The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  Naturally Friedelind’s behaviour could be interpreted far more positively than Wolfgang allowed, and she surely did not despise the whole family – rather the ideology with which its members, in varying degrees, had identified. Apart from her semi-businesslike contacts with Wieland, she had begun to send over food and clothing in CARE packets from which all the Wagners benefited, not least Wolfgang, his wife Ellen and baby Eva. Still, she undeniably did represent a threat to the ambitions of the family’s ‘non-emigrants’, albeit not the only one. Already in 1946 the newly appointed mayor of Bayreuth, Oskar Meyer, had appealed to what he called the Master’s ‘legitimate and politically uncompromised descendants’ abroad, to return to Germany and help get the festival going again on a wholly new basis. One of the mayor’s letters went to Friedelind in the US who, it seems, failed to respond – at least directly. The other went to Franz Beidler in Zurich.14 The name meant little or nothing to most Wagnerians but it set warning bells ringing among the scattered members of the clan in Germany. In the dim and distant past, little Franz had for a while looked well in line to succeed to the Bayreuth throne. Was he belatedly going to make it after all?

  Small wonder that Beidler felt, as he put it, ‘moved and shaken’ when he received the mayor’s ‘momentous letter’. He took nearly a month to reply, saying he judged the omens for a new start in Bayreuth to be poor because ‘too much has happened over the years for us ever to be able to erase it from our memories’. But he agreed a try had to be made and just before Christmas he arrived in Bayreuth with a draft plan that was as detailed as it was ambitious. Under its terms, the festival was to be turned over to an independent foundation with a governing council on which representatives of, among others, Bayreuth, the state of Bavaria, UNESCO, Switzerland and a ‘future Federal German State’ would have seats and voting rights. Thomas Mann was slated as the council’s honorary president along with a dazzling array of experts (‘only Jews’, Winifred inaccurately complained to a friend) ranging from Alfred Einstein, Ernest Newman and Beidler’s old Berlin boss Leo Kestenberg to the composers Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, Arthur Honegger and Karl Amadeus Hartmann. Much of the ‘donkey work’ would evidently have fallen to Beidler who suggested himself as first secretary.15

  Most of the ‘big names’ did in fact indicate they were willing to take part; even Thomas Mann in his Californian refuge did not quite say no despite his intense reluctance to get involved again in any enterprise on German soil.16 The proposed foundation would not, therefore, have lacked for prestige, but would it have worked in practice? The structure Beidler outlined looked pretty unwieldy with too many chiefs and too few Indians, but that could – and probably would – have been streamlined. The biggest snag was that, as Wolfgang cuttingly put it, Beidler was ‘handing out the pelt before the bear had been felled.’ Under the joint will of Siegfried and herself, in 1930 Winifred had inherited the entire Wagner estate – including the festival theatre and Wahnfried – on condition that when she died, or if she remarried, the fortune would pass to the four children in equal shares. In other words, although the festival assets had been requisitioned by the Americans and placed in trusteeship they were still the property of the Wagner family, as Wolfgang tirelessly stressed to all and sundry in Bayreuth, including his visiting ‘cousin Franz’. If the assets were legally to pass to the Beidler foundation or to any other party, the Wagners – in the first place Winifred – would have to be dispossessed. That was no news to Beidler himself, who even argued against offering compensation. Siegfried, he noted coolly, had proposed back in 1914 that the festival theatre and Wahnfried be ‘given to the nation’ via a foundation.17 That aim now looked close to being realised, albeit more than three decades late.

  In those first post-war years, dispossessing the Wagners (with or without compensation) did indeed seem a real possibility, as Tietjen for one underlined in 1947. Already rebuilding his career and seemingly eyeing a possible return to the Green Hill, the irrepressible ‘Heinz’ argued that although the festival ought in his view to stay a family business, the military government might use ‘the law of the victor’ to decide otherwise. In that case, he claimed, the only feasible solution would be an international foundation with an artistic director (Tietjen?) and a governing council that could include some members of the Wagner family. He specifically mentioned Wolfgang and even Beidler but not Winifred and, unsurprisingly, not his old foe Wieland.18 The Bavarian government, too, for a time toyed with plans for a foundation to replace the Wagners, fearing not least that tourists, especially Americans, might stay away from Bayreuth if so notorious a ‘Third Reich’ family stayed in control.19

  Tietjen was right in principle about the ‘military government’. But in practice the Americans had by this time largely handed over denazification to German tribunals, although they still kept a weather eye on the proceedings, and no longer directly intervened in the murky affairs of the Wagners. All eyes therefore turned to Winifred’s trial, which began before a Spruchkammer in Bayreuth on 25 June 1947 – two days after her fiftieth birthday. Accused among other things of being ‘one of the most fanatical and loyal supporters of Adolf Hitler’ who ‘received considerable sums of money’ from the Nazis thanks to her ‘active role in the party’, Winifred faced possible conviction as a ‘major offender’ – meaning she stood to lose virtually everything, including her freedom. That prospect seems not to have fazed her. Armed with a sixty-four-page defence plea that she simply called her Denkschrift (i.e. exposé), and backed by an array of witnesses who testified that she had helped them in the worst of times, the ‘exiled Mistress of Bayreuth’ sought to show she had done no wrong and much right. Her main arguments were, by this time, familiar enough: to wit, that her close ties to Hitler had been those of personal friendship based on a love of Wagner’s work; that her last meeting with him had been early in the war (which, she stressed, she had firmly opposed); that she had consistently used what influence she had to help Jews and others victims of the party machine; and, last but not least, that the funds the Nazis had ploughed into Bayreuth (peaking at an annual average of more than a million Reichmarks during the war) had gone to the festival, not to enrich her personally.20

  Much of that seemed plausible, but it was far from the whole truth. Even leaving aside the question of when she had really last seen Hitler (decades later she claimed it had been in 1944), Winifred hedged and contradicted herself over how much she had known about the concentration and extermination camps. Although she had manifestly hoped up to 1939 that the war could be headed off, she then backed it to the bitter end, terming it in a Bayreuth booklet a struggle between ‘the world of Western culture and the destructive spirit of the plutocrat-Bolshevist world conspiracy’.21 Such antisemitic, anti-Russian jargon might well have come from one of the many tirades of her friend Wolf, and perhaps that is where she had picked it up. As for the Nazi money for the festival, it was true that little of it had gone directly into Winifred’s own purse (and also true that the gifts the ‘mistress of Bayreuth’ received from the Führer were probably worth no more than those she gave him). But wasn’t the festival Winifred’s private property and main means of livelihood? Didn’t it – and therefore she – thrive after 1933 above all because Hitler backed it with his presence and, directly as well as indirectly, with funds?

  Behind these matters of detail lay the key question of how far, if at all, Winifred was justified in drawing so firm a line between her private life and its public context; here her friend Wolf, there the Führer; here the family festival, there the Nazi backing for it; here her personal appeals for ‘clemency’ for those who she considered ‘worthy’ (as she put it), there a regime incarcerating and slaughtering at whim and will? Where did Winifred’s responsibility and guilt really begin? What, indeed, was her crime? The public prosecutor (the ‘so-called’ prosecutor as Winifred privately called him) was on tricky ground when he argued that the accused had ‘placed Richard Wagner’s legacy at the disposal of the ideological vie
ws of National Socialism’. Had she really been responsible for that, even assuming accord could be reached on which ‘legacy’ was meant and what the Nazis had made of it? The prosecutor had rather more of a point in arguing that the very number of witnesses Winifred had lined up – some thirty of them present and others sending written testimony – backed his case rather than hers. That she had been able to help so many off the Nazi hook who would otherwise have been jailed or murdered, in his view simply went to show how great her clout had been at the very top of a system evil through and through.

  Faced with arguments of such scope and complexity the court evidently felt out of its depth and its verdict, handed down on 2 July, unsurprisingly satisfied neither side. Because Winifred had helped ‘many people in trouble’ and had ‘at no time behaved in a brutal and reprehensible manner’, it was decided that she should not be placed in the top (i.e. worst) category of offenders. On the other hand, as a ‘loyal friend of Hitler’s’ she was deemed to have ‘been a committed supporter of the National Socialist tyranny’ and was accordingly classed as an ‘activist’ (category two). Later Winifred reflected with mingled hilarity and contempt on some of the penalties imposed, such as a ban on preaching or giving radio commentaries for five years. Others, like a commitment to 450 days’ community service, were hardly a laughing matter. Easily worst, sixty per cent of her assets were to be confiscated for good.22 Beidler regarded the latter step as an at least partial victory for all those pressing for a ‘New Bayreuth’, and urged that in the light of it a quick decision should be made on the festival’s future ownership.23 But that was easier said than done. Winifred, particularly aggrieved at being dubbed a backer of Nazi tyranny, promptly appealed against the sentence. The prosecutor, sure that a ‘major offender’ was being allowed to slip away, did the same. The matter therefore went back to the courts for nearly eighteen months – crucial ones, as it turned out, not just for the Wagners but for Germany and the wartime victors. Circumstances changed – and circumstances, as the saying goes, alter cases.

  Just two years before Winifred went on trial, the war in Europe had ended with what seemed to most people a clear outcome. On the one side were the Russians and the western Allies deliriously celebrating their joint victory over Hitler; on the other were the Germans, crushed in battle and increasingly despised as the full extent of Nazi mass murder began to emerge. Amid that fever of joy and disgust, it was at first easy for many in the west to forget or fail to realise the threat posed by ‘Uncle Joe’ Stalin’s Soviet Union – a dictatorship no less odious than ‘Uncle Wolf’s’ had been. The Russians, it was widely acknowledged, had suffered terribly and fought valiantly. If their troops now occupied much of Europe, including a big slice of Germany – well, that was due to Hitler’s initial aggression, not to intrinsic Soviet imperialism. Besides, at the ‘big three’ conference between the Americans, British and Russians in Yalta shortly before war’s end, hadn’t Stalin agreed (spuriously, as it turned out) to future free elections in ‘liberated’ eastern Europe? He had even backed moves to create the United Nations organisation!

  Rather soon, though, even the least discerning began to realise that the ‘hot’ war was being replaced by a ‘cold’ one in which a former partner was becoming a foe and, more gradually, vice versa. In March 1946 Winston Churchill famously declared that an ‘iron curtain’ had descended across the continent ‘from Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic’. The Russians, he warned, sought ‘an indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines’ notably in Germany. Six months later Secretary of State James Byrnes in a Stuttgart speech underlined the US determination to keep Germans as far as possible in the western camp, promising them a free, self-governing and prosperous future (a far cry from the former US ‘Morgenthau plan’ that had aimed to deindustrialise Germany for good). It was not long before the Byrnes pledge started to be fulfilled, politically and economically. Facing deadlock with Moscow over Germany’s future, the western Allies decided a common political order should be established in the area under their control. Accordingly a provisional constitution called the ‘Basic Law’ was drafted in the summer of 1948 (provisional because Germans in the Soviet zone were not – yet – able to join), and the following May the Federal Republic of Germany (west) was born with the Rhineland town of Bonn as its capital. A few months later a ‘German Democratic Republic’ (east) was formed in the Soviet zone.

  Meanwhile, US Marshall Aid – boycotted as ‘American economic imperialism’ by Moscow and the states under its thumb – had begun rolling into devastated western Europe, among other things laying the basis for the West German Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) of the 1950s. At least as vital a prerequisite for the ‘miracle’, though, was the currency reform of June 1948 in which the enfeebled Reichsmark was scrapped, along with most price controls and rationing, and replaced by the perky new Deutsche Mark. Implemented not only in the western areas of Germany but also in the western sectors of Berlin, a city under four-power occupation although far inside the Soviet zone, the reform brought a swift and drastic backlash from the Russians. They introduced a separate currency in the east and, for nearly a year, cut off all land and waterway links from the west to the two-and-a-half million citizens of west Berlin. In response the western Allies organised an airlift of unprecedented scope, running nearly three hundred thousand flights to shuttle food, fuel and goods to the greater part of a city on which, a few years before, they had been raining bombs. Many Germans saw the pilots as heroes and in much of the west the image of the ‘plucky Berliner’ tended to replace that of the goose-stepping Nazi. If Stalin had sought to encourage popular support for a new anti-Soviet alliance, he could hardly have found a better way.

  In this context denazification almost inevitably ran out of steam. By early 1948 the drive was anyway near-complete in the Soviet zone, thanks to the ‘clean sweep’ made by the communists as they busily replaced the old dictatorship with a new one of their own. For the western Allies the hunt for the guilty, long beset by problems of personnel and procedure, made ever less political sense as the cold war grew frostier. Whatever the moral scruples about letting old Nazis off the hook, it seemed essential to swallow them and forge a common front against the growing danger in the east. Besides, hadn’t scruples already been swallowed in respect of those Nazis – from the rocket expert Wernher von Braun to ‘Hitler’s top spy’ Reinhard Gehlen – deemed of special value to western military and intelligence immediately after the war? It now became a matter of applying similar Realpolitik to the far greater number of Germans still in the waiting line for judgement. Not that denazification ground to a halt right away; it limped on until 1950 when the Bundestag (the lower house of the federal parliament) under Chancellor Adenauer more or less buried it – albeit not for good. But as a rule the longer the process lasted the less people caught up in it had to fear – much to the disgust of those who had come before them and been more strictly treated.

  Suppose Winifred had been brought to trial a year earlier. Might she indeed have been deemed a ‘major offender’ with all the consequences, as the prosecution demanded? If so, what would have happened to the festival? Would the four children have taken over, or some of them, or would the Beidler scheme for an international foundation have come into its own? Speculation aside, the fact is that by 8 December 1948 when the appeal court gave its ruling, the Berlin airlift was in full swing, the birth of the Federal Republic was just a few months away and denazification had lost its élan. Winifred had even applied for reinstatement of her British nationality, believing that as a Briton she would stand a better chance of a reduced sentence. Evidently British officials looking into her claim were not impressed by her chutzpah (one noted ‘I think there is little doubt she is a bad lot’), and failed to expedite her application.24 But she did indeed regain her British nationality – while retaining her German one – soon after completion of her ‘denazification’, under a new law that thoroughly revamped Britain’s complex rules on nation
ality, citizenship and naturalisation. Thus the ‘mistress of Bayreuth’ re-established the formal link with the land of her birth that she had lost on her marriage to Siegfried more than three decades before.

  In a parallel development far more parochial but nonetheless vital for the Wagners, local council elections in Bayreuth in May 1948 brought a new mayor to office. Out went Oskar Meyer of the Christian Social Union, in came the Social Democrat Hans Rollwagen who thought nothing of his predecessor’s moves to hand over the festival to expatriates and foreigners. In his first public speech in his new job Rollwagen stressed that although, as he delicately put it, a ‘shadow’ had fallen over the festival in recent years, the Wagner family’s right to run things was ‘sanctioned by history and the law’. A few days later he got together to plan strategy with Winifred and Wolfgang in the Wahnfried gardener’s cottage (a kind of ‘resistance centre’, as Wolfgang put it, for organising the defence of family interests) and began to pull what strings he could with the Bavarian government in Munich, which was still undecided about the festival’s future. Prospects for Beidler’s foundation plan were thus dwindling steadily but, pending the result of the appeal, they had not quite vanished.