Most honoured Sir,
Accept my sincere thanks for your parcel, and also for your letter. Your little booklet contained much that I found encouraging. As for your letter, I can tell you that it had the same consoling effect upon me, something which very rarely happens, but which, when it does, leaves an even more pleasing impression in that insipidity and malice cannot affect me as adversely as wit and sympathy can cheer me. In the present instance you are the first and only person to have given me this pleasure and, in doing so, happily made up for so much that is bad.
As for the object in question, the brochure itself, you do well to recognize that my only aim could be to ensure that it is read at all: how people interpret it is of course not my affair but theirs. My own view is not that anything can still be done to arrest our present great cultural decline, but that something must be done to force us to see what has happened. Just as the poor political economy of the Poles has led to the country’s wealth falling into the hands of the Jews, so the boundless neglect, nay, the squandering of the German spirit’s cultural capital by German governments has allowed this same capital to be exploited by the selfsame Jews in accordance with entirely similar natural laws. All one can do is admit this: it is no longer possible to fight against it or argue about it. But we should not seek to conceal this from ourselves for the sake of our own convenience. That was my intention, as you yourself recognized it to be. Why should we squabble with our conquerors? It is only ourselves that we have to blame for having caused us to be disinherited. -
May I thank you once again, and ask that you keep in touch?
I remain, Sir,
your most respectful and obedient servant
Richard Wagner
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 377