The Wagner Clan

by Jonathan Carr

  At odds with all those Germans who deplored his ‘distorted’ views about the ‘Third Reich’, Mann – once the embodiment of bourgeois conservatism – ironically also ran foul of the cold war’s ever-mounting anti-communism. After visiting Germany in 1949 he was attacked, not least in America, for receiving a literary prize in Weimar, the town that had once been home to Goethe and Schiller but that now lay in the Soviet zone. Shocked by what he called a ‘hysterical, irrational and blind’ campaign that, fanned by the Congressional Un-American Activities Committee, spread across the US to engulf far more liberals than dyed-in-the-wool communists, Mann finally retreated to Switzerland and died there in 1955. Few other exiles from the world of the arts had a better time of it. Some, like the philosopher Theodor Adorno, did indeed manage to establish themselves in the newborn Federal Republic and others, like the writer and dramatist Bertolt Brecht, settled in the so-called ‘Democratic Republic’ in the east, although they found life under the Soviet thumb no easy option. But many could not bring themelves to return at all and some of those who did, like the novelist Alfred Döblin, left again in disappointment.

  Friedelind was one of those who became a commuter between the New World and the Old. Advance word that she was planning to return to Bayreuth in 1953 for her first visit in fifteen years naturally aroused mixed feelings among the rest of the clan; intense curiosity, some joy (notably in Verena’s case) and much foreboding. Would she try to muscle in on running the festival – a particular worry to Wolfgang who already felt that Wieland’s wife Gertrud wielded too much influence on the Green Hill as adviser and choreographer? Would she bring up the ‘Third Reich’ and crow over her role at the expense of her mother and siblings? In the event the family reunion went off well enough, as though everyone, even the trenchant authoress of Heritage of Fire, had decided in advance to skirt ‘awkward’ topics. Cheeks were kissed, toasts were offered, the new generation of little Wagners was comprehensively cooed over by the glamourous auntie who had mysteriously popped up from America. From photos snapped at the time – one in particular showing a beaming, elegantly attired Mausi on her way to a festival performance with a similarly radiant Winifred at her side – you might think that the whole nightmare of the ‘Third Reich’, of flight and exile, of ‘destruction and extermination’ had never been.

  For Friedelind, though, the full story was far less cheerful than those snaps suggested. Hardly had she settled in at Bayreuth than the vexed affair of the von Einem jewellery she had received in Switzerland and pawned in America came back to haunt her. She had long since told her ex-boyfriend Gottfried what had happened to the jewels and why; but once she set foot on German territory she was promptly served with a demand for full compensation by lawyers for Gottfried’s mother Gerta Louise von Einem, that ‘dashing baroness’ who had also been a grande dame of espionage.

  Just what ‘full compensation’ meant was a question that plagued German courts and titillated the press for years. Some speculated that the amount owed could be so vast that Friedelind would only be able to muster it by putting in hock the share due to her of the Bayreuth inheritance.21 The accused herself maintained that the jewels had netted her no great sum, hence her continued hand-to-mouth existence in New York. She also claimed that before her flight to London from Switzerland in 1940 the von Einems had armed her with a power of attorney, to be used in extremity, over a bank account they had amazingly managed to keep in Britain even in wartime. Friedelind said that she had at no point made use of this freely offered safety net but, despite a search in London in 1954 in which both the police and MI5 became involved, she was unable to dig up documents to back her story.22 For outsiders, and probably most insiders, the affair of ‘Von Einem against Friedelind Wagner’ soon became as baffling as most other things in the baroness’s chequered history. In the end, Friedelind was sentenced to pay compensation amounting to five thousand US dollars and eighty-two British pounds (with interest) – no fortune, but for the perennially impecunious Maus no negligible sum either.23

  That marathon legal scrap did not mean the von Einems shunned the Wagner family as a whole (although Gottfried came to do so later). On the contrary, as early as June 1951 the baroness had visited Wolfgang to propose using her manifold contacts in politics and business on the festival’s behalf. At that stage she was already aware of the fate of her jewels but, according to Wolfgang, she agreed from the outset that her claims on Friedelind could have ‘absolutely no bearing’ on her support for Bayreuth. Not surprisingly, her offer was snapped up. Cash for the festival was still desperately short and Friedelind from afar had, in public and private, fiercely opposed raising more by selling off some of the Master’s manuscripts – one course repeatedly mulled over by Winifred and her sons. When Wolfgang asked the baroness whether she might even be able to prise aid out of the federal government in Bonn, although public responsibility for cultural matters lay first and foremost with the provincial states, she inscrutably replied ‘We shall see what we shall see.’24 Was it just chance that a year later Bonn made its first (but far from last) grant to the festival – a total of close to a quarter of a million Deutschmarks used to renew the stage lighting system? Whatever the background to that particular transaction, it is sure that the baroness’s unsurpassed skill as a puller of strings lay behind a stream of donations for Bayreuth from all sorts of sources throughout the 1950s.

  If Friedelind had loved or at least admired what she saw of the Federal Republic from the start, if she had believed that the new state was, even in embryo, the kind of Germany she and other Nazi foes had yearned for, perhaps she would have settled in the ‘old country’ and fought harder to run the festival after all – her attachment to America and her court battle notwithstanding. Later, indeed, she would constantly return to Bayreuth, mainly to run a series of masterclasses (of which there will be more to say). She got on with Wieland and was close to Verena, who seems to have been the only family member to feel her sister deserved backing in the von Einem affair. But the truth is that, on her every visit, she could hardly wait to leave again – not just her provincial home town but the country as a whole. Her letters make that painfully clear.

  ‘Bayreuth has a crippling impact on the psyche, on the spirit, on the body, really on the whole person,’ Friedelind wrote to a friend in America. She elaborated:

  I simply yearn to get ‘out’ again – I mean from the whole of Germany … it is like reliving the bad dream BEFORE my emigration. One is shocked to see time and again that basically nothing at all has changed – least of all the people! That thin veneer of political polish applied thanks to the occupation has long since been washed away by ‘sovereignty’ – and to have been a Nazi is once more exactly what it was ten years ago, NOT to have been one … It is depressing and horrifying.25

  Harsh words; even harsher than those the outraged Beidler had used about the resumption of the Bayreuth festival ‘as though nothing has happened’ a mere six years after Hitler, and on the face of it hard to justify. On the contrary, there seemed more to praise than curse about the buoyant new (western) Germany, rising from the ruins with almost none of the inbuilt flaws of Weimar, let alone of the ‘Third Reich’. As a federal state with a wisely framed constitution, the fledgling republic enjoyed a thoroughgoing devolution of power that arguably harked back to the regional diversity of the pre-Bismarck era – but without the worst drawbacks. The federal parliament, for instance, was made up of two chambers – the Bundestag (representing the nation as a whole and elected by universal suffrage) and the Bundesrat (representing the regional Länder) – that governed through a more or less amicable tug-of-war. Beyond that, two independent institutions in particular set limits to the ambitions of power-hungry and/or greedy politicians: a Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court) that stood guard over the Basic Law, and a Bundesbank (first called the Bank Deutscher Länder) with a mission to keep the currency strong, above all by fighting inflation. Many non-federalists (like the British) wondere
d how such a confusingly multipolar set-up could work at all, but they comforted themselves with the thought that a German system with too many checks and balances was far more desirable than one with too few.

  Moreover, the country seemed lucky from the first with its political leadership: the veteran Konrad Adenauer as chancellor, a shrewd Christian Democrat from Cologne with a strong anti-Nazi record and a special commitment to rapprochement with the old enemy, France; Kurt Schumacher as the main opposition leader, a charismatic Social Democrat who had survived years in concentration camps; and the learned, liberal Theodor Heuss as president, admittedly now a largely ceremonial office wisely shorn of most of the sweeping powers invested in it under Weimar. To say the least, early post-war Germany could have done a lot worse for its ‘top trio’ of national leaders. Psychologically and symbolically, too, the choice of unpretentious little Bonn as federal capital could hardly have been a happier one. From the start, the mere sight of the ‘federal village on the Rhine’ helped soothe those foreigners who arrived with qualms that Germany, already resurgent economically, might soon become too big for its boots again. The sleepy charm of the place did, it is true, bring some drawbacks. Once in a while official visitors would come late to appointments with the federal establishment grousing that their cars had been delayed by flocks of sheep on the road. Better that, though, than a punctual arrival under intimidating escort amid the mind-numbing bombast of ‘the Führer’s Berlin’.

  Friedelind, then, was wrong to claim that ‘nothing at all’ had changed; but she was sadly on the mark with her charge that many Germans still sought to forget, ignore or explain away (not least to themselves) their real roles between 1933 and 1945. Despite all the immediate post-war efforts to mete out justice – like the thirteen showpiece Nuremberg trials of the Nazi ‘elite’ and the flawed but far-flung ‘denazification’ drive to punish the rank and file – German society in the 1950s was frankly riddled with ex-servants of the ‘Third Reich’. Those who found themselves back with jobs and clout included bankers who had helped finance Hitler, industrialists who had helped arm him, professors who had given intellectual absolution to his racism, doctors who had gone along with the euthanasia of ‘undesirables’ – not to mention tens of thousands of civil servants who had been removed from office just after the war only to be amnestied a few years later. Adenauer himself drew some ex-Nazis into his cabinet and long employed Hans Globke, co-author in 1936 of a notorious official commentary on the Nuremberg racial laws, as one of his closest aides. As for judges who had handed down shoals of draconian sentences, often death, in dispensing what passed for ‘justice’ under the Nazis, hardly one of them was called to account in the Federal Republic. Broadly speaking, it was claimed that ‘their Honours’ had simply been applying the then law of the land – an argument notoriously underpinned in a keynote ruling by the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Supreme Court) in 1956 and only revised four decades later. Ex-victims of Nazi courts might sometimes even find themselves up for trial before the selfsame judges who had sentenced them during the Reich.

  Did this have to be? The unpalatable truth is that backing for Hitler had been so widespread, and so ardent at least until the war began to go badly, that it would have been hard indeed to find enough experienced people with a wholly untainted history to run the young Federal Republic. Besides, the new democracy faced challenges from both ends of the political spectrum; from the communists on the far left and from several small but fast-growing parties on the far right, the latter partly drawing support from among the millions of homeless refugees flooding in from the east. By urging an end to denazification – in effect offering a ‘second chance’ to those with a ‘brown past’ – Adenauer was able to kill two birds with one stone. He helped draw into the political mainstream (not least into his own Christian Democratic Union) many of those who, had they continued to be punished or shunned, might well have swelled the ranks of the neo-Nazis. That in turn created a sturdier bulwark against the communists, not just internally but vis-à-vis the Russians who claimed to be ready to accept a reunified Germany – but only in return for its neutrality. Adenauer distrusted Moscow’s intentions at least as much as the western Allies did, hence his proposal that Germany rearm and place its forces at the disposal of European defence. Whatever qualms the Allies (and indeed many Germans) had about that scheme, the need for a German buffer against Soviet expansion outweighed them. That meant, among other things, making use of those who had served in Hitler’s war and whose expertise could now be vital to the proposed new Bundeswehr (federal armed forces).

  In retrospect, the best argument for this Realpolitik (one of those words, like ‘Angst’, that came to be widely adopted by non-Germans) is that, against the odds, it worked. From a deeply unpromising start, with much about it that was depressing and even horrifying, as Friedelind said, a mostly prosperous state emerged in which extremists have never won national power, that remained firmly tied to the Western community of nations, and that achieved reunification by peaceful means after decades of confrontation. For all that thanks is fairly due to Adenauer – coolly calculating almost to the point of callousness – and to Allies who, whatever their motives and failings, did not impose crushingly punitive conditions on Germany as they disastrously did after 1918. But there was a price to be paid for this happy result. It is all very well to extol a policy of Schlusstrich – of drawing a line under a peculiarly disagreeable past so that people and energy can be freed to mould a better future. The trouble is that the past is not so easily disposed of. Those who leave skeletons in the cupboard should not be surprised when others, especially the inquisitive young, eventually dig them out and start asking tricky questions. That is what happened in Germany and, albeit falteringly, what happened in Bayreuth.

  16

  Sins of the Fathers

  Some time in the autumn of 1956 when his parents were on holiday, Gottfried Wagner, aged nine, managed to pocket a master key to the deserted Festspielhaus and set off alone, heart thumping, to explore the place. With its maze of passages, buried orchestra pit and cluster of outbuildings housing weird and wonderful ‘props’, the ‘fortress on the hill’ promised untold adventure to any child, but especially to Gottfried who had been strictly forbidden from playing there by his father, Wolfgang.

  After snooping into every nook and cranny of the main theatre, the little boy unlocked the door to the old set-painting workshop nearby, padded up the dusty stairs inside and found himself in a junk-room-cum-archive. He poked into boxes filled with barely decipherable letters in old German gothic script, he recoiled on spying an oil painting of Hitler fondling a menacing Alsatian dog, and he pored over a huge plaster model of what seemed to be the Festspielhaus transformed. Only later did he learn that the model was part of the grandiose design, produced at the Führer’s wish, for a kind of monumental, fascist Parthenon on the Green Hill – to be built as soon as Nazi Germany had won the war.1

  Shortly before that escapade, Gottfried had seen film shots of the Nazi era that showed the Wehrmacht on the march, the mass adulation for Hitler and the corpses piled high at Buchenwald. But when he had sought to find out more, his father had told him he was too young to understand (a familiar chant throughout Germany in those days) and his granny Winifred had dismissed the scenes of mass carnage as American ‘propaganda’. It was not until he was sixteen that he realised just how close the link had been between the Wagners and the Führer. Poking about at home while his parents were again away, he uncovered reels of old film in rusty containers in the sidecar of his father’s motorbike. Bit by bit he examined the footage with a magnifying glass and identified one member of the family after another, strolling about happily with Hitler at Wahnfried. As Gottfried recorded in his memoirs three decades later, Wolfgang, Wieland and much of the rest of the adult world suddenly came to seem sinister. He carefully replaced the containers where he had found them, hid the film material in his wardrobe and took to questioning his father with as innocent a face as he
could muster about life in the ‘Third Reich’. Much had been good about it, the sceptical youth was told, including Hitler’s ‘idealistic rescue of the Bayreuth Festspiele’.2

  Perhaps in other circumstances – had there been no Hitler, no war and no Holocaust – Gottfried might have ended up as director of the festival, or at least co-director. In principle he seemed destined for the role. Born in Bayreuth in 1947 and raised initially in the gardener’s cottage next to dilapidated Wahnfried, he was named Gottfried after the heroine’s brother in Lohengrin, and Helferich after his grandfather Siegfried. Among the new generation of six Wagner children he and Wieland’s son Wolf Siegfried were the only boys – and despite the Cosima/Winifred tradition, not to mention Siegfried’s will, it was long assumed that when it came to taking charge on the Green Hill the girls would hardly be in the running. Besides, with his jutting chin, prominent nose and disconcerting tendency to switch from charm to fury in a trice, Gottfried came closer than any other member of the clan to resembling the Master himself. What else could he possibly do other than take over the festival?

  The answer turned out to be pretty well anything, from producing opera (but never, one brief spell as an assistant apart, in Bayreuth) to selling shoes in Italy, from working in a Munich bank to writing a dissertation in Vienna on Kurt Weill – the German-Jewish composer of Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), a piece whose aesthetic was light years away from the world of Richard Wagner.3 In a clinch with his father from the start, shocked by what he uncovered about the Hitler connection, repelled by all antisemitism but especially Wagner’s and bored by the provincial world of Bayreuth, Gottfried became a wanderer who until quite late in life lacked a real role. As for the exasperated and infuriated Wolfgang, he finally seemed to shrug off the son of whom, no doubt, he had once had high hopes, and did his best to ignore him. In his more than five-hundred-page autobiography he barely acknowledges Gottfried’s existence. He writes little more about his daughter Eva – that baby born by candlelight in 1945 as the Americans marched into Bayreuth – but until his second marriage his relationship with her was relatively friction-free.