by A. N. Wilson
My parents and their friends stayed there all night, praying and singing and not allowing the thugs near the synagogue.
In the morning Germany, and the world, woke up to what had happened in the night, though, like individuals of a destructive tendency, they did not wish to acknowledge what had occurred during the hours of darkness and preferred to put it all quickly behind them. Out of 9,000 Jewish shops in the whole of Germany, 7,500 were gutted. Millions of Reichsmarks’ worth of goods were looted: jewellery, cameras, electrical goods, radios and so forth. In Berlin alone, fifteen synagogues had been burnt to the ground – 520 synagogues in all were destroyed across the whole of Germany in one night. The synagogue in Bayreuth was one of the very few to escape the torch.
So in 1960 we hurtled on by train to Leipzig, you and I, and other passengers could have seen us, a thin, skull-like man, with close-cropped grey hair and spectacles, and a young woman, also with slightly longer hair, dark brown, and intense eyes behind her spectacles, and both are weeping, as at the back of their heads the largely flat landscape of East Prussia is put behind them. When they got home, they found that they had been less lucky than the synagogue they were protecting. The Brownshirts had smashed their windows and their nice little cat Nina had been impaled on the front door. In my father’s study they had not actually started a fire, but they had pulled a lot of the books out of the shelves and someone had smeared shit on his photograph of Adolf Harnack. The cello was in bits.
It was not long after that that my father was summoned for yet another interview with Gauleiter Schemm. It was actually before the war that they placed him under arrest. My mother and I made two visits together. She was even more than usually thin and frail, from then onwards. It was years, probably decades, since she had been out, or done anything independently of my father, so that having to make the decision to visit him was a strange one. He was in KZ Aussenlager, a small concentration camp erected just outside Bayreuth, charged with unpatriotic behaviour and using his pulpit as a political platform to undermine the Reich. It surprised me, on our first visit, that my brother wasn’t there, but my mother told me that Vati had asked Heinrich to stay away. He said it would damage ‘the Cause’ if they both got arrested, and it was better that the older man should be the one locked up.
On the second visit my father looked terrible, much, much older than his nearly seventy years. His eyes were hollow and he seemed completely distant, not only from me (which he always was) but also, much more shatteringly, from my mother. I have told myself since that the reason for this was that he did not dare show the emotions he felt, for fear of breaking down completely and thereby causing her yet worse distress. We were not allowed to visit him again. Sometime in 1941 my mother received a curt letter informing her that her husband had died of an infection. We never knew whether to believe this or not. Clearly the regime in that place was terrible, my father was used to a gentle life. Maybe it was simply the life there that killed him. My mother must often have asked herself whether he was tortured. I ask myself that question and it is not bearable. He was one of millions. But he had made his stand.
* * *
When I came out of the first act of that Herz production I was in a state of ecstatic happiness, and I think one of the reasons for this was, quite simply, the beauty of the set. If you had spent well over ten years, as I had, in the industrial suburb of ———, living in a very small flat; if your place of work had been a school built out of brutalist hunks of concrete; if, in order to get to it, you had a tram ride through grey streets lined with more concrete – Karl Marx Strasse, Friedrich Engels Strasse and so on and so on … What a tribute to these inventive thinkers this glorious architecture is. Sometimes, sitting on the tram, I would think of two late seventeenth-century gilded angels blowing trumpets round the organ case of the Stadtkirche in Bayreuth, supposedly, according to what the children in the Karl Marx Schule are meant to believe, from a time when the human mind was imprisoned by dogma and the human race was intolerably oppressed. I think of the sheer joyousness of those angels, and of the twin towers of the Stadtkirche, which are of about the same date, presiding over the beautifully laid-out cobbled streets in Bayreuth, our town. The handsome buildings, school, hospital, orphanage, piano factories, had all been designed with as much dignity and care as the opera house and the New Palace. The Hofgarten was always, as far as I am aware, open to the public to enjoy. Until the desolations of war fell on Bayreuth, and the British and American war planes came after us as a punishment for having housed Uncle Wolf, I do not believe there was a single ugly building in Bayreuth, a single alleyway or street or stable yard which, when glimpsed by a passer-by, did not give a lift to the spirits. Whereas I do not suppose that anyone living in the sub-town of ———, where I have spent the last decade, has felt anything but depression as a result of the architecture.
So my first impression of that Meistersinger was the set. It was an intricate, highly realistic depiction of an old sixteenth- or seventeenth-century theatre with galleries, such as Shakespeare or Molière might have known. And it was here that the comical burghers of Nuremberg held their singing competition, thrown into disarray, first by the intrusion of Walther, who isn’t part of their narrow circle – he is an aristocrat, he finds it difficult to fashion his songs into the narrow confines of their rule books – and also by old Hans Sachs, the poet-cobbler. Sachs’s overriding characteristic is generosity. He is the best poet in the play, but he uses his skill to train Walther to win. He is in love with beautiful young Eva himself, but he allows her to go off with Walther. It is true that he tricks the fussy, drunken and pedantic Beckmesser. But in the Herz production even Beckmesser is given his due. His claims for the place of rules and formality in art are not, as I think they sometimes are, made to seem totally ridiculous.
Because you were in the orchestra and I therefore sat alone amid strangers in the stalls, I was able to give up my total delighted concentration to the opera. And although I must have seen it over a dozen times, and sat through many of Tietjen’s and Furtwängler’s rehearsals of it during the 1930s, I had never before been so very moved by it, nor heard how rich its music is, nor been more impressed by how generous it is, generous as Sachs himself, in its central ideas. And yes, yet again, I was overpowered by how un-Nazi it is.
After the performance I hovered rather nervously, feeling very provincial, very old, very out of things as I waited for you to appear. It was a bit like waiting at a school gate when you were a little girl. I could see other members of the orchestra patting you on the shoulder, quipping with you, lighting up cigarettes. That was your world and I was out of it. In my worn-out, terrible, dark-blue suit, which I’d owned since the end of the war, and my frayed mackintosh and my cap, I was as alien from your world, now, as my parents had been from mine when I was in my twenties. But you kindly took me in to the reception they held afterwards. I was never very much good at large assemblies of people and this experience told me that I had lost what capacity I had for social chat.
‘Vati, I’d like you to meet’ – and you were leading me up to a pleasant-seeming young man. He was little more than a boy. This was Joachim Herz himself; and of course if I had been a poised, social kind of a being, I should have had so many paragraphs finished in my head about the originality and spectacular humanity of his Meistersinger; I’d have praised the performers, the intense colour and sensitivity of the orchestration, in short the complete brilliance of the production. I would have said, ‘You, Comrade Herz – truly a comrade to all who love Richard Wagner – have rescued this beautiful work of art from the Nazis, who made its stirring overture, brashly played, into their theme song at rallies, who made ironical, warm Hans Sachs into a militaristic buffoon…’ But of course I only half twigged who he was, and just mumbled some embarrassing nonsense about being your dad, and made some silly joke, which I could see you hating, about not being able to hear your cello playing above all the singing and the other instruments. I’d wanted to pay a comp
liment to you, but this was the moment to pay a compliment to him and, by making this ridiculous cello remark, I of course seemed to be expressing total indifference to the production we’d just seen.
Herz just gazed at me a bit quizzically. He was in any case surrounded by people and, as we were being nudged out by the next lot who came up to pay their respects, someone of evidently high importance, to judge from their bossy bearing and their shoulder movements through the crowds, was leading up … Wieland Wagner.
So Wieland, Winnie’s son, was here. He’d crossed over from the West to see what the opposition was up to. Some such terribly unfunny quip was springing to my mind and at that moment I was seized with a desperate desire to talk to him. He had never been the Wagner child to whom I had been closest; that, undoubtedly, was his sister Friedelind. But we had seen one another daily during his teens and here he was, a man of over forty, very handsome, clever-looking – your brother, or rather half-brother. He had a very touching look of his father Fidi about him that night, but also, in the brow and the shape of the head, and the intense expression, of his grandfather Richard Wagner. I had last seen him when he was a young soldier in uniform at the beginning of the war.
I do not know, in retrospect, whether you knew that this man being led towards Joachim Herz was in fact Wieland Wagner. I remember only the look of intense embarrassment on your face as I wriggled back into Herz’s circle to hold out my hand and say, ‘Wieland! Wieland!’
Wieland and Herz were exchanging polite remarks about Meistersingers, and both looked up at me with that expression of disdain bordering on alarm when a stranger bursts into an intimate circle. Combined with annoyance that bad manners are being perpetrated by an outsider is the flickering fear that they might be about to confront a piece of serious bad behaviour, perhaps even downright lunacy. Wieland in particular, presumably because I was overexcitedly repeating his name, looked at me as if I might be about to produce a gun or lower my trousers.
I said my own name, but he showed not the smallest flicker of recognition.
‘Come on, Dad.’ You were tugging at my elbow.
I said my name – again.
It was then that Wieland smiled, but there was no warmth in the smile. ‘Of course – of course – how is life treating you?’
‘I mustn’t complain.’ (Untrue. Here in the East I believe it is a duty to complain.)
‘But, but … how wonderful…’
‘And your mother?’ I asked. ‘How is your mother?’
The smile was totally glacial and turned into a ‘social’ mirthless laugh. ‘Indefatigable,’ was his reply. ‘But if you will excuse me.’
‘This is my daughter…’
Of course I was not going to say ‘This is your sister. This is the daughter of your mother and…’ But I had wanted you both to shake hands at that moment.
It was not to be. Your patience was running out and anyway, by then, very many were milling around the two great men of the evening – the director of this particular Meistersinger, and the man who, in the West, had transformed post-war Bayreuth and introduced ‘modern’ productions there. I could very easily imagine what Winnie thought of those. Dear Winnie, she must have been over sixty then – an incredible thought.
But here we are, milling around at the party. There isn’t much to drink. The grandees seemed to have been given something fizzy. I wonder what it was? Soviet champagne? The rest of us had some form of fruit cup laced with schnapps, quite nice but one small tumbler each was all that was allowed.
‘I think I’m going to have to be getting back,’ I said.
We had worked out that it was just possible, when the opera ended, to get a train home, though only by changing at Dessau.
It was one of those sad moments that occur so often between family members when both have run out of things to say to one another; both therefore want to part; yet both feel the sadness of the parting. You must have felt it more than I did because you knew that you were about to make your brave defection to freedom.
‘I’ll walk to the station with you.’
‘No. No, darling, you stay here with your friends.’
‘Really? You all right, Dad?’
‘I’m fine.’
We hugged. I hugged you perfunctorily to stop myself making a scene and breaking down in tears, for, even though I did not know that this was actually our last farewell, there were always long gaps between our meetings and the goodbyes were always full of pathos for me.
‘’Bye, Dad.’
The quickest way to walk to the enormous railway station at Leipzig from the opera house is along Goethestrasse, a wide, modern road, lined with the big museums, and framed at one end by the gigantic modernist university buildings. But what the hell, I strode past the museum into the old town and walked about in what was left, after Communism and aerial bombardment, of the old Market Place, and found (locked, of course) the great medieval Gothic Thomaskirche where Richard Wagner (in 1813) and Johann Sebastian Bach (in 1685) had both been baptized. Leipzig! It was a living, scarred embodiment of the truth which the Mastersingers of Nuremberg had expressed in music. Its streets and churches and houses and people had been turned to rubble by American pilots, and crudely, insensitively knocked into shape again by our new masters; both of whom had made the fatal and ugly bargain to sacrifice love in exchange for power. But why do we remember Leipzig? Yes, yes, an important market town since the Middle Ages, a population of such-and-such, a Prince of Anhalt-Dessau who built such and such a church, such a Rathaus or Schloss? Maybe. But that is what the obsessives remember. It isn’t what the world remembers. They maybe remember that Martin Luther preached here.
But outlasting any political philosophy or regime, and of infinitely more relevance to human life – and of infinitely more interest – is the music of Bach. The exiguous refreshment at the party, where I’d made such a fool of myself, was hardly enough to make me drunk, but I was quietly sniggering, like a drunken loon, when I entered the dingy lobby of a small hotel – Bach beat Ulbricht! Tee-hee.
‘Papers?’
After the nervous fumbling which in my case follows any attempt to find a tram card, a train ticket, I found my ID.
A completely joyless woman, with the statutory Communist halitosis, stated mechanically, ‘You’ve made no reservation.’
I explained about attending the opera, intending to get a train home, but having missed it.
‘You can’t stay without a reservation and without a permission form.’
I got this reaction in about three little hell-holes. For about an hour I walked around in Leipzig, then I sat on a cold bench on the Central Square. I was numbed – by saying goodbye to you, by seeing Wieland, by the whole experience. But something mysterious had armed me against feeling crushed. I suppose it was Meistersinger itself, the brilliant reminder that art outlasts politics, that the sordid and cruel things we human beings have been doing to one another in the last century in Europe are not the last word, that music outsoars it and is stronger than it: that Bach outlasts Frederick the Great and that Wagner too outlasts his more outlandish patrons and admirers.
Human beings do exist, even in our present-day Marxist paradise. On my next peregrination I entered a small hotel quite near the station. When I began the fumbling process all over again – for inevitably, money, ID, train ticket had all mysteriously jumped from my left to my right pocket – the hotel clerk here merely smiled.
He was a bearded man, thin, in his forties. The ashtray in front of him was full but he was smoking as if he had an ambition to build a small mountain of fag butts. His amused eyes were red and his cheeks through the nicotine habit prematurely lined. ‘I think we can let you have a room.’
He looked a little like the English writer D. H. Lawrence, whose Nietzschean romances of working-class life I had read with deep admiration when at uni. As he showed me to the box-like cell, the tiny bed with its thin bedding folded upon it, he gave me a strange ‘look’. ‘No luggage.’
/> ‘I … missed the train … didn’t think…’
Have you noticed in this country since the war – perhaps further back, since 1933 – we always react to quite innocent enquiries with over-elaborate self-justification, as if officialdom is trying to wrong-foot us?
‘Just hope you’ll be comfortable.’
‘It’s very good of you.’
D. H. Lawrence stared at me seriously. Then, lighting another cheap cigarette, lingered a moment too long. ‘You are all right?’
‘Perfectly.’
I do not flatter myself that my almost sixty-year-old body is an obvious object of desire, especially to homosexuals who surely prefer lissome youth. But what if he were the sort who liked ‘older men’? What if his sole reason for being kind to me, and allowing me to stay in the hotel without authorization, had been a sexual one?
So, as I lay beneath the flimsy sheet and blanket, clad in socks, underpants, vest and shirt, my mind was a jangle of memories, impressions, fears, thoughts. The town band at Bayreuth playing a travesty of the overture to Meistersinger to herald some awful parade, inspected by Gauleiter Schemm – the swastikas in their banners falling from the large elegant windows of the old Margrave’s palace, now Party and Administrative HQ. The performance I’d just heard, the true music of Wagner disinfecting the earlier memory. The nagging fear, which kept coming into my mind, that a priapic D. H. Lawrence would come into the room – how would one cope? The thought of your sad face as you said goodbye to me, of the jawline and handsome brow in your face, and the hypnotic charm of the deep-blue eyes …
Rat-a-tat!
Silence. The man in the hotel cowered.
‘Is anyone there?’
Another silence. Who would it be this time? Secret police? Or merely debt collectors.
‘Excuse me – Herr ———?’ This was the false name under which he was travelling.