The third omission concerns Wagner’s publications during these heated and, finally, violent times; it is the most important in terms of our concern here, though it is also the one where he may be least accused of outright prevarication, as it is the one that most clearly segues into matters of tone and interpretation.
In Mein Leben Wagner quotes four lines from a poem he sent off to be published in a Berlin paper in support of the rebels. He does not say, however, that on May 15th, when fighting again broke out in Vienna, Wagner responded with a poem, “Greetings from Saxony to the Viennese,” which was imprudently published in the Allgemeine Oesterreichische Zeitung on June 1st.
In Mein Leben Wagner synopsizes — accurately — a speech he delivered on June 12 to a rally at Röckel’s Vaterlands-Verein (in the Marcolini gardens?), — a speech that went on to appear as a newspaper article which, indeed, attracted quite a bit of public attention — to the effect that he was for the establishment of a republic, but that he wanted the king to remain the first citizen of that republic. While he dismissed communism, i.e., “… the equal distribution of property and earnings…,” as “… that most fatuous and senseless doctrine…” (no, it is fairly certain that he had not read Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto published a few months before; but he had read Proudhon and may have discussed some of Marx’s ideas with Bakúnin, who was certainly familiar with Marx’s writings), he called on His Majesty to do the right thing by his people and on the people to march towards light and freedom. At least one of the lines amidst his inflated rhetoric, however, scored a hit. He accused his fellow Saxons of having “a standing army — and a recumbent militia.” A day later the speech appeared in the Dresdner Anzeiger. In the various papers of the politically super-charged city, the general response of commentators, after the ire over Wagner’s insult to the local armed forces, seems to have been pretty much what such a harangue might be expected to yield today. In trying to appease all sides, Wagner, said everyone else, while stirring up already uneasy waters with his rhetoric, had said nothing of much usefulness. In one commentator’s words, from another newspaper, Wagner’s speech was far more “full of problems than of solutions.” But as fiery as his speech was, unless one can conceive of a Marxist who is also a Monarchist, however parliamentary, there was nothing of socialism in it.
In Röckel’s Volksblätter’s October 15th issue, an anonymous article by Wagner, “Germany and its Princes,” appeared. It took the court to task for its indolence and irresponsibility and declared: “Awake!.. the eleventh hour has struck! Abandon your impotent and futile resistance. It can only visit suffering and ruin upon you!”
In April of ’49, three of his poems appeared in Röckel’s paper, one of which was called “An einen Staatsanwalt” (“To a State Attorney”), another, “Die Noth” (which means, in German: Need, crisis, desperation, or any number of other such concepts): the first heaped scorn on state officials and the second pictured the miseries of the German people while inviting them, only somewhat metaphorically, to take up arms. It is significant, because Siegfried’s reforged sword, in the Ring, was eventually named Nothung — though it started out as Balmung. The third was a prose poem called simply “Revolution,” which is embodied as a goddess, who declares to the people that, among other things: “I shall destroy the dominion of the one over the many, of the dead over the living, of matter over mind. I shall shatter the power of the mighty, of law and of property… destroy the order of things that divorces enjoyment from labor, makes labor a burden and enjoyment a vice…”
In Mein Leben only the rally speech of June 12 (and the article that appeared from it) is mentioned. What Wagner does not say in Mein Leben is that he published numerous other articles (and poems), some signed, some unsigned, and some of which were far more vehement.
What Wagner does give us in Mein Leben, however, is a portrait of himself at the center of the organization of Dresden’s republican rebels. His advice is sought and he advises. He edits the radical newspaper. He prints posters to propagandize the royalist soldiers and hangs them up. He runs information and goes on missions for Heubner and Bakúnin. Once the open fighting starts he stands guard in the Kreuzkirche Tower all night. And when Dresden has to be abandoned because of the bloodshed, he accompanies Bakúnin and Heubner on their trip to establish a provisionary republican government for Saxony at Chemnitz. Though he does not come out and say it in so many words, he leaves a strong impression with the reader that if, indeed, the new government had been established at Chemnitz, Wagner himself would probably have been third or fourth down on the new totem pole. (If anything, one suspects he is exaggerating his importance, influence, and position!) But while he is clearly not anxious to rehearse the fiery extremes his republican rhetoric reached under military fire from the Prussians, I don’t see how he could have presented himself as more involved in the Dresden Uprising if he’d tried. What I think has been missed in his Dresden account is that Wagner was not trying to exonerate himself from involvement with the republican cause so much as he was trying to make the republican cause, in which he was clearly and centrally involved, appear as rational, logical, and civilized as possible to his young, royal patron. And he does not, of course, admit to any crimes. But we must remember, besides being the century of romanticism and revolution, the nineteenth century was also the century of euphemism and decorum. No one aspired to the late twentieth century’s ideals of radical honesty on all fronts.
If Wagner failed to mention the odd grenade or a slew of over-vehement poems and articles, it is because he wanted the republican cause to look rational to the young king and not seem a criminal enterprise; it is not because he wants to make himself appear any less involved in it or less sympathetic to it.
In his study of 1897, The Perfect Wagnerite, George Bernard Shaw saw the Ring as a clear allegory of the proto-Marxist ideas Wagner received from the anarchist Bakúnin. I think Shaw overstates the case. The question at Dresden was Monarchy or Republic, not Monarchy or Marxism. Still, it would be hard for any reader of Mein Leben not to feel that Wagner wants us — or King Ludwig — to attribute at least one of the important ideas of the Ring cycle to the Russian anarchist, still serving a prison term for his various activities at the time Wagner was writing.