Richard Wagner’s musical and prose works are shot through with ideas, imagery, and speculation relating to race. Given the influence of racial theorising on almost every area of nineteenth-century European thought and culture, this is hardly surprising. Yet Wagner did not just absorb theories of race: he actively disseminated them, a fact that remains a troubling, if unavoidable part of his legacy. This chapter provides a selective overview of the history of scientific racism in Europe (especially Germany) from the Enlightenment era to the early twentieth century, focusing on the intersections of racial theory with aesthetics, comparative philology, and religious ideologies, including antisemitism. Special attention is devoted to Arthur de Gobineau’s influence on Wagner’s late essays, and the impact of those writings on the Bayreuth Circle, including Houston Stewart Chamberlain.

The protagonist of Winterreise wanders through a landscape that is both real and imagined. Banished from one home but unable to conceive another, he follows a path that circles back on itself repeatedly, leading only to exhaustion and defeat. Yet while the singer of Winterreise appears to inhabit a lonely landscape, Wilhelm Müller’s verses and their musical setting by Franz Schubert would also have evoked a concrete social world for their audiences, that of the road (Landstrasse). The road, by its very nature, was filled with people on the move, some of them (journeymen, pilgrims) heading purposefully from one place to another, but others with no particular destination, whose poverty, criminality, or “dishonorable” status banished them from their towns and villages. These last types, the “wandering people” (fahrendes Volk), had become well established as an object of public fascination and state scrutiny by the eighteenth century.

NOT VERY LONG AGO, the playwright and polemicist August von Kotzebue (1761–1819) was considered beneath the consideration of serious scholars of German literature. If he was remembered, it was as an antipode to Goethe, an exponent of Trivialliteratur, or as the unfortunate though perhaps deserved victim of the student nationalist Carl Ludwig Sand. Despite his enormous literary output and his influence on the cultural lives of his contemporaries, a recent history of German literature mentions Kotzebue not a single time. In recent years this tide has turned, as scholars have discovered the importance of Kotzebue for postcolonial studies, the Baltic Enlightenment, the cultural politics of the Napoleonic era, and debates regarding the meaning and function of literature. The 200th anniversary of Kotzebue's assassination brought forth a number of remembrances that were quite favorable to him, certainly more sympathetic than most of what was written in the immediate aftermath of that event.

Despite the growing interest in Kotzebue's literary and polemical output, barriers exist to a closer study of his life, with most biographers still relying on the accounts in his literary memoir and in the autobiographical pieces that were published after his death. The Kotzebue Nachlass, held in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, is extensive but fragmentary, and there has been no concerted attempt to collect and publish Kotzebue's personal papers and correspondence, which, in any case, are strewn across archives and libraries throughout Germany and beyond. With that said, one key source on Kotzebue's life has remained largely unexplored, despite lying more or less in plain view for many years—namely, the manuscript Mein Umgang mit dem schönen Geschlecht (My relations with the fair sex) which forms part of the Kotzebue Nachlass in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and is published here for the first time.

The manuscript consists of twenty-six pages, written in what looks to be Kotzebue's hand on thin, somewhat transparent paper. Although the manuscript is undated, its opening line indicates that Kotzebue was 56 when he wrote it, placing its origin around 1817. This also means that it was written in the same time period that Kotzebue penned two other autobiographical texts, Betrachtungen über mich selbst (Reflections on myself) and Woher kommt es daß ich so viele Feinde haben?

The dream of ancient Hellas and its gods shaped the intellectual projects of Schelling, Hölderlin and Hegel from the very beginning. As students in Tübingen, they came to see Greece as a second homeland, whose language, culture and geography were as familiar as those of Germany but infinitely more attractive. To express their sense of the fundamental unity of the world, they adopted the slogan ‘Ἓν καὶ Πᾶν’ [one and all]. And when they sought to realise their hopes for a new union of poetry, philosophy and religion they called for a ‘new mythology’, with the Greek gods serving as model and inspiration. Even after Schelling and Hegel distanced themselves from such youthful utopianism, Greek mythology remained a crucial reference point for their philosophies. In their mature systems, it would serve as a rich source of metaphors and narratives, as a tool for critiquing and reconstructing Christian theology and (for Schelling) as a key to explicating the subterranean forces at work in the human psyche across the ages.

In turn, Idealism's rich legacy of speculation on myth would leave a lasting impact on the ‘science’ of mythology. To be sure, Vico and Herder had already identified myth as the storehouse of a people's earliest ideas about nature, religion, morality and law. Yet it was Idealist philosophy, particularly that of Schelling, that systematised these insights while suggesting that mythology could provide an intuition of the absolute itself. By linking mythology to the highest aspirations of religion and metaphysics, Schelling helped create a template that would be followed by many generations of scholars, whether philologists, theologians or anthropologists. Indeed, one can find echoes of the Romantic–Idealist approach to myth in the work of F. Max Müller, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade, among others. At the same time, however, the elevation of myth to a central category of cultural analysis gave new power to the project of demythologisation. The ‘negative’ concept of myth – as a form of illusion, distortion, or under-developed knowledge – became a tool for undermining not just particular stories or legends but entire religions, worldviews and social structures.

It is difficult to read both the theoretical literature in political science on the causes of war and historians' case studies of the origins of particular wars without being struck by the difference in their respective evaluations of the importance of domestic political factors. Whereas historians devote considerable attention to these variables, most political scientists minimize their importance. Domestic political variables are not included in any of the leading theories of the causes of war; instead, they appear only in a number of isolated hypotheses and in some empirical studies that are generally atheoretical and noncumulative. This gap is troubling and suggests that political scientists and historians who study war have learned little from each other. A greater recognition of the role of domestic factors by political scientists would increase the explanatory power of their theories and provide more useful conceptual frameworks for the historical analysis of individual wars.

This study takes a first step toward bridging this gap by examining some of the disparate theoretical literature on domestic politics and war. It examines the relationship between national attributes and war behavior, the relative likelihood of democratic and non-democratic regimes going to war, Marxist and liberal theories regarding the impact of economic structure, the influence of nationalism and public opinion, and the scapegoat hypothesis. First, however, this article takes a closer look at the different treatment of domestic sources of war by political scientists and historians.

Are there really lessons of the past? The past is certainly a source of knowledge, our only source of knowledge given the flow of time, but, strictly speaking, it does not teach lessons. By lessons I mean maxims for attaining particular outcomes in the present or future: for example, Si vis pacem, para helium, or it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. Insofar as these maxims seem to offer guidance for policymakers, they are usually psychological, not historical. They supposedly summarize human traits that persist regardless of changing historical contexts. Other examples might include the notion that appeasement encourages aggression or that “military decision makers will tend to overestimate the feasibility of an operational plan if a realistic assessment would require forsaking fundamental beliefs or values.” Identification of such allegedly constant traits was the goal of philosophical history and may have seemed an appropriate program for historians during the Enlightenment and their policy-studies heirs. Subsequent historians, however, have usually sought to describe changing societal contexts or outcomes.

Explanations of the origins of World War II tend to emphasize either deliberate, if failed, choices or inexorable processes. The first view indicts Adolf Hitler's aggrandizing choices and preference for violence, and questions the judgment and strategy of the appeasers, personified, correctly or not, by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. The second view broadens the focus, pointing to secular changes in relative power between states; to the relation between states' commitments and their ability to uphold and protect them; and to domestic, economic, and cultural dynamics that individually, or in combination, predisposed the situation to conflict. Attention to both dimensions is necessary to appreciate Britain's strategy as the central axis of diplomacy and rivalry with Germany in the 1930s and to distill the “lessons” of the origins of the war.

In the 1930s, Britain took over the mantle of maintaining the status quo vis-à-vis Germany. Chamberlain and his associates faced the classic issue of judging the nature of its adversary's ambitions. Morgenthau captured the dilemma for Britain in this period: “While it would be fatal to counter imperialistic designs with measures appropriate to a policy of the status quo, it would be only a little less risky to deal with a policy [of an adversary] seeking adjustments within the status quo as though it were imperialistic.”