Module F. The Romantic Rhine.

As we pass the famous Lorelei rock in the scenic Rhine Gorge north of Rüdesheim we might well want to follow the example of every German who goes by here and burst out into song. (I’d be very surprised if the ship doesn’t play the song on the intercom as we pass the rock. I’ll teach you the words and the melody if you wish to sing along):

1. Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten,
Daß ich so traurig bin,
Ein Märchen aus uralten Zeiten,
Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.
Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt,
Und ruhig fließt der Rhein;
Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt,
Im Abendsonnenschein.

2. Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet
Dort oben wunderbar,
Ihr gold’nes Geschmeide blitzet,
Sie kämmt ihr goldenes Haar,
Sie kämmt es mit goldenem Kamme,
Und singt ein Lied dabei;
Das hat eine wundersame,
Gewalt’ge Melodei.

3. Den Schiffer im kleinen Schiffe,
Ergreift es mit wildem Weh;
Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe,
Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh’.
Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen
Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn,
Und das hat mit ihrem Singen,
Die Lorelei getan.

It appears one COULD sing these English words, which almost, if not quite, match the music:

(1. I don’t know the meaning
Of the sorrow that fills my breast:
A fable of old, through it streaming,
Allows my mind no rest.
The air is cool in the gloaming
And gently flows the Rhine.
The crest of the mountain is gleaming
In fading rays of sunshine.

2. The loveliest maiden is sitting
Up there, so wondrously fair;
Her golden jewelry is glist’ning;
She combs her golden hair.
She combs with a gilded comb, preening,
And sings a song, passing time.
It has a most wondrous, appealing
And pow’rful melodic rhyme.

3. The boatman aboard his small skiff, -
Enraptured with a wild ache,
Has no eye for the jagged cliff, -
His thoughts on the heights fear forsake.
I think that the waves will devour
Both boat and man, by and by,
And that, with her dulcet-voiced power
Was done by the Lorelei.)

Here’s the famous German tenor Peter Schreier singing the Lorelei (with a couple of very slight changes to the text):

https://youtu.be/9c8Ows3wRh0

It’s the tale of a siren who sits on the cliff overlooking this dangerous stretch of the river, where careful navigation through a tricky curve is required to avoid hitting a submerged reef in the water. Sailors who wreck on the reef could blame their misfortune on the siren who mesmerized and distracted them with her singing.

This romantic ballad, which is arguably one of the quintessential German romantic works par excellence, written by the famous German poet Heinrich Heine, gives us an excuse to discuss briefly an important epoch in German and European history, namely the period of romanticism in the 19th century.

Romanticism has had a remarkably wide resonance, from architecture to poetry to drama to music to politics to history, to ...  surprisingly, linguistics (for as we have seen, the world’s first professional, scientific linguist was Jacob Grimm, who with his brother Wilhelm, was a famed collector of romantic folk tales).

Where romanticism is perhaps best known is in music. Beethoven, Wagner, Bruckner, Brahms, Mahler, Debussy, Richard Strauss, Grieg, Pucinni, Rachmaninoff, Holst, Ives, Von Weber, Schubert, Berlioz, Chopin, the Schumanns, Liszt, Verdi, Gounod, Offenbach, Franck, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak ... is only the  beginning of a long list of remarkable composers who owe their inspiration to romanticism, which can be seen as a reaction to enlightenment, rationalism and to the scientific world view, which romantics came to view as too sterile, too left-brained, too lacking in deep religious, artistic, and spiritual power.

The Cologne cathedral stands, as we have seen, as a monument to the power of the romantic imagination to revive the reputation of the Middle Ages, to rehabilitate the word Gothic, for example, which had fallen into disfavor in the age of the renaissance and then, later, of the enlightenment.

This is related to the linguistic side of romanticism, strangely enough, because it was the romantic linguists like Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm who discovered that the German language is of very ancient derivation, and that it was not merely some vulgar language spoken by heathen barbarians in the Roman Empire as people had believed, but that it went back closer to the original Adamic Language (as the romantics believed), than anyone had ever supposed.

Ancient German tales, poems, songs, and legends have come down to us from those blessed ancient times of a kind of Golden Age which can bring us closer to God, the romantics firmly believed, hence they collected and published any such things with great enthusiasm. They felt that these works had a special ancient quality, handed down from generation to generation in an oral tradition possibly going right back to the time of the Garden of Eden.

The Grimms’ Fairy Tales, for example, always seem to have a kind of symbolic salvation motive, such as in the tale called Snow White (whose name and color represents the whiteness, i.e. purity or goodness of humanity), but whose mortality (represented by the red blood which spurts forth when her expectant mother first pricks her finger, falling on the white snow of the ebony windowsill, itself representing the black of death) is underscored by the chunk of the red side of the apple offered to her by her Lucifer-like stepmother, which then sticks in her throat, in her Adam’s Apple, as it were, causing her to fall into a death-like state.

But she is brought back to life by a prince, whose love for her is greater than death, and who takes her home to live with him in his father’s house, where, he says, there are many mansions. (There are a lot more of these kinds of religious motives in Grimms’ fairy tales...)

The greatness of the religion practiced, it was imagined, in older, purer, times, when Europe had one unified, Catholic (= universal) religion, was the object of romantics, even Protestant romantics, many of whom converted to Catholicism.

The discovery of the antiquity of the German Language and a renewed interest in the holy Middle Ages also coincided with the discovery of important medieval German literary documents, which had been sadly neglected and in many cases totally forgotten such as the Nibelungenlied, (the Song of the Nibelungen), story of Siegfried the Dragon Slayer, which is part of the source – the rest comes from related sagas from Scandinavia – of the gigantic cycle of four long, beautiful operas by Richard Wagner, Der Ring des Nibelungen, (The Ring of the Nibelung).

Since we are on the Rhine and these operas deal with the Rhine, allow me a very brief digression about them: In the first opera of the Ring cycle, Das Rheingold (The Rhine gold), Alberich, an evil dwarf from the dark, subterranean place called Nibelheim (literally: Fogville) comes up into the river and steals a golden treasure from three mermaids, the Rhine Maidens, who are guarding it.

Alberich fashions from it a magical ring (which has a terrible curse on it) as well as a kind of magical helmet allowing shape-shifting. The rest of the 15-hour Ring cycle has to do with cosmic good and evil, the denizens of the realms of light – the Germanic gods – and the denizens of the realms of foggy darkness, and the fate of this ill-gotten gold and the accursed ring and of the whole creation.

(Here’s a wonderful four minute video from the Metropolitan Opera with Conductor James Levine and his colleagues during a rehearsal of Das Rheingold, describing the remarkable first four minutes of the Ring, that deep E flat pedal tone and its overtones, symbolizing the creation of the world, segueing into a flowing rhythm symbolizing the waters of the Rhine, and the introduction of the Rhine Maidens):

https://youtu.be/Iuf1NOAWvug

In the fourth and final opera of the Ring cycle, Die Götterdämmerung (The Twilight of the Gods), the heroic Siegfried – now the unwitting and unlucky owner of the accursed ring – makes a fateful Rhine Journey, at the end of which he is first robbed of his memory by a magic potion – the evil guys from down in subterranean Fogville conspire to destroy him – then he unwittingly betrays his wife, is himself betrayed, and finally killed.

(You deserve to listen to the Berlin Philharmonic playing about three minutes of this theme, Siegfried’s joyful Rhine Journey. Listen for his horn, for example, as he heroically navigates the waves of the Rhine in his boat):

https://youtu.be/mmMx0zSJxMU

(Or try an older, more complete version – six minutes or so– with the incomparable Bruno Walter, in which you will also hear the menacing theme of the Ring’s curse returning at the end of the joyful journey):

https://youtu.be/r5fA4Szs8sk

After his death, Siegfried’s loyal wife Brünnhilde learns the truth about the magic potion, builds a gigantic funeral pyre for Siegfried, lights it ablaze and then rides her mythical steed onto the pyre and is burned up with her husband. The blaze catches the remainder of the world on fire – including Valhalla, the dwelling place of the gods. The golden ring and all the other Rhine gold melts down, the Rhine floods up and the gold flows back into the Rhine where it originated. The Ring cycle ends with the same low E flat with which it began, implying a new creation is at hand.

(In Wagner’s opera it is not clear exactly where it is along the Rhine Siegfried travels, but the ancient Song of the Nibelungen says he was born in Xanten, a German city near the Dutch border, and travels upstream to Worms, where he meets his future wife, here named Kriemhild. After his death, this poem says, she moves east to Vienna where she marries none other than Attila the Hun with whose aid she takes terrible vengeance on her husband Siegfried’s murderers.)

Wagner also makes remarkable operas out of other newly rediscovered Medieval epic poems and similar texts such as Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (Wagner spelled it Parsifal), Tristan und Isolde by Gottfried von Strassburg (!), Lohengrin (the son of Parsifal), Tannhäuser, and the Mastersingers of Nürnberg. (We can say a lot more about all of this if anyone is interested. Sensing that I may be wearing my audience out, I’m trying to keep this module shorter...)

Finally, a word on the dark side of romanticism: Alas, there are some very dark sides. Not only did the anti-rational, anti-enlightenment romantics discover and explore insanity and psychedelic drugs in search of higher spiritual insights, even more frighteningly, the discovery of Germany’s remarkable past, its great heroic epic poetry, for example, led Germans to begin to believe in the inevitability of Germany’s present and future greatness as a nation. The whole new idea of nationalism was invented in the romantic period. Before that, the concept of nationalism did not even exist.

The first word in Nazi is National: it’s the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP). It was also from romanticism and from the innocent linguistic research of poor old Jacob Grimm that Nazis got the idea that Germans were the descendants of a pure, Aryan (Indo-European) race, a race of tall, blond, blue-eyed Nordic supermen, as they imagined it (there were hardly any such persons amongst the top leadership, though Hitler was said to have piercing blue eyes.)

During the nineteenth century, gradually, militarily, and with considerable bloodshed, the some 325 separate small principalities and dukedoms collectively known as “the Germanies” were eventually united in the name of nationalism under the leadership of the militaristic state of Prussia, with its seat in Berlin.

After romanticism and after nationalism, by about 1870, now there was GERMANY!, an industrial and military giant, with the latest steel-making and machine-tool capabilities in the world, far more modern than those old factories from the first industrial revolution in quaint old England.

Worse still, Germans were taught by romanticism that WAR was a glorious thing, a heroic act, like that of Siegfried, who slew the dragon and regained the ring of power. (His own subsequent destruction is easily overlooked by zealous nationalists, even if it’s clear that Wagner meant it as a warning to megalomaniacs, that the thirst for absolute power corrupts absolutely.)

Is it surprising, then, that the misguided megalomanic messianic mind of one Adolf Hitler loved the operas of Wagner, saw in them saviors like Parsifal, a consecrated hero who helps heal his society, or Siegfried, the Dragon-Slayer, who takes the gold and the ring away from the misshapen ugly dwarf Alberich, toiling away after treasure in subterranean darkness with his enslaved subjects like so many later Nazi caricatures of money-grubbing Jews?

It pains me to share a typical one of them with you, from the official Nazi paper Der Stürmer (the Stormtrooper) which explains that this is how all the Jews arrived in Germany, but then they soon had taken over the banks and everything else, which is why they are such a threat to the German race. The Jews are the cause of our calamity! the paper proclaims:

http://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/images/sturmer/ds-flyer2.jpg

Wagner, of course, went to his grave long before Hitler expropriated his operas, but he has probably been turning over in it ever since. Yes, Wagner was a ferocious Anti-Semite, – where have we seen that before? – but his political views were very much those of a left-wing revolutionary in 1848, similar to the views of Lincoln’s Interior Secretary Carl Schurz, who fled Germany to the US the same year Wagner fled to Switzerland. Both would have stood for the exact opposite of Hitler’s ultra-right-wing nationalism. (In those days before Hitler, most Anti-Semitism came from sources on the left.)

In the next couple of modules we’ll look a bit closer at Hitler and his Nazis. In module G we’ll examine how the industrial strength of Germany not only helped bring Hitler and his followers to power, imagining that his policies would be good for business, but how industry became fatefully entangled in a web of culpability ranging from the use of slave labor from the infamous concentration camps to the creation of weapons of mass destruction such as the V2 rockets.

In module H we’ll look in a brief history of the Mormons in Germany at how LDS members variously reacted to the rise of Nazism, with their reactions ranging from fanatical enthusiasm to bewildered neutrality to organized resistance.