by A. N. Wilson
Wolf took the bouquet from you and when a flunkey tried to take it from him he said, ‘No, no, this is a present from my friend Senta. I shall hold onto it. And if I can ever give a present to you…’ He bowed down to you and crouched on his haunches so that his face was level with yours. ‘What can I give you, my girl?’
‘Please – is there going to be a war?’
His smiling face was instantly clouded. You could see his suspicious nature calculating who had planted this question on the child’s lips – in fact, I think there was no such prompting. Then the cloud passed and he was all smiles again. ‘I can give you my promise, little Senta,’ said this man three weeks before the invasion of Poland, ‘there will be no war. Trust me – there will be no war.’ He then stared silently at you for some time, with an expression of great tenderness, before asking gently, ‘Do I get a kiss?’
‘If you promise there will be no war.’
‘I promise.’
You put one arm round his neck and bestowed a little kiss on his apple cheek. Then, with the smile of a child who had just sung a solo at a concert, you were visited by nerves, and with a blush and a giggle you ran back to Helga.
* * *
We were in Munich with Helga’s parents when the raid on Bayreuth began. Her mother had appendicitis and for a short time this family crisis had overshadowed all others, including the fate of our country. We did not think it was safe to travel from Bayreuth to Munich with you. The war had reached the stage when any German city was vulnerable to attack. The Russians had surrounded Berlin and the last terrible battle was being fought – so unnecessarily and with such loss of life, all to satisfy the crazed ego of the Man in the Bunker.
In the south, Munich was suffering, still, from aerial bombardment, though what strategic purpose the Allies thought it served God knows. It seemed safer to leave you, then a child of thirteen, with Granny (that is, with my mother) in Bayreuth. Since there was no reason on earth why the RAF or the American Air Force should want to bomb our beautiful small town, Helga and I agreed you would be safer there.
But then – we were in Munich, Helga’s mother had made a good recovery from her operation – the calamitous news came: the US 18th Air Force had started to bomb Bayreuth. Telephones were down, but somehow or other we found out that the station and all surrounding railway lines had been bombarded, so there was no possibility of getting home by train. My father-in-law immediately gave us his car. As a doctor, he had a more generous petrol allowance than most, so there was just about a full tank in his distinguished old Mercedes. We knew that there was next to no chance of our being able to buy any petrol en route, but despair makes human beings act impulsively. We drove off. The journey is in the region of 200 kilometres and it was the most extraordinary car journey of my life. The outskirts of Munich were pitted with smoking rubble and ruined houses. All along the road we passed refugees, hobbling along with their belongings on their backs, and as we approached Nuremberg we could have been driving into hell. The whole city seemed to have been destroyed. We were driving through soot and flames. At one point we lost the road altogether and appeared to be driving across a smoking plain of burnt-out rubber tyres, wrecked vehicles and gutted buildings, so scorched and so totally pulverized that it was impossible to guess whether they had once been garden huts or Gothic cathedrals. The allies of freedom had managed to wreck the finest Gothic city in Europe, while leaving untouched the sinister great stadium built on the outskirts of town by the National Socialists for their rallies, and these were the first intact buildings we saw as we careered through Nuremberg and left it behind as fast as we could.
The longer we drove the more anxious we became, sometimes telling one another that you would be safe at my mother’s house, sometimes unable to believe that we should ever survive the journey, and sometimes in a daze of fear, unbelief, anger at what we saw all around us. I do not know, actually, what guardian angel led us round the outskirts of Nuremberg. Driving through it, or round its ring road would not have been possible, since it was a ruinous, sulphurous mass of smoke and flame. At every roadside were despondent, destitute people, children, women, the old, some standing like scarecrows, others making pointless movements, though to what purpose and in what direction it would have been hard to guess. Beyond Nuremberg the road cleared, and for twenty kilometres we were cruelly deluded into thinking that we had left all scenes of desolation behind us. The placid, rolling Franconian landscape lulled us into thinking that this gentle bucolic place knew nothing of the war. Then we came across a checkpoint, where the Americans had set up a roadblock. A GI who spoke no German, or none that was intelligible to Helga or to myself, told us that we could not advance any further. This was just beyond a small town called Trockau. Helga spoke English. I did not, though I could make out what was being discussed. She had ‘that look’ on her face – the look of defiance which had come over her that evening in the café when she started making jokes about the Führer and ended up spending two weeks in Dachau. I just hoped she wasn’t going to get up the GI’s nose.
She was explaining that we had a child in Bayreuth and that we needed to get home. The man chewed gum and seemed unimpressed. I thought he was a bastard. People in the West talk about those months as the Liberation. I never met any Germans during that time who felt they were being ‘liberated’ by these people. However glad we might feel to see the back of the Nazis, none of us welcomed the bombs and none of us welcomed these invaders. Helga was trying to be reasonable. She was gesturing with her hands a lot.
Then the bastard offered her a cigarette. Maybe a bit less of a bastard than I thought? She laughed at something he said.
‘What was that? What was that joke?’ I asked.
‘He said they are American cigarettes – better than I’d been used to. True,’ she said, as the smoke blew out in straight lines on her laughter, and as she handed me the ignited fag for a puff.
‘Let your husband have one, please,’ said the GI.
So I too had some of his excellent Virginia tobacco and the conversation went on. I realized that the two syllables I’d heard so often on his lips during this talk – ‘Ber-ruth’ – were his way of saying Bayreuth.
Helga began to translate for me: ‘He says there has been heavy bombing in Bayreuth; it wouldn’t be safe to drive there. He forbids us to drive. What do you think?’
‘The look’ had turned to pure mischief and my eye gave a quick glance towards the machine-gun the American boy had slung over his shoulder. Would he use it on us if we did what, so evidently, Helga was going to do?
‘So,’ she said in English, ‘you don’t recommend us to drive on.’
‘That’s right, ma’am.’
‘I’d better just – what? – turn the car round?’
We got back into the car without looking at one another. Helga was at the wheel and started the ignition. The checkpoint did not cover the entire width of the road and it was possible, by mounting the pavement, to squeeze past the small kiosk the soldiers had erected for themselves.
‘Hey-eh-eh, lady!’ was what they appeared to be shouting.
But Helga’s foot was down and we were driving out of town like the wind.
We had no further trouble until we approached the outskirts of Bayreuth.
It was midday on 12 April 1945. As we drove over the brow of the hill the familiar skyline of our dear little town was completely altered. The twin towers of the Stadtkirche were still standing, but amid clouds of smoke. As we came into the town it quickly became necessary to abandon the car, since all roads were blocked with rubble and ruins. Houses from whose fronts the walls had been wrenched out displayed the tattered destruction of life – here some sticks of furniture, bizarrely still intact on the top floor of a building whose staircase was ash; there a fireplace or some wallpaper in an otherwise gutted set of rooms. They looked like dolls’ houses destroyed by a malignant child. Many buildings, especially as we got near the centre of town, had been reduced to mountains of rubbl
e. The attic eaves of top storeys lay at angles across piled-up girders and piles of debris. Some buildings tottered with half-life, their metal girders or wooden joists stretching out like despondent limbs. Huge blocks, torn from pediments, had been hurled across the streets like pebbles. There was a terrible stench – of burning and of drains, all combined.
Though I grew up in Bayreuth and would reckon on knowing my way about the town blindfolded, I had several moments, as we stood beside yet another pile of rubble, of not knowing where we were.
Eventually, however, I recognized the small shop at the corner of my father’s old street. We looked towards his church, hoping for the reassuring sight of its tower and cupola, but also, with the Pavlovian instinct, as a way of seeing what the time was, since I had always followed the passage of the hours from the sundial clock on the side of this tower. The church was flattened. The cruel sky beyond it showed a jagged profile of wrecked houses and roof beams stretching at desperate angles.
Instinct made us run. We ran to the corner of the street and down the cobbles towards the house where you, and my mother, would have been lodging the previous night with the elderly spinster, Fräulein Boberach.
If you go down a very familiar street that has just been bombed, it is impossible to take in, at first, what you are seeing. The bombs rearrange the buildings. Where the eye is accustomed to see a high wall it sees open sky and wrecked cars, burnt sticks of furniture; dust and piles of bricks, stones and masonry lie completely at random, so that the shape of the street itself is altered. You clamber, making your way as best you can, but no longer following the line of the road. And when you reach the spot you have been seeking, you so very much don’t want to read the signals that it is giving you that you go on scrambling until you are lost.
We had walked, or climbed, or tripped, about four times round the ruins of Fräulein Boberach’s house before its message penetrated my skull: it had been destroyed by enemy action. That meant that the inhabitants had probably been killed. That meant Fräulein Boberach was dead – a sweet old lady and I was sorry about that. It meant my mother was dead – and that’s something to take in, the death of a mother. I certainly did not take it in there and then. And it meant you were dead – our adored adopted daughter, the centre of our life together over the last decade.
Time, sound, space, all the settings in which we assume we move during ‘normal’ experiences become suspended. How long it took us to recognize that we were in the ruin of a house, that its inhabitants were almost surely dead, I do not know. It could have been hours, we were wandering about like that, it could have been only a few minutes. At some point Helga came over to me and hugged me, and we stood there among the ruins, simply moaning and hugging one another, and then moaning some more.
Then someone was shouting to us.
We went over to him. It was a fireman. He told us it wasn’t safe to be so near the buildings, there was a danger of falling masonry.
And one of us, either Helga or I – for at that moment we had become one consciousness, one bewildered shared grief – began calling out your name and saying my mother’s name, Frau N———.
And he looked at me, the fireman, and – we are a small community in Bayreuth and most of us know one another by sight – he said, ‘The minister’s wife, a good lady. A very good lady.’
‘My mother!’ I was howling.
‘And our child – our child – what happened to the kid?’ Helga was bellowing.
Everyone was yelling, or talking, or making noises all at once. We were not asking for information, or receiving it, in the balanced to-and-fro of rational enquiry or discourse. The pain and confusion had made our exchanges an opera of sound.
Somehow or other, at some point someone – perhaps the fireman, perhaps someone else – told us what had happened. The two old ladies were dead. They had carried the old ladies out from the rubble – my mother and the Fräulein Boberach.
But the child, the child, the child?
Where were you?
You had gone missing. No one had found you.
‘Winnie?’ Helga was saying to me. ‘Winnie has her?’
‘But why? We left her … we left her with Mutti,’ I was saying.
But we weren’t standing in the ruins of the Boberach house any more, we were running through the town, or what was left of it.
Bayreuth, as well as being the subject of air raids, had also become a spot of convergence for refugees. Where were they all from? There were some Austrians and Czechs among them, as we found in subsequent days. The end of a war finds millions of persons displaced, their homes uprooted or destroyed, their chief needs being food and warmth.
It was a raw April, with a high wind, and many of these ragamuffins had arrived in our town without any resources. They had fallen on the Festival Theatre like scavengers and, in their desperation for warm coverings, they had raided the opera costumes, which they continued to wear for several weeks until more normal attire was supplied by the International Red Cross. So it was, as Helga and I made our painful pilgrimage across the remains of the city centre, that we passed fur-clad Siegfrieds and Siegmunds; Grail Knights in pale-grey cloaks adorned with scarlet crosses; medieval Nurembergers clad for a song contest; pilgrims coming from Rome to tell Tannhäuser that he was redeemed. The opera costumes, worn on wrecked street corners alongside American soldiers and helmeted airmen, added to the surreal timelessness of the scene. Wagner, who had come here to stage his dream dramas, now watched as they escaped the theatre and spilled over into a ruined world. Most of us keep our dreams, hopes, fantasies, unrealized inside our skulls. It is given to a very few – film directors, dramatists and opera composers – to see these dreams embodied, but contained, on stage or celluloid. What we appeared to be seeing, as we watched two Norns help fur-clad Burgundian knights across the precarious road and avoid the huge chasms made by the bombardments, were the fantasies of Richard Wagner escaped and at large – figures who for thirty years could not escape his head and who were at length staged on our Green Hill at Bayreuth, were now free. The great doom of our world, Ragnarok, the end of all things, seemed to be enacted. The gods had sunk in their twilight. The wolf gnawed at the great Ash Tree of the World. Chaos and despair ruled.
I do not know whether Helga had an aim in view as we continued to run, but instinct was taking me to where it all began – to the house where Richard Wagner and his wife had settled and brought to our sedate little town their disturbing messages from the world of passion: Wahnfried, Peace after Passion.
We found it as we had feared. Actually, the sight of the house after the bombing was rather worse than anything I could have feared, but since our primary thought, at that stage, was for your safety, the wreckage of Wagner’s house seemed but the appropriate background of our despair rather than its primary cause.
Like Brünnhilde before her awakening, Wahnfried was surrounded by fire. Most of the fires had been put out by the time we arrived, but in the gardens and the adjacent Hofgarten heaps of ash and rubble still smouldered. Enormous craters had made the Hofgarten a volcanic landscape, black and smoking.
The main façade of the house was intact, and the inscription placed there by Richard Wagner could still be read:
Hier wo mein Wähnen Frieden fand –
Wahnfried – sei dieses Haus von mir benannt.
Here where my passions found in peace their frame
May Wahnfried be my chosen house’s name.*
These survivals demonstrated their own doughty defiance, perhaps aptly, since Richard Wagner possessed in abundance the qualities of the survivor and would demonstrate after the war, despite the disastrous association of his name with Uncle Wolf, that he would rise up again to haunt the human consciousness. His house, however, had not exactly survived. The whole of the wing known as the Siegfried House – where Uncle Wolf had been wont to stay – was now in ruins. The top storeys of the house had been burnt out. The nursery, with the toys, had been blown to smithereens.
I had crouched down in the ashy rubble and was holding on to a small wooden hand. Gentle dusting of the cinders and flakes of fallen masonry revealed Mr Punch in a remarkably good state of repair. I could not see Judy, or the policeman, though it was possible that some of the charcoal remains, crunched beneath our feet, were the puppet’s old companions. Either the passage of time, since he enacted the role of the Jew in the thornbush, or a scorching, or his Icarus-like descent from the nursery floor had removed the papier-mâché nose, or most of it, from his wooden one.
‘Put it down,’ said Helga furiously.
‘By God, that’s Wolfgang,’ I replied.
At a distance of some fifty yards, standing in the ruins and staring through bare joists and girders to the relentless grey sky, stood Winnie’s younger son. When he recognized us he smiled, a big toothy grin, which was a welcome rather than a token of mirth.
‘Wieland is still in Berlin,’ he said.* ‘Mummy has taken Ellen to the country. She hasn’t had the baby yet.’ He was talking of his young, heavily pregnant wife.
‘Senta – Senta –’ Helga was saying your name like a mantra. At that moment we had no hope that you were alive. We were both in shock. My mother was dead. Since we had left you in her company, it was natural to conclude that you were dead. The house where you had been staying was a bombsite; Wahnfried, too, was in ruins.
‘We will rebuild this place,’ said Wolfgang. ‘I am determined to rebuild this place.’
‘Your mother?’ I asked.
‘Mummy’s gone to the cottage. It’s all right. Your kid – Senta – she’s taken her there. She took her to get out of the raid. Your own mother…?’
While I gestured speechlessly, tears streaming from my eyes, I would not have been able to know whence they flowed – from grief at so much loss, or from relief that you survived.