Book description
Winnie and Wolf is the story of the extraordinary relationship
between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler that took place during the
years 1923-40, as seen through the eyes of the secretary at the Wagner
house in Bayreuth.
Winifred, an English girl, brought up in an orphanage in East
Grinstead, married at the age of eighteen to the son of Germany's most
controversial genius, is a passionate Germanophile, a Wagnerian
dreamer, a Teutonic patriot.
In the debacle of the post-Versailles world, the Wagner family hope
for the coming, not of a warrior, a fearless Siegfried, but of a
Parsifal, a mystic idealist, a redeemer-figure. In 1923, they meet
their Parsifal - a wild-eyed Viennese opera-fanatic in a trilby hat, a
mac and a badly fitting suit. Hitler has already made a name for
himself in some sections of German society through rabble-rousing and
street corner speeches. It is Winifred, though, who believes she can
really see his poetry. Almost at once they drop formalities and call
one another 'Du' rather than 'Sie'. She is Winnie and he is Wolf.
Like Winnie, Hitler was an outsider. Like her, he was haunted by the
impossibility of reconciling the pursuit of love and the pursuit of
power; the ultimate inevitability, if you pursued power, of
destruction. Both had known the humiliations of poverty. Both felt
angry and excluded by society. Both found each other in an unusual
kinship that expressed itself through a love of opera.
A. N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College,
Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he has held a
prominent position in the world of literature and journalism. He is an
award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist, winning prizes for
much of his work. He lives in North London.
