What it Means to be an Antisemite: The Case of Wagner
With the playing of Richard Wagner compositions at the 20th year celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall last week, various discussion threads have brought up the issue of how to relate to artists who expressed antisemitism who “lived in another era.”
The case of Wagner shows however that the musician did not passively accept anti-Jewish stereotypes and pass them on to others through simply reproducing them on the margins of his work, but rather that he was an antisemitic activist, ruining the careers of Jewish artists in particular, and transforming Christian anti-Judaism (with its forced assimilation of Jews into Christian society) into a systematic German racial antisemitism (where even assimilated Jews were blamed for the “downfall” of Christian society and who should be excluded from it).
