Posted on 10/18/2018 9:00:18 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
The Nazi years lie like a bolt over the memory of a good Germany, of the composers, poets and philosophers who gave the world so much beauty and enlightenment in the 18th and 19th centuries: Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Wagner and the Romantics. Nevertheless...in only a few years, a nation of culture was turned into one of modern barbarians.
Could the philosophical abstraction, artistic elation and yearning for collective salvation that drove the country also have contributed to its ultimate derailing into the kind of mania that defined the years of National Socialism? After all, it wasn't just the dull masses that followed the Führer. Members of the cultural elite were also on their knees.
Music and the Holocaust come together in that shadow: one of the most beautiful things created by man, and one of the worst things human beings have ever done. Wagner, the mad genius, was more than a composer. He also influenced Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, even though he was already dead when the 12-year-old Hitler heard his music live for the first time, when he attended a production of "Lohengrin" in the Austrian city of Linz in 1901. Describing the experience, during which he stood in a standing-room only section of the theater, Hitler wrote: "I was captivated immediately."
Many others feel the same way. They listen to Wagner and are captivated, overwhelmed, smitten and delighted. Nike Wagner, the composer's great-granddaughter, puts the question that this raises in these terms: "Should we allow ourselves to listen to his works with pleasure, even though we know that he was an anti-Semite?" There's a bigger issue behind this question: Can Germans enjoy any part of their history in a carefree way?
(Excerpt) Read more at spiegel.de ...
Valentina is Ukrainian, BTW. She is a riot in her heavily accented English, doing a vid called “How to become a concert pianist in five easy steps” or something like that.
My fave Valentina number is Chopin’s Black Key Etude. Amazing!
this is kinda stupid, IMHO
since hitler rode around in a mercedes, should Mercedes be forever with an asterisk by their name?
same goes for BMW...airplane engines for the luftwaffe, and of course, motorcycles for the wehrmacht
daimler.....aircraft engines
walther pistols
mauser...rifles...
etc etc ad nauseum...
If von Braun hadn't gone along with the Reich, he would probably not have survived the war at all. Certainly if he had made known any misgivings he had during the time of the death camp assembly lines, he would have been executed immediately.
He was a true believer and rocket enthusiast well before the dritte Reich, and from what I can discover, his interest in going to the moon was entirely sincere, having begun when he was a boy.
It was my understanding that he was an inspirational leader to the people at NASA; his personal charisma caused the people who worked for him to struggle and go beyond their limitations in order to get his nod of approval.
His willingness to put away his own vision for the mission profile — replacing it with the staged concept of John Houbolt once he understood the wisdom of that approach — has always struck me as a true demonstration of von Braun's caliber as a person.
Anyway, I'm not really arguing with you. His service to Hitler will always stain his memory, and I guess it's true to say he had blood on his hands.
“...Wagner was reverse engineered by Lord of the Rings into a giant blessing.” [ckilmer, post 11]
“...If anything Tolkien took Wagner’s Idea.” [partyrepub, post 24]
“...Tolkien by contrast set out to repurpose the old pagan stories to make them a sounder foundation for the Christianity that would succeed them...” [David P Goldman, cited approvingly by DiogenesLamp in post 72]
Forum members who see parallels - or causality - between Der Ring Des Nibelungen and The Lord of the Rings have too much time on their hands. And they are too in love with conspiracies. Or, they are searching for a doctoral dissertation topic by force-fitting their own fantasies onto words that simply cannot go together.
Der Ring Des Nibelungen is Germanic.
The Lord of the Rings is English.
The appearance of a “Ring” in both stories is a coincidence.
In Der Ring Des Nibelungen, the Ring was not even a ring to begin with. It was a magical material with power, but no moral content. The characters imbued it with good or evil according to their own qualities.
In the Lord of the Rings, the ring was first a maguffin. The author had to rewrite major portions of his alternate cosmology to make everything fit. And while the One Ring was indubitably, irretrievably evil, bear in mind that the author stated flatly that “...nothing was evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so...”
I’d put less importance on a stray comment JRR Tolkien made to a BBC interviewer, than his written words in the preface to some edition of The Lord of the Rings, where he denied the tale had any purpose beyond “a really long tale” spun by a tale-teller, to entertain, captivate, move readers.
In other written comments, Professor Tolkien remarked that there was no specifically “English” mythology or legend, and that he created hobbits in part to make up for that lack. He certainly did not do it to convert readers to Christianity. No matter how many rabbis or American fundamentalists wish otherwise.
Not everything is imbued with morality. As Americans, we make a mistake to believe such: it overcomplicates and oversimplifies our perception of reality, all at once.
doesn’t sound like you believe or understand blessings and curses. That’s ok.
... and with Natalie Wood.
/sarcoff
Yep. I do love some Romantic, especially Tchaikovsky.
= The Tyranny of Recency.
Human foible exploited by communists.
How Neoconservatives Destroyed Southern Conservatism
Of course it's nonsense.
The older Southern conservatism wasn't as benign as he implies.
Today conservatism in the South reflects aspects of the old and the new South more than anything alien and neoconservative.
And, overheated language aside, the author doesn't show that what he favors would be much of an improvement.
But what does it have to do with Richard Wagner?
That doesn't change the connection between Hitler and Wagner, but it should be noted that the idea some people have that Nazi Germany was mad about Wagner isn't really that true.
Was it addressed to you?
Dr. Wernher von Braun, Marshall Space Flight Center's first director, points out details on a Saturn rocket to President Dwight D. Eisenhower. President Eisenhower was at Marshall to participate in the center's dedication ceremony, Sept. 8, 1960.
Two years earlier on July 29, 1958, President Eisenhower signed into law the National Aeronautics and Space Act (Pub.L. 85-568), the United States federal statute that created NASA.
I tend to agree with Gioachino Rossini (William Tell, Barber of Seville) who said, “Monsieur Wagner has good moments, but awful quarters of an hour!”
Great quote by GR.
Here's what it has to do with Wagner: the mentality of apologetic self-hatred and self-flagellation that motivates politically correct Germans to blacklist Wagner's music (Richard Wagner Platz in Leipzig was recently renamed "willkommene Flüchtlinge Platz" = "Welcome Refugees Platz") is identical to the mindset of politically correct Americans who want to purge Confederate monuments and anything else that might offend overly sensitive "minorities" and Social Justice Warriors.
Thank you! I had heard of the Tristan Chord but never understood it. Pappano gives a clear demonstration of it.
“doesn’t sound like you believe or understand blessings and curses...” [ckilmer, post 85]
That’s perfectly possible, but I’m not sure what the implications are, in attempting to comprehend the real world.
Literary critics are forever seeing patterns where no real-world interaction exists. Not too many English-lit majors have a grip on reality that is any surer; they are free to draw any and all parallels they can dream up, but defending such in a credible manner is something else.
JRR Tolkien was a philologist first and foremost: gifted with an extraordinary imagination, he created languages. Then he dreamt up peoples, societies, and locales who spoke those languages. All entirely fictional. And - unlike many (most) authors of fantasy and science fiction - all of his worked together pretty decently, on its own terms. So much so, in fact, that readers were seduced in numbers unprecedented. Hardly any fan of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings can deny that Middle Earth is so compelling, so wondrous, that at times they’ve wished it were true; that it ought to be real.
But neither work can be properly understood outside the cosmology and made-up history Tolkien imagined for them: The Silmarillion barely scrapes the surface. The dozen-plus volumes of additional material compiled, edited, and published since its appearance by Tolkien’s son Christopher helps in obtaining perspective.
Forum members might find it interesting to read Tolkien’s essay “On Faerie Stories”, and additional works like Leaf by Niggle and Farmer Giles of Ham.
Critics and lit students have written a lot of words about Tolkien’s writings, but few have perceived the central truth that The Lord of the Rings is a tragedy: a final act (not a very big one either) of the entire alternate cosmology sketched out in The Silmarillion, which itself is a tragedy.
If you don't want people to comment on something, you can click private reply and send a freepmail to whoever you want.
Your writer thinks the one true Southern tradition is conservative and libertarian, against the federal government and maybe just against government, against foreign wars and maybe just against wars.
Apparently, he never heard of Madison, Jackson and Polk: Wars against Britain and Mexico, Jacksonian Democracy, Westward Expansion, Manifest Destiny.
And if he's heard of Wilson, Truman, and Lyndon Johnson, he may not think of them as real Southerners. Maybe they weren't 100% Southern, but they certainly weren't New Englanders or New Yorkers.
Still don't see what this has to do with Wagner and Hitler, though.
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