by Ron Hansen
And a further shock was that the film actress apparently obeyed, lilting an unobjecting sentence of some sort and shifting from foot to foot as she tossed off her high-heeled shoes.
Continuing his self-flattery, Hitler only paused here and there to say, “Aren’t you lovely” and “Yes, those, too” and “Slowly please.” The film actress said once, “Unhook me” otherwise she said nothing, or spoke so quietly she couldn’t be heard.
“Walk to me now,” Hitler said.
There were voices outside, and Geli saw Frau Maria Reichert, the landlady, holding a wool coat shut at her throat at the glass foyer door as she helped her frail old Mutti up the stairs and inside. Fat snowflakes were fluttering down like torn paper. The old mother must have asked the time because Frau Reichert said, “Midnight,” and then Geli clicked past the women in her heels, offering them a Grüss Gott.
She hung up the mink in the vestibule and found Hugo Bruckmann sitting in the first-floor parlor in his pajamas, striking a match and holding it to the bowl of a calabash pipe. She was thankful his mood was unfit for conversation, and that the Princess Cantacuzène was sleeping poutily under an eye mask, the door ajar and a vigil candle burning just as she’d insisted on since childhood—a hex against the Wichtelmänner, who steal children from their beds and put changelings in their places.
She’d forgotten to cover the canaries so they were fretfully awake, sidling and turning on their perches and chewing the golden cage. She called them each by name, Honzi and Hansi, then gave them night and sang Brahm’s “Lullaby” to them as she got out of her clothes. She again heard her uncle saying, “Walk to me now,” and she watched the faint jiggle of her full breasts in the mirror as she did so. Wide as a gate in the hips. The chunkiness of her thighs. She was surprised by her jealousy, her loneliness, her feelings of inadequacy.
She was still far from sleep under her feather-filled comforter when she heard the foyer door slam next door, and she hurried to her fourth-floor window to see the film actress stalking through fresh snow in her heels. Geli wanted to see her face, and when she walked under a streetlight she did.
And Geli smiled, for the face was fraught and ashen and filled with confusion, as if Hitler had found the will to confess whom he truly loved.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LIFE STUDIES, 1929
With singing lessons at Vogl’s her sole obligation, Geli was generally available to Hitler, and more than ever he sought her out. They took cold-weather strolls with Prinz around Kleinhesselohersee in the Englischer Garten, huddled with Bahlsen biscuits and steaming tea from a vacuum bottle in the Apollo Temple at Nymphenburger Park, watched old men in ski caps and many sweaters sweep snow from the frozen canals and slide red and yellow and green curling stones across steel-blue lanes of ice. The fields and sidewalks were white with snow, shrubs and trees were just strokes of black, and the skies were the gray of cigarette smoke with no more than a faint hint of white where the hidden sun was; but she loved it that the children carried skates to school, painted their faces, wore masks, and that the Volk in general were as motley and costumed and festively gay as the huntsmen in paintings by Pieter Brueghel.
The Sturmabteilung and the Hitler Youth hosted many parties and masquerades during January’s Carnival and Lent’s week of Starkbierzeit, or strong beer time, and the organizations took care to invite Hitler’s famous niece, but Geli was generally forbidden to attend the affairs for Hitler’s fear that she’d fall into what he called “a misalliance,” and she supposed Hitler felt that his political fortunes were still too precarious to risk having his voluptuous, twenty-year-old niece by his side at formal party functions. She joined him only for opera nights at the Kammerspiele or the Cuvilliés Theater, or for full days at the cinema where he could sit in stillness and joy and fascination as he watched three feature films in succession.
Workdays for him could be little more than a noontime conference with Amann and Rosenberg in the Schwabing office, followed by Italian food at the Osteria Bavaria; an interview with a journalist at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten and dessert with Putzi and Hess in the Carlton Tearoom; a change into his tuxedo to hear Wagner’s Lohen-grin at the Prinzregenten Theater, then a four-course dinner with the faithful at the Café Heck, with him holding forth on any subject he fancied until closing time at two.
Weeks of leisure would inevitably be interrupted by public speaking and the pursuit of money, however, and there could be long strings of days when Geli wouldn’t see him at all: He was talking to a party cell in Münster; he was rallying trade unionists in Düsseldorf; he was staying in the castle of a coal tycoon named Emil Kir-dorf; he was in Mühlheim conferring with Fritz Thyssen of the United Steel Works; or he was in Essen, touring the Krupp factories with Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. And then he’d be in München again, saying nothing of his week to Geli, offering her a stroll through the Residenz of the Wittelsbach rulers or an afternoon at the Glyptothek on Königsplatz where he stood for a full twenty minutes before the Aeginetan sculptures, or hunched forward, his hands locked behind his back, his spectacles far down his nose as from all sides he examined the Hellenistic figure of a sleeping satyr that was known as The Barberini Faun.
In March she and Henny were taken downhill skiing by him—just in time, he promised, for the finest snowfall of winter on the majestic Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany. Emil drove them all to Garmisch, ninety-five kilometers southwest of München, but he would not ski. And Hitler feared the party would be hurt if he himself were seen falling on the runs, so he let the girls go alone up the slopes on the condition that they stuff their telltale hair under stocking caps and fasten face scarves under their ski goggles. They then looked so much like boys that Hilter laughed until he ached, and Henny later took a Leica shot of Geli at the summit, with her hands obstinately on her hips and a scold like a lumberjack’s. “And now do Gary Cooper,” Henny said.
Wildly flapping her arms, she joked, “Wings.”
Emil and Hitler hiked through the forest in snowshoes until four p.m., when they raced each other back to the ski lodge, choosing different routes—the führer, Emil was sure, taking the wrong one. At twilight Emil was still alone, slouched in his heaviest coat on a rattan chair near the lift, finding the girls in binoculars as they slalomed down. And the three of them were still there at nightfall in flying sleet when they finally saw a furious Hitler on the blue hill, his snowshoes tossed in his wrath, tilting alternately from side to side as he sank as high as his knees in drifts, his clothing white from his many humiliating falls. Even when he was a hundred meters away, they heard him yell in forewarning, “It is not funny!”
Though he’d promised the girls a night in a Garmisch spa, and had filled an hour on the road lauding the health benefits of saunas, Hitler suddenly found the high prices there and in Partenkirchen outrageous, and so he sat in the front seat fuming as they headed due east to Haus Wachenfeld, getting there just before nine.
Geli had alerted her mother to their coming with a telephone call, and Angela was ready with one of Hitler’s favorite Austrian dinners of Wiener Schnitzel and poppyseed cake, which he praised her for. And then Hitler shoved his plate forward and sought to embarrass both Emil and his niece by talking about a poll on feminity in a women’s magazine.
“Women are agreed,” he said, “that a girl should never go on a first date with a boy without female friends along. Or hold his hand until the fourth or fifth date. Are you aware of that, Sunshine?”
“I have it in needlepoint,” Henny said.
“Women agree that kissing, just kissing, nothing further, ought to be a sign that the couple will soon become engaged.” He smiled. “Are you counting your marriages, Emil?”
Emil stared into his coffee.
“Women in Germany think that a girl who smokes cigarettes is a whore. Their opinion, not mine. And that a good wife will be pregnant within the first year of marriage.”
“I find this fascinating,” Geli said.
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��And that’s why I brought it up,” Hitler said. “Who is the happiest of men?” he asked. “Again, I am reporting the consensus of the poll.”
Angela thought aloud that it might be a haughty Austrian with Wiener Schnitzel in his stomach.
“Close,” Hitler said. “Women consider a fat husband with four children the happiest of men.”
“And the happiest of women?” Henny asked.
“Who can tell?” Emil said.
“Your meaning?” Geli asked him.
“I was just looking for something to say.”
“And there was an interesting question,” Hitler said. “A mother interferes when a father is beating their child. Women consider her…what? Angela?”
Without hesitation she said, “A bad wife.”
“Oh, very enlightened,” Geli said.
“Ah, but Angela is correct,” Hitler said. “And seventy-five percent of the women in Germany agree.”
With a scolding glare, Angela told her daughter, “You still have much to learn.” And then she got up from her chair to gather their dishware.
Ostensibly to reward Emil for his hours of driving, Hitler took him to the Gasthof Hintereck for snifters of Asbach Uralt cognac. The girls washed and dried the dishes as Angela took the weight off her feet at the kitchen table and sipped from a jigger of schnapps. “Are you still seeing Emil?” she asked.
Henny elbowed Geli; Geli silently elbowed her back. Henny turned to Frau Raubal. “You can’t tell, can you. Emil’s as amorous as a mole.”
“Were I just looking,” Angela said, “I’d say it was Adolf who was in love with you.”
The sixteen-year-old vigorously nodded. “The hurt feelings. The jealousy. The mooncalf look when she’s near.”
Angela smiled. “Women in Germany agree.”
“My father’s models are wild about him.”
Geli sloshed water on her friend as she forcefully handed her a dish.
Angela got up from the table. “Don’t be too choosy,” she said. “There are more evergreens than cedars.” And she headed for her room.
“She meant what by that?” Henny asked.
“Uncle Adolf’s as rare as a cedar. It’s true.”
With financial assistance from Fritz Thyssen, Hitler found the cash to purchase as the new headquarters of the National Socialist German Workers Party the fenced and gardened, three-story Barlow Palace on fashionable Briennerstrasse. He would name it the “Brown House” in honor of his SA and would hire Professor Paul Ludwig Troost, one of Germany’s grand old architects, to handle the interior and exterior renovations, so his afternoons were often given over to visits to Troost’s atelier, where he would venerate the architect’s skill and feel jubilant whenever consultated on fabrics, furniture, hardware, and masonry.
Geli sang through all the soprano parts in Wagner, she walked Prinz when her uncle couldn’t, she shopped with Elsa Bruckmann, she practiced English with Helene Hanfstaengl, she took up photography under the guidance of Heinrich Hoffmann, she celebrated the final day of Starkbierzeit with Christof Fritsch because Emil Maurice had taken her uncle north to a quarry. But then on a Wednesday in May her uncle found her upstairs in the Bruckmann’s town house reading Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, and he insisted she put away the book in order to join him and Fräulein Hoffmann on a cultural tour of the Pinakothek.
He avoided the halls of Italian and Spanish art as “far too religious” and concentrated on a highly opinionated survey of the paintings of Flanders and Germany. He forced them to stare at Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Lucretia for five minutes, then hurried them to Albrecht Dürer’s Lucretia. Executed just six years apart, each picture featured an unfortunate female nude with a Roman face and waist-length auburn hair who for some fabled reason was stabbing herself with a dagger. Which, he asked, was superior?
“Cranach’s,” Henny guessed.
Hitler frowned. “Why?”
Geli said, “She’s prettier. She’s complex.”
“And Dürer’s?”
“Well, it’s so austere.”
Hitler focused again on Dürer’s version, found confirmation of his judgment, and told them, “You’re both quite wrong. Albrecht Dürer’s is far better. The coldness is intentional. Look at the equilibrium in the limbs. The rigor in the face. She’s architecture. This,” he said, “is the most virtuous nude in the history of art.”
“Which is a good thing,” Geli informed her friend.
Abruptly Hitler strode forward and they followed him to the French wing where he hunted out François Boucher’s rococo and sentimental Nude on a Sofa, which featured a sweet, pink-rumped girl, front forward and seemingly falling off a fainting couch. Geli secretly thought she’d been having sex and was watching her lover leave, but her uncle saw the allusions differently. “She’s your age,” he told them. “Unspoiled, feminine, and naïve. A debutante of pedigree. Wistful. Unsuspecting. Do you see how disorderly the sheets and curtains are? She’s been in emotional torment. Even now, with that far-off gaze, that finger delicately touching her chin, she’s possibly dreaming of one day falling in love. This is the finest art: sensual yet chaste.”
In a hushed voice Henny asked her friend, “Why are her knees so wide apart?,” and Geli fought off a giggle.
“You two,” Hitler said, but he smiled.
Then he took them to see the Pinakothek’s great collection of Peter Paul Rubens, standing still for a long time in front of the hurl and tangle of anatomies in The Fall of the Rebel Angels, and again in front of the great wheel of two frothing horses, two seething men, two Cupids, and two fleshy and pliant Venetian nudes in Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus.
Off to the side, Geli watched her uncle’s hand float just above the canvas, following the flow of beige highlight and bister shadow on the flanks of the virgins. “I have so much to learn,” he said, and he turned. “Will you let me draw you?”
Wearing, as he’d requested, a red ski sweater, a plaid wool skirt, and green knee-high stockings, she went to his Thierschstrasse flat the next afternoon at four. A failure of nerve that he sought her that way, she thought, for she knew he wanted a Lucretia, or a nude on a sofa, and she wasn’t confident she’d reject him.
Widow Reichert was making tea for him, and he went to get it after he formally greeted Geli in his pin-striped, three-piece suit. The furniture, she saw, had been moved so that his folding table and chair were centered in the flat, the headboard and bed were against the curtained front window, and a stool stood in the rear in a rhomboid of sunlight just to the right of the photograph of Hitler’s crazily staring mother. She heard Der Rosenkavalier being introduced in English by an announcer from the BBC and she saw that her uncle had acquired an American Crosley radio. She wondered if he’d gotten it from Doktor Goebbels.
Wanting attention on the folding table was an old Skizzenbuch, sketchbook, with occasional architectural drawings in pencil and maybe twenty skillful, patient, and surprisingly poetic watercolors of the meadows, mountains, and lake lands of Bavaria. In one, orange skies hinted at a fabulous sunset that couldn’t be seen because of the forbidding fortress wall of a forest in winter. Another seemed to be of the Chiemsee, with a gray wash for the sky and Delft-blue waters, and only far away on the scumbled sand of the beach were there a few hasty strokes of his brush to suggest children playing on the shore. She carefully turned to another page and found a pleasant, sunlit village, but again viewed from a great distance and from behind a black fence and skeletal trees that seemed almost to be the bars of a jail. There were fences in many pictures, screens of trees, yawning chasms that functioned like moats, a general sense of exile and awayness, and she felt sorry for him—for his melancholy, his loneliness, his isolation, his consciousness of separation from the community and the happiness of others.
And then Hitler walked in with his tea, silently took away his old sketchbook, got a fresh one from his bookcase, and sat at the folding table. Geli was given no instructions, so she positioned
herself on the stool.
“Like this?”
“That’s fine.”
At first he sketched too small, stroking in millimeters like an amateur, as he did when he doodled on paper place mats whenever others were talking. She saw him try her face four times before he sat back. “Look at my hands,” he said as he lifted them. “They’re shaking.”
She rotated away from him, her hands on her thighs, her heels on a rung of the stool. “Why not just try roughing in the whole form first. Loosely. Don’t be so careful.”
“Oh, I see; you are instructed in art?”
“We took drawing in high school.”
“Soon you’ll be sketching me,” he said in an unfriendly way. “Were you any good?”
“Tight,” she said. “Tentative. That’s how I know.”
She was facing a framed 1896 poster for Simplicissimus, the illustrated satirical weekly, with an issue price of ten pfennigs. The price was now sixty. A frolicking lady in fancy Victorian dress was haphazardly holding an artist’s palette and completing the final s in Simplicissimus with the paintbrush tail of a naked, pitch-black devil who was fiercely hauling her elsewhere by the waist even while he was reading.
She asked, “Are you friends with Simplicissimus now?”
“I just liked the poster,” he said. “Hold still.” She heard him finish a sketch, jostle the folding table either left or right, and with a flourish draw a few bold lines. “It’s going better,” he said.
“I’m glad.”
“Shall we be silent? I find the talk distracting.”
“The choice is yours,” she said.
Thirty minutes later Hitler asked, “Are you comfortable?”
“Stiff.”