by Ron Hansen
Scoffing at the notion, Hitler said, “I have been a pagan all my life.”
Raubal hit him on the head with the flat of his hand.
“Ow!” Hitler said, and worried his hair.
“Monsignor is trying to save your soul.”
The old priest turned to Raubal. “At the confirmation party he ran outside to play Red Indians with nine-year-olds. And him fifteen.”
“It’s of a piece,” Raubal said.
“Leo,” Angela cautioned, “manners.” She turned to Adolf. She was six years older than her half-brother and fondly remembered the sunny days when she’d put him in a stroller and parade with him, pretending he was her child. Ever since then she’d been able to forgive him anything. She touched his wrist. “Are you hungry, Adolf?”
Her half-brother unhappily examined the potatoes in jackets, the cold kielbasa, the Russian eggs, the gherkins, the herring rolls, a hunk of Gouda cheese, and, complaining that it was Jewish food, asked Angela to please make him Mehlspeise, a flour-based, meatless dish.
She was heading to the pantry when Raubal shouted, “Don’t cook for him! Eat what we eat, Adolf!”
Kubizek finished his beer and stood. “You have a piano. Why don’t I play us something?”
Excitedly, Hitler said, “We’ll do a duet!”
The party moved to the front room where there was a magnificent Heitzmann grand piano that Hitler’s mother had given him when it seemed to her that Adolf was full of fabulous talents that needed only to be stirred. Kubizek sat on the right side of the bench and deftly handled the primo parts, while Hitler hunched over the left half of the keyboard and hammered the secondo score of Antonio Diabelli’s “The Pleasures of Youth.” Enthusiastic applause at its conclusion encouraged them to try a minuet by Franz Joseph Haydn, but Hitler struggled enough that when they finished, his sister Paula frankly said, “We want to hear August alone now.”
Hitler got up from the bench, but not without saying, “It’s my piano, you know.”
Raubal suggested that Kubizek honor the monsignor by playing something by Anton Bruckner, the former organist at the Alter Dom in Linz.
“Anton Bruckner,” the old priest sighed. “He could turn any church into a cathedral.” And then he sat heavily on the sofa with Aunt Johanna as Kubizek interpreted Symphony No. 7.
Angela tipped the wing chair on its hind legs and pulled it to the sofa, then sat with little Leo on her knee.
The party listened in silence to the piano for a few minutes. And then Aunt Johanna tilted toward Angela and in a hushed voice said, “Adolf asked me for his inheritance.”
“What inheritance?”
“Whatever I intend to give him when I’m gone—he wants it now. Yours, too. Says he’ll pay it all back when it’s time.”
Angela let her fidgety son get on the floor. “And what did you say?”
“That I didn’t know what was worse, his greed or his effrontery.”
“Are you talking about me?” Hitler asked. His hands were folded behind his back as he listened to his friend, but his head was turned to them.
“Have you no ethics?” Angela asked.
Hitler faced his Heitzmann grand piano again.
Too beschwipst with beer to pay attention to the music, the monsignor asked Aunt Johanna, “What nationality is Pölzl?”
“Moravian,” she said. “Czech.”
Angela said, “So is Hitler, we think. From Hidlar, or Hidlarcek. Meaning ‘small holder.’ Aunt Johanna’s sister and my father were both from the Waldviertel region of Austria.”
“The village of Spital,” Aunt Johanna said.
“Close to the Czechoslovakian border,” Angela said.
The monsignor folded his hands on his stomach. “I see.”
Kubizek heard their talking and halted after the first few pages of the score. Without irritation, he said, “Well, you get the idea.”
“Continue, Gustl!” Hitler exclaimed.
“It’s too hot to concentrate,” Kubizek said.
The monsignor was still interested in genealogies. “And your grandmother went by what name, Angela?”
“On my father’s side? Maria Schicklgruber.”
“A good Austrian name. And your grandfather?”
And then Hitler was there, his hands folded in front of his fly, his forehead wormed with a vein of fury as he asked, “Confession, is it? In public?”
“Watch your tone,” Raubal said.
Angela told the priest, “We don’t know.”
The monsignor thought for an instant and put it together. “Your father, Alois, was illegitimate?”
Raubal said, “We heard their grandmother was a maid in the house of a man—”
Hitler shouted, “You don’t know! It’s gossip! Reckless speculation!”
Raubal asked him, “Why are you always so noisy?” And he continued, “Of a man named Frankenberger and got pregnant. Whether by him or his son, we aren’t sure.”
“You aren’t sure of anything,” Hitler said. “It is not a true story!”
“It happens so often,” the old priest said. “A girl without money. And the tedium, the proximity to a boy her age, the promise of wealth.”
“We’re going, Gustl,” Hitler said, and he went to get his jacket, his silk top hat, his ivory-handled cane.
“We’ll change the subject!” the monsignor called.
Angela got up. “Don’t be like this, Adolf!”
“What shall I be?” he asked. “Without shame?”
Leo Junior waved his hand and said, “Bye-bye, Uncle Adolf.”
Hitler firmly fixed his top hat on his head and tilted onto his cane as he asked with a false smile, “And what kind of name, Monsignor, is Frankenberger? Why have you failed to ask that? I wonder, is it Jewish?”
“Could be.”
Hitler withdrew to the front door and halted to say, “I have seldom had so unpleasant an afternoon. And I won’t again. I shall have nothing further to do with my family.”
And then he fled the house as Leo Raubal whistled and clapped his hands.
CHAPTER TWO
SCHLEISSHEIMERSTRASSE 34, 1913
Worried that Adolf was dead or dying, Angela Raubal left Leo Junior with Paula and took her five-year-old daughter to München in the fall of 1913 in hopes of finding her lost half-brother, who was wanted by federal authorities in Austria for failing to register for military duty.
Angela was then, at thirty, a widow of three years’ standing. Leo Raubal had died unexpectedly from a simple bronchial catarrh in 1910, and his wife had only inherited three children to take care of and a civil official’s monthly pension that hardly paid the rent.
August Kubizek had attended Leo Raubal’s funeral Mass in Linz and, afterward, the reception for friends and family at the house on Bürgergasse, frankly expecting to find Adolf there, and forlorn when he didn’t. While sitting with Angela on the sofa, Kubizek told her that in the fall of 1908 he’d gone away for eight weeks of training with the Second Austro-Hungarian Infantry Regiment, and when he’d gotten back to the flat on Stumpergasse in November, he’d found that Hitler had abruptly moved out and had left no forwarding address. And still no letters or postcards had arrived from his friend.
“Of course there’d been differences of opinion and horrible rows,” Kubizek told her, “but with Adolf that was quite normal. I’ve been pondering the situation for a long time now and I haven’t discovered the slightest reason for his hurt feelings or his silence. He’d never so much as hinted at our parting, even in moments of anger. I feel so despised and alone.”
“I, too,” Angela said.
Kubizek remembered that Leo had just been buried and said, “Oh, I’m so sorry. I’m being insensitive. Your loss is far greater.”
Angela grimly said, “Yes, it is.”
With few job opportunities in Linz and, as far as she could see, no available men with the fortitude to marry a widow with three children, Angela finally was forced to move the family to Wien in
1913, finding work as a chambermaid in a one-star hotel. She still had not seen her half-brother for a long time, and she’d received only one letter, and that one so formal and unfamiliar it had seemed a form of sarcasm.
But Paula was becoming a weekly rebellion, and the children needed the firmness and safety of a father, even if he was one as childish and hot-tempered as their uncle. So Angela finally did what August Kubizek had failed to do earlier, going to the central registration office at police headquarters in Wien where she discovered that Adolf Hitler’s last known address had been at Sechshauserstrasse 58, where he’d listed his occupation as “Writer.” But that was three years ago. The only other police form he’d filled out had a blank line after “Address.”
She went to Sechshauserstrasse, where an older woman in the building thought she’d seen Hitler sleeping on a park bench one night, and suggested Angela try the hostelries that served the poor.
She did that, going systematically from one to the other over the next few days before finding on Meldmannstrasse a hostel known as the Männerheim. A few of the homeless men there remembered Hitler well, for his offensive clothes were so ferocious with lice that they’d been forced to hold him down to his bed while they stripped him and scrubbed all he owned with kerosene. Others remembered him shouting venomously against the Habsburgs, singing “The Watch on the Rhine” as he shaved, chilled to the bone because he’d sold his winter coat in the fall, concentrating on watercolor postcards of famous buildings that he’d sell to tourists on the street, or hanging around an occult bookshop in the Old Quarter. And that’s where she went next.
She wanted to exit as soon as she entered the shop, for it stank of old food and dirty shirts, flecks of dust hived in the fusty air, and an insane chaos of books and pamphlets were heaped on the floor or sloppily jammed in close bookcases that seemed a jolt away from tipping. Charts for astrology and alchemy were on the walls, and there were framed photographs of weird and glaring people she hoped she’d never meet. She heard a man say from a storage room, “Who is it?” She gave her name, and immediately the owner hurried forward through the draped doorway and with both his damp hands held hers as he introduced himself as Ernst Pretzsche. A hunched little man far smaller than Angela, he seemed all too fascinated that she was Hitler’s half-sister, inching ever closer to her as he talked about his dear friendship with Adolf and her own beauty, while the only thing she could think was that his face was like a toad’s. She asked him where Hitler was, but he seemed not ready to tell her yet. Holding his hand to his heart, he exclaimed, “To have such a genius as a relative! I won’t pretend I don’t envy you, Frau Raubal. Young Hitler! That self-confidence, that passion, that force of will, those mystical eyes!”
“Have you seen him lately?”
Pretzsche simply wiped out a cup with his handkerchief and filled it with cold coffee for her, then offered Angela the stool behind his cash register as he told her his own history, saying he’d grown up in Mexico where his father was an apothecary and a weekend anthropologist who’d studied the magic rites and blood cult of the Aztecs. “But you don’t like the black arts,” he said.
“You can tell?”
His facial expressions swam from one to another, as if holding on to just one was a feat of coordination. “You need not patronize me,” he said.
“You haven’t told me yet where Adolf is.”
“You don’t believe I know him?” he asked.
“But I do.”
“Stay!” he said, and scuttled down an aisle. “I’ll show you a book he sold back to me!” And he produced a foxed and tattered old copy of Parsival by Wolfram von Eschenbach, telling Angela that Eschenbach was a thirteenth-century lyric poet whose famous legend about the Holy Grail had been the inspiration for the nineteenth-century opera by Richard Wagner.
She took the book from him and saw Adolf’s signature inside the front cover. And then she turned a few pages and was shocked to find Hitler’s handwriting all over them, filling all the white space as he commented on the text, corrected phrasings, cited other authorities, heralded a useful footnote with an exclamation mark and dismissed another with “NO!”
“Was this a favorite book?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” Pretzsche said, “but so were a hundred others. Ancient Rome, yoga, hypnotism, astrology, phrenology, the Eastern religions, Wotan. Unfortunately, he couldn’t afford to buy books. So I took pity on the boy and let him borrow.”
“But why was he poor?”
Pretzsche fiddled with a fountain pencil in his shirt pocket as he looked to the front door. No one else was there. “Maybe he gambled, or lost it on women. Maybe he was paying a tutor. Who knows what happens to money?”
Angela gave him back his coffee cup and got up from the stool. “You haven’t seen him for a while?”
“A full year. Maybe longer.”
“Have you any idea where he’d be?”
A faltering smile squirmed onto his wide mouth as he inquired with quaint innocence, “Are you still unmarried, Frau Raubal?”
She headed for the front door.
“Wait!” he called. And when she didn’t, he called, “Bavaria!”
She turned. “Where?”
“Aren’t there artists there?”
Riding west through Austria with five-year-old Geli in a second-class railway car, Angela lifted up a picnic basket and got out a lunch of Wienerwürstl, rye rolls, sweet mustard, and white radishes. She told her daughter that München was short for bei den Mönchen, “at the home of the monks.” Cowled Franciscan friars had been brewing beer there in the twelfth century. And now there were hundreds and hundreds of breweries.
“Are we going to see somebody?” Geli asked.
Angela said, “You don’t remember your uncle, do you?”
Geli shook her head.
Angela told her all about him. She was six years older than Adolf, she said, and had grown up up thinking of the tiny boy as her plaything, a favorite doll. She’d called him Schatzi, Sweetie. But he was a Muttersöhnchen, a mother’s darling; she often vied with Frau Klara Hitler to hold or coddle him, and both found it easiest to talk when Adolf was the subject. Klara Pölzl had been serving as Angela’s mother’s maid when she’d gotten pregnant, and she’d been four months along when Angela’s mother died and Klara married Alois Hitler, her uncle. Twenty-three years younger than Alois, the obedient girl never thought of him as less than a superior being and throughout their marriage addressed her tyrannical husband as “Uncle.” If he were away and she needed to scold, Klara would point to his rack of meerschaum and calabash pipes as a sign of authority. Angela told Geli that the family had lived for three years in Passau am Inn in southern Germany, and she’d frequently heard Adolf describe his childhood there as the happiest years of his life. You could still hear a hint of a Bavarian accent when he talked. She confessed that she’d taught herself to kiss at twelve by kissing him, and when she’d been flooded with love for a high school boy who’d hardly known she existed, she’d found a kind of self-fulfillment in offering her affections to Adolf, fondling him, telling him how handsome he was, how gifted and intelligent, how worthy of everything. Oh, how she had adored him then! Even their father, Alois, who was hard to please and had chased his first son, Alois Junior, away from home with his carping, was flamboyantly proud of Adolf, helping his friends remember the high grades his son won at the Benedictine school at Lambach, how he sang such a glorious tenor at the choirboys institute, how he had a head for facts of all kinds as well as a hand at art. But Adolf only recalled his father’s chidings, his criticisms, his canings. “And he recalls nothing but his mother’s saintliness,” Angela said. And then she added, “Will you always think of me as saintly?”
Geli smiled. “Uh-huh.”
At the Hauptbahnhof, the main railway station in München, Angela asked a woman selling used jewelry on a blanket where the writers and artists stayed. “Everything is in Schwabing,” she was told.
She therefore took her lit
tle girl on a six-block tram ride into the district and got off at the first café, where Angela began holding up to idlers there an old photograph of an unhappy Hitler in the Realschule at Steyr. Within the hour, in front of a Schwabing cabaret called The Eleven Executioners, she’d found a white-bearded sidewalk caricaturist who, once he’d ascertained that she was not a creditor, told Angela he was not particularly a friend but that he sometimes talked Communism with Adolf Hitler and thought he sold his watercolor versions of postcard scenes at the Kunsthandlung Stuffle on Maximilianstrasse. And at the gallery she finally learned that her half-brother lived at Schleissheimerstrasse 34, above the Josef Popp Tailor Shop.
A friendly Frau Elisabeth Popp welcomed Angela and Geli to Germany and, just to confirm that it was the same Herr Hitler, got out a registration form he’d filled in with his fast, slashing, handwriting style on May 25, 1913. “Adolf Hitler,” it read. “Architectural Painter from Wien.”
“An Austrian charmer, he is,” the landlady said. “Ever so gallant and funny. But can’t he be a mystery? You just never know what he’s thinking.” Frau Popp thought he was out now, but she took them up to his third-floor furnished room to wait for him there. She confided to Angela on the way up that she need not fear, Herr Hitler was quiet, pleasant, helpful, and fastidious, and she’d never once seen him with kangaroos.
Angela thought that rather faint praise until she determined that “kangaroo” was slang for “prostitute.”
The landlady unlocked his door with a skeleton key. “Often he stays home for days at a time, hardly eating or drinking, his head buried in those books of his. Shall I stay with you?”
“We’ll be fine,” Angela said, and Frau Popp walked sideways down the sheer cliff of stairs.
The flat was furnished with a feather bed, a lavender sofa, a petroleum lamp, a ladder-back chair and a dining table, and matching oleograph prints of a schnauzer and a dachshund. Angela installed Geli on the sofa where she swung her legs and dangled her unlaced shoes from her toes as her mother hunted for food for them. She found only a mostly finished tin of English biscuits and four chocolate-covered almonds in a box. She gave Geli a biscuit, then wandered to the dining table and its high stack of books on loan from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. She lifted off something titled Das Kapital and feared the worst as she flipped through the pages, but was relieved to find none of his crazy handwriting inside. She began reading the first chapter but found it hard going, then heard the flat’s door open.