by A. N. Wilson
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
The Flying Dutchman
Lohengrin
Tannhäuser
Mastersingers
Parsifal
Tristan und Isolde
Götterdämmerung
Also by A. N. Wilson
About the Author
Copyright
To
Beryl Bainbridge
I received the typescript of this book from a woman I truly believe to be the daughter of Adolf Hitler.
Winifred Hiedler died at the Raymond and Rubie Kranz Seniors’ Home for Retired Musicians on 27 October 2006. I had been visiting Ms Hiedler for some years, since I joined our Lutheran congregation in South Heath as junior pastor. She had lived either in our neighbourhood (which is, as you may know, a suburb of Seattle) or in downtown Seattle itself.
It is perhaps worth saying a word about her name. The former Mrs Senta Cristiansen, she came to the United States in 1968 with her husband. They had no children. They were both professional musicians, he a violinist, she a cellist, playing in one of the larger orchestras in Stockholm before applying to work in the United States. Shortly after she received her naturalization papers, Mrs Cristiansen, as she was then, reverted to her former name of Senta N———. (She made it a condition of this book being made public that her adopted family name be kept secret.)
She joined our congregation at South Heath before I arrived as a pastor in the mid 1990s. Anyone from 97th St Lutheran Church, South Heath, will remember her as a courteous, bright-eyed, white-haired woman, with a brisk walk and perfect manners. She always wore the same beige-coloured mackintoshes, and the only variation in her wardrobe of a Sunday morning appeared to be her wide choice of berets, in pink, pale-blue, green etc. etc. She spoke perfect English, with an only slightly foreign intonation, which many took to be Scandinavian. She was a regular supporter of all our church work; she was always available, until infirmity made this impossible, to help with any of our charitable undertakings, including taking food to the down-and-outs, AIDS awareness, and baking for our annual Christmas socials with deprived children. Also, she took an especially keen interest in the choral singing, though she was occasionally critical both of our choice of music and of its execution. She would attend church socials, but only if they were in our social centre. She did not accept personal hospitality, never came to the home of any member of our congregation, and never invited any of them into her home. I was the only person, apart from medical personnel, who ever visited her at the Seniors’ Home.
While she was still active, she vacated her small apartment in downtown Seattle and took the room which she occupied until her death at Kranz Seniors’. She was more than eligible for her place there, having spent most of her professional life as a poorly paid and highly skilled musician, and having limited resources. (Her hip replacement operation in 1995, for which she insisted on paying herself rather than claiming from Medicare, left her with next to no assets.)
In all the time I knew her she was named Winifred Hiedler. I did not know that she had chosen legally to assume both the first name and the second name in 1982, when she was fifty years old, after she received through the mail the text of which this book is composed. Nor did she ever speak to me about this book. After her second hip began to cause difficulties, her churchgoing became less frequent and I took to visiting her on a regular basis. We spoke very largely of generalities – the news, television programmes (she was particularly keen on staying up for Larry King Live!). But she also liked a comedy show called Bewitched! and, of course, music. It was in the course of these conversations that I was told that although her husband had been Swedish, and she came to the United States from Sweden, she had in fact been born in Germany. At first this information was thrown out quite casually, but in time I came to see that this deeply reserved woman who had, as I came to realize, no living friends or family, had a secret, or a story, or something which she wished to communicate.
It was some five years before she died that she gave me a stout parcel. As I discovered after her death, it contained the typescript of this book. She asked me not to open, still less to read, it until after she had died. I have kept to this promise.
I have myself translated it into English. If the pages are to be trusted, they purport to be what amounts to an extended letter, or meditation, or memoir, addressed to Ms Hiedler from her adopted father, a Herr N———, born in Bayreuth, Franconia, in 1902 and dying in East Germany some time in 1979–80. He lived in the industrial town of ——— for the last decades of his life.
These pages contain the astounding claim that Senta Schmidt, of Germany, later Mrs Cristiansen of Stockholm, later Seattle, and the Winifred Hiedler who was such a devoted member of our church congregation, was none other than the daughter of Winifred Wagner, the composer’s daughter-in-law, and Adolf Hitler.
The fact that my old friend legally changed her name from Senta Cristiansen to Winifred Hiedler twenty-six years before she died is a token of the fact that she herself clearly believed the contents of this book. Hitler’s father Alois was the illegitimate son of a woman called Maria Anna Schicklgruber. When the child was five years old, Maria married an itinerant millworker called Johann Georg Hiedler, and the boy Alois adopted this name, only later spelling it Hitler. Evidently my old friend believed that it was possible, even in a Lutheran congregation where many German émigrés worshipped, to adopt the surname Hiedler without appearing too conspicuous, and evidently she was right, since I never heard any member of the church make the fantastic suggestion that this mild-mannered, reclusive and polite woman might be the daughter of a mass murderer. As a serious-minded and truthful person, she clearly chose to change her name so as to … so as to what? To tell the truth?
That she was the adopted daughter of Herr N———, the author of these pages, there seems no reason to doubt. As for the rest, it is difficult to see how some of this story can be true. Though Ms Hiedler believed it enough to go to the trouble of changing her name, there is more than sufficient evidence in the text itself (for example, when the author actually meets Winifred Wagner’s son Wieland in 1960 and is barely recognized) to suggest that it is, just possibly, a work, not of fraud, but of fantasy. It seems to have been the case that Ms Hiedler was indeed an adopted child and, as anyone with pastoral experience can tell you, the need to find a birth parent can lead down the most bizarre avenues of speculation. Another possibility is that this is a work of fiction, penned by Ms Hiedler herself. If so, it would certainly suggest very deep mental unbalance; but, as I have emphasized, I only knew her on a superficial level and she was always careful to keep herself to herself.
Hermann Muller, Assistant Pastor
South Heath Lutheran Church
Seattle, WA 98124
Easter 2007
The Flying Dutchman
Die düstr’e Glut, die hier ich fühle brennen
Sollt’ ich, Unseliger, die Liebe nennen?
Ach nein! Die Sehnsucht ist es nach dem Heil:
Würd’ es durch solchen Engel mir zu Teil!
The Flying Dutchman
‘Are you a policeman?’
It was a disconcerting question, coming as it did from the shadows behind a life-size bust of the goddess Athene, which stood on the occasional table on the upstairs landing.
‘Only,’ the goddess continued, ‘you
keep following Uncle Wolf about.’
‘Do I?’ I asked edgily.
‘I haven’t told anyone,’ said Athene.
‘Why not?’
‘It could be our secret. If you’d like.’
Friedelind, aged seven, stepped into the chiaroscuro.
‘That would be good,’ I conceded.
She was a substantial child, much larger than most seven-year-olds. Her fleshiness was disconcertingly adult and she entirely lacked shyness. When I had arrived in the household the previous year, the children had very naturally shrunk back. Time had been necessary before I got their confidence. I had been employed as a general assistant to their father, Siegfried Wagner, himself a composer, an inspired conductor, as well as the director of the Festival Opera at Bayreuth. My business was chiefly with him. I helped him with his correspondence, organized his diary and was a general dogsbody about the house, taking telephone calls and in effect acting as an unofficial valet to Siegfried and butler to the rest of them when the need arose. Siegfried needed, a fact which caused the predictable raising of eyebrows, a young man at his side. When they had asked me to do the job, Siegfried and his wife Winnie had alluded, as tactfully as possible, to the great age of his mother, Cosima, the composer’s widow. It was suggested to me that when the day came of her departure from this planet, there would be a wealth of papers for me to study. I would be given the first glimpse of such treasures as her correspondence with her great husband and be allowed to read her diaries.
One of the great perks of my humdrum employment was that it allowed me to breathe in so much information about Richard Wagner and permitted me to quiz the older members of the household – the composer’s surviving daughters. Occasionally, very occasionally, I was allowed to accompany the Mistress (that is, Wagner’s widow Cosima) on her stately progress into the Hofgarten, or even to sit with her and listen to her daughter Eva read aloud to her. In Cosima’s presence, however, my questions were strictly forbidden.
It was my hope, one day, to write a book about Wagner and philosophy. All these dazzling operas, even the apprentice work in Rienzi, but certainly The Flying Dutchman and everything he had written subsequently, did not merely seem to me the most wonderful music that had ever been composed. They were also the most fascinating examples of philosophy transposed into art. They were dramatized ideas.
So, the answer to the seven-year-old Friedelind’s intrusive question was yes, I was an investigator and I did want to solve a mystery, or series of mysteries. How was it that the young revolutionary Richard Wagner who had been expelled from Dresden in 1848 for being a political subversive came, after his death, to be the hero of the most reactionary figures in Germany? Why did the grand duchesses, and margraves and lieutenant-generals resplendent in their uniforms come up the Green Hill outside Bayreuth to sit through hour upon hour of subversive operas which, if seriously considered, would have caused them all to evaporate? How did it come about that Wagner who, even in his more conservative old age, despised any political parties and was unimpressed by Bismarck himself, how did it come about that he was seen as the great hope of all these bizarre ‘völkisch’ parties who were making such headway in our poor confused Germany in those post–First World War years?
Is it possible to be apolitical? Wagner was left-wing. Then he stopped being left-wing largely because he read a philosopher called Schopenhauer. He read Schopenhauer over and over again. Schopenhauer came to believe that the only way to wisdom was by a denial of the will. He read the Upanishads and believed that Western thought (apart from Plato and Kant) had been misguided altogether. He was against Christianity, systems, tyranny, but above all the tyranny of the mob. He had once allowed soldiers into his room so that they could get a better aim at rioting students. This anecdote always haunted me. I too loved Schopenhauer, but could one want to shoot enthusiastic young people who merely desired to demonstrate against injustice or the folly of things?
Wagner had in him this need to renounce the will, but did he also have in him something of that violence? That understanding of violence? Was that partly what appealed to some of the nastier völkisch types with their desire to beat up Jews or have pub brawls with the Reds?
Was I a policeman?
‘Uncle Wolf is only staying one night,’ the child persisted.
‘Really?’
‘He has really, really important work to do back in Munich. Partly he’s written a book which is going to save Germany. Mummy gave him the paper and pencils to do it. While he was in prison. Do only bad people go to prison?’
‘Not invariably, but on the whole, yes.’
‘That’s not an answer.’
‘Most of the people who get sent to prison are bad.’
‘Uncle Wolf is good, though?’
‘He went to prison for trying to start a thing called a revolution. He and some other men tried to throw out the government, that’s the people who rule over us, the people we had elected to rule over us. Uncle – your friend – shot men. People got killed. That is why he went to prison.’
‘Mummy says that there have been three really great Germans – Martin Luther, Frederick Grossman and Uncle Wolf.’
I forbore to wonder aloud whether Goethe, Beethoven, Hegel or Einstein deserved consideration. Instead I asked, ‘Who’s Frederick Grossman?’
‘No.’ She giggled and corrected herself: ‘Frederick…’
‘Friedrich der Grosse?’
‘That’s him.’
‘He was the cleverest king Prussia ever had, but very ruthless. He had lots of wars. Lots of people got killed.’
‘He is a great – is it philatelist?’
‘Philosopher.’
‘That’s it. He’s a philosopher, he has really, really clever thoughts. And he is wise, and good and he’s going to save us all from the Reds and the Jews.’
‘Frederick the Great? He read philosophers. He wasn’t one himself.’
‘No, Uncle Wolf.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘Are you teasing?’
‘No.’
‘You don’t sound as if you think Uncle Wolf will save us from the Jews.’
‘I don’t think we necessarily need saving from the Jews.’
‘Luther and Frederick the Great hated them too, you know.’
‘I haven’t really thought about it much, Friedelind.’
‘Only Mummy says Uncle Wolf has a bit of a bee in his bonnet and the yids we know are all right, the ones in the orchestra and dear Dr Liebermann.’
‘Of course.’
‘I like Dr Liebermann. When I had that cold last year? When it was really, really bad and Mummy said it was all in my imagination and I had to go out for my walk as usual in the Hofgarten? And Dr Liebermann came and said “I prescribe three days in bed with hot drinks and Grimm’s fairy tales”.’
‘That was kind of him.’
‘Too kind, Mummy says. But are you?’
‘Go to bed, Friedelind. You’re meant to be having your afternoon rest.’
‘I wouldn’t tell anyone. If you were a policeman. It could be our secret.’
Later that afternoon, coming back through the large entrance hall of the Wagners’ house, I could hear Wolf’s voice, rasping and blaring from behind the closed doors of the salon. It was a very carrying voice at the best of times, but during one of his recitations for the children it rose to an extraordinary volume.
I had just walked out to the little kiosk halfway down Richard Wagnerstrasse with a haversack of paper money, hoping to buy myself the Völkischer Beobachter and a packet of cigarettes – but I did not, as it happens, possess enough for the newspaper, which was selling at thirteen billion marks. By the time I had paid the twenty billion for cigarettes there was no cash left over for the nationalist newspaper we all liked to read (it was 1925) and whose aspirations during that period – a recovered German economy, the undoing of the Versailles Treaty, the restitution of the German lands in the Ruhr region at present occupied by the French �
� seemed even less realistic than the ambitions of the fisherman’s wife in the Grimms’ story, which Wolf was enacting (more than reading) for the children.
You remember the folk tale, no doubt. A fisherman lives with his wife in a pisspot beside the sea – and every day the fisherman fishes and fishes. One day he catches a flounder, but the fish explains to him that he is not truly a fish. He is a prince under an enchantment, and if the fisherman will only spare his life he will grant him his wish. The fisherman goes home and talks to his wife. The fisherman’s wife is in a state of perpetual discontent. She tells him to go to the flounder and to ask for a little cottage to live in. So off he goes, chanting over the water in the Pomeranian dialect,
flow-undurr, flow-undurr, where be ye?
Come up out of that thar bubblin’ zee!
Moy woyf Ilsebill won’t be content
As oi’d ’ve wished and oi’d ’ve meant.
The wife’s discontent grows and grows. Unhappy with the cottage, she wants a palace; discontented with the palace, she won’t be satisfied until she has occupied all the land round about it. Disgruntled with owning huge estates, she wishes to be king – then emperor – then pope. With each crazy request to the flounder, and with each recitation of the fisherman’s rhyme, the sea boils more angrily and the skies darken. By the time I had slipped into the salon the wife had become pope and the poor husband was hoping to creep out of the bedroom unobserved by his ever more ambitious companion.
The three children at Wolf’s feet were Wolfgang, aged six, Friedelind, seven, and Wieland, eight. Little Verena, aged five, sat a bit apart from them on the knee of her mother Winifred. I forget who else was present – perhaps Lieselotte the governess, perhaps not. What I chiefly recollect of the scene was the wide-eyed wonder with which the children hung upon the words of this master storyteller. Though remaining in his chair, Wolf conveyed, by stealthy movements of his shoulders and comical screwings-up of his features, that he was the hen-pecked fisherman trying to escape his wife, now transformed into the pope. But His Holiness had woken up.