The Great Dictator at 85, Part 1: Chaplin, Wagner, and the dilemma of ‘right-wing art’

This October 15^th marked 85 years since The Great Dictator was released in American cinemas. Written, directed, produced by and starring the visionary filmmaker and performer Charlie Chaplin, the film represents a significant turning point in the artist’s career . Having spent decades as the greatest innovator (along with Buster Keaton) in the silent comedy genre, The Great Dictator was his first entirely “talking” picture. He also audaciously chose the rise of Adolf Hitler and fascism as his subject at a time when the United States was officially neutral during the Second World War.

On the surface, the film’s central premise is quite shocking and subversive: ‘Tomanian’ dictator Adenoid Hynkel (with Chaplin uncannily channeling Hitler’s screeching oratory, cartoonish paranoia, and neurotic physical discomfort) seeks to invade nearby Osterlich (with parallels to Austria being wholly coincidental) as the next step on his quest to becoming Emperor of the World. At the same time, a Jewish barber who bears a striking resemblance to Hynkel (as well as the ‘Tramp’ character made world-famous in earlier masterpieces such as Modern Times and City Lights) emerges from a decades-long coma and returns to his business. He finds that his home has become a ghetto and that his countrymen have been robbed, beaten, and humiliated by Hynkel’s thugs, with greed and hypocrisy being the order of the day. The noble barber and his comrades decide to take up arms against the dictator; mixups and hilarity inevitably follow.

Though the film achieved enormous popular success upon release, The Great Dictator was and remains a controversial work, one that is central to a debate that has raged for the last 80 years: can one successfully find humor in the greatest horrors, including the most profound inhumanity perpetrated in the modern age? One does not have to agree that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” in order to understand why we should be skeptical about art’s power to confront barbarism. After all, Chaplin himself confessed in 1964 that had he been aware of the Nazi holocaust in 1940, he could not have made his film.

For all its genius, Chaplin’s film did not and could not definitively answer the question of whether Nazism is an appropriate comedic subject for our post-WWII culture. What he did demonstrate very effectively, however, was how an anti-fascist culture can provide a meaningful accounting of reactionary or even fascistic artworks and artists. Today, left-wing influencers often bizarrely claim that right-wing art does not exist, and that intellectually and spiritually serious works of culture have only originated on the left. I happen to think that this view is nonsensical (see the poetry of TS Eliot or Ezra Pound, the paintings of the Italian Futurists, or the more jingoistic films of John Ford or Leo McCarey), but I would at the same time argue against a simplistic “separate the artist from the art” set of criteria. In trying to reconcile the divide between political convictions and aesthetic preferences, leftists should instead try to locate the qualities of so-called ‘right-wing art’ that are compatible with our worldview and our values (or in other words, examine them dialectically). The works I mentioned earlier in this paragraph all contain insights into the nature of the modern age and the human soul that are profound, regardless of their creator’s political orientation. One of Chaplin’s greatest achievements in The Great Dictator was his unsparing examination of the contradictions of reactionary artworks. This critical examination is in fact the basis for the two most iconic and celebrated scenes in the movie.

The first of these scenes takes place around the film’s midpoint, when Hynkel’s second-in-command Garbitsch (Goebbels) urges the dictator to look beyond invading Osterlich in order to set his sights on conquering Europe and eventually becoming emperor of the world. Positively giddy, Hynkel gasps: “I want to be left alone!” As Hynkel approaches an oversized globe positioned beside his desk, we hear the ethereal, otherworldly strains of the Prelude to Act 1 of Wagner’s Lohengrin. Hynkel picks up the globe (revealed to be a massive balloon) and with childlike glee bounces it on his head like a soccer player, kicks it upward with his heel, and spins it upon his finger while cackling maniacally.

Audiences rarely miss the obvious symbolism of the dictator using the world as his plaything. Less obvious is the significance of Chaplin’s choice of music. Wagner, a notorious antisemite, was Hitler’s favorite composer, the Nazi leader’s obsession with his operas being extremely well-documented. However, Wagner was Chaplin’s favorite composer as well (Chaplin and Hitler were also born within the same week, grew up in extreme poverty, and had similar tastes in facial hair). Chaplin, a dedicated pacifist and sharp critic of capitalism, was certainly aware of and disgusted by Wagner’s proto-fascist ideology. In The Great Dictator, he searched for and answered the difficult question of how Wagner’s music could resonate so powerfully with an antifascist like himself as well as with Hitler.

Hitler viewed Wagner’s music as embodying the Teutonic, warrior-like spirit of the German people; Chaplin sends this up by portraying Hynkel in this scene as dainty and effeminate. Wagner described the central theme of Lohengrin as “the contact between a metaphysical phenomenon and human nature, and the impossibility that such contact will last.” Wagner makes this complex idea audible in the music itself: the shimmering strings represent heaven’s messenger descending to Earth, while the spine-tingling harmonic dissonance suggests humanity’s longing and frustration in its inability to attain perfection. The sadness in the music lends an added poignancy to the sequence: Hynkel represents the worst of human nature, and the fact that he is such an inextricably human monster illuminates the tragic undertones of the sequence.

The second pivotal scene comes at the film’s conclusion, after the Jewish barber and Hynkel have accidentally switched places with each other. The barber is brought to a political rally where he is expected to address the crowd. Initially terrified, the barber makes an impassioned plea to humanity, denouncing fascism and urging progress and international cooperation (a link to this sequence is included here for those who are interested, although its impact is muted without watching the entire film that precedes it). As the barber concludes, the scene shifts to the countryside of Osterlich, where Hannah, the barber’s love interest, has taken refuge with her family. Through tears, Hannah looks hopefully to the sky, and the Lohengrin prelude swells up again as the film concludes.

In returning to Wagner at the film’s conclusion, Chaplin highlights a duality within Wagner’s art and the multitudes it contains. In one sense, Wagner’s art, with its antisemitic undertones and its appropriation by Hitler’s fascist forces, represents the darkest side of human nature. On the other hand, Chaplin’s inclusion of the Prelude in the film’s cathartic, hopeful final moments forces the viewer to reevaluate the meaning of the music. How can the same piece of music so perfectly complement a scene of impending destruction, and a later vision of utopian optimism? It is because, as Chaplin shows us, the most profound art encompasses the widest possible spectrum of human behaviors and emotions, from the most noble to the most base. I believe that the chosen sequence of these scenes is reflective of Chaplin’s political philosophy: that mankind is capable of the greatest savagery and nihilism, but in the end our better nature will radically transform the world for the better.

In 1933, on the fiftieth anniversary of Wagner’s death, the great German novelist Thomas Mann delivered a lecture on the composer’s legacy. He described “Wagner’s warring identities as mythmaker and psychologist, German and European, anarchist and bourgeois, populist and intellectual.” Mann admitted that Wagner’s antisemitism, nationalist chauvinism, and demagogy could not be erased from his legacy. At the same time, however, he contended that the artist “all his life fervently rejected power, money, violence, and war…no spirit of reaction and pious backwardness can claim him – he belongs instead to every future-directed will.” Chaplin followed Mann’s lead seven years later: while recognizing the kernel of Nazism contained in Wagner’s worldview, he also contended that the composer’s legacy was too rich to cede to the far-right

.