During what was an exceptionally long and productive career as a man of letters, Du Bois was closely associated with only one literary and cultural movement: the “New Negro” movement, which is also more narrowly and more commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. It is never easy to date the beginning and end of such a period of creative activity exactly, though there is a clear scholarly consensus that these particular labels refer to an unprecedented literary and cultural productivity by African American artists and intellectuals located largely in the 1920s and 1930s. David Levering Lewis proposes a more precise demarcation between 1917 and 1935, and divides this period into three distinct phases: the “bohemian renaissance” (1917-23), characterized by a growing body of writing on black American culture, society, and history produced mainly by white rather than African American authors; the “era of the Talented Tenth” (1924-6) which Lewis sees as a period in which black and white authors worked in collaboration under the strong leadership of organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the National Urban League (NUL); and the “Negro Renaissance” (1926-35) in which a new generation of black writers came to the fore to develop new aesthetic and cultural agendas, and to challenge established political programs and attitudes.

If within this time frame we take the New Negro movement to refer to works of art and cultural reflection produced by black Americans, then Du Bois was, by measure of both quantity and quality, among the foremost contributors. Between 1917 and 1935 he published six books (see Further Reading), among them Dark Princess (1928), his second novel, and Black Reconstruction (1935), his groundbreaking reconsideration of the role of African Americans in the Civil War and post-Civil War period.

Of foremost importance in defining the Civil Rights Movement in the United States is the question of periodization. When raised as a historical topic, often the term “civil rights movement” conjures images of events such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1963 March on Washington. Inextricably linked to those events are people such as Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks. Issues of concern that they are known for advocating include voting rights and desegregation. And while these people, issues, and events all legitimately constitute the modern-day Civil Rights Movement, accurately situating the struggle for civil rights along a historical continuum is key. This is particularly the case when examining the role of W. E. B. Du Bois as both a central black leader in the drive for equal rights for blacks, as well as an architect of the later Civil Rights Movement.

This chapter explores two aspects of Du Bois's civil rights activism: his role in forming a concept of black leadership rooted in a “Talented Tenth” and his organizational activism. From 1905 to 1915 Du Bois grappled with the intellectual and strategic problem of the appropriate demands black Americans needed to make of a democratic nation still treating its minorities as second-class citizens. Integration or “separate but equal” accommodation and education? What was best for the future of black Americans: education in vocations, such as blacksmithing and teaching, or a liberal arts education? Who would lead this rising black nation?

During the period from 1910 to 1935 Du Bois served as a founding member and only black board member for many years with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Du Bois was also the editor of the NAACP’s periodical Crisis, which, under his editorship, was a lightning rod for debating the pressing issues facing the NAACP’s constituency. His involvement with the NAACP and the Crisis marks what some believe to be the height of Du Bois’s pre-eminence as spokesman for black America.

For a generation of young, urbane, adventurous college graduates aspiring to an academic career, the late nineteenth century was a period of singular excitement and opportunity. America, struggling with the challenges of rapid urban and industrial growth, was open to foreign ideas and precedents, an intellectual sea-change challenged accepted dogmas and beliefs, the new social sciences came into their own, and transatlantic travel had become cheaper and easier than ever before. W. E. B. Du Bois's intellectual development and academic work owed much to his participation in the lively transatlantic exchange of ideas and atmosphere of experimentation which helped define the intellectual parameters of the fledgling social sciences and shaped the political ideas of a generation of progressive thinkers in the United States. In turn, Du Bois's historical and sociological research, from his student days at Fisk University, Harvard College, and the University of Berlin in the 1880s and 90s to his resignation as professor at Atlanta University in 1909, yielded a number of pioneering studies which advanced innovative research methods, opened up new fields of inquiry, and shattered old orthodoxies. Though encompassing only a small segment of his overall oeuvre, they provided crucial analytical underpinnings of his thought and activism throughout his career. Generations of students have been inspired by Du Bois's work, yet his contemporaries paid little attention to his record as historian and social scientist. In his Autobiography (1968), he bitterly remarked that African American academics “remained unrecognized in learned societies and academic groups. We rated merely as Negroes studying Negroes, and after all, what had Negroes to do with America or science?”

The long road to Parsifal

The Ring complete, the Bayreuth festival a fragile reality, Wagner turned – or more precisely returned, after a long hiatus – to work on Parsifal in 1877. He finished the poetic text in April and then labored for five years on the music, fighting ill health and struggling to ensure the future of the festival along the way. He composed act by act, drafting “compositional” and “orchestral” sketches virtually simultaneously, sometimes making use of material conceived earlier and occasionally revising the verbal text. After finishing the orchestral sketch in April 1879, Wagner needed almost three years until he concluded work on the full score, in January 1882. Further revisions and rehearsals fraught with diverse problems preceded the first performances in the summer of 1882, when the aging master celebrated himself and his achievement by conducting the last act of the final performance – a true Schwanengesang.

The opera Parsifal is a “summation and consummation,” a late work and Wagner's self-described “last card.” He drew it from a very mixed deck that he had begun to assemble already in the 1840s. In the intervening decades he completed an intellectual and artistic journey whose course was defined by the many twists and turns, detours and reversals, through which the opera accrued a rich assortment of philosophical ideas and poetic-dramatic and musical elements. If Wagner had composed a “Parzifal” on Wolfram von Eschenbach's medieval epic in 1845, when he first read the poem, it would have joined Tannhäuser and Lohengrin to form a trilogy of Romantic operas on medieval Christian legends.

When Gerda Buddenbrook presents Edmund Pfühl with piano arrangements of selections from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, the bookish but genial music-master in Thomas Mann's novel Buddenbrooks shrinks back in horror: “I won't play this, madam. I am your most obedient servant, but I will not play it. That is not music … It is pure chaos! It is demagoguery, blasphemy, and madness! It is a fragrant frog with thunderbolts! It is the end of all morality in the arts. I will not play it!” Eventually he gives in to Gerda's persistent requests, but soon breaks off for fear of the adverse effects the music may have on her impressionable son, Hanno: “And think of the child, the child sitting there in his chair. He stole in quietly to hear music – do you wish to poison his mind for good and all?” As it turns out, Pfühl's concerns are not unwarranted. In the next-to-last chapter of the novel Hanno loses himself in an improvisatory reverie at the keyboard, a fantasy whose climactic passage (with its “unyielding surge,” “chromatic struggle upward,” and “convulsions of desire”) clearly hearkens to the closing pages of Wagner's Tristan (that is, Isolde's “Transfiguration” or Liebestod). The next chapter begins ominously (“Cases of typhoid fever take the following course”) and goes on to recount the early demise of young Hanno Buddenbrook. This final scion of a decaying family, Mann suggests (if not without irony), passes away through and in some sense because of his extended Tristanesque daydreaming.

The subject of music in Nazi Germany invariably elicits the name Wagner, whether as a reference to Hitler's legendary adulation of the composer, to the notorious admiration for Hitler on the part of the composer's (posthumous) daughter-in-law and Bayreuth festival director, Winifred Wagner, to the presumed prominence of Wagner's music in the Third Reich, or to Wagner's anti-Semitism as a harbinger of the extermination of European Jewry. Yet the multiple roles of “Wagner” – the man, the family, the works, and the cultural-ideological legacy – in the Third Reich cannot be understood without peeling away several layers of myth. While some of these myths arose in Hitler's Germany, most were inspired by German expatriates and developed from postwar debates resulting from the desperate attempts to explain how a highly cultured people could carry out such atrocities. scholars have only recently begun to sort the myth from the reality in assessing the functions of Wagner and Bayreuth in Nazi culture, politics, and musical life. The following exploration will examine the many roles of the phenomenon of “Wagner” in the Nazi state, considering Nazi-era realities as well as their postwar historical interpretations and, sometimes, distortions.

No question has exercised the Wagner literature of the last fifteen or twenty years like that of Wagner's anti-Semitism. From a strictly biographical point of view, of course, there is no question: Wagner's well documented antagonism to the Jews as a presence in nineteenth-century Europe is a simple matter of record, although scholars can debate the exact origins, the shifting contours, or other “nuances” of his attitudes. The real question has to do with the consequences of these facts, either for our understanding of the operas or for any possible consensus regarding Wagner's implication in the murderous anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi regime that came to power in Germany fifty years after his death. These are almost certainly two separate questions. To argue that the extermination of European Jewry attempted in the later years of the Third Reich was a direct result of social messages encoded in Wagner's dramas and their music would be more than a little preposterous. But to argue that Wagner as a historical figure (which includes his writings and public persona, and indeed his artistic oeuvre) contributed in some significant way to the cultural climate in which Nazi ideologies could take root is by no means preposterous. It is the undeniable affinities between Wagner, “Wagnerism,” Bayreuth, and Hitler (if not the entirety of the Nazi Party) that give the question of Wagner's anti-Semitism a moral urgency quite incommensurate with such other perennially popular topics as his adultery or his reckless borrowing and spending habits.

“I cannot say by what means I might ever enjoy the purest radiant happiness other than through Wagner's music: and that even though it by no means always speaks of happiness, but [also] of the terrible and uncanny subterranean powers of human activity, of the sorrow contained in all happiness and the transience of our happiness; the happiness that issues from this music must have to do rather with the way it speaks.” Thus wrote Nietzsche in an unpublished fragment from the summer of 1875.

“Happiness” (Glück): the word occurs no less than five times in this one sentence. This was written at a time when Nietzsche had already begun to distance himself from Wagner in many ways. All the same, that music – as Thomas Mann wrote in his 1933 essay “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner” – was the “great love and passion of Nietzsche's life.” Yet Nietzsche's love was not for the music alone; it was just as much for Richard Wagner the person, the “old magician” as he repeatedly called him. “I loved him, and none other.” That comment, all the more remarkable for its lapidary formulation, was written in the spring of 1885, two years after Wagner's death.

For more than a century a dense thicket of legends and rumors has continued to grow up around Nietzsche’s relationship to Wagner. The many unpublished writings and fragments – which have only recently become available in a reliable, unexpurgated edition (that of Colli and Montinari) – indicate that the “break” with Wagner was hardly so rigorous as it has long been represented, based on an insufficient knowledge of the documentary sources. The younger Nietzsche’s attitude toward Wagner intertwined passion with critique, just as passion is merged with polemics in the later writings. That is why Mann could perceive the late polemics as really “a panegyric in reverse, another form of eulogy.”

In describing Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman), Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin as “Romantic operas,” Wagner fell back on a term that he had first used for Die Feen (The Fairies) in 1833–34, but the taxonomical similarity conceals an ideological difference that we can best understand only by briefly examining the conceptual background to these works.

As a literary movement, Romanticism had emerged at the end of the eighteenth century as a protest against the utilitarian, skeptical spirit of the Enlightenment. If Kant had lamented the limits of the powers of reason, Fichte now proceeded to glorify the potentialities of the imagination, opening the floodgates of subjectivity and the irrational, often expressed in the language of Catholic mysticism. At first the movement was apolitical, but the sense of inadequacy induced by the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and by the Wars of Liberation of 1813–15 led to a desire to escape from the sordid, reactionary present into a past in which Germany had once been united and strong. One of the leading apologists of the Romantic movement, August Wilhelm Schlegel, summed up the aims of his fellow poets with reference to this feeling of nostalgia: “The poetry of the ancients was that of possession, ours is that of longing.” Sehnsucht, or longing, became a leading motif of Romantic poetry, specifically a longing to re-create the world of the Middle Ages.

The subtitle of The Souls of Black Folk is “Essays and Sketches.” Together, the title and subtitle indicate a collection which offers the reader variations upon a theme. The fourteen chapters which comprise the main body of the book were written between 1897 and 1903. Nine had been published previously in various journals and magazines before being revised for inclusion in Souls. Taken together, the fourteen chapters range across social, political, and economic history, religion and education, psychology, the sociology of music, autobiography, and fiction. But Souls is more than simply a collection of essays and fiction held loosely together by a focus on the broad common ground of African American historical experience and contemporary life. It is a “combination” but one which is more than “mere addition.” In bringing together the disparate pieces, in revising the already published ones, and in ordering and framing them in particular ways, Du Bois transfigured them, so that Souls became a literary work which is greater than the sum of its parts.

In its opening lines Souls announces the problem which is its first subject: “the color-line” as a border which, in its very divisiveness, is constitutive of modernity. The present essay argues that the book's literary achievement lies above all in creating a form in which understanding can only grasp the scope and nature of the problem of race and modernity, its confounding knottiness, by passing through its own undoing and leaving behind the established academic and journalistic conventions of social analysis.

At every point in his career, Du Bois demonstrated a belief in the centrality of the African peoples in world history, and the interdependency of the continent of Africa with the rest of the world. He viewed this centrality and interdependence both in moral and in economic terms. He understood that Africa, no less than Europe, had been defined by and benefited from the cultures of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, the Arabian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean. He also realized that Africa, Europe, the Near East, and the New World had mutually defined one another. To this, one must add that Du Bois also perceived the geographic centrality of Africa as both a doorway to and a barrier between the Atlantic, and the Indian Oceans. With his sensitivity to both elitist and grass-roots perspectives, Du Bois's insights are indispensable to a comprehension of any worldview that might currently be associated with terms such as “Africanity,” “Afrocentrism,” “Pan-Negroism,” “Pan-Africanism,” or “the black Atlantic.”

Du Bois's earliest scholarly references to Africa made clear a desire to place African peoples at the center of history. These writings were equally imbued with racial romanticism, social scientific awareness, and a sense of political mission. He did not treat the issues of slavery, colonialism, and racism solely as moral issues, but as crucial elements of the global economy. He did not wish to view even such an obviously moral discourse as the African slave trade exclusively as a protest against victimization. Thus in The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America, 1638-1870 (1896), the book of his doctoral dissertation, he perceived the collapse of the slave trade in terms of political economy as well as morality. And thus he introduced the Haitian revolution as a Pan-African event, a milestone in the histories of Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

It is characteristic of twentieth-century black radical intellectual culture that, moving toward Marxism, it comes to discover its difference from Marxism. Canonically, this was stated by the Martiniquan poet and thinker Aimé Césaire in his Lettre à Maurice Thorez, his letter of resignation from the Parti Communiste français in 1956. Césaire does not dismiss the revolutionary project to which he had devoted his life since his student days at the Ecole Normale in Paris, his encounters with Surrealism and André Breton, his formative friendship with Léopold Sédar Senghor and the collective formation of Negritude, rather he asserts an issue of singularity, what he terms a “fact of capital importance”:

There are variations on this position and Cedric J. Robinson's important book on Black Marxism (1983) is a study motivated by the way in which the encounter with and difference from Marxism by black radical thought has been a means of self-definition.

The genesis of the Ring project

The outline of the drama that was to become Der Ring des Nibelungen, namely “Der Nibelungen-Mythus: Als Entwurf zu einem Drama,” dates from October 1848, the same year as the “Plan for the Organization of a German National Theater for the Kingdom of Saxony,” Wagner's radical proposal to establish an association of dramatists and composers along with a drama school and expanded court orchestra. That manifesto for theatrical reform naturally reflected Wagner's sociopolitical outlook of the period, hostile as it was to the status quo presided over by the aristocracy. The same preoccupation with nationhood and freedom also informed the contemporary reception of Greek drama, especially as mediated by the leading translator and commentator Johann Gustav Droysen.

The essays of the revolutionary period elaborate the emergent concept of the Wagnerian music drama in greater detail. Art and Revolution (1849) celebrates the Greek drama with its integration of all the arts, contrasting it with the vacuous, mercenary theater of the modern age. The Artwork of the Future (also 1849) develops this theme, proposing a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” that would unite dance, music, and poetry in a new kind of theater designed solely according to aesthetic and artistic criteria, no longer for commercial gain or social ostentation. And finally, Opera and Drama (1850–51), after offering a critique of the genres of modern opera and analyzing the nature and history of theater, attempts to illuminate the linguistic, dramatic, and musical ingredients of the proposed Gesamtkunstwerk.

W. E. B. Du Bois has occupied a pre-eminent place in African American literary, social, and political thought for a very long time, and, in recent years, he has been recognized as a figure central to the history of American thought in the twentieth century. His critique of the educational and political policies of Booker T. Washington set the agenda for debates about populism, leadership, and the relative merits of a humanistic education within the black community for much of the century. His role in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) placed him at the forefront of the African American civil rights movement. As a key interpreter and disseminator of Pan-Africanism, he became a central figure in postcolonial discourse. As the author of a number of landmark works in black historiography and sociology, he brought a scholarly rigor to an understanding of the social and historical dimensions of race in the United States which is impressive even today. As a mentor to and supporter of many of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, he helped shape the literary movement which continues to attract the greatest attention within African American literary studies. Perhaps most importantly of all, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he produced a work of exceptional literary achievement, among the most widely read and most often quoted works in African American literary history. It is the work by which most readers know Du Bois; it is also the work in which he most thoroughly explores the implications of his famous proposal, made at the first Pan-African conference in London in 1900 and then repeated throughout his career, that “the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.” No other writer has made us understand as clearly and fully as Du Bois that race and modernity are indissolubly linked: to think one is necessarily to think the other.