by A. N. Wilson
One of the few books I have in this little flat where I now live is The Idiot by Dostoevsky. Do you remember the passage where the Idiot says, ‘He who has no roots beneath him has no god! That’s not my saying. It was said by a merchant and Old Believer, whom I met when I was travelling. It’s true he did not use those words. He said: “The man who has renounced his fatherland has renounced his god.”’ All the terrible qualities Chamberlain praised as quintessentially German were aspects, the worst aspects, of Britain. True, Germany had a few African colonies but its empire was absolutely tiny beside the vast tracts of Africa and Asia, not to mention Australia, New Zealand and Canada, which constituted the British Empire. We Germans never had an Indian empire and we never put down uprisings with the brutal severity used by the British in their Indian Mutiny in which they fired human beings out of cannons and even slow-roasted them over fires. It was the British who invented racism and, in South Africa, concentration camps.
Twisting all this round, Chamberlain invented or discovered a link between all the Aryan peoples, that is those who spoke the Indo-European languages from Sanskrit to Icelandic. These Aryans were the pure-bloods but they had weakened themselves by mingling with other races. The Jews had allowed themselves to maintain race identity while surreptitiously undermining the racial purity of the Aryans. This they had done by allowing their daughters to ‘marry out’ with influential Gentiles. Chamberlain saw the land of his birth, England, as having sold out to commerce. The aristocracy had married money to preserve its old privileges rather as the old gods in Wagner’s Ring had stooped to alliances with dwarfs to get their hands on Nibelung gold. Disraeli the Jew had bamboozled England. The pure English aristocracy was corrupted by Jewish gold. America was likewise a mere ‘dollar dynasty’. One nation, and one nation alone, that of the pure Teutons, could redeem mankind. ‘The future progress of mankind depends upon a powerful Germany extending far across the earth.’
War would purify the Teutonic spirit. But it would also be necessary to purge the German Reich of its most pernicious enemy within: the Jews.
This was the strange set of doctrines propounded by the English admiral’s son educated at Cheltenham College. (I have never managed to find out what Cheltenham is like but since it is, according to The Gazetteer, a Spa town, I imagine an English Baden-Baden.) Although his ideas were hugely popular in Germany, I honestly believe they would never have been propounded in the first instance by anyone other than an Englishman. The English sense of racial purity at that time in history, their obsessive desire to exclude Indians from clubs, tennis courts, European hotels, transport and so on, was of comparatively recent vintage, differing markedly from the eighteenth-century nabobs who took Indian brides and often adopted Indian religions.
Anti-Semitism, too, never rife in Germany where only a tiny proportion of the population were Jews, was an English obsession, especially when Disraeli’s premiership was followed by a large influx of poor Russian Jews into London.
My father used to joke that it was because he was half English that our Emperor was so militaristic and there is more than an element of truth in this. Of course there was militarism on both sides and it destroyed both our countries. Anti-Semitism after the war seemed to explain a lot: the Russian revolution, the collapse of money markets, which made most of us poor and a few internationalist capitalists rich, and so forth.
Chamberlain’s attitude, however, went beyond run-of-the-mill half-baked dislike of Jews. It was a mania. My father once told me that when his old professor, Harnack, met Chamberlain in Berlin, he praised parts of The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. Indeed, like most educated Germans of those pre-war years, he kept returning to it, rather as we all read and discussed Spengler after the war. ‘But’, said Harnack, ‘you really are possessed by an anti-Jewish demon, which dulls your vision and disfigures your excellent book with a stain.’ What troubled Harnack’s civilized liberal Protestant mind was that hatred, not merely of the Jew, but hatred generally, was deemed by Chamberlain to be necessary for personal and national regeneration.
Well – I’ve said enough about him to show why Chamberlain was a hero to Wolf and friends. Although Winnie, when she married Fidi, adopted his hatred of Eva, she always got along well with ‘the old gentleman’ as she called him – a rare instance of her using an English phrase. (As a mark of their German patriotism these two English persons living under the same roof spoke German to one another always. Chamberlain did not even get German – Bavarian – citizenship until halfway through the first World War. I heard, incidentally, that after the Second War Winnie reverted to British citizenship. I don’t know if it is true.)*
Chamberlain, quite as much as Richard Wagner, was a ‘draw’ for National Socialists. And so it was, on that day in 1923, when I was still a student working on my philosophical doctorate and doing part-time work, when they were short-staffed, as a waiter at the dear old Golden Anchor Hotel. (In later days it was considered quite normal for students of our social class to make a little extra holiday money by working as waiters, porters and so forth. We had no money – quite literally no money – after the war, but it was certainly a torment to my parents to see me ‘lowering’ myself doing such work.)
If you had told me in 1923 during the ‘German Day’ in Bayreuth that the National Socialists would achieve absolute power within a decade or that H would become the Chancellor of Germany I should have dismissed you as a crank. The more völkisch among us enjoyed these ‘German Days’, which were occasions for demonstrations of national unity. Girls and boys in Bavarian National Costume paraded: there was some folk dancing, in some towns there was a church service. In Bayreuth I remember the bells of the Spitalskirche at the far end of the market tolled out in memory of our war dead. For conservative-minded people such as my parents there must have been a great tug of loyalty there. The anniversary of the Armistice was as solemn a day for my father as was Reformation Day in our church calendar. My eldest brother, several cousins, and my mother’s younger brother had all been killed in the war.
‘Don’t you see,’ my father said, when I made some remark at the time, tolerant of the völkisch viewpoint, ‘those people are hijacking the decent patriotic feelings and fears which we all feel.’
‘If we all feel them, what’s wrong with wanting to do something?’
My father shrugged. ‘It was very wrong of P———’ – he named the Pastor of the Spitalskirche – ‘to let his church be used in that way.’
‘They do say,’ said my mother, ‘that if only Ludendorff became Chancellor we’d get the Rhinelands back.’
‘Yes, yes, and solve unemployment at a stroke and reduce inflation and defeat Communism overnight. It’s all so easy if you view the world in their baby terms,’ said my father.
‘They say this young H is quite a firebrand,’ my mother had observed, ‘just an ordinary common soldier, but with quite a gift of the gab.’ She gave a nervous little laugh, adding that she wouldn’t mind going along to the Riding Hall tonight to hear him.
The handsome old indoor riding school, built in the eighteenth century by the Margrave who also built our old opera house and the Eremitage and who laid out the Hofgarten, had been hired for the evening. My mother’s sprightly claim that she’d’ve liked to hear the speaker was met by a glare from Vati. The idea had not been seriously entertained. She never went anywhere without him and little, apart from very occasional dinner invitations from friends or concerts of the classical repertoire, drew them away of an evening from their own hearth, their own music stands, their own books and comforting pots of ingeniously concocted beverages.
‘He’ll turn out to be a fly-by-night,’ was my father’s verdict on the speaker.
I did not go to the Riding Hall to hear H speak. To judge from the reports in the Oberfränkische Zeitung it was a piece of fairly standard patriotic stuff: the Reds who had dragged our country down for the last four years should go and live in Moscow with their comrades; France should be made to give
back the land it stole from us after the iniquitous peace treaty. What Germany needs is not ten million academics or ten million diplomats but ten million soldiers.
It was after this speech that H walked the few hundred yards to the Anchor and a small reception was held. I handed round trays of refreshments and so it was that I witnessed the first meeting between Winnie and Wolf. The reception was hosted by the Bechsteins and I suppose there were forty or fifty people in the Anchor’s small panelled dining room.
H – remember, I had not heard his speech – made very little impression upon me at all. He had on a navy-blue serge coat whose lapels were shiny with wear, and a plain dark-blue tie. It would not have been surprising to be told that rather than being the guest of honour he was Frau Bechstein’s chauffeur. There is a little alcove in the dining room and he stood there nervously twiddling a glass of very good Moselle, the best in the hotel’s cellar. I hovered nearby with a bottle and although he had barely consumed anything I asked him if he would like me to fill up his glass.
‘No, no.’ He was perspiring heavily.
I was reasonably handsome. Even if you would not agree with this verdict, I was still of an age when the bloom of youth was upon me and felt the eyes of others upon me, especially in crowded rooms such as this. I had already received the distinct impression that Frau Bechstein, with her swept-back blonde hair, her very moist skin, her expensive scent and her fur wrap, was a femme fatale who wanted to seduce a waiter. Now I felt those night-sky eyes of H’s upon me. He was staring as if he wished to bend me to his will: at the same time there was something doglike, beseeching, about his expression. ‘Could you … I do not know if there is the possibility…’
‘What can I get you, sir?’ I tried to keep any suggestion of flirtation from my voice by now taking in the body odour and, what I have always found a particular turn-off, the moist sweat on his upper lip, so that the small moustache and the skin on either side of it shone wetly. What was he going to ask me?
‘Could you bring me, please –’
‘Anything for sir.’
He whispered – spoke so quietly that he in effect mouthed the words ‘sugar lump’ and pointed a plump index finger towards his hock glass. It was the awkwardness of a child unable to digest any of the food or drink on offer at a party for grown-ups.
When I returned with the sugar bowl and the silver tongs, he did not use the instruments provided but plunged his hand into the bowl. By that time Frau Bechstein was approaching. Her expression of disapproval, the raising of her painted pinkish-orange eyebrows, first at the sugar tongs, then at myself, seemed to imply that he had only performed his act of clumsiness at my suggestion. ‘May I introduce Frau Wagner?’
Winnie was twenty-seven and she bounded up with tremendous heartiness, a schoolgirl being presented with a trophy for basketball. Her clear complexion, as natural as Frau Bechstein’s was oiled and creamed and pampered, flushed an excited scarlet as her hero clicked his heels together and bowed to touch the back of her hand with his moustache.
As if in slow motion, I saw it all happening: it was indeed as if I saw it slightly before it happened, the glass flying, the Moselle splashing, the bowl, the tongs. The sugar lumps raining like hail.
‘Oh my goodness!’ This from Frau Bechstein.
‘I will fetch a cloth.’ This from me.
By the time I had returned, very quickly since the glazed door into the kitchen was only a few feet away behind a screen, the three of them were in what I came to see as highly characteristic poses. Frau Bechstein was furious and had made matters worse by calling out to another of the waiters and trying to dab herself with a napkin, every step she took crunching sugar into the carpet.
Winnie was roaring with laughter, laughter which put the guest of honour at his ease.
First meetings are definitive. In the unimportant encounters of life this might not be so, since to mere acquaintances we give nothing away. The first few moments of an encounter with a person who will make a difference in our life is quite otherwise. A part of ourselves knows, not merely that we stand on the threshold of a love affair, an important friendship, a life-changing meeting of minds, but also the very terms on which all future encounters are to be conducted.
Wolf’s abject awkwardness when I had first set eyes upon him in the panelled alcove no doubt owed something to that chemical depletion which overpowers great performers when they come off stage. I have seen Friedrich Schorr, Lauritz Melchior, Lotte Lehmann or Heinrich Tessmer similarly wilt when, having thrown their all into the previous two or three hours of music, they had, for a while, nothing inside them. They become like empty bags from which all content has been removed. By all accounts, H’s speech that night in the Riding Hall was not one of his truly legendary displays of emotive oratory. Nevertheless, I do not believe that he ever spoke in public without some deep expenditure of emotional and psychological energy. Afterwards, though centre of attention and hero of the hour, and clucked over by the overbearing Frau Bechstein as her pet, her creation almost, he must have felt emptiness, even desolation. Also (the sugar lump) perhaps the body craved the lost energy which only a boost of sugar can provide. Having seen the gloomy, shy figure in the panelled alcove, and not witnessed the public spectacle of an hour previous, I had not taken in, as I would do in retrospect, the significance of these things.
Much as Winnie admired her Wolf from a public and political viewpoint and proud as she is to this day (as far as I know) to be the ‘only Nazi in Germany’, the nature of their strange relationship was not to be seen in terms of H’s public life. During the sugar drama there was a look in his upturned sweaty face which was not that of one grown-up being introduced for the first time to another. He was in his early thirties, but what I saw, in the combination of expectancy and relief in his smile, was a child who had been anxiously waiting at the school gate for its mother to arrive. Finally, after a few minutes of agonizing delay in which the worst of fears had been making their nightmare march through his brain, he sees her – Mummy! That was what I saw. As well as seeing a boy of about eleven in the soldier’s face, I also saw a countryman. I very seldom saw this in H when he became the best-known face in the world; in the domestic setting, however, one was conscious of it all the time. He was the young subaltern returning to his village on leave; even, a Brueghelesque figure who had come back to the house for an hour before resuming mowing or cutting in the fields. His complexion, no longer crimson with embarrassment, had resumed its bucolic appley pink.
‘And, please,’ said Winnie, who had ‘taken charge’ of the conversation as she often did, ‘you [thou] must call me Winnie – please, please. And don’t stand on ceremony.’
‘Thou art too kind.’*
‘And shall I call thee – ?’
‘Wolf!’
‘I shall – Wolf it is. Wolf, thou must come back to Wahnfried’ – this was said after the final brushings-down, the expressions of horror by Frau Bechstein when I was foolish enough to attempt to wipe away the sugar with a wet cloth.
‘You fool! Do you want to cover us all in treacle…’
‘Come back now for a late supper.’
‘That is not possible,’ said Frau Bechstein. ‘We have important business here – and the crowds outside are not going to allow our most honoured speaker to retire without an encore.’
‘Then breakfast tomorrow,’ Winnie insisted.
Once again, what one saw in his delighted face was a child who suddenly discovered that he was wanted.
Shortly after this hastily concluded agreement, H was swept up by Frau Bechstein. The atmosphere of the dining room, which I dutifully circulated in my capacity as a waiter, was less that of a fanatical political rally than of a church social. One overheard phrases such as ‘It all went really well…’
‘Weren’t the costumes wonderful? I thought the young girls dressed as…’
‘I met young Thomas Koseleger on the corner of Ludwigstrasse and said that’s a fine warrior you are, and he re
plied…’
‘I thought the flowers in the Spitalskirche were…’
‘I’m not just any warrior, Frau ———, I’m Wallenstein!’
‘I see Frau Wagner put in an appearance…’
‘The young Frau Wagner … She managed to speak to…’
‘Did you see the way she simply rushed up to him?’
‘He’s going out on to the front steps now to address the crowds…’
I have emphasized more than once that the Wolf we all came to know at Wahnfried was a private family person. Indeed, when I have meditated upon it I have sometimes wondered whether Winnie offered Wolf something he never had anywhere else: a family life where his sad past, his struggles, and his political world did not intrude. Complicated as Winnie’s relationship with Fidi may have been, it was always able to be maintained with a level of normal good humour or normal bad temper as normal family life might be. Strange as it must have seemed to many and distressing as she found his forays in the direction of boys, the central fact of their lives together was that they were parents; in their fashion they were both extremely good and affectionate parents, and it was into this well of parental love that Uncle Wolf could dip his needy bucket.