Winifred Wagner

British Nazi supporter

• Born: June 23, 1897
• Birthplace: Hastings, England
• Died: March 5, 1980
• Place of death: Überlingen, Germany

Cause of notoriety: Through her close association with Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, Wagner debased the esteemed Wagner Festival at Bayreuth by making it a Nazi Party nationalist propaganda tool.

Active: 1923-1950

Locale: Germany

Early Life

Born in Britain and orphaned before the age of two, Winifred Wagner (VAHG-nuhr) was adopted at age ten by Karl and Henriette Klindworth, who gave her some musical training and a thoroughly German education. Through long association with German composer Richard Wagner and his family, Klindworth was a familiar figure at Bayreuth, where annual presentations of Wagner’s operas and others’ composed works drew crowds. The Klindworths visited the Wagners in 1914 and brought seventeen-year-old Winifred, who was introduced to Siegfried Wagner, the composer’s only son. Siegfriend and Winifred were immediately drawn to each other and married the following year.

In 1906, Siegfried’s formidable but enfeebled mother yielded the direction of the festival to him. However, his potentially scandalous homosexual tendency prompted the family’s concern over maintaining its traditions and controlling it. With heirs required to run the festival, Winifred was accepted, despite hostility from her sisters-in-law. Though Siegfried preserved a quasi-bachelor existence through the marriage, he and Winifred did have four children: sons Wieland and Wolfgang and daughters Friedelind and Verena.

Nazi Career

In 1924, Siegfried revived the annual festivals, which had been suspended during and after World War I. The poisons of reactionary nationalism and anti-Semitism were already at work. Both had been elements of Wagner’s thinking and more virulently of the thinking of his widow, Cosima. In 1908, their daughter Eva (Siegfried’s sister) married Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), who was an ardent Wagnerite and passionate anti-Semite and turned Bayreuth into a beacon of anti-Jewish nationalism. Although personally conservative and anti-Semitic, Siegfried was also politically naïve and sensitive to Jewish sources of financial backing. Winifred, on the other hand, was nurtured in anti-Semitism by Klindworth. However, the couple mutually detested the liberal Weimar Republic and its disorders.

In September, 1923, Winifred first met the still-obscure Adolf Hitler. She was immediately captivated by him and welcomed him to Bayreuth and its inner circle. When Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch failed in Munich two months later, Winifred ostentatiously aided the jailed conspirators. The 1924 festival reopening was rife with Nazi associations. Siegfried, less captivated personally by Hitler, formally distanced the festival from Hitler, but Winifred, who became a party member in 1926, deepened her cordial relationship with the Nazi leader.

Siegfried died suddenly in August, 1930, four months after his mother’s death at age ninety-two. Winifred, despite being only thirty-three, became his legal heir and assumed control of the festival. Her leadership began tumultuously but was transformed when Hitler came to power in 1933. Identifying himself with Wagner and his music, the dictator turned Bayreuth into a focus of Nazi cultural ideology, a grand propaganda machine, while Winifred’s close friendship made him a virtual member of the Wagner family. Hitler meddled constantly, attending each festival and conceiving a vast architectural program for Bayreuth. Artistic standards slipped and then collapsed in the war years amid factional struggles and Wagner family infighting.

In 1945, with the war’s end and the subsequent American occupation of Germany, all the Wagners’ property in Bayreuth was confiscated. Eventually, plans emerged to revive the festival. Badly tarred during denazification, Winifred in 1950 finally renounced her legal rights in favor of her two sons. She remained, however, an unrepentant Nazi, outspoken in her devotion to Hitler, his memory, and his lingering partisans. In 1975, she spoke out in a belligerent documentary film titled Winifred Wagner und die Geschichte des Hauses Wahnfried von 1914-1975. Allowed to resume residence in Bayreuth, she was a recurrent embarrassment to her son’s regime until her death in 1980.

Impact

The festivals resumed in 1951. Wolfgang was soon pushed aside by Wieland, a formerly fervent Nazi and theatrical reactionary who became politically respectable and notoriously progressive in his productions. Upon Wieland’s death in 1966, amid recurrent family squabbles, Wolfgang resumed control, fending off challenges to his leadership. Despite full artistic revival, Bayreuth remained shadowed by memories of the Nazi associations that Winifred Wagner had fostered so disastrously.

Bibliography

Hamann, Brigitte. Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler’s Bayreuth. Translated by Alan Bance. London: Granta Books, 2005. A fully documented account of Winifred’s career.

Köhler, Joachim. Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple. Translated by Ronald Taylor. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. A controversial argument for Hitler’s profoundly Wagnerian background.

Spotts, Frederic. Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. A commanding study, with full exposition of Winifred’s career.

Wagner, Friedelind, with Page Cooper. Heritage of Fire: The Story of Richard Wagner’s Granddaughter. New York: Harper, 1945. Winifred’s staunchly anti-Nazi daughter describes her Bayreuth youth and her escape from it and her mother in 1938.

Wagner, Nike. The Wagners: The Dramas of a Musical Dynasty. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998. Winifred’s granddaughter considers family history and interprets her great-grandfather’s works.