by Ron Hansen
“And so you joined the party,” she said flatly. “And you needed to tell me that, face-to-face.”
“Aren’t you pleased?”
She heard the door chimes. She cursed.
“Who is it?” Christof asked.
“I have no idea.” She stood up and leaned out the open window to see Prinzregentenplatz. Hitler’s Mercedes was there, gray smoke swirling from its exhaust pipe, and her uncle was huddled in the front seat, poring over a newspaper. “Oh no.” She heard the foyer door open.
“Hallo!” Emil called.
As she went to the hallway, she touched a hand to Christof’s mouth to silence him. “Emil!” she said. He was wearing jackboots, a gray soldier’s coat, and a storm trooper’s stocking cap that was pulled so low it folded out his ears. His hands were red with cold and he blew into them as he asked, “Would you like to join your uncle at the Osteria?”
“Oh, I think not, thank you,” she said.
His face seemed indifferent to her answer. Then he frowned. “Are you smoking, Geli?”
She saw that she was holding the cigarette between the middle fingers of her right hand just as Doktor Goebbels did.
“Who’s there with you?” Emil asked.
And then Christof was hulking in the doorway. “An old friend,” he innocently said.
Emil sneered and calmly called Geli “Meine Dirne,” a term that could be as inoffensive as “my lass” but could also mean “whore.”
“We were just talking,” she said.
“Well, that’s how it always starts, doesn’t it,” Emil said. Walking forward, he seemed to find vicious joy in Christof’s frail lifting of his hands, as if helplessness would pacify him.
Geli firmly said, “Don’t, Emil.”
“I joined the party,” Christof weakly said. “We’re comrades.”
Emil smashed him hard in the nose and blood flew against the soft-green trellis wallpaper. Christof groaned and held his face with his hands as he knelt on the floor. Geli screamed and crouched over Christof as Emil said, “Oh, you think it’s over so soon?” and he kneed him in the mouth. Christof cried out and folded over, blood and saliva drooling from him as he found a lost tooth on his tongue.
Tears streaming down her face, Geli held on to Emil’s hands and yelled for him to quit.
Emil seemed to hear nothing. “So you think you can have my girlfriend, and in my leader’s house?” With a strength greater than his middleweight size, Emil grabbed hold of Christof’s mackintosh and lifted him to his feet before hurtling him into the doorjamb, shivering the room, then hauling him out. And then Emil manhandled him down the hallway to the foyer, yelling his hatred for intellectuals and sissies, his hands flashing out into Christof’s face whenever he saw a free shot, his postwar years with the Ehrhardt Naval Brigade remembered as he threw Christof into the walls and the shaking doors of the library.
Christof fell and Emil kicked at him; then Emil wildly swung his leg again and his foot hit the wall. Even with his jackboots on, Emil hurt his toes, and he tried to walk off the pain as Christof lay in the foyer oozing blood.
And then Hitler was there with a pistol in his hand, shouting, “We cannot have this!”
Emil was startled, his eyes on the handgun. “Are you talking to me?”
“Who else? You have made my niece cry!”
“She was—” he started, but Hitler swatted Emil’s head with his free hand, as if he were just a boy, and Emil fell miserably into a sit as Hitler railed at him for subjecting his home and his niece to such violence.
Geli screamed, “I hate you, Emil! I hate you!” And then she got a wet hand towel to hold to Christof’s face.
While Emil pitied himself, Hitler went on and on, not letting up, lifting up Emil’s chin with his handgun so he could shout that Emil’s actions were shameful, unforgivable, an outrage against decency.
Woozily Christof got to all fours, then his feet, saying into the reddening towel, “I have to get to a doctor.”
Hitler forced Emil to help Christof up, then he glanced at his niece and said, “My deepest regrets, Princess. This won’t happen again.”
At first she’d thought he’d be angry with her, then she saw how this suited him. Emil would be fired from his job, she knew, and Christof was no fool. She was Hitler’s alone now.
Christof staggered out, hanging on to Emil’s shoulder, his galoshes squeaking on the flooring.
Geli asked, “Was the pistol in your car?”
Hilter looked at the Walther in his hand. “I heard you screaming.”
“Christof just came to say he’d joined the party.”
With forlorn eyes her uncle glimmered a smile and said, “We needn’t talk about it,” as if he had much to forgive. And then he was gone and there was nothing for Geli to do but sponge the blood from the floor and the walls.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ELECTIONS, 1930
An American businessman named Owen Young chaired an international commission that sought to give Germany economic relief by amending many punitive conditions of the Treaty of Versailles. Agreeing with Gustav Stresemann, Germany’s foreign minister, the commission established a ceiling of 121 billion reichsmarks in war reparations, to be paid off in fifty-nine yearly installments that would finally end in 1989. Taxes on industrial obligations, and other duties, were abolished. Arbitration was to take the place of sanctions. And the Allies would give up their occupation of the Rhineland four and a half years ahead of schedule.
All the changes only outraged the enemies of the Weimar Republic, who thought the original treaty was grossly unjust and ought to be wholly rejected rather than modified. Communists and other parties on the left joined the Stahlheim (the army veterans’ party), Alfred Hugenberg’s Nationalists, the Pan-German Association, the Resistance to Oppression Movement, and the National Socialist Democratic Workers Party in urging that the agreement be voted down in a December 1929 plebiscite.
And with no one to match him for stirring oratory, Adolf Hitler became the featured speaker at some enormous rallies—seven thousand heard him at the Zirkus Krone—where the majority of his audience otherwise felt no affinity for his politics. Hitler took advantage of the opportunity to widen his popularity by saying nothing about the Jews, having the inflammatory swastika taken off rally posters, and concentrating on the noxious elements of the Versailles Treaty. He shouted that Germany was not guilty for causing the war, it was only guilty of having lost it by tolerating the treachery of politicians; that while Germany was being disarmed and shackled, the countries around it, preaching peace, were constructing great armies and navies; that Germany was in no want of food and raw goods and fuel, except for that which was being stolen from it. “Shall we consent to pay out eighty marks per second for the next sixty years? Shall we be slaves for three generations? Shall we continue to say yes to our oppressors? I say no!”
The Reichstag finally adopted the Young Plan anyway, but for Hitler it was a victory, for party membership increased by forty thousand, Alfred Hugenberg’s chain of newspapers had portrayed Hitler as an ultrapatriot, and he was more than ever salonfähig, or worthy of acceptance in upper-class society. Prince August Wilhelm of Prussia, the kaiser’s son, publicly joined the party in 1930 and induced Prince Philip von Hessen, a grandson of Queen Victoria, to join the Nazis as well.
Hitler knew that, with the worldwide depression, American creditors were calling in their loans on the Continent, farms were being foreclosed, factories were shutting down, three million in Germany were already unemployed, and onerous taxes were being attached to income, property, inheritances, and every commodity but beer. All the party needed, he decided, was a major new offensive in public relations founded on a martyr for the National Socialist cause. And Horst Wessel, he thought, would do.
Horst Wessel was the twenty-two-year-old son of an Evangelical pastor who had rejected his father’s advice and had joined the Sturmabteilung in order to fight the Communists in the streets. Der Angriff had publis
hed Wessel’s sentimental poem “Raise High the Flag,” which he’d written to commemorate those friends of his who’d been “shot dead by the Red Front and Reaction,” and the party had liked it so much that Wessel set it to a tune from an old Austrian cabaret song, but “hotted up,” as he put it, to fit marching time.
Wessel had fallen in love with a prostitute named Erna and had moved in with her, but they fought loudly and often, and their landlady hired Communists who were friends of Erna to harry them out of the flat. Since Wessel was famous for his viciousness in the streets, one of the Red Front militants took advantage of their meeting to shoot him in the mouth, shouting, “You know what that’s for!” Three weeks later, Horst Wessel died.
With his genius for propaganda, Doktor Goebbels reported the shooting in Der Angriff and the Völkischer Beobachter so that it seemed a political assassination, and he organized a spectacular funeral at the Sportpalast in late February 1930, where he sonorously recited, “Horst is one who, leaving home and mother, lived with gentle concern among those who scorned and spit on him. Out there, in a tenement attic, in a proletarian section of Berlin, he proceeded to build his youthful, modest, caring life among depraved subhumans. There can be no doubt, he was a Socialist Christ! One who appealed to others through his generous deeds. His spirit has risen in order to live in all of us now. He is marching within our ranks. Even now he raises his weary hand and beckons us into the shimmering distance, shouting, ‘Forward over the graves! At the end of the road lies Germany!’”
Then six great choirs joined in on what was now called the “Horst Wessel Lied,” singing, “The banners flutter, the drums roll, the fifes rejoice, and from millions of throats resounds the hymn of the German revolution, ‘Raise high the flag!’”
Doktor Goebbels had wanted Hitler there to deliver the oration and to make the occasion more politically important, but Hitler was afraid that Communists would murder him and didn’t want to say so; instead he claimed he was ill, or busy, and, with the shilly-shallying he was not yet famous for, he went into hiding for a fortnight with Geli.
She was his escape, his torpor, his surrender to the vacillation and passivity that were increasingly part of his nature. With a Rolleiflex he’d given her, she took snapshots of him in his Tyrolean costume sitting on a snowbank in Obersalzberg, of him throwing sticks in the woods to his Alsatians Prinz and Muck, of him on a wood-runnered sled in a sweatered suit, his trouser cuffs tucked inside woolen stockings. And in each one he was smiling.
After their hikes they listened to the radio programs from München in the Winter Garden while Angela heated saltwater for his footbath. When she walked out to them from the kitchen, she’d often see Geli kneeling on the floor, taking off his stockings and folding his woolen trouser cuffs to his white, hairless calves. Angela put down the steaming basin and her half-brother whimpered with counterfeit pain as he immersed his feet, saying, “Oh, why do the women in my family torment me so?”
“Because you crave it,” Geli said and got up.
Hitler luxuriated, oozing contentment and shutting his eyes. “It’s true, it’s true. I like it so much. I’m so happy. So, so happy.”
In March, at twilight, Hitler stood at parade rest in the cold winds of the north terrace, filling his chest with ion-rich air and staring out at the majestic Alps and a fleet of clouds trundling in. Geli went out to him in a cardigan, her flying skirt as tight as paint against her legs. She put her arm around his waist, and he held out a gloved finger to the villages below, giving each its name, as if he were Adam. “Bischofswiesen is farthest west. Then Berchtesgaden. Maria Gern. Obersalzberg. Marktschellenberg. And far behind it Salzburg. East is Oberau. Hallein. Klaushöhe. Buchenhöhe.”
“I love it here,” she said, and she shamefully realized she was urging him to say he loved her here.
Instead he tried out a line of just imagined poetry. “And high above the world,” he quoted, “on the cold fastness of the Kehlstein, I feed the needy flames of my hate.”
Hurt and discouraged, Geli said, “I have to go in now.”
There were midnights in Obersalzberg when she would hear his shoes in the hallway and see him hesitantly tip his head just inside her bedroom door to see if she was still awake. She’d invite him in, and often he would simply plant a swift kiss on her forehead and wish her a Schlaf gut, “Sleep well,” but there were also other times when he’d sit against her blanketed calves and in a fatherly and official way consult with her about what she’d done that day, what she wished to do in the morning, whether she had all she needed. Then he’d softly pat her knee and get up, perfectly comfortable with just that.
She heard him arguing for an hour on the telephone in the Winter Garden one night, and then he walked into her room with a glass of Riesling. And he stood over her as he said, “There are those in the party who dislike my involvement with you. Who wish you’d just go back to Austria.”
“And?”
Holding a hand over his eyes, he confessed, “I feel such love for you, Princess! I feel I could marry you!”
“Why is that so painful to say?”
Hitler turned to the frosted window and found his own face in a high, night-shaded pane. “I have to stay single,” he grimly said, “so I can give myself fully to Germany. Without diminution. And yet I feel I have to watch over you, and exert a fatherly influence on your circle of friends until such time as you find the right man.”
“Wherever I go, there’s you there.”
He smiled. “I shall choose to take that as a compliment.”
She wasn’t sure if it was or wasn’t. She got up against the pillows and hugged her knees.
“What others see as compulsion on my part is simply prudence,” he said. “I have such fears that you’ll fall into the hands of someone unsuitable.”
“Emil, for instance.”
“An Old Combatant, but a misalliance,” he said, and finished his wine. “Are you growing impatient?”
She nodded.
“Oh, how I wish,” he said, and his hand found her hair, flowed down her face, and fell flat and heavily onto her right breast. She inhaled as if she’d jumped into shockingly cold water, and his hand lifted off. “Sleep well,” he said, and walked out.
She was going alone to Wien in April in order to renew her visa, so her mother and her uncle took her to the railway station in Berchtesgaden. Geli would handle the government paperwork that afternoon, stay the night with old high school friends, and get back the next day, but Hitler seemed to fantasize that she was going to the Congo, and he was uncertain if he was angry or worried or full of grief in his affliction. Hitler had forfeited his own Austrian citizenship and was not yet a German national, so he was stateless and could not join her, and yet that was all he wanted then, and as Geli got ready to board her first-class railway car, he seemed to want to hug her good-bye just as Angela did. But he held back and instead stropped his hand hard and loud with his riding whip, shaking out the sting as he stalked away.
Angela asked, “Won’t you consider becoming Adolf’s fiancée?”
She flushed red and lied, “I haven’t thought about it.”
“Well, he has, you can tell. He’s lovesick. Men just don’t know it as soon as we do.”
Often Geli felt she was in love with him, too. Adolf Vogl’s wife had had a baby boy, and Geli was the first to visit them in the hospital. She took along a Schwatzei, or gossip egg, and touched it to the newborn’s mouth so he’d learn to talk early. “My uncle says unless a girl has a child, she’ll get hysterical or ill. Are you finally sane now, Frau Vogl?”
She smiled. “I haven’t screamed for hours.”
“May I hold him?”
“Of course.”
Geli gently cuddled the newborn and held her cheek to his head as she swayed from side to side. She said, “Oh, I want a baby, too!”
Adolf Vogl’s wife asked, “Whose?”
Geli just blushed. “Oh, you know who.”
She smiled. “Would it b
e Herr Hitler perhaps?”
“He’d say I have already said way too much.”
Which was true. Of the many roles Hitler played with his niece—father, confidant, educator, financier, swain—she disliked most his role of warden. Walking down the hallway one afternoon, she discovered that her uncle was back from his meetings in Essen and was in the kitchen interrogating the Winters about what she’d done while he was away. She slammed open the kitchen door and found him sitting at the pantry table, still in his chocolate-brown leather trench coat. Without hesitation, Hitler continued, “And Thursday afternoon?”
“Singing lessons,” Anni Winter said.
“She left when?”
Anni tried to recall. Georg said, “Wasn’t it one o’clock?”
“I’m here,” Geli said. “Why not ask me?”
Smiling at her fleetingly, but with irony and mistrust, Hitler again turned to Georg and asked, “She got back from Herr Vogl’s when?”
And she was at Hitler’s Stammtisch at the Café Heck in June. Thirteen months earlier Alfred Rosenberg had finished a book that in self-flattery he’d insisted on calling his magnum opus, and he had given Der Mythos des 20 Jahrhunderts to his leader to read lest he find anything objectionable in it. She knew her uncle had not troubled himself to, in fact, read the book, but kept it for a full year before giving it back with the hastily penned comment “Very good” on the title page. Still, Rosenberg was elated, and as Rudolf Hess talked to Hitler about some pressing matter in the north, Rosenberg sought to give Geli a few reasons why her uncle was so impressed.
With a halitosis that forced Geli to shield her nose with her hand, Rosenberg leaned close to say that The Myth of the 20th Century was the fulfillment of the race theories that had first been formulated by Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Paul de Lagarde. “I have outdone them, however, for I have proven that the highest cultural achievements of the West all had their origins in ancient Germanic tribes. And that Christianity, corrupted by Jesuits, Freemasons, and international Jewry, has destroyed Germanic culture by urging the dilution of our blood with feeble strains.”