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Thanks to the pathological alienation which the nationalist idiocy has established and still establishes among European peoples, thanks as well to the short-sighted politicians with hasty hands, who are on top nowadays with the help of this idiocy and have no sense of how much the politics of disintegration which they carry on can necessarily be only politics for an intermission - thanks to all this and to some things today which are quite impossible to utter, now the most unambiguous signs indicating that Europe wants to become a unity are being overlooked or wilfully and mendaciously reinterpreted. With all the more profound and more comprehensive men of this century the real overall direction in the mysterious work of their souls has been to prepare the way to that new synthesis and to anticipate, as an experiment, the European of the future. Only in their foregrounds or in their weaker hours, as in old age, did they belong to their "fatherlands" - they were only taking a rest from themselves when they became "patriots." I'm thinking of men like Napoleon, Goethe, Beethoven, Stendhal, Heinrich Heine, Schopenhauer. Don't get angry with me if I also count Richard Wagner among them. About him people should not let themselves be seduced by his own misunderstandings - geniuses of his kind rarely have the right to understand themselves. Even less, of course, by the uncivilized noise with which people in France these days close themselves off from and resist Richard Wagner. Nonetheless, the fact remains that the late French Romanticism of the forties and Richard Wagner belong together in the closest and most inner relation. In all the heights and depths of their needs they are related to each other, fundamentally related. It is Europe, the one Europe, whose soul pushes out and upward through their manifold and impetuous art, and it longs to go - where? Into a new light? Towards a new sun? But who could express exactly what all these masters of new ways of speaking did not know how to express clearly? What is certain is that the same storm and stress tormented them, that they sought in the same way, these last great seekers! All of them were dominated by literature up to their eyes and ears - the first artists educated in world literature - most of them were even themselves writers, poets, conveyers of and mixers in the arts and senses (Wagner belongs as a musician with the painters, as a poet with the musicians, as an artist generally with the actors); they were all fanatics of expression "at any price" - I'll cite Delacroix, the one most closely related to Wagner - they were all great discoverers in the realm of the sublime, as well as of the ugly and the horrific, even greater discoverers in effects, in display, in the art of the store window - all talents far beyond their genius, virtuosos through and through, with mysterious access to everything which seduces, entices, compels, knocks over, born enemies of logic and the straight line, greedy for the strange, the exotic, the monstrous, the crooked, the self-contradictory; as men they were Tantaluses of the will, up-and-coming plebeians, who knew that they were incapable of a noble tempo, a lento [slow movement], in their lives and works - think, for example, of Balzac - unrestrained workers, almost killing themselves with work, antinomians and rebels against customs, ambitious and insatiable without equilibrium and enjoyment; all of them finally collapsing and sinking down before the Christian cross (and they were right and justified in that, for who among them would have been sufficiently profound and original for a philosophy of the Antichrist?-), on the whole, a boldly daring, marvellously violent, high-flying kind of higher men, who pulled others up into the heights, men who first taught the idea of "higher man" to their century - and it's the century of the masses!²⁰ The German friends of Richard Wagner should think about whether there is anything essentially German in Wagnerian art or whether it is not precisely its distinction that it comes from supra-German sources and urges. In doing that, one should not underestimate just how indispensable Paris was for the development of a type like him, how at the decisive period the depth of his instincts called him there, and how his whole way of appearing and his self-apostleship could first perfect itself at the sight of the model of French socialists. Perhaps with a more sophisticated comparison people will discover, to the honour of Richard Wagner's German nature, that he had driven himself in all things more strongly, more daringly, harder, and higher than a Frenchman of the nineteenth century could - thanks to the fact that we Germans stand even closer to barbarism than the French. Perhaps the most peculiar thing that Richard Wagner created is even inaccessible and unsympathetic and beyond the emulation of the entire Latin race, which is so mature, for all time and not merely for today: the character of Siegfried, that very free man, who, in fact, may be far too free, too hard, too cheerful, too healthy, too anti-Catholic for the taste of an old and worn cultured people. He may even have been a sin against Romanticism, this anti-romantic Siegfried. Well, Wagner more than made up for this sin in his old and gloomy days when - in anticipation of a taste which in the meantime has become political - he began, with his characteristic religious vehemence, if not to go to Rome, at least to preach the way there. So that you don't misunderstand these last words of mine, I'll summon a few powerful rhymes to my assistance, which will reveal to less refined ears what I want - what I have against the "late Wagner" and his Parsifal music:

-Is that still German?
Did this oppressive screech come from a German heart?
Is this self-mutilation of the flesh a German part?
And is this German, such priestly affectation,
this incense-smelling, sensual stimulation?
And German this faltering, plunging, staggering,
this uncertain bim-bam dangling?
This nun-like ogling and ringing Ave bells,
this whole false heavenly super-heaven of spells?
Is that still German?
Think! You're still standing by the entrance way.
You're hearing Rome, Rome's faith without the words they say.