Book Review: Bernd Weikl, Swastikas on Stage

Bernd Weikl, Swastikas on Stage: Trends in the Productions of Richard Wagner’s Operas in German Theaters Today, tr. Susan Salms-Moss (Berlin: Pro-Business, 2015). 221 pp. €15.00. ISBN: 978-3-86460-305-1.

A scene from Burkhard C. Kosminski’s Düsseldorf production of Tannhäuser. Photo: Hans Jörg Michel/ Deutsche Oper am Rhein

The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has recently made cultural as well as political headlines in Germany. In late 2015, it obtained a preliminary injunction against Berlin’s Schaubühne using images of its members in Falk Richter’s FEAR. The party’s 2016 manifesto for Saxony-Anhalt, where it came second in regional elections, spoke of obliging museums, theatres and orchestras to offer a ‘positive’ view of their ‘homeland’. Cultural organisations should not only stage more classical German drama but do so in productions that ‘inspire identification with our country’.[1] Cheered on by Facebook’s ‘Against Modern Opera Productions’ (AMOP) page, which chillingly declares that it is not a forum for discussion but for mobilisation and conceals its mysterious administrators under the cloak of anonymity, this Kulturkampf receives implicit support in this equally chilling book by Bernd Weikl. Weikl certainly seeks no anonymity. Whether his politics in more general terms resemble those of AfD and AMOP, I have no idea; I have no reason to think so. However, his wish to prohibit Wagner stagings that do not conform to his conception of their ‘pure form’ (a slightly odd, yet not entirely unreasonable, translation of his original, ‘bloße Form’), urging criminal action against those engaging in presumably ‘impure’ productions, marks a sad coda indeed to a highly distinguished musical career.[2] For alas, if one of Weikl’s most celebrated Wagner roles were as Hans Sachs in Wolfgang Wagner’s almost incredibly banal Bayreuth Meistersinger, he seems to have taken Wolfgang the director as his model, rather than Wolfgang the daring recruiter of external directors from Patrice Chéreau to Stefan Herheim.

Weikl’s book is presented – not uninterestingly, yet with hopeless lopsidedness – as a trial of the facts. First, we have the evidence against Wagner, largely drawn from a few journalists, few of them truly informed on the range and depth of scholarship on Wagner and anti-Semitism. Weikl’s uncorroborated claim is that the German productions of which he disapproves are a response to and endorsement of claims of anti-Semitism in Wagner’s work. ‘Objectively speaking’, he writes, ‘opera directors have been trying for years to effect a necessary performance ban for Richard Wagner’s antisemitic music dramas, for their directorial concepts and sets repeatedly point out the composer’s hatred of the Jews and his link to the extermination mania of the Third Reich.’ Such, apparently was the ‘objective’ intention of David Alden’s Munich Tannhäuser and Wolfgang Mehring’s Nuremberg Meistersinger (pp. 82–3). Weikl gathers all such stagings – essentially, anything more probing than his beloved Otto Schenk – under the unhelpful umbrella-name of Regietheater, to which Anglo-Saxon theatres are apparently immune. The reasoning for such lies in a quick reference to the German Sonderweg, without naming it (p. 93) as such, and an approving reference to the USA, praised for ‘private donors who enable productions at the Metropolitan Opera that do not insert political scandals in Hänsel und Gretel, and thus remain true to the works themselves’ (p. 97). Ah, the works ‘themselves’. A whole generation or two of musicological, literary, other questioning goes unmentioned, unconsidered; we return to the comfortable realm of Werktreue, without so much as a mention of its ideological provenance, assumptions and consequences. No matter: Weikl-Spengler knows that our hallowed concept, allegedly ‘the recreation of a work that exists and is cohesive, and thus has already been created’ (p. 79), has been jettisoned during a period of ‘definite decadence in German theaters, […] already visible in the practice of the arts during the decline of the Roman Empire’ (p. 80).

Susanne Kopp-Sievers, of Saxony-Anhalt’s Museumsverband, responded to the AfD manifesto in no uncertain terms; theirs was anti-pluralistic, frankly Nazi rhetoric. As Kopp-Seivers asked, echoing, consciously or otherwise, one Richard Wagner: ‘Aber was ist deutsch?’ Various participants at the conference at which she spoke interpreted the manifesto in terms of a wholesale rightist assault on the German cultural sector and public subsidy.[3] Like its UKIP counterpart, the populist AfD seems not to prize consistency; whereas other regional branches wish to eliminate public funding altogether, the Saxon-Anhalt manifesto spoke of increasing cultural subsidy, albeit only to approved, ‘positive’ causes. Goebbels, as we do not read in Weikl’s book, wanted entertainment, Unterhaltung, rather than Wagnerian challenge. (Parsifal, we may recall, was not performed at Bayreuth during the Second World War.) He likewise wanted newspaper arts criticism to be factual, not critical; discussion or even contemplation of ideas was not desirable. Indeed, he wanted, onstage and off, precisely what is longed for by many 21st-century ‘conservatives’, aghast at our own Cultural Bolshevism.

Weikl has, credit where credit is due, put his money where his mouth is. As he outlines in Part V, he has taken ‘real legal steps against those responsible for the especially onerous production of Tannhäuser in Düsseldorf’ (p. 99). He reproduces documentation, with reference to the German criminal code, which he sent to the public prosecutor in his ‘case’ that ‘on May 4 2013, the accused persons, [Christoph] Meyer as General Director’ of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein and Burkhard C. ‘Kosminski as Stage Director, working together in conscious and wilful collusion, produced Richard Wagner’s opera, Tannhäuser, in which various serious offences were committed concurrently through its performance’ (p. 100). A correspondence with the poor public prosecutor ensues. ‘Unfortunately, these efforts’, writes Weikl, non-ironic lovechild to Stalin and Mary Whitehouse, ‘did not have any positive results. Similar steps by the wider public would, of course, be more than welcome’ (p. 99).

In this particular case, even Against Modern Opera Productions seems only to have wanted the production discontinued, which, after a carefully orchestrated campaign of online bullying, it was. Nevertheless, resort to legal methods, civil and criminal, is persistently urged on its page too. Weikl and AMOP share the trait of not even having seen a production, yet considering it entartet on the basis of a few pictures of the designs and manufactured outrage from a noisy section of the (alleged) first-night audience. Covent Garden-goers may recall recent stagings of Rusalka and Guillaume Tell. But this is, of course, a more serious matter. Because of Auschwitz, ‘the state educational mandate must be adhered to and freedom of expression and freedom of the press must have certain limitations’ (p. 11). Limitations, it seems, that go so far as to prohibit performances of Tannhäuser one has not seen, but which someone with whom one has made an online connection did not like. Some might think we already stand not so very far from burning – and certainly not in the modern sense – DVDs on the Bebelplatz/Opernplatz. Or, as Goebbels, in his 1933 Feuerrede, one of his earliest acts as Propaganda Minister, put it: 'German students: we have directed our actions against the un-German spirit; consign everything un-German to the fire. Against class struggle and materialism, for Volksgemeinschaft and idealistic living, I consign to the fire the writings of Karl Marx and Kautsky. Against decadence and moral decay […] I consign to the fire writings of Heinrich Mann, Ernst Glaeser, and Erich Kästner.'

The Staatsoper Unter den Linden, on the western corner of that square, reopened in 1955 with a performance of Die Meistersinger (as it had indeed also reopened in 1942, under Furtwängler). A fabled Scots fundamentalist response to Our Lord having changed water into wine at Cana is: ‘Aye, but he shouldn’a hae.’ Our celebrated Sachs seems to think, by contrast, that the East Berlin house should have skipped straight to his final peroration, shorn entirely of context and somehow thus registering as an act of anti-Nazism. Perhaps he should read Richard J. Evans’s tale of the David Irving trial and consider the dangers of not doing one’s Vergangenheitsbewältigung properly.[4] Doubtless Weikl sincerely believes the following, whatever it may mean, or may have meant prior to translation: ‘Cultural edification, including a differentiation of their [the audience’s] emotions, would be the basis for an altruistic image of humanity, and thus best suited as a contraceptive against new “beginnings”’ (p. 87). It seems, in context, to mean that ‘edification’ via ultra-reactionary, Met-like stagings, enabling ultra-reactionary (or worse) audiences to feel better about themselves are more likely to prevent a return of Nazism than ‘seeing swastikas and the gassing of Jews on the stage, which will more likely insult and anger them’ (p. 86). Perhaps, though, people need to be insulted and angered; perhaps it is one of the tasks of art to do so; and perhaps the censorship Weikl demands is more prophylactic than ‘contraceptive’. Following a lengthy, almost unreadably tedious series of allegedly satirical concepts for contemporary productions, we come to Weikl’s second, laudable ambition: performance of Wagner’s dramas in the State of Israel. Alas, the idea that we proceed to that via fulfilment of his principal, prohibitive ambition straightforwardly beggars belief.

Clichés concerning how much has been written on Wagner may or may not be true; one can safely say, however, that no composer has had such a high quantity of arrant nonsense – and sometimes worse than mere nonsense – published concerning him. Weikl is not one in any sense to stand in the way of tradition. I was no fan of Katharina Wagner’s Meistersinger when I saw it at Bayreuth. While finding many of the underlying ideas interesting, their execution on stage seemed to me so inept as to undo any good that might have been done – save, perhaps for the old, arguably still-necessary, chestnut of épater les bourgeois. At least Katharina, though, in succeeding her father’s – and Weikl’s – production, acknowledged onstage that Wagner had been and could be again what Thomas Mann ironically yet truthfully called a Kulturbolshewist; in that, her staging offered hope for Wagner and for Bayreuth. The man who once sang Sachs in houses across the world, telling us that the art of old German masters would flourish, no matter what the political situation, now places himself firmly in the activistic camp of Mann’s Munich assailants.[5] Or, as they now style themselves online, ‘Gegen Regietheater in der Oper’.[6]

(This review was first published in The Wagner Journal, 10/2 (2016), 78-82. Please click here for subscription details.)

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[1]     ‘“Die Stimme der Bürger!” – unser Programm! Wahlprogramm zur Landtagswahl am 13. März 2016. “Wir für unsere Heimat”’. Manifesto of the Alternativ für Deutschland, Saxony-Anhalt , accessed 30 Mar. 2016, 20.

[2]     I have not had opportunity to consult the German original (Bernd Weikl, Warum Richard Wagner in Deutschland verboten muss (Leipzig, 2014)), but Barbara Eichner, who has, tells me that ‘bloße Form’ is used for the equivalent phrase to the English blurb explanation, while the more troubling ‘rein’ [pure] is used frequently throughout the book.

[3]     Christoph Richter, ‘Der Traum von der deutschen Leitkultur‘, Deutschlandfunk, 12 Mar. 2016, <http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/kulturpolitik-der-afd-der-traum-von-der-deutschen-leitkultur.691.de.html?dram:article_id=348240>, accessed 30 Mar. 2016.

[4]     Richard J. Evans, Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History, and the David Irving Trial (London, 2002).

[5]     Thomas Mann, ‘Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner’, in Essays of Three Decades, tr. Helen Lowe-Porter (New York, 1947), pp. 307–52. Mann’s celebrated address was delivered at the University of Munich on 10 February 1933, and was followed by the ‘Protest’ in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten of 16/17 April, subsequent to the ‘national restoration of Germany [… having] taken on definite form’. It is reprinted and translated in Sven Friedrich, ‘Ambivalenz der Leidenschaft – Thomas Mann und Richard Wagner. Zum 125. Geburtstag Thomas Manns’, in Programmhefte der Bayreuther Festspiele (Bayreuth, 2000), pp. 142, 150.

[6]     That is the German-language version of AMOP, where the still harder-core material, semi-free from prying Anglophone eyes, appears. What seems to be a slight misquotation from Marcel Prawy, in which the Kiss me, Kate enthusiast and sometime Viennese dramaturge likens Regietheater to AIDS – ‘Das Regietheater ist für die Oper das, was Aids für den menschlichen Körper ist’ – has been posted approvingly on more than one occasion (e.g., 13 July 2015, , accessed 23 Mar. 2016). Protests met with all manner of abuse, homophobic, misogynistic, racial and more, often from members with a curious pattern of coincidentally having ‘liked’ Pegida pages.

 

Tannhäuser at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein

I wish I could begin to understand the hysterical cries from people who, though not having seen a staging of an opera or indeed of anything else, consider it so offensive that they demand - in this case, successfully - that it be withdrawn. Like them, I am in no position to offer any sort of criticism of the Deutsche Oper am Rhein's production of Tannhäuser; I have not seen it and now it looks as though I never shall. What little information has come my way from reports is insufficent to enable any of us meaningfully to engage with the staging, though what I have heard concerning the director's Konzept strikes me as far from intrinsically absurd. I spend a silly amount of my time and energy fighting lazy, ignorant connections being posted between Wagner and National Socialism, but to inform a staging of one of his dramas with themes drawn from later - for that matter, contemporary or earlier - German history - does not seem to me questionable or even controversial.

Of course the Third Reich and the Holocaust are, rightly, sensitive topics. Yet, bizarrely, there often seems to be far greater controversy when they are interrogated than when - sickly, to my mind - they are treated as material for mere 'entertainment'. There was often particularly shrill criticism of a fascinating staging I saw at the Edinburgh Festival from the Cologne Opera of Strauss's Capriccio; I found it especially thought-provoking, but doubtless it enraged those only wished to see 'pretty' frocks, rather than to ask about the compromises Strauss and German culture engaged with, let alone to interrograte themselves. Again, I do not know into which category - interrogative, entertainment, or perhaps some other - Burkhard C Korminski's production fell, thoigh so far as I can discern from reports, there appears at least to be an element of the former. It may well have turned out to be needlessly 'controversial', unmusical, or all manner of other bad things; only those who have seen and thought about it are in any position to know, and they of course may have their minds clouded too. Nevertheless much of the public laps up with quasi-pornographic relish endless documentaries, films, popular histories about the Third Reich and Hitler in particular as if there were no tomorrow. Moreover, arrogantly uninformed productions - 'I could have approached The Damnation of Faust by reading a great deal about Berlioz but I avoided that' -such as Terry Gilliam's Damnation of Faust treat the Third Reich as little more than fodder for theatrical spectacle and are lauded for it. I thought Gilliam's production truly dreadful, indeed offensive, but it never occurred to me to agitate for the English National Opera to shut it down; nor, so far as I am aware, did it occur to anyone else to do so. Likewise, the exit of Elisabeth into a gas chamber in Sebastian Baumgartner's Bayreuth Tannhäuser struck me and many others as offensive, largely on account of its gratuity; it seemed quite unmotivated in what was in any case a highly arbitrary, indeed quite incoherent, production. People have every justification, every right, to discuss any staging, though it helps of course if one has actually seen it, but to seek to silence those with opposing standpoints?

So what was different on this occasion? That genuinely puzzles me. Part of the answer may lie, not in the circumstances of this production, but in an increasingly noisy, though, it would seem, for the most part numerically insignificant, faction amongst opera audiences and, still more, amongst people who - yes, I have to plead guilty here! - spend too much time talking about opera and music on the Internet. Their enemy is something they call either Regietheater or, still worse, 'Eurotrash'. (The latter seems to be originally an American term, though it is no longer confined to the other side of the Atlantic, and exhibits a curious, some might say imperialist. claim to 'ownership', or at least to 'protection', of an artistic phenomenon from another culture.) Lazy phrases such as 'the composer's intentions' - some peddlers seem even to be unaware that Wagner was highly unusual in writing his own poems, and that the librettist might actually deserve some consideration - or Werktreue are angrily chanted with all the self-reinforcing fervour of a self-selecting single-issue lobby, or even a quasi-religious sect. Drama goes for little, or nothing, in this world; instead, its heralds not only desire but demand a series of set and costume designs that monumentalise the worst taste of the 1950s. There were wonderful productions during the 1950s, so far as we can tell, just as there have been terrible productions, 'traditional' and 'radical', during the early twenty-first century. Yet the success of a production goes far beyond its designs; one can tell very little from a photograph or two, which is all most protestors have had to go on, and indeed one may be entirely misled by a decontextualised image.

I may be entirely wrong about this, and hope that I am, but it seems that the present debacle has more to do with an opportunistic attempt to berate a German theatre - German opera houses tend, for various reasons, to be more open to experiment than their British, let alone American, counterparts -through exploitation of the very historical phenomena about which the protestors claim to protest. It may not have been consciously designed as such, for fanatical fervour tends not to operate in that way; 'the cause', however incoherent, becomes internalised. One of the functions, indeed imperatives, of great art is to try to liberate us from such a Nietzschean 'herd mentality'. Yet uninformed insistence that 'unwholesome', 'degenerate', art must be eradicated, in order to 'protect' that which is 'good' and 'true': have we not heard such claims somewhere before?