Wagner Family Feud

Katharina Wagner

The Daily Mail reports:

A feud has broken out between members of the Wagner opera family in Germany as the leader of the clan threatens legal action unless they co-operate with a ‘moral house cleaning’ aimed at de-Nazifying the world’s leading opera festival

Katharina Wagner, who now directs the annual Bayreuth Festival of Richard Wagner’s operas, wants family members to turn over every document they have in a bid to exorcise the ghosts of the Third Reich – including ‘potentially explosive’ letters penned by Hitler to Winifred Wagner, the Englishwoman who became head of the family in wartime….

Amélie Hohmann, granddaughter of Winifred Wagner, the English-born bride of Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried, who became one of Hitler’s closest confidantes and irrevocably bound the festival up with the Nazi cause, is against this – because she has what are described as ‘explosive’ letters between her grandmother and Hitler among masses of sealed paperwork that forms part of her estate.