by A. N. Wilson
But here, on the balcony, which led into one of the very few boxes in the theatre – the Wagner family seats – stood Frau Bechstein and her entourage. She had kitted Wolf out in evening dress, which must have been made for him. Unlike his lounge suit the swallow-tail coat, white waistcoat and black trousers actually fitted him, though the white bow tie was a little wonky. It was clear that he was in a state of great agitation.
Winnie had that expression on her face which betokened real anxiety. She nearly always wore it before curtain up. She joined us more than usually flustered, though, and I suspect she had had one of her innumerable tiffs with Fidi before he went to the orchestra pit to see Michael Balling, who was conducting the performance and had been unwell.
‘I feel it is a betrayal of our race and this I must declare!’ Wolf shot out. He was staring bulbous-eyed. ‘It is a racial sacrilege to have the god of our German pantheon, Wotan’ – he threw back his head – ‘played by…’ There was no doubting the sincerity of his passion, yet, although these rhetorical pauses and eye-rollings had so mesmeric an effect on large crowds, in a small group gathered on the balcony it was different: acutely awkward, embarrassing, perpetually frightening. ‘… played by a Jew!’ he bellowed.
‘None of us wanted a Jew,’ muttered Frau Bechstein, ‘but perhaps they couldn’t…’
‘Why not get Rode over from Munich to sing the role? What is wrong with…’ the opera geek Wolf began to reel off names of bass-baritones.
You will already have gathered my feelings about Winnie and I did not believe it was possible to love her more than I did. This evening she brought about that miracle. She appeared at first not to have heard. She was looking out over the balcony at the Wagnerians making their way up the hill and onto the terraces. ‘Wolf,’ she said. She was smiling as she said it. The many distractions of the evening had clearly, for once, put his feelings and concerns rather low down on her list of priorities. ‘I and my family have supported you through thick and thin. When you first began your career in public speaking, I came to hear you – I came back here and told my family, this is the man. I know you can save Germany. We watched the failed putsch in Munich from our hotel window. We helped get your friends over the border to Austria. Fidi paid for Göring to go to hospital in Vienna when he was shot. When you needed paper and pens in prison to write Mein Kampf, we sent them to you. We stood by you when you were a state outlaw. And you are probably right that the bloody Jews want to take over the world. For all I know you are right about the depravity of being a queer. But just look out there –’ she waved her smouldering cigarette in the direction of the opera goers. ‘When you were fighting for your country, this place closed down. You want to hear the music dramas of Richard Wagner, right? Would you like to tell me which are the two categories of human being who enjoy him the most? Eh?’
She lit another cigarette from the butt of the old one and squidged the dead butt under a golden evening shoe. ‘Do you know who paid for the revival of Bayreuth? The Jews and the queers. They are the people who like Richard Wagner. Half the chorus are pansies and one quarter of the orchestra is Jewish. If you love Wagner that is what you get. If you want something different, go into Munich and hear The Merry Widow – or finance the bloody Festival yourself.’
I often wondered, when reading about H as a warlord who roared and ranted at his generals and air marshals, often directing them into catastrophic strategies and prodigious loss of life, what would have happened if they had delivered a comparable speech to him. Probably they would have been shot. I read somewhere that he claimed to have absented himself from that year’s Ring on the grounds of Schorr’s race, but like many of his claims this was a lie. I was quite close to him in the box that evening, and as the familiar and catastrophic chords began, and the strife among the divinely irresponsible inhabitants of Valhalla started its clash of voice, wind, harp, I could clearly see that it was not merely sweat but tears that cascaded down his plump, still youthful, face.
I was in the habit of returning each evening to my parents’ house in the ——— district of the town. On that evening I either was not bidden for a late supper at the theatre restaurant or at the Eule or the Anchor, or one of the other restaurants we liked in the town. Perhaps tiredness took me home, where the familiar front door of my father’s parsonage was opened by Elsa, who prepared me what she called coffee but which was surely a mixture of ground acorns and chicory. Like everyone who did not have a Swiss or American bank account my family had been reduced to extremes of austerity, but unlike most of my acquaintances, my parents never made any comment upon the fact, slowly eating meals composed solely of root vegetables with the same decorum as, before the war, they had consumed roast meat. From the parlour I could hear the trio playing what my parents, and especially my father, who played the violin, would call proper music. It was a piece by Haydn for violin (my father), cello (my brother) and piano (my mother). Sometimes, of course, I formed a quartet. We were never good enough to play Beethoven’s last quartets – though we tried. More normally we played Haydn and Mozart, sometimes Brahms.
You of a younger generation often express astonishment that we could have fallen for the doctrines of National Socialism. And you simply can’t believe it when we reply that most of us did not fall for anything or subscribe to any particular idea. We followed what we thought we wanted: full employment, national pride. It is not to our credit that we failed to notice the evil things that were there from the beginning, but the truth is that most Europeans say (and think) unpleasant things about the Jews. Although H, like Mr Chamberlain, took this to truly manic extremes both in what he said and in what he wrote, it wasn’t the anti-Semitism that made him distinctive. Most public figures had that. What made him special was his mesmeric qualities of hope, his hypnotic faith in the future.
Winnie, more than most of us, loved these. But the orphanage girl had within her an anarchic desire to throw over the traces. It occurred to me that evening – if you had to find a reason why a nice and far from fanatical girl like Winnie should have been a National Socialist, you need look no further than the scene that presented itself in my parents’ parlour as the Haydn trio ended.
My mother, her white hair in a bun, sat at the piano. She had a faintly flushed expression when she played music. Her pale-blue eyes blinked back into focusing on the room and her sons, after their acute concentration on the score. She wore a simple, immaculately clean, sky-blue blouse fastened at the neck by a ‘good’ old jewel – something, I believe, from Father’s side of the family. My bespectacled brother Heinrich, with sandy hair parted in the middle, with a dark coat and trousers and a loose silk tie of sober colour, looked exactly like what he was: a teacher at the local Gymnasium who was considering following my father into the Lutheran ministry but who was held back by doubts about the miraculous elements in the New Testament.
My father – ah, my father – how can I write about you in the light of everything which was to befall you and my brother? How dare I write about you, you whose lives so put mine to shame? From the very beginning you saw through the madness which would one day possess our country. You never drank from the chalice that blinded the eyes, bewitched the gaze and numbed the senses of the rest of us.
At the time, my father’s moderation, his measured, rational approach to life, his exactitude and probity and caution, were all qualities I found enraging. I foolishly mistook my family’s quietness and politesse for being hidebound by convention. I even suspected them – here perhaps I had some justification for my suspicions – of snobbery. I’m sure it was from my mother I heard the objection to our local National Socialist candidate that one could not consider voting for someone ‘like that’ – Hugh Walpole’s objection precisely – by which she clearly meant ‘common’. My father’s realism made him believe, as one government tumbled and another was patched together from its ruins, that Germany should struggle on. There were signs of economic recovery. The President and whoever happened to be Chancellor would
one day persuade the Americans to force the French to lift the punitive sanctions on our country. One day French troops would move out of the Rhineland. It was certainly madness to speak of restarting the war. Everything my father thought and said was moderate, considered. That is what I mean by saying he was the absolute embodiment of everything that made impulsive Welsh Winnie into a Nazi.
She said she loved all things German but she didn’t. The majority of Germans are like my father: quiet, patient, moderate and gentle. Wagner is not a typical German, any more than was his French-Hungarian widow, his Welsh daughter-in-law or his fanatical English son-in-law Chamberlain. You might add Wolf to the list of atypical un-German outsiders. What made my father most intensely German to me was not so much his quiet methodical way of life, nor his musicality, nor his domestic authoritarianism (for he was firmly master in his own house) as his belief in reason. You might ask – as I did, and loudly – how a belief in reason squared with what he did for a living. He was a Lutheran pastor at one of the finer old baroque churches in our town.
This is a book about Winnie and Wolf, and if anything would die in this Communist republic of ours it presumably would be the faith of Martin Luther? So I’d have guessed until you revealed yourself to be a Christian in your teens. But my father plays a part in this story, so I ought to make a short excursus on his career. I think of him sitting there that evening with his violin. I thought of him as an old man then – a tiresome old man. He was – what? – born in 1870, so he was just fifty-five years old.
At about the time Nietzsche (professor of philology at Basel, later demiurge of modern atheism) was engaging his ecstatic imagination first with Wagner’s and then no less violently rejecting him, Adolf Harnack was approaching the story of Christianity from the position of a rational historian. At about the time Nietzsche wrote Beyond Good and Evil, Harnack was beginning to publish his monumental History of Dogma.
Harnack is one of the intellectual giants of our country’s history, but I find he has been ironed out of the story – I have never met a student who has read him. (Maybe things are different in the West.) He was professor at Berlin in the early years of our century – in spite of the protests of the Church dogmatists who pointed out that he doubted the Virgin Birth, the Ascension, the Resurrection and so forth. It was the Emperor himself who rescued his career, giving him the chair at Berlin, and eventually he was made the Director General of the Royal Library, the largest library in Germany. After the revolution of 1919 he was still held in such high esteem that he was asked by the government to be the German Ambassador in Washington, but he turned the honour down. He was primarily an academic and his monument, apart from his books, which will endure for ever, are his pupils. They included nearly all the noted theologians of subsequent generations such as Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and they also included my father.
Unlike Barth, who broke away from the disciplines set by Harnack and adopted a form of fideism or Irrationalism which enjoyed a vogue in the German Church and the greater world, my father was a straight Harnack devotee. Harnack must have been an extraordinary teacher. My father once asked him how long it would take him to memorize one page of Greek he had never seen before. Harnack replied, ‘If I read the page slowly, I would know it by heart.’ He taught his pupils to be rigorous in their sifting of evidence, in their believing that their only duty was to the truth. This ultimately was what would lead his son Ernst, my father, and so many others to resist the National Socialists and to suffer accordingly – but that is to race ahead.
I had intended, as my brother did, to follow my father into the Lutheran ministry, but in my first few semesters I became bitten by the Nietzsche bug, and the milk and water version of Christianity (as I perceived it then – my God) of those who thought like my father was a poor substitute for a true emotional engagement with the claims of Christianity. We had just lived through a war in which millions of young lives had been destroyed, in which thrones and altars had rightly been torn down, in which we had all found ourselves stumbling around among the rubble and the dust and the blood, our old values shredded like our houses, our limbs, our bank accounts. In such a world Nietzsche’s fury with God for not existing, his assertion of a supremely irrational humanism, his desire to worship a God who could dance, his belief that morals had no power to make us good – they all spoke to me, as they spoke to my mentor and supervisor Martin H———. Nietzsche’s idea, sustained even when he had fallen out of love with Wagner, that music might save us, or at least speak out our fears and desires better than religion, was true for me. It was what made the music dramas of Richard Wagner so repeatedly revisitable a source.
And there sat my father, with his violin, and his soft complexion and gentle eyes, thinking that the world would be a better place if everyone could be persuaded to be gentler and more rational. ‘How was it?’ he asked, meaning The Ring of the Nibelungs I had just attended. I wanted to repeat to him the whole extraordinary conversation between Winnie and Wolf about Schorr. Something checked me. Both my parents, but especially my father, gave off the everlasting air of sitting in judgement. If I told Father what Winnie had said my narrative would have been complicated by all kinds of defensive reactions, I would sense both my parents, and my brother, wincing at the mention of homosexuality. And then again I did not want to be in the position of holding up Winnie to my family and saying, ‘You disapprove of her political views; but here – you see – she is a decent person really…’ So I left the story untold.
I talked instead of well-known faces I had seen in the interval – seen, not spoken to, for I ‘knew no one’ unless Siegfried or Winifred introduced me to their guests. I had no entry into the greater world. I spoke of seeing Karl Muck, Thomas Mann and, to please my mother, who would have been happy had Bavaria regained autonomy from the rest of Germany and brought back dear old King Ludwig III, I described various members of the European royal families who had come including Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria. I conjured up Winnie and Fidi bowing and curtsying to those pre-revolutionary ancients. The glint of large old jewels in the evening light, the brightness of white ties and stiff shirts, the tiaras and, in the case of one visitant, the sash with decorations had actually disconcerted me, recalling Nietzsche’s disillusionment with Wagner, when he actually saw Bayreuth, and witnessed Cosima fawning upon the crowned and coronated heads. My mother would not have shared my or Nietzsche’s views. I think it possible that she abominated the Dionysian raptures of Richard Wagner’s music even more than Father did, but she did think there should be a hierarchy in the management of society, and that kings and queens were conducive to an orderly and Christian life for the rest of us.
My mother made a few approving remarks about the Wittelsbach dynasty and commented – information gleaned of course from newspapers rather than personal knowledge – on the recent illness of Prince Rupprecht and the marriage of the Crown Princess Antonia. I do not suppose my parents ever discussed such matters as our (demoted and dethroned) royal family when they were alone together. Rather, these royalties provided a neutral conversational buffer which my family and I could erect between one another to disguise our lack of sympathy.
I tried to tell them about the English novelist, Hugh Walpole, but my father merely shook his head silently with a gentle smile, an habitual gesture which conveyed not merely that he had not heard of the persons under discussion but that he did not deem them worth knowing about. Then, rather suddenly, came the question which evidently all three of them had been wanting to ask me all evening. ‘Was he there?’ There could be no doubt, even at that very early date, that they meant H.
The directness of the question wrong-footed me, creating an unjustifiable defensiveness. My reaction would only have been appropriate had I been Wolf’s political agent or if I had asked him to Bayreuth myself. ‘I believe he was there,’ I said, stammering out the name of the Bechsteins, as though it made things better or worse where he spent the night. There was a silence.
Then my
brother, who had been largely silent ever since I got home, remarked with vehemence, ‘It was a scandal that he was ever let out of prison.’
In spite of his subsequent rewriting of history and his claim not to have heard Schorr’s Wotan, H returned to the second opera of the cycle, Die Walküre, the next day to hear Schorr’s rendition of Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde – Leb wohl, du kühnes, herrliches Kind! – which must be one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever composed. I do not believe anyone could improve upon Schorr’s interpretation, so steady, so implacable, so heartbroken, as the Divine Father takes leave of his daughter and the nineteenth century knows that it is taking leave of its God.
H, as a Wagner devotee, must have known that he was hearing one of the great interpretations of The Ring. Presumably it was this which provoked his stream of letters over the next few years protesting against the use of Jewish artists at Bayreuth. I blush to record that Winnie tried to lure him back with the promise that she would find an Aryan understudy for Schorr on any night Wolf deigned to attend future Festivals, though she could hardly hope to replace all those in orchestra and chorus who either were, or were married to, Jews. My own belief is that H boycotted the next few Festivals not because of this painful subject but because of that powerful strain of superstition in his nature which believed he was being led by Fate from one phase to the next, but who also, having narrowly escaped death in the war, was never sure when nemesis might appear.
The final drama in the Ring cycle, The Twilight of the Gods, has no role for Wotan, so the anti-Semites among us could sit back untroubled. On this evening, however, all was not well, and the incident which took place on the stage of the Festival Theatre would have been disconcerting even for one who was not, like H, so acutely and superstitiously aware of portents and signs. The familiar story began with the three Norns weaving their rope of destiny and rehearsing the doom-laden mythology of the north – how Wotan came to drink of the well of wisdom and paid for his knowledge with an eye; how he carried secret runes on his spear taken from the World’s Ash Tree, a token of his divine power; how he punished his daughter Brünnhilde by surrounding her with fire, which could only be broken through by a hero who knew no fear; how the dwarf Alberich stole the Rhinegold to win the arid triumphs of power without love; how the rope was tautening and snapping, and mere anarchy was loosed upon the world. Believe me, in 1925 such a story made a lot of sense.
