by Ron Hansen
Hitler’s Niece
A Novel
Ron Hansen
For Bo
Contents
1. Linz, 1908
2. Schleissheimerstrasse 34, 1913
3. The Corporal and the Schatzkammer, 1919
4. The Beer Hall Putsch, 1923
5. The Merry Widow, 1923
6. Landsberg Fortress, 1924
7. München, 1925
8. Haus Wachenfeld, 1927
9. The Pension Klein, 1927
10. Hitler’s Friends, 1928
11. Picnic, 1928
12. Next Door, 1929
13. Life Studies, 1929
14. Prinzregentenplatz 16, 1929
15. Elections, 1930
16. Das Braune Haus, 1931
17. Confessions, 1931
18. September 18, 1931
19. Afterward
Author’s Note
Praise
Other Books by Ron Hansen
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
LINZ, 1908
She was born in Linz, Austria, on June 4, 1908, when Hitler was nineteen and floundering in Wien, a failure at many things, and famished for food and attention. Within the month she was christened as Angelika (“Ahn-GAY-leek-ah”) Maria Raubal, in honor of her mother, Angela, Hitler’s half-sister, but the family was soon calling the baby Geli (“Gaily”), as she was to be known all her life.
Hitler first saw his niece at a Sunday-afternoon party after the June baptism in the Alter Dom cathedral in Linz. Angela heard four hard knocks on the front screen door and found Adolf on Bürgergasse in front of the Raubal house, looking skeletal and pale in a high, starched collar and red silk bow tie and the ill-fitting, soot-black suit he’d worn at his mother’s funeral in December; his wide, thin mustache so faint it seemed penciled on, his hair as chestnut brown as her own and as short as a five-day beard. With unquestioning love, Angela invited him in and hugged him, but it was like holding wood. And then she saw that hurrying up Bürgergasse from the railway station was his only friend, August Kubizek, whose father owned an upholstery shop in Linz. Angela hugged him, too, saying, “We’ve missed you, Gustl.”
“And I, you.”
She called to the kitchen, “Leo! Paula! Look who’s here!” And then she noticed that her half-brother held a silk top hat in his hand and was absurdly twirling a black, ivory-handled cane, as if he were a gentleman of plenty. “Aunt Johanna’s here, too,” she said. “And the Monsignor.”
“Oh, Lord,” Hitler said.
Swerving out of the kitchen with a tankard of beer was Leo Raubal, Angela’s husband, a flinty, twenty-nine-year-old junior tax inspector in Linz whose jacket and tie were now off. Everything Hitler loathed about his dead father, Leo Raubal professed to admire, and he seemed to be imitating the late Alois Hitler as he said, “Why, it’s Lazy himself! The bohemian! Rembrandt’s only rival! Aren’t we honored to finally have you here!”
“Leo, be nice,” Angela said.
“Who’s nicer than I? I’m Saint Nicholas! I’m a one-man charity!”
Hitler’s twelve-year-old sister, Paula, who suffered frequent trials with mental illness and would be nicknamed “The Straggler,” hung back in the kitchen, winding string around a fist and flirting a stare at Kubizek, whom she was fond of, until Hitler held out a present to her. “I have a gift for you, Paula!”
She scuttled forward in once white stockings and took the package, irresolutely staring at a festive wrapping of tissue paper that Hitler had hand-painted.
“You can tear it,” he said.
“But I don’t want to.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, do it!” Leo Raubal said.
She tore off the paper and found underneath it a fat and difficult novel, Don Quixote. “You say the title how?” she asked. Hitler told her. She opened the book, and inside, where she hoped for a sentimental note from the older brother she worshiped, or even a “To My Dear Paula,” she instead found Hitler’s handwritten list of other books in history, biography, politics, and literature that would possibly benefit her. Her face fractured with disappointment as she said, “Thank you, Adolf,” and hurried to put Don Quixote away.
“What a treat,” Raubal told Hitler. “Girls really go for things like that.”
“She’s all right?”
Raubal touched his head. “She’s all wrong up here.”
Aunt Johanna Pölzl, the wealthy, hunchbacked, forty-five-year-old sister of Hitler’s late mother, walked down the hallway from a bedroom. She smiled. “I was taking a nap with Leo Junior when I heard your voice, Adi.”
“My favorite aunt!” he said. “My sweetest darling! Are you feeling well?”
“Oh, just tired,” Aunt Johanna said. “I’m used to it.” She held out her left hand and he kissed it, as did August Kubizek.
Angela got the baby from a bassinet and held the tiny girl up to Hitler’s face so he could kiss her on the forehead.
Jiggling Geli’s left hand with his index finger, her uncle said, “Aren’t you pretty?” She gripped the finger in her fist. “Will the fräulein allow me the pleasure of introducing myself? My name is Herr Adolfus Hitler.”
“Your uncle, Angelika,” Angela said, and shook the baby, trying to get her to smile, but Geli only stared at his hair. “See? She loves you.”
“And why not?” he asked.
Leo Raubal called, “August Kubizek! Would you like some good beer?”
Walking into the kitchen, Kubizek said, “Clearly I have some catching up to do.”
“Won’t take but a pitcher,” Raubal said.
Hitler stayed in the front room as Angela gave Geli to Aunt Johanna and went into the kitchen behind August in order to get out the potatoes in jackets. Canting back into the pantry with a full stein of beer was a stout and white-haired monsignor in rimless glasses and a pitch-black soutane with red buttons and piping. “Welcome, Herr Kubizek!” he too loudly said. “Are you liking the Conservatory of Music?”
“Very much, Monsignor.”
“The child’s a miracle at music,” the old priest told Raubal. “You play, what, violin, viola, piano…. What else?”
“Also trumpet and trombone.”
“Amadeus Mozart,” the old priest said.
Angela got a braising pan out of the oven and put it on an iron trivet on the kitchen table. “We have potatoes in jackets here. And herring rolls in the icebox.”
Raubal handed Kubizek a stein of beer and a cold skillet of sliced kielbasa in ale, then focused intently on his high forehead and his soft, feminine face. “And what does our Adolf do in Wien while you study your music?”
“Oh, he works; very hard. Even to two or three in the morning.”
Raubal was astonished. “At what?”
“Watercolors of churches, parliament, the Belvedere Palace. Reading in Nordic and Teutonic mythology. Writing of all kinds. And city planning. Adolf strolls around the Ringstrasse in the afternoons, carefully observing, then redesigns sections of it at night. Amazing things, really. Architectural drawings for a new opera house. And plans for a high-level bridge over the Danube here in Linz.”
Raubal smirked. “Dare I presume no one pays him for this?”
“We have made friends with poverty, so there is no urgency.”
Raubal told him, “You know what Hitler’s poverty is? An orphan’s pension of twenty-five kronen per month plus a loan from his Aunt Johanna of another thousand.”
Angela asked, “Are you going to want anything else to eat?”
She was ignored. “And what is my salary,” Raubal continued, “the hardworking husband and father of two children and the guardian of his crazy sister? Ninety kronen per month. Don’t talk to me about your friendship with po
verty.” Raubal turned to the priest. “Nineteen years old! And a thousand kronen to play with!”
“A fortune,” the monsignor said.
Kubizek fixed his stare on the beer inside his stein. “Wien is expensive,” he said.
“You get germs from money,” Paula said. The twelve-year-old walked as softly as a kitten to a kitchen chair and sat. “Torrents of them all over your skin.”
Raubal stared at his sister-in-law for a moment, then turned to the monsignor. “And this is what I have to put up with.”
“Well, it’s never easy, is it,” the old priest said.
Angela went back into the front room and took the baby from Aunt Johanna. Hitler watched as Geli squirmed and widened her mouth and finally cried in a worn, soft, cranky way, like a hinge that needed oiling. “She’s hungry,” Angela said, and eased down onto the sofa where she mindlessly unbuttoned her blue dress and offered the infant a full and aching right breast. And then she realized that her offended half-brother had fled into the dining room where he looked out a window with his hands locked firmly behind his back. She remembered him hiding in his bedroom as he dressed, or holding his mouth in malaise when she talked about childbirth, that he was squeamish about anything having to do with the body.
She called to him, “You have to give me your new address before you go. Where are you staying?”
“A few minutes from the Westbahnhof, in the Sixth District. In a flat at Stumpergasse 29.”
While the baby nursed, Angela wrote down his address. “And your landlady?”
“Frau Maria Zakreys. A Polish woman. Hungarians are shouting all day next door. Upstairs are Slavs and Turks. The Habsburgs have made Wien an Oriental city.”
Wearily Aunt Johanna slumped to the right in a wing chair, her forearm on her forehead. “Are you not liking this apartment, Adi?”
Angela watched Geli feeding and heard Adolf holding forth about the city. Almost every night he went to the Burgtheater or the opera—Tristan und Isolde just yesterday, and Der fliegende Hol-länder on Thursday—but he could afford it only because August got free tickets through the conservatory. Otherwise things were so expensive he’d had to hock his winter coat. And others were worse off than he was. Small wonder that the city was thought to be filled with Raunzer, grumblers. It was a hard and dangerous place to live.
Aunt Johanna tut-tutted while Angela forced Geli to try her left breast. And now Hitler was pacing around the dining room table. Did Aunt Johanna know he’d walked the streets of Wien for a full afternoon and not found one true Austrian? Really. Yesterday he’d gone into a café to read a newspaper and found many hanging on canes, but in Czech, Italian, Polish, and Croatian, not one in German! Equality of the races, pah! It was shameful. Hitler half-turned, but saw Geli was still feeding, so he faced the hanging portrait of Alois, his strict, pompous, irritable, authoritarian father, who’d died in 1903.
“Evil is rife there!” Hitler said. “One night August and I saw a hair-raising play called Spring’s Awakening and I felt it necessary to take him to Spittelberggasse and the sink of iniquity—”
“The sink of iniquity?” Aunt Johanna asked.
“Houses of prostitution,” he explained.
“Oh dear.”
Angela thought of him as a misogynist; she wondered if he’d ever even held hands with a girl. She smiled and said, “You shock me, Adolf.”
“I have no interest in contracting syphilis, I assure you. In fact, August and I have solemnly vowed to keep forever pure the holy flame of life. But if it is my goal to form the ideal state, I have an obligation to investigate from afar those festering and illicit monuments to the perversion of our times.”
Aunt Johanna frowned. “Who can fathom what you’re talking about?”
Angela grinned at Geli, who was forgetting to nurse, lost in a fog, her tiny and affectionate hand as delicate as a moth on the huge white urn of Angela’s breast. Was it possible to feel more love than this for a child and not faint with ecstasy? Would there ever be a time when Angelika was not essential to her? She heard the three men howling in the kitchen and she wondered if whatever was said was truly funny, or was it Leo’s Schadenfreude? Leo who clapped when waiters dropped plates, who found all falls hilarious, who often teased children to tears; Leo who first got interested in Angela Hitler because he’d heard she was fine Hausfrau material and a jolly woman who loved to have a good laugh. She was twenty then, and strong and pretty in a square-jawed way, and oh so eager to get out of her stepmother’s house. And now she was twenty-five and, she thought, much had changed.
Aunt Johanna was talking, and then Adolf. Angela heard him say, “We face a gloomy interior courtyard. Even in the afternoon I have to light a stinking kerosene lamp in order to sketch.”
Angela asked her half-brother, “Why aren’t you painting at the academy of fine arts?” And she heard a shifty moment of quiet before she looked up to find that Adolf had turned from the dining room window with his hand inside his jacket. Crossing spitefully to her, he pulled out a folded sheet of paper that he sarcastically ironed out on the sofa arm next to Geli’s head.
“Official judgment,” it read. “Adolf Hitler, born Braunau am Inn, Upper Austria, on 20 April 1889. Religion: Catholic. Father: civil servant (deceased). Education: four forms, Realschule. Sample drawings: Inadequate; few heads.”
“You weren’t accepted?”
“You’re quick, aren’t you, Angela.”
“Oh, Adolf. I’m so sorry. Was there nothing you could do?”
Aunt Johanna offered, “Learn to draw heads?”
Controlling his temper, he said, “I went to the director. Professor Siegmund l’Allemand. A Jew. He thought I had little talent for painting, but ought to consider the school of architecture.”
“And?”
“I admitted I quit taking classes here at sixteen and didn’t have my diploma.” And then, his face flushed as if he were seething, he began ranting first about the intransigence of the officials at the grueling four-hour exam, and then about their being petty bureaucrats, all of them old-fashioned, fossilized civil servants. Without taste, without fairness, without common sense. With no loyalty to their heritage.
Aunt Johanna sighed. “You realize, of course, that if you’d studied at a technical school you’d have matriculated by now? But no, you’re an artist, you won’t listen to anybody. You’re as pigheaded as your father was. You go your own way, thinking of no one else, just as if you had no family. My sister died six months ago, and this is your first visit.”
Hitler fell melodramatically to his knees before her and in a high, whining, sniveling voice, his face rolling against Aunt Johanna’s thigh, confessed his failings, his fecklessness, his fruitless talent; confessed, too, that it was shame and vanity and his wanting so desperately to please her that had frustrated his good intentions. And now he felt doomed to waste his life in the filth of questionable surroundings, frostbitten in winter, feeble in the heat of summer, his youth wholly lost, penniless but for the paintings he sold and too proud to ask for financial assistance, having only Sorrow and Need for companions.
Aunt Johanna softly petted his hair. “There, there now,” she said.
Angela thought, The Mommy routine. While growing up with him, she’d all too often watched Klara give way to his miserable abjection and lamentations, and now she could abide no more. She buttoned her dress, lifted Geli to her dish-toweled left shoulder, and gently patted the baby’s back as she walked to the kitchen.
The monsignor was wiping tears of laughter from his eyes and her husband was fully intoxicated and addleheaded on the floor. Angela got a platter of Russian eggs from the icebox and put a jar of gherkins next to it on the kitchen table. Leo got up, filled his mouth with an egg, and hunted in the gherkin jar with his fingers. Angela got out a fork. August Kubizek was sitting beside the kitchen sink, saying, “No sooner do we go partners on a ten-kronen lottery ticket than Adolf begins fantasizing that we’ve already won. A sure thing. Endless tal
king about how we’d rent a house across the Danube, he’d furnish it to his own taste, paint his own trompe l’oeil on the walls, make the house our own conservatory. We’d also hire a lady of exquisite culture and placid temperament to be our chatelaine. Elderly, of course; for as he put it, he wanted ‘no prospects to be aroused of a kind unwelcome to us.’”
Raubal winked as he asked, “Could it be young Hitler has a religious calling, Monsignor?”
“You give me goose flesh, Herr Raubal.” The old priest peered through the bottom half of his glasses at the baby girl and smiled as he petted her flossy brown hair with his hand. “She’s fallen asleep,” he whispered.
“I’d better go put her down.”
Kubizek was saying, “And then when the lottery winner was announced, and it wasn’t us, Adolf was destroyed. Annihilated. It was unjust, he shouted. Authorities had stolen the prize from us. All he could do was lie in a dark room for two days. And I realized, ‘What a fantastic imagination! Others’ wildest dreams are reality to him!’”
Angela walked to the hallway just as Leo Junior was toddling out of the children’s bedroom, crabby with wakefulness. After she put Geli down in the crib, she hiked Leo up on her hip so the two-year-old could rest his forearms and chin on the railing and watch his sister doze for a while, her cheeks working furiously on her thumb. Then Angela changed and groomed her son, and took him to the kitchen like a gift, but found that Hitler had taken off his jacket because of the heat and had moved from Aunt Johanna to the company of men.
The monsignor was saying, “And confirmation was worse. Whitsunday, 1903, 1904?”
Without interest, Hitler said, “1904.”
“Of all the boys being confirmed, he was the sulkiest, the most unpleasant, the most ill-prepared; as if religion were a giant bore for him, and confirmation repugnant. We had to drag the words out of his mouth.” The monsignor filled his stein again as he asked, “You don’t go to Mass or confession anymore, I’ll wager.”