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

INTERLUDE 225mains the power before which all our acts and efforts lose their force.' Inother words, the world domination of economics is the worlddomination of Jewry. Wagner later translated this idea into poetry andmusic. In his Ring trilogy, he tells the story of the treasure of theNibelungs, treating the old legendary motif of the curse of gold as apolitical allegory. In a prose commentary he tells us what he has inmind: that in the present era 'the fateful ring of the Nibelungs takes theform of a stockbroker's wallet,' and thus we have 'a gruesome picture ofthe ghastly world overlord' (read Jew).Wagner was a man of repellent egotism, disarming by virtue of itsvery magnitude. He felt himself to be the spiritual center of the world —a terrifying example of artistic madness, even in a great creative artist.He took a polemical, partisan stand on all controversial issues of histime, though he remarked naively that the issues in themselves did notreally interest him, but that all his fighting and writing were intendedonly to serve 'his art.' But what is this art? It is a great epic about thedecline and death of nobility in this world. The love-death of Tristanand Isolde, the twilight of the old gods — all Wagner's images areaspects of the one terrible vision: the exalted values of an earlier dayperish in the rising flood of mediocrity. And what actually does he meanby 'mediocrity'? 'Where do our German barbarians sit?' he asked. Andanswered. 'We find them in parliaments chosen by universal suffrage.'Wagner is a true child of Germany's great disillusionment andexhaustion in the latter half of the nineteenth century. To be sure,Germany's outward successes in the same period seemed to overshadowthis mood. In the sixties a group of Prussian junkers built up the armywhich has filled the world with fear and suspicion ever since. This armycame into being against the express will of the majority of the Prussianpeople. For four whole years the Prussian statesman, Otto vonBismarck, had to deal dictatorially with the Prussian parliament in orderto create an army. These years (1862-1866) mark the birth of modernPrussian militarism. It was the product of a diplomatic defeat whichPrussia had suffered after the years of the German revolution when thecombined superiority of Russia and Austria forced Prussia to resign