While verena was lunching with Hitler on a trip to Berlin in January 1938, her sister was still in England. Far away from events in Germany, Friedelind was brimming with initiative and living on a generous 200 marks a month. Life was good.

Winifred was glad to have enough hard currency to keep her uncomfortable daughter at arm's length. ‘Every month in England is a relief to us. Geissmar says she is always there during office hours and helps her out a lot with correspondence. That's a strange child! She won't help Bayreuth and her mother, but she'll do it voluntarily for the Jewess!!!!’

Friedelind's intellectual exchange with her aunts continued unabated. Daniela and Eva read Shakespeare's Coriolanus, a work that according to Eva ‘was a particular favourite of your grandfather's’. They also started on Balzac's novel Illusions perdues, which depicted a Paris – according to Daniela – ‘where the beast and the devil reign in the shape of man, along with poverty, vice and despair (it's nothing for the young like you!).’ Friedelind replied cheekily that the youth of the day was enlightened, ‘while you were probably as innocent as lambs at the age of nineteen … and a little nine-year-old squirt probably knows more than both of you at 77.’

Winifred wagner died on 5 March 1980. No one could claim that in running the Festival she had in any way squandered the legacy of Cosima and Siegfried, for by engaging Tietjen, Preetorius and Furtwängler, and by retaining Toscanini, she had maintained and even expanded the Festival's importance as an institution that set the benchmark for theatres all over the world. One could hardly blame her for possessing neither the artistic talent nor the erudition of her mother-in-law Cosima. Even her blind enthusiasm for Hitler in the 1920s might be regarded as having been determined by the exigencies of the time. It is always problematical to sit at a safe chronological distance and indulge in moral judgements over people who had to live in times of dictatorship – not least because Winifred could claim, with some justification, to have helped people in need during the Nazi era, including several Jews.

What remained incomprehensible to Friedelind was her mother's steadfast fidelity to one of the most heinous criminals in world history – a fidelity that she maintained to the very end. But for all her anger at her unreconstructed mother, Friedelind was unable as a daughter to distance herself completely from her, and their relationship remained characterized by conflicting emotions. Both women possessed an iron will. If Winifred had condemned Nazi ideology after the fact, then she would have had to have rehabilitated the daughter who had fled from it.

Friedelind had made up her mind. ‘I won't let myself be ground through the mill if I can avoid it. And I will fight my whole life long for the truth only, for the good, the great and the divine – not for dirt and crime.’ These words, somewhat lofty but no less serious for it, were directed to Daniela while Friedelind was preparing for her departure to England. Once she had switched countries, she was emboldened in her sense of radical opposition to Nazi Germany and able to take a public stance in newspaper articles. She wanted to show the world – especially her mother – who was right in the coming battle. And she wanted the outside world to know what Wagner's granddaughter stood for. She had inwardly said farewell to her family and to their adulation of Hitler. Half measures were not for her. ‘I now stand on a different shore from you all – and I have learnt to love and appreciate “Germany's arch enemies or mortal enemies”, as you call them,’ she wrote to Daniela. ‘And I know that they don't want to destroy Germany. In fact, they want to save what can still be saved of its great human values. But it means sweeping aside the criminals, murderers and rabble-rousers who have caused immeasurable suffering in the whole world. Is it really German, all that Hitler has brought you??? Hasn't he turned the world into a miserable heap of rubble and doesn't he have the lamentations and tears of millions on his conscience – the death of the best of our youth and the greatest of our men?’.

‘I want to do half an hour of maths with Maus. It's urgent because of the shoolwork she's facing. She simply doesn't want to. But after a strenuous exchange I leave the field as victor (which is quite something when you're up against Maus) and we plod through it for three quarters of an hour.’ According to her governess Lieselotte Schmidt, Friedelind either didn't do her homework at all, or ‘at best, five minutes before the deadline.’ These problems could be overcome, as in this case. But what really bothered Friedelind so much about school was the manner in which knowledge was presented. Years later she had nightmares when thinking back to her school years in Germany, whose education system seemed to her the epitome of ‘narrow-mindedness, intolerance, dogmatism. It was a systematic act of poisoning everything beautiful. Hate and revenge were the basic tenor of almost everything in school education after the First World War.’ Even if one has become accustomed to Friedelind's turn of phrase, her vehement dislike of school remains striking.

In her teenage years Friedelind enjoyed an especially close relationship with her aunt Daniela Thode, the first daughter of Cosima's marriage to Hans von Bülow. It was a friendship which continued into the years of Friedelind's early adulthood. Daniela was generally regarded with some contempt as a fossilized old maid. But she was clever and spirited, even passionate. ‘She was continually exploding, wrecking everything about her, continually repenting and flagellating herself for her outbursts,’ recalled Friedelind. Cosima had brought up Daniela firmly within the narrow bounds that were normal for girls at the time, so she had been unable to develop her intellectual and creative abilities to their full potential. Heinz Tietjen claimed that Daniela was ‘stubborn and dangerous’ and tried, without success, to drive a wedge between her and her niece by insisting that Friedelind show solidarity with Winifred. ‘We have to protect your mother,’ he said. Friedelind resented such pressure and remained attached to her aunt notwithstanding all her eccentricities. She also drew close to Eva, Richard's second child. After both aunts had lost their husbands (Daniela through divorce, Eva when her husband died) the two of them moved close to one another in Bayreuth and often went on trips together.