(Ye with hands raised. Image source: Dimitrios Kambouris for Getty Images)

“I don’t hate Jewish people,” singer and rapper Ye declared last October. Far right conservative activist David Horowitz latched onto that statement as proof that Ye was not antisemitic. Then Ye directly praised Hitler, and even the David Horowitzes of the world mostly abandoned him.

Ye’s antisemitism is neither subtle nor in contention. But his somewhat contradictory statements raise questions about what antisemitism is and how it functions. Ye is probably to some degree lying, to himself and to others, when he declares “I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis.” But it’s also worth taking him seriously when he says he doesn’t feel like he hates Jews, even as he rants about Jewish influence in the media and praises the architect of Jewish genocide.

Antisemitism is often defined, or thought of, as hatred of Jewish people. But that can be misleading. Prejudice, discrimination, and even violence do not necessarily require animus. You don’t have to hate to hurt. Or, to put it another way, the internal state of the oppressor is not necessarily of that much relevance to the oppressed.

Ye might be one illustration of this point. But a more complicated and illuminating example is another, more distant musical icon: the early 20^th century Austrian composer Anton Webern. There’s much better evidence that Webern didn’t hate Jewish people. But we also know that he loved Hitler. By looking at Webern, we can see how those two things aren’t necessarily contradictory, and perhaps better understand Ye and the antisemitism of our current MAGA moment.

Webern vs. the Nazis

Today, to the extent people think about Webern’s politics, he’s generally known as someone who was a target of Nazis, rather than a supporter of them. Born in 1883 to a high-ranking civil servant, Webern was an intense, prickly, awkward man with high ideals and little practical sense. He was a student of Arnold Schoenberg, with whom he had a deep lifelong relationship characterized by an almost embarrassing reverence—his dedication to Schoenberg’s career often prevented him from composing his own work.

Schoenberg’s music was famously difficult, cacophonous, unmelodic, and resolutely anti-populist. In 1913, he conducted a program that included his own compositions and Webern’s, as well as that of others in their circle. The so-called Skandalkonzert provoked a riot, as lovers of traditional music became enraged by the experimental, ugly sounds. Audience members attacked the musicians and trashed the theater.

The violent public resistance to Schoenberg in the 1910s foreshadowed the Nazi response to his work. Schoenberg was Jewish, and the Nazis declared his music degenerate. He fled Germany for the United States in 1934.

(Anton Webern. Image source: Wikipedia Commons)

Webern, who was not Jewish and was living in Austria, stayed in the country even though his music was banned after Germany annexed Austria in 1938. The famous Jewish cultural critic Theodor Adorno, himself a student of Schoenberg, framed Webern’s short, abstract miniature arrangements as a kind of record of the composer’s own authoritarian banishment. “In Webern the musical subject, falling silent, abdicates; Webern abandons himself to the material, which assures him indeed of nothing more than the echo of muteness.”

Webern’s short compositions, teetering on the edge of silence, evoke yearning and pathos. The less than two-minute fourth of the 5 Movements for String Quartet from 1909, for instance, sounds like hushed breathing. The strings exhale in a long sigh interrupted by an occasional brave plunk; the ending is suspended, without a cadence. When you listen to it today, you can hear it as a record of lonely, romantic resistance to popular taste and to the state.

Supporting Hitler

The problem, though, is that Webern didn’t resist the Nazis. It’s true he had several Jewish friends, and unlike many at the time, he continued to associate with Jews personally and professionally. But he also supported Hitler. Perhaps in time he would have repudiated him, but he was accidentally shot and killed shortly after the end of the war, and never got a chance at even partial redemption.

Evidence for Webern’s support of Hitler and the Nazis isn’t secret or difficult to find; it’s well-documented by his biographers, including Malcolm Hayes (1995) and Kathryn Bailey (1998).

Webern’s son joined the Nazi party before the annexation of Austria, and his other children were for the most part similarly enthusiastic about Hitler. Webern may or may not have been a party member himself. But either way, he wrote enthusiastically about Nazi military victories. In May 1940, following Germany’s occupation of Norway and Denmark, he gushed in a letter (per Bailey’s translation):

“Though this is called unification, it also absolutely indicates a process of inner purification. That is Germany today! But only under National socialism!!! No other way! This is the new state, for which the country has been preparing for over twenty years.”

Even more disturbing, if possible, is Webern’s reaction after reading Mein Kampf, which he describes in a letter from March 1940.

“The book has brought me much enlightenment…What I believe I see at present makes me supremely confident! I see it coming, the pacification of the entire world. At first east of the Rhine as far as—yes, how far? This will depend on the USA. But probably as far as the Pacific Ocean! Yes, I believe this, I do believe, and I cannot see it another way!”

Webern read Hitler’s vicious, sustained, genocidal antisemitic rant, and came away dreaming of the Nazi “pacification of the entire world.”

Supporting Jewish People

Yet, somehow, there is every bit as much evidence for Webern’s personal opposition to antisemitism as there is for his support of the Nazis.

Early in his life, Webern did seem to harbor some prejudice against Jews. As a 20-year-old university student in 1903, he repeatedly denigrated Jewish classmates, referring to them as “unfriendly” and expressing shock and disgust that “every Jewish girl dares to judge the greatest artists.”

As an adult, though, Webern believed that many Jewish composers—Schoenberg, Mahler—were the greatest artists. His closest personal and professional relationships were with Jews.

Moreover, where some Nazi enthusiasts like Heidegger deliberately dropped their Jewish associates after Hitler’s rise, Webern never did. He continued to correspond with Schoenberg (who could not have been more explicit about his hatred of the Nazi regime.) And Webern went far beyond that, putting himself at real risk with his steadfast refusal to condone or participate in antisemitism. In 1934, when Nazi influence overshadowed Austria, he chose to perform a concert including Mendelssohns’ Violin Concerto on Austrian Radio. Mendelssohn was Jewish. In his biography, Hayes suggests the programming choice probably led to an unofficial blacklisting of Webern, who never conducted on Austrian Radio again.

(Illustration of Anton Webern. Image source: João Fazenda)

Webern was not deterred though. In 1936, he dedicated his Piano Variations to Eduard Steurmann, a Jewish pianist who had already fled the country. Its recital in 1937 was the last public performance of Webern’s work in Austria in his lifetime. After the German annexation in 1938, Webern helped a number of Jewish friends hide, including music instructor and theorist Josef Polnauer and Schoenberg’s son George.

Antisemitism Without Hatred

How could Webern at one and the same time fantasize about a Nazi conquest of the globe while celebrating Jewish musicians and defending Jewish people? Webern himself seems to have been unable to answer that question to his own satisfaction.

In 1936, the Russian-born, American Jewish violinist Louis Krasner came to Vienna to rehearse the last concerto of the recently deceased Alban Berg. Webern, Berg’s close friend, was to conduct the performance in Barcelona.

The two were going to travel to Spain together. But instead of going through Switzerland, the usual route, Webern insisted they take a train passing through Nazi Germany. In Munich, Webern demanded Krassner leave the train and join him for a beer in a dining hall, with the implicit goal of “proving” to Krassner that the Germans were not antisemitic. When they arrived safely in Barcelona, Webern declared, “There now, Krassner! Did anyone do anything to you?”

Sociologist Victor Ray notes that most common understandings of prejudice characterize racism as “a special category of meanness… perpetuated by bad, prejudiced individuals who hold negative ideas about a racial out-group.” Webern, by that definition, did not do anything antisemitic, because he did not feel hatred in his heart. Webern was traveling to a concert to work with a Jewish musician at some risk to his reputation and livelihood; he obviously wasn’t motivated by antisemitic animus.

And yet, it’s also obvious that forcing a Jewish person to travel into Nazi Germany in order to salve your conscience is an antisemitic act. Webern didn’t hate Krassner because he was a Jew, but he set up a situation where Krassner could have been harmed as a Jew—and a situation in which, as a Jew, Krassner had to have felt at least some discomfort and worry. There was not necessarily antisemitic intent, but there was an antisemitic outcome.

Feminist philosopher Kate Manne, in her book Down Girl, argues that focusing on the intent of bigots over the outcomes of bigotry is usually a way to excuse, or to bring about, those outcomes. When you obsess over whether (say) Donald Trump actually dislikes women, you are spending all your time centering his perspective, trying to read his mind and heart and understand what he is thinking. In contrast, when you shift to looking at the outcomes of oppression, “the focus…naturally shifts to misogyny’s targets or victims—that is, girls and women—and sources of hostility they face in the social world they navigate.”

Manne adds that “this shift helps us to do justice to forms of misogyny that (1) involve purely passive or structural power in operation, (2) are perpetrated by agents who are channeling and acting “under the influence” of wider social forces, rather than harboring the relevant hostilities more deeply.” Bigotry is not necessarily about the intent of bigots; it can also be about creating structures in which everyone, bigots and non-bigots alike, is empowered to harm a particular group.

Webern’s Ethnic Fundamentalism

From Manne’s perspective, Webern doesn’t have to hate Jewish people to drag Krassner into Germany as an experiment. Webern just needs to be acting in accord with “wider social forces.” In this case, we might call those wider social forces “German nationalism,” or, per historian Claudia Koonz, German “ethnic fundamentalism.”

Koonz is the author of The Nazi Conscience, a classic study of German public collaboration in the Third Reich. She argues that Hitler’s most virulent expressions of antisemitism were not very popular and threatened to alienate many Germans.

However, Koonz says, “a more sober form of racial thinking held the potential for mobilizing broad segments of the population.” This was “ethnic fundamentalism,” a blend of religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism.

Hitler’s ethnic fundamentalism claimed “to defend an ancient spiritual heritage against the corrosive values of industrialized urban society.” It also encouraged its followers to “seek vengeance for past wrongs” and “to forge a glorious future cleansed of ethnic aliens.”

Nazi ideology was framed around passionate, rabid hatred of outsiders (Jewish people) and a passionate commitment to insiders (the German volk.) The hatred and the love were structurally and intentionally inseparable; a belief in your own racial superiority requires there be someone to be superior to. But individuals could emphasize one side or the other, focusing on the racial regeneration and German pride while largely not noticing (or pretending not to notice) the consequences for the excluded. “They could become ‘yes but’ Nazis,” Koonz explains, and “welcome ethnic fundamentalism and economic recovery while dismissing Nazi crimes as incidental.”

That describes Webern perfectly. The composer was an ardent German nationalist, who framed his patriotism in metaphysical terms which both included and attempted to elevate xenophobic bigotry. In 1914 he wrote to Schoenberg to gush about his “unshakeable faith in the German spirit, which indeed has created, almost exclusively, the culture of mankind.”

This mystical faith in a Germanic soul permeates Webern’s work and life. Sometimes, it’s relatively innocuous, as in his lifelong admiration of the Austrian mountains. Sometimes it feels on the edge of tipping over into something darker, as in Webern’s 1938-39 song that uses the lyrics for Hildegard Jone’s poem “Zündender Lichtblitz des Lebens (Igniting flash of life)”. Here’s the translation by Sharon Krebs:

The furious lightning-flash of life
struck out of the cloud of the word.
Thunder, the heartbeat, follows,
until it ebbs away in peace.

The music includes dissonant, abrupt martial choral declarations. Is this about an inner experience of passion? Or is it related to Webern’s ecstatic post-Mein Kampf call for universal Nazi pacification?

There’s nothing antisemitic in Jone’s poem. But Webern’s intense commitment to German national traditions is embedded in a structure that allowed antisemitism to flourish, to say the least.

Tradition and the Individual Bigot

My favorite Webern recording is a 1950 album by Jewish avant garde conductor Rene Leibowitz, which emphasizes the music’s dry, startling, and playful abruptness. The “Concerto for Nine Instruments” sounds like the performers are wandering around with toy instruments, bumping into walls and tripping over honking waterfowl. It’s intentionally and gloriously cerebral and confrontational, a deconstruction of high Germanic pomp and seriousness. This is the decadent Webern that Hitler’s regime hated.

But in other recordings (and even in Leibowitz’s) you can hear Webern not as a refutation of pomp, but as a kind of quintessence of it. His most famous work, like his Five Pieces for Orchestra, pare away and pare away, leaving a hint of romantic melody, a flourish of a horn, a tinkling of bells. It’s like he’s seeking the essence of that great Viennese tradition, trying to strip away everything unnecessary and superfluous, finding a core of purity and truth.

It’s moving and beautiful. But also, you can’t help but feel there’s maybe something sinister when a Nazi-sympathizer seeks purity and essence by trying to eliminate unnecessary material.

Webern wasn’t intentionally composing music as a blueprint for genocide. But he was composing music as a German nationalist in a moment when German nationalism was marching towards horrific atrocities. Hate wasn’t in Webern or in his music, arguably. But an exclusionary hateful vision of national power and national identity shaped it, and him.

Ye’s identity too is shaped by an exclusionary Christian nationalism; he’s said that Jews should work for Christians. Similarly, Christians who advocate for prayer in public schools, or call for abortion bans that contradict Jewish teachings, don’t necessarily have personal animus towards Jews. Intense national racial/ethnic/religious pride doesn’t require hate from every adherent. But it creates a structure in which hate fits and works.

There is a lesson here in Webern’s life that speaks to today. Webern’s odd, quiet, questing compositions sometimes seem like they’re trying to escape from their own time and their own selves, vanishing into a private space where public obligations and pressures can’t find them.

But there is no such space. Webern is dead and doesn’t care about history’s judgment one way or the other. But his life, and his music, are a reminder that what you feel inside is often significantly less important than what you assent to in the name, ostensibly, of love.

Noah Berlatsky is a freelance writer in Chicago. He writes about fascism and other subjects at his substack, Everything Is Horrible.