of Valhalla] outlive themselves and yield to superstition or unbelief, whilst Art [the heroic deeds of art which Siegfried’s muse Bruennhilde will inspire him to create] eternally shoots up, renewed and young, from out the ruins of existence.” [729W-{9-12/67} German Art and German Policy: PW Vol. IV, p. 79-80]
These two passages provide several key insights into Siegfried’s early dependence on, and abhorrence of, his foster-father Mime. One, Mime clearly represents an earlier phase of Siegfried’s existence from which Siegfried instinctively desires to wean himself. Two, Mime represents objective reality while Siegfried’s impulse is to idealize it. Three, Mime (miming, imitation), with his practical intelligence, represents the precondition for Siegfried’s ability to posit an ideal realm which transcends reality, just as Alberich’s forging of his Ring of consciousness was the precondition for mankind’s involuntary invention of the gods and their heavenly abode, Valhalla. Four, Mime is the intermediate link between Mother Nature (Erda) and Siegfried’s ideal. Five, Mime represents repetition and sameness, while Siegfried represents the eternally new, Wotan’s ideal of change, the ever-youthful originality and spontaneity represented by art. Six, it is clear from our second extract that while Mime can be identified with both State and Religion, i.e., with Wotan’s establishment, Siegfried represents the artist whose originality transcends the conservative limits of a religion-based society.
Our analysis above should make clear that though Wagner was in his private life, and even sometimes in his published essays, an avowed anti-Semite, in the Ring his critique of Judaism is actually better understood as his critique of the universal shortcomings, first, of all men per se, and secondarily of that class of men who are inherently incapable of original creativity and/or disinclined to seek to create or admire any ideal higher than practical need or the acquisition of power (political, financial, scientific, technological, etc.). For those content to see Wagner merely as a typical Nineteenth Century racist, it may come as a surprise to learn that, ironically, one of the motives Wagner invoked for his own (and German) anti-Semitism was that, according to him, the Jews were dedicated to a narrow racist view of the world, while Wagner’s idealized German sought the “purely-human,” i.e., sought to embrace what is universal to all races, all of humanity:
“Despite the enormous disadvantage at which the German race (if so we still may call it) appears to stand against the Jewish, we yet have ventured to suggest the re-awakening of a German instinct as one factor in the present [anti-Semitic] agitation. As, however, we have been obliged to discard all idea of its being a purely racial instinct, we perhaps might search for something higher: a bent that, merely vaguely (wahnvoll) felt by the Folk of to-day, would at first appear indeed as instinct, though really of far nobler origin and loftier aim, and which might haply be defined as the spirit of the purely-Human.” [1069W-{1-2/81} Know Thyself –2nd Supplement to ‘Religion and Art’: PW Vol. VI, p. 272]
Thus Siegfried’s loathing of Mime may be said to stem, among other things, from Siegfried’s abhorrence of the narrowness of Mime’s instincts, Mime’s lack of breadth and depth, his lack of openness and generosity toward life and the world outside himself.
