by A. N. Wilson
Another – yet another! – point of difference was beginning to emerge between Richard Wagner on the one hand, and the National Socialists who had appropriated his name and his music for their own political purposes on the other. He saw the power, the strength, the point of mythologies. He knew why they were essential to any group, or nation or family, they were a natural and organic way which human beings had of expressing their shared concerns in story. The Greek tragedy was born in the shared, if buried, dreads, superstitions, hopes of Greeks – not the collective noun People but people, actual men and women. They responded to the Dionysian in art, religion, story – mythology – not to the formal ideas of Apollo but to the frenzied impulses of Dionysus.
Wagner did for people of the nineteenth century – not for The People – but for people – what Æschylus did for the ancient Greeks. Their fears about the collapse of society, about sex, about the disappearance of their god he refashioned for them in music. But the point of his dramas in a way is that there is no right or wrong way of performing them, they are endlessly available because art, unlike ideology, is fluid. Let us Germans stop being proscriptive; we’ve seen where wars and politics got us, let us see where art takes us – thus Hans Sachs, changed immediately by German audiences ever since into ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles’. And then again, with the great mythological dramas he is saying: come again into these darkened, damp, dwarfish caves, come among the mossy rocks of the Rhine and re-explore these old stories of heroes and gods. History and mythology intermingle, play against one another like moving light flickering through trees beyond the window and dappling a room; but in the end history must be fixed in fact and can never therefore take us further into truth. Whereas mythology, once recognized as mythology, can.
To believe in the truth contained in The Ring you would have to disbelieve in any literal surface truth. (This I take it was the sort of area my brother, whom I had the cheek to mock, was exploring in his reading of the Bible.) When I heard the children saying that they believed in their grandfather’s mythology – the Norns, the Earth-Goddess Erda foreseeing the future and so forth – I had a jolt. I thought I was with one set of people and I found myself to be with another. It was understandable to me that simple Bible Christians should think that theologians like my brother were undermining belief by saying that Noah’s Ark never sailed in history or that angels did not fly over Jesus’ stable birthplace, which was almost certainly not in Bethlehem. Understandable – but wrong. They were failing to see that far from disputing the truth of the Bible the demythologizers, as they were known, were working hard to reach it, like miners on their hands and knees, hacking at generations of accumulated strata that concealed it. But beyond the objections of these ‘simple’ believers were the much more dangerous ‘fundamentalists’ who failed utterly to see the nature of mythological material.
Maybe Wolf and the other Nazi Wagnerians were ‘fundamentalists’ on this level, able to miss the multiplicity of truths contained in the mythologies because they sought in them not the disturbing and ever-changing power of sound and story, but rather the hard confirmation of their ideology. Therefore it had to mean this or that. Alberich grubbing for gold, purchased through power at the expense of love, ceases to be a life-transforming general principle and becomes a cheap mask for Jewry: Hans Sachs, deprived of his generosity and irony, becomes a German nationalist.
To say one has been bewitched is not to deny the power of whatever magic has worked its enslavement. One is not denying the power; rather the creepy truth claims of the occult.
I had been bewitched by love of Winifred Wagner. I had watched the same thing happen to others – to Toscanini, for example. But although I now believed – knew – that Winnie and Wolf were lovers, I saw him as an enchanter of an altogether different order. His admirers were, definitely, bewitched – enchanted, mesmerized – one could say almost hypnotized. It was closely akin to the kind of obedience called forth by other religions. The goals offered were so attractive that self was lost in an ecstatic common cause.
Apart from watching Wolf from behind, as he leaned from a hotel window at Bayreuth in the very early days to harangue the admirers, I had never seen the performances before huge crowds, phenomena that were already legendary. It was the Wagner children who initiated me into this unforgettable experience.
It was at a youth rally in Potsdam in October 1932. It was not, primarily, the chance of seeing Wolf as H, wowing the masses, that made me say that I would take the children. It was, primarily, the chance of going to Berlin accompanied by their mother, who would stay with us all in a hotel. While I was in Berlin, I also wanted to catch up with my brother. First and chief of all the attractions, however, was to accompany Winnie. Although, in her absence, I sometimes told myself that my love for her was finished – that it was simply too painful to acknowledge that she had slept with Wolf, had a child by him, loved him; and that, relentless as were her appetites, she was almost certainly prepared to sleep with Tietjen too – it only required one minute of her actual presence for all my slavish adoration of her to return. Every single part of her was desirable to me. Her fleshiness, the softness of her lips, especially when she sucked on a cigarette, her cheeks, her calves beneath the hems of her often boring dresses and skirts, her hair, her eyes, all filled me … of course with lust, but with a yearning, sadness, longing which I never felt for another woman. Sexual frustration, and inexperience, you will say, pure and simple. But is anything pure and simple? I’ve often said to myself since, since she was obviously someone who enjoyed sex and was by no means naturally monogamous, would she not rather have enjoyed launching me on my erotic life? But no hint ever came from her that she would be willing to do this and I would never have had the courage to make a lunge. Our relationship was determined, on my side at least, by yearning.
There could not have been a greater contrast between the two worlds I saw during that visit to Berlin. On the one hand there was the awkward couple of hours I spent with my brother in the rather dreary suburb where he was working as a pastor. No doubt my visit was inconvenient to him and I caught him at a busy time, but his impatience sprang from my real reason for being in Berlin. Naturally, he had guessed why I was there. Every street, every bus stop, every metro station was red with posters advertising the Youth Rally at Potsdam. In some districts these posters had been defaced, half torn down or scrawled over with Red slogans. There was an extraordinary atmosphere of tension, of violence, wherever one went. Small riots and outbreaks of fisticuffs were regular occurrences in the streets of Berlin. You felt that any group of people standing near one another – say, at a bus stop – might at any moment erupt into violence. I’m sure it wasn’t just in my head, the suspenseful consciousness that something awful was about to happen. For some of us this ‘awful thing’, if we’d been asked to define it, was a civil war, or a Communist revolution, or both. For others like my brother there was no doubt what was most to be dreaded.
At first we kept off the subject. He gave me a cup of coffee in his book-crammed room – he was living as the lodger of a clergy widow in the parish – and then, apologizing because he could not give me more time, he asked me to walk with him while he went on a sick visit.
Heinrich had always looked much younger than his years. Now, at less than forty, he had started to look much older. His baldness – not total but affecting the whole of the top of his head – happened fast. There was a greyness of pallor about his face and he had lost quite a lot of weight. As we walked along the suburban pavement we talked about our parents in that ironical way we always had of discussing them – humorous, even satirical, but quite affectionate.
It was a blustery October afternoon. Light seemed to fade from the sky with every word we spoke to one another and the shadows between us, the intellectual gulfs, grew as we spoke family generalities. I could sense that Heinrich was working his way up to making one of his ‘statements’. If he had not been Heinrich, always the bossy older brother, always sel
f-righteous, if he had instead been a friend of mine, or better, a casual acquaintance, I should have been able, I think, to make some kind of response to the objections which I could anticipate him making to my attendance at the Potsdam rally. But Heinrich it was, and all the old rivalries and difficulties between us, probably going back to rivalries for our mother’s attention in early childhood, returned. So, I was not able to say, ‘Look. I do not go along with the madder mythologies of National Socialism any more than you do. I hate the SA thugs who beat up Jews and I don’t believe the majority of decent Germans like that side of their movement. But something’s got to be done in this country – we can’t go on having a new government every few months and nine million people unemployed. We are in a state of anarchy and all your so-called reasonable parties have failed us – I don’t want a confiscatory system of state Communism. So what do you propose? Why not have a short spell of what will in effect be martial law to see if we can get ourselves back on our feet again?’
I might have tried some speech like that, and I might have gone on to say that, whatever Heinrich and my parents thought of the Wagners, they had become my friends, and the children and their mother were entitled to have views that differed from those of conservative wishy-washies like Mum and Dad.
But there was that intensity in Heinrich’s eyes as he turned to me. And I realized then that he had been lying to me when he said that he had to go on a sick visit that afternoon. For he had led me to the door of his church hall, a large barn of a building on the corner of this tree-lined street. There were posters on the door. On these posters there were two pictures. One was a reproduction of that Dürer painting of Christ crucified against a night sky, which hangs in the Dresden gallery. The other was a photograph of H in SA uniform.
WHICH OF THESE TWO MEN IS THE BEST GUIDE FOR YOUR LIFE?
That was the legend beneath the pictures.
Heinrich turned to me and suddenly asked, ‘We are having a meeting here tonight, to coincide with … with … with the one in Potsdam. I’m hoping to get some of the young people in the area to come along and … and at least to see what’s happening.’
‘Heinrich, I…’
‘Please. Would you consider bringing the children, the young people in your care, the Wagners, to join in the discussion here, rather than taking them to … that charade?’
Oh, Heinrich, oh, my brother. When I think of all the things that happened to you after that and how you suffered for your bravery. It pains me to record that I simply laughed at you.
The idea that the four Wagner children, who had been imploring me for weeks to accompany them to this big Youth Rally in Potsdam, would agree for a single moment to come out to this dismal suburb for a discussion group about Christianity with my brother Heinrich and a few earnest church adolescents with acne! It was very laughable.
‘They might at least see,’ he persisted through my mockery.
‘The light?’ I countered mercilessly.
‘They might see that life is a bit more complicated than the Nazis are making it. They might see that life is not to be found in selfishness, whether it is personal selfishness or organized selfishness.’
‘You don’t think Germany needs to be a bit selfish, a bit collectively selfish just now? Well, I’m sorry, Heinrich, but I do.’
I felt my voice trembling and I realized I was losing control. It would have been so much better to have stuck to the generalities and the ironical jokes about our parents. But I could not stop myself now. ‘Force me to choose between either of those gentlemen,’ I said, pointing to the poster, ‘and maybe in an ideal world I wouldn’t choose either. But we’ve had enough of being crucified.’
Heinrich stared at me. In the fading afternoon light his face had taken on an expression of infinite sadness. He wasn’t out of control.
Then he spoke very quietly. ‘The Crucifixion hasn’t begun,’ he said.
I mind very much, when I recall that conversation in all its painfulness, that I was so angry. I simply turned away from him and did not even say goodbye.
In my tattered old copy of The Idiot, I kept my brother Heinrich’s last letter, written from prison towards the end of the war.
My dear ———,
Something tells me this will be the last letter. I have written to Mother and Father, but I want to write a separate word to you, my brother. We are very different characters, with different takes on life. Sometimes, I have failed to see what you were trying to say to me, and I’m sorry not to have made more effort to understand you. Clearly, in the last decade we have taken very different views politically and this has led to a failure of sympathy on my part. I know that you are a good person and I believe you when you say that, for example, Winifred Wagner is a good person also. I would like you to forgive me if, in my anger at what has happened to our country, I have appeared to sit in judgement on you or on anyone else.
Maybe our early differences over Richard Wagner highlight what I am trying to say. It seems strange to be devoting the last letter I shall ever write to the subject of myth and music theory, but here goes. Do you remember that squabble we once had about the old Northern mythology and Christianity? You said that you thought that there was a nobility in the old Teutonic religion because, in spite of all the endeavours of the gods to build up their Valhalla, and in spite of the courage of Thunder and the virtue of Baldr, in the end they only face chaos and defeat? In Ragnarok, the Wolf, Fenris, devours the great World’s Ash Tree and everything descends into fire and chaos … And you said this was a truer picture of things than Christianity, which promised a fake happy ending, with hallelujahs for the faithful and tears being wiped away from every eye.
Perhaps you do not even remember this conversation. I confess when we had it (you were a student, and I was still a teacher) I did not really know how to answer it. My own version of Christianity was what you would call Liberal Protestant or Hegel-and-sodawater. I did not believe Christianity to be ‘literally true’, but merely a set of myths by which we could improve our lives. And well – maybe if that is all it is, who was I to say one set of myths was worse than another set of myths?
———, my brother, from my prison cell, from a man who is about to die, please let me tell you how wrong we both were. I was worrying my head in those days about whether the Gospels recorded true stories, and whether Christ ever performed miracles. But when I went to Berlin and began my work as a pastor, and started to take part in the protest campaigns of the Confessing Church, I discovered a quite different Christ, one who is alive, who takes possession of the heart and soul. When this has happened to a human soul, questions about the historical Jesus become … not irrelevant, exactly, but dry as dust. For it is now that we watch the water turning into wine; it is in our own lives that we feel our blindness turned to sight, the paralysis of our limbs leaping into joy.
The Nazis made me a Christian. For that I shall always feel a sort of gratitude to them, even as they take me out to be hanged. Poor benighted men and women, they have things so wrong. They have tried to invert Good and Evil. They have demonstrated it cannot be done. Good will always go on being Good, and Evil will always be Evil. Christianity does not invent a fake happy ending of hallelujahs. It discovers a God who reveals himself not in power and triumph but in suffering and in apparent defeat. We used to hear so many sermons about the sorrows of Good Friday being followed by the glory of Easter. These harsh times in Germany have taught us again that the Glory was the Cross. God’s glory never shone forth so brightly as on the Cross. Only a suffering God could save us – not a false idol, not a muscular Nordic demigod like Siegfried who knew no fear, but a vulnerable Christ who knew fear and doubt and horror, and who died doubting.
———, my dear brother, forgive a sermon as my last word to you, but I so love you, although we have not always appeared close. And in my last words of love I owe it to you to tell you what now seems to me the only truth worth knowing. You will survive this terrible war, as will Mother, pray God
. And even if the institutional Churches do not survive, and all Europe is in ruins by the end of the nightmare, Christ will survive – the fundamental truth about dying-in-order-to-live, and life-through-death-of-self, that will survive, through Jesus Christ Our Lord.
By the time I got back to the hotel the young Wagners were all vastly overexcited. There had been talk of going out to Potsdam by the excellent railway, but Winnie decided to hire a car. Needless to say, very good seats in the stadium had been reserved for us all.
Potsdam is now wrecked. Even as you and I were making our way to Leipzig in the train for Meistersinger, the bulldozers were destroying what was left of the City Palace in the centre; what was left, that is to say, after the devastating air raids of April 1945. I do not know even now whether the Palace of Sanssouci survives, where Frederick the Great entertained Voltaire and played the flute to J. S. Bach’s accompaniment. For all I know that too has been demolished for ideological reasons.* The last vestiges of the Hohenzollern dynasty have probably been wiped off the face of the earth. And why not?
