by A. N. Wilson
‘I think we would all agree’, said Wolf, when we had taken our places at the table, ‘that a meal to celebrate this occasion, a meal which anticipates the greatest triumph in the history of Bayreuth, should not be at variance with the wishes of the Master. By the time he wrote Parsifal, the Master had enjoined many of his friends to become vegetarian. He regarded the eating of animal flesh as mere cannibalism and the message of the Last Supper was clear enough – Thou shalt not eat meat!’
‘Well, Herr H———,’ began Roller, who might or might not have had some views on this subject.
But Wolf had views on the place of carnivores in evolution. He spoke of Darwin, next to Wagner the greatest man of the nineteenth century.
‘I believe,’ began Roller, ‘that when Parsifal was first performed that…’
‘Which is why in all his later writings he makes it so clear that any kind of race mingling is really little better than minglings between the different species. Indeed, it is not at all clear that the Negro is the same species as ourselves.’
‘As for Parsifal,’ tried Roller once more.
‘It is of all Wagner’s operas the most complex,’ replied Wolf. He told Roller the number of times he had seen it. He complimented Roller handsomely on all those productions in Vienna that he had seen with his own eyes – The Egyptian Helen, Tristan, Rosenkavalier, Valkyrie, all superb. And your Parsifal.’
‘Which I was going to suggest…’
There was no chance during that meal of anyone, least of all the guest of honour, interrupting the unstoppable monologue. He told us that the beginner loves Tannhäuser for its melodies and melodrama. Later, one might develop a love of the Ring cycle. But for the true Wagnerian, the more one experiences of the Master’s genius, the more one realizes that Parsifal contains … the Message! But this gnomic (and to me, to this day, not entirely comprehensible) dictum did not come pithily forth, still less was it laid open for further discussion. It was sandwiched between a long flow of talk about the miraculous recovery of Germany (had not Wagner said a strong absolute monarch means a free people?), the race theories of Darwin, but chiefly productions. He had an apparently encyclopaedic recall of every single opera he had ever attended since boyhood and Roller nodded in appreciation as the names of tenors and sopranos and bass-baritones were recited, and their respective merits assessed.
For me, the chief memory of the meal, however, was when he made that remark about the celibacy of the Catholic clergy being the secret of the Church’s inner power, and the look of unstoppable shock that spread over Winnie’s features as she chomped her way through the slightly flavourless spaghetti dish and ratatouille set before us, washed down with mineral water. I am convinced that he had summoned us all to the Chancellery not for one reason but for two. Yes, he wanted to tell Winnie that the 1934 production of Parsifal was saved. But he also wanted to tell her that though they would always be friends, they could no longer be lovers. Several years later he said, ‘I have sometimes been asked why I have never married. I reply, a man in my position is married to the German Reich. It is not for his country’s leader to give himself to one woman when Germany is his bride.’ Perhaps by banishing Winnie from his bed, he also banished his last chances of contact with a decent and normal human being, who, for all her many faults, never let pity or affection die in her.
* * *
I did not tell Helga about our lunch at the Chancellery. I realize now that I should have done so, that I should have come clean about this. Winnie’s involvement with Wolf was a matter of common knowledge, not only among the orchestra and chorus at the theatre, and the townspeople of Bayreuth, but throughout Germany. Nevertheless, my new and deepened involvement with Helga should have made me see that I owed her complete frankness from the first. Many complications would have been avoided later on in our relationship if she had known that … not that Wolf was a friend of mine; he wasn’t; but that I belonged to that very small band of people who had seen Wolf – rather than H – had seen a genial opera lover; the apple-cheeked yeoman-soldier in a dark-blue serge suit of my first few meetings with him, a man who with Winnie and the children was all geniality and who, in spite of a discernible vein of overenthusiasm, and an occasional coarseness of expression, was, or appeared to be, an essentially benign figure. The extent to which he was playing a part when he was at the Villa Wahnfried has often occupied my mind, of course it has. But, you see, I do not think he was. I think there was a side of him which quite conceivably regarded the demonic side to his nature with dread and retreated from it into the family circle that Winnie provided with hearty relief. If circumstances had been different – if, say, the economy of Germany had taken a great upturn and the normal, mainstream political parties had won back all the votes taken by the Nazis – it would have been the end of some of his cronies and gauleiters; but I honestly believe that it might have been the beginning for him. I don’t think he’d have been a murderer in private life, if he had not been the Leader. I think if – unthinkable if – he had been voted from office and Winnie had, as it were, tamed him, and allowed him to become a set designer for the Bayreuth theatre, he might have been transformed into an amiable old gentleman. But I know this view of mine is totally at variance with everything people now believe about the all-out monster H, who ruined our world; ruined it irreparably. And it is frivolous of me, perhaps, even to voice these thoughts when so much damage has been wrought, so many lives destroyed, so many nations enslaved.
As far as Helga was concerned, the suspicions she had about my involvement with dodgy right-wing politics were set at rest at a fairly early stage of our relationship. She knew I was not a Nazi at heart, nor any more anti-Semitic than the ordinary run of human being who allows his mind to fall into unthought prejudices, base and coarse thoughts from which it is easy to cure oneself with consideration. My thoughts about Wolf were of a different order, almost a metaphysical thing. Like most people in Germany, perhaps in the world, Helga had profoundly superstitious thoughts about H. She had been brought up in a Catholic family in Munich, but had never taken religion seriously, and when she began to think about such matters she had decided she was an atheist. Nevertheless, she believed in Evil, possibly even in the Evil One. She certainly always believed, as soon as he came into her consciousness as a political leader, later as a voice blaring from radios and microphones, that H was out of the ordinary run of political baddies; that he was really Satanic. For this reason, if for no other, I owed it to her to explain that I had supped with the devil. In any event, when one loves another person one should trust them; else one lie leads to another. By suppressing the lunch at the Chancellery, I had to tell a number of outright lies about how the children and I had spent our time in Berlin.
‘You want to get away from those lunatics.’ She blew a puff of smoke as she said this.
The snow was still on the ground. It had been (for Franconia) an uncommonly long winter. We had made a short expedition to the Eremitage. In the summer, this eighteenth-century pleasure garden built for the Margravine Wilhelmine always had a sprinkling of visitors, and at Festival time it was crowded in the afternoons. Today, however, it was completely deserted. The statues were all boxed in against the frost. The principal grottoes were closed, but it still made a pleasant place to walk about, with someone with whom you were wondering if you had fallen in love.
That description went for both of us. We were wondering quite what had happened. Certainly, in the years to come, we had plenty of time to do some more wondering. That I did fall in love with Helga at some stage, and she with me, can’t be denied, but we were very different types of people and quite how, or why, or even when this conjunction of souls took place I couldn’t say. From the beginning there lurked in my mind a doubt. Was she my excuse to get away from the Wagners? Why was I lying to her about Berlin? Obviously, her politics were about as far away from National Socialism as it would be possible to be. But my silence was prompted by something more personal than that. I did not want he
r to think that I was a Nazi. My mind was in a state of absolute political confusion, which had been building ever since my brother had established himself in Berlin. The horrible incident on the bus with the SA youth made clear, as if it had not been clear already, what the dark side of the Movement was. Yet certain things could not be denied – unemployment was down and there was an atmosphere, in those early years of the Third Reich, of extraordinary optimism about the future.
‘We’ve been given back our pride.’ That was a sentence you often heard.
I’d begun to see, however, that the systems of thought to which my brother Heinrich and my friend Helga, in their very different ways, adhered had winkled out something inherently wrong with Nazism. Yes, Germany might be saved by systems of public works, new roads, new factories, new industrial bases, new hope. But if these things were to be brought to us by these people, we had already paid too high a price. Christians, Communists, a few lofty old aristocrats and royalists could see this; they could see, what hindsight makes transparent, that we had made our bargain with the devil, and we would not come out of the contract until we had paid with our last drop of dignity and blood. But I am not gifted with certainty and I did not see things clearly.
The fact that I had begun to do so, and had begun to feel sheepish about my besotted devotion to Winnie, was attributable to my new feelings about Helga. Hence, when she said, ‘You want to get away from those people’, I turned to her. Her face was pink in that snowy air. She wore a woollen hat, which framed her pretty, boyish face, and she was looking at me with the kind of mocking seriousness that was her most characteristic expression.
I kissed her.
I had never kissed anyone before, except for kissing my mother goodnight. I had seen erotic kissing feigned in films often enough and had no idea how it was done.
‘Here,’ she said and threw away her stub, which hissed in the snow.
Gently, slowly, she coaxed my lips and teeth with her tongue and taught me how to kiss her. One of the many things for which I was always grateful to her was that she never commented on my lack of experience. She guided me by gentle degrees, with ‘here’ being the usual preface to the next stage. After kissing for a while, in the snowy sunken garden by the larger of the grottoes, she took my woollen fingers in her woollen fingers and rubbed my hands affectionately. Then she looked at me with very great happiness. ‘I wasn’t sure whether you wanted to do that,’ she said.
‘Yes. Very much.’
We started to sleep together that afternoon, after a lunch in a small restaurant in her district of town, beyond the cemetery where Fidi and Houston Stewart Chamberlain lay beneath the snow; and apart from being wonderful in themselves, the wonderful couple of hours in her single bed provided my deliverance from the whole National Socialist madness. Surprisingly enough, there were no bungles. It was complete bliss from the first try. I did not ask whether I should have been taking precautions. The matter did not crop up in conversation and since she so clearly knew what she was doing I assumed that everything would be all right. Whatever all right was.
What I liked so much about her, apart from the intimate and magical things that took place between us in bed, was her manner towards me when we had our clothes on once again – having cups of coffee, chatting in the Festival Theatre, or simply going about together. There was a jokey friendliness in it all. ‘So, old comrade!’ was often her way of greeting me and of parting from me, sometimes defiantly raising her fist, sometimes affectionately punching me. When I think of the ruin of our relationship, years afterwards, when we began to grate upon one another and annoy one another in a very small flat with you, our adopted child, I think with tremendous sadness of those jokes and that friendliness. To tell the truth, although I know we were lovers, nearly all the details of our lovemaking have vanished. But every second of our early courtship, of the quality of our friendship and companionship, remains with me, a torture of memory to contrast with the mean-spirited marital crossness which came to replace it. But that is not really the subject of this story.
* * *
I have entitled this section ‘Parsifal’, and that was the opera which loomed over the summer months of 1934. Helga was rehearsing – for she was also, of course, as a member of the Festival orchestra, playing in the Ring cycle – but there was something especially exciting for her about rehearsing Parsifal with Richard Strauss, even though Strauss had been inveigled earlier in the year into signing the infamous petition. With old Roller designing the sets, it was clearly going to be a ground-breaking production about which little Tietjen was understandably excited. The day-to-day details of keeping this show on the road, together with the Ring cycle, were Tietjen’s and Winnie’s, and it was a frantically busy time in which I had much to do. The children were still, for as long as possible, incarcerated in various hellish boarding schools, and between my love affair with Helga and my work at the Theatre there was little time for noticing what was going on in the world that summer.
Had I done so, I would have realized that the unpleasant incident on the bus, with the young ‘storm-trooper’ making a nuisance of himself, was symptomatic of a crisis building in Germany, but especially in Bavaria, over the hated Brownshirts.
Winnie’s Nazi life, which went back to the very origins of the Party in the years after the First World War, was never something of which I had been especially aware, knowing her – as I have already indicated – in the domestic and theatrical setting. Although, when Wolf became the All-powerful Leader, we started to see more of the High Command – and the whole intricate palaver of bureaucracy controlling public performances in theatres, concert halls and the like was placed, for example, under the unlikely supervision of the Fat Gamekeeper – we never saw much of these extraordinary people. An exception, however, was the strange little man who became the leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm.
Privately I considered him as one of Winnie’s lame ducks, a category I easily recognized, since I belonged to it myself. He came to stay at Wahnfried on several occasions (without Wolf) and although none of us could quite see what she saw in him, I am sure it was not the same thing as his underlings in the SA saw. I think she saw a sad little homosexual with a scarred face – part of his nose had been shot off in the war, so he was especially ugly. I remember him once, half-sozzled with schnapps, saying to us after dinner, ‘I can’t live the life of the respectable bourgeois citizen. I’m not a marrying man – I like rent boys and soldiers. The war was fine for me – it was my best time. I’m not a good man. I’m a pervert. I can only operate in a sphere of violence and mayhem. Wolf wants to bring order to Germany – or so he says. Well, we’ll see.’ He’d laughed when he said this. He was always very open about being queer, and I think this was something Wolf appreciated. It was amazing to me that Wolf, in many ways an extremely strait-laced and conventional person with regard to social mores, entirely accepted Röhm’s sexual predilections, even though I believe there were others who felt sure they were a liability.
Anyway, Röhm’s words about only being happy in an atmosphere of violent mayhem made a great deal of sense to me, uttered as they were at some stage of Weimar topsy-turvydom when a packet of fags cost two billion marks and when every value, moral and monetary, we’d ever taken for granted was up the spout. Here was a self-confessed moral nihilist, who lived for street violence and anarchy. He seemed like a symptom of the times, rather than someone directing their course.
After the so-called seizure of power by the Nazis, words much loved by Röhm and mates because they implied that Wolf had become Chancellor by some bit of fisticuffs rather than by voting and manoeuvring, Röhm’s position and that of the entire SA seemed redundant. Göring enlisted as many SA members as possible into respectable roles, trying to make them abandon the brown shirt and join the police force, for example. Plenty of policemen and prison warders were needed for the newly established concentration camps, which had been set up almost at once to deal with political dissidents.
But t
here were fears, from the moment that Wolf got into a Cabinet with von Papen and the other ‘stuffed shirts’, that he would betray the grass roots of the Movement and forget the Socialist ingredient in the National Socialist mix.
In H’s first year in power, Röhm, down in Munich, enormously increased the membership of the SA and discontent spread among its ranks. SA yobbos were running amok in many towns, especially in Munich. As the weather heated up, their drunken routs turned into threatened riots and Röhm, presumably – we hadn’t seen him for years by then – was a happy little man, egging on his skinheaded ugly boys to bait Jews, vomit on street corners and smash windows.
And his fear was a self-fulfilling prophecy. General von Hindenburg and others did indeed tell H that enough was enough and that the SA must be brought under control, if not wound up altogether.
Whereas the respectable or semi-respectable politicians such as von Hindenburg and von Papen, and the army chiefs, saw the SA as primarily a threat to public order, H’s perspective was very different. He was acutely aware of the way Röhm’s queer mind worked. Between the two men grew up feelings of twisted disloyalty, paranoid fear. H had used the SA ruthlessly as a means to power, both within his own movement and at local political levels all over Germany. Membership of the SA swelled wherever there was discontented, unemployed moronic youth lurking at street corners. They were enlisted with ease by promises of barely controlled hooliganism and plenty to drink. But they were really an anarchist army and, now that he was in power, they could only be a personal threat to him.
When news reached him that Röhm was being openly disloyal and making speeches to the yobbos in which he criticized the leadership, H decided to act.