Woman in the Shadows

by Jane Thynne

  “Perhaps,” he suggested to Decker, as though it had just occurred to him, “Fräulein Henning might be more inclined to help if we interviewed her in another setting.” He nodded his head in the direction of the car outside.

  Horror-struck, Ilse looked from one to the other. “No! I’m trying to think. I’m trying to remember everything I can!”

  But Wiedemann was bored with her now. He behaved as though she had already been dismissed. He turned to address Decker.

  “I’m beginning to think Fräulein Henning is not the right kind of woman to be training at a Reich Bride School,” he mused. “Perhaps she will not be able to stay here, and then she won’t be able to marry, and what will happen to her then, eh? Maybe she will have to make a living out on Friedrichstrasse in green-laced boots.”

  Ilse burst into a torrent of sobs and buried her face in her apron. She could not believe this was happening to her. She had been brought up to think of policemen as good men who looked after the interests of decent, God-fearing people like herself and her family. It was true that she had seen them shouting at troublemakers in the street, hitting men with sticks, or arresting Jews who had caused trouble, but that was other people. Ilse had always assumed that the law existed for her protection. This was not the kind of thing that happened to a girl like her.

  Fortunately, the Gestapo men seemed to have suspended the interrogation.

  “We’ll be coming back.”

  Wiedemann rose to leave and brushed roughly past her. As he left the room, Decker looked back and pointed a finger at her like a gun. “Keep thinking, eh?”

  Much later, when all the brides had gone to bed and Ilse was still issuing great, shuddering sobs into her pillow, she remembered something she should have told them. That builder, the one who was constructing the model house. She had seen him talking to Anna. Perhaps he was the one who killed her. She should have told them that.

  CHAPTER

  19

  “Fräulein! Fräulein! Wachen Sie auf!”

  Clara had fallen asleep on the train somewhere outside Nuremberg. She had been enjoying the beauty of the Bavarian countryside, the tiny medieval villages with their fairy-tale spires, timbered gables, and winding cobbled streets. The flat farming land interspersed with massive blocks of forest. But her early start, and the rhythm of the train, which rocked her like a baby, had lulled her to sleep for a few minutes and made her vulnerable. She was dreaming she was back in England, in a performance of The Merry Widow at the Haymarket theater, and she had completely forgotten her lines.

  “Fräulein! Wachen Sie auf!”

  Now the man opposite her was giving her a gentle nudge, and the first things she saw as she snapped back into full consciousness were the curious eyes of his wife upon her. A guard in a green uniform stood stolidly before her, waiting to check her papers.

  After the guard had left, slamming the steel door behind him, she looked at her reflection in the window, imprinted against the fields flashing past. The image of a young woman with dark hair floated before her, observing her soberly. In some ways, Clara was always accompanied by a ghostly image of herself, not just the heightened self-awareness that a woman in public has but a picture of herself, a constant consciousness of her appearance to others.

  She thought back to the time she had arrived in Germany, four years ago. How much had changed since then! She studied her reflection and thought of the Clara Vine who came, full of hopes for a screen career, escaping a bad love affair, nervous and more than a little naïve. That Clara Vine no longer existed.

  And yet, it was strange how suited she was to this life. As a child she had not seemed especially suited to anything. She was shy beside her gregarious elder sister, one of those quiet, watchful children who notice everything but tend to be overlooked. Even when she developed a passion for acting, it was less about self-promotion and more about self-effacement. To be anyone, and no one, at the same time. She had gained in confidence, of course, since childhood, yet this was something she was strangely good at. Perhaps she was like one of those characters Leo Quinn had told her about in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Those mythic women with the power to transform themselves, blending into their surroundings with mysterious speed.

  She thought of Ralph Sommers’s proposal. It was one thing to be gathering gossip from the wives and girlfriends of the Nazi elite. Some of them, like Emmy Goering, could barely be silenced. She only had to open the door to open her mouth. Whenever they met, Emmy Goering would unleash a torrent of anecdotes about the rivalries of the top brass, their squabbles, their differences of opinion, their private doubts. And it was not just the men who had feuds. The women were the same. If only the men knew what anger and passion churned beneath those floral silk dresses, bodices, and embroidered blouses! If they thought they could contain a woman’s emotions by constricting her in a dirndl, they were badly mistaken. Women like Emmy, with a strong propensity to gossip, found Clara an ideal companion. They trusted her because of her father’s political inclinations and because, being half English, she seemed not entirely of their world. Yet cultivating Arno Strauss was something else entirely. Even though Clara had secured an invitation to Goering’s party, she was still not sure what she planned to do.

  She looked around the carriage. The man opposite was sleeping, his head nodding on his chest with the motion of the train. Automatically she wondered if he was genuinely asleep or secretly watching her. Apart from him there was only the elderly couple who had woken her, the man in leather shorts and green loden hunting jacket, his wife in a jaunty Tyrolean hat. They kept sending inviting glances in her direction, as if eager for some conversation. Sure enough, they took little encouragement to start chatting. They were traveling to Munich to visit the Führer’s Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung at the House of German Art. Had she heard of it?

  “I have. It sounds fascinating.”

  That summer Hitler had opened an art exhibition to showcase what he called the New German Art. Fifteen thousand works had been submitted, and Hitler had helped to make the final selection, seizing on Nordic nudes, gentle landscapes, and genre painting, weeding out anything obscure or difficult, even kicking holes in some of them. He had his own peculiar standards, which included a ban on any color that could not be seen “in nature” and any scenes that depicted anguish or eroticism. Displays of extreme emotion, it seemed, were reserved for the Führer himself.

  And why was Clara visiting Munich? the old couple wanted to know.

  Why? Because Bruno Weiss was a dear friend, who needed to know that he had been reported to the authorities? Or because if Bruno was arrested, there was a chance he would give her name under interrogation? Perhaps it was both.

  “I’m visiting my sister.”

  Clara chatted about her fictitious sister and said she hoped she might get a chance to see the Führer’s exhibition, too. The old couple talked excitedly and a trifle nervously about all the sights they intended to cram into a weekend. The Opera. King Ludwig’s Residenz. The Chinese tower teahouse in the Englischer Garten. For that moment, Clara poignantly wished she were exactly the person they thought she was, looking forward to nothing more demanding than a leisurely few days sampling the food and the famous Munich Gemütlichkeit.

  She disembarked at the Hauptbahnhof and consulted the map she had brought with her. From what she could see, she needed to walk eastwards to Prinzregentenstrasse to reach the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. The Entartete Kunst, the exhibition of Degenerate Art, was only a short distance away, in the Archaeology Institute. She had a small leather bag in which Anna Hansen’s stationery case was packed, as well as a change of clothes for an overnight stay.

  Munich was sparkling in the afternoon sun. It was easy to see the appeal of the place, compared to the somber Prussian cityscape of Berlin. Munich was prettier, cleaner, less frenetic. Clara walked slowly along the broad boulevards, flanked by handsome white buildings with russet roofs, clanging with blue and white trams, until she reached the town square of Ma
rienplatz, with its craggy, neo-Gothic Neues Rathaus, stained with soot and encrusted with more gargoyles than Hitler’s cabinet. The town was busy with shoppers, the crowds swollen by tourists attending the annual Oktoberfest, with their knapsacks, leather suspenders, and green hats. She began to relax a little, dallying along the parades, looking into the shop windows, thinking about buying some late lunch from a bakery, or at least a cup of good coffee. The sense she had in Berlin of being continually watched had gone. Here, there seemed little chance she was being followed.

  As she walked, she looked curiously around her. Munich was where it had all begun. The birthplace of National Socialism and still its spiritual capital, where back in 1923 Hitler and his gang of associates had led a putsch in a beer hall and ended up in jail. Since then, Bavaria had become Hitler’s stronghold. In Berlin he was always on duty, always formal, in his bombproof marble-lined Chancellery. Munich was his playground. Here he could relax, attend the opera, eat at the Osteria Bavaria restaurant, or have orange pekoe tea in the Hofgarten with the thuggish group of ex–storm troopers that Goebbels referred to sarcastically as his “Munich clique”: Rudolf Hess, Putzi Hanfstaengl, and, until he was executed a few years ago, the brutal SA leader Ernst Röhm.

  Clara had no trouble finding the Haus der Deutscher Kunst. It was unmistakable. A spectacular neoclassical temple whose pale stone columns rippled with the blood and black of Nazi banners. It looked like a railway station might look, if it had been built by ancient Greeks. Designed by Hitler’s architect Paul Ludwig Troost, it had taken four years to construct and had been opened in a grand ceremony that July. A sweep of steps promised gleaming halls and immense vistas of blood-red marble. Clara had no interest at all in seeing it.

  Instead she turned to another building a short walk away, where a banner above the door read DEGENERATE ART, ENTRY FREE.

  A long queue snaked up a narrow wooden staircase, skirted around the first sculpture, a menacing evocation of Christ on the cross, and funneled into a series of gloomy, low-ceilinged rooms crammed with exhibits, chaotically assembled. Everything was deliberately jumbled together, pictures hung askew and unframed on the walls, suspended by string or rope. Cubists, Fauvists, Impressionists, and Expressionists were side by side. Beside each work was the price that a museum had paid for it, and some of the paintings were daubed with Nazi epitaphs. The walls, too, had slogans scrawled all over them. A THREAT TO THE GERMAN NATION! PURIFICATION AND EXTERMINATION! WE DESPISE THE OPTICAL ILLUSIONS OF THE JEWS! A pair of SS guards presided like the opposite of museum guides, contemptuous backs to the exhibits, casting bored glances over the throng. Clara scanned the crowd rapidly. Could Bruno possibly be here?

  The place was jammed. Clara fell in step with a tour guide shepherding a goggle-eyed group of Munich matrons around the room. They passed a group of Kandinsky watercolors, hung in chaotic series beneath a sign reading CRAZY AT ANY PRICE. Despite the dim lighting, the colors burst like fireworks from their frames. The guide pointed a disdainful baton and explained. “The Führer tells us that degenerate artists cannot see colors or forms as they are in Nature. That is a sign of racial inferiority.”

  It was at that moment that Clara sensed again the feeling she had had in Berlin. The distinct yet irrational impression that someone was following her. The invisible brush of eyes on the back of her neck. She waited until the group was moving on and turned abruptly to see, at the far edge of her vision, the whisk of something rounding a corner. Then a large-bosomed woman in a flowery hat sailed into view, and when Clara looked again, whatever she had seen was gone.

  Could that be a tail? Or was Clara merely being stalked by her own overheated imagination? Was it a person, or merely some figment knitted from the interplay of light and shadow? The room was so ill-lit it was impossible to tell. Shaken, she tried to focus again on the paintings themselves. How shocking and energizing they were. Bodies that looked less like people than like the raw carcass of some animal’s kill, yet were still electrifying in their impact. She stared up at them, marveling at the alchemy by which base pigment seemed transformed into the very living substance of flesh.

  The next room was entirely devoted to the depravity of women, and the first painting she saw gave her a jolt of recognition. The Devil’s Bacchanal by Bruno Weiss. She had last seen it propped in the corner of his room in Pankow, and now it was here, a vast six-by-six-foot canvas, cheek by jowl with Van Gogh and Emil Nolde. The painted scene was surreal; the composition had the garish texture of a nightmare. In the foreground the earth seemed convulsed and malign, as if it had engendered the evils perpetrated on its surface. Above it a naked woman was surrounded by licentious scenes of men cavorting with each other, including, in the background, one who closely resembled the late Ernst Röhm. The woman herself, for whom Anna had been the model, her white flesh gleaming like a piece of meat on a butcher’s block, appeared both beautiful and inhuman. Above the painting a Nazi curator had scrawled: AN INSULT TO GERMAN WOMANHOOD!

  So this was where Bruno had stood, appraising his own work. Clara had to smile. He was right to be proud, and no wonder he was gratified to be exhibited in the company of artists he admired so much, even if the presentation left a little to be desired.

  She stayed in front of the painting for several minutes, allowing the tour group to move on and hoping against hope that Bruno would materialize. Yet as the minutes passed, the sheer futility of her search became apparent. Even if Bruno had been here, even if the Luftwaffe officer Fleischer had seen him, what on earth would persuade him to return? No Jew in his right mind could feel comfortable in this place, or anywhere in Munich for that matter. Bruno must have been aware he was a living target. As a Jewish Communist agitator, who had already been arrested in 1933 on suspicion of pamphleteering, he would surely feel as relaxed in Munich as a deer in a forest full of wolves.

  Suddenly some sixth sense, prickling on the surface of her skin, caused her to look around. It was a flicker at the far edge of vision, as slight as a tree’s leaves frisked by a passing wind, and as she wheeled around she glimpsed something. A man with his back towards her, his face obscured by the tilt of a hat’s brim. About five foot eight, with a suitcase in one hand. He was on the far side of the room, observing Otto Dix’s War Cripples, a vista of hideous, skeletal veterans selling matches in the street. There was something familiar about the man. But even as Clara tried to scrutinize him, he stepped around the corner and was gone.

  Quickly she followed, turning left into a vaulted corridor lined with glass cases and then into the next room, a cramped, low-ceilinged space, where people stood three deep to view the exhibits. As she pushed through the crowds, she received several angry reprimands, but the man had disappeared. After threading as fast as she could through the rest of the rooms, she clattered down the wooden stairway and looked right and left along the street. A bus crawled past, blocking her line of sight to the other side of the street. She dashed across the road, narrowly missing a truck whose driver craned his head, mouthing inaudible imprecations behind the window. There was no sign of the man. Either he had vanished into thin air or he could perform optical illusions as well as any degenerate artist.

  Retracing her steps along the broad thoroughfare of Prinzregentenstrasse, Clara tried to analyze her suspicions. She had learned to trust her instincts over the years, and her instincts told her that something about the man in the gallery was familiar. Yet she could not, for the life of her, think why. Added to which, nobody, except for Mary Harker and Ralph Sommers, knew she was here. And even if the Gestapo were observing her in Berlin, what was the chance they would have tailed her all the way to Munich? On the other hand, if the man had been a genuine visitor, why would he simply vanish?

  She crossed town, wandering up Leopoldstrasse, flanked by stately Baroque buildings of cream and soft ocher. Lost in thought, she barely noticed that a crowd had formed ahead of her, until a forest of right arms rose around her and a supercharged twelve-cylinder Mercedes, followed by a three-car e
scort full of armed guards, sped past. The cavalcade stopped at the corner of Schellingstrasse and Schraudolphstrasse, in front of a dark, low-timbered restaurant. The sign above the door said OSTERIA BAVARIA. A posse of black-uniformed guards ran out of the escort cars like beetles from under a stone.

  An Alsatian bounded onto the pavement, tail wagging. The Führer was in town. And lunching at his favorite restaurant.

  Turning sharply away, Clara was almost knocked over by a gaggle of girls on bicycles, eager, unlike her, to catch a glimpse of the Führer as he headed towards his favorite table, tucked safely away at the back. She half wondered if she might see Unity Mitford, in her black shirt, among them. Mitfahrt, Emmy Goering said she was called, because she followed Hitler everywhere. Then Clara remembered that the Mitford sisters were in Berlin, preparing to attend the Goerings’ reception.

  Despite Clara’s avoidance tactics, it was impossible to escape the Führer. A little way down Schellingstrasse she passed a glass-fronted shop adorned with photographs of him. Hitler speaking, Hitler gazing into the distance, Hitler reading. He stared at his audience without breaking his gaze, in a way that speakers usually did not—a tactic, Clara had heard, that was designed to arouse fear and awe. The Hitler gallery seemed excessive, even by the enthusiastic standards of Third Reich shop displays, until she looked up and saw the name—Heinrich Hoffmann.