Rebel with a Cause: Life was tough for a black sheep of the Wagner family, finds Tim Blanning

This is a depressing book. It tells, in relentless detail, the story of an unhappy, frustrated woman, from a rancorously dysfunctional family, against a background of the rise of Nazism and the horrors it perpetrated. Friedelind Wagner was the second of Siegfried and Winifred Wagner’s four children. Her homosexual father was already 46 years old when he married the eighteen-year-old Winifred Williams in 1915, but he then certainly made up for lost time, siring four children in quick succession – Wieland in 1917, Friedelind in 1918, Wolfgang in 1919 and Verena in 1920. Close in age and neglected by their parents, who spent much of the time on conducting tours, the children naturally formed a gang that got up to all kinds of mischief, protected by their status as Wagner’s grandchildren. It was unfortunate for Friedelind that she was the favourite of her father, who died when she was twelve, but was victimised by her mother, who lived for another fifty years.