by Ron Hansen
She handed him sheet music. “Giacomo Puccini,” she said. “‘O mio babbino caro.’”
“‘O my dear daddy.’ A good choice. Sweet and short.”
They went into his practice room where he sat at his grand piano, and she sang poorly, mispronouncing the Italian and failing for air at the highest notes. When she finished, he was forbiddingly silent, and she smiled in embarrassment. “Well, that was faultless, wasn’t it.”
“We have something we can work on,” he said, and got up from the piano bench to give her instructions about the anatomy of singing, his hand pressing just under her ribs so she could feel her diaphragm and then journeying familiarly between her breasts to her throat, squeezing her larynx, and softly circling her sinuses and the bridge of her nose. She smelled cabbage on his fingertips. “And now just an ‘ahh’ for me.”
“Ahh,” she sang.
“You’re still in your head voice,” he sang in his head voice. “We want to hear your chest voice,” he sang in a fuller voice.
Weakly, she attempted it.
“Head high. Heels together. And now hum for me, Fräulein Raubal.”
She obeyed.
“Much better. Can you feel the flow and arc of the sound, firing out from the bridge of your nose but controlled by the diaphragm? You have to make sure your voice is constantly supported. Work on the muscles. Did you know that there was a great Italian soprano named Tetrazzini who had a diaphragm so strong she could move a piano with it?”
“I have men to haul things for me.”
“Aren’t you funny,” he said. “Oh, that famous Austrian charm.”
Vogl’s far younger wife brought him a tall glass of Weissbier, adoringly kissed his ear, and went out, and Vogl heavily sat on the bench with the beer as he investigated Geli’s range, hitting the C above middle C on the piano, having her match it, and going on to the higher notes.
Geli handled that well enough, but faltered going lower than B flat, and when he insisted she find the F below middle C, she said, “If I go that far down I feel I’ll vomit.”
“We’ll have to work on your lower register then. A good singer has a range of two octaves, sixteen notes. You have fourteen.”
She flushed. “So I’m no good?”
“You can be taught, perhaps. I have a pupil who began with thirteen notes, and now she has sixteen. She practiced. Will you practice?”
She feared she nodded too fervently, like a child.
“Have you heard of the diva Bertha Morena?”
“Of course.”
“Another one of my success stories,” Vogl said. “She learned from me, she practiced and practiced, and now she’s a star.” He collected sheet music and closed the piano fall board as he said in afterthought, “She was Bertha Meyer then. She’s Jewish.” And then his face paled. “Don’t tell Hitler.”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m practiced.”
She’d practiced in the fall of 1927 by failing to mention to Hitler a tall, handsome, blond medical student named Christof Fritsch, wide-shouldered but skeletal, his mind full of scientific facts and philosophy, his preferred clothing a black turtleneck sweater, his favorite foods inky coffee and hard rolls, his face always as serious as a final examination. Christof had fallen in love with Geli in chemistry class and often found his way into her company when she was alone, whether she was feeding the swans in front of the Nymphenburg Palace or holding a textbook up to shield herself from the sun in the meadows of the Theresienwiese. She’d failed to convince Christof that she was not interested in politics—she was, after all, Hitler’s niece—so he’d afflicted her with weighty reflections on the new parliamentary system, the Weimar Republic, and the Volk. On the feast of Saint Nicholas he’d surprised her with a fancy gold angel ornament he’d picked up at the famous Christ Child’s Market in Nürnberg. She’d seen him on ice skates during Winter Carnival and Christof had informed her with the coldest intensity that for her sake he’d been studying the history of opera. And on May Day, 1928, Christof had sneaked into the Pension Klein far before sunrise in order to put an oak branch outside Geli’s door in a folkloric sign of his constancy. Christof was still around, writing her highly intellectual letters full of worship, passion, and his own peculiar Weltanschauung, and if she did nothing to encourage him, she did not mention him to Emil either, and she worried about what that meant.
She also failed to mention to Hitler a January 1929 party in Berlin for Hauptmann Hermann Göring and Herr Alfred Rosenberg, who, to their mutual horror, shared the same birthday.
Within months of his election as a Mitglied des Reichstags, Göring found out that Lufthansa Airline wanted government subsidies for civil aviation, so for a consulting fee of fifty thousand reichsmarks per year he agreed to pursue Lufthansa’s goals, and though he would finally give only two addresses to the Reichstag, they were fittingly on topics Lufthansa chose. Soon he was a consultant as well for BMW, Heinkel, and the Messerschmitt aircraft company; Fritz Thyssen of the United Steel Works furnished the decor and zinfandel-red carpets for his luxury apartment on Badenschestrasse in the Schöneberg district of Berlin; and the coal magnate Wilhelm Tengelmann was giving him money for “geological investigations.” So he was happier than he’d been since the putsch, and far more prosperous than he’d ever been in his fairly affluent life, and he was getting so fat that there was a joke about him that “he sat down on his stomach and wore corsets on his thighs.”
But now Göring was in his wide white suit, his eyes so scarily bloodshot there seemed to be no blue in them, and he was confessing that he worked nineteen hours per day, his wife Carin’s health was failing, and Herr Hitler still found him chancy, suspect. As he sweatily told Geli, “I try so hard with your uncle. I have facts and convictions. Opinions in desperate need of expression. But every time I stand before the leader, my heart drops into the seat of my pants.”
Doktor Goebbels overheard and in his cordial, milky manner confided, “Even if we’re powerful in our own domains, all those who work closely with the leader are to a degree slavish and timid in his company. This is as it should be. We should not have contempt for our weaknesses, Herr Göring, but only think of it as a tribute to Herr Hitler’s mystical strength.”
“I have used up my contempt on others,” Göring spitefully told Goebbels. “I have nothing left for myself.”
Doktor Goebbels smiled. “A gross imbalance I shall challenge myself to correct.” And he limped off.
With Goebbels gone, Göring called him “Clubfoot,” and grinned hugely, like a boy of eight, as if that were high wit. Geli just stared. She wondered if he was floating on the fall and swoon of Eukodal. Sipping from his glass of Château Latour, Göring saw that Hitler was in the dining room, fully engaged with some urgency with Alfred Rosenberg, and his face changed. “I have something to show you,” he told Geli. And he took her into his walnut-wainscotted study, which he’d stocked with the Langenscheidtsche Bibliothek and first editions of other books he’d never get around to reading. His favorite acquisition, though, was a gleaming round mahogany table whose four legs were sculpted to represent four gigantic and erect penises, with nipples attached to the cannonball testicles on the floor.
“Aren’t you odd,” Geli said. And then she felt Göring shift behind her, felt his huge, soft belly pillow into her back as his hands squashed her breasts. She smelled three different perfumes on him.
“My pretty child,” he whispered. “You have heard the gossip that I am impotent, no? How would you like to cure me?”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” she angrily said.
“Here,” he told her, and his right hand took hold of hers and guided it to the bulge in his pants. “And now, what do you feel?” he asked.
“Disgust,” she said. She freed her wrist and wriggled, and he let her go.
Seemingly worn out, he sat heavily on an ottoman and melodramatically dropped his guilt-ridden face into the open book of his hands. “And you don’t find me at all attr
active?” he muttered.
“You’re a glutton for punishment, aren’t you.”
“I’m such a fool!” he said. “A Hanswurst! A clown!”
“Am I expected to disagree?”
“Could it be that I’m losing my mind? I fear it’s so.” Weeping uncontrollably, he was a planet of grief, and though Geli felt she ought to go, she stayed, sitting far from him, on the edge of a sofa.
With the forearm of his white suit, Göring finally smeared away his tears, staining the fabric with mascara. “You could ruin me, you know.”
She was silent.
The fat man falsely smiled. Only Hitler, she thought, could so abruptly alter his personality.
“Oh, the luxury of power you now enjoy! Aren’t you excited? You could waltz into the dining room right now, give Herr Rosenberg the old heave-ho, and tell your uncle what just occurred here. And I? My face would be bloodied into pulp by the SA, just as a beginning, and I would be finished, homeless, out of a job, without a pfennig for Carin’s medicines. To think you could do all that! Were I in your position, I would. Without hesitation.”
“Aren’t you clever to put it that way. Seeing how little I want to imitate you.”
With difficulty he stood up. “Angelika Maria Raubal! Such a nice girl! With such vicious men around her! But you have grown attached to the good life, haven’t you, darling. And you’re afraid you’ll do something to end it? Would Hitler believe you? Would he question why you were here alone with me?” He took out a handkerchief and blotted his face. “An enchantress, they call you. Affectionate; fun-loving; sexy. Aren’t females always in some way at fault? I was in Wien a few years ago. There were girls your age selling themselves for the price of a packet of cigarettes. They seemed…unhappy.” Göring slicked back his glossy hair and tidied his wide suit jacket as he strode heavily to his study door. And there he turned to sneer, “You won’t tell,” and went out.
She agreed. She would be in some way at fault. She got up and followed him out.
On the first night of Winter Carnival, 1929, she and Henny Hoffmann accompanied Adolf Hitler to a comic operetta at the Münchener Kammerspiele on Maximilianstrasse where his favorite seats in the sixth row of the stalls were reserved. Hitler was at his handsomest in his Rousselet hat, coffee-brown leather trench coat, and tuxedo, and Geli flaunted Elsa Bruckmann’s snow-white mink coat and the gift from her uncle of a slinky, silver-sequined gown that, when they checked their coats, daringly revealed the flawless flesh of her back. She felt men staring, and liked it. She was not sure if Hitler did.
The girls were forced to idle in the Kammerspiele lobby for many minutes as Hitler shook hands with party members and celebrities, then, while escorting the giggling girls to the stalls, Hitler halted and told them he’d forgotten something, but he wasn’t sure what it was. He fussed and fumed about it, ostentatiously feeling all his pockets for what was missing until he seemed to find enlightenment. “Ah-hah! I have it! It’s just as Nietzsche says: “Are you going out with women? Do not forget your whip!’”
Geli sighed heavily while Henny grimaced, but Hitler found himself hilarious, and soon others in the stalls were laughing because the famous man was. Congratulating them all for their good humor, he stiffly bowed from the waist and kissed the hand of a beautiful blond film understudy with Universum Film A. G. who was there with an aunt and seemed titillated when Hitler confided that he was friendly with Herr Alfred Hugenberg, the film and press lord. And from that point on, whenever Hitler thought the operetta was particularly funny, he’d swivel in his seat to find out if the film actress was joining him in the merriment. She was.
At the interval, Hitler fetched Fachingen mineral water for Henny and his niece, then left them to themselves by the box office so he could have some fervent conversation with the film actress, whose name they never got. She had, they heard, a tinkling laugh. She softly touched the silk lapel of Hitler’s tuxedo as she appeared to compliment him on it, and then she winningly sipped from a flute of champagne as he seemed to launch into the subject of formal clothing.
“She’s wearing sheer hose,” Geli said.
“She isn’t!” said Henny, for hose were still fairly rare, and frivolous, and desired. “She is.”
“And lipstick. He hates that.”
“Don’t glare,” Henny said.
Geli spun away from them. “Distract me, then.”
“Are you still taking singing lessons?”
“Indeed,” Geli said.
“Are you sure you really want to be an opera singer?”
“Why not?”
“To have to stand alone up there onstage in front of thousands, and sing every note perfectly by heart, and pretend you’re dying or lovelorn, and fall in a heap; and then, after the curtain rings down, to have to hop up and hold those roses and cherish all that applause.”
“And what were you thinking was the unpleasant part?”
“I’d hate it,” Henny said.
“Oh no, it’s wonderful. To be a Valkyrie on the flaming rocks, or Isolde, dying of love for Tristan. To be Salome and ask for John the Baptist’s head because you want to give him a final kiss.”
Wide-eyed, Henny said, “She just did. She kissed him.”
Geli fought off the need to turn. “On the mouth?”
“The cheek. She’s gone back inside.”
And then a fresh and excited Hitler was with them, his hands finding the skin of their backs as he guided them to the stalls. “I have had a sudden change of plans,” he had the effrontery to say. “Will you take a taxi home?”
Geli flushed with hurt feelings, but said nothing.
And when they were in their seats, Hitler leaned toward his niece. “One thing you ought to know about the male of the species is that for him there are two types of women: those he admires, such as those who are celebrated for fabulous wealth, social status, or fame; and those to whom he is strongly attracted, women who are less prominent and may even be beneath him socially, but with whom he feels he can be fully himself.”
“And where do I fit in?” she asked.
At once he was flustered and shifted away. “You belong in a special category,” he said.
Afterward, he did not even wait with them in the cold and slush of the filled taxi queue, but folded five reichsmarks into his niece’s palm and ducked into the front seat of his Mercedes. She saw him lean forward in order to show Julius Schaub an address he’d scrawled, and then he was majestically driven away.
“Are you in need of a ride then?” a man asked.
Geli turned and found it was Christof Fritsch in his charcoal beret and gray wool coat. She smiled.
Christof took them to the Max Emanuel Brauerei on Adalbert-strasse, where Geli bought four rounds of Löwenbräu beer with Hitler’s marks and Christof slammed into her as they danced a schottische and he finally fell on the floor in his drunkenness.
“Thunder weather,” he said, Alsatian slang for unhappiness and surprise. Still flat on his back, Christof twisted his fists into his eyes as if trying to erase them. And then he considered his feebleness as Geli and Henny hauled him up onto his hobnailed boots and helped him to their booth.
“We really have to be going, Christof,” Geli said.
“Another beer,” he insisted.
“Why don’t you stay? Drink coffee. Eat cake. We’ll get a taxi.”
In English he said, “Okay,” slang she’d taught him from an American song, and then waved good-bye while saying in German, “Much love.”
The taxi driver first went to Henny Hoffmann’s home in Bogenhausen, far east of the Englischer Garten, then steered west toward Schwabing where he let Geli off at Isartorplatz. And she was just walking to the Bruckmann’s town house in her snow-white mink and sheath dress and cold, high-heeled shoes when she saw Hitler and the film actress heading into his flat above the Drogerie at number 41.
She hid in a moon-shaded doorway until they were fully inside and then hurried forward to the farther, unshov
eled sidewalk so she could huddle in the wind and watch his front window as Hitler first switched on a lamp and took off his hat and trench coat before helping the film actress with her fur. At first he wanted to lay the fur on his bed, but hesitated and folded it over a chair back. Apparently offering her something to drink, he got a nod and a funny reply, for he laughed hard as he twisted out the cork in a half-finished bottle of Winkelhausen Deutscher cognac and poured an inch into each of two juice glasses. She took one juice glass from him and Hitler turned around the chair with the fur and hunched forward on it. The fur irritated him, though, so he laid it on the folding table and took his seat again.
And now where will she sit? Geli thought.
The film actress found there was no other furniture but the folding table and the bed. She softly settled onto the swaybacked mattress as if that were only natural and sourly took in Klara Hitler’s photograph above the headboard as she sipped her cognac. Geli jealously noticed that she had good legs, which she crossed at the knees, and she wore her blond hair in waves just like Lilian Harvey, an English actress famous in Germany. Hitler was formally upright in his chair, holding forth in his way, and the film actress was probably trying to understand why an internationally famous man lived so frugally. Still talking, Hitler got up, sidestepped to the front window, and jerked the floral drapes closed.
Shall I go in? Geli thought. Her feet were stones and her face felt as hard as stiff leather. And so she did, scuttling across the street to the Bruckmann town house, but then changing her mind and going up the stairs beside the druggist’s shop where she found the foyer door unlocked. Geli took off her heels to softly walk to Hitler’s flat. She couldn’t peek through the keyhole, but crouched at a newly painted door and heard her uncle’s baritone as he talked about his first disappointment with the party in 1920 and his fateful decision to join after all. And then he talked about his first successes as an orator, the firmness of his will in the face of opposition, how he’d conquered his enemies with the force of his personality and his revolutionary ideas. On and on he went, trying to woo her as he wooed the crowds, chronicling the National Socialist movement while the plainly bored film actress said little more than “Oh?” or “I see.” Then Hitler halted his lecture to say, “Won’t you take off your clothes?”