"Ah, Wagner, that old magician, how much he imposed upon us!" (Nietzsche)

Although he was undoubtedly the most controversial musical figure of the Nineteenth Century, Richard Wagner was a great literary, philosophical and political activist whose contributions to the development of German Romanticism were unrivaled by any of his contemporaries. His life and works may be said to crown the musical achievements of German Romanticism, but they are simultaneously celebrated and condemned like the works of no other composer in music history. His Music Dramas are hated as much as they are worshiped in the world today, but even among those who damn Wagner as a human being, his genius as a composer is not denied.

It took Wagner twenty-two years to complete The Ring of the Nibelungs entirely, and it stands as one of the most remarkable and profoundly influential achievements in Western music. The drama cycle is not just a story about gods, humans, and dwarfs, but it embodies reflections on every aspect of the human condition. It has been interpreted as socialist, fascist, Jungian, prophetic, as a parable about industrial society, and much more.

As an original Wagnerite, Nietzsche begins from something close to a fascist position and then repudiates it with great thoroughness. The fascist position is contained in Wagner, who, says Nietzsche, makes eyes at master morality, while speaking to an essentially servile need for redemption and salvation. There is illusion created through being a follower, especially not realising that one is such.

Fresh out of convent school Eva Braun met Adolf Hitler the first time when she was working as the assistant of Hitler´s personal photographer Hoffmann. A few weeks after this meeting she followed The Führer to his mountain retreat in the alps.

In 1936 she moved to Hitler's Berghof at Berchtesgaden where she acted as his hostess. Reserved, indifferent to politics and keeping her distance from most of the Führer's intimates, Eva Braun led a completely isolated life in the Führer's Alpine retreat and later in Berlin. They rarely appeared in public together and few Germans even knew of her existence.

Even the Führer's closest associates were not certain of the exact nature of their relationship, since Hitler preferred to avoid suggestions of intimacy and was never wholly relaxed in her company.

Their attraction was immediate, and over the objection of her parents, she became his mistress. For the next sixteen years, she lived in luxury as millions suffered and died at the hands of her maniacal 'Wulf'.

Eva Braun, the young woman who had spent most of her life waiting for Hitler, would now be with him forever. Eva Braun had agreed to share Adolf Hitler`s fate. A local magistrate married them early on the morning of April 29, 1945. The next day at a little after 3:30 p.m., they bit into thin glass vials of cyanide. As he did so, Hitler also shot himself in the head with a 7.65 mm Walther pistol.

Those who entered Hitler's suite saw him lying on a blood-soaked sofa. Eva Braun lay on the sofa beside him, but she had made no use of the revolver at her side, preferring to take the poison instead.

Hitler's bloodstained body was wrapped in a blanket and carried, along with Eva Braun's, up four flights of steps and into the garden of the chancellery. Both bodies were doused with gasoline and burned.