Wagner exhibition in Berlin: anti-Semite, and now?

The devastating impact of Richard Wagner on German sentimental politics, his role in the emotional mobilization of military and government decision-makers has long been a topic of research.

In 2003, Nora Eckert published her book "Parsifal 1914", which impressively describes how the figures of thought and linguistic formulations of Wagner's culturally pessimistic and racist "regeneration writings" from the environment of his last music drama "Parsifal" can be found in the justifications for the First World War.

Four years earlier, in his essay “Art, Cultural Pessimism and War.

Solution Approaches to the Mystery of 1914" describes Wagner's fascination with top German officers in the army command who did not plan the war with military reason,

but longed for a cathartic event that - following Wagnerian promises - should bring salvation and cleansing in the fall.

These were remarkable approaches to a "history of feelings" that created hard-hitting social facts.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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The new exhibition “Richard Wagner and the German Feeling” in the German Historical Museum Berlin also follows this research trend of asking about the relevance of emotions.

As the museum director Raphael Gross and the curator Michael P. Steinberg explained at the opening, the exhibition wanted to show how Richard Wagner as a composer, publicist and festival director firstly taught his audience to

and secondly to feel

.

His teaching of feelings as a school of contemplation and internalization was directed against art as a spectacle, business and entertainment;

in a second step, the nationalization of introspection, depth and truthfulness as “German” in contrast to “French” and “Jewish” took place.

All of this has been known for a long time.

But how do you make that visible in an exhibition?

The curators divide the room, which is kept light and airy by the Merz-Merz office, into four emotional complexes: alienation, eros, belonging and disgust.

Other terms such as "sensation of decay", "longing for death", "hope for salvation" would have been obvious, but do not appear here.

The catalog with pointed essays by excellent authors such as Laurenz Lütteken, Stephan Mösch or Herfried Münkler provides some strong philological arguments for the emotional rubrication, which is less evident in the exhibition.

Perhaps the essay is the better medium to negotiate such topics?

The exhibition, which begins with Wagner's birth in Leipzig in 1813 and extends to video interviews with contemporary Wagner interpreters, proceeds chronologically and at the same time wants to bundle its material - pictures, manuscripts, the beret and a molar of Wagner - thematically, what not works because it creates the illusion of historical single file of emotions.

In detail, it is already doubtful that the text commentary refers to "alienation" as the "basic feeling of the 1830s and 40s", when the same questions were already being dealt with under the term "division" in the founding documents of German idealism around 1800.