Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation [Hardcover]

Joachim Kohler (Author), Ronald Taylor (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 11, 1998

This volume, first published in German in 1996, presents an account of the relationship between the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the composer Richard Wagner, and his wife Cosima. Nietzsche was 25 when he first met Wagner and his 32-year-old mistress Cosima (daughter of Franz List and at that time wife of the conductor Hans von Bulow) in May 1869. The relationship survived on a combination of mutual intellectual admiration - dominated by the bullying Wagner - and erotic jealousy, until the composer's death in 1883 and the philosopher's own descent into madness six years later. Joachim Kohler brings this relationship to life. He shows how their traumatized childhoods bound Nietzsche and Cosima in submission to the demonic, ageing Wagner, how Nietzsche was enticed into the Bayreuth labyrinth, entrapped in its culture wars and used as a tool in its sectarianism and anti-semitism. The book sheds light on Nietasche's early writings, revealing them subverted by Wagner to parade his own ideas of German superiority, of the domination of the masses by a few chosen geniuses, and of the supremacy of art and aesthetics over morals and humanity. The source of Nietzsche's "Superman" and "Will to Power" are traced to the pre-fascist ideology of Richard and Cosima Wagner, an ideology later uncomprehendingly idolized by Hitler's Reich.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

When Friedrich Nietzsche first met Richard Wagner in 1869, the magisterial composer was more than twice the age of the fledgling philologist. Wagner had also just been banished from the royal court of Bavaria for his adulterous affair with Cosima von Bülow. Although the friendship between the two men began rather well, it would famously degenerate into a bitter intellectual and emotional feud, over which Nietzsche would continue to obsess even after Wagner's death in 1883 (but then, Cosima--who'd married Wagner as soon as possible after her divorce--was more than happy to keep up her late husband's end of the battle, and Nietzsche's own death in 1900 did nothing to change that).

Joachim Köhler's densely compact Nietzsche and Wagner draws heavily upon available correspondence from all parties--and Nietzsche's early writings--to examine this turbulent relationship. The point is not so much that Wagner was a manipulative jerk (although he certainly was that) or that Nietzsche and Cosima, who both suffered miserably in youth, were psychologically vulnerable to Wagner's seductive but emotionally abusive behavior; rather, the idea seems to be an examination of the effects of the relationship on the philosopher's thinking, both before and after their breakup. It's an academically rigorous account, so while it is fraught with traces of melodrama, they are buried under careful analytic prose, making this book far more suitable for scholars than general readers interested in biographical data on any of the principals involved. --Ron Hogan

From Library Journal

First published in Germany in 1996, this book studies the complex relationship among Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and Wagner's wife, Cosima. Kohler, an editor at Hoffman & Kampe Verlag, demonstrates a parallel between the interaction of the three principal characters and the myth of Dionysus and Ariadne, a story that obsessed Nietzsche throughout most of his adult life and that serves as the theme for the entire narrative. Their story has all the turgid ingredients of a good 19th-century novel: art, revolution, philosophy, erotic jealousy, infidelity, insanity, and a cast of real characters the equal of any in classical literature. Given the complicated material and the number of facts per square inch, the translation is as clear as one could expect. Truth can be as fascinating as fiction. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Timothy J. McGee, Univ. of Toronto, Canada
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; 1st edition (December 11, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300076401
• ISBN-13: 978-0300076400
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,312,169 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #28 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( N ) > Nietzche, Friedrich
  • #47 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( W ) > Wagner, Richard

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

58 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Incoherent, ignorant, incompetent, January 13, 2000

By 

Laon (moon-lit Surry Hills) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation (Hardcover)

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

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars inaccurate and utterly tedious, November 25, 2009

By 

Fabert (New York City, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation (Hardcover)

I very much regret having read this work. I did it before I knew better; before I knew who Joachim Köhler was; and before I knew enough about either Nietzsche or Wagner to realize that I should have put the book down immediately. The friendship between Wagner and Nietzsche has received a great deal of attention, and there is absolutely no reason why anyone should have to turn to the incompetent Köhler to learn about it. There isn't all that much that I could add to what Laon has already said in his review. In essence, this is a work of fiction, entirely unreliable, slanted, poorly written, betraying a laughable ineptitude in psychological insight. It is rather disturbing that some reviewers have given this work *more* than one star. Yet I suppose that Amazon works according to democratic principles in this regard, as anyone can have his or her say on the matter. It should be absolutely clear, however, that the scholarly community is in perfect agreement on the utter incompetence of this hack. No Nietzsche scholar would ever back up a statement about the philosopher by a reference to Köhler. No Wagner scholar would either. The man cannot be taken seriously, and the man is not taken seriously. That he can still find some gullible readers from a non-academic audience is unfortunate, but probably not to be helped.

5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Awful logic, tendentious manipulation of facts, June 13, 2006

By 

eupraxis "eupraxis" (New Orleans, LA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation (Hardcover)

This hatchet job is truly a scandal. The author has an ax to grind. Skip it.