by A. N. Wilson
If Stresemann had lived … But he died before the plebiscite was counted. If the economy had somehow picked up … But the world-wide depression that year culminated in the Wall Street Crash and by the end of the year there were three million German men unemployed. The next year there was yet another general election. The Nazis had a mere handful of seats in the Reichstag. In the two years since the previous election they became the second largest party in the Reich. On 13 October 1930, 107 Nazi deputies took their seats in the Reichstag, each wearing a brown shirt and shouting out the surname of Uncle Wolf as they answered the roll-call.
My brother Heinrich, who in early middle age had gone back to university to prepare for life as a pastor after all, was in Berlin at the time and wrote to us,
At the very moment those uniformed criminals were taking their seats in the Reichstag, their comrades, disguised in civilian mufti, were rampaging in the streets of Berlin. I was having coffee in K’damm. They strode past the window laughing raucously. They peered at us through the window. One had the unpleasant sensation of being encaged in some surreal zoo, for the diversion of sadistic apes, as though the normal position of the zoo were reversed and it was humanity locked up for the amusement of lesser primates. Were they going to enter the premises? Everyone in the café visibly hoped not. But we were lucky. The oafs strode on. It was evident from what happened at the next street corner what they had been looking for. They had been checking the name over the door and making sure we were an ‘Aryan’ establishment. (My God, this lunacy!) The next café along was not so lucky. The tykes picked up one of the chairs arranged at a table on the pavement outside and casually used it to smash the large plate-glass window. No one stopped them. They laughed and moved on to a large tailoring store – Schneider’s – a few doors down. That too had its windows smashed.’
Tannhäuser
‘Caro mio, of course we want you to do fucking Tannhäuser! … Of course … of course.’ Siegfried was chirruping abruptly into the telephone, an angry blackbird who had just watched a starling swoop upon a worm. He held the speaking tube to his mouth with one hand and in the other, which held the instrument itself, there also smouldered a cigarette. Histrionically, he raised his eyes to the ceiling and moved the listening device away from his ear, so that the anxious voice of Toscanini, crackling down the wire from Berlin, could be distinctly heard agonizing about the suggestion that he should conduct Wagner’s early erotic psychodrama.
‘Darling,’ shouted Fidi back, ‘le tout Berlin, everyone, my dear, said your Tannhäuser was a sensation … Why else should we be begging on our knees before you.’
The very mention of being on his knees before a man made Siegfried smirk at me, as though I could not even hear the phrase without mentally chewing off flybuttons.
‘Dear heart – between you and me – fuck Muck! I know … I know … Caro, he is doing Götterdämmerung, he does it brilliantly – well, up to a point!’ More conspiratorial grins at me. ‘But … no, honey, that would be tiresome of you. Truly. Not at this stage…’
More crackling down the line.
‘If I wanted to get heavy, caro, I should say it was because you were already under contract to conduct Tannhäuser.’
There was a weighty pause. Then he said, ‘No, dear. You signed. Your agent signed, you signed, what the fuck difference does that make? But it isn’t just that, you know it isn’t … It’s because we love you … You can have any views you like about his Götterdämmerung and he can … Exactly, my dear. So the rehearsals start in June … wait a moment…’ With sharp, imperious gestures he pointed at me, then at the surface of his desk. I knew him to mean that he wanted his large 1930 desk diary.
He flicked the pages towards the summer. His fingers turned rapidly, reaching September, October. He was turning to dates, little did he know, when he would no longer be alive, virgin soil, Fidi-dead days; post-Siegfried Bayreuth.
‘We said 26 June? Still perfetto! Caro mio, sono in cielo! Sì, sì, e siamo tutti cosi felice, sì, sì, caro. Mia madre anche, sì. Naturalmente … E Winnie anche, sì, sì … At a what? A rally, my dear…’ He shrieked with laughter. ‘She does love them, bless her. A Parteitag sets her up a treat … Sì, nostrano Duce, fatto in casa, sì, sì!… Non te la prendere, tutto è sistimarà. Ciao!’
‘So, Toscanini…’ I asked.
‘Yes, he’ll do the Tannhäuser. He knew he would. I knew he would, but he has to go through this stupid bloody charade of thinking bloody Muck wants to conduct it. Well, bloody Muck can want.’ He threw his cigarette stub on the floor, whence I retrieved it, and stared into the middle distance.
Karl Muck, rumoured by some to be Richard Wagner’s natural son, had a deep antipathy towards Siegfried, which was heartily reciprocated. He was a good conductor, but ‘more trouble than he was worth’, making endless mischief behind Fidi’s back. Bayreuth was a hive of gossip, as you will already have gathered, and there were those who believed that Siegfried could not possibly have sired any of the four increasingly disorderly children. Some believed that Muck was the father of at least some of them.
As a would-be philosopher, endlessly trying to debunk my brother’s would-be gruel-and-water Protestant theology, I would ask myself how he could say he believed things which serious reflection must tell him were untrue. He would sometimes come up with some spurious stuff about behaving as if you believed (say, in the Risen Lord, and this ‘making’ it true). This covered the mysterious area of behaving as if you believed, and making it true, while not with your mind believing. In matters of the heart, it is also possible for the corollary or opposite to take place. That is to say there are things you believe while not believing. In the former case the brain is trying to force the gut and in the latter it is the other way round. If asked to vote on the matter of was Winnie promiscuously unfaithful to Fidi, I’d have voted no, but with my gut I believed that she was wild and, even if she did not actually break her marriage vows, she wanted to.
This made loving her all the more complicated and painful. I was naive, unimaginably so, it now seems to me. My very inexperience and the romantic haze in which I had chosen to paint my crush on Winnie – a haze which conveniently disguised from myself my own shyness and awkwardness about sex – made it impossible to make a pass at her. Retrospect tells me that she would have been up for it.
Sometimes when these thoughts occur to me I say to myself, ‘Everything would have been different if I’d been to bed with her.’ But what does ‘everything’ mean in this context? That she would have married me? Scarcely. That I would have been different and absorbed in its totality her fatal political blindness? Or that she would have come to know my parents and my brother, and to have her doubts about Wolf? Doubts were not in her nature.
As with all other aspects of their matrimonial arrangements, it was impossible to reach a certainty of view about Siegfried’s attitude to the passionate friendship between his wife and the rising political star. I never felt it was pure canniness which, in the last five years or so of his life, caused Siegfried to give H a wide berth. Winnie would always say, ‘Fidi can’t be seen to admire Wolf too much – it would upset our sponsors.’ Or, ‘For Fidi the Festival must come first. You know how stuffy people are – he can’t espouse the Cause as openly as I do, but of course, he loves Wolf as much as I do.’
This was manifestly not the case. And with the hindsight of a grown-up perspective I do not see how Winnie’s obsession with Wolf could have failed to be annoying, quite apart from any political or public embarrassment it would cause him. I remember an occasion, not so long before Fidi died, of her driving them both down to Munich. She arranged to meet Wolf in a restaurant for luncheon, and Fidi – ‘Wasn’t it sweet of him? He said, “I know you two want to be together – I’ll have lunch on my own”.’ H had apparently expressed admiration for Fidi’s extreme unselfishness about this, but the husband must have felt a bit snubbed?
Certainly, Fidi’s way of discussing the Leader was less reverential tha
n his wife’s: ‘Poor Win thinks he’ll be our Mussolini. She forgets what a tremendously respectable country we are. As I know to my cost. Il Duce can take his trousers down on a daily basis and screw every secretary, film star and tarty little chorus girl in Rome, my dear. Insofar as the rumours of it all seep out, it just increases his popularity with the Eyeties. But here! You only have to see them sitting in their rows in church, the men in their stiff collars, the sole stiff thing about them, if you ask me; their plain, warty, well-scrubbed wives – I’m not talking about your father’s church, my dear.’
‘Of course not.’
‘But you know what I mean – too respectable to have sexual feelings. God, what must they feel when they come to Tannhäuser?’
‘They don’t.’
‘Don’t say that. I’ve just spent a bloody fortune getting Toscanini to come and conduct it. Some Germans love Tannhäuser – presumably they heave a sigh of relief when he escapes Venusberg and then…’
‘The strange thing about the opera is that you could read it as a story precisely as simply as that. He escapes the goddess and he goes in pursuit of the pure Elisabeth…’
‘Nothing is simple about my father’s work, dear, surely you have realized that by now. You know he wanted to call the opera Venusberg – the Mons Veneris! He might as well have just called it Cunt and had done with it. That’s what it’s about. Men’s obsession with cunt, their inability to get away from it, the fact that they will do anything for it, even if it risks damnation – especially if it does. Makes it more exciting for them. Anyway, that’s not a part of the body that Miss Wolfie interests herself in very much.’ He allowed this morsel to drop into the air and watched it swirl like the smoke of his cigarette into silence.
Like many men who prefer their own sex, Fidi spoke habitually as if any male named in the conversation must, upon further thought or investigation into his character, turn out to be ‘in the regiment’, as he sometimes put it. At this date my own agonies about whether I qualified for a commission, or whether I could find happiness with a woman, my general muddle about sex and my feeling, on occasion, overwhelmed by directionless desire, were all so great that I had very confused ideas about grown-ups. Uncle Wolf was surely not in the regiment? I think I believed in the Proustian idea that regimental status could only be achieved by the effeminate, and that Wolf’s soldierly bearing, robust language and rasping baritone surely suggested another area of preference altogether.
But this was not, evidently, Fidi’s line of suggestion, since he airily continued, ‘Of course, half the people in his movement are fucking pansies, my dear, that’s as clear as daylight. They love marching around in their uniforms, with the prospect of a good bit of sadomasochism thrown in. Did you ever meet that Captain Röhm creature? My darling! Half its nose shot off, and about four feet tall and positively oozing queer love, oozing it, for the Leader. Winnie introduced us at Munich once. She said he was a “fine fellow”. Bless Winnie. Do you think she notices anything, anything at all? Is that what she has in common with Wolf, not noticing? I’m sure Wolf hasn’t spotted that the little Captain has the hots for him. Probably just thinks of him as a trusty little patriot who can be relied upon to stir up street fights, beat up a few yids … you know, my dear … But no! That isn’t where Wolf’s area of interest lies. If, my dear, the rumours … Of course, I know how terribly cruel rumours are, because they nearly always turn out to be true.’
He paused. He wanted, perhaps needed, the satisfaction of my actually asking, rather than simply allowing him to recite all the goodies uninvited. ‘What are the rumours … the rumours about … Wolf?’
‘Well, my dear’ – in the tone of ‘I thought you would never ask’ – ‘you know that they are in the money now – the Party? Rolling. Wish some of it would come our fucking way. Helene [Bechstein] has put them in the way of meeting some real money. You know, until very lately, he [Wolf, that is] was living in a little bedsit – no more than he was used to when he dossed down with the tramps in Vienna after the war. But it’s all very different now. Not only has he bought the Barlow Palace for his Party headquarters, but he has also set himself up very nicely in a flat in Prinzregentenplatz. Huge place, nine vast rooms. Servants. Everything. Meanwhile his sister Angela – did you ever meet her? My dear, the complete peasant, you never met anything like it in your life – is down in the Berghof, his little mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, keeping house there. So who do you think is living with him in the flat? Angela’s daughter, Geli. A medical student. The doctor can see you now.’
‘Isn’t it perfectly normal for a niece to live with her uncle?’
‘I don’t think normal is quite the word we’d use … I don’t think the Faithful at all those rallies Winnie loves to attend would quite think it was normal, what young Geli gives Uncle for breakfast – to drink and to eat, my dear.’
I had never in my life heard of the practice to which Fidi referred, and it was necessary for him to spell out in more graphic detail than I need do on the page what was rumoured to go on between uncle and niece. ‘You’ve surely heard of Golden Showers?’ he asked me sharply. I suddenly felt that, as well as an encyclopaedic knowledge of Wagner’s operas, part of my job requirement should have been a knowledge of the perversions of the human heart. ‘Greek, isn’t it? Philia, something you love, kopros, poo-poo. You know how fussy he is about what he eats and drinks. Yes, before she goes off to the hospital in the morning to cut up cadavers, young Geli has to give Uncle his little yellow face bath and feed him up with Number Twos. Or … so they say.’
I reeled. I literally felt the room swaying. Never in my life had I heard anything so disgusting. In fact, it was impossible for me to believe that I had actually heard these words spoken. Outside the window, in the bare twiggy branches of the trees, sparrows and blackbirds pursued their innocent lives. I could see the profile of the bust of King Ludwig, from whose nose drips of rainwater still clung from a short downpour that had fallen on the town some hours before.
Of course, when men are famous, rumours circulate about their erotic preferences and capacities which have no necessary relationship with the truth. Even at my immature stage of development I knew that. I knew in that moment that Siegfried Wagner had actually come to hate Wolf, and his association with his wife; and this hatred fed his desire to believe the rumours about the seedy private life. But it was surely revelatory that the rumours circulating Wolf and his innermost circle were so very unwholesome? His own mysterious attitude to sex, which bursts out on occasion from the pages of Mein Kampf, revealing an obsessive fear of syphilis, lends some plausibility to the idea that he preferred something a little different.
‘Anyway,’ I said, breathing deeply and looking at the garden, ‘it is very good news that Toscanini is to conduct Tannhäuser this summer.’
‘I must tell Mummy,’ said Fidi. ‘She’ll be thrilled.’
The pale old head of Mummy was not, perhaps, beyond pleasing, but it was hard to know what it contained. So short were they of ready cash in that year that they allowed an American woman, a journalist, to sit up in Cosima’s room for day upon day in exchange for 1,000 US dollars. Cash. Fidi and Eva fell upon the notes like carrion crows devouring the stomach of a dead weasel in the forest. Ten dollars in those inflationary days could keep you going for three weeks in Germany. On the streets of Bayreuth veteran soldiers, some with their medals pinned to their tattered chests, were begging for food.
Above, lit only by the winter daylight which cast its elfish silver glow from the back garden, Cosima reclined on her sofa. Her large nose already had the sharpness of death upon it. Her white hair, soft and beautiful, reposed against a white lace pillow. Her life music was playing inside her skull, sometimes in snatches, sometimes in extended passages, for the last time. The large warty face of her father sometimes leaned over her and the incomparable skill of his fingers on the piano made all other playing of that instrument seem not merely less good but a different order of things.
> When Liszt played, the music came forth as if by nature, like the purling of a waterfall. You never heard him striving for effects. He had bestridden the two worlds – bodily lust and spiritual hunger. Cosima’s childhood had been defined by her father’s absences, the public’s demand to hear him play and his desire to inhabit the magical kingdom of Venusberg. He had married none of them, his clerical status giving him the excuse to behave as perhaps all men wished to behave, pollinating one follower and then the next.
Cosima, a love child and the child of music, was left in Paris with her mother and her grandmother, while Liszt went off to another mistress and another musical assignment in Weimar.
Her century, the nineteenth century, had been posited on the notion that these feelings, the feelings which dictated her father’s entire life, were unmentionable, shameful, perhaps non-existent. That was one of the myths by which the middle class was sustained. Home and hearth, a bürgerliche Madonna with her well-brushed children in their velvet frocks and lace collars. Yet music had given away the secret, hadn’t it? Her father’s haunting Hungarian strains told of the passion, but only in hints. It was Richard Wagner who let the cat out of the bag altogether: Was that why bourgeois audiences always loved Tannhäuser? And why he wished so earnestly that he could have revised it and made it into a fully fledged music drama like his later work, rather than leaving it to retain, as it did, the elements of the old-fashioned opera with ‘numbers’?
For what was it other than the simple difference between the world seen through the eyes of one in the thrall of sexual passion, and the world seen through the eyes of one liberated, if to lose desire is indeed a liberation? We think we are happy in the world of the bourgeois song contest and of the domestic, religious, sexless Elisabeth, who offers us security and warmth and pure love; yet a madder music draws us.