by Ron Hansen
Uncharacteristically silent throughout dinner, Hitler slouched in his head-of-the-table chair and took joy in his company, fondly gazing at Geli as she talked to Rudolf and Ilse, and lightly touching her hand when he wanted the butter or salt. With formality he finally said, “Tell me, Heinrich. How did you find the lamb?”
Hoffmann joked, “I just moved the potatoes and there it was. Ha, ha!” And then Hoffmann fell into an off-color story that was eventually so carefully sanitized for Hitler’s sake that all that was left of it was innuendo.
Then Baldur von Schirach took up the spirit of fun by telling a story Ernst Hanfstaengl had told him about an old Washington Post article in which a journalist had written that President Woodrow Wilson had taken his fiancée, Mrs. Edith Galt, to the theater, and was so intent on “entertaining” her that he’d scarcely watched the play. Well, the journalist was horrifed the next morning to find there’d been a typesetting mistake in the paper so that it seemed he’d written that the president spent most of his time “entering” Mrs. Galt.
Only Schirach himself laughed when he finished. Confused faces were focused on him. Coldly glaring, Hitler turned to his niece. “Won’t you help us forget this violation of etiquette with a song?”
“I’m really so sorry,” Schirach said.
To rescue him, Geli stood and announced, as Schirach mouthed a thank-you, that she’d sing Mozart’s “Welche Wonne, welche Lust.” What bliss, what delight. And she sang it so prettily and with such humor that there were chortles and titters until the conclusion, when the four men jumped up and wildly applauded. Tears of joy filled her uncle’s eyes as he leaned forward to say into her ear as she sat down, “This is why you are here!”
There would be many more dinner parties, Hitler told his niece at breakfast, and many nights at the opera, so he wanted Geli to fill her closet with fine clothes.
“Oh, all right,” she sighed, and at noon she took the green trolley to Odeonsplatz and bought a hair waver, two pairs of silk stockings, patent leather heels by Ferragamo, a yellow satin housecoat with pajama trousers, a Vionnet tweed coat cuffed and bordered in nutria, a Lanvin evening gown in black faille and strass, and a Lanvin silver coat with a white fox collar. She ordered them sent to the flat. And as she was walking to the trolley she saw Heinrich Hoffman wave to her from his new Mercedes-Benz and roll down his side window. Would she like a lift?
When she got in, he said, “I just heard a good one. What is an Aryan’s Nordic ideal?”
“Tell me.”
“To be thin like Göring, tall like Goebbels, and blond like Hitler. Ha, ha! Don’t you think that’s good?”
“Aren’t you afraid of them hearing?”
“I’m a jester!” he said. And then he started to worry. “Don’t tell, all right?”
“I won’t.”
Heading north on Ludwigstrasse, he said, “I have to have a nap. Too much champagne.” He thanked her for the night before and said he’d never seen the leader look happier. She was the cause of that. All his friends were grateful.
“Well, he’s been so generous to me. If I can give him pleasure, maybe it’s more of a fair exchange.”
“Ho, ho,” Hoffmann said. “You sound like Eva.”
“Eva?”
Hoffmann hit his forehead with his fist, as if he found himself a fool, and he smiled goofily as he said, “I have a big mouth.”
“Who’s Eva?” she asked.
Traffic was halted as horses hauled a freight wagon into Galerie-strasse. Hoffmann sighed and told Geli he’d hired a featherbrain named Eva Braun as a clerk and photographer’s model for his Schellingstrasse studio. She was seventeen like Henrietta, and blonde, with a chocolate-box type of prettiness, and she was just out of a convent high school where she’d not done well. One late afternoon in the October just past she was up on a ladder, filing papers in a high cupboard, when Hoffmann walked into the studio with Hitler, and Hoffmann noticed that the leader was fancying Eva’s athletic calves. Eva later confessed that she’d had no idea who the man in the felt hat and London overcoat was, for he had introduced himself as Herr Wolf.
“You can see how frivolous she is,” Hoffmann said. “She won’t even look at my photos. To her he was just an old gentleman with a funny little mustache. Old, at forty. And she thought he was staring because the hem of her skirt was uneven.”
“Men worry a lot about tailoring,” Geli said.
Hoffmann forced his car into a lane between a green trolley and a milk truck, and headed toward the Englischer Garten. Eva, he said, had been sent out for Weisswurst and Thüringer and Augustiner beer. They all ate and drank together, and just before she’d gone home to her father and mother, Hoffmann had told Eva that she’d been chatting with Adolf Hitler—whose politics her father, a schoolteacher, hated. She did not get along with her Vati, so she was thrilled. Within a few days Hitler visited Eva in the studio, with a flower assortment, a box of Most pralines, a signed photograph of himself, and an invitation to join him at an opera matinee.
“Which opera?”
“She didn’t say.”
“She’s not a connoisseur?”
“Ha! Oh, Geli, you have no idea what a funny idea that is.” The photographer guffawed a further frantic set of has, and headed east on Prinzregentenstrasse.
“She’s superficial,” Geli said.
“Well, for example, I hinted at Hitler’s fondness for full-figured girls and found her stuffing handkerchiefs in her brassiere. I then told her I felt a sneeze coming on. Ha, ha!”
Geli hoped not to seem to be prying. “They’re seeing each other often?”
“Occasionally, not often. In the afternoons.” A yen of his own was in his face. Widower’s eyes, she thought. “Evenings,” Hoffmann said, “are for you.”
“Is he trying to keep it secret?”
“Well, how to say it? The leader puts his things in many different boxes. We’ll never see half of them.” Hoffmann turned to her. “Are you offended?”
Geli shrugged and gazed out the passenger window. “Why should I be?” They rode in silence for a while, and she added, “It’s not like he’s my husband.”
She stayed in the flat for no more than five minutes. She heard Maria Reichert vacuuming in the parlor and watched the canaries sidestep and spin on the perches, then she got up and took a trolley back to Schwabing.
She had no idea what she intended. She walked into the photography studio on Schellingstrasse and was surprised to find Eva Braun right in front of her, sorting packets of film negatives at a counter. She was a petite Nordic blond, five inches shorter than Geli. With a gymnast’s body. With a heart-shaped face and a candy mouth and the Delft-blue eyes of his mother. She seemed not to recognize who Geli was. And Geli realized she’d gotten what she wanted.
“Nazi headquarters?” Geli asked.
Eva stood on her tiptoes to point across the street. “There.”
She’d nightmared herself into wakefulness and was reading Der Steppenwolf in her yellow pajamas when she felt a mood in the room and was surprised to see her uncle just inside the door, his homburg in his hand, his gray wool suit coat still tightly buttoned.
“You’re home,” she said. “Where were you?”
“Talking,” he said. “Talking, talking.” He shied his stare from hers as he said, “It’s half three.”
“I’ll be quiet.”
His hand lifted his forelock and petted it flat. “It’s not that. I’ll have trouble sleeping. I finished a whole pot of green tea.”
She could tell he was trying to say something else, but she was mystified as to what it could be.
Then he asked, “Would you please go wake Frau Reichert for me?”
“At this hour?”
“She’ll know what to do.”
She got up from her bed and tied on her housecoat. “I’ll do it.”
“Are those new?” he asked.
“The pajamas? I got them today.”
“Thanks to me,” he needlessly s
aid. “They’re beautiful.”
“Thank you for everything.”
Hitler hesitated, introverted and ill at ease in the terra nova of his niece. And then, as sharp as the snap of a maître d’s fingers, he said, “Very good,” and withdrew to his bedroom, saying as an afterthought, “Take off the housecoat.”
She did that and followed him, self-consciously feeling the sway of her breasts under the yellow pajama top. She heard him say, “Stay out there for a minute,” and she stood in the hallway, her hands finding no place to settle, her feet getting cold on the herringboned oak. She stepped onto the carpet runner. She heard hangers ringing in his closet; she heard drawers slide and shut with a tock.
“Enter, Princess,” he finally said.
Her uncle’s swank bedroom was fashioned after his favorite suite in the first-class Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, with furniture of mahogany, fixtures of gold, red suede walls, and a plush golden quilt on a high and wide feather bed. Hanging below one brass wall sconce to the bed’s right was a fuzzy photograph of his mother, and twinning it on the left was a haunting painting by Franz von Stuck called Die Sünde (Sin). Hitler was hunched as if ill in a fire-red wingback chair, just under Adolf Ziegler’s frank nude, his hands folded at his crotch, facing the bed in a white, collared nightshirt.
“What do I do?” Geli asked.
Whining it, he said, “Won’t you fill my water glass for me?”
She saw a full pitcher and water glass on one nightstand and went to it.
“Say what you’re doing,” he said.
Would Eva do this? Would his actresses? She said, “Here’s your water, Uncle Alf.”
“Yes,” he said, “in case I get thirsty.”
She was about to turn until he said, “Don’t turn.”
“And now what?”
“Window,” he said, as if she were slow.
“Shall I open a window for you?”
“Yes,” he said, from his own storybook. “The air gets so stale.”
She quelled a host of misgivings as she felt him watching the cinema of her motherly movements. She raised the sash of a far window just an inch, then another inch, and another.
“Quit.”
She found half his face in a mirror—so sincere and guileless and fascinated, like a high school boy’s first reverent glimpse of the swellings beneath a girl’s blouse—and she felt only affection for him. She shifted to the next step by saying, “Oh, you’re so tired, aren’t you, Uncle Alf.”
“Yes,” he said in a child’s voice. “I’m sleepy.”
She waited.
Quietly, he said, “And you turn down the covers.”
Was this what Klara did for him? She tried, “Shall I turn down the covers for you, Adi?”
“Yes, please,” he said in the child’s voice. “I’m so sleepy.”
She walked to the head of the bed, took hold of the golden quilt, blanket, and sheet, and folded a triangle back from his fat white pillow.
Whining again, he said, “Don’t do it so quickly.”
“Again?”
“Again.”
Geli stood tall, stooped over, held the bedding in her hands, and folded a bigger triangle back.
“Stay that way,” he said.
Would a wife do this? Would a girlfriend? Would nurses, maids, secretaries do this for men they were fond of? And yes, she decided, they would, they did, hundreds and hundreds of times. She felt the travel of his interest as she held there, as she posed with her rump high, the yellow satin pajama trousers filmy against her buttocks, her elbows planted on the mattress to ease the strain of her spine.
“Aren’t you lovely,” he said. “Aren’t you lovely.” And then Hitler sighed and said, “You can go now.”
She kept her eyes on the floor as she walked out, and at the door she said, “Sleep well.”
“I shall, I think. Thank you.” Calm and unembarrassed; as if she’d handed him a pill.
She was digging a soft-boiled egg from its shell with a teaspoon the next morning when he strolled into the breakfast room at eleven, fully rested and buoyant. Maria Reichert shuffled in with a tray of hot cocoa, hard rolls, and sticks of chocolate on a plate, and they talked like old friends about the cold weather, higher grocery prices, the difficulties a cousin of hers was having at his factory job.
“Well, we all have to pay our keep, don’t we,” he said.
“We do,” Frau Reichert said. “If it’s free it’s not worth having.” And she left.
“Was that meant for me?” Geli asked.
Hitler seemed honestly startled. “We were just making conversation.”
She felt guilty. She could not face him. She held her coffee cup with both hands. “Will you have me do that again?”
She ought to have known he’d be ready, and would trivialize it. “Our little game?” he asked. “Our child’s play?”
“That.”
Hitler softly stroked her hair and said, “We shall do only what gives you pleasure, Princess.”
“Others have done it?”
“Yes.” He got a hard roll from a straw basket and sawed it without anger with his knife. “Don’t feel in any way compelled—”
“I just wanted to know,” Geli said.
What Makes Him Unhappy:
Emil, lately. My talking on the telephone. Warm rooms. Radiator heat. Empty apartment. Questions. Contradictions. Any foreign language. Horseback riding. Office work. Modern art and music. Yawns. Other men and me. Any touching. Any mention of cancer. Wetness on floor or sink. “Spicy” foods.
What Makes Him Happy:
My asking permission. Any dessert. Me here when he comes home or calls. “I find you very handsome.” Head and neck massages (Wagner playing). With him at meals, even if I don’t eat. Watching me shave my legs. Unending compliments. Orange marmalade on zwieback. “Noticeable” females, far younger or far older. These poses: “Bathing,” “The Nap,” “Venus Awakening.” My hair longer than it is now. My smile.
In December she read a news article about the novelist Thomas Mann, who lived along the Isar just a short stroll from them. The Swedish Academy had awarded him the Nobel Prize for literature and afterward he’d been honored as München’s favorite son with a banquet at city hall. She mentioned it to her uncle at breakfast, and without hesitation Hitler told her, “My Struggle is now outselling both Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain.”
“Still, he’s a great writer.”
Suddenly reddening, and seeming to dare her to try another word, he said, “And he’s an enemy of the party!”
She was quiet.
Just before Christmas Geli’s gramophone was loudly playing Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte and she was singing along with the aria “Der Hölle Rachen” as she watched snow strike her windows. And then she heard Christof Fritsch shout her name from the foyer. She turned off the gramophone and tilted out into the hallway. She couldn’t see him, so he must have been in a parlor. She called out, “Who let you in?”
“I found the door open. Are the servants gone?”
She calculated: The Winters were off for the day, Maria was at the Viktualien Markt, and old Dachs was deaf. “Wait!” she said, and went into her room for a sweater as she called out, “I am forbidden male visitors here; I told you.” Then she heard the jingle of his galoshes on the floor. She hurriedly fussed in her room, hiding under-things, and then he was large in the doorway, his beret in his hand, his blond hair in havoc, his black mackintosh flaked with snow.
“I have written you three letters and torn them all up,” he said. “I need to say it face-to-face.”
“Say what?”
Worn out, Christof slid down the wall and sat heavily in a university way, his ankle-high gutta-percha galoshes angled far out and bleeding water onto the fine woolen rug. When he unfastened his mackintosh she smelled India rubber, tobacco smoke, and the fading fragrance of the outdoors. She settled onto the sofa and hunched forward, her forearms crossed on her knees. Waiting.
&nbs
p; “I haven’t seen you much,” he said.
“We haven’t been in the same places.”
“Are you confined here?”
“I go out. With my uncle.”
“And not with Emil?”
“Were your letters about this?”
Christof sighed. “Earlier, before I started at the university, I thought politics was all clamor and vulgarity. The fanaticism of parties seemed so alien to the purity and simplicity of the intellectual life. This is what I was writing you last night. With the hard times in Germany, though, and the popularity of Communism, I have forced myself to look again at the strongest alternative, National Socialism. And what did I find? Energy and vitality and attractiveness to the young, Germany’s future. And so two nights ago I went to hear your uncle speak. Were you there?”
She shook her head no. “I generally don’t go.”
“Why?”
She shrugged. “It’s boring.”
“Oh, but it’s not! It’s thrilling!”
“Are you carrying cigarettes?” she asked.
Christof got a packet and shook a cigarette out. She took it, hunted for a match, and lit it. She lifted a window as high as she could, letting fresh air and flurries of snow sail in, then sat again on the sofa, folding her legs. “Tell,” she said.
“There were five thousand students there, and many respected professors on the stage, and Hitler was not a zealot, as I’d heard. The Jews were hardly mentioned. Rather, he talked in measured tones about social justice and harmony and an idealistic new world, one that sought freedom and work and bread for the masses while rejecting materialism and selfishness and class distinctions. Unlike other politicians, he appealed directly to the young, offering us a chance to join in his crusade for the good and glory of Germany if we would only follow him without hesitation. By the end, we were all elated. We felt that if he could excite us so much with just a speech, then maybe our fatherland could be saved if he was our leader. A friend of mine, a Jew, was there, and he surprised me by saying that if it weren’t for the party’s anti-Semitism he’d be joining them himself.”