“After Auschwitz, when you have this name, you have two choices,” Wagner says. “Silence or activism.”
Wagner, a philosopher, musicologist, stage director, lecturer and producer-author who lives in Milan, Italy, chose activism.
He will give a public lecture, titled “Beyond Wagner & Hitler; Confronting German and Personal History After the Holocaust,” Monday, Oct. 7 in San Francisco, in a program sponsored by the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
He will be in San Francisco to participate in the State of the World Forum from Wednesday, Oct. 2 to Sunday, Oct. 6.
Wagner first learned about the Holocaust at the age of 9, when his grade-school class saw a documentary about World War II as part of Germany’s re-education program in the 1950s.
“Suddenly, I heard Wagner’s music, which I knew quite well, and I saw my grandmother up on the screen with Hitler. I was completely shocked. I was confronted for the first time with photographs from the concentration camps,” he said.
When he asked his family about the pictures and their connection to Wagner’s music, they replied, “Pay no attention. This story of concentration camps is the invention of the New York Jews.”
Wagner never got the answers he sought from his family, but through his persistence he uncovered 30 years’ of anti-Semitic writings by his illustrious ancestor, 27 reels of family films showing Hitler socializing intimately with the Wagner family and a relationship between his grandmother, Winifred, and Hitler.
“My aunts and uncles used to call him `Uncle Wolfie’,” Wagner said. “Until the day she died in the 1980s, my grandmother was completely enamored of her beloved Wolfie. She was disgusted by my work and considered me a traitor.”
Wagner, 49, has used his family legacy to travel worldwide, including to Israel, drawing upon the Holocaust experience to teach about individual responsibility to democratic principles.
In 1991, he co-founded the Post-Holocaust Generations Dialogue Group with a child of survivors to deal with the seemingly irreconcilable differences between Jews and Germans after the Holocaust. In a self-imposed exile from the family home in Bayreuth, Germany, he lives with his wife and son in Milan.
Two years ago, he traveled to Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, where he spoke with Jewish Holocaust survivors and their children.
He has published numerous articles on music, anti-Semitism, German culture and politics, philosophy and post-Holocaust dialogue. His book “Never Ask Me Who I Am and Where I Come From — Autobiographical Notes of a Great-Grandson” will be published in Germany next year.
“Dr. Wagner has a unique vantage point from which to speak about the Holocaust, a subject on which much has been written, a view from the children of perpetrators who carry the burden of their family and national history,” said Barbara Goodman, executive director of the Holocaust Center in San Francisco.
“He is specifically interested in working with and speaking to the Jewish community in general and the survivors and their children in particular, and that’s commendable in light of the family history he brings with him.”