There’s graffiti, there’s tagging and there are political messages. I suspect these were meant as instances of the latter. Hitler’s “Waffen SS” had the motto “Meine Ehre heißt Treue” (“My Honour is Loyalty”), a sentence that you hear or read once in a while when Austria’s neo-Nazis feel that it’s time for provocation again, and often it’s reduced to the word “Ehre” alone.
Funny, huh? There’s nothing particularly dishonest about the word “honor”, but around here it has been degraded to a tag, to a political slogan for the worst of our worst. Why? Because it is so frequently used with that SS connotation, used as a code, as a reference to our dreadful past, used by those who don’t find that past dreadful at all.
Poor Wagner. Yes, he was an anti-Semite and a scoundrel in so many ways, but he didn’t deserve to be loved by Hitler. Nobody deserves that.
“Tristans Ehre, höchste Treu’”, that’s a line from “Tristan und Isolde”. See a video of one of the better performances, Daniel Barenboim directing in Bayreuth, Rene Kollo and Johanna Meier as Tristan and Isolde. See a video on YouTube.