The Wagner Clan Page 27
With his father dead Wieland became for a time the ‘man of the house’ if hardly, at age thirteen, the ‘master’ of it. Long aware that he was Winifred’s favourite, as Friedelind had been Siegfried’s, he now sought to meet her every wish almost before she asked, plundering his savings to buy her presents and putting her for a time at the centre of his new hobby, photography. With all-too typical boorishness, he told his girlfriend (and future wife) Gertrud Reissinger that they could never be wed because he would only marry someone as lovely as his mother.6 No wonder Tietjen’s arrival caused him inner turmoil no less radical than Friedelind’s – not, admittedly, at the very start when the odd-looking newcomer with vast theatrical experience seemed something of a blessing, but soon thereafter when ‘Heinz’ began to haunt Wahnfried still more regularly than ‘Uncle Wolf’ had done.
For all the children, but especially for Wieland, it was disturbingly clear that more linked their increasingly preoccupied mother to the new director than festival business alone. The usually steady and resolute Winifred began to switch with bewildering speed from a mood of near euphoria to one of gloom and vice versa; she monitored her weight with furrowed brow and hung with rapt attention on Tietjen’s every word, however commonplace. In short she had fallen in love – again. The new object of her infatuation possessed no ‘kindly voice’ like Siegfried’s nor hypnotic blue eyes like Hitler’s but he had a persuasive tongue and an air, usually justified, of being able to control the trickiest situation. Although he was sixteen years her senior Winifred surely saw that as no drawback; on the contrary, experience showed that in the main she felt attracted to older men, her late husband and Wolf included. Perhaps she was unconsciously seeking the father she never knew; at any rate she was, as her private letters show, consciously seeking a husband.7 Unlike Cosima, she was far from disposed to play a widow’s role for around half a century although, despite her best efforts, she ended up doing just that. When Siegfried died she was only thirty-three and had good reason to feel she was getting a second chance, but unfortunately for her Tietjen already had a wife (though he lived apart from her). He promised to obtain a divorce and eventually kept his word but then, soon after the war, it was a ballet dancer he married – not the ‘Mistress of Bayreuth’ he had kept dangling for years.
Like Hamlet, Wieland resented his mother’s new attachment and was plagued by indecision. In contrast to Mausi, he remained far from sure that he wanted to devote his life to Bayreuth – yet his mother, not to mention Hitler, seemed to take it for granted that he would do so. Not surprisingly most of the rest of the Wagnerian world did so too. Time after time at official gatherings it was Wieland who was seen to be closest to Winifred’s side, and when the Führer was snapped arm in arm with the two sons it was naturally Wieland that he placed on his right. For all that, Tietjen carefully worked to keep the succession issue open, sometimes seeming to favour one brother, sometimes the other, temporarily at least encouraging Mausi but also flattering the ever-prettier Verena. Was this a policy of sensible even-handedness in the spirit of Siegfried’s will or one of ‘divide and rule’? Perhaps both. Tietjen may genuinely have felt that it was too soon to earmark any ‘greenhorn’ for a job that demanded so rare a combination of artistic talent and management skills. At the same time he clearly had a vital interest in securing his own role on the Green Hill for the indefinite future. For Tietjen, Bayreuth was an added insurance against harassment and worse by his many foes among the country’s new rulers, Goebbels in particular. In Berlin, he was protected by Göring who wanted to ensure that ‘his’ Staatsoper stayed the best; in Bayreuth he had Winifred as a powerful advocate with Hitler, who distrusted Tietjen but was prepared to set aside his doubts in the interests of the festival.
Tietjen could not afford to be seen placing obstacles in Wieland’s path, all the same. That would have risked too much strife with Winnie and besides, there was no gainsaying the ever more evident talent for visual art of her adored eldest son. Much encouraged and influenced by Franz Stassen, an artist friend of his father’s, Wieland honed his painting skills and began constructing models of stage sets that showed real promise although still in firmly traditional mould. From models he soon moved on to the real thing, designing scenery for productions of three of his father’s operas – Der Bärenhäuter in Lübeck and Cologne, Sonnenflammen in Düsseldorf and Schwarzschwanenreich in Antwerp. Above all, in 1937 Tietjen finally let him wholly redesign the sets for Parsifal that Roller had concocted three years before and that most people (a disappointed Hitler included) agreed had been unsuitable. This was surely a challenge and an honour for a young man just turned twenty, even for a clearly gifted Wagner heir, but Wieland was anything but grateful. Years later he still claimed that he had had to fight hard to extract the commission from Tietjen at all; besides, he had also designed costumes of which (for whatever reason) few were used. After a long period of indecision he now wanted more from Bayreuth and quickly too – or nothing. When Tietjen offered him an eight-year ‘learning the ropes’ course in production and management at the Berlin Staatsoper, he turned it down with a snort. With the Parsifal achievement behind him, eight years of training seemed to Wieland a lifetime – as Tietjen had no doubt expected. Sure that he was being baulked by an interloper of an inheritance that he alone had the right to take up or spurn, he stomped off to Munich to study painting. Long seething, his dislike of Tietjen now erupted into hatred.
When Wieland left home in the autumn of 1938 for an atelier in Schwabing, Munich’s bohemian quarter, the ‘thousand-year Reich’ was little more than five years old. In that brief span the Nazis had worked to transform Germany at giddy speed as though rightly sensing that they did not have a millennium of power before them after all. Foul though they were, the events of 1933 like the burning of books, the ‘coordination’ of culture and the (only partly effective) boycott of Jewish shops were just the first steps down a trail of blood and terror. Others quickly followed. In 1934 Hitler consolidated his power in the ‘night of the long knives’, using the regular army and SS to crush the SA, the near-independent stormtrooper force of his rival and erstwhile friend Ernst Röhm. Röhm himself was murdered along with scores of other alleged ‘traitors’ – some unconnected with the SA but (like ex-chancellor Kurt von Schleicher) thought ripe for elimination anyway by Hitler and his main accomplices, Göring and Himmler.
A year later new action was taken against Jews, already chased from the civil service and for the most part from the professions and the arts. Under the 1935 ‘Nuremberg Laws’ that notoriously claimed to define Jews by race rather than religion, they were now deprived of their civic rights and marriages were forbidden between them and ‘citizens of German or kindred blood’. Tens of thousands emigrated but, disastrously, many stayed put for years until the trap snapped shut on them. When Hitler came to power Germany’s Jews had totalled some half a million (less than one per cent of the population) and despite every villainy, most of them continued to look on Germany as their home. Besides, the cost of leaving was high and the prospect of being welcomed elsewhere with open arms small. After each new stage of persecution Jews tended to believe the nadir had been reached and each time they were wrong. In 1936 they were indeed harassed less overtly because the Nazis did not want to revolt foreigners visiting the Olympic Games in Berlin. But once the Games were over hostility mounted again, reaching a new but far from final peak of violence on 9–10 November 1938, the so-called Kristallnacht (literally ‘crystal night’ or ‘night of broken glass’), when hundreds of synagogues were gutted countrywide and thousands of Jewish homes and shops ransacked. Close to a hundred Jews were murdered and up to thirty-five thousand others thrust into concentration camps, raising the number of inmates to around sixty thousand in one swoop. Four months earlier, at the United States’ behest, a thirty-two-state conference had been held in Evian, France, to address the plight of Jewish refugees. It took no firm action.
Although Jews were the main targets they were not, of c
ourse, the only ones to suffer. Real and imagined foes of the regime were hounded down, tortured and slaughtered; ‘inferior elements’ including gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally handicapped were sterilised or used as ‘guinea pigs’ for odious medical experiments. The web of concentration camps spread steadily, culminating in the creation of extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau and Treblinka in Poland after war began. How much of all this were ordinary Germans aware of, despite the Goebbels-induced clouds of propaganda emitted via the ‘coordinated’ press and radio? Many knew enough not to want to know more. Besides, the Gestapo and its army of informers seemed everywhere. ‘Awkward’ questions, let alone criticism, even within the family, could spell denunciation, sudden arrest and disappearance, perhaps for good.
For all that, the Nazi era seemed to many Germans not so much a ‘reign of terror’ as a stunning success, at least until the first big setbacks of the war. Thanks above all to public-spending programmes (not directed, at the start, mainly towards an arms build-up), unemployment that had peaked at more than six million at the end of the Weimar era had all but vanished by 1938; indeed in some sectors there was a serious shortage of skilled labour. The efficacy of what became known as ‘Keynesian economics’ was thus being demonstrated in practice in Nazi Germany even before Keynes got his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money down on paper in 1936. Moreover a lot of good jobs and affordable dwellings became available because Jews were booted out of them or left the country, a circumstance that evidently gave few of the beneficiaries a bad conscience. On the contrary, many of those who deplored physical violence against Jews nonetheless welcomed the practical benefits that were being siphoned off at last to ‘true Germans’. In this respect lawyers and judges, presumed guardians of justice, were no different to other professionals and intervened just as rarely on behalf of wronged Jewish colleagues – although some did intervene. In many fields there were individuals who shunned opportunism and tried to help the victims – but such bold and principled spirits were the exception, as they usually are in every place and era. Meanwhile the masses were enjoying cheap vacations, theatre trips, sports events and the like offered by Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy), a Nazi organisation that was meant to boost morale and demonstrably did so.
As for foreign policy, Germans happily noted that Hitler seemed able to thumb his nose at the rest of the world and get away with it, especially by reneging on the hated Versailles treaty. He ordered troops into the demilitarised Rhineland in 1936, gobbled up Austria in the Anschluss of 1938 and soon afterwards tore the mainly German-speaking Sudetenland away from Czechoslovakia with the connivance of Britain, France and fascist Italy. No wonder most Germans felt that ‘Wir sind wieder wer’ (We’re somebody again) after the drift and humiliation of the Weimar years; all the more so since an impressive array of foreigners clearly felt the same. One such fan was David Lloyd George, British prime minister from 1916 to 1922, who after visiting Hitler in 1936 extolled him as ‘the George Washington of Germany – the man who won for his country independence from all her oppressors’. It was true, he conceded, that Hitler’s methods were not those of a parliamentary democracy; nonetheless, Germany was now ‘full of hope and confidence, and of a renewed sense of determination to live its own life without interference from any influence outside its own frontiers’.8 Lloyd George was no fascist, though there were plenty such in Europe, including Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts in Britain. Nor was he, at heart, either a coward or an appeaser. He was simply dazzled by the Führer and, like the mirror image of so many western democrats praising Stalin’s nightmarish Soviet Union as a socialist paradise, he was endlessly naive.
What did the Wagner children make of all this? When the Second World War began in September 1939, Wieland was twenty-two, Friedelind twenty-one, Wolfgang just twenty and Verena nineteen – all old enough, in principle, to have views of their own. During Hitler’s rise to power they had, of course, been too young to be fully politically aware even if their Bayreuth environment at home and school had encouraged a critical interest in politics, which it had not. Their father apart, they had been surrounded mainly by Nazi sympathisers like Winifred and ‘the aunts’, not to mention ‘Uncle Wolf’ with his singular entourage on his lightning visits. After Siegfried’s death, Wahnfried became an even firmer pro-Nazi preserve with the coming of Lieselotte Schmidt, a busybody of a young woman who was engaged ‘temporarily’ as a children’s coach-cum-secretary but who stayed for years. Her letters and diary entries gush with admiration for ‘Wolf’ (although her special idol was Hans Frank, Hitler’s lawyer and a frequent Wahnfried visitor, whom she vainly hoped to marry) and are shot through with near-hysterical antisemitism. In 1933, for instance, we find her claiming that Jews had inspired a ‘real witches sabbath’ against Bayreuth with a campaign of lies and dirty tricks, but that happily the newly ensconced Führer had driven back the ‘forces of darkness’ in the nick of time.9 The children tended to resent Lieselotte, not (with the later exception of Friedelind) because of her antisemitism but because she tried too overtly to play ‘mistress of the house’ when Winifred was away. On the other hand she readily helped them with their homework and cooed over every jot of talent they displayed. So she became a semi-permanent member of the household.
Although Hitler’s achievement of power was an obvious boon for the festival itself, it at least temporarily caused a protocol dilemma for the Wagners. How if at all do you raise trickier matters of (Nazi) state – like plots, pillage and murder – with a Führer you have known for years as a close family friend? Specially alive to this problem after the Röhm purge in the summer of 1934, Winifred told the children to be tactful when ‘Wolf’ arrived a few weeks later for the festival. She need not have worried. Hitler himself broached the matter right away, claiming that not more than seventy-seven people had been executed, although unavoidably, several had been shot by mistake. According to Friedelind, her mother expressed understanding for the action, noting that the ‘poor Führer’ must have had a terrible shock ‘to find himself betrayed by his best friend’. And the children? There is no good reason to suppose they reacted very differently, not even Friedelind at the time. Although she later related the incident in her book with a general air of condemnation for Hitler, back in 1934 Mausi was still an innocent in more ways than one. When she was told in a shocked whisper that on his arrest Röhm had been found in bed with a man, she retorted: ‘But imagine how embarrassing it would have been if they had found him with a woman?’10
Four years later Winifred seems to have been genuinely horrified by Kristallnacht, probably because she had the nasty evidence thrust under her very nose. In Bayreuth Nazi thugs mishandled Jews, pillaged their homes and laid waste the four remaining Jewish businesses (from more than thirty when Hitler came to power) that had not already been ‘appropriated’ by ‘Aryans’. It may be that Winifred played a role in preventing the synagogue from being burned down, although it was ransacked. The details are murky. But it is a fact that the synagogue immediately adjoins that superb Margravian opera house the Master had loved but found too small for his festival needs, and that if the former had been set alight the latter would almost certainly have been gutted too. That would have been an awful loss for the town, and particularly so for a Wagner.11 Anyway, according to a report by the mayor, Winifred was appalled by the violence and resolved to complain to Hitler when he was next in Bayreuth. She seems to have kept her pledge but that does not mean she blamed him personally. On the contrary, to the end of her days, Winifred held ‘Wolf’ responsible for all she felt was good about the ‘Third Reich’, and his treacherous, incompetent underlings for all that was bad. Naturally Hitler encouraged this approach. According to Wolfgang, when he and Wieland expressed ‘indignation’ over Kristallnacht, the Führer replied that the affair had been an independent initiative launched by Goebbels. He, Hitler, had not known about it in advance – a claim that the evidence, including Goebbels’ diaries, unsurprisingly fails to suppo
rt.12
1 Cosima with Richard Wagner. ‘I shall come to you and seek my greatest and highest happiness in sharing the burdens of life with you,’ Cosima, just turned 31, pledged in her diary on New Year’s Day 1869. ‘What love has done for me I shall never be able to repay.’
2 Protected or trapped? Richard Wagner’s only son Siegfried, aged about 4, encircled by his sisters Isolde (Loldi) and Blandine (Boni) at the rear, Eva and Daniela (Lulu) at the front.
3 Young Wagners clutch an old friend. Eva, Isolde, Siegfried, Daniela and Blandine (left to right) with Hans Richter, long close to the family and conductor of the first ‘Ring’ cycle at Bayreuth in 1876.
4 Dandies on parade. Siegfried (right) enjoys a joke in front of the Festival Theatre with his brother-in-law Heinrich ‘Henry’ Thode (left), a historian, and Karl Muck (centre), a martinet of a conductor who rarely looked as jolly as here.
5 The thwarted heir. As Richard Wagner’s grandson who went into Swiss exile from the Nazis, Franz Wilhelm Beidler (1901–81) was invited to return and put the Hitler-tainted festival on a new footing after 1945. In the event, the Bayreuth branch of the family managed to retain ownership and management (left).
6 Evangelist of Race. English-born Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) adored Germany, married Wagner’s daughter Eva and decisively influenced the family circle at Wahnfried for many years. His chauvinistic, anti-semitic writings were deeply admired by Kaiser Wilhelm 11 and Adolf Hitler.