by Ron Hansen
Angela quickly grew tired of Alois and his all-too-obvious disinterest in Paula or the Raubals, and she told him they were going to the Deutsches Historisches Museum. Alois allowed them to pay the bill, saying he’d treat them to a fine dinner next time, and they went outside to Wittenbergplatz.
“Well, that’s an obligation fulfilled,” Geli said.
Angela was nearing forty-four and was thirty pounds heavier than the woman in Linz who had given birth to Geli, and so she asked, “Would you mind if I went back to the Gasthof now? I have to get off my feet.”
And when they got to their room, there was a message from Emil Maurice saying, “I really miss you,” and another from Doktor Goebbels saying there was a sudden change of plans, that the führer, whom they’d not yet seen, would be having dinner with Edwin and Helene Bechstein, the film actress Dorothea Wieck, and Herr Reinhold Muchow, Doktor Goebbels’s chief of organization for the Berlin Gau, and Herr Muchow’s wife. Would it be an impertinence to offer himself as their sole company for the night?
Angela thought she’d had about as much fun as she could stand, so she gave Geli permission to go out with him, provided Julius Schaub went along.
“Oh, Mother!”
Angela held up her hand, brooking no further argument. “Adolf wishes it,” she said. “And in Wien once, I was a girl.”
Wearing a double-breasted suit to widen his body, Doktor Goebbels was sitting in the front seat of an unfamiliar car when a characteristically gloomy Julius Schaub honked the horn for Geli in front of the Gasthof Ascanischer. The Doktor, as he called himself, gaily got into the rear with her and stayed allergically far away on the ride to the fashionable Charlottenburg district, filling the time with vanity about his doctorate in Romanticist drama from Heidelberg University, as if she’d arranged the night just to talk about the playwright Wilhelm von Schütz. They headed first to a filled restaurant where the Tyrolean chef, himself a Nazi, insisted they have his Colchester oysters and Adlon, a honey-glazed breast of duck. And then the Doktor had Schaub ferry them to a nightclub where they drank the Berlin specialty of Weisse mit Schuss, or wheat beer with a shot of raspberry juice, and watched an American Negerin sing “Madiana” and “La Petite Tonkinoise” while all but naked.
Doktor Goebbels confessed, “Any female excites me to the marrow. It’s horrible. Like a hungry wolf, I prowl around them in pursuit of satisfaction. I can be at an elegant dinner, completely engaged in conversation, but in my fantasies I find myself assessing the attributes of the female guests or imagining how my host’s wife or daughter would be, nude and in bed.”
“And here I am, wearing you out again.”
He smiled. “At the same time, I am timid, like a child. Afraid of rejection. I do not understand myself.”
“Why don’t you get married?” she asked.
“And become bourgeois? And hang myself within eight days?” Doktor Goebbels waved to a cigarette girl, bought a pack of Aristokrats, lit two in his mouth with the flame of a backhanded match, and attached one of the cigarettes to Geli’s mouth in a vaguely sexual gesture that seemed so glamorous the fine hairs stood up on her forearms.
Inhaling his cigarette deeply, he expelled wisps of smoke as he asked, “Haven’t you found me to be completely amiable and charming, Fräulein Raubal?”
“Were you trying to make a good impression?”
“Certainly. You are Hitler’s niece.”
She fetchingly asked, “And what have you been resisting?”
“It’s far too shocking for words.”
On the nightclub stage a female troupe in headdresses and gauze see-through tunics was now performing an Egyptian dance to the music of Erik Satie.
“Would you like to go back to my flat?” he asked, and his tone was so silky and enticing that she flushed with nervousness. “I’ll only fantasize, I promise you.”
“Will Herr Schaub be joining us?” she asked.
“Must he?”
“I feel so sorry for him, just waiting for us in the car.”
Doktor Goebbels sighed.
Julius Schaub took off his jacket as soon as they got to the flat, and he found a bottle of Schultheiss beer in the icebox as the Doktor popped open Taittinger champagne. Schaub squatted by a high stack of thick RCA Victor records, hunting for “Yats,” or jazz, and, finding none, tuned an American Crosley radio to a station that was playing Bix Beiderbecke and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. And then he dourly sat on the floor by the speaker as if he were alone in the world.
Doktor Goebbels was like Hitler in thinking the highest order of entertainment was his talking about himself. And so Geli learned that he was from the Rhineland; that his childhood nickname had been Ulex, short for Ulixes, the shrewd hero of the Trojan wars; that his family was petit bourgeois—his father was a factory accountant—and had fervently hoped he’d become a priest, and that he was estranged from them now because of his hostility to the Catholic Church. Like Hitler and others in the party, he’d volunteered for military service in the Great War, but unlike them he’d been rejected because of his “infirmity” and was so frustrated and ashamed that he’d tried to kill himself with a hunger strike but had been rescued by his mother. And then his dream had become that of being a journalist for the Berliner Tageblatt, and he’d sent the editor-in-chief, a Jew, twenty or more articles. And each of them had been rejected. “I’ll have the last laugh, though. I’ll be humiliated no more.” While he had once been a radical socialist, he told her, hearing Hitler talk had forced him to further examine his political thinking, and now the conversion was complete.
Watching him talk she’d had to shake from her head the anti-Nazi doggerel she’d heard: “Oh God, make me blind / that I may Goebbels Aryan find.” She asked, as a distraction, “Were you recruited by my uncle?”
“In a way. Are you aware of the writings of Johann Wolfgang von-Goethe?”
She said she was even though she wasn’t.
The Doktor quoted, “‘Half did she drag him / Half he gave himself to her.’”
She wondered at the oddness of the feminine pronoun, but simply said, “Ah-hah.”
Julius Schaub was hugging his knees like a boy, his eyes tightly shut, listening hard to Mamie Smith singing “Crazy Blues,” though he could not have understood a word.
“And what do you do for the party?” Geli asked.
Doktor Goebbels gave it long thought and said, “I orchestrate opinion. I offer the masses the savior they have been yearning for, and I offer Hitler confirmation of his call to greatness.” Tugging himself up from the sofa, he lurched across the flat in his hard-swaying gait, his left leg seemingly no more than a cane as he hitched along. “Shall I read to you from my diary?” he asked.
She gave no reply and he seemed not to expect one, for he took a notebook from the bookcase and found the pages he was looking for. “In 1926 I visited our dear and revered Herr Hitler at the Pension Moritz. Delightful! Three whole weeks in his company. Here, for example, from July twenty-fourth. ‘The Chief speaks about racial questions. It is almost impossible to render it. You had to be present. He is a genius. I stand before him deeply shaken. That is how he is: like a child—dear, good, full of compassion. Like a cat—sly, clever, and smart. Like a lion—roaring, powerful, and overpowering. A real fellow, a man. He speaks about the structure of the state and of political revolution. Thoughts that I have harbored secretly but have never pronounced. I feel overcome by something like true happiness! This life is worth living! His parting words to me were, “My head will not fall before my holy mission is fulfilled.” That is how he is! Yes, that is how he is! I lie sleepless for a long time.’”
Doktor Goebbels looked up, inviting sounds of approval, but Geli was occupying herself by filling her sherbet glass with champagne.
“And this,” he said. “‘In darkest distress a star has appeared! I feel bound to him to my last breath. My last doubts have vanished. Germany will live! Heil Hitler!’” Excited by his own prose, he flipped through other
pages and halted. “‘There may come a day when all around us breaks apart. We shall not break. The hour may come when the mob around you will slaver and scream, “Crucify him!” Then we shall stand firm. Men of iron, we shall exclaim and sing: “Hosanna!” Then you will see around you the phalanx of the last guard, who will not know despair, not even in death, for that guard of iron men will not want to live if Germany dies.’”
Was this her uncle he was talking about? Geli was mystified. “Aren’t you idolizing him just a little, Herr Doktor Goebbels?”
Shoving his diary back in the bookcase, he said, “I have no desire for friends, Fräulein Raubal.” And then he faced her, his left hand on his hip. “I desire instead a leader. With him I am linked unconditionally. Without him I cannot live. When I needed to be needed, he needed me. When I wanted to be known, he knew me. And if that isn’t love, it feels like it. And so he may humiliate me, or ignore me, or scold me, but I shall always love him and only be challenged to further and greater efforts to please him.”
Julius Schaub finally made his presence felt with vigorous applause.
She did not meet Hermann Göring until May 1928, but she’d heard a great deal about him, for, next to her uncle, he was the most famous Nazi in Germany. She was told by Putzi Hanfstaengl—whose job as foreign press officer obligated him to know—that Göring’s father, the first governor of West Africa and a former consul general in Haiti, had been sixty-four years old when Hermann was born in 1893, and had named his son after a friend who was a wealthy Austrian Jew and who flagrantly took Hermann’s mother as his mistress. The child had been raised by aunts, and his first memory of his mother was when she forced herself on him when he was three and he had screamed in fear at her kiss.
“Even then,” Putzi told her, “our Göring claims that he wanted only to be a soldier.” At first assigned to an infantry regiment after his graduation from the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps, Lieutenant Hermann Göring later joined the air corps and gained fame in the war as a fanatically brave fighter ace, flying Fokker biplanes against the British Sopwith Camels. After his twentieth victory in the air, Lieutenant Göring had been awarded Germany’s highest military decoration, the Pour la Mérite, or Blue Max, and had become a national hero. Commander of the Richthofen Flying Circus at the time of the armistice, he had bargained away his future pension in exchange for the higher rank of Hauptmann, or captain, but had soon found that his status as an officer was hateful to some when he’d been attacked by Communists in Berlin who bloodied his face and tore off his medals and insignia.
With few job opportunities in Germany, he’d gone to Denmark and collected fees for aerobatic stunts, then become a commercial pilot for Svenska Lufttraffik airlines. Crash-landing in a field, he’d staggered to a castle where he’d met and fallen in love with the motherly Carin von Kantzow, whose father was a member of the Swedish nobility, whose mother came from a family of Irish brewery owners, and whose officer husband had stoically put up with their affair in order to have control of his young son.
At the Osteria Bavaria, Geli heard from Rudolf Hess that Captain Göring had rejected an offer to join the Reichswehr so he would not have to defend “the Jew republic,” and that for a short time he and Hess had attended a few university classes together in München before Göring lost interest in academics. Cynical, defeated, and embittered, Göring on his own had chanced upon a political rally in October 1922 and heard a former frontline soldier with an Austrian accent talk feverishly about his hatred of the Jews and of his call for revolutionary action in Germany, and he’d felt compelled to meet this Adolf Hitler.
Hess told her that her uncle had been overjoyed at their meeting, for he’d thought Captain Göring was just what the party needed: a famous holder of the Pour la Mérite, and a fattish but still fairly handsome Nordic he-man with ash-blond hair and hawkish blue eyes; a regal, nonchurchgoing Protestant only a little more cultured and educated than himself, and a cosmopolitan from high society and wealth—though he and Carin’s lavish ways were funded by loans and the sale of her jewelry. Within a month Hitler had made Captain Göring supreme leader of the Sturmabteilung, which was then just two thousand of the unemployed who eagerly fought Communists in the streets; and within the year Hitler was offering Göring his Vollmacht, or authority, to head the party in his absence.
With Hitler harrying them about observing the proprieties, Göring had finally married Carin in 1923 and they’d taken possession of a villa furnished by her lovelorn former husband. And then there had come the putsch, when Captain Göring had become conspicuous not only for his bravery but for his bloodthirstiness and brutality, for he’d told his storm troopers to gain respect through terror and had ordered them to kill at least one man in every neighborhood of the city to frighten and cow the people. “Wounded savagely in the groin,” Hess said, hinting at the full extent of his injury, “Göring was taken to Austria after the Feldherrnhalle massacre. And then we lost track of him.”
Emil skimmed a stone on Kleinhesseloher Lake, in the Englischer Garten, and told Geli that that wasn’t so, but that some in the party were jealous when forty thousand photographs of a helmeted Göring sold out after the putsch. And when party officials heard he’d taken his agonies poorly, chewing on his hospital pillow and perpetually groaning, that he’d become addicted to Eukodal, a synthetic morphine injected intravenously, and that he was, furthermore, penniless, they’d wanted nothing further to do with him.
Around midnight, when Emil had drunk a few too many Dop-pelspaten, and he knew party officials were with her uncle at the Café Heck, Emil scared and excited Geli by sneaking her into the Nazi offices on Schellingstrasse and showing her the file on Göring. “Look at who he is,” Emil said. “The fraud.”
In the file was a poorly typed German translation of a 1925 confidential psychiatric report by Doktor Hjalmar Eneström of the Lång-bro Asylum for the Criminally Insane in Sweden. Eneström claimed his patient H.G. had inflated self-esteem and was fundamentally lacking in moral courage; that he was sentimental and talkative, suicidal and domineering, colosally vain and full of self-loathing; belligerent, weepy, troublesome, and strongly affected by any palliative, even table salt; that he thought he was the target of a Jewish conspiracy; that he faked or exaggerated his withdrawal symptoms from morphine; that he hallucinated about Saint Paul, whom he called “the most dangerous Jew who ever existed” and about Abraham, who he dreamed had offered him a promissory note and three camels if he would halt his war against the Semitic people; that he would be finished politically if news of his insanity ever got out in Germany.
Emil smiled. “And that, of course, is perfectly true.”
Geli was disturbed. She hadn’t seen the schemer in Emil. “Are you threatening to use it?” she asked.
“Am I going to blackmail him?” Emil shrugged. “Maybe not. But I have to protect myself if the vultures come. And so I have a photograph of the letter, just in case.”
She later thought of vultures when she heard Doktor Goebbels delight in telling how a hangdog Göring had returned to Germany in 1927 to sell parachutes in Berlin for the Swedish company Tornblad, and had suffered the ignominy of finding that his name had been erased from the party’s membership rolls and of having to apply again, “like some lowly farmer from Worms.” But Doktor Goebbels had watched “His Corpulence” use whining, flattery, threats, and fawning obsequiousness to gradually insinuate himself far enough into the party and Hitler’s good graces that he had been permitted to have his famous name inserted far down on the list of those men the National Socialists were putting up for the Reichstag elections of May 20, 1928.
“Will they vote for him?” Doktor Goebbels asked. “I do hope not. It’s crowded at the top.”
Adolf Hitler gave fifty-six speeches throughout Germany in the three weeks prior to the 1928 elections and was so convinced the party and its candidates would do well that he invited his niece up to Berlin for a night of celebration after the Sunday voting. Emil picked her up at the r
ailway station and they kissed and fondled in the front seat of Hitler’s car for a frustrating few minutes before Emil had to drive them to Berchtesgadenerstrasse 16 where Herr and Frau Göring were renting a tiny apartment on the third floor.
Wild-eyed and ebullient, his belly as huge as a beer barrel beneath a shocking white suit, a white slouch hat aslant on his head, Göring waved his arms from the sidewalk to halt them, and squeezed part way through the front passenger window to firmly shake Emil’s and Geli’s hands, his face rouged, his wide mouth faintly lipsticked, a full bottle of Chanel seeming to waft off him in eddies. “Deputy Göring,” he called himself, for he’d just learned, he told them, that the party had gotten enough votes for him and for Doktor Goebbels and ten less famous Nazis to join four hundred eighty men from other parties in the Reichstag.
“Only twelve?” Emil said, for that meant the party had lost two seats. But Göring was in no mood to have his victory diminished, and he turned to escort his frail wife down the front steps and into the car.
Carin was taller than he and flat-chested, with frizzy auburn hair and a face that was as wan as his was red. She would die of a heart condition in October 1931. Emil had told Geli that Carin was “soulful and mystical,” but as she seemed to faint into the Mercedes she seemed to Geli only vexed and vicious, talking in fluent German about the hundreds of revolting Jews who’d ruined their sunset in the Tiergarten, and of the Communists who’d paraded in the streets all that week “with their crooked noses and their red flags with the Star of David on them.”