Twilight of the Wagners: The Unveiling of a Family's Legacy by Gottfried Wagner, Della Couling (Translator)

From the Publisher

In Twilight of the Wagners, Gottfried Wagner chronicles his family's connection with National Socialism, from his great-grandfather's anti-Semitic pamphlets to his father's, uncle's and grandparent's close relationship with Adolf Hitler.Gottfried's discovery of his family's controversial past has led him on an impassioned crusade as an adult to examine the hatred and racism he knew growing up in Bayreuth-- where the family's annual festivals in honor Richard Wagner's operas are major cultural events.

Library Journal

Gottfried, the great-grandson of Richard, indulges himself with this opportunity to lash out at everybody who has ever done him wrong, reducing what could have been a fascinating family memoir to just another tale of a dysfunctional clan. The bad guys, especially Gottfried's father, Wolfgang, are mostly within the family. Beyond them, any art critic, musician, or politician that ever crossed Gottfried is always reduced to rage by a perfect comeback or Gottfried's righteous indignation. This autobiography strings together one anecdote after another, an exercise in intense navel gazing. It's a pity, for Wagner could have told a compelling story of the Bayreuth Festival's relationship to the Nazis, anti-Semitism, and postwar Germany, but he fails. Of interest to Wagner and opera scholars who want an inside view of Bayreuth's feuds; recommended for larger academic libraries with an extensive interest in music history or opera.--Randall L. Schroeder, Wartburg Coll. Lib., Waverly, IA

Kirkus Reviews

In his memoirs, prominent musicologist and stage director Wagner unveils the anti-Semitic sentiment that prevailed in his family ever since his illustrious great-grandfather, composer Richard Wagner, expressed his pathological Jew-hatred in his 1850 essay "Jews in Music." Born shortly after WWII into an influential family who singlehandedly managed the Bayreuth Wagner Festival, Gottfired began investigating German-Jewish relations and his family's Nazi past from an early age. This interest eventually made him an outcast among his relatives. Richard Wagner anticipated Hitler's Final Solution when he called for the restoration of the German Aryan race, pure of degenerative Jewish blood. Drawing on family letters and photographs, Gottfried uncovers his grandmother's close relationship with Hitler: Winifred was proud to have supplied an incarcerated Hitler with the paper on which he wrote Mein Kampf. Although she declined his marriage proposal, she remained the Führer's intimate friend and a dedicated Nazi Party member. As for Hitler, he found Wagner's chauvinistic ideas inspiring and his music a perfect background for military parades. We read precious little about Richard Wagner and the origins of his ideological stance, as the book mainly details the author's interaction with his family legacy. Gottfried takes us through a confrontation with his authoritative father, academic and family research, job searches, two marriages, and the adoption of a Romanian orphan. Gottfried's accomplishments include a doctoral thesis on Jewish-German composer Kurt Weill, whose works were condemned in Nazi Germany, opera productions in Europe and Turkey, and worldwide lectures on the Wagners. Inthe 1980s, his career took an odd twist when he tried his hand in banking. Thanks in large part to Gottfried's lecture tour in Israel, Richard Wagner's once-taboo music was played for the first time on Israeli radio in 1990. A disturbing examination of the great composer's legacy that sheds new light on a powerful clan and the persistence of Nazi ideology in postwar Germany.

What People Are Saying

"A great-grandson [Gottfried Wagner] seeks to unmask a false god.... Wagner and Hitler bypass civilization; they appeal to something deeper in us, something violent, sensual, yearning, acquisitive, and, in the case of Wagner, pleasurable beyond measure. All the primitive impulses humankind has tried to forget are revived in the music of one and the politics of the other." Bernard Holland, The New York Times

"It's not enough merely to acknowledge that Hitler was an enthusiast of Wagner. Hitler saw himself as Wagner's servant, disciple, executor. The Wagners had been marching toward Hitlerism for some time." --Alex Ross, The New Yorker

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Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Villa Wahnfried

From the moment I was born in Bayreuth, on 13 April 1947, it seemed I was predestined to follow Wagner family tradition. I was introduced to the world at large, via birth announcements, as Gottfried Helferich Wagner, son and heir of Wolfgang Wagner. The choice of my Christian names was already an indication of some future leading role in the family business. Gottfried is the name of Elsa's brother, the ruler of Brabant, in the opera Lohengrin by my great-grandfather Richard Wagner, and also the third Christian name of my uncle Wieland Wagner. My other Christian name, Helferich, was the third name of my grandfather, Siegfried Richard Wagner, and a name Richard Wagner himself had invented for his only son.

    This rather droll manner of giving names was typical of family tradition. In a letter to King Ludwig II, dated 9 February 1879, Richard Wagner wrote: "The son, now still so young, shall, when he has reached male maturity, know exactly who his father was. Nothing more. Then he may decide. This is also more or less the fashion in which we shall raise him. The boy will not be forced to do anything at all; we shall merely support and guide his inclinations quite freely. We are not at all aiming to turn him into an `artist': I have only indicated one direction to him through the names which I have appended to his surname: two names mark him out as my son—Siegfried Richard Wagner; but I have added `Helferich,' i.e., the `helpful,’ to this."

    I was christened on Richard Wagner's birthday, 22May. As godparents my father chose his mother, Winifred Wagner, and Bodo Lafferentz, my aunt Verena's husband. Winifred Wagner, together with the staunch Nazi Heinz Tietjen, general intendant of the Prussian State Theaters, had run the Bayreuth Festival from 1930 until 1945. On orders from Hitler, Lafferentz, as a colleague of Robert Ley, head of the Labor Front, had safeguarded the organization and material interests of the Bayreuth Festival from 1940 to 1944 through the National Socialist organization Kraft durch Freude [Strength Through Joy].

    What looked, and was intended to look, from the outside like a peaceful family idyll was in reality quite different. The main focus of interest for Wolfgang and Wieland Wagner was the Bayreuth Festival, the annual production of Richard Wagner's stage works. Founded in 1872 on the composer's fifty-ninth birthday, the festival had been dormant since the end of World War II because of economic and political difficulties. In 1951 it began again, directed, as always, by a member of the Wagner family. In order to devote themselves undisturbed to preparations for this event, my parents took my elder sister, Eva, and me to the Etzerschlössl children's home in Berchtesgaden, a sort of upscale boarding house for the children of well-to-do families. Before leaving us my father explained the reason for our sojourn: "The festival will be starting soon now and it is very important. We must all make every sacrifice for the future and you, as a boy, will just have to grin and bear it. If you're good, you'll get some lovely presents."

    I have never understood what was meant by the "sacrifices" our family was supposed to make for the festival, except that in this, the first of the many places I was sent off to during my childhood and youth, I felt miserable. It created in me an aversion to the hectic activity of the festival preparations and even to the "lovely presents"—new clothes, a puppet theater, expensive toy cars—that my parents bought to try to salve their guilty consciences.

    Both of my parents' lives were wrapped up in the Bayreuth Festival and its obligations. My father was the second son of Siegfried and Winifred Wagner, both of whom directed the festival, Siegfried from 1904 until 1930 and Winifred from 1930 until the war temporarily shut it down in 1944. As a young man my father assisted Tietjen, the Nazi-influenced artistic director of the festival, and in 1951 he and his older brother, Wieland, became its codirectors. Throughout all of his work at Bayreuth he has remained loyal to the vision of Richard Wagner, his grandfather, and worked to secure the festival's financial base. My mother's life was similarly wedded to the theater, though she would rather perform than direct. By her early twenties she had become a successful ballet dancer, performing mostly in large opera houses. She met my father in Berlin in 1942. After their marriage she gave up her career and dedicated herself to my father's, until their divorce in 1976.

    Shortly before the solemn reopening of the festival my sister—two years my senior—and I were brought back to Bayreuth, where my parents would present the public with the image of a happy family. I longed not to be packed off to the children's home in Berchtesgaden once more; but in my family's view, it was my role, my duty, to do whatever was necessary and good for the Wagner legacy and the success of the festival. As my father's successor, I was required from birth to obey him as he and Wieland led another generation of Wagners toward my great-grandfather's vision of supreme art and culture. So I tried, even at the age of four, to be exactly what the grown-up world expected of a "genuine" shining example of a Wagner: I didn't answer back and didn't interrupt the adults' conversations. I kept my stories of the children's home to myself: I was taught to think of myself as privileged, living in the midst of the monumental achievements and goals of my illustrious ancestor and his progeny.

    A cult of Richard Wagner and his ideology imbued nearly every aspect of life in my family and the theater community surrounding it. This cult placed Richard Wagner at its center, imbuing his legacy with quasi-religious images—many of which came from his own works—and venerating him as a cultural messiah. My first image of the Wagner cult in Bayreuth was a photograph of the Wagner bust by Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite sculptor. It struck me at once as heroic and menacing. Another impression was made by Zdenko von Kraft, a devoted Wagnerian, who in 1951 wrote the following poem, "Genius," for the festival book on the opening of the new era:

Many have passed on, many will come Yet ever faithful a new circle forms, What was once flame burns ever hotly The glow of the spirit shines undimmed For what the best of their time have perceived Is close to God, it endures and lasts. Who counts moons, thankfully counts death; The unforgettable knows naught of years, That are, that come and were before us, Are only leaves on the flourishing vine That winds about exalted beauty, That binds us together in a noble way. For this is the last word of art, What is common to all is its strength, What is valid to all creates its works, What is holy to all feeds its fruitfulness, And where it inflames a genius, He has announced himself for the whole world, Whether the paths of error or pain, Whether a cobbler's workshop or the trials of gods— Man's final word means death, But the seer says a redeeming "Grace! And so he refines the last things To a mysteriously beautiful Ring."

I have never understood the New Bayreuth euphoria, but managed as a dutiful four-year-old to appear thrilled by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony under the baton of the famous conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler, and by my uncle's Parsifal. I was taken aback by the tumultuous applause of the audience: I had not been at all prepared for such a spectacle in the Festspielhaus and didn't dare admit how frightened I was of Wieland Wagner's dark world of Parsifal and the Holy Grail.

    I acknowledged with a smile the constant reminders of how much I looked like Richard Wagner, the "Master of Bayreuth," and the reassurances of what a great future I had before me. Like my father, my uncle, and others before me, I was supposed to behave like a "real Wagner," worshiping at Bayreuth's temple of Wagnerian redemption. I was taught to believe that one day Wagner's works and ideas would save the world. I could make little of the contrast between the devotion demanded within the family to Richard Wagner's art and the overwhelming, spontaneous display that the members of the Bayreuth artistic tribe seemed to find appropriate on public occasions. I felt at home neither in the monumental world of the Festspielhügel—the hill on which Wagner's theater, the Festspielhaus, is situated, a few miles northwest of Bayreuth—nor in the children's homes I was put into again and again as sacrifice for Richard Wagner's "art of mankind." I envied children allowed to grow up in families that did not depend on Richard Wagner for their salvation—surely a more normal environment than what I knew.

    During those first seven years I lived with my parents in what was known as the gardener's house, part of the Villa Wahnfried estate, which my great-grandfather had built in the 1870s. We shared the first floor of the small brick house with the gardener, Düret, and his family. The nursery window in our apartment looked out over the front façade of the Villa Wahnfried, the estate's central building and Richard Wagner's famous home. British bombers destroyed much of the main house on 5 April 1945, and U.S. Air Force officers used it as a casino until 1957, an American flag flying overhead. The view from my window showed part of the villa that had survived the war, including the Wagner house's motto: "Here where my fancies [Wahnen] found peace [Frieden], this house I name Wahnfried."

    In front of the Villa Wahnfried, perched on a high plinth, was a bust of King Ludwig II, who had financed many of Richard Wagner's years as a composer. This statue was surrounded by a pine hedge where I liked to hide and watch undisturbed the many tourists passing in and out of the front part of Wahnfried Park. There too I waited for the right moment—that is, once my father had left the park—to start up a conversation with Uncle Wieland's family, or with American officers.

    I was forbidden to talk to my cousins or to enter the partly reconstructed Siegfried Wagner House, where my uncle Wieland's family lived until 1966. (The house was not finally rebuilt and refurbished until 1976, when it was reopened for its one hundredth anniversary and made into a museum.) Though the main house, designed by Wilhelm Neumann in 1872, contained a concert hall, a library, a rotunda, and eventually an annex for the Führer, the house my immediate family occupied was modest, and a constant reminder of the animosity between my father and his brother.

    My father gave his orders in a stern voice, and the penalties for disobeying him were steep. He was strong and choleric and he refused to accept any objections to his authority. When he discovered me playing with my cousins, he threatened to beat me again, and I believed that he would. I learned to hide myself—in the cupboard, under the bed, in the hedge, around the statue of King Ludwig—in order to avoid my father's anger. My father never discussed his rules: he gave orders and I had to obey. Afraid of being beaten, for he was a very strong man, I pretended to agree with him, cultivating an internal life of dissent that I hid from him and the adult world.

    My father never explained to me exactly why I was not supposed to play with Iris, Nike, Daphne, and Wolf-Siegfried, whom we all called Wummi. He spoke disparagingly of his brother and his family, especially the children, referring to their bad manners—not the right company for my sister and me. I soon realized that these accusations were untrue. I was also forbidden to play with other children who visited the park.

    In a way I led a double life: with my parents I was the obedient son, but given the opportunity, I broke the paternal laws. As soon as I saw that my father had left Wahnfried Park, I would leave my hiding place in the hedge, climb over the wall dividing the Villa Wahnfried and the gardener's house, and enjoy wild games and what to me seemed boundless freedom with Wieland's children. As soon as my father returned, I would clamber back over the wall and scramble anxiously back into the hedge. Once my father had disappeared into the house, I slipped across the lawn next to the entrance drive, my allotted playground. Despite all my precautions, my father caught me now and again during these escapades, which meant a sound beating. But these beatings only served to strengthen my resolve to leave my parents' home and the Wagner bombast and the Festspielhügel as soon as possible.

    My family life appeared monotonous and regimented when I compared it to the easy hours I spent with the "Wieland children." My father dictated the hours during which I could play and which friends I could have. He forbade my friends from entering our garden house or his villa beside the Festspielhaus. I began to rebel, lying to him about where I was going, making up stories about school meetings. When he discovered my disobedience, he beat me even more severely. My father labeled me the "little Russian," recognizing in me sinister qualities of disobedience which he believed were typical of "the Russians." My rebelliousness worsened with my elder sister Eva's, constant efforts to exercise control over me. If she caught me doing anything wrong, she reported it to my father. As my mother also blindly subjected herself to her husband's will, I was alone in my family. My father beat me until I was sixteen years old and finally rebelled: I told him that if he beat me one more time, he would never see me again.

    There were a few bright spots, like my fifth birthday, when my father did allow me to play with Wieland's children. He had given me a bright blue car built of heavy iron with a moped motor, and without prior explanation he sat me behind the steering wheel, put my sister on the backseat, and started up the motor. The thing drove off, I tore round the fountain in the Wahnfried garden and lost control. The trip ended abruptly in the rhododendron bushes near Richard Wagner's grave. Swearing furiously, my father dragged me from the car and the afternoon of birthday games was over. I never got in the car again.

    Even at that time, I already felt the tensions between my father and my uncle, primarily about who did what on the Festspielhügel. Their differences of opinion frequently exploded into noisy quarrels, and as even the children heard the mutual exchange of contemptuous remarks, family unity was gradually destroyed. The Wieland party and the Wolfgang party grew further and further apart. Eventually, they didn't even congregate at Christmas or Easter, either in Villa Wahnfried or in my grandmother Winifred's spacious house in the Fichtelgebirge, the mountains to the east of Bayreuth. (My grandmother lived in this first-class "exile villa" from 1945 to 1957, when she moved back into the Siegfried Wagner House, where she lived until her death in 1980.)

    During one of my own illicit visits to Villa Wahnfried, Christmas 1952, I was overawed by a gigantic Christmas tree standing in the hall, decorated only with red apples and beeswax candles. I suppose it was then that I wondered why the Wagner family did not stick together especially at Christmastime, which, as I had always been told in the Bayreuth kindergarten, was a festival of love and peace. I asked my father to pray with me at the time, but he mockingly refused.

    The family was now firmly divided into the "Wielands" and the "Wolfgangs." My father was denigrated by his brother as a simpleminded manager, whereas Wieland was generally regarded as an artist. It seemed there were "gifted" and ungifted" Wagners, a label that was to remain for decades and even color media reporting.

    To escape at least occasionally from family tensions, my parents, my sister, and I spent weekends in a small house near Neunkirchen, a few kilometers from Bayreuth, set in beautiful countryside. These weekends, together with the regular trips to children's homes, were at that time my parents' only diversions. Their work on behalf of Wagner's theater and legacy required so much of their time and energy that even when we were in Bayreuth with them, surrounded by the theater's business, they rarely told us children anything about it—their work claimed so much of their attention.

    In order to escape from such enforced isolation, I disobeyed my father more and more frequently. I thought it ridiculous that I was forbidden to enter the Siegfried Wagner House. At the beginning of the 1950s, there were regular "big parties" on weekends, where American officers would celebrate noisily. They sang and danced, and there was always plenty to eat and drink. It was at these parties—which I observed from the outside, peering in through the window—that I first heard dance bands, jazz, and all the music of the 1940s from North America, which my father dismissed as "nigger music." I enjoyed the warm, lively atmosphere, and instead of listening piously to homemade Holy Grail music, I sat in raptures in the Wahnfried garden in from of the Siegfried Wagner House music-room window and tapped my feet to the boogie-woogie of the "uncultured Yanks," as they were called in my family.

    Once, one of the black employees noticed me. Suddenly remembering my father's objections, I went to make my escape, but the big, powerfully built African American saw I was afraid and approached me. With a broad smile and the words "Have fun," he handed me a piece of wedding cake and an orange, at that time luxuries, and not just for me. Why should I be against "Yanks" and "Negroes"?

    The year 1953 was to be important for me for two reasons: first, my father staged his first production and also designed his first set for the Festspielhaus; and second, I started school. Father had chosen Lohengrin for his Bayreuth debut, and during his intense preparations he expected even more consideration and respect from us children than ever before for the great idea of the festival. When he was working at home, we had to keep absolutely quiet; any noise disturbed him. Come rehearsals in June, there was only one subject of conversation: his Lohengrin. The sheer fascination of the preparatory work, first on the rehearsal stage, then on the main stage of the Festspielhaus, compensated a little for the subjection of the whole family to the cause. The hectic life at rehearsals and in the workshops was exciting. But having constantly to pose for photographers—to illustrate the family enterprise—soon became annoying. I was placed in every conceivable pose next to the papier-mâché swan prop and made to smile sweetly again and again.

    My father categorically forbade me, without giving reasons, from sitting in on my uncle's Rheingold rehearsals, which were taking place at the same time. Such a ban seemed completely incomprehensible to me; but as I was thrilled just to take part in the theatrical work of the Festspielhaus, and did not want to jeopardize this privilege, I didn't argue. At my insistence, my father briefly recounted to me the fairy tale of the good Lohengrin, who comes down to earth from the wonderful world of the Grail as a king's son to free the good Elsa from the wicked Ortrud and Telramund. It struck me as odd that Lohengrin has to leave Elsa because she asks his name and where he comes from, but I didn't pester any further once my father answered my curiosity with: "The music explains everything anyway." I didn't understand that. I also suspected that something wonderful and unearthly was happening in the Lohengrin act-one prelude; but I could not grasp why Elsa dies after Lohengrin's return to his father, Parsifal, in the Grail world, and why her brother, Gottfried, previously turned into a swan by the wicked Ortrud, now had to go to war as "leader of Brabant" against the terrible "enemies in the east."

    It was not so much whether I understood Lohengrin as the fact that it made me uneasy. And yet I assumed that I would take the nonspeaking role of the boy Gottfried. It was a blow when I learned that my father had given this role to the son of the bass Ludwig Weber, who was singing King Heinrich. The boy was only a little older than I. Father's explanation—"I don't want you to be given preference in getting a role just because you are my son"—left me unconvinced: my cousin Wummi, four years older than I, was allowed to play one of the Nibelung dwarfs in Rheingold. But Father had decided, and at that time he remained unalterable.

    Looking back now, I see that my father considered me a potential rival. He was afraid of living in the shadows of both his artistically talented brother and a possibly gifted son. He wanted to be the last Wagner of consequence, thereby securing his place in Bayreuth history. My mother told me with pain of how he had hoped for a second daughter, and his disappointment when, instead, I arrived.

    After the Lohengrin premiere we sat with invited guests in the festival restaurant, and there I had my first dealings with the press. In contrast to my cousins, I had been excluded from public life, and I found unsettling the sudden overwhelming interest in me as a Wagner scion and in my opinion on Lohengrin. The questions of the tabloids in particular confused me. For example, they wanted to know how I had liked Father's Lohengrin and Wieland's Rheingold. It was natural for me to find my father's production good, in contrast to most of the critics, who preferred Wieland's directing. About the Rheingold I could only say that I hadn't seen it yet.

    I was disappointed that my father would not let me sit at the same table with the Wieland children after the Lohengrin premiere. Since then, at all such occasions there has been a Wolfgang table and a Wieland table, and we children hardly spoke to one another. We were paraded as the "nice little Wagner children," instructed to greet particularly nicely those who were introduced to us as members of the Society of Friends of Bayreuth—that is, of the festival. I didn't always manage this to my parents' satisfaction, tending to identify whom I liked and whom I did not with childlike naiveté, whether these were influential sponsors or ordinary mortals.

    I found my grandmother's behavior on such occasions particularly unpleasant: she could not resist expounding in a very theatrical way on the theme—albeit with variations—of "family resemblance." At the core of this always highly elaborate tale were two sentences: "When you were in my house as a baby and I had guests, I would ask them if they wanted to see Richard Wagner as a baby. Of course they all wanted to see the infant Richard." Nothing could prevent her from parading this joke. Once when I cheekily countered with "Was I really that ugly?," "Omi" thought my retort droll and "typically Wagnerian."

    After Father's great performance with Lohengrin my sister and I, in new clothes and loaded with new presents, were sent off to Berchtesgaden again. In September 1953 I started school in the nearby village of Maria Gern. This idyllic village school consisted of two classrooms: grades one to four were in one; in the other, grades five to eight. A pretty peasant girl of around twelve, Maria, helped me learn to write, read, and do arithmetic, and lessons were punctuated by long, happy walks in the countryside, during which the teacher, Lösch, taught us the names of the plants. My new school-friends, who mostly came from farming families, were friendly and welcoming; and to better adapt to the new environment, I took up the local upper-Bavarian accent. I enjoyed ringing the bell of the little village church with the other boys, jumping up and hanging on tight to the bell rope, swinging as the bell loudly tolled. In fact, Maria Gern finally saw me play like other six-year-old boys, and I hardly missed my parents and Bayreuth.

    But this carefree time was short-lived, and in October I was entered in a second school, this time in Bayreuth. This was the start of a sixteen-year schooling period that would be torture from the first day to the last. Towns, schools, tutors, and teachers changed constantly, and I often had to repeat classes three times. The few highpoints were stimulating teachers and friendships with fellow pupils.

    My very first school experiences in Bayreuth were nightmarish. It quickly became clear to me what it meant to be different from the other children: I was made fun of for my upper-Bavarian accent and the traditional dress that I had so liked wearing in Maria Gern. And I was a long way behind in my knowledge too. My first teacher in Bayreuth, the kindly and sympathetic Frau Grohm, tried in vain to defend me; she got no help from my parents.

    But what separated me most from my fellow pupils was the fact that I was a Wagner going to school in Bayreuth. Of course envy will have played its part in my isolation. First I tried to make the best of the situation, and played the clown. But that didn't make any difference, either. Gradually I began to withdraw into myself, which only made the other children more aggressive. I once was severely beaten up on the way home, and another time I found written on the sandstone outer wall of the Wahnfried garden "Gottfried is stupid," which amused passersby. My schoolwork deteriorated, and my parents arranged extra instruction at home by nannies and private tutors. The number of tutors who strove in vain to improve my school marks grew steadily. I continued to stand out at school not only through bad marks but also through frequent illness and absenteeism.

    Neither of my parents ever helped me with my course work: my father was so obsessed with his work for the festival that he had no real friends of his own, let alone time to tutor his son. Dominated by my father, my mother denied her own needs so often that I felt the need to care for her myself. By the age of thirteen I felt as if I were her older brother, in which role I felt only pity for her and the humiliations she endured in my father's house. My mother cried each time I returned to school; my father acted glad to be rid of me. a distraction from his self-centered Wagnerian projects.

    In 1954 my father revived his Lohengrin, an event that proved less exciting than the meeting with my aunt Friedelind Wagner, my father's elder sister, who came to see the performance in the Festspielhaus. Strange stories circulated in the family about her, which made me curious to get to know her. My father made the most disparaging remarks about her saying she had been a terribly naughty child and had eventually run away from home to America. When I met this "brazen American aunt" (known as "Maus" in the family) for the first time in the Festspielhaus, my immediate impression was quire different. She resembled us very closely, with her "Wagner nose," but I was more impressed by how she distinguished herself from my father. She wore wide, theatrical dresses which were shockingly colorful and concealed her round, feminine body. She wore her hair in an old-fashioned style, often beneath a hat. I admired her brash, assertive manner. She approached me with a smile and greeted me very affectionately, with warm hugs and soothing words, becoming the only one in the family who ever asked what my interests were and treating me like a boy of my age. "Call me Maus, not Aunt Friedelind," she said. She bore none of the Bayreuth affectation or "Wagner cult" ethic so fervently maintained by the rest of the family, and I listened fascinated as she told me how she had met some "red Indians" in the American prairies. I could have talked to her for hours, but my father soon insisted on driving me home and en route, forbade me any further contact with Aunt Friedelind. This time l didn't accept the edict; I protested and demanded reasons. I didn't get any, however, instead just stonewalling: "It's a long story; I'll tell you one day." I didn't give up, and replied, "Tell me now," to which my father answered: "You wouldn't understand it anyway." Annoyed, he dropped me off at home. I began to suspect that there were a lot of secrets I was not to know about.

    Maus knew those secrets, and she was brave enough to expose them in a book she published in 1944, The Royal Family of Bayreuth. In that book she made clear how close Hitler was to the Wagner family. She was the only Wagner of her generation who opposed Nazi Germany and the Wagner family's elitism. My father despised Maus, both because she was intellectually and culturally his superior and because she would not let me forget his ties to the Nazi regime. He publicly criticized her book, even at her funeral, which he held at Bayreuth against her dying wishes.

    After our first meeting Maus and I saw one another only sporadically between 1959 and 1966, when she was working as director of her Bayreuth Festival Master Classes for music students from all over the world. These summer courses comprised discussions with the students on Wagner operas and productions and took place in a primitive shed right next to my father's home. Father always made fun of Maus and rightly feared her cultural and intellectual standard, for she was fortunate to know and appreciate not only the works of Richard Wagner, but also those of her great-grandfather Franz Liszt and her father, Siegfried Wagner, whom she was the only one in the family to promote. Whenever my father and I talked about her there was a row: I did not share his cutting opinion of my aunt.

    After Wieland's death, in 1966, the conflicts between Father and Maus over his style of directing reached such a violent level that in 1972 she finally left and settled in England. I missed her then: during the few conversations we were able to have together she was always frank with me, and right until her death, in 1991, she was always interested in my professional development, coming with a touching pride to the premieres of most of my productions. Maus helped my mother, too, after my parents' divorce in 1976, with great selflessness, which was typical of her plucky character—atypical of the family—and her ethical principles; and yet she did not have much luck at all in her choice of friends, who often exploited her.

    It still gives me great pleasure to read my correspondence with Maus now and again. I recognize in it that we—as Wagner descendants in opposition to the Wagner cult, and as family outsiders—actually always liked one another, in spite of all the obstacles, differences of opinion, and Bayreuth intrigues. Mans was the only one in the family enthusiastically to applaud both my journey to Israel and the adoption of my son, Eugenio. I believe I owe it to her to prevent her memory being dragged through the mud, for whatever reasons.

    In January 1955 we were able to leave the gardener's house and move into a villa on the Festspielhügel. "Finally we'll be able to live in peace and quiet," said my mother, who was worried about the precarious state of my health. I believe that I was reacting physically to my unstable emotional environment. I was growing rapidly but remained weak and very often sick. Despite having a large room to myself, my situation did not improve, as our villa was only a few meters away from the Festspielhaus and my father now devoted himself day and night exclusively to his work for the Bayreuth Festival and other Wagnerian concerns. Our new home turned into an annex of the Festspielhaus, and my father tolerated nothing but the cult of the Wagner legacy. He had the grounds enclosed by high walls, wooden fences, and hedges, which I could see over only from the second-floor windows. The Festspielhaus was no longer visible from the garden in summer, but I often felt as though I were in a prison. I missed Villa Wahnfried with its big open garden, its proximity to the town, and the forbidden games with the Wieland children.

    Moving to another part of the town meant attending the Graser school. Here I was confronted with a very strict teacher, Herr Schäfer, whom I found threatening. I impressed him only once, when I managed to sing without a single mistake a melody he had played on the violin. Of course, I was also fulfilling the school's expectations, which were that anything other than music would not interest a Wagner anyway. "You're not up to much in school, but at least you can sing," was Schäfer's only positive remark about me.

    A more-than-welcome change from the dreary monotony of school was my first big trip abroad, in April 1955. I flew with my parents to Barcelona, where the Bayreuth Festival was on tour with my uncle's productions of Parsifal and Die Walküre. This first experience of the Mediterranean had a profound and lasting effect on me: not only the luxury hotels, the big gardens, the villas, and the deep blue sea, but also the glittering society inside and outside the opera house. I found it all fascinating. I saw that newspapers, as well as those members of Bayreuth's social elite whom we saw on our vacation, enviously viewed the Wagners as a special dynasty. The Wolfgang and Wieland children were made much of too. Grandmother Winifred declared at every conceivable opportunity "how decently and splendidly these Spaniards stood by us Germans against the Bolsheviks." Enthusiastically she recounted stories of Hitler, praised his Spanish ally the caudillo Francisco Franco, and wallowed in memories of the "glorious times" of the National Socialist dictatorship. The hosts applauded heartily, my father remained silent, and I started shouting with the others "Franco-Hitler! Franco-Hitler!" I didn't know what it meant.

    In Barcelona everything seemed big and impressive. The reverence paid to all the Wagners went to my head, and I now believed I had a great future in front of me. This burgeoning pride produced a direct effect when we returned to Bayreuth, where I completely lost interest in school, and my marks sank accordingly. I was only interested in the Festspielhaus, and I wanted to take part in everything that happened there. My parents made it unmistakably clear to me, however, that I was only to sit in on Father's rehearsals for the new production of Der fliegende Holländer. At the rehearsals for my uncle's Tannhäuser, on the other hand, I made sure I was not found out. I quickly discovered various hiding places in the Festspielhaus: over the auditorium, in the orchestra pit, in the prompter's box, under the stage, in the lighting towers, in the flies, or on one of the many roofs. Now I not only could watch my uncle's rehearsals in peace, enthralled, but was also witness to the ruthlessly waged conflict between my father and his brother and the latter's wife, Aunt Gertrud. Tyrannically, Wieland enforced his will in the interests of his work, and my father had to submit to him in front of everybody. Wieland's fits of violent rage, his cynicism, and his damning remarks about people who did not agree with his ideas alienated me just as much as his scornful remarks about my father's productions. Father suffered very much under this: he wanted to be his brother's equal as an artist. I did admire Wieland's directorial work and his sets, which appealed to me more than my father's stagings, but during this time I often felt sorry for my father.

    My uncle's frank disparagement of my father's productions led to the formation of two rival factions in the Festspielhaus, who worked and intrigued against one another. The climate became more poisonous, and the rift in the family deepened. During performances we children were no longer allowed to sit together in the family box. Only the Wielands sat there now, while the Wolfgangs sat on the left in the first row of the stalls. In official photos, too, the two families were no longer shown together.

    Under these sorry conditions my father's production of Der fliegende Holländer was premiered. Wieland and the press, closely allied with him, rated it as badly as they already had the Lohengrin. My father, believing I was on his side, took the time to explain the story of Der fliegende Holländer to me. It had a similar effect on me as the story of Lohengrin had two years before: afraid of the ghostly ship, I could not understand what Senta's suicide at the end of the opera was about and why the Dutchman should then be "redeemed" by this. Naturally, before these festival events, my sister and I were once again packed off to a children's home, this time to the Renée home in Wyk on the island of Föhr in the North Sea, just off Schleswig-Holstein. Saying goodbye to my parents and Bayreuth was easier for me than in former years. I didn't feel at home anywhere, a feeling that didn't change after we got back to Bayreuth, and I was ill more, and more frequently.

    That year, 1955, we spent the Christmas holidays in the Hotel Wetterstein, Seefeld, in the Austrian Tyrol. It was here that for the first time I met people who were proud of being German. I understood this just as little as the saying "We Germans are somebody again," which was often heard now.

    Around this time the adults would heatedly argue about German rearmament. When I asked my father what the Federal Army and the National People's Army, the armed forces of the GDR were, he answered: "The Federal Army are our brave soldiers here, to protect us from the wicked soldiers of the People's Army if they attacked us." I couldn't understand this explanation. But the People's Army of the "Soviet zone" did not worry me in particular. What made the adults anxious in the intensifying cold war, I saw more as a cops-and-robbers story.

    I was preoccupied now with National Socialists, seeing for the first time film news bulletins, newspapers, and magazines. During one film presentation at school we saw excerpts from contemporary propaganda material on Nazi Germany, the National Socialist party congresses in Nuremberg, and the world war unleashed by Hitler: goosestepping German soldiers, hysterical mass adulation of the Führer, the war crimes of the Wehrmacht—and all of it to a background of Richard Wagner's music. Shocked by the piles of corpses in the concentration camp of Buchenwald, I told my father about the awful films and especially about the music I had heard in them. "You are still too little to understand all that," he answered. But I refused to be satisfied with this, and he shouted at me to go away and play—or, better still, to finally get down to my homework—instead of asking about things I could not understand anyway. If I had persisted any further with my questions I would have been beaten, so I shut up. But I resolved to get to the bottom of the matter. My next attempt at finding out the truth was aimed at my grandmother, who answered my question of whether there really had been concentration comps in the Third Reich with: "That's all propaganda by the New York Jews, who want to make us and the Germans out to be bad!"

    At this time I had another experience that was to influence the course of my life: Wieland's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg of 1956. I had already seen a few illustrations of sets of Meistersinger productions of earlier times, but hadn't found them very interesting. When the curtain went up in the 1956 festival season, though, I was stunned: before me was a magical set with constantly changing lighting effects in front of a simple and bright semicircular horizon, with just a few, but wonderful, changes in the different acts. At that time Wieland was my artistic ideal, and I was determined to become a director. When I told my father of this he didn't say a word. I was dismayed when aggressive booing broke out as the curtain came down after the last act. Even my grandmother was among those who found Wieland's production a besmirching of Die Meistersinger.

    After these events, the end of the festival was hard to take, as a great boredom then descended on the provincial town of Bayreuth. But this time autumn was to bring some diversions. Around then I also began to understand what Winifred meant at her celebrations on 20 April, Hitler's birthday, by "USA": "unser seliger Adolf"—our blessed Adolf—and now I started secretly investigating the family history.

    My parents, as was usual after the festival period, had gone on holiday, and so Gunda Lodes, who worked in the telephone exchange of the festival administration, looked after my sister and me. Gunda, with her warmhearted, loving nature, had become a substitute aunt for me, and I have her to thank that my childhood and youth in Bayreuth was not a total nightmare. Gunda's father, the kindly Hans Lodes, had been the caretaker of the Bayreuth Festival for decades. "Grandpa Lodes," as I called him, guided the crowds of tourists through the Festspielhaus and explained in simple words everything essential about the history of the festival and Richard Wagner. My first knowledge of the history of my family I owe to him. Of his wife, Kunigunde, I have equally good memories. She was small, round, good-natured and, like her husband, came from a Catholic farming family. What's more, "Grandma Lodes" made the most wonderful Bayreuther Glees—potato dumplings. On weekends the grandchildren Werner and Helmut turned up at the Lodes family home, and finally I could play like other children. Werner, who is six years older than I, became my favorite playmate. I admired him for technical skills that I, a Wagner in training to be an artist, totally lacked. His powers of invention of a steady stream of new games in the garden, and then more and more in the Festspielhaus as well, were limitless. Neighboring children soon joined us, such as Matthias Röntgen, the son of a painter, who lived in a wooden hut on the other side of the Festspielhügel, and Hubert Franz, the son of the forester from the adjoining plot of land.

    Of course, before my parents left on their holidays my father had strictly forbidden me to play in the Festspielhaus. Such a prohibition was like a challenge for me to furtively slip the master key to the Festspielhaus that Father had hidden in a secret place into my trouser pocket and to begin my expeditions around the historic building. First I opened all the doors that had been locked to me until then, and behind which, I suspected, lay momentous secrets. My heart thumping, I entered the rooms over the old set-painting workshop, where I found a large plaster model of the Festspielhaus, paintings depicting scenes from Der Ring des Nibelungen, thick tomes on racial theory, festival programs from the years 1933 to 1944, and photos of my grandmother, Uncle Wieland, and my father with the Führer. I also found an enormous oil painting of Hitler with a menacing Alsatian dog. I found boxes of countless handwritten letters, which, being partly written in the old German script, I had difficulty deciphering. Although these finds were lying around dusty, dirty, scattered in wild confusion I carefully picked up each one, piece by piece, and, propping art objects against the wall, examined them.

    The plaster model I thought particularly intriguing, but the question was, who would be the best person to answer my questions? I dared not turn to my father, as I was in forbidden territory here. Besides, his previous reaction to my questions on the Nazi films had shown me how loath he was to talk about the subject. Grandpa Lodes, on the other hand, seemed a suitable informant, and so as not to give myself away, I invented an excuse that would enable me to return to the scene legally. I told him I had heard strange noises over the painting workshop, and he immediately whistled up his powerful Alsatian, Bodo, who terrified me and hurried with me in his wake to the painting studio. I urged Grandpa Lodes to climb up the stairs into the lumber room. He contemplated the little footprints on the dusty stairs suspiciously, and although when we entered the room I pretended I had never seen any of it before, he noted drily: "You've already been here." He wanted to know how I had gotten in, and finally I told him the whole story, swore I would never do it again, and started questioning him.

    He answered my questions quite readily. "That's a plaster model of the Festspielhaus. After the Final Victory the Führer wanted to have the old Festspielhaus roofed over and used only for very special occasions by very special people. Next to the old Festspielhaus he wanted to have another built, exactly like the old one, to be used for performances." It was only much later that I learned how this plaster model was part of the "monumentalization" of the Festspielhaus by the Nazi architect Emil-Rudolf Mewes in 1940.

    "This Führer, was he here often? I wanted to know.

   "The Führer loved Wagner and your family very much."

    As Grandpa Lodes talked about the Führer in such a friendly way, I wondered where he was today.

    "He's been dead a long time," answered Grandpa Lodes, and firmly took my hand to draw me out of the room. Silently and with a serious expression he locked the doors and then said: "I don't want to see you here again without your dad, otherwise you won't be able to come and see us anymore."

    I promised Grandpa Lodes to keep my mouth shut, for the sake of Werner, Helmut, and the wonderful wild games, but I didn't promise that I would not go into the mysterious room again.

    After my parents returned, the family investigations ended, as did the carefree life with the Lodes family. Our school class got a new teacher, named Herr Popp, who had apparently set himself the task of bringing me up to scratch. He enjoyed coming up very close when talking to me: "Now, Wagnerchen, let's just hear what you've been learning." This sentence was the prelude to his interrogations, which always ended in my having nothing left to say. With a malicious grin he would slowly curl the fingers of his right hand into a fist, then belabor the back of my head with it in short, rhythmic blows. "The Wagnerian musical skull sounds hollow yet again," he would say, before finally pulling the hair over my right temple and, to the delight of my classmates, gleefully entering a six in his notebook. Another favorite pastime of Herr Popp's was to recount his experiences as a soldier in the Second World War. "If we Germans had only had a bit more time, we would have been certain of the Final Victory. But the whole world was against us," he would moan.

    After one of Popp's attacks I would have severe pains in my head. When I complained at home about his treatment of me, my father called me a crybaby, but he did send my mother to talk to the man, and from then on Popp reminded me only once a week that I had a hollow Wagnerian musical skull.

    During this time my father was away from home more often than usual for the festival, and with his production of Tristan und Isolde in the summer of 1957 he was scarcely approachable at all. He no longer gave me any introductory information on the works he was directing, so I read the contents of the program instead, understanding little of the story, but gripped by the Tristan music as never before. I attended every orchestral rehearsal and performance, under Wolfgang Sawallisch, that I could. Two famous Wagnerian singers, Birgit Nilsson and Wolfgang Windgassen, gave unforgettable performances as Isolde and Tristan.

    My grandmother only had time for my father's productions and campaigned against Wieland's work. She constantly tried to play my father off against my uncle, and so the tensions in the family continued to increase. I was not exposed to this strain for long, though: my grades were bad yet again that summer, and because of an allegedly weak heart owing to growth problems, I was sent off to the Schliersee to stay with an elderly couple named Zankl. There were no playmates, but at least I was free of Herr Popp.

    In September I came back to the Graser school. My new classmates welcomed me by chanting: "Wagner, Sitzenbleiber, Zeitvertreiber [Wagner, loser, time-waster]!" Their antipathy was coupled with a growing pressure to do well as I now had to prepare myself for the forthcoming entrance examination for the Humanistisches Gymnasium, the classical secondary school. My grandfather, my uncle, and my father had all attended this school, and I was constantly reminded of their example. Frau Moritz, a teacher who appreciated my situation and encouraged me, provided a little relief. It also says much for Frau Moritz that she was obviously uneasy when we had to sing all three verses of the German national anthem. The first verse describes geographic borders that no longer existed for Germany after 1945 and proclaims, "Germany, Germany above all nations": "Deutschland über Alles." The second verse is equally chauvinistic, while the third is about unity, justice, and freedom for the German fatherland. Since 1952, only the last verse has been officially sanctioned in Germany.

    Winifred, my grandmother, had returned to the Siegfried Wagner House in 1957, after the Americans had left. I visited her now and again and usually found her in the anteroom to the dining room on the ground floor, sitting at her desk. She would be chain-smoking her unfiltered North States, writing letters or gazing through the open window out to Wahnfried Park. That way she could keep a check on who came in and out. During one of my visits I told her of Frau Moritz's reservations about the first verse of the national anthem. She lost her temper and railed against the school, where they were now apparently starting to tell the children a distorted version of German history.

    In July 1958 I found out that I had passed the entrance exam for the Humanistisches Gymnasium, although at first I couldn't quite believe it. Buoyed up by my unexpected success, I sat in on the rehearsals of Wieland's first Lohengrin on the Festspielhügel. Just as his Meistersinger had, my uncle's new production enthralled me. Whenever I could I watched him at work. When Father noticed my enthusiasm, he forbade me to spend so much time in the Festspielhaus. But that had little effect on me. I would say I was going to the cinema or swimming and instead creep into the Festspielhaus via my secret routes. Wieland understood my situation but didn't comment on it. Once my father suddenly appeared during a lighting rehearsal. He had somehow found out that I hadn't gone swimming, and angrily he asked my uncle if he had seen me. Wieland had spied me shortly before, on the lighting bridge, but he played dumb. Scarcely had my father disappeared in fury when he winked at me with a grin and murmured: "The coast's clear."

    This was not our only conspiracy. One day I crept secretly into Wahnfried Park again, waited until Wieland came out of the villa, and then told him how fantastic I thought his Lohengrin was. Such naiveté from the other family camp surprised my uncle. He went back into the villa and returned very soon with an envelope, which he pressed into my hand. I didn't dare open it in his presence. When he got into his car I asked him for his autograph. "But I'm your uncle," he replied, astonished. "But we can't ever talk to one another, so at least I'll have something from you," I explained. When I got home, I opened the envelope and found a twenty-mark note in it. I had hoped for a more personal present, but I was still pleased. With the money I bought my first record, a Louis Armstrong LP—"nigger music," as my father and grandmother would say.

    After my first exam success I was looking forward to secondary school. But my optimism was soon quelled. I became ill again, and private tutors had to visit me in Bayreuth and Berchtesgaden. It wasn't until April 1959 that I was able to attend the gymnasium.

    In the autumn of that year my father started preparations for his first production of The Ring, which he intended to put on in the coming season. My mother, as usual, had to give all of her time to my father's great Wagnerian undertaking. My father became more and more of a stranger to me: our holidays together in Braunwald in the Swiss Alps were mainly for our exhausted parents to recover.

    On our return from one holiday our enormous schnauzer, Froh, died after a painful death drawn out over months. He had been my companion for twelve years, and I had loved him very much. My father had no sympathy for my tears.

    As the 1960 festival approached, my sister and I were once again sent off to Berchtesgaden, this time to the elegant Hotel Geiger. By this time I viewed the festival solely as a threat to domestic peace. A visit to the ruins of Hitler's Berghof on the Obersalzberg left me feeling very oppressed. When I told my father about it, he replied with a positive observation on the architecture of Hitler's Alpine home.

    The competition between my father and my uncle lay like a shadow over my parents' marriage. I became, at the age of thirteen, the mediator of their many disputes. Confronted by the problems of adults, my childhood ended. I found the intrigues of the hostile camps sickening, and yet I was being pulled into them more and more. I tried to be loyal to my father, but his productions excited me far less than Uncle Wieland's.

    In the summer of 1961 I opposed my father openly for the first time, protesting against his constant reprimanding of my mother. It ended in a beating for me and an almighty row between my parents. And the conflict had a sequel. My father threatened that he would put me into the strictest school in Germany, to finally make a man of me, little wimp that I was. I answered back defiantly: "Go on then, do it." Promptly a chauffeur delivered me to the boarding school in Stein, near Traunstein. The drive was agony for me, as I was very worried about my mother; she was scared of being alone with my father and cried as I left her. I felt guilty for leaving her to deal with the dueling Wagner brothers and all of my father's demands. She had referred again and again to the festival as "suicidal." Yet in spite of all the family strain, life in the boarding school proved to be far from punishment. I now reaped the benefits of the Bayreuth training, for I was ahead of my new classmates and found myself in the unaccustomed position of being one of the best in the class. Instead of studying diligently, I did everything I was not supposed to do: I smoked, secretly visited girls at night, drank beer, annoyed the teachers, and preferred going swimming to attending class. My only worry was having to go back to Bayreuth.

    One day I was surprised by the news that my cousin Wummi was joining the Stein boarding school as well. The everlasting family battle had proved incapable of weakening my affection for Wummi, much to the annoyance of my father, who had kept on running Wummi down. We had many things in common: he too had grown up practically parentless, had changed schools and tutors frequently, and had acquired the reputation in Bayreuth of being stupid and lazy. I hadn't seen him for a long time and was keen to meet him again. He just said, "Hallo, Gottfriedla," and immediately the feeling of belonging together was reawakened. At that time we were convinced that we would one day take over our quarreling fathers' "shop." Despite our shared childhood experiences and dreams of returning together to run the festival as adults, we hardly spoke about our parents and Bayreuth, finding these subjects awkward and painful. But I did confess to him how much I admired his father's work. Wummi was always generous to me and treated me affectionately, like a younger brother. It was a pleasant time, but it ended abruptly—in fact, as soon as my father learned that Wummi was there. Immediately I was brought back to Bayreuth, although I continued to meet Wummi secretly.

    My sudden departure from Stein did have one advantage, however, in that I was able to enjoy Wieland's Tannhäuser rehearsals. There was a commotion in the Festspielhaus: the beautiful young black singer Grace Bumbry was portraying Venus, and Maurice Béjart created a provocatively erotic choreography for the Tannhäuser bacchanale in the Venusberg scene in Act One. The Wagnerian old guard were horrified and declared: "Thank God she's not singing Elisabeth—that's all we'd have needed, a negress singing a Wagner heroine in Bayreuth!"

    But that wasn't the only reason for the uproar. Wieland had joined up with the left, verbally supporting East Germany's politics and taking advantage of a West German media whose leftist sympathies were increasing. In the end, Wieland was an opportunistic bystander: leftist politics were good for promoting his image, but certainly he would have hated to live in the GDR. The anticommunist hysteria affected the Society of Friends of Bayreuth too; there was even talk of war. Quite beside herself, my grandmother raged publicly: "How on earth could Wieland join up with those left-wing Jews Bloch and Schadewaldt, of all things? And then Bumbry on top of everything else! Bayreuth is turning into a whorehouse." My father said nothing. At the time I had only vague ideas of what "left," "Jew," and "Negro" meant, but as a secret Wielandian I was angry at my grandmother's intrigue and my father's silence.

    After so much freedom in Stein and the excitements on the Festspielhügel, going back to the Bayreuth gymnasium became torture. When a ruptured appendix had me bedbound, my schoolmates accused me of shirking. I was often ill after that and became once again the outsider in my class, especially as my best friend at the time, Tyll Schönemann, had moved to Munich. I developed an aversion to the opinions enforced by bully tactics in my class, and was unwilling to approve of certain teachers just because the majority demanded it. One of the most popular teachers was named Herr Och. On one occasion before Christmas he decided to tell us about his experiences as a soldier in Russia. Sparing us no detail, he raved about the courage of the Nazi army. I dared to criticize Och in front of other classmates, for which they gave me a thorough beating one day.

    Though instructed in school by a man who used Christmas as a time to glorify his bloody wartime service to the Nazis, I was fortunately also the student of a more righteous Christian man. In the spring of 1962, after a year's preparatory instruction, I was confirmed by the witty Reverend Flotow. In his positive, kind way he opened my eyes to the splendors of the Bible as a history book, and I owe an awakening of my interest in ethical questions to him. My interest in Christianity became yet another departure from my family's philosophy. My family hardly ever discussed religion outside of the home, but when they did, it was to talk about "stupid priests" and "the bloody church." If pressed to say something positive about religion to the public or their guests, my parents would mention Albert Schweitzer, a man who had had contacts with my grandfather Siegfried. Not even Schweitzer was acceptable to my grandmother, however, who expressed her antagonism toward Christianity more and moe openly. My father called us "pious heathens," in Goethe's sense of the phrase. Meanwhile, I was a religious child, always interested in philosophical questions, and quickly frustrated by my parents' hypocritical religious posturing. In the end, I think, they found religion in the cult of Wagnerian mythology.

    In the summer of 1962 Wieland staged an epoch-making new production of Tristan und Isolde. The set was strongly influenced by the English sculptor Henry Moore, with a lighting design clearer and more penetrating than ever before. This production in particular illustrated just how wide the artistic gulf was between Wieland and Wolfgang, and my admiration for the creative work of my uncle reached a new pinnacle. Not so my school career, unfortunately: in 1962 I had to repeat the forth level at the gymnasium.

    The summer of 1963 was devoted to the 150th anniversary of Richard Wagner. The slogan was "A life for the theater," and Wagner was yet again presented apolitically as a "European genius of the theater"—something of an absurdity, as Wieland had already moved further to the left through his contacts with the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, which provoked some very sarcastic comments during rehearsals. He continued to criticiz e the Christian Democratic party (CDU) and the Christian Socialist Union (CSU), although this did not prevent him paying court to the ultraconservative Friends of Bayreuth and accepting their financing. The more Wieland played the armchair socialist, the more conservative my father acted. It was only logical that my grandmother regarded him as the true heir of the Wagnerian legacy.

    Wieland's second Meistersinger production, in 1963, was marked by elements of the Shakespearean stage, comprising a basic set that remained the same throughout, with only minor changes. This concept coincided, of course, with several anti-illusionist elements of the Brechtian stage, such as clearly visible scene changes and mobile screens. There was something else too. In 1960 the very young Anja Silja had made her debut in Bayreuth as Senta in Der fliegende Holländer. For Wieland she embodied the ideal of the modern singer-actor. For him she meant, as he so wonderfully and provocatively put it, the end of the "bourgeois singing cow." So it was no surprise that he cast her as Eva in Meistersinger—and soon fell in love with her. Whether he got divorced for that reason is something one can only speculate about, since in November 1966 he died suddenly at the age of forty-nine. My father moralized heavily against Anja, who had loosened up the internal climate of the Bayreuth Festival with her loud Berlin accent, sharp remarks, and noisy behavior.

    As usual, we were sent away before the festival, but this autumn two important turning points took place in my life. First, my sister, having now finished secondary school, was sent to a domestic science college for young ladies, freeing me from her constant supervision, so I spent much of my time with a warmhearted and cultured Bayreuth family named Grossmann, who together with Gunda had kept an eye on me for years. I used my new freedom most of all, when Father and Mother were on holiday, to hold parties on and over the Festspielhaus stage, which was empty outside the season. I waited for the weekends, when nobody was working in the administration building, and using Father's master key I let my party guests in through the office area, up to a giddy height over the flies into a large room over the circle, which we turned into a dance hall. From there Elvis Presley's "Jailhouse Rock" boomed out so loudly that passersby alerted the police to the noise in the "Woogna Deooda"—"Wagner theater" as tendered in the Upper Franconian dialect. Grandpa Lodes turned up with the police, we hid, and scarcely was the place "fuzz free" when we rocked on.

    The beginning of my friendship with Eckart Grebner and Reiner Heller also dates from this time. Together we kept an eye out for pretty girls and played at dares, one of which was to smear red paint over Arno Breker's post-Nazi Richard Wagner bust, which had stood in the Festival Park since 1955. I looked on with relish while the fire brigade cleaned up the menacing monster. My school grades went rapidly downhill.

    The other turning point of autumn 1963—one that was to have a long-lasting effect—occurred when my parents were on holiday, recovering from their Bayreuth Festival exertions. I took the chance to explore a wooden shed next to the garage, where Father's heavy BMW motorcycle and sidecar were housed. In the sidecar, in two cardboard boxes, I found a large number of round, aluminum cans of various sizes. They were so rusted that I could not open them with my bare hands, so I secretly conveyed them to my room, got rid of the rust, and prized them open carefully with a screwdriver. In each can there was a reel of film. I took out one of the larger reels and inspected it with a magnifying glass What I discovered left me stunned. I saw my aunts, Uncle Wieland, and my grandmother, Winifred, together with Hitler, who was dressed in an elegant double-breasted suit, laughing as they strolled in Wahnfried Park. Happy Führer, happy Wagner children, happy Grandmother Winifred! Then pictures of the Führer in the Festspielhaus. All arms were outstretched in a "Heil Hitler" salute: Wagner's art and the Führer's power. Strutting members of the Master Race and laughing victors, in premature celebration of the Final Victory. "Uncle Wolf" and the Wagners belonged together—such was the message behind the film. And my father had been the cameraman throughout.

    He and Wieland, like the rest of the adult world, suddenly became sinister to me. I remembered pictures of Buchenwald from the cinema newsreels I had seen in 1956, and it became clear to me that I had to keep the films and prevent my father hiding them again or even destroying them, so I hid them away in my wardrobe, covered the empty cans with dirt again, and put them back in the two cardboard boxes in the sidecar. I decided not to tell my parents anything about my find but to question them persistently about Hitler.

    The first opportunity presented itself during the winter holidays in Arosa, in Switzerland, in December of that year, on one of the long walks with my parents and my sister. I didn't want to put my father on the defensive, as that would have brought the conversation to an abrupt end. So I emphasized, against my convictions, that I was interested more or less for purely historical reasons in the connection between my family and the Führer. I asked Father what impression Hitler had made on him as a human being. He made no secret of the fact that Uncle Wolf had fascinated him, and described his meetings with him with restrained affection. Later he told me proudly again and again of how the Führer had visited him in the Charité hospital in Berlin, where the famous surgeon Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch himself had treated Father after he had been wounded in the Polish campaign. "Your uncle was exempted from war service by Hitler—I alone had to serve the Fatherland," he added, and in detail and with enthusiasm he talked of community service and military training, where a unique camaraderie had developed. He recounted how the only friend in his life, Emil, had been killed in a village by "crafty Polacks" as the "brave German army" had conquered Poland.

    And Hitler, again and again! After the National Socialists' seizure of power a "Führer annex” had been specially built onto the Siegfried Wagner House, and inside the annex was built the "Führer fireplace." After a performance of Götterdämmerung in the Festspielhaus, my uncle and Father accepted Hitler's invitation to a lengthy nighttime discussion at the "Führer fireplace" on the future of German art in the spirit of Richard Wagner, as an expression of the renewal of the world through National Socialism. I had some difficulty in understanding my father's torrent of words, but didn't interrupt for fear of provoking him to break off, and he continued his story. "We were sitting around the fireplace, and Hitler sketched out for us his cultural visions of the future. `Once we have rid the world of the Bolshevik-Jewish conspirators, then you, Wieland, will run the theater of the West and you, Wolfgang, the theater of the East.'"

    Quietly I asked Father whom he meant by the "Bolshevik-Jewish conspirators." My interruption annoyed him, and I was worried he might end the conversation; but instead he launched into German history. It had all started with the "shameful Versailles treaty," which was then followed by mass unemployment in the chaotic Weimar Republic with the incompetent left and the "bloody liberals." And so he came to the "great achievements of Hitler up to 1939." I wanted to know about this in detail, and Father did not let me down, answering: "Hitler cured unemployment and restored worldwide respect for the German economy. He freed our people from a moral crisis and united all decent forces. We Wagners have him to thank for the idealistic rescue of the Bayreuth Festival."

    "But what about the Jews, Father?"

    He replied: "There's a lot of talk about that, and there are a lot of malicious lies told about us Germans by left-wing intellectuals about how many and so on. But that was the only real mistake Hitler made. If he had won over the Jews to his side, we would have won the war. After the war things would not have got as bad as the Allies' propaganda machine makes out."

    We continued side by side in silence for the rest of the walk, until my mother started talking about Christmas presents.