Winnie and Wolf

by A. N. Wilson

  Until that August I had, insofar as I tried to understand her political views, assumed that she had joined the Party as the most effective way of fighting fascism and the Nazi ideology. I knew that at certain moments during their struggle for power, the Nazis, largely at the instigation of Nosferatu, had joined forces with the Reds in organizing strikes against the Social Democratic coalitions of the Weimar era – for example, over rents and housing. I don’t think (to this day I don’t know) such alliances occurred in Munich where Helga was a student and where she joined the Party. I think the Red-Nazi coalitions happened in Berlin and the northern cities. I don’t remember and it doesn’t matter. As you can imagine, we hardly saw anything of the Reds in our conservative little town and as you will have gathered my political interest is all but nil.

  Cursed or blessed by the inability to believe, or at any rate to believe in, large catch-all metaphysical systems such as Wolf’s social Darwinism or Helga’s Marxist-Leninism, I am unimaginative when meeting absolutism in other human minds. I think, ‘You can’t really think that; you are telling yourself you think that because it is a system at present useful for your purposes’ – rather as a scientist, in order to make any sort of progress with an experiment, has to start with an hypothesis that can then be discarded. (So Helga’s perfectly intelligent parents stayed with Catholicism – so I told myself – because they were tribally programmed to share its value systems, because at that date in history it was lonely to be on your own, because, because … but not because they ‘really believed’ in the mythology about the Archangel Gabriel or the Virgin Mary.) Apart from being patronizing, this attitude of mine is quite simply wrong. Absolutists do believe what they say they believe. How else can we account for their preparedness to die, and to kill, for their beliefs?

  Helga believed in Marx with the simplicity and fervour that enlivened my brother’s belief in Christ and Wolf’s in Darwin. Extraordinary journeys are travelled by those who believe. In August 1939 Joachim von Ribbentrop persuaded Stalin to sign a non-aggression pact with the National Socialist government of Germany. From that moment – until Wolf’s decision to invade Russia in 1941 – millions of Communists throughout the world instantaneously lost their hostility to the Nazis. It was rather as if for a serious and literal-minded (what’s the point of being any other sort of minded?) Roman Catholic, Rome had spoken. Although the Reds and the Nazis had fought to the death on our German streets, this new alliance, no doubt seen on both sides as temporary, was part of the scheme to further World Revolution.

  I assumed – rather like assuming that the Catholics can’t ‘really believe’ that the wafer becomes Christ’s Body – that Helga could not have changed overnight. But she had. Naturally she remained a decent person. She would still, I have no doubt, have stood up to a thug bullying a Jewish old lady on a bus as she had done at our first meeting. Her attitude to H himself, however, appeared to have changed instantaneously. And the sign of this was her preparedness to let you, my dear, be presented to him at the Festival Theatre when he came to hear a performance of Götterdämmerung.

  We met in 1933, we’d been together six years now, married for four. I never tried to defend Wolf to Helga, but what I did try to defend, and what I hope these pages have been able to describe, if not exactly speaking to explain, is Winnie’s attitude to him. Outsiders saw it at the time and see it even more so with hindsight, as grossly irresponsible that she offered Wolf not merely her friendship, but the endorsement of the Wagner family name and by extension the Festival itself. People the world over who loved Wagner’s music now knew that Germany’s revolutionary leader had the endorsement, the love, of one of our country’s prime cultural shrines, as of its High Priestess.

  Do I think her culpable for this? My attitude to that is: everyone else is busy blaming her. I’d rather sit here in my flat, knowing I’ll never see Winnie again, and leave the blaming to others. For instance, I could leave it to those who were enthusiastic supporters of the Third Reich while it lasted and who then, as leaders of industry or as politicians in the post-war era in the West, turned out to have been dedicated democrats after all. It’s amazing how few Nazis there were found in West Germany after 1945 – not enough to fill one small village hall, let alone the whole stadium at Nuremberg or the Sports Palace in Berlin. No doubt all those cheering crowds were illusions, not really there – magic by Dr Nosferatu. Winnie’s truthful refusal to deny her friendship with Wolf might be shocking, but it is less shocking to me than the nauseating humbug of West Germany.

  I’ve been thinking about these things, largely in silence, for the last fifteen years, and I’m more and more convinced that you lay at the centre of Winnie’s attitude to her Wolf. He for his part knew that almost any other woman in the Western world would have somehow or other wanted to exploit the fact that she had borne his child. Had she been that kind of woman, there can be no doubt that you would have been killed – so would she, probably. Even if the man who authorized the Night of the Long Knives had stayed his hand, his murderous entourage would never have wanted their divine Leader to be open to blackmail. And so the secret was kept, and you were rescued from the orphanage and became our child, Helga’s and mine, much loved, the centre of our lives, the excuse we both used, after a little while, for hiding from ourselves that we had nothing whatsoever in common.

  After you’d gone to university, as you know, Helga and I split up. I don’t think you wanted to discuss it all in great detail with either of us. Perhaps you’ve wondered, since, what conversations we had about you. Here was one – I suppose it was about six months before we finally parted: it would therefore have been in the late 1940s just after I got my first teaching job.

  ‘You knew, when you were first taken to the orphanage?’ said Helga. ‘You went with her – she told you…’

  ‘Winnie – Frau Wagner – told me nothing. Don’t you see that if I’d suspected then what you suspect now we couldn’t have adopted Senti – don’t you see her safety depended on our not knowing who she was?’

  ‘But you did know – you said so.’

  ‘No I didn’t – don’t distort my words. Why can’t we speak to one another without either mishearing or deliberately distorting –’

  Furious as I was with her I chucked a packet of cigarettes in her direction. She lit up. I was smoking more or less continuously in those days, as I still do.

  ‘You admitted you knew –’

  ‘Helga – I said I think I now understand why Winnie trusted us. She knew we were too intelligent to ask questions.’

  ‘So you were prepared to put me in that position, make me the stepmother of his child. With all that implies. You loved me – or I thought you loved me – and you were prepared to do that.’

  ‘Helga, I…’

  ‘You were so soppily devoted to her – so don’t try and defend yourself. By Christ, the boring evenings I’ve had to spend with you hearing about that bloody family – Frau Wagner this, Herr Wagner always said that, little Prince Wolfgang did the other … You should have heard yourself. If you wanted to spend your life licking Winifred’s arse, why marry me? Why get me mixed up in this … in this … why make me love that bloody’ – she was speaking more and more jerkily as the tears came – ‘child as if she was mine … No – don’t come near me.’

  I’d reached out to hold a hand. It was years since we had made love.

  As you know, this isn’t a country where you lightly or casually commit thoughts to paper. I do not think that the Stasi had any inkling of our secret, but if they did have, the flat would have been bugged. I wanted to write Helga a letter – and as well as being an overdue explanation to you, perhaps these pages constitute the letter I never could write to Helga, who already had cancer when we had that row and who died three years after we separated. If I had tried to write Helga a letter while you were still at university, and if that document had been found, what would your life have been? Now you have emigrated, and I am hoping to get this story parcelled up an
d mailed to you in the United States before I myself die.*

  When we were having rows, I knew there was something undignified about nabbing the last word. But on this occasion, when Helga was accusing me of having adopted you and kept your identity a secret simply because of some arse-licking sycophantic attitude to the Wagner family, I could not let her words pass without a reply. I remembered the whole weirdness of the Soviet-Nazi axis.

  It was August 1939 and we knew that H would be attending the performance of Götterdämmerung. We did not know it would be his last visit to Bayreuth and I suppose no one knew for certain, perhaps not even he, that within a few weeks Europe would have been plunged into war.

  Helga was rehearsing most days. You were being cared for by my mother. I was involved in the variety of humdrum tasks that fell to my lot in the Festival Theatre. It was one evening, when we were all together in the flat – you, me and Helga – that Helga quite casually let fall that Winnie had approached her. Would it be possible, when the Leader came to the theatre, for little Senti to present him with a bouquet of flowers?

  To give her her due, Helga was quite crestfallen and awkward when she made this announcement. When I looked up at her with blank astonishment at the suggestion, she gave a sheepish grin that was trying to be ironical. But it could not, in such circumstances, entirely succeed. This was a woman who until a few days earlier had regarded H as the enemy of mankind. Because he had signed a treaty with Stalin, another mass murderer – indeed, one who at that date had killed innumerably more people than Uncle Wolf – she was prepared to let her own child go up to the Monster and give him a bunch of flowers. I had spent the last fourteen years watching children fawn on Uncle Wolf and him doting on them. For me, there was nothing especially surprising about the idea. What made me speechless with astonishment was the volte-face by the KEH.

  We did not have a quarrel about it, but a strange silence descended on the little flat after you had gone to bed. It was agreed that you would be kitted out with a new hat, a new pair of shoes and that you would learn a little sentence off pat – some twaddle of the sort children are taught to say to visiting dignitaries everywhere.

  ‘It was you who got Senti to present him with a bouquet.’ That was the sentence I came out with eight years or so after the event, when Helga and I had entered the phase of total hostility.

  It was true, but she had her guns pounding continually: ‘It was your friend who asked me. Winnie. And we know why, don’t we?’

  I flashed a look at Helga. I knew she was capable, in her rage, of blurting out the truth and this was a burden with which it would simply have been unfair to weigh you down. ‘No – no, Helga. Don’t say that.’

  With a glimpse of you – you, aged sixteen, were buried in a book, trying not to notice that this unseemly conversation was taking place – Helga retreated: ‘OK.’

  But in this incoherent exchange was buried a depth of meaning you were quite intelligent enough to discern; which is why, I suspect, the story contained in this parcel, if you ever get to read it, won’t come as a surprise to you? Maybe there are things we know, without knowing we know them. From the moment I saw your eyes in the orphanage, there had been recognition; but my knowledge was only really confirmed when I heard of Winnie’s plan – to engineer a meeting between you and Uncle Wolf on that night of The Twilight of the Gods – that the obvious truth began to click inside my brain. Winnie, with her natural wisdom, must have known that we were near to war and that war would separate her from. Wolf for a very long time. Perhaps deep instinct told her that she would never actually see him again. She wanted this last encounter to involve you – their child. She did not ask me. Very properly, she went to your ‘mother’, Helga, for she knew that if she got Helga’s assent there would be no gainsaying it.

  It was a time of extraordinary tension. Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Ambassador, had come to Bayreuth, nominally to hear Wagner’s operas, but in fact to see if it would be possible to meet the Chancellor and try a last-minute effort to make peace. Tietjen, I seem to remember, had a lot to do with inviting Henderson, who stayed at the Golden Anchor. (Uncle Wolf was being accommodated in the Siegfried House, the wing of Wahnfried that was now kept for his occupation whenever he needed it.) Tietjen believed that if Winnie could only arrange for Henderson to cross the threshold, if the two men could just meet one another, the catastrophe of war could be averted. By now, Czechoslovakia had fallen into German control – the British had cravenly given it to us, thereby increasing both Wolf’s high opinion of himself and his contempt for the cowardice of the Englishmen who attended the Munich conference. The next stage of the game would be for Wolf and Stalin to carve up Poland between them. But it was a gamble, as the man knew, who had so boldly enacted the demands of the fisherman’s wife. And if the gamble failed, the worm-like British conservatives – Neville Chamberlain, Lord Dunglass, Lord Halifax and the rest – might finally stir themselves to fight a war to save the Poles. If that occurred France, our old enemy, would amass its huge armies against us and the dreadful carnage of 1914–18 would happen all over again.

  None of us Germans wanted war – none I ever met. We had been lulled by the fisherman’s wife into supposing that the ‘conquests’ of the previous few years – Austria, the Sudetenland and so on – had come about because the German-speaking peoples of these lands actually wanted a Greater Germany. There had been no loss of blood. But Poland was a different story. As I buzzed about, at Tietjen’s and Winnie’s request, delivering notes to Sir Nevile at the Anchor, I too had come to share their superstitious ardour – their belief that if only the very pro-German English diplomat could be persuaded to meet our Leader, the two men would somehow be able to patch up a compromise.

  Wolf continued to refuse to meet Henderson. Winnie brought the British Ambassador to a performance of Die Walküre, but he was not admitted to the box where the Leader sat with his entourage. Afterwards I heard from Wieland Wagner that it was the only time he saw Uncle Wolf truly snub his mother.

  ‘Please, Wolf, I beg you – as a friend – for the peace of the world,’ she had pleaded.

  His reply was curt: ‘The German Chancellor will not be compromised by such an unscheduled meeting.’ He did not have one of his famous explosions but Wieland said it looked like a close-run thing.

  Poor old Henderson went back to Berlin the next day. He had done his best.

  It was the following afternoon, at the beginning of The Twilight of the Gods, that you were to have your moment. The presentation was to happen just before the performance began. Wolf was dressed as a civilian. Military uniform had been set aside in favour of the simplicities of a tuxedo and a black bow tie. Rather incongruously – but then he never did anything entirely by the rule book, in spite of the years of training in the social niceties Frau Bechstein had given him – he was clutching a Bavarian trilby hat with a feather stuck in its side.

  You were meant to say, ‘My Leader – I present you with these flowers as a token of the love which we all feel for you in Bayreuth.’ Or some such nonsense. Helga denied having briefed you to say anything else. Given the fact that you had a pretty headstrong attitude to the world, especially to the world of grown-ups, and given also the identity of your natural parents, it would have been surprising if you had not been a tough-minded person with ideas of your own, even aged seven.

  The Führer arrived, with Winnie on his arm. If there had been froideur the previous evening, when she tried to preserve the peace of the world, such coolness was now, for the sake of public appearances, laid to one side. He seemed to be all affability. We were waiting, the three of us, on the sidelines at the main entrance to the Festival Theatre. You were clutching a bunch of roses. In your white summer hat, your pale-blue coat, your white socks and sandals, you looked not unlike the newsreel pictures of the little English Princesses.

  As almost invariably happened when confronted with a child, Wolf seemed to be quite genuinely delighted by your appearance.

  ‘
This is Senta,’ said Winnie. ‘She’s got something for you, Wolf.’

  ‘So I see!’

  It was really strange to watch Helga, quite formally dressed in a hat and a coat and skirt, coming forward with you to make your presentation.

  Wolf asked you a number of questions about where you lived and where you went to school. It was routine stuff, only for me an occasion of overpowering emotion. I found myself in tears as I witnessed it. Many would have supposed this was a simple patriotic love of the Leader, which was felt by so many Germans at that time. But by then I had lost whatever affection or admiration I might have had for him and had learnt to see him through the sane eyes of the KEH before her party line made her think otherwise; I had learnt to see him as my parents and my brother saw him, though I could not share their faith.

  ‘We must meet again,’ Wolf was saying … to you … to his child … This was when the reality of the situation fully dawned on me and this was why I wept – Winnie at the orphanage, Winnie’s utter self-sacrifice (on one level) to this man, and on another level her extraordinary confidence, which led to her being the only woman in Germany who had done what, presumably, so many would have been so proud to do: borne his child.