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ljwritesI'm reading this long piece on the Second World War. Somewhere around where the author lovingly describes the portrayal of the weather in the 1943 production of Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, Wagner's non-Viking opera, I started to suspect the essay has ranged far beyond the Longform tagline that sold me ("An essay . . . on how and why we forget war"). Still, these war minutiae are so entertaining I don't really care where it's going.
It's certainly a piece that rewards patience. At one point author Lee Sandlin discusses Wagner's artistic intent for Der Ring des Nibelungen and then goes on for 10,059 words about the Battle of Midway, military bureaucracy, Bob Dole, an allied campaign in Tuscany, the conditions of U.S. marines in Okinawa, and Hitler's love of architecture before swinging back to Wagner and contrasting his understanding of Der Ring with Hitler's.
And when it came to Hitler's understanding of his favorite opera, especially in contrast to its creator's, I was struck by a most creepily unwelcome feeling: Familiarity. I think his line of thinking would be familiar to anyone who's run around geek and fandom circles--you know the type, the person who disregards what a work is about to talk about its external trappings as though those are the point--and, far more troublingly, map those points to the real world.
If you don't want to wade through the whole essay (though it's really fun, I promise) here's how Sandlin explains Wagner's intent for Der Ring:
And here, the critical stylings of the Fuhrer himself:
The major point of divergence is that overlithe's essay was about writing bad stories, whereas the failure here was in the fan, not the creator. (Not that the creator was perfect in this case--Sandlin doesn't try to whitewash Wagner's prejudices, though he does pull the "product of his times" card.) Wagner created a serious and meaningful story about the destruction of civilization from its lust for power; Hitler was the one who turned it into puerile revenge porn by disregarding the whole point and drooling over the set and costumes instead. It's a classic case of Misaimed Fandom, though it may have been a single Misaimed Fan here--Sandlin points out that most Nazis hated Wagner because, y'know, international music scene mumblemumble Jews galore, and because Wagner was so damned morbid. (They had a point there, Sandlin concedes.)
Obviously not everyone who reads fantasy to serve their agenda is Hitler. There are some pathetic wannabes who also misread fantasy, like the white supremacist groups who claim the Lord of the Rings supports their cause, but they're not Hitler, either. Rather I think the point is that the power of fantasy isn't in its trappings, but in what it says. By seeing elves and rings and whatnot as the point, not the means, it becomes easy to both write and read immorality into stories. This is exactly the kind of thing Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream was lampooning.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing bad about having fun with the trappings of a story; dressing as elves and wizards never hurt anyone. (Do watch out for sewing accidents, though.) The problem is when the trappings cease to be fun diversions and are taken as SRS BZNS. This happened, for instance, when the British National Party nitwits took the skin colors of the characters in LotR as some sort of racial theory of the real world. Another example is the time the American Nazi Party placed The Iron Dream on their recommended reading list. You can recognize Teflon-like obliviousness when even themes like "Your entire ideology sucks" fail to stick.
The settings and cool powers of genre fiction are fascinating and seductive, I know. I've spent many an hour lost in the world of Middle-Earth and later Harry Potter. In the end, though, the true power of these fantastical elements comes not from being cool and sparkly but from the resilience and morality of the stories they tell. Take away the struggles with power and loss from LotR and you're left with a silly elves-and-goblins story, one with unfortunate racial implications at that. (Arguably Professor Tolkien brought the BNP's accolades on himself, at least in part.) Take out the struggle between good and evil from Harry Potter and you have a bunch of kids waving wooden sticks around. The real magic in these stories is in the humanity of the tales told, not in the supernatural feats performed in the pages. Forget that and--well, it won't make you Hitler, at least in of itself. But you could be missing the depths of your favorite stories, and if there's one thing a dedicated fan can't stand it's missing out.
It's certainly a piece that rewards patience. At one point author Lee Sandlin discusses Wagner's artistic intent for Der Ring des Nibelungen and then goes on for 10,059 words about the Battle of Midway, military bureaucracy, Bob Dole, an allied campaign in Tuscany, the conditions of U.S. marines in Okinawa, and Hitler's love of architecture before swinging back to Wagner and contrasting his understanding of Der Ring with Hitler's.
And when it came to Hitler's understanding of his favorite opera, especially in contrast to its creator's, I was struck by a most creepily unwelcome feeling: Familiarity. I think his line of thinking would be familiar to anyone who's run around geek and fandom circles--you know the type, the person who disregards what a work is about to talk about its external trappings as though those are the point--and, far more troublingly, map those points to the real world.
If you don't want to wade through the whole essay (though it's really fun, I promise) here's how Sandlin explains Wagner's intent for Der Ring:
[Wagner] intended the Ring to be not just his masterwork, but a summation and final accounting for Western culture -- a vision of its foundational myth and a prophecy of its coming collapse. . . . [A]ll Wagner could see ahead of him was [Western civilization's] ruin and decline. He found among the ancient legends of the Teutons and the Vikings the epic story of the cursed ring of the Nibelung and the fall of the noble house of the Volsungs, and he saw it as a vast parable of the rot eating away at the foundations of the contemporary world. The ring represents avarice and the lust for power; it will give dominion over the whole earth to anyone who renounces love -- but the gods can see no danger of that, since how could there be a being, mortal or immortal, who would ever renounce the glory of love for the paltriness of mere power? Wagner looked around him and knew there would be no shortage of takers.
And here, the critical stylings of the Fuhrer himself:
[Hitler] did have his own myth about Germany. He was obsessed with the shadowy folkloric world of the Vikings and the Teutons, the vanished Nordic past that had inspired the medieval sagas of the Volsungs and, through them, Wagner's Ring. His imagination was filled with the rush and thunder of the ancient warriors who'd beaten back the Roman empire and swept the barbarians back into central Asia. But where Wagner had used these stories for their symbolic value, Hitler responded to them as a primal vision of reality. (The allegorical choice in the Ring between love and absolute power meant nothing to him.) Sometimes he talked as though that world was more real to him than the daylight world around him -- as if the whole of modern civilization was an evil mirage obscuring the unceasing flow of mythic struggle.I was immediately reminded of overlithe's jeremiad LoK, Being on Team Human, and Stories About Nothing, which is about exactly this type of genre-fiction fantasy--where the mechanistic reading trumps the thematic one, and symbolic story trappings that aren't fucking real like element-bending are given precedent over real-life issues like oppression, violence, and power.
The major point of divergence is that overlithe's essay was about writing bad stories, whereas the failure here was in the fan, not the creator. (Not that the creator was perfect in this case--Sandlin doesn't try to whitewash Wagner's prejudices, though he does pull the "product of his times" card.) Wagner created a serious and meaningful story about the destruction of civilization from its lust for power; Hitler was the one who turned it into puerile revenge porn by disregarding the whole point and drooling over the set and costumes instead. It's a classic case of Misaimed Fandom, though it may have been a single Misaimed Fan here--Sandlin points out that most Nazis hated Wagner because, y'know, international music scene mumblemumble Jews galore, and because Wagner was so damned morbid. (They had a point there, Sandlin concedes.)
Obviously not everyone who reads fantasy to serve their agenda is Hitler. There are some pathetic wannabes who also misread fantasy, like the white supremacist groups who claim the Lord of the Rings supports their cause, but they're not Hitler, either. Rather I think the point is that the power of fantasy isn't in its trappings, but in what it says. By seeing elves and rings and whatnot as the point, not the means, it becomes easy to both write and read immorality into stories. This is exactly the kind of thing Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream was lampooning.
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing bad about having fun with the trappings of a story; dressing as elves and wizards never hurt anyone. (Do watch out for sewing accidents, though.) The problem is when the trappings cease to be fun diversions and are taken as SRS BZNS. This happened, for instance, when the British National Party nitwits took the skin colors of the characters in LotR as some sort of racial theory of the real world. Another example is the time the American Nazi Party placed The Iron Dream on their recommended reading list. You can recognize Teflon-like obliviousness when even themes like "Your entire ideology sucks" fail to stick.
The settings and cool powers of genre fiction are fascinating and seductive, I know. I've spent many an hour lost in the world of Middle-Earth and later Harry Potter. In the end, though, the true power of these fantastical elements comes not from being cool and sparkly but from the resilience and morality of the stories they tell. Take away the struggles with power and loss from LotR and you're left with a silly elves-and-goblins story, one with unfortunate racial implications at that. (Arguably Professor Tolkien brought the BNP's accolades on himself, at least in part.) Take out the struggle between good and evil from Harry Potter and you have a bunch of kids waving wooden sticks around. The real magic in these stories is in the humanity of the tales told, not in the supernatural feats performed in the pages. Forget that and--well, it won't make you Hitler, at least in of itself. But you could be missing the depths of your favorite stories, and if there's one thing a dedicated fan can't stand it's missing out.
