Winnie and Wolf: A Novel [Paperback]

A. N. Wilson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 27, 2009

Winnie and Wolf  is the story of the extraordinary friendship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler in the Years between the First and Second World Wars. The girl who would become Winifred Wagner was raised in an orphanage and married, at the age of eighteen, to the gay son of composer Richard Wagner. As heiress to the country's most august cultural legacy, she grows up in the Wagner family compound, surrounded by the philosophers and composers who would define western European culture in the mid-twentieth century. In 1923, the Wagners met the man who would be their hero and hope for the future: a wild-eyed Viennese opera fanatic named Adolf Hitler. Almost immediately Winnie and Wolf struck up an intimate friendship. In A. N. Wilson's most bold and ambitious novel yet, the world of the Weimar Republic comes to vivid life as the backdrop to this strange and powerful kinship.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Veteran British biographer and novelist Wilson's plodding latest concerns the private life of Adolf Hitler (Wolf) and his friendship and affair with Winnie, the daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner. The novel opens in 1925 and is composed by an unnamed secretary to Winnie's husband. Though weighted down by detailed discussions of philosophy and the opera that so inspired Hitler, the narrative at times hums with life. Wilson offers a new way of viewing the charismatic (though sweating and flatulent) leader, who appears to the Wagner family as the savior who will raise up a starving and humiliated interwar Germany and who made you feel that the struggle would not have been worth it unless it had gone too far. Unfortunately, Wilson seems so intent on demonstrating the breadth of his knowledge and research that narrative technique feels like an afterthought. This dense and dry tale is unlikely to appeal to readers who aren't already at least armchair scholars of the era. (Nov.)
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.

From Booklist

Wilson examines the unusual relationship between Winifred Wagner, patriotic daughter-in-law of composer Richard and guardian of his acclaimed, controversial musical legacy, and Adolf Hitler, aka “Wolf,” portrayed as a socially insecure family man and opera aficionado with a flatulence problem. The central conceit is their imagined affair, resulting in an illegitimate daughter later adopted by Herr N——, secretary at the family’s Bayreuth household. Beginning in 1925, his account takes the form of interrelated, frequently dry digressions into Wagnerian opera, Teutonic mythology, and politico-philosophical thought, interspersed with livelier anecdotes about the Wagners, his own family’s courageous actions, and Britain’s contributions to Germany’s rising anti-Semitism. A self-professed coward, the narrator also vividly describes one poignant scene of selfless heroism on the part of local townspeople. This interweaving of fact and fiction may be too close for the uninitiated to discern the difference, and readers will search in vain for anything resembling a conventional plot. However, what it does extremely well is situate readers firmly in post-Versailles Germany, a land falling inexorably into the grip of Nazi dominance. --Sarah Johnson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Picador; First Edition edition (October 27, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312428626
• ISBN-13: 978-0312428624
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,938,332 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Winnie and Wolf, July 8, 2008

By 

Peking Duck (Beijing, China) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Winnie and Wolf (Hardcover)

This is a gorgeously written book that I could not put down. It is absolutely not for everyone. But if you are interested in the life and music of Richard Wagner and/or the strange story of how the Nazis co-opted his works and perverted their meaning, or if you are interested in Germany's bizarre path from tentative democracy following the Great War to becoming the evil empire under Hitler, and why the German people surrendered their critical facilities and allowed Hitlerism to bring them, and much of the world, to the brink of destruction - if you are interested in these things, you will savor every page of Winnie and Wolf.

The premise, that Winifred carried on an affair with Hitler and bore his child, is absurd, but it doesn't matter. The author's observations about life in Bayreuth after it was usurped by Hitler is accurate to the finest detail. I strongly recommend reading it after you've finished Brigitte Hamann's suberb Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth. You will see how faithful the novel is to history, and you will have more context to understand the cast of characters such as Hans Tietjen, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Friedelind Wagner, etc.

Mesmerizing, hypnotic, touching and ripe with keen insights into German history and philosophy and music, not to mention human nature.... Well, what more can we ask for? As I headed into the last 50 pages or so I started to read it more slowly, sometimes reading only one or two pages a night before bedtime, because I didn't want it to end. A book to cherish.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding, But Why the Need for a Hitler Love Child?, December 7, 2008

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L. Young "palmtree2000" (West Orange, NJ USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Winnie and Wolf: A Novel (Hardcover)

Wilson's 'Winnie and Wolf' exhibits a prodigous knowledge of German history from the end of WW1 until the end of WW2, Wagner's music, German philosophy, literature and art and the history of the Bayreuth Festival. Why I asked myself, did he write this as a novel using the wild premise that Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler had an affair that produced a child?

Wilson hangs his novel on a framework of having the novel writen as a memoir of 'N', Siegfried and then Winifred's personal assistant which N later in life will give to his adopted daughter the biological child of Winnie and Hitler. By using this device we become privy to private conversations between Winnie and Hitler, Winnie and Tietjen, Winnie and Toscanni. But more importantly it makes vivid the everyday life of Germans in Weimar Germany who then witness and then for the most part deliriously support the rise of their ultimate Leader, Hitler and Nazism. N finds himself torn between his love of Winnie and of Wagner, and his ambivalent feelings towards the charismatic Uncle Wolf who reguarly visits Bayreuth and who reads fairy tales to the Wagner children and adores dogs. It is N's theory that the Uncle Wolf of Bayreuth and the Hitler of Munich and Berlin are two conflicting beings inhabiting one body, an interesting psychological premise.

The device of the narrator works superbly in allowing the reader to view the rise of Hitler through the eyes of everyday Germans. However, the premise of Winnie's and Hitler's 'love' child seems silly and unnecessary. Did the author think such an outrageous premise would spark the book buying public to purchase more books? If so he is wrong. This is definitely not a book for the general reader, but for those who are already well acquainted with the music of Wagner, the history of the Bayreuth Festival and the rise and fall of Adolph Hitler.

3.0 out of 5 stars Odd, November 1, 2009

By 

Megan (California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Winnie and Wolf: A Novel (Paperback)

I don't usually read historical fiction and this book reminded me why. The author had a unique voice and a way of capturing the reader's attention but overall the story was... odd. Humanizing Hitler is certainly a daring exploit but I still found myself disliking him and most every character in the novel. I don't know that much about Opera or music and felt a lot of things went over my head. This isn't something I'd ever pick up again, but not necessarily something I regret reading.