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Don't Say Pooh! To This Winnie-Wolf Tale It Could Be True

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By ROGER K. MILLER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 9, 2008

"Winnie and Wolf," by A.N. Wilson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25)

Out of his fertile imagination, British novelist A.N. Wilson pulls the startling notion that Winifred Wagner, the British-born daughter-in-law of German composer Richard Wagner, gave birth to a daughter sired by Adolf Hitler.

Implausible, unlikely, but not entirely impossible. Hitler was not quite the sexual neuter he has been portrayed as being, and, as a worshipful admirer of Wagner's operas, he did enjoy her company and even materially supported the Wagner opera enterprise at Bayreuth. He affectionately called her Winnie, and she, with affection, called him Wolf.

And so, Wilson says in "Winnie and Wolf," somehow overcoming the turnoffs of Hitler's excessive sweating, explosive flatulence and disgusting sexual proclivities, in 1932 she bore a daughter for her dear friend and Führer.

The facts of Winifred's life - a sickly 9-year-old British orphan named Winifred Marjorie Williams sent in 1907 to Germany to be raised by elderly distant relatives (and Wagner fanatics) - are as fascinating as anything Wilson makes up. "Winnie and Wolf" is told in the first person as a sort-of book-length letter to the daughter, named Senta, by her adoptive father, referred to only as N-----, who in the 1920s and 1930s had been an assistant to Siegfried Wagner and then Winifred, and thus often in Hitler's presence.

The letter, written in the early 1960s in East Germany, reveals to Senta her astonishing biological heritage, which had been kept secret even from Hitler. When the reader learns of the letter, it has been in Senta's possession since the early 1980s. Living in the Seattle area but recently deceased (2006), she had taken to calling herself Winifred Hiedler.

"Winnie and Wolf" is a remarkable effort, simultaneously dazzling and sluggish. Wilson pulls off a daring risk in seeking to humanize an unspeakable monster by giving him a domestic life and a mundane past because he realizes that to explain is not to exonerate. But he moves so laboriously through his novel of ideas-become-action that the reader wants to scream with impatience.

This is not the first fictional depiction of Hitler, nor the first fictional child he has had. Five years ago, Dutch novelist Harry Mulisch published "Siegfried," another novel of ideas, in which Hitler had a son of that name born of Eva Braun and raised by an Austrian couple.

Whether the device of a secret son or daughter captures the "true" Hitler, no one can say. At the least, it gives us a glimpse of him and his surroundings from a perspective we might not otherwise have taken.

Roger K. Miller, a former newspaperman, is a novelist and freelance writer, reviewer and editor.

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