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6 - ‘It's precisely because I'm German that I'm not living in Germany’. The farewell 1940

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2013

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Summary

Friedelind had made up her mind. ‘I won't let myself be ground through the mill if I can avoid it. And I will fight my whole life long for the truth only, for the good, the great and the divine – not for dirt and crime.’ These words, somewhat lofty but no less serious for it, were directed to Daniela while Friedelind was preparing for her departure to England. Once she had switched countries, she was emboldened in her sense of radical opposition to Nazi Germany and able to take a public stance in newspaper articles. She wanted to show the world – especially her mother – who was right in the coming battle. And she wanted the outside world to know what Wagner's granddaughter stood for. She had inwardly said farewell to her family and to their adulation of Hitler. Half measures were not for her. ‘I now stand on a different shore from you all – and I have learnt to love and appreciate “Germany's arch enemies or mortal enemies”, as you call them,’ she wrote to Daniela. ‘And I know that they don't want to destroy Germany. In fact, they want to save what can still be saved of its great human values. But it means sweeping aside the criminals, murderers and rabble-rousers who have caused immeasurable suffering in the whole world. Is it really German, all that Hitler has brought you??? Hasn't he turned the world into a miserable heap of rubble and doesn't he have the lamentations and tears of millions on his conscience – the death of the best of our youth and the greatest of our men?’.

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Friedelind Wagner
Richard Wagner's Rebellious Granddaughter
, pp. 94 - 109
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2013

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