June 20



GERMANY:

'German-Jewish history more than just Holocaust'


In Luebeck, the prime minister for the German state of Schleswig-Holstein,
Peter Harry Carstensen, on Sunday called for German-Jewish history to be
viewed as more than the history of the Holocaust.

Speaking at a ceremony marking the 125 anniversary of Luebeck's synagogue,
Carstensen said the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis during World War II
was not the sum total of German-Jewish interaction.

The Luebeck synagogue was first dedicated on June 10, 1880 and was the
only synagogue in Schleswig-Holstein that was not destroyed by Germany's
rightwing National Socialist party.

The Vice President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Charlotte

Knoblauch, also said Germans and Jews were bound by a common spiritual and
cultural history.

"The destruction of the synagogues in 1938 ended the most fruitful part of
German-Jewish history," she said. "But Jewish culture must not be reduced
to the time of its annihilation."

German President Hoerst Koehler in a written greeting, said the
celebration was a sign that it was possible for persons of different
persuasions to live together in Germany.

Among the attendees of the ceremony was Salomon Carlebach, the grandson of
one of the synagogue's founders.

Carlebach, who lives in Israel, said that until 1933, when Hitler came to
power, his grandfather like other rabbis and members of the Jewish
community was a highly respected citizen of Luebeck.

The Luebeck Jewish community today numbers around 700 persons, most of
whom are immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

(source: Expatica)



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'Formative Nazis trading on a famous surname'


THERE ARE almost as many books about the Wagner family as there are about
the composer himself. Why read about a nasty clan of nonentities who keep
banning one another from the family shrine? Because there is a strong
suspicion that the Wagners contributed to the greatest atrocity of modern
times. Brigitte Hamann's new biography of Winifred Wagner, the composer's
English-born daughter-in-law, brings to light fresh evidence of the
family's involvement with Hitler and its complicity in his crimes.

It took ingenuity - as the Wagners squirrelled away their papers and
refuse access to outsiders - but Hamann, a Viennese scholar, laid hands on
Winnie's letters to her best Nazi girlfriend and, with other sources, has
assembled a dossier strong enough to have landed several Wagners in the
Nuremberg dock.

Winifred was an outsider. Adopted as an orphan by a pair of Wagner
worshipp-ers, she was presented in 1915, at 18, for marriage to the
Master's only son, Siegfried, a homosexual of 46. Her role was to make
babies and help "Fidi" take over the Bayreuth Festival from his mother,
Cosima. This was no easy task, as the war had wiped out the family savings
- they blamed the Jews.

By 1921, with no resumption in sight, Fidi toned down his virulent
anti-Semitism to court funds from Jewish Wagnerians in Europe and the US.
Back home, he mingled with rabid nationalists. In September 1923 Adolf
Hitler visited the family to pay homage to his favourite composer. Winnie
and Fidi went to Munich to witness Hitler's putsch and later sent him
goodies in prison. The festival reopened in 1924 and Hitler came the
following summer, seeing a full Ring cycle, Parsifal and Mastersingers. He
bonded with the Wagners, who called him "Wolf". When Fidi died in August
1930, Winnie took over the festival with Hitler as her consultant.

To please Hitler, Winnie booked his favourite conductor, Wilhelm
Furtwngler. When Hitler became Fhrer in 1933, Winnie, facing a shortfall
on ticket sales due to the ban on Jews, appealed to Goebbels, who sent her
packing. Hitler then ordered Nazi organisations to bulk-buy tickets at
full price, a subsidy that continued throughout the Third Reich - but for
Hitler, Bayreuth would have gone bankrupt. Under his patronage, it became
part of the Nuremberg rallies. Until the Second World War, he was a
regular, meddling with the casts, mingling with the family.

Relations cooled after Winnie's daughter, Friedelind, fled to America and
made anti-Nazi broadcasts, but Hitler remained attached to Winnie's sons,
Wieland and Wolfgang, and conspired with them to oust their mum and
Tietjen.

Wieland, whose middle name was Adolf, was in contact with Hitler until
February 1945. With his brother-in-law Bodo he set up a concentration camp
near the festival grounds to manufacture parts for flying bombs. The
Wagners employed slave labour and set up a gallows in the yard. Wieland
was named governor of the camp. After the war, its SS guards were put on
trial but the Wagners escaped unpunished.

When denazification came, Winifred was banned from running the festival
and her two sons took over, just as Hitler intended. The festival,
reopened in 1951, became a gathering for relics of Hitler's circle.
Wieland attacked his mother in the press as "a former leading Nazi" while
protesting his own political innocence. Wolfgang raised funds for the
enterprise from old Nazis and steel magnates.

After Wieland's death in 1966, Wolfgang barred his children from the
succession. Later he banned the son and daughter of his own first marriage
in favour of his lastborn child, Katharine.

While Wieland had been a competent stage director and enlightened manager,
Wolfgang was a plodder, a thick-skinned autocrat. In 1973, the town of
Bayreuth bought the festival theatre, its archives and the Wagner home for
12.4 million Deutschmarks (about 4 million at the time), but Wolfgang runs
the festival to this day as his private fiefdom. If the Bavarian
authorities have any respect for public probity they will move swiftly on
his death to suspend the intended succession.

The Wagners, as Hamann confirms, have shed nothing but shame on their
ancestor's ideals. They were formative Nazis, active SS men and
unregenerate acceptors of post-war Nazi gold. They were also creative
nullities, trading on a famous surname. Their family saga is no sillier
than most TV soaps, except that it involves crimes against humanity.
Hamann has provided the fullest indictment so far of Wagner family guilt.
The reckoning cannot be deferred indefinitely. Only when the festival is
removed from family hands will its wicked past be fully purged. I won't
set foot in the place until there is evidence of regime change.

Winifred Wagner: A Life at the Heart of Hitler's Bayreuth by Brigitte
Hamann is published by Granta Books, price 30.

(source: The Scotsman)