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Número 276 - Zaragoza - Diciembre 2023|
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FORO
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| Wagner y H. |
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Hola a todos/as: A vueltas con el tema. Unas curiosidades más sobre el asunto Wagner y Hitler a través de un extracto de una entrevista a Brigitte Hamann, publicada hoy en La Vanguardia. ?La historiadora más famosa de Austria, Brigitte Hamann, vive en el distrito 19, a 15 minutos en coche de la Heldenplatz de Viena, donde los vieneses celebraron con júbilo el Anschluss de 1938. Hitler ocupa un lugar central en dos de sus libros, Hitler´s Vienna: a dictator´s apprenticeship (La Viena de Hitler: el aprendizaje de un dictador) y Winifred Wagner: a life at the heart of Hitler´s Bayreuth (Winifred Wagner: una vida en el corazón del Bayreuth de Hitler), una biografía de la nuera nazi del compositor. Cuando quería distraerse de la guerra, no había nada que le gustara más a Hitler que mirar Gotterdammerung en su palco especial en Bayreuth con su amiga Winnie al lado. (...) - Su libro sobre Winifred documenta la obsesión de Hitler con las óperas de Wagner. Dado que Hitler era aburridísimo en sus conversaciones, me pregunto: ¿era más interesante al hablar de cisnes y divas? - No. Seguía siendo aburrido. Las veladas después de la ópera eran una prueba para todos. Imagínese, él siempre dormía hasta las doce; a las cuatro empezaba la ópera y por la noche estaba de lo más animado y conversador. Solía quedarse hablando hasta las cuatro de la mañana, bebiendo zumo de manzana. Todos luchaban por mantenerse despiertos en la Villa Wahnfried junto a la chimenea. ¡Era una tortura! - Winifred era una de las pocas personas a las que Hitler trataba familiarmente. ¿Por qué esa amistad se acabó al iniciarse la guerra? - Ella siempre estaba sentada frente a la máquina de escribir, redactando cartas. Quería salvar gente. Creo que él se cansó de ella. Pero ése es el aspecto interesante del carácter multifacético de esta mujer: por un lado, era antisemita. Por otro, salvó a muchos judíos. - Su libro revela que su hijo, Wieland Wagner, el reconocido director escénico del festival tras la guerra, dirigió un pequeño campo de concentración en Bayreuth. - Wieland no quería ir a la guerra y estaba a salvo con este trabajo-No era un trabajo regular; iba allí unas pocas Brigitte Hamann, en una imagen del 2003 horas por semana para trabajar en iluminación con los detenidos que eran electricistas. La iluminación fue la esencia del trabajo de Wieland como director escénico. - ¿Por qué se mantuvo en secreto? - La gente en Bayreuth sabía que Wieland era un nazi de alto rango, pero nadie iba a sacrificarlo. Y Winifred, si bien pudo haberlo odiado por momentos, amaba a su hijo. Nunca habría dicho nada que lo perjudicara. Su objetivo siempre había sido dirigir el festival hasta que Wieland fuera suficientemente mayor. - Para su 50. º aniversario, Hitler recibió varias partituras raras de óperas de Wagner como regalo de industriales. ¿Qué pasó con ellas? - Las debió haber conservado cerca. Dudo que fueran robadas y no han sido encontradas. Creo que él las quemó, sabía que iba a morir. Me cuesta imaginar que dejara la más querida de sus posesiones en legado al pueblo alemán, al que odiaba tanto en el momento de su muerte. No habría querido que los alemanes, los estadounidenses o los rusos se apoderaran de las partituras. Eran su reliquia sagrada.? |
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Caro Merlin: Gracias por tu aporte.- Realmente me sorprende y tengo serias dudas que Wieland Wagner, dirigiera un campo de concentración en Bayreuth, y esto fuera ignorado por los aliados, que todo lo investigaron.- Resulta practicamente imposible, que en un lugar de concentración de personas, todos se juramenten silencio, y menos los allí internados, que debemos presumir que fueron liberados.- Habrá que leer el libro, del cual parece haber una traducción al inglés. Un abrazo Tristanisimo |
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Se trata de una entrevista que aparece en la Vanguardia de hoy, día 28 de marzo de 2007, pg. 14, en relación con el médico judío de Hitler, y posteriormente deriva al tema Hitler/Wagner, etc.. Me imagino que habrá algún defecto de traducción y/0 quizás una cierta mala fe en el entrevistador, ya que el tema Wagner/Hitler siempre comporta un cierto morbo. Nótese que la pregunta, o mejor dicho, la afirmación del entrevistador es que Wieland "dirigió" un "pequeño campo de concentración" y la respuesta de Briggitte Hamann que Wieland trabajaba a tiempo parcial "unas pocas horas por semana" en la iluminación. Saludos. |
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| http://www.lavanguardia.es/gen/20070328/51318624609/noticias/hitler-ordeno-proteger-al-medico-judio-de-su-familia-bayreuth-austria-wagner-viena-the-new-york-times-nueva-york-gestapo.html |
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El resto de la entrevista no me pareció venir a colación con el tema que aquí tratamos pero ciertamente el morbo, en ocasiones, es informativo. Sin juicios de valor. |
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Hola, Por si alguien se había quedado con ganas del libro de la Hamann ?el de Winifred, no el del doctor-, aquí va una reseña del New York Times. Parece que últimamente van saliendo datos turbios de todos y cada uno de los alemanes de la época. Grass, Wieland, todo el pueblo alemán? Que no digo que sea o no sea así, pero? ¿Cuándo le tocará a Thomas Mann? Ahí va la reseña: A Widow?s Might By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT Published: March 11, 2007 In 1915, the 18-year-old Fräulein Klindworth married Siegfried Wagner, and thus became part of the most prominent ? not to say scary ? cultural dynasty in the Kaiser?s Reich. And yet she wasn?t even German. Born Winifred Marjorie Williams, she became German by adoption after she was sent from a Sussex orphanage to Berlin to be looked after by elderly distant relations named Klindworth. WINIFRED WAGNER A Life at the Heart of Hitler?s Bayreuth. By Brigitte Hamann. Translated by Alan Bance. Illustrated. 582 pp. Harcourt. $35. Soon enough Winifred evinced the extreme nationalism of the outsider. The Klindworths had inculcated in her the ardent spirit of ?blood and soil,? and she found in Bayreuth, where the Wagners lived and carried on the tradition of the founder, not only a marital residence but a spiritual home. There she remained, in glory or in disgrace, until her death in 1980, devoted to the memories of Richard Wagner and of Adolf Hitler. Her enthralling and repellent story is now told by the Viennese historian Brigitte Hamann in this remarkable biography, ?Winifred Wagner.? As a lurid family saga, ?The Wagners of Bayreuth? could match ?Dynasty? or ?Dallas,? but with one curious twist in the plotline thanks to a combination of late marriage and longevity. Even today the Wagner festival at Bayreuth is run by Winifred?s son Wolfgang Wagner, who still comes onstage to make announcements in his thick Franconian accent. And then you remember that this is the grandson of a man born nearly 200 years ago. That man was Richard Wagner, who was born in Leipzig in 1813 and died in Venice in 1883, a very great composer and a very much less likable man. After a first marriage, he took up successively ? and characteristically ? with two wives of men who had helped him. The second of these women was Cosima, with whom Richard fathered two daughters and, in 1869, a son, Siegfried. When Wagner died, the festival he had created for his operas was inherited by Cosima, who guarded it long and fiercely. Siegfried took full control only in 1924, when the festival finally reopened after World War I. His marriage to Winifred was problematic quite apart from the age gap: his homosexuality was well known and dangerous (it was a criminal offense at the time), and marrying Winifred looked like a cover. He managed nevertheless to brace himself and father four children, Wieland, Friedelind, Wolfgang and Verena. And Siegfried?s career as a composer was also a problem. As with other less gifted sons of brilliant fathers, to choose the same path was almost to invite humiliation. Even in his lifetime his operas were not greatly esteemed ? they sounded like the work of a Wagner student, Debussy said, ?whom his teacher did not consider very promising? ? and they are now forgotten except as oddities for occasional revival. Siegfried died in 1930, only four months after his mother ? she was 92, he 61 ? but his widow, Winifred, taking after Cosima, outlived him for nearly 50 years. And what years! She had befriended the young Hitler even before his failed 1923 putsch, and he remained close to the Wagners after he came to power 10 years later: the family would use the informal ?du? with the man they called ?Wolf? and treated as an uncle. This alliance was all too natural. Whether or not there is any Jew-baiting subtext to be found in Wagner?s operas is much disputed by scholars, but there is no argument about his personal anti-Semitism, or Cosima?s. The Bayreuth circle was breeding mephitic ultranationalist ideology well before Hitler, notably through the ?scientific? racist theories of another English immigrant, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who married Siegfried?s sister Eva. Under the Third Reich, Bayreuth became a temple of National Socialist art, although the regime was not monolithic in this respect. After Siegfried?s death, the man in Winifred?s life was the conductor and director Heinz Tietjen. Thanks largely to him she became embroiled in cultural politics, in the form of a long duel between Goering and Goebbels for control of musical life. (This story is told in Fred K. Prieberg?s ?Musik im NS-Staat? of 1982, which deserves to be translated.) When war came, it brought diverse fortune to the family. Wolfgang was badly wounded in the Polish campaign, but his sister Friedelind, who was in Switzerland when the war broke out, was briefly interned as an enemy alien in England before traveling to Argentina and then the United States, where she denounced Hitlerism. Or as Goebbels wrote in his diary after Friedelind repeated some remarks Hitler had made about his ally Mussolini: ?This fat wretch has committed out-and-out treason. She?s been extremely badly brought up.? She thereby acquired a virtuous reputation which she may not have entirely deserved. Although Hitler, to Winifred?s bitter regret, never visited Bayreuth after 1940, opera continued to be performed there for audiences largely made up of nurses and wounded soldiers, for whom one can almost feel sorry as they sat baffled through the lengthy works of the Meister. And so to the Götterdämmerung that engulfed the ?Thousand-Year Reich.? In Hamann?s account, a vivid portrait of Winifred emerges: intelligent and handsome, determined and obstinate, and simply horrible. After the war, she went before a de-Nazification tribunal. She denied the rumors that Hitler had been her lover, but was happy to confess to her ?admiration and friendship? for him. She got off with a comparatively lenient sentence, in part because she was able to claim that she had tried to shelter some Jewish colleagues. This was true, but it was always done as a favor ? that softness toward individual Jews that Himmler warned the SS against ? rather than on principle. And a spiteful tone ran through Winifred?s correspondence. Before the war, ?Nagods? in her private language meant Jews; after it, she and her frightful group of impenitent loyalists would refer to ?USA? ? not the land of the free, but unser seliger Adolf, ?our blessed Adolf.? She also said, late in life, that Wagner had wanted only ?to put an end to the intellectual influence of the Jews? and that ?he never had in mind the physical extermination of the Jews?; all that ?one objected to was the Jewish influence on cultural life.? So that?s all right, then. Eager to rehabilitate itself, the family managed to keep Winifred tucked away for decades, although in 1969 she was still deluding herself that ?I?m becoming accepted again.? Then came the grotesque coda. As the festival centenary in 1976 approached, she was asked if she would be interviewed for film by Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, who enlisted the help of her grandson Gottfried. There was undoubtedly an element of deception at work, as Syberberg softened the old lady up while keeping a hidden tape recorder running. But the result was bloodcurdling, as Winifred talked with undimmed love of her friend and Führer, whom she would gladly greet again if he walked through the door. What made it worse was the way she blew away the pretense of contrition by all Germans, not least the Wagners. As punishment, she was banished from the Festspielhaus for a time. Not every page of Hamann?s biography is elegantly written, though this may be the fault of the translation by Alan Bance, which is more accurate than idiomatic. (There are plenty of sentences like ?It really did take a great deal of effort on the part of many well-disposed friends to bring Siegfried close to the haven of marriage at last?; while ?In the final analysis, Winifred had the upper hand? deftly packs two clichés into nine words.) And as gripping as the book is, it?s not pure pleasure to read 500 detailed pages without a single likable or admirable character, at least among the main players. To be sure, there was Berta Geissmar, the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler?s Jewish manager, who was forced to flee to London; or the conductor Fritz Busch, an ?Aryan? who was so appalled by Hitler that he came near to suicide before he too left, to help create the Glyndebourne festival and adorn the Met; or Elisabeth von Thadden, the brave and decent headmistress of a Protestant girls? school, who refused to bend to the regime?s will and was duly executed. And that just about exhausts the list of Good Germans found in this book. There surely aren?t many among the descendants of Richard Wagner, even those who have tried to dissociate themselves from their unhappy legacy. Alas, the legacy just keeps bubbling up. On her 75th birthday, Winifred received a telegram from three of her grandchildren in effect telling her to drop dead. That wasn?t very appealing in any case, but more to the point these were the three daughters of Wieland, whose part in this story turns out to be most startling of all. As the Allied armies approached Bayreuth in February 1945, Wieland tried to escape to Switzerland armed with some of his grandfather?s manuscripts to pay his way. Later, he hid himself away in southern Germany, in the French sector where de-Nazification was taken less seriously than by the Americans or British. In 1951, he and Wolfgang revived Bayreuth, to celebrate Wagner the peace-loving democrat. This always seemed pretty good chutzpah (or whatever they call it in Franconian), although the result was artistically memorable. While Wieland may not have been a truly great director, circumstance obliged him to reform Wagner performance, stripping away the Teutonic encrustations with their unfortunate memories, and relying on bare sets and lighting. It helped that this was a golden age of Wagner singing, as we are vividly reminded by the 1955 Bayreuth ?Ring? under Joseph Keilberth, recently released after 50 years, whose mouth-watering cast ? Astrid Varnay, Wolfgang Windgassen and Hans Hotter ? must make any operagoer today weep with envy. Wieland remained a hero of the German left until his death from cancer in 1966. Now we learn from Hamann that as a boy he kept a puppet theater, where he performed shows with Nazis beating up Jews. He joined the National Socialist Party when he was 21. Then, toward the end of the war, having managed to avoid military service, he was given his very own concentration camp to run near Bayreuth, a ?satellite? labor camp whose memory was erased for decades afterward (and isn?t much paraded in Bayreuth today). In the whole history of denial or imposture, this takes some beating. Over recent years in Germany, there has been a significant turn in opinion about the past. For the first time since 1945, Germans have not simply abased themselves in contrition but instead have begun recalling their own sufferings during the war. Hence Günter Grass?s novel ?Crabwalk,? which begins with the death of thousands of German women and children in a ship escaping the Russians in 1945, or Jörg Friedrich?s book ?The Fire? (published in the United States last December) about the incineration of so many cities and their inhabitants by Allied bombing. Those sufferings were real. But then we may recall Emil Preetorius writing to his friend Thomas Mann: ?No German today has the right to complain. ... Among many questionable German postures, self-pity is the most pathetic.? It?s fair to surmise that few readers will finish Hamann?s book with huge sympathy for Grass or Friedrich. Then again, if the Third Reich taught us anything it was the folly of generalizing about ?races? or nations. By birth, Winifred Wagner was a compatriot of Winston Churchill (and, humbly, myself). So where does that leave us? |