The great-granddaughter of Richard Wagner, Adolf Hitler’s favorite composer, has vowed to investigate her family’s links with the Nazis in a move that could be bitterly opposed by other members of the dynasty.
Katharina Wagner, 31, an opera stage-director, feels she has a duty to do what previous generations have avoided.
“When I was growing up, I was repeatedly confronted with this topic,” she said. “Was my grandmother Hitler’s lover? To what extent was my father embroiled with Hitler? No one in the family ever spoke about it. If my sister and I don’t ask the questions, who then will?”
PHOTO: EPA
Nine months ago, Katharina took over as co-director of the Bayreuth Festival, which started 133 years ago to showcase Wagner’s work. She has introduced several changes with a view to opening up the event to the masses, including podcasts and giant TV screens, but last week’s announcement that she plans to invite a team of researchers to lay bare the show’s Nazi connections is her most controversial move yet.
“There’s a shadow hanging over Bayreuth, and I feel a responsibility to try to get some clarity,” Katharina said.
She said she wanted “independent, renowned historians, and not only those with an affinity to Bayreuth” to carry out their investigations “independently of me and my family.”
Wagner, who took over as festival co-director with her half-sister, Eva Wagner-Pasquier, after a lengthy family feud, said she expected some opposition from members of the clan. However, she said that the private archives of her father Wolfgang would also be open to scrutiny, suggesting he favored her initiative.
Hitler supported the festival long before he became a political force and befriended Winifred Wagner, the British-born wife of the composer’s son Siegfried. This connection allowed the festival to remain largely independent during the Third Reich and after the war led to Winifred’s conviction for supporting the Nazis.
Katharina said that “every nook and cranny” of the festival’s archives needed to be raked through.
She made the announcement a month before she opens the festival with Wagner-Pasquier for the first time since they took over from Wolfgang Wagner, who ran the show for 54 years but was often accused of a lack of innovation.
The leadership battle was one of the longest and fiercest feuds in the world of classical music, with Katharina’s cousin, Nike, also contesting the post.
Katharina’s announcement about the investigation has attracted as much attention in the German press as did her artistic plans for the program on the “Green Hill,” as Bayreuth is affectionately known.
There is some doubt as to whether an investigation will throw any new light on the role of the Nazis and how the Wagner clan courted Hitler, experts said.
Katharina herself said she did not know what to expect and that, “although the topic has been dealt with, it has clearly not been dealt with extensively enough.”
Wolfgang Schreiber, a critic for the Suddeutsche Zeitung, said: “We can hardly expect anything particularly mind-blowing to emerge from this, because Bayreuth’s ideological past is a well ploughed field.”
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
CONFIDENCE BOOSTER: ’After parkour ... you dare to do a lot of things that you think only young people can do,’ a 67-year-old parkour enthusiast said In a corner of suburban Singapore, Betty Boon vaults a guardrail, crawls underneath a slide, executes forward shoulder rolls and scales a steep slope, finishing the course to applause. “Good job,” the 69-year-old’s coach cheers. This is “geriatric parkour,” where about 20 retirees learned to tackle a series of relatively demanding exercises, building their agility and enjoying a sense of camaraderie. Boon, an upbeat grandmother, said learning parkour has aided her confidence and independence as she ages. “When you’re weak, you will be dependent on someone,” she said after sweating it out with her parkour classmates in suburban Toa Payoh,
Chinese dissident artist Gao Zhen (高兟), famous for making provocative satirical sculptures of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東), was tried on Monday over accusations of “defaming national heroes and martyrs,” his wife and a rights group said. Gao, 69, who was detained in 2024 during a visit from the US, faces a maximum three-year prison sentence, said his wife, Zhao Yaliang (趙雅良), and Shane Yi, a researcher at the Chinese Human Rights Defenders group which operates outside the nation. The closed-door, one-day trial took place at Sanhe City People’s Court in Hebei Province neighboring the capital, Beijing, and ended without a
‘TOXIC CLIMATE’: ‘I don’t really recognize Labour anymore... The idea that you can implement far-right ideas in order to stop the far right is nonsense,’ a protester said Tens of thousands of people on Saturday marched through central London to protest against the far right, weeks ahead of local elections and six months after Britain saw one of its largest far-right demonstrations. Organized by hundreds of civic groups, including trade unions, anti-racism campaigners and Muslim representative bodies, Saturday’s Together Alliance event was billed as the biggest in UK history to counter right-wing extremism. A separate pro-Palestinian march had also converged with the main rally. While organizers claimed 500,000 had turned out in total, the police gave a figure of about 50,000. Protesters carrying placards with slogans such as
RSS