Nietzsche Wagner Und Die Juden

Download or read book Nietzsche, Wagner und die Juden written by Rudolf Kreis and published by Königshausen & Neumann. This book was released on 1995 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzes Nietzsche's opposition to Wagner's views, particularly on Judaism. Wagner condemned the Jews as materialistic, earthbound; Nietzsche extolled their attachment to the earth and to life. Wagner accused them of poisoning Western culture; for Nietzsche they were indispensable to his Great Politics of world government. The figure of Kundry in Wagner's "Parsifal" is the Wandering Jew, doomed for mocking Jesus on his way to the Cross. Her poisonous embrace, the contamination with Jewish blood, produce a putrid wound in Amfortas; only the pure-blooded Parsifal can redeem him. Through him, Kundry, too, is redeemed spiritually but dies physically (just as Wagner, in "Das Judentum in der Musik", described the redemption of the Jews through extinction). Nietzsche saw Wagner as caught in Christian supersessionist dogma, which he traced back to Paul. Hitler echoed Wagnerian phrases in his diatribes against the Jews. In postwar performances of "Parsifal", the figure of Kundry is distorted so as to suppress the antisemitism of the opera. Argues that Wagner should be presented as he was, as an "educational example". In the preface (p. 9-13), Wagner's great-grandson Gottfried stresses Nietzsche's opposition to Wagner's antisemitism and warns of the dangers of Wagnerianism even today.