by Michael Dean
*
Hitler met Ello at the foot of the polished wooden staircase to the apartment, flapping the escorting Brückner away. He was still wearing the brown uniform he had worn at the Party entertainment. He clicked his heels and bowed to her, then took her fox-fur stole from her shoulders. They walked up together, side-by-side, godfather and goddaughter, Ello and her Uncle Dolf, their footsteps clacking on the wood of the stairs.
Hitler’s apartment was familiar to her from social occasions – as usual it was a good five degrees too cold – though she had never before been alone there with him at midnight. How was she going to get back? Presumably Schreck slept some time.
Sheer annoyance quickened her stride to the seating area by the fireplace. She sat herself in one of the low armchairs, before he could lead her to the sofa. She looked away from him, up at the painting in front of her.
The triptych The Four Elements by Adolf Ziegler was above the fireplace. Stretching nearly to the coffered ceiling, it featured four soulless frontally nude females, two in the middle panel, one on each of the wings. More bastardised Greek mythology as an excuse for stripping women, she thought.
She knew Ziegler. He was a tall, handsome man who always eyed her at parties, with knowing arrogance. The Nazi pet artist, he taught over at the Academy of Fine Arts and had some administrative sinecure or other.
Hitler sat facing her. He reached across to her, took her hand, kissed it and murmured
‘Tschapperl. Your eyes are like my mother’s. Will you kiss me?’
Ello withdrew her hand and said, in a bored voice. ‘Uncle Dolf, I’m tired. It’s a little late for all this.’
He looked relieved.
There was a faint rustling noise as the tall, angular figure of the housekeeper, Anni Winter, bustled toward them. In a floral-patterned dress with puff sleeves, she exuded confident composure. Ello knew how much the housekeeper had despised Geli. But the aristocratic, ladylike Fräulein von Hessert was a much more suitable match. Anni’s oily-skinned face, framed by a helmet of black hair, radiated approval, showing her views on the improvement only too clearly.
‘Good evening, Fräulein von Hessert,’ she said. ‘How good to see you here with us again.’ And then to Hitler. ‘What may I prepare for you, sir?’
Hitler pouted at Ello, proud of his new girlfriend.
My God, she thought, this was like being on a first date with a teenager.
‘Just coffee with chocolate for me,’ he said to Anni Winter. ‘And what would the lovely Fräulein like?’ The pout deepened to a simper.
Ello groaned inwardly. Actually, the lovely Fräulein would like nothing better than to get out the hell out of this mausoleum and go home. She had lectures to go to tomorrow, at the university. She was qualifying as a psychologist soon; there was piles of work to do.
‘Tea perhaps, Frau Winter,’ she said. ‘Chamomile, if you have it.’
‘Of course, miss,’ Anni Winter said. She gave a small bobbing curtsey, a sign of high favour. ‘And if the Fräulein would like to tell me privately what is required from her room for the night?’ She smiled, showing yellow teeth. ‘Schreck will drive me to fetch it.’
Ello looked at Hitler, alarmed. ‘What?’ she said. ‘I’m not staying ...’
‘Nonsense, mein Schatz,’ Hitler said. ‘You shall stay in Geli’s room. We’ve had it made ready for you.’ Steel had entered his voice. The pout had gone. He looked at her for the first time that night – staring her in the eye. She dropped her gaze before he did.
Anni took her by the arm and led her gently to the far end of the room, so she could list her toiletry and nightwear requirements out of male hearing. Hitler was pouting again. At the end of it, the housekeeper nodded and gave Ello’s arm a faint squeeze. They were under the arch that led to the dining room, private in the vastness of the apartment.
‘I’ll be back soon, gnädiges Fräulein,’ she said. ‘Herr Winter and I aren’t returning to our little flat tonight. We’ll be in our rooms here. We won’t be far away.’
Never leaving the well-defined bounds of servanthood, Anni gave her a quick complicitous look, woman to woman.
‘Thank you!’ Ello said.
Although she despised the fawning housekeeper, right then she could have hugged her.
Anni bustled off. Ello walked back to the fireplace and sat down again in the armchair. Hitler jumped up; the fart was audible. He started pacing, a concentrated look on his face, as if weighing weighty matters. Another volley of farts broke from him. Half turning his back to her, he took something from his jacket pocket and put his hand over his mouth. Ello recognised the distinctive lozenge-shaped tin of Dr Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills. They contained strychnine and atropine – one could but hope ...
He began to pace in the vast room, until the nervous farting had stopped. The sleek, silver-haired figure of Georg Winter appeared, in a plum-coloured velvet smoking jacket and black trousers. He was carrying a silver tray with tea, coffee and a two-layer silver cake-stand. The cake-stand contained neatly-placed croissant-like Wiener Kipfeln (top layer) and raspberry tartlets (bottom layer).
‘Herr Winter!’ Ello called out, relieved not to be alone with her Uncle Dolf, however briefly. ‘How are you? How is your knee?’
The butler-cum-valet smiled as he laid out the delicacies with soft hands. ‘It’s a little rheumaticky in cold weather,’ he said. ‘But I don’t complain, gnädiges Fräulein. Thank you kindly.’
As the servant slowly made his way out, a shaft of intuition ran through Ello, exciting and frightening at the same time. Hitler wanted a second chance with Geli. He wanted to be forgiven.
Her Uncle Dolf had sat down and was now looking at her directly again. She told herself to note when these rare occasions of eye contact occurred. It was when he wanted to impose himself, she would take a wager on it.
Anni Winter came in, without knocking, with a portmanteau bag. She told Ello all her things would be laid out in Fräulein Raubal’s room. There was another reassuring nod as she left, but Ello felt much stronger now.
She looked to her right and saw a drawing, framed, hanging low from a cord, between two paintings.
‘I’ve seen that before!’ she said. ‘At the Hoffmanns’. It’s City Hall. It’s one of yours, isn’t it?’
Hitler nodded. ‘Yes. Do you like it?’
‘Which one is the copy?’ Ello asked. ‘Herr Hoffmann’s or this one?’
‘Both. I did Hoffmann’s for his birthday.’
‘Both? What? Two copies?’
‘Yes, I did these drawings all the time, when I first came to Munich. I can do them very quickly. I used to make a living from them. Do you know the Zehme Hat Shop, on Marienplatz?’
She was amused. ‘Yes!’
Hitler sipped his drink, then spoke. ‘I sold my first drawing of City Hall there. I got fifteen marks for it. It’s actually called The Old City Hall with View over Marienplatz. I did another five or six the same day and sold them all. Do you know the baker’s in Gabelsbergerstrasse?’
Ello smothered a giggle. ‘Uh. No, I don’t think I do.’
‘It was run, in those days, by a chap called Franz Heilmann. This was just before the war. I used to go in there every evening to buy sweet bread for my supper. Anyway, this Heilmann bought my drawings – The Old City Hall and The Residence. He put them up in his shop window. Then all the shopkeepers started to buy them.’
‘What else did you draw?’
Hitler shrugged. ‘The Asam Church, the Deutsches Theater, the Hofbräuhaus – any interesting building. I would then go into the building, or wait outside, and sell them.’
‘Always buildings?’
‘Yes. I love buildings.’
‘So you never draw people?’
‘No, no. Except ...’.
‘Except?’
He shifted in his armchair. ‘Two or three times ... I did some drawings of Geli.’
Ello nodded. Geli had told her Hitler wanted to draw her naked – purely
a device to see her undressed, Geli felt. He usually drew people as cartoons. Geli could draw well herself, and she had praised one of her uncle’s cartoons to Ello. She said it had made her laugh. Drawn when Hider was eleven, it showed one of his teachers holding an ice cream, looking like a child.
Ello thought back to the cartoon figures Hider drew at the Ostaria Bavaria and the Café Heck. One, she remembered particularly, was the industrialist and politician Alfred von Hugenberg’s face on the body of a cat. He had given the cat black riding boots and a dagger.
But his party piece, in company, was an architect’s elevation, perfect in detail and proportion, of the Palace of Westminster. It was a copy of a picture in Spamer’s encyclopaedia. Hider dashed it off in seconds, to great applause from the hangers-on. He did it nearly every Wednesday at the Ostaria. She had had her suspicions since that time, but now she had a preliminary hypothesis, well, diagnosis. And she knew how to test it out.
‘Tell me about the buildings you like best.’
‘All right ...’ He was pleased. ‘When I was in Vienna, I used to look at the buildings on the Ring for hours. There is everything there, you know. Some Classicism, some Renaissance, some baroque.’
‘Go on.’
Rocking slightly in his chair, he dropped into the chanting rhythm he used when he was telling her things. She had been familiar with it since childhood. ‘There’s the Votive Church – that’s by Heinrich Ferstel. There’s the Town Hall – that’s by Friedrich Schmidt. There’s the Parliament – that’s by Theophil Hansen.’
‘Go on.’
‘Another one I love is the Opera. That’s by van der Nuell. He put a bullet in his brain on the day it was opened. Because he thought it a failure. How glorious to die, just as one’s work is complete!’
Ello remembered Hitler’s frequent threats to commit suicide when thwarted. He had threatened to kill himself both during and after the Beer Hall Putsch, and at the Party’s lowest political ebb, the November election last year, the first time the Nazi vote had declined from one election to the next. And she had been here, herself, in this apartment, when he threatened suicide after Geli died.
‘Did you draw buildings in situ? When you first came to Munich, say?’
‘No, no. I drew them back in my room. I was in the little room in Schleissheimerstrasse in those days. My real bestseller was the Registry Office. I used to sell that drawing to couples after they got married. I did a five or six of them a day sometimes, one after the other. I could draw it with my eyes shut.’
‘So you could picture the building clearly in your mind?’
Hitler nodded vigorously. ‘Yes, yes.’
Eidetic memory, then. Ello frowned, concentrating. ‘How long did these drawings take you?’
He shrugged. ‘About ten minutes.’
Ello took a deep breath. She pushed back a few strands of hair which were escaping from the gold clip. Hitler waited, not caring why she was asking these questions, content to follow her lead.
‘Uncle Dolf, have you got any more of your drawings? Here?’
‘Yes. A portfolio full. And there’s a painting in Geli’s room. It’s ...’
‘Get the portfolio first, please. Show me.’
‘Certainly.’ He was on his feet before she had finished speaking.
While he was gone, crossing the huge room rapidly with his mincing gait, she reviewed the literature, her mind ice-clear. The Swiss psychiatrist Paul Bleuler had coined the term Autismus. But it was Dr J. Langdon Down who had first identified Savant Syndrome.
Savants have excessive ability at some aspects of one skill, occasionally art; other aspects of their mental make-up are impaired. An overlap with autism is proved; most savants are autistic but have normal or above-average intelligence.
A key case in the field is Clever Ludwig – an artistic savant, from Vienna. Clever Ludwig is obsessed by detail and order; any disruption of order disturbs him and makes him angry. When he was three, he would line up alphabet cards in the correct sequence on the floor, and if his parents moved any of the cards, he would become visibly upset.
Ello remembered a dinner at her home when, for some reason, she and Henni were there with Hider before the guests arrived. A formal table had been laid. Hider spent nearly twenty minutes tensely reordering the cutlery, napkins and tableware, until everything was lined up perfectly. Henni had made one of her waspish jokes – saying to Ello that Hider was ‘more Prussian than the Prussians’.
In her mind, Ello heard Hider saying ‘Ortnung’ in his Austrian accent, Ordnung – order. It was one of his key words. She thought of another occasion.
One of the regulars at the Ostaria Bavaria, his favourite restaurant, was Dr Manfred Curry – the man who classified human beings according to climate type. He always arrived for lunch in a flashy blue sports car. One day he parked it crooked – not obstructing anyone, just slightly crooked. Hitler arrived in the Mercedes and saw the car like that. He stormed into the restaurant and screamed at Curry to go back out into Schellingstrasse and repark the car straight – which the humiliated doctor duly did. Ortnung again.
Clever Ludwig had some repetitive motor mannerisms, like flapping his hands up and down. Ello pictured Hitler’s flapping, fly-swatting version of the Nazi salute and his chopping motion while talking.
When Clever Ludwig was nine he was taken to the Prater – the funfair in Vienna. Some of what he drew there was like any other nine year old – the people were just stick figures – but the technical detail of the rides was extraordinary. The construction of the girders was rendered perfectly, every detail in place and in proportion. The drawings were completed in approximately ten minutes each.
There was something else, small in itself, but it confirmed the savant diagnosis: those closest to Hitler – Hoffmann, Bormann, Hess – all praised his memory, both his recall of past conversations and his grasp of the technical specifications of cars and ships. With cars, this extended to the exact weight, as well as the name, model and number of cylinders. Savants have good rote memory, especially of concrete information linked to specific contexts – corticostriatal memory – though nobody knows why.
*
Hitler returned with a portfolio of 35 × 45 cm drawings. The first one showed two sides of a nineteenth-century administrative building. He had titled it Ratzenstadl, Wien. Ello thought it showed multiple perspectives. Clever Ludwig’s drawings of his day at the Prater showed multiple perspectives, inside and outside a ride-car. But she didn’t know the building Hitler had drawn, which made it difficult to judge the drawing.
She pulled out a number of Hitler’s early sketches of opera houses and the future Linz Art Gallery, but these were of imaginary buildings.
‘Do you have any of the drawings you did of buildings in Munich? The ones you were telling me about?’
‘Oh yes!’ Hitler said. He smiled at her, showing a gold tooth on the right. His teeth at the front were yellow, which made his breath musty. ‘Here’s one of the Old Residence. I tinted it.’
The picture he pulled out was a yellow-tinted architectural pencil drawing. It showed the courtyard of the Old Residence, the medieval palace by the Hofgarten, in minute detail. There, foregrounded on the left, was the well of the Well Courtyard, there the mullioned tower, the steep tiled roof, the latticed windows. It was a perfect representation.
‘It’s good,’ she said. It was very good, at least she thought so.
‘My problem as an artist has always been with figures,’ he said. ‘That’s why they refused me at the Vienna Academy. They told me to be an architect, but I wasn’t qualified.’
She knew that. She was thinking rapidly. ‘Uncle Dolf, will you draw something for me? Now?’
His surprise and pleasure were almost comic. ‘Yes! I would be pleased to ...’
She gave him a tight smile. ‘Get paper and a pencil, please.’
He fetched his artist’s materials from his room. He was wearing his glasses when he came back – the glasses he wou
ld never let Hoffmann photograph him wearing. On the way across the room, he switched on the overhead light and two more lamp-standards. He always drew sitting down, using an artist’s block to rest the paper on. He settled back in the armchair with the block, paper and pencils now, blinking in the strong light.
‘Uncle Dolf, I’d like you to draw a building you have not seen for some time. Something from your Vienna days, perhaps. But not one that’s already in the portfolio.’
Hitler nodded absently. The request aroused no curiosity in him. ‘The Charles Church,’ he murmured, and immediately began to draw, bent right over the paper, starting with the ornamental work on the campanile. He had small hands but large thumbs. His fingernails were bitten.
While he drew, Ello leaned back in the armchair and shut her eyes. Forcing herself to overcome growing exhaustion, she reviewed the behavioural characteristics of autistic artist savants. Savant artists spend between two and six hours a day compulsively drawing. They rarely draw people. Although they have difficulty drawing figures, they are good at cartoon renditions of people they have previously seen.
What else? They have a preoccupation with one subject, or type of subject, typically one offering strong linear perspective. They repeat this subject many times. Savants often draw from memory, with their faces close to the paper. They begin drawing a peripheral element of a scene, using colour only to fill in defined areas – like the yellow in Hitler’s sketch of the Old Residence.
Hitler finished his drawing of the Charles Church in about fifteen minutes. Ello had been there once, with Geli. The detail, the proportion and the likeness were astonishing.
In particular, the proportions were perfect – autistics have superior ability to segment an image into parts.
‘Will you sign it for me, Uncle Dolf?’ she asked. ‘And dedicate it?’ Hitler pouted, delighted. ‘Sign it to Ello and Rudi, please,’ she added, wanting her brother included. Hitler nodded and complied.
Ello took her drawing and stood, a perfect excuse to end the evening. But as she did so, she noticed a pencil drawing half in and half out of the file. It showed a strange conic edifice, like a beehive on a hill.