Bayreuth Circle

The Bayreuth Circle (German: Der Bayreuther Kreis) was a name originally applied by some writers to devotees of Richard Wagner's music who attended and supported the annual Bayreuth Festival in the later 19th and early twentieth centuries. As some of these devotees espoused nationalistic German politics, and some of them were supporters of Adolf Hitler from the 1920s onwards, this group of people has been associated by some writers with the rise of Nazism.

The term 'Bayreuth Circle' was originally applied to the enthusiasts of Wagner's music who were also associated with or subscribed to the publication Bayreuther Blätter, established in the 1880s by Wagner himself and edited by Hans von Wolzogen. This journal, apart from containing snippets by Wagner himself on social, political and aesthetic matters, was also strongly nationalistic and anti-Semitic. Its circulation was small and it was not politically influential.

After the death of Wagner in 1883, his second wife Cosima in continuing to propagate what she saw as her husband's views, was supported by a number of active anti-Semites, including Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Ludwig Schemann. Schemann, the founder of the German Gobineau Society, 'did a great deal to bring Gobineau's term 'Aryan' into vogue amongst German racists'. Chamberlain (d. 1927), who wrote an influential anti-Semitic book, The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, married Eva Wagner, daughter of the composer.

There was never any organisation named the 'Bayreuth Circle' or any group of people who identified themselves by that name; but the term has been used by some historians from about the 1960s onwards as a convenient label for Hitler supporters associated with Bayreuth. Examples of such association are given in the following citations.

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