The Wagner Clan Page 37

  If Friedelind’s intervention did not imply that she was disowning her book, why, then, did she intercede on behalf of her mother at all – and then only at the last moment? Later she referred vaguely to her motive as a disinclination to ‘kick a person when she is down’, which was no doubt true but hardly goes to the heart of the matter. Mausi, remember, had been at (often violent) odds with Winifred since early childhood. As a young woman she had come to despise her mother’s unwavering support for Hitler and – perhaps above all – she resented the emergence of Tietjen as an, in her view, wholly inadequate Ersatz for her beloved father. Her resentment was all the greater because she believed, rightly or wrongly, that a far more appropriate suitor had been in the offing after Siegfried’s death but that the chance had been missed. In a letter to an American friend, Friedelind claimed that during his Bayreuth days Toscanini had fallen ‘madly in love’ with Winifred (despite her ‘Nazi passion’) and later regretted that he had not plucked up the courage to start an affair with her. ‘I regret it almost as much or more so,’ Friedelind added, ‘because things might have taken a different turn in that case!’7

  Reasons enough, one might think, for a triumphant Friedelind to relish Winifred’s post-war plight, with the Führer dead, Tietjen remarried to a ballet dancer and her trial looming. No doubt the daughter who had been through so much for her convictions really did enjoy being proved right at long last – but that was surely not all she felt. Her relationship with her mother was far too complex for that. In one revealing passage of Heritage of Fire, Friedelind describes a fierce confrontation just before leaving home in 1938 for what turned out to be years of exile. Before retreating to bed, Winifred accused her daughter of bringing disgrace to the name of Wagner by associating with ‘international Jews and traitors’ and vowed never to ‘let you out of my sight again’. Recalling the scene years later, Friedelind wrote:

  That was the memory of her I carried away, beautiful and flushed and unforgiving. At midnight I slipped out of Wahnfried as though I were a thief, not a daughter, and … wondered what was this fierce emotion that we aroused in each other. Under the storm and fury there was respect, I knew, and admiration.8

  Respect and admiration? Perhaps Friedelind was implicitly admitting how similar she and her mother were in strength of will and lack of tact, despite all their differences on politics and people. Indeed, wasn’t it exactly because the two were so alike in character that time after time their disagreements blew up into ‘storm and fury’? As for Winifred, she surely did feel baffled respect for what she later acknowledged to be the ‘enormous sense of justice’ of her unbudgeable daughter.9 Respect, though, was far from enough for Friedelind. She sought the love she had enjoyed for years from her father and that her mother so rarely showed, maybe could not really feel. In her book, Friedelind recalls being embraced on a few occasions when Winifred was distressed and herself looking for solace, but the moments quickly passed and the stage was set for the next row. Mausi’s correspondence home tells a similar tale of hopes briefly raised by this or that warm remark from her mother only to be quickly dashed. ‘How can you stand by and let your best friends spread slander after slander about me,’ she bewailed to Winifred in one letter from abroad just before the war, ‘at the very moment when I receive evidence of your motherly affection?’10

  If Friedelind had loved her mother wholly, without reserve, it is hard to see how she could have gone ahead with publication of Heritage of Fire – however strong her belief that the truth about Hitler and the Wagner family ought to be made known. Although the ‘Mistress of Bayreuth’emerges from the account not as personally evil but as blinded by her friend ‘Wolf’, it must have been plain to the authoress that she was – at the very least – doing her mother no service. On the other hand, if Friedelind had simply despised Winifred she would have left post-war justice to take its course. Instead, her feelings were at least as intense and contradictory as ever: fury and frustration on one side, unwilling admiration and the hope of love on the other. Given that inner turmoil, Friedelind’s sudden bid to help her mother after so long a silence seems more understandable – but it was not the only reason why she acted as and when she did. Another was her long-protracted uncertainty about her status in America.

  In the introduction to Heritage of Fire, Friedelind notes that she flew into New York from Buenos Aires with Toscanini on a summer afternoon in 1941 and at ‘nine o’clock the next morning I made application for my first American citizenship papers. Again I will belong. How good it is to have a country in which one can work and breathe and live in amity with his neighbours, only those can know who have experienced the other kind of life.’11 What Friedelind did not make clear when she wrote those evidently heartfelt words is that in 1945 she had still not been granted full US citizenship, despite her manifestly anti-Nazi stance, of which her book was only the latest evidence. Until her papers came through her situation remained shaky. She was odd-jobbing, near-broke and light years away from realising her aim to found a US opera company – a scheme that, if successful, stood to consolidate her claim to the throne in a rebuilt, denazified Bayreuth.

  Meanwhile Winifred, with her widely publicised post-war praise for Hitler ‘as man and music connoisseur’, seemed almost to be going out of her way to confirm the picture of her drawn in Heritage of Fire. Small wonder, in the circumstances, that Friedelind did not choose (and perhaps at that stage did not feel the urge) to speak up on behalf of her defiantly unrepentant mother. In a solitary interview with the New York Times in April 1947, she even claimed that although she sent her siblings CARE packets, which was true, she had not written to any of them since the war, which was not.12 Apparently she still sought to avoid even a hint of collusion with those who had not turned their backs on Hitler as she had done. Just two months after that interview, on 9 June 1947, Friedelind became a US citizen at long last.13 All her efforts on Winifred’s behalf came between that date and the start of the Spruchkammer hearing sixteen days later.

  Suppose those citizenship papers had not come through until later. Would the daughter just have stood by and watched as the mother went to trial? It seems very likely. As the years passed, Friedelind evidently yearned more than ever to become a US citizen and shunned anything that might even remotely have told against her. Despite often menial jobs and chronic lack of cash, she had come to see America as her new home – one could say her ‘real home’ – and she was determined to be adopted by it, no matter what. With her enthusiasm and lack of guile she won friends (and foes) easily; she found in New York a variety and frisson she had not encountered before, even in London; and she was, she admitted, simply overwhelmed by the quantity and quality of the music-making on offer.

  In a (seemingly unscripted) radio broadcast on ‘Music in America’ that she later made during one of her visits to Germany,14 Friedelind’s words tumbled over one another as she introduced stage works by – among others – Alban Berg and Benjamin Britten, recalled peerless recitals by artists like Rudolf Serkin, Adolf Busch and the late Sergey Rakhmaninov, and extolled orchestral concerts under Serge Koussevitzky, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Eugene Ormandy, the young Leonard Bernstein and, of course, Toscanini. She was critical of the Met – too much a ‘society affair’, too vast and ‘plushy’ for the good of singers – but stressed that the regular opera broadcasts from there reached an audience of millions. As for Carnegie Hall, she so often haunted the place for rehearsals as well as performances that the doorman had proposed she move her bed there. ‘I’m often asked in Germany whether I really like life in America,’ Friedelind noted at the start of her hour-long talk. ‘The answer is – I do, madly.’ She certainly looked as though she thrived on it, as those who had known her back in the 1930s noted with some wonder. Gone was the plump, moody tomboy; in her place a far slimmer, self-assured blonde with a ready smile and chic apparel that would have turned heads in Berlin, let alone Bayreuth. The sharp tongue, admittedly, was much the same as ever. Partly through force of circums
tance, partly thanks to her own temperament, Friedelind thus became the Wagner family’s first real cosmopolitan – or at least the first after grandfather Richard, who had also knocked about a lot, had likewise fled into exile and in his last years, it will be recalled, had pondered settling in America. Whether he would really have taken to the life there and been given the support he felt he lacked in Europe is quite another matter. As for Siegfried, he was drawn to all things Italian but never broke with Bayreuth, and neither Winifred nor her children, Friedelind apart, knew much of the world beyond Germany. While Wieland struggled with less than full success to escape the Bayreuth-centred orbit into which he was born, Wolfgang evidently felt no impulse to try. Verena with her brood down by the Bodensee became a marginally more distant satellite – but a satellite all the same. Would the spirited Mausi, ‘on the road’ more or less continuously since that first spell at a Yorkshire boarding school in 1930, really have been content to renounce her beloved New York for a life in provincial Germany – even if it had meant fulfilling the role for which she felt her father had destined her? It is hard to imagine. By 1947 at the latest it was manifestly hard for Friedelind herself to imagine. In her New York Times interview that year she confirmed that she felt ‘an obligation to save’ the Bayreuth festival but also stated flatly that she planned to make her permanent home in America.15

  In other words, Mausi hoped to have her cake and eat it. She must have had at least an inkling that this was unrealistic, but at that stage she did not believe the festival could restart for another decade and in the meantime her top priority was to get an American opera company of her own on the road. Even if, though, she had been right about the Bayreuth timing and her US plan had succeeded, in the long run the festival could hardly have thrived under a director absent for much of the year. Perhaps Friedelind really aimed to share power with Wieland or even with both brothers – she using her international contacts mainly from New York to drum up singers and conductors, they dealing with the production and business side on the spot. On paper that might have looked like a clever solution; in practice, anyone aware of the family’s recent history and the abrasive characters involved would have known that such a trio would be unable to harmonise for long. As it was, the Wieland–Wolfgang duo alone had a job to stay in tune.

  Family strains apart, Friedelind surely had qualms about how she would react to the shamed and shattered land of her birth and about how most Germans would react to her. Notwithstanding the urgent appeal from Bayreuth’s well-meaning mayor to her (and Beidler) to return, she could not expect to be welcomed by all and sundry as the plucky, politically uncompromised young Wagner who had suffered for her convictions and hence deserved the top festival job. More likely she would be looked at askance – not by everyone but very likely by most, as a drifter who had turned her back on her country and who had had the luck to choose the winning side. That the buoyant young lady breezing in from New York had turned out to be right about Hitler would not increase her attraction. Rather, her very presence would seem aggravating to the many who did not want to have their consciences jogged and who felt that they were suffering enough anyway. Officially the ‘new Germany’ (not to mention the occupation authorities) would be on her side. Unofficially, she seemed bound to run into intense hostility.

  A foretaste of what might well await her, and exiles like her, had come immediately after the war in a widely publicised battle of words between Thomas Mann and others – notably writers – who had failed to leave the ‘Third Reich’ during the Nazi era. What began as a more or less civil exchange, with an appeal from an ex-colleague16 in an ‘open letter’ to Germany’s most famous living author to return home from America, soon became a bitter shouting match in which neither side gave quarter. Mann, who had for years written and broadcast attacks on the Nazis from exile, did not even try to hide his contempt for those who had failed to take a similar stand. In his long reply sent to an Augsburg newspaper, he argued that if the whole of Germany’s intelligentsia – writers, musicians, teachers, and so on – had shunned the regime at the start, had gone on strike or into exile, things could have taken a different turn. As one who had watched ‘the witches’ sabbath’ from afar, it was now hard for him to reach an understanding with those who had danced along with it and ‘paid court to Satan’.17

  That broadside naturally brought a counterblast, especially from writers who argued that they had gone into ‘inner emigration’ – sticking it out in their benighted ‘Fatherland’, refusing to produce propaganda and even, so they claimed, taking judicious snipes at the Nazis ‘between the lines’. What raised hackles most, though, was Mann’s assertion that books printed in Germany between 1933 and 1945 ought to be pulped because they stank of ‘blood and shame’. It was all very well, outraged scribes retorted, for the renowned Thomas Mann to adopt a high moral stance from the comfort and security of his home in Pacific Palisades, California. Few other German writers had enjoyed similarly influential foreign contacts and financial means. Besides, some of Mann’s own work had gone on being published in Germany for several years after the Nazis came to power. Did it too reek of ‘blood and shame’? Maybe it was better if Mann, a US citizen since 1944, did not leave his new homeland after all. As one critic scoffed, the very sight of the rubble in Germany might mark so sensitive a soul for life.

  Friedelind was undoubtedly aware of this exchange. She had contact with the Mann family in the US and besides, one person became involved in the conflict whom she had known well years before at ‘home’ – Tietjen’s stage-designer partner in Bayreuth (and Berlin), Emil Preetorius. In that ‘witches’ sabbath’ piece flaying Germany’s intelligentsia, Mann had devoted one long passage to music and musicians – a world that he adored almost as much as that of literature, sometimes perhaps more. His sharpest barbs were aimed at conductors (he was surely thinking in the first place, but not only, of Furtwängler) whom he felt were guilty of an ‘obscene lie’ in claiming they had simply made music and fostered culture, although their actions served the regime’s propaganda machine. That Beethoven’s Fidelio, a work imbued with love for freedom and respect for human dignity, could have been staged and applauded at all in ‘Himmler’s Germany’ he found simply disgusting. Almost in passing, Mann also noted sarcastically that more honourable activities were conceivable than creating Wagner décor ‘for Hitler’s Bayreuth’.18 He did not specifically name Preetorius and compared with the rest of his tirade the comment was mild – perhaps because he and the accused had struck up friendly relations more than two decades before. Still, there was no doubt whom he meant.

  Deeply hurt, Preetorius wrote a long reply to Mann, thought twice about sending it but finally did so all the same. He pointed out that he had neither joined the Nazi party nor in any way extolled its ideology or leaders, that he had never publicly or privately backed antisemitism and that, indeed, the Gestapo had opened his letters, tapped his phone and interrogated him because of his contacts with Jews. As for Bayreuth, he had first been singled out for work there by Siegfried Wagner himself and he had made his debut on the Green Hill in 1931 – after Siegfried’s death but well before Hitler came to power. Subsequently, in the years before the war, he had been invited to stage works by Wagner in Britain, France and Holland and to address audiences throughout Europe on topics from Chinese art to the origins of French impressionism. Was it likely, he asked Mann rhetorically, that he would have been thus treated had it been felt he was a propagandist for the ‘Third Reich’? Preetorius added that he found it ‘deeply shaming’ to feel forced to frame such a self-defence and realised that, in the end, nothing was to be gained by it. ‘Your heart has become hard,’ he sighed, ‘and your perspective from all too far away is necessarily distorted.’19

  What Preetorius wrote about his career and his distaste for the Nazis was demonstrably true. Had he wished, he could have mustered a lot more detail to back it up, even raised the question of his betrayal to the Gestapo for which he suspected a jealous Wieland – t
he ‘Bayreuth arsehole’ as he called him in a post-war letter to Tietjen – had been responsible. In other words, he seemed to have good reason to reject the snide remark about him from one he had considered a friend. But Mann did not in the first place set out to attack this or that individual, particularly not Preetorius; he argued more drastically that it had been simply impossible to produce untainted work of true cultural value within the ‘Third Reich’, even for genuinely talented and well-meaning artists, let alone for the mass of blatant propagandists and mediocre opportunists. However fine the painters and writers, however professional the singers, producers and stage designers, their achievements could not help but lend spurious lustre to an abominable system. Indeed, the more accomplished the creators and performers, the more they contributed to the fiction that German humanism not only survived but thrived in Hitler’s state. Not that Mann only had members of the ‘intelligentsia’ in his sights, although in this case they attracted his main fire. In his view everyone was tainted who had helped stabilise the regime. That firmly included not just the active supporters but also those who had shrugged off the crimes – the good citizens who, as Mann implacably put it, went about their business in a seemingly honourable way and tried to ignore the stench of burning human flesh from the death camps.20