Put the Blame on (Über-Degenerate) Wagner

"Richard Wagner is in himself alone charged with a greater abundance of degeneration than all the degenerates put together with whom we have hitherto become acquainted. The stigmata of this morbid condition are united in him in the most complete and most luxuriant development. He displays in the general constitution of his mind the persecution mania, megalomania and mysticism; in his instincts vague philanthropy, anarchism, a craving for revolt and contradiction; in his writings all the signs of graphomania, namely, incoherence, fugitive ideation, and a tendency to idiotic punning, and, as the groundwork of  his being, the characteristic emotionalism of a colour at once erotic and religiously enthusiastic.
For Wagner's persecution mania, we have the testimony of his most recent biographer and friend, Ferdinand Praeger, who relates that for years Wagner was convinced that the Jews had conspired to prevent the representation of his operas—a delirium inspired by his furious anti-Semitism. His megalomania is so well known through his writings, his verbal utterances, and the whole course of his life, that a bare reference to it is sufficient. It is to be admitted that this mania was essentially increased by the crazy procedure of those who surrounded Wagner. A much firmer equilibrium than that which obtained in Wagner's mind would have been infallibly disturbed by the nauseous idolatry of which Bayreuth was the shrine. The Bayreuther Blätter is a unique phenomenon. To me, at least, no other instance is known of a newspaper which was founded exclusively for the deification of a living man, and in every number of which, through long years, the appointed priests of the temple have burned incense to their household god, with the savage fanaticism of howling and dancing dervishes, bent the knee, prostrated themselves before him, and immolated all opponents as sacrificial victims.
We will take a closer view of the graphomaniac Wagner. His Collected Writings and Poems form ten large thick volumes, and among the 4,500 pages which they approximately contain there is hardly a single one which will not puzzle the unbiased reader, either through some nonsensical thought or some impossible mode of expression. Of his prose works (his poems will be treated of further on), the most important is decidedly The Art-work of the Future. (01) The thoughts therein expressed—so far as the wavering shadows of ideas in a mystically emotional degenerate subject may be so called—occupied Wagner during his whole life, and were again and again propounded by him in ever new terms and phraseology. The Opera and the Drama, Judaism in Music, On the State and Religion, The Vocation of the Opera, Religion and Art, are nothing more than amplifications of single passages of The Art-work of the Future. This restless repetition of one and the same strain of thought is itself characteristic in the highest degree. The clear, mentally sane author, who feels himself impelled to say something, will once for all express himself as distinctly and impressively as it is possible for him to do, and have done with it. He may, perhaps, return to the subject, in order to clear up misconceptions, repel attacks, and fill up lacunæ; but he will never wish to rewrite his book, wholly or in part, two or three times in slightly different words, not even if in later years he attains to the insight that he has not succeeded in finding for it an adequate form. The crazed graphomaniac, on the contrary, cannot recognise in his book, as it lies finished before him, the satisfying expression of his thoughts, and he will always be tempted to begin his work afresh, a task which is endless, because it must consist in giving a fixed linguistic form to ideas which are formless.

(...)
Together with this anarchistic acerbity, there is another feeling that controls the entire conscious and unconscious mental life of Wagner, viz., sexual emotion. He has been throughout his life an erotic (in a psychiatric sense), and all his ideas revolve about woman. The most ordinary incitements, even those farthest removed from the province of the sexual instinct, never fail to awaken in his consciousness voluptuous images of an erotic character, and the bent of the automatic association of ideas is in him always directed towards this pole of his thought. In this connection let this passage be read from the Art-work of the Future (p. 44), where he seeks to demonstrate the relation between the art of dancing, music, and poetry: 'In the contemplation of this ravishing dance of the most genuine and noblest muses, of the artistic man [?], we now see the three arm-in-arm lovingly entwined up to their necks; then this, then that one, detaching herself from the entwinement, as if to display to the others her beautiful form in complete separation, touching the hands of the others only with the extreme tips of her fingers; now the one, entranced by a backward glance at the twin forms of her closely entwined sisters, bending towards them; then two, carried away by the allurements of the one [!] greeting her in homage; finally all, in close embrace, breast to breast, limb to limb, in an ardent kiss of love, coalescing in one blissfully living shape. This is the love and life, the joy and wooing of art,' etc. (Observe the word-play: Lieben und Leben, Freuen und Freien!) Wagner here visibly loses the thread of his argument; he neglects what he really wishes to say, and revels in the picture of the three dancing [181] maidens, who have arisen before his mind's eye, following with lascivious longing the outline of their forms and their seductive movements.
The shameless sensuality which prevails in his dramatic poems has impressed all his critics. Hanslick (07) speaks of the 'bestial sensuality' in Rheingold, and says of Siegfried: 'The feverish accents, so much beloved by Wagner, of an insatiable sensuality, blazing to the uttermost limits—this ardent moaning, sighing, crying, and sinking to the ground, move us with repugnance. The text of these love-scenes becomes sometimes, in its exuberance, sheer nonsense.' Compare in the first act of the Walküre, (08) in the scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde, the following stage directions: 'Hotly interrupting'; 'embraces her with fiery passion'; 'in gentle ecstasy'; 'she hangs enraptured upon his neck'; 'close to his eyes'; 'beside himself'; 'in the highest intoxication,' etc. At the conclusion, it is said, 'The curtain falls quickly,' and frivolous critics have not failed to perpetrate the cheap witticism, 'Very necessary, too.' The amorous whinings, whimperings and ravings of Tristan und Isolde, the entire second act of Parsifal, in the scene between the hero and the flower-girls, and then between him and Kundry in Klingsor's magic garden, are worthy to rank with the above passages. It certainly redounds to the high honour of German public morality, that Wagner's operas could have been publicly performed without arousing the greatest scandal. How unperverted must wives and maidens be when they are in a state of mind to witness these pieces without blushing crimson, and sinking into the earth for shame! How innocent must even husbands and fathers be who allow their womankind to go to these representations of 'lupanar' incidents! Evidently the German audiences entertain no misgivings concerning the actions and attitudes of Wagnerian personages; they seem to have, no suspicion of the emotions by which they are excited, and what intentions their words, gestures and acts denote; and this explains the peaceful artlessness with which these audiences follow theatrical scenes during which, among a less childlike public, no one would dare lift his eyes to his neighbour or endure his glance.
With Wagner amorous excitement assumes the form of mad delirium. The lovers in his pieces behave like tom-cats gone mad, rolling in contortions and convulsions over a root of valerian. They reflect a state of mind in the poet which is well known to the professional expert. It is a form of Sadism. It is the love of those degenerates who, in sexual transport, become like wild beasts. (09) Wagner suffered from 'erotic madness,' which leads coarse natures to murder for lust, and inspires 'higher degenerates' with works like Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Tristan und Isolde.

(...) The fact that only in Bayreuth could this music be heard, unfalsified and in its full strength, was also of great importance for the esteem in which it was held. If it had been played in every theatre, if, without trouble and formalities, one could have gone to a representation of Wagner as to one of Il Trovatore, Wagner would not have obtained his most enthusiastic public from foreign countries. To know the real Wagner it was necessary to journey to Bayreuth. This could be done only at long intervals and at specified times; seats and lodgings had to be obtained long in advance, and at great expenditure of trouble. It was a pilgrimage requiring much money and leisure; hence 'hoi polloi' were excluded from it. Thus, the pilgrimnage to Bayreuth became a privilege of the rich and well-bred, and to have been to' Bayreuth came to be a great social distinction among the snobs of both worlds. The journey was a thing to make a great parade of and be haughty over. The pilgrim no longer belonged to the vulgar crowd, but to the select few; he became a hadji! Oriental sages so well know the peculiar vanity of the hadjis', that one of their proverbs contains an express warning against the pious man who has been thrice to Mecca.
Hence the pilgrimage to Bayreuth became a mark of aristocracy, and an appreciation of Wagner's music, in spite of his nationality, was regarded as evidence of intellectual pre-eminence. The prejudice in his favour was created, and provided one went to him in this mood, there was no reason why Wagner should not have the same influence on hysterical foreigners as on hysterical Germans. Parsifal was especially fitted completely to subjugate the French neo-Catholics and Anglo-American mystics who marched behind the banner of the Salvation Army. It was with this opera that Wagner chiefly triumphed among his non-German admirers. Listening to the music of Parsifal has become the religious act of all those who wish to receive the Communion in musical form.
These are the explanatory causes of Wagner's conquest, first of Germany, and then of the world. The absence of judgment and independence among the multitude, who chant the antiphony in the Psalter; the imitation of musicians possessed of no originality, who witnessed his triumph, and, like genuine little boys wanting 'to be taken,' clung to his coat-tails—these did what was still needed to lay the world at his feet. As it is the most widely diffused, so is Wagnerism the most momentous aberration of the present time. The Bayreuth festival theatre, the Bayreuther Blätter, the Parisian Revue Wagnérienne, are lasting monuments by which posterity will be able to measure the whole breadth and depth of the degeneration and hysteria of the age.



Max Nordau, Degeneration, 1892

Notes
01
Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft . Leipzig, 1850.
07 Edward Hanslick, Musikalische Stationen. Berlin, 1880, pp. 220, 243.
08 Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Band VI., p. 3 ff.
09 In a book on degeneration it is not possible wholly to avoid the subject of eroticism, which includes precisely the most characteristic and conspicuous phenomena of degeneration. I dwell, however, on principle as little as possible on this subject, and will, therefore, in reference to the characterization of Wagner's erotic madness, quote only one clinical work: Dr. Paul Aubry, 'Observation d'Uxoricide et de Libéricide suivis du Suicide du Meurtrier,' Archives de l'Anthropologie criminelle, vol. vii., p. 326: 'This derangement [erotic madness] is characterized by an inconceivable fury of concupiscence at the moment of approach.' And in a remark on the report of a murder perpetrated on his wife and children by an erotic maniac—a professor of mathematics in a public school—whom Aubrey had under his observation, he says, 'Sa femme qui parlait facilement et à tous des choses que l'on tient ordinairement le plus secrètes, disait que son mari était comme un furieux pendant l'acte sexuel.' See also Ball, La Folie érotique. Paris, 1891, p. 127.

The Time Capsule of Cupaloy

WITHIN the limitations imposed by space, the problems of preservation, and the difficulty of choosing the truly significant to represent all the enormous variety and vigor of our life, we have sought to deposit in the Time Capsule materials and information touching upon all the principal categories of our thought, activity, and accomplishment; sparing nothing, neither our wisdom nor our foolishness, our supreme achievements nor our recognized weaknesses.
We have included books and pictures that show where and how we live: some in apartments like dwellers in cliffs, but comfortably; others in detached houses; still others moving about the country in homes mounted on wheels.
We have set forth the story of our architecture, by which we have reared soaring pinnacles into the sky.
We have described the offices and the factories where we work, the machines that write, compute, tabulate, reproduce manuscript a thousandfold, sort out, and file; the machines that stamp and fashion metals; the machines and methods with which metals are knit together by electricity and cut apart by gas; the complex techniques of mass production, with which articles that consist of scores of different materials, requiring hundreds of operations to assemble, can nevertheless be sold among us for a few cents.
We have described in text and picture the arts and entertainment of our day; the games we play; the history & development & present attainments of painting, sculpture, music, the theater, motion pictures, and radio.
We have included copies of representative newspapers & magazines of this day, containing news, articles, fiction, and advertisements broadly characteristic of our period. We have also included a novel, the most widely read of our time. For good measure we have added specimens of our cartoons and "comics," such as daily and weekly delight millions in our newspapers and in our moving picture theaters.
Ours is a day of many faiths. We have provided descriptions of the world's religions, numbered their followers, and enclosed the Holy Bible, a book which is the basis of the Christian faith. We have provided outlines of the world's principal philosophies. We have discussed the all-pervading and effective educational systems of our time, and told in text and pictures the story of the training of our young.
We have included a copy of our Constitution, and something about our government, under which we live as free men, ruled by our own elected representatives chosen at regular intervals by the votes of all, both men and women. We have included, also, a history of our country and a chronological history of the world.
Our scientists have measured the speed of light and compared the distances of the planets, stars, and nebulæ; they have charted the slow evolution of primal protoplasm into man, fathomed the ultimate composition of matter and its relation to energy, transmuted the elements, measured the earth and explored it, harnessed earthquake, electricity, and magnetism to probe what lies be neath our feet; they have shifted the atoms in their lattices and created dyes, materials, stuffs that Nature herself forgot to make. The stories of these achievements have been set forth in the Time Capsule.
Our engineers & inventors have harnessed the forces of the earth and skies and the mysteries of nature to make our lives pleasant, swift, safe, and fascinating beyond any previous age. We fly faster, higher, and farther than the birds. On steel rails we rush safely, behind giant horses of metal and fire. Ships large as palaces thrum across our seas. Our roads are alive with self-propelling conveyances so complex the most powerful prince could not have owned one a generation ago; yet in our day there is hardly a man so poor he cannot afford this form of personal mobility.
Over wires pour cataracts of invisible electric power, tamed and harnessed to light our homes, cook our food, cool and clean our air, operate the machines of our homes & factories, lighten the burdens of our daily labor, reach out and capture the voices and music of the air, & work a major part of all the complex magic of our day.
We have made metals our slaves, and learned to change their characteristics to our needs. We speak to one another along a network of wires and radiations that enmesh the globe, and hear one another thousands of miles away as clearly as though the distance were only a few feet. We have learned to arrest the processes of decay; our foods are preserved in metal or frost and by these means we may have vegetables and fruits in any season, delicacies from foreign lands, and adequate diet anywhere.
All these things, and the secrets of them, and something about the men of genius of our time and earlier days who helped bring them about, will be found in the Time Capsule.
How our physicians have healed the sick, controlled pain, and conquered many diseases, has been recounted there; how we have suppressed epidemics through the enormous undertakings of our system of public health; how our drugs and biologicals are compounded, and the enormous and varied list of them.
There are included samples and specimens of the new materials of our time, created in the laboratories of our engineers and chemists, on the looms of our mills, and in the forges, furnaces, and vats of our factories.
There are also samples of the products of our farms, where machinery has turned scarcity into abundance; where research has produced plants never seen in nature; where science now is able to produce plants even without soil.
There are also many small articles that we wear or use; that contribute to the pleasure, comfort, safety, convenience, or healthfulness of our lives; articles with which we write, play, groom ourselves, correct our vision, remove our beards, illuminate our homes and work-places, tell time, make pictures, calculate sums, exchange values, protect property, train our children, prepare our food.
Believing, as have the people of each age, that our women are the most beautiful, most intelligent, and best groomed of all the ages, we have enclosed in the Time Capsule specimens of modern cosmetics, and one of the singular clothing creations of our time, a woman's hat.
That the pronunciation of our English tongue may not be lost, a "Key to English" has been prepared and printed in this book. That our vocabulary may not be forgotten, we have included in the Capsule a dictionary, defining more than 140,000 common words and phrases. That our idiom may be preserved, we have provided also a dictionary of slang and colloquial expressions. Finally, that our method of writing may be recovered, should all other record of it disappear, we have included a book in which the Lord's Prayer is translated into three hundred different tongues; also the fable "The Story of the North Wind & the Sun" translated into twenty-five languages. These may serve, as did the trilingual Rosetta stone, to help in the translation of our words.
In the Capsule there are only two actual books of our time, in the size and form to which we are accustomed. These are this book and the Holy Bible. All the rest have been photographed page by page on microfilm, which by the small space it requires has permitted us to include on four small reels the contents or equivalent of more than seventy ordinary books—enough in their usual form to fill the Capsule's crypt several times over. A magnifying instrument is included, with which the microfilm may be read.
Should those who recover the Capsule wish to know our appearance, and how we dress, act, and talk, there have been provided two reels of significant and typical scenes of our time, in pictures that move and speak, imprisoned on ribbons of cellulose coated with silver. If knowledge of machines for projecting these pictures and voices has disappeared, the machines may nevertheless be recreated, after recovery of the Capsule, from photographs and descriptions.
Each age considers itself the pinnacle & final triumph above all eras that have gone before. In our time many believe that the human race has reached the ultimate in material and social development; others, that humanity shall march onward to achievements splendid beyond the imagination of this day, to new worlds of human wealth, power, life, and happiness. We choose, with the latter, to believe that men will solve the problems of the world, that the human race will triumph over its limitations and its adversities, that the future will be glorious.

TO THE PEOPLE OF THAT FUTURE
WE LEAVE THIS LEGACY

THE BOOK OF RECORD OF
THE
TIME CAPSULE
OF CUPALOY
DEEMED CAPABLE OF RESISTING THE EFFECTS OF TIME FOR FIVE THOUSAND YEARS • PRESERVING AN ACCOUNT OF UNIVERSAL ACHIEVEMENTS • EMBEDDED IN THE GROUNDS OF THE
NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR
1939

Crypt of Civilization

Preserving Our History in a Tomb
“CRYPT OF CIVILIZATION” WILL RE-CREATE OUR DAILY LIFE FOR PEOPLE OF 8113 A.D.
THE YEAR is 8113. Spired cities built by the ancient people of the twentieth century have long since crumbled to dust. Of the airplanes and automobiles in which they traveled, not a rusted scrap remains. Their perishable tools, utensils, books, magazines, and newspapers have vanished completely. What learning they possessed is but dimly known. But where Oglethorpe University once stood, in what was Atlanta, Ga., a band of archaeologists has just unearthed a door of stainless steel. They break it open—and find themselves in a treasure house of the past. Pictures and records, perfectly preserved through the ages, tell them in every detail the long-forgotten story of what life was like in 1938.
That is the romantic, breath-taking vision that is taking practical form at Oglethorpe University today. Into a crypt as large as an average living room, hollowed out of the granite bed rock beneath the campus and lined with walls of gleaming chromium, experts are stuffing motion-picture films, copies of present-day encyclopedias, textbooks, works of art, and models of machines that will give future historians a complete picture of their distant ancestors.
When the crypt is filled, the air in it will be replaced with inert nitrogen gas, and it will be sealed against the ravages of the ages. Graven in a plaque upon the stainless-steel door, a message will direct that the vault be opened in 8113—a date chosen because it is as far in the future as the first recorded date in history, the beginning of the Egyptian calendar, is in the past.
For the first time, points out Dr. Thornwell Jacobs, president of the university and originator of the project, the art of copying books and pictures in reduced size on movie film permits storing a vast bulk of priceless records in limited space. Duplicate “microfilm” copies of volumes for the Georgia vault are being made upon standard cellulose acetate film and upon tissue-thin metal film, a new invention that is believed still more durable. To prepare it, the image of the negative is etched into stainless steel, nickel, or copper by photo-engraving methods. An inlay of another metal, such as platinum, is then deposited in the etched portions. The result is an indestructible picture on metal in black upon a white background.
Five rolls of film, surrounded by inert gas, are sealed in a glass tube. Protected by a layer of asbestos, the tube in turn is placed in a seamless receptacle of stainless steel, a foot long and four inches in diameter. The receptacle itself is inclosed in a ribbed casting of extra-strong alloy, capable of resisting a crushing force of thousands of pounds. Row upon row of these receptacles will line the metal shelves of the crypt. Barring accident, their contents should be found in perfect condition after sixty centuries!
Suppose the location of the vault is for- gotten with passing centuries? Descriptions of the deposit, engraved on metal, will be placed in all the great libraries and museums of the world, and even in such out-of-the-way places as monasteries in Tibet and temples in China and India! Some one of these clews will almost inevitably be discovered. If English is an unknown tongue by 8113, how can the records be deciphered ? The first thing to meet the eye of a person entering the vault will be a movie machine of the pioneer “mutoscope” type, with the addition of a phonograph attachment. Turning a crank reveals one of 3,000 metal plates, bearing, say, a picture of an apple and “APPLE” in print. Sound apparatus then pronounces the word.
Since no one knows what sort of electric current people will use in 8113 A.D., if it is available at all, a windmill generator will provide current for the electric sound-film projector.
Records to be stored away will include sound films of the voices of present-day leaders, stereoscopic photos of all the world’s masterpieces of sculpture, a year-by-year history-in-pictures of the United States for the last 100 years, and the world’s greatest masterpieces of poetry. Models will show every essential kind of modern tool and machine, household utensils and tableware, and great engineering feats. A complete set of costumes for men and women will be preserved in helium gas. There will be cook books, histories, science textbooks, and books of practical instruction in mechanics, engineering, and all the arts and manufactures. Two Popular Science handbooks are to be included. Supermen of 8113 may be chagrined to find that some of their inventions were anticipated as early as the twentieth century. Or, if world war or some natural cataclysm has made mankind revert to a barbaric state by that time, the “lost arts” preserved in the Georgia crypt might conceivably start the race back along the road to civilization."

Popular Science, December 1938