by A. N. Wilson
I have no idea how we found the car again, Dr Gerlandt’s Mercedes. We did so, however, and again Helga was at the wheel. I sat in the passenger seat, lighting cigarettes, which I passed to her lips and then took back for a puff of my own, while nursing Mr Punch on my lap.
I had been to Winnie’s weekend retreat in the Fichtelgebirge on a number of occasions and we managed, by using small country routes, to avoid the American roadblocks. As we approached the cottage garden we saw you hanging out washing on a line, with a beautiful peasant woman who, with clothes pegs between her lips, was doing the same.
‘For God’s sake’ – Helga’s response to my tears – ‘she’s alive. Take a grip on yourself.’
You put the unpegged shirt, drawers, bodices back in the basket and ran to greet us. Your resemblance to the peasant woman at the washing line was uncanny, the same polished weather-beaten cheekbones, the same thick dark-blonde Celtic hair. Only the deep midnight-blue eyes were different. How often, in your childhood and adolescence, would strangers, or those meeting you for the first time, remark upon those eyes. Of course, once my suspicions about your identity had formed themselves into a certainty these comments made me bridle. Did they know? Could they see?
The peasant woman finished pegging a sheet, waved to us and came forward: Winnie in all her beauty, all her gutsiness, all her absurdity, her culpable absurdity. ‘How are things in town?’
‘We’ve seen Wolfgang,’ I said.
Helga said, ‘N———’s mother. Darling’ – she took your hand – ‘Granny…’
Winnie said, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. So very sorry.’
You reacted immediately. You burst into tears while Helga enfolded you in her arms.
I do not know how long this moment lasted. It was a timeless tableau. It could well have been an hour, or several hours, later that Winnie defiantly asked, ‘Any news from Berlin?’
‘I gather Wieland is coming. Wolfgang thought he might have escaped.’
For a moment her sons seemed of no importance to her. ‘The last proper news we heard on the wireless was that the Führer has given orders that we should fight on. Of course, the Americans have taken over the radio stations down here now, so it is impossible to get any news.’
‘I wish they’d stop this nonsense – it’s obscene,’ said Helga. ‘The Russians have taken Berlin. I wish they’d just stop the killing.’
Winnie drew herself up to her full height and there was a deep intake of breath. ‘I have no doubt whatever,’ she said firmly and she began to nod her head rhythmically to emphasize each syllable, ‘that the Führer’s policy will be vindicated, that he is probably even as we speak mobilizing our divisions. He will drive the Russians out of Berlin. He will drive the Americans out of Bayreuth.’
I so well recall where we were all standing when she said this – on the lawns of her cottage. I could see the spring sky behind her proud head. She looked very confident, almost happy. Helga was shaking her head in disbelief, in the way you might if someone had taken leave of their senses. But she wasn’t mad, Winnie – unless you think it is mad to live exclusively in a world of your own and to insist on life being understood exclusively on your terms.
We had not planned to stay, and we were not invited to stay, with Winnie in her cottage. We did not part with her on bad terms, we did not quarrel with her conviction, as hundreds of thousands of Germans died and our cities went up in flames, that Wolf would once again perform a miracle. But it became clear we should move on. A row was smouldering, and in the car it escalated, between me and Helga about whether we should drive the Merc back to Munich – my idea – or pursue her proposal that we go to Leipzig, the birthplace of Bach, Wagner and music. In making this decision, for Leipzig, we unwittingly became East Germans, and the rest of your upbringing and education was destined to be in a Communist state. Here you stayed – until your chance to escape came, some time after that Meistersinger in 1960.
None of us in the Mercedes knew what the future held. You sat in the back, with some apples, some cheese, some bread and some sausage, which Winnie had given us. It must have been so boring for you when your ‘parents’ began their warm-up routines for one of their rows. Even as Helga reversed the Merc, she was advancing the case for Leipzig and I was asking, ‘Don’t you think your father would like his car back?’
‘Oh, I see, so you know more about what my father wants than I do?’
You’d turned your profile, identical to that of dear Win, and you were waving to her – it was the last glimpse you had of her, as she stood there, in her white apron, a broad, confident smile lighting up her face and her arm raised, either in valediction or salute.
Also by A. N. Wilson
FICTION
The Sweets of Pimlico
Unguarded Hours
Kindly Light
The Healing Art
Who Was Oswald Fish?
Wise Virgin
Scandal
Gentlemen in England
Love Unknown
Stray
The Vicar of Sorrows
Dream Children
My Name is Legion
A Jealous Ghost
The Lampitt Chronicles
Incline Our Hearts
A Bottle in the Smoke
Daughters of Albion
Hearing Voices
A Watch in the Night
NONFICTION
The Laird of Abbotsford
A Life of John Milton
Hilaire Belloc
How Can We Know?
Penfriends from Porlock
Tolstoy
C. S. Lewis: A Biography
Jesus
The Rise and Fall of the House of Windsor
Paul
God’s Funeral
The Victorians
Iris Murdoch as I Knew Her
London: A Short History
After the Victorians
Betjeman
Our Times
A. N. Wilson was born in 1950 and was educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is an award-winning biographer and celebrated novelist. He lives in North London.
WINNIE AND WOLF. Copyright © 2007 by A. N. Wilson. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
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Originally published in Great Britain by Hutchinson
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First Picador Edition: November 2009
eISBN 9781466893726
First eBook edition: March 2015
* Olga Blomé.
* It is true. H.M.
* I have here translated the words literally as they appear on N———’s page. What H is saying is that he wishes, from the first, to address her as an intimate and an equal. In all formal relationships between grown-ups it would be more usual, even today (how much more so in 1923) to use the second person plural. Such gradations of politeness do not exist in our language as they do in French or German. H.M.
* Reached Bayreuth and already regretting it.
* Lilli Loewe, by then Lilli Lehmann, sang one of the Rhinemaidens in the first production of The Rhine-gold at Bayreuth in 1876.
* Obviously to N———, but not necessarily to others. This is one of the many moments in his narrative when N——— strains our credulity. Eva Braun shot herself with her father’s pistol on 1 November 1932, but it seems to have been more a ‘cry for help’ than a serious attempt to take her
own life. She was able to telephone for an ambulance after she had done it, and the Leader visited her in a Munich hospital, bringing a bunch of flowers, the next day. The day after he addressed a huge rally at the Berlin Sportspalast. In all the many attempts to write about Fräulein Braun, no one has ever, before N———, suggested that she had heard of Winifred Wagner giving birth to H’s child. H.M.
* N——— was unduly pessimistic. The Palace and Gardens of Sanssouci all survive, magnificently restored. The Chinese Pavilion, the Ehrenhof (Court of Honour), the Belvedere on Klausberg Hill and many other pavilions and palaces have survived the tragedies of the twentieth century.
* N——— is probably writing a good decade before the five-hour-long television interviews given in 1975 by Winifred Wagner to Hans Jürgen Syberberg, in which she caused scandal by her impenitent expressions of personal fondness for H, exclaiming that if he walked through the door at that moment she would rejoice – ‘The part of him that I know, shall we say, I value as highly today as I ever did. And the H that everyone utterly condemns does not exist in my mind, because that is not how I know him.’
* Pope Pius XI (Achille Ratti, a former Vatican Librarian) was a cautious but vehement critic of National Socialism. Some people believed he was murdered by the fascists in 1939.
* Eugenio Pacelli, as Papal Nuncio in Germany, agreed various Concordats with H in an attempt to preserve the freedom of Catholics to worship, and to educate their children as they pleased, and to avoid a widespread persecution of the Church. As Pope Pius XII from 2 March 1939 onwards he was widely criticized for not speaking out more forcefully against Nazism.
† Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, leader of the Catholic Party, had been prepared to disband its ranks and accept the Concordats offered by H as a way of keeping Bolshevism at bay. ‘It matters little who rules so long as order is maintained’ was his view in 1933. Most Catholic bishops in Germany took a broadly similar view at this early stage of the regime, though the laity were divided and many would have agreed with Heinrich N———’s much more radical denunciation of the racialistic intolerance of the Nazi life view.
* N——— is referring to Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973), premier of the DDR, responsible for building the Berlin Wall in 1961; to his deputy and successor, Erich Honecker (1912–94); and to the Soviet Union (in Russian, Sovyetskii Soiuz), which exercised an iron control over East Germany at the time of writing.
* H was, as so often by his Ambassador in London, misinformed. Sir Thomas Beecham, though a Germanophile who did indeed conduct in the presence of the German Chancellor, was by no stretch of the imagination a political sympathizer.
* Buddhist Scriptures, selected and translated by Edward Conze (Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1959, p. 177).
* The observations about the dog eyeing the cat are to be found in his The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1873); in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) Darwin did suggest that the Africans and the native inhabitants of South America (both ‘savages’) were a ‘sub species’, just as he states as a categorical fact that women are inferior to men, but he does not actually state that black and white people are a separate species as H imagined.
* The Goebbels children were Helga, Hilda, Helmut, Holde, Hedda and Heide, all destined to be killed by their mother in H’s bunker in April 1945.
† Again, a reference to N——— and possibly his wife, having been in France, presumably during the German occupation. The text throws no light on this and much about his war years will remain shadowy.
* Auch in Entwerfen der Handlung ist Wagner vor allem Schauspieler (from Der Fall Wagner).
* Friedelind Wagner, The Royal Family of Bayreuth, Eyre and Spottiswoode (London, 1948).
* Herr N———, from internal evidence, would seem to be writing his book during the 1960s. Although believing himself to be near death, he seems to have concealed his manuscript at least until the early 1980s when he managed to mail it, or otherwise get it transported, to Senta, later Winifred Hiedler, in Seattle.
* Literally, ‘Here, where my passions found peace, may this house be named by me – Wahnfried.’
* Wieland was in fact on his way by car.