Winifred Wagner was born in England in 1897, and at the age of 18 married Wagner's only son, Siegfried. When he died, she took over the direction of the family's annual Bayreuth Festival, and ran it from 1931 to 1944; it became known as Hitler's court theater. Hitler was, of course, fanatically devoted to Wagner, and found in his music some of the inspiration for Nazism. He came to Bayreuth for the first time in 1923, and even then, Winifred remembers, she found him attractive, with a magnetic personality. The friendship grew, and there was talk of a romance, possibly even a marriage.
After the war, she was tried in a denazification court, incriminated, and forbidden to speak in public. She remained silent for 30 years, and then broke the law in allowing this film to be made. "Some of my friends have been surprised that I chose to break my silence," she says, "but I ask them -- why not?"
Her conditions were rigid: The camera should focus only on her, with no visual embellishments, and the film had to be shown in strict chronological order, as it was shot, with nothing added or taken out. In its original five-hour version, “The Confessions of Winifred Wagner” was one of last year's most controversial films in Germany.
It's a documentary that fascinates and horrifies us; a film that focuses almost exclusively on the face of this formidable 78-year-old woman, and listens to her talk. No attempt has been made to provide “Winifred Wagner” with visual variety, and with the exception of a few shots, it's filmed entirely in close-up, but our curiosity about this woman grows so compelling that we don't mind the unrelenting camera. We're listening.
And what we hear is a woman still almost completely without regrets, second thoughts, or even a real understanding of how she must sound to others. She doesn't apologize for her admiration for Hitler, doesn't hold him responsible for most of the things he was "accused of," and refers with a chuckle to "we old Nazis." She says time and again that her only common ground with Hitler was love of Wagner's music and the Bayreuth Festival. She had no interest in politics, in policy, in philosophy. And yet people persist in holding things against her, she complains: "I sent Hitler the paper on which he wrote Mein Kampf, and now, gracious, you'd think I was responsible for the book myself!"
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