Der Fuehrer - Hitler's Rise to Power (1944) - Heiden

210 DER FUEHRERThat man was Richard Wagner.All this was a small episode in the great and futile German revolutionof 1848-49, a single sigh in the storm that raged through Europe in themiddle of the nineteenth century.Most of the state interests and national boundaries that these menwere fighting over have vanished beneath the dust of history. Butthrough these struggles ran a spiritual stream which, in the comingdecades, rose higher and higher, a stream which has flooded our present,breaking through all dikes. A man stood on the tower, singing of lovewithout fear of the bullets — justly conscious of his immortality forwhich he was to fight all his life with good means and bad. But hisimmortality weighs like resonant bronze on the souls of men, an evilspell that has not yet begun to lift, a poison that men would spew outwere it not so sweet. His best, or at least his most popular, musictransforms the curse of power into a glamorous song; and destruction —the inevitable fate of unbridled power — resounds in it with tragicbeauty. Love of overwhelming disaster — that is his haunting leitmotiv.Such a fateful love is presented in this book. It is an attempt to give apicture of the power-hungry intellectual. He has become a leader inmodern life. We shall attempt to observe his beginnings. We shall studythe birth of the Antichrist.The Antichrist arises out of an immense fear; Wagner's soul andWagner's life combined to a high degree the forces whose strugglecreated the Demon of our days. It is true that all his life Wagnerpersonally detested the demonic man of power, but he contributed morethan he suspected to create the Demon. A pamphlet forged in St.Petersburg did not conjure up the Demon out of nothing; it only drewhis picture and publicized him. He did not arise suddenly out of thedistant desert to lay waste our civilization. The truth is that with fatefulnecessity he arose everywhere out of the substance and conditions ofour own life. It is his universality, growing like mildew in the soil ofmodern civilization, that makes him dangerous. The Antichrist is aworld-citizen, else he could not be a world-ruler. A Prussian junker witha Baltic horizon could no more be a world-demon than a Cossack chief;the Antichrist is no barbarian, he is refined and civilized. That is whyhis mightiest