Juliet Koss’s Modernism after Wagner is a groundbreaking addition to studies in the history and theory of artistic modernism. Her work traces the fortunes of Richard Wagner’s notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), beginning with his writings in the late 1840s. Throughout her book, Koss explores the various understandings and misunderstandings that continue to dog Wagner’s legacy to the present day. Assailed by Friedrich Nietzsche in the late nineteenth century and later embraced by Adolf Hitler, Wagner and his dream of a total work of art were dealt a series of critical blows. Most devastating were those delivered by Theodor Adorno who excoriated the composer’s theories as little more than fascism avant la lettre.

Koss argues against several received ideas regarding Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk. These include claims that his creation of multi-sensory, immersive aesthetic environments eroded boundaries between various media, such as painting, music, poetry, and theatrical performance. To counter the infamy of Hitler’s admiration for Wagner’s work, she also takes issue with those who denounce the Gesamtkunstwerk as necessarily rendering its audiences passive, unreflective, and prone to manipulation. Koss uses a series of chronologically arranged and interlinked case studies to expose how these apprehensions of Wagner’s original theories are not only the product of changing historical circumstances, but also reductive and inaccurate. More importantly, these case studies converge to reveal a historically unfolding, diacritical relationship between notions of the Gesamtkunstwerk and modernist aesthetic principles of purity, autonomy, and medium specificity. The end result is a sustained reflection on the Gesamtkunstwerk as it served both to constitute and contest modernist aesthetics from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century.

In chapter 1, Koss provides a close reading of Wagner’s writings, followed in chapter 2 by an account of the Festival Theater at Bayreuth, which was built for the inaugural performance of his Ring of the Nibelungen in 1876. Her account begins by reminding readers of Wagner’s radicalization in the upheavals of 1848. He soon disavowed this interlude in his life and later began to espouse noxious anti-Semitic views. But his experience of revolution nonetheless percolated into a preference for theatrical performance as a shared, rather than individualizing, aesthetic experience. This early vision of the Gesamtkunstwerk, therefore, imagined it as fostering an ideal, homogenous, and participatory community modeled on the precedent of the Greek polis. In chapter 2, Koss describes Wagner’s disappointment with the Festival Theater. It fell short of his revolutionary ideals on several counts, including its reliance on cultish spectacle. The structure nonetheless gestured toward some of the composer’s goals. Koss describes how the Festival Theater attempted a creative reciprocity between spectators and performers through the various optical and physical perceptual means deployed in its space. These devices worked against passivity and instead invited spectators to complete, not merely observe, the meaning of the performances to which they were witness.

Wagner’s notions of a sympathetic and participatory spectator derived from turn-of-the-century theories of Einfühlung (empathy) and the psychology of perception. Koss excavates these theories in chapter 3, where she discusses the writings of Adolf Hildebrand, Robert Vischer, Conrad Fielder, Wilhelm Worringer, Theodor Lipps, Heinrich Wölfflin, Wassily Kandinsky, and others. Through close textual readings, she explores their notions of art and spectatorship. Common among them was a model of perception that was not simply tactile, embodied, and empathetic, but also carried within it hallmarks of later Greenbergian modernism and its ethos of opticality, autonomy, and strategies of aesthetic detachment. Spectatorial notions typically assigned to the Gesamtkunstwerk thus shared a theoretical birthplace with notions of modernist abstraction. Given that this was so, the historical entwinements and disentanglements between the Gesamtkunstwerk and modernism become the critical thread central to Modernism after Wagner‘s succeeding chapters. Koss’s discussion of Einfühling also foregrounds a key argumentative dimension of thinking about the Gesamtkunstwerk, namely the presumed nature of its audience. That audience shifted and changed according to the ineluctable effects of modernization and the blandishments of film and other diversions in the 1920s. Koss narrates the ways in which this history not only compelled the adaptation of the Gesamtkunstwerk to new spectatorial regimes, but also altered understandings of its immersive strategies.

Chapters 4 through 7 lay out an evolutionary schema of these adaptations and changes, beginning with an analysis of the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony of 1901. Koss focuses in particular on performance activities at the colony that were shaped by Peter Behrens’s and Georg Fuchs’s notions of theater reform. Such reform entailed continuing efforts to erode the distinction between art and life and stage and audience. Behrens, Fuchs, and other theorists also sought to render perception “efficient” and modern during this period by dispensing with the conventions of the peep-box stage in favor of a shallow, abstract performance space for theatrical productions. Max Littmann’s Artists’ Theater for the Munich Exhibition of 1908, treated in chapter 5, provides a transition between nineteenth- and twentieth-century understandings of the spectator. Koss argues that his anti-naturalist relief stage both competed with and anticipated cinema’s flat screen. It also moved away from a more humanist, empathic, and individualizing notion of the spectator characteristic of nineteenth-century formulations toward notions of the mass audience of the 1920s. Chapter 6 traces this line of argument into debates on the nature of film audiences and cinema’s solicitations of psychological projection as a latter-day, technologized instance of Einfühlung. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Siegfried Kracauer’s ambivalent assessment of film audiences on grounds far removed from Wagner’s concept of the engaged, participatory spectator. For Kracauer, the new mass media threatened instead to render its viewers passive, effeminized, and distracted by the inauthentic and absorptive allure of cinema’s compensatory pleasures.

Chapter 7 shifts focus from the stage and cinema to the Bauhaus and its penchant for blurring performance and the everyday. Koss draws attention to the understudied social dimension of the school. Students and instructors were apparently fond of masquerading in the guise of technologized automata or “dolls,” inspired in part by Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet (1922). Koss provides astute readings of photographs taken at the school that document various costume balls and instances of performative interaction among Bauhaus members. In several, students and instructors appear tricked out in metallic masks and pillowy, genderless costumes that announced their status, in Koss’s inspired formulation, as “construction sites of modern subjectivity” (241). These Bauhaus automata enacted the all-encompassing fusion of art and life and the erosion of the line between performer and spectator announced by the Gesamtkunstwerk idea. Koss skillfully interprets them in light of the full range of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century theories regarding the Gesamtkunstwerk and modernist aesthetics that animate her study. Modernism after Wagner maintains throughout that the Gesamtkunstwerk and modernism occupy not two opposing poles but rather a theoretical and practical continuum in the history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art. Accordingly, readers are led to understand these Bauhaus automata as engaging us in a dance of absorption and estrangement. We become both drawn to their appealing doll-like familiarity and disquieted by their anti-humanist projections of a world in thrall to the machine.

Modernism after Wagner concludes with a defense of Wagner against Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Thomas Mann, and others whose denunciations of him are echoed in the reception of his work and ideas down to the present day. Koss is certainly correct that none of them shared the careful historical circumspection that she brings to bear on the composer’s life and ideas. They were theorists, cultural critics, and artists, not historians, however; and for them Wagner’s importance was less historical than allegorical. Writing in the long shadow of Hitler’s nightmare regime, they saw in Wagner a cipher for Germany’s unfolding tragedy. Several of them condemned Wagner’s desire to fuse the various arts into a coherent, grandiloquent whole as a dilettantish failure to appreciate the integrity and tradition of distinct artistic media. Thanks to Koss’s painstaking research, these charges are revealed as historically inaccurate and a distortion of Wagner’s professed desire to preserve media distinctions within his concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. But the target of these critics’ writings was not the past. It was, instead, a horrifying present in which Wagner’s alleged dilettantism served as a metaphor for the shallow, superficial, and megalomaniacal perversions of German culture and a civilized world that Nazism threatened to render wholly unrecognizable. From their perilous perspective, Wagner’s dream of the total work of art had given way to fascist totalitarianism, and his evocation of the mythic aspirations of German culture to Hitler’s murderous logic of racism.

Though Koss’s handling of Adorno, Mann, and Brecht’s critiques is thorough and illuminating, her defense of Wagner leaves unexplored why his ideas lent themselves to distortion in the first place. Such investigation might lead back to Wagner’s revolutionary past and a more critical interrogation of his early writings, which Koss identifies as utopian, democratic, and egalitarian. His ideas indeed possessed those qualities, but they also betrayed a certain fascination for power, elements of proto-nationalism, and romantic anti-capitalism. Wagner made specific choices in the midst of the revolutionary stew out of which he emerged, choices that set him on a different path than that of Karl Marx, for example. Marx’s experience of 1848 pointed him instead in the direction of socialism, internationalism, and class justice. Wagner’s ability, ultimately, to accent the more reactionary dimensions of his revolutionary thought in later years attests at the very least to a certain political indeterminacy of his 1849 writings that also warrants consideration in this history.

In the opening pages of Modernism after Wagner, Koss insists “the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk,” despite repeated charges of its reactionary implications, “maintains the radical, emancipatory potential of its revolutionary origins” (xxix). For some, Gesamtkunstwerk notions of bringing artistic media together into a total work of art might seem dated in our post-modern, post-media contemporary art world. For others, the problem is even worse: Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk is forever compromised by totality’s fateful historical entwinement with totalitarianism. Ours, however, is an era of “clashing civilizations” in which artists and theoreticians struggle with renewed urgency to imagine what a non-hegemonic, open-ended universalism—or totality—might be. In this regard, Koss’s elegantly written and thought-provoking contribution is a must-read not only for those concerned with the history and theory of modernism. Anyone engaged with artistic and political imaginings of an improved world will also find Modernism after Wagner an invaluable prehistory as they think through whatever “emancipatory potential” might reside in our crisis-ridden present for a better, if not utopian, future.