Conversations with Hitler
On the authenticity of Hermann Rauschning's "Conversations with Hitler"
Joachim Köhler's wet dream of blaming Richard Wagner for the Holocaust is the common thread throughout his book Wagner's Hitler-The Prophet and his Disciple. Köhler bases this claim, among other things, on the testimony of Hermann Rauschning in his book "Conversations with Hitler." What about its authenticity and what are the facts available to us today?
"Gespräche mit Hitler" from 1939 is one of the most influential, but also one of the most controversial books ever published about Hitler, says Jan Oegema in his preface to the Dutch translation of Rauschning's book. The book is said to be the literal record of a series of conversations Hitler had with him and others. The first postwar generation of historians and biographers drew richly from it. Joachim Fest quoted from it more than 50 times in his 1973 Hitler biography. But his later colleagues have shown restraint. And with good reason, for it has since become clear that Rauschning regularly puts words into his subject's mouth with demonstrably different origins. This revelation is to the credit of Swiss history professor Wolfgang Hänel. What Hänel uncovered in 1984 was disconcerting : Rauschning had met Hitler only four times, had thus quoted much that did not come directly from Hitler's mouth, had deliberately made his account spectacular here and there, and had been urged to do all this by a Parisian publisher who knew how to make handsome money from anti-Nazi books and who could reward Rauschning handsomely for his achievements. Those revelations made big headlines at the time in Der Spiegel and Die Zeit, among others.
"The authenticity of Conversations with Hitler by Hermann Rauschning is now in such doubt that I have not quoted from it once," says Hitler biographer Ian Kershaw in 1999. German historian Brigitte Hamann does not even bother to mention Rauschning in both her books Winifred Wagner oder Hitlers Bayreuth and Hitlers Wien. Frederic Spotts describes Rauschning as belonging to that suspect category of sources from which he quotes only if that quote is confirmed by another independent source. Richard Evans, author of the monumental study on The Third Reich, does not waste a word on Rauschning.
Hermann Rauschning was born in 1887 and earned a doctorate in music history. In 1931 or 1932 he joined the NSDAP, a party that he believed had a more powerful answer to the economic crisis and the disgrace of Weimar. The Nazi leadership appointed him senate president of the free city of Danzig in the early summer of 1933. He held this post until November 1934, when due to political differences he was no longer maintainable by the Nazis and was forced to make way for his local rival, Gauleiter Albert Forster. It was in his position as Senate president that Rauschning met Hitler several times (four meetings are certain, two are uncertain). Rauschning left Danzig in 1936. With stopovers in Poland, Switzerland, France and England, he emigrated to the United States in 1940, where he died on his farm in Portland on Feb. 8, 1982. Until his death, he always avoided all critical questions regarding the content and creation of his infamous book. The latter proves one thing above all : that he was shy about the origin of the quotations and that he was very well aware that he had misled the reader by wrapping his message in a genre that had acquired the status of an authentic source. Had Rauschning simply given his view of the dictator and his intentions, of course, the immediate effect would have proved incomparably weaker than the version of authentic utterances. That tactic caught on as the book became a glorious bestseller immediately upon its publication, just months after the outbreak of WWII.
Nevertheless, there are still historians who see Rauschning as an important witness, a man who quoted Hitler well, if not literally, at least in the spirit. Perhaps that is why Rauschning has always had more credit with philosophers and literati, including, for example, Abel Herzberg, Harry Mulisch, George Steiner and Rüdiger Safranski. The latter broke a lance for Rauschning in 1996 in his essay Das Böse : "People have disputed the authenticity of the conversations recorded by Rauschning. The discussion of them is barren and purely academic simply because, as is well known, Hitler left nothing to try to put into action all the ideas developed in those conversations. Hitler's politics is proof of the authenticity of those conversations."
Claims like these leave the reader with the uneasy feeling that historical truth has suddenly become an elastic concept. Through preface and epilogue, the publisher of the Dutch translation makes every effort to perpetuate the Rauschning myth, probably motivated by self-interest. The publisher does not fail to point out that criticism of Hänel and his followers has also grown among historians. The preface reads: Jürgen Hensel and Pia Nordblom argued in 2003 for a more balanced approach. They dispute that Rauschning was a frustrated Altnazi, eager for revenge and money, and refute some of Hänel's claims with vigorous arguments and by invoking archival material that has recently become available. Without condoning or glossing over anything, they show that the genesis of the conversations is more complex than Hänel suggests. They put into perspective the role of the Paris publisher (Hänel's chief informant, who was demonstrably mistaken when he claimed that the idea for the conversations came entirely from him) and make a plausible case that the challenged publication made Rauschning little financial gain (even though, according to Hänel, it had made him a wealthy man). More generally, they believe that Rauschning deserves renewed attention from historical scholarship by virtue of his accomplishments and his special position as Hitler's "right-wing" opponent.
The remarkable thing is that you can google your way to the Hensel/Nordblom study but you will not find anything about it. No rave reviews in German newspapers this time. Is the German conscience better off condemning Rauschning?
The "Conversations with Hitler" are the only source in which Hitler reveals something about his personal interpretation of one of Wagner's works, specifically Parsifal. That passage sounds like this : "By the way, you must see the Parsifal quite differently from how it is usually interpreted, as, among others, by that silly Wolzogen. Behind the insipid Christian fable in enchanting Good Friday concealment lies something entirely different: the actual theme of this profound drama. Not Christian-Schopenhauerian pity is glorified here, but pure, noble blood. To shepherd and glorify this in all its purity, the knowing have found each other in brotherhood. The king suffers from an incurable malady, that of the corrupt blood. Then the unconscious but pure man is led into temptation to surrender in Klingsor's enchanted court to the lust and intoxication of a depraved civilization, or to accompany the noble knights who guard the secret of life: the pure blood. We all suffer from the malady of the mixed, depraved blood. How can we cleanse ourselves and do penance? Notice that the pity that leads to insight applies only to the inwardly depraved, the ambiguous. And that this pity has only one action, which is to let the sick person die. The eternal life granted by the grail is given only to the truly pure, the noble!
To me Wagner's trains of thought are deeply familiar. I return to him at every stage of my development. Only a new nobility can lead us upward to a new culture. If we disregard the poetic, then it turns out that only in the persistence of a long struggle does ennoblement and regeneration occur. A world-historical shifting process takes place. Whoever sees in struggle the meaning of life, ascends the ranks of a new nobility. He who desires the dependent happiness of peace and order, regardless of descent, sinks into the nameless masses. The mass, however, is at the mercy of decay and self-absorption. At our world revolutionary turning point, the masses are the sum of the dwindling culture and its dying representatives. They should be left to die together with their Kings like Amfortas. " Hitler hummed the motif "Durch Mitleid wissend."
"It can almost be assumed with certainty that Rauschning has invented his testimony about Parsifal and most of his so-called conversations " says Saul Friedländer at the symposium Wagner und die Juden. It's not even that hard to figure out what inspired him. In Mein Kampf, Hitler writes :" The sin against blood and race is the original sin of this world, and it means the end of a self-sacrificing humanity...;there is only one sacred human right...;to ensure that blood is kept pure." Nowhere does Hitler refer to Wagner or to Parsifal. That is most likely the work of Rauschning who puts a variant of this statement in his mouth and makes the connection to Parsifal himself.
There are two authentic sources that could confirm Rauschning's Parsifal statement but explicitly do not : the "Table Talks" on the one hand and Gertrud Strobel's diary on the other.
The "Table Talks" came about under the supervision of Hitler's secretary Martin Bormann. They took place between July 1941 and November 1944 in various military headquarters on the Eastern Front where Hitler was accustomed to having sober meals with his staff and guests. Like an old-fashioned pater familias, Hitler philosophizes in them about everything that concerns him. If Parsifal was so ideologically important to him why did he never discuss it in intimate circles but did so to the insignificant provincial Rauschning? Or as Hermann Göring declared at the post-war Nuremberg trial : "Do you really believe that the Führer would have confessed his most secret insights to the first provincial politician?"
More convincing still are the diary entries of Gertrud Strobel. Gertrud Strobel was a chorister at the Bayreuther Festival and a friend of Wieland Wagner. The diary contains a variety of statements made by Wieland as a result of his conversations with the Nazi leadership. In 1942, Wieland has several meetings with Hitler in which the role of Parsifal within the Third Reich is discussed. Nowhere does Wieland mention an understated, racist interpretation of Parsifal to Hitler, and it may be clear that Wieland spoke with Hitler about art matters for much longer than Rauschning did. There is no conceivable reason why the 25-year-old Wieland, with the highest cultural office at hand, would have hidden this from his girlfriend.
The conclusion from all this can only be that it is highly unlikely that Hitler saw a racist agenda in Parsifal. But even if Rauschning's testimony were correct, it is clear that he is turning the world upside down. Thus concludes Udo Bermbach at the symposium Wagner im Dritten Reich: "From such an insight, one might conclude that Parsifal was Hitler's model and inspiration for a blood order, for an elite group of the NS movement, ideological support for the intention to raise in 'order castles' a violent, lordly, fearless and cruel youth , appearing as the beautiful, self-governing god-man, as a cultic image, or however Hitler and Himmler may have imagined the SS as a form of Grail Knighthood.
It must be remembered, however, that such a highly selective understanding of reception has virtually nothing to do with the opera itself. For the Nazi fantasies of masculinity and blood were not at all compatible with the character of the protagonist, much less with Wagner's original intentions. The tendencies of pacifism, religious compassion, an ascetic renunciation of the world, and the suppression of urges, perhaps even a suppressed homosexuality, which impose themselves on a narrowly conceived interpretation of the text, must have caused the Nazi ideologues the greatest difficulties."
The Nazi top having great ideological objections to Parsifal is confirmed by Gertrud Strobel's diary and by the removal of Parsifal from the Bayreuther Festival's playing schedule during the war years. Bermbach again : "Given these facts, it is completely absurd to claim that the murder of millions of European Jews is the lasting mark that Parsifal left on history." Joachims Köhler's wet dream is in dire straits.
EPILOGUE
In 2014, seventeen years after the publication of "Wagner's Hitler," the Munich literary scholar Joachim Köhler confessed that he had been wrong. In an essay titled "Wagners Acquittal," published in The Wagner Journal, he listed all the arguments that completely disprove his previously formulated thesis. Köhler thereby relegates his outrageous train of thought to the junk room of history. Those who diligently quoted from it go with him into the depths. The German historian Michael Hesemann, for example. In his book "Hitler's Religion," he bluntly calls Wagner a racist and blames him for an unsavory blood ideology. Consult Hesemann's source list and you will see only a single work on Wagner; you guessed it, Joachim Köhler's "Wagner's Hitler."
Why Köhler was incapable of this exercise of thought 17 years ago and what distress of conscience led him to put on the penitential robe is a mystery to me but undoubtedly belongs to the realm of psychopathology.
"We must allow them to die with their kings, like Amfortas." This single sentence renders Rauschning's entre book rubbish. Amfortas doesn't die in *Parsifal*. Hitler knew this. He couldn't have uttered those words.