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Winifred Wagner Oder Hitlers Bayreuth. by Brigitte Hamann. Munich: Piper

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Winifred Wagner Oder Hitlers Bayreuth. by Brigitte Hamann. Munich: Piper 636 BOOK REVIEWS German political elite was unable to balance a respect for individual (and thus minority) rights with its deeply entrenched nationalist strivings. Moreover, lib- eral notions of personal autonomy did not motivate Weimar-era minority pol- icy; rather, it was dictated by the state's foreign and security interests. Outside pressure, rather than any inherent republican impulse, explains why minority rights were somewhat democratized in the Weimar Republic. Although the tenacity of antidemocratic values among the Weimar political elite is hardly new to scholars, Gothel has expertly analyzed just how these values held sway in the arena of national minority politics. This is a dense work. Gothel tends toward abstractions that obscure more than they illuminate. In discussing the failure of Weimar policy, for example, Gothel points to such factors as "the functionalization of the democratic state under the rule of law," the "inability to communicate a wlkstums-political lib- eralism," and the "overtaxation of a national dualism" (pp. 399—402). These and other ideas could have been presented in more reader-friendly language. Given its length and detail, the book would also have benefited from a conclusion summarizing its main findings. And although Gothel describes some of the bureaucratic chicaneries that minorities were forced to endure, there is very lit- tle on how individuals experienced the Weimar Republic qua members of a minority population. Despite these shortcomings, the persistent reader of Demokmtie und Volkstum will learn much about the antidemocratic nature of minorities policy in the troubled Weimar Republic. CATHERINE EPSTEIN AMHERST COLLEGE Winifred Wagner oder Hitlers Bayreuth. By Brigitte Hamann. Munich: Piper. 2002. Pp. 688. €26.90. ISBN 3-492-04300-3. The author has entitled her book Winifred Wagner oder Hitler's Bayreuth; hence it is clear that she wants to tell her readers something about a Nazified Frau Winifred and a Nazi leader inspired by Richard Wagner and his peculiar racial- cultural constructs. Although the book in many ways offers nothing new, it succeeds more than previous volumes in defining Winifred Wagner as a Nazi- conditioned political animal, and Hitler as a politician who fundamentally believed in the Bayreuth creed, utilizing it toward Third Reich governance. Winifred Klindworth (born in England as Winifred Williams) became volkisch and an anti-Semite as an adolescent growing up in Berlin; her foster father, Wagner acolyte Karl Klindworth, had been a friend of Alldeutsch leader Heinrich Class. Because Klindworth knew the Wagners, Winifred met Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 04 Oct 2021 at 18:29:56, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900003241 BOOK REVIEWS 637 Siegfried, the master's son, in Wahnfried in 1914; she was seventeen, and he forty-five. That it was love at first sight, as she later claimed, one does not have to believe, but in 1915 she married the bisexual composer, who was under pres- sure from his family to produce an heir. It is not clear how happy thereafter she really was; Siegfried's mother Cosima still ruled Wahnfried with an iron hand, and Hamann speaks frequently of Winifred's utter boredom. It may be because as yet she had little to do with the festival, which after World War I was con- tinually in financial straits, that she became overly preoccupied with volkisch and, after Hitler's failed 1923 Putsch, increasingly with National Socialist causes. Influential members of the extended Bayreuth clan — Cosima, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Hans von Wolzogen and Siegfried Wagner himself — were all dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semites. Hitler was a frequent houseguest, usu- ally on his habitual runs between Munich and Berlin, and Winifred could pro- ject her sexual and occupational frustrations onto him and receive solace in return, certainly of the ideological kind. Hamann credibly dispels any lore that Hitler ever had a sexual relationship with Frau Wagner, or that the visiting British writer Hugh Walpole or, later, Berlin Staatsintendant Heinz Tietjen did. When Cosima and Siegfried had died in 1930, the direction of the Wagner fes- tival fell to her. After 1933, her abiding bond with Hitler must be explained in terms of her continuing need for funds, which only the Third Reich could pro- vide, her persistent belief in Nazi dogma, and her personal attachment to "Wolf" Hitler, who was in years her junior and, as Hamann writes, looked upon her often as a mother to confide in. As Hitler became more powerful and with more important things on his mind, he began to treat Wahnfried and the Wagner family more cavalierly, and his long-standing intermittent neglect terribly hurt Winifred, who was pining for his attention. This situation did not improve when the festival was utilized not just for Nazi party purposes but declared an instrument of war, in that after 1940 (till 1944) only soldiers and party functionaries were sent there peremp- torily, as mostly indifferent audiences. Nevertheless, this assured Frau Wagner of a continued flow of money, anchoring her ever more firmly in National Socialist ground. The end of the war found her disappointed (because of a Third Reich badly run, as she later charged), but still full of adoration for the Fiihrer and his initial goals, although she had been shaken by individual exam- ples of the persecution of the Jews along the way. Allied occupation authorities deprived her of much property and the direction of Wahnfried's everyday affairs, which devolved upon her sons Wieland and Wolfgang. Winifred Wagner died in 1980 at the age of eighty-two, essentially an unreconstructed Nazi and in terrible discord with members of her family, especially her maturing grand- children. Today one must concede to her that she possessed strength of character, and Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 04 Oct 2021 at 18:29:56, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900003241 638 BOOK REVIEWS in this respect Hitler was not far off the mark, either. He meant it when he pro- claimed that Richard Wagner's was the most important influence on his life, and his love of Wagner's music was consistently genuine. Although Wagner, what- ever his proclivities, did not make Hitler into a Nazi and certainly not an anti- Semite, as several authors have liked to maintain, on his part Hitler realized that Bayreuth was the supreme cultural symbol of the political ideology he espoused, one by which he could convince others, even foreigners, of the importance of his causes. Hence he used Bayreuth and Frau Wagner personally in matters of high policy, for instance when she had to travel to Berlin or he accompanied visiting dignitaries to Bayreuth. His unwavering admiration for Wagner's music and his unqualified belief in the Wagner family, albeit long known, has now been even more convincingly documented in Hamann's book. The childless Hitler centered much of his personal attention on the oldest son Wieland, born in 1917, thus converting him into an egregiously fanatical Nazi. Wieland Wagner, less true to principle than his elders, jumps from the pages of this book as by far the least likable character of all, Hitler himself included. He was a young man who ruthlessly exploited the Third Reich for the spoils it had to offer him, accepting an expensive Mercedes from the Fiihrer at eighteen and never questioning why he should be exempt from military service, whereas his younger brother Wolfgang was not. In 1944 he delighted in the job of deputy commandant of a small concentration camp nearby, Flossenbiirg camp's Aussenlager Bayreuth, whose slave-labor specialty included the manufacture of war materiel and, very probably, props for the Wahnfried stage. In contradis- tinction, when Wieland, in partnership with Wolfgang, assumed the director- ship of the festival after World War II, he was quoted as saying that everybody knew how he had abhorred Hitler and the Nazis and never had had anything to do with the Jews or anti-Semitism. As instructive as Hamann's book is on the strength of its major two themes, it does fall quite short in the areas of cultural history and the general history of the Third Reich. Richard Wagner's music seems to have been performed at Bayreuth in thorough isolation from anything else cultural, especially musical, which went on in Germany between 1923 and 1944. Hamann cannot distin- guish between the cultural (music-political) functions of Goebbels and Goring, and she repeats old canards in the biographies of artists such as Fritz Busch, Bruno Walter, Richard Strauss, and others, clearly showing that she has not bothered to read literature in the field since some twenty years ago. Her knowl- edge of general German history is equally shallow. Karl Liebknecht was not a Jew, and Martin Bormann did not commit suicide in the Fuhrerbunker. The bones of King Heinrich I that Himmler thought he had exhumed near Quedlinburg were not the king's, and physicians certainly were allowed to practice medicine without membership in the National Socialist Physicians' League. These and many other errors are only symptomatic of the author's Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. University of Athens, on 04 Oct 2021 at 18:29:56, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900003241 BOOK REVIEWS 639 failure to paint the broader sociopolitical and cultural canvas of Germany, before which the relationship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler was allowed to unfold.
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