NEW SOLIDARITY

April 8, 1980

Page 4

The Strange Case of Winifred Wagner

by Dennis Speed

Britain's creature Richard Wagner (inset) and the Bayreuth festival he created.

To have met [Hitler] is an experience that l would not have missed in my life." Winifred Wagner, in a 1975 interview.

Anyone who has not yet understood how the Nazi phenomenon was controlled by British intelligence has only to consider the strange case of Winifred Wagner who died March 5. Stating that Wagner and his family were fascists is no news, but the British input into "German" fascism via the Wagners is usually downplayed. Richard Wagner started his career by setting Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel, Rienzi, to music and journeyed to London to consult (apparently unsuccessfully) with Bulwer-Lytton prior to writing the opera. Lytton, a top British intellectual and intelligence operative who directed the assassination of Edgar Allan Poe, was also the author of a book entitled Vrill, the Coming of the Master Race. Wagner Against America Wagner was deployed by the British to attempt to sever the well-known connection between the American Revolution and Beethoven and Mozart. Wagner contended that the Schiller "Ode to Joy," the basis of the choral finale in Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, was inessential to the body of "pure music" of the Ninth Symphony. Yet Beethoven took over ten years to set the German poet Schiller's text, written in honor of Benjamin Franklin, to music. The British effort to establish Wagner's racist "Volk"-music as "German" in opposition to the universalist tradition of Beethoven was intended to introduce "cultural relativism" into the arts and was an aspect of the British attempt to destroy the European-American link that was forged by the Society of Cincinnatus and continued by American intelligence operative Poe. Wagner's son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, was the author of Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and the leading exponent of the theory of the Aryan master race. Chamberlain was the personal advisor to kook-cultist Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany before the First World War, and convinced the Kaiser to pursue that genocidal conflict in the interest of the master race. About Wagner he states: "I find many points of contact between the Wagner-Schiller (sic) mode of thought and the anarchism of Proudhon." Chamberlain declared Hitler to be the Anti-Christ in 1923. It was his cousin, Neville Chamberlain, who willingly gave Hitler a significant portion of Eastern Europe until the Fhrer slipped out of British control in the late 1930s.

"Uncle Adolf" The Englishwoman Winifred married Wagner's son Siegfried in 1915 and with him was in charge of setting up the cult-orgy known as the Bayreuth Festival. Bayreuth, a huge theater built for Wagner in the latter half of the 19th century to accomodate the production of the "Ring" cycle, had functioned from that time on as the center of political liaisons and deployment of the cult "intelligentsia" around Wagner and fascist philosopher Nietzsche. The festivals, held regularly in Bayreuth, thus became the nexus point for introducing and legitimizing the cult ideas and symbology to the rest of Germany and Europe as a whole. It was the fascist ideology, popularized and spread from this center, which eventually was used by the Hitler movement. Rather unrestrained in her admiration for Hitler, Winifred personally ran Bayreuth from 1930 until 1944, when the Allies put a stop to the festival. Hitler was a frequenter to her home "Wahnfried," the Wagner estate, and her sons referred to him as "Uncle Adolf." Arrested in 1947, Winifred reminisced for the New York Times, "Adolf always wanted to sing opera." Her son Wieland, under her direction, personally conducted Wagner's racist opera Parsifal for Hitler in 1937. The fact that the old lady as late as 1975 "still believed in the final victory of the Fhrer" and was therefore somewhat of an embarrassment to the rest of the family, led son Wolfgang to ban her from the festival (reestablished in 1951). After this, she gave an interview and made a documentary in which she declared, "At any time, I can distinguish between the Hitler that I knew and the Fhrer who is today the subject of general opprobrium. To have met him is an experience that I would not have missed in my life." In this context, one vomits at the idea of a Leonard Bernstein conducting Wagner at the Bayreuth Festival under the direction of grandson Wolfgang Wagner. It is best to bury these tools of British-inspired fascism and kookery once and for all, and let the poor human race mourn only the fact that such creatures were ever born.