by Ron Hansen
Angela turned and tried to find Adolf the wolfish, skinny Artist there, five feet nine in height and no more than one hundred twenty pounds, with injustice in his milk-white face and his hand still theatrically on the door handle as if he would soon slam it. His fairly clean but unshorn hair was in avalanche at his frayed green collar, his first try at a full goatee was like a child’s crayoned jeer on a face in a poster, and his hand-me-down clothing was as weirdly pied as a jester’s: ankle-high shoes with broken laces, a yolk-yellow waistcoat underneath a too tight and short-wristed purple suit, a green shirt, a blood-red tie.
The landlady seemed to have prepared Hitler for his family being there, for he acknowledged the little girl on the sofa with flitting glances, then scowled at the book in Angela’s hand as he walked in, saying, “I have been immersing myself in a doctrine of destruction called Marxism.”
“Is it politics?” Angela asked.
“Everything. Economics, politics, culture. A world plague.”
Angela looked at the book beneath it, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels’s The Book of German Psalms: The Prayerbook of Arios-Racial Mystics and Anti-Semites. And beneath that was a book by Berthold Otto, The Future State as a Socialist Monarchy. She heard in her head what her late husband would say and couldn’t help but ask it. “Will you make money with all this reading?”
“Dear Frau Raubal,” Adolf said with an insincere smile, “Who knows for certain what will or will not be of use to him in life?”
Geli was fiddling with a shoelace, and afraid to look at her uncle. Sitting jauntily next to the little girl, he waggled her knee with his hand. “And you are Angelika all grown up?”
With great seriousness she held up her right hand, her five fingers spread. “I’m this many.”
“So old! I am all my fingers and toes, two eyes, two ears, and not yet a nose. What is that?”
She giggled, but shrugged.
“Twenty-four,” he answered. Crossing his legs, he held his higher knee with his hands as he inquired of Geli, as of a waitress in the Löwenbräukeller, “And you, Fräulein Raubal. What have you been reading? Anything good?”
Geli seemed full of regret as she said, “I don’t know how to read yet.”
Angela asked, “You are liking München, Adolf?”
“Absolutely!” he said. “And Schwabing is the capital of the arts in Europe.”
Angela looked at his easel. On it was a half-finished painting of the Cuvilliés Theater. On the floor was a fine if academic rendering of the sixteenth-century St. Michael’s Church, where the Wittelsbach royalty were buried.
“I haven’t turned pious,” Hitler said. “Churches sell.”
Angela held up a penciled sketch of the Hauptbahnhof for her daughter and asked, “Have you seen this building, Angelika?”
She shook her head.
“But you did! Where did we get off the train?”
“Oh.”
Angela frowned at a watercolor of the Sendlinger Tower. “Why are the people so tiny?”
“I have trouble with proportions,” he said, flushing with petulance and embarrassment. “Why are you here?”
“Are you aware that Austria has a compulsory service law?”
“Angela! You surprise me. You’re working for the Austrian government now?”
“Look at what I have been getting in the mail!” She got an official document from her purse and handed it to him. It indicated that Herr Hitler was to present himself for Austrian military service in Linz within a fortnight. If he failed to comply, he would be prosecuted, and if he was found guilty of having left Austria with the object of evading military service, he would be fined heavily and imprisoned.
Adolf folded the official document and handed it back to her. “I have no fear of prison.”
“Oh good,” Angela said, “because the police tell me you’ll be arrested at the border.”
“And why would I go back to Austria?”
“Us!”
“Who’s that?”
“Your family!” she shouted, and watched him chew his fingernails as she urged him to find a real job in Linz or Wien, to register for his Austrian military duty, and to help in taking care of his childlike, seventeen-year-old sister.
And then it was Adolf’s turn to argue, and she found she was no equal to his flame as he wildly paced all around the flat, his hands flying, his voice a screech as he harangued his half-sister about a hopeless Austro-Hungarian army composed of gypsies and mongrel people, about Wien, the home of the despicable Habsburgs and their Babylon of mixed races, and about his own Wagnerian genius as a thinker and artist that she wanted quelled with grinding labor and drudgery.
It was the tyranny of anger she’d grown used to with him. Angela begged him to see things her way, but she hated her own whining tone as much as she hated his nastiness and scorn, which reminded her so much of their father’s, and so she finally did what his mother would do. “Dear Adolf,” she said, “you’re so worked up. Are you hungry?”
Obviously he was, but he wouldn’t say so.
“Shall I get us some groceries? We can talk later, when we’ve eaten. We’ll all feel better then.”
With anxiety he again noticed his niece on the sofa. “Don’t stay away long.”
“Shall I take her, then?”
Hitler shrugged. “I have no company here usually. I’m a hermit. She won’t be a nuisance?”
“You’ll be good, won’t you, Geli?”
“And quiet?” he asked.
The little girl looked at her mother in fright.
“She’ll be fine,” Angela said.
Hitler shoved his forelock left with his right hand. “Kindergarten isn’t man’s work, you know.”
Angela sighed, got her hat and purse, and went out.
A sheet of paper with handwriting on it was weighted down by an inkwell on the sill beside his bed. The little girl pointed to it. “What’s that?”
“A poem,” he said. “About my mother. She’s passed away.”
“Oh,” she said. And then, “Will you read it to me?”
Uncle Adolf sighed, but twisted to get it. “‘Think of It!’” he read. “That’s the title.”
She was listening with great seriousness.
“‘When your mother has grown older, / And you, too, have grown older, / When what was formerly effortless / Now becomes a burden, / When her dear loyal eyes / Do not look out into life as before, / When her legs have grown tired / And fail to carry her anymore—/ Then lend her your arm for support, / Accompany her with gladness and joy. / The hour will come when, weeping, you / Will join her on her last journey! / And if she asks questions, answer her. / And if she asks again, have patience. / And if she asks another time, speak to her / Not stormily, but in gentle affection! / And if she cannot understand you well, / Explain everything joyfully. / The hour will come, the bitter hour / When her mouth will ask no more!’”
She finally said, “Oh.”
“A good poem?” her uncle asked.
She gravely nodded.
Hitler slid the sheet of paper under the inkwell again, and then he seemed to faint, falling backward onto his feather bed and throwing a forearm over his eyes.
“Are you sad?” Geli asked.
After a few seconds, he said, “Tired.”
The sofa fabric was making her thighs itch, so Geli slid off. “I’m hot,” she said.
“Darling, I have to rest a little.”
She heard a ticking clock on the windowsill and walked to it. She put her ear to its face. She got up on tiptoes and looked out the window to a playground on the other side of Schleissheimerstrasse, but no children were in it. She found three paintbrushes in a full glass of water. She slightly lifted the tallest one and watched a faint strand of blue paint float from it and change into smoke, and then there was nothing but tinted water. She watched her uncle to make sure she was being good. His fists were clenching and unclenching. His hands were fair and hairless. One ankle-high shoe was still o
n the floor, the other was rucking the quilt. She squatted and stared underneath the bed. A high stack of magazines was there. She pulled out the top one and held it in her lap as she sat on the shellacked planks of the floor. She traced the big letters on the front cover.
“Ostara,” her uncle said.
She looked up and found him critically watching her from the feather bed with the Those are mine face that she often got from her brother.
“Ostara is the ancient Germanic goddess of the spring.”
With great effort she turned the pages of the magazine, finding a puzzling cartoon of a pretty blond woman whose clothes had fallen off and who seemed to be crying and hitting with her fists a hairy human being or ape who seemed to be trying to lie on top of her. “What’s happening?” she asked.
“It’s what Jews do to Aryan virgins. You wouldn’t understand.”
She turned a page. “What’s it say?”
“‘Are you blond?’” he read. “‘Then you are a culture-creator and a culture supporter! Are you blond? If so, dangers threaten you!’” Hitler got down on the floor beside his niece and held up other magazines in the stack. “The ‘Race and Welfare’ issue,” he said. “And here’s one on ‘Sexual Physics, or Love as Odylic Energy.’” Then he guided Geli’s forefinger under the fancy lettering as he read the front page of another: “‘The Dangers of Women’s Rights and the Necessity for a Masculine Morality of Masters.’” Hitler went to another. “And here’s my favorite, Angelika. ‘Judging Character Through the Shape of Skulls.’”
“Why is it your favorite?”
Hitler’s hands fell upon her head and felt all around underneath her hair, saying in a ferocious voice, “Because I can tell if Angelika’s naughty or nice just by feeling the knobs on her noggin!”
Hitler’s niece squealed with delight.
When Angela got back to the flat with groceries, she found them still on the floor, wildly laughing as their hands inched along each other’s flushed faces. “I have food for us,” she said.
Hitler raked a hand through his flowing hair as he sat up. “What kind?”
“Leberkäs, sauerkraut, and strudel.”
“And coffee?”
“Chicory. And milk. Many things.”
She started putting the food away and Hitler held Geli close as he stage-whispered, “This is what it is to have a mother!”
CHAPTER THREE
THE CORPORAL AND THE SCHATZKAMMER, 1919
Late in the first year of the Great War, Angela was pawning an emerald necklace for food money when she happened upon a shop window that displayed a famous press photograph taken in München in August 1914. The photo featured a huge crowd gathered at the Feldherrnhalle, the Hall of the Field Marshals, to register their wild enthusiasm for the alignment of Germany with Austria in a war against Russia and Serbia, a conflict that they thought would be over within a few weeks. And Angela was surprised to find Adolf there in the front of that rally, white-faced and frail, his hair now short, his hat lifted high in a cheer, happier than she’d ever seen him. She found out that Adolf had formally petitioned Ludwig III for permission to enlist in the Bavarian army and, in spite of his general unhealthiness, had been accepted as a volunteer. Even though it meant forfeiting his Austrian citizenship, Hitler was overjoyed, and he later wrote Angela, “I am not ashamed to say that I fell to my knees and thanked Heaven with an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being allowed to live at this time.”
Angela in fact got few letters from her half-brother in the four years of the war, but Hitler was in regular correspondence with his former landlords, Josef and Elisabeth Popp, and they often forwarded news of him to the Raubals in Wien. And so they heard from Elisabeth Popp that Hitler was with the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. She told them that his friends called him “Laced Boots,” called him “Adi.” And now he was a Meldegänger, an orderly and runner between headquarters on the front, “functioning,” as he put it in one letter, “as a field telephone,” the favorite target of snipers. “My highest goal,” he wrote, “is to follow my superior blindly and contradict no one.” In occasional postcards from the Popps, Angela heard that he was in Ypres, Belgium; in Messines; in the battle of the Somme. His favorite food, he’d told them, was zwieback toast and honey. Sergeant Max Amann had gotten him to paint the officers’ dining room. A superior’s report noted that he was “modest and inconspicuous,” which he took as high praise. He’d found a lost white terrier he’d named Little Fox. Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea was in his backpack and he was memorizing it.
Even at Christmas, when Angela expected some private summary of his year on the front, she got only one poem:
I often go on bitter nights
To Wotan’s oak in the quiet glade
And with dark powers form a union!
The moon offers spells and magic
And all who are defiant in daylight
Are made fearful and insignificant!
Shells and guns and bayonets
No longer have power over me!
I am Wotan and in charge
Of my own destiny!
Enemies waving their shining swords
Are all changed into pillars of stone!
So the false ones part from the real ones
As I consult the ancient nest of words
And find formulas of blessings and prosperity
For the pure, the just, and the good!
Angela heard secondhand that a shell had wounded him, and in the field hospital he’d been awakened by a nurse, the first female he’d seen in two years. And then he was healing in Beelitz, outside Berlin, where he found “only hunger and dire misery.” Children were drinking coffee because there was no milk, and cats were being called “roof rabbits.” And then he was in the Ludendorff offensives on the Somme, on the Aisne, and on the Marne. Just before the Armistice she heard he’d been blinded by a gas attack near the village of Werwick. Another letter forwarded from the Popps reported that he was “fit for field service” again and was living in “the pigsty of the Türkenstrasse barracks” near his old Schwabing neighborhood. Angela heard that Frau Popp had taken a calf’s head vinaigrette to him and that he’d finished it in one sitting. She said Hitler wouldn’t say what he was still doing in the army, but he’d told her he was stunned to hear that the Raubals never got his letters. Liar, Angela thought.
Then, six years after Angela and Geli had last seen him in München, Hitler showed up, on a furlough, at their flat near the Westbahnhof in Wien. Geli was then eleven and her uncle was thirty, and handsome, she thought, in his polished boots and gray, high-necked tunic and a faintly perfumed, gull-winged mustache known as a Kaiserbart. She peered closely at his hero’s medals as he proudly described them to his niece and his admiring thirteen-year-old nephew: the Iron Cross, first class; the Iron Cross, second class; the Military Cross, third class, with swords; the regiment’s diploma for conspicuous bravery; the Medal for the Wounded; and the Service Medal, third class. And then he let Leo feel through his gray woolen trousers the gouge that a shell had torn in his left thigh. Even after four years in the war, Hitler had gone no farther in rank than Gefreiter, a lance corporal, owing to his Austrian background, he told Leo, and to the circumstance that his preferred and dangerous job as a runner could not be held by someone with a higher rank.
His twenty-three-year-old sister Paula hesitantly brought out their finest porcelain tea service and simpered and curtsied to him before going back into the kitchen to help Angela with the Austrian dessert that was called Kaiserschmarren. And then Leo was sent to the bakery for rolls because their only bread was the wretched stuff made of potato peelings and sawdust.
And so the choreography of family allowed his niece to be alone with Hitler in the parlor, watching silently and starstruck as he sat forward in her father’s old chair and held a Dresden teacup and saucer rather daintily in his hands, letting the tea become lukewarm and then cold as he talked and talked about
the endless war of attrition that Germany would have won were it not for the pacifists and slackers and traitors who had signed the armistice.
She imagined this was how it was to have a father or a husband. To be affectionate, first of all, to tell him how gallant he looked, to offer him spice cakes or strudel, to loll in a heated parlor, to hear his voice and be the still pond on which he skimmed his opinions. She tried to seem poised. She found herself adjusting her stockings and her skirt, but he failed to notice. She otherwise kept her ankles crossed and her hands folded and her head tilted in fascination. When she lost track of what he was saying, she’d gently smile and Uncle Adolf would be encouraged to go on with his monologue.
Often in Belgium, he told her, they were forced to hide from heavy artillery fire for days on end. In cold trenches of crumbling mud. With water up to their knees. And so it was a relief to charge forward, hearing the first shrapnel hissing overhead. Watching it explode at the edge of the forest, splintering trees as if they were straws.
“We observe it all with curiosity,” he said. “We have no idea yet of danger. We crawl forward on our stomachs while above us are only howls and hisses. Shattered trees surround us. Shells explode and hurl clouds of stone, earth, and sand into the air. Even the heaviest trees are torn out by their roots. We get to water, a stream, and though it offers some protection, we find it choked in the yellow-green stink of poisons. We cannot lie there forever, and if we have to fall in battle, we choose to be killed as heroes. We attack and retreat four times. And do you know, Geli, from my whole company only one other soldier remains, and finally he also falls? And so I am alone. A shot tears off my right coat sleeve, but I remain safe and unscathed. Quickly I find a hiding place. At two o’clock in the afternoon others join me and we go forward for the fifth time, and finally we occupy the forest and the farms. We slaughter all the animals, until the fields flow red with blood. Within a few days, we withdraw.”