Hands off Wagner! The composer's granddaughter is against using his name in politics

The granddaughter of the great German composer Richard Wagner, Katarina Wagner, is outraged that a Russian private military company is named after her grandfather. «It takes my breath away», — she complains, «from the fact that my grandfather's name is smeared with blood again».

It is well known that Wagner's work was used for their own purposes by the Nazis. And not only. For example, the famous excerpt from the opera «Valkyrie», known as «Flight of the Valkyries» became the soundtrack to the helicopter attack scene in Francis Ford Coppola's cult film «Apocalypse Now».

Katharina Wagner considers it «an artistic tribute to a long tradition.» «Wagner's music has been repeatedly associated with war, nationalism, anti—Semitism and 'political madness'», — she writes in her article «My view on Prigozhin's Wagnerian mercenaries», published in the influential German publication Die Welt.

Meanwhile, according to the most common version, the name of the PMCs belonging to Yevgeny Prigozhin was given by the call sign of one of its commanders, a certain Utkin — «Wagner», since he was allegedly a fan of a certain ideology.