by A. N. Wilson
I had not exactly made a promise to Helga, but there was an unspoken understanding between us that, although we both worked for Winnie in different capacities and could no longer, for the time being, hope for work anywhere else (given Helga’s political and prison record), I should give a wide berth to Winnie’s ‘friends’ – we did not often name them, but it was perfectly clear whom she meant. Sometimes I had broken this rule, as when, at the bar of the theatre one lunchtime I had fallen into chat with Putzi Hanfstaengl, the tall American, who told me the story – recorded earlier in these pages – of coming to the theatre during the period of its closure with H and finding the cobwebby stage set of The Flying Dutchman still in its ghostly place. For the most part there was no difficulty in keeping my unspoken but clearly understood bargain with Helga; the Nazis did not come my way, nor did I wish them to. Winnie told me sometimes of her rows and tempests with the local gauleiter, a dreadful figure called Wächtler. (Schemm was dead. Wächtler, who made great play of having his baby son christened at the Spitalskirche, the most Nazi of the Lutheran churches in town, had a bit of a religious obsession, and made it his business to persecute and harry all the decent pastors and priests in the town.) It was at this stage that I began to realize that my own father, who received endless letters and visits from the wretched Wächtler, had become radicalized, though I did not realize until the fateful Crystal Night, already described, how far he was prepared to go in defence of his principles. Both my father and Helga would have been horrified to see me there in the Hofgarten, with my hands on the handlebars of the bike, hobnobbing with Sussi and Wolf.
Sussi, a predecessor of the more famous Blondi, was a highly intelligent-looking German Shepherd, with a magnificent healthy coat and eager, bright eyes.
‘Look at you!’ he exclaimed with utter love, as he knelt and kissed her. Then, as if she had spoken, he replied, ‘Oh, all right then, one last run.’
She did appear to understand him, since she bounded with the speed of a wolf through the forest across the grass, with that particular spurt of energy dogs always display just after emptying their bowels.
‘Darwin tells us of his own dog balancing a biscuit on her nose and eyeing his cat with wary suspicion,’ said Wolf. ‘It is obvious from his writings that he considered dogs far superior in their intelligence to the Negro. Indeed, he says in one of his books that the nigger is a different species from ourselves. Oh yes. Oh yes.’
I forbore to ask him in which of Darwin’s writings these expressions of opinion are to be found.*
‘It is wonderful to live in a scientific age and see that we follow natural laws. It increases, rather than diminishes, our sense of sympathy with animals. This, for me, is one of the messages of Parsifal. Vegetarianism becomes not simply a fad but a moral necessity when you consider the chain of being that links all life together. The Reichsmarschall eats so much pork, I tell him his resemblance to a pig is hardly surprising.’
Wolf was in expansive good humour, as well might a man be who was now worshipped as a god by the majority of the population. I suppose I was seeing him, that morning, at the apogee of his achievement and personal happiness.
‘I never read Darwin,’ I said. ‘I suppose I should.’
‘The laws of nature, the absolute laws of nature. The strongest monkeys oust the weaker monkeys. The clever monkeys begin to stand. Always, always, it is strength, cleverness, which will single out the superior species from the herd. This is the very principle of nature itself. When nature reasserts itself, then comes calm. After the chaos of being ruled by nincompoops, weaklings and criminals, Germany knows that the strong hold the tiller. Sussi, girl, Suss, Suss, Sussi!’
The animal turned and looked at us, flirting with her master, pretending that she would run away further. He chuckled appreciatively.
I saw that he had a book under his arm – Karl May’s Der Pfahlmann.
‘It’s a very good book,’ he said, noting my eye movement. ‘I have read it many times.’
‘Really? I don’t think I know that one.’
‘Then you will remember the scene when the cowboy is alone in the desert, and he sees desert dogs and vultures hovering near an almost-dead figure in the sand? Oh, that is a masterly scene. Try telling me that some Slavic pacifist nobody such as Duke Tolstoy could write a scene like that and I am sorry, I shall not be convinced. Oh, when he dismounts and he waits for the prairie dogs to come for him. Up they come, trustingly … Suss, Suss, Suss!’
The dog was running towards us now.
‘And he shoots – oh God! He shoots them and he drinks their blood, and then he fills a vessel with that dog blood and kneels to the half-dead figure in the sand. What a moment. “Water!” You remember that moment?’
It seemed superfluous to repeat that I had not read the book.
‘Water! And the man drinks the blood and he is revived. Yes, revived’ – he was saying this to Sussi, whose head he was fondly caressing and who had now returned full of pleasure after her run.
I let them go through the gate before me, wheeling my bike past into the little cemetery garden. Wolf removed his trilby hat as he came past the slabs. Then, at the grave of Richard Wagner, he turned to me and said, ‘Germany was that exhausted man in the desert, lying prey to the vultures. I was that cowboy who rescued him. And if it takes a glass of blood, which he believes is water, to revive him, then so be it.’
We went in, he to his austere breakfast and I to the morning’s correspondence.
There had been speculation about whether he would attend that evening’s performance of Tristan. What had become common knowledge by the time I reached the Festival Theatre was that several leading members of the government were to be there.
Winnie was in a particular state of tension and agitation throughout that day. She was not snappy with me, but there was a shortness bordering on unfriendliness as she chain-smoked. Normally, when she signed letters I had typed, she would make some good-humoured allusion to the correspondents or to the contents of the letter, but on this occasion she simply signed and signed, with a regal air, the ciggy dancing on her lips. I guessed she was having trouble with Tietjen, or with the children.
Suddenly, having signed the letters, she burst out, ‘N———, what am I going to do about Friedelind?’ Friedelind was a perpetual worry to her mother – her obesity, her burgeoning sexuality, her crush on Max Lorenz (flattering to him since, much to his wife’s fury, he had been found in flagrante with a man in the chorus), her bad school reports …
‘Anything in particular?’ I asked.
‘She’s starting to say such terrible things about Wolf. And I am afraid she plans to say something to the Goebbelses when they come tonight.’
‘They are coming?’
‘We have Herr Speer, we have Dr and Frau Goebbels, we have Reichsmarschall and Frau Göring,’ she reeled off a catalogue of murderers’ names, but at that date in history they seemed, though a dislikeable bunch, not much more so than other politicians. ‘I just don’t want Friedelind to … well, to upset Wolf. And Goebbels is … between you and me I don’t like Goebbels. He is so cruel – he lacks all Wolf’s gentleness and sensitivity. I think he is a sadist really – his reason, I guess, he chose to marry a member of the persecuted people.’
‘Frau Goebbels is Jewish?’
‘All but. Technically not, but she had a Jewish stepfather. Her last lover was Jewish – shot in Palestine by Goebbels’s men a couple of years after the little brute married her. Magda is in such trouble. She is in love with Hanke – you know, Goebbels’s Number Two at the Propaganda Ministry? I don’t know how far things have gone, but she has simply had enough of the Herr Doktor’s philanderings and cruelties, and she has told the Führer so.’
‘And what does Wolf … what does the Führer say?’
‘Naturally, he says that they must patch up their troubles for the sake of the Fatherland. I say they should have another baby. That always binds a couple.* Mind you, with men like little Goebbe
ls you can’t stop them – actresses, whores, they simply cluster to him.’
How strange it is to lie here in my flat a quarter of a century after that evening and to think of the passions of Isolde so urgently, but to my ear always forcedly, expressed by Frida Leider. How strange to think of Frida, of whom we saw a certain amount during our time in Paris† singing that last extraordinary aria – ‘Mild und leise’. She did it perfectly well, but anyone who has heard Kirsten Flagstad sing will never think that any other Isolde quite rises to the part. But there, at the end, is Isolde’s voice. King Mark blesses her and the dead Tristan, but the other figures on the stage are mere ciphers. The thing has resolved itself into a dialogue between Isolde’s voice and the orchestra; and, coming through the strings at the very end, that spine-tingling combination of oboes and cor anglais. Played that night by Helga. So, on the stage Isolde. From the orchestra pit my wife. And in the Wagners’ box (so Winnie told me later) an inconsolable Magda Goebbels, sobbing at times so loudly that they considered taking her out. During the intervals they got her out of sight of the crowds and put her in a small drawing room where she continued to sob, while Wolf and Dr Nosferatu worked the crowds from the balcony. Every impression of life, every viewpoint, shifts with time – perspectives, altering like a townscape seen from a moving car or train – towers which were once in the foreground now shrinking and buildings which appeared side by side now hidden one by another. Listening to Frida’s Isolde my dominant expression was that she was singing of ‘us’ – of me and Helga who were getting on so well – of an eternity of love, a love which transcended death.
For Wolf, whose obsession with the ‘Liebestod’ motif in the opera was a sort of addiction, and who would play it over and over on his gramophone, the opera can hardly have spoken of any love except that perhaps of his mother dying in pain in a poverty-stricken kitchen with a Christmas tree at her side – a Liebestod of a different sort. Now in my solitude I see the opera as I have already written, as being not so much about consummation as about separation. But for Wagner, who wrote it in despondent mood and who saw its first performance in the emotional chaos of Cosima von Bülow bearing his child, an unforeseen and highly ‘un-Wagnerian’ future was destined. That is, in spite of illness and money worries, the deep happiness and the domestic bond he had with Cosima.
The only advantage of the crisis in the Goebbels family marriage, as far as Winnie was concerned, was that the unhappy pair were far too absorbed in their misery to allow any chance for Friedelind to come up to Nosferatu to denounce him. Poor Winnie. With Friedelind’s burgeoning anti-Nazi sympathies, her mother must have felt as devout Christians do – my parents say – when a child ostentatiously loses his or her faith.
You? Would you come to share your mother’s Marxist faith, or your father’s no-faith? I was working my way forward to my creed, which was ‘No philosophy of life, not even the philosophy of having no philosophy of life’. Your (surprising?) life of Lutheranism was as yet hidden from me. At age four, you were at home in our small flat. My mother, who doted upon you, had come to babysit and sing to you, folk songs and hymns, as you sank into innocent sleep.
Götterdämmerung
On 14 April 1945 my mother would have been sixty-four years old. On 11 April, however, a young man from Boise, Idaho, killed her. He did not know this beautiful, vague, musical woman with her white hair everlastingly about to escape from its clips and combs, with her excitable dark eyes and pink cheeks, who had consistently disliked National Socialism and who had lost a husband and one son in concentration camps, and another, quarter of a century before, on the battlefields of Northern France. She did not know her killer either and nor do I, and perhaps he came from Portland, Oregon, or Denver, Colorado, or from Salt Lake City. I have sometimes spent whole days looking at the map of the United States wondering where this young man lived who killed my mother, the woman you called Granny.
Usually, in my imagination he is a clean-living, amiable, unimaginative hulk of a boy, perhaps a little over twenty, proud to be flying with the US 18th Air Force in the closing stages of the Second World War. He has been sent to drop bombs on Bayreuth and one of the bombs he dropped happened to fall on the house of the Fräulein Boberach, two of the old ladies who, with my parents, demonstrated in front of the synagogue on Crystal Night in 1938. My mother had been living with the Boberachs since my father’s arrest and their necessary departure from the clergy house. One of these old ladies was already dead, but the raid of 11 April killed the surviving sister, Brigitte, as well as my mother. It also flattened my father’s old church, reduced to rubble the baroque carved pulpit, the gallery adorned with the armorial bearings of all the original patrons of the church, the superb painted altarpiece and the organ that had pealed forth, in its time, almost every note of music ever written by Johann Sebastian Bach, as well as hymns and chorales without number from other composers. During that raid, and the two of the previous weeks on 5 and 8 April, a storm of fire descended upon our little town, destroying the railway station and all surrounding streets, the whole of the northern side of the Market Place, the Old Palace – though not, mysteriously, King Maximilian II, whose statue proudly survived outside his former residence amid its rubble. Most of Richard Wagnerstrasse got hit, and Wahnfried, their chief target, was bombed, though not utterly destroyed.
The reason my mother was killed, and the reason the US 18th Air Force wished to destroy a gentle eighteenth-century town beautified for and by the Margravine Wilhelmine (they managed to bomb her Eremitage, though not utterly to destroy it as they would have wished) was simple. This small Franconian town, with its eighteenth-century palaces, opera house and churches, its small pottery industry, its Colosseum Factory (Fabrik-Kolloseum) manufacturing cloth scarcely posed a military threat to the Allies, whose victory over Germany was in any case by that date totally assured. (Wolf, sick unto death and all but mad, was in his Berlin bunker, preparing for suicide.) The bombs were a message to Winnie. They were a punishment bombing because Winnie had loved Wolf and Wolf had loved Richard Wagner. More than this, the bombers whose preferred music was Glenn Miller and who might well not have heard of Wagner, were punishing the memory of this composer because of the supposed evil, not only of his admirers, but of his very music which was, over the years after the Second World War, particularly esteemed to have contained within it some of the poison that would destroy our country. So our poor little town was reduced to rubble for the sake of a philistine, clodhopping musicological theory, and my mother – did she die instantly or was she imprisoned for hours beneath the rubble? – was killed because she happened to live in a town where a nineteenth-century composer had taken up residence in the hope, one day, of performing his cycle of all but unstageable musical dramas, The Ring of the Nibelungs. A war which, begun because Germany had broken a treaty and crossed the Polish border, ended in a chaos of fire and revenge in which the aristocratic British and Communist Russians joined forces against us and – in the case of our unfortunate town – the Americans bombed us for liking the wrong kind of music. Thank Wotan, Christ and all the gods you were not staying that night with my mother. She loved having you to stay. It was the air raids on 5 April that made her move you to the safety of Winnie’s chalet in the Fichtelgebirge. Little as she liked Winnie, or approved of her, my mother overcame her aversion for Wagnerism on this occasion and so saved your life.
It was the Margrave’s opera house that first drew Wagner to our town, as he searched Germany for a place where he might conceivably stage the drama he had been devising and composing for quarter of a century. As anyone knows who has seen this beautiful little rococo theatre, in which every trumpeting putto, every sprouting column and fluted architrave is carved out of wood and brightly painted and gilded, there could be few less suitable settings for a Wagnerian music drama. By a series of accidents, however, not least his befriending the local bank manager, Herr Feustel (reading of Wagner befriending bankers makes one almost sorry for them: it’s like reading
of a friendship between a fox and a plump chicken), the little town saw the commercial potential of an annual music festival, were Wagner prepared to build a new theatre on the Green Hill just out of town with money from his insane royal patron. Rather as the little Pyrennean village of Lourdes could hear the cash registers jingling almost as soon, in 1858, as the Virgin Mary had appeared to a local peasant called Bernadette Soubirous, even so did the burghers of Bayreuth see, and rightly see, that the creation of a Wagnerian festival in their town would attract pilgrims by the thousand, all of them in need of hotels, restaurants, shops, their equivalent of rosary beads and illuminated Madonnas – miniature busts of the Master, musical scores and prints of the masterpieces.
So in April 1872 they arrived from Tribschen, the Wagners, living at first in the aptly named Hotel Fantaisie in Donndorf, a village nearby, until Wahnfried was completed to their extravagant requirements – Cosima aged thirty-five, Wagner aged fifty-nine, and their children: Fidi, three; Isolde, seven; Eva, five. (Daniela von Bülow was twelve and her sister Blandine nine.) The Royal Family of Bayreuth, as Friedelind called them in a needlessly sour book about her life experience.
The move to Bayreuth coincided with, and caused, the rift between Professor Nietzsche and his old hero. There is no doubt that Wagner behaved deplorably to Nietzsche, as he did to most people in the end, except Cosima and the children. He wrote to Nietzsche’s doctor, Otto Eiser, an ardent Wagner fan and resident in Frankfurt, to question the pathological abnormality of the young man’s apparently celibate state and to suggest to the doctor that the reason the wretched philosopher was almost blind before his thirty-fifth birthday was that he was a masturbator, a judgement with which the doctor, and contemporary medical wisdom, concurred. Not content to share the ‘knowledge’ with his doctor, Wagner spread the rumour so that Nietzsche, when he came to Bayreuth, was openly sniggered at in public places. This, combined with an unrequited and Platonic love for Cosima – parallel, I have often thought, to my own for Winnie in the twentieth century – may be deemed to have contributed to Nietzsche’s disillusionment with Wagner, his belief that he was a disease, not a man, that when it came down to it, Wagner was nothing but an actor.*
