Gottfried Wagner, great-grandson of the composer Richard Wagner and son of the former director of the Bayreuth Festival Wolfgang Wagner, already called for an honest and independent appraisal of the Wagner clan´s Nazi past in his autobiography in 1997. This summer, his sister Katharina Wagner finally announced it to be in process.
“He who doesn’t howl with the wolf” revealed the sustained delusion of one of Germany’s most illustrious families when it was published in 1997: The proclaimed democratic recommencement in “New Bayreuth” in the post-war period did never occur. The Wagner clan’s love of the “Führer” was followed after 1945 by suppression and glorification. There was a refusal to examine the heavily burdened Wagner heritage. And the family’s secret admiration of Adolf Hitler, “Uncle Wolf”, continued. Breaking with the Wagner cult and his father Wolfgang, who glossed over the past and reigned autocratically over the “Green Hill” until 2008, was only the first step for Gottfried Wagner. His preoccupation with anti-Semitism, which had already been initiated by the heroicised opera titan, finally took him to Israel, and to the victims of the Holocaust.
Published in 1997, the book became an international bestseller and triggered an avalanche of opposing opinions in hundreds of reviews and media reports. In his new afterword, the author writes about his most recent activities relating to the dialogue between Jews and Germans. He also expresses his wish that, after the new directors of the festival announced all correspondence between Hitler and the Wagners from 1923 to 1945 to be made public, the years of suppression and deception in Bayreuth will finally be brought to an end.
