Section 10
In the absence of direct impressions, I tried to use pictures of Hitler as a physiognomist, as an interpreter of facial expressions. I finally came to an irrelevant, perhaps untenable conclusion, which I expressed using Schopenhauer's terms: Hitler's face, from his forehead through his powerful eyes to the third third of his nose, suggests a superior "intellect"; the part of his face
below the second third of his nose suggests a proletarian "will" in whose service the "intellect" worked. This is not a condemnation of Hitler; for Schopenhauer himself taught that only very few people, and not at all times, are capable of withdrawing their "intellect" from the service of the "will". Among the German generals, Moltke is particularly worthy of mention; he always managed to let his "intellect" rule over his "will". Moltke’s dignity is also based on this, but also on the fact that such a noble man can no longer be understood by the people of a declining age, most of whom are in slavery to their “will”.
According to my impression, Hitler's proletarian "will" was expressed above all in the fact that the traditional socialist initiation of the general, equal ordinariness of all people became his goal for his "comrades" as well, whether he was aware of it or not. In this way he also accommodated the socialist wishes of those whom Goebbels had called the "March Fallen". His proletarian "will" was also revealed in how many men of a subordinate nature he elected as "officials" and promoted to higher offices. Thus, "people's community" was finally understood by the urban masses as the state of general, equal ordinariness. Did Hitler see himself as the superman whose right and duty it was to lead the Germans as a unified mass into such a "community"? I would not like to assume that he ever consciously had such a goal in mind; but his "will" controlling his "intellect"? -
I must confess that in order to solve the Hitler riddle I also tried to "analyze" his sense of music, because the music a person appreciates can often say something about the person's spiritual nature - about his spiritual nature, but hardly anything about his statesmanlike goals and achievements. But, as I have been told, Hitler's preference was in the direction of Wagner-Bruckner, while I stuck to Bach, Handel, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. So I was probably not the best judge of Hitler's musicality. There was, however, one Wagner opera in which we could meet: "Tristan and Isolde". This masterpiece had me under its spell for years, even though I was still a Wagnerian, after I heard it for the first time as a student. But even today the prelude and the second and third acts still overwhelm me.
Although I have to agree in many respects with the eminent music critic Eduard Hanslick, who had judged the Vienna premiere in 1881 - he also criticized the unbearably tortured language of the text - I have to reproach Hanslick for apparently not having heard from these notes that when he wrote "Tristan" it was a matter of life and death for Wagner as never before or since in his life. The great theatricalist - I place the emphasis on the word "great" - revealed his innermost being in the prologue and the second and third acts - and only here: the hopeless, consuming love of the "master" married to Minna for the wife of his Zurich benefactor, Mathilde Wesendonk. The Wesendonks had given the penniless Wagner and his wife a garden house in their park to work on their music.
By chance, Hitler and his entourage appeared in a box at the Weimar National Theater, in front of which my wife and I had been given seats in the first row. We had taken our seats when, just before the start of the prelude, the movement of the theatergoers drew my attention to the distinguished guests entering the box behind us. I turned around briefly, recognized Hitler, but, as was proper, immediately turned my gaze to the stage curtain. I did not have the opportunity
to observe Hitler up close that evening either. So I thought all the more - less during the performance and in the intervals, but more afterwards - about what might have moved Hitler, whose enthusiasm for Richard Wagner I knew, in "Tristan and Isolde." I also knew that he particularly appreciated the Norwegian Gunnar Graarud as Tristan and the Swede Larsen-Todsen as Isolde, the two main actors that evening.
During one of the breaks in the evening, my wife and I had asked Gunnar Graarud to report to us backstage. The huge Norwegian welcomed us in his dressing room as Tristan, initially hesitantly - you shouldn't distract stage artists during breaks - but then, once we spoke Norwegian to him and he had understood who we were, he welcomed us with his winning warmth. From this first meeting until the death of the great artist, who was married to a German, we were friends with the nationalist-minded singer, who was particularly well-versed in prehistory and early history. After 1945, Graarud was treated disgracefully by the vengeful Norwegian government because he had volunteered for the Volkssturm in Vienna. Graarud once told me that he particularly liked "metaphysical" roles like Tristan, and especially enjoyed singing with the Swede Larsøen-Todsen.
Was Hitler able to hear Schopenhauer's "metaphysics" in "Tristan and Isolde"? - "Tristan and Isolde" is the highest intensification of the painful isolation of man in a world of causality, space and time, and at the same time the highest intensification of the individuality, of the individualism of superior people. The two lovers recognize the beginningless and endless intertwining of chains of causes and effects in which we are all woven in time and space, our existence as a necessity to exist and our being as a necessity to be. In view of the limitlessness of their love, Tristan and Isolde perceive all limitations in space and time and through the binding chains of causes as a constraint of the "day" and long for the "night", the joint dissolution in the liberating nothingness, which is only a negative term for everything that arises and passes away in space and time. The two lovers recognize their necessity to exist and be as they are through fate, yes, the fate of a love which, according to the opinions of their human environment, is only a violation of custom and honor. But what do custom, honor, marriage, clan, tribe, nationality, fatherland, followers and all the other values that Hitler wanted for his people mean to these lovers compared to the inevitability of their fate? Both are isolated individuals, destined to exist and be as they are, who, in defiance of everyone else, seek their unlimited, spaceless and timeless union - she: "I Tristan, you Isolde", he: "I Isolde, you Tristan" - and both are ready for union in the beginningless and endless nothingness, both convinced that the "day" for two people separated by their being will always bring division, division through the fate that lurks between all people. So they are delighted by the expectation of merging together in the same nothingness; for according to Schopenhauer they are certain: "If something is nothing of all that we know, it does not follow that it is absolutely nothing..., but only that we are limited to a completely negative knowledge of it." Richard Wagner himself said that Isolde felt "the most blissful rapture of glowing longing" before Tristan's corpse, an "eternal union in immeasurable spaces, without barriers, without bonds, inseparable." So Isolde dies, sinking over Tristan's corpse, with the confession: "Unconscious, supreme pleasure!"
"Tristan and Isolde" is the greatest musical setting of the fate-based lack of commitment of high-spirited, self-important individuals. Since Richard Wagner, music has become accustomed to playing more on the strings of the human nerves than on those of the human mind, cf. for example Richard Strauss, Salome. In "Tristan and Isolde", however, the strings of an intrepid human mind that does not shrink from any conclusion are touched.
But what might Hitler have heard in these tones, Hitler, the optimist, in the musical setting of the philosophy of a merciless pessimist? - Everything that he demanded for himself or at least of his people is negated in "Tristan and Isolde", everything, everything. -
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