Bayreuth plans Nazi documentation centre
OrchestrasThe town of Bayreuth is planning a Nazi documentation centre. It will be housed in the former mansion of the British antisemitic polemicist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a significant influence on Adolf Hitler.
The planned centre is a municipal act of remembrance for which the town has allocated 11.5 million Euros. It has nothing to do with the Bayreuth Festival or its governing Wagner family, which avoid acts of self-reflection.
‘The Wahnfried House has always been anti-Semitic,’ says Sven Friedrich, director of the Wagner Museum Bayreuth and co-initiator of the NS Documentation Centre.
pictured: Hitler with Furtwängler, backstage in Bayreuth
Norman, you neglect to mention the rather remarkable Denkmal on the Festspielhaus grounds, featuring homages/tributes to the many Jewish artists who contributed their gifts and skills to the festival. Those who were later executed were commemorated with individual memorials; those who were banned but survived the worst share their stones of rememberances with others. Hardly an avoidance of self-reflection, and thanks largely to Katharina Wagner. The museum at Haus Wahnfried is likewise honest in its presentations of the Nazi era.
To be sure – the exhibition on anti-semitism in Bayreuth you rightfully point out as being culturally significant is sponsored by the city, not the Festspiel. By using public land (not land actually managed by the Festspiel), the city forced this exhibition into close proximity of of the Festspielhaus.
I may be misinterpreting, but this story seems to present the Documentation Centre as a bad thing. There are Nazi Documentation Centres in other parts of Germany, including Nuremberg, which lay out what went on there during the Nazi regime. They are all publicly funded and represent admissions.
Is it not possible that that is precisely what is aimed at in Bayreuth, and using the building in question may help erase its former associations? And is is not possible that the role of the Festival and the role of specific members of the Wagner family will be addressed in the Centre?
Surely the members of the Wagner family who associated with Hitler are all dead. The notion that the existing family avoids all acts of self-reflection seems like an accusation that includes the contention that children are responsible for the sins of their forbears. An attitude responsible for a lot of the wars both historical and current.
It’s also worth pointing out yet again that the real Nazis in the Wagner family were British: Winifred and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, both of whom were close to Hitler at different times in their lives. Siegfried and Adolf didn’t care for each other, and what were the children supposed to do?
Ease up on the Germans in the Wagner family, they’ve had enough of a bad rap.
In general I agree with the comments of V. Lind and Anthony Sayer. Yet there is one outstanding issue regarding the Wagner family that makes it somewhat difficult to include everyone in that family. As I understand it, Winifred’s granddaughter Amélie Hohmann still refuses to permit the handing over of voluminous correspondence – which has been termed “explosive” – between Winifred and Hitler. Might this be because Amélie’s mother, Verena (Siegfried and Winifred’s daughter), was strongly linked to the Nazi hierarchy as a result of her marriage to SS Obersturmbahnnführer Bodo Laferentz? Apparently all four branches of the Wagner family have to agree to the release of the correspondence. Given the often fractious relationships within that extended family, it seems agreement has so far not proved possible. What does that correspondence hide? Until that is known, surely the family as a whole remains tainted to some degree with its Nazi past.
Decent point, but Winifred’s infatuation with Hitler has never been a secret and Verena has long been known as possibly the most unreconstructed of her four children. It’s also hard to imagine what explosive truths the correspondance could contain beyond repositing the theory the two were lovers. I don’t see why or how Katharina should anyone for any of this.
I’m inclined to agree. Winifred’s infatuation with Hitler is not news; some think she hoped to marry him. Others have claimed and I believe documented that she was opposed to his policy on the Jews, and in fact interceded — successfully — on behalf of some individual Jewish friends.
None of that excuses her continuing devotion to him — she may have disagreed with his Jewish policies but that did not stop him implementing them, which she could hardly have failed to know.
But for her grandchildren’s’ situation, it is surely believable that they wish to be dissociated with all this and to move on? Do they have to be placed on the front lines of a huge anti-Semitic story at a time when active anti-Semitism is on the rise in Europe (and elsewhere), and when they as a family have done nothing, as far as I know, to perpetuate the attitudes of their forbears?
I understand scholarly interest in the letters, but it could very easily be abused. The main focus of Bayreuth is to concentrate on and present the music of Wagner, which is too valuable to lose. The family has sought to do this for decades, and the last of the nastier elements of the family has passed away. Possibly these letters could wait a generation.
Both above comments make assumptions that there is virtually nothing in those letters which is not now in the public domain. Fair point. But why then is Amelie still holding out against the other branches of the family? If those letters are so relatively innocent, what is holding her back from agreeing to their release? It may be something which the world would now regard as relatively innocent. Maybe she is only trying to protect her father’s name. But until their release, historians and others are left to guess. Lack of transparency only encourages conspiracy theories
I doubt the letters are “innocent” — Amélie herself has referred to them as “potentially explosive.” Which does not mean there is anything new in them.
Their release would focus a lot of unpleasant attention on Bayreuth and the truly innocent Wagner descendents, like Katherina.
The potential for misuse by the rising number of open anti-Semites is another concern, though I doubt it is what is holding up Amélie.
Atone. Autocarrot again.
Chamberlain had no influence on Richard Wagner because he only began writing after Wagner’s death, in the nineties of the 19th century.
Just to be clear.
Also it should be remembered that Wagner’s antisemitism was a cultural critique clothed in racial terms, a very stupid thing to think. As if this was not nasty enough, his family and followers laid it on much thicker and that is where Chamberlain came into the picture, a stupid and nasty man who had nothing better at his hands.
HSC had an influence on Hitler though, whom he met at Wahnfried. Ever read his Grundlagen des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts?
I keep the tome on the shelf to be read by my PA as punishment if she ever is impertinent again.
With a 1,350% increase in hate crimes against Jewish people in London over the last 12 months, I find it difficult to get worked up all over again about the Wagner family.
I have an amusing Bayreuth story which has never been published. At the end of World War II, my grandfather’s best friend, Captain Jacob “Jack” Matis, a Jewish army officer and later cardiologist was put in charge of the administrative functions of the town of Bayreuth. He was a physician at the large 120th U.S. Army Station hospital there. At some point after 1945, the Wagners were allowed to come back to examine Wahnfried which had sustained damage and it was well known by that point that the Wagners were complicit with the Nazis. Jack was quick as a whip and also had a sardonic sense of humor and arranged for a black GI to play boogey woogey on Wagner’s Steinway when the family arrived. While I cannot prove that it happened, the stories he told that I’ve been able to check all turn out to be true, so I have no reason to not believe this story he told me one day 30 years ago. I’ve never repeated it before, but I think this article is just the right place for it.