JOURNALfor the STUDYof ANTISEMITISM

244 JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF ANTISEMITISM [ VOL. 3:243
BEING WAGNER
Wagner’s loathing of Jews is a much-examined topic in the vast biographical
literature about the composer. A consensus of the opinions of
many of those examining the subject focus on a seminal phobia in Wagner’s
life: an anxiety responsible for his efforts to distance himself from
Jews, namely, his belief that he was of Jewish origin.
Wagner was not certain of his father’s identity, and one possibility was
that the actor, poet, and painter Ludwig Geyer, a man who Wagner suspected
of being of Jewish descent, sired him. No proof is available to
resolve the biological question, nor does it matter—the overriding consideration
being not whose son he was, but who and what Wagner thought his
father might have been. So consumed was he with the question of his own
heritage that he may have held suspicions of a possible Jewish ancestry for
his mother, too.
Thus, it is suggested that Wagner became one of the most vocal
antisemites in Europe as a means of focusing attention away from his own
ethnicity. Sadly, there are many cases of such extreme examples of selfhatred.
The idea of a fatherless hero appears at least five times in Wagner’s
music dramas. Siegfried, Siegmund, Tristan, Parsifal, and Walther were all
either unaware of who their fathers were or else had the father disappear or
die when they were young. It is difficult to see this leitmotif reoccur so
many times in Wagner’s operas and not believe that he was obsessed with a
father’s absence.
The idea for Wagner’s possible Jewish descent was exploited by
detractors of his music, often in caricatures that appeared in the press,
where he is shown with an excessively large nose designed to resemble the
stereotypical “distinctive physiognomy” that Jews were accused of possessing.
Such caricatures also burlesqued other unVolkish physicality in Wagner.
He was short, large of head, and had an excitable nature.
Theodore Adorno (1903-1959), a German-born Protestant intellectual,
sociologist, philosopher, musicologist, and composer (of Jewish descent),
wrote in In Search of Wagner (1981) that Wagner’s early depiction of the
gnome Mime, an important character in The Ring, was so psychologically
self-descriptive that Wagner withdrew and replaced it as soon as he realized
what he had done—i.e., he had described some of his own physical characteristics:
“[Mime] is small and bent, somewhat deformed and hobbling. His
head is abnormally large, his face a dark ashen color and wrinkled, his eyes
small and piercing, with red rims, his grey beard long and scrubby, his head
bald . . .” Wagner’s description of Mime, which later also depicts him as