Tag: Cosima Wagner

Monday Morning at the Wagners

From Cosima Wagner’s Diaries 1878-1883: Coming from his bath, R.[ichard] says to me: “You are quite right—we should have slaves”… [January 7, 1878] One more potential bit of evidence, incidentally, for my claim that Nietzsche’s arguments in early essays like “The Greek State” and in Birth of Tragedy may have been about real, not metaphorical, slavery. In her diary, Cosima Wagner makes clear that she and Richard had been discussing the benefits of slavery over wage labor (“I declared recently that slaves had been happier than the present-day proletariat”), which was one of the main defenses of slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War in the South. Though the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche was, in 1878, on the brink of a permanent […]