Winnie and Wolf

by A. N. Wilson

  But what did I do to stop it? Did I join in resistance movements, like my brother, or speak out against the anti-Semitism, as both my parents and a handful of old ladies at their church were brave enough to do? Did I heck.

  Winnie continued to behave as if the manifestations of the true nature of this regime – the arrests, the bullying – were aberrations. She continued to bother Wolf with her shopping lists of complaints and on the whole he was always ready to listen to her. The first lie, the first series of lies, I told Helga – lies by omission, lies which were not spoken, the suppression of what a large part Wolf played in all Winnie’s decisions and activities – held back from her the fact that she had only received almost instantaneous discharge from Dachau at the personal diktat of the Leader.

  I do not think she was ever able to come to terms with that, nor was she ever able wholly to forgive me. Of course that anger, perfectly justifiable, was only the beginning of our estrangement over this matter, which took place throughout your teens in the 1950s. The ultimate indignity – that Helga and I had been asked to adopt you because you were Winnie’s and Wolf’s daughter – that was something which was never, ever, spelt out between us. But I am sure that Helga had begun to suspect.

  In one of our rows, when you were about fifteen, she said, ‘You just never got that woman out of your hair, did you? You wanted me for sex – was that all it was?’

  ‘Helga, you know that’s not true…’

  ‘Not even for that?’

  ‘You know it was so much more than that – don’t spoil it all.’

  ‘Oh, so it’s me spoiling it all.’

  ‘I haven’t finished – don’t spoil even the past by pretending we never had anything together; we did and I’m for ever grateful that…’

  ‘Oh, you’re forever grateful? You’re forever grateful – you patronizing bastard! Why not go to her – go back to Bayreuth where she’s probably still sitting with her Nazi friends, chuckling at having got away with it all.’

  ‘I’m sure, I’m convinced, she’s put all that behind her,’ I said, hoping more than believing that this was the case.*

  ‘Are you sure you aren’t little Senta’s father?’

  This shot, fired out in your presence I am afraid, was so confusing for you, wasn’t it? Neither Helga nor I had hidden from you the fact that we adopted you, when you were nearly three years old, from the orphanage in Bayreuth. We did so because Winnie asked us to and we both, at that stage, felt pathetic, total gratitude to her for getting Helga so quickly released from the concentration camp. She told us merely that the child should never have been sent to an orphanage, that its parents had been unable to look after it themselves, but that they longed for it to have a happy family upbringing, to be normal. Winnie had spoken to us movingly about her own desolation in the English orphanage, and of her feelings of security and happiness when the Klindworths had brought her to Germany and set her free.

  We brought you up very closely, very lovingly. It had become clear by then why Helga had not worried about taking precautions when we made love. She was much more experienced than I and she had already begun to fear, what medical examinations later made definite, that she was unable to conceive. She told me, excitedly, when the idea of adopting you first arose, that she wanted a kid more than anything – that she’d first started taking me seriously because although she wasn’t sure of me as a bloke, she thought I’d do as a dad. (Fair, I hope you agree, on some levels.)

  We smothered you with over-attention, probably. And I know it was hell for you when, not long after the war, our normally bickery, slightly combative relationship turned really sour. One aspect of our over-cautiousness with you was that we kept you innocent, much longer than I would think perhaps wise, about all aspects of sexual knowledge. Even after your first period – and we were still living in France then, I think – neither Helga nor I had really told you anything about the ‘facts of life’. Hence the peculiar horror of the moment, yelled out when you were in your mid teens, about the possibility of my being your actual father. By then you knew, you must have known, how children are born into the world, but the complex business of who you were, and who your birth father had been, clearly a matter to obsess Helga, was now being tossed about as a cannonball in our marital crossfire. I’ve never been able to ask what that did to you, hence this coward’s way out of writing the whole thing down as a story, hoping that bits of the truth will emerge – for me if not for you.

  Certainly, the love I felt for Winnie, the calf love or crush, was not something that ever went away. It hasn’t gone away to this day. I recognize that she was and is a silly woman, but there was something about her which was magnificent, and magnanimous, and in every sense big. Helga began like someone who seemed as if she was capable of being big, but the experience of being married to me made her shrink, it embittered her, it limited all her emotional and intellectual possibilities, just as it did to me too. In taking on the responsibility of caring for you we somehow gave away more of ourselves than it was right to give. And the fact that we could not ask candid questions – of one another or of Winnie – about you meant that we lost the capacity to tell the truth at all. Respect went; love had gone long since; soon even vestigial liking, or the ability to be pleasant in one another’s company, was impossible. And that was the poison gas you breathed in, day in day out, in our little flat, every bit as polluting as the belching acrid orange and charcoal-grey smoke from the artificial-fibre factory where most of our fellow townspeople work.

  The awful thing is that I responded to Helga’s accusation, that you were my love child made with Winnie, because I so wanted it to be true. I loved and love you as a father, and I would love you if you were not his. For some time afterwards perhaps you thought (hoped too?) that this was true. Of course, we could only communicate in half-sentences and silences and hints, so the matter was never aired even some years later, when Helga had moved out and you too were getting ready for university (Dresden).

  * * *

  The production was the last Richard Strauss conducted at Bayreuth, so it would have been memorable for this reason alone. Strauss had a Jewish daughter-in-law and he had moreover that summer written a letter to the writer Stefan Zweig, which was intercepted by the secret police. It made his position as President of the Reichs Music Chamber untenable.

  We were in a serious pickle at the Festival Theatre, in danger of losing all our star conductors. Fu was in disgrace and his dragon of a secretary-manager-agent-companion Berta Geissmar had left Germany – non-Aryan. Toscanini had made it clear he would not work in Nazi Germany and was now in America, keeping in touch by letter only with his favourite Wagner child, Friedelind. Winnie said to me several times before Strauss’s last appearance that she wondered seriously whether the Festival would take place the next year. But they had been wondering that every year since they revived it ten years before …

  There was a paradox about Bayreuth, however, which enabled Tietjen to do some of the most innovative operatic work that had ever taken place in Germany. All theatres, opera houses and concert halls in the Reich now came under the control of Nosferatu, head of the Chamber of Culture, of which the Music Chamber was a sub-section. Winifred alone of all theatre directors in the Reich refused to join. And she alone in the Reich, because of her special relationship with Wolf, was allowed to get away with it. There developed the extraordinary paradox that her very closeness to Wolf enabled her to dare more than any other theatre in the country. She could continue to employ those who would have been forbidden to work anywhere else – Jews, political dissidents and so on. Many of these were the ones who came forward in 1945, when she was in danger of being imprisoned, or even hanged, and got her sentence commuted to a mere reprimand for her ‘culpable stupidity’ in having supported the Third Reich.

  All this had a great effect upon us, on me and Helga. For although I agreed passionately with Helga by now that I ought to ‘get away from all these people’, and would have been happy
to make a break and leave Bayreuth, it was, paradoxically, Helga who could not leave. Given her membership of the Communist Party, her short spell in a concentration camp and her record as a dissident, there was no possibility of her getting employment as a player in any of the orchestras controlled by the Reich Music Chamber. Only in Bayreuth, where we existed like vassals dependent upon the whims of a medieval king, was it possible to bend the rules, and for a Red like Helga or a ‘non-Aryan’ like Alice Strauss, the composer’s daughter-in-law, to get employment.

  I think that 1934 Festival was in some ways the strangest I ever witnessed. It happened like a dream, in the background of my obsessive concern about Helga. In Dachau, she had been made to do military drill and gymnastic exercises. The hours had been strict, the food and drink disgusting, and the conditions of some of the longer-term inmates clearly most alarming, with rumours of torture rife. Her poor father, a chest specialist at the biggest hospital in Munich, drove out to fetch her and bring her home. Helga loved her father and mother, and it seemed that, conservative and Catholic as they (and most of her siblings) were, they tolerated her political deviation. They did not like the atheistic tenor of Marxism, but they did not feel that it was, like National Socialism, an actual blasphemy against the Holy Spirit who is indwelling in every human soul.

  I had Dr Gerlandt’s telephone number in Munich and rang it obsessively. On the day of Helga’s release she came to the receiver. Her voice had a slight tremble in it, but retained its usual tone of jokey irony. ‘My gag about the Choral Society didn’t amuse the old comrades in the bar.’

  ‘You must be careful.’

  ‘Any particular reason?’

  ‘Because I have found I can’t live without you.’

  She came back to Bayreuth a couple of days later by train. She’d missed some of the Ring performances but was on hand to play her cor anglais parts in Parsifal and in all subsequent Rings. What I told her was true. I was waiting for the Munich train to come into Bayreuth station. She could hardly have been thinner than before, but she looked if anything paler. Presumably with a view to pleasing her parents, whom she had just left in Munich, she was more than usually conventionally dressed, with a little cloche hat, a dark-blue linen coat and skirt and only the lightest hand luggage.

  ‘Is that all you’ve brought?’

  ‘For some reason they did not invite me to take ball gowns or a grand piano to the KZ.’

  ‘I didn’t mean … I…’

  It was I who was more or less crying and she who was laughing, as I put her bag down and once again enfolded her in my arms. ‘Marry me.’

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe wait until the Festival’s over – only three weeks?’

  Which is what we did. The wedding has no part in this story, though it had its dramas. We were married by the registrar in Munich, in an office with a giant painting of H behind the man’s head. And then we repaired – this was the tricky bit – to a Catholic church for a nuptial blessing by a priest. I was amazed that Helga consented to take part in this rigmarole, but she did so to please her family. My non-Catholicism was a very great stumbling block with both Dr and Frau Gerlandt. At the somewhat chilly wedding breakfast – the temperature outside was warm enough, it was the old parents on both sides who provided the refrigeration of atmosphere – Frau Gerlandt was heard to remark that no member of her family had ever, so far as she knew, married a Protestant. My brother, dear, friendly, open-faced Heinrich, chatted earnestly to one of Helga’s brothers about the Pope,* and whether there was any sign of the Vatican strengthening its denunciations of the German regime.

  ‘I liked what he said earlier this year – that we are all spiritual Semites,’ Heinrich said.

  ‘The Pope said that?’

  ‘It was reported in the papers. It was a real disappointment to us in the Confessing Church that Pacelli* caved in over the abolition of the Catholic Party. Do you think he is just playing politics? We can’t tell. Kaas† seems to think anything is better than Bolshevism, but some of us hope Pacelli is giving the Nazis enough rope to hang themselves with, in the hope that the Catholic Party can return. The anti-Nazi vote held up very well down here among all the Catholic Party faithful…’

  My parents looked intensely embarrassed by the guilelessness of my brother’s talk. It was undoubtedly bad manners on Heinrich’s part to quiz my brother-in-law so innocently, having no idea what his own particular take on events might have been. I, as usual, misinterpreted my parents’ anxious and disapproving silence on this occasion, having no idea at that stage how deeply they identified with Heinrich’s position and how bravely they would express their opposition to the regime only a few years down the line.

  My family life began during that summer. Deep, deep fondness for one another, Helga and I, somehow made the strange world of Parsifal little more than noises off, background music if you will.

  It was, by any standards, a triumph for Winnie. Against the aunts, against the bank manager, against the Fates themselves, she had brought off this production. And though Tietjen and Roller had designed it, and though Richard Strauss conducted it, and though the choral director and the chorus and the orchestra and the stage managers played their usual tireless roles, there could be no doubt that this was in some senses a Winnie and Wolf production; their finest hour.

  Wolf arrived for the opening night and his appearance at the Festival Theatre, in a swallow-tail coat and a stiff shirt and white tie, on Winnie’s arm, could almost have been that of a crown prince and princess coming into their kingdom.

  It was during the interval of that production that I happened to be beside him, and he repeated that gnomic remark which I have pondered on and off ever since. ‘Parsifal is your favourite of them all?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s wonderful – this production is wonderful – but for me the true interest of Wagner will always be in the Ring cycle.’

  ‘I thought that when I was your age,’ he said with a genial smile. ‘When you are older, you will understand that Parsifal is the masterpiece.’

  I love Parsifal to this day and I suppose I always shall, though I think it is an incoherent masterpiece, which touches dark places in an unintended way – that, therefore, it is an imperfect work of art. But I have never made the transition Wolf predicted. I have never considered it a more interesting or more impressive thing than The Ring.

  As we all sat there, on a very hot night in Bayreuth, crowded into the darkened amphitheatre of the Festival Theatre, and as the Grail Knights sang their peculiar Eucharistic devotions, the world outside was changing and, looking back upon it all, it seems to me that somewhere there in the darkness, Wolf stopped being Wolf altogether and simply became H. Winnie never noticed this, of course, or if she did, she was determined never to let on – since if he ceased to be Wolf, he ceased to be hers. The private self of her old friend was being subsumed into the mythological national hero; and this was very largely not because of a change taking place in himself – though that change had almost certainly been hastened by the Röhm murder and the Night of the Long Knives – it was events. While old Titurel lay in the grave, half dead but more alive than his wounded son, and growling at his Knights, the ancient hero of Germany, President von Hindenburg, was slowly sinking towards death in Berlin.

  During the interval in which Wolf made his remark to me about Parsifal there were movements afoot. The Mad Gamekeeper arrived towards the end of that interval with a fleet of huge cars and out he climbed, wearing an extraordinary white tunic, half military, half the tuxedo of the wine waiter on a transatlantic liner, with a large peaked cap which could have been that of a self-important chauffeur. He came to warn H that a Nazi coup in Austria had been unsuccessful. The Austrian Chancellor, Dollfuss, had been assassinated, but the government had fought back. Many Nazis including young Ulrich Roller, son of our set designer, had been arrested. Von Papen, the Conservative Catholic Vice-Chancellor, arrived by the end of the opera to sound out H
’s position on the crisis.

  Wolf seemed utterly indifferent to the international news, as it was brought and muttered to him at the back of the Wagners’ family box. When he appeared on the loggias and balconies with Winnie, his face was lit up by that ‘sublime’ and trancelike expression which possessed him when listening to the music of the Master. It is impossible for me to say in retrospect whether he was genuinely transported by Parsifal (my own view) or whether he was acting a part of indifference, so that the world press, some of whose photographers were present outside the theatre, could never accuse him of having a hand in the failed Austrian coup. Accounts I have read since told me that when he got back to the Villa Wahnfried, he went into a tirade of fury with von Papen, shouting out the names of various Austrian politicians as if they were swear words. And he cut short his visit to the Festival, swooping back to Berlin at some moment in an aeroplane.

  I was a witness to none of that. Helga and I were in her bedsit in Weissenburgerstrasse. Being very careful what jokes we made, we had eaten some spaghetti at a cheap Italian restaurant and headed for bed and the consolations of purely private affections. Only in the morning when, naked and Giacometti-thin, Helga sat up in bed to ignite her dawn cigarette did she talk of the assassination of Dollfuss – which had been on everyone’s lips in the restaurant – and speculate with an unrealistic hopefulness about the chance of an anti-government coup here bringing low the ‘criminals’, as she often and rightly called them.