Adolf and the Wagners

Published on Saturday 25 August 2007 01:13

Winnie and Wolf

by AN Wilson

Hutchinson, 384pp, 17.99

The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

Faber & Faber, 384pp, 20

FEW OUTSIDE THE SEATTLE SUB- urb of South Heath noticed when Winifred Hiedler (formerly Mrs Senta Christiansen) passed away at the Raymond and Rubie Kranz Seniors Home for Retired Musicians on 27 October last year. She would be remembered, if at all, as a courteous, bright-eyed, white-haired woman, with a brisk walk and perfect manners, little more.

But she left behind a typescript parcel. And this is what makes her very interesting. Written years earlier by her foster father, it reveals her to be the daughter of Adolf Hitler and Winifred Wagner.

Fantastical? It is no more fantastical than the all-too-real grotesques who comprised the offspring of Richard Wagner and who became infamous through their association with the Nazi Fhrer.

The life of Winifred Hiedler doesn't much figure in this new novel from AN Wilson, longlisted for the Man Booker prize earlier this month. Rather, the focus is on the drama that was (and remains) the Wagners; and the extraordinary relationship that Winifred Wagner, a Welsh girl brought up in an English orphanage and daughter-in-law of the composer, forged with Hitler on his visits to Bayreuth.

Winifred was besotted with "Uncle Wolf". It was widely rumoured at the time that her friendship with Hitler was more than platonic. Had he offered marriage there is little doubt she would have accepted.

She remained a Hitler loyalist to the end. For "Wolf" in her eyes was the national saviour and devoted Wagner lover, never the demonic dictator. And Hitler, for his part, protected her and doted on her children. His particular objects of affection on his visits to the Festpielhus were less the errant daughter Friedelind (later to denounce her family), but little Verena, and sons Wieland and Wolfgang. He read them stories and showered them with gifts (gold watches for the boys, gold bracelets for the girls), and to Wieland gave a shiny new Mercedes-Benz on his 18th birthday. Later, he would pull Wieland from frontline military service.

His younger brother Wolfgang, now 88, continues to run the Bayreuth Festival, clinging on in the hope that he will be succeeded by his youngest daughter, Katharina. "How did it feel," the conductor Otto Klemperer once witheringly asked him, "to have been dangled on Hitler's knee?"

Winnie and Wolf is told through a self-effacing male secretary at the Wagner house in Bayreuth. It is he who came to the darkest suspicions that the four-year-old child that Winnifred beguiled him into fostering from the Bayreuth orphanage, just ten minutes' stroll from her home at the Villa Wahnfried, was none other than her own daughter by Hitler.

Wilson's narrative approach cannot be confused with that of a Frederick Forsyth. This is not a breathless tale of deceit, conspiracy, dark espionage and desperate concealment of the Fhrer's daughter under the noses of the East German Stasi.

What we get is a psychopathology of Nazism as seen through Winnie's devotion to Wolf as Parsifal, the mystic idealist who had come to save Wagner, his descendants and the whole of Germany. The themes of The Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser and The Ring are skilfully woven in to this bizarre mindscape, leavened by family and opera-house gossip - and the plot has lashings of gossip.

It is rich, too, in the light it sheds into the darkness of Wagner drama, much of which seems a fateful premonition of the tragedy that lay in store for Germany. Nothing, it seemed, could bring this collective catastrophe to an end other than the death of the hypnotist - and millions of his subjects.

How Germany got itself into this state is, and will always remain, a complex mystery. Not far behind is how, despite the poisonous anti-Semitism of the Fhrer and his determination to root out homosexuals and political opponents, Winifred was able to intercede on their behalf, so that Bayreuth became a haven for the very people Hitler was bent on liquidating. Not only were there many Jews and political dissidents among the leading singers and orchestra musicians at Bayreuth, but Winnie well knew that a large proportion of the Bayreuth audience regulars were Jewish: indeed, it is arguable whether the Bayreuth Festival could have continued without their patronage and support.

The ambivalent secretary as narrator is perfectly positioned for this darkest of narratives, and a perfect foil, too: diffident and semidetached from family and political passions, he represents the ambivalence of that large section of German opinion which recoiled from the thuggish extremes of Nazism but was prepared to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt in the early years because unemployment had come down, pride was re-kindled and stability restored.

The narrator can also see that the chemistry that enabled Winnie to bring out the polite, charming opera "geek" in her lover was also the poison that prevented her from seeing him as the mass murderer responsible for Auschwitz, Belsen and the destruction of Germany. Her capacity for self-deception was boundless. And so, from such a mother, anything is possible, including the hiding of a secret daughter by the Fhrer and her ability to put that secrecy above motherly love.

Is the tale plausible? Utterly, though there is perhaps one telling omission. If Winifred Hiedler, formerly Senta Christiansen, was indeed the daughter of Winnie and Wolf, she would be about the only member of the feuding, fissiparous Wagner family not to have made a pitch for stewardship of the Bayreuth Festival, her claim bolstered by some ghastly post-modern production of The Ring set in a galactic brothel with the Valkyries as drug-raddled rock chicks.

In any event, Wilson leaves his ambivalent narrator to provide a reluctant credibility. More important are the insights he brings to this bizarre relationship and the narrative he weaves round the Festpielhus and the trance-like state of Germany it came to signify.

Jonathan Carr's The Wagner Clan is an altogether more straightforward account of how this relentlessly feuding family was both shattered and strangely unified by its association with Hitler. It takes us through the postwar battles between Wieland and Wolfgang, Winnie's declarations of Fhrer loyalty right up to her death in 1980 at the age of 82 and the subsequent fighting and feuding.

Of Hitler's direct support for Bayreuth there is no doubt: in 1934 alone the propaganda ministry bought up more than 110,000 tickets for a sum equivalent to around one-third of the whole Bayreuth budget that year. In the years up to 1939, Hitler's chancellery was the biggest backer, putting up a total of more than half a million marks for Bayreuth tickets and new productions. During the war years, on Hitler's orders a Nazi leisure organisation bought up all the tickets and paid nearly all the bills, doling out on average more than a million marks annually.

Was it the case, as charged by Thomas Mann, that there was much in Wagner's music that inspired Nazism? Ironically, by the end of the war there was not much of the Wagner canon that was politically safe to stage. In the early years of the war, both Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde were dropped from the Bayreuth programme, the former because the Nazis found it "problematic" and the latter because the spectacle of the dying hero in Act 3 was felt too dispiriting. Finally, in 1942 and 1944 The Flying Dutchman and The Ring were dropped, and Meistersinger alone was performed.

But there is little doubt that Wagner's own anti-Semitism, amplified by the writings of his son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, fuelled the German Far Right and Hitler in particular.

In the postwar de-Nazification programme, the Wagner clan escaped lightly - Winnie was classified as a "lesser offender" and put on probation, while Wieland, who had worked at a nearby concentration camp, was judged a mere "fellow traveller" and fined a laughable hundred marks. Winnie later held tea parties for Emmy and Edda Goering (widow and daughter of the former Reichsmarshall) and Ilse Hess (wife of Rudolph).

There was every good reason for the Wagner clan to bury the past and re-open the Festival. This Wieland duly did in 1951, with critically acclaimed sparse and pared-down productions. They were to have a massive influence on opera staging for the next half-century.

But how could Bayreuth be back in business as if nothing had happened? The problem of sweeping skeletons into cupboards is that they are prone to crash out again. This duly happened in the 1970s with a more critical appraisal of Germany's dismissal of her Nazi past and, for the Wagners, more damning revelations about their involvement with the Fhrer.

Arguably, what did for the family's reputation was Wolfgang's breathtaking claim that he and his brother "had no reason to put on sackcloth or beat our breasts with remorse". Not only did that enrage many but, as Carr argues, it threw away a vital chance for courageous reflection, out of which may have come a more healthy Bayreuth.

Wolfgang is still in charge, and daughter Katharina has staked claim to succession with an outrageous production of Meistersinger in Bayreuth last month that was met with a storm of boos. That is now almost par for the course and may have done her no harm. And it has intensified a wider debate, not only about re-interpretation of the master, but also about the validity of the past in shaping the future.

It is a saga Carr tells with great pace and assurance, and indeed, because his account extends right to the present day, can be said in comparison to Winnie and Wolf to be the greater thriller.

Fallout from the Fhrer’s obsession

"THE truth is that many Nazis, in high and low places, were bored to tears by Wagner. They were reputed to have had a special affinity to Wagner's music. The evidence suggests this was simply not true... Albert Speer is only one of those who gave the 'inside story' of those 'gala' performances of Der Meistersinger on the sidelines of the Nuremberg rallies. In 1933, so few of the invited party 'faithful' were present when the work began that Hitler in fury sent out patrols to the brothels and beer gardens to round up the truants. The next year the house was well filled from the start ... but many fell asleep or clapped in the wrong places."