The Wagner Clan Read online

  What emerged was a preposterous but seductively well-written racist view of civilisation across the centuries, published in 1899 in two volumes totalling more than 1,100 pages and called Die Grundlagen des 19en Jahrhunderts (The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century). Chamberlain had originally planned this hotchpotch of fact and fiction about religion and philosophy, science and the arts as only the first of three parts, but happily he never got round to the other two. He might well have done so since he dashed off Die Grundlagen in less than two years, shutting himself away in his study for days on end and preceding each new session at his desk with a prayer to God for guidance. It was during this period that his marriage, shaky ever since the Dresden days, began to slide irretrievably towards breakdown, although the final split did not come until 1905. Unable (at any rate unbidden) to share in his work, merely tolerated by his passionately Wagnerian friends and probably aware of his dallying with other women, Anna began to have the kind of nervous disorders that her husband had so often suffered. Chamberlain agonised between a sense of duty to look after his wife, as she had him, and a yearning to be free of her at last – a dilemma he hinted at by letter to Cosima and hence, inevitably, to Eva. The Mistress of Bayreuth left no doubt where she stood. ‘In my view, men are not born to nurse,’ she replied, backing her words with a reference to Schopenhauer. ‘That is woman’s work.’9

  The main contention of Die Grundlagen is that there is no such thing as ‘humanity’, only races of different backgrounds, physiognomy and ability. All that is best and noblest stems from Aryans, whom Chamberlain from time to time also confusingly labels as Indo-Europeans, Nordic peoples, Teutons and Germans. Everything that is most harmful originates with Semites, although the author hits out at all sorts of targets ranging from Africans to Jesuits, from Peruvians to Napoleon, as well as at those he pinpoints as Jews. History, according to Chamberlain, is comprehensible only as a titanic struggle between these two main forces. Greece and Rome, the sources of true art and law, had gone down to racial degeneration and in the chaos that followed Jews had further spread their evil influence. If there was any hope for civilisation, and Chamberlain evidently thought there was, then it had to be pinned on Aryans (i.e. Germans and the like) emerging supreme at last.

  One of the countless drawbacks to this breathtakingly, to many readers irresistibly simple thesis involved the British. In principle Chamberlain’s countrymen were Aryans too, yet he found them despicably shallow and commercial – more or less Semitic, in fact. He never really resolved this issue beyond hoping that repeated doses of Germanic culture would drive out the non-Aryan infection to which the British had somehow fallen prey. A much bigger problem was posed by Jesus Christ. Chamberlain had worshipped Christ since childhood (his ‘only friend’ at school) and stressed in Die Grundlagen that he regarded Christ’s birth as the greatest event in history. Yet Christ was generally held to be a Jew. Chamberlain therefore concluded that the general view must be wrong and devoted much space to arguing that Christ was really Aryan, coming as he did from Galilee where, unlike Judaea, Jews were relatively rare. His main point, though, was that since Christ was goodness itself and Jews were intrinsically bad, then Christ could not possibly have been Jewish. Thanks to similarly ludicrous logic Chamberlain also managed to ‘prove’ that the great figures of the Italian Renaissance were Aryan. In view of their genius, there was nothing else they could be.

  This, then, was the book that quickly became a bestseller such as other Bayreuth scribes could only dream of (and that naturally delighted Bruckmann, who became one of Hitler’s first wealthy backers in the 1920s and later published much Nazi-oriented material). Some hundred thousand copies of the German version alone were sold in ten editions before the First World War and translations soon emerged in English, French and Czech. All but unknown a decade earlier, Chamberlain suddenly emerged as a celebrity guru whose racist bible people with intellectual pretensions needed to have a view about, even if they had not actually ploughed through it. One person who not only ploughed through it but reread it so often that he could quote long passages verbatim was Kaiser Wilhelm II, who swiftly became Chamberlain’s most highly placed fan. Not content with extolling Die Grundlagen to government members and pressing free copies into the hands of influential visitors, Wilhelm summoned the delighted author to his country seat and lined up the whole household, including servants with blazing brands, to greet him at the door. ‘It was God who sent the German people your book and you personally to me,’ he told Chamberlain in a long letter written on New Year’s Eve 1901. Recalling how inadequate he had felt his education to be for the mission facing him in the new Reich, the Kaiser went on, ‘Then you come and with one magic stroke you bring order into confusion, light into the darkness; [you reveal] aims to be striven and worked for; an explanation for what was dimly sensed; paths that should be followed for the salvation of the Germans and hence of mankind.’10

  This letter, signed ‘Your true thankful friend,’ was only one of a series between Wilhelm and Chamberlain that spanned more than two decades, lasting until well after the Kaiser went into Dutch exile in 1918. In their often ecstatic tone the exchanges recall those between Wagner and King Ludwig and, as with that correspondence, it is often hard to tell when the participants are being serious. In the case of the Kaiser that was never easy anyway. Vain and unstable, much given to phrase-mongering by turns drastic and flowery, he tended to treat the world as a stage on which he could strut in his favourite costume, a military uniform, against his preferred backdrop, a parade ground. The ruthless but rarely reckless Bismarck rightly called him a balloon that needed to be held on its string or it could drift just anywhere. But after the young Wilhelm, newly crowned, dismissed the long-serving chancellor in a show of muscle in 1890, no one adequate was available to keep that string tight. As a grandson of Queen Victoria, whose daughter – also called Victoria – had married Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, Wilhelm was fascinated by England and obsessed by its armed forces. One of his proudest moments came when he personally commanded more than a thousand German marines, goose-stepping past his grandmother at a parade on the Isle of Wight – just a short boat trip, as it happens, from Chamberlain’s birthplace of Southsea. Was there any good reason why a united Germany, increasingly predominant economically, should not have military might and colonies to match Britain’s? Wilhelm thought not and, as a first step, gave orders to build a battle fleet that would be at least the equal of the Royal Navy. Chamberlain had little interest in military hardware but his hopes for his adopted country were no less ambitious. ‘Germany can achieve complete control of the world,’ he wrote to the Kaiser in 1902, ‘partly by direct political means, partly by indirect methods of language and culture, only if it succeeds in taking a new direction, which means bringing the nation to a final break with the Anglo-American ideals of government.’11

  Like Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), Oswald Spengler’s dismal hit after the First World War, Die Grundlagen caught a national mood and fostered it with a vast display of pseudo-erudition. But whereas Spengler spoke to a desolate, defeated nation, Chamberlain addressed a boisterously unstable one – flattered to be told with such conviction, moreover by an Englishman, that the future of civilisation lay largely in German hands. Common to both audiences, though, was a widespread loathing of those comparatively new German citizens, the Jews. Not that this animus was much evident in parliament itself at the time Chamberlain was writing. Anti-semitism was shunned by the Social Democrats, who were going from strength to strength as rampant industrialisation bolstered their working-class clientele; and new parties with a specifically antisemitic agenda, often badly organised and internally divided, had little success at the polls. But none of that meant envy and hatred of Jews were evaporating, simply that they were coursing mainly through extra-parliamentary channels. Antisemitism was, for example, part of the raison d’être of a plethora of newly founded nationalist pressure groups. These included the Flottenverei
n (Naval League), set up to back the Kaiser’s aim to rule the waves, which eventually numbered around a million members; the Bund Der Landwirte (Agrarian League), hostile to free trade and especially influential in the Conservative Party; and the Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German Association), born in chauvinistic rage over the 1890 deal with Britain, under which Germany swapped its claims to Zanzibar for control of the North Sea island of Helgoland.

  With Die Grundlagen, Chamberlain made this dangerous brew of nationalism and antisemitism seem palatable – especially to a middle class that felt proud of Germany and hostile to Jews but that, on the whole, abhorred extremists and rabble-rousers. The intellectual ground had been prepared by publications like the Bayreuther Blätter and by influential writers such as Paul de Lagarde, a biblical scholar obsessed by the danger he felt Jews posed to German unity and European peace. But it was Chamberlain who most caught the public imagination with his seeming mastery of many fields and his ability to draw a clear racial message from a bewildering mass of material. Many genuine experts rightly saw this feted all-rounder as an inspired dabbler with easily challengeable logic; but even they could not gainsay the effortless style, the beguiling sweet reasonableness, with which he made his nonsense palatable to a wide audience. In Die Grundlagen Chamberlain often seems to criticise the Jews more in sorrow than anger, actually deploring in the introduction a ‘perfectly ridiculous and revolting tendency to make Jews the general scapegoat for all the vices of our time’.12 Yet later he refers to Jewish existence as ‘a crime against the holy laws of life’ and rounds off the first volume with a warning that where the struggle with Jews ‘is not conducted with cannon balls, it takes place noiselessly in the heart of society … More than others, precisely this silent struggle is a struggle of life and death.’13 Did the author fail to notice a certain lack of consistency in his approach? Indeed he did not. When Cosima objected to one or two favourable references to Jews in Die Grundlagen, Chamberlain boasted that he had inserted them to make his negative comments seem more credible.

  It may seem strange that a work so attractive to Wilhelminian Germans should also prove popular with the French (hardly pure Aryans), the British (vilified as conceited mongrels) and even the Americans (given short shrift). But in all three countries Chamberlain was widely praised for his learning and the clarity of his writing, even in translation. His stance on the Jews excited relatively little reproof, further evidence that antisemitism was far from being confined to the German-speaking world alone. In France, wracked by the Dreyfus affair, Die Grundlagen fell on especially fertile soil. In Britain, the book’s success owed much to the efforts of the first Lord Redesdale, grandfather of the Mitford sisters – two of whom, Unity and Diana, became notoriously close to Hitler in the 1930s. It was Redesdale who revamped the initially poor translation of Die Grundlagen, wrote a fulsome introduction and pressed it on influential friends. Like The Times Literary Supplement, which called The Foundations ‘one of the rare books that really matter’, the noble lord did in fact chide Chamberlain for his antisemitism while implicitly admitting that he felt the author had a point.

  In America the former President Theodore Roosevelt took a similar line in a long review. Although critical of Chamberlain’s ‘foolish hatreds’ against Jews among others, Roosevelt concluded: ‘Yet, after all is said, a man who can write such a really beautiful and solemn appreciation of true Christianity … a man, in short, who has produced in this one book materials for half a dozen excellent books on such diverse subjects, represents an influence to be reckoned with and seriously to be taken into account.’14 It was, however, the Nazis who took the author most ‘seriously into account’, especially their pernicious ideologist Alfred Rosenberg, who paid implicit homage to Chamberlain in the title as well as the content of his main racist work Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century), published in 1930.

  Ironically, one person who did not join in the jubilation over Die Grundlagen was Cosima. In principle Wagnerians everywhere and at Wahnfried in particular should have been able to bask in the reflected glory of so noted a Bayreuthian. Indeed, much in the book might have been written by the Master himself; the call to preserve an ‘essence of religion’ that had been lost to the church; the homage paid to Christ while questioning his Jewishness; the antisemitism that one moment seemed to offer the hand of friendship and the next brandished a clenched fist. But for Cosima that was just the trouble. She felt Chamberlain had taken over many of Wagner’s ideas without making adequate acknowledgement. Nor were Wagner and the ‘fortress on the hill’ given what she regarded as their proper place at the pinnacle of Aryan civilisation – even allowing for the fact that Die Grundlagen was meant to be only the preface, as it were, to a much longer work in which this ‘failing’ could be made good.

  This was not the first occasion on which Cosima and her usually adored ‘Houston’ had found themselves at odds. In Vienna, Chamberlain had given a lecture claiming that Wagner, although an unmatched artist, had never fully understood the philosophers he most extolled. Cosima was not amused. Chamberlain had also constantly pressed her to receive the young and brilliant Swiss stage designer Adolphe Appia, whom he had met in Geneva and who had become a close friend. Chamberlain felt that Wagner’s music dramas would be enhanced by Appia’s sophisticated use of colour, light and shade – as indeed they were when Wieland Wagner adopted similar techniques on the Bayreuth stage half a century or so later. But Cosima would not hear of it, though her son would be more receptive. Where Appia’s notions were correct, she decreed, they were already being put into practice in Bayreuth; where they were not, they were simply childish.

  Cosima felt that with Die Grundlagen, Chamberlain had become altogether too big for his boots; that although he laudably reproduced much of the Wahnfried gospel, he was also implicitly issuing a personal declaration of independence. In this she was largely right. Intellectual modesty was no feature of Chamberlain’s character. With a decade of successful propaganda and a bestseller behind him, the former disciple saw himself – not Wolzogen and others under Cosima’s firm thumb – as the truest interpreter of the Wagnerian message. He continued to venerate the Mistress of Bayreuth and to adore the Master’s music dramas, but he swam free of the belief that everything Wagner had written was above criticism, or even invariably made sense. Naturally Cosima could not stand for that and detailed her art historian son-in-law Henry Thode, fiercely jealous of Chamberlain for years, to launch a counter-attack. Thode accordingly produced a long review in 1900 lauding Die Grundlagen for its scope but arguing that parts of it were derivative and/or misconceived. Chamberlain, incensed, hit back at Thode without mentioning him by name. He even skipped attending the festival and for a few years his correspondence with Cosima became merely polite, although it was never wholly broken off.

  That might just have marked the end of Chamberlain’s specially close relationship with the family, had it not been for Siegfried. Wagner’s composer/conductor son, seemingly the soul of equanimity, had been on good terms for years with ‘the sage of Bayreuth’ and had stayed firmly on the sidelines during the scrap over Die Grundlagen. After his mother suffered a heart attack in 1906, Siegfried took over the festival and begged his old (and useful) friend to return to the fold. Chamberlain in turn made his peace with Cosima, without giving much if any ground on the views he had expressed in his book, when she visited him in Vienna during a trip south to recuperate. Things then moved quickly. Chamberlain’s divorce from Anna finally came through and the hitherto sporadic correspondence he had exchanged with Eva became a torrent. In summer 1908 he returned to the festival at last and on 26 December, two days after Cosima’s birthday, he and Eva were married. ‘After arduous years,’ he wrote to the Kaiser, ‘first an intolerable conjugal life, then a period that, although it enriched my soul, was often one of aching loneliness, my life’s ship now glides into friendlier waters.’15 As so often, Chamberlain was wrong. For him, the Wagners and Germany the worst was yet to com
e.

  7

  Odd Man Out

  On the face of it the Wagner clan had much to be grateful for in 1908, exactly a quarter of a century after the Master’s death. The festival was going strong, the leadership had passed more or less smoothly from mother to son and, thanks to Adolf von Gross, the family was not just debt-free but seriously rich. Eva had finally married, the last of the four daughters to do so, and Siegfried was widely regarded as one of Germany’s most eligible bachelors – although there was naturally speculation about just why he still was a bachelor at the age of thirty-nine. ‘Nun danket alle Gott’ (Now all give thanks to God), Cosima exulted as she surveyed the family situation in a letter to a friend on New Year’s Eve.

  The Hohe Frau (Exalted Lady) was now seventy-one, she had suffered a heart attack and she was half blind; but she was still clear-minded enough to know that, whatever the public image that she did her best to polish, privately much was far from well with the Wagners. The Italian branch of the family by this time gave least cause for worry. More than a decade after the tragic death of her husband Biagio, Blandine was settled comfortably in Florence, rather to the envy of Siegfried whose inborn love of all things Italian waxed as the years passed. The brightest of her sons, Manfredi, became a top diplomat, to whom no problem seemed intractable; none, that is, until 1929, when he was appointed High Commissioner to Danzig, the Baltic port city placed under the auspices of the League of Nations after the First World War. He died three years later aged only forty-nine, vainly trying to reduce tension there between Germans and Poles. Another son, Gilberto, felt irresistibly drawn to Bayreuth, where Siegfried fostered his musical gifts as conductor and flautist, even composing a tuneful but tricky concerto for him in 1913. With his mischievous smile and seemingly inexhaustible stock of brightly coloured bow ties, Gil – as he was popularly known – became a kind of mascot around Bayreuth right into the 1970s. Latterly he had a vital but inglorious role giving curtain cues during performances at the festival theatre; rather a comedown for one who had earlier won acclaim as an orchestral conductor, even in Vienna. But evidently that did not bother Gil. He seemed almost childishly happy simply to belong to the clan. A rare bird.