Herfried Münkler: “Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche. World in Transition” – Culture

In the emptying field between intellectuality and politics, Herfried Münkler is Germany’s most famous professor. This Sunday he celebrates his 70th birthday, and that’s not the only reason why you have to say that he has undoubtedly earned this reputation. One can only admire how Münkler, even in the most prosaic context of political advice, draws on a large fund of ideas from the history of ideas in order to bring problems of his time to the fore.

Every forum is happy when Münkler comes, he speaks with quiet, searching urgency, he is not dogmatic, but precise, he helps with orientation, and one appreciates his mixture of republican friendliness and merciless Thucydideic lack of illusions. Even in his youth in Hesse, he laid the foundations for this, with a membership in the Jusos and an old-language grammar school education. From his celebrated Machiavelli dissertation in Frankfurt, his many years of work as a political scientist unfolded in the heart of the Berlin republic. Münkler’s books such as “Die neue Kriege” (2002) or “Imperien” (2005) are influential, and in all conflicts that afflicted him personally at the university, he always maintained, according to the title of another book, “Mitte und Measure “.

As if to demonstrate his intellectual openness and curiosity again, Herfried Münkler publishes a material-rich monograph on three very different figures of the 19th century just in time for his birthday: Karl Marx, Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Three Germans who have made an impact all over the world, namely – rather buzzwords, as Münkler admits in the introduction – like this: one as a revolutionary analyst of capitalism, the other as the savior of the myth for modernity and inventor of the art-religious total work of art, the third as a herald of a pre- or post-Christian, world-affirming “idea of ​​individual freedom”.

To this rather cautious, suggestive handling of the great consequences of the work of the three men, a suitable warning can be cited from Karl Löwith, who spoke of “historical insight” in his book “Von Hegel zu Nietzsche” (1939), which treads the same ground. “that the ‘pioneers’ have always been to change Prepared the way herself did not go “.

Why are these three together? One wants to ask

So if Münkler’s book primarily examines a historical constellation, and if it is best to ask right at the beginning: Why these three together? The answer is best to be honest: Unfortunately, the actual synopsis in this book does not provide much a lot of. Except that the contrasts make the differences between the three more clearly visible, especially where their motifs touch.

If Münkler is to name the meaning of the overall view of the triumvirate Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche from today’s perspective, there are only empty formulas: “Coming from a world in upheaval, they could become companions of the 21st century, also a world in upheaval, whereby this accompaniment is more of a critical questioning than a self-confident guidance. ” Or: “In their time as well as our present, they stand for different perspectives on society and culture.” Well, that is not a big profit, and it would not have been much different if the author had included Hegel at the beginning of the century or Sigmund Freud at the end.

But that’s not so bad, because in detail you learn a lot of interesting things in this book. Herfried Münkler, himself certainly not a Marxist in the ideological sense, had been entrusted with the continuation of the Marx-Engels Complete Edition (MEGA) at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences since 1993. During this time, especially after the financial crash of 2007/2008, the re-seriousness of Marx as a descriptor of capitalism’s susceptibility to crises, despite all the mistakes of its prophecy. At the same time, Münkler holds seminars together with musicologists Richard Wagner organized at the Humboldt University. It is from this material that the most fruitful comparisons in this book emerge.

Münkler discovers “internal class disputes” at Wagner

So it is fascinating to watch how Münkler sifts through not only Wagner’s writings, but also his musical dramas as a political thinker and discovers “internal class disputes” in the mythical cosmos of the Nibelungs – a nice shift between opera leader and the history of political ideas. For example, Münkler contrasts Wagner’s “Ring” and Marx as follows: “Wagner’s bourgeoisie is too conservative to be able to survive politically under the conditions it has created; Marx’s bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is too revolutionary not to fall victim to the developments it has initiated to fall. “

Both Marx and Wagner saw the failure of the German revolution of 1848/49 as a formative experience of their generation. (For the younger Nietzsche it was the Wars of Unification and the founding of the Reich in 1871, which he first welcomed patriotically, but very soon rejected as a threat to culture.) This trauma – Wagner himself went on the barricades in Dresden against the princely rule – both dealt with, however, very much differently: “Wagner renounced the overthrow of society”, writes Münkler, “in order to be able to hold on to the revolutionization of art; Marx, on the other hand, held on to the social revolution by breaking up the overthrow into small portions and inscribing it in the socio-economic process . “

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Richard Wagner rejected industrialization and the monetary system of capitalism (which he defamed anti-Semitically); Marx saw both as inevitable progress in the antagonism to the proletariat. Both of them had money worries again and again (while Nietzsche lived on a Spartan early retirement). Both believed that the social order of their time had to be overcome and saw “history” as power – but Wagner hoped for renewal through destruction as the restoration of an idealized Middle Ages, while Marx believed in the future. Not redemption, but liberation.

These profile-sharpening comparisons are the privilege of the later-born historian of ideas, whereas the contemporaries Karl Marx and Richard Wagner hardly noticed each other. Only Marx was annoyed once that the hotels in Nuremberg were fully booked because of the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876 when he was on his way to the spa in Karlsbad Bakers’ congress, partly by people from all parts of the world who wanted to go from there to the Bayreuth jester festival of the state musician Wagner “. When he arrived at the spa, Marx wrote again to Friedrich Engels: “Everywhere you are tormented with the question: What do you think of Wagner?” No answers from Marx himself to this question have come down to us, and there is no comment whatsoever from Wagner about Marx.

In the 20th century, the legacy of Marx and Nietzsche was misused in different ways

It is similar with Marx and Nietzsche: The intellectual-political antipodes – one visionary of mass society, the other despiser of it – did not take notice of one another until Marx died in London in 1883 and Nietzsche ended up in a state of derision in 1889. One finds criticism of Hegelian thinking only indirectly in Nietzsche (in the “Untimely Considerations” of 1874) – this leads to “idolatry of the factual”. In the 20th century, as is well known, the legacy of these two was taken over and abused in different ways, with the vanishing points of Stalinism and National Socialism.

What remains is the Wagner / Nietzsche couple – Münkler also recounts the familiar story of the two, the “Wagner case”. Nietzsche, still professor of philology and beginning philosopher, was initially an ardent follower of Wagner, he hoped for “the gradual awakening of the Dionysian spirit in our present world”. A completely new cult of art was to make Germany the new Greece, an art that was driven by “the mothers of being, whose names are: delusion, will, woe”. Nietzsche wrote this in the “Birth of Tragedy” in 1872, but soon after the first festival in Bayreuth, the alienation between the two began, which led Nietzsche to ever more lonely heights: “Because I had no one but Richard Wagner.”

Herfried Münkler is also astute and knowledgeable in this book. Although he finally had “great peace of mind” to write in the lockdown, as he says, while reading it always remains a little unclear what the digression and what the main narrative is. Herfried Münkler could therefore also imagine a clever lecture or essay on the subject of “Possibilities and limits of comparative doxography and biography”. We will keep listening to him.

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