Ellen Drexel

Ellen Drexel (1983)

Ellen Drexel (born August 20, 1919 in Wiesbaden , † April 17, 2002 in Eppstein im Taunus ) was a German ballet dancer and, through her marriage to Wolfgang Wagner, a member of the Richard Wagner family . After her divorce from Wolfgang Wagner, she revised her diaries and notebooks until 1999, collected historical articles and systematically expanded her knowledge of the details and backgrounds of National Socialism and the Holocaust .

family

Ellen Drexel's father was the wine wholesaler Adolf Heinrich Drexel (1887–1940) - a brother of the avant-garde painter Hans Christoph Drexel. Her mother was Thora Auguste Franziska Drexel, b. Nissen (1891–1953), who worked as a teacher in Wiesbaden and was interested in music, literature and theater and whose father came from the wealthy Hamburg merchant family Nissen.

Life

Ellen Drexel's tombstone in Cerro Maggiore near Milan

Gottfried Wagner next to some of Ellen Drexel's documents. June 2017

Drexel's interest in literature was awakened early on by her mother's library. Drexel's career as a dancer and pantomime began at the age of four in 1923, when she appeared in “Madame Butterfly” at the Wiesbaden State Theater . Her ballet and pantomime career led Ellen Drexel from Wiesbaden to Darmstadt , Breslau and from 1941 to the State Opera Unter den Linden in Berlin .

During a guest performance in Rome, she met Wolfgang Wagner, the son of the Bayreuth Festival director Winifred Wagner . At the time, he was assistant to Heinz Tietjen , general manager of all Prussian state theaters that were formally subordinate to Hermann Göring . Drexel got engaged to Wolfgang Wagner and moved into his apartment in Berlin's Muckstrasse, but gave up her career as a dancer.

The wedding with Wagner took place on April 11, 1943 in the Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth. Drexel took the family name "Wagner". Adolf Hitler had roses brought to the bride and groom for their wedding.

Ellen Wagner survived a bombing of her Berlin apartment and was heavily pregnant in the Villa Wahnfried in April 1945 when it was destroyed by a bomb. Her daughter Eva was born a few days later in Winifred Wagner's country house in Oberwarmensteinach in the Fichtel Mountains.

Ellen Wagner witnessed the occupation of the destroyed Villa Wahnfried by US troops and witnessed the denazification proceedings against Winifred Wagner, who was classified as “offenders” in Group II in 1947, but in the appeals process at the end of 1948 only as “underly offenders” in Group III.

In 1947, Ellen Wagner's son Gottfried Helferich was born. At that time the family lived in the gardener's house on the property of Villa Wahnfried. In January 1955 the family moved to the Villa Festspielhügel 3. This house was located on Parsifal-Strasse next to the "Aryanized" villa of the Gauleiter of the Bavarian Ostmark, Fritz Wächtler .

After the Second World War , Ellen Wagner accompanied her husband on all business trips to sponsors and supporters from German business, politics, culture and the media to rebuild the bankrupt family company Bayreuth Festival, but essentially looked after her children. From 1945 Ellen Wagner kept a brief diary. She encouraged her son to study the persecution of Kurt Weill by National Socialism and the Holocaust by letting him keep her notes.

After her divorce in July 1976, she began to write down her life and to comment critically and self-critically on all remaining diaries. In 1977 she intensified contact with her uncle Hans Christoph Drexel, who had to accept a work ban as a painter during the Nazi era , as well as her interest in the previously “ degenerate art ”.

After a stroke and cancer , she lived from 1999 until her death on April 17, 2002 in the senior citizens' residence Main-Taunus-Kreis in Eppstein . She was blessed at the Südfriedhof in Wiesbaden. According to her wishes, her ashes were buried on May 27, 2002 in the cemetery in Cerro Maggiore near Milan .

All diaries and notebooks as well as essential documents of the Wagner and Drexel-Nissen families are in the Gottfried Wagner archive in the Zurich Central Library . After a planned evaluation, essential statements of the recordings are to be published.

Sources and literature (selection)

• Diary entries and notebooks by Ellen Drexel in the Gottfried Wagner archive of the Zurich Central Library
• Gottfried Wagner : Who doesn't howl with the wolf. Autobiographical notes of a Wagner great-grandson. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-462-02622-4
• Gottfried Wagner, Abraham Peck: Our zero hour. Germans and Jews after 1945. Family history, the Holocaust and a new beginning. Historical memoir. Böhlau, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar 2006, ISBN 3-205-77335-7 . (USA: Unwanted legacies: sharing the burden of post-genocide generations , Texas Tech University Press, 2014).
• Brigitte Hamann : Winifred Wagner and Hitler's Bayreuth. Piper, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-492-23976-5 .
• Jonathan Carr: The Wagner clan. Biography of a German family. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 2010, ISBN 978-3-596-18504-7 .
• Compare Gottfried Wagner: You shouldn't have any other gods besides me. Richard Wagner - A minefield. Propylaea, Berlin 2013, ISBN 978-3-549-07441-1 .