Grotesque as it may sound now, in the Third Reich thousands of women lusted after Adolf Hitler with a fever equal to that of today’s groupies for rock stars. Unable to satisfy their passion directly, they had to settle for bearing babies “for” their führer.
Except, in the rich imagination of British novelist A.N. Wilson, for one. Winifred Wagner, the British-born daughter-in-law of German composer Richard Wagner, he says in “Winnie and Wolf,” gave birth to a daughter sired by Hitler.
Implausible, unlikely, but not entirely impossible. Hitler was not quite the sexual neuter he has been portrayed as, and — a worshipful admirer of Wagner’s operas — he did enjoy her company and even materially support the Wagner opera enterprise at Bayreuth. He affectionately called her Winnie and she, with affection bordering on ardor, called him Wolf.
And so, Wilson says, somehow overcoming the turn-offs of Hitler’s excessive sweating, explosive flatulence and disgusting sexual proclivities, in 1932 she bore a daughter for her dear friend and führer. In real life Winifred must have been an exceptionally adaptable as well as a capable and sensual woman, for she had not let the manifest homosexuality of her husband, Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried (who died in 1930), deter her from giving him two sons and two daughters.
The facts of Winifred’s life — a sickly 9-year-old British orphan named Winifred Marjorie Williams sent in 1907 to Germany to be raised by elderly distant relatives (and Wagner fanatics) — are as fascinating as anything Wilson makes up. They were detailed two years ago in a gripping biography by Austrian historian Brigitte Hamann, which Wilson seems to have absorbed along with a small library of Germanic and Wagnerian studies. He has the history of Weimar and the Third Reich down cold (and does not always successfully mask his knowingness).
At 58, Wilson must be the hardest working man in British letters, not to mention the most prolific. Whether it is his early Christian-themed novels or the five-volume Lampitt Chronicles series or the half-dozen other novels or the many biographies and other nonfiction works, he rarely fails to satisfy.
Nor does he here. “Winnie and Wolf” is told in the first-person as a sort-of booklength letter to the daughter, named Senta, by her adoptive father, referred to only as N—–, who in the 1920s and ’30s had been an assistant to Siegfried and then Winifred and thus often in Hitler’s presence.
The letter, written in the early 1960s in East Germany, reveals to Senta her astonishing biological heritage, which had been kept secret even from Hitler. When the reader learns of the letter, it has been in Senta’s possession since the early 1980s. Living in the Seattle area but recently deceased (2006), she had taken to calling herself Winifred Hiedler.
Wilson, through N—–, makes a distinction between “Wolf” (Winnie’s darling, the benevolent and beloved “uncle” to the Wagner children) and “H” (the mass-murdering dictator). If a number of things had been different, N—– says, Hitler “might have been transformed into an amiable old gentleman,” though he knows that “this view of mine is totally at various with everything people now believe.”
“Winnie and Wolf” is a remarkable effort, simultaneously dazzling and sluggish. Wilson pulls off a daring risk in seeking to humanize an unspeakable monster by giving him a domestic life and a mundane past, because he realizes that to explain is not to exonerate. But he moves so laboriously through his novel of ideas-become-action that the reader wants to scream with impatience.
In sections named after Wagner operas, the author reflects upon Wagner’s importance to the Third Reich. Bitter ironies arise. The Nazis persecute Jews and homosexuals, yet, Winnie tells Wolf, at Bayreuth “half the chorus are pansies and one-quarter of the orchestra is Jewish.”
Winnie is here, as in Hamann’s biography, more silly than sinister, mouthing anti-Semitic idiocies while working desperately to rescue individual Jews. Borrowing a phrase from the biography, N—– says she is guilty of “punishable stupidity.”
This is not the first fictional depiction of Hitler, nor the first fictional child he has had. Five years ago Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch published “Siegfried,” another novel of ideas, in which Hitler had a son of that name born of Eva Braun and raised by an Austrian couple.
Whether the device of a secret son or daughter captures the “true” Hitler no one can say. At the least it gives us a glimpse of him and his surroundings from perspective we might not otherwise have taken.
Roger K. Miller, a former newspaperman, is a novelist and freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
Fiction
Winnie and Wolf by A.N. Wilson, $25
