On the southern edge of Berlin’s main public park, the Tiergarten, stood this elaborate monument to Richard Wagner, arguably Germany’s greatest operatic composer, creator of “The Ring of the Niebelung,” etc. It shows Wagner seated on top gazing at some unseen Valhalla, with other figures, presumably characters from his works, beneath him. I don’t know why the protective overhead canopy was added; maybe his memory is considered too precious to be exposed to the indignities of Nature?

In most places, a memorial to Wagner would just be an edifying tribute to creative genius, but in Germany, events have given his memory darker overtones. His career began in the mid-19th century, well before German unification, but as a strident nationalist, he was considered one of the new German Empire’s artistic godfathers (as Verdi was, for Italy). He set to music ancient Teutonic myths which not only praised heroic values, but offered shared national legends to Germanic peoples – Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, Hessians, etc. – united by language, culture and experience, but long politically separated.

Before and after the founding of the Empire, Wagner wrote music that portrayed Germans as a noble, chivalrous, valiant – and martial – race, and which continued to define and nourish the new country’s sense of identity. Having finally achieved their long-thwarted dream of single nationhood, many Germans reveled in how Wagner depicted their origins and glorified their virtues, seemingly now also manifest in their thriving land’s great feats of science, industry and the arts.

Wagner died in 1883 (well before Hitler was born), but after Germany’s defeat in the Great War/World War I, resentful nationalists continued to be agitated by his works. Hitler, a rabid believer in inherent ethnic superiority, was a fanatical Wagnerian – as much for his message as for his music. Also, Wagner had been well-known as a cultural (if not violent) anti-Semite, considering Jews an alien adulteration of pure German blood and culture – though there is evidently debate as to whether, or how much, Wagner might have approved of the Nazis and their goals.

(I’m not qualified to have a scholarly opinion on that debate. However, pride in one’s ethnic background does not automatically imply enthusiasm for lethal vainglory, let alone for mass murder.)

The Nazis use of Wagner as both symbol and inspiration, to adulate “manly” German pride and destiny, has blotted his reputation ever since their downfall. During World War II, German military heroes often got the signal reward of being sent to performances of his operas in their spiritual sanctuary, the theater Wagner himself designed in Bayreuth (in Bavaria). More gruesome, his music was allegedly played in guard barracks in concentration camps, to make the guards feel heroic (drugged, more like) so they could murder “sub-human” prisoners without hesitation or remorse. Joyously, in fact.

Thus, Wagner, though by any standards a great artist, may never again be known exclusively for his art, as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven are. He may always have the stain of heinous associations, made long after his death, about which it is impossible to be sure how he would have felt. The Nazis used his music to beguile the German people with things they (or at least, a great many of them) longed to believe about themselves, as demigods – unbound by the rules of lesser men – beliefs that would energize them to commit many of the worst crimes of the 20th century.

So I include this picture of his monument as a meditation on German cultural inclination to Fascism, for the way his music was used to stimulate, then sustain the Nazis’ exaltation of power as this world’s principle value. It is a caution that even creativity meant to offer us the experience of the sublime, like Wagner’s music, can be misapplied so as to lure us into the diabolical, and distract us from our sacred, humanity-defining duties as beings capable of empathy.

Art is not meant to so intoxicate a man that he is willing to be indifferent to hate in his heart or blood on his hands; but that was how Hitler used Wagner’s resplendent music.

CONTEXT: This was taken from my original online posts about my trip to Europe in October, 2016. Other posts from my visit to Berlin gave more context about this site, for example, that the Gestapo building had originally been the Prussian Academy of Arts; hence the reference here to ‘art school studios.’

Detainees were held in these underground cells; with walls of common white industrial tile, this might be any basement in the world if one didn’t know what it had been. Gestapo staff routinely tortured prisoners during questioning on the destroyed building’s top floor, where the art school studios had been, but these tiles presumably witnessed immeasurable fear, pain and sorrow before and after such interrogations.

When a site of atrocity shows no evidence of it – just tidy, white walls – the mind’s eye conjures images. The ones I saw were horrific, so I couldn’t treat this as just some generic place of interest; its searing poignancy pleaded for a gesture of sympathy, however seemingly pointless, for what had been endured here. So I gently stroked the smooth surface of these tiles, as if to soothe agony one could imagine seeping through their coating and still being there, in need of comfort. None of the staff told me to stop; I almost certainly wasn’t the first to do such a thing.

Surely, in such a setting, no compassionate impulse, however clumsy, impractical or non-rational should be suppressed; and stroking those tiles was the only one I could think of at that moment. Deliberate suffering of the magnitude inflicted here degrades all of human experience, and thus transcends time; it felt urgent to be empathic to it, no matter how long ago it happened.

But if this place, foremost, saw cruelty and horror, it must also have seen Olympian courage and nobility. Presumably only high-value suspects would have been brought here, major spies, ranking prisoners of war, officials of resistance movements in occupied countries or Germany itself – people the Gestapo thought had precious knowledge that they would do anything, and everything, to extract.

We should remember and honor the bravery many of them must have shown, facing the most terrible circumstances, a price often worse than death paid to save the world from Nazism. Heroes died under hideous torture in this building, rather than yield information that could have cost thousands of Allied lives, or even altered the course of the war. The secrets they defended – despite having their teeth and fingernails torn out, and even worse – surely helped destroy Hitler.

One may find cause to have hope for humanity, even in the most awful, unlikely settings – indeed, perhaps especially in them. Here, men and women, aware they were being tormented for the sake of something far greater than their own lives, found the strength to withhold things the Gestapo was furious to learn, things on which the very fate of our species – its progress, or its eventual regression – might have pivoted.

The evil done in the structure that once stood here was incalculable – but not insurmountable. Within it, some of the darkest depths and brightest heights, the very worst and very best, of human nature contended and played out. And surely, the better side sometimes won, mightier than all the savagery deployed against it.

Thus, blood shed here helped water a rose of freedom.

For me, that is enough to sustain faith that all mankind is not corrupt beyond redemption. That faith is my tribute to all those who suffered here for posterity’s sake; it would feel ungrateful to yield to cynicism, as if their glorious example and sacrifice were for nothing. Valor that inspiring is never “for nothing,” but the heroism sometimes shown here helped rescue the honor of our race from the primal stain that Hitlerism was.