Na’ama Sheffi teaches at the School of Communication at Sapir College, Sderot (Israel). She completed her studies in modern history at Tel Aviv University, and has published extensively on German and Israeli culture.

The Ring of Myths

The Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis

By Na’ama Sheffi, Martha Grenzeback, Miriam Talisman

Sussex Academic Press

Copyright © 2014 Na’ama Sheffi
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84519-574-8

Contents

Preface,
Glossary of Political Parties,
1 An End that Marked a Beginning,
2 Legends, Tribes, and Anti-Semitism: Ideas and Issues in Wagner’s Work,
3 Racism, Music, and Power: The Nazification of Wagner,
4 Music, Politics, and Morality: The Beginning of the Boycott in Palestine,
5 Toward Germany, Away from Germans,
6 The 1960s: An End to Forgetting – The Establishment of Symbols,
7 The 1970s: Political Furor, Musical Calm,
8 The 1980s: Xenophobia and Overt Political Intervention,
9 The 1990s: A Breakthrough and Stagnation,
10 The Early 2000s: A Mounting Wall,
11 Epilogue: Wagner and the Israelis – A Multifaceted Commemoration,
Bibliography,
Index,

CHAPTER 1

An End that Marked a Beginning

In November 1938, following the decision of the Palestine Symphony Orchestra to cut the prelude of Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg from its first concert series of the season, performance of Richard Wagner’s music in Palestine, and later, Israel, came to an end over an extended period. From then on, no professional musical body in Israel could play works by this celebrated German composer without creating an uproar; for that cancellation, motivated by a desire to condemn the conduct of the Third Reich and the Nazis’ incitement of the Kristallnacht pogroms, proved to be the beginning of a taboo that would persist for many years. In Israel the boycotted composer became one of the most prominent and problematic symbols of the Third Reich’s legacy. Wagner’s exclusion from Israeli repertoires in succeeding years was the basis for a long series of disputes marking the beginning of a complex and intriguing public debate. As a sort of invisible presence, Wagner became a central figure in a process of cultural controversy which at times even seemed manipulative, extending far beyond the boundaries of the musical world.

The Wagner affair became one of the most interesting junctures between art and politics in Israeli society. In its early stages the political aspect seemed dominant. Members of the Yishuv (the small Jewish community) in Palestine received news of distressing developments in Europe in general and in Germany in particular, but were not always able to grasp its significance. When matters came to a crisis – or at least what seemed at the time to be the apex of brutality – the political leadership in Palestine could do little in response. The Yishuv was small and ruled by another power – the British Empire; the Yishuv’s influence in the international order that had been violated by the rise of dictatorial regimes in Europe was slight indeed. Thus, even if the Zionist leadership considered taking some sort of action, its only real option was propaganda, which would be disseminated primarily among Jews rather than other, more important and influential, leaders.

However, in the cultural sphere the leadership of the Yishuv found compensation for its political impotence. Although on both the political and cultural levels any response was essentially directed inwards, toward Jewish society – and particularly Palestinian Jewish society – gestures in the cultural field were perceived as having a wider impact. Moreover, the means used to express protest made it seem more of a public statement, and heightened the Jewish community’s sense of internal solidarity by uniting the different sectors of the Yishuv. The Jews of Palestine themselves, at least, could see some sort of trenchant statement in their modest response. Their cultural protest served largely as an outlet for political steam and the emotions that had built up with respect to the Nazis.

The cancellation of Wagner’s piece, which was one of those most popular with the leaders of the National-Socialist party, was only one element in the cultural struggle against the Third Reich. The same aversion to German sounds applied to the German language, and as a result the first victims of the opposition to the Third Reich’s outrages were in fact Jewish immigrants from Central Europe who had chosen to settle in Palestine. Their continued use of the German language made them a target for the ridicule of the veteran community, and their mother tongue a focus of nationalistic opposition. At the same time, selective restrictions were imposed on the import of German culture to Palestine, one of the most conspicuous examples being an embargo on German- language films. Another major change was in the kind of books translated from German to Hebrew. From the beginning of the 1930s to the establishment of the state, the translation of German works into Hebrew increasingly provided a means of expressing opposition to Nazi ideology. The main trend in the translation sphere at that time was a very calculated, ostentatious discrimination in favor of writers whose works the Nazis sought to eliminate – Jews and other opponents of the Nazi regime – and a complete disregard of literature admired by the Third Reich.

What began as a political statement and a struggle over the image of modern Hebrew culture became a vehicle for perpetuating and shaping the cultural heritage after World War II and the establishment of the State of Israel. As the true dimensions of the Holocaust began to emerge, and the Nazi-inflicted physical and emotional scars of the survivors were revealed, the Israeli perception of German culture became a channel for expressing horror, rage, and hate. Initially there was a sweeping opposition to German culture as such. However, over the years the scope of the rejected culture narrowed dramatically until it comprised only isolated cultural items, most notably the music of certain German composers – especially Richard Wagner.

The evolution of the resistance to Wagner’s music in Israel encompasses far more than the history of a modern Israeli cultural repertoire. Doubtlessly many people are familiar with the main points of the affair, either from personal memory or from having noticed Wagner’s absence from the musical repertoire in Israel; others have learned about the turbulent attitude toward Wagner through the drawn-out dispute. The development of the complex relationship between the State of Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany – as well as between Israeli and German society – is also well known. However, conjoining the two subjects may shed additional light on the construction of nationality in Israeli society, and on the ways in which that society has dealt with its past and with the creation of its collective memory. An integrated study of the three sides of the triangle formed by state, society, and culture offers broader insights than the usual treatment of the Wagner affair. By elucidating the different stages of the controversy’s development and by adopting a methodology that incorporates more than one level of research, the present work puts the opposition to Wagner into the context of Israeli reality and explains it more fully. From this perspective the Wagner affair reflects certain aspects of the formation of a modern civil–secular Israeli nationality that has, to some extent, cut itself off from the obsolete practices of the Diaspora. Nonetheless, the 2012 finding that 80 percent of the Israelis believe in God – from “to some extent” to full orthodoxy – suggests that the society is undergoing a significant change.

With each new discussion of Wagner or other musicians who were perceived as inspirations for or collaborators with the Nazi regime, emotions boiled over again in Israel. The main argument against these composers’ music, and the one that kept recurring for several decades, was the absolute impossibility of accepting anyone who had served the satanic regime that had cut short the lives of millions of Jews. At first this argument was voiced most often by those who had experienced the horrors of the Holocaust themselves or who had lost family members in the concentration camps. However, as the years passed it became etched on national memory, a code of conduct and response unrelated to the actual proximity to the Holocaust of individuals in Israeli society.

The different inflections of each successive public debate on the topic – debates that together formed one multifaceted controversy – show that the issue was not purely cultural, or even a clash between cultural needs and political views. The opinions expressed in the course of all the debates over the “forbidden” musicians suggest that historians who see the affair as an intersection of culture and politics may be adopting too narrow a view. The controversy should rather be perceived as a meeting of culture, politics, and social and national integration, since in it the head-on collision of culture and politics gave rise to an ideology that served broad sectors of society.

Among all these highly charged, intersecting issues, certain common lines connected the different phases of the controversy. Since the Wagner affair gave the politicians an axe to grind, its general political features are easily identified. The most prominent of these was its instrumentality. Every sector that pronounced on the issue found Wagner a handy vessel in which to pour ideologies with varying aims. Thus, in the 1950s and 1960s Wagner was an important argument for the factions opposing the restoration of ties with Germany; in the 1970s he was a vehicle for the anger of intellectuals at what they termed Israeli hypocrisy; in the 1980s he was a key figure in the struggle over the preservation of the memory of the Holocaust; in the 1990s he served the national ultra- Orthodox religious ideology which calls on Israelis to content themselves with Hebrew culture and stop copying the ways of the Gentiles; at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Wagner functions mainly as a common emblem that Israelis cannot deny.

However, since the debate was both emotional and rational, attitudes on the Wagner issue did not follow conventional political lines. In general terms, the political right supported the taboo against Wagner and musicians who had collaborated with the Nazis, this being part of their general opposition to any sort of relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. Parts of the center and the left advocated lifting the boycott in the name of ideological pluralism and separation between the ideology of the regime and the professional and ideological decisions of artistic bodies. This attitude may have been fostered to some extent by the spectacle presented by the totalitarian regimes established in the early twentieth century – including the Nazi regime, which had made all cultural institutions subject to the governmental apparatus of the Third Reich. Nonetheless, some members of the right took a moderate view of the affair, while, conversely, even more members of the left – particularly those who had lived through the Holocaust – were vehemently opposed to any lifting of the boycott, out of consideration for the feelings of those who had survived the death camps. At the beginning of the twenty-first century it seems that most politicians prefer to either avoid the sensitive subject or express fierce objection to public performances of the only boycotted artist, Richard Wagner. In short, even the customary characterization of the right as anti-Germany and the left as defenders of freedom of expression does not apply – or less consistently, at least – to this affair.

The process by which politicians became involved in the affair was interesting not only in the context of each particular flare-up of the controversy, but also as a continuing evolution over time. At first their intervention typically consisted of formal statements about the neutrality of the political bodies and the right of every orchestra to make its own artistic decisions. Behind the scenes, however, many political influences were busily at work trying – successfully – to prevent local musicians from shaping their repertoire and the country’s musical life in the European image familiar to them. Hence, in many respects the Wagner affair was conducted much as other cultural and educational issues were at the time: with a great deal of governmental authoritarianism. Nonetheless, Wagner was never formally censored in Israel. All governmental bodies – the Ministry of Education, the Knesset Education and Culture Committee, and the Tel Aviv District Court – all ruled for freedom of expression of musical bodies.

During the first decades of the controversy, government intervention was limited to covert pressure while the Ministry of Education and Culture repeated the litany: If the musical bodies in question were to ask our advice, we would counsel refraining from public performances of works by composers who had collaborated with the Nazis in any way. Only in the last phases of the dispute, when the governing coalition included people who had been vociferous opponents of breaking the taboo in the 1950s and 1960s, and their successors, was there any open attempt to explicitly interfere in the orchestra’s artistic decisions. And even then the Ministry of Education refrained from actually imposing the views of the coalition majority on any musical institution. Yet, in 1994 the Knesset Education and Culture Committee released an appeal “from the heart,” requesting the cultural institutions to refrain from performing the works of anti-Semitic composers, as these might hurt the feelings of the public.

The theoretical possibility of governmental intervention in the establishment of the repertoire exposes one of the legal problems still existing in Israel with respect to civil rights. Until 1992, human rights were not recognized by the Basic Laws, the closest thing to a constitution that Israel has; and even after the enactment of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, many gaps remained that, while making the law more flexible, also emasculated it. Moreover, freedom of speech was still subject to ad hoc decisions by the court system. Since the issue of performing Wagner in Israel never actually came up in a court of law, it was hard to know whose freedom was deemed more important in the eyes of the judiciary. Was an audience’s right to hear music, any music, paramount, or should consideration of a particular sector’s offended sensibilities take precedence? In Israel, there were no hard and fast rules to sanction the infringement of the former or the disregard of the latter. The recurring disputes concerning the performance of Wagner’s music in Israel were possible in part because of the hazy legal status of civil liberties.

Despite similarities between the successive rounds of the controversy over the musical ban, each stage of the dispute had unique aspects that reflected the spirit of the times. During the 1950s, the opposition to Wagner – and, in some cases, to other German music – was fueled by other burning issues of the day. The recent discoveries of what had taken place during the Holocaust and the highly controversial signing of a reparations agreement with the Federal Republic of Germany were central to the debate over cultural affairs. The same arguments that had not prevented the government from concluding a political alliance served as important ammunition in the battle against public performances of music by composers favored by the Nazis; and just as the political struggle against the reparations agreement had given rise to attacks on Ben-Gurion’s policy from both the right and the left, so the cultural dispute, too, created unusual rifts in the leftist camp. The same motives underlying the institutionalization of public commemoration of the Holocaust through the inauguration of a Holocaust and Ghetto Uprising Remembrance Day (1951), the establishment of the Yad Vashem institute to document the Holocaust (1953), and the legislation of the Day of Remembrance of the Holocaust and Heroism (1959) also served the interests of those who opposed any manifestation of German culture in Israel. In other words, the need to preserve the national trauma as a perpetual outrage worked on several cultural levels, from the establishment of the national pattern of commemoration to the codification in art of what was desirable and what was loathsome.

In the following decade opposition to the “forbidden” musicians continued strong, but on slightly different grounds. The Eichmann trial publicly exposed the pain of the survivors and focused public attention on the events of the Holocaust and concentration-camp survivors’ difficulty in living with fears of the past. The trial’s significance for Israeli society and that society’s perception of the Holocaust in all its horror remain controversial. Some claim that the public disclosures made by survivors did not materially change the attitude to the Holocaust, because awareness of the Holocaust had developed earlier; others assert that putting the subject on the public agenda in this revelatory way eliminated the shame associated with the Holocaust and facilitated a rapprochement between those who had “been there” and other Israelis. It was now easier and more acceptable to evoke the horrors of the Holocaust as grounds for rejecting German culture. The revelation at the beginning of the 1960s that the Germans were providing financial assistance for the development of Egyptian missiles lent support to those who claimed that there was no such thing as “another Germany,” and that consequently neither forgiveness nor concessions could be extended. This particular issue remained part of the overall opposition to Germany, although ultimately it proved to be a mountain made out of a molehill. The establishment of diplomatic relations with West Germany in 1965 was grist to the mills of both opponents and proponents of German culture. The opponents saw the cultural issue as the last barrier to the relinquishment of Israel’s anti-German bias, whereas the proponents could now portray their adversaries’ adherence to the cultural taboo as unnecessary and facile niggling that flew in the face of the economic and political ties Israel was developing with Germany.

(Continues…)Excerpted from The Ring of Myths by Na’ama Sheffi, Martha Grenzeback, Miriam Talisman. Copyright © 2014 Na’ama Sheffi. Excerpted by permission of Sussex Academic Press.
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