by A. N. Wilson
Wagner saw Parsifal as a renunciation of violence in favour of mystic love – love of animals, of the universe, of all things living – yet behind it there lurks a strange fascination with blood and the booming all-male choruses cannot be heard without feeling that they foreshadow the sinister orders of knights who kept us so painfully in order during the 1930s.
I can’t conclude a chapter about that year of Parsifal without recalling the moment when, for me, H became a figure in his own opera and ceased to be a person upon whom I could easily focus as a private individual. It was the following year, in spring 1935, and Helga and I, who had been married about six months, had been to Freiburg to visit old university friends of mine, and to take our honeymoon in the Black Forest. The coming of spring never seemed more miraculous, the buds of the trees on our forest walks, coming into leaf, the sunlight filtered through pale green, the song of the birds. We were making love so often, in boarding houses and hotel rooms as we journeyed about, that I was convinced that by the time we returned to Bayreuth, Helga would be pregnant. Sometimes, in our worst moments before we separated, over a decade later, we snarled such cruel sayings to one another – that we had never loved one another. And recollections would then return of those walks in the Black Forest in the spring of 1935, memories that stabbed me with guilt at my blasphemy against our love – for we were in love in the hope of spring and the alchemy of sexual joy, spiritual union, ecstatic happy fondness took us out, as a pair, from the horrors that were possessing our country and allowed us, for a week or so, to be indifferent.
We were in an artificial heaven of love. Though the world was beginning to go mad and Germany had perhaps been mad since the end of the war, nature continued its powerful, self-renewing journey through time, bringing deep messages of peace to us who loved. It was when we came back to Freiberg that a rival dream clashed with and invaded our own. It would be impossible to say that ‘reality’ intruded, for what we saw, and experienced, when we queued outside the cinema and watched the performance of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will was an alternative to reality every bit as artificial and choreographed as a Wagner opera or a high mass.
I cannot even remember now why we went to see it – we weren’t obliged to do so and before we entered the cinema we had been so happy. One or both of us had evidently concluded that we ‘ought’ to see this work by a rising young female photographer and director.
‘No one who has personally seen the face of the Führer in The Triumph of the Will can ever forget it. It will stay with them day and night, and like a silent glittering flame it will burn into their soul’ – so, Nosferatu.
I can more remember the sensation of seeing the film, and of Helga’s reaction to it, than I can remember much of the actual footage, though of course it has become a classic of cinema. The torchlit processions; the numberless ranks of the faithful in the stadium by night and day; the workers marching with the tools of their trade to show that our country had thrown off the curse of unemployment; the youth innocently emerging from tents; the troops marching through the medieval streets of the loveliest old town in Europe; but at the centre of it all him, that figure whose facial muscles and hypnotic eyes had been so well known to me for a decade, now projected onto a huge cinema screen, working the enchanter’s magic not only on the crowds in the film, but on the rows and rows of people, transfixed in their cinema seat and staring upwards. If I had not been in love with Helga, and if I had not been sitting beside her, I can easily envisage that this masterpiece of the black arts would have carried me away, at least for a time.
I forget now where I read, or heard, that Leni Riefenstahl, who worked solidly on the film from the time of the Nuremberg rally in September until its release the following spring, had an extraordinary effect on H. He had known, perhaps since his youth but certainly since the war, that he had the power to electrify audiences. At meeting after meeting, in huge sports palaces, in the Reichstag, on national radio, H had demonstrated his power to bewitch the masses. Never until he became a character in Leni’s lens, however, had his figure come into so sharp a focus, had the witchcraft been quite so polished, so fatal.
Years after the war – our war, not the first War – I must have read or heard somewhere Leni’s claim that they had walked together, H and she, by the shores of the North Sea, and he had told her that he always spent Christmas, the time of his mother’s death, alone. When she had stretched out to comfort him he had embraced her and then drawn back, saying words to the effect, ‘I may not love a woman until my work is complete.’
The supposed scene (I might even have remembered it wrong) has the whiff of fiction about it, yet it is convincing for that very reason. Certainly I can remember how scornful Winnie was whenever Riefenstahl’s name was mentioned in the later years of the 1930s. (A similar hostility existed between Riefenstahl and Nosferatu, since that particular evil puppet master obviously liked to think that he was pulling all the Leader’s strings.)
The monkey or the organ grinder? The old question I had asked myself in the Chancellery. Riefenstahl, herself an organ grinder of genius, left audiences in no doubt that H was in an all but divine control. Whatever the truth or otherwise of his relations with her, she had invented a person, or found out a person, who was, like other demigods, above carnal relationships. His work must be completed before he could love again.
Outside the cinema in Freiburg the crowds were awestruck. It was like coming out of a great oratorio. The Saviour had come to earth. When we stood beside one another on the pavement, Helga took hold of the front of my shirt with her fists. It was a passionate, bitter gesture, which hurt me, because she had gathered up nipple, chest hair, shirt buttons so indiscriminately in her nicotine-stained fingers. She put her brow against my throat and I realized she was weeping, weeping bitterly.
Tristan und Isolde
The orphanage where you spent the first three years of your life is at number 14 Friedrichstrasse in Bayreuth. It is on the corner of Ludwigstrasse. From the Villa Wahnfried, if you cut through the Hofgarten and walk through the stable archway of the Neues Schloss, it is less than a ten-minute walk.
I had noticed once or twice that Winnie made visits there. Pedalling down the cobbled surface of Friedrichstrasse on my bike I had more than once seen her unmistakable form, now much bulkier than when first we met, entering the large, rather forbidding eighteenth-century building which abuts upon the street. The sculpted relief in the pediment above the main door depicts young children reaching out to their mothers, something the inhabitants of that place, being incarcerated there, were almost by definition unable to do.
Winnie had no ‘side’. She made no secret of the fact that she had been brought up in an orphanage. I assumed that she made periodic visits to the Bayreuth orphanage because she felt some empathy with the inhabitants. At any one time, she always had some ‘lame ducks’ to whom she was being especially kind, musicians whose finances or marriages were in crisis, widows, children. It was noticeable that this philanthropic side to her character was thrown into ever sharper relief as life, personal life, became more fraught. Being young, insensitive and myself embarking on a new life with Helga, I childishly took Winnie for granted. Only the lonely hours of reminiscence and memory I spend in this dump of a flat give me an insight into the sufferings she was then enduring. She was still – we are thinking of 1936 – a comparatively young woman, not yet forty. The four Wagner children were adolescent and giving her much cause for anxiety, the two boys at one another’s throats, Friedelind an emotional chaotic. All four hated Tietjen who was a tyrant at the Festival Theatre and a testy, charmless little domestic despot at Wahnfried. For, despite his refusal to give up mistresses in Berlin, he had clearly moved into a quasi-stepfatherly role in the Wagner family. Winnie, who could be hot-tempered enough herself, as anyone who worked at the Bayreuth Festivals could tell you, cowered before Tietjen’s tongue lashings, often dissolving into tears when he launched on his tirades.
Towards the e
nd of one particularly disastrous Tristan, the soprano Frida Leider had been almost inaudible. Her voice had been going for the whole evening and it was agonizing to hear its croaky failures to reach the more spectacular climaxes of the first two acts. By Act Three there were actual moments of silence as she mouthed, but could not sing at all and her final spectacular aria was entirely drowned by the orchestra.
‘We beat her that time,’ was Helga’s jokey response when I saw her afterwards. Apart from any other considerations she always loved playing Tristan because of the prominence of the cor anglais parts. She would say that if it is properly conducted the combined notes of oboe and cor anglais should be heard through and even above the strings in their final poignant repetition of a theme that asserts the eternal sadness of things. You’ll remember better than I do that Helga used to say that in Tristan the most important character is the orchestra, that attempts to explain the themes of the opera are all bollocks, that it’s music, pure and simple – Wagner’s greatest moment. On this night, though, her jokey wish that the singers should know their place and submit to the strivings, yearnings, hypnotic swayings of the strings and the persistent sadness of the woodwind repeating their notes of everlasting pessimism had gone further even than her expectations. The soprano was a choking, silent, nervous wreck.
Much had been going on in poor Frida’s life to provoke such a collapse, not least the fact that she was probably fifty by then and far too old to be singing the part in the first place. Her husband Rudolf Deman was insistent that she take some rest and Winnie agreed with him. Tietjen exploded with wrath, asking them both where he was expected to find another Isolde at a moment’s notice. Deman walked out on him at that point and Winnie had then pleaded, pathetically, with Tietjen, who was a good half-metre shorter than she was, reminding him that Deman was ‘non-Aryan’, that Frida had been suffering torments about their safety and that what they needed was sympathy – understanding …
‘Oh, I see – you who know so much about music. I need no sympathy, but this selfish cow – you gave her cigarettes this afternoon – croaks on me and you know better than I do.’
So he would rage. And Winnie would weep. (Deman went into exile not long after – to Switzerland.) Frida was forced by Tietjen, a stupid decision, to sing the role to the end of that season, wrecking the performance for the other players, the orchestra, the audience. Winnie tearfully implored him to try some of the understudies but this merely produced more rage. What understudies? The pushy young women who thought they could sing Isolde and who had been encouraged by Winnie to learn the role were not, in Tietjen’s view, understudies and Winnie knew nothing. Got that? Nothing. Friedelind’s attempts at intervention during these rows, to defend her mother, only made matters worse, since the mutual antipathy between Friedelind and Tietjen had deepened to poisonous loathing.
In the past, when Festival life or family life were a source of grief, Winnie at least had her relationship with Wolf to fall back upon. At the time I considered that this was still the case, since she maintained for the most part her breeziness, her heartiness, of manner. Only retrospect makes me ask what lay behind this carapace of cheeriness when ‘Uncle Wolf’ made one of his periodic and often unannounced visits to Wahnfried. He showered her children with presents – gold watches for the boys, gold bracelets for the girls. For Wieland’s eighteenth birthday a Mercedes-Benz.
She came to wonder, surely, whether it was her or the children that Wolf loved. Once, when she was in Berlin staying with Tietjen at his flat, the telephone had rung: ‘Winnie?’
‘Wolf…’
‘Do you feel like seeing your children?’
‘Very much but – My Leader’ – her cigaretty giggle at anything improbable – ‘this would involve a rather long journey. You see, Wieland is at one of those insufferable camps which our new gauleiter insists he goes on – really, Wolf, if these hearty fellows only knew you they wouldn’t insist on torturing poor youth in your name with gymnastics! Wolfgang’s at a fearful school and the two girls are safely locked up in the convent, and miss them all dearly as I do, I’d have had no time to work unless they…’
‘They are here.’
‘In Berlin?’
‘At the Chancellery.’
‘What’s happened? Has there been an accident?’
‘I missed them too. I sent cars for them.’
‘But the girls’ convent is in Heiligengrabe –’
‘Why else do you think I built the Autobahns?’
She had gone to lunch and of course she had made it all into an anecdote – of the irrepressible, fun-loving Führer sending cars all over Germany to give his favourite young people a treat. But how had she felt about this unilateral co-opting of her children without consulting her? A little excluded? And for his part, what? Unable to have the company of his actual child, to whom Winnie had given birth, he threw himself with ever greater enthusiasm into friendship with them, rather than trying to prise her away from her obsessively unhappy relationship with Tietjen?
To this phase of life belonged, when chance allowed, her most frequent visits to the Bayreuth orphanage, some of which I had started to notice.
On one particular occasion when, cycling along Friedrichstrasse, I saw her, my mind was filled with my brother Heinrich. He had been arrested and charged with preaching sedition. My parents were worried to distraction and without telling them of my intention, I thought I’d try discussing the matter with Winnie. This moment of finding her alone, on the pavement, was not to be passed by.
‘N———,’ she greeted me by name, using the familiar ‘Du’ form.
‘Frau Wagner, can I talk to you about something?’ I always spoke to her formally, using the polite ‘Sie’ for ‘you’, confirming that our relationship was that of junior to senior.
I poured out my brother’s story: an enthusiast, an idealist who wanted to help the poor and the young, one who made no secret of his feelings, who had thrown in his lot with the Confessing Church under the leadership of Pastor Niemöller.
‘My friend Lange, Hans Joachim Lange – he used to come and play with me when I was living with the Klindworths in Berlin – has already asked me to put in a good word for Pastor Niemöller. The poor Führer says that he loses sleep at night from all these turbulent priests. Niemöller was a very good man no doubt – he was in the navy with my friend Lange and seemed sympathetic to the Cause – but now he’s turned against Wolf and he fills that huge church of his in Berlin, denouncing the government … I’ve said to Lange, I’ll ask Wolf to protect Niemöller from the Gestapo, but Wolf says he wouldn’t need protecting from the Gestapo if he would just shut up.’
‘I don’t think Heinrich can shut up.’
‘Which prison is he in? I’ll see what I can do.’
How often she had made that promise, and she had more influence than most. It is easy now, in retrospect, surveying a landscape torn with fire and thunder, to see these few brave persecuted ones, Jews and Christians, as the forerunners or pioneers of the millions more who were to die before the drama sounded its last chords. At the time it did not feel like that. Because of loving Helga, because of loving my family though they drove me nuts, I was perhaps more conscious than many Germans of how the regime was viewed by the dissidents. To date, two of those I loved most, Helga and Heinrich, had ended up in prison, albeit for short periods.
(Heinrich was hanged eventually, but that was much later, during the war, when I was away in France. After repeated warnings he had spoken out once too often, and after my father’s death in the KZ Aussenlagers he spoke with greater recklessness than ever.)
But these were the very distinct minority and I have to say that I could not see things at the time as they saw them. These brave and high-principled people were, as we now see, right: the regime was built upon murder and the suppression of the human spirit; from its first setting-forth the march, at whose vanguard strode our glorious Leader, led inexorably to an intended engulfment of massacre, to fire an
d destruction. All I can say is that in 1936 it did not feel like that to the great majority of Germans. Our country had changed, changed very swiftly and dramatically. Where once millions were unemployed there was now full employment. That sense of inhabiting a madhouse had gone. You might say, But surely the National Socialists have erected the greatest madhouse in European history, but it didn’t feel like that. When H had still been struggling for power, and when he came to Wahnfried sunk in depression, following the death of his niece, our country was on the edge of civil war. There was now the most palpable feeling of happiness and calm. Jobs were safe. We felt secure from Communist oppression. (Insufferable I may sound, perhaps am, but I never took Helga’s Communism seriously and I shared the view of all my other friends that a Marxist-Leninist Germany would lead to the loss of all freedom – and to a bloodbath.)
There isn’t much freedom from where I am sitting in this foul little flat, but the amazing achievement of Wolf and friends is that they eventually created a hell beside which a repressive Marxist police state such as I have inhabited for the last fifteen years actually feels … well, if not better in every way, at least more decent. In 1936, the year I’m thinking of, the euphoria and the national pride which we, most of us, had recovered, was to a large extent the result of deception. The economy had turned round because none of us knew, or none of us could quite face knowing, that it had become a war economy, with much of the ‘regeneration of industry’ being in reality the stockpiling of aggressive weaponry, which would eventually kill millions of people.
In 1936, the year of our greatest pride as a nation, it did not feel like this. My parents never spoke a word in praise of H or of his government. Even they, however, could not prevent their eyes sparkling and their mouths smiling when they heard the news that the Rhineland, so utterly unjustly taken from us by the Versailles treaty, had been reoccupied in March that year. All the generals and bigwigs and diplomatic experts told H that it was too risky, that the French would be bound to retaliate, and that Germany would suffer what was worse than actual military defeat – international humiliation as our men returned to the Fatherland with tails between legs. But not for nothing did he love the story of the fisherman and his wife, and he gambled. The 25,000 German troops who reoccupied what was German land were greeted, not by French field artillery but by cheering crowds, and by priests with incense burners blessing and welcoming them. Aachen, the burial place and capital of Charlemagne, German Emperor, was ours once again.
