Wooing but not winning Uncle Wolf

Tim Blanning is captivated by the true story of one very unlucky-in-love woman and the evil genius she worshipped

This consistently enthralling book more than justifies the bold claim made in the foreword: "This is the kind of story you only find in novels." Winifred Williams was born in 1897 in Hastings and orphaned soon afterwards. She was rescued from the hell that was an English Edwardian orphanage when she was nine years old by distant and elderly German relatives, Karl and Henriette Klindworth, who took her to Berlin and then lavished on her love, care, attention and an excellent education.

Klindworth was a pupil of Franz Liszt and saw his life's work as transposing for the piano the works of Richard Wagner, whom he had known well. Not a day went by when Winifred did not hear her benefactor playing Wagner, initially the transcription of The Flying Dutchman, on which he was working. So she was well prepared to play the role of Senta when Wagner's bachelor son, Siegfried, came to woo her in 1915. In appearance she was more like Brunnhilde - tall, slender, athletic, blonde - although her swain did not resemble his namesake in The Ring, being 46 years old, ill favoured and very much in thrall to his mother, the formidable Cosima. A homosexual by preference, Siegfried was anxious to get married to continue the Wagner dynasty and to escape from a looming tabloid scandal. In that respect at least, their union was an unqualified success, as Winifred quickly produced four children in as many years.

Winifred turned out to be a poor chooser of men, falling in love first with Hugh Walpole, who proved to be exclusively gay, and later with Heinz Tietjen, who was undoubtedly heterosexual but incorrigibly promiscuous. Along the way she had also fallen for Adolf Hitler, and it is of course this relationship that justifies a book of this size.

Hitler first visited the Wagner family home at Bayreuth in October 1923, shortly before the Munich putsch, then he came back again and again and was often alone with Winifred. There was a great deal of warmth on both sides.

Indeed, it was so obvious that on the death of Siegfried in 1930 it was widely rumoured that they would get married. Asked at school whether she was about to acquire a new daddy, 12-year-old Friedelind Wagner replied in broad Franconian "Me mother'd like to - but me Uncle Wolf (Hitler's nickname), he don't wanna do it."

Brigitte Hamann's first book on Hitler - Hitler's Vienna (1996) - was rightly praised for doing simple but important things very well, namely taking a fresh and critical look at old evidence. In this next instalment of what is beginning to look like a Hitler biography by proxy, she does that once again, and also displays truly impressive enterprise in locating quite new sources. Denied access to Winifred's correspondence with her eldest son, Wieland, Hamann has filled in some of the gaps at least by an intensive trawl of the smaller fry, both inside and outside the family. As she herself writes, this version is provisional only, awaiting amplification when other archives are eventually opened.

A short review can only indicate some of the riches with which this book teems. Among other things, it has a great deal to say about völkisch attitudes in Wilhelminian Germany; the psychological and material impact of the First World War; the early days and development of National Socialism and the Nazi movement; the glory days of Bayreuth under Toscanini and Furtwangler; what Germans did and did not know about the Holocaust; the collapse of the Third Reich; de-Nazification and the foundation of the Federal Republic; and of course about Hitler, the evil genius who haunts almost every page. Hamann does not seek in any way to exculpate Winifred, whose "shameless honesty" (Klaus Mann) kept her an unrepentant worshipper of "Wolf" until the day she died in 1980 at the age of 83. It is, however, made clear just how bad a Nazi Winifred was, whether it was refusing to join the Reich Theatre Chamber, refusing to get rid of Jews, homosexuals and other non-persons from Bayreuth or interceding with Hitler to save dissidents. Hamann's conclusion that "she was neither a heroine nor a criminal, but one of the great mass of trusting, misguided people who succumbed to the great seducer Hitler" is judicious.

The real villain of the piece, at least in the Wagner camp, was her son Wieland, variously described as "the most odious of Hitler's favourites" (Hans Tietjen) and "the arsehole of Bayreuth" (Emil Preetorious), who had lunch with Hitler in his Berlin bunker as late as December 1944 - albeit at two o'clock in the morning. It is some measure of the amnesia that settled over post-1945 Germany that Wieland Wagner was able to distance himself from the regime he had served so enthusiastically and to rehabilitate the Bayreuth Festival so rapidly with his minimalist productions.

Tim Blanning is professor of modern European history, Cambridge University.