The Wagner Clan Read online

  Perhaps at the home of the Klindworths, the old couple near Berlin who cared for her for eight years; but when Winifred first arrived on their doorstep in April 1907, supposedly for a stay of only six weeks, she was aged nearly ten and was already emotionally damaged goods. The visit might easily have been a flop for all concerned. While still in England Winifred had contracted a bad skin complaint that was probably psychologically induced. She urgently needed to convalesce but no one could be found to take her until the orphanage, in near despair, finally won guarded assent from Henriette Klindworth, a distant relative of Winifred’s mother married to a German musician. Henriette was then seventy, her husband Karl seventy-six. Childless, they lived in a modest country house, pottered in the garden and dreamed of the good old days when Karl had studied piano with Liszt and had been a friend of Richard Wagner. Indeed, he had produced fine piano versions of the Master’s scores and still kept in regular contact with the Wagner family, especially Cosima. But times were hard, Karl had to give piano lessons to help make ends meet and neither he nor his wife was in the best of health. In short the Klindworths seemed anything but suitable candidates to take on the challenge of a problem child and a sickly one at that.

  Unexpectedly, though, the old people quickly became devoted to Winifred and she to them. The six-week deadline came and went but no move was made to send the little girl back to England, and anyway, no one there was clamouring for her return. So the Klindworths became Winifred’s foster parents and eventually adopted her. Karl taught her the piano, giving her first German lessons at the keyboard, and Henriette showed her the basics of housekeeping and gardening. They even abandoned their beloved country retreat and moved with their charge to a flat in Berlin when this seemed better for her schooling; the move gave her access to a wider circle of contacts, including the wealthy and influential Bechsteins. Naturally Wagner’s music was among the first Winifred heard in the Klindworth home and, by her teens at the latest, it had become her passion. She dreamed of the Master’s heroines – for a time she even signed her letters ‘Senta’, nicknaming herself after the Flying Dutchman’s obsessed and selfless saviour.

  She did not, however, get much if any chance to see Wagner staged. Old Klindworth, for all his personal kindness to Winifred, was a nationalist and antisemite who regarded Berlin productions as the new-fangled abominations of an increasingly Jewish-dominated theatre. For him, as for most ‘old school’ Wagnerians, the Bayreuth festival was the only spot where the world of the Master was still more or less in order. Despite his creaking limbs, he loved attending Bayreuth dress rehearsals at Cosima’s special invitation and in 1914 he won permission to bring along Winifred, then aged seventeen. There she was introduced to Siegfried. The cultivated festival director with the smooth-skinned, almost babyish face was nothing like the haggard, driven ‘Dutchman’ of her dreams, a role Hitler later filled much better. But he was, undeniably and irresistibly, a Wagner – one, moreover, with a kindly voice that Winifred later confessed she instantly fell for.

  As for Siegfried, he had once or twice remarked that if he were to marry, his bride would have to be poor and without a family. No doubt, consciously or not, he was keeping at least one eye open for a girl in no strong position either to clash with ‘Mama’ or to make a fuss about his bisexuality. Suddenly there she was (or seemed to be) and just in the nick of time. Although Isolde had lost her court case that summer, the affair had emphasised the vulnerability of the Wagner dynasty so long as Siegfried produced no heir. Siegfried was well aware of that himself, but the family kept reminding him anyway, especially sister Eva who sent him a long letter stressing it was high time he found his ‘Katerlieschen’ (little kitten). To cut a long story short – shuttle trips by Siegfried to Berlin, engagement, a bureaucratic battle to win Winifred German nationality despite the outbreak of war – the two were married in Wahnfried on 22 September 1915. The Klindworths were too ill to attend and Karl died the following year.

  The house that Winnie (as family and friends called her) now entered was no cosy nest. Built in massive sandstone as though to withstand a siege, Wahnfried featured a bust of King Ludwig in the front garden, a single heavy slab marking the Master’s grave at the back (with space ready and waiting for Cosima) and a Wagnerian frieze linking tragedy, myth, music and youth above the entrance. Inside next to nothing had been changed since the Master’s death more than three decades before. Cosima spent much of her time in her quarters upstairs, gazing out to the grave from her balcony, receiving old friends like Adolf von Gross and dictating to Eva her (by now dwindling) correspondence. Sometimes she would drift about the house in black, flowing robes, switching to white on special occasions to please Siegfried, checking on the servants and – after the marriage – seeing that Winnie did the dusting properly. The Hohe Frau did not believe that a young wife should be under-employed. If Winifred knew much English literature, which is uncertain, she may well have felt transported into a world combining the odder features of Jane Eyre and Great Expectations. A more sensitive creature would have felt daunted from the start; but Winifred had been toughened in a hard school, as her hapless sisters-in-law and ultimately Cosima herself came to realise.

  Eva had taken the lead in pressing Siegfried to marry but she had not expected that the ‘little kitten’ she urged him to find would have such sharp claws. Before the wedding, she insisted on choosing ‘suitable’ dresses and shoes for Winifred, who scornfully changed them or gave them away. Eva also tried to advise on housekeeping but Winifred, thanks to Frau Klindworth and a ‘domestic science’ course in Berlin, already knew a lot more about that – and showed it. Siegfried was called upon to intervene but, true to type, he managed to pass off this or that domestic crisis with a joke and fled to his ‘bachelor quarters’ – the cottage next to Wahnfried where he composed and met his own (usually male) circle of friends. Poor Eva! Even the parrot seemed against her, as Winifred later maliciously recalled, pecking at her papers and rudely burping whenever she entered the room.

  Daniela, too, tried to upstage Winifred, for instance by taking up most of the stool when they played piano duets. But bit by bit she and her sister were sidelined, decisively so when Winifred handsomely fulfilled the main role expected of her and produced four babies in four successive years. Wieland, the eldest, was born on 5 January 1917 – an event so shattering in the long-frozen Wahnfried world that Cosima actually floated down to play a few bars of the Siegfried Idyll on the piano. Family legend has it that she had not touched the instrument since Wagner’s death and never did so again. It was, in fact, a difficult birth. The baby emerged blue and failed for a while to utter a sound, as though unsure whether the world it had entered was worth the effort (a question the mature Wieland, too, found desperately hard to answer). Friedelind came next nearly fifteen months later on 29 March 1918 – a Good Friday, which was felt to be some sort of omen. Wolfgang followed on 30 August 1919 and Verena on 2 December 1920. Winifred, it seems, was raring for more offspring but Siegfried, who (jokingly?) called his constantly pregnant wife ‘Mrs Globus,’ was definitely not. He felt he had already done more than his dynastic duty.

  By the time Wolfgang and Verena were born the war was over but life even for the relatively well-placed Wagners got harder still. That rarely fazed Winifred who, far better than her husband and in-laws, knew what it was like to go without. The tougher things became the more she seemed to bloom. Ignoring accusations of ‘sacrilege’ from local fogeys, she had turned Wahnfried’s lawn into a vegetable patch during the war. Later, as heating fuel became ever scarcer, she squeezed most of the family (bar Cosima and her nurse) into Siegfried’s cottage, where Verena was in fact born. When her husband went on conducting tours to raise funds, she packed him food to save on restaurant bills and urged him to bring back what he failed to eat. She also dealt with correspondence on his behalf, signing herself at first ‘Frau Siegfried Wagner’. Later she tended to drop the ‘Frau’, an omission that, to this day, much vexes archivists, dealers
in historic memorabilia – and biographers.

  Despite Winifred’s thrift and Siegfried’s earnings, there was barely enough cash to cover the family’s day-to-day spending, let alone to allow resumption of the festival. Inflation gradually decimated not only what was left in the festival kitty after the truncated season of 1914, but also the proceeds of a new fund-raising scheme launched by ultra-orthodox Wagnerians in Leipzig in 1920. One result of the financial woe was growing friction between Wahnfried (Cosima apart) and Adolf von Gross. Siegfried, happy to ignore money matters in pre-war days, now blamed his ex-guardian for having kept funds in ‘beschissene Staatspapiere’ (‘crappy state securities’) instead of shifting them into value-retaining property.4 Von Gross in turn accused Siegfried and his wife by letter of diverting sums intended for the festival into speculative investments without informing him. Clearly wounded, he went on to recall that he had looked after the family’s interests for more than five decades – ‘not without success’.5 A typical understatement – what the Wagners, especially Cosima and her son, owed the old man was inestimable. Nonetheless Siegfried, whether he liked it or not, should long since have been prepared for the business responsibilities he now tried in his fifties to shoulder willy-nilly. Von Gross faded away to the wings as an adviser although, for old times’ sake, he remained a regular visitor to Wahnfried until his death in 1931.

  Lack of funds, food and fuel; uncertainty over when or even whether the family ‘business’ would be re-launched – the Wagners suffered all that. But at least in Bayreuth, as though in the eye of the storm, they were spared the worst of the violence sweeping Germany, especially the cities. Small wonder that the Weimar Republic – hated by far left and far right alike, distrusted by the masses who yearned for peace but felt they had been betrayed of victory in war – was more or less stillborn. The real surprise is that it managed to survive until 1933, even beginning to look quite healthy once or twice. Back in the early post-war years the question was not so much whether this or that government would last as whether the country itself, united barely fifty years before, could avoid disintegration. Bands of armed Freikorps, disaffected soldiers back from the front without jobs or hope, roamed the country offering their deadly services – also to the central government that lacked resources to keep order. Spartakisten, immediate forerunners of the communists, sought to drum up revolution in Germany as the Bolsheviks had done in Russia in 1917. Even in once strongly monarchist Bavaria, a Soviet-style republic was briefly proclaimed until Freikorps units intervened to smash it. Politically motivated assassination became routine. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, radicals (and henceforth martyrs) of the left, were among the victims. So was Walther Rathenau, foreign minister and one of the Republic’s few mainstays.

  Only one thing, it seemed, united all sides, and that was resentment of the Versailles Treaty that had stripped Germany of territory, restricted its armed forces and given it sole blame for the war. Reparations were set at 132,000 million gold marks, to be paid to the victors in annual instalments, a burden bound to prove economically crushing and to foster political extremism. Wise foreign observers like John Maynard Keynes pointed that out, but their warnings went unheeded for years by political leaders, especially those in a vengeful France still smarting from the Prussia-led drubbing of 1871. Germany, that had begun to feed inflation by printing money to finance the war, now created hyperinflation by printing vastly more to try to meet the near-intolerable demands of peace. As the crazy paper chase accelerated, what a hundred marks had bought yesterday, a thousand could not buy today and a billion might not buy next week. With the exchange-rate of the German currency going into free fall, Lord D’Abernon, the statistically adept British ambassador in Berlin, worked out in 1923 that he was able to obtain as many marks for a single pound sterling as there had been seconds since the birth of Christ.

  Some, like his lordship, did not immediately suffer from the crisis. Those with goods and property could sit tight; exporters won new markets with dirt-cheap products; the national debt that had seemed such a burden in weighty old pre-inflation marks marvellously lightened when expressed in gossamer new ones. But millions of people nonetheless faced ruin; pensioners, civil servants, ‘blue collar’ workers – all those relying on paper savings and paper wages. Next to no one understood the cause of the calamity although as usual Jews were widely blamed, as they were for a variety of other ills including the ‘stab in the back’ in 1918 and the ‘Bolshevik threat’ from Moscow. Jews apart, the French seemed the main tormentors, especially when they marched into the Ruhr industrial area in early 1923 on the grounds that Germany had failed to pay reparations on time. Months of strike and more or less passive resistance followed, further crippling the economy and the currency. Secession began seriously to loom in the Rhineland and Bavaria; communists and Social Democrats, usually fierce rivals, joined forces to control Thuringia and Saxony; the end of the Republic seemed at hand.

  Such was the chaos when Hitler first met the Wagners in the autumn of 1923, although of course, they had heard about him for years. Back in 1919, Wagnerian friends in Munich had told them of the fiery young corporal, war-wounded and holder of the Iron Cross, who was creating such a stir at meetings of the newly formed Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party). But at that stage the DAP was just one more ultra-nationalist group, so puny that it pathetically began numbering its members at 500 (Hitler was number 555) to try to look bigger. That soon changed. Even before he formally won control in 1921, Hitler lashed the DAP into measures that would boost its appeal. At his instigation, it renamed itself Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party), largely as a gambit to win working-class backing. It also turned out a twenty-five-point programme full of populist demands: abrogation of the Versailles treaty, acquisition of more territory to form a ‘greater Germany’, a ban on immigration and the denial of equal rights to those already present but not of ‘German blood’, specifically Jews. All non-German immigrants who had entered the country after the start of the First World War were to be expelled forthwith. People keen to know with some precision what Hitler and the Nazis stood for did not have to wait for Mein Kampf. They simply had to read this programme made public at a rally in the Munich Hofbräuhaus on 24 February 1920, although at that stage even the far-right press did not take much notice of the event.

  Almost any crackpot could have put such things on paper and got next to nowhere, but this one subsequently went from strength to strength. Why? Obviously Hitler’s near-matchless demagoguery and ruthlessness (not least towards over-ambitious fellow Nazis) against a background of mounting national desperation had much to do with it. Less manifest but also crucial was the sheer charm that won him backers among wealthy families, like the Bechsteins (music) and the Bruckmanns (publishing), who would never normally have let such an ill-bred upstart into the garden, let alone the salon. For the ladies involved, Hitler’s very awkwardness seems to have added to his attraction. Both Helene Bechstein and Elsa Bruckmann evidently loved the challenge of teaching etiquette to a guest who seemed keen to learn but who would thrillingly appear at the front door equipped with a whip and a pistol. Such seemingly genteel circles were more than ready to overlook the brutality of the Nazi quasi-militia of stormtroopers, the SA (Sturm-Abteilung) or – if forced to acknowledge it – tended to argue that one naturally had to defend oneself against leftist ruffians who upset one’s rallies. Hitler’s nationalist heart, they claimed, was in the right place, and anyway ‘things cannot go on as they are’. As for the antisemitism he trumpeted, that was anything but new. It had reared up in fresh forms after the emancipation of the Jews more than half a century before, but then it had lacked a leader able to tap it right across class barriers and sensibilities. Now, in the wake of the Versailles humiliation and amid the despair of Weimar, it got one.

  The Wagners, especially Chamberlain and Winifred, fell for the same charm and had an added reason to do so. Hitler
had been enthralled by the Master’s music ever since his first Lohengrin as a youth, had drunk it in at one splendid performance after another in Vienna conducted by (ironically enough) the Jewish-born Gustav Mahler. So it was that when he entered Wahnfried for the first time, on the morning of 1 October 1923, Hitler seemed awed to tread on what was probably the nearest thing for him to sacred ground. As Siegfried and Winifred led him through the great entrance hall, the music room and the library the Nazi leader found himself oddly short of words. Later he stood alone for several minutes in the garden before the Master’s grave, then returned to the house to promise the family (vainly as it proved) that should he come to power then Parsifal would again become Bayreuth’s exclusive property. Hitler met the children but apparently did not see Cosima, although he must have yearned for the honour. Perhaps the Hohe Frau, now nearly eighty-six and largely confined to her upstairs room, was simply too weak to receive him. Or maybe she felt the sallow young man with awkward manners and lowly pedigree was not the sort of person with whom she cared to associate – despite all that Houston and Winnie might say in his favour. Whatever the truth, Cosima took it to her grave.

  Just over a month later, on 10 November, Siegfried was due to conduct a concert in Munich that included the premiere of his joyful new tone-poem Glück. He and Winifred arrived a day or two early for rehearsals and thus witnessed the collapse of the putsch after an exchange of fire between Hitler’s followers and the (far outnumbered) police in front of the Feldherrenhalle in the city centre. More than a dozen of the insurgents were shot dead: others were injured, including Hitler himself and Hermann Göring, the former wartime flying ace who later became the most flamboyant of Nazi leaders. The concert was shelved. Back in Bayreuth Winifred gave her version of the Munich events to the local branch of the (now outlawed) Nazi party and a few days later she drew up an open letter of support for Hitler, apparently on behalf of the whole Wagner clan.6 In the next few months she collected clothes and money for the families of jailed Nazis and helped organise a local petition that won ten thousand signatures demanding Hitler’s release. Winifred seems never to have visited Hitler at Landsberg, though those of his Party friends who did so claimed they had never seen their leader looking better – healthy, rested and enjoying the obvious admiration of his jailers. However, she did provide him with various creature comforts including writing paper. Helene Bechstein, not to be outdone, sent him a gramophone and, after his release, a Mercedes.