Wagner is vilified for his own words, but also because those words and his music became tied to the horror of the Holocaust—because he contributed to the aestheticization of fascism. But isn’t his essay “Judaism in Music” bad enough in itself? If language needs to have effected action in order to be objectionable, haven’t we just let every raging bigot who doesn’t actually hold political office off the hook? Anti-Semitism isn’t only wrong when it contributes directly to a Holocaust.
