ARTS More than 60 years after their last official appearance, Nazi banners returned to the Bayreuth stage on Friday in the middle of the Wagner festival’s new Parsifal. After a moment of shock you could sense the first-night audience (led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel) breathing a collective sigh of relief.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s swastikas bedecked the Festspielhaus. Getting into bed with Hitler was Bayreuth’s darkest hour – something it has hitherto refused to acknowledge, partly for fear of jeopardising its commercial success, partly because the Wagner family’s support for Hitler is a can of worms.
