by A. N. Wilson
His boast, made more than once as Uncle Wolf at Winnie’s table, was ‘I have achieved a bloodless revolution. That makes me proud.’
If we ignored the brutal imprisonment of the troublemakers (which seemed to include most of my family except myself); if we ignored the bullying and harassment of the Jews (not at that stage much in the way of murder there, and certainly no genocide on the scale that would unfold beneath the black cloak of war); if we ignored the 1934 massacres following the murder of Röhm, it was true. You can say, from your youthfulness and your exile in the ‘free’ West, that we should not have ignored these things, that they were all warning signals of how dangerous National Socialism was. I’m telling you that if you had known what it was to be half starving; to see Reds and SA fighting on the streets; to see your life savings reduced in a few months to two dollars; to see a quarter of the work-force unemployed and to see your country belittled and shamed at every diplomatic turn for years – my God, I’m telling you that in 1936 it felt good to be a German.
Helga, quite rightly, always contradicted anyone who said that National Socialism and Communism were two sides of the same coin, or that one form of absolutism was just like another. I have lived for the last fifteen years under Communism and I lived for six years under Nazism until the outbreak of war. There is no comparison. When I set out in the morning in this small town of ours, I hardly ever see a cheerful face. Oh, true, we all have a flat and we all have a job, but we are living under a fog of gloom here in the East and there is no obvious future release from it. I’ve actually come to like the gloom; it seems more fitting to life than the eternal optimism of those heady days in the 1930s. Perhaps political systems have to choose between the tyranny of doctrine and the despotism of a person. I do not attribute our daily sensations of depression to Ulb or Hon or the Sov-Soiuz.* Any system that tried to follow Marxist-Leninism would have resulted in this universal greyness, regardless of who was in control. Whereas ‘a happy people under a strong king’ was what H liked to say. Under the Leader there was a small proportion of people who were miserable, angry, morally shocked. But I am telling you, the huge majority were happy. The Rhineland was ours again. The world flocked to Berlin to see the Olympic Games in the summer, and they began to admire us, love us even. Old enemies like the British loved us.
Winnie, who had never previously made much of her British origins, was ecstatic about the new King of England. ‘Very much one of us,’ she had stated approvingly. ‘Proud of his German roots and appreciative of what Our Leader has done for us. Why, look at them now in England – the same old men who have been running the country for years, doing nothing to help the poor. They even confiscate their property – did you know that? They send inspectors round, for a so-called “means test” and if some poor unemployed man with five children to feed has just one little heirloom, as it were a silver teapot, they will steal it, take it away. Their new King will put a stop to that. If only we could have a fascist government in England. Here in Germany the Leader has provided proper benefits for the very few workers remaining without work – and no theft of their treasures.’
So excited were Winnie and Wolf by the new English King that they felt they wanted to do something for him.
It was Wolf who had the idea, after an especially glorious production of Lohengrin on the Green Hill. It was perhaps Tietjen’s finest hour, that production. Old Roller was dead, but the sets designed by Tietjen’s protégé Emil Preetorius were grander, more spare – the aesthetic of the aunts had been most definitely rejected. Furtwängler conducted – I doubt whether Lohengrin has ever been better played. The chief roles were sung to perfection by Max Lorenz, Maria Müller, Jaro Prohaska and Margarete Klose.
‘Winnie, I have it! The present we were planning for our King, our friend the King of England!’ he remarked, pop-eyed and sweaty-faced, during the interval. He was hyper-energetic that night, ecstatic with the pleasure of the music, but also rolling on the waves of his political and diplomatic successes of the previous year. ‘We’ll give this production of Lohengrin to King Edward as a present – to mark his Coronation!’
‘How do you mean’, asked Winnie, laughing, ‘give it?’
‘We’ll send it over to London, it will be staged at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden – who is that conductor who is crazy about me, Sir Thomas Beecham, Ribbentrop says he is a Nazi.* We’ll take Herr Preetorius’s set. I’ll come, Winnie, you can show me the treasures of London – the menagerie in the Tower, the lions who ate the poor little Princes, the great tombs in Westminster Monastery. I shall arrange for my plane to fly over to Tintagel and for us to see King Mark of Cornwall’s castle together.’
The stage at the Festival Theatre in Bayreuth is apparently about four times the size of that at Covent Garden and it would have been impossible to move Preetorius’s scenery into place there. Even if the orchestra at Covent Garden had been prepared to surrender to that of Bayreuth, and even if Furtwängler had surrendered his baton to Beecham, the logistics of the Leader’s extravagant enterprise would have been considerably more difficult than reoccupying the Rhineland. They did, however, begin to negotiate the matter – even I had to write some of the letters to the Director of the Opera House in London. In the end the thing foundered because the new King of England himself got to hear about it. No opera fan, he was more the sort of man whose musical tastes would be satisfied by sitting in a nightclub and tapping his co-respondent shoes to the rhythms of the latest American dance band number. When the scheme of German generosity reached his ears he had said that personally he had nothing against it, so long as he didn’t have to go to ‘the damn thing himself’.
But … I have left Winnie in Friedrichstrasse and myself approaching upon the cobbles on my wobbly bicycle. She waved cheerily at me. Although the meeting was entirely a matter of chance, it was as if she had been waiting for me but, such was the beauty of a spring morning in Bayreuth, she was by no means impatient with me for being late.
Helga and I had been married for a little over eighteen months and we were still very much in love. The jokes were fantastic and so was the sex. Both of them made a protective cocoon, which enabled us to live as if outer circumstances only partially existed. We had in fact achieved that happy egotism which was the life ideal of our small town’s only famous native-born philosopher, Max Stirner – he who despised Hegel and his systems, who put no trust in political systems, or the dogmas of religion as defined by other people and who believed that the attainment of wisdom was found when we recognized that the only reality is in our own ego, our bodily experiences, our trivial sensations, of taste, sound, sexual appreciation, bowel well-being. These are what constitute ‘reality’. It is, of course, when life is sexually happy between two people, or when a non-sexual friendship is going especially well, possible for two people to share in some small part the egoistic pleasures of the other; but we are all ultimately alone in our egos and attempts to break these egos down, or to intrude upon them, will always ultimately fail.
Yet, although I had made myself late for work, and Helga late for a rehearsal, by cheerfully lingering in bed, savouring her smell and feel and touch, and although, as I pedalled along, I could still taste and smell her, and was in a dream of warm, physical pleasure, and although I was luxuriating in the happiness that her companionship brought to me, there still existed another, dreamier part of my ego which was decidedly mine and not Helga’s, in which Winifred was, and always would be, a goddess.
If expressed in words, these matters would be hurtful to whomsoever believed herself at any one time to be important, or the most important person in our heart. (Do you remember? At school? Who is your best friend? Your third-best friend? Your tenth-best friend? And how important these gradations were to you, to all of us?) In my inner imagination, in the quiet private part of myself where I alone exist and where my dreams are all, there is something which I almost envisage as the reredos of a great church, adorned, as in some medieval chancel, by figures of those
I have loved. In a medieval building the central place would be occupied by the Virgin and around her would be the particular saints to whom the building was dedicated. Next would come the Twelve. Then, there might be prophets, evangelists, or other figures of history or legend, stretching far up into the Gothic tracery. In my inmost soul such a screen is populated chiefly by women. My mother is there, and Helga is there, and of course you are there. Some of the figures in this fantasy screen carving would be amazed to know that they were there – they are ‘crushes’, waitresses, women who have served me in shops, faces regularly glimpsed on the tram. They are ‘my’ guardians, the tutelary angels of my inward self. They make life in this little flat endurable, especially when I close my eyes. But central to them all, like the great Madonna on a medieval choir screen, is Winnie. And as I write I see her on that spring morning in 1936, raising her arm to me. I see her fine aquiline nose, and the fresh moisture of her pink skin, and the thickness of her wavy Welsh hair piled on her head, and bound at the nape in a bun. Even then, even on that morning when every wobble of the bike reminded me of the previous passion night with Helga, Winifred waving constituted a vision of glory. She seemed then, and she still seems to me for all her ‘culpable stupidity’, to be one of the best human beings I have ever known.
‘I’m going in here,’ she said when I drew level with her and the large front door of the orphanage.
‘How so?’
‘I do visit the place quite a lot. Perhaps it is my orphanage childhood that explains this. Like to come in and look at the little perishers?’
Such an idea had never previously occurred to me. My tendency had been to scutter past this institution, almost as if it were a place of which to be ashamed. Perhaps I imagined it was a place where the children were ill-treated – I cannot, to myself, let alone to you, explain my feelings of diffidence about it.
We were admitted by a man in livery, a green frock-coat and yellow breeches, who could quite easily have been living in the time of the Margravine Wilhelmine who had founded this place, as she had founded so much else in our town. There was a cordial bow, as to a dignitary, and as to a regular visitor, and he announced that he would fetch the Direktorin. The woman in charge of the orphanage – rather oddly, her name escapes me – came to greet us. She was tallish, though not as tall as Winnie, and she had curly blonde hair cut quite short in the bob mode then fashionable. She wore a white shirt and a dark-blue skirt; whether or not this constituted a uniform I could not say.
‘You’re in time for cocoa and biscuits!’ she said with a merry briskness.
We were led into a rather fine dining hall, with hammer beams, and three low-level refectory tables. There were, I should guess, about fifteen children at each table – and this constituted the entire population of the orphanage.
The children were at that moment filing into the hall. Some were little more than toddlers of two or three. None was older than ten. The boys wore blue knickerbockers, grey stockings and short grey coats of the traditional ‘Bavarian’ cut, which Fidi used to like wearing. The girls, many of whom had beautifully elaborate plaited hair, wore grey pinafore dresses over their immaculate white shirts.
They paused for a moment and all placed their hands together in prayer before the enormous portrait that hung over the chimney-piece. It was the only modern addition to the room, which was otherwise furnished traditionally and which contained no other painting. It was a giant picture of Wolf, wearing a brown shirt and swastika armband, and staring benignly into the middle distance.
Oh Führer, Our Führer, sent by God’s right hand,
Guard us we pray, and guard our German land!
Thank you, dear Führer, for our daily bread,
Guide us from dawn of life until the grave’s dark bed.
Führer, oh Führer, our faith and our light,
Hail to thee, Führer, our saviour and our guide.
They chanted it in the rhythmical manner in which children always chant poetry or prayers collectively, their tinny combination of voices depriving the words of any meaning they might conceivably have had.
Their grace said, they proceeded to the hatch where a cook, abundantly greasy and red and fat, was distributing cocoa from a metal jug into enamelled mugs, each of which bore the arms of the House of Bayreuth-Brandenburg. Having taken their mug, they then passed another table where some homemade biscuits arose from the plates in mountains.
Winnie came forward, when they were all seated, and approached a small child at the end of one of the tables, her legs dangling from the grey smock dress but not yet long enough to reach the floor from the bench. ‘Senta, this is my friend, Mr ———.’
‘Hello – Senta?’ I was not sure that I had caught the name correctly and for a moment I wondered whether all the juvenile inhabitants of this establishment had been given names from Richard Wagner’s operas.
It was our first meeting, yours and mine. I think of it now. I think of squatting down on my haunches and looking into your deep-blue eyes and thinking how pretty you were with your thick dark-blonde hair wound in plaits round your head. And even as I think of that first meeting I think of what will have been our last – my leaving you in Leipzig after the Meistersinger performance in 1960. And between those dates – from the mid 1930s to 1960 – there was our life together. And I suppose that image, of Winnie leaning over you in the orphanage, is what is central in my reredos.
Very characteristically, you did not say anything at all to me at that first meeting, though you chatted away to Winnie when she whispered to you. She asked you if you had been learning songs and whether you could play the triangle.
I suppose our visit took about ten minutes. Before we left, Winnie picked you up in her arms and hugged you and kissed your cheek, and rather than wriggling with awkwardness as any three-year-old would have done with a stranger, you were happy to be held in her arms – though the truth of your relationship did not occur to me on that day, nor indeed for years afterwards.
When we had left you in the orphanage, it was not of you but of her own childhood that Winnie spoke: ‘The difference between Germany and England … if you had to explain it to somebody, you could not do better’ – she said the words with her firm emphasis on every syllable – ‘than to compare this place with the orphanage in East Grinstead. Naturally, there are rules here. Naturally, there are certain disciplines and if the children step out of line they are punished. Children need to know the parameters of their moral universe. But no one here is cruel. Of that I am convinced.’ (It is three syllables in German and once more, her head moved from side to side in rhythm, almost like a clockwork figurine as she said ü-ber-zeugt.)
There was no self-pity in her memories, but she smiled with contempt as she told me about the Protestant nuns of East Grinstead. ‘The whole place had been started by a hymn writer – he wrote a poem called “The Golden Jerusalem”, which is very well-known, highly regarded, in the English Church. He had a fondness for the old Middle Ages and so he dressed up these young women, including his own daughter I may say, in these outlandish medieval robes and veils. And they thought of some outlandish medieval tortures, I can tell you. For everything we were whipped. If you cursed, you had to eat soap. If you said an angry word you had to hold a spoonful of mustard in your mouth – that was an especial favourite of Sister Ermenild, the hymn writer’s daughter. Sister Geraldine Mary had a leather thong with which she chastized the bed-wetters. I do not believe they were atypical of the English, look at their so-called public schools, where the aristocracy and the upper classes send their children to be tortured. People complain about the few, the very few who are kept by our authorities in KZ – and who invented the KZ, I ask them? The English!’
There was no English accent in Winnie’s speech, but she could not summon up her past in this way without reinforcing for me the sense of her as a stranger, at odds with the world, never truly at home in it – one of the chief things she had in common with Wolf.
She d
id not spring her idea upon me immediately that morning. It was later in the day that she asked me to tell Helga about our visit to the orphanage, and to wonder whether, next time, she would like to come too to visit little ‘Senta’. ‘I think it’s a little chick, isn’t it?’
And then, perhaps not on that occasion but in a couple of days: ‘We can’t think of the little chick spending its days in institutions, now can we? Where should I have been if I hadn’t been rescued by the Klindworths? Working as a parlourmaid – that’s what we were being trained up to do, you know.’
Helga was much quicker than I was to recognize just what it was that Winnie was proposing. Helga knew of my ‘crush’ on Winnie, as she sometimes called it; my ‘Winnie-worship’ being another term of semi-affectionate abuse. She did not approve of my loving Winnie and she certainly did not approve of Winnie, whose politics she completely abominated. But she did share my view, and never strayed from it, that Winifred Wagner was a good-hearted person. And in our present situation she was more than that; she was our lifeline. It was she who had rescued the KEH from Dachau of all God-awful places. And now that the ban existed throughout Germany on Communist Party members working in German orchestras, there was nowhere, apart from the eccentrically organized Bayreuth, where Helga could have found work. She could probably have got a job teaching music in schools if she had been prepared to forswear her Communist allegiance, but this she resolutely refused to do. Her political commitment was deepening as the international situation changed. The rumours that our government was to send German planes – fighters and bombers – to help the rebel General Franco in his military revolt against the legal republican government of Spain had reached the ears of the Communist Party faithful via the bush telegraph of the Popular Front, and it had merely confirmed all Helga’s fears about the European parties of the right – in Spain, in Italy and at home.
