The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Only the Beidlers loomed as a problem. Chamberlain, it seems, had shown an interest in Isolde many years before and may therefore have been jealous of the graceless young Swiss for whom she finally plumped. That aside, he and his wife stood to be sidelined if Isolde were re-admitted to the family fold with a confirmation of the glorious paternity that she now chose to claim. Perhaps, indeed, it was Eva who first intercepted the Beidlers’ begging letter to Cosima. She was ideally placed to do so. Can it be that she and Chamberlain subsequently influenced the reply sent by Siegfried? There is no proof but it is striking how the tone of Siegfried’s letter, full of bitterness and threats, matches next to nothing else in his available correspondence. Not that Siegfried would emerge with any glory even if it could be shown that he ‘merely’ gave his name to a document largely formulated by others. Besides his surely genuine concern for ‘Mama’s’ health, he was at least as aware as the Chamberlains of how much there was to lose if the Beidlers gained direct access to Cosima and managed to ‘unfreeze’ her. If not the main string-puller, he was among the puppeteers – then and later. In 1911 a rash of reports swept through the German press falsely claiming that the Beidlers had divorced and stressing that Isolde was not, as many people believed, Wagner’s daughter. The source for this particular fiction was not given, but those who attributed it to ‘Wahnfried circles’ were surely close to the mark.

  Finally realising that she was getting nowhere, Isolde decided – for her son’s sake at least as much as her own – to get her true lineage established once and for all by taking her mother to court. She was already suffering from the tuberculosis that was to kill her but she went ahead in 1913 all the same, convinced that her cause was just. No doubt it was but, to cut short the tale of a long legal battle, she lost. After months of deliberation and reams of often gloating press coverage, the Bayreuth court ruled on 19 June 1914 that Isolde had not proved her case and ordered her to pay costs. As the law stood, a wife’s sexual intercourse was assumed to be ‘exclusive’ throughout her marriage; ergo, Cosima’s then husband – von Bülow – was automatically deemed to be Isolde’s father. This presumption could be overruled only if convincing evidence to the contrary were produced and the court decided that Isolde had not done so. She had been born during Cosima’s marriage to von Bülow, she had been baptised a von Bülow and she had accepted a share of the von Bülow estate. Hence she could not, under law, be considered Wagner’s daughter. Cosima could have turned this result on its head by swearing that she had made love only with Wagner throughout the period during which Isolde must have been conceived – but of course she swore no such thing. She was not even called to give evidence under oath.

  By the time the verdict was announced, poor, doomed Isolde was already undergoing treatment for tuberculosis in Davos. There she remained like a character from Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg (Magic Mountain), fighting vainly to regain her health, surveying the outbreak of war far down on the ‘Flatland’ – and, it seems, passing on the background to the trial in every nasty detail to her teenaged son. Was she aware that her husband was meanwhile having an affair with an opera singer and that the two had a daughter (who incidentally as Eva Busch became one of Germany’s most famous left-wing cabaret singers)? Probably not. Numbed by growing doses of morphium her spirit broke, then her body, and she died on 7 February 1919 – two months before her fifty-fourth birthday.

  This tale has a bizarre postscript. Isolde was buried in Munich where her widowed husband now lived, but that was not her final resting place. Beidler later married his Bavarian housekeeper, Walburga Rass, with whom he had a daughter, Elsa. She in turn married a writer from Söcking, a village close to Lake Starnberg. Many years after Beidler’s death in 1930, Isolde’s corpse was exhumed and reinterred with his at the cemetery on a hilltop above Söcking. As the crow flies, Isolde’s remains thus now lie only a few miles from the spot where she was conceived – that villa made available to Wagner by King Ludwig to which Cosima sped ahead of von Bülow in 1864. After Beidler’s second wife Walburga died in 1975, her body too was placed in the selfsame grave. Whoever formulated the inscription on the brown wood memorial there decided to play it safe. Cosima’s ‘first child of love’ is comprehensively identified as ‘Isolde Beidler geb. von Bülow-Wagner’. Of all the family victims in the history of the Wagners, Isolde is arguably the saddest.

  In retrospect, Isolde stood little chance from the start of winning her court battle, but it seems that Cosima and her troops themselves were not sure of that. While the trial was still going on, Siegfried dropped a bombshell, apparently believing that this could induce a wave of public sympathy for Cosima’s cause. He suddenly announced a plan to turn over the whole of the Wagner legacy, including the festival theatre and its grounds, Wahnfried and its archive, to a national foundation ‘in perpetuity’. He and his mother, Siegfried declared, had decided that the ‘Bayreuth of Richard Wagner … belongs not to us but to the German people.’ What largesse! Maximilian Harden, for one, smelt a rat and said so in an article in which, besides taking an indirect swipe at Siegfried’s private life, he scorned the whole clan for pious posing and wearing ‘a mask of lies’. Harden was right to be suspicious. Siegfried claimed that the foundation plan had been concocted in mid-1913 and that it could already have gone some way towards implementation. The implication was that by going to court and putting a question mark over the Wagner legacy, Isolde was ‘selfishly’ delaying the bestowal of cultural riches on the German nation and, if she got her way, might block it altogether. But in fact Cosima had drawn up a will in the second half of 1913 and there was not a word in it about a foundation. On the contrary, she left everything to her son. Once the trial was over little more was heard of the scheme, at least not for sixty years. Then a national foundation really was set up, although those who believed this would mark the end of the Wagners’ rule in Bayreuth soon found they had to think again.18

  Isolde’s decision to go to court, the end of copyright on the Master’s work, the failure to confine Parsifal to Bayreuth; all that made 1913 an awful year for Wahnfried. If anything it seemed still more vile because the family had to go through the motions of celebrating the centenary of Wagner’s birth. Speeches were made, choruses sung, even more flowers than usual were placed on the Master’s grave, Wolzogen composed a sonnet his fans thought profound. Siegfried was made an honorary citizen of Bayreuth and he was present when a white marble bust of his father was reverently placed in Walhalla, an incongruous Doric temple built decades before on a perch above the Danube. But he understandably looked far from his usual buoyant self that year. It was hard to believe that 1914 could bring anything worse but it did. Nine days after the Isolde trial ended to sighs of relief at Wahnfried, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Habsburg throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo and the old European order moved a big step closer to collapse. The festival went ahead, but as international tension grew the ranks of the foreign pilgrims thinned and of twenty planned performances only eight were held. The final one – Parsifal – was given on 1 August before a half-empty house. The same evening Germany ordered general mobilisation.

  Although the truncated season meant that the festival made a loss of 360,000 marks, the outbreak of war did not seem an unmitigated disaster at Wahnfried, at least not at first. It spared the Wagners unwelcome questions about when the promise of a foundation would be made good and also, probably, a renewed attack from Harden in Die Zukunft. Besides, Chamberlain for one felt war might be the only way for the noble Germany he believed in to renew itself at home and humble greedy, superficial foes – especially Britain. He pinned up a map on the wall at Wahnfried with flags to mark the (soon-stymied) German advance, and produced a stream of rousing pamphlets that won him the Iron Cross in 1915. A year later he took German nationality. The only surprise is that he did not do so sooner. But as the troops stayed bogged down and victory prospects faded, Chamberlain began to complain that the state with its corrupt and squabbling politicians was not worth
y of its brave, disciplined army. Lots of Germans felt the same. So was born that disastrous ‘stab in the back’ legend – that Germany was not defeated but betrayed by cowardly string-pullers in Berlin, not least Jews. Next time, many people swore, things would be different.

  Siegfried also wrung his hands over the war and increasingly over the break in the festival that was ultimately to last all of ten years; but he had other things on his mind too. At the age of forty-six he took a step which by that time astonished almost everyone, including perhaps himself. He got married. His bride was no opera singer, no noblewoman, but an eighteen-year-old English-born girl, orphaned as an infant, called Winifred – ‘rather boyish-looking’ some observers knowingly claimed. Boyish or not, she soon bore Siegfried four children, consolidating the clan but opening the way for new battles a generation hence over the Wahnfried succession. Winifred made her mark in quite another way too. Far more than her husband and no less than her fanatical brother-in-law, Chamberlain, she became devoted to Bayreuth’s most notorious visitor – Adolf Hitler.

  8

  Wolf at the Door

  ‘Much esteemed and dear Herr Hitler,’ the fan letter from Bayreuth began.

  You are not at all as you have been described to me, a fanatic. The fanatic inflames the mind, you warm the heart. The fanatic wants to overwhelm people with words, you wish to convince, only to convince them … You have immense achievements ahead of you, but for all your strength of will I do not regard you as a violent man. You know Goethe’s distinction between force and force. There is the force that stems from and in turn leads to chaos, and there is the force that shapes the universe.1

  Although Chamberlain was responsible for this fatuous panegyric, over which the recipient reportedly rejoiced ‘like a child’, he did not physically write it himself. Since the war years the ‘seer of Bayreuth’ had been close to paralysis with an illness never diagnosed for sure, and his speech was so slurred that the devoted Eva was one of the few who could still understand him. It was she, long her mother’s secretary and now her husband’s too, who acted as his interpreter to visitors and who painstakingly took down his copious correspondence, including this particular letter dated 7 October 1923 to the up-and-coming leader of the Nazi party. At the end of it, Chamberlain confessed that his hopes for his chosen nation had been at a low ebb until Hitler’s visit to Bayreuth a week earlier. Now though, ‘at one blow you have transformed the state of my soul. That Germany in its hour of greatest need has given birth to a Hitler is proof of vitality … May God protect you!’

  A few weeks later, on 8–9 November, Chamberlain’s supposed espouser of non-violence tried to stage his Munich ‘beer hall putsch’ – planned as the prelude to a march on Berlin to seize nationwide power. The bid failed and Hitler was subsequently jailed. This was less of a setback for the Nazis than it seemed, if indeed it was a setback at all. Hitler used his trial as a propaganda forum and his time in Landsberg prison (he served only nine months of a five-year sentence) to rethink his strategy, during which he produced the first part of the book later called Mein Kampf (My Struggle). Chamberlain, for one, remained convinced that Germany’s saviour had emerged at long last even though all too many Germans, in his view, sadly failed to realise their good fortune. In a letter dated 1 January 1924 and later widely publicised to mark Hitler’s thirty-fifth birthday on 20 April, he compared the Landsberg jailbird to Martin Luther in his ‘courage’ and ‘holy seriousness’ and, not least, in his antisemitism. ‘He (i.e. Hitler) finds it impossible to share our conviction about the pernicious, even murderous, influence of Jewry on the German Volk and not to take action,’ Chamberlain observed. ‘If one sees the danger, then steps must be taken against it with the utmost despatch. I daresay everyone recognises this but nobody risks speaking out; nobody ventures to extract the consequences of his thoughts for his actions; nobody except Hitler.’2 Under ‘nobody’ presumably Chamberlain included himself. Like most ‘intellectual’ antisemites he did not care to describe, let alone try to initiate, concrete steps to solve the ‘Jewish problem’. Hitler, evidently, knew what to do.

  Deeply misguided, painfully ill, seemingly close to death (though he lived on until 1927) – Chamberlain was all those things, but he was anything but irrelevant. Among those members of the Wagner clan rooting for Hitler in those days, he was easily the most influential. It was Chamberlain who had produced the by now near-legendary Grundlagen des 19en Jahrhunderts; Chamberlain whose patriotic wartime essays had sold up to a million copies; Chamberlain who served as a model for a new generation of racist writers, ranging from the relatively genteel scribes of the Bayreuther Blätter to the brutal Artur Dinter – later Nazi Gauleiter in Thuringia – whose Die Sünde wider das Blut (The Sin against Blood) became a runaway bestseller. That Chamberlain had for years been a confidant of the now-exiled Kaiser Wilhelm merely added to his prestige – at least among many of those who despised or despaired of the newborn Weimar Republic with its struggling, squabbling politicians. Chamberlain had stayed personally loyal to the Kaiser, and he had gone on extolling the pedagogic value of Wagner’s music dramas. But he had finally concluded that Germany could be saved neither by the monarchy nor from the stage – even Wagner’s stage. What the nation needed, he declared, was an ‘iron broom’ to sweep it clean.

  Hitler was well aware of Chamberlain’s reputation and had evidently dipped into his works; indeed parts of Mein Kampf read like an inelegant crib from Die Grundlagen. But when he came to Bayreuth on 30 September 1923 it was not, in the first place, to visit either the racist guru at Nr 1 Wahnfriedstrasse or the rest of the Wagner clan round the corner. It was to address a German Day rally – one of a series at which he was trying to drum up support throughout Bavaria and at which, the available evidence suggests, no member of the Wagner family was present. That evening, with the main business of the day behind him, Hitler at his own proposal paid a call on Chamberlain and then went on to a nearby hotel reception hosted by two of his richest sponsors, the piano manufacturer Edwin Bechstein and his wife Helene. Winifred Wagner, who had known the Bechsteins for years, was also present at the party (evidently without Siegfried) and she invited the guest of honour round for breakfast the next day.

  Was it love at first sight? It is hard to say what love may have meant to Hitler, if anything; but he clearly took to the twenty-six-year-old ‘mistress of Wahnfried’ (if not, yet, of the Bayreuth festival) and henceforth, for nearly two decades, he repeatedly sought her company. As for Winifred, she surely did fall right away for the blue-eyed charmer eight years her senior who talked so stirringly of his aims for Germany and his passion for (Richard) Wagner. She was not, of course, alone in that. Hitler’s erotic allure is well documented, for instance in those countless newsreels showing women shedding tears of ecstasy at the approach of the Reich’s most desirable and least attainable bachelor. But Winifred remained more or less infatuated to the end and, what’s more, she did not care who knew it. As late as 1975, five years before her death, she visibly brightened up during a long filmed interview when the talk turned to Hitler. Her devotion was of a different type to Chamberlain’s, but it was not a whit less absolute.

  Winifred Marjorie Williams was born on 23 June 1897 in Hastings, a Sussex seaside resort located, as it happens, only a shortish drive along the coast from Chamberlain’s Hampshire birthplace. It seems likely, though, that these two arch-Bayreuthians (who always conversed with one another in German) rarely talked about their southern English origins and certainly never did so with pleasure. Like Chamberlain, Winifred from the start lacked a real home; like him she went through agonies of loneliness and rejection; like him she only won a sense of belonging when she went to Germany. No doubt all that helped forge the fierce and uncompromising attachment of both outsiders to their adopted country – a passion extreme even by the standards of most native-born, patriotic Germans. The same was surely true of the Paris-bred Cosima with her usually absent French–Hungarian parents and, in part, of the Austrian-born
, pan-German Hitler who suffered abject failure and poverty as a young artist in polyglot Vienna. All four of these rootless souls found a physical home at or next to Wahnfried (Hitler, admittedly, only sporadically), and an emotional one in music, above all Wagner’s.3

  Winifred never knew her parents. Her Welsh father, a writer, died of a liver disease before she was two and her mother, an actress of Danish descent, succumbed a year later to typhus. By her own account, the little girl was pretty wild. No one seemed to want her for long and as a result she became wilder still. Decades later she still recalled with awful clarity the privations of her East Grinstead (Sussex) orphanage where kids found guilty of fibbing had their tongues smeared with mustard. That treatment did not make the adult Winifred more tolerant of youthful foibles, at least not consistently. She notoriously often let her own brood run riot as though no discipline was good discipline. But she also fought a fierce battle of wills that lasted for years with her elder daughter Friedelind, who was at least as rebellious as the young Winifred herself had been. The more her mother applied pressure – forcing her to eat what was ‘good’ for her until she vomited, sending her away to ‘learn sense’ at a cheerless boarding school (shades of the orphanage!) – the more the girl dug in her heels. Friedelind, it is true, was a special case but, in general, Winifred was not accustomed to taking children in her arms or showing sympathy for ‘cry babies’. No doubt she thought she was acting for the best and did not mean to be cruel, but she lacked real warmth. Where, indeed, would she have learned what warmth was?