I love period non fiction and classical music. I should have loved this book then, right? I didn't. It was very laborious and tedious to read. I didn't care about any of the characters. It felt like a reading assignment rather than an enjoyable read. ( )

Did Winifred Wagner and Adolf Hitler produce a “love child” in Bayreuth in the 1930s? This is the premise of A.N. Wilson’s interesting novel, Winnie and Wolf. But that’s only one of the several stories at play. Wilson also explores the Wagner operas and Wagner himself, his life, his loves, and the philosophies that influenced him. Then there’s the story of Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law, and her relationship with Adolf Hitler. And finally, there’s the story of the narrator of the book, who is dogsbody to Siegfred Wagner, Winifred’s husband, and adopted father of Senta, the aforementioned “love child.”

Sound confusing? Yes, it is, but if you stay with it this is an intellectually rewarding novel. Unfortunately, Wilson intersperses the dramatic story with long passages of academic prose analyzing the operas and contemporary philosophy. While interesting, these passages detract from the story. On the other hand, reading of the Wagner operas sent me online to learn more and I even watched some of the operas and found them more interesting and complementary to the several stories in the novel.

While the Wagner story is interesting, even more compelling is the description of Germany in the years leading up to WWII. Wilson is excellent at portraying a quasi-sympathetic Hitler, “Uncle Wolf” to the Wagner children, who retreats to Bayreuth to refresh himself and who while there rarely exhibits the demon he actually is. Through Wilson’s characterization of Germany during this period, you can see how easily the Germans fooled themselves into believing that Hitler offered the way to a better word…a chilling picture of complacency and denial. It is through the narrator’s parents, a Lutheran clergyman and his wife, that we see any dread and opposition to what the future will hold.

This is not an easy read, but the story is fascinating and the concept is intriguing. While not for everyone, those you have an interest in the period and in learning more about a fascinating musical tradition will find this a worthwhile novel ( )

I enjoy reading nonfiction, and I love to read fiction. However, when I pick up a fiction book and it reads like nonfiction, I get very frustrated, and that's what happened with this book. I was really looking forward to reading a fictionalized account of a little-known part of history, but I felt like I was slogging through a history lecture for too much of the time. The characters were just too distant for me to care about them. ( )

Fictionalized account of the love affair between Adolf Hitler and the widow of Richard Wagner's gay son, Seigfried in Weimar Germany. Contains a great deal of information about the opera & orchestral illuminati of the 19th and early 20th century, along with ruminations about how the state of Germany & the German people throughout the 1920's and how they were able to fall under the spell of Hitler and his movement. A. N. Wilson crams the book with information, and the reading ends up choppy and a slog. This is a book for people who want intricate details about opera or the political workings of Weimar Germany. ( )

I do have to admit to finishing this book in one sitting. I liked it, didn't love it, although there was something about it that really intrigued me and kept me reading. What was good was its warning about the folly of a person's (or put in much wider perspective, a nation's) admiration for charismatic individuals leading to blindness, gullibility, and outright denial of said charismatic individual's ulterior motives and nefarious methodology. This is a topic that is current and should be heeded.

For this purpose, the author weaves a tale around the relationship between the daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner (Winifred Wagner, married to Siegfried Wagner) and Adolph Hitler, known to Wagner's children as Uncle Wolf. The narrator, a secretary in the Wagner household in Beyreuth, relates how Winnifred became smitten with Hitler, and how after her husband's death, became sexually involved with him. Even after such events as Krystallnacht, the Night of the Long Knives, the harassment of ordinary people by Hitler Youth brownshirt thugs, etc., Winnifred is still so taken by Hitler that she absolutely refuses to see the truth about him and his policies. Wilson notes through his narrator, Mr. N___, that it wasn't just Winifred -- many intellectual and well-educated Germans at the time were happy with the results of Hitler's economic programs (less unemployment, an economy that was starting to pick up), and had believed that harsh, authoritarian policies as a short-term solution were what Germany needed in the aftermath of the reparations demanded by the Treaty of Versailles and in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The belief was that after the economy was flourishing again, the need for such rigid measures would disappear. Yeah, uh-huh. Right. Hitler swept in, played on feelings of German nationalism, and bolstered it with the use of the mythology behind Wagner's operas, following all of that up with his understanding of crowd psychology, also noted by Mr. N___. Fascinating stuff.

But there are a couple of putoffs in this book. First of all, I'm not a huge opera fan and have never really pictured Wagner as a likely candidate for my own personal historical study, so the amount of history and personal quirks about the famous composer thrown in by the author made it feel sometimes like I was getting lectured. However, to be fair, I think that through the narrator, the author was trying to show that even though Wagner was fascinated with the Germanic mythologies and philosophers like Schopenhauer, what he loved most was music and dogs -- and probably would not have approved of Hitler's hijacking of his work. Second, I didn't think the author needed to resort to Hitler and Winnifred Wagner having a child as the basis of the story, although from what I have read, this was definitely a rumor that actually took on some credence in many circles. There's really no point to it, except to use it as a device around which the narrator tells the story. Third -- this is Hitler we're talking about here and a man who planned genocide on such an epic scale had no soul. Maybe he had a desire not to lose loyal followers and their friends in the upper echelons of the social world, but that's probably about it.

I didn't much care for any of the characters in the book except for maybe Friedelind Wagner, the daughter who couldn't take any more of "Uncle Wolf" and his raving and decided to leave Germany.

This is a book that is definitely not for mainstream readers -- there's so much history and information in here that it can be a little tedious at times. I think if you're a reader interested in the rise of National Socialism, or the perils of blind acceptance of someone who is touted as being a savior, then you might like it. It is definitely worthy of the reading time. ( )