This is a response to the ongoing debate about my Wednesday post ‘Part of the System’.
I can’t weigh in on the issue Thankmar and Vlad Tepes debate because I woke up racially until after half a century of existence, and never had time to read in-depth the authors Thankmar or Vlad mention (e.g. The Edda, compilations of stories related to Norse mythology, and what scholars debate about it). But even from my ignorance of these classics, I can contribute my two cents.
Recall what on pages 149-156 of my book Daybreak I wrote about Johann Sebastian Bach in the context of what Thankmar says: Christian propaganda. I think that in what I wrote there is the key to this matter.
Let’s think about Hitler. He was indeed initiated spiritually with Richard Wagner, as Savitri well saw in her book. But when I saw my first Wagnerian opera I was surprised that, at the end, Tannhäuser repudiated Venus and invoked the Virgin Mary! Wagner acted as a transitional bridge between a purely Christian art (like Bach’s St Matthew Passion) and an art that, although still inspired by Christianity, already has pagan elements, like Tannhäuser or Parsifal.
In other words, we must be tolerant of these ‘bridges’. When the Third Reich was already underway, Richard Strauss, a fanatic Wagnerian, even left behind the Christian tail that Wagner still suffered from, and composed the symphonic poem I like best of his, Thus Spake Zarathustra, his opus 30. Strauss himself acknowledged that that symphonic poem was ‘freely inspired in Nietzsche’ and he also composed some operas. (Many years ago I was lent the visual DVD of Strauss’ Elektra, based on the Greek myth according to Sophocles’ tragedy.)
So, considering that musically Strauss was heavily influenced by Wagner, and that Hitler himself also was a fanatic Wagnerian, why not be tolerant of bridges? Ultimately, that bridge, from the Christian Bach to the half-pagan Wagner, lead to Strauss and eventually to us (as a child and pubescent I listened a lot of times to the LP we see on the left). It could even be argued, as I do in the featured post, that Hitler and Rosenberg themselves could be bridges to an even more refined NS than the one they promoted (an Aryan Jesus, etc.).
Because of the majesty of the music, I can enjoy Wagner’s Parsifal without being much bothered by the Christian inspiration precisely because it already represents a breakthrough, or bridge, to our side of the Wall.