by A. N. Wilson
It was about two years after her death that my parents and I went to the dull suburb of Berlin where my brother Heinrich was to serve as a curate in a middle-class parish. As before in this narrative, I cannot remember precise dates, but I know he was sailing near the wind. I cannot actually remember whether he was ordained before or after the National Socialists came to power, but this event must have seemed like an inevitability. Perhaps already the first of the anti-Judaic legislation had come into effect, or perhaps he was merely commenting upon this part of their programme as a coming inevitability. In either event, I so clearly remember that large, rather soulless church, so unlike the beautiful baroque building in which my father preached his weekly sermons. In his black robe and with his white neckbands, my brother looked much younger than his thirty-five years, like a child dressed up as a clergyman rather than an authoritative figure in the pulpit. For the first few sentences of his sermon, indeed, I wondered whether he would ever be able to raise his voice to an audible pitch. He was nervous, and his hands shook as he placed them on the pulpit and read the words he had prepared.
‘My dear friends, I think today of Martin Luther, and his words, which are now so often quoted in political circles: “I was born for my beloved Germans: it is them I want to serve”.’ Unnecessarily (but how typical of Heinrich, as it would have been of my father also) he repeated the words in their original Latin, a tongue I could be quite sure was incomprehensible to the wives of businessmen, the doctors and dentists and accountants and shopkeepers who made up this prosperous congregation: ‘“Germanis meis natus sum, quibus et serviam”. And so it is for any minister of the Gospel, at this time or any time. And how can a minister of Christ’s Gospel serve the German people at this time? Only by telling them the truth. Luther’s words, Christ’s words, any good words, have been appropriated in our day by the political propagandists and they have thereby deprived the everlasting challenge of the Gospel with a piece of empty flim-flam.’
Heinrich was no orator. His words might have been strong, but his voice was not. He always had a somewhat reedy voice, intellectual and gentle, and not at all suited to speaking to a large audience. This gave the words considerable power. ‘Let me tell you, my friends, of a vision I had. I came into this church.’ With a shaky hand the smooth-cheeked Heinrich gestured around at the white-plastered walls. It was a building of the mid nineteenth century, with box pews, a lumpy pulpit, in which he stood, but with very little adornment. The only conspicuous religious decoration, as I recall, was an oil painting of Christ on the Cross, which hung on one of the side walls. ‘In my vision, dear friends, I was not standing here in the pulpit. I was standing at the back. The church in my vision is as full as it is today, of devout worshippers. There was another figure, not myself, in the pulpit, wearing a brown shirt. And he was declaiming, “Non-Aryans are requested to leave the church.” Nothing happened, so the words were repeated, this time in a louder voice: “Non-Aryans are requested to leave the church immediately.” Again, nothing happened. So the figure in the pulpit speaks yet more loudly: “I repeat: Non-Aryans are to leave the church.” And at the third time of asking, my friends, Jesus Christ came down from that great golden frame’ – here my brother pointed to the picture – ‘and left us alone. He left us without him. I was born for my beloved Germans; it is them I want to serve. Those of us who have been given the responsibility of preaching the Gospel at this crisis in our national destiny can only tell the truth. My friends, National Socialism is not just another political doctrine, to be set against Communism or Social Democracy or Conservatism, beliefs which any rational person might argue about or entertain. It is a plague, a mental plague. It means lies, hatred, fratricide and unbounded misery. Its leader teaches the law of lies. And I must warn you, as your pastor, those of you who have fallen a victim to the deceptions of those lies – wake up!’
* * *
After Geli’s suicide – shortly after, though I could not say how soon – the Mercedes pulled up at Wahnfried. Julius Schreck was not at the wheel. I do not know what happened to him. The figure who emerged from the back of the car was at first scarcely recognizable as ‘Uncle Wolf’. He was dressed, as of old, in a dark-blue suit, with a white shirt and a dark tie – I think a black tie. Yes, I am sure he was in semi-mourning. He carried a trench-mackintosh over his arm, and he was wearing a trilby hat. His shoulders were now hunched and I was reminded of the depleted, shy being whom I had first encountered, eight years earlier, in the dining room of the Golden Anchor Hotel, the man whose expression, when Winnie came bounding up to him, had reminded me of a child who had been awaiting its mother to fetch it from school. Before that meeting he had been crushed, entirely alone and strangely insignificant.
He almost dragged himself to the door of the house. His shoulders were slumped, his face was drained of colour and his eyes were red. They forwent the formalities of little bows and hand-kissing. Winnie was there at the porch, though his visit had not been announced, and she flung her arms round him, enfolding him in a great hug.
By the time the tea had been brought in, someone had been sent out to buy some of the confections he most enjoyed. There was a cherry-and-cream sponge concoction of peculiar ingenuity which our favourite baker in town, who curiously enough was called Fräulein Göring (though no relation, as far as I am aware) had made her pièce de résistance. Wolf normally brightened at the sight of these magnificent creations of Fräulein Göring’s. The cream cupolas and multi-layers of different pinks and whites, interlaced with delicate eggy sponge, were in their way as ingenious as the rococo plaster-work in the churches and monasteries with which the Asam brothers, themselves originally pastry cooks, adorned Munich and its environs.
It was the first time any of us ever saw Wolf survey one of these cherry cakes of Fräulein Göring’s without at once setting to with his fork. He was slumped and utterly wretched. The unthinkable, about this all-but-teetotaller, crossed my mind: that he might be the worse for drink. Naturally, I soon dismissed such a thought and realized he was merely in the grip of a profound depression.
‘Oh, Winnie, this is bad … bad.’
‘Try to eat, Wolf.’
‘That child…’
Winnie’s own children burst in at that moment. Verena had a drawing she wanted to give to Uncle Wolf and the boys had some boring magazine with pictures of motor cars of which they were imagining themselves the owners. In normal circumstances Wolf would have cast aside any of his own conversational needs and given himself wholeheartedly to the children. True, he did take the drawing from Verena and say, ‘Oh, I say. What have we here? Clouds!’
‘They’re sheep,’ she said, her own crestfallen expression matching his misery.
The boys, however, hung back and Friedelind said, ‘Uncle Wolf wants to be alone with Mum.’ I thought this remark was addressed to me as well as to her brothers, but, if Lieselotte was sitting out Wolf’s visit, I saw no reason why I should leave until I was actually dismissed from the room.
‘Winnie – I think the game is up.’
‘What do you mean?’
As it happened, Wolf’s visit occurred at one of those many moments in Winnie’s life when she was really too busy to be able to concentrate. There was a children crisis, there was an opera crisis and there was a Tietjen crisis. They were all, in a way, related. Tietjen’s enemies, of whom there were many, were trying to persuade Winnie that she had made a mistake in hiring him as artistic director and that the unprecedented success of the 1931 Festival – a financial as well as a critical triumph – was all illusory. The local right-wing papers denounced her for harbouring a Socialist in her bosom and the left-wing papers denounced her for being a Nazi. The sisters-in-law were up in arms about Tietjen’s proposed reforms of any future stagings of the music dramas.
Meanwhile the children were showing all the signs of emotionally intelligent beings undergoing the grieving process. Anyone could see that their persistent ‘bad behaviour’ was an attempt to draw attention t
o themselves. The English boarding school had said it refused to have them back and various attempts to engage tutors had come unstuck when the children had, as only they knew how, put these unfortunates through their paces.
Most disturbing of all was the violence, literal violence, which had developed in the relationship between Winnie and Friedelind. The child, who always had a tendency towards plumpness, had become obese in the year since her father died and this was an ingredient, one felt, in the real hatred her mother appeared to feel for her. Winnie and Tietjen spoke openly about Friedelind, in front of the girl, as a problem.
‘Look at its wobbling thighs, I mean, Winnie, you’ve got to do something.’
‘What do you suggest – starvation?’ Winnie laughed.
Friedelind, desperately missing both her actual father and her father-substitute, Toscanini, developed a carapace of indifference, laughing off any of the gibes, insults, calls to order Tietjen tried to throw at her and being as openly insolent to him as he was horrible to her. It shocked me that Winnie allowed him to behave like this to her own children and that she was seemingly so indifferent to what they must be going through in the year after their father’s death. But that was Winnie. I have never said she was a perfect being.
And here was Wolf, with his burdens, which he was attempting to lay at her feet. Another needy child.
Although I saw more of him, close up and face to face, than many human beings did, the psychology of Wolf, a subject which could be said to dominate the entire history of the twentieth century, was no more easily understood by me than by anyone else. Yet it is noticeable that before each of his strides towards a new stage of his violent life journey there was a sinking back, a near collapse. Geli’s death was evidently a tremendous grief to him; it was also very nearly a political disaster. Yet in the peculiar rhythm of his life it was perhaps a necessary preliminary to the next stage of extraordinary fortune. He plummeted, then he rose. In hospital, blinded by mustard gas at the end of the war, H had made a decent recovery and his sight was restored; but then, the red flag had been hoisted over the Chancellery in Berlin, the Kaiser had gone into exile and the November Criminals had sold Germany to France, disbanded the army that had marched so triumphantly in 1870 and 1914, and undermined everything H had hoped for. He went blind again. Professor Edmund Forster of the Berlin Neurological Clinic diagnosed a case of hysteria. There was no physical cause for the blindness, and none for the peculiar and sudden recovery when his sight came back and he was able to feast on the extraordinary narcotic of public speaking that gave him strength. Then again, four years later, there was the extraordinary setback of the beerhall putsch in Munich, its abject failure and H’s imprisonment. His political hopes plummeted to nothing and he sank into a deep depression. Once again, words, spoken words proceeding from his own mouth, lifted the cloud. Although Winnie was always proud to boast that he wrote Mein Kampf with pencils and pens supplied by herself on paper ditto, the book was in fact dictated to the faithful Hess who might, or might not, have used the paper from the Wahnfried stationery cupboard which, together with the Swiss chocolates and other luxury items, were regularly transmitted.
Now, after Geli’s bloody death, another of these troughs had been descended. ‘It’s all over, Winnie. It’s all over.’
The cream cakes remained untasted – by Wolf, that is. Friedelind made short work of them as soon as they had been cleared from the room.
When he said ‘It’s all over’, he was shaking as he spoke, not shaking as he did when addressing a public meeting, when the veins on his face stood out, when his hands made their irresistible hieratic clawings in the air, when his whole body carried his hearers with its gyrations and choreographed gestures of hope or violence. He was shaking like the down-and-out in a doorway he had once been on the streets of Vienna.
It was during this visit, which lasted a few days, that I had one of the few personal conversations I ever had with him. As a shy, youthful backroom boy, I did not expect visitors to Wahnfried to take any notice of me and it certainly was never part of my ambition to be a member of H’s entourage. So it was: I never knew for certain whether, from one occasion to the next, he even remembered having met me before. It was during this depressed, quiet, depleted visit that he found himself alone with me. He spoke as if we had often had conversations; also as if it would be perfectly obvious to me that he remembered my working as a waiter at the Anchor, and his strange moment of discomfiture having addressed a meeting at the Riding Hall in the summer of 1923. ‘Those hotels! You know, you are a middle-class boy, eh?’
‘I suppose you could say that.’
‘Oh, come on! Your father is a pastor.’
I had never told him this. He had ‘clocked’ me. This was both highly flattering and slightly disconcerting.
‘Your father is an old conservative Lutheran pastor who doesn’t much like the cut of the National Socialist jib. Your brother in Berlin is a bit more of a firebrand, thinks we all come from the devil. And you – you’ll do. You see the point. But even though you see the point, you are a middle-class boy. You got a job as a waiter as a bit of a lark – OK, we all need money, God knows everyone in Germany needs money. But you’ve never gone to bed hungry – with an empty belly that wasn’t fed today and wasn’t fed yesterday. You’ve always slept in sheets. You’ve always had a maidservant, someone to cook your meals, someone to serve you, huh?’
This was indeed the case.
‘You know what I feel when I go into one of those posh hotels in Munich? Or here in Bayreuth, when I see the rich people coming out of the Golden Anchor – I see the Tsar of Bulgaria or Herr Furtwängler and his yid assistant, and Thomas Mann and Sir Thomas Beecham and all of them, yes, even Frau Bechstein … I remember … I remember going up the steps of the Excelsior Hotel … They had given us brooms.’ He was speaking as if he were in a trance. The very first time I ever met him, at the Golden Anchor that night, I had seen a little of this side to his personality. It was not Uncle Wolf, the confident, jolly family friend; still less was it the Leader appointed by Providence to save our nation. It was an outsider of outsiders, awkward, fearful, even, with his highly polished shoes and blue suit, slightly deferential towards the society which had chucked him out ‘… to sweep away the snow…’
Who had given ‘them’ brooms? I did not ask, though subsequently I came to think this must have been some pathetic work scheme devised by those who ran one of the bums’ hostels in Vienna where he had lived in the years of his greatest destitution.
‘We were to sweep the steps of the hotel, sweep the snow, so that the guests would not get so much as a drop of moisture on their golden evening slippers and their patent-leather dancing shoes. And we could feel the cold damp coming through the holes in our boots. It was like being at the Western Front all over again … And one night, as I swept there and stared up at the golden doors, there emerged from the hotel a boy with whom I had been at the Realschule in Linz. He was with his parents and one of his sisters. She was very grand, the sister. She was once painted by Klimt, a bloody decadent painter in my opinion. Klimt! All he was for was to paint yids, splashing on Jew-gold in the background and making their Jew-faces beautiful … He was a Jew, my school friend. I say friend – he hardly ever spoke to any of us. Too lofty. Too sneering. Yet there was something about that kid, that Ludwig. You know, I liked him. I liked his seriousness. And for a few seconds I thought, all I have to do is to run up to the Wittgensteins and say, “Look, it’s me! I was at school with Ludwig and then (like him) I fought in the war, and look where it has got me – help, please help!” I think they would have helped, actually. I am sure they would have done … But I was ashamed. There was I with patched, ragged trousers and a pair of boots that leaked, and there was Ludwig Wittgenstein in a white tie and a swallow-tail coat. Coming out of the grandest hotel in Vienna. So I swept the snow from under their feet and his father tipped me – he gave me a few thalers. I looked at Ludwig’s face but I could not tell whether he r
ecognized me or not.’
I was on the verge of interrupting him and asking him whether he had ever read any of his friend’s subsequent writings. After a pause, however, he provided a sort of answer to this question. ‘Funny man, Ludwig Wittgenstein … wanted to become an aeronautical engineer. Went to Manchester in England, like a lot of yids do. My sister knew England. Manchester is the yid capital. But!’
For the first time in this monologue he sat up straight. His shoulders had been sunk in self-pity as he recollected sweeping the snow from the Vienna hotel steps to allow the Wittgensteins to pass. Suddenly, however, it all became a new thing. His glistening countenance was lit up with a merry triumph. ‘Do you know what happened to him? I heard about him from someone. Like so many of us after the war, he tried a little of this and a little of that; rudderless, directionless, purposeless man. Nothing, of course, came of his ambitions. He did not have the application to become an aeronautical engineer. I could have done it myself, actually. I have the strongest possible views on aircraft construction. But him! Do you know what he is reduced to doing? The rich man of Vienna’s Jew-son? He is a village schoolmaster somewhere in the Swiss Alps.’ Wolf nodded when he had imparted this information and it slightly seemed as if it was no more than Wittgenstein deserved, having walked down some steps in the snow when H was standing there with a broom.
