Derek Hughes, Wagner and the Boryspil Pogrom: A Reply to Barry Emslie

March 2018, Volume 12, Number 1, 37–9.

I recently published two articles in The Wagner Journal, addressing a number of what I saw as prevalent historical misconceptions about the composer. One was the perception of Wagner as a virulent (or rabid) racist. I argued that until the late 1860s Wagner saw the differences between Germans and Jews as primarily cultural. Although he then came to see the Jews as a racially distinct group, he did not – even after his acquaintance with Count Gobineau – derive this view from a wider system of racist theory, and indeed distanced himself from the wildest extremes of the anti-Jewish movement. Several National Socialist scholars mentioned his deficiencies as a racist.

Although I found Wagner innocent of some of the extreme charges levelled against him, my aim was proportion and historical precision, not total absolution: truth, not beauty. ‘The truth’, I wrote, ‘should be bad enough. Yet, clearly, it is not. There is a widespread investment in making it worse.’