by Ron Hansen
“And you must be Angelika,” he said. “Aren’t you pretty!”
“My friends call me Geli.”
She felt her hand lose itself in his as he introduced himself first as Herr Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, and then as his friends and family knew him: Putzi, a childhood nickname that meant Cutie. “Say it, please.”
“Putzi.”
“And so we are done with formalities,” he said, and offered Geli’s hand back to her.
Angela held up the gift box and said, “Look, Geli, chocolates!” And then she shouted to the kitchen, “Paula, won’t you have some?”
“Hah!” Paula said.
Putzi Hanfstaengl’s hand found Geli’s forearm as he tilted toward Angela to offer, “You know what I would like to do, Frau Raubal? Rather than have coffee with you here, I’d far rather take your family out.”
Leo Raubal was still at his high school, where he assisted the night janitor, and The Straggler preferred to stroll Stadtpark as she always did, one hand in a sack of crushed zwieback toast, hunting in vain for pigeons to feed. So only Angela and Geli went with Hanfstaengl to the swank Café Sacher for mocha mit Obers and their famous Sacher torte.
Riding there in a taxi he cordially lectured Angela on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a little pamphlet that Adolf insisted she read in order to understand fully who the party’s archenemy was. With an intensity she associated with high school acting, Putzi informed Angela that the Jewish Nationalist Movement of the Zionists had been founded at a congress in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. Ostensibly their intention was to lead the Jews back to a homeland in Palestine, he told her, but in their secret sessions the Zionist elders had been hatching a heinous plan for a Jewish conquest of the world. Each of their speeches had been recorded in shorthand and the collected papers had been sent by courier to Frankfurt am Main where they were to be stored in the archives of the Rising Sun Lodge of Freemasons. Czarist secret police had somehow intercepted them, however, and the pamphlet had been published in Russian just before the revolution. It was then that Alfred Rosenberg, a Baltic architect who was often called “Hitler’s co-thinker,” had fled to München and, fearing that a Jewish conquest was already well under way, had joined the National Socialists, for whom he had translated the text into German. The famous automaker Henry Ford had been so shocked by the protocols that he’d had them published in America under the title The International Jew.
“And what do they say?” Putzi rhetorically asked. “‘We’—the Jews—‘shall create unrest, struggle, and hate in all of Europe and thence to the other continents. We shall poison the relations between peoples by spreading hunger, destitution, and plagues. We shall stultify, seduce, and ruin the youth. We shall use bribery, treachery, and treason as long as they serve the realization of our plans. We shall paint the misdeeds of foreign governments in garish colors and create such ill-feeling toward them that the people would a thousand times rather bear a slavery that guarantees them order than enjoy the freedom offered them by others.’”
Angela frowned. “Are you saying this is occurring right now?”
“Oh, so you’ve seen it in Austria as well?”
“The Jews I know aren’t like that,” she said.
“There are Jews and there are Jews,” he said. “I would only caution you to be suspicious.” Putzi found his fountain pen, tore out a page from his address book, and wrote on it The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He handed it to Angela and watched with satisfaction as she dutifully put it in her purse. And then he saw Geli in the front seat, hiding a yawn. “All this grown-up talk,” he told her with a smile. “We do go on, don’t we?”
“I wasn’t really listening,” she said. “I was just enjoying the ride. I haven’t been in a taxi before.”
They were in front of the Sacher, and as Putzi Hanfstaengl got out his wallet, he grinned and said, “We’ll make this a night of firsts.”
Coffee in the Sacher Café was a first for Angela, too. She found herself frightened by the high prices on the menu, the haughty ladies in furs, the Old World opulence of the furniture; and she was embarrassed by her faded dress with its cooking stains on the front, the shine on a green gabardine overcoat that she’d bought before the war, the hair that she’d been cutting with kitchen shears since the hard times after the armistice. She was forty, and just four years older than Putzi Hanfstaengl—whom she could not call by his nickname—and yet she felt dull and male in his company, without fascination or joy. She forgot the Jew-hating after a while and found herself liking this huge, generous, genial man; she even liked his ugliness—it gave a flavor of wry comedy to whatever he chanced to say. But he seemed to find it hard to unfasten himself from Geli’s admiration, and he seemed to be talking only to the girl when he said he was from an old family of art dealers and publishers on the Continent and in America, that he’d graduated from Harvard and had belonged to the Hasty Pudding Club, that he’d worked on Fifth Avenue in New York City for twelve years, then had returned to Germany to work on a doctorate in eighteenth-century history, that he was German on his father’s side and American on his mother’s, that his grandfather had been a Civil War general and a pallbearer at Abraham Lincoln’s funeral.
Angela thought she ought to know that name; she glanced anxiously at Geli. Lincoln?
Without shifting her fond gaze from Putzi, Geli said, “A president of the United States.”
“I was just thinking that,” Angela said.
But that was only the beginning of Angela’s being left out. Geli flirted with him outrageously, giggling at the faintest humor, finding reasons to touch his hands, flattering him with awe.
“I first met your uncle at the Kindl Keller beer hall,” Putzi said. “While I had some misgivings about him and his program, I was utterly conquered by his oratory. And I recalled something that Teddy Roosevelt told me long ago when I visited him at his Sag-amore Hill estate. The former president told me it was wise in my business to buy only the finest art, but I ought to remember that in politics the choice is often the lesser of two evils. And so I became a member of the party.”
“The lesser of two evils,” Angela said. “High praise.”
But Hanfstaengl was too focused on Geli to hear her. Confessing that he and his wife, Helene, had taken Hitler on as their joint project, Putzi told how they’d spruced up her famous uncle, found him a tuxedo and a good tailor, taught him the graces of the dining table, and forbade him from adding four teaspoons of sugar to one of Prinz Metternich’s finest Gewürztraminer wines. “I haven’t yet got him to change that postage stamp of a mustache, though. He looks like a fourth-form schoolteacher or a bank clerk who lives with his mother.” Putzi told them he’d offered Hitler their parlor for his afternoon reading, invited him to parties with their wealthy friends, cheered him up by banging out Wagner preludes on the piano “with Lisztian fioriture and a fine romantic swing.”
The headwaiter refilled his coffee cup and then he continued, “While in the first days of his remand at Landsberg, Hitler followed the Sinn Fein of Ireland in trying a hunger strike. Roder, his counsel, got in touch with my wife, and Helene forthwith sent a message to Adolf saying she hadn’t prevented his suicide in Uffing just so he could starve to death in the fortress. Wasn’t that exactly what his enemies wanted? Well, Hitler has such a great admiration for my wife that her advice turned the scale, and he’s far fitter now.”
“You have our thanks,” Geli said.
Putzi tilted forward in a bow while saying, “And you have my admiration.”
“Will you be staying in Wien long?” Angela asked.
Geli glared, as if she’d heedlessly thrown cold water on a cake.
“Oh no,” he said. “Who can work here?” And he offered his observations on the gaiety and frivolity of Wien, falling into French to say, “Elle danse, mais elle ne marche pas.”
It was left to Angela’s fifteen-year-old daughter to translate: “The city dances, but it never gets anything done.” And then in the way o
f teenaged girls with their mothers, Geli added, “French.” She smiled at Putzi. “I want to hear you speak English.”
Hanfstaengl gave it some thought before saying in English, “You are quite the saucy morsel.”
Geli grinned in fascinated ignorance at Angela. “Did you understand him?”
Angela shook her head.
Hanfstaengl said, “I told her she was not unattractive.”
Angela stared glumly at Geli and said, “Yes, it’s true, isn’t it.”
Only then did he turn to the older woman. “You often hear gossip in high society about Herr Hitler and glamorous women, that he fancies this one, that he’s marrying another, but I assure you, Frau Raubal, there’s absolutely no substance to it.”
Angela grimly asked, “Why are people always assuring me that my family has no love life?”
Geli sighed loudly, then fluttered her eyes at Putzi in apology.
“Well,” he said. “We’re having such a lovely time I hate to have it end. Shall I try to get us seats at the opera?”
Geli nearly shrieked, she was so thrilled. “Oh, could you?”
Putzi stood up from the dining table and said, “The concierge of the Sacher Hotel is famous for finding tickets when none are available.”
Angela watched him lumber through the dining room to the hotel lobby, then she frostily said to her daughter, “You shock me, Angelika!”
She smiled. “Only because I have such an electric personality.”
“Carrying on with a married man.”
“We were just talking, Mother!”
“You’re fifteen years old! The thought of you at twenty gives me goose bumps!”
“Well, that’s easy: Don’t think.”
Angela furiously hit the dining table hard with the flat of her hand. Cutlery jangled and Geli jumped with fear. Heads turned in wonder throughout the Café Sacher.
Tears filled Geli’s brown eyes as she thickly asked, “You know how long it’s been since I’ve had any fun at all? Why can’t you just let me be this one night?” She sniffed, and got out a handkerchief. “It probably won’t ever happen again.”
She’s right, Angela thought, and said nothing more. She watched a handsome couple on Kärntnerstrasse get into a horsedrawn carriage. She ate the last of her Sacher torte. And then the last of Geli’s. Then Ernst Hanfstaengl was there again, huffing with breathlessness but holding up three opera tickets in triumph. “The Merry Widow,” he said.
Geli felt sure he was making fun of her mother, but she couldn’t help herself. She laughed.
CHAPTER SIX
LANDSBERG FORTRESS, 1924
At Christmastide the Raubals got a card from Ernst and Helene Hanfstaengl featuring a fine reproduction of Raphael Sanzio’s Madonna of the Chair and saying in a note how much Putzi had enjoyed meeting them in Wien, and that in a porkpie hat and fake muttonchop whiskers he’d sneaked back into Germany through a dangerous railway tunnel near Berchtesgaden known as the “Hanging Stone.”
Within the card Putzi included a journalist’s newspaper account of a living tableau that a group of artists had created at the Blute Café in Schwabing. Called “Adolf Hitler in Prison,” it featured a jail cell and snowflakes falling behind a barred window as a dark-haired man hunched at a desk with his face buried in his hands. A hidden chorus softly sang “Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht” as a female angel gracefully carried in an illuminated Christmas tree and placed it on a table. Looking up in surprise, the prisoner showed his face “and the crowd in the café gasped and sobbed, for many thought it was Hitler himself.” When the lights went up, the journalist had noticed some wet-eyed men and women hastily putting away their handkerchiefs.
After she’d read the account aloud to Angela, Geli was astonished to see that her mother’s face was streaked with tears. “Are you weeping?”
Wiping her cheeks with her palm, Angela said, “I just wish you children could have gotten to know your Uncle Adolf better.” She got the Christmas card from Geli and displayed it on the fireplace mantle. “And I suppose I’m crying because I’m ashamed that it was strangers who first pointed out to me what an admirable man my brother is. The family always, always underestimated him. No wonder he was so distant.”
In February 1924, Adolf Hitler, Erich Ludendorff, Ernst Röhm, and seven codefendants went on trial for Hochverrat (high treason) in a classroom of the old brick infantry school. Hitler was the first to be called to the dock and immediately accepted full responsibility for the putsch, regretting only that he had not been slaughtered along with his fallen comrades, and consigning “the other gentlemen,” including General Ludendorff, who was pompously there in full dress uniform, to the weaker, subordinate roles of those who “have only cooperated with me.” Calculating that the conservative judiciary preserved nationalist sympathies and despised socialism, just as he knew the police and army did, Hitler immediately upset judicial proceedings by becoming the accuser, arguing in a strong, baritone voice that he was not a traitor but a patriot, that he alone was trying to lift Germany up from its oppression and misery, that he alone was forming a bulwark against Communism in whatever form it took.
In front of a huge international press corps, Hitler proclaimed that “the man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled; he wills. He is not driven forward; he drives himself forward. There is nothing immodest about this. The man who feels called upon to govern a people has no right to say: ‘If you want me or summon me, I will cooperate.’ No! It is his duty to step forward.”
Employing his mastery of rhetoric and effrontery, he thoroughly dominated the little, goateed presiding judge, the three thunderstruck lay judges, and a chief prosecutor so harried by the hoots and jeers of university students that he began offering platitudes to the principal defendant, congratulating him on his self-sacrifice, his military service, his private life that had always been proper in spite of many carnal temptations, and calling Hitler “a highly gifted man who, coming from a simple background, has, through serious and hard work, won for himself a respected place in public life.”
Hitler held sway throughout the forty days of the trial, inventing himself as a popular hero as he shouted ridicule, interrupted testimony, and orated at one point for four whole hours—about which the presiding judge meekly explained, “It is impossible to keep Hitler from talking.”
The Münchener Neueste Nachrichten noted in an editorial, “We make no bones about the fact that our human sympathies lie on the side of the defendants and not with the November criminals of 1918.” The jailers were said to be uncertain as to whether to watch him or wait on him. Women were bringing flowers to him. A female follower requested permission to take a bath in his tub. One of the panel of three lay judges was heard to say after a speech, “But he’s a colossal fellow, this man Hitler!”
In accordance with German law, he was given the final word, and he told the court: “It is not you, gentlemen, who pronounce judgment on us. That judgment is spoken by the eternal court of history. What judgment you will hand down, I know. But that Court will not ask us ‘Did you commit high treason or did you not?’ That court will judge us, the Quartermaster General of the old Army, his officers and soldiers, men who, as Germans, wanted and desired only the good of their people and fatherland; who wanted to fight and die. You may pronounce us guilty a thousand times over, but the goddess of the eternal court of history will smile and tear to tatters the brief of the state’s attorney and the sentence of this court; for she acquits us.”
The Raubals followed the judicial proceedings in the Münchener Zeitung and were shocked that the stuffy and querulous Erich Ludendorff, who’d condemned Adolf during the trial as a foreign agitator, was acquitted of high treason, and Wilhelm Frick, a collaborating police chief, and Ernst Röhm were condemned but released, while Adolf and the other codefendants were found guilty of the charges against them, and Hitler was sentenced to four and a half years in the prison at Landsberg am Lech—precisely the length of time he’d served in the war,
and the number of years between his resignation from the Reichswehr and, as it was now called, the “Beer Hall Putsch.”
Within days of the sentencing, Angela got a letter from the presently illegal Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, signed für den Führer by Alfred Rosenberg, saying that Herr Hitler would benefit psychologically and in the court of public opinion if the Raubals were to reestablish family ties with him. While party officials thought it would be fitting for Leo and Paula to stay in Austria, they wondered if Angela and Geli would be so good as to visit Adolf soon at Landsberg am Lech. Included with the letter were two round-trip railway tickets and what seemed to Angela a generous amount of money “for miscellaneous expenses.”
“What do you wear to a prison?” Geli asked.
They went in funeral dresses and black veiled hats, going to München in a first-class railway car, and then an hour west by taxi through the mists of the forests above the Lech River. The fields were still white with snow and the sky was as gray and close as a kettle lid. On a hill outside the handsome medieval village of Landsberg was a fortress of high stone walls and watchtowers that surrounded the old gray buildings of what was now a penitentiary. There common criminals were jailed in one part and those considered political prisoners in another. Adolf Hitler was being held as a traitor in cell 7.
Walking Angela and Geli inside, a friendly prison guard named Franz Hemmrich took them past the dining hall where forty-five Nazis ate their meals at five linked tables and where Hitler would sit regally at the head in front of the hanging red flag and swastika of the party. And when they were going upstairs to cell 7, Hemmrich confided to them about Herr Hitler’s good manners and magnetism, how firmly he governed the other prisoners so there was never any fuss, how he’d given all his guards boxes of Lindt truffles to take home to their wives, how he was like Saint Paul in chains: You knew that if the jail fell down, you would still find Hitler obediently waiting in his cell. “To be frank, I hated him and his program just a few months ago,” Herr Hemmrich said, “but the warden forced me to listen in as he talked to his friends, to find out what he was plotting, and he made so much sense to me that within a few days I joined the party. Others here are doing the same.”