by A. N. Wilson
‘No – no, of course not.’
‘What a relief.’ She puffed out smoke into the wintry air. Why did this remark make me so happy? Because it suggested she wanted to include me in her future?
‘But he also recognized, the Basel loon, that the music of Parsifal was bloody marvellous – best thing Wagner ever wrote, I think. You remember, Nietzsche asks somewhere, “Has Wagner ever written anything better?” So although he hated Wagner for falling sobbing at the foot of the Cross and all that crap, he knew that the music cuts you through like a knife. That Prelude is just an amazing piece of musical juggling. You start with A flat major, all those arpeggios building up; then he repeats the motif with arpeggio harmonies a whole octave higher with violins, trumpets, oboes; then back again at the end, with the trumpet, to A flat major, with that slow building of C minor – oh, yes, yes!’ She punched the air.
I began trying to say why I thought the Christian elements in Parsifal worked very well. I talked about the nineteenth century having got rid of God too brutally – with the young Wagner reading Feuerbach and deciding that Christianity had to go – but that later, when he’d read Strauss’s Life of Jesus, Wagner had realized how crude those reductionists’ views of the New Testament were and …
‘My Christ, you are a Christian!’
‘Schweitzer talks about Tragic Christians.’
‘That old Nazi!’
I had never heard anyone disparage Albert Schweitzer before. He was universally, and not just in Germany, regarded as a saint.
‘He’s just gone to Africa to assert the superiority of white men over black men. What’s so clever in that? His so-called Tragic Christianity is just a reinforcement of the colonial cultural traditions we should be encouraging the Africans to throw off. It’s so dishonest, it makes me boil. Schweitzer admits that Christianity isn’t true, but he wants to go on living as if it were true.’
‘Isn’t there some nobility in that?’ I was thinking of my brother in Berlin; it had not occurred to me that my parents were in a similar situation and would be equally brave, equally ‘tragic’, when the time of testing arrived.
‘There can’t be any nobility in living a lie,’ she said firmly.
‘But they don’t want to lie, the Tragic Christians. Their tragedy is that they want to tell the truth. And incidentally, I think Wagner was one really. I think that’s what Parsifal is about. I think it’s about recognizing that Christian myths, even if they are myths, can still sustain and feed us – not just our imaginations but our capacity to be good.’
‘No one can be good in a criminal society. Only when society is reordered can there be any virtue. Virtue without social justice is simply an illusion.’
‘And who will do the reordering?’ I asked.
‘We will,’ she said simply.
Then the bus came.
* * *
Christ left the nineteenth century because there was no place for Him in it. He could find no refuge in its lust for profit, in its industrial inventiveness, in its exploitation of child workers, in its grinding down the faces of the poor, in its boorishly material answers – Marx-Engels – to its spiritual problems. How could it come to have made so many moral mistakes: factories/colonialism/capitalism? In fact, once caught up in the capitalistic nightmare, no one could really escape it, though Tolstoy, rich aristocrat that he was, could afford to become a simple peasant-anarchist and pretend that the machine age had not arrived.
So they all railed against Him and, like Kundry, laughed at the Crucifixion. Hegel had spiritualized Him out of existence, made Him an ideal, rather than the perpetual disturber of the human conscience, the perpetual upsetter of the idea of morality with the concept of grace and redemption. So came the materialistic interpretations of the New Testament and its origins, a New Testament without miracle, a Gospel demythologized by Feuerbach, Wagner’s youthful hero, and by Strauss of Tübingen. Nietzsche thought he was banishing Christ by his childish anger against a non-existent God, but he did not realize that it was he, with his loud ranting, who had already been banished. (After their quarrel, Wagner wanted to send Nietzsche, as a gentle jokey reproach, a bust of Voltaire which he and Cosima acquired.)
Cosima had her own relationship with the nineteenth century’s mad spiritual journey. She was brought up a Catholic and could never entirely expunge the mental habits it had brought along with it. But while she was falling in love with Wagner and putting aside her husband in order to be with him, the Pope was assembling his Vatican Council in which he would declare himself to be an infallible being. Against the relentless reason of the nineteenth century, its churning machines, its steel battleships, its steam pistons and its business logic, the ancient Italian aristocrat Pio Nono asserted the supremity of unreason, a gesture as violently angry, and as mad, as Nietzsche’s declaration that God was dead. In fact, the Pope declaring himself infallible was the same gesture, for to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit so violently as to claim a property of divine infallibility for oneself must be the ultimate denial of God.
Cosima became a Protestant and confronted the awful raw possibilities of being fallible – about God, about sin, about sex, about anything. She found a sort of freedom in it for a while, but pretty soon had to construct a new religion. Living without the old idolatries of Rome, she had to replace them with the idolatries of Bayreuth, and Parsifal, which she urged Wagner to write, was her sacred text. Ceaselessly and unsuccessfully she tried to petition the Reichstag to make it a unique text in the whole of German drama and music: she tried to make them pass a law which stated that only on the hallowed stage of the Festival Theatre could this solemn ritual ever be enacted. She went to her grave bitter that she had failed.
And there arose another, more fervent if possible even than Cosima, in his devotion to this text: ‘If I had power,’ said Wolf … ‘If I had the power, I would indeed put this law through the Reichstag, that in Bayreuth, and in Bayreuth alone, could the story of Parsifal and the Grail Knights be sung.’
And as so often, the spirit of Richard Wagner laughed at the absurdity of his devotees and their mad reversals of everything he had believed.
* * *
Wolf was at his large desk in the Reich Chancellery. The social misfit to whom I had offered sugar in the dining room of the Golden Anchor only eight years before was now Napoleon. But he was also a Grail Knight, awaiting the demise of the old wounded hero; for General von Hindenburg still lived on as President and his other old comrade in arms, Ludendorff, who had supported Wolf in his early days and even played a part in the putsch of 1923, now intoned his operatic warning: ‘I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery. Future generations’, he intoned to the old General, ‘will damn you in your grave for what you have done’ – that is, offer Wolf the Chancellorship.
* * *
Mistaking my turn, rather than entering the library where we had been told to assemble before the meal, I blundered into the dining room itself. To call it spacious does not convey the size of the place. It felt as if tanks could easily have been driven into it and still not brushed against the tables. In the middle was a large refectory table of polished mahogany. It would have seated thirty people with ease. But then beyond that, in a bay near one of the large windows that looked down on Unter den Linden, was a round table set for eight, as I quickly saw.
It was a striking table display. It could have been the slightly fussy luncheon table set in one of the more chichi Munich cafés. It was too ornate to be domestic. A large silver epergne, representing a youthful warrior, stood to attention in the middle of the table, around which were arranged clusters of white flowers, lilies of the valley, white freesias, white carnations, in which had been set very narrow candles, almost too small for table candles, practically the sort you would put on cakes. The napkins too were not of the kind you would expect to see either in an official residence such as this nor in a domestic setting. They were folded
into the shapes of fans and inserted into the glasses. I stooped to look at one more closely and noticed that in the corner of every single napkin had been embroidered the initials A.H.
Disconcertingly, the glass containing the napkin moved, first an inch one way, then back again. ‘That,’ rasped a familiar voice, ‘is straight, I think. People never give enough attention to the laying of a table.’
Wolf was squatting on his haunches, with his eyes at the level of the table top. He was making sure that every place setting was exactly regular and symmetrical. Without getting up he added, ‘I had some English guests staying; very, very great friends. I gathered they found it amusing that my initials were embroidered on the napkins. And on the towels in the bedrooms. Eduard – he is a very good footman, he comes and tells me things – said that they sat on the edge of the bed, these young Englishwomen and their mother, and laughed because there were initials on the towels.’
‘Really?’
Was there some kind of trick? Should I have been sharing in the laughter or was it an example of the general oddity, which the rest of the world has noticed over the last few centuries, of the things that make English people laugh?
‘That should do it.’ He moved a silver knife a millimetre to the left, then stood up, rubbing his hands. He stared at the table with the satisfaction of an artist. ‘Winnie would perhaps know about the initials,’ he said, ‘though it is a long time since she was in England, of course. And this morning’ – he spoke almost in a tone that suggested I had come into the room simply in order to discuss the matter with him – ‘I spoke on the telephone to Reichsbischof Müller. We are nearly there. What does your father think of Reichsbischof Müller?’
This, like the initials on the towels, was esoteric stuff. With some conversationalists you might have expected a trick question here, but in my experience, anyway when he was in Winnie’s entourage, Wolf did not go in for trick questions.
‘I told Bishop Müller that I belong to no confession. I am neither a Protestant nor a Catholic, I believe only in Germany. It is obvious that just as I have entirely reorganized the Civil Service and the other institutions, we should put our national Church, the Church of Martin Luther, on a rational basis. I’m sure most decent Germans want that – the vast majority of God-fearing Germans. I have always made it clear that our Movement is fundamentally a Christian movement, but it is not for us to propagate religion. That is for Bishop Müller, and your father, and his churches.’ He looked me full in the eye. He conveyed the sense that he would do anything to help you, that the reorganization of the Church was something for which the majority of God-fearing Germans had been yearning, Sunday by Sunday.
My father’s opinion of Bishop Müller would not have been repeatable in this setting and if I had told the Leader what my brother was proposing to do, when these Church reforms were put into effect, he would probably have been sent to a concentration camp. Müller was a puppet of the regime. Only that week Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, the daughter of my father’s old supervisor and mentor, had written from Berlin to say that she had published a petition to all the Churches to stay clear of state control and to avoid adopting the ideas of the ‘Movement’, especially in relation to anti-Semitism. Frau Zahn-Harnack had written, ‘In every area of our national history and culture they appropriate it and make it their own. You were so right to stay away from the 450th anniversary celebrations of Luther’s birth in Wittenberg in November. Müller’s speech was pure Nazi and at the statue of Luther in the town square the bishops actually raised their hand in the Roman salute! Everyone from our history is enlisted. Frederick the Great – imagine the scorn he would in actual life have felt for the moustachioed one. Goethe will probably be next. We must hold out against it. When Luther said Germanis meis natus sum, quibus et serviam, he did not mean he was a Nazi. In fact, now the best way we can all serve our fellow Germans is to tell them to wake up and stop before it is too late.’
That was the voice of Harnack’s daughter. I suspected that many of the more intelligent practising Lutherans would agree with her. I no longer greatly cared. The Kommunistische Englisch-Hornspielerin had taken up residence inside my head and any faint sentimental feeling I might have retained of being a fellow-traveller with Christianity had vanished. As for my feelings about Winnie and Wolf, and about the current political climate, these too were in a jangle of chaos since the overconfident elfin figure of the KEH sat beside all my thoughts and laughed, inside my skull, at my hedging and fudging, and at the general weakness of my outlook and expression.
‘I was brought up, as you may know, as a Catholic.’ For a moment he stared into the middle distance. Then he smiled and, coming closer to me, patted my upper arm and said, ‘Good, good!’
I had the disconcerting sense that I was supposed to have agreed to something, even though I had hardly uttered a syllable. He led me from the room as if a very satisfactory conclusion had been reached to a hitherto insurmountable set of problems.
* * *
It was Herr Treibel, who owned the small apartment block in Linz where they lived, who had made the suggestion. No doubt the lad’s mother had chattered, a mixture of pride and desperation, for what was he to do with himself, this moody youth who thought that normal professions were ‘boring’, who said he wanted to be an ‘artist’, who whistled tunes from operas, who inhabited quite another world from the one all his contemporaries appeared to accept, the world where you work, bring home your money, make love to your wife, get drunk, sleep, go to work … Someone had suggested he try to join the Civil Service, become a Customs clerk maybe, like his dada had been. She’d (without telling the youth) investigated it. His qualifications weren’t up to much, they had not really esteemed him highly at the Realschule, which was anyway full of snobs.
He knew, the youth, that some such pathetic thoughts had fluttered in his mother’s hopeless, irritating, ever-beloved heart. He thought of the Marriage Feast of Cana, when the mother of the Saviour had tried to push Him forward – ‘Ask Him, if you want a miracle performed. My boy will do you a miracle!’ And the Lord had replied, ‘Woman – my hour is not yet come.’
None of them could possibly understand – not the teachers at the Realschule, who completely failed to engage with what was going on inside his skull; not his brutal father, thank God five years dead, nor the father’s children by the earlier marriage, Alois and Angela – they all understood as little as his baby sister Paula. God understood, only he had discovered at an early age that God, as such, did not exist. What existed, to take you out of all this, out of the banality, the poverty, the conversations about the price of coffee, the tedious nothingness of the family’s conversation, and to take you too away from the dread and the violence and the smell of his father – which still, though he was five years dead, could frighten him, that great hulking brute! – what could take you out of it all was ceremony.
He had first been aware of it when he was only five or six years old. It was the year they lived in Passau – the hulking monster-brute undeserving of the name of father had worked in the Customs office there, and then been assigned to a job in Linz, leaving the rest of the family behind. Every second that his father was there, you felt the threat of his presence – the smell of alcohol and sweat and tobacco, the bad language, the shouting, the violence – towards them all, but especially, it seemed, towards him, the little lad. So when the father was gone, away in Linz, Passau had been a sort of paradise. The mother had let him wander, much of the time, and he had liked to walk about in the cathedral and lose himself in the vast, whitish-grey baroque space. The twinkling lights before the statues of the saints, the priests muttering their private masses at the side altars, the murmured voices from the confessionals, all added to the strangeness of the place, but most amazing of all was when the curtain went up, and they did a show – Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament on a Sunday afternoon, with the Host in a huge gilded clock-like case, carried and waved about the submissive crowds, and rank upon rank of well
-choreographed acolytes with candles and priests in their stiff embroidered robes. That took you out of all this! That redeemed you from the humdrum. Retrospect, from any of the tormented staging posts of his life, did not, when looking back on that carefree year in Passau, recall any personal awareness of the Almighty. It was later that that came, not mysticism – that he detested – but a sense that he was riding the thunderclouds, that destiny, great impersonal Fate, woven by the Norns and decreed by the Earth-Mother Erda, had singled out his destiny above his fellows’.
The Passau experiences, added to by experiences in Linz, gave merely the simple consolations of taking part in large colourful ceremonies in buildings ten thousand times the size of home. Other aspects of Church life displeased him. Even more than being made to go to confession himself, he hated the thought of his mother going through that humiliation – she who had never committed a sin in her life. How dare they, the black-robed maggots, sit in their polished confessionals and force that sacred being to tell them of her sorrows and sufferings, when it was they, with their pot bellies and their sexual perversions, who should be made to crawl along the ground and lick the very dust before her feet. That thought made him, even as a growing boy, feel as if the blood in his head was quite literally boiling, and he had to stop and jump up and down with rage. For this reason, of course, he had made a mockery of the confessional from the very beginning and, when being prepared for his first Communion the year after they left Passau, he had told the priest a pack of lies – mainly about the lavatory, but also about his siblings.
‘You must not make up fairy stories, this is a sacred place,’ the priest had said. But it had only inspired the boy to go on and on with the filth. There was nothing the priest could do to stop him. Even in adolescence, when he had of course given up religion except as the most formal outward observance, he had sometimes felt tempted, when passing one of the confessionals in the cathedral at Linz, to go in and spew out the filthiest and most violent lies he could think of. Nothing the black maggot could do, with his craven commitment to keep the secrets of that sordid box until the grave. (A likely story in the Jesuit churches, of course – it was well known that the Jesuit churches in Munich, for example, regularly sold the confessional secrets of their most distinguished penitents to a big Jewish operator in New York.)
