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Eliot's Beethoven-inspired Coriolan I Triumphal March (1931) responds to and challenges the right-wing reception of Beethoven and Nietzsche in interwar Germany. Parodying the fascist interpretation of both composer and philosopher as military heroes, Eliot's poem instead invokes Beethoven in the idealist spirit of the Vienna Secession's 1902 Beethoven art exhibition. In particular, Triumphal March reveals itself as an ekphrastic response to Max Klinger's 1902 Beethoven sculpture, which portrayed the composer as a Promethean artist-hero aligned with Nietzsche's Übermensch. Resisting a militarist interpretation ofNietzsche's "superman" and a fascist discourse of Beethoven-Führer, Eliot follows Klinger's utopian vision of a "Third Kingdom" as suggesting peace, reconciliation, and inner transformation.
Keywords: TS. Eliot / Ludwig Beethoven / Friedrich Nietzsche / fascism / visual culture
A hundred years from the publication of The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot remains a controversial figure, one whose seemingly reactionary views continue to raise problematic questions around his corpus of work. In both public and scholarly circles Eliot is associated with conservative, even "proto-fascist" views (Harding 177). Importantly too, critics assume that these views remained in place until the outbreak of war in 1939.1 The question of Eliot's anti-Semitism has been widely debated in scholarship from the 1990s on and revisited in two Special Issues of Modernism/Modernity (2003). In this light, any work that highlights Eliot's indebtedness to German artists and thinkers such as Ludwig Beethoven and Friedrich Nietzsche would perhaps only suggest support for Eliot's "proto-fascist" tendencies. However, in what follows I argue that Eliot's 1931 poetic series Coriolan is in fact an anti-fascist work that celebrates Beethoven, Nietzsche, and the work of the Jewish artist Max Klinger whilst deliberately satirizing and rejecting the fascist cultural politics of this time. Eliot's approach is characteristically obscure, drawing on German philosophy, art history, and music discourse. Nevertheless, his yoking of these figures is a repudiation of the mythologization of national "heroes" by the German National Socialist Party in the 1920s and 1930s.
In Germany, the Führerprinzip or 'leadership principle' was established by the Nazi party as early as 1921 and Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925, 1927; abridged, 1930) extended this principle to the Third Reich.2 In Mein Kampf Hitler reflects on his artistic career in Vienna and recounts the shaping influence of German art and music...