Peter Viereck - Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler

Here are the three changed editions of Metapolitics, with varying subtitles. Written between 1936 and 1941, while the author was an undergraduate and graduate at Harvard and Oxford, the first edition appeared with Knopf in mid 1941 (before Pearl Harbor and writtenor overwrittenin the anguished emotional context of Hitler seemingly winning). This first edition was accepted as my Harvard Ph.D. thesis in January 1942. The second edition, a Putnam Capricorn paperback, appeared in 1961 and 1965, the original text unchanged but with several key appendices (Wagner, Jahn, Alfred Rosenberg, etc.) and with a new (1961) preface (in the calmer context of Hitlers defeat).

The present third edition, prepared in 2002 and scheduled for 2003 with Transaction Publishers, isin effecta new book. It leaves unchanged the 1941 original (whose mood of crisis cannot be recaptured or rewritten now), its index, and the 196165 appendices and preface. But it adds well over a hundred completely new pages as part 2, headed Discoveries in German Culture (Claus von Stauffenberg, Albert Speer, Stefan George, Georg Heym, etc). These greatly separated layers of dates are presented, at Hofmannsthal; the publishers suggestion, to supply the contexts (and contradictions?) ranging from 193641 (late teenage, early twenties) to 2003 (age eighty-six): a sixty-six-year palimpsest.

My bibliographies aim not at completeness nor up-to-dateness (anybody can copy off a library list). They aim to show the books on which (aside from my many interviews with Germans) I based my research. Not listed are the hundreds of books and articles on Wagner and on Hitler that have appeared thereafter and thus irrelevant to my argument. The 1941 edition has its share of prophecies (e.g., of Hitlers later use specifically of gas chambers, cf. The Rooted German, page 317). Tampering with first editions can lead, among other things, to a seeming precognition.

Too late for inclusion in my earlier editions were Cosima Wagners diaries about her husband Richard, long suppressed by the family. The quotations that follow are all from volume II of Cosima Wagners Diaries, 18781882 (English translation published by Harcourt Brace, N.Y. 1980; German edition, Munich 1977). Here are random examples from the American edition. In 1879 (p. 302), Wagner praises a German writer as another true German for calling Jews beasts of prey, a phrase that pleases him greatly. February 19, 1881 (p. 627): He enlarges upon the subject of how terrible it is to have this foreign Jewish element in our midst, and how we have lost everything. February 15, 1881 (p. 622): Discussing his friendship with Count Gobineau, the French apostle of Nordic superiority, Richard adds jokingly, If our civilization comes to an end, what does it matter? But if it comes to an end through the Jews, that is a disgrace. December 27, 1878 (p. 240): Very animated discussion of the evils the Jews have brought on us Germans. Richard says that he personally has had some very good friends among the Jews, but their emancipation and equality has been ruinous. He considers Germany finished. The Germans have been exploited and ridiculed by the Jews. September 6, 1880 (p. 534): Richard is amused by Rothschilds request for an audience with the Emperor in order to explain to him to what extent the Jews in Germany are endangered, and he says with a certain satisfaction, I have played some part in that.

Well, the nineteenth century is full of such philosophers of anti-Semitism in Germany (and anti-Dreyfusard France). But none talked of physical mass murder of Jews, not one, not Treitschke, not Lagarde, with the lone exception of Wagner. December 19, 1881 (p. 773): He makes a drastic joke to the effect that all Jews should be burned at a performance of Nathan To decode this, we must recall two facts: Lessings play Nathan Der Weise warned against persecution of Jews, attracting many German Jews and enraging Wagner. And Wagner was reacting with glee to the actual burning alive of over 400 Jews in 1881 in Vienna when the Ring Theater caught fire. His remark has been defended as merely a joke. Some joke. Nowhere else in the long range of racism has mass murder been praised (prophesied?) even as a joke.

In the diaries, Wagner objected to Nietzsches anti-anti-Semitism. This Nietzsche became the basis for Stefan Georges defense of his many Jewish disciples in 1904 against proto-Nazis (cf. my George essays in part 2) and perhaps indirectly led to Stauffenbergs bomb against Hitler and Werner Bests saving of the Jews of Denmark.