by Ron Hansen
He beamed. “Do you think?”
“Oh, indeed.”
Hitler faced the Chiemsee as she tilted the sketchbook toward her friend.
“Sexy,” Henny said.
Geli glared Are you crazy?
“Well drawn,” Henny said.
Hitler’s face was flushed, and his back was as shut to them as a wall. “Don’t humor me,” he said. “It’s like pity. I have far too much talent for that.”
Geli lightly stroked his shaking trouser leg. “We do think it’s good.”
“My thanks,” he archly said. “And now why don’t you girls put clothing on and fix lunch?”
Geli’s brother found her rinsing dishes. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you,” he said, and so they strolled far from the group to an impermanent dune of sand where they could feel erosion underneath their stomachs as they lay there and watched a hot wind harry the hurrying green waves. “Are we far enough away?” Leo asked.
“Why?”
Leo found two handmade cigarettes of Turkish tobacco in his wrinkled shirt pocket, offered one to his sister, and lit hers with a friction match. With fraudulent elegance she poised the cigarette in her right hand just as her older brother did. She smiled at him as she considered his friendly but not handsome face. His hairline had receded in just a few years, with a hand’s-width stripe of dark hair combed straight back and two fresh areas of forehead beside it, shaped like the heels of shoes. And his mustache she found unfortunate, only a little wider than Hitler’s; but when she questioned him about it he said it was the fashion for teachers in Realschule.
“And that’s what you want to be?”
“I have already been offered a position in Linz after graduation next year.”
“Good for you.”
“Thanks. Are you still studying medicine?”
“I haven’t totally given it up.”
“You aren’t, then?”
“I have other concerns.”
He smiled with cunning and told her his own “other concern” was a Frenchwoman named Anne whom he hoped to make his fiancée even though Uncle Adolf considered it a misalliance. “Are you seeing someone?” Leo asked.
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“You guess.”
“He’s here?”
“Aren’t you observant.”
Geli’s brother frowned and rested his chin on one fist, squinting as he inhaled smoke and flicked away ash. “Emil Maurice?” he finally asked.
“Awfully difficult for you.”
“Well, it’s not very obvious.”
“Haven’t you talked?”
“You weren’t mentioned.”
She hit her brother on the shoulder.
“Really,” he said.
“Don’t say it just because it’s true.”
“Are you in love?” Leo asked.
“I’m not sure now.”
“Don’t fume.”
“You’d think he’d have a hundred things to ask an older brother.”
“Adolf talked about you. ‘Such a darling girl. So delightful.’”
Geli sighed. “Always the adulation.”
“Uncle was my second guess.”
“You don’t find that odd?”
“Well, he’s only your half-uncle. It’s just that Schicklgruber bloodline, that one-quarter contribution.”
“And he’s nineteen years older.”
“Age,” Leo said. “What’s that?”
White sunlight splintered through a palace of clouds. The far off Women’s Island and its fishing boats were painted with their shadow. Geli said, “I have the distinct impression that you don’t like Emil.”
Geli’s brother ground out the stub of his cigarette in the sand dune. “Like him? Actually I do,” Leo said. “And I have the feeling you like him, too.”
Evening came. Putzi Hanfstaengl fell asleep in a Bombay hammock he’d strung between trees while Henny and her father and Emil, Schaub, and Geli’s brother stood in a wide star pattern in a forest clearing, kicking a scuffed white soccer ball to each other, the men with their shirts and socks and shoes off, drinking Spaten they held by the necks, smoking Herr Hoffmann’s Palo cigars, scolding faulty shots and imperfect form. Hitler shouted his own corrections as he sleepily reclined on a striped folding lawn chair, a china cup of Apollinaris mineral water cradled against his chest. A wild kick rolled to him and he skidded the soccer ball slowly back with a feint of his foot. Schaub congratulated him.
Geli wedged a rug and the picnic hamper into the trunk of the Mercedes, found a still cool Spaten for herself, and strolled over to her uncle, sitting beside him on soft ferns.
“Company,” he said and smiled.
“Are you happy?”
“Quite.” In the European way, his familiarity with her nakedness was balanced by a formality that would have seemed stiff in a first-class hotel. Hitler frowned. “Your skin is burnt.”
“All the girls get as brown as they can now. It’s the fashion.”
“Really? I had no idea.”
She nodded as she drank beer. She asked, “You didn’t want to swim?”
“Oh no. I might be photographed. There are few things as discouraging as the sight of a politician in a bathing suit.”
“But Uncle Adolf, you’d be dashing.”
“I find your innocence quite endearing.”
Emil flipped the soccer ball high and Leo smacked it with his forehead flush into Schaub’s face. Wide-eyed, Schaub considered a crushed cigar that seemed to have exploded, as in a cartoon, and the others fell over with laughter.
Watching them, Hitler said, “Even in groups one can be so alone. Whether because of force of mind or character or other unusual traits, one becomes aloof, different, an outsider. It’s the principal hazard of leadership.”
“Are you lonely?”
Hitler forcibly took in breath and sighed it out. “Often,” he said. “In childhood. On the front. With my followers now. I have given up so much for the party, for Germany. And I wonder if it’s worth it. Self-sufficiency is a fiction whose father is false pride. We in fact need someone of our own; someone with whom we can be wholly ourselves, foolish and intimate and off guard. I have such a longing for that.”
“You have me,” Geli said.
With wet eyes, Hitler focused on his niece, his normally stern mouth twitching as he said, “Yes. With you I can fully relax. You’re so natural and free spirited. And tactile. Affectionate.”
She didn’t know what else to say but “Thank you.”
Hesitantly touching her hair, he told her, “And I hope you have come to see me as the father you never had.”
Geli’s flesh tingled as she felt his fingertips graze her skull and then grip a sun-blond hank of hair inside his fist. She told him he’d been quite generous.
“My father was fourteen years younger than his first wife,” Hitler said. “And twenty-four years older than his second. She was Fanni, his first wife’s maid. Did you know that Alois Junior was illegitimate?”
She nodded.
“And Angela was born two months after the wedding?”
“Yes.”
“And then when your mother’s mother became ill with consumption, my father shifted his courtesies to his young niece, Klara, who was taking care of the children. When his wife died, he married my mother. At six in the morning, so he could get to work punctually at seven. She was twenty-five years old, and he was forty-eight. She would continue to call him ‘Uncle’ until he died, at sixty-six.” He freed her hair. He smiled. “Had you heard all that?”
“A few times, but it’s confusing.”
“And that’s exactly why I mentioned it.” Hitler put his china cup on the grass to his right and linked his hands at his waist. “We are given the impression that good German families have their origins in a man and a woman of about the same age who first meet each other as strangers and gradually fall in love and get married. We see, though, that there are many surprisi
ng and successful exceptions to the pattern. Endless variations, really. Children born out of wedlock. A wife twenty-three years younger. A husband who is also her uncle. We are living in times that cry out for ingenuity in how our finest men and women achieve intimacy with each other.”
She was farther ahead of him than he thought. A child of nine would have been. She said nothing.
Emil walked over, sheeted in sweat, and fell to his knees next to Geli. His hard muscles bunched as he dried himself with his shirt. “Are we out of beer?” he asked.
“Herr Doktor Hanfstaengl was standing on the case to hang up his hammock.”
Emil turned. “Oh, I see it.”
“I was just falling asleep,” Hitler said mildly. He tilted his head onto his left shoulder and squinched his eyes shut as he nuzzled his chin into his gray flannel lapel.
Emil kissed Geli’s cheek and left to find himself a Spaten. And Heinrich Hoffmann hushed Geli from making a sound as he hunched nearby with his Stirnschen camera in order to take a photograph. “This will be fantastic,” he whispered, for Hitler seemed so fond of her, so content and youthful yet fatherly, and his niece seemed so feminine and adoring and wryly amused.
CHAPTER TWELVE
NEXT DOOR, 1929
Within a few days Hitler forced his niece to go with him to München to find a flat for her, insisting that the university students would be getting back for their fall classes soon and that the finest situations would be lost. Rudolf Hess found five rentals for them to consider in Schwabing and Haidhausen, the first of them just below the shabby apartment of Franz Xaver Schwarz, the party treasurer. Geli thought it was nineteenth century and ugly, and Hitler agreed, but that was just the start of his dissatisfactions that day. A flat near the Hauptbahnhof Hitler rejected as far too noisy. Another, he was convinced, would be cold in winter; in the fourth he hated thinking about trudging up so many flights of stairs; and the fifth on Rudi’s list, he decided, was foul with the odors of its former occupant.
The Café Heck was fairly near, he said as he checked his watch, and he was hot, and weary of real estate, and so they walked to his Stammtisch for an afternoon luncheon. Waiters were just filling their water glasses when Hitler, whose silver eyes were persistently flitting toward the entrance, joyously smiled and half-stood from his dining chair, lifting his right hand in an effeminate wave. “Look who happened by,” he told his niece. “Princess Cantacuzène.”
Was he trying to seem deceptive? “Aren’t you surprised,” Geli flatly said, and turned to find Frau Elsa Bruckmann. She was the wife of the foremost publisher in München, a former princess in Rumania, and, with Helene Bechstein, one of Hitler’s first socialite benefactors. Chic and worldly and confident, a grande dame in her sixties, she wore a fashionable Zeppelin dress and held a white bichon frise to her significant chest as she offered the café her Egyptian profile and then, in a fraudulent piece of acting, finally seemed to notice the führer. She at once asked the maître d’ to escort her to his table, and she and Hitler both loquaciously overdid the coincidence of their meeting.
She was invited to join them and took some time in silently assessing Geli’s poise and courtesies and clothing as Hitler chatted convivially about his far too short vacation in Obersalzberg—he was working, he said, on a secret book about Aryan blood and the Jews—and then told her about his fractious day trying to find a flat for his niece.
“But, my dear Adi,” Elsa Bruckmann falsely protested. “How you hurt my feelings. You should have called me first.”
“Are you aware of something?”
“She can stay with Hugo and me!”
“Really, I couldn’t,” Geli said, and she felt Hitler touch her forearm in a hushing gesture.
“Wouldn’t it be an imposition?” he asked.
“We have a huge home,” Elsa Bruckmann said. “Rooms for chess. Rooms to cry in. Rooms for polishing silver. I have to send the butler as a scout just to find my husband in it.”
Hitler formally informed his niece, “Herr and Frau Bruckmann inhabit Thierschstrasse, right next door to me.”
“Are you seeking my approval?” she asked.
“She wants to be on her own,” Hitler said.
“A furnished room, a private bath. She can dine with us or with the servants.” She joked for the fräulein, “I’ll warn Hugo to keep his hands in his pockets and his hungry eyes on the floor.”
Still Adolf demurred, but Elsa insisted, and Geli watched in silence and fascination until the play was over. They ate lightly due to the August heat, and then they took the Bruckmann’s car to the Thierschstrasse town home. And while Hitler went next door to find fresh shirts in his shabby flat, Geli was introduced to her fourth-floor quarters and to Italian furnishings that would have suited a regal hotel. Elsa told her they used to offer their first-floor rooms as a völkisch salon after the war, inviting philosophers from a group known as the Cosmic Circle to educate their friends on the secret meaning of the swastika and the need for a pagan revival. “We once had a Dionysian evening,” she said, “in which an ancient Coryban-tine dance was performed by gorgeous young men who wore nothing but copper bracelets.”
Geli smiled and lamented, “And there I was in Wien, doing homework.”
“We first met Adolf on one of our salon nights, and he became our homework. Hugo taught him how to kiss a lady’s hand, and I instructed him on how to eat an artichoke or a lobster. To give him a more masculine air, we bought him his first dog whip. I suppose we’ll have you as our project now.”
Geli icily said, “Oh, you’re so kind to offer, but I don’t think that’s necessary.”
Elsa judged her for a second and said, “We’ll see.”
“Are you sure you want me here?”
“Quite sure.”
“I have canaries,” she informed Elsa.
“We have cats,” the former princess said.
Their stares warred. Elsa won. Geli shifted her gaze to an Etruscan helmet on a scrolled white desk. She felt the wealth of pink silk on a quattrocento chair. “What are you getting out of this?” she asked.
“Access to him,” Elsa frankly said.
“And Uncle Adolf? He gets what?”
Elsa smiled. “Control.”
She often saw Emil Maurice from her fourth-floor window as he waited for Hitler in front of his flat, shining chrome with his handkerchief or just standing in Thierschstrasse with folded arms and a cigarette, avoiding even a wayward and sudden glance at the Bruckmann’s cream-colored town house. Ever cagey, and in vague ways frightened, Emil seemed to Geli all forethought and geometry, figuring the angles, the odds, the tricky, male arithmetic of what would be gained versus what would be forfeited. If he drove Geli somewhere without her uncle, she would sit in the front seat and his hand would gingerly find her inner thigh, squeeze her breast, huddle her nearer for kisses when street traffic stalled, and Emil would say flattering, loving, thrilling things that gave beauty to their future. With Hitler in the car, he was cold and silent, his face forward, his manner correct, his hand even tilting the rearview mirror so he wouldn’t find Geli in it.
In Emil’s mind she was always subordinate to her uncle. Schaub drove them all to a picnic once and Emil sat in the back of the Mercedes with her, strumming the same three chords on his mandolin as he sang verse after verse of an Irish ballad in a falsetto voice that wanted to be a tenor. With irritation Hitler finally turned in his front seat and asked, “Does it ever end?” And Emil finished the song at once.
And they were all in a farmer’s field near Dachau, sharing a goatskin of cider with six other young people around a fire, watching a scarecrow fall in on its own ash, the night above it wrinkling with heat, and fireflies of red sparks spiraling up. Emil kissed her hard on the mouth, for the first time in days. And then she heard a honking noise and saw her uncle tilting into his car and holding his hand angrily down on the horn. Emil immediately ran.
She was losing interest in Emil, and once told him so. She was alone in the
back of Hitler’s car waiting for Henny in front of the Hoffmann Photography Studio. Emil’s face fell forward onto his forearms atop the steering wheel, and he professed how much he loved her, that this was killing him, he ached to have her with him, but she had no idea how difficult and dire and overpowering her uncle could be, how he could dominate any man he met and defeat the firmest intentions with the merest flinch of dismay.
Geli sighed. She said she’d perhaps only felt a Schwärmerei, an infatuation, for Emil after all. And then she told him, “Here’s Henny. Smile.”
She also heard of Hitler’s tyranny from Adolf Vogl when she began taking singing lessons from him in September. Geli stood in his front parlor, idly scrutinizing framed opera programs and captioned photos of Vogl in chromatic makeup and costume, a fierce, full-bellied man with a wild effluence of gray hair, performing into his fifties in Fauré’s Requiem, Schumann’s Dichterliebe, Beethoven’s Fidelio, Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah. And then Vogl swaggered in from his dining room, food still in his mouth, and found that Geli was alone. With relief he said, “Oh good. Your uncle’s not with you.” She thought that strange enough that she frowned, and he hurried to say, “Don’t misunderstand, Fräulein Raubal. I consider myself Hitler’s friend, his foremost disciple, and yet after only a few minutes with him, I feel exhausted and wholly depleted.”
“I have heard that said.”
“You aren’t…disquieted?”
“We relate differently.”
Vogl considered Geli for a few seconds. “You wish to be a Wagnerian soprano, he says.”
“My uncle wishes it.”
“And you?”
She shrugged. “I just like to sing.”
“And I like making one hundred reichsmarks per month. We have much in common. Have you a song to try out with me?”