Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Books

Seduced by evil

Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of composer Richard Wagner, made no apologies for her devotion to Adolf Hitler.

By ROGER K. MILLER, Special to the Times
Published December 10, 2006

Grotesque as it may sound to us now, in the Third Reich thousands of women lusted after Adolf Hitler with a fervor equal to that of today's groupies for rock stars. Unable to satisfy their passion directly, they had to settle for bearing babies "for" their fuehrer.

Nor was it limited to German women. The beautiful young English noblewoman Unity Mitford, besotted with Hitler and National Socialism, put a bullet through her brain out of despair over war looming between her country and Germany. One of Unity's sisters, Diana, wife of English fascist leader Oswald Mosley, also was attracted to Hitler and had close ties to Nazi leaders.

But the most interesting such case - in intensity, complexity and duration - is that of Winifred Wagner, the British-born daughter-in-law of composer Richard Wagner. Brigitte Hamann, an Austrian historian (Hitler's Vienna), does not state it too strongly in the preface to Winifred Wagner when she says, "This is the kind of life story you only find in novels." Hamann has produced a gripping, full-dress biography of a woman for whom "fascinating" is too pale a word.

Love and loyalty

She was a 9-year-old, sickly English orphan named Winifred Marjorie Williams when she was sent in 1907 to live in Germany with distant elderly relatives, Karl and Henriette Klindworth. Karl was a fanatical enthusiast for the late Richard Wagner's music and everything that went with the composer's legend: "extreme German nationalism, anti-Semitism, anti-liberalism and racism." (Though many have pointed out that this extremism was far from the spirit of Wagner's art.)

Winifred was 18 when she married Wagner's 46-year-old son, Siegfried. The age difference, and Siegfried's homosexuality, proved no barrier to their producing four children.

In October 1923 Hitler, a knowledgeable Wagnerian, first visited the Wagner family's Villa Wahnfried at Bayreuth, to build up contacts with the "better circles." Winifred, 26 to Hitler's 34, fell in love with him (a love that seems never to have been consummated, however much Winifred may have been willing).

From then on, Winifred wrote, she had "a passionate commitment to Hitler and his ideas." Siegfried was just as caught up in what the author calls "the almost religious devotion to Hitler that gripped Villa Wahnfried."

When Siegfried died in 1930 and Winifred became head of the nearly bankrupt Bayreuth Festival, Hitler showed his gratitude for the Wagners' years of support by securing financial assistance.

As conditions grew worse for Jews, communists, socialists and others being persecuted, Winifred used her close friendship with Hitler to intercede. Hamann characterizes the help "that Winifred gave to so many Jews" as "spontaneous, unquestioning, full of human sympathy, and not at all calculating." Yet Winifred never stopped blaming Jews for everything and making vile, anti-Semitic remarks.

She last met Hitler in 1940, though he continued to do favors for her. Winifred's control over Bayreuth waned; her elder son, Wieland (a favorite of Hitler's), began what turned into a decades-long battle for control of the festival.

Hitler's 'other side'

Winifred Wagner shows the powerful grip that, long before the Nazis, nationalist and racist ideology had on the upper reaches of German society. It also brings out something that historians and other writers tiptoe around - the "other side" of Hitler, the charming and knowledgeable music lover, the Wagner family's "nice uncle."

But that side, essentially, is what drew Winifred to him. She steadfastly maintained she could not believe that murderous deeds committed in Hitler's name had his blessing. Though in postwar Germany nearly everyone claimed to always have opposed Hitler, Winifred, right up to her death at age 82 in 1980, continued to express pride in her friendship with him.

One German observer said Winifred was guilty of little more than "punishable stupidity." The author says she was neither criminal nor hero, but one of the misguided millions "who succumbed to the great seducer Hitler." She had absorbed all the lessons of the master, Wagner - and none so well as the "loyalty unto death" virtue of the Nibelungs.

Roger K. Miller, a former newspaper book review editor, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.

The book

Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth

By Brigitte Hamann; translated from the German by Alan Bance Harcourt, 592 pages, $35

REVIEW BY ROGER K. MILLER

[Last modified December 8, 2006, 09:35:50]