by Ron Hansen
The girls of Seraphim joined boys from Wilhelmsgymnasium in performing The Messiah at the Theatine Church that afternoon and were supposed to stroll through the Altstadt that evening, but when Geli got back to her room, she found a message from the concierge saying her uncle was speaking that night at the Hofbräuhaus am Platzl and was inviting his niece to hear him. And to wear her new clothes. She got the faltering permission of her teacher to go, and she was talking with Ingrid and four other friends in front of the Königshof Hotel when Hitler’s sleek red supercharged Mercedes Compressor arrived beside them as softly as fluid. Envy filled her hushed friends’ faces when they saw handsome Emil Maurice hurry out from behind the wheel to gallantly hold open the right-rear door for her. She got in with false majesty, and fluttered a queenly wave to her friends as the Mercedes headed off, leaving them to wander their high school around the Marienplatz and the shut-up stalls of the Victuals Market.
Her uncle failed to say hello as he tilted into the far-side window of the backseat in order to hold a page up to the fading sunlight of a quarter to eight. Wearing a gray velour fedora and gray wool suit with a soft-collared American white shirt and uninterestng tie, he looked like a financier as he oriented his black-framed glasses higher on his nose and frowned at his notes.
Sitting in the front-right seat was a White Russian with flawless German who turned and grandly introduced himself to Geli as Herr Alfred Rosenberg, editor-in-chief of the Völkischer Beobachter, which he unnecessarily told her was the official newspaper of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. He was a finely dressed widower of thirty-two with heavily pomaded dark hair, but he was also sallow, serious, faintly foul-smelling, and vain for no discernible reason, and within a few minutes she could see he was wholly deferential to Hitler, who paid him no heed at all. Rosenberg asked her, “Have you heard your uncle speak, Fräulein Raubal?”
“My mother says he was trying it even in childhood.”
“Humorous,” he flatly said. And then he looked at Hitler lovingly. “Oh, what an orator! Your uncle is better than opera!”
She looked at him. Hitler simply turned a page.
“My own gift is writing,” Rosenberg said.
She felt an ellipsis he wanted filled. “Shall I pry?” she asked.
Her uncle chuckled, but continued scanning his notes.
“Well, only articles and pamphlets up to now,” Rosenberg said. “The Tracks of Jewry Through the Ages?”
She shook her head.
“Of late I have been laboring on a book about the biological necessity of war. Soon the blood spirit will cry out and world revolution will sweep away all falsifications as the soul of the blond, Nordic race is awakened under the sign of the swastika.”
She hardly heard a word, so stunned was she by his halitosis. “But who of us here is blond?” she asked.
Rosenberg faced the front again. “You probably wouldn’t understand my pamphlets. They’re not for females. Quite scientific.”
Without irony, Hitler said, “Herr Rosenberg is the party’s intellectual.”
Emil Maurice slyly shifted the rearview mirror to find her in it. He smiled, then changed lanes in traffic to pass a fruit vendor’s cart being pulled by a horse, then peered at her again. He smiled. Watching Emil watching her, she faced forward with a stiffened neck and formally folded hands and a look, she hoped, of insouciance.
The Hofbräuhaus was filling up when they got there. Hitler quickly hid his glasses as twenty urgent Sturmabteilung men in their late teens and twenties rushed to the famous car when they saw it. Each was in jackboots and jodhpurs and brown shirts, with the Hak-enkreuz, or swastika, insignia on a red armband. Hitler fondly smiled at them, as a father would his children, waiting for them to hold back the surging crowd before he got out and gracefully strode toward the Hofbräuhaus entrance under the Nazi salute, his dog whip in his left hand. Rosenberg followed him, and then Geli and Emil, his hand gently riding her waist as he guided her forward.
She heard the crowd wondering aloud who she was. Ever stilted and serious, Rudolph Hess pompously bowed toward Geli as he conferred with Max Amann at a folding table stacked high with the first volume of Hitler’s memoir Mein Kampf (My Struggle). It had just been brought out by the Eher Publishing House, which the party owned. The price for the book was twelve reichsmarks, whereas the price for the old Völkischer Beobachter daily she’d seen had been eight billion Rentenmarks. Much had changed.
She saw an unconscious man being hauled out of the Hofbräuhaus by the ankles, his face an affluence of blood. She heard havoc to her right and shouts of “Red scum!” as three storm troopers chased onto a tramway a frail man in his sixties whose misfortune it was to resemble Lenin. She looked away in horror as each took turns hitting him, and when she looked back again he was just a bleeding heap on the tracks, trying to find a tooth.
But she forgot the violence in the festivities. Teenaged girls were handing out pretzels, and singing men were sharing a tankard of beer. Everywhere there were red-and-black political banners and posters: of Nazi hands holding out tools to job seekers under the words “Work and Bread” an illustration of a Nazi fist strangling a frightening black python underneath “Death to Lies” a fierce eagle astride a swastika held up by the masses, and over it “Germany Awake!” and a sketch of three scowling soldiers haloed by a swastika and the phrase “National Socialism—the Organized Will of the Nation.” Above the front doors of the Hofbräuhaus was a freshly painted sign that read NO ENTRY FOR JEWS.
About four thousand people were crammed inside the hall and interior garden, the greater percentage of them forlorn middle-aged men who seemed to be former army officers, civil servants with dueling scars, schoolteachers, waiters, clerks and shopkeepers, factory workers and farmers, some in the lederhosen, jackets, and feathered hats that was the Bavarian national costume; and in the front rows were old ladies in fine dresses and hats, a few of them knitting as they waited. Emil called them “The Incorruptibles.” A greater part of the crowd, though, was comprised of high school students, fraternity brothers from the university, even children—the majority of those wearing Nazi pins were under twenty-five. Collection baskets were being passed from hand to hand, as in church. Everyone seemed to have a tankard of beer and a cigarette or a pipe, and some were stooped over paper plates of bratwurst and sauerkraut. Tobacco smoke hung in the hall like filmy curtains of gray and blue.
Emil told her she would be sitting far away from the main stage because there were generally fights at these rallies, and ferocious arguments over nothing. She was installed, therefore, in an upper loft in the hall. With her there were journalists slouched in their chairs, some wives or mistresses of party members, a harried waitress with tremendous breasts filling orders for food, and, in the farthest corner, a stern priest in a black suit and Roman collar watching Emil leave.
She leaned over the railing of the balustrade to observe Emil as he fought through the crowd to join Julius Schaub as a bodyguard while Rosenberg and Hess huddled with her uncle and other party officials by the stage. Hitler was the only one not talking, a fact he seemed to find irritating. She was fascinated that so many people there seemed excited about hearing him speak, for from this distance he seemed wary, officious, and ordinary, like a concierge in a hotel that had fallen on hard times.
She heard a man say, “You must be important.” And she turned to find the priest leaning on a cane held in his left hand, his black fedora in the other. He was a fit, broad-shouldered man of fifty, a few inches over six feet in height, with steel-blue eyes, a wild shock of graying brown hair, and the hard, weathered face of a frontline infantry soldier. He further explained himself by saying, “Wasn’t that one of Hitler’s friends?”
“His chauffeur,” she told him. “Herr Hitler is my uncle.” She saw the hint of a wince before the priest forced a wide smile and hunted for a calling card in his suit-coat pocket. “Would it be an impertinence if I introduced myself?”
She took the ca
rd and read, “P. Rupert Mayer, S.J., Maxburgstrasse 1, München.” “You’re a Jesuit, Pater Mayer?”
“And you must be a Catholic.”
She held out her hand to him, and he shook it as she said, “Angelika Raubal.”
Shifting his cane to his right hand, it knocked his knee, and he must have seen her shock at the sound of wood striking wood, for he told her, “In the Great War, I was a military chaplain with the Eighth Division. A grenade forced the surgeons to amputate my leg.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” She half turned out the chair next to her. “Would you like to sit, Pater Mayer?”
“Your uncle would find that highly inappropriate, Fräulein Raubal.” Crinkling his eyes, he smiled in private merriment, though his mouth was little more than a wide, flat line. He told her they went back a long way, Herr Hitler and he; to 1919 when they’d both participated in a public debate in München on the false teachings of Communism. Corporal Hitler had been an “education officer” then and had followed Mayer to the platform and said, “We have had a religious attack on Communism from a priest; now I shall attack it politically.” And he had electrified the crowd. Even Mayer had been carried away. But beneath the brilliance of his oratory, the Jesuit had found ideas that were so disturbing that he’d begun attending Herr Hitler’s meetings whenever he could. “And now I have heard a hundred times what Adolf Hitler has to say,” he told her. “I regret the offense to you, his niece, but your uncle is a dangerous man.”
Geli reddened in defensiveness, but the priest simply wished her a good evening and limped off to his faraway seat. Then the hall lights went black and Rudolf Hess stiffly walked onto the spotlighted stage below, his sunken eyes zigzagging beneath his fabulous eyebrows, and in his shrill, frightened voice he went on and on with his fawning introduction, flattering Hitler so fulsomely that people began to rhythmically stamp their feet with impatience. Hess finally turned to his leader, offered the Fascist salute, and shouted, “Heil Hitler!” And then, as his followers cheered and five hundred inflamed storm troopers jumped up as one and yelled over and over again, “Victory, salvation!,” her uncle walked onto the stage.
Without looking at the crowd, Hitler put his pages of notes faceup on a plain table there, diffidently arranged and squared them, and coughed softly into his fingertips in a way that Geli thought of as prim and effeminate. He seemed at first as reluctant to speak as Hess. He held his stare on the floor and stood a little behind the table, as if he’d totter without its support. Quiet settled on the audience and he uttered in a guttural, hardly intelligible bass voice a few sentences about the crisis they were facing in this twentieth century. She could see others leaning forward just as she was, frowning as they tried to hear.
Then both the timbre and the volume of his voice began rising, and in a good High German that was often tinged with Austrian slang and pronunciations, he gave his own interpretation of their motherland’s plight since November 11, 1918. “When we ask ourselves today what is happening in the world,” Hitler said, “we are obliged to cast our minds back to the kaiser’s abdication and his flight into Holland.” And then he reminded them of how the armistice had been signed by weaklings and criminals in Berlin, stabbing a knife in the back of the great German army when it was on the brink of victory. Communist Spartacists had incited a revolution against the Weimar Republic, but were quelled in hundreds of street battles by the Ehrhardt Brigade and other soldiers in private armies, many of them now his loyal and necessary storm troopers. But while they were shedding their blood for their friends and families, European and American enemies humiliated, in fact, sought to murder, their precious motherland with the Treaty of Versailles—“the treaty of shame,” he called it—compelling Germany to take sole responsibility for the war, and calling for fantastic reparations payments, the theft of 13 percent of its territory, and the occupation of the Rhineland and Saar by Allied forces. “The hands that signed that treaty shall wither!” Hitler shouted, and his audience leapt to its feet in wild applause.
Waving them down and quieting, he reminded them that the Weimar government had foolishly tried to fulfill those war debts that were impossible to meet by simply printing more money, hence its currency had soon become worthless. An American dollar could purchase a little more than four German marks in 1914, about eight and a half in 1918, and well over two hundred billion five years later! Hard-won savings were lost, factories were shut down, houses were sold to foreign investors for the price, to them, of a cup of tea.
We are on the right track again, Hitler said. Errors in policy have been corrected. But we are still being preyed upon by the four horsemen of hunger, illness, unemployment, and loss of national pride. There were Europeans at Versailles who wanted the “pastoralization” of Germany. Shall we permit them to do that? Have we, in fact, become sheep? And when he got them shouting no, his face turned fiendish as he threatened, “I’ll haul all those bargain-hunting, pact-making sissies right off the political stage.” Which was followed by tumultuous applause.
And so on. The history was familiar to Geli and everyone else in the Hofbräuhaus, but her uncle’s recitation of it was stunning in its conviction, its poisonous wit, its passion. Shunning rationality, he sought the peoples’ faith with his own certainty. Hard questions were given easy answers. Objections were overcome with insistence. Opinions difficult to accept were continually repeated. Every complex issue was simplified. Every suspicion of paranoia was offered due consideration and respect. The ill-educated in the audience got the impression that they finally understood politics.
Geli looked at her watch and realized an hour had passed since her uncle had begun speaking, and there was no sign he would soon quit, but the people seemed rooted in their seats, fully absorbed in what he was saying. She felt almost as if they’d furiously turn on her if she stirred, for he was healing them in his peculiar way, acquitting them of hostilities in the war, justifying their fury and spite, holding up as praiseworthy their most petty and shameful emotions, for hatred, fanaticism, and mercilessness were not only good but obligatory if the Aryan nation was to find its rightful place in the world. Exalting warfare and struggle as “the father of all things,” insisting that death in battle was a soldier’s highest duty, stressing his own ruthlessness and brutality, frankly admitting the intolerance of his ideology, Hitler was far less a politician than a ferocious prophet of wrath.
Geli later learned that each of Hitler’s ten or twelve large foolscap pages of notes contained fewer than twenty words, which served as cues for what would be ten or fifteen minutes of his rant. Each of his speeches was no less than two hours long and frequently closer to three, obeying the rules of a Wagnerian symphony in its fiery construction. Watching her uncle from afar, she saw how he kept the crowd, like his friends, off balance, first quarreling with the right wing for their feudal economic system, their meanness and class prejudices, their fears in the face of adversity, and then attacking the left wing for their facile thinking, their lax moral values, their abandonment of the great Germanic traditions. Without saying so, he gave the crowd the choice of agreeing with him or of being annihilated by his contempt, and they found themselves in his sway.
She saw that her uncle could do what cannot be faked: He honestly, deeply, majestically felt the hurt, the shame, and the outrage of being in Germany in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Hitler’s gift was to make his hearers feel he was speaking to each one personally, heart to heart, and that he was proudly one of them, a Völkischer—ill-educated, ill-favored, from humble beginnings, a failure in all his undertakings, just another wounded, unknown soldier, and he had suffered precisely as they had. And yet he foresaw a glorious future for them if they would put their complete faith in him as their führer. “One is either a hammer or an anvil,” he shouted. “The only choice is between Hitler and death, victory or destruction, glory or ignominy. We shall be rich or we shall be poor. We shall be conquering heroes or sacrificial lambs. We shall be hot or cold, but those who
are lukewarm shall be damned.”
Even beyond the inflammatory wording, Geli saw that Hitler captivated his audience with a skilled actor’s talent for histrionics: his fists at his heart when he talked of his patriotism; his face ravaged, his shoulders shrugging beneath their heavy burden as he talked about Germany’s afflictions; his hand reaching upward, his face transfixed, as he talked about seizing the future. Often, though, he stood like a soldier at ease, his hands folded protectively in front of his crotch, his head high, his face reddening, his voice an orchestra of primal emotions as he shouted out his enmity for the Weimar parliamentarians, the Communists, the industrialist war profiteers, the intellectuals, and the Jews, promising that all the enemies of the people would one day be “beseitigt,” eliminated. And in case there was any question about who the foremost enemy was, Hitler finished his second hour with one long harangue against those he called “the Hebrew defilers” and the “ferment of decomposition.”
Everything wrong in Germany, he said, was wrong because of the secret Zionist conspiracy to conquer the world. The Jews were parasites; they were vermin. They had stood by idly as Aryan soldiers died at the front, they had forced the armistice, fostered Communism, put their signatures on the “treaty of disgrace,” and gotten fat on Germany’s misery in their black markets. And now they were manipulating financial affairs, miseducating the young, radically changing the sciences, filling the humanities and arts with their ugliness and degeneracy, polluting Aryan blood with intermarriage. With a rage verging on hysteria, his face running with sweat, his shirt soaked through, his voice growing hoarse, Hitler shrieked, “I will pull out the evil of Jewry by its roots and exterminate it!”
Was this why he had invited her here? Was he aware that Geli had girlfriends who were Jewish, that Angela worked in a Jewish hostel and Paula in a Jewish firm? Was he trying to change that, to make them regret it? She felt he was screaming at her personally, like an unhinged, upbraiding father in the midst of four thousand witnesses. She was chagrined. And she was shocked by other feelings as well, for if what he said was hateful and terrifying, it was also electrifying. Each sentence was being cheered now. Half of those in the hall were on their feet. Even grown men joined the high school boys in getting up on the tables to hoist their steins to him and yell their enthusiasm. Geli saw a girl faint with ecstasy. Elderly ladies were weeping with love of him. Cold weather was not as real as the thrill she felt around her.