Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation

Rating:
Summary: Ecce Homo(cough, you know what).
Review: A great sage once said, "All history's a lie" and this book only further enhances that point. Which is why I am recommending it.

Kohler not only contends that Nietzsche was a homosexual, but an uber-sissy who was lowered to menial tasks of propaganda and undershorts buying for the heavy-handed Master Wagner. Drawing largely from the diaries and personal correspondence of three megalomaniacs, which we know are highly accurate accounts of objective reality and history, Kohler paints a picture of a menage a trois of ascetic bondage: Nietzsche to Cosima and the Maestro, Cosima to the Master, and Wagner himself to the libidinous gods of hedonism. To top this off, the Dionysian Nietzsche in his final stages of dementia and mustachio maximus, calls out to Cosima, his spiritual Ariadne and soul-bride to come save his tottering soul from the labryrinth of the Wagnerian oppression that continued even after their reknowned split. Thus proclaiming, "C-o-s-i-m-a, you are the only MAN for me." Well Kohler didn't say that, but in saying that Wagner was "a woman" in Nietzsche's eyes and that Nietzsche himself, the constant companion of man-worshippers and man-worship was feminine in affection and mannerisms towards his friendths[sic], we can deduce from Nietzsche's admiration for her as an intellectual equal(remember his MISOGYNY!), that she was the only masculine personality in the triumvirate and thus Nietzsche's love and his homosexuality are validated. Not to mention that Herr Wagner is a dead ringer for Redd Foxx!

All facts and fictions aside, the book made me laugh quite a few times. Maybe the truth was lost somewhere in the translation from German to English but it didn't stop my enjoyment. Why let history and truth get in the way of that? I mean, Nietzschean lore has purported that the young man, while serving in the German calvary during a riding exercise had fallen from his saddle and was dangling upside down under the belly of the horse(Perhaps it was the same horse that he witnessed being flogged and this was what sparked his madness!) and said, "Oh Schopenhauer, where are you now?" Who's buying that but the ghost of Schopenhauer and me?

Rating:
Summary: if your interested in these two, buy it.
Review: NW is not the most academic of books in form, but readability and lack of footnotes do not make a book worthless. Köhler may not have enough evidence to convince the critical, but the material provided is well worth the read. Homosexuality/onanism/anti-semitism: these elements are simply not central to either individual (Wagner's anti-semitism may be the exception). Some of Köhler's conclusions may be questionable, but his observations are not what make the book. The content itself is very interesting, and the intelligent and familiar (with RW/FN) will come away with a great degree of insight. To anyone sincerely interested in either, it is requisite. Perhaps you will not agree with Köhler, so what? The book is simply worth the read. My opinions didn't change from the book, but I have a much richer picture of both men. (I am honesty surprised that anyone could find this book upsetting [see review below]. It's a fun little book, if you hate it, you really ought to relax a bit. Not for tyros: if you've only read a bit of FN or seen an opera, and you want a key to understanding either, forget it. But if you are deep into either, you skip it at your peril.

Rating:
Summary: if your interested in these two, buy it.
Review: NW is not the most academic of books in form, but readability and lack of footnotes do not make a book worthless. Köhler may not have enough evidence to convince the critical, but the material provided is well worth the read. Homosexuality/onanism/anti-semitism: these elements are simply not central to either individual (Wagner's anti-semitism may be the exception). Some of Köhler's conclusions may be questionable, but his observations are not what make the book. The content itself is very interesting, and the intelligent and familiar (with RW/FN) will come away with a great degree of insight. To anyone sincerely interested in either, it is requisite. Perhaps you will not agree with Köhler, so what? The book is simply worth the read. My opinions didn't change from the book, but I have a much richer picture of both men. (I am honesty surprised that anyone could find this book upsetting [see review below]. It's a fun little book, if you hate it, you really ought to relax a bit. Not for tyros: if you've only read a bit of FN or seen an opera, and you want a key to understanding either, forget it. But if you are deep into either, you skip it at your peril.

Rating:
Summary: if your interested in these two, buy it.
Review: NW is not the most academic of books in form, but readability and lack of footnotes do not make a book worthless. Köhler may not have enough evidence to convince the critical, but the material provided is well worth the read. Homosexuality/onanism/anti-semitism: these elements are simply not central to either individual (Wagner's anti-semitism may be the exception). Some of Köhler's conclusions may be questionable, but his observations are not what make the book. The content itself is very interesting, and the intelligent and familiar (with RW/FN) will come away with a great degree of insight. To anyone sincerely interested in either, it is requisite. Perhaps you will not agree with Köhler, so what? The book is simply worth the read. My opinions didn't change from the book, but I have a much richer picture of both men. (I am honesty surprised that anyone could find this book upsetting [see review below]. It's a fun little book, if you hate it, you really ought to relax a bit. Not for tyros: if you've only read a bit of FN or seen an opera, and you want a key to understanding either, forget it. But if you are deep into either, you skip it at your peril.

Rating:
Summary: Incoherent, ignorant, incompetent
Review: Once in a lifetime a book comes along ... that is so arm-wavingly silly that it's almost Pythonesque. This book, "Nietzsche and Wagner: a Study in Subjugation" is actually less reliable than Robert Gutman's or Marc Weiner's Wagner books, which were previously the record-holders. But Kohler beats them hollow. I'm sorry to say that this book has the scholarly merit of a UFO abduction memoir.

Kohler doesn't even bother to try to substantiate his various untrue and silly claims. One of these claims is that Nietzsche was homosexual, for which Kohler (as several critics have pointed out) adduces no evidence at all. Maybe Kohler thinks that Nietzsche calling a book "Die Froeliche Wissenschaft" (The Gay Science) makes Nietzsche "gay" in the current sense. (The meaning of "gay" seems to be changing again, but that's another story.) But we have plenty of evidence of Nietzsche's heterosexuality and no evidence at all of same-sex desire or practice. Nietzsche was a misogynist, hostile and contemptuous towards women, also clearly afraid of them, but that doesn't make him homosexual. Kohler seems to think that claiming something is the same as making it so.

Kohler also claims that after the Nietzsche-Wagner split Wagner conducted a relentless and vindictive campaign against Nietzsche on the grounds that he (Nietzsche) was homosexual. Again, Kohler doen't support this claim of a homophobic campaign by Wagner with any evidence. But then, how could he? There was no such campaign. Instead there was the famous letter from Wagner to Nietzsche's doctor, expressing concern for the health of "our young friend N."and suggesting that Nietzsche's nervous problems might be caused by excessive masturbation.

Wagner's letter is splendidly dotty, but it also brings Kohler's claims crashing to the ground. (1) Masturbation is not the same thing as homosexuality. Wagner did not think Nietzsche was homosexual; instead, prescient in so many things, Wagner was the first major thinker to call Nietzsche a wanker (just kidding, Nietzsche fans). (2) A kindly meant, if eccentric, letter to Nietzsche's doctor is not quite the same thing as persecution. It's clear from Cosima Wagner's Diaries that Wagner's private reaction to the split with Nietzsche was regret, a wish to have the breach healed, and an undoubtedly patronising pity for "that poor young man" Nietzsche. These are not the sort of feelings that lead to persecution or a campaign of vilification, as Kohler claims.

As well, Wagner's actual attitude to homosexuals (there were no gays in the 19th Century) is suggested in an earlier letter to a homosexual friend. Wagner suggests that his friend "try to cut down a little, on the pederasty"... The attitude is one of amused tolerance, which won't do now, but it was progressive and liberal by the standards of his time. Wagner wasn't a homophobe.

In fact Wagner didn't respond in public to Nietzsche's repeated attacks (except once, a very indirect reference in one of his essays, without mentioning Nietzsche's name); contra Kohler, the abuse was very much a one-way street, and not in the direction that Kohler suggests.

Kohler also presents a Nietzsche who wrote antisemitic passages in his works during the alliance with Wagner, but who stopped after the split. This is simply and flagrantly untrue. The post-Wagner Nietzsche attacked antisemites, but he also continued to attack and insult Jews. There are many, many antisemitic passages in Nietzsche's work - Nietzsche fans, like Kohler and the reviewer from Kirkus Review quoted above, like to overlook Nietzsche's antisemitism, but antisemites find Nietzsche a useful supporter and resource. You'll find plenty of antisemitic quotes from Nietzsche on proud display on the Web's neo-Nazi sites, and the vast majority of these antisemitic passages were written AFTER the split with Wagner.

And there's Nietzsche's attack on Wagner in which he claimed that Wagner had a Jewish father. There is irony, of course, in claiming an antisemite has Jewish parentage. But it reflects what Wagner himself seems to have believed, that the man who was almost certainly his real father, Ludwig Geyer, was Jewish. For this attack Nietzsche must have drawn on his private conversations with Wagner, in which Wagner poured out personal fears to a man he believed was his friend. The nastiness in Nietzsche's attack is in the betrayal of confidence, not in the claiming that Wagner had a Jewish parent.

I mention this attack by Nietzsche, couched in antisemitic terms and involving personal betrayal, because Kohler skips blithely over it. Imagine what he'd said if it had been the other way round; Wagner attacking Nietzsche in antisemitic terms while betraying an intimate confidence. But in fact there are suspiciously few quotes of any kind from Nietzsche in Kohler's book. Given the book's profound ignorance of the details of Nietzsche's or Wagner's life and philosophies, I suspect this is not so much because Kohler wants to keep it simple, but because he is not particularly familiar with his subjects' work. Given the sort of book he's written, he didn't need to be.

By the way, an earlier book by Kohler, that's only just been translated into English, "Wagner's Hitler", is now available. Friends who've read the German edition tell me that it's even more fanciful, nonsensical, dishonest and incoherent than this book. I'll look for it in a remainder bin.

Laon

Rating:
Summary: Esthetic monstrosities
Review: The author of _Zarathustra's secret_ takes us through the period encounter between Nietzsche and Wagner in a quite graphic tale of one of the first of the modern celebrity farces, that of Wagnerian ego and its hangers on. Although the account is well done, I should wonder if a clever cutpurse like Nietzsche was ever really subjugated and whether he didn't, despite an series of emotional shocks, achieve the net equivalent of going undercover as a Wagner disciple, to his profit or loss in unclear. For all the background music of the philosophic, more than musical, leitmotiv (Schopenhauer gave it away with fake hint, the 'will') this account of artistic overdrive twice over is a remarkable tale of psychological helplessness, in Wagner and Nietzsche. Anyway, worth reading.