by A. N. Wilson
We all – and by we all I mean the household, the servants, the children – watched with incredulity and horror as Winnie allowed herself to become more and more Tietjen’s creature during that year. She was a different character from the rebellious, laughing wife of Siegfried. With Tietjen she was timorous. He often reduced her to tears by the sharpness of his tongue. And his absences in Berlin, welcomed by the rest of us, by none more than the children, caused her anguishes of jealousy, for he had no intention of dropping his mistress there.
Yet if Tietjen was a monster, he was a monster with a purpose, a monster with a passion for Richard Wagner’s music and a desire to rescue Bayreuth from either the disastrous legacies of Cosima (turning the place into a shrine) or the disastrous possibilities of Wolf (turning the place into a platform for National Socialism). All he really cared about, apart from himself and his own advancement, was putting on good opera and in this he helped Winnie to succeed triumphantly. At times when their affair was going painfully, she was crushed by him. But there were other moments when even I, sexually innocent and jealously appalled by this development, could see that Tietjen had supplied more than just sex in her life. The sex had given her self-confidence; and with the self-confidence, she was enabled – forced and cajoled by Tietjen it is true – to establish a new regime at Bayreuth.
First, he made it clear that it was necessary to get Furtwängler and Toscanini to return to the Festival that summer, even though both these prima donnas had said it was impossible to work if the other were present. Like many power-brokers, Tietjen realized that the hatred between the two rivals was a positive asset to the Festival since, after all their huffing and puffing, both Toscanini and ‘Fu’, once persuaded to come, would be determined to outshine the other in the ears of the audiences. Friedelind, who confided in me more and more about her hatred of Tietjen, was confused and upset by the perpetual rowing of the two conductors; confused, too, by the fact that her beloved ‘Papa’ Toscanini should have such deplorable political taste. In May that year, shortly before leaving Italy to come and start rehearsals at Bayreuth, Toscanini had been conducting a concert at Bologna, which he refused to begin with the rousing fascist anthem ‘Giovinezza’ – a much jollier thing, by the way, than our own ‘Horst Wessel Song’, which must have been coming into vogue at about that time. A furious mob stormed the podium and tried to beat him up. He was badly punched in the face. Given his hostility to fascism and the fact that he could have found work anywhere in the world, it was on the face of it surprising that he should have chosen that summer to come back to Bayreuth, and to spend almost every day in the company of Wolf’s most enthusiastic supporter.
The obvious, to those of us who are tormented by the pangs of love, is often the last thing we see. At first I imagined, as Friedelind, Tietjen and others all boasted, that the very simple explanation was Toscanini’s desire to outshine Furtwängler. It was only the tone in which the great Italian said the syllables ‘Winnie, ah, Winnie!’ – we were having a drink together in the bar at the Festival Theatre – that made the full truth dawn. Until then, I may say, I had been hoping against hope that my suspicions about Winnie and Tietjen were unfounded and that they had simply entered into a very close business relationship.
Papa Toscanini was a little drunk. He had arrived at the Festival Theatre in time for a scheduled orchestra rehearsal and had been told by Winnie, halfway through, that he must cut it short. There had been a muddle over the schedules. Furtwängler had also been promised the afternoon for rehearsing.
Clearly, Winnie knew that it was going to be difficult to break this news to the volatile Maestro since she had employed the cowardly expedient of asking me if I’d like to come into the Festival Theatre to hear the last of Toscanini’s rehearsal. It very nearly was the last, too. She sidled through the darkened semicircle of the auditorium into the director’s bench, where sat Tietjen and two others. From this vantage point she called down to the Maestro, during a short pause, that he in fact had only ten more minutes rather than the allotted two hours.
Toscanini turned and peered up towards the director’s bench with astonishment. ‘But we have only just begun.’
‘Arturo, I am extremely sorry, the rehearsal scheds have gone awry and Herr Furtwängler…’
‘You have promised the theatre to Herr Furtwängler when…’
‘I haven’t promised anything, but he is arriving in ten minutes and the orchestra…’
It was enough. Toscanini displayed not merely anger, but a tempest. He raised his hand in the air and brought the baton down against his lectern with such force that it snapped in half. Reaching into the depths beneath the podium – for what? – he picked up the bewildered figure of Rigoletto, his little fluffy terrier. As he stormed out of the orchestra pit, several members of the orchestra also put down their instruments and began to walk too. A general chaos ensued.
Furtwängler got his rehearsal time, but it was a close-run thing whether Toscanini would ever be tempted back onto the Bayreuth podium again. Or so I thought, until coming across him at the bar. I suppose Winnie must have sent me along to see what I could do to calm down the great man. He was stroking his dog. ‘This is all so much worse than last year,’ said Toscanini to me. ‘Ah, Winnie.’
And then I could see it all – not merely that Winnie was Tietjen’s lover but, another equally obvious fact that had entirely escaped me through all the previous twelve or fifteen months: Toscanini was in love with her also. Presumably he had agreed to come back to Bayreuth in the hope of wooing her, but when he got there he had found Tietjen already installed in her bed and the National Socialists, whom he abominated, installed as a political fixture in her heart.
Later that afternoon, when his chauffeur had driven him, me and the dog back to the Golden Anchor where we continued to drink (a rather good grappa of deadly potency) in the dining room, he said, ‘You know, my young friend, I would forgive her anything. I do not even mind all this … political nonsense … anything … It would have been good – a good combination, don’t you think? Her and me?’
Winnie was presumably not tempted by film-star good looks or film-star qualities. She moved from the oddity of marriage to Fidi to the unprepossessing Tietjen, pausing on the way to sound out Wolf who, for all his mesmeric appeal on some spiritual plane, could never be called a model of masculine good looks. Perhaps she was simply too caught up in the crisis of Fidi’s death to notice that Toscanini was in love with her; or maybe she noticed and merely thought it was a bit of a laugh. It must have added bitterness, either way, when he went to America and began denouncing the political slant of the Festival since Siegfried Wagner had died.
* * *
For most of that summer Wolf was touring and speechifying, and we saw little of him. He was maintaining his boycott of the Festival, which began the summer that Friedrich Schorr took the role of Wotan, and his visits to Bayreuth were therefore in any event more sporadic than they had been and tended to take place in the winter. Winnie too was deeply preoccupied – by Tietjen and by the Festival. The victims in all this were, in Bayreuth, the children; in Munich, Wolf’s niece Geli.
Whatever the nature of his relationship with Geli from a sexual viewpoint, he stood in loco parentis to her. Clearly, he vacillated between moods of great tenderness, when he took her around on his arm to social functions, never, I think, to political rallies or speeches. There were long, notorious shopping expeditions in which he sat patiently in Munich department stores while she accumulated the bags and dresses and shoes. But at some stage during this summer he had also formed his liaison with the young woman who would eventually become his wife – Eva Braun.
I never met Eva Braun and have no idea what she was like, though of course I’ve seen her photograph. She was never mentioned, in my recollection, by Winnie, though by some stage Winnie must have known about her. Geli I did meet once or twice. Wolf brought her over to Wahnfried for lunch. He had by now reached the grand stage of having his own chauffeur, Ju
lius Schreck, who spent a lot of time needlessly burnishing the already gleaming Merc while Wolf ran into the house, to the usual whoops of excitement from the girls and the boys.
Since Wolf was, as always, caught up with the children, Geli had me for company. At a loose end for conversation, I asked her how her course was going at the university. I was attempting, with an unsuccessful effort of the will, to banish from my mind all the things Fidi had said about Fräulein Raubl’s relationship with her uncle. The only ‘clean’ thing I could remember was that she was a medical student. Like so many of the things one remembers, this was not in fact true. Insofar as she was a ‘student’ at all, Wolf was paying for her to have some singing lessons. But I persisted for some time in quizzing her – ‘was she pre- or post-clinical, did she intend to specialize when she went into medicine, did general practice or hospital work more appeal to her?’ – this line of questioning.
‘Are you a doctor yourself?’ was her response to this.
Geli, as she asked me to call her, was not conventionally beautiful, but she was very sensual. She seemed younger than her twenty-three years; she was almost as schoolgirlish as Friedelind, but whereas in Friedelind there was a latent sexuality, in the case of Geli, you were aware of something which was totally overt. She had thick, wavy brown hair, and the lips hung half open much of the time. She wore clothes on that late summer afternoon which seemed too old for her, too formal – a sleeveless, probably expensive, cream-coloured dress, cut vaguely square at the neck, and a large heavy necklace of amber and silver balls. Her pale skin was mottled with freckles.
‘No,’ was my response, ‘I’m not even a doctor of philosophy.’
‘Why “even”?’
We had wandered out of the house into the garden, and although it was not my intention to show her the graves – Cosima had now joined the Master, the Newfoundland dog Russ and the parrots at the bottom of the garden – that was the direction in which we were heading.
‘I mean, I didn’t finish my thesis. Don’t know if I ever will now.’
‘So – what do you do here?’
‘I’m a dogsbody.’
‘Who told you I was going to be a doctor?’
‘I…’
She turned her face fully towards mine and looked up. She was smiling and it was the first time in my twenty-five years of life when I thought to myself, ‘I might kiss this girl – she really wants me to do it! I could have a proper girlfriend.’
The moment did not last, naturally; and I did not kiss her, but it had created a feeling of conspiratorial intimacy between us. We were the two young ones in a world of grown-ups.
‘I’m not, you know.’ She laughed.
I laughed. ‘You’ve given it up – medicine?’
‘I was never going to be a doctor. I don’t know where you could have picked up the story. I suppose everyone talks about us – me and Uncle?’
This statement was so direct that there seemed no point in denying it. ‘I suppose they do.’
‘It was Mum’s idea, my moving into the flat. I liked it at first. The Leader! Great! Like, the Leader was my uncle – I was the Leader’s little pet.’ She did a twirl in her – as it now seemed – ridiculously middle-aged dress. ‘What was your name again?’
I told her.
‘Do you fuck a lot – fuck around?’
I turned away, completely unable to cope with the question.
‘That wasn’t meant to be rude,’ she said.
‘No, no, of course it wasn’t. I … er … good heavens!’
‘I do,’ she said quietly. ‘When I can. Bloody prison, that flat. It was Mum’s idea – did I tell you that? Mum’s idea that I move in with Uncle, but my God! I’m going to escape. You know Julius?’
‘No.’
‘The man in the drive.’
‘The chauffeur.’
‘Yup.’
‘We’re engaged.’
‘You’re engaged?’
‘Uncle doesn’t know yet.’
She got out a packet of cigarettes and offered me one. ‘So this is the great Richard Wagner,’ she said, lighting up over the composer’s grave slab. When my cigarette was lit she said, ‘You know my uncle…’
‘A bit.’
But she wasn’t asking me if I knew Wolf, she was beginning half a sentence. ‘You wouldn’t believe the things he expects me to do.’
The walk threw no light on this utterance, which was thrown out almost casually. I wondered if she was a little mad. I even wondered, rehearsing the conversation over and over again in my head, whether she was under the influence of alcohol or some other narcotic. Her directness of approach was certainly unlike anything I had ever come across. My mother would have attributed this to her ‘commonness’. She certainly spoke with the broadest of accents, even broader than that of her uncle, but there was more to it than that. Her directness was that of desperation, knowing that she had only a few more minutes before her uncle re-emerged from the house and the Mercedes sped back to the luxurious flat in Munich. It was not long after that, no more than a few weeks I should say, that we heard the shocking news of Geli’s suicide. She shot herself with a 6.34 calibre pistol belonging to her uncle.
You could go on speculating for ever about the causes of her death. For a few weeks afterwards the wildest of rumours circulated – that she had been pregnant, that she was pregnant by a Jewish musician, that her body showed signs of having been badly beaten, that she had not committed suicide but been murdered. Needless to say, for those who believed she was a murder victim, H was the prime suspect, even though he was addressing a multitude of admirers in Nuremberg at the time of her death and there were probably five thousand people who could have provided him with an alibi.
It was not the suspicion of murder, nor even the suspicion of improper relations with his niece, which were damaging to H at this time. It was something much less specific and much deeper. It was a generalized association between H and death, H and disaster, calamity. A Liebestod indeed: love and death inextricably mingled.
‘That luxury flat’s more like a bloody prison’ – this she had said to me on our short walk in the garden.
The gunshot was a wild signal to the outside world that all was not well, not merely within the flat but within her uncle. From the post-war historical perspective in which I write, this is so obvious. But it was not obvious to us at the time. You’ll never understand our generation unless you realize that the optimists who supported the National Socialists were not all sinister, Jew-hating decadents in love with death. We thought this band of admittedly rough and ready types, forged into a great national movement, would bring about good things, not bad, life not death.
Baldur von Schirach wrote a poem at about the time that I went to work for the Wagners, some time in the early or mid 1920s. Lieselotte made the children learn it by heart and it was applied unquestioningly to the man they loved as Uncle Wolf:
You are many thousands behind me,
And you are me, and I am you.
I have had no thoughts
Which do not vibrate in your heart.
And if I speak, I know no word
Which is not one with your will.
For I am you and you are me
And we all believe, Germany, in you.
He was, for those of us who believed in him, an incarnation of the good German future, and to this extent it is not absurd to speak of him as a sort of German Christ. I would later have this conversation with my brother. Heinrich did not think that Jesus had gone about believing himself to be the redeemer of the world. The peculiar historical circumstances in which he found himself, however, condemned by the Romans for political insurrection and the perceived leader of a dissident group within Judaism, made him the natural figurehead of the new devotion. Thus Heinrich’s and my father’s Hegelian Christ became himself the servant of the moment, a redeemer of precisely the kind required by the time.
Uncle Wolf was a different kind of redeemer, because we l
ived in different times. As long ago as 1922, in a speech in the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich, H said,
I say: my Christian feeling points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. [tumultuous and long applause] It points me to the man who, once lonely and surrounded by only a few followers, recognized these Jews and called for battle against them, and who, as true God, was not only the greatest as a sufferer but also greatest as a warrior. In boundless love, as a Christian and as a human being, I read the passage which declares to us how the Lord finally rose up and seized the whip to drive out the usurers, the brood of serpents and vipers, from the Temple! [tumultuous applause] Today, however, two thousand years later, I am deeply moved to perceive that his tremendous struggle for this world against the Jewish poison was most profoundly marked by the fact that he had to bleed on the cross for it. [stirrings in the hall] Two thousand years ago a man was also denounced by the same race. The man was dragged before the court and it was also said of him, ‘He stirred up the people.’ So he too had been a rabble-rouser! And against whom? ‘Against God!’ they cried. Yes, indeed, he roused the rabble against the ‘God’ of the Jews, for this ‘God’ is only gold. [tumultuous applause]
This sense of H as our national saviour was so strong among his followers that the questioning of it seemed like a blasphemy, and not merely among his more fanatical followers like Winnie or Lieselotte. The dark chords played by Geli’s suicide were intensely shocking to those, such as myself, who placed a hope in the National Socialist movement as (I imagined) a short sharp shock of realism injected into our national life before we could get ‘back to normal’. We saw him as wielding a whip, but as one which needed to be wielded before the temple was cleansed; and Geli’s death, which was not merely tragic but sordid – as though for a moment in one of Bach’s chorales the orchestra had suddenly played one of the more discordant and atonal psychological disturbances from Alban Berg. A corner of the veil had been lifted, but I for one did not wish to consider its implications.