The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Another stalwart during Friedelind’s London years was Berta Geissmar, Furtwängler’s former private secretary who had taken on the same role for Beecham, Britain’s leading conductor, after being chased from Germany because she was Jewish. Whatever prejudice Friedelind still had against Jews in general at that time, she liked Berta and helped her with odd jobs at Covent Garden. The feeling was mutual. ‘Maus was in many ways the image of the great Richard,’ Berta wrote in her book The Baton and the Jackboot in 1944. ‘She was gifted and courageous; but she was not an easy character, and has gone her own way in life.’3 Although far from well-off herself, Berta invited Friedelind to stay with her and naturally slipped her opera tickets. On one occasion during the 1938 season, she recalled, Maus happened to share a box with Gustav Mahler’s sculptress daughter Anna, who had just fled Austria and had also approached Berta for a free ticket. How much those two independent-minded ladies would have had to say to one another: Friedelind the Master’s granddaughter, Anna the only surviving child of that great composer and conductor of Jewish origin whose Wagner at the Vienna Hofoper had so thrilled Hitler. Sadly, it seems the chance was missed.

  The presence of a Wagner daughter in London was not just a matter of interest to music fans in general and Wagnerians in particular. As a member of a family that had enjoyed regular and intimate contact with Hitler for years, Friedelind naturally came under the close scrutiny of British (and later American) officialdom. She notes in her book that at the start of the war ‘I had already put myself at the disposal of the English government which considered me of “unique propaganda value”,’ and broadly speaking that seems true.4 Although she mentions no names, her main backer in London was, in fact, Beverley Baxter, a Canadian-born Conservative MP who was also an influential writer and journalist. He in turn brought Friedelind’s case to the attention of powerful contacts – notably Sir Samuel Hoare, the then Home Secretary, Sir Robert Vansittart, from late 1937 chief diplomatic adviser to the government, and R. A. (Rab) Butler, under-secretary of state at the Foreign Office. According to Baxter, all four of them agreed that the Wagner girl could be ‘of use’. Whether they actually saw her as of ‘unique’ value is another matter.5

  Meanwhile in Berlin, Hitler had apparently been pumping Friedelind about her impressions while in England and did not like what he heard. She claims that at a private lunch in the Berlin Chancellery around Christmas 1937, she told the Führer that Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador in London, thoroughly misjudged the British and that his lack of diplomatic finesse was making unnecessary foes in high places. The Austrian ambassador, she added, was far more popular and respected. Hitler, it seems, angrily rejected this analysis, although Ribbentrop’s blunders (like giving the Nazi salute to the Royal Family) were notorious even in Berlin. But he calmed down after taking a pill and a glass of water.6

  It is perfectly possible that Friedelind did indeed see Hitler when she says she did. Mausi with her big mouth and puppy fat was surely never Hitler’s favourite Wagner – but a Wagner she was and hence, like all other members of the family, almost under orders to pay the Führer a visit when in Berlin. It is also more than likely, in the circumstances, that England would have been discussed even though the details Friedelind gives are unverifiable. On the list of Hitler’s obsessions Britain with its empire ranked high – an object of fury but also of wary admiration, as repeated allusions not least in Mein Kampf make clear. For the Führer as for (Houston Stewart) Chamberlain the British were Aryans, and hence natural racial relations of the Germans, who had gone tragically wrong under Jewish influence. But what had gone wrong, in Hitler’s view, could and should be put right. Nazi Germany was showing how!

  Nor did the Führer lack for signs, mixed though they were, to back his hunch that Britain was an ally-in-waiting. Hadn’t the London government largely acquiesced in his muscle-flexing foreign policy; didn’t Lord Rothermere’s press empire busily issue one pro-Hitler paean after another (like that George Washington comparison made by Lloyd George); weren’t many of the ‘upper class’ in particular wooed by the Nazi ability to ‘keep order’ and (apparently) to stand firm against Soviet communism? The British visitors who beat a path to Hitler’s door included the Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated as King Edward VIII in 1936 and who made little secret of his sympathy for the Reich. Hitler did not put much faith in Oswald Mosley’s fascists as a force for change in Britain, feeling they were too close to foreign brands – notably Mussolini’s blackshirts – to win credibility at home. Had he been starting such a party there, Hitler once mused, he would have taken Oliver Cromwell as his model and probably called his followers ‘Ironsides’. He did, however, hugely admire Mosley’s scintillating, aristocratic wife Diana, one of the Mitford sisters, who had first been married to the wealthy Bryan Guinness (later Lord Moyne). When Oswald and Diana wed in Berlin in October 1936 the Führer devoted much of his day to them – throwing a Chancellery supper in their honour as well as attending the registry-office ceremony and a subsequent lunch offered by Goebbels at his Wannsee villa. Amazingly, the event itself and the attention given it by the Nazi leadership stayed hidden from the public for two years.7

  For Hitler, Diana and her still more fervently pro-Nazi sister Unity seemed handsome proof that the finest Aryan stock still flourished among Britain’s ‘top people’. They were, as he was well aware, daughters of the ultra-conservative Lord Redesdale whose own father had done so much to promote Chamberlain’s racist bible Foundations of the Nineteenth Century in England three decades or so before. Both Mitford girls accompanied Hitler to Nazi rallies and to the Bayreuth festival; indeed for a time Unity was so often on hand that she became known as Mit-fahrt, a pun hinting both at her role as political fellow traveller and as the Führer’s frequent companion. According to her diary, she met and conversed with Hitler on 140 days over the five years between 1935 and 1939, a claim that other accounts suggest is not exaggerated.8 When the land of her birth finally declared war on her beloved Nazi Germany in September 1939, Unity was so distraught that she went to the Englischer Garten, Munich’s biggest park, and shot herself in the temple. If she had really meant to kill herself she botched the job. Critically injured, she was taken to a local clinic where Hitler visited her, paid her bills and packed her off to England. There she lived on as a brain-damaged invalid for almost another decade.

  In those pre-war years, Hitler pumped both Unity and Diana for word on the mood in Britain and made comments ‘in confidence’ that he evidently assumed would be passed on to influential circles in London. Perhaps he tried to use Friedelind in a similar way. If so he chose the wrong person at the wrong time. It was almost certainly in 1938, and thanks in particular to her friendship with Frida Leider, that Mausi became fully aware of the iniquity of the Nazi regime. Frida was married to a Jew, Rudolf Deman, who hitherto had been protected by two things: his Austrian nationality and his key role as concertmaster (leader) of the orchestra at the Berlin Staatsoper, valued and protected by Tietjen. When the Nazis came to power Frida had considered making her career in America but Tietjen, keen to keep both artists, told her all would be well and offered her a stellar salary. For years neither Deman nor (by association) his non-Jewish wife suffered direct threat despite ever-more virulent antisemitism, but that changed in 1938 when Austria was drawn into the Reich. In one fell swoop Deman lost his Austrian nationality and Frida, sick with worry, came close to a nervous breakdown. In the summer she went to Bayreuth but had to cancel a performance, to the fury of Tietjen who felt she was well enough to sing (and of Winifred, who looked askance at the close ties between Frida and Mausi). Deman, seeking to defend his wife, had a dispute with Tietjen so heated that the shouts resounded through the corridors of the festival theatre. A few months later Deman fled to Switzerland. Frida stayed behind, fearful that she would be unable to start a new career in exile at the age of fifty and hoping that the worst might soon pass. But she never sang in Bayreuth after that 1938 season and it was nearly eight ye
ars before her husband could return to Germany.9

  Since that first encounter in a Bayreuth dressing-room a decade before, Friedelind had witnessed Frida’s triumphs in London and Paris as well as Germany; she had met her scores of times privately and had come to admire her talent, her spirit and her taste (not least in clothing). Above all she was able to pour out her heart to her as she almost never could to Winifred; indeed Frida came close to being the mother Mausi felt she had never really had. Friedelind had overheard the Deman–Tietjen row, she saw her beloved friend brought low, physically and spiritually and she knew what was at the back of it – Nazi racial laws, in this case combined with Hitler’s march into Austria. She reacted with pain and revulsion.

  Although the Frida–Deman affair was evidently the key event on the road to Friedelind’s final break with the Nazis, it was not the only one. That same summer, she attended the newly created Lucerne festival, backed largely by artists who either could not or, on moral grounds, would not perform in the Reich (which now included Austria). Winifred dismissed the festival as ‘anti-German’ but, with great self-exiled artists like Adolf Busch and his brother Fritz making music there with Jewish colleagues, Friedelind knew better. All the more so since Toscanini was on hand to welcome her and to pay special homage to Wagner with a performance of the Siegfried Idyll in the garden of Tribschen. The next year Friedelind was back again and this time she stayed, occupying rooms at Tribschen long since made available to members of the Wagner family. What more fitting spot could she have found to rest and reflect on her uncertain future than the villa where her father had been born and where even her explosive grandfather had found something like peace for a time? ‘You will see where your Hitler is leading you, namely into the abyss, into ruin,’ she told her mother in a letter around that time.10 Recalling that warning nearly four decades afterwards Winifred paused as though a bit nonplussed, then belatedly conceded, ‘Unfortunately she was right about that.’

  Once war broke out, Winifred made a single, desperate bid to extract her ‘prodigal daughter’ from her refuge and bring her home before her presence abroad caused real propaganda harm to the Reich. With Hitler’s approval and clutching a visa personally issued by Himmler, she crossed into neutral Switzerland in February 1940 and spent two days and nights trying to make Friedelind see the error of her ways. But the Maus was not to be trapped.

  The fraught encounter took place neither at Tribschen nor at nearby Lucerne but, at Winifred’s proposal, in Zurich – a lot closer to the German border. In Heritage of Fire, Friedelind says she had grave doubts about making the trip, fearing the Gestapo might have plans to kidnap her; but she went all the same – drawn to her mother despite everything and anxious for more news of the family. As it happens the two of them stayed at the Baur au Lac, the lakeside hotel where nearly nine decades earlier the newly exiled Master had given the first public readings of his Ring text, but naturally neither was in the mood to discuss music drama or family history. Over long hours in restaurants and hotel rooms Winifred sought with all manner of arguments – the brothers’ shame over their errant sister, the failing health of ‘the aunts’, the Führer’s intense vexation – to persuade Mausi to come to heel. Finally, as the time for parting neared, she told her daughter she faced a stark choice – to return to the Reich or to go to a neutral country and keep quiet for as long as the war lasted. If she failed to comply, ‘the order will be given; you will be destroyed [vertilgt] and exterminated [ausgerottet] at the first opportunity.’ Friedelind wrote that she felt the blood leave her face, not so much at the threat itself as the language her mother used. ‘Destroyed’ and ‘exterminated’, she noted, were surely Hitler’s terms or Himmler’s.

  Friedelind’s account of the Zurich meeting, especially that last chilling phrase she attributes to Winifred, is easily the most notorious part of Heritage of Fire. It was seized on avidly by the press when the book was published and it helped put Winifred still more on the defensive immediately after the war. How credible is it? Since no one seems to have overheard what the two women said to one another (though Friedelind reports that she looked under her bed for a spy) the memoir is the only detailed report available.11 Not surprisingly Winifred declared the whole book to be full of holes and errors, a claim backed among others by Wolfgang, who specifically called the ‘destroyed and exterminated’ quote an anathema ‘worthy of the Old Testament’. That does not prove the words were never uttered. Winifred was surely convinced her daughter was in mortal danger and perhaps, when she saw her mission was failing, she did indeed parrot a brutal remark she had heard only recently in Berlin (more likely from Himmler than from her ‘Wolf’). According to that interpretation, the ‘threat’ would really have amounted to a dire warning issued as a last resort by an anguished mother.

  A few weeks after the reported ‘showdown’ Mausi sent her mother a letter from Tribschen that she does not mention in her book; indeed the memoir ends with Winifred’s departure by train for Germany wailing ‘Do come home, Mausi. Please come. I need you.’ In her letter, Friedelind described the recent get-together as ‘worthwhile’, pledged to do ‘nothing unconsidered’ and signed off ‘heartfelt thanks for all your kindness, your Maus’.12 On the face of it those affectionate words cast doubt on the harsh account of the selfsame meeting given in Heritage of Fire, but there is more to the tale than that. The letter is dated 29 February (no slip of the pen since 1940 was a leap year). The very next day – on 1 March – Friedelind left Lucerne, crossed France (three months before the German invasion) armed with a transit visa and finally arrived in Britain for which she had another visa, evidently thanks to the pressure applied on her behalf by Beverley Baxter. In other words, when she wrote so warmly to her mother she knew she was about to turn her back on the Reich and enter enemy territory for good – or at least for the foreseeable future. Almost certainly, therefore, her letter was meant to put the Gestapo off her track (which, for a while, it evidently did). Friedelind was well aware by this time that her correspondence was being intercepted; and if she had had any lingering doubts about the danger she faced as a self-exiled Wagner in wartime, the Zurich meeting with her mother must have put paid to them.

  Friedelind had yet another reason to be ultra-cautious, of which next to no one was aware at the time. In Heritage of Fire she briefly refers to a 1938 summer holiday she spent in Lucerne, Venice and other spots with an ‘attractive young Austrian’ and his mother, ‘a dashing Viennese baroness’.13 Winifred, she says, backed the trip, vainly hoping her unruly daughter would marry the young man, an assistant at the Bayreuth festival, and thus be off her hands for good. Although Friedelind named no names, it was not hard from her description to identify the couple as Gottfried von Einem, later one of Austria’s most noted composers, and his mother Gerta Louise von Einem, the German-born wife of an Austrian nobleman. ‘Dashing’ the baroness certainly was – a woman of striking beauty and countless affairs (Gottfried was the product of one of them with a Hungarian count), and also a spy whose tangled activities during the Nazi era have never been fully unravelled. Suffice to say here that she survived arrest by the Gestapo as well as death sentences from both German and French courts, and passed away peacefully in her bed in 1964.

  Friedelind admits that she and the ‘young Austrian’ spent much of their free time together, but in his 1995 autobiography, appropriately entitled Ich hab’ unendlich viel erlebt (I Have Had a Boundlessly Eventful Life), Gottfried von Einem goes further. For a time, he says, he and Mausi were ‘in a way even engaged’ and when they went to hotels together they took care to take adjoining rooms with an unlocked door between them.14 After war broke out, Gottfried managed to get into Switzerland (he does not reveal how), withdrew all his mother’s valuables from her bank accounts there and passed them on to Friedelind before she left Tribschen for England. In other words he (and presumably his mother) did not feel Switzerland would be a safe haven from the Nazis for long and decided to use Mausi as a courier. He even claims he accomp
anied her across the border to France. At least part of this tale is suspect. According to Gottfried, an ebullient, larger-than-life figure with a tendency to exaggerate, the valuables included all his mother’s Swiss money, jewels and ‘a considerable quantity of gold’.15 It is hard to see how Friedelind could possibly have carted such a Fafner-like hoard through so many controls, in wartime at that. There is no doubt, nonetheless, that she did take von Einem jewellery with her from Switzerland at Gottfried’s behest, and that this had repercussions after the war.

  No wonder Mausi was keen to hide her real plans when she wrote to her mother on that last day of February 1940. For a while thereafter she seemed to vanish into thin air. Winifred desperately tried to discover her whereabouts, but she and the family only learned the truth in May when Friedelind began writing articles in the London Daily Sketch that filled Goebbels for one with growing fury. ‘The little fat Wagner is writing disclosures against the Führer in London,’ he noted in his diary on 4 May. ‘This could become embarrassing.’ A day later he reported that Wieland had been called in by Hitler to be told of the ‘serious disgrace’ caused by his ‘fine little sister’. Finally the propaganda minister abandoned any pretence at irony and charged in his entry of 10 May that ‘This fat beast is committing wholesale treachery against her country.’16 The particular cause of that outburst was a piece in which Friedelind detailed snide remarks she claimed Hitler had made in private about Mussolini. By this time Winifred must have been not just worried but truly alarmed. ‘Of course if we hadn’t been members of the Wagner family, the whole lot of us would have been put in a concentration camp,’ she reflected years later – a remark more revealing than she seems to have realised.17