Always with an “old German” velvet beret: Richard Wagner, photographed here by Franz Hanfstaengl in Munich in 1871.
Image: German Historical Museum
Handwriting and slippers, beret and molars – all this is shown in the exhibition “Richard Wagner and the German feeling” in the German Historical Museum Berlin. But as pompous as she is, she cannot explain so many things. She avoids the music.
Dhe devastating influence of Richard Wagner on German politics of emotions, his role in the emotional mobilization of military and government decision-makers has long been a topic of research. In 2003, Nora Eckert published her book “Parsifal 1914”, which impressively describes how the figures of thought and linguistic formulations of Wagner’s culturally pessimistic and racist “regeneration writings” from the environment of his last music drama “Parsifal” can be found in the justifications for the First World War. Four years earlier, in his essay “Art, Cultural Pessimism and War. Approaches to solving the riddle of 1914″ describes Wagner’s fascination with top German officers in the army command who did not plan the war with military reason, but yearned for a cathartic event that – following Wagner’s promises – should bring redemption and cleansing in the face of destruction. These were remarkable approaches to a “history of feelings” that created hard-hitting social facts.
The new exhibition “Richard Wagner and the German Feeling” in the German Historical Museum Berlin also follows this research trend of asking about the relevance of emotions. As the museum director Raphael Gross and the curator Michael P. Steinberg explained at the opening, the exhibition wanted to show how Richard Wagner, as a composer, publicist and festival director, first and foremost feel and secondly German taught to feel. His teaching of feelings as a school of contemplation and internalization was directed against art as a spectacle, business and entertainment; in a second step, the nationalization of introspection, depth and truthfulness as “German” in contrast to “French” and “Jewish” took place.
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