Winnie And Wolf [Hardcover]

This is the first novel I've read by A N Wilson, and it won't be the last. He has taken on an immense subject--German history, culture and philosophy in the last two centuries, and the roots of Nazism--and has drawn from it an affecting and engrossing book which I found hard to put down. The initial idea is a startling one--Hitler had an illegitimate daughter by Winifred Wagner, the Welsh wife of Wagner's son, and the Director of Wagner's festival theatre at Bayreuth during the Thirties. But what makes this idea tenable is the framing device--we are told in the introduction that this is a manuscript found by an American pastor after the daughter's death, and translated from the German. Even the pastor does not know if it is true, a fiction, or a hoax. That framing device allows Wilson to play some audacious games with history (as well as to allow his supposedly German narrator to fall into some glaring Americanisms!). All that stops this novel getting five stars is its tendency to lapse into long sections of fairly undigested Wagner history--but even then Wilson has the get-out that it is his narrator that is being boring, not Wilson himself! Thomas Mann pulls off the same trick with his famously tedious narrator in 'Dr Faustus', a much greater book, but one with which 'Winnie and Wolf' can stand comparison.

Some say that so much has been written about the Second World War that novels covering this period only regurgitate old material. However this intimate and very specific novel offers a completely new view on certain events in Hitler's rise. The responses to his blossoming regime by the people (jews and gentiles alike) around him are particularly interesting. All this is set against a background narration of the stormy and emotional Wagner family saga. It is beautifully written.

It is tempting to start the review of Winnie and Wolf by saying that if you like Wagner, Nietsche and Nazis then this is the book for you. That's because Wolf isn't the middle aged Gladiator who always lost, it's Adolf Hitler. Hello Hitler!

Seriously, dropping Hitler into a work of fiction is a difficult thing to do. On the one hand, you have a name which is synonymous with genocide, and on the other hand there is the risk that portraying him as human will lead to Springtime For Hitler bad taste comedy. In Winnie and Wolf, we learn from AN Wilson that Hitler, bless his apple cheeks, was very good with children, loved cherry and cream cake, and was a bit of an opera geek. It's clear which side of the dilemma AN Wilson has fallen. To an extent, the potential poor taste is ameliorated by referring to Hitler throughout as either Wolf, when he is with the Wagners, or H when he is in public. Thus, we don't get sidetracked by seeing the Hitler name on page after page. This, to an extent, permits a more human portrayal to be given.

So, the novel itself sets out in some detail the life of the Wagners - Richard, son Siegfried, daughter in law Winnie and the whole clan. And it seems that Hitler is Winnie's best friend, never away from their family home in Bayreuth. Meanwhile, the Wagners have set up Bayreath as the centre for Wagnerian operatic performance, providing a steady stream of itenierant and dissident musicians. Many of these lead charmed lives as Hitler's friendship with Winnie allows her to bypass the normal Aryan employment laws. The novel is narrated by N_____, who appears to be a close friend of the Wagners, and it takes the form of an extended letter to Hitler and Winnie's love child, who has been raised by N_____ as an orphan (the two of them have found themselves on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain).

The novel does go into some detail of operatic theory and wider German philosophy. This might allow Wagnerian scholars to see marvellous parallels between the lives in the novel and Richard Wagner's great works. But if such parallels existed, they were rather lost on me. Instead, for my own reading, I saw a portrayal of some rather lonely and offensive people, struggling to find love, with a backdrop of pretty uncritical Nazism. There was token relief from the anti-Semitism in the form of N_____'s family, wife and latterly N_____ himself does seem to acknowledge that there were some unacceptable murders. But nevertheless, the conclusion is left that life under the Nazi's was pretty good for most of the people, and had Hitler only stopped short of seizing lands that had never been German, it might have all worked out. Certainly, N______ finds that life under the communists is rather inferior to a life under national socialism.

Winnie and Wolf also allows some insight into the minds of the architects of the Nazi movement - rehearsing the oft paraded lines that had Germany not been brought to its knees after World War I then there would have been no impetus for a nationalist regime. There is solid detailing of the aristocratic lifestyle of the old money in southern Germany, and the impact that inflation had in eroding savings but not social class. And there was a fair bit about Wagner and opera (did I mention that?).

The challenge of Winnie and Wolf is not in the writing - it is well written and quite engrossing, except in the worst excesses of operatic theory. The issue is whether the world really needed a humanising of Adolf Hitler. I suspect that events of 1939-45 are still too recent to allow for a comfortable and impartial take on Hitler's personal style. One cannot question the quality of the work in front of us, but one can certainly question just why AN Wilson thought we needed this novel.