by A. N. Wilson
Many Germans, especially the unemployed and the hungry, felt that almost anything would be preferable to the murderous anarchy in which we were living. However much old Hindenburg tried to cobble things together with new chancellors and vice-chancellors, the problems got no better – unemployment remained terrifyingly high; the economy was in free fall. We all sensed we were about to have a civil war.
‘We must see how von Papen shapes up,’ my father gently remarked, folding his morning newspaper and laying it beside his breakfast roll.
‘At least he is a gentleman,’ said my mother.
‘Though a Catholic,’ added my father.
They seemed to be living in never-never land. The appointment of von Papen as Chancellor did nothing to stop the hunger, the confusion, the violence.
Old Oswald Spengler and his wife hung swastika banners from the windows of their flat in Munich. (‘When one has a chance to annoy people, one should do so,’ he said – even though he believed H was a ‘fantasist’ and a ‘numbskull’.)
‘I do not see how anyone can be so irresponsible, or so’ – my father paused – ‘so stupid as to think those people could bring order to our country, when they are street fighters, gangsters.’
‘You didn’t think much of this speech, then?’ I indicated the newspaper, reporting a speech H had made in Munich in which he invoked the Revelations of St John the Divine. The Laodiceans had been lukewarm and Almighty God had spewed them out. This was not a time for being lukewarm. It was a time for action against the ‘world pest’, Bolshevism. It was a time for all good Germans to unite – for full employment, for economic stability and for our pride in ourselves as a nation.
As always when he was losing an argument, my father merely shook his head disapprovingly and said nothing.
After a silence, my mother said, ‘I don’t know why they don’t bring back the Emperor from exile – or if the Prussians don’t want that, at least let us have our own royal family in Bavaria. Things have never been right since they declared the republic.’
Uncle Wolf did not make much of an appearance in the Wagner family circle that year. The electioneering and the campaigning were more or less constant. He had conquered his fear of flying and was now escorted round the country in a small plane, surrounded by his particular entourage of associates – the bespectacled head of the SS, the very sight of whom gave one the creeps; there was the fat soldier whom Fidi had rescued after the beerhall putsch, whom I privately thought of as the Mad Gamekeeper; and the sinister Nosferatu with a club-foot.
At one point in the year – I forget all the order of events now – there was a great crisis in the Party. I do remember it, because it was one of the moments when Wolf spoke openly among us about his political chances – rather than being an uncle who spoke only of opera, or cowboy stories by Karl May. ‘Strasser is trying to betray me,’ he told Winnie in my hearing. ‘If he takes a place in the government – Streicher is offering him the Vice-Chancellorship – then I am finished. And if I am finished, then the pistol will end the story.’
‘Wolf, Wolf – you think the German people will want to be governed by Strasser?’
The crisis passed. Gregor Strasser had been one of Wolf’s old comrades from the first days of the movement. A Socialist, who always wanted to insist on that element in the National Socialist programme, he had indeed been offered a place in one of the coalition governments that year – possibly under some kind of military dictatorship run by General Kurt von Schleicher (who was briefly the Chancellor at the end of that year). Had it worked … It is one of the big ifs of history: a brief period of calm, with martial law and a firm military government; the Nazi rank and file united behind Strasser, but prepared to work with the conservatives in government and other parties in the Reichstag; the routing of the worst thugs in the SA …
It was never going to happen. As we now know from the history books, H did one of his most successful pieces of emotional blackmail, accompanied by threats. He sobbed, he ranted, he shouted that Strasser had betrayed him, betrayed the Party. Strasser went out into political exile. Nosferatu persuaded H that he should demand the Chancellorship or nothing. After that the Presidency and absolute power. Absolute power or nothing.
All your memories of mature life, all your political memories at least, until you made the decision to get out, are of a Communist East Germany, which has been extraordinarily stable. As you know, I have no truck with the comrades, but it seems amazing now that ‘we all’ thought that Leninism would be the ultimate catastrophe. I look out of the windows of my little hell-hole of a flat as I write these words and, well, yes, it’s ugly, yes it’s not much fun and no, we have no freedom. But we all have somewhere to live, something to eat. Your schooling was rather good – better than mine, I should say. There is a social justice of a sort. The great monolith of Soviet Communism will never ever be broken, as far as I can see. I don’t see what there is that can break it. The most that can happen is that such things as that wonderful Herz Meistersinger in Leipzig will lead to a different kind of Socialism here in Germany, more benign, less intolerant, less fearful.
But this is your Germany, albeit the one you left behind. It is one of appalling dullness and of almost non-existent economic growth, and of political repression. But all your life with me in this town of ——— has been stable. Sometimes there were queues for sausage or for boots, but not riots, as there were in 1932, not open civil war in bars, cafés, town squares.
Well, there was no excuse, we made our choice, we Germans, and boy did we get it wrong. And I was at the very epicentre of the wrongness, no doubt about that, with Winnie having no scintilla of doubt that her Lohengrin would lead us all to the Promised Land.
The Wolf whom we glimpsed that year, flitting in and out for evening visits and always remembering to bring presents for the children, was still the old Wolf – a warm, jokey family visitor and friend. But we all read newspapers avidly. And it was obvious that he was no longer just Uncle Wolf, but also the person who might, just might, overcome the anarchy and become the national saviour.
You will find it unsatisfactory that I have no memories whatsoever of your birth parents together during that year of your birth.
It was a very hot summer, the year of your birth, and it must have been a month or so after you were born and brought to the orphanage at Bayreuth that I saw Winnie, in a loose summer frock, and knew what had happened. Of course she did not tell me, but I knew. The sustained absence in Switzerland in the late spring and early summer had all been explained to us, and to her children, as being of a business character. But apart from her visit to America in 1924 with her husband, what business had ever kept her away from Bayreuth for such an extended period?
I do not know if she flew around with Wolf on his whistle-stop electioneering and speechifying tours, but there is no doubt in my mind, looking back, that she regarded herself as his mistress, partner, all but wife, during that year. And of course it was at that time that the situation must have been obvious to his young Munich girlfriend. About a year after his niece committed suicide, Eva Braun made an unsuccessful attempt to shoot herself.
This minor event was but one of the blood spats on the pages of the 1932 calendar. Some of the more melodramatic plays of the young Shakespeare have gratuitous deaths and murders in almost every scene, so that one more or less fails to make an impact. That is what the year of your birth was like. I can’t even remember the exact date at which Fräulein Braun did attempt suicide. Obviously,* she had found out about Winnie and Wolf – and perhaps about your arrival on the scene. She herself, it need hardly be added, never persuaded Wolf to give her a baby. You are unique.
It was, as I have said, several months before Eva Braun’s attention-seeking display that my hunch about Winnie and Wolf hardened to certainty. It was during that very hot summer.
Winnie was looking magnificent in that loose, polka-dotted summer frock. Wolf was paying one of his flying visits and the children were all aroun
d them on the grass in the garden just outside the french windows of the grand salon at Wahnfried. ‘We think you’ll do, don’t we, Wolf?’ said Winnie to me, looking up in that slightly teasing way she always had of speaking to me.
‘Yes, yes,’ said Wolf.
She was absolutely glowing: with health, with sexual energy, and with – yes – with triumph. The man she loved was at her side. I suppose there were many things he loved about her. One was her unswerving loyalty and her unwavering fondness for him. But another was that she did not kowtow to him, she treated him like a person and if necessary she stood up to him. Here they were together and, oh, were they together that afternoon.
‘Winnie, don’t eat so much!’ – her husband Fidi’s constant outburst at meals had been made half in jest, half out of genuine exasperation. Over the years there was no doubt that Winnie had filled out, though she was still, and surely always would be, magnificent. It suited her to be fleshy, it added to her charm. But I now saw that her shape, only vaguely discernible beneath the summer dress, had undoubtedly undergone a great change. The brightness in her eyes and the softness of her skin also told me what had happened.
For any other woman, perhaps, it would have seemed a tragedy. She was – still is, no doubt – deeply maternal. Motherly is one of the adjectives that would inevitably come to anyone’s lips who was attempting to describe Winifred. It would not be just a reference to her bodily figure. Yet there was always this robustness of spirit, and this strange impenetrable curtain, which I have concluded to be a specifically Celtic capacity to guard its secret soul, which made it impossible to know what was going on behind her smiles – or behind her anger and grief when they were in evidence. She did not expose herself.
‘We’ve been talking. You don’t mind that I’ve discussed your situation with Wolf?’
‘Of course not,’ I said, not quite bowing to him, but certainly feeling a sort of deference; more than that, a very definite glow, that this man, who was now on the front page of every newspaper in the world, every day, had been discussing me.
‘Naturally, your work for Fidi at the theatre, and here, has been invaluable, and I don’t want to backtrack in any way. You came to us, not just as a dogsbody but as someone who wanted to write a book about the philosophy of Richard Wagner. And you must do that, you must.’
‘Have you read Schopenhauer?’ Wolf suddenly asked.
The question really did summon up Spengler’s image of him as a dolt (Hohlkopf). How could anyone even consider writing about Wagner and philosophy without having read Wagner’s favourite philosopher (or the one he said was the favourite – part of my book would be to explore the mystery of Wagner’s silence about Hegel – and whose ideas quite obviously permeate all the music dramas but especially Tristan and the Ring cycle, that is, the primary works).
But of course Wolf’s question had not been a question. It was a cue to himself to perform one of his party tricks, which was to recite whole pages by heart of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. It was remarkable that anyone should have such powers of recall, yet, as he spouted the words and Winnie looked on admiringly, it was noticeable that she also had no hesitation, when there was a slight pause in the performance, about butting in with her own talk.
‘Wolf agrees with me that as a stopgap arrangement it was satisfactory; but it is not ultimately right’ – she began speaking in that extraordinary overemphasis which was her hallmark – ‘for the grandchildren of Richard Wagner to complete their education in an English boarding school.’
She pronounced the last three syllables (In-ter-nat in German) with equal emphasis on each syllable. ‘And so – what is to be done? Some local schools must be found for the autumn. But they need someone who can be like a tutor to them, a little like a sort of father figure, if you will. I have had to be away this year’ – she smiled, both mysteriously and almost mystically, as though her absences might conceivably have been on another planet. ‘One must be realistic. We have to think who will be here for the children. Their father, alas, is no more. Wolf has done all he conceivably can. But his place…’
Wolf, all the time she spoke, was continuing to recite Schopenhauer.
‘His place is elsewhere. He has been kind, kind beyond measure to those children. But his destiny is to save Germany, not to be Uncle Wolf, simply.’
She lit a cigarette and gave one of her throaty dismissive chuckles. Her tone somehow suggested that she was putting up a struggle against those who had been arguing for Wolf abandoning his political life in favour of childcare. ‘So, my dear N——— – I wondered, Wolf wondered, we both agree with one another – would you be prepared to … adopt a tutelary role towards the children?’
It was a fairly tall order. Wieland was now fifteen, Friedelind fourteen, Wolfgang thirteen and Verena twelve. I said yes immediately, as I said yes whenever Winnie asked me to do something, and wondered inwardly what I was letting myself in for. Whatever Winnie wanted me to do with the children, it was not going to be easy. She was the reverse of a disciplinarian. Presumably in reaction against her own regimented childhood, first in an English orphanage, then as the adopted child of very old people, deeply set in their ways, she imposed almost no structure or order on her children. Fidi had been completely at one with her in this, allowing the children to tumble up more or less as they pleased and believing that so long as they were ‘cultivated’ people who could speak a variety of European languages to the many grown-ups who came to the house, nothing else much mattered; except music, of course. But now Fidi was gone, where did I fit in?
Later, when Wolf had left, she expanded more generally on what she had in mind. ‘I could not say, not in front of Wolf, but I am spending more and more time in Berlin. With Tietjen. He is going to revolutionize Bayreuth. It will be terrific. But we have so much to plan and he can’t always leave Berlin. He is finishing off his work there at the State Opera and besides, the new designer he hopes one day to bring to Bayreuth, Emil Preetorius, is also in Berlin. You’ll all survive without me for a bit.’
I almost felt emboldened at this point to make a declaration of sorts; to say that I was not sure I ever could, from now onwards in my life, survive without her; but that if the best I could hope for was to be her childminder, this was at least one way of staying close to her.
I did not ask, nor did I need to ask, what she meant by saying she could not talk about Tietjen in front of Wolf. It had been obvious from the first that the men loathed one another.
And so began my new life, in which my duties were much less specific than they had been when I was Siegfried Wagner’s personal assistant. Half the time Winnie really did intend me to have the freedom to pursue my researches and to write some work about Wagner’s philosophy. The rest of the time I was to take responsibility for the children who were no longer quite children.
‘Do you believe in astrology?’ This was Friedelind’s question when I was sitting around with all four of them and we were presumably meant to be having some kind of improving, if not directly educational, talk.
Normally, when questions of belief were raised, I hummed and hawed. Ask me if I accepted this or that political or religious proposition and I began to stammer. But luckily, Friedelind had, for once, asked me an easy one. Did I believe in astrology. ‘Absolutely not.’
Wieland, already a handsome young man more than he was a child, asked if I did not then believe in the Norns, or Erda, in the Ring cycle being able to foresee the destiny of mortals and immortals.
This rather threw me. I’d assumed he was an intelligent lad, which he was. ‘It’s a story, Wieland, it isn’t…’
Wolfgang, his younger brother, who always wanted to ‘score’ off his brother – the two of them scrapped and fought all the time, and not merely verbally – intercepted my remark with ‘You see, Wieland? It’s all rubbish.’
‘It can’t be,’ said Friedelind intently. ‘Else why would Uncle Wolf consult magicians?’
While I tried to say
that it was news to me that Uncle Wolf believed in magic, the four children all started talking at once. It was some time during this conversation, however, that the truth about Wolf began to dawn on me. I mean, the whole ghastly truth about this man and what he was about to unleash upon our country. It was, at this stage, only a glimmering. Irritation with my (as I thought) self-righteous parents still prevented me from seeing the whole truth. So did the truly anarchic and terrifying condition of the country. So did the surface plausibility of Wolf who, for all his strange habits and tendency to monologue, was a very dear friend of my dear friends.
‘Erik Jan Hanussen is the greatest magician alive, according to Uncle Wolf,’ said Friedelind earnestly. ‘He can see into the future. He is going to go to where Uncle Wolf was born and dig up a mandrake root. If he digs up the root by the light of the full moon, it will be a sign that Uncle Wolf will become the Chancellor next year.’
I must have laughed at this suggestion, because an uneasy silence descended on the little circle, as though they did not want to share with me any more of the secrets Uncle Wolf had imparted to them.
It was the first time, really, that I became aware that National Socialism was, quite literally, an occult rite, a branch of the black arts, more than it was a political party. To this extent it was not really to be set beside Social Democratic or Communist or Monarchist Conservative views. It was burrowing away deep into the strange world which rationalists such as the Brothers Grimm, with their fairy stories, or Goethe, with his lifelong evocation of the Faust legends, had explored: that Gothic depth of the irrational which the Enlightenment, far from driving away or expunging, had merely driven underground. Its manifestations in post-Enlightenment times were the decadent art of Baudelaire or Huysmans, the later operas of Richard Wagner; and such disturbing aspects of the völkisch movement as virulent anti-Semitism, which had not a scintilla of reasonable justification. (The more you tried to ‘explain’ anti-Semitism, the more you ended up constructing an implausible ‘justification’ for it, such as that there had been a lot of Jews ‘behind’ the Russian revolution. The truth is that anti-Semitism did not feed upon such ‘explanations’; it grew in the fertile, poisonous soil of mythology, with the Wandering Jew standing at the foot of the Cross and mocking the suffering Christ, or tramping through Christian towns with a sack of Christian babies over his shoulder, which he intended to devour.)
