Winnie and Wolf: A Novel - Softcover

Wilson, A. N.

3.3

164 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312428626 ISBN 13: 9780312428624

Publisher: Picador, 2009

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Winnie and Wolf is the story of the extraordinary friendship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler in the Years between the First and Second World Wars. The girl who would become Winifred Wagner was raised in an orphanage and married, at the age of eighteen, to the gay son of composer Richard Wagner. As heiress to the country's most august cultural legacy, she grows up in the Wagner family compound, surrounded by the philosophers and composers who would define western European culture in the mid-twentieth century. In 1923, the Wagners met the man who would be their hero and hope for the future: a wild-eyed Viennese opera fanatic named Adolf Hitler. Almost immediately Winnie and Wolf struck up an intimate friendship. In A. N. Wilson's most bold and ambitious novel yet, the world of the Weimar Republic comes to vivid life as the backdrop to this strange and powerful kinship.

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From the Back Cover:

‘An extraordinary work whose achievements are almost Wagnerian in scale’ Daily Mail

Winnie and Wolf is the story of the extraordinary relationship between Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler, as seen through the eyes of the secretary at the Wagner house in Bayreuth.

Winifred, an English girl who married the son of Germany’s most controversial genius at the age of just eighteen, is a passionate Germanophile, a Wagnerian dreamer, a Teutonic patriot.

She and the Wagner family hope, in the debacle of the post-Versailles world, for the coming, not of a warrior, a fearless Siegfried, but of a Parsifal, a mystic idealist, a redeemer-figure. In 1923, they think they have found him: 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 is an outsider. Like her, he is haunted by the impossibility of reconciling the pursuit of love and the pursuit of power, and the inevitability, if you seek power, of destruction. Both have known the humiliations of poverty. Both have felt angry and excluded by society. In each other, they find an unusual kinship that expresses itself through a love of opera.

In A. N. Wilson’s most ambitious novel yet, the world of the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany is brilliantly recreated, and forms the backdrop to this incredible bond, which ultimately reveals the remarkable capacity of human beings to deceive themselves.

‘Grippingly imaginative’ Observer

‘A bold, ambitious piece of fiction’ Guardian

‘Deeply clever and gripping... Vividly presented and immaculately researched’ Spectator

About the Author:

A. N. WILSON is an award-winning biographer and a celebrated novelist. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in North London.

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