Derek Hughes, Wagner: Race, Nationalism and Other Distractions

March 2017, Volume 11, Number 1, 4–29.

In the early 1920s, the publisher Ernst Boepple issued a series of books on Germany’s greatest men and the Jews: the first stage in an anti-Semitic career that was to lead him to the gallows in 1950, for supervising the construction of gas chambers at Sobibor and Treblinka. The great men included Luther, Schopenhauer, Goethe and of course Wagner, the Wagner volume being entrusted to the musicologist Karl Grunsky, who was to edit the 1924 and 1925 Bayreuth Festival guides. With a little padding (on, for example, the iniquities of the Talmud), Grunsky spins out his book to ninety-five pages, which might seem damning evidence of Wagner’s usefulness to Nazis and proto-Nazis.

The truth, however, is less simple.