by Ron Hansen
“We’ll stop.”
She got off the stool. “Will you let me see them?”
Quickly, Hitler shut the sketchbook. “Maybe eventually. I’m embarrassed now.”
“Don’t be.”
“They’re not as beautiful as you are. I haven’t the hand yet. Won’t you come tomorrow?”
She did. And a week later, too. She liked it. She was flattered by his attention, pleased to so easily have the access to him that others schemed for; and she felt that for the first time he was selfless and sincere and concentrating solely on her, and that she was being seen by him just as she was.
In their fourth session Hitler seemed to find sentences on the floor as he said, “We’ll be doing different poses today.”
“Which?”
He still wore a full three-piece suit, as if he would be called to a finance meeting in a wink, and his hands were sorting charcoals and pencils needlessly here and there on the folding table, but he seemed far more confident of his talent and his notions of art, and there was that hint of mastery that he found after his first introverted minutes with a crowd. “Without clothing,” he said. The tone was imperative. “You can take everything off in the bathroom there.”
She hesitated, and Hitler sat at his sketchbook as at a fine meal, his fast finally ended. The Crosley radio was playing the American jazz he hated, and she knew it was for her. Without looking up, he asked impatiently, “Have you understood me?”
She told him, “Yes,” and the yes seemed to preclude any other options. With a thrilling fear she went into his bathroom and took off her clothes, wanting to be neither fast nor slow about it. She fleetingly thought about first hiding herself in a yellow bath towel there, but that would imply indecency, she’d seem a present to be unwrapped. And so she checked herself in the mirror and with a flutter in her stomach walked out, forcing her hands to shield nothing as she faced him frontally.
There was no lift of his eyebrows, no blush, no intimation that this was salacious. “We’ll be doing life studies,” her uncle said from his chair. She saw that he held The History of Erotic Art open on his knees like an instruction manual. “We’ll start with you on the stool.”
She got on it. She felt a faint crack in the cold, lacquered wood.
“Still facing me. Yes. And with your hands flat on the seat.”
She glanced down. “There’s no room.”
“Widen your legs.”
She joked, “Are your eyes good at this distance?”
“They are.”
She sighed and did as she was told, watching his flash of interest as he glanced between her shaved thighs for just an instant before her hands and wrists hid her sex. She was surprised that she took pleasure in that.
“Aren’t you beautiful,” he said.
“I’m not really. I have flaws.”
“Where?”
“Well, it’s not like you can see them with just your eyes, Uncle Alf. You need a microscope.”
“Your flaws shall stay a mystery then.”
As he frenetically sketched in silence, she listened to the jazz that he called “hellish noise” and to the slash and silty shadings of his charcoals on paper. Then he flipped to a favorite page in his history of women in such positions, and ordered her into a change. After he finished sketching her fourth pose, Hitler got up and folded and flattened a freshly washed bedsheet on the cold, green linoleum, and Geli lay on it in whichever pose he wanted, gifting her uncle with the globes of her breasts, the intricate petals of her vagina, the secret between her buttocks, giving up any shame or worry as she got used to his greed and seriousness and wonder. She felt breathless. She felt sexy. She felt self-conscious and vain and insolent, free and reckless and criminal; and when he’d finished his drawing she felt so confused she wanted to be kissed.
With yearning she stood naked in front of him as he smiled with satisfaction and shut his sketchbook. “I did good work today,” he told her.
“Will you let me look?”
Hitler shook his head. “I found out that models never do. It’s a tradition.”
“Who will see them?”
“They’re only for me.”
A shrinking in him made her cautious. “You won’t tell Emil about them?”
“Certainly not.”
“You won’t show them to your friends?”
“Shall I give you my word of honor?”
“I think that would give me solace, yes.”
Hitler held up his right palm and swore, “You have my word of honor that no one shall see these drawings but me.”
“Thank you,” she said. She held his cheeks as she kissed his forehead, and she felt him stir as if he wanted to touch her. She withdrew to the bathroom for her clothes feeling victorious.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
PRINZREGENTENPLATZ 16, 1929
In June Hitler attended a meeting in Berlin with Alfred Hugenberg, the Prussian head of the conservative Nationalist Party and the owner of many newspapers and movie theaters as well as Ufa, the major film studio in Germany. With upper-class arrogance Alfred Hugenberg told others that he’d found the fulminating Austrian ill-bred, ill-educated, and fortunate to have gotten as far as he had in politics, and he wrongly thought Hitler could be controlled and his oratory directed to right-wing programs if Hugenberg confidentially offered him financial assistance just as Fritz Thyssen had done.
With such gifts Hitler became a far wealthier man and was far less reluctant to have it publicized. Heinrich Hoffmann shot twenty-two rolls of film as Hitler took the Raubal family and a full statesman’s entourage to the horse races at the Hamburg Derby, on a cruise to the island of Helgoland in the North Sea, and on a visit to a film location in Denmark where it was he who signed autographs, not the stars.
Acquisitions became more frequent: a London trench coat and a Savile Row suit; an erotic painting by Adolf Ziegler, the so-called “master of pubic hair” that Hitler privately titled “Nude in Distress” and a purebred Alsatian pup that Hitler named Muck and boarded at Haus Wachenfeld so Prinz would have company. He also shifted funds intended for the National Socialist headquarters in the Barlow Palace—wasn’t he, after all, the Nazi party? wasn’t the party Hitler?—and urged Professor Paul Ludwig Troost, who’d outfitted ocean liners, to design for his own use weighty mahogany furniture that was constructed at the Vereinigte Werkstätte in München. And then all that was left for Hitler to do was shop for and, in September, purchase a grand luxe, nine-room apartment in Bogenhausen at Prinzregentenplatz 16 just a few blocks east of the Isar River and the Angel of Peace monument and only a little more than a kilometer from the future headquarters in Schwabing.
At dinner in Obersalzberg that night he told Angela he could not afford to pay off the mortgages on Haus Wachenfeld and Prinzre-gentplatz and furnish his niece’s rent as well, so he regretted to announce that if Geli wished to stay in Germany she would have to move in with him. They ought not fear scandal or impropriety, however; Frau Maria Reichert, his landlady on Thierschstrasse, would be joining the household as his Mädche’ für alles and would be sharing quarters there with her old mother, Frau Dachs. And since he would be entertaining a great deal now, he’d also engaged the staff services of Georg and Anni Winter, a husband and wife, as Haushofmeister and Koch.
On November 5th, after her uncle was fully moved in, Emil met Geli’s train from Berchtesgaden, but was so unhappy about his girlfriend sharing a flat with her uncle that he wouldn’t even kiss her. Emil failed to mention her high-fashion Rodier jersey and new tweed skirt, he failed to offer to carry the canaries in their golden cage, and as he drove her from the Hauptbahnhof to Prinzregentenplatz 16, Emil told Geli stories of the wild old days when she was still a child in Austria and timid Adolf would give him twenty marks for any girl Emil found for him.
Geli changed the subject by pointing out that in Bogenhausen she’d be within strolling distance of Henny Hoffmann’s house, that four-star restaurants lined the wide avenue, and that she’d be within the
floodlit glow of the stunning Prinzregenten Theater, which, she told him pedantically, specialized in Wagnerian operas and was modeled on the Wagner festival theater in Bayreuth.
“Big deal,” Emil said. And he parked the car.
The five-story Prinzregentenplatz building was sand-colored granite with white-and-teal-blue trim. Two bays of oriel windows bracketed wide balconies on the second, third, and fourth floors. A gray stone frieze of Wotan was just above the entryway; green and gray tiles lined the outside wall of the formal staircase to the upper floors where the gaslights had just been changed to electric.
Emil rang the door chimes next to two tall oak doors on the second floor and asked, “Are you impressed?”
“The Raubal flat in Wien was a lot like this.”
Emil smiled. “With the rats and cockroaches?”
“Many pets,” Geli said.
And then the Haushofmeister was there, welcoming Fräulein Raubal and his old friend Emil, and inviting them inside. Georg Winter was a fine-boned blond in his late twenties, a former orderly for General Franz Xaver Ritter von Epp, who was now a Reichstag deputy for the NSDAP. Winter was an officious, ironic, often wryly amused party member wearing a starched white shirt, a headwaiter’s black suit and bow tie, and a red-and-black swastika pin. Quietly taking Geli’s overcoat and the canaries in their cage, Winter went away, with Emil behind him, and she was left staring at the herringboned oak flooring in the foyer and hallways and the freshly painted white wainscotting on the walls.
Taking off a full, white apron, Anni Winter swatted flour dust from the front of a short black dress as she walked to Geli from a far-off room that must have been the kitchen. She curtsied to Hitler’s niece but introduced herself familiarly as Anni, and within their first few minutes together she let Geli know that she’d been a lady-in-waiting to Countess Törring and was an internationally famous cook, and that she felt this job was beneath her but for the chance to be so near Herr Hitler. “And how old is the fräulein?” she asked.
“Twenty-one.”
“I have twenty-four years,” Anni Winter said. She seemed to think she’d established the governance of an older sister.
“We ought to get along well then,” Geli said.
Anni just stared. “Those who have not grown up with servants can be annoying to work for. There’s so much they have to be taught.”
“I’m sure you’ll be the most patient of teachers.”
Anni smirked. She showed her a bay parlor of four oriel windows where a tasseled floor lamp was next to a wide round mahogany table on a vine-and-pomegranate William Morris carpet. Six soft-cushioned chairs surrounded the table. Their color, Anni said, was “claret.” She called a grander sitting room “the library,” though there were only nine short shelves of Hitler’s familiar books, including six copies of Mein Kampf, The International Jew by Henry Ford, and the collected Westerns of Karl May. A high-priced portrait of Otto von Bismarck by München’s own Franz von Lenbach had been hung just above the secretary. A Wilton carpet in a tulip-and-lily pattern was on the floor, and two floral sofas were on either side of a soft leather armchair that faced an arched casement door leading to the balcony. The white Bechstein piano she’d seen in the foyer at 41 Thierschstrasse was huddled like Geli’s Aunt Paula against a far wall.
“Some of these things are Frau Reichert’s?” she asked.
Anni Winter frostily said, “My husband and I have not been privy to the details of the arrangement.” And then she added, “Anyway, everywhere in Germany great fortunes have been lost.”
The other four-windowed bay parlor was called “the breakfast room,” though Frau Reichert and her mother often played cards or worked at puzzles there in the afternoon, Anni said, and, “Herr Winter may be found here with the shades drawn if he is suffering from one of his sick headaches.”
“Oh, that malingerer,” Geli said.
“Are you being funny?” Anni asked.
“I was trying to be.”
Anni grimaced a smile. The Prinzregentenstrasse wing held a laundry room, a bathroom as plain as a plumbing shop, and the Reichert/Dachs quarters where the deaf old mother lost track of time. Anni then took her to the quieter Grillparzerstrasse wing and the formal dining room with its gleaming mahogany table and seating for eight on chairs covered with a jay-in-the-garden fabric. In the hallway Geli heard Emil’s hearty laughter in the kitchen, but Anni walked beyond it and a full bathroom of white marble that she said Geli would be sharing with her uncle, and “he insists it stay immaculate.”
“Which means?”
“Herr Hitler scents his bathwater with essence of pine. You may also, if you wish. His towels are brown; yours are white. His personal soap is Mouson-Ente; you are to use another brand. Hide your lotions and toothbrush and whatnot. Do not hang in here hose or what you hand-wash. Do not touch his things. Dry the faucets and sink and floor after use. Do not fill the air with perfumes, for he sneezes. I forget the rest, but he’ll tell you.”
“It goes without saying,” Geli said.
Her bedroom was just across the hall from the bathroom. Soft green trellis wallpaper was on the walls, and the room held the furniture of a four-poster bed, a wardrobe, a dresser, and a desk that was white but for its hand-painted wisteria trimming.
“It’s beautiful,” Geli said.
Anni nodded. “Yes, it is.”
She touched a canary-yellow floor lamp and matching desk lamp, a new, blue gramophone, and a framed and fairly good watercolor of a Belgian landscape that her uncle had painted in the Great War.
“Aren’t you fortunate,” Anni said.
“Oh yes,” Geli said. “Uncle’s awfully nice to me.”
Anni went out to the hallway and into Hitler’s office. Watercolors from the Thierschstrasse flat were on the walls as well as the framed Simplicissimus poster and a large Heinrich Hoffmann photograph of a haughty Hitler with his head tilted high like Il Duce, finishing a spellbinding speech in his Sturmabteilung uniform. Otherwise it might have been the office of a city government functionary: just a cabinet, an old reading chair, a black rotary telephone and lamp on the left side of the desk, fountain pens and ink blotter in the middle, a dictionary and an oval, silver-framed portrait of his mother on the right. She opened the drawers and found the desk empty. “And here the tour ends,” Anni said.
“His bedroom’s next door?” Geli asked.
“Naturally. One has to sleep.” She did not show Geli the room. She said, “I have kaiser rolls in the oven,” and went out to the kitchen.
Emil and Georg were sitting there, drinking Franziskaners, and Geli saw that the interior windows overlooked a pleasant green garden of shrubs and ivied trees. “And so,” Emil asked, “do you love it here?”
“I do.”
“Will you be happy, happy, happy?”
“Are you drunk?”
Georg Winter winked.
Emil fell forward onto the kitchen table and used it to heave himself up. “I have to go get your luggage,” he said. “And then I get my leader.”
Winter told Geli, “We’re having a dinner in your honor tonight.”
She learned that she and Hitler were hosting Rudolf and Ilse Hess, Heinrich Hoffmann and his daughter, and Baldur von Schirach, the founder of the National Socialist German Students’ Alliance, who was the first to arrive for dinner. Geli was wearing a new Louis-boulanger white chiffon gown printed with orange flowers and green leaves; Schirach was wearing a black tuxedo and was holding a flute of the Taittinger champagne he’d brought. Cologne eddied from him as if he were its source.
Schirach was a tall, soft-bodied man with ice-blue eyes whose fine Nordic face seemed meant to be photographed. Twenty-two years old, he was the son of a Weimar theater director who’d died the year of his birth, so he’d been raised solely by his American mother, whose ancestors included two signers of the Declaration of Independence. He told Geli he was now studying German philology, folklore, and art history in München while assisting Herr Doktor
Ernst Hanfstaengl—Baldur had been forbidden the use of the nickname Putzi—as the party’s foreign press secretary. First looking around the room in caution, he confessed in English, “We actually don’t get along very well.” And he hesitated. “Ernst says you speak our mother tongue?”
In English she said, “Speak it I can some. A little. I need…praxis.”
“Practice,” Schirach corrected, then giggled in a high voice as he laid his free hand gently on her forearm and said in German, “Sorry to torture you, darling. The faces you make hunting for words!”
She found Schirach friendly and suave and stunningly good looking, but wide-hipped, pudgy, effeminate, and insolent in that Nazi way she associated with Göring. He told her that he’d first met her uncle in 1925, just after Hitler’s release from Landsberg am Lech, and that he was party member number 17,251. It was he, Schirach said, who called for the storming of the universities by Nazi youth, and the party was now getting 38 percent of the votes there. “We’ll have all of them in a few more years. With the stock-market crash in America, the Continent’s economies will also be failing soon. And history tells us that our party thrives when financial conditions are at their poorest. Good heavens, are the people going to go to the Communists? They’re so dreary.”
She heard the chimes and watched Winter let in and loudly announce, “Herr and Frau Hess, and Herr Hoffmann and his daughter, Henrietta.” And just then Hitler emerged in his tuxedo from the Grillparzerstrasse wing and forced his guests to tour his new apartment.
She went with them until she noticed Henny hanging back from the group. She ducked into the dining room and Henny joined her there. In a hushed voice she asked, “Don’t you think he’s amazing?”
Geli smiled. “My uncle?”
“Herr Baldur von Schirach! Don’t you think he’s so handsome you can hardly breathe?”
“It’s the cologne,” Geli said.
“Who’s he intended for?”
“You, I think.”
She brightened. “Are you sure?”
Geli found Hitler affectionately watching her from the hallway, a faintly worried smile rocking underneath his little mustache, his shining stare full of sentiment and imagination. She’d become his resting place, his lost civilization. “Yes,” she said, “I’m sure.”