Stein goes on to write that, with Chamberlain, it is the duality of scholar and artist that accounts for the many contradictions in his concepts and ideas. For Stein, it is often the scholar who is victorious over the artist, but usually it's the other way around. He writes:
‘With my mind I am a follower of Spinoza, with my heart I am a devoted Christian’ is the fundamental destiny of all Romantics. Chamberlain is the strict nominalist and actually sees this as a characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon races. According to Chamberlain, ‘the social manifestation of nominalism is individualism’. Yet these sober observations collide abruptly against Chamberlain's ideas regarding race. Ultimately, the Romantic irrationalist, instinctive philosopher, mystic and artist in Chamberlain are stronger than the logistician and scholar. His heart has conquered his head.
Chamberlain distances himself substantially from Gobineau and makes it clear he does not wish to be thought of as a Gobineau disciple. Yet we must challenge this ‘racial imperialism’ and ‘racial Romanticism’ that Chamberlain claims to be a characteristic of the Teutonic people. Undoubtedly the most Romantic concept put forward by the philosophical historian is indeed the concept of the ‘Teutonic race’. Chamberlain himself dismisses the misty-eyed views of German Romanticism of heraldry and minstrels, folk songs and minnesingers. He despises the notion of this sort of Romanticism that
‘throws shadows in all directions and thus becomes the basis of explaining all mystical experiences’.
[…]
The masters of modern culture, according to Chamberlain, are the Nordic races. He gives them the collective name ‘the Teutons’ [Die Germanen] which he has taken from Tacitus, despite using the term in ways that Tacitus would not have recognised. He admits as much […] but with this new concept, he accords a practical identification to an ethnic grouping within current human history. We wish to address a final word on […] ‘racial Romanticism’ as laid out by [Chamberlain] regarding this new ethnic entity that he implacably places against the Jew. […] Chamberlain's protestations that he is not a Romantic must be seen in the context of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, who would also not have welcomed this particular moniker. […] The mind offers us logic, while feelings offer us the mystical. The two are in constant conflict and from the one we have science and technology measured in units, while from the other we have religion and [artistic] creativity. […] The duality of mankind consists of reason and emotion which remain in continuous alternation with each other and are variously described as Classicism or Romanticism.
12
Stein expands this duality by stating that the predominance of Classicism leads in the long term to a stifling of the personality, the individual and to eventual authoritarianism. Against this, the Romantic is the born revolutionary. According to Stein, it was implicit from Chamberlain's writings that the world was now about to enter a new age of Romanticism:
For the Romantic, nothing is more characteristic than worshipping at the cult of genius. Emotions are the progenitors of all values […] yet the highest of all values is that of ‘the genius’. Only the artist reaches such exalted states of humanity according to the Romantics. The Romantic cries that the artist stands atop humanity as Nature stands atop a pedestal. It is the new aristocracy, the aristocracy of the mind, the spirit, the creative individual: it is ‘the artist as aristocrat’, an idea in which both Wagner and Schopenhauer luxuriate. […] For Nietzsche, the idea of the complete person is the ‘superman’, for Chamberlain, it is the ‘Teuton’. Yet in truth, the ‘Teuton’ is merely the collective of Nietzsche's formula, and Chamberlain's Teuton becomes the Super-race.
13
Race, often referred to as ‘blood’, thus became the new, all-defining answer to most of nature's riddles. This new world which was being shaped by ideas wilfully extrapolated from science by arrogant ‘dilettantes’ such as Chamberlain was a reaction against the sentimental romanticism of the German people as
historic Teutons by elevating them into the more dangerous notion of the German people as
racial
Teutons.
The Jewish Response to Neo-Romanticism
Though written as early as 1899, Chamberlain's book was incorporated as a philosophical foundation for National Socialist racial dogma. It was against this background that various anti-Romantic movements were assembling themselves, including those composers who exemplified ‘New Objectivity’, or others who wished to return to classical models such as Hans Gál, reaching for Mendelssohnian templates, and Egon Wellesz, returning to a form of musical theatre based on Baroque opera. In his
Judentum und Modernität
, Leon Botstein also sees this return to older models as a Schoenbergian aspiration. Certainly, the earliest compositions of Schoenberg, as well as those of Schreker, Toch and particularly Zemlinsky, were based on a more classical, Brahmsian ideal before they turned, with the exception of Toch, en masse towards the harmonic Wagnerian opulence of fin de siècle Vienna.
With the exception of Hindemith, the most popular and successful of these composers, reacting against Romanticism, whether writing music for education or for the workers of a new society, or re-interpreting the musical past, were Jewish Germans and Austrians. As Stein wrote of Chamberlain, the Romantic notion of being racially and culturally German was ‘implacably placed against the Jew’. And as the dust began to settle after the First World War, Jews even found themselves blamed for Germany's ‘defeat’ and subsequent humiliation, despite the disproportionate number of Jewish soldiers who fought for the Kaiser and the most potent of all wartime poems
A Paean on Hate For England
, with its battle cry of ‘God condemn England – God condemns her!’, having been penned by the fanatically patriotic Prussian Jew, Ernst Lissauer.
