How Fascism Corrupts Art

How Fascism Corrupts Art:
What Tyranny’s Love for Wagner reveals about Toxic Worship

by Priya Sridhar
Editor, Coreopsis Journal

Fascists know that if they control a country’s art, they influence its culture to support a regime. Nazi Germany was no different, taking inspiration from German creators like Richard Wagner for national pride. Though Wagner could not have predicted Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, as the two lived in different centuries, his views did influence the latter. Hitler also used Wagner to reinforce a violent, shameful German nationalism. When fascists love a piece of art, a toxic worship ensues out of a desire to control others.

Wagner’s Rise and Influence

Wagner backed up an arrogant attitude with genuine dedication to composition. Though he came from a family of actors and theater enthusiasts, music soon became a tool for his goals:

“His highest ambition was to achieve a stupendous drama which in the matter of sensations and murders should eclipse anything yet done. But it dawned upon him that without music his play could not make its full and proper effect, so into music he went, and was at once caught in the impetuous torrent of the time” (Runciman, 3).

Despite many failures and creditors on his tail, Wagner persisted. He wrote operas to pay the bills and let European travels inspire their premises. Though his involvement with the 1849 May Uprising in Dresden resulted in several decades of exile, Wagner continued to write whether in Germany or in another country like Italy or France. His first well-known opera, The Flying Dutchman, echoed anti-Semitism with a central character labeled “a Wandering Jew of the ocean,” referencing a myth of an immortal man fleeing from place to place (Heine, 132). Though Wagner adapted the opera from a satirical novel’s description of an opera, he missed the potential impact that spreading such a myth would have in the future. His present mattered more with financial woes haunting every horizon.

Exile reinforced Wagner’s nationalism. As he wrote in his 1842 “Autobiographical Sketch”, “For the first time I saw the Rhine—with hot tears in my eyes, I, poor artist, swore eternal fidelity to my German fatherland” (Wagner). Unable to return to Germany until 1862, patriotic music kept him tethered. He wanted to write operas that reflected his homeland’s culture and color. As a result, operas like The Ring Cycle drew from German folklore and Norse mythology, tying the past to a seemingly glorious present.

Wagner’s anti-Semitism and hatred of Jewish composers lay beneath loyalty to his homeland. His 1869 essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik” accused Jewish people of infiltrating the music sphere: “The Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation, but he speaks it always as an alien” (Wagner). Such phrasing dehumanizes a Jewish person based on their religion, justifying that they will always be an outsider. It doesn’t matter if they were born in Germany and grew up with no synagogue or Hebrew school; they are Jewish, and that is all the person will be. This dehumanization would become popular in Nazi Germany seventy years later.

Despite these awful opinions, Wagner’s music has endured for centuries. Gerard McBurney wrote for The Guardian that despite his parents warning him that Wagner is a “bad man,” the operas seduced him (2011). Fanatic Wagnerians and new audiences found the tragedies of Siegfried, Tristan and Isolde moving them to tears. Never mind that despite Wagner’s popularity and success, colleagues and German audiences questioned his character. One cannot ignore how one particular fascist adopted Wagner. The music somehow persists, despite his many black marks.

Germany’s Degenerate Labels

Nazis and fascists dislike art they do not understand. In fact, they have a name for this type of art: degenerate. Neil Levi recreates in words the context behind this term when describing an exhibit of 600 stolen works during this time period:

“Goebbels’ Ministry for Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment planned Degenerate Art as a counter-exhibition to the first annual exhibition of Great German Art, which opened in Munich’s newly consecrated House of German Art on July 18, 1937. Degenerate Art opened a day later in the same city’s Archaeological Institute-an appropriate enough venue for works that were to be consigned to the dustbin of history” (42).

Many of these works either had marginalized creators or abstract roots in movements like expressionism. Regardless of their cultural significance, they threatened Hitler’s propaganda. Labeling art as “degenerate” would associate it with shame and vitriol. Loyal German citizens would focus on what Hitler and his men approved rather than form opinions that risked rebellion. As Faith Ruetas in Rethinking the Future recounts, “Nazis fulfilled a key pursuit of fascism: making everything of a specific aesthetic through rigid, culturally-appropriate standards” (Ruetas 2021). Such rigid standards meant that they would adopt the art and music that they could understand and control. Then the Nazis could label this art as “German” for national pride and boot out whom they detested.

Wagner’s nationalism endeared him to the Nazi regime. Per The Collector, he “declared that German music was superior to any other…German art was profound where Italian and French music was superficial” (Stranex, 2022). This attitude resonated with Hitler from when he was a child, and he brought Wagner to the fascist stage. He could use the compositions to justify expelling and exiling Jewish-German composers while setting a new standard.

Thanks to Hitler’s worship, Wagner’s music carries a taint. One can attribute this taint to Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law, who later ran the “family business,” the Bayreuth Festival, after her husband Siegfried died. Though Winifred Wagner “used her influence to save some Jews, Communists and homosexuals from the Nazi death camps,” her devotion to Hitler turned the Bayreuth Festival into a national spectacle (“How Adolf Hitler Fell in Love,” 2004). Since post-war courts banned her from running the festival due to these close Hitler associations, her sons Wieland and Wolfgang Wagner took over management. Wieland expressed the need for damage control combined with atonement, “to salvage Bayreuth from its politically tainted past” (Thurman 610). Such a battle remains uphill, however, with controversy over casting a black soprano in the 1961 Bayreuth Festival. Winifred Wagner to her dying day refused to recant the close bond with Hitler or admit she did wrong. Perhaps no Wagner from that time period can.

Wagner’s descendants have to decide which side of history they choose. Richard Wagner’s great-grandson Gottfried Wagner lamented in 2008 how his relatives did and still do not wish to understand the harm inflicted on the world. As he stated to The Independent, “Though I and my generation are not Nazi criminals, we still share a responsibility for German historical consciousness” (2008). Such actions led to his ostracization from the family, including the exile from his father’s deathbed. The Guardian reported that “the family had excluded him from the entire mourning procedure and that his name had been omitted from the full-page newspaper death notices the family placed in Germany’s leading newspapers” (Connolly, 2013). Gottfried has refused to recant his family’s Nazi connections, or he would have been welcomed back. Such a feud doesn’t show promise of erasing the taint over Wagner.

After the Corruption

Wagner’s legacy serves as a cautionary tale to modern artists. Whether or not a piece of work becomes powerful, the creator’s word carries weight. If they choose to dehumanize and scapegoat others, that taint spreads over their work and legacy. When modern fascism reverberates and chooses new idols, each artist and musician has a choice. As of 2025, the Wagners cannot escape the taint of anti-Semitism until they address it fully. Neither can Germany nor Wagner worshippers. The next famous composer needs to think about what side of history they wish to enable. Serving as a voice for hate causes exponential harm. No amount of greatness or longevity in the art can suffice for atonement.

Listen to “Seigfried” here: Filmed on 12 and 19 November 2021 at the Deutsche Opera Berlin, Germany https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYRcKxqp3NQ&themeRefresh=1

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