ABSTRACT
Brigitte Hamann's Winifred Wagner oder Hitlers Bayreuth is a follow up to her very successful book, Hitler's Vienna. Hamann's straightforwardly narrative style, which sometimes veers off into the picaresque, is partly responsible for this, but it is a sober style which cannot explain the sometimes sensationalist aspects of the book. Hamann also develops with a great deal of sympathy Winifred's travails during the Second World War and in its devastating aftermath. To Wieland's children, Winifred was known as the "monster." Hamann shows how in many ways Winifred was an unfair dismissal of a complicated and even decent figure. However, "monster" is not so far off the mark. Hamann's account of Winifred Wagner demonstrates the close, historical connections between authoritarian German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and Wagnerism, at least as it was practiced in Bayreuth. Winifred Wagner's behavior—especially during the war—in some ways closely parallels E.M. Forster's privileging of the personal over the political.
