by Ron Hansen
“And you call for what?”
“We need war,” he said. “A cleansing.”
Without thinking, Geli said, “Oh good. Begin with the teeth.”
Affronted, he sat back and in full volume said, “Others have reported that you are an impudent girl. I now have confirmation.”
She was stunned that Rosenberg would dare talk to his leader’s niece in that way, but when she turned in outrage to her uncle, she saw that he and Hess were watching them in a tolerant silence that seemed to endorse Rosenberg’s insult. Had he been put up to it?
Hitler smiled. “Men have little use for cleverness in women. We want them to be nice, little, cuddly things. Soft and sweet and perhaps a tad stupid.”
Her face was hot. Her mouth was weak. She felt a flutter in her stomach. “Am I here to be corrected?”
“Only as it seems necessary.”
She was near tears, so she just stared at her plate. She heard Hitler tell Hess and Rosenberg, “I find nothing more enjoyable than educating a young thing. A girl of eighteen or twenty is as pliable as wax.” Geli was going to say she was nearly twenty-two, and then she remembered that Eva Braun was younger.
Rosenberg asked Hitler, “Would you mind if I quoted you to Herr Hess?”
“On this subject?”
“You were saying it just yesterday.”
“I say so many things.”
“If I have it right it was, “A man must be able to put his mark on every girl. Women wouldn’t have it any other way.’ I find that so psychologically—”
Geli began to get up from the table.
“Where are you going?” her uncle asked.
“I feel ill.”
“Sit!”
And then there was silence until a waiter finished serving them bowls of minestrone. Rudolf Hess tried to soften the tension by asking, “Who was it who said, ‘For men love is a thing apart; for women it is their whole existence’?”
“I did,” Hitler said. “But not in those words.” And then he saw tears running down his niece’s cheeks and he changed the subject.
At four in the morning she heard her door open and softly shut, and she got out of bed to find a small package wrapped in gold foil. With it was a card on which he’d sketched an ugly green dragon whose face was his own. “I am a monster,” he’d written. “Will you forgive me?” His gift was a glamorous set of half-carat diamond earrings. And he was so abject all the next day, and so fatiguing in his gloom, that the Winters insisted and she finally forgave him.
There was going to be another election in September, and Hitler thought the party’s chances were so good that he gave up his opera nights and the cinema and his July and August in Obersalzberg in order to campaign. Geli again took Henny with her to Haus Wachenfeld for the summer, and Heinrich Hoffmann mailed them weekly photographs of Hitler in Bremen, Darmstadt, Leipzig, or Potsdam, genially tousling the hair of blond boys, patting the sunburnt cheeks of girls in their village costumes, shaking the hands of factory workers, sitting on a tractor hitch to eat a farmer’s wurst and sauerkraut, congratulating a grocer for the cleanliness of his store, scowling at a map in his chartered airplane, offering a formal bow to the older ladies whose votes he could always count on, stonily addressing a hall crammed full of his hard and lean Sturmabteilung for whom he was ever more an object of reverence. “Six speeches in a row and not a peep about the Jews,” Hoffmann wrote. “We offend no one these days.”
With her father’s Leica, Henny took photos of Geli sitting on the northern terrace with her flowered white skirt lifted to mid-thigh so the jackdaw Schatzi could perch on her knee; of her imitating the flamboyant pose of Lilian Harvey outside the Mirabell movie palace in Salzburg; of her lying in a meadow and laughing hard with her brother, Leo, Prinz Josef cigarettes in their hands; of Geli sleeping nude on the Freikörperkultur beach with a flock of butterflies softly fanning their wings on her suntanned skin.
Because he feared that Communists would try to foil him by kidnapping or injuring his niece, Hitler had given handgun lessons to Geli and Henny and had consigned his Walther 6.35 and four boxes of ammunition to them so they would get to be good shots. And so they’d shoot at pine cones in the high woods near the Pension Moritz or wander farther down the Kehlstein to the horse stables of Doktor Seitz where they’d fire at tin cans on the fenceposts. They liked the maleness of it. They felt like Chicago gangsters, or like Jack Hoxie or William S. Hart in an American Western.
Walking back to Haus Wachenfeld one afternoon, Henny told her friend that she had a confession to make, that Hitler had joined the Hoffmanns for dinner a few months before. Afterward he’d played some Wagner on the piano, and the leitmotiv of Verdi’s La forza del destino, and then he and Henny’s father had gone out. She had been alone in the house when she’d heard the front door open and found Hitler hunting for the whip he’d forgotten. “Don’t you find it strange that he carries that thing?”
Geli shrugged. “I have no idea what strange is anymore.”
“Well, he planted himself on the red carpet of the foyer, his whip in one hand and his felt hat in the other, and with great seriousness he asked, ‘Will you kiss me?’”
Geli forced herself to grin. “And you did?”
“Of course not. I told him, “No, please, really not, Herr Hitler! Kissing you is impossible for me!’ And then he left in a huff.”
“Without trying to persuade you?”
She shook her head and asked, “Has he persuaded you?”
“A little.”
“To have sex?”
“We just touch now and then. And nothing ever in public. We must keep up appearances. We share occasional kisses. Linking of arms. Sentimental looks. A hand to my bosom three times now. Quickly on, and then off, like a jittery boy.”
“Aren’t you frustrated?”
“Well, the ethics of the situation seem to be under a cloud.” A jackdaw she didn’t know stumbled up into the air and flew a few meters to the green lawn of the Hotel zum Türken. Calm women in white summer dresses were having cocktails under a shade tree and staring at the gun in her hand. She said, for no particular reason, “My uncle’s a watcher, I think.”
“Are you still modeling for him?”
Was there a betrayal that would surprise her now? Geli asked, “How did you hear?”
“We saw. My father and I. You can’t tell it’s you, really.”
“Who else saw the sketches?”
“Well, many of his friends, I think. Herr Hitler was quite proud of them.”
In fury she said, “He swore they were just for him! He gave me his word of honor! Am I supposed to face those people now?”
Trying to cheer her up, Henny joked, “They just know you a little better.”
Howling with shame, she folded her arms over her head and cursed him.
“There, now,” Henny said in a motherly way, and smiled as she flung an arm around Geli and hugged her. “It’s just art, Angelika.”
Checking a tear, Geli sniffed and said, “Oh. Easy for you to say. You’re a hussy.”
Doktor Goebbels organized six thousand meetings and torchlight parades throughout Germany for the 1930 campaign. Millions of books about the party were sold or given away. And in the last six weeks before the September election, Adolf Hitler gave over twenty major speeches, often in freshly raised circus tents holding as many as ten thousand. No country on the Continent had ever before undergone such furious miseducation, and the fruit of the propaganda was in the polls, where thirty-five million voted—up four million from the 1928 election—and the National Socialists won one hundred seven seats in the Reichstag, a gain of ninety-five. What the masses still called “the Hitler Movement” was now the second-largest party in the Reich.
With success came anxiousness. Hitler was wracked by stomachaches he feared were cancer, his insomnia worsened, he worried about his foot odor and flatulence; his hands, he felt, were too moist. And so a few days after the election he decided that he needed a v
acation, and that he, Geli, and Angela were going to travel to Berlin for what Hitler called “a family outing with Alois,” Angela’s older brother.
Julius Schaub was at a jazz festival in Stuttgart, so Hitler determined they could just as easily take the railway north. Wanting a first-class car without crowds, Hitler got them to the Hauptbahnhof just before four a.m., but as it was Sunday, bicyclists, the hikers who were called Wandervögel, the Jewish sports clubs Maccabee and Shield, the Friedrich Jahn Gymnastics Forum, and the League of German Girls were in full scream at the railway station, waiting for trains to Garmisch, Passau, Nürnberg, and Bad Tölz.”
Hitler tilted his trilby hat and hid his face from the chaotic crowds with an old Berliner Illustrierte as Angela got them all hot tea and Geli wandered through the railway station seeking lozenges for her sore throat.
She found instead, near a closed bookseller’s stall, thirty reverent hikers in Tyrolean costume wearing badges of membership in Saint Michael’s Sodality of Our Lady as they watched a consecration at a folding table turned into an altar. She hadn’t been to church since she’d moved into her uncle’s flat, so she stayed there, trying in vain to pray, but she was soon aware that her uncle was watching, and she walked back to the railway platform for Berlin.
Angela was wearing her cloche hat and raincoat and swastika pin, finishing her tea, and her uncle was pretending to scan track-meet news in the Berliner Illustrierte. She heard him snidely ask, “Still believe in the mumbo jumbo?”
There seemed to Geli no satisfactory reply.
“Oh, you and your smart talk,” Angela said.
“I never found that going to church got the bills paid.”
“Alois is the same way,” Angela said. “Heathens, the both of you.”
Hitler folded the newspaper and said, “We cannot have a strong nation if there are religions vying with us for control of the people. We need all of a man, not just a piece of him. We’ll first get rid of the Jews. And then we’ll rule out Catholicism. And then all the other religions. In a few generations no one in Germany will know that a Jew called Jesus ever existed.” The railway cars for Berlin were shuttling into the station and he craned his neck to see where the first-class cars would be.
“I’m a Catholic,” Geli said. “Mother is. Leo is.”
“And I used to be,” he said. “I have put away childish things.”
A taxi took them to Alois Hitler Jr.’s third-floor apartment on Luck-enwalderstrasse, and his second wife, Maimee, invited them into a purple-hued home so filled with inherited pictures and furniture that she had to sidestep them in order to put coffee on.
Angela and Geli uneasily shared the sofa and Adolf squeezed just beside his niece, his hand so squashed he at first settled it familiarly on her thigh before choosing his own. They were all facing the finest object in the living room, a new, flattering, life-size oil painting of Adolf Hitler in his Sturmabteilung uniform and his “man of destiny” stare.
“Am I really so dashing?” he asked.
Geli did not smile. “What they always miss in pictures is your modesty.”
“And here you all are!” Alois Hitler said, zestfully walking in and widening his arms. At forty-eight he’d changed his mustache to one just like his half-brother’s, but in his rimless glasses and his hard-collared manner there was still an air of the railway waiter and he seemed far too anxious to please as he waved forward from the hallway and introduced his firstborn son, William Patrick Hitler, who was on holiday from his job in London and whom he’d last seen in Liverpool in 1913.
Willie, as he was called, was nearly twenty and worked, Alois told them, as a draftsman in an engineering firm on Wigmore Street. He was a slim, fairly handsome young man in a gray tweed suit, with woe-filled eyes and a full head of brown hair brushed straight back from a high forehead. “My German not good,” Willie said.
Adolf genially said, “Oh, but you are fortunate, English boy,” and waggled Geli’s knee with his palm. “My Geli here speaks your language like the queen.”
With relief Willie sighed and said in German, “What an illustration!”
Alois corrected his “Erläuterung” to “Erleichterung.”
“Oh yes,” Willie said. “What a relief!”
And Geli said in English, “Like telegrams we will talk.”
“Herr Doktor Hanfstaengl and I have just written an article on the elections for the London Sunday Express,” Hitler told him. “And I have an interview with the London Times later this week. I see journalists all the time. Are you understanding my German, Willie?”
Hitler’s nephew nodded and said he did.
With surprising fury, Hitler shouted, “Numskull! Woodhead! Did you think I would not hear about the American newspapers? Only Adolf Hitler talks about Adolf Hitler! I shall not have you or your mother, Bridget, or you, Alois—no one—think they can climb on my back and get a free ride to fame!”
Willie told his father in English, “All the Hearst fellow wanted was a picture of me. And a few questions. I didn’t know that much.”
All too familiar with Hitler’s rages, Geli sighed and got up from the sofa. “Shall we help Maimee with the coffee, Mother?”
Angela got up, too. “I was just going there,” she said.
Maimee was standing behind the kitchen door with a frightened face and folded arms, stunned by the tantrum she’d heard. “We thought he’d be grateful,” she told Angela. “And the money was so good.”
“Which newspaper?” Angela asked.
“The New York American.”
They heard Alois telling Adolf, “But I say how good and generous you were as a boy!”
“And what about my childhood ‘fantasy life’? Am I in fact ‘far removed from reality’? Even your lies are idiotic! Sweeping streets for food in Wien? Working in München as a house painter? A wallpaper hanger?”
“They put words in my mouth,” Alois said.
Geli found dinner napkins and rolled them inside porcelain rings. She said, “Who’d have guessed a family outing could be so much fun?”
“He’s under a lot of strain,” Angela said.
“Why do you always apologize for him?” her daughter asked.
“Well, he’s a genius,” Angela said. “They’re all high-strung.”
“Hah,” Geli said. She held open the kitchen door and peered out.
Wallowing in self-pity, Hitler clamped his forehead with his left hand as he whined, “Oh, how carefully I have always kept my personal affairs out of the press! And now people are trying to find out who I am! In my book I did not say a word about my ancestry or my family or my childhood friends, not a word, and now investigations are being made and spies are sent out to dig up our past! Even a breath of scandal will destroy all I have worked so hard for!”
Maimee got out coffee cups and saucers and Geli carried them to the dining room in a “Don’t mind me” way as her uncle, who seemed precariously near tears, shouted that he was henceforth disclaiming Alois and Willie as his relations. If his sister could assume the name Paula Wolf and hide from the press in Wien, then Alois could say he was adopted by his father, that he and Adolf were unrelated. And Willie could go back to England and tell the Hearst people that he’d found out he’d made a horrible mistake, his uncle was another Hitler, and the famous Adolf Hitler was not family at all.
Angela walked out. “Hot coffee!”
Seemingly forgetting his anger, Hitler grinned. “And cake, I hope?”
“She made one fresh this morning, just for you.”
With childish pleasure, Hitler hopped up from the sofa and flattered Maimee as Alois and Willie shared a look of surprise. Geli whispered to Willie in English, “Hot and cold. Off and on. Black and white.”
Adolf ate three pieces of cake in silence as Alois and Angela talked about old times, and then as Alois played with their nine-year-old, Adolf felt restless and proposed that the family all take a stroll through the Tiergarten.
Geli said her throat still hurt
and Willie opted to stay with her in the flat, listening to the BBC on Alois’s radio: “Am I Blue,” “You Do Something to Me,” “Can’t We Be Friends?” Willie finally took off his jacket and shoes around five and fell heavily onto the sofa next to Geli. She sucked on a lozenge. She could feel him hunting for words, and then in English he said, “I hope you won’t think me too forward, but you’re really smashing, you know. You’re really the nicest of all the family.”
“Thank you.”
“I have a girlfriend of my own, in case you were wondering.”
She said in English, “That is good for you, yes?”
“Oh indeed. Quite satisfying.” With shock at himself, he added, “Not physically. We’re not—”
She smiled. “I understand.”
“Embraceable You” was playing, and they listened to it for a while before Willie said, “Uncle Adolf can be rather unpredictable, can’t he? Emotionally, I mean.”
“You get used to,” she said.
“What’s he like?”
She laughed when she thought about it. “A crocodile. Waiting and waiting. And then, in a blitz, the scurry forward. Und die Zähne.”
Willie translated, “And the teeth.”
She shifted to German to say that for hours at a time their uncle would do nothing but chew on his fingernails and stare out a window and whistle. And then there’d be shocking activity until he took his rest again. She said he was stunningly consistent. Others stewed and worried and hemmed and hawed, but their uncle had decided things once and for all, and he would think on Thursday of next week just what he’d thought four years before, and he’d die without changing his mind. She allowed that Hitler was quite winning at a first encounter, but that was because he found all people fascinating the first time he met them. Joining his company, they’d be offered courtesies and pleasantness while being questioned about their fields of expertise, and she’d see his internal machinery collecting what he needed from them while figuring out their affections and secret longings and ways of thinking and feeling. And then he would talk to them, a flood of words, using all he’d learned, dominating their minds, and they’d be amazed by his force of will and intellect, his well of sympathy. If he wanted to charm you, you were charmed. If he wanted to persuade you, you were persuaded.