by Ron Hansen
“And if he wanted to love you?”
Saying nothing, Geli jerked forward and got out another lozenge.
Willie asked in English, “Are you the only one Uncle Adolf’s affectionate with?”
“So this you notice?”
“Oh my word, yes. Will you marry, do you think?”
She flushed. “We are just uncle and niece! Was this anyone saying?”
“My father.”
To avoid Hitler’s glare in the formidable portrait, she got up from the sofa and sat on the floor underneath the painting, hugging her knees. She shifted again to German to tell her cousin, “I owe Uncle Adolf a lot for acting as my father and for taking care of the family. I can never repay him. We’d have no home or money without him. We’re all grateful. And I’m sure he’s fond of me in his way. But I don’t like it that he’s so jealous and possessive. Often I feel enslaved by him. Are you aware of that feeling?”
Willie said in English, “I can’t say so, no.”
She said in German, “There are times when he can’t bear to have me show interest in anything or anyone other than himself. Any moment I have to be ready to go where he wants, or halt whatever I’m doing to obey his latest whim. Even my weekly singing lessons get cancelled because he so hates to be alone. We sit in the movies all day sometimes, and then he wants to go back again in the evening. I get so bored. Or it’s the opera. Night after night. I’m twenty-two. I want to have fun. With people my age. And all I ever seem to do is have dinner with older men.”
“And they can be so tedious,” her cousin said.
She was surprised to find herself in tears, and to find in Willie’s face a flabbergasted terror that she’d go on gushing. And still she continued, “It’s because wherever he goes he needs company. An adoring audience. Words fly up all around him, like a fortress of sentences. Who can get inside it? And does he listen to others?”
Willie admitted that Uncle Adolf seemed to find listening a distraction.
“Yes! And so I am a mystery to him. We all are. Undiscovered. Uncomplicated. He only wants me to be a good housewife, a pet. Even my singing annoys him. It’s a wonder I give him any pleasure at all.”
Willie said in English, “Well, I’m sure he’d be pleased to see he’s made you so upset.”
She laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m just frustrated. I have a fever, maybe. We have good times, too. And Uncle’s very generous.” She wiped tears from her cheeks with her palms. She breathed in. “Won’t you try to forget the horrible things I said when you go back to England?”
Willie gallantly said, “I shall remember only you.”
“Even when I hate Uncle Adolf, he wins. I fret over him; I’m obsessed by him; I can’t get him out of my mind.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
DAS BRAUNE HAUS, 1931
On January 1, 1931, at Briennerstrasse 45, just east of the white stone prairie of the Königsplatz, Adolf Hitler officially dedicated the Brown House as the headquarters of the National Socialist German Workers Party. When the formalities of the grand opening were finished late that afternoon, Hitler, in jackboots and jodhpurs and Sturmabteilung uniform, took Geli on a private architectural tour, first walking her around the four sides of the four-story building and tilting her head in his soft and feminine hands so she could see how the walls had been sandblasted and painted, the window balconies added, and the huge scarlet-and-black flag of the Nazis hung over its front entrance.
“You did a good job,” she said.
“Would you like to know the technical details? How many hours of labor went into it, for example? How many wooden scaffolds were used, how many tons of cement?”
She smiled wanly. “Not really.”
“I have all the facts memorized.”
“Seeing is enough.”
With a furrowed brow, Hitler viewed the Brown House from afar and said, “In the Weimar Republic, it is a foreign embassy. We’ll soon be changing that.” And he took her hand as he walked her through the giant bronze door past four hard-faced and black-uniformed Schutzstaffeln sentries who offered the Nazi version of the Fascist salute while shouting, “Heil Hitler!”
The floors were highly polished marble, handsome inlaid oak paneled the walls, and swastikas had been imprinted into the stucco ceiling or etched into the fine window glass. The forty regional Gaue were represented in the hall by their blood-red revolutionary standards, all tilted in reverence toward two bronze memorials containing the names of those sixteen Nazis killed in front of the Feldherrnhalle in the 1923 putsch.
She was taken downstairs to the chrome-bright records office where fireproof steel cabinets held the personnel files of five hundred thousand party members. “We’ll stop taking applications when we have one million,” Hitler said. “Either we can do it with a million or we can’t do it at all.”
Then he took her back up to the first-floor “Hall of Senators,” where the highest-ranking dignitaries in the party would be invited for conferences, seating themselves in sixty chairs of red morocco leather arranged in a horseshoe of two rows facing, of course, the führer. Heroic busts of Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of the German Empire, and Dietrich Eckart, who had died soon after the putsch and to whom Hitler had dedicated Mein Kampf, were on pedestals beside four plaques illustrating phases of the party’s ten-year evolution: its formation, the announcement of its program, its vanquishment at the Feldherrnhall, and its renewal after Adolf Hitler’s release from Landsberg am Lech. Even as he showed the hall of senators to Geli, Hitler hinted that he thought it too parliamentary, too much like the Reichstag he hated, and she got the feeling it would never be used.
Wide doors opened into an elegant first-floor restaurant of soft blond light above walls of herringboned oak, gold damask chairs, and dining tables of tan marble. Waiters were still there after the afternoon luncheon, putting out Dresden china and silverware, arranging hothouse flowers in crystal vases, vacuuming the plush red carpet. Each choice of fabric, color, and ornamentation had been personally made by Hitler.
Offices for Hess, Himmler, Goebbels, Göring, Schwarz, and other party officials were on the second and third floors. Each desk was perfectly clean except for a black telephone, a writing pad and a fountain pen, and a framed photograph of Adolf Hitler. Each hallway held a huge oil portrait of the führer, and on one wall was a green map of Germany with its cities and villages pinned with black swastikas.
Hitler’s office was grander and far too large, perhaps fifty strides from door to door, with a suede wall covering of reddish-brown, ceiling-high windows facing the Königsplatz, a sumptuous red carpet that felt as soft as a mattress beneath Geli’s shoes, a great fireplace and a golden sofa and chairs at one end, and at the other two secretary chairs in front of a huge, ornately carved ambassadorial desk that was free of even a pencil. A full-length portrait in oils of auto tycoon Henry Ford, a secret patron, hung on a wall, a fine stone bust of Benito Mussolini was on a pedestal, and not far from it was one of Heinrich Hoffmann’s haunting, ghostly photographs of Hitler, his face artificially handsome and framed in blackness, his hypnotic stare like a fiery assault.
Geli strolled by a fair illustration in oil paints of the Sixteenth Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment on its first attack in Flanders in 1914, and then walked to one of Hitler’s many eighteenth-century paintings of Frederick the Great. She realized for the first time that the king of Prussia’s left hand was effeminately posed on his hip, just as her uncle’s often was.
“Old Fritz,” Hitler said, and she turned. He was sitting in his high-backed chair of pudding-soft leather, his hands folded in front of him as if she were his theater, his entertainment. “Old Fritz kidnapped a pretty Italian ballerina named Barbara Campanini so she could perform nightly for him as his private dancer. But she became more than that. She was his Leyden jar, his source of energy. “La Barbarina,” she was called. Odic force radiated from her and electrified the Prussian king, whose many obligations and long hours may have sapped his poten
cy.”
“Why don’t you have a picture of her here?”
Hitler did not smile. “I have you.”
She looked at him without blinking. “Oh yes. I forgot.”
“Haven’t you found by observation, Geli, that health and vigor and zest for life fairly surge from an older man when he is with an enchanting young girl? You can only agree. Wives are not the same thing at all. Wives ought to be, first of all, mothers. An older man needs a mistress.”
And Eva’s yours, she thought. She spun a world globe on its axis as she felt him frowning.
Abruptly standing up, he knocked the heels of his jackboots together, and raised his right hand high in the Fascist salute. “I can hold my arm up like this for hours! With only my stupendous iron will for support! At the party congress in Nürnberg, Göring tried to keep his own up for as long but failed utterly. He fell limp with exhaustion. Others would not even try.”
She just stared at him.
“I have letters!” he said, and he searched his desk drawers until he found a file swollen fat with cards and envelopes. He put on his spectacles and read one. “This is from a fanatical woman named Hildegard, who also sent me a cake. ‘My dear, sugar-sweet Adolf,’ she begins. ‘I stare at your pictures constantly, spreading them out in front of me and giving them a kiss. Yes, yes, my dear, sweet, good Adolf, love is as true as gold, and I can’t do a thing about it.’ Et cetera.”
“And you have no idea who she is?”
“This is from a Melita. ‘My heart’s own!’ she begins. ‘I’m having a front-door key and a key to my bedroom made for you. In the next letter, you’ll get the first one; and in the letter after that, you’ll get the other. We must be very careful because the scum will try to kill you. But come here as early as you can, whenever you want.’”
“Were the keys sent?”
“Who knows? Hess takes care of my mail. I have another one from a high school girl.” Hitler hunted for it, read a few lines to himself, and smiled. “She calls me ‘Poppet.’ She talks about meeting. ‘If the worse comes to the worst, our parents (because they’re yours now as well) have given me permission for you to come to the house at any time so we can spend the night together.’”
Insolently smiling, she said, “Take her up on it, Uncle Alf. I can feel the Odic force from way over here.”
He took off his spectacles, folded the letter, inserted it in the file, and shoved the file inside his desk. “Hundreds of women find me desirable,” he said.
“I think that’s well-documented now.”
Hitler just stared at her until she glanced away. He said, “Baldur von Schirach is hosting a Carnival party here for the National Socialist German Students’ Alliance. Would you like to go?”
She toned down her excitement before saying, “Could I?”
“I’ll do far better than just give you permission. I’ll be joining you.”
Schirach rejoiced, of course, and extorted party funds for a giant swastika ice sculpture, an effuse Swedish smorgasbord of chilled meats and fish, and a chanteuse and a six-piece band from the Resi nightclub in Berlin. Hearing the führer would be there, hundreds more students came than Schirach had planned for, a few from as far away as Heidelberg and Innsbruck, and a fascinated crowd seethed around Hitler as he shook hands and signed his autograph and Schirach spoke stirringly about him as Germany’s greatest son.
“My church is no longer the altar of Christianity,” Schirach shouted, “but the steps of the field marshal’s hall where the blood of the Old Combatants was poured out for our sake. Their spirit lives on in Adolf Hitler, our leader and hero, in whom rests the roots of our world. Upright, firm, and modest, he remains a man like you and me, and so we love him all the more, for we know he is a genius whose soul touches the stars!”
If Hitler’s niece beside him was looked at, it was with either jealousy or wonder. Who’s the girl? they seemed to be saying. She’d lived in Germany since 1927 and still she was nothing more than an adjunct, a trifle, a plaything, a subject of gossip, an odor of scandal, a niece. She was wearing a Lanvin evening gown in black faille and strass and she felt wealthy, old, and humorless as she sat with Hitler and Schirach in their tuxedos, all three of them glumly watching the many young partygoers fusing and dancing. Then Rudolf Hess was at the entrance, his face as dour as Scotland, and her uncle rose up, saying, “I have a meeting. Ten minutes, no more.”
She asked, “With whom may I talk?”
Quickly glancing at the jarred Schirach, Hitler pretended to be surprised by the question. “Anybody, of course!”
She said nothing. She did not watch him go out. She saw Henny on the dance floor shaking her head to a boy who’d asked her to join him as the band played a nonsense hit from 1928, “My Parrot Won’t Eat No Hard-Boiled Eggs.”
Henny seemed to see Geli with the handsome founder of the alliance and walked over, flushing a little as she tried not to face Schirach, who stood from his chair and gaily said, “Please join us, Fräulein Hoffmann.”
“Will it be all right?” she asked Geli.
“Certainly.”
Schirach shoved in her chair as she sat.
“Are you here alone?” Geli asked.
Wide-eyed at someone behind Geli, she shook her head.
Geli turned. Henny’s hunchbacked father was merrily strolling over in his tuxedo, his arm linked with Eva Braun’s. She was wearing a shirred, ankle-length taffeta gown and a black wool overcoat with a fitch collar and cuffs. She’d hidden her blond hair underneath a fitch turban by Agnès. Weeks ago the full ensemble had been featured in a store window on Maximilianstrasse. Were they gifts from Hitler?
Schirach stood. “I haven’t had the pleasure, Fräulein.”
She forced a smile onto her kittenish face as she shook his hand. “Eva Braun.”
Hoffmann held her waist as he joked, “I have been telling everybody she’s my niece.” And in a silence as loud as a slamming door, he furthered his insult by saying, “What the leader does, I do.”
“She’s his shop girl,” Geli frostily said.
“Clerk,” Eva said. “And model.”
“Oh, I see,” said Schirach.
“Are you drunk, Daddy?”
“Well, others thought it was funny.”
Eva and Geli exchanged glares. Eva said, “I just saw your uncle. I’m so sorry that he seemed so sad.”
“Was it sadness over seeing you?”
Eva wasn’t a wit. She said, “I think not.”
“Was it over all the monkeys they killed for that turban and coat?”
Eva looked at the fitch fur of her cuff.
“Are you drunk?” Henny scolded.
In a fair imitation of Eva, Geli slacked her jaw and said, “I think not.”
“Changing the subject for a moment,” Hoffmann said, straddling a chair, “I was just talking to one of the students here and he told me he was having a hard time cramming for his examinations in law. Well, so I helped him out by going over the various pleas a lawyer could make for acquittal.” Hoffmann found a hammered silver flask inside his tuxedo jacket and held it out. “Schnaaps, anyone?”
There were no other takers. Hoffmann tilted the flask and finished it, then hid it inside his jacket again.
“The fellow was fine for a while,” he continued, “but he was forgetting the insanity defense. I said, ‘Oh, come now. There’s one you hear about every day. Criminals who are acquitted of violent acts not because they are minors or because they acted in self-defense, but because of…what?’ Well, the fellow seemed lost for a while and then his face brightened with insight and he said, ‘Because they are Nazis?’”
Heinrich Hoffmann guffawed at his joke and glanced around to guarantee that his daughter and Geli and Eva joined him in the hilarity. Baldur von Schirach squirmed uneasily in his seat, and Hoffmann squinted at him with annoyance. “We must puncture the swellings, Herr von Schirach.”
“I just didn’t think it was funny, or fair.”
�
��The leader did.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. Hitler has a fantastic sense of humor, doesn’t he, Geli?”
She granted that he did seem to enjoy laughing at others’ misfortunes.
Eva volunteered, “We go to Charlie Chaplin films all the time.”
“And not the zoo?” Geli asked. “To see the primates?”
Eva was going to say something foolish, but Hoffmann saved her by getting up from his chair. “We ought to be going,” he said.
Schirach smiled. “We want to see you Charleston, Heinrich!”
“Oh no, the black bottom’s my dance,” Hoffmann said. “There’s a joke there somewhere. I’ll have to go think of it.” And he took Eva by the hand as he strolled across the floor to the hosted bar.
Geli called, “Good-bye, Monkey Girl!”
Eva glowered over her shoulder.
“Aren’t you gracious,” Henny said.
“She’s my rival.”
“She isn’t.”
She turned to Schirach and intensely asked, “Will you go out with me?”
He blanched. “But I was under the impression that you and Herr Hitler—”
She turned to Henny. “See? And so she goes with him to Charlie Chaplin films while I stay home alone. Who isn’t afraid of offending my uncle? Who can risk his jealousy? Uncle Alf has put me in quarantine.”
Seeing that she was near tears, Schirach gallantly stood. “Won’t you dance with me, Geli?”
She glanced at Henny, who furtively nodded, and she listened to the Resi singer as she began “Falling in Love Again.” She got up. “Yes. I would like that. Thank you.”