Wagner’s Hitler – or Hitler’s Wagner? Tim Blanning assesses two recent attempts to elucidate the compelling Hitler–Wagner nexus

Reviews of Wolfram Pyta, Hitler: Der Kunstler als Politiker und Feldherr. Eine Herrschaftsanalyse (Siedler Verlag, 2015) and Hans Rudolf Vaget, ‘Wehvolles Erbe’: Richard Wagner in Deutschland. Hitler, Knappertsbusch, Mann (Fischer Verlag, 2017).

July 2018, Volume 12, Number 2, 92–6.

Every time it looks as if the controversy over the relationship between Wagner and Hitler has run out of steam, another combatant enters the fray, from one side or the other. Recently, two heavyweight contenders have appeared whose originality and intellectual power deserve close attention. They have much in common in their approaches, although they come to very different conclusions. Their essential similarity is revealed in the subtitle of Wolfram Pyta’s book – ‘the artist as politician’, for both stress the aesthetic dimension. This is not entirely new, of course. Goebbels noted in his diary in 1932 that ‘the Führer is essentially a person whose sensibilities are aesthetic’. More recently, after accompanying Sir Mick Jagger to a showing of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will about the Nuremberg Rally of 1934, the late David Bowie remarked: ‘Hitler was one of the first great rock stars.’