Two shocking examples of projecting the moral bad are presented in this chapter: Hitler’s and Putin’s worldviews. The deeper commonalities in the social identities they propagated are analyzed: dehumanization, purification, internal unity/external division, and enemy image construction. This leads to some practical implications: recognizing the existence of moral multiplicity instead of moral dualism, avoiding the identification of people on the basis of one category only, replacing social categories by personalized I-positions, broadening one’s moral circle beyond one’s favorite ingroup, intergroup contact, promoting a superordinate identity, developing an overarching meta-position, and creating access to the moral middle ground.

Wagner’s project for the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth also established ‘the Bayreuth idea’, in which festival visitors were to participate directly in the performances. Initially, an explicit separation of art and politics anchored this separation, yet later ideologies came to influences the Bayreuth circle, and in turn, the Festival itself. Two are examined in this chapter, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (in relation to Cosima), and Adolf Hitler (in relation to Winifred), alongside the Festival in the aftermath of the Second World War.

Today’s reception of Wagner and assumptions about the composer’s complicity in inspiring the Holocaust are primarily influenced by events that transpired long after the composer’s death. This chapter analyses Wagner’s own shifting attitudes toward Jews in the context of his life and times and considers the twentieth-century events that have shaped the Wagner legacy: Adolf Hitler’s associations with the Wagner family and Bayreuth, the exploitation of works and musical excerpts for political purposes during the Third Reich, rumours about the use of Wagner’s music in concentration camps, repertoire and staging during the Hitler years, and the troubled and conflicted reception of Wagner’s works in Israel. It also considers how refugees from Nazi Germany initially raised suspicion about the anti-Semitic content of the music dramas and their characters, how post-war scholarship has concentrated on proving these allegations, and how the Wagner family still struggles to come to terms with the past.

The final chapter examines the impact that the intense struggle over secularism had on German politics in the years 1930 to 1933. This chapter examines the many camps involved in this struggle. In particular it aims to demonstrate that antisecularism became a key binding agent for formations on the right that were promoting authoritarian solutions to the deepening political crisis. It looks at the role of church leaders in elaborating the slogan of “cultural Bolshevism” and promoting church militancy and calling for a “Christian front” to battle godlessness. It will make an original contribution to the significant recent scholarship on the collaboration of the Christian churches and National Socialism but bringing to the table not the religious, but rather a confessional basis of collusion. The affirmation of “positive Christianity” in the 1920 program of the NSDAP reflected the party’s commitment to an ecumenical struggle against secularism and Judaism. Hitler repeatedly placed his party’s position on religion in a quasi-confessional context.

The grand hoteliers of Berlin, who were also German financial, industrial, and commercial elites, cast their lot with Hitler in 1932. Several factors played into the decision, but the most important was an unshakable pessimism, born of the chaos of 1918–23, especially the hyperinflation of 1923, that never quite dispelled in the years of relative prosperity of 1924–28. After 1929, during the Great Depression, this pessimism hardened into fatalism: that is, certainty that business would fail under present conditions. Under the influence of a contagious fatalism endemic to their milieu by 1932, the Kaiserhof’s owners, in particular, would not have seen or understood the ramifications of their decision to let Hitler use the hotel as his headquarters. On the one hand, the decision at least kept open the possibility of a different future under the next regime. And on the other hand, the alternative, ejecting Hitler, might trigger immediate and violent retaliation by the Brownshirts. In the end, however, these same hoteliers, because they were Jewish, found themselves running for their lives as some of the earliest victims of the Nazi persecution.

This chapter assesses the emergent mindset and the city’s insular nature by providing an analysis of the propaganda created in Königsberg during its siege. As the idea of Volksgemeinschaft steadily lost its appeal, propagandists struggled to convey their message to the fortress’s population. By drawing attention to the efforts of local propagandists, this chapter examines the impact of the Wehrmacht ‘on the ground’, and discusses the need to forge a Kampfgemeinschaft, based on Königsberg’s ‘battle’ rather than on Germany’s ‘struggle’. Rather than encouraging the population to leave the city, the fortress command instead propagated a false sense of safety. An assessment of the themes portrayed in local media reveals how, in a fractured Germany, local authorities presented their message and how they sought to link it to the larger regional picture of events. A martial narrative came to dominate Königsberg’s propaganda while the unfolding events were consistently explained by drawing parallels to the city’s Prussian past, offering an alternative to the National Socialist rhetoric. The population’s reluctance to leave the city until the very end is a sombre testament to the propagandists’ success in downplaying the dangers to which all were exposed.

Surveys the laws and procedures for the POWs, who came in front of military tribunals, and the German women, who usually had to stand a public trial at a special court, an institution set up to repress and ruthlessly punish dissenting behavior. Briefly touches on trials against civilian men, including trials for homosexual acts.

Analyzes the military tribunals and special court trials. While the former became harsher in response to massive steering from the highest places (the High Command of the Army and Hitler personally), the latter became more lenient, partly in reaction to an intervention by Hitler in 1942 that denied women agency and therefore allowed the courts to be more lenient, especially if the woman had a forgiving soldier husband. While the military tribunals proceeded under international observation, the women were often interrogated and intimidated by the Gestapo. Their confessions counted almost always as proof even if the prisoner denied the charges.

The specters of Nazism and the Holocaust loom over Wagner’s Ring cycle. In the first half of this chapter, I consider whether Wagner’s anti-Semitism is present in the Ring – whether the Nibelung dwarves Alberich and Mime are meant to be caricatures of Jews. I conclude that the Nibelungs’ physical appearance, behavior, language and music took on aspects that Wagner found repellent about Jews, but that our deep unease about the relationship between the Germanic hero Siegfried and the dwarf Mime has much to do with our post-Holocaust symbolic landscape. In the second half of the chapter, I examine the Ring’s broader role in the Third Reich. Hitler was a committed Wagnerite, and the Nazi regime made plentiful use of Wagnerian music, motifs and stagecraft, but the connections between Wagner, Hitler, and Nazism are not straightforward, and must be traced back to the Wagner cult amongst German speakers at the turn of the twentieth century. Wagner’s Ring was not the ideological wellspring of Nazism, yet I argue that the impact of the composer’s work on Hitler did play a role in shaping the Führer’s – and thus Germany’s – political destiny.

Chapter 5 investigates my counter-example, the rogue diplomat whose indiscipline harmed U.S. interests. Joseph P. Kennedy, a contributor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1932 and 1936 election campaigns, demanded Embassy London as a reward, and FDR obliged. Upon arriving in Britain, Kennedy concluded that Adolf Hitler's Wermacht was invincible, that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's strategy of appeasement was correct, and that America had to remain neutral. Kennedy repeatedly misrepresented the Roosevelt administration's anti-fascist policy. Whereas FDR and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were endeavoring to bring American--and world - opinion around to a posture of resistance to Hitler, Kennedy proclaimed that America had no stake in the conflict and that, moreover, he expected Germany to win any war that might break out. No matter how often FDR ordered Kennedy to hold his tongue, he would not comply. Germany's 1939 invasion of Poland horrified the ambassador, who forecast an end to democracy in Europe and America. At the close of Kennedy's thousand days in London, Anglo-American relations were in tatters and Britain stood alone against the Nazi juggernaut. Few did more than Kennedy to bring about this hideous state of affairs.

This essay was penned in 2008 shortly after the release of a documentary film titled <italic>Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed</italic>. Directed by Nathan Frankowski and starring the popular conservative financial commentator Ben Stein, it claims that there is an academic conspiracy afoot among scientists and scholars to censor the speech of creationists and Intelligent Design advocates. As the film appeared in over a thousand movie theaters, grossing $7.7 million, and was widely discussed in popular culture and the media, evidently we aren’t very adept at censorship. More importantly, I felt I needed to set the record straight about what the film is really about and why the speech of those who hold a different view of the origins and evolution of life on earth is not being suppressed, inasmuch as I was featured in the film. The government never moved to censor the film, theater owners gladly screened it, and a nontrivial portion of the public viewed it. What Stein and his on-camera voices object to is that their theory (that’s too lofty a word – call it conjecture) of a top-down intelligent designer of life is rejected by scientists for lack of empirical evidence and internal coherency.

Chapter 18 discusses the fateful elections of 14 September 1930 from the perspective of the German Right and the various factions on the Right that were vying for power. It focuses first of all on the efforts of the young conservatives who reorganized themselves into the Conservative People’s Party in the hopes of uniting those who had left the DNVP into a single political front. But these efforts, which enjoyed strong support from Paul Reusch and the German industrial establishment, evoked little interest from the leaders of the CNBLP and CSVD, both of whom were determined not to compromise the uniqueness of their own political appeal by entering into close ties with other political parties. In the meantime, Hugenberg and the DNVP leadership tried to organize their campaign around the mantra of anti-Marxism but misread, as did most of the other parties in the middle and moderate Right, the threat that National Socialism posed to their party’s electoral prospects. As a result, the Nazis were able to capitalize upon the disunity of the non-Nazi Right to score a victory of epic proportions that gave the NSDAP fourteen percent of the popular vote and 107 Reichstag mandates.

Chapter 6 deals with the crisis year of 1923 and examines the German Right’s response to the hyperinflation of 1922–23, the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr, the increasingly palpable fear of Bolshevism, and threat of Bavaria’s secession from the Reich. After a discussion of the DNVP’s relationship to the Cuno government that assumed office in November 1922, the chapter takes a particularly close look at its opposition to the Stresemann cabinet that assumed power at the height of the crisis in August 1923. Following the termination of passive resistance in the Ruhr, many DNVP leaders began to embrace the idea of a “national dictatorship” under the tutelage of the army commander-in-chief Hans von Seeckt as the only way out of the crisis in which Germany found itself. But movement in this direction was cut short not only by Seeckt’s ambivalence but more importantly by Hitler’s abortive “Beer Hall Putsch” in Munich. As the Stresemann government moved to consolidate its position in the aftermath of the putsch, any chance of replacing the Weimar Republic with a more authoritarian system of government had vanished.

Chapter 17 examines the repercussions of the December secession from the DNVP Reichstag delegation upon the fate of the Müller cabinet and the decision to appoint Heinrich Brüning as the head of a new government based upon the parties of the middle and moderate Right. The architect of the Brüning cabinet was military strategist Kurt von Schleicher, who hoped either to force Hugenberg’s resignation as DNVP party chairman or trigger a second secession on the party’s left wing that was more extensive than the one that had taken place the preceding December. But the support that Hugenberg enjoyed at the base of the DNVP organization was unassailable, with the result that the dissidents within the DNVP Reichstag delegation found themselves increasingly isolated within the party. Consequently, when Hugenberg decided to support Social Democratic efforts to force the dissolution of the Reichstag in July 1930, their only recourse was to leave the party in a second secession that was, to be sure, more extensive than the first but failed to shake Hugenberg’s control of the party.

National Socialism is said to have ended the success story of operetta art: the death of the genre may be situated between 1933 and 1945, caused by Nazi purges. This chapter takes a closer look at operetta during the Nazi regime, dealing with three different approaches. First, I sketch the consequences for operetta of the Nazi ideology of denial (Verweigerungsideologie). Operetta stood against every Nazi theory of ‘German art’ for two main reasons: its dazzling aesthetics and artists, mostly defamed for being Jewish. Second, the chapter focusses on the aim to conceive an original type of German operetta. The examples of Heinrich Strecker’s chauvinistic Ännchen of Tharau (1933) and Hermann Hermecke’s and Arno Vetterling’s propaganda operetta The Dorothee (1936) reveal that attempts to reinvent the genre were dominated less by instructions from potentates than by artists who wanted to support the regime. Third, the chapter examines theatre practice, exemplified by Munich’s Gärtnerplatz Theatre between 1938–44. Even in these years, theatres had to deal with an audience that still demanded the roaring, non-German genre tradition. Operetta offers a glimpse into quotidian culture under the dictatorship, where the ‘death’ of the genre was not as widespread as stated.