by Ron Hansen
Geli knew just enough English to shyly grin.
Hearing a foreign language, Hitler frowned, but then he turned in his chair to his private secretary and told Rudi what a marvel his niece was because she could follow the fiction serials in twelve magazines and newspapers simultaneously. “And she always knows how the stories fit together. She even notices when an installment is missing.”
Geli turned and found Ilse Hess interestedly staring. “What’s your sign?” Ilse asked.
“My sign?”
“Astrologically.”
“I’m Catholic. We don’t believe in astrology.”
Ilse smiled indulgently. “What’s your birthday?”
“June fourth.”
She sat back. “You’re a Gemini then. I’ll have to do your chart.”
Waiters put china and glassware in front of Geli and filled a flute with champagne. She heard Hitler holding forth to his followers about the joy of having such glamorous female company as he dined. “Women have always been such a comfort to me,” he said. “I have always found that feminine beauty lifts me from my doldrums and helps me put aside the cares that the world so often hands me. Whether she is intelligent or original is quite unnecessary. I have enough ideas for both of us.”
Helene Hanfstaengl sighed at his gracelessness, and softly asked Geli in German, “Are you in love?”
Geli thought for a few seconds, furiously nodded, and then she and the women laughed.
Kristina, the photographer’s model, asked, “Are you talking about the man you walked in with?”
“Hitler’s chauffeur,” Helene Hanfstaengl said.
Kristina fascinatedly looked over her shoulder as Emil walked from the Herrens to his chair near Hitler. “He’s very handsome. Is he French?”
“Corsican,” Geli said. She saw that Herr Hoffmann was now telling a joke, but Hitler was divided in his listening, flicking his worried attention between Emil and her, trying to be a jocular man among men yet wanting even more to hold his niece’s voice next to his ear, like a seashell with an ocean’s roar. She heard Helene ask in English, “Are you kissing yet?”
Geli answered in first-semester English, “Yes. But many time kissing not. Uncle watches.” She pinched her thumb and first finger a few millimeters apart. “Little only.”
Hearing them, Putzi Hanfstaengl widened his knees and hunched into their group, his white tie falling loose. In English he whispered, “Who’s kissing whom?”
“Emil and Geli.”
Clownishly dropping his jaw, Putzi tilted his ugly head to his wife. “And how will our smitten corporal take that?”
“Why should he care? Women don’t matter to him. He’s a neuter.”
Ilse asked Geli in German, “What are they saying?”
“I have no idea,” she said, but she did.
Waiters put down hot plates of food in front of Kristina and Ilse and Helene. Heinrich Hoffmann was full of satisfaction as he sat back to be served and continued his story, telling it now only to Emil Maurice and Rudolf Hess, whose hand failed to hide his buckteeth as he smiled. Geli’s uncle was glaring at her across the dinner table as if she’d betrayed him, his white face seeming about to fracture with hurt. Hoffmann finished his joke by shouting, “Hold the lion!” and the men howled with hilarity, and Hitler joined in, too, repeating Hoffmann’s final words and folding over with laughter, laughing so hard that he took out his handkerchief and wiped the wetness from his eyes.
She was scheduled to take the afternoon train to Berchtesgaden and share Christmas with Angela at Haus Wachenfeld, and so at noon on December 21st Hitler visited her white room at the Pension Klein, staying in his coffee-brown leather trench coat and slouch hat as he scanned her science textbooks and turned the handwheel on the Köhler sewing machine on her desk. A chart of the periodic table of the elements caught his attention, and he seemed at once to hate it. Swatting his right trousers leg with his dog whip, he asked, “Are you enjoying your studies, Geli?”
She said she was, but heard the heartlessness in it, as did he.
“We call it the Talmud high school,” he said, “there are so many Jews there.”
She shrugged. “They’re smart.”
“Are your studies difficult?” he asked.
“I have so much reading to do. And memorization.”
Hitler flinched a smile. “And you don’t have much time for either.”
Emil, he meant; the friend he envied, the rival he revered. She put a pfennig in the heater and watched the coils warm into radiance as she buttoned up a pink cardigan and hugged the chill in her torso.
“Are you thinking of Emil now?”
“Always,” she said.
She felt a soft nudge against her forearm and saw that her uncle had taken off his hat and was jutting out a present that was the size of a fountain pen in a box.
“I have something for you,” he said.
She took it from him and smiled. “Well, it’s too small to be a photo of you.”
Saying nothing, her uncle sucked his right little finger as he often did when he was nervous.
She tore off the silver foil wrapping and opened a jeweler’s box to find a fourteen-karat-gold chain and swastika pendant. “Oh,” she said. “Thank you.”
“And now you can take off that other thing.”
She was still wearing the crucifix, on a fine steel chain, that she’d gotten at her confirmation. She took it off to please him, and he fastened his gift around her throat. She felt his hands hover just above her shoulders, his face tilt close enough to inhale the fragrance of her freshly washed hair.
“Love has made you even more lovely, Geli.”
She touched the swastika and said, “Won’t the girls at school be envious.” She felt him withdraw from her and sink down on the white-enameled bed, his leather trench coat talking with each move. She turned and he was lying back as he so often did, as if in a faint, one forearm flung over his forehead, one hand hanging to the floor.
“I hate the Christmas holidays,” he said. “Have you any idea why?”
“No.”
“Of course you don’t. You weren’t even born.”
“Oh,” she said. “Your mother.”
“Today is December twenty-first. She died precisely twenty years ago today.”
She sat forward on her desk chair. “Uncle Adolf, I’m so sorry.”
“Cancer of the breast,” he said. And he told her that Klara had been just forty-seven. She’d gone through a mastectomy, but they’d still found cancer in the tissue. A Jewish doctor had told them their only chance of a cure was to continually saturate the wound with iodoform, which burned into her skin like acid. Even now he could smell its foul, hospital odor. Klara had clenched her teeth on a towel so she wouldn’t scream. When it entered her bloodstream, she couldn’t swallow. When he’d offered her water, it had tasted like poison. They’d installed her in the kitchen, Aunt Johanna and he; there was no heat in the rest of the house. They’d torn down a closet and hauled in a sofa so he would be in perpetual attendance, and would hear her moan in her sleep. “I was in hell.”
“But wasn’t it good for her, having you there?” Geli asked. “Wasn’t she happy for the company?”
Rolling to his side, he crushed a pillow under his head and squeezed his forearm between his knees. “I was eighteen, and she changed me. She was so brave, Geli. So tender and considerate. Unflinching. Without complaint. We put up a Christmas tree and filled it with candles, and she fell asleep in their flickering glow. I was sketching her face just after midnight when she died. Angela found us at sunrise.”
Geli got up and gently knelt by him, a handmaiden to his grief. “And you still feel the loss?”
He childishly turned his face into the pillow, childishly nodded his head.
“Are you crying?” She heard nothing but a false kind of wailing, a boo-hoo-hoo. “Don’t, Uncle Adolf.” She put a hand into his hair and trained it back. She kissed his shoulder. “You’ll make me cry,
too. You don’t want that.”
Wildly thrashing, like a fish in a net, Hitler tore away from her and hiked up his dark trench coat to hide his face. “Don’t look at me like this!” he shouted.
With fright she got up from her knees and faced the window. A female equestrian in fur coat and jodhpurs trotted a gelding through the fields of the Englischer Garten, the horse sinking to its fetlocks in the snow. “Are you all right, Uncle Adolf?”
She heard his shoes find the floor, heard him sigh in a halting way, his face perhaps in his hands. “She was everything to me. And now you are. I have such fears—”
“You needn’t—”
The floor shook as he fell to his knees behind her, hugged her thighs, buried his face against her buttocks. “If only I had someone to take care of me!” he wailed, his words like hot, moist handwriting on her skirt.
She felt his hair with a hand. “I’ll take care of you.”
“Will you?”
Clarification seemed necessary. She told him, “You’re my uncle.”
“I have no friends, no family—”
“You have me. You have Angela and Paula.”
She felt him shaking his head. “They don’t love me! I need love!”
“I love you.”
She felt him withdraw from her, still on his knees, his hands riding his thighs. And then he stood as an old man does, finding his balance, hurting and huffing, then collecting himself. “I have to find my hat,” he said.
She gave it to him without turning.
“I do hope you’re happy, putting me through all that.”
She turned. His scowl was as red as a scream. “I didn’t—”
“You have made me look ridiculous,” he said.
“I’m confused, Uncle Adolf. I—”
And then he smiled. His hand oh so gently groomed her hair and fondled her cheek and chin. “Aren’t you pretty,” he said, and put on his hat. “I have rules for you, Princess. Each reasonable and generous. One, I still expect your obedience, your loyalty, and your company. Two, I will be in charge of when you go out with Emil and when you do not. Each of you separately must ask my permission. This is what fathers do for their daughters. Three, you shall keep the relationship secret from the public. You shall not be photographed together. You shall not be seen with him at the university or in the cafés. Four, you shall continue your studies until I say otherwise. You may give them up, but not to get married, and if so, you’ll need my permission. And five, you are nineteen years old. You cannot marry for two years. When you’re twenty-one, we’ll see.”
And then he walked out, and she sat on her bed. Weak and exhausted.
CHAPTER TEN
HITLER’S FRIENDS, 1928
Of his friends in the National Socialist hierarchy, she was fondest of Herr Doktor Paul Joseph Goebbels, but only because he seemed fondest of her. They met in March 1928, when the thirty-year-old Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin and editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack), journeyed to München on party business and later wrote in his diary: “Yesterday I met Hitler, and he immediately invited me to dinner. A lovely lady was there.”
Geli had heard that he was a former floor man on the Cologne stock exchange and a facile writer of fairly high intelligence, at first politically far left of the Nazis but now a frenzied campaigner and zealot for Hitler, who had affectionately said of him, “Our Doktor is all flame.” So she’d fashioned in her mind a man far different from the one she saw at their first meeting in the Osteria Bavaria, for he seemed a scrawny juvenile of thirteen, just over five feet tall, weighing no more than one hundred pounds, his head too big for his body and his brown hair creamed against a skull that was cadaverously there just beneath his face. Limping to their table in his overlarge white trench coat, he tilted steeply to the left due to a childhood illness, osteomyelitis, which had caused his left leg to halt growing and stay four inches shorter than his right. And yet he seemed to think himself handsome and jaunty, and his eyes feasted on Geli with a lickerish stare as her uncle introduced them.
“Aren’t you lovely,” he said.
She said, “Enchanted, Herr Goebbels,” and offered her hand.
“Herr Doktor Goebbels,” he corrected, and though he was smiling, she felt rebuked. But he was so amiable otherwise, and his huge and luminous black eyes betrayed such tragedies in his youth, such scorchings to his psyche, such an aching to charm and fascinate that Geli forgave him his haughtiness. And she did find him fascinating, for he was cultured, quick, an intellectual, and funny, if malicious; his voice was a beautiful baritone, as rich and sonorous as a full-throated church organ; his fine hands were faultless, those of a skillful pianist who’d never risked injury in work or game of any sort; and he modestly admitted that his play The Wanderer had just a few months earlier been performed at the Wallner Theater in Berlin.
She’d never met a playwright before, and said so, and then she was fearful she’d sounded too impressed and unpoised.
“And he’s a novelist, too,” Hitler said. “Won’t Eher be publishing it this year?”
Doktor Goebbels bowed to him. “With your help.”
“And its title?” Geli asked.
“Michael: The Fate of a German. It’s just a little thing in the form of a diary, about a young intellectual eager to grasp life with every fiber of his being. Who finds his calling among workers in the mines.”
“I’m in it,” Hitler said, as if that were only fitting and reasonable.
Doktor Goebbels graciously bowed again. “You are Germany’s fate, its man of destiny. The novel would be hollow without you.”
The fawning continued throughout their three-course meal. She thought her uncle was in one of his fouler moods as he flitted from subject to subject, his insights floating somewhere between the banal and the just plain weird, but Geli saw that Doktor Goebbels hung on his every word, hardly eating, as full of adoration as one of Hitler’s hounds. And when Hitler excused himself to go to the Herrens, Doktor Goebbels confided, “When he speaks, it’s so simple, but so profound, so mystical, full of infinite truth. It is almost like hearing the Gospels. Like hearing the final word on whatever topic he’s chosen. I feel shudders of awe.” He smiled. “All night I have been fighting the urge to genuflect to him.”
“Self-control is a good thing,” she said.
Doktor Goebbels lifted a goblet of Chianti and softly gazed just over its rim at Geli in a way he might have thought seductive. “You are a very lucky girl,” he said.
“And why is that?”
“With his elementary strength, you can walk safely in the abyss of life. With him, you have at your side the conquering instrument of fate and deity.”
“Oh; I knew that. I just wanted to hear you say it.”
“Amusing,” he said, and winced a smile, then swallowed Chianti and resettled the goblet on the table. And then there was silence between them. She watched a red tear of wine ever so gradually trickle down the stem and cross the base of the goblet until it stained the white tablecloth. She found him focused on her face. “Would you like to visit me in Berlin?” he asked.
“I have a boyfriend,” she said.
With disdain, he said, “Oh yes, Hitler’s chauffeur.” And then he added, “I say that without disdain, you understand. Emil Maurice is an Old Combatant. He took part in the putsch.”
“We’re in love.”
“And there he is, sitting outside in the car,” he said, and scowled at the shame of it. “Waiting for us to finish. Wondering what that devil Herr Doktor Goebbels is up to.”
“And what are you up to?” she asked.
“I invite you in all innocence. With no tricks up my sleeve. An American expression. Won’t you come up with your uncle next weekend? We’ll attend to party business, and then I’ll show you the city. Berlin is magnificent.”
Hitler strode back into the dining room and seated himself.
Geli leaned toward him and lightly touched his jacket sleeve. “Uncl
e Alf, Herr Doktor Goebbels has invited me to join you in Berlin next weekend. May I please?”
Hitler’s right hand held hers to his forearm as he smiled at his Gauleiter and said, “Our Doktor always finds ways to make me happy.”
Although the party furnished Hitler with a suite on the third floor of the first-class Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, just across from the Reich chancellery, Geli and Angela—whose presence he’d insisted on—were installed in the filthy and fourth-class Gasthof Ascanischer in order to give journalists a fitting example of party frugality. And to further make his niece’s misery complete, Hitler had decided that Julius Schaub rather than Emil Maurice should escort them on their railway journey north.
Seeking to avoid Schaub’s company, mother and daughter took their own cold-weather walking tour of Berlin on Saturday, starting out by mistake on Nollendorfplatz and hurrying past dance halls and underworld bars and a fire-red building called Erotic Circus. Even in the morning there were prostitutes standing together in threes, chattering about their children, and dressed just like housewives on their way to the grocery. Angela said, “I ache so for them. In the misery we’re in, how can they marry?”
“I couldn’t ever do that,” Geli said.
Angela softly patted her wrist, saying, “Oh what a comfort you are to your mother.”
They finally reached the Emperor Wilhelm Memorial Church, then visited, for Geli, the Zoologischer Garten, strolled through the Tiergarten to the Brandenburger Tor and the Reichstag, and took a taxi to Wittenbergplatz, where Angela’s brother, Alois Jr., had just opened a restaurant.
She hadn’t called ahead to warn him, so he was shocked when he carried forward menus and found her in the vestibule with a niece he’d never seen. Alois was the illegitimate son of Franziska Matzels-berger, Alois Senior’s kitchen maid, whom their father had married just two months before Angela was born. Although he was only one year older than Angela, Alois seemed closer to sixty and, with his walrus mustache, thin, graying hair, and skeptical squint behind rimless glasses, he looked far more like the photographs Geli had seen of her grandfather than he did his half-brother, Adolf. The worrisome qualities that Adolf had somehow made work for him, Alois hadn’t; he seemed merely vulgar, selfish, pompous, and conniving, like a stuffy waiter who steals from the till, or a civil servant who alters the rules for a fee. Sharing fireside coffee and sandwiches with them, he seemed avid for news of Adolf, for he was sure their fortunes were connected and he felt it was his turn, as he said, “at the trough.” “And who knows? We could even become friends, once he gets over the bigamy business and his fears that I’ll damage his good reputation.”