by A. N. Wilson
Before the war, however, all these magnificent rococo palaces and landscapes survived, and our drive into Frederick the Great’s residential city, with its domes and churches and parks and pavilions, was very beautiful, for the buildings had been lit up and although we could not see the extent of the parks, it was like driving into a vast illuminated doll’s theatre.
All along the way, young people were still trooping to the rally, and when we got to the field on the edge of the town where the speech and the parade were to take place, it was evident that tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of human beings had assembled. Winnie had by now attended many Party Days in Munich and Nuremberg, but this was the first really large-scale event I had seen. And absolutely immediately one was swept up into the excitement of it all.
Of the four Wagner kids, Friedelind was undoubtedly the most excited, pointing out boys in their SA or Hitler Youth uniforms, or those who, without uniform, nonetheless wore swastika armbands of red, white and black. ‘Look at them!’ (A banner saying ‘We have walked from Prague’. Another saying ‘The youth of Vienna salutes A——— H———’.)
Somehow the driver left us by the main entrance to the field and we were shown to our seats in the grandstand which had been erected in the field. The field itself was lit with spotlights and arc lights. There was loud music. Then one of the speakers, not a very good speaker, told us that the moment for which we had all been waiting was about to arrive. Our Leader was going to come and address us.
As if spontaneously, the crowd broke into the Horst Wessel song. For over a year now, this strange but haunting song had been the anthem of the Movement. Horst Wessel was a young SA leader in Berlin. He moved into some dingy lodgings with a prostitute called Erna, but neither of them would pay the rent and the landlady got the local Communist street fighters to come and turf them out for her. It happened that the leader of this particular Communist gang was also a client of Erna’s, so he said, when he raised a pistol and shot the twenty-one-year-old Horst Wessel dead, ‘You know what that’s for.’
It wasn’t a very edifying incident, but the Party’s Nosferatu, Dr Goebbels, soon got to work. Horst Wessel had left behind a poem, ‘Raise high the flags’, which he used to sing to an old Viennese cabaret tune. Nosferatu made Wessel into a working-class German Jesus: ‘Leaving home and mother, he took to living among those who scorned and spat on him. Out there, in the proletarian section, in a tenement attic, he proceeded to live his youthful, modest life. A socialist Christ!’
This German Jesus had died in February 1930 and the Mary Magdalene, Erna, had survived. Now we sang Horst Wessel’s song, with the cabaret tune rearranged to fit (just about) a march rhythm.
Raise high the flags, the ranks in close formation
Of SA men march calmly and march strong.
Our comrades shot by Reds and by Reaction
March now in spirit with us, all the ages long …
Winnie was making herself hoarse as she belted out the words and it was evident that her children knew them by heart already. For those of us who were new to this sort of thing, there were programmes with the words of this, and many other stirring ditties, printed.
The streets are free now for the Brown Battalions,
Free streets where Sturm Abteilung march ahead!
Where swastikas hang out, there hope springs for the millions
It brings the day of freedom and of bread!
And then the most rousing chorus of all.
For one last roll-call sounds the gallant bugle,
For one last fight stand ready friend and friend!
Soon over every street those flags will triumph,
The time of slav’ry hastens to its end.
The tune is only a cabaret song, but when it is sung by over a hundred thousand voices it is hypnotic. And then, almost before the words had been finished, the Leader, with brilliant timing and perfect choreography, came almost running up the steps just beneath us. The arc lights were trained upon him and, as if the crowd were now not a hundred thousand individuals but one great creature, trained to his absolute will, we roared, we cheered and we raised our right hands in the Roman salute.
Victory, Hail! Victory, Hail! Victory, Hail!
If one were to write down on the page the exact words spoken in the next half-hour, they would look quite unimpressive. In any case I can’t remember them exactly. I do remember that he had tempered his words perfectly for a young, idealistic audience. He spoke of them coming from Austria, from Czechoslovakia, yes, from all over Germany. For Germany was not a place whose borders were determined by its enemies. Germany was wherever the German soul was to be found and wherever the German language was spoken. He thanked Almighty God that he had been born near the borders of two great empires, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Prussian or German empire. And now, after a gallant war and the betrayal of the greater Germany by its enemies, we had all been through the hardest decade of our history. But that time was over. Germany had awoken. German youth had awoken. And in all German lands, from the borders of Switzerland to the furthest reaches of Poland, from the Baltic to Bavaria, from Czechoslovakia (so-called) to Austria, the German people would one day be free.
And then, I do remember – he quoted, or rather he most revealingly misquoted, Hans Sachs:
Even though the Roman Empire should vanish into the mist, yet should remain – German Culture, German Art, German Youth and German Strength!
It was an extraordinary performance by any standards. We were all transfixed by it. I do not believe that even brother Heinrich, had he been present, would have been able to resist the hypnotism of that speaker. On this occasion his words were all positive and uplifting. There were harsh words for the enemies of Germany, but he did not spell out who they were. There was no coarse anti-Jewish sentiment. It was a kind of patriotic aria, ranging from quiet reminiscences of his own youth and childhood, and his yearning to serve his country in peace and in war, to the terrible condition of things today and to our determination to raise ourselves out of it.
You could not but be carried away by his mental music. It was mass hypnosis, mass hysteria if you will, of the most electrifying kind, all the more so, I think, because the audience were so young. After he had spoken the Youth organizations from all over Germany marched past the podium, carrying torches and banners, while we cheered and sang and raised our arms. Looking back, it seemed inevitable that this man, with such an extraordinary power to win over crowds, should have achieved the impossible: he became the Chancellor of Germany a few months later, at the end of January 1933. It wasn’t a decade since I had offered him a sugar lump to put in his wine in the dining room of the Golden Anchor Hotel in Bayreuth. Not long before that he had been in prison, this man who in his youth had failed to get into an art school and had lived as a bum in the dosshouses of Vienna. A Triumph of the Will indeed.
Naturally, I did not tell my parents about going to the rally, though they must have guessed. The newspapers were full of it and my rather feeble attempt to explain away the visit to Berlin as a cultural event, in which the children had been to art galleries and concert halls, was not plausible. By the time I got home, they were much more worried by what had happened that evening at my brother’s parochial hall. Astoundingly, he had managed to persuade about twenty brave Christian teenagers, evenly divided into the sexes, to come to his meeting. Not much had been said because they had been joined by some SA men (in mufti) who tore down the posters and threatened even the girls with violence. Most of the young had fled, but a few had remained, hoping to protect my brother from a beating. They did not succeed. He was found beside some bushes just outside the church hall, bleeding from the mouth and from the skull. He had lost about six teeth and for several days he was concussed. He had two broken ribs. My mother told me, with a mixture of terror for his safety and pride at his courage, that in spite of a swollen jaw he had insisted upon preaching the next Sunday. He had chosen for his text ‘I have fought with wild beasts�
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Parsifal
One very cold winter morning in the winter of 1933–34 I took the bus to the nearest stop at the bottom of the Green Hill. I wasn’t averse from riding my bike in the snow, quite the opposite, but after a skid on the ice the rear wheel needed replacing and I’d left it with the menders the previous afternoon. I don’t know what impulse made me take the bus. I hardly ever took buses – our town is too small, really, to make such journeys necessary, unless you live in the sprawling working-class suburbs beyond and want to get to the centre, or to one of the outlying villages. Anyway – it is simpler perhaps to believe that Fate made me change my habits and take the bus.
It was fairly crowded at that hour of the morning, and there was a good fug of steamed windows and cigarette smoke as everyone chattered happily. But at a certain stop along the line a young oik wearing the brown shirt and swastika armband of the SA got on board. Though he was alone he had that vacant stupid look on his face which addicts of violence, often exhibitionists, wear: ‘Look at me, while I kick someone’s face in.’ An expression that carries with it defiance: ‘Any objections? If I kick this human face? Objections? Anyone?’
Winnie had often complained to Wolf about the street bullyism of the local SA lads, while having a personal fondness – I’ll talk about this a little later – for Ernst Röhm, the actual leader of the SA, that private Nazi army which had been so important a part of their personal mythology in early days. Now that Wolf was Chancellor, right-hand man to old General von Hindenburg and in cahoots with the regular army, the semi-, or actually criminal activities of the street army were a liability to him. Many thought he should wind it up, but it would have lost him many loyal supporters in the Party and the more his personal power grew – it was already approaching Napoleonic heights – the stronger grew his persecution mania and the certainty that Party colleagues were plotting his downfall.
The SA oik in the bus, with his nerdish peaked cap and BO, was an unimpressive person. Cigarette in mouth, he moved down the crowded bus until he was standing quite near me and then asked me, ‘You wanna seat?’
I didn’t know what he meant and made some dithering remark to the effect that I was OK standing, but that should the crowd thin out I’d sit down.
‘’Ere – you!’ I realized to my horror that he was addressing an old lady sitting just beneath us. With sausage fingers he pushed her hat askew and prodded her bony shoulders. ‘Didn’t you ’ear the gentleman?’
The old lady looked up, her face tautened with fear.
‘An Aryan wants to sit down,’ said the oik. ‘So stand up – yid.’
I protested that I did not want the old lady’s seat.
‘What’s the matter? You a yid too?’
I was reduced to a stupid incoherence by this question. There were now murmurings round the youth. Some people seemed revolted by his behaviour, but I do not think I deceive myself when I say I remember some people talking about ‘them’ taking up space on ‘our’ buses.
‘Well, if this poofter won’t take your seat, I will,’ said the youth and he pulled the old lady to her feet. He looked around, blushing slightly, but with a conceited grin, his behaviour in his own eyes deserving applause.
Courage, like music, is a matter of timing. I had hesitated for only a split second, but it was enough to give the thug his advantage. I should instantly, for I was the one standing nearest him, have punched his suppurating face. The old lady was badly shaken, as much by the brutal rudeness as by having been manhandled. But in the split second I had hesitated someone else had risen from her seat. ‘Here. Take my seat.’
‘It’s all right, dear, it’s all right,’ said the old woman with a trembly voice.
‘No. You sit down.’ The person who said this was someone who could easily have been taken for a boy. She wore her thin mousy hair short, in a crop. She had a cigarette alight between her fingers, whose orange tips, like Winnie’s, revealed the habit of chain-smoking. Her nails were very short, pared right down. The very dark-brown eyes animated her thin face. The elfin beauty was not immediately obvious, since the character breathing through the features was so strong that you were aware of the personality before you took in the appearance, a very unusual sequence in my experience. She exuded confidence; the world was to be understood and accepted on her terms or not at all.
‘I insist that you sit down,’ she said, laying a gentle hand on the old woman’s shoulder.
‘What you, then, a lesbian?’ The oik looked around the carriage for approval of his joke. I’m glad to say, for the sake of my fellow townspeople, that he did not get it. The atmosphere of menace he had created was, as well as frightening, acutely embarrassing.
The girl – she was only in her very early twenties – continued to caress the shoulder of the old woman, as if she were her grandmother. She did not look at her, merely kept the hand there to comfort and to protect. ‘Just tell me when you want to get off the bus,’ she said.
After a few minutes we reached the stop at the bottom of Burgerreutherstrasse, where I should have got off for the Festival Theatre. So, too, should the girl, because I recognized her. She was the one that Winnie, who liked nicknames and jokey appellations, referred to as the Communist Hornplayer (die Kommunistische Englisch-Hornspielerin). Winnie’s whimsy obviously had to do with her automatic sensing of other women’s attractions to Tietjen. The KEH, as she was sometimes abbreviated on Winnie’s lips, had lately joined the orchestra. It was unusual, though not unknown, for women to play wind instruments in those pre-war days, but no one had any doubts about the Communist Hornplayer’s abilities. I could even remember the day of her auditions and Tietjen remarking upon the skill with which she had played her ‘party piece’, as he called it – the amazing, long cor anglais melody of the ‘shepherd’s pipe’ at the beginning of the third act of Tristan.
I could not work out if the KEH had ‘clocked’ me as someone who also worked at the Festival Theatre. At that moment her attention was entirely focused on our fellow bus traveller who, it transpired, was going to visit a sister who lived in St Johannis, a village about four miles from the centre of town. The SA oaf had got off the bus long before this.
The old lady was pathetically grateful to the KEH, almost slavishly so. It was horrible to sense the way she had come, within less than a year of the National Socialists taking power, to feel she was living in Germany on sufferance, she who had lived here all her life. We took her up to the door of a small, neat house, surrounded by shrubs in pots, conveyed her safely to her sister, then walked back together to the bus stop.
‘So!’ said the KEH, lighting up her umpteenth fag. ‘I think we’ll have a long wait till the next bus. Helga Gerlandt!’ Her handshake was surprisingly hearty and firm. Knowing nothing, I immediately thought of the SA thug’s taunt on the bus and, putting the handshake together with her short hair, assumed lesbianism.
Perhaps it was this that put me so much at my ease in the first instance? There we stood, by a cold bus stop, waiting for the next one to come along (it took over forty minutes). She had indeed recognized me as someone who worked for the Wagner family. Was this why she did not make any allusion, any at all, to the incident of the old lady on the bus? Was it because she assumed an absolute political division between us? You couldn’t be too careful in Germany then, as her subsequent experience showed.
I made some fleeting reference to how well she had behaved. But she still wouldn’t pursue it. ‘I wish I’d hit him,’ I said.
‘He’s a bastard. They all are.’ She threw her butt and it hissed in the snow. ‘You don’t smoke?’ This question was accusatory.
‘I do, but not that much.’
‘Not as much as me? Go on’ – she offered me one of hers. My gloved finger fumbled, her ungloved finger took a cigarette and our hands touched.
‘So – quite a lot of trouble about this year’s Parsifal.’ Everything she said was tinged with heavy irony. This continued to be the case for all the coming few years until
crossness – mutual crossness with one another – drove out the jokes. But that was much later, after we had married.
We began to talk about the Parsifal row, which was the talk, not only of Bayreuth but of the whole opera world that winter. Tietjen had been determined, during Winnie’s ‘sabbatical’ (the year you were born), to tackle the problem of the stage designs and costumes at the theatre. Many of the props, costumes and pieces of scenery dated back to the time of Richard Wagner himself and were absolutely ragged. As were the two aunts, Eva Chamberlain and Daniela Thode, but this did not prevent them having strong feelings. When they heard that there were plans afoot to have a redesigned Parsifal they drew up a petition, for which they got nearly a thousand signatures from devotedly conservative Wagnerians, that the original 1882 stage sets should never be altered.
Winnie, who was now open in her hatred of the aunts, did not care about their hurt feelings, but she was rattled by the prospect of these thousand names, who might withdraw their support. Was there any guarantee that there were a thousand modernists out there who would buy tickets to take the conservatives’ places? ‘It makes me so angry!’ she had exclaimed during one of the rows with the aunts. ‘You might as well claim that it was going against the sacred will of the Master not to light the stage with gas, because that was what he did. My children, make it new – that was his motto. My God, it’s a theatre, not a shrine.’ But this heretical idea only confirmed the aunts in their view that, as far as Parsifal at least was concerned, they were right to resist any change whatsoever.
‘It’s a load of crap, total shit, of course, Parsifal,’ said the KEH. ‘Nietzsche for once in his life got something right.’
‘You’re just thinking of The Case of Wagner,’ I said.
‘No, I’m not,’ she returned instantly, aggressively, passionately. I saw for the first time the anger that was always part of our relationship – her brown eyes blazed at the implied patronage in my suggestion that she had not read everything. ‘His judgement of the contents of the Parsifal poem are all true,’ she asserted. ‘More Liszt than Wagner. Counter-Reformation – decadent drivel.’ She giggled. ‘All too restricted by Christianity.’ She suddenly looked sternly at me and asked, ‘You’re not a Christian, are you?’
