Hannu Salmi is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Turku in Finland. He has published numerous articles on the history of music in Finland and Germany, but is also known as a historian of film and popular culture.

"Salmi lays forever to rest the myth, propagated by some of Wagner's older apologists and by many of his more recent critics, that there existed a communality of interests between Wagner and Bismarck, as well as between the new 'Reich' and the Wagnerian cultural enterprise. Salmi shows, more clearly than anyone has done thus far, how Wagner at first styled himself as the 'most German of Germans' only to realize, in the end, that he had been crucified 'am Kreuz des deutschen Gedankens'."—Hans Rudolf Vaget, Smith College

• Acknowledgments – Introduction – Wagner’s Concept of the German Past – The Home of the German Spirit – The Gesamtkunstwerk and the Future Germany – Wagner in Munich, 1864–65 – A Political Outcast between Bavaria and Prussia – "I Stir Them Ever to Strife …" – Disappointment with the New Germany – Bayreuth: Towards Immortality – Epilogue: "My Kingdom Is Not of This World" – List of Sources – Index.