Bayreuth Circle

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The Bayreuth Circle is a name applied by some writers to devotees of Wagner's music who attended and supported the annual Bayreuth Festival in the later 19th and early twentieth centuries. As certain of these devotees espoused nationalistic German politics, and certain of them were supporters of Adolf Hitler from the 1920s onwards, this group of people has been associated by some writers with the rise of Nazism.

Typical examples of such association are given in the following citations. Strong on assertion, they are weak as substantive evidence: it should be borne in mind that Eckhardt died in 1923, Chamberlain was dead in 1927, and Cosima Wagner in 1930, i.e. before the first political victory of the Nazi party in the September 1930 elections. They also make the typical, and unsupported, assumption of many modern historians that the German people in general knew, or cared, anything at all about Wagner or his operas.

"Only with timely support from the Bayreuth circle, especially Houston S. Chamberlain, Winifred Wagner, and henchmen like Dietrich Eckhart in the Thule Society, could the unimpressive Hitler assume the self- then public image of a Wotan/Siegfried figure, complete with telling nickname: "Wolf." " Crying “Wolf”? A Review Essay on Recent Wagner Literature. (Summary by Prof. David B. Dennis of views of the writer Joachim Köhler, German Studies Review, February 2001).
"Thus Hitler himself admitted: `It was Cosima Wagner's merit to have created the link between Bayreuth and National Socialism'. It was the Bayreuth circle which raised Wagner's message to the status of gospel, manoeuvring his ideas into a Germanic-Christian doctrine of salvation." Hitler and Wagner, History Review; 12/1/1998 (Student essay by Jayne Rosefield, from a web-site of Miami-Dade Community College).

Evidence for any political active role played by a 'Bayreuth circle' as a group is contentious. There was never any organisation named the 'Bayreuth Circle' or any group of people who identified themselves by that name.

Amongst those often listed as a member of a supposed 'Bayreuth Circle' are British-born author Houston Stewart Chamberlain (d. 1927), who married Eva Wagner, daughter of the composer, Cosima Wagner (d. 1930), second wife of the composer, and Winifred Wagner, wife of the composer's son Siegfried. None of the Wagners, however, played any personally active role in the Nazi movement, although Hitler was undoubtedly influenced by Chamberlain's anti-Semitic book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Chamberlain himself joined the Nazi Party and contributed to its publications. Their journal Völkischer Beobachter dedicated five columns to praising him on his 70th birthday, describing Foundations as the "gospel of the Nazi movement".[1] Hitler later attended Chamberlain's funeral in January, 1927 along with several highly ranked members of the Nazi party.[2] Other members of the circle, such as Winifred Wagner, were sycophants of Hitler, partly from political sympathy, partly in the hopes of obtaining advantages (including financial support) for the Bayreuth Festival.[3]

Later in the Nazi era, as part of the regime's propaganda intentions of 'Nazifying' German culture, specific attempts were made to appropriate Wagner's music as 'Nazi' and pseudo-academic articles appeared such as Paul Bulow's Adolf Hitler and the Bayreuth Ideological Circle (Zeitschrift fur Musik, July 1933). Such articles, as pointed out by Frederic Spotts, were Nazi attempts to rewrite history to demonstrate that Hitler was integral to German culture. Modern writers who assert any political or social significance to the 'Bayreuth circle' risk falling into the traps thus set by Nazi ideologues.

[edit] Literature

  • Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival ISBN 0-300-06665-1
  • Altgeld, Wolfgang: "Wagner, der Bayreuther Kreis und die Entwicklung des völkischen Denkens". In: Richard Wagner 1883-1983, ed. U. Müller. Stuttgart 1984, S. 35-64. Considers Wagner's relationships with Bayreuth enthusiasts in his own lifetime.
  • Schüler, Winfried: Der Bayreuther Kreis von seiner Entstehung bis zum Ausgang der Wilhelminischen Ära. Wagnerkult und Kulturreform im Geiste völkischer Weltanschauung. Münster 1971. Deals with Bayreuth enthusiasts of the late nineteenth century.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ William, L. Shirer The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1959, p.109 of 1985 Bookclub Associates Edition.
  2. ^ "Der Todestag des Schriftstellers Houston Stewart Chamberlain, 9 Januar 1927", West Deutsche Rundfunk, 2003-01-01. Retrieved on 2007-12-20. (German) 
  3. ^ See, for example, Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936 ISBN 0-14-028898-8. p. 189, p. 310, p. 352

[edit] External links