The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Unfortunately for Friedelind, the ‘unique propaganda value’ she claims to have had for the British did not protect her for long from being treated as an ‘enemy alien’. She had arrived in London during that period of relative calm known as the ‘phoney war’ – before the retreat from Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain and the Blitz – but even so her friends were dumbfounded when she popped up unannounced in their midst. Isabella Wallich recalled her jaw dropping when she peered out of her window one day and saw Mausi, of all people, dressed in a black cloak and approaching the house ‘like a ship in full sail’.18 Isabella and several others did what they could to help, but once the war began in earnest Friedelind was arrested, bustled off to Holloway prison in north London and thence to internment in the Isle of Man. She stayed under lock and key for nearly nine months, from 27 May 1940 to 15 February 1941, when she was packed off to Argentina.

  It may seem odd that Mausi should have been thus treated – given those friends in high places who had helped her enter the country in the first place. But by the end of May at the latest Britain was manifestly in grave danger of invasion. German troops had just sliced through Holland and Belgium and, skirting the supposedly impregnable ‘Maginot Line’, were advancing on Paris. British forces on the continent were in retreat and about to be evacuated willy-nilly from Dunkirk, leaving their equipment behind. Neville (‘peace in our time’) Chamberlain had resigned and been replaced as Prime Minister by Winston Churchill who told Parliament he had nothing to offer but ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. Such were the circumstances in which tougher steps were demanded – and in part implemented – against around seventy-five thousand men, women and children in Britain who were of German or Austrian nationality or descent. In the event some thirty thousand of them, mostly refugees from Hitler and many of them Jews, were interned or shipped off to distant parts of the British empire.19

  This policy of mass internment was far from undisputed even within the government itself, let alone in the country at large. Both the Home Office and Foreign Office long argued against locking up people many of whom had already suffered at Nazi hands and who could well prove useful to the British war effort. But the War Office and especially MI5 claimed that allowing so many ‘enemy aliens’ to run free posed a grave security risk, and their view prevailed – at least for a time. By the summer, though, the internment policy was being fiercely debated in Parliament and contested as a grave injustice by part of the press. Eventually it was largely reversed – a striking show of democracy still working even at a time of great national peril. But in the meantime thousands of innocent people were swept up by it – including Friedelind, despite the seemingly firm anti-Nazi credentials she had displayed to all and sundry in her Daily Sketch pieces.

  Ironically, it was in part those very articles that told against her. At first only a few people were aware that Mausi was back in London, but her subsequent press attacks on the Nazis naturally put her in the limelight and aroused decidedly mixed feelings. Some readers praised her evident pluck, others – including people who had known her personally – expressed strong doubts over whether her professed ‘conversion’ was genuine. One couple, for instance, warned police that Friedelind had once told them she believed Britain would be better off under a dictatorship. An ex-mistress at the Yorkshire school Friedelind had attended in 1930 told how her charge had constantly given the Nazi salute, much to the mirth of fellow pupils. Another woman recalled how Friedelind had boasted at school that she was ‘a personal friend of Hitler’. One of the odder reports to the authorities came from a woman professing to be a distant relative of Tietjen (who, as noted earlier, had a British mother). She asserted that around 1937 Friedelind – ‘unquestionably very much under Hitler’s influence’ – had sought her help at the request of Tietjen, who wanted to trace his British ancestry and prove that he was, for the Nazis, a ‘true Aryan’.20

  These and similar claims that flowed in from citizens worried about a ‘fifth column’ in England were very likely true. Mausi’s final ‘conversion’ evidently did come pretty late and then for a reason – the fate of Frida Leider and her husband – that next to no one in England knew about. In any case such accusations served to bolster doubts at official level about the ‘Wagner girl’ (variously called, Friedelinde, Friedland, Friedlen and Mausie), as files first released in 2005 by the security service make all too clear. One British source reported home from (neutral) Lisbon that Friedelind worked for the SS, another claimed she was one of a small group of agents personally sent abroad by Hitler in 1938 ‘with ample funds’, yet another noted that while in England she had met Franz von Rintelen – a master spy for the Germans during the First World War who had settled in Britain after apparently disowning his homeland. A police report concluded that ‘she could prove to be a singularly dangerous woman.’

  Those trying to collate such material in London were far from convinced that Friedelind was a spy; still less did they believe the rumour, apparently first put about by the Gestapo in Paris, that she had become the mistress of Anthony Eden, Foreign Secretary until 1938 and again from 1940. But they did feel there was enough cause to put her where she could do no harm – and keep her there. When Friedelind applied in September from her detention camp in the Isle of Man for a visa to leave for South America, she was refused forthwith, although in the meantime Toscanini, hearing of her plight, was pulling strings from the US on her behalf. Her case was also raised in Parliament, but this too brought no change. The breakthrough came only in December when Beverley Baxter wrote a stinging article in the Sketch charging, with some exaggeration, that the treatment meted out to Friedelind reflected badly on Britain ‘in the eyes of the world’.21 First officialdom had dragged its feet over allowing her into the country, he claimed, so that her ‘damaging anti-Hitler propaganda’ had come somewhat late. Then she had been locked up and her request to go abroad rejected. Baxter conceded that Mausi was ‘obstinate, opinionated and tactless. If these are crimes instead of misfortunes then she is guilty. But Richard Wagner was her grandfather and he, too, was all these things.’

  Baxter might have added that Friedelind resembled her grandfather in yet another way – her strong propensity to run up debts. Several documents make that plain, including a solicitor’s letter arguing that if ‘Miss Wagner’ were to be released she should first be brought back from the Isle of Man to London (as indeed she was), not least because she had many creditors pressing for payment. According to the letter, Friedelind had not so far received a cheque for £150 that had been sent on to her for the Sketch articles, and she seemed to have no other resources in Britain apart from (a possible reference to the von Einem ‘hoard’?) ‘certain jewellery of no great value’. It is not clear from the letter whether the missing £150 would have been enough to pay off the outstanding bills, and as a self-exile – let alone as an ‘enemy alien’ – Mausi was bound to be hard-pressed for funds anyway. But she had, in fact, earlier received a hefty advance in Britain for a book that she had started but (unsurprisingly) failed to deliver, and just a month before her detention another sum from an undisclosed source had been credited to an account for her in London. She evidently used the latter for, among other things, the hire of a Steinway piano. Not that Friedelind spent money simply on herself, either in London or elsewhere. Friends over many years testified to her spontaneous, even wild, generosity. But it is plain that when she did come into funds, which was not often, they tended to slip through her fingers like sand.

  Following publication of the Baxter article, it was decided to grant Friedelind an exit visa after all and she was brought back to London en route for Buenos Aires. Toscanini had fixed her up with an invitation to work at the city’s famed Teatro Colón, where he was himself due to appear, and the exiled Erich Kleiber – also a regular conductor in the Argentinian capital – put in a word for her too. But despite the backing of these two noted anti-fascists, British officials still had lingering doubts about Friedelind and were not inclined to let he
r go without further scrutiny. On 24 January 1941, she had an hour-long visit in London from a man who told her he was an anti-Nazi writer interested in her work but who, records show, was working for the security service. In his account of the meeting, he described Friedelind’s comments as politically naive – including, surprisingly, her claim that as late as 1937–8 Hitler had still wanted to be friends with Britain – and concluded ‘the remote possibility remains that Miss Wagner may secretly be a Nazi propagandist’.22

  This informant, identified only as ‘source 32a’, was soon to change his tune. A few days later he reported that he had now had a chance to examine the contents of Mausi’s suitcase and had read the incomplete manuscript of ‘her book on Hitler’ (clearly an early draft of what became Heritage of Fire). The latter he regarded as so important that he – vainly – recommended it for immediate publication even in ‘abbreviated form’.23 But it was evidently letters he found in the suitcase, above all ones from Winifred warning her daughter what she risked by turning her back on the Reich, that finally persuaded him Friedelind was genuine. ‘If Miss Wagner were an agent,’ he concluded, ‘then Hitler would know it. If Hitler knew it, the mother would know it. If the mother knew it she could [emphasis in original] not have written these letters.’ 24

  Thus Winifred unwittingly proved of service to her ‘errant child’ after all. Little more than a fortnight after ‘32a’ had rummaged through her luggage, Friedelind was taken from London to Glasgow under Special Branch escort and put on the SS Andalucia Star bound for Buenos Aires. The crossing was rough, not to mention dangerous, with German U-boats about, and Mausi was often seasick; but there is no hint of that or of her previous long months of privation in a photo taken after her arrival – unless it be that she had, to advantage, manifestly lost weight. Sporting an elegant outfit topped by a huge round hat like an over-emphatic halo, she stands beaming with obvious relief, arm in arm with Toscanini, her ‘second father’.

  Mausi spent only a few months in Argentina before winning entry to the United States, again with Toscanini’s help. On arrival in New York she was questioned by the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, but such information as she had to give did not bring her special privileges – nor, it seems, did she seek any. Rashly determined to stand on her own two feet, she eked out a meagre existence for years with a string of jobs including waitress, dish-washer, secretary and market researcher. Between times she tried to get on with her book, although some material for it that had been retained in England and was later sent on to her apparently got lost in transit. Fatefully, when she was all but skint, she pawned the von Einem jewels and was later unable to raise the cash to get them back. The items were therefore sold and passed beyond Friedelind’s reach, let alone the von Einems’, for good.

  Despite her chronic shortage of funds, the Maus somehow managed to keep up with her music. She took singing lessons from the peerless baritone Herbert Janssen, a refugee friend from Bayreuth festival days, and mulled over plans to found an opera troupe to tour the US in better times – a dream that years later nearly came true. Meanwhile, she did not have to miss out on exemplary renderings of her grandfather’s works. Hitler or no Hitler, New York’s Metropolitan Opera continued to give much of the Wagner canon with casts (including Kirsten Flagstad, Kirsten Thorborg, Helen Traubel, Lauritz Melchior, Alexander Kipnis – and Janssen) rarely matched at any time anywhere – even in Bayreuth. One case in point was the Tannhäuser under Erich Leinsdorf given at the Met in February 1942, just two months after America entered the war, to mark the anniversary of Wagner’s death. Friedelind was present, of course, and during one of the intervals she broadcast to her homeland. ‘It was not easy for me to leave Germany,’ she declared, ‘and I only did so when the murderous intentions of the current German regime became plain.’ Wagner ‘loved freedom and justice even more than he loved music’, she added, and ‘Alberich–Hitler’ blasphemed him by making him his favourite.25

  One may doubt whether Wagner really loved anything more than music, particularly his own. On that his defiant granddaughter-in-exile, not quite twenty-four years old, was probably a mite too idealistic. But in comparing Adolf Hitler – Germany’s Führer and Wahnfried’s ‘Wolf’ – to the Ring’s power-hungry, lethal Nibelung she was surely bang on target.

  13

  War – At Home and Abroad

  While Friedelind was still digging in her heels at Tribschen and Wieland toiled at his easel in Munich, Wolfgang had to go to war. He evidently went on leaden feet but his combat duty did not last long. During the invasion of Poland in September 1939, his patrol was caught in a hail of machine-gun fire. One bullet smashed through his hand and wrist, another through his thigh. Bleeding badly, he was briefly taken prisoner by the Poles, then dumped in a cart and returned to the German lines. Thanks to an operation by a top surgeon at the Charité, Berlin’s finest hospital, Wolfgang’s arm was saved but his fighting days were over. After a long spell of recuperation he was listed as disabled and discharged from the army in June 1940, two months before his twenty-first birthday.

  According to Winifred, the Führer visited the invalid in hospital – even brought him flowers and told his own doctor to keep an eye on the case. Special treatment for a Wagner?1 Wolfgang rejects the very idea, putting down the tip-top care he received at the Charité to ‘the unpredictable workings of a kindly providence’.2 Be that as it may, big brother Wieland had no need to rely on mere ‘providence’ to evade wounds or worse. As ‘heir’ to Bayreuth, he was one of a few lucky young men personally exempted from call-up by Hitler on the grounds that their survival was specially vital to the Reich. And what was Wieland doing in his Munich studio to prepare himself for his great calling while Wolfgang vainly sought to dodge bullets at the front? At first not much – indeed in the wake of his rejection of Tietjen’s training offer it seemed doubtful whether he would take up the reins at Bayreuth at all.

  That began to change in the course of 1940. It was clear to Wieland that although his artistic ambitions met with the Führer’s benevolent interest, more was expected from him in return for his release from military service. Besides, his brother unexpectedly started to emerge as a pretender to the Bayreuth throne. Just before the war Wolfgang had, in fact, raised the prospect that he might help run the festival one day, arguing it was unlikely that Wieland would be willing or able to do everything himself. It is unclear whether Wieland took that portent seriously at the time, but even if he did he must have largely discounted it when Wolfgang left for the front. A year later, though, things looked different. Out of the army and seeking a career, Wolfgang was offered a training course at the Berlin Staatsoper by Tietjen and, unlike his brother back in 1938, he accepted it. By the autumn he was starting to learn the ropes at arguably the finest opera house in the Reich and, for a time, he lived in Tietjen’s flat. He even saw Hitler now and again and discussed the festival’s future. From being a happy-go-lucky ‘second string’ in the provinces, Wolfgang began to look – and feel – like an upwardly mobile professional at the heart of the action.

  It was hardly mere chance that in that same autumn Wieland began to take music lessons in Munich from Kurt Overhoff, a Viennese-born composer and conductor. Overhoff later ascribed his engagement to a meeting at Wahnfried at which he had played extracts from Rheingold on the piano and analysed the technique the Master used to make emotional and psychological points. Wieland, he said, then bitterly complained that his mother and Tietjen were deliberately holding him back and begged the visitor to become his long-term tutor.3 No doubt Overhoff did not need much urging. Although he had for years been music director in Heidelberg, a prestigious post in its provincial way, he was only thirty-eight and looking for a change when Wieland made his appeal. By becoming mentor to the Bayreuth ‘heir’ in matters musical, he must have hoped to land a key job at the festival at the latest when his (presumably grateful) pupil took over. Instead he walked, more or less blindly, into a snakepit
– albeit one where he was greeted with anything but venom by a deeply relieved Winifred. Far from holding Wieland back, she was delighted that her eldest son seemed to be showing a real interest in music at long last. She promptly negotiated Overhoff’s release from his Heidelberg job and put him on the Bayreuth payroll.

  What was it that turned Wieland from being a notable dabbler into one of the finest producers in the history of theatre? Clearly he inherited his father’s talent for painting and something of his grandfather’s instinct for drama, but up to the start of the 1940s neither his pictures nor his stage designs hinted at real originality, let alone genius. Besides, he had no special knowledge of music, and had it not been for Hitler’s Bayreuth expectations and Wolfgang’s growing aspirations perhaps he would not have moved to acquire it. Happily he alighted on Overhoff, a practical musician with the rare ability to make the paraphernalia of counterpoint, key relationships and tone colour seem quite riveting and, in opera, to relate it all to the composer’s dramatic aim. From him, Wieland gained the technical wherewithal to plumb the most complex of scores, above all his grandfather’s, and even to conduct an orchestra, although he only needed to try the latter once to realise it was ‘not his thing’.