The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Naturally reasons could be found to justify the Furtwängler–Karajan–Kna lineup. All three conductors had come through post-war vetting by the Allies and all were undeniably fine artists, albeit in very different ways. But were there no excellent maestros around who were wholly untainted by the Nazi era? Toscanini’s return would have been too much to hope for, but what of exiles like Fritz Busch, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer and Erich Kleiber, or rising stars like Rafael Kubelík (who later made exemplary recordings of Lohengrin, Parsifal and – especially – Meistersinger down the road in Munich)? Busch was the only one of these ever to conduct at Bayreuth, and then for just a single season in 1924. Later he made common cause with Toscanini and resisted Nazi blandishments to return to the Green Hill or anywhere else in the Reich. As a sturdy anti-fascist as well as a peerless interpreter fêted at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, Busch might have been the ideal catch for ‘New Bayreuth’ – at least at the very start. Sadly, he died aged sixty-one only a month after the first postwar festival ended. As for the other possibles, Wieland, it is true, did meet Klemperer in the mid-1950s and got on well with him, despite the veteran maestro’s typically caustic greeting: ‘What was it like sitting on the Führer’s knee?’4 But plans for the two of them to work together fell through mainly because of Klemperer’s failing health.

  Beidler’s complaint that there was ‘not the slightest sign of change’ could hardly have applied to the 1951 singers – a largely new team that included, to name but two outstanding sopranos, the Swedish-American Astrid Varnay as a dazzling Brünnhilde, and the German Martha Mödl as a supremely alluring yet pitiable Kundry. He was on rather stronger ground with respect to the ‘brown history’ of key but less prominent figures. One of them was Gerhard Rossbach, a vital raiser of festival funds and ex-leader of a notorious paramilitary Freikorps unit that thirty years earlier had sought to destabilise the Weimar Republic. Another was Hans Reissinger, Gertrud’s architect uncle whose career had spectacularly flowered under the Nazis. He was now responsible for the Meistersinger décor and also turned his hand to a couple of anodyne articles, one on ‘The Beautiful Town of Bayreuth’, in the festival’s programme book.5

  Apart from such personnel questions, though, there was a broader issue and it was raised by Wieland and Wolfgang themselves at the very start. In a written declaration, the brothers urged that in ‘the interests of a trouble-free realisation of the festival’, visitors should ‘kindly desist from discussion or debate of a political nature’. On the face of it that request seemed fair, all the more so since it ended with the words ‘Hier gilt’s der Kunst’ (Here, it’s art that counts) – the very words with which Siegfried had sought to block further ultra-nationalist demonstrations in the festival theatre long before. But for Beidler and those who thought like him, ‘debate of a political nature’ was exactly what was needed in post-war Germany, not least in Bayreuth, a place that stood for much of the best and worst of which the nation was capable. How did the ‘unparalleled material and moral collapse’ come to happen? Who was responsible? How could any recurrence best be prevented? As for the festival, how come that in democratic Germany it was still in the hands of a family that for years had been closer than any other to Adolf Hitler? Such questions were tricky, of course, but that was no good reason to avoid thrashing them out. Quite the opposite.

  On at least three occasions before 1945, a knife had seemed poised over the umbilical cord between the Wagner family and its voracious baby, the Bayreuth festival. In 1883 after the Master died intestate, it had at first been far from clear that Cosima could or should take charge of the infant, even assuming it survived. And Winifred’s position in 1930 had initially looked hardly more secure. Although named as Siegfried’s heir, in the eyes of many hard-line Wagnerians she was (another) foreign-born ‘interloper’ with little authority in artistic matters. In between the reigns of these iron-willed matriarchs, Siegfried – fearing a growing campaign by a hostile press against himself and the family – had talked in 1914 of handing over the whole Wagner legacy ‘to the German people’. Whether sincerely meant or not, that proposal might even have been adopted had not the outbreak of war taken people’s minds off Bayreuth scandal. So it was that thanks to luck, tenacity, canny advisers and latterly the backing of the Führer, the Wagners kept the festival in the family for nearly seventy years.

  At the end of the Second World War, though, that long-standing link seemed set to be severed for good. In Germany the clan was scattered between two of the four occupation zones set up by the victorious powers, with Winifred and Wolfgang answering to the Americans and the Nussdorf contingent to the French. Most of the family assets, including the festival theatre and what remained of Wahnfried, had been impounded and it was unclear when – or even whether – they would be returned. Meanwhile in New York more trouble was brewing. Friedelind, like an avenging angel, was publishing her Heritage of Fire with its inside story of the close links between the Wagners and Hitler. Initially the other members of the clan did not know what was in the book, indeed had long heard nothing from Mausi at all, but they naturally fretted about what she might be up to.

  It was not even plain in those early days that Bayreuth would ever again host a Wagner festival, with or without the family. What Winifred called ‘clueless, coloured’ US soldiers poked about for souvenirs in the Wahnfried rubble and jitterbugged in the garden around the grave of the Master and Cosima. The adjoining Führerbau did varied service as a counter-intelligence headquarters, an officers’ club and, according to Wolfgang, a brothel.6 At least the theatre on the Green Hill had escaped destruction, though no one seemed sure why. Some claimed that Allied bomber pilots had been keen to spare so famous a cultural landmark, others more plausibly held that the sprawling reddish pile had been mistaken for a brewery. Whatever the truth, Wagnerian costumes and scenery were looted (by desperate Germans as well as trophy-hunting Americans), the sunken orchestra pit was covered over and the place turned over to entertainment for the troops. The ‘hallowed hall’ that had closed a year before to Meistersinger, was soon resounding to performances by the Rockettes from New York’s Radio City and to shows including Ten Little Indians and (suitably enough) Anything Goes. Not for long, though. For the Americans the place proved too vast for its new role and, despite the deployment of around two hundred stoves, too hard to heat in winter. In 1946 the ‘white elephant’ was dumped on Bayreuth – or, put more elegantly, it was placed in the trusteeship of the struggling, semi-ruined town.

  Characteristically, Winifred was unbowed and unrepentant: indeed, like Wolfgang, she claimed to see nothing to be repentant about. When Furtwängler asked her how she could bear to have invective like so many buckets of refuse poured over her by the Allies and hostile Germans, she serenely replied that none of it touched her as she felt guilty of no crime. Like an exiled queen, she issued firm but usually fruitless edicts from her Oberwarmensteinach refuge, ticking off the Americans for installing all those stoves in the highly combustible festival theatre and urging Interpol to be on the lookout for the former Führer’s missing Wagner manuscripts. Yes, she repeatedly told allied interrogators, she had long been a close, personal friend of Hitler though, no, she had never slept with him.7 She had always found him to be charming, humorous and reliable – as well as a real Wagner connoisseur – and she was not going to claim otherwise just because he was now dead and the war had been lost. Their relationship, she insisted time after time, had had nothing to do with politics.

  Although Winifred was forthright by nature, it is unlikely that her seeming openness in this case was devoid of calculation. The allied campaign of denazification was already starting to roll – with special impetus in the American zone – and the ‘mistress of Bayreuth’ well knew that much about her links with Hitler was too well documented to be deniable. Far better, from her point of view, to admit right away what was broadly known, seek to have the most favourable interpretation put on it and draw a veil over the rest. When asked whether she had
any letters from Hitler she promptly handed over a few but, as she later noted privately, she kept back many others and the Americans, happy with her seeming readiness to cooperate, did not probe further. Even Thomas Mann’s son Klaus, back from US exile and at least as hostile as his father to Hitler, reacted to Winifred with something like awe. After interviewing her for the American forces newspaper Stars and Stripes, he reported that he had met only one person in post-war Germany who freely admitted to having been a Nazi – and she was British-born.

  Down by the Bodensee, though, Wieland was far from thrilled by his mother’s apparent candour, which seemed bound to draw still more unwelcome attention to the family’s role, especially his own, during the ‘Third Reich’. Happy enough for years to enjoy Hitler’s favour, he was now keen to dissociate himself from the Führer and all his works. In a letter, he told his mother she might be surprised to learn that but for his ‘understanding’ for her in the era that ‘thank God lies behind us at last’, he would ‘a hundred times over’ have chosen the course taken by Friedelind.8 Winifred surely was surprised. Although Wieland had latterly considered fleeing the Reich, and had abortively tried to do so at the very end, there was no sign that he had considered exile when Hitler was at the height of his power. But apart from her surprise, if not incredulity, over this particular revelation, Winifred simply felt it behoved Wieland to show more thanks to his late benefactor. As she pointed out years later, Hitler had favoured Wieland ‘in every possible way’ – had probably even saved his life by freeing him from military service. That her eldest son showed such ingratitude after the war was, she bemoaned, incomprehensible.9

  It was, of course, nothing of the kind. Although it was not immediately clear at war’s end just what penalties the Allies might impose on ex-Nazis, the ‘heir’ had every reason not to trumpet about his long and privileged relationship with ‘Uncle Wolf’. The fact that he had joined the party ‘only’ at Hitler’s personal request was unlikely to be seen as a mitigating circumstance, even given his youth; nor might his constant hobnobs in the Berlin Chancellery almost until the final days of the war be construed simply as harmless contacts in the cause of art. Then there was that brief but potentially damning spell at the Flossenbürg offshoot in Bayreuth. All in all, Wieland had good cause to keep his head down. So did Bodo Lafferentz, who along with his family was a fellow refugee in Nussdorf. Although Lafferentz had not been part of the Wagner clan for long and had had few personal contacts with Hitler, he now looked specially vulnerable thanks to his record as an SS officer and top manager in the Nazi war machine. As best they could from afar, he and Wieland followed the start in November 1945 of the Nuremberg war crimes trial against leading Nazis – among them familiar figures from old Bayreuth days like Hermann Göring, Albert Speer and Hans Frank (Lieselotte Schmidt’s former heart-throb, dubbed ‘the butcher’ during his term as a pitiless Governor General of occupied Poland). In the event, of the twenty-two accused who went into the dock, twelve – including Frank and Göring – were sentenced to death. Lafferentz’s former boss Robert Ley was also among the Nuremberg prisoners, but he strangled himself in his cell before the trial began.

  Compared with such sharks Wieland and Lafferentz were smallish fish, but that did not mean that they, let alone Winifred, were likely to slip through the net altogether. Under guidelines laid down by the pacesetting Americans and later adopted by the other Allies, Germans faced case-by-case scrutiny and classification into one of five categories according to the degree of support they had shown for the Nazis. All but those in the fifth group (‘exonerated’) were liable to penalties that ranged from the draconian for ‘major offenders’ – up to ten years’ hard labour and forfeiture of all assets – to little more than fines for ‘fellow travellers’. Fair though this procedure may have looked on paper, the guidelines were applied by the Allies in different ways from zone to zone. Besides, German civilian tribunals (Spruchkammern) set up under Allied supervision to try suspects, badly lacked qualified personnel and their proceedings were clogged by testimony from shoals of ‘witnesses’ keen to whitewash former comrades or denounce old rivals.

  In their zeal to track down former Nazis and active backers of the regime, the Americans concocted a 131-point questionnaire to be filled out by all Germans over the age of eighteen. Penalties for giving false or incomplete information were high and, on key matters at least, culprits ran a real risk of exposure as full membership lists of the Nazi party and related organisations had early on fallen into US hands. Even so, with millions of more-or-less completed forms flooding in, the resources were simply not available for comprehensive crosschecking. Broadly speaking, the British and French turned out to be less rigorous and instead of trying to chase up every last possible miscreant they tended to concentrate on ‘worst cases’. For Wieland and Lafferentz, holed up in the French zone, that was some comfort – but not much.

  Life was harsh for the Nussdorf Wagners even leaving aside the threat of denazification. They were surely far better off than the many millions of homeless and wounded in Germany and beyond, especially in the east, but that seemed small comfort. Packed into four rooms of a holiday home never meant as winter quarters, shunned by many locals gleeful that the once-mighty visitors from Bayreuth had been brought so low, they were bitterly cold for nearly half the year, often sick and almost always hungry. By the end of 1945 there were ten of them – five adults (with Elfriede, Gertrud’s sister) and five children, including two new babies. Somehow amid the howling, the nappy-changing and the constant hunt for food, fuel and medicine, Wieland found time to look into philosophy and psychology (when he could get hold of the books) and eventually to paint (when his fingers were not too numb to hold a brush). Late at night, when they were not wholly exhausted and the children were in bed, he and Gertrud would sprawl on the floor and argue loud and long over the Master’s scores, notably Tristan. For a time Wieland even hoped to get over to Garmisch and realise an old ambition to study the whole Wagner oeuvre with Richard Strauss. But Strauss, it turned out, had beaten a retreat to Switzerland and when Wieland got to Garmisch at last it was mainly to resume study with Overhoff, who had been engaged there as music teacher to Strauss’s grandson.

  Wieland later referred to this period as his ‘dark, creative years’ – a spell in the wilderness, as it were, that finally formed him for the top job in Bayreuth. There is something in that. For the first time he came across the theories of Freud and Jung, he took a new look at the work of some of those ‘degenerate’ artists he had previously passed over and he excitedly identified parallels in the Ring between Greek and Nordic myth (an obvious connection that, oddly enough, seems not to have struck him before). As a result, although the seeds of his later ‘Bayreuth style’ had already been sown in the war years, during the ‘Nussdorf era’ he at least partly rethought his approach to the stage. The trouble was he had no stage to work on and prospects looked slim that he would get one anywhere in Germany, let alone on the Green Hill. For a while he vainly considered trying to establish a Wagner festival abroad – in Switzerland or even Monte Carlo – to be kick-started with funds from the sale of some of the Master’s manuscripts.10 The United States seemed a possible option too. Long before his mother, he made contact with Friedelind who had applied for American nationality and aimed to set up her own opera company. Wieland sent her costume and stage designs – also some of his oil paintings that his sister promised to hang in the foyers of theatres across the US when her company went on tour. The pictures, it seems, were largely ruined in transit.

  Wolfgang was livid when he got to hear about this unexpected transatlantic entente, fearing that if Friedelind’s scheme were a success (it later foundered for lack of funds) she might use it as a springboard to the top job in Bayreuth – with Wieland’s indirect help, at that! Where would that leave him, the ‘little brother’ who alone of the family had had to fight (however briefly) for the ‘Fatherland’, who had persevered with the Berlin opera training Wieland had shunne
d, who had stuck by his mother in and around Bayreuth at war’s end and who had daringly spirited away much of the Wahnfried archive for ‘safe keeping’ from prying American fingers?

  Even the dogged Wolfgang seems to have had some doubts whether he or any Wagner would ever return to the Green Hill, once telling Wieland he felt the family was simply ‘incapable’ of getting the festival on its feet again.11 Nonetheless, in early 1946 he had moved back to Bayreuth from Oberwarmensteinach with his wife and baby Eva and had set up home in four rooms above the gardener’s cottage at Wahnfried. A year later his only son, Gottfried, was born. Of itself, his presence ‘back on base’ gave Wolfgang no special rights with respect to the festival, but he was better placed than any other member of the clan to resume old contacts and watch for new opportunities. He was also, as he put it, ‘entirely devoid of political encumbrances’12 – which was true inasmuch as he had never joined the Nazi party. Back in 1938 he, unlike Wieland, had managed to slip away when Hitler had raised the question of party membership, and his later contacts with the Führer had been neither as regular nor as intensive as his brother’s. Hence if there were to be a festival one day and if any Wagner were to be involved – two big ‘ifs’ – then Wolfgang looked well placed to play a key role, perhaps even the leading one. This was provided his pesky sister in America did not muscle in: no wonder he was wrathful when she and Wieland seemed to make common cause.

  In view of their growing differences, the two brothers agreed in early 1947 to meet and thrash things out on neutral ground – the Strauss villa in Garmisch. It must have been a stormy session with Friedelind’s spirit, like Banquo’s ghost, haunting the fray. Wolfgang’s wrath still shows through in his memoirs, although he wrote them long after the event when both his elder brother and sister were dead. Wieland’s ‘sudden affection for Friedelind and his participation in her work’, he charged, ‘might have been understandable from the aspect of pure self-interest, but not when one considered her behaviour towards the family, the non-emigrants who had remained in Europe and whom she despised with all her heart’. By ‘selling himself’ to his sister Wieland had been in effect ‘betraying the rest of us, who were doing our best to preserve Bayreuth’.13 For ‘the rest of us’, Wolfgang might as well have written ‘me’. Winifred was also much interested in ‘preserving’ Bayreuth, but in the first place she had to preserve herself. At that time her denazification trial was imminent and she was busy marshalling her defence.