Belmont Club has a fascinating rebuttal to the use of the word Nazi by mainstream media, celebrities and blue state commentators. It's constantly used these days by liberals to describe conservative Christians:
"When people aver that 'Bush is like Hitler', it presumes the speaker has a clear historical knowledge of what Hitler was really like, an assumption which is increasingly invalid. "
Mr. Wretchard breaks apart -- concept by concept -- the current misuse of the term Nazi, by using uncomfortable facts in the face of self-serving blue-state fantasy. This is something that the blogosphere excels at these days. However, he doesn't go deep into the artistic and cultural sources of real Nazism, and so I decided to write up a little essay about this fascinating and bizarre history.
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When I tell people what I studied in college, I usually end up staring into a puzzled gaze. Sometimes, there's a guffaw. At least in those moments I know they know something about the subject. What was it?
Medieval literature.
More precisely, I read the stories of the Welsh, the Scots, the Irish, a tiny bit of the French, but mostly it was the Germans, the Scandinavians, and the Anglo-Saxons. They're great stories, many very long, and filled with action and moral consequence. After many years, I can visualize the men of the Gododdin riding to battle. I recall the wacked out chess game in the Dream of Rhonabwy. And I can see Tristan sickened by the dragon's tongue, and later, Isolde raising Tristan's own sword to strike him while he soaks in a bath. I can see Egil Skallagrimson at York offering his head to King Erik Blood axe, and his friend, Arinbjorn, holding vigil on a window sill, protecting Egil from the evil intentions of a changling-nightingale. I still think about Njal's decision to order his family into the burning house, all to die, save one; and every once in a while I'm reminded of Njal's creepy son, Skarphedin.
Don't even get me started with the Irish stories. There's the story of two birds hunted by Ireland's greatest hero, Cu Chulainn, who transform themselves into women. One, wielding a whip, strikes him down, and he wastes away. Whenever I read a story of our brave young men and women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, I think of the courage Beorhtnoth's men, fighting the Danish viking invaders: will the stronger, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.
What is old is ever new again. There's something effervescent about pop culture. A decades-long international obsession with neopaganism barely registers with people today. Cultural undercurrents that produced some of the most beautiful works of art and music of a century, are forgotten by most people. However, they show up in contemporary pop culture, usually in the form of some sort of secret knowledge or age-old wisdom. I'm particularly stunned at the silliness generated by The DaVinci Code, a pile of neopagan fluff wrapped in a good story, and passed off as ancient wisdom. My friends ask me about the "facts" in this stupid novel, because they know I've always had an interest in things medieval. I always disappoint them.
When I studied medieval literature in college, I also studied the men (and women) who first brought them into the modern age. The epic stories of poets like Wolfram von Eschenbach had survived in manuscripts for centuries, but in the 19th century they were rediscovered. That rediscovery is a story in itself, and the late Norman Cantor only scratches the surface in Inventing the Middle Ages. One sad result of this rediscovery was the use of these works in nationalist movements in countries like Ireland and Russia. However, it was used to greatest effect in Germany.
The revival of the European Middle Ages wasn't the renewal of a Christian civilization, it was the revival of a pagan past. And that pagan past took 19th century Germany by storm. Richard Wagner can take the lion's share of responsibility for this movement. His last opera, Parsifal, was for decades one of the most popular operas on both sides of the Atlantic. Ten years ago I had the pleasure of seeing a recently restored 1904 version of Parsifal, complete with accompanying piano score. Wagner died in 1883. Twenty years later Thomas Edison invests his money on what movie? It would take World War I to wrench Wagner-love from the hearts of many Americans.
Wagner's Parsifal and the pagan ideals it articulated show up everywhere in the the Art Nouveau movement. Stretching from the 1880s up through World War I, the Art Nouveau movement represented almost 40 years of neopagan and non-Christian influence in Western popular art.
In his biography of Brahms, Jan Swafford sums up the Wagnerian influence on Western civilization:
By the turn of the last century before the millennium, Wagner's world-ideas were some of the most influential in the Western artistic milieu. In Austria and Germany the reactionary antisemitic nationalism that he helped inspire eventually culminated in violent and world-threatening forms. In the arts, the period called Modern became a vast, sprawling movement, different in every art, splintering into subdivisions from Primitivism to Futurism, Surrealism to Serialism (and including Modernists who claimed to despise Modernism). All the while a necessary underpinning for this Babel was the one Wagner and the New Germans proclaimed in the middle of the nineteenth century: the creator as high priest in the religion of art, not the entertainer of the public but a revolutionary leader to whom the masses owe understanding. For the duration of Modernism, even if the nature and extent of his victory is hard to pin down, Wagner had won the War of Romantics that raged between the two camps in the nineteenth century.
[Please note that in the 1830-40s, Robert Schumann identified the destructive potency of Wagner's ideas, and called Wagner and his followers Philistines. The struggle between Schumann (and later Brahms) and Wagnerites, is a precursor to today's culture wars, and is the inspiration for this blog.]
Any genuine scholar of medieval Germanic literature cannot ignore the 100 year stain of racist nationalism on the works of Wolfram von Eschenbach, the Nibelungelied poet, and many others medieval poets. It's there, and a teacher is always doing the right thing by acknowledging this tainted past so that their students don't repeat those mistakes. I had a professor who used to tell stories of his "reeducated" Nazi professors at the University of Vienna in the 1950s. He didn't shrink from the truth.
Where there is Siegfried, there's also the shadow of an ugly past.
I get a kick out of my blue state friends (some of them Jewish) embracing the senseless "facts" of the DaVinci Code, which is really a mishmash of proto-Nazi fantasy that has its source, not in the Middle Ages, but in 19th century German salons. These are the same salons that showcased Wagner's disdain for Jews. These were fertile ground for idiotic neopagan fads such as vegetarianism. According to Wagner, the pagans of German's past were vegetarians, and so he was. But he wasn't. Decades later, Hitler and his followers, believing Wagner's b.s., were exacting vegetarians.
[I get a kick out of modern-day Philistines who practice vegetarianism and accept neopagan "belief systems." They're usually humorless people, who mutter crap about "too many people in the world" as a justification for abortion rights and feel strongly about stopping the "holocaust" against chickens. Their world view shares its source with some of the most violent and racist ideologies ever devised. It's a monumental irony.]
The Nazis so embraced their neopagan ideology that they used to sponsor these vast, outdoor "events" called Dingspiels. When I was in college I read about these silly pagan pageants, but couldn't believe that Germans would dress up in "viking" garb and parade around like some Wagnerian Grail Castle ceremony. I was stunned to find a picture of one such event in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings:
I can't find any attribution for this picture, but the author is succinct in his context for it:
When the National Socialists came to power in 1933 they started a crusade against 'decadent' modern culture, systematically replacing it with their own version of 'Aryan' culture, based on the heritage of the Vikings, Old Norse mythology, Wagner, and German peasant culture. The Nazis particularly encouraged a new and supposedly Germanic form of drama, called Dingspiel ('thing play'), huge collective manifestations of the 'folk soul', with much parading and collective chanting of political slogans, performed in majestic outdoor arenas made to look like the places where, according to the sagas, Norse farmers held their [th]ing meetings.
Sound familiar? This resembles the argument for nanny-government policies of blue state politicians and commentators. Their argument goes: we live in a decadent world of cigarettes and fast food, big cars, and too many children. We need government controls on people in order to curb their behavior, make them healthier, improve the air quality, control their fertility, etc. We need to get back to simpler times when people walked to work or were in "balance" with nature. One commentator has called this McMoralism. In an earlier time, such beliefs were associated with the very ideologies Philistines are hoisting on to conservative Christians. Go figure.
The fantasy imagery in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzifal continues to find resonance, and exerts itself in ever-more absurd forms. The past two decades have seen a spurt of neopagan "studies" of the Holy Grail. Blue state men and women, longing for some excuse to throw away the last vestiges of Christianity in their lives, have embraced the "ideas" discussed among the characters in the DaVinci Code. It's just proto-Nazi paganism, folks, wrapped in a new package. Wagner must be smirking from his place in Hell.
I recently had to disappoint a friend by telling her that the Grail Quest really didn't happen, even if all those folks in the Middle Ages wrote about it. It was fiction, you know, like Star Wars. And as a matter of fact, I told her, the original "grail" was a big rock that eminated "energy" and filled a banquet table with food. She was so bummed.
Curse you, Dan Brown.
You cannot separate pagan idealism from Nazism, one is wellspring of the other. So it always surprises me when I hear Philistines describe conservative Christians as Nazis. They obviously know nothing about Nazis.
