Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

224 DER FUEHRERthe defeat of the great ideals in 1849, shame, gloom, discouragement,led men to affect a lofty contempt for freedom and the masses. It wasgenerally said that politics ruined the character; a pitiable philistinismspread — the dusty ashes of spent ideals. 'It is no mean accomplishmentto read through world history and retain one's love of the human race,'writes Richard Wagner, twenty years after his act of light-hearted,confident defiance atop the Church of the Cross in Dresden.The new reality was world economy. This might seem rational toHegel's misguided students, Marx and Engels, to the cottonmanufacturers of Lancashire, or to Baron Rothschild. But the demonicintellectuals found that Europe had succumbed to a leaden winter'ssleep, to a puritanical 'work-a-day sentiment,' as Heine had called it.Wagner has a similar image: 'With all our far-flung state and nationaleconomy, we seem to be caught in a dream; first it lulls, then itfrightens, and in the end it oppresses. We are all eager to waken. But thestrange thing about this dream is that, as long as we are in it, we regardit as real life and struggle against awakening as against death.' He foundthat all political parties in Germany from Left to Right in reality servedonly economic interests. Not an original discovery in itself; but Wagnerhad the remarkable insight and foresight to view these supposedly sovital interests as phantoms and figments of the brain, concealing the farnobler, but also harder, reality.Wagner exerted an enormous influence on history that cannot bemeasured in numbers of opera performances. A dilettante withoutthorough — at all events without scientific — education, he gave theimpetus to a philosophy of history which, after decades of hesitantknocking at the portals, is shaking the world in our days. Withoutknowing or intending it, he contributed some of the most importantsentences to the message of the Antichrist.In a purely outward sense, this begins with the fact that Wagnerconducted a lifelong, embittered struggle against the Jews. Two yearsafter the episode in Dresden, he wrote a long essay entitled Jews inMusic. The grim earnest in Wagner's attack was this: 'The Jew, in thepresent state of the affairs of this world, is more than emancipated: herules and will rule so long as money re-