Winnie and Wolf

by A. N. Wilson

  But now we were all edging forward in a crowd into the hall of the hotel, past the reception desk and towards the glass front door. H was presumably ahead of us, since at a certain point we could hear a roar from the crowd.

  It was then that one of Frau Bechstein’s entourage, a cadaverous and instantly dislikeable young man with a heavy club-foot, approached me, with dear old Herr Graf, the proprietor of the Anchor. ‘N———,’ said my boss, ‘this is Herr Gobelin from Berlin. He thinks that our speaker will not be audible from the front steps.’

  ‘There is a big crowd out there,’ said the thin man. ‘Only the first few dozen will be able to see. We shall not have any difficulty in making our speaker heard, I assure you, Herr Graf.’

  It was contrived that H should address the crowd below from the central bedroom on the upstairs landing, which had a window opening directly onto the Market Square. Herr Graf was uneasy with the immediate entourage, especially with the thin gentleman from Berlin, who resembled Nosferatu. In spite of his limp, perhaps because of it, he gave off an air of physical as well as of psychological power. He limped with purpose, even aggression, and one felt that all his energies were devoted, like some arcane practitioner of the dark arts, towards the summoning up of power for its own sake.

  A small group of us, when the arrangement had been made, conducted H, his friend from Berlin, Frau Bechstein and a number of strange, thuggish individuals who I did not believe came from our town.

  ‘Quick, quick!’ said the thin limping young gentleman from Berlin as I fumbled with keys.

  ‘I am doing my best, Herr Gobelin.’

  ‘It is Goebbels,’ he said, in a harsh, precise voice. ‘My name is Goebbels.’ He had moved forward and seized H fiercely by the elbow.

  I went to the window to open it wide and H was on the verge of rushing forward to satisfy his public.

  ‘No, no,’ said Goebbels. ‘You must wait. Create a sense of expectancy.’ It was as if, from the background of the large white bedroom, the little limping dwarf knew how to control the crowd below, rather as our choirmaster could, while sitting in the director’s chair in the body of the Festival Theatre, control the volume of the swelling choruses.

  The waiting did indeed create an effect. The first few rows of people in the cold square below had seen their hero. Then he had been withdrawn from them. There were murmurings. Then they began to call out their hero’s name. Inside the bedroom, like a greyhound anxious to leave its traps and begin to race, he was transformed from the person I had served with wine and sugar into something different, a performer who needed his audience.

  Only when the crowds actually began to shout did the Nosferatu figure himself lean out of the window and call with a cold sneer, ‘Who do you want to hear?’

  They shouted back their hero’s name.

  ‘Who was that?’

  Again and again they called.

  ‘Now!’ said Goebbels. ‘We’ve got them eager. Now you can go to them.’

  Standing behind H in the bedroom, we could see only his back, his bottom and the lower half of his blue-serge legs as he leaned right out of the window and addressed the townspeople. ‘A triumphant day…’ the harsh bass-baritone resonated. He was not making a speech, as such, merely acknowledging the emotion of the people before him.

  ‘A German Day for the German people!’ Roars from below. ‘A proud people … A people who have had enough of being lied to…’ Roar. ‘Had enough of being deceived…’ Roar. ‘Had enough of being bled to death by international finance.’

  With each phrase proceeding from the orator’s mouth, a phrase which moved the crowd below to an ever-greater sense of patriotism, his body gave a jerk, and the buttocks let out the quickfire whumps and cracks that accompanied the volleys firing from the mouth, and the room gradually filled with a gaseous sulphur odour. The acoustics of the situation was such that one heard only one word in twenty, whereas each rectal contraction and thunderclap, from where we stood behind him in the room, was shamelessly audible. Thus came about the surreal impression given by the buttocks, and the invisible torso, over which white lace curtains were draped, that the crowd were expressing their congratulatory applause for the shot and shell erupting into the bedroom at a truly heroic level of volume and smell rather than for the uplift of his spoken words.

  ‘November crimin – pfff –’

  Cheers.

  ‘Pff – pff – raspberry roar – pff –’

  Yet greater cheers.

  ‘And I say this with my – pfft – pff – TRUMPET BLAST…’

  ‘Germany will – pfff – and we will – PFFF –’

  At this last Vesuvius of an outburst the crowd had begun to sing ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles’.

  The visit to Wahnfried next day has passed into legend, but since I was not present it does not seem right to comment on the plausibility or otherwise of the stories. Some say that, upon meeting the pasty old Englishman with his prison pallor, H fell to his knees. Others deny this, while admitting that Chamberlain was chair- or bed-bound, and that some degree of stooping was unavoidable on the part of any visitor to the writer at this date.

  What is on record is the letter Chamberlain wrote after the younger man’s departure:

  It has been occupying my thoughts why it should have been you in particular – you who have such an unusual capacity for awakening people from Sleep and from the mundane – should have given me a longer and more refreshing sleep than any I have experienced since that fateful day in August 1914 when I was struck down by this insidious illness. Now I believe I can understand that it is precisely this which characterizes you and defines your very being: the true Awakener is at the same time the bestower of Peace.

  You had been described to me as a fanatic but you are not one at all, in fact, you are the complete opposite of a fanatic. Indeed, I would describe you as the polar opposite of a politician, for with you all parties disappear consumed in the heat of your love for the Fatherland.

  It was, I think, bad luck that our great Bismarck became so involved in a political life – may you remain spared this fate.

  You have immense achievements ahead of you, but for all your strength of will-power I do not regard you as a violent man. The fact that you brought me such peace is very largely owing to your eyes and your hand-gestures. Your eye actually works like a hand – it grips and holds a person. And you have the singular gift of being able to focus your words on one particular listener at any given moment. As for your hands, they are so expressive in their movements that they rival only your eyes. Such a man brings Peace to a poor tormented spirit.

  My faith in Germanness has never wavered. But that Germany should, at the hour of its greatest need, have given birth to you is proof of its vitality. I was able to sleep without a cure. May God protect you!

  That one of the most popular ‘thinkers’ of the day should have responded in such a manner was of immense importance to the campaign managers who saw H’s oratorical skills as their greatest asset.

  In the first years in which I came to work in the Wagner household, as I have indicated, the public aspects of Wolf’s life were discussed in his absence, but he presented himself during his visits as a family friend, a music lover, a playful uncle. Thus, when I first went to work for Siegfried in 1924, ‘Wolf’, as they always referred to him, was in Landberg Prison for his pivotal role in the failed Munich putsch of the previous November. This was when General Ludendorff, Wolf and others had announced to a pre-warned crowd of supporters in the Hofbräuhaus in Munich that they had taken over the government and were to march on Berlin. Siegfried was in Munich, poised to conduct a celebratory concert when their friends seized power. Siegfried and Winnie had watched the counter-revolution from their window overlooking Maximilienstrasse in Munich – they had seen the swastika flags hung from windows, heard the outbreak of gunshot as the authorized government led by Gustav Ritter von Kahr defeated the putschists. When their friend was imprisoned in Landberg, Winnie
had done her best to keep him supplied with nice food and had sent Hess, to whom H was dictating his memoirs, a ream of paper, or so she claimed.

  I know how important all this was to Winnie because I first worked as her husband’s assistant while they were away fund-raising in the United States. It was my task to prevent the unanswered correspondence becoming too mountainous either in his office at home or in the office at the Festival Theatre. But as well as receiving incoming letters it was also my task to send out boxes of chocolate (difficult enough to come by), sketch pads, pencils and paints to their friend in prison.

  During this period, whenever the Wagners were present at their house in Bayreuth they would discuss the political situation in Germany at large. We all did, all the time, without being able to stop ourselves. It is one of the great differences between my life now and then. Today it is not worth discussing the situation in our country. Apart from the fact that it would be dangerous to do so, and that there is no one left in my life with whom I might have such a discussion, there is also the fact that for East Germans today there is nothing to discuss. I see no way out of our situation. We live in a Russian colony and will never get out. Communism will last for ever – what is there to destroy it?

  In my early twenties every day was a state of flux – a new government, a new currency, a new anything was possible. It became impossible not to discuss every failure on behalf of our elected democratic representatives to form a lasting administration. Would the Communists take over and enslave us as the Russians had been enslaved? That was how we viewed things then. Or would we be saved by our Swan Knight from the Austro-Czech border, drive the French from the Rhineland and begin at last to be a proud, peaceful etc. etc? You couldn’t not speak about it. Obsessively. All the time.

  But when Uncle Wolf was on a visit this was not the case. Then, the children were in a state of high excitement knowing that here was a grown-up who was prepared to focus upon them his undivided attention. Then, his concentration upon physical games, romps, Grimm’s fairy tales, puppet shows, jokes and teases was absolute. I think I can say I never knew a man with a more natural empathy with children. When I think of my own childhood and that of my brothers, it was a very different story. How much at the time would we have valued an Uncle Wolf. My parents’ idea of ‘fun’ was musical practice. I do not recollect either of them larking about. Anything such as the visit of other children or of relatives who might display slightly more willingness than my parents to let their hair down would be deemed, especially by my mother, in danger of getting us, Ernst, Heinrich and me, ‘overexcited’.

  I am speaking of Wolf’s visits alone to the Wagner household. There were several occasions, however, when he visited not the Villa Wahnfried but the Chamberlains’ house – more or less next door in Franz Liszt Street. We did not always witness these visits, Eva by then getting on poorly with Fidi and Winnie, and Mr Chamberlain himself being immobile and all but incapable of speech. The strange old half-corpse was still capable of writing, and continued to pen essays and articles about the vultures of revolution, the Jews, inspiring the breakdown of government in Weimar.

  ‘My dears, the creatures you see going in and out to visit Mister C,’ Fidi would say, pursing his lips with malicious amusement. ‘That horrid little Dinter person.’

  The Wagners had one of Arthur Dinter’s best-sellers lying around, and I had heard one or other of them praising it – The Sin Against the Blood, the story of a young scientist married first to the daughter of a Jewish financier and then, when he realizes his mistake, to a nice German girl. Then, horror of horrors, she gives birth to a baby with Jewish features. The explanation was not that she had double-crossed her German husband. Rather, in her youth she had been seduced by a Jewish army officer. This one case of ‘crossing’ the races had been enough to drive out the ‘good’ German blood. We had all been sophisticated enough to laugh at the sheer scientific nonsense of Dinter’s novel but it had impressed Fidi. I once heard him speaking with admiration of Dinter – until, that is, this purveyor of nonsense began to call on the Chamberlains.

  Sometimes a whole entourage would turn up to pay their respects and it was not long before the end that Julius Streicher and Josef Goebbels – and Wolf of course – came for one last visit. By then the mumbling, speechless philosopher could do no more than stretch forth mottled hands from the bed and clutch at Dr Nosferatu’s hand. He had wept, he had dribbled.

  ‘I suppose you could say it is kind of them to have come,’ said Fidi when he heard about it. He was blind to the ingenuity with which these people could turn anything to their use.

  After Chamberlain eventually died, in January 1927, it was natural that his mother-in-law should have been consulted about the funeral arrangements. ‘It will be quiet,’ she had murmured. He was to be buried in the frosty earth up in the largest town cemetery.

  Eva was proud to receive notification that royalty, albeit exiled Prussian royalty, would be attending – the exiled Emperor’s son Prince August Wilhelm – and we all knew that local dignitaries would come. The coffin was laid in the hall of Wahnfried for a few days before the funeral. The undertakers arrived about an hour before the ceremony to load the casket onto the hearse, but they were interrupted in their work. Fidi was sitting with his sister Eva when the lugubrious Herr Fischer, the undertaker, tiptoed up, asking if they were ready. Eva, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, was too distraught to be wholly coherent but she appeared to be saying that the undertakers’ men were unnecessary, and that … other arrangements had been put in hand.

  ‘Other arrangements? But darling, I told you, Mr Fischer…’

  ‘Yes, but … Dr Goebbels … so nice … so kind … so infinitely obliging.’

  At this point the front doors of Wahnfried, which had been closed behind Mr Fischer to keep out the wintry cold, were roughly flung open and a group of men, perhaps a dozen, marched in. Four each linked up on either side of the coffin and two others stood guard by the door. They wore brown shirts and armbands of the familiar red, black and white with swastikas. They were young – in their teens – acned and at least a couple looked frightened of the coffin. Upon the barked orders of the man who had opened the door – who was perhaps in his mid twenties – they advanced upon the coffin.

  ‘I say!’ exclaimed Fidi. And he raised a black sleeve in a well-manicured protest. But the boys were carrying out the coffin and, short of creating a ridiculous scene, Fidi could do no more than pick up his tall silk hat, offer an arm to his heavily veiled widowed sister and troop after the cortège. The coffin was placed in a horse-drawn hearse and the Wagner family, accompanied by myself, followed in cars. There was a much bigger crowd than Cosima had expected. (She stayed at home. Public outings were now a thing of the past and in any event it would not have been deemed wise for her to venture out on so very cold a day.)

  The pastor at the church managed to conduct the funeral as a purely religious ceremony, but as soon as the body was conveyed out of the church the Brownshirts, who had assembled in great number in the churchyard, burst into song – first ‘Deutschland, Deutschland’ and then various others of a military flavour quite unsuited to the burial of a bed-bound, pampered old man who had spent his life among books and women. At a certain point H raised his hand and the entire crowd became silent instantaneously as if they were voices on a wireless which he could turn on or off.

  I cannot remember all the words. I remember the intense cold, the thick snow on the ground, the gaping brown earth of the grave almost a desecration of the snow. Into the clear winter air that rasping voice spoke of the sword of Siegfried which would one day smite the staff of Wotan. The great and honoured friend to whom we said farewell at this graveside was not privileged to live to see the day when that sword would one day be raised. But it was on his anvil that the sword had been forged – the flames of his words had heated the anvil. One steady hammer …

  To tell the truth, the metaphors of the tribute were all somewhat muddled. Who was the
Siegfried in this convoluted analogy? H himself presumably. But did this make Chamberlain into the despised dwarf Mime in whose hut the magic sword is forged? Most of the older mourners did not look too troubled by such niceties. The great question for them was how long the speech, or speeches, were going to be. And sure enough there was a speech from the mayor, and a speech by strangely eyebrowed Rudolf Hess. As the coffin was eventually allowed to be lowered into the frozen earth the uniformed attendants, heavily outnumbering the family and ‘civilians’, raised their right arms and called rhythmically, ‘Hail! Victory hail! Victory hail!’ I shivered, and not just with cold, when we returned to the cars.

  * * *

  Siegfried Wagner was born, interrupting the composition of the opera after which he was named, in Tribschen, Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Vierwaldstätt, near Lucerne. He was his mother’s last child. Two – Daniela and Blandine – had been born to her husband, Hans von Bülow. One, as I have mentioned, Isolde, was of questionable parentage. Then Cosima had made open her relationship with Richard Wagner and they had run off together.

  Cosima’s Diaries, more dramatic than any novel, begin in 1869, when she has made the break with her husband and set up a new life with Wagner in Switzerland. She is by turns ecstatic with joy in her new love, melodramatically guilty about her husband and tormented by the necessary separations from her children when they remain with their father. It is a strange fact, but I was the first person, after Richard and Cosima Wagner, to read these diaries. Just as Richard Wagner had to wait for decades before anyone saw a performance of his Ring cycle, so no one has read Cosima’s account of her marriage. I do not even know for certain what has happened to these magnificent diaries, but I feel sure, if they survive in Bayreuth, that one day they will be published and the world will see what an extraordinary bond between two kindred souls this marriage was. When I think of the grumpy silent evenings I have spent in this flat with my wife in the latter stages of our marriage, it is with envy that I recall those rapturous pages in which Cosima describes evening after evening, reading Shakespeare or Goethe or the Greek tragedians, and discussing philosophy, music, politics, religion and the characters of their friends.