Product Description

This book presents an absorbing account of the bizarre relationship between the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the composer Richard Wagner, and Wagner's mistresslater wifeCosima. It sheds intriguing light on Nietzsche's early writings, showing how they were subverted by the Wagners' pre-fascist ideology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1736131 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 192 pages

Amazon.com Review
When Friedrich Nietzsche first met Richard Wagner in 1869, the magisterial composer was more than twice the age of the fledgling philologist. Wagner had also just been banished from the royal court of Bavaria for his adulterous affair with Cosima von Bülow. Although the friendship between the two men began rather well, it would famously degenerate into a bitter intellectual and emotional feud, over which Nietzsche would continue to obsess even after Wagner's death in 1883 (but then, Cosima--who'd married Wagner as soon as possible after her divorce--was more than happy to keep up her late husband's end of the battle, and Nietzsche's own death in 1900 did nothing to change that).

Joachim Köhler's densely compact Nietzsche and Wagner draws heavily upon available correspondence from all parties--and Nietzsche's early writings--to examine this turbulent relationship. The point is not so much that Wagner was a manipulative jerk (although he certainly was that) or that Nietzsche and Cosima, who both suffered miserably in youth, were psychologically vulnerable to Wagner's seductive but emotionally abusive behavior; rather, the idea seems to be an examination of the effects of the relationship on the philosopher's thinking, both before and after their breakup. It's an academically rigorous account, so while it is fraught with traces of melodrama, they are buried under careful analytic prose, making this book far more suitable for scholars than general readers interested in biographical data on any of the principals involved. --Ron Hogan

From Library Journal
First published in Germany in 1996, this book studies the complex relationship among Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, and Wagner's wife, Cosima. Kohler, an editor at Hoffman & Kampe Verlag, demonstrates a parallel between the interaction of the three principal characters and the myth of Dionysus and Ariadne, a story that obsessed Nietzsche throughout most of his adult life and that serves as the theme for the entire narrative. Their story has all the turgid ingredients of a good 19th-century novel: art, revolution, philosophy, erotic jealousy, infidelity, insanity, and a cast of real characters the equal of any in classical literature. Given the complicated material and the number of facts per square inch, the translation is as clear as one could expect. Truth can be as fascinating as fiction. Recommended for public and academic libraries.?Timothy J. McGee, Univ. of Toronto, Canada
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A speculative, sometimes fanciful interpretation of the relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. In 1869, when he was 25 years old, Nietzsche fell under the spell of Wagner, the most influential anti-Semite of 19th-century Germany. Khler, author of another, untranslated book detailing Wagner's supposed influence on Hitler, tries to show how the young Nietzsche was the willing executor of Wagner's vicious ideological agenda. Khler's success is at best modest. Hes able to produce some anti-Jewish passages from Nietzsche's minor early works. However, the author is so eager to press his case against Nietzsche that, in the face of sparse or contradictory evidence, he resorts to deciphering hidden messages. Even when Nietzsche is not talking about the Jews (for instance, when he rants against ``the Philistines'' of Germany), we learn that he is using a secret code to imply that Jewish people are the actual culprits. Khler's argument has the kind of edgy paranoia associated with conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination or alien kidnappings: Evidence to the contrary always points to a sinister cover-up. Khler first portrays Nietzsche as an anti-Semite, but offers no explanation for his change of heart when he appears at the Wagners' with a close Jewish friend in tow. Finally, though, Khler's strongest interest emerges toward the end of the book. The evidence suggests to him that Nietzsche turned against Wagner because Wagner knew about Nietzsche's secret life as a homosexual. This kind of radical reinterpretation calls for careful sourcing. And yet, Khler doesnt bother with footnotes: A skimpy ``bibliographical note'' is made to stand in for the customary critical apparatus. He may be right that the possible anti-Semitism of Nietzsche's Wagner phase hasnt really been dealt withmaybe, even, that Nietzsche was a homosexualbut Khler's own exploration of these questions is itself insufficient. (14 illustrations) -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

Incoherent, ignorant, incompetent
Once in a lifetime a book comes along ... that is so arm-wavingly silly that it's almost Pythonesque. This book, "Nietzsche and Wagner: a Study in Subjugation" is actually less reliable than Robert Gutman's or Marc Weiner's Wagner books, which were previously the record-holders. But Kohler beats them hollow. I'm sorry to say that this book has the scholarly merit of a UFO abduction memoir.

Kohler doesn't even bother to try to substantiate his various untrue and silly claims. One of these claims is that Nietzsche was homosexual, for which Kohler (as several critics have pointed out) adduces no evidence at all. Maybe Kohler thinks that Nietzsche calling a book "Die Froeliche Wissenschaft" (The Gay Science) makes Nietzsche "gay" in the current sense. (The meaning of "gay" seems to be changing again, but that's another story.) But we have plenty of evidence of Nietzsche's heterosexuality and no evidence at all of same-sex desire or practice. Nietzsche was a misogynist, hostile and contemptuous towards women, also clearly afraid of them, but that doesn't make him homosexual. Kohler seems to think that claiming something is the same as making it so.

Kohler also claims that after the Nietzsche-Wagner split Wagner conducted a relentless and vindictive campaign against Nietzsche on the grounds that he (Nietzsche) was homosexual. Again, Kohler doen't support this claim of a homophobic campaign by Wagner with any evidence. But then, how could he? There was no such campaign. Instead there was the famous letter from Wagner to Nietzsche's doctor, expressing concern for the health of "our young friend N."and suggesting that Nietzsche's nervous problems might be caused by excessive masturbation.

Wagner's letter is splendidly dotty, but it also brings Kohler's claims crashing to the ground. (1) Masturbation is not the same thing as homosexuality. Wagner did not think Nietzsche was homosexual; instead, prescient in so many things, Wagner was the first major thinker to call Nietzsche a wanker (just kidding, Nietzsche fans). (2) A kindly meant, if eccentric, letter to Nietzsche's doctor is not quite the same thing as persecution. It's clear from Cosima Wagner's Diaries that Wagner's private reaction to the split with Nietzsche was regret, a wish to have the breach healed, and an undoubtedly patronising pity for "that poor young man" Nietzsche. These are not the sort of feelings that lead to persecution or a campaign of vilification, as Kohler claims.

As well, Wagner's actual attitude to homosexuals (there were no gays in the 19th Century) is suggested in an earlier letter to a homosexual friend. Wagner suggests that his friend "try to cut down a little, on the pederasty"... The attitude is one of amused tolerance, which won't do now, but it was progressive and liberal by the standards of his time. Wagner wasn't a homophobe.

In fact Wagner didn't respond in public to Nietzsche's repeated attacks (except once, a very indirect reference in one of his essays, without mentioning Nietzsche's name); contra Kohler, the abuse was very much a one-way street, and not in the direction that Kohler suggests.

Kohler also presents a Nietzsche who wrote antisemitic passages in his works during the alliance with Wagner, but who stopped after the split. This is simply and flagrantly untrue. The post-Wagner Nietzsche attacked antisemites, but he also continued to attack and insult Jews. There are many, many antisemitic passages in Nietzsche's work - Nietzsche fans, like Kohler and the reviewer from Kirkus Review quoted above, like to overlook Nietzsche's antisemitism, but antisemites find Nietzsche a useful supporter and resource. You'll find plenty of antisemitic quotes from Nietzsche on proud display on the Web's neo-Nazi sites, and the vast majority of these antisemitic passages were written AFTER the split with Wagner.

And there's Nietzsche's attack on Wagner in which he claimed that Wagner had a Jewish father. There is irony, of course, in claiming an antisemite has Jewish parentage. But it reflects what Wagner himself seems to have believed, that the man who was almost certainly his real father, Ludwig Geyer, was Jewish. For this attack Nietzsche must have drawn on his private conversations with Wagner, in which Wagner poured out personal fears to a man he believed was his friend. The nastiness in Nietzsche's attack is in the betrayal of confidence, not in the claiming that Wagner had a Jewish parent.

I mention this attack by Nietzsche, couched in antisemitic terms and involving personal betrayal, because Kohler skips blithely over it. Imagine what he'd said if it had been the other way round; Wagner attacking Nietzsche in antisemitic terms while betraying an intimate confidence. But in fact there are suspiciously few quotes of any kind from Nietzsche in Kohler's book. Given the book's profound ignorance of the details of Nietzsche's or Wagner's life and philosophies, I suspect this is not so much because Kohler wants to keep it simple, but because he is not particularly familiar with his subjects' work. Given the sort of book he's written, he didn't need to be.

By the way, an earlier book by Kohler, that's only just been translated into English, "Wagner's Hitler", is now available. Friends who've read the German edition tell me that it's even more fanciful, nonsensical, dishonest and incoherent than this book. I'll look for it in a remainder bin.

Laon

Ecce Homo(cough, you know what).
A great sage once said, "All history's a lie" and this book only further enhances that point. Which is why I am recommending it.

Kohler not only contends that Nietzsche was a homosexual, but an uber-sissy who was lowered to menial tasks of propaganda and undershorts buying for the heavy-handed Master Wagner. Drawing largely from the diaries and personal correspondence of three megalomaniacs, which we know are highly accurate accounts of objective reality and history, Kohler paints a picture of a menage a trois of ascetic bondage: Nietzsche to Cosima and the Maestro, Cosima to the Master, and Wagner himself to the libidinous gods of hedonism. To top this off, the Dionysian Nietzsche in his final stages of dementia and mustachio maximus, calls out to Cosima, his spiritual Ariadne and soul-bride to come save his tottering soul from the labryrinth of the Wagnerian oppression that continued even after their reknowned split. Thus proclaiming, "C-o-s-i-m-a, you are the only MAN for me." Well Kohler didn't say that, but in saying that Wagner was "a woman" in Nietzsche's eyes and that Nietzsche himself, the constant companion of man-worshippers and man-worship was feminine in affection and mannerisms towards his friendths[sic], we can deduce from Nietzsche's admiration for her as an intellectual equal(remember his MISOGYNY!), that she was the only masculine personality in the triumvirate and thus Nietzsche's love and his homosexuality are validated. Not to mention that Herr Wagner is a dead ringer for Redd Foxx!

All facts and fictions aside, the book made me laugh quite a few times. Maybe the truth was lost somewhere in the translation from German to English but it didn't stop my enjoyment. Why let history and truth get in the way of that? I mean, Nietzschean lore has purported that the young man, while serving in the German calvary during a riding exercise had fallen from his saddle and was dangling upside down under the belly of the horse(Perhaps it was the same horse that he witnessed being flogged and this was what sparked his madness!) and said, "Oh Schopenhauer, where are you now?" Who's buying that but the ghost of Schopenhauer and me?

Awful logic, tendentious manipulation of facts
This hatchet job is truly a scandal. The author has an ax to grind. Skip it.