Author : Jos Hermans
For Winifred Wagner, it seemed obvious that with the outbreak of war in 1939, the Bayreuth Festival would be temporarily disbanded just as it had been during the First World War. Hitler, on the other hand, insisted on keeping the theaters and opera houses open to demonstrate the Third Reich's commitment to culture. Singers, musicians and stagehands were personally exempted by him from military service. With the festival of Bayreuth, moreover, he had a very special intention. At last he could now open the festival to "his guests." Thus the so-called "Kriegsfestspiele" came into being as of the 1940 season.
These guests of the Führer were military personnel and workers from the war industry who were rewarded for their patriotic merits with a short stay in Bayreuth; the expenses incurred were reimbursed. Winifred and Tietjen retained full artistic control but otherwise the festival came under Hitler's personal direction. The administration came into the hands of "Kraft durch Freude," an Orwellian-sounding organization headed by Bodo Lafferentz, a fanatical Nazi who became a member of the Wagner family by marrying Winifred's daughter Verena in 1943. These grotesque Kriegsfestspiele were the occasion par excellence for an aggressive and brutal cultural propaganda. "We all know the old saying : When the cannons speak the muses are silent. But in the new Germany lyre and sword belong together," was how Robert Ley introduced the first Festival in 1940. Thus culture was destroyed in the name of culture - a perverse theme that would be played on unabated in the following years. "Kill for Wagner and the fatherland" was pretty much the message.
Because of the special circumstances of the war, Bayreuth had now opened its doors to the common people for the first time. In so doing, Richard Wagner's dream of giving the public free admission to his festival had cynically come true. What the composer had in mind, however, was the confrontation of his work with an audience of art connoisseurs. Hitler's forcibly recruited working-class audience from the munitions factory was anything but that. A forced audience that had no other choice. Transported by the Reich Music Train, they arrived at 6 p.m. where they were housed in barracks, fed, and received a set of vouchers that they could exchange for beer, cigarettes, and one opera performance. The next morning they were given booklets on Wagner followed by a lecture on the work they were to see. The next day they left again to be relieved by a new trainload of "guests of the Führer." Twenty to thirty thousand guests thus attended each of the five war festivals annually. Later, when more and more wounded soldiers were among the audience, the Festspielhaus would gradually come to resemble the infirmary of a hospital rather than an opera theater.
Notwithstanding his enormous responsibility during these years, Hitler remained very committed to the festivals at Bayreuth. Winifred's letters to him make clear that she submitted to all his decisions in this matter. Hitler had the last word on singers, conductors and on the repertoire. Most of the letters were about the repertoire: whether the agonizing Tristan was a suitable subject to confront wounded front soldiers and whether Die Meistersinger was not a better subject. For reasons that have never been clarified, Parsifal disappeared from the schedules after 1939, both in Bayreuth and in the rest of Germany. In 1940 and 1941 Der fliegende Holländer and the Ring were rerun. In 1942, Der Fliegende Holländer and Götterdämmerung followed, along with one full cycle of the Ring reserved specifically for wounded soldiers who had fought on the Russian front.
The ideological manipulation of the brothers-in-arms present was not out of the blue. The publications they got their hands on had nothing to do with opera but everything to do with "the enemies of German culture": from the "Bolsheviks in the East" to the "Jewish clique around Roosevelt" in the West. Men with the echo of the battlefield still fresh in their ears were told that Wagner's operas would make them understand what was at stake. In essence, after all, the Ring was to be seen as Germany's ultimate victory; the collapse of the world at the end of Götterdämmerung made possible the idea of a new Germany. Men who had so often faced death at the front were assured that they would understand the second act of Die Walküre like no other audience in the world, with its allusions to death and transfiguration of the war hero. Meistersinger audiences were predicted how they would head for the battlefield or the factory with renewed courage, filled with the sacred mission of German culture. As a souvenir, each visitor was given the booklet "Richard Wagner und seine Meistersinger," a poisonous anti-Semitic tract by a certain Richard Wilhelm Stock.
Audiences were not the only conscripts. Singers and conductors were also reminded of their duty. It was under these circumstances that Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted again in 1943 and 1944 alongside veterans like Heinz Tietjen, Karl Elmendorff, Franz Von Hoesslin and newcomers Hermann Abendroth and Richard Krauss. Apart from a revamped version of Das Rheingold, there was only one new production to note in those years: Wieland Wagner's Die Meistersinger in 1943, which had traditional, realistic sets. Due to a lack of singers, Bodo Lafferentz arranged for the mammoth chorus of Die Meistersinger to be supplemented by members of the Viking division of the SS. With storm troopers on stage and with an SS fanfare on the balcony, Third Reich Bayreuth had now just about reached its moral nadir. Richard Wagner was more unrecognizable than ever.
Der Heinz
That Tietjen had asked the young Wieland to be a set designer for Die Meistersinger instead of Preetorius had to do with the rancorous war that raged between the two of them, and with this gesture he hoped to bring about a truce. Tietjen's relationship with the children of the Wagner family was particularly difficult. His complete dominance over Winifred stirred a deep Oedipal resentment in Wieland, feelings that were initially personal rather than professional. For Wieland, the doomed successor to his father and grandfather, it was not nearly as clear what path he would take. He had no special musical talent, and designing sets was the only thing that could excite him about opera; and even for that he made only sketches and no models. He delivered his first sets for Siegfried Wagner's Bärenhäuter in 1937 for the Lübeck opera. The following year came the commission from Bayreuth to redo Rollers Parsifal, but there were also invitations to stage Siegfried's operas from Antwerp, Düsseldorf and Cologne, among others. He haughtily declined Tietjen's offer to come to the Berlin Opera to learn the trade thoroughly. Once the war was underway, Hitler ordered Wieland to be permanently exempted from military service.
Hitler saw Wieland as the direct descendant of Richard Wagner and as the future leader of the festival. In 1937 he had ordered that Wieland be relieved of paramilitary service, and in later years he treated him as a sort of national monument, to be protected from harm. If Wolfgang and Wieland were both expelled from the Hitlerjugend for insulting the head of the organization, no unpleasant sanctions followed. Wieland was about the only young man in the Third Reich who could do what he liked. And what he wanted at that time was to indulge in his passion for painting. And so he left for Munich to learn the trade. During his second year, in 1940, he met Kurt Overhoff, a composer, conductor and Wagner expert who fascinated Wieland with his explanations of the deeper meaning of Wagner's music. Under Overhoff's tutelage and encouraged by his fiancée Gertrud Reissiger, Wieland gradually began to develop an interest in opera. And as his interest in opera grew, so did his suspicions that Tietjen and his mother had denied him this kind of education in an attempt to keep him from his future leadership of the festival. In the summer of 1940 it came to a kind of confrontation after which Winifred decided to work on the education of both her sons. She and Tietjen would then retire 5 years later in favor of both brothers on the occasion of the inauguration of the new festival building.
The idea of a new festival building had sprung from Hitler's megalomaniacal and effects-hungry mind in the 1930s. According to Hitler, the festival building was much too small and not nearly impressive enough. His ideal opera house was in Paris, the Opéra Garnier. On his triumphal entry into Paris in 1940, this was the first building he entered. Preetorius found the idea ridiculous after which Hitler never spoke a word to him again. Winifred himself made the Führer dream of his grandiose plans to make Bayreuth one of the greatest cultural sites in the world. After all, the city of Bayreuth was on the list of German cities that would be rebuilt to Third Reich standards with immense stadia, meeting places, public forums, etc. In the process, the Green Hill itself would be transformed into a kind of acropolis with the giant festival building as its parthenon. Hitler could be persuaded, with difficulty, to leave the core of the building intact, because of its special acoustics.
This new festival building and the Wolfgang/Wieland era were to be inaugurated at the same time as a new production of Tannhäuser, again to be staged by Wieland. As the construction was then delayed by the war, Wieland's suspicions fell on Tietjen rather than on the circumstances of the time. Distrust turned to irreconcilable hatred. In the summer of 1941 he complained to Goebbels and at least twice in conversations with Hitler he tried to oust Tietjen from his throne. Tietjen played his trump card and offered his resignation. Faced with the withdrawal of all soloists from the Berlin Opera, Wieland understood that he would never be able to live up to his position after which an uneasy truce ensued. Goebbels solved the problem by appointing Wieland as opera producer in Altenburg, with Overhoff as music director. This Saxon town had a remarkably good opera company and it was here that Wieland's career could take off.
Wieland awakens
Fueled by the new challenge, Wieland threw himself into his work with great passion. In little more than a year a new Ring, Weber's Der Freischütz and his father's "An allem ist Hütschen schuld" were created. At the same time he accepted commissions from outside: Die Meistersinger in Bayreuth and Die Walküre and Götterdämmerung in Nürnberg. Of all these efforts, the Ring was the most important. According to Overhoff, the catalyst was Wagner's essay "Eine Mitteilung an meine which Freunde” which recommended ridding the stage of whatever was not strictly necessary. Thus began the deconstruction of the operas that would become the hallmark of postwar Bayreuth. The stage setting remained realistic but was simplified. He began to use lighting to replace physical objects and to reinforce physical and psychological impressions. Wieland still saw the stage through the lenses of traditional realism and still saw the Ring gods as the nineteenth-century Nordic deities, even though they had to shed some of their armor. His approach was clearly in transition.
Wieland was also preparing the first festival of peace that would mark Germany's military victory. This brought him into constant contact with Hitler. The Führer himself visited the festival only once during the war: in July 1940, on his way to Berlin after the conquest of France, he had his train run to Bayreuth where he attended the ongoing performance of Götterdämmerung. Contacts between the Wagners and Hitler continued until the bitter end. Even after the failed attempt on his life, in July 1944, and while quietly everything around him turned to rubble Hitler remained so committed to Bayreuth that he asked Winifred if the festival could go on in 1945 as far as she was concerned. She replied in the affirmative.
In January 1945 Wieland visited the Führer in his Berlin bunker to ask for his help in publishing a new edition of the scores, texts and keyboard versions of Wagner's works. A few weeks before the collapse of the Third Reich, Wieland visited the Führer for the last time and asked him to give him Wagner's original scores that he had in his possession for safekeeping in a vault in Bayreuth. These original manuscripts by Wagner's hand had been given to Hitler in 1939 for his 50th birthday by a group of industrialists who had bought them from descendants of King Ludwig. They included the original scores of Die Feen, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi, original copies of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre and the orchestral sketches of Der fliegende holländer, Götterdämmerung and the third act of Siegfried. Hitler, who thought the manuscripts were safe with him, refused to give them up. It is assumed that they were destroyed during the last days of the war.
Wahn! Wahn! Uberall Wahn!
While many a German city was mercilessly bombed by the Allies, Bayreuth had escaped the bombing throughout the war. Friedelind had pleaded with Roosevelt to spare Bayreuth; British and American Wagnerians had intervened. Neither the Festspielhaus nor Wahnfried was on the list of buildings to be spared by the bombing. This was because the town simply lacked military importance. Unfortunately, the town also possessed a small railroad, and although this fact was of little importance by April 1945, the British-American war machine chose it as a target. The U.S. Air Force bombed the town with 4 air raids, on the 5th, 8th, 10th and 11th of April. Together, these attacks were so destructive -two thirds of the city was destroyed- that Bayreuth came in at number five on the hit parade of destroyed cities. During the first attack, Wahnfried was hit. By early 1945, Winifred had begun removing all items of historical importance from the Wahnfried villa. Wagner's library was kept at a friend's house in a neighboring village, paintings and archival materials were moved to the basement of the Winifred Wagner Hospital in Bayreuth. When she tried to move historical furniture, she was accused of "defeatism" by the Gestapo. The bomb that landed on Wahnfried destroyed the entire back of the house, wrecked Wagner's desk but spared his Steinway, which he had received in 1887. After the unfortunate air raid, all the remaining possessions along with all the belongings from the hospital were quickly transferred by Wieland and Wolfgang to the family's summer house on Lake Constance and to Winifred's weekend cottage in Oberwarmensteinach. The Festspielhaus was broken into. Costumes and props were stolen and it is said that for miles around German refugees could be seen in the garb of characters from one or another opera. Fortunately, the Wehrmacht decided not to defend the city so an American armoured column was able to enter the city unhindered on April 14. White cloths fluttered from the old royal entrance. Paul Eberhardt, Tietjen's lighting director, greeted the soldiers in his best English. He was assured that the building would not be damaged. Three weeks later at the end of the war, the then sergeant Joseph Wechsberg, passing through Bayreuth, decided to take a look at the opera house he had heard so much about. The door was open and he found himself immediately on the stage, right in Hans Sachs' studio, which was ready for a rehearsal for the 1945 season. Wechsberg sat down in Hans Sachs's chair and sang his Wahn monologue. This time the auditorium was empty.
After the war the possessions of all prominent National Socialists were confiscated. The Festspielhaus, Wahnfried, and all of Winifred's other possessions, except her properties outside of Bayreuth, were taken over by the military. The opera house was now used for religious services, for plays, operettas and shows to entertain the troops. The Siegfried Wagner house became the headquarters of the local counter-Intelligence Corps. Wahnfried was left to moulder though occasional parties and dances were held in the garden and soldiers are said to have danced the jitterbug on Wagner's grave. The Festspielhaus itself quickly proved impractical for the army's intentions. The Americans abandoned it as early as July 1946 and handed it over to the city of Bayreuth four months later. For a time it served as a reception center for Sudeten Germans exiled from Czechoslovakia; after that, the city had no idea what to do with it next. The only thing that was clear was that the Festspielhaus could not be used as before.
The Wagner family had been disgraced, the Festival desecrated, the operas traduced, the old Wagnerians discredited and Wahnfried exposed as the Valhalla of German culture, morally corrupted and physically in ruins. Since the festival building was one of the few public buildings that had survived the bombing, the idea arose to use it for screening films and variety shows. Mayor Oskar Meyer convinced his colleagues and the American authorities to limit it to serious concerts, recitals and operas. And so it happened that for the first time in history La Traviata, Fidelio, Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Madama Butterfly could be experienced in the special acoustic space of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre. That the theater would one day be used again for a Wagner festival became quietly clear beginning in the fall of 1946. Proposals to use it for premieres of contemporary opera, for performances of music by composers persecuted by the Nazis, or, together with the Markgräfliche Opernhaus, for a more loosely structured festival of the Salzburg-type, received little support. The practical problem revolved around ownership and management. Mayor Meyer wanted to establish an advisory board made up of Wagnerexperts and members of the family who had not been discredited. Wolfgang was invited but rejected every proposal. Wieland expected the festival to be taken over by Friedelind. When Meyer contacted Friedelind in America he received no response.
Meyer also wrote to Franz Wilhelm Beidler, Isoldes son and a notorious opponent of National Socialism. He replied with an elaborate plan to establish a Richard Wagner Foundation that would take full responsibility over the festival and opera house and include in its ranks such expert advisors as Ernest Newman, Alfred Einstein, Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith and Arthur Honegger and with Thomas Mann as honorary chairman. Beidler's plan never got off the ground but the Foundation idea found fertile ground with Bavarian officials who were convinced that the festival would never be able to shake off its Nazi past as long as the Wagner family was at the helm. "It has become clear to me that our family can no longer continue on its own with the Festival" Wolfgang wrote to his brother in 1947. Wieland himself thought it might be best to hold the festival outside Germany, in Switzerland or in Monte Carlo. The big complication was Winifred. By the disposition of Siegfried's will, all property belonged to her. At her denazification trial, she was accused of being one of Hitler's most fanatical supporters and of having given Richard Wagner's estate out of the hands of the Nazi party for propaganda purposes. What saved her was her testimony that she had helped certain Jews, homosexuals like Max Lorenz and Herbert Janssen and other persecuted people. Toward the end of 1947 she came to realize that she needed to turn over her authority to her sons.
In the meantime, the Bavarian government had come to the decision that the festival should be run by an international advisory board including, besides Thomas Mann, Bruno Walter, Sir Thomas Beecham, Paul Hindemith and Richard Strauss. By mid-1948, two camps had emerged - on one side Winifred and her sons, the city of Bayreuth and the Bavarian Social Democrats; on the other, top officials of the Bavarian government along with the conservative Christian People's Party and managers of the main West German opera houses who wanted the Wagners out. In a sense, the historic rivalry between Munich and Bayreuth had been revived.
Then suddenly Winifred threw a spanner into the works by suggesting that she and Tietjen should after all take over again. The denazification program was running out of steam and she evidently anticipated that her sentence would be eviscerated. That is what happened in December 1948 when her sentence was reduced to a period of probation and even that was to be forgiven if she withdrew irrevocably from the festival. The following month she took the solemn oath renouncing "any participation in the organization, administration and direction of the Bayreuther Festspiele." Legally, the matter was settled so that Winifred could keep her rights under Siegfried's will but the management of the festival was transferred to the sons to whom she rented the festival building and the villa Wahnfried. Thus, in February 1949, the assets of the festival were transferred to Wieland and Wolfgang.
Stunde Null
The challenge the two brothers now faced could hardly have been greater. Germany had never presented such a devastated sight since the Thirty Years War. The festival was bankrupt and the theater itself was in dire need of repair. Costumes and sets had been looted or lay out of reach in a salt mine in Russian-occupied territory. There were neither singers, conductors, musicians nor a chorus to fall back on. Political resentment against the brothers lingered on, as did doubts about their professional abilities and intentions. The Germans now had to agree on which Wagner they wanted. So it came to pass that although Wagner's operas were performed in London and New York during and after the war, and were performed again in Paris from 1946 onwards, no theater in Germany dared to put a Wagner opera on before the fall of 1947. Only in the early 1950s was Wagner back in the repertoire everywhere.
From the beginning, the brothers agreed on dividing the work according to their backgrounds, temperaments and talents - Wieland as director, Wolfgang as manager and financier. After his discharge from the army in 1940 due to a wound received during the invasion of Poland, Wolfgang had been brought in by Tietjen at the Berlin State Opera as an apprentice. With this experience and a talent for administration, he was able to lay the practical groundwork for a new festival. With no money, no assets, and an uncertain future and a compromised institution in their hands, Wieland and Wolfgang faced the most depressing financial prospects. Although traditional German governmental support for the arts continued unabated, the Bavarian government was initially ungenerous. In industrial circles, however, there was great interest in getting the festival back on track. Rather than Bach, Beethoven, Goethe or Schiller, conservative nationalists and ex-Nazis felt that it belonged to Wagner to be the leading ideological beacon for the rediscovery of good, old-fashioned German values.
Gerhard Roßbach, one of Hitler's earliest collaborators acted as a catalyst in the founding of the Society of the Friends of Bayreuth. The Society not only provided the crucial start-up capital but also granted the brothers the necessary credibility in conservative financial circles. In return, the brothers had to keep the past quiet: no one was accountable, no one had to repent. Characteristically, when Winifred appeared at the Society's first plenary session she was able to receive an ovation. By the autumn of 1950 and after he had travelled a total of some 40,000 km by motor-cycle for 6 months in search of money lenders, Wolfgang had reached his objective of 1,483,157 DM. This sum had come from the Bavarian government, the city of Bayreuth, private donors, radio broadcasting rights and pre-sale of tickets. Immediately the announcement could follow that the 1951 season would start with Parsifal and Die Meistersinger. Later the Ring was added. The demand for tickets was so encouraging that the number of performances could be increased to 21, with the Ring as the biggest magnet. At the end of the first post-war season the financial balance, despite a small deficit, was so close to Wolfgang's estimate that he immediately earned himself great respect as financial manager.
On the artistic side, Wieland was steering for a complete break with the past. Conductors, singers and other veterans of the Third Reich were excluded from participation; only Kurt Palm as chief costumier and Paul Eberhardt as lighting expert were retained. On the advice of the young Herbert von Karajan, Wilhelm Pitz was designated as choral director. The indefatigable Pitz traveled all over East and West Germany in search of a choir, visiting 38 opera houses and holding more than 800 auditions. 1,500 musicians offered themselves at the auditions for the orchestra.
Looking for soloists, Wieland first turned to Kirsten Flagstad for the role of Brünnhilde. Flagstad declined his offer but on the other hand managed to recommend 33-year-old Astrid Varnay whom he accepted without an audition. Most of the singers of the previous generation were no longer there and Wieland had to take his chances with younger, unknown singers. Gradually a solid cast came together that became the core of early postwar Bayreuth: Astrid Varnay, Martha Mödl, Wolfgang Windgassen, Paul Kuën, Hermann Uhde, Ludwig Weber and Gerhard Stolze.
Engaging the right conductors was more important than ever. Except for Hans Knappertsbusch, whose quarreling with the National Socialists in 1935 had cost him his job as music director of the Munich Opera, all the leading German conductors were politically malodorous - Furtwängler as well as Clemens Krauss, Karl Böhm as well as Von Karajan. All had benefited personally by taking posts from exiled colleagues. Few Germans were concerned about the past of these conductors but for the reputation of the festival abroad it was not a good thing. Moreover, Wieland was concerned with musical style. His preference was for what he called "Latin conductors." He christened each conductor as Latin who approached Wagner's scores with a certain lightness, such as the Austrians Clemens Krauss and Karl Böhm. Both were fiercely admired by Richard Strauss who, in turn, was praised by Wieland for his "super-fast" Parsifal in 1933 - and this notwithstanding that the premiere in 1883 under Herman Levi had ended even 4 minutes faster. Around these non-traditionalists like Krauss and Von Karajan, he would have liked to form a team to emphasize the break with the past. But because of his conservative rear guard, he needed tradition just as much. And so he invited Furtwängler alongside Von Karajan. Furtwängler hated Von Karajan, so he conducted only the inaugural concert with Beethoven's ninth. By choosing Knappertsbusch, who was an exponent of the Bayreuth tradition, he had to dispense with Krauss. Krauss had taken over Knappertsbusch's post at the Munich opera in 1935, which led to his refusal to perform with him in the same house. Wieland consequently had to make do with Knappertsbusch and Von Karajan for all 22 performances. In the end, it was the productions themselves with their innovative aesthetic and intellectual concepts that would make the difference. These were the achievement of Wieland himself, an unexpected accomplishment in which he had grown only slowly.
Wieland Wagner, the putative leader of the Third Reich's Festspiele after its "final victory", was psychologically as devastated in 1945 as his homeland was in ruins physically and morally. He allowed the villa Wahnfried to deteriorate as a "sign of fate and the beginning of a new era." A few days before the fall of Bayreuth, he had moved his family to Winifred's summer home in Nussdorf on Lake Constance. There he spent the next 3 years which he called his "creative black years." During those years he did what many other Germans did: looking back into history to see where things had gone wrong. "After Auschwitz, there can be no more discussion of Hitler," he let slip several times.
Radical renewal
In these years of enforced isolation, Wieland discovered new aesthetic and intellectual worlds, worlds that had never seen the light of day in Wahnfried since 1883. Even more exciting was his introduction to worlds forbidden by the Third Reich: Freud and Jung, Picasso and Klee, Adorno and Bloch, Moore and Lipschitz. At the same time he got to know Mozart, a famous composer who had never been heard in Wahnfried. Another revelation for him were the Greek tragedy writers, Homer and Aeschylus in particular. In the spring of 1947, together with Overhoff, he threw himself into months of intensive analysis of the musical and psychological elements in Wagner's scores. Later, when asked about the origin of his concepts, he was rather closed-minded and called himself self-taught. Sometimes he admitted a vague influence from Craig, Appia and Roller. Before the festival began he broke with Overhoff who had dared to question one of his Parsifal designs. Shortly thereafter, he relegated the man to the status of a non-man, someone he had never known. The name Preetorius barely passed his lips. The antipathy was rather symbolic: he saw Preetorius as the personification of the Third Reich against which he was now rebelling with all his might. Rebellion was one stimulus. The other was the insight that to save Bayreuth Wagner had to be saved - not from Nazism, since Wieland saw the works themselves as unstained by the past, but the unfortunate composer had to be brought back to life on aesthetic and intellectual grounds. After the Third Reich, it was impossible to look at him in the old way. It had to be made clear that the operas had something to say to a post-war post-nuclear world. Bringing the works back to life was the central objective of the new Bayreuth. More than any other theater, Bayreuth was supposed to prove itself by the quality of its productions. Bayreuth's traditional style would be the basis of his new work, but at the same time he stated that the festival should not become a museum and should be able to deliver productions with a contemporary artistic look. Of vital importance, he felt, was the need to appeal to the younger generation. He tried to reconcile his right-wing backers with his left-wing intellectual friends. Very quickly, however, he managed to shift his priorities, leaving tradition behind in favor of innovation. While in his earliest public comments-in the Munich Abendzeitung and in the Jahrbuch der Musikwelt in 1950-he still went to great lengths to stress his devotion to Bayreuth orthodoxy, this was hardly the case a year later.
In his determination to reach out to the postwar generation, he faced a delicate problem: how to free Bayreuth from its disastrous past, from its longstanding penchant for reactionary politics and anti-Semitism? By embracing figures like the Marxist Jews, Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch, Wieland hoped to reach those who had never felt at home in Bayreuth. But the more innovation, the less tradition; the greater his openness to Jews and leftists was, the less room he made for traditionalists and ex-Nazis. He could avert open confrontation only by placing a veil over the past. When the festival reopened in 1951, large posters could be seen hanging on the Festivalhaus, signed by Wieland and Wolfgang, in which both declared that discussions and debates of a political nature had no place on the festival grounds: Hier gilt's der Kunst! And with that, an old slogan was once again revived, like a new fig leaf for a new era. The same attitude was evident in the press. Even though expectations were not high, all eyes were on the future. Bayreuth was no longer the symbol of German cultural supremacy but "a bridge between nations based on a common cultural experience." For the first time the city was decorated with foreign flags. In the scaffolding here was a new festival, a new Bayreuth, a new Germany.