The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  That is about as close as one can come to pinning down how the paths of Hitler and the Wagners began to cross, but the facts have become obscured by a fog of legend that, if anything, gets thicker as the years pass. For this the family is much but not solely to blame. Unsurprisingly, Winifred played down her own role to denazification authorities shortly after the Second World War, although she played it up later, especially when reminiscing to her still Hitler-besotted friends. She publicly conceded that she had sent ‘masses of paper’ to the jailed Hitler but scorned the very idea that she was therefore indirectly responsible for the birth of Mein Kampf. In that, at least, she had a point. Hitler dictated his text to fellow prisoners, above all to his close aide Rudolf Hess, and history does not record how much, if any, of Winifred’s supplies they may have used. That has not, however, harmed circulation of the tale that Hitler set down his grotesque bestseller on Wahnfried notepaper. A related claim has it that the author called his book Mein Kampf to forge an obvious link with the adored Wagner’s Mein Leben. But Hitler’s original title was Viereinhalb Jahre Kampf gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit (A Four-and-a-Half-Year Struggle against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice). His publisher Max Amann understandably found that less than catchy (and much of the text itself a disappointingly turgid read). He thus proposed Mein Kampf instead.

  It is sadly true that the plucky Friedelind, who fled Nazi Germany before the Second World War, also contributed to the confusion. In her pungent biography called Heritage of Fire, first published in America in 1945, she wrote that her mother had met Hitler in Munich even before he came to Bayreuth. There is no evidence to support this and next to none to back up another of her colourful claims, often repeated since – namely that Siegfried visited the wounded and impoverished Göring in Austria immediately after the putsch, paid all his bills and arranged for him and his wife to stay in Venice for a year free of charge. Friedelind also undermined her credibility by wrongly naming May, not October, as the month when Hitler was first shown round Wahnfried – a small point but one that has made it easier for her foes inside and outside the family to cast doubt on the rest of her account. Where Friedelind sticks to her own observation and does not repeat hearsay she is nearly always credible. But when Hitler first came to Wahnfried she was only five years old.

  Did Hitler discuss his projected putsch with the Wagners? It has often been suggested that he did, but the claim gains no greater credibility through repetition. A coup was surely ‘in the air’ in 1923 but Hitler did not go about chattering to outsiders (or even to brand-new friends) of his hazardous and constantly changing plans. Chamberlain, for one, clearly knew nothing or he would not have extolled Hitler in his letter of 7 October for his ‘non-violent’ intentions. Siegfried’s tone-poem Glück is sometimes offered as circumstantial evidence of collusion. It is alleged that the premiere of the piece was timed to coincide with and celebrate the putsch; or even, as one contemporary German author amazingly suggests, that the putsch was timed to coincide with the premiere.7 Had there been such a plan the composer would hardly have gone ahead – as he did – and given the work its delayed first hearing in December in Munich, a stone’s throw from the spot where Hitler’s bid to seize power had ended in a hail of bullets just a month before. Siegfried did, it is true, complete his first draft of Glück (the full score took him another few weeks) on 20 April 1923, Hitler’s birthday, but that is no proof that he was implicitly honouring a politician he had not then even met. More plausible is the claim of the late Gertrud Strobel, for many years keeper of the Wahn-fried archives, that when Siegfried composed Glück it was his long-dead friend Clement Harris, not Adolf Hitler, that he had in mind. But naturally Siegfried could not afford to risk tongue-wagging by making that connection plain in public.8

  Leaving aside myth and conjecture, what did Siegfried really think of Hitler and his programme, not least its racist component? The answer is far from straightforward. Unlike his wife and sisters, Siegfried never joined the Nazi party and, unlike Chamberlain, he was not obsessed with its ideology – or, indeed, any ideology. Winifred reported on one occasion that ‘even Fidi’ was reading Mein Kampf, thus confirming (perhaps unwittingly) that it was not her husband’s favourite kind of book. Siegfried nonetheless shared the general conviction that Germany was in dire need of a ‘new broom’, if not necessarily the ‘iron’ one Chamberlain advocated; and at least at the start, he evidently felt that if Winnie’s new Wagner-loving friend filled the bill then so much the better. ‘My wife fights like a lioness for Hitler. Splendid!’ Siegfried wrote to a friend in late 1923. At least he seems to have done so. The original letter has gone missing and only a transcript remains available, but on balance the text is probably authentic.9

  Moreover, a few months later Siegfried joined with Winifred in a bid to extract what could have been crucial financial backing for Hitler from Henry Ford, the fiercely antisemitic car king in the United States. Although themselves in America on a (largely luckless) tour to seek cash for Bayreuth, the Wagners managed to win an introduction to Ford for Kurt Lüdecke, Hitler’s main fund-raiser and wheeler-dealer abroad. Lüdecke had high hopes of the meeting, noting that ‘with one rasp of his pen’ the American multimillionaire could solve the Nazis’ money problems and allow them to push their programme ahead ‘like a battering ram’. In the event, though, he drew a blank. Ford was becoming wary of stirring up more problems for himself with America’s Jews, and while he gave the emissary a sympathetic hearing he did not offer any cash.10 Evidently Hitler did not hold that against him. In Mein Kampf he referred to Ford as a ‘great man’ and saw to it in 1938 (when the Reich’s business ties with America were still close and, indeed, economically vital) that he received the highest award the Nazis could bestow on a foreigner.

  The Lüdecke affair shows that, in early 1924 anyway, Siegfried was ready to help Hitler if he could, as the Nazi boss clearly realised. In a letter to Siegfried from Landsberg in May, he thanked both the festival director and his ‘lady wife’ for their support and stressed that Bayreuth lay on the ‘line of march’ from Munich to Berlin, a comment notable not just for its geographical accuracy.11 It may also have been thanks to Lüdecke that the Wagners were given an audience in Rome by Hitler’s fascist crony Benito Mussolini on their way home from America – a further sign that at this stage Siegfried was ready and perhaps even eager to hobnob with the far right. A year later though, in the summer of 1925, things were starting to change. Hitler, out of jail and back in action, went to the Bayreuth festival for the first time and heard everything on offer – the Ring, Meistersinger and Parsifal. But he attended privately at the invitation of the Bechsteins, not as a guest of the festival or the Wagners, although he did meet Winifred and gave her a copy, hot from the press, of the first part of Mein Kampf. After that he did not return to the festival until the summer of 1933, a few months after he had become chancellor of the Reich and three years after Siegfried’s death.

  Hitler later claimed he had abstained for so long with regret, despite repeated pleas from Winifred, because he did not want to drag the Wagner shrine into political controversy. There may be something in that. More to the point, by 1925 Siegfried had markedly cooled towards Wolf – the Nazi leader’s well-chosen pseudonym – and wanted him on the prowl neither at the festival nor, in principle, at home. Hitler, however, was not so easily kept at bay – at least not in private. He took to flitting into Wahnfried, usually by night and often unannounced, delighting the lady of the house and thrilling the children with bedtime tales about his (real or imagined) adventures. Sometimes, if he were in the neighbourhood but could not drop by, Winnie would drive out into the country to see him if only for a few minutes. Leaving aside the aged Cosima, it would seem that the only member of the Wahnfried clan not overjoyed to clap eyes on Hitler during Siegfried’s lifetime was Siegfried himself. Even Straubele, the family schnauzer who normally snapped at strangers, is said to have nuzzled up to Wolf from the start.

  Winifred’s correspon
dence shows that Siegfried repeatedly tried, with precious little success, to stop her attending Hitler’s public rallies; but he seems early on to have resigned himself to the private contacts between his wife and the Nazi leader. ‘Unfortunately Wolf present,’ Siegfried noted gloomily in his diary after he and Winifred had arrived at a Munich hotel to find a beaming Hitler in the lobby.12 He left the happy pair to spend the evening together and went off alone to the theatre. On another occasion he actually took Winifred to a restaurant where she was due to lunch with Wolf, then went off to eat elsewhere. Was Siegfried simply incapable of putting his foot down? Or could it be that he and Winifred had reached a more or less tacit understanding; that he could have his own private life, artistic and sexual, and she could have hers? If so, that need not imply that Winnie actually slept with Wolf. For what it is worth, she later denied having done so. Besides, the trickle of real evidence (as against the floods of rumour) suggests that despite all his outward allure Hitler’s involvement with women – from the domineering Helene Bechstein and the headstrong Unity Mitford to the vulnerable ‘Geli’ Raubal (his niece) – tended, for whatever reason, to stop short of the bedroom. Even Eva Braun, his long-time companion, seems to have been not so much a mistress as a mascot, at least if heavy hints later dropped by Hitler’s housekeeping staff are to be believed. All that said, the fanatical adventurer who came and went like the wind clearly offered the hyperactive Winifred thrills her husband could never deliver.

  Something of the highly charged emotional atmosphere at Wahn-fried in those days emerges from a staccato account given by Joseph Goebbels, later Nazi propaganda minister, after he visited the Wagners in 1926. Like Hitler on his first pilgrimage, Goebbels was awed by the Master’s heirlooms and grave and, also like Hitler, he was much drawn to Winifred. ‘They should all be like that,’ he wrote of her in his diary. ‘And fanatically on our side. Sweet children. We’re all friends right away. She pours out her sorrow to me. Siegfried is so spineless. Yuck! Shame on him before the Master. Siegfried is there too. Feminine. Good-natured. Somewhat decadent. Rather like a cowardly artist. Does such a thing exist?’ At the end of his stay, Goebbels found it hard to tear himself away and stood around chatting with Winifred in the hall and the garden. She was crying. ‘A young woman weeps,’ he recorded, ‘because the son is not as the Master was.’13 Hitler evidently had a similar view of ‘Fidi’s’ person and character but when he raised the topic years later it was more in sorrow than anger. Siegfried, he mused aloud to Goebbels in May 1942, had been compromised by his homosexuality and ‘made to marry in a hurry’ (presumably a reference to the threatened press revelations of Maximilian Harden).14 A few months earlier Hitler had even described Siegfried to other leading Nazis as a personal friend – albeit ‘politically passive. The Jews would have wrung his neck; he could not do anything else.’15

  Had Siegfried not been the Master’s son, the Führer would surely have been much nastier about his record. When August Püringer, an antisemitic newspaper editor and leading Wagnerite, demanded in 1921 that Jews be barred from the festival in future, Siegfried sent a long letter of reply stressing that Jews (and foreigners) had often supported Bayreuth when ‘supercilious Germans’ had failed to do so. ‘If the Jews are willing to help us that is doubly meritorious,’ Siegfried added, ‘because my father in his writings attacked and offended them. They would, therefore, have – and they do have – every reason to hate Bayreuth. Yet in spite of my father’s attacks, a great many of them revere my father’s art with genuine enthusiasm … On our Bayreuth hill we want to do positive work, not negative. Whether a man is a Chinese, a Negro, an American, an Indian or a Jew, that is a matter of complete indifference to us.’16 Siegfried later repeated these views in an exchange of letters with a Bayreuth rabbi, although there he drew a distinction between patriotic Jews and revolutionary ‘Marxist’ ones who, he claimed, wanted to overturn all that true Germans held dear. The rabbi rejected the ‘Marxist’ connection and said Siegfried had much to learn about Judaism; but he added that he was glad to find his correspondent did not share the intense antisemitism of some in the Wagner family. He specifically mentioned Chamberlain.17

  Even if Hitler was unaware of these texts, at least at first, he can hardly have missed seeing an open letter in similar vein that Siegfried issued to the press in February 1925. In it the festival director announced that he had done all he possibly could to ensure that the coming season (i.e. the one Hitler then attended ‘privately’) would be free of political overtones. Everyone, he pledged, ‘whatever religious belief or race he may have, is welcome in Bayreuth … No one need worry that any unpleasant incidents will occur’18 – a reference to vileness that had marred the previous year’s festival. In the heart of town, Nazis and other extremists had spat on visiting Jews, thrust anti-semitic leaflets into the hands of passers-by and daubed swastikas on buildings. At the festival theatre itself, most of the audience had risen at the end of Meistersinger to intone Deutschland über Alles, drawing from Siegfried the ironic aside that if things went on like that the Ring would soon be supplemented by public renderings of Die Wacht am Rhein (The Watch on the Rhine) – a patriotic song much favoured by German soldiers during the Franco-Prussian war. Making use of a quote from Die Meistersinger, he had notices pinned up urging an end to such demonstrations on the grounds that ‘Hier gilt’s der Kunst’ (Here it’s art that counts). When the public in 1925 nonetheless burst into song, Siegfried had the lights turned off.

  All that, though, still does not amount to proof that Siegfried was either politically liberal or racially tolerant. His objection to ‘audience participation’ might have been mainly aesthetic. In the 1930s Hitler himself insisted that no sounds other than Wagner’s, not even the most stirring Nazi chorus, should echo through Bayreuth’s hallowed hall. Besides, in 1924 the flag of pre-Republican Germany was hoisted above the festival theatre, Erich Ludendorff (the general who had most propagated the ‘stab in the back’ legend and who had taken part in Hitler’s failed putsch) was among the favoured few invited to attend the general rehearsal, and a book issued to mark the reopening was filled with ultra-nationalist material. Busy though Siegfried was trying to ensure the festival would take place at all, it would be naive to imagine he was unaware of these things. Indeed, like many Germans, Siegfried regarded Ludendorff as a great patriot and was shocked that the old man had been among those shot at by police during the putsch.

  As for Siegfried’s letters, might they not simply have been ploys to try to ensure that vital Jewish support for Bayreuth would not evaporate? No doubt that is partly what Hitler had in mind when he claimed that Siegfried had been forced to act as he did or Jews would have ‘broken his neck.’ That interpretation also seems to be backed by the chronology. Siegfried’s rebuff to Püringer was issued in the context of the first major drive after the First World War to raise funds to restart the festival. As for the ‘everyone is welcome’ declaration in 1925, that came when the festival was in business again but still shaky. A year earlier the Wagners’ US tour had yielded a profit of only eight thousand dollars, not least because American financiers, especially Jews, had looked askance at Wahnfried’s contacts with the Nazis. Then came the summer and the antisemitic outrages on the sidelines of a festival that anyway looked more nationalistic than patriotic, let alone international. Siegfried surely had cause by the end of 1924 to try to reassure Bayreuth’s wealthy foreign and Jewish friends.

  On the other hand, Siegfried’s stance cannot solely be explained by his need to drum up cash. The more firmly he came out in favour of Jews, for whatever reason, the more likely he was to run foul of Bayreuth’s German nationalist allies, especially in the Richard Wagner associations, who were themselves striving to raise funds for the festival. The same circles also deplored Siegfried’s engagement of Jewish artists like the baritone Friedrich Schorr, an outstanding Wotan, and the bass Alexander Kipnis, an unsurpassed interpreter of Gurnemanz in Parsifal. Hitler, in particular, squirmed through his f
irst Bayreuth Ring because he felt that having Schorr portray the ruler of the gods amounted to ‘racial desecration’. Why hadn’t Bayreuth instead booked Munich’s Wilhelm Rode (later a fervent Nazi), the Führer rhetorically demanded years afterwards of his no doubt nonplussed entourage?19 To which Siegfried would have had a simple answer: Schorr was finer. ‘I must admit that one can really work much better with Jews,’ Siegfried wrote to a friend in 1930. ‘They are far more intensive and ambitious in their work, and once they have learned something they have got it for good.’20

  This manifest admiration was far from free of envy. Siegfried often pointed out that Jews achieved particular success because they stuck together and supported one another. If only, he lamented, his own work and that of Bayreuth could enjoy the same kind of solidarity from Germans generally! Siegfried surely spoke from the heart. Over more than two decades he had composed, on average, one new opera every two years, but none had been a hit like Bärenhäuter – his very first stage piece, which bubbles along to a happy ending although unpromisingly set during the Thirty Years War. Siegfried’s post-Bärenhäuter frustrations did not emerge simply because his work was found wanting compared with his father’s, nor because his style was considered archaic. Cosima did her son no service when she called Bärenhäuter the finest comedy since Meistersinger but – remarkably – at the turn of the century it was the opera most often performed on German stages bar none. Mahler himself took it up in Vienna, albeit with cuts.