by A. N. Wilson
True, shamelessly true; human, too human. Nietzsche, with his intense inverted religiosity, his hatred of God for being dead as his Lutheran-pastor father had too early died, had in his nature all the fastidiousness of the clergy house – his detestation of alcohol, his obsessive cleanliness, his shyness with women – how I empathize with them all. Blowzy boozy Wagner had grown up with the smell of greasepaint. His mother, his stepfather, his sisters were all in the theatre. His father’s serious brother, Adolf, had disapproved of them all and tried to persuade his nephew Richard to be serious, to read books. There was always a certain dichotomy in Richard Wagner’s nature. When he finally finished The Twilight of the Gods he saw it as a great German masterwork, immortal as Goethe, and he exclaimed, ‘If only Uncle Adolf knew!’ But the truth is that as soon as he had had the Festival Theatre built, to his own exact specifications, he was at his happiest, not in theorizing, but in the sheer fun of the theatre.
He wanted the new Festival Theatre to have as many as possible of the splendid technical effects he’d seen at the pantomimes and Vaudeville theatres in London. The Rhinemaidens, for the opening scene of The Ring of the Nibelungs, the first drama in the cycle, swayed in a Big Dipper which made the girls vomit during rehearsals. The mists of the magical Rhine were to be re-created by a twelve-centimetre pipe from a little boiler house fifty metres from the stage, with two old locomotive boilers. The lighting was initially gas, though they were early pioneers at the theatre of electricity. For the dragon to be slain by Siegfried, Wagner once again turned to the English pantomime stagers and employed Richard Keene of Wandsworth, south London. When the dreadful thing with papier-mâché hooves arrived from England Wagner was in despair: ‘Get rid of it! Into the junk room.’
But these disasters, together with all the excitement of working with overwrought, egoistic, highly sexed thespians, was such a world away from Nietzsche’s experience that he could not begin to understand it – any more than he ever really, in spite of their deep friendship, caught the measure of Wagner’s throwaway humour.
‘Can anyone remind me what the hell The Ring is supposed to be all about?’ he asked in an early rehearsal as he stood at the podium. (Parallel to his chuckle before a rehearsal of Parsifal – ‘And now for our Black Mass!’ – or his remark to Cosima, piously setting out to the Stadtkirche for a Good Friday Service: ‘Give my regards to Our Redeemer.’)
Nietzsche the professor attempted in his writings to throw over all constraints of ‘morality’, ‘religion’ or the Socratic method in philosophy, but deep down he could not stop himself being local and serious. It was the older man, Wagner, man of the theatre, who was really much more of an anarchist, yet ultimately, and so unfairly, a deeper creator. Nietzsche wondered how it was possible for a drama conceived in terms of almost Marxian optimism in the 1840s to make sense when recast as a mystic Schopenhauerian work of renunciation. The Ring Mark One suggests that the old order – the ancien régime financed by the Industrial Revolution – is to be overthrown by a new liberated humanity. Brünnhilde is a new emancipated woman, Siegfried with the self-forged sword smashes the old wand of throne and altar. This is the Wagner who appeals to the comrades here in the East, of course.
But then along came Schopenhauer, or that’s what Wagner wants us to believe, and when Wagner had read that gloomy pessimist the drama became a story of the illusoriness of power, the futility of human yearning.
Nietzsche, like many – perhaps nearly all – of the Wagner scholars since, is taking Wagner too much at his own word.
Wagner once told Cosima that he was not an artist who could think in wholes – he was a details man. He’d just been orchestrating a little scene from the beginning of Siegfried and he said, ‘You know, the weird thing about the way I set about my Art – I look on every detail as an entirety. When I’m concentrating on it, that’s all I think about, I never stop to say Hang on, if we do this now that means I’ll have to change that earlier back in the play.’ The result is, of course, an incoherence in The Ring of the Nibelungs as it now appears on stage, and however you try to disguise it. For example – to take something rather crucial – the Ring of Power itself. It has been stolen from the Rhinemaidens by the wicked dwarf Alberich. Nothing will go right until it is given back to them. The gods trick Alberich; the one surviving Giant, transformed into a dragon, gets the ring as a ransom. Siegfried kills the dragon and gives the ring back to Brünnhilde who in turn gives it back to the Rhine. The older order should therefore have been restored – but it isn’t. The gods still fall.
The last of the operas, The Twilight of the Gods, is the most puzzling thing of all since most of its story has nothing to do with the gods, or with the passing away of the old order of things. It is a straightforward Shakespearean comedy. Man – Siegfried – leaves girl – Brünnhilde – is beguiled by a love potion into loving another girl, Gutrune: her brother Gunther disguises himself as Siegfried to trick Brünnhilde into sleeping with him. In May 1874, as the Festival Theatre neared completion, Richard and Cosima continued to read to one another each evening, as often as not from Shakespeare. They were reading The Two Gentlemen of Verona as they moved into Wahnfried, the sort of silly stagecraft which Shakespeare made to work in the theatre – Two Gentlemen being the same story of broken vows and improbable disguises as the so-called Götterdämmerung.
For some years after coming to the East I underwent a Nietzschean sense of revulsion against Wagner. I did not think of him as responsible for the Nazis, any more than I blamed Nietzsche for the Nazis. (Unlike my contemporaries, I was never fooled into thinking that the Nazi text known as The Will to Power was really by Nietzsche: we now know it was cobbled together by his hateful old sister Elizabeth, partly to make money and partly to ingratiate herself with the new regime.)
Just as Nietzsche in his reviling of his dead God is one of the great original Christians – with Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky part of the immortal trio who rescued the Christian soul in the nineteenth century from Nibelheim – so Nietzsche in his attacks on Wagner is really the greatest Wagnerian. One says this not out of a love of paradox but because of the evidence in Nietzsche’s own writings. There is no more tender hymn to Jesus and his pity for humanity than in Nietzsche’s Antichrist and his Wagner denunciations, which breathe such profound disappointment in his hero’s failings, are peppered with admissions that his friendship with them both, Cosima and Richard, was the high point of his life and that the music, maddeningly, is wonderful, even when you have pulled it all to bits and laid bare its crude appeals to the emotions, the sickness of its late Romanticism.
The truth is that Shakespeare was far more important to Wagner than Schopenhauer. Wagner once told Cosima he was a mixture of Don Quixote and Hamlet. (It would have been truer to say he was half Falstaff, half Osric.) Hamlet is not only one of the greatest plays ever written – it is also one of the most incoherent. The man musing on death as ‘that undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns’ has just seen a ghost.
We draw so much out of Wagner’s Ring cycle, and it continues to fascinate audiences around the world, partly because it is stupendous musically, but also precisely because it is so incoherent. It does more than touch us, it stabs us with all the deepest preoccupations of which we as human beings are capable. It is ‘about’ the crisis and storm cloud of capitalism, sure. It is, too, a drama of beings who do not know who they are, who, in pursuit of lovers, are also looking for lost parents. In discarding the gods, it enters ever deeper into the spiritual basis of religious life. The old northern mythologies, as found in the Prose Edda, have the Earth-tree Yggdrasil gnawed by the Wolf, Fenris, who brings the whole existing order into ruin. In the end, the Wolf has dominion and devours even Odin/Wotan, father of the gods, and darkness descends over the world. The three Norns at the beginning of Götterdämmerung make allusion to all these terrible things, but when their rope of destiny snaps they are no longer able to see into the future. Wagner, with his mastery of detail and his i
ndifference, from scene to scene, of the big picture, ends with Brünnhilde’s song of triumphant love. As Valhalla goes up in flames she turns a brave horse towards the fire, shrieking of eternal love.
Bayreuth – I think of you every day; I think of you as my childhood idyll; I think of you as the backdrop against which Winnie’s destiny touched my own, until the Wolf gnawed at the tree and all fell to ruin and flame. What are you now? The Festival still continues, I believe, with Winnie’s sons presenting stylized versions of the Master’s works and, while they quarrel among themselves with the intensity of the gods at the beginning of the Ring cycle, they no doubt, in that hypocritical shithole which is the West, have contrived to forget that there ever was such a person as Uncle Wolf who gave them fast cars and paid for the Festival to survive.
It’s funny, I knew those boys so well as children – and I do not write this in bitterness because Wieland snubbed me, that last evening with you – but neither of them returns to my mind with the vividness of their grandparents, old Cosima, whom I knew only as an old lady and Richard, who lives for ever in the mysterious immortality of his music.
‘What’s the matter, don’t you love me any more now you’re married?’
‘Oh, hello, Friedelind.’ I had stopped calling her ‘Mausi’.
‘Like a fuck?’
‘Not just at the moment.’
‘Like a coffee?’
‘I hesitate to say, but in both cases just had one, thanks.’
‘Please. I’m serious – not about the fucking – about wanting to ask you something.’
‘Oh, all right then.’
The little girl who had thought I was a policeman in 1925, on the trail of her beloved Uncle Wolf, had become an altogether different being at a gargantuan twenty-one. There was an air of swaggering self-congratulation about this obese young woman, which failed to beguile me. By now she was spending most of her time in Paris and Switzerland. When war eventually broke out she refused to return to Germany. Later she wrote a book in which she claimed Winnie had come to Zurich in 1940 and threatened her with kidnap, or even murder, if she did not stop her denunciations of the regime.
That Mausi and Winnie had been enemies, as mothers and daughters often are, for a number of years, really since the outset of her teens, there could be no doubt. I do not know what to believe about her book. It was written in English, published in New York at the end of the war.* I never read it or even knowingly saw a copy, but everyone knows what it says, but … I don’t know. The story of Winnie going to Switzerland and threatening Mausi that Himmler would have her bumped off if she didn’t shut up doesn’t ring true to me. However, war had broken out and war drives people to behave in a manner which in peacetime would be considered insane.
‘N———.’
‘Yes.’
We were in the cafeteria and Friedelind was leaning forward in a conspiratorial way. ‘Helga hates them, your family hates them. Why are you so bloody … wishy-washy?’
‘Hates the…?’
‘You know who I mean. You know Mother insisted on taking me along to dinner at the Chancellery and Goebbels told this story: “Oh, my boys are thoroughly enjoying themselves,” he said. It was a foul story about some of his thugs stopping a Jew in the street and demanding to see his wallet – they found 300 marks in his pocketbook and insisted on seeing the proof that he owned this money. They took the cash, of course, and the man was arrested. I asked the good Doctor what had happened to him and he said the Jew had been sent to a concentration camp. N———, Mother was just sitting there. She did not utter one word of protest. “What had that man done wrong?” I asked and, quick as a flash, Frau Goebbels called down the table to me, “Just look at the child – she’s gone pale. You must not pity, girl. Never feel pity.”
‘She said that. Mother just sat. She was agog for what the Führer was going to say next – some crap about German art which the Goebbels thing had interrupted. I decided there and then I’ve got to get out of this madhouse. Doesn’t Helga feel the same? Don’t you want to get the kid out?’
The answer to these questions was No. Anyone today, in the early 1960s, who knew that I had been so often in the same room as the architects of the Second World War would be inclined to ask whether I ever felt tempted, for example, to assassinate Wolf. The truth is that the idea never crossed my mind. His entourage of thugs and gangster-weirdoes was obviously uncongenial. He himself, it must be said, was never anything but courteous to me and I saw him, even in the late thirties when he had become the most famous man in the world, as primarily Winnie’s friend. This may seem ludicrous or even shameful, but insofar as I thought of a bigger picture, well, yes, I was what Friedelind called a wishy-washy. Our country had been in complete chaos in 1933. Six years later we appeared to be the most powerful country in Western Europe. The British negotiators had cowered before H at Munich. There was great anxiety among all of us Germans, all that I met at any rate, about the coming of war, but we all hoped it might be averted. Just as he had achieved a revolution which, if not bloodless, was more or less so compared to the Russian experience, so H had managed to reoccupy the Rhineland, and to annex the German parts of Czechoslovakia and Austria without any fighting. The Austrians were rapturous, yearning not merely for absorption into a Greater Germany, as every plebiscite since 1919 had revealed, but also enthusiastic for National Socialism. God knows, we regretted horrible incidents like the arrest of a wretched Jewish man with his pocket full of cash, and only fanatics would have gone along with Frau Goebbels’s ‘Never feel pity’. But the street violence of this kind did not make any of us foresee – how could anyone have foreseen? – the fate of the six million Jews who were exterminated three, four, five years later.
Did I want to get you out of Germany? I see now clearly enough that it would have been for the best …
‘Look, N———, Papa Toscanini is going to get me a passport – to the Argentine. From there I can sail to New York. He liked you – he’d do the same for you…’
I did not know, absolutely know, though I had begun to suspect, who you were. I had no idea how the next six years would pan out. I believed that H had performed a miracle. I had forgotten the fisherman and his wife. I believed he shared the vision of the huge majority of Germans: namely that something like martial law and an autocratic government were necessary as a short-term solution to the problems we all faced in 1933. We were approaching the time, surely, when after a brief period of necessary autocracy things would get back to … what was normal in Germany? The dear old monarchy and aristocratic hierarchies of nineteenth-century Bavaria, Mummy would have said. A modern liberal democracy such as was attempted after the defeat of 1919 would have been my brother’s answer. For my father who, next to Hegel and Bach – and Harnack, of course – loved Goethe more than any other German, the answer was federalism. Germany for him was most itself when each locality had autonomy. In the conversations with Eckermann Goethe says that the Germans are more cultivated in general than the French because they aren’t centralized, they don’t have a Paris by comparison with which every other town is provincial. Instead, every little duchy and principality in Germany has its own theatre, opera house, university.
I thought, in 1939, maybe one day we’ll come back to that – for the time being H has brought us prosperity, strength and peace.
So that was why I rejected, almost hotly, Mausi’s suggestion that she help get us three out of Germany at that juncture. She sat opposite me in the coffee room of the Festival Theatre. Under the table our knees met and across the table her large fleshy face almost touched mine. I could feel and smell moist coffee-flavoured breath on my face – no trace of halitosis. I thought of all the moments when this young woman and I, since her girlhood, had been alone together. I thought of how I had always been aware of her physicality, her plumpness and moistness. Although she had never seriously propositioned me I had always felt it was on the cards.
As schoolboys, totally ignorant of sex and the
emotional life as one is at that age, we’d muttered to one another about nymphomaniacs, girls or young women who were desperate or who would do it with anyone. A lot of smutty talk in which we swaggeringly indulged involved fantasies about nymphos or crudely cast out suggestions that a friend’s sister (mother even) might come into the category. I had no desire to be Joseph before Potiphar’s wife. You might have supposed that for an intensely shy boy like me the thought of my first ‘experience’ with a woman being accomplished in so uncomplicated a way would have its attractions. But I was intensely fastidious and dreaded it – for quite specific physical reasons which I need not set down here. They had to do with smell. I wrongly supposed that Elsa, our housemaid until Crystal Night, smelled of it – though wider experience of life has told me that it was from her armpits that the odour emanated. No doubt my overt fear of this smell putting me off my stride was in fact a useful cloak, an excuse for a much deeper fear, which probably remains with me to this day, of women – and not only of women but of people – of commitment, of the loss of self involved in any relationship. Certainly, although you fill my head day and night – wherever you may be: New York? – and although I think much of Winnie, I am never lonely. It would be torture to make me share this little flat with anyone else and my only fear of prison related to the others.
I mention these, perhaps distasteful, details about myself as a way of trying to explain to you my state of mind in the late summer of 1939. You must after all have asked yourself, given what was happening to my father and brother and to those Church ministers who opposed the regime, why did I not join the resistance or get out of our country until it had come to its senses. Such talk is very easy with hindsight, and hindsight is the one gift – forgive the absurdity of this tautology – you don’t possess at the time. Even with the precious gift of hindsight, I do not know whether either Helga or myself would have wished to follow Mausi into exile. You see, the only real reason I’d have had for doing so was to ensure your safekeeping, your anonymity. Your identity was something I only began to guess in that crisis month, August 1939, just before the outbreak of war. It was indeed the crisis which made me have the suspicion. There is one other factor, historically all but unimaginable, which you have to bear in mind about Helga. That is her fundamental and doctrinaire Communism.