Wagner Jr won’t let curtains fall on Nazi ties

BAYREUTH (GERMANY), July 28: Richard Wagner's operas celebrate the triumph and tragedy of mythical Germanic heroes, with bold, stirring mus...

BAYREUTH (GERMANY), July 28: Richard Wagner’s operas celebrate the triumph and tragedy of mythical Germanic heroes, with bold, stirring music such as “The ride of the Valkyries.”

Among those inspired by the Teutonic dramas was Adolf Hitler. The composer’s heirs would rather forget that fact, but his great-grandson won’t let them.In a soul-baring autobiography, Gottfried Wagner charges that the family has yet to come clean about its anti-semitic past and warm kinship with Der Fuehrer.

The book has rattled the cozy world of Bayreuth, where Wolfgang Wagner, Gottfried’s estranged 77-year-old father, rules the annual Wagner Opera Festival that began last week.

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Gottfried Wagner, wracked by guilt about the holocaust, is not alone among Germans of his generation to rebel against a father who glided smoothly from the third Reich into the post-war era. It’s his family link with a national cultural icon that has caused the fuss.

“You can’t just go out and write one-sided books that say Hitler equals Wagner, Wagner equals Hitler,” the elder Wagner angrily told a news conference on Saturday. “I will continue to go my way.”

He called the book “primitive” and said he has banned his son from the family home in Bayreuth, a town in the rolling hills of eastern Bavaria, where Richard Wagner built a stage for his operas in the 1870s.

Gottfried traces a line from Hitler and the holocaust to Richard Wagner’s anti-semitic writings, notably aimed at Jewish rival composers and perceived anti-Jewish themes in his work.

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“And Wolfgang Wagner,” he says, “failed to renounce the virulent anti-semitism of his mother, Winifred, an admirer of Hitler, who headed the Bayreuth Festival under the Nazis, in the 1930s.

During her reign, Hitler helped fund the festival and meddled in artistic decisions.

“Such details were suppressed to keep the family enterprise going after the Nazi defeat in World War II,” Gottfried Wagner argues.

His first glimpse at the past came when he was nine years old, during his secret explorations of the brick-and-stone opera house. He found dusty photographs of his family posing with with Hitler and books on racial theory.

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Later, a stash of films he found in a shed revealed happy scenes of his grandmother with the Fuehrer and a festival audience united in the stiff-arm Nazi salute. Wolfgang Wagner had been behind the camera. But Gottfried says his father brushed off questions about the Nazis.

The keeper of the faith after the war was Winifred, inviting widows of top Nazis to Bayreuth, where she now spoke of “Hitler as USA”, meaning Unser Seliger Adolf, or Our blessed Adolf.”

She dismissed the holocaust as “lies and insults” and told her grandson to go ask the “New York Jews” for money when he struggled as an opera director, Gottfried says.