SOURCE: Weiner, Marc A. “Introduction: Wagner and the Body.” In Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, pp. 1-33. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995.

In the following excerpt, Weiner scrutinizes the racial implications of Wagner's depiction of the body in his operas.

There is no anti-Semite who does not basically want to imitate his mental image of a Jew, which is composed of mimetic cyphers.

—Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Gleaming or dripping eyes, a resonant or screeching voice, the bodily aromas of youthful love or the stench of sulfur and flatulence, the steady tread of a muscle-bound warrior or the lopsided, hobbling gait of a diminutive, hairy, goatlike creature whose skin is ashen or deathly pale—these are images of the body through which Richard Wagner metaphorically expressed his theories concerning the failings of nineteenth-century Europe and his vision of a superior and future Germany. For Wagner...