Berlin - The new co-chief of the Bayreuth operatic festival in Germany, Katharina Wagner, promised in a news interview Wednesday to enable a tell-it-all inquiry into the Nazi and earlier periods of the Wagner opera event. Historians have often suggested that all has not been told about the Wagner family's ingratiating welcome to Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, who was an enthusiast for the operas. Wagner, 30, had said before her Monday appointment she wanted the truth to come out.
She told the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper she wanted the full history of the theatre and the summer festival organized by the Wagner family in the southern city of Bayreuth told including the "taints."
"There are files piled up in our basement," she said in the remarks printed Wednesday. "It's high time to analyse them."
But Wagner said the festival could not pay for the historians and would seek donations to finance the work. She also stressed that other estranged branches of the Wagner family would have to open up their own archives at the same time.
"It would not be right for certain parts of a divided family to keep sitting on their own documentary heritage," she said.
"Even if we find that it is all just hot air, at least people will hopefully stop constantly devising legends about cupboards and locked attics concealing the dirt. I favour all-out transparency."
Wagner, who is taking charge of the festival in tandem with her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier, 63, said she planned a "flexible and less patriarchal" form of management than her father, Wolfgang Wagner, 89, provided, as well as contact with popular media.
"Why should I just cultivate a handful of elite newspaper critics? As a national event, actually an international event, Bayreuth is also interesting for mass-market newspapers on a different level," she said.
