Winifred Wagner [Hardcover]

Brigitte Hamann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 6, 2005

Winifred Wagner's story is a remarkable one. The Welsh-born orphan became Richard Wagner's daughter-in-law, one of Adolf Hitler's closest personal friends. Brigitte Hamann presents the first major, unbiased biography of the First Lady of Hitler's Bayreuth. Born Winifred Williams in 1897, she was adopted, aged nine, by distant English relatives and in 1915 the eighteen-year-old Winifred married into the Wagner family when they needed an heir to secure the Wagner heritage and the festival site at Bayreuth. In 1923, shortly before the Munich Putsch, Hitler made a pilgrimage to Wagner's grave in Bayreuth. And so began a close, lifelong friendship between 'Winnie' and 'Wolf'. She became a founder member of the Nazi party and from 1933 the town of Bayreuth at festival time was the centre of the German political world. Described as 'the last Nazi in Germany', she remained loyal to the memory of 'Wolf' till her death in 1980. Drawing on previously untapped sources, this book presents a portrait of an extraordinary woman, as well as revealing glimpses of the 'private Hitler', offering the best insight yet into his relationship with Bayreuth and its central place in twentieth-century German history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Viennese historian Hamann's important biography tells the complex story of Winifred Wagner (1897–1980), Richard Wagner's daughter-in-law, who headed the Bayreuth opera festival during Hitler's rule. An impressionable 18-year-old, British-born Winifred Williams married Wagner's middle-aged only son, Siegfried, in 1915, bearing him the heirs the Wagners so desperately wanted. When in 1923 Hitler solicited the Wagners for political support, an infatuated Winifred joined the Nazi Party, becoming Hitler's loyal devotee. Widowed in 1930, Winifred assumed directorship of Bayreuth amid rumors of future betrothal to Hitler, who, as Reich chancellor, put the festival center stage in his political campaigns. As increasing numbers of Jewish artists were exiled, Winifred bargained to gain exemptions for her friends and was gradually frozen out by Hitler. Without claiming heroic status for Winifred or denying her anti-Semitism, Hamann (Hitler's Vienna) meticulously places Winifred's aid in the context of the nationalist, anti-Semitic Wagners and their circle. Hamann describes the public denunciation of Winifred by her American émigré daughter, Friedelind; Winifred's equally problematic relationships with her other children; and her postwar openness about her affection for Hitler. This is a fascinating portrait not only of Winifred but of the Wagners and their milieu. 8 pages of b&w photos; map. (Dec.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

PRAISE FOR WINIFRED WAGNER

"A fair and balanced appraisal, free of vitriol or misplaced sympathy . . . a gigantic historical study of Nazi Bayreuth with, at its center, the life history of a dubious, yet remarkable woman." --Der Spiegel (Germany)

"A magnificent book" --Glasgow Herald (UK)

"Riveting"--Sunday Times (UK)

 

 

(20060821)

"Hamann has produced a gripping, full-dress biography of a woman for whom ''fascinating'' is too pale a word."

(St. Petersburg Times 20060821)

"Hamann provides a rich picture of Winifred''s complex personality and of the social and artistic forces surrounding Bayreuth during its Nazi period while giving equal depth and force to the hypocrisies of postwar denazification and Winifred''s final years and legacy. An important book for all libraries with in-depth collections on the Nazi era or music history; there are no comparable treatments of this subject in English."

(Library Journal 20061215)

"A unique perspective on the Wagners, centered on the clan''s most controversial member and most tumultous period...Hamann diligently explores this naive young woman''s slow seduction by wealth and power." (starred)

(Kirkus Reviews )

"[I]mportant...this is a fascinating portrait not only of Winifred but of the Wagners and their milieu." (starred)

(Publishers Weekly )

"Compelling...[and b]rilliantly translated by Alan Bance, Wagner, as a figurehead of cultural politics, is best dealt with by a political historian like Brigitte Hamann"

(New York Sun ) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Granta Bks. (June 6, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1862076715
• ISBN-13: 978-1862076716
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 2.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,072,189 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

41 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars FASCINATING INSIGHTS INTO THE WAGNERS AND HITLER, October 4, 2005

By 

Klingsor Tristan (Suffolk) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Winifred Wagner (Hardcover)

The subtitle of this book is important - A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth - for Winifred Wagner's institutionalised childhood, her youth with the ageing hippie Klindworth couple and the early years of her marriage to Siegfried are all raced through in around 50 pages (out of 500). Another mere 50 cover the 30 odd years after her de-nazification hearings and the takeover of the Bayreuth Festival by her two sons. The main bulk of this book concerns itself with the 25 years of her relationship with Hitler (and his with the Wagner family and the Festival) and its immediate aftermath.

That said, Brigitte Hamann provides a fascinating and eminently readable account of that relationship. Her attitude towards her subject seems to change as the book progresses. Initially she presents Winifred as a fervently (German) Nationalist, anti-Semitic character, much influenced by the writing and the presence around Wahnfried of her brother-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, even before she met and fell under the spell of Onkel Wolfi, as the family referred to Hitler. (Incidentally, Chamberlain was also English by birth but, like Winifred, became more German than the Germans.) The older Winifred is a rather different person as portrayed here. Throughout the war, as evidenced by many of the testaments taken from her de-nazification hearings, Winifred became some kind of Schindleresque saint, saving everyone she could from the clutches of her top Nazi friends - friends, acquaintances, friends of friends, people she didn't know at all, jews, gentiles, the lot. One suspects that all this is coloured by Winifred's own practical need for self-justification at those hearings and should be taken with a slightly larger pinch of salt than Hamann seems prepared to. One can accept that there was a certain naivety to Winifred that wouldn't allow her to accept either what was happening to these people or that her beloved Fuhrer had any knowledge of what was being done in his name. But her continued and oft-expressed loyalty to both Hitler and the principles of National Socialism throughout her later life would suggest that her opinions had not changed gthat much since her youth.

What comes clearly out of Hamann's narrative is a Hitler who found in the Wagner family and its mistress a privacy, a domesticity and a family life he so obviously needed and lacked elsewhere. Hamann remains remarkably tacit on whether the Adolf/Winifred relationship was ever consummated. One suspects not. What does come as a surprise, though, is how early in the War the relationship between them broke down. After all those secret midnight trysts in the 30's, it comes as a shock to realise that they didn't meet at all during the last four years of the War and that correspondence between them became more and more infrequent and formal.

Most of the other members of the Wagner family and many around the periphery come out of this book pretty badly. It seems as though there's something in the genes that drives Wagners to the bloodiest and most internecine of family wars. What is currently going on around the succession to possession of the Green Hill and all that goes with it appears to be little more than a re-run of what occurred towards the end of the war with the previous generation. Wieland emerges particularly badly. A spoiled kid determined to get his way and inclined to smash things if he didn't, he played the most political of games in securing the Festival for himself, conducting vicious and potentially lethal campaigns against the likes of Tietjen, Preetorius and even his own mother. And he was certainly the most duplicitous of all of them about his relationship with AH and the party. It transpires that he was actually second-in-command of a local concentration camp in the latter days of the War - something he would never admit to in later life. Wolfgang remains a much shadowier figure - perhaps because he was necessary to the writer for allowing access to the family archives, albeit still severely restricted and censored. Even Furtwangler turns out not have been quite the Parsifalian simpleton, devoted only to his art, that he and his supporters made him out to be after the Fall of Berlin. In fact, both before and after the War he was a dedicated schemer, determined to get the better of Toscanini, Tietjen and later the one he called the `K man', von Karajan, by whatever means it took.

So this book provides a good sprinkling of gossip as well as a fair amount of new material and information about a crucial and shaming period in Bayreuth's history, all meticulously researched and referenced. It also does us the service, like the film Downfall, of showing Hitler as a human being with human foibles and human insecurities rather than just as a mythical ogre - and that is what is so much more frightening.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wagner and the Third Reich, May 10, 2007

By 

Eileen Pollock (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth (Hardcover)

This biography is for those with a deep interest in classical music history, Hitler and the Third Reich. For those who have the particular interest, this book repays close reading. I must personally thank the author, Brigitte Hamann, for the enormous research project she undertook to bring Winifred Wagner to 21st century readers, and to history. Hamann has meticulously read correspondence, archives, newspapers and conducted personal interviews with those still living. And unlike so many researchers, she brought her story to life in readable language. This is a jam-packed history, brimming with event, and I read almost every word with intense interest. Winifred Wagner's purpose in life was the Richard Wagner festival in Bayreuth, and as head of the festival she maintained a close friendship with Hitler, who was her chief sponsor from 1933 to 1944. The source of this partnership was the so-called "spiritual" relationship between the German nationalist ethos of Wagnerism and the theoretical underpinnings of Nazi Germany. Winifred Wagner was a hyper-nationalist and ardent Hitler supporter since the Munich putsch of 1923, she was a strong anti-Semite as her many letters attest; and yet she extended herself for individuals, especially Jews, many of whom she personally helped and who survived Nazi Germany because of her intervention with Hitler on their behalf. This is fully documented in the book. After the war, unlike most Nazis who hastened to obliterate their past, Winifred Wagner was proud of her friendship with Hitler and made no apologies; never did she try to whitewash her history. She was a remarkable, deeply deluded woman, who ran the Bayreuth festival and headed the Wagner family for many years. Her logistical abilities could easily have been put to deadly use in World War II - luckily, she was buried in Bayreuth where she could do the Allies no military harm! There is no doubt that Bayreuth today is implicated and besmirched by its close Nazi ties. This biography is a brilliant accomplishment. Only toward the end does the story begin to flag as Winifred's life winds down in a series of futile family quarrels. But til then it is a fascinating history. Do read it!

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating historically and musically, February 13, 2007

By 

Books R Us - See all my reviews

This review is from: Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth (Hardcover)

One of the most interesting books of the many that have been written about Nazi Germany. The book explains the motivation behind the seeming adoration of Hitler by the Wagner family. Having read Friedelind Wagner's book "Heritage of Fire" , it was very interesting to get a more objective account of those years in Bayreuth. The book can be read on several different perspectives and is carefully document. this is a "saver"