What Winnie did with Hitler

Winnie and Wolf: A Novel
by A.N. Wilson

In her infamous five-hour ‘confession’ filmed by Hans-Jurgen Syberberg in 1975, Wagner’s English-born daughter-in-law Winifred talked openly and unashamedly about her close friendship with Hitler and his support for the Bayreuth Festival, which she personally managed throughout the Third Reich. When Syberberg confronts her with the rumours that she and the Führer had a sexual relationship, she pooh-poohs the idea, and her candour is persuasive. Brigitte Hamann’s authoritative 2002 biography confirms her denial (though the letters the two exchanged remain locked away).

A.N. Wilson’s deeply clever and gripping new historical novel thinks otherwise, however. Here Winnie and Wolf (the name by which Hitler was affectionately known among the Wagner family) do dally in the bedroom, and Wilson even invents a daughter of their union, farmed out to an orphanage and then adopted by another fictional character, Winifred’s male secretary, who tells the whole story, purportedly written to the child in order to inform her of her biological parentage.

Wilson’s nameless narrator tells Winnie’s tale from a sympathetic angle — even after his crush on her has faded, and he is retrospectively appalled at the way he was brushed by the glamour of Nazism and Hitler’s personal charisma, he cannot stop himself admiring the magnanimity, honesty, loyalty and forceful character of someone who joined the Nazi party but played no part in anti-Semitic persecution or other atrocities, and whose sole active concern was the independence of Bayreuth from Nazi rules and prohibitions. When it came to her festival, the party could go hang, and she had no inhibitions about petitioning Hitler (often successfully) on behalf of those who fell foul of the regime if they were useful to the Wagnerian cause.

The novel is rich in other characters, all vividly presented and immaculately researched — aside from his central fictional premise, Wilson does not play games with the facts.