by A. N. Wilson
* * *
On 30 June Strauss had his first full orchestra rehearsal with the chorus and singers on stage. Tietjen and Winnie sat halfway down the amphitheatre at their director’s bench. Helga and her fellow players were in the invisible orchestra pit and the first act began – the strange story of a band of celibate knights, fed by the Eucharist alone, who were tending a fatally wounded prince, Amfortas, whose sores and wounds had to be bathed each day; a band of knights into whose midst two strangers come, the utterly mysterious Kundry, wild woman, witch, bringing her healing Arabic balsam for the wound, but also her bewitching and sexual spells; and the Fool, the Wild Man of the Woods who barely knows his own name and whose act of casual, ill-considered violence has led to the death of a swan.
* * *
Three thousand SA troops had rampaged in the streets of Munich the previous night. H travelled through the night from Berlin, flying in a three-motor Junker 52, and being driven at speed in a Mercedes to the Hanselbauer Hotel in Bad Wiessee at six in the morning.
* * *
‘We’ll take that from the top,’ said Richard Strauss from the podium. ‘Before the plundered sanctuary, in prayer impassioned knelt Amfortas.’
* * *
The SA High Command had been doing some serious drinking the night before and they were in no condition to resist the intrusion of H himself, who was accompanied by armed detectives. The rival SS had the building surrounded in case of trouble. The only person who was not in bed with a boy was a cousin of Röhm’s, Max Vogel. They found him with a frightened, naked chambermaid. Otherwise, in almost every room they entered they found a naked senior SA officer in bed with some eighteen-year-old youth, male.
H entered his old friend’s room, carrying a whip. He pulled back the covers. The detective who followed H into the room dragged the toyboy out without even giving him the time to dress, while H produced a revolver from his pocket. ‘Ernst,’ he shouted, ‘you (Du) are under arrest.’ Röhm was given the chance to get dressed in a crumpled dark-blue suit.
By mid-morning a hasty court martial had been arranged at the Brown House, the SA headquarters in Munich, and Röhm and the other conspirators had been condemned to death. The difficulty was in finding someone who would be prepared to shoot the old hero of the Movement, who had been there from the beginning of this socialist and nationalist adventure, taking part in the putsch of 1923 etc. etc.
* * *
‘Try that again,’ suggested Tietjen. ‘Amfortas, you are holding back the boys, but only with a gesture of the hand. You are wounded, grievously wounded – “What is the wound and all its tortures wild” – try that.’
* * *
‘Spare Röhm,’ said H suddenly in the middle of the morning. Rather, it was Wolf, awkwardly aware of what H was up to; like a fanatic who has been in a trance and wakes up to find his hands on a bloody knife, he does not quite know what he has done and tries to persuade himself that he is still dreaming. He was speaking to General von Epp, who had arrived at the Brown House and was determined that the SA menace be finally stamped out. H began raging – one of his real tantrums. The general walked out of the room muttering, ‘This man’s crazy.’
In Berlin, Himmler, Heydrich and Göring, cock-a-hoop at the prospect of a bloodletting of old enemies, had already begun a series of arrests and killings. General Kurt von Schleicher, one of von Hindenburg’s oldest friends, who had prevented H becoming Chancellor two or three years before and taken the job himself, found two Gestapo agents in his study. When his wife, in a neighbouring room, ran in to follow the noise of gunfire, she too was shot.
H always gave it out that he flew straight away to Berlin, but by a strange compulsion his morbid sado-pity for Röhm kept him back; he stayed until the next morning, July 1, and visited cell 474 at Stadelheim prison one last time. ‘You have forfeited your chance to life, Ernst,’ he whispered in his old friend’s ear.
‘My Leader!’ Röhm shrieked, as that stubby finger pulled the trigger twice and the already mutilated face took the bullets that removed his life.
Sometimes it was not enough to order a killing: it was necessary to be a killer oneself – to watch the fear in the eyes, then the mysterious vanishing of life as the soul flies out and leaves a crumpled piece of meat. Then calm comes.
He flew back to Berlin. The killings, which had been going on all night, the night which came to be known as the Night of the Long Knives, had deeply disturbed the old President. ‘Is it true? That you have had General von Schleicher and his wife shot?’ he asked gruffly when his Chancellor came in to see him at midday.
H could feel the revolver, hard and strong in his pocket, an everlasting manhood that would not, like ephemeral manifestations of his prowess, rise and fall. The killing of Röhm, and the purge of the SA boys in Munich, and the knowledge that so many had died during the night in Berlin, had given him a preternatural burst of energy. ‘It was necessary,’ he said curtly to the old man.
‘How so?’
‘My General, I have brought you a telegram to sign. It is addressed,’ he said with such rising excitement in his voice that he also yelped the words, ‘it is addressed to myself…’
FROM THE REPORTS PLACED BEFORE ME I LEARN THAT YOU BY YOUR DETERMINED ACTION AND GALLANT PERSONAL INTERVENTION HAVE NIPPED TREASON IN THE BUD COMMA YOU HAVE SAVED THE GERMAN NATION FROM SERIOUS DANGER FULL STOP FOR THIS I EXPRESS TO YOU MY MOST PROFOUND THANKS AND SINCERE APPRECIATION
‘Can we go back a bit?’ asked Tietjen. ‘Titurel, we need a bit more emphasis on “Shall I ever look on the Grail and live – must I perish, unguided by my Saviour?”’
* * *
On 13 June we were sitting, Helga and I, in a bar just off Schüllerstrasse. We liked going there, it was the sort of place not patronized by the Festival Theatre lot and there were old men drinking beer quietly in the corner. We had a particular reason for choosing this place today, however, since we did not want to hear the broadcast of the Leader’s speech from the Reichstag. In about three of the bars we’d been into, loudspeakers had been set up to make sure that no one missed the glorious words. Imagine, then, our disappointment and disgust when we got to this normally quiet little spot and found that even here a big wireless set had been placed on the bar, which was playing patriotic music.
Helga was making one of her usual political jokes: ‘Reichstag! How many times has it been summoned in the last year? About twice. They have no parliamentary function whatsoever. In fact, all they do is file in, sit down, listen to his nibs talking nonsense and then they get up and sing “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles”. They aren’t a parliament, they are the best-paid choral society in Germany.’
I liked these jokes, but I wished she wouldn’t make them so fearlessly and publicly. Several of the old geezers who normally greeted us with friendly nods looked scandalized when they overheard, if not her exact words, then her tone and subject matter.
But now it was ‘Pray silence for our Glorious Leader’ and we heard that voice, so familiar to me from puppet shows and dinner talk, rasping out from the loudspeaker on the bar.
‘If anyone reproaches me and asks why we did not call upon the regular courts for sentencing, my only answer is this: in that hour I was responsible for the fate of the German nation and was thus the Supreme Judiciary of the German people … I gave the order to shoot those parties mainly responsible for this treason … The nation should know that no one can threaten its existence – which is guaranteed by inner law and order – and escape unpunished. And every person should know for all time that if he raises his hand to strike out at the state, certain death will be his lot.’
‘My God,’ said Helga. She took my hand and held it very tight.
‘Shut up, you.’ An old man – a perfectly respectable old man, nearer eighty than seventy – was standing beside our table. ‘I heard you – the whole bar heard you mocking Our Leader, mocking our Reichstag. Can you see and understand nothing, you stupid little child? All the unemployed men getti
ng back to work. Our country feeling pride in itself again.’
‘Pride? At having a Chancellor who shoots people rather than putting them on trial?’ she fired back.
‘Leave it, Helga,’ I pleaded, touching her hand.
‘It’s a few people. It will settle everything down,’ said the old man. ‘What do you want? Anarchy? To be ruled over by France for ever and ever?’
I saw an expression pass over Helga’s face that was already familiar to me – it was indeed one of the reasons I had begun to fall for her. It was moved by an innate superiority complex. She was not merely cleverer than most people, she didn’t mind showing them, even rubbing their noses in it. With a very scornful smile she seemed to be considering the old man’s rhetorical question. ‘I’d live with it,’ she said, nodding and lighting a fag.
We left the bar almost immediately. I am probably rewriting history when I say that I already had a sense of foreboding, but I am sure I knew that such open talk as Helga had indulged in was dangerous now. Two days later, after I had checked the post in the office at the Festival Theatre, I ambled off down one of the innumerable subterranean corridors of the theatre to find her in one of the rehearsal rooms. We often took a mid-morning break like this nowadays and her colleagues had come to accept us as ‘an item’.
When I flung open the door, however, I saw at once from the faces of her friends that something dreadful had happened.
‘They’ve taken her,’ said Erich, a clarinetist. ‘They’ve taken her and about six other members of the orchestra – Eva Fraenkl, Rudolf Levi, Andreas Kaminski…’
‘You mean the Jews in the orchestra? They’ve taken the Jews…’
I know in retrospect that following the Röhm murder and the Night of the Long Knives there was a huge ‘culling’ in Germany and that for several weeks afterwards those deemed by the government to be undesirables – Jews, Commies, anarchists, troublemakers of various kinds – were rounded up and arrested. My emotions on hearing that ‘they’ had ‘taken’ Helga were confused. I think at first I simply felt fear, dread that something was going to happen to her. Almost immediately I could imagine her impertinent tomboy manner not being quietened by some secret police bully-boy. I had a horrible vision of their maltreating her, beating her face.
‘Where have they taken her?’
‘No one seems to know,’ said the clarinetist, ‘but there is a rumour they’ve taken a lot of people from here to that camp outside Munich the newspapers are always raving about.’
It is true that when the Dachau concentration camp was started, the news was greeted with rapture by most of the conservative-minded newspapers and not simply by Nazi rags. Naturally, when this terrible place opened, no one had any inkling, probably not even the people who built it, how many would die there in the early 1940s. What shocks us all in retrospect, us Germans, is thinking how easily we turned a blind eye to the implications of building such a place in the first instance. The old man in the bar who was so angry with Helga was probably very typical: if the price for peace, stability, prosperity was to remove a very few people, well, why not? One could turn a blind eye to that. Here at last was a solution to all our national problems – lock ’em up!
‘But this is … This isn’t possible, this…’ And I ran, I ran down the corridor until I could find Winnie.
* * *
At the end of the war, when the whole nightmare was over, Winnie herself was arrested, as is well known. By then, Helga and you and I had got out of Bayreuth, left behind us that scene of carnage and rubble and misery, and found some other one, some other pitted, burnt, wrecked hell-hole in which to live the next five or ten years of our lives. (We headed first for Leipzig, Wagner’s birthplace, Bach’s shrine. We had lost your cello. You were ill. Do you remember your thirteenth birthday in that hostel in Leipzig? We thought you would starve, your legs and arms were so thin.)
By that stage the Americans had taken over Bayreuth, and we were in a part of Germany that would eventually come under Soviet control, though everything was still pretty chaotic at that stage. Word reached me from someone we hardly knew – you remember Dietrich Hönisch, that kid who was an assistant stage manager trained up by Tietjen? He wrote to say Winnie had been arrested and was in danger of being hanged. All kinds of stories were going around. The American troops had searched (the bombed and half-wrecked) Wahnfried actually expecting to find H in hiding there! The ‘denazification’ process began.
Here isn’t the place to say what I think about that, though I will say in passing that by ‘denazifying’ Germany, with the best possible intentions, the Allies sucked out a vast amount of what made Germany so distinctive. Because the Nazis had appropriated so much German literature, music, religion and tradition for themselves, and pretended that Luther, Goethe etc. etc. were all proto–National Socialists, it became necessary to ‘cleanse’ much that was interesting, especially in the area of, to use a term very loosely, the Gothic in the German imagination. By that I mean both the genuine medieval Gothic, such as the incomparable carvings of the Wise and Foolish Virgins outside the St Sebaldus church in Nuremberg which so miraculously survived the bombings; or the eerie, etiolated Crucifixions of Cranach. Such as these have a tangible connection with the ‘Gothic’ or ‘Romantic’ strains in much later German art, with the fantasies of Novalis, or the troubled strange canvases, set in high rocky peaks, where a few evergreens or ruins or Calvarys jut against mad skies, of Caspar David Friedrich. This world, this Gothic German world, to which Richard Wagner gave the most incomparable expression, was destroyed by denazification. And when the vacuum cleaner of good Western liberal democracy came and denazified us, they sucked out much else too – which must in part explain why life here has become so bloody boring and we in the East have nothing better to do than sit here half envying the prosperity of the Westerners and half despizing them for the moral compromises we believe they have made; and they are probably sitting there demonizing us and thinking we are all brainwashed Soviet agents. But that’s my hobby-horse.
Fifteen years ago, at the end of the war, the denazification process was deemed not merely a polite bit of window dressing but an absolute necessity before our country could rejoin – God, the hypocrisy of these phrases! – the Family of Nations. And Winnie was part of that process. They had her up as a major offender: not surprising, since she was one of the first Germans to join the wretched Party, and she insisted throughout the hearings that she was a personal friend of H and would not deny that she still considered him, as a private individual, whatever evils he had done as a public figure, to be her friend. This was a distinction which many, many people (though not I) believed was in itself positively evil to make at this juncture of history. Helga did. Christ, the rows we had about that, with her shouting, weeping, screaming abuse at me, tears starting from her face, and you, from thirteen onwards staring reproachfully at both of us for our bad manners, not being able to stop ourselves having these rows in your presence.
When the worst of the criminals were actually put on trial in Nuremberg, Winnie’s future still lay in the balance, though it was clear by then she would not actually be hanged. Some spoke of her being sentenced to ten years’ hard labour. That was when I persuaded Helga to write a letter – believing it would do no good, but that justice required that we should write. I can’t even remember now how we found out that there was an address to write to; but one brief letter from Winnie, sent years later – my last communication with her ever – suggested that our letter had not only got through but had been allowed as evidence. And several of the Jews she got out of Dachau after Helga’s arrest actually came in person to testify on her behalf.
‘What! Arrested!’ I remember her face so clearly when I burst into her office that morning and told her that Helga had been arrested. Every member of the local Communist Party, not only in Bayreuth but in Franconia and in Nuremberg, had been rounded up over the space of that week and many had suffered the fate of Helga. She spent only about ten days in
Dachau, many spent much longer, but Winnie did manage to get all the members of her orchestra and chorus out before the big productions that summer.
‘You told me’ – this the furious, the incandescently angry Helga had shouted when, in about 1950, I told her the full truth – ‘you told me at the time that the Wagner family name had been enough to get us all out of that camp. That was what you said! Oh, can’t you see how this makes me feel? I’d rather have stayed there, I’d rather have stayed … that I came out as a favour to him, I came out because he had authorized it, I came out so I could get back in time to play in fucking Parsifal for him…’
With her seemingly unshakeable belief that Wolf personally would never condone any of the atrocities of his own regime, Winnie had rung him up in a temper. Did he know that at the moment when rehearsals were reaching the most critical stage the local gauleiter had arrested various members of the orchestra? There had been quite a lot of shouting at him – not least because she was unable to believe that he had anything to do with the murder of Röhm and the others. ‘I know that you would have insisted on a fair trial,’ she told the telephone receiver.
When he told her that the bloodletting had been necessary for the greater good of Germany, she was silenced, puzzled; but even this admission did no more than strike her as hideously out of Wolf’s normally decent and reasonable character.
The short spell Helga spent in Dachau had been horrible, but she described it all in a very matter-of-fact manner. They had not tortured her, merely treated all the inmates toughly – a great deal of exercise, enforced works; short commons, short sleeping hours; bullying guards. Some of the prisoners had been tortured, but not her, though she had, as I feared would be the case, been struck several times by a sergeant for insubordination.
Helga’s arrest, and the whole Night of the Long Knives experience, opened my eyes finally and for ever to the nature of this regime. I saw that whatever veneer of order and prosperity the new government would bring to our country, these advantages had been bought at the expense of holding us in fear. The capacity of that old man in the bar to turn a blind eye, for the sake of the advantages which would come from such blindness, had not been lost on me. Without the clear faith of my brother or my parents or (in her different way) Helga, I could see clearly enough that one could no longer support or countenance what had happened – and this was the very early days, compared with the horrors in store.
