Background
Winifred Wagner was born in Hastings as Winifred Williams, on 23 June 1897.
Winifred Wagner was born in Hastings as Winifred Williams, on 23 June 1897.
Winifred first met Adolf Hitler (an ardent admirer of Wagner’s music) in 1923 at a time when he was still an aspiring political agitator. During his imprisonment after the unsuccessful Munich putsch, Winifred sent him food parcels and the paper on which Mein Kampf was written. Henceforth her loyalty to Hitler and Nazism never wavered.
In 1930 when both Siegfried and the aged Cosima (wife of Richard Wagner) died, the thirty-three-year-old Winifred found herself mistress of the Festspielhaus. During the Third Reich she turned it into a cultural shrine, one of the annual highlights of the Nazi calendar and the glory of the German opera season. By 1933 her relationship with Hitler had grown so intimate that there were even rumours of a marriage. Haus Wahnfried, the Wagner home in Bayreuth, became the Chancellor’s favourite retreat from the cares of State. Hitler, who regarded himself as patron of the annual festival (it received generous government assistance and was completely exempt from taxes), remained a close friend of the family and treated Winifred’s children as his own.
In Albert Speer’s words ‘he was gay, paternal to the children, friendly and solicitous towards Winifred Wagner'. No doubt this had a great deal to do with his hero-worship of Richard Wagner, whom Hitler acknowledged as a major intellectual influence and whose music reigned supreme during the Third Reich - lending itself perfectly to Nazi myth-making. Bayreuth and Wagnerian art served as an epic ritual or secular cult of German nationalism, of Nordic self-realization, völkisch creation and visions of grandeur. Like Hitler, Winifred Wagner believed profoundly in these values and in Nazism as the fulfilment of her father-in-law’s aesthetic ideals.
After the collapse of the Third Reich, she was forbidden, among other things, to run the Bayreuth Festival, which she made over to her sons Wieland and Wolfgang. In 1975 she broke her long silence in a marathon filmed interview with Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, where she appeared utterly unrepentant concerning the past. Her political view remained unbending, but what was more striking was her love for Hitler, the man who had always shown unfailing Herzenstakt. To have met him', Frau Wagner declared, ‘is an experience I would not have missed.'
After having lost both her parents before the age of two, she was adopted eight years later by a distant German relative of her mother’s, Karl Klindworth, a musician who had been an early supporter and friend of Richard Wagner. In 1914 he took his seventeen- year-old ward for the first time to the Bayreuth Festival.
A year later she was married to Siegfried Wagner, the forty-five-year-old son of the famous composer.