My Impressions of Adolf Hitler: Section 11

 Section 11 

In November 1936, the term "believers in God" was officially introduced for all non-Christian denominations. Soon after, I was led through the Moabite prison by a prison chaplain who was also active in the field of psychology and racial psychology, and I had to laugh at how many prisoners on remand who had understood "the signs of the times" had written "believers in God" under their names on their cell doors - surely in the expectation of a more lenient sentence. - But now "believers in God" and "Tristan and Isolde"? The third act in particular is the overwhelming musical setting of an atheism, a godlessness of all creation and decay, and thus the denial of any belief in a creator. The "sad shepherd's tune", played by the English horn, which in itself can express boundless loneliness - it particularly characterizes the isolation of man who faces a world phenomenon without a creator with an unshaken spirit. The human being who - in the sense of Schopenhauer and Wagner - has come to know and is isolated to the point of loneliness through his knowledge looks here - and this is not only heard in the sad shepherd's melody in the third act - into the infinity of a world phenomenon that is not a creation. Here and only here, in Wagner's despair, but at the same time an uplifting despair, Wagner's musical art has perfected itself. 

But what did Hitler feel when he listened to these melodies, he who, if not recommended, then at least allowed the term "believer in God" to be used? Had Hitler read the sentence by Arthur Schopenhauer, whom Richard Wagner greatly admired: "If a God created this world, I would not want to be that God, for its misery would tear my heart apart"? Hitler's heart may have been different, or did he regard Wagner's admiration for Schopenhauer as a forgivable aberration? Did the optimist Hitler not hear Wagner's pessimism in his "Götterdämmerung" either? 

The NSDAP's program had declared itself to be a "positive Christianity." If a reader wanted to ask me how such a Christianity relates to "Tristan and Isolde," I would have to ask him to refrain from answering - bearing in mind the warning from my history teacher mentioned above (p. 10) [note from the VS editor: in this text p. 6] not to write satires. 

But now I hear the growing indignation of many readers about how I, a weary and precocious aesthete, and a person who is obviously unsuited to politics, could dare to judge a statesman according to the type and degree of his understanding of music. In response to this accusation, I

must remind you in my defense that I only promised to look at Hitler as a man - to look at him, not to judge him. But a person's sense of music can say a lot about his spiritual being. 

However, I fear that I must assume that Hitler's preference for "Tristan and Isolde", an opera that contradicts everything that Hitler wanted the German people to value highly, can hardly be explained in any other way than by deficiencies in Hitler's musical sensibilities. There is evidence of this: the addition of the Horst Wessel song to the Deutschlandlied, which Hitler tolerated or perhaps desired, the transition from the Haydn tune, characterized by Wilhelm Furtwängler in its sublimity, to the tune of the Horst Wessel song - modelled on a French chanson?. Haydn's tune was followed, "like a glove", a fifth higher, in a different key and with a different rhythm, by the song in which an abbreviation (SA) was sung and in which the verse caesura tore words apart in the middle: "millions are already looking at the swastika full of hope; the day for freedom and bread is dawning". - The two wise men behaved like people - but people in its highest sense - to the masses, like a mature people to an immature mass. 

Hitler had founded a Reich Music Chamber, which was headed by two or three highly talented musicians, as well as busybodies. Did none of these gentlemen dare to tell Hitler about the musical horror of such an addition? Or did Hitler, in his quest to meet the tastes of the masses since 1933, want the addition? Someone might object here, 

that in the decline in musical taste in Europe and North America, which was already noticeable in Hitler's time and is now obvious, only two or three out of ten thousand listeners would have noticed the horror described, two or three whose grumbling would not have bothered a politician. But anyone who wanted to excuse the horror in this way would be saying that Hitler, whose musical sense was praised, was more interested in the applause of those ten thousand people who had no judgment than in the opposition of those two or three who were capable of judgment.