This year, as every year, the opera buffs and the beautiful will gather at Bayreuth, in Bavaria, for the annual celebration of Richard Wagner's music. Germany's leading politicians, artists and business folk will be there, mixing with Europe's cultural elite. And, like every other year, they will put down their champagne flutes and make their way to their seats, prepared to concentrate on the music to the exclusion of all else.
Those there to listen to Wagner's music will have long ago resolved in their minds the debate over the composer. The fact that he was an anti-Semite, whose writings vilified Jews, they may or may not find excuses for, but in any case, they have decided music knows no politics. As they make their way to their places, they may well look around for sightings of the composer's descendants, who control the Bayreuth Festival - his grandson Wolfgang and various great-grandchildren. The Wagner family will not be able to take their seats quite so comfortably this year. The composer's great-grandson, Gottfried, a vigorous 50-year-old man with a shock of white hair and his ancestor's china-blue eyes, has published his autobiography: He Who Does Not Howl With The Wolf: The Wagner Legacy. The book's style has been seized upon by critics who have highlighted its whingeing tone. To do this is to ignore how Gottfried details the Wagner family's close identification with Nazism, his grandmother Winifred's devotion to Hitler and Hitler's involvement in raising Gottfried's father Wolfgang and Wolfgang's brother Wieland. Reviewers say Gottfried has written a tract of how "unwanted, unloved, and misunderstood" he has been. The Sunday Telegraph said "there is something ludicrous and unseemly about Gottfried's self-appointed role as a professional self-hating German."
Sitting in a London hotel to publicise his book - a work which has catalysed Germany, re-opening wounds many would rather leave unexamined - Gottfried Wagner is not what is expected. It is true to say that Gottfried's story reads like that of a maladjusted man, but that is not the Gottfried Wagner we meet. The book is far too detailed - every remembered slight is there, so that the historical is submerged by the personal.
Gottfried shrugs it off, saying: "It was something I had to write." Gottfried was nine years old when he first learned of his family's role in the second World War. "The Bavarian Ministry for Culture provided educational programmes - as part of the agreement with the Allies - such as films on Nazi Germany. Our class attended, like all schoolchildren, and we were shown the rise and fall of the Third Reich. So just before the scenes of the outbreak of the war, there came a clip of Hitler driving up the "festival hill" (at Bayreuth) and being greeted by my grandmother, my uncle and my aunt. At the end, in total silence, we saw scenes from Buchenwald. I was not prepared for the horrifying scenes from the concentration camps or for the fact that I'd be seeing my family.
"I went home and asked my father about it, and his answer was typical. He said, you're much too young to understand. My grandmother said, `How can you believe all that? It's manipulation of films by New York Jews'." When it comes to discussing his grandmother's affair with Hitler, Gottfried is circumspect, respectful of his grandmother's privacy. But he muses aloud about Hitler's hold over people like his grandmother. "That she was fascinated by this man, was obvious. I asked people, both inside my family and out, what was his charisma? For us, seeing film of him, posing in the mirror, trying out ridiculous provincial actor poses, it seems absurd that he exerted such a hold! How could this petit bourgeois seduce the German elite? "Well, the family members I asked all said the same: that Hitler had these very hypnotic eyes. My grandmother always talked about his fascinating light-blue eyes and also about his warmth. She found him charming, because he played the role of the Austrian gentleman. The Austrians kiss the ladies' hands and give them many compliments.
"Underlying all this attraction, was the fact that there was a complete agreement on cultural and political aims. The model to whom Adolf Hitler looked, was Richard Wagner." Wagner's anti-Semitic pamphlet, Judaism In Music outlines the striving for a pure Germanic form "uncontaminated by Judaic idea".
Ten years before Hitler came to power, he visited Wagner's grave, as a pilgrim. "My grandmother told me many times," says Gottfried, "about how his eyes were red from crying over the grave. My grandmother saw him as a `holy grail' - that was her phrase: a saviour of the world, and of the Wagner family."
Gottfried lives in Italy now, with his second wife Teresina, and their adopted Romanian son Eugenio, who is 13 years old. His circumstances are straitened; he no longer has any contact with his father Wolfgang, though he remains close to his mother who is now divorced. Gottfried has co-founded the Post Holocaust Dialogue Group, which sets up meetings between children of Holocaust victims, and those of Nazi criminals, and he continues to be actively involved. He makes money by commuting from Italy to Zurich to lecture in music history, and at present is busying himself with his next project, a satirical play about contemporary Germany.