by Ron Hansen
Geli sketched a costume she’d sew for herself on her Köhler machine, and she took it to Hitler for his approval as he shared coffee and strudel with Ilse and Rudolf Hess in the parlor. On the wide, round mahogany table was a sheet of red poster board on which Hess had pasted famous faces and the lettering “Wer ist der wichtigste Mann der Welt?”—Who is the most important man in the world?
“We’ll merely ask the question,” Hess told her. “The conclusion will be inevitable. We wonder, though, if the faces aren’t too hard for the man in the street.”
“She’s very smart,” Hitler said. “She’ll get them all.”
She leaned over the poster. “Herr Gerhart Hauptmann, the playwright,” she said. “Uncle Adolf. Leon Trotsky. Albert Einstein. And him I don’t know.”
“Our new friend Hjalmar Schacht,” Hitler said. “The former president of the Reichsbank.”
Geli shrugged a you-could-have-fooled-me. “Herr General Paul von Hindenburg,” she said. “Max Schmeling.”
Hitler asked, “What does he do?”
“Isn’t he the heavyweight boxing champion of the world?”
“No,” Hitler said. “He demonstrates the superiority of the Aryan race.” And he laughed hard at his own joke as Ilse took Geli’s sketch of her costume.
“Oh, I like it,” Ilse said. “Who is it?”
“Diana.”
“Diana who?” Hitler asked.
Ilse handed the sketch to her husband as Geli said, “The Roman goddess of the moon. The protectress of women.”
Ilse asked, “What fabric?”
“A yellow chiffon.”
“Won’t that be lovely.”
Rudolf silently handed the sketch to his führer.
Examining it, Hitler asked, “What’s chiffon?”
“Oh, you see it in lots of dresses,” Ilse said. “A sheer fabric.”
“Meaning see-through,” Hitler said. He tossed the sketch onto the poster and said, “If you want to wear something like that, you might as well go naked.”
Geli stared at him in fury, flushing red. “I forgot,” she hotly said. “We have the highest standards of decency to uphold.” And then she took the sketch and ran to her room, volcanically slamming the door.
In silence Hitler dithered with his strudel, his gaze flying about in distraction until he formally excused himself and carried his whining contrition down the hallway.
She finally settled on a white ciré satin dinner dress by Mainbocher with a silver headband adorned with a white feather, though she thought it all wasted as she sat in a theater box with Hoffmann and Amann in their tuxedos, watching the fun others were having on the floor below them. Max Amann’s hair seemed no more than a fallen leaf on his head, and he’d shaved off his Hitler mustache on Hitler’s orders, so she was suddenly aware that his nude upper lip was as long as his foreshortened nose. She coldly asked, “How old are you, Max?”
“I’ll be forty in November.”
“Are you sure you’re not older?”
“War changes you,” Amann said.
“And you, Heinrich?”
Hoffmann finished popping a magnum of champagne, and reported that he was forty-five. “We’re both short, too,” he said. “We’re both unattractive to you. And we already know we’re spoiling your evening.”
She said, “I’m hard to read, aren’t I? I have subtle ways.”
“I have a daughter,” Hoffmann said.
She saw a pretty woman who was wearing only an eye mask and a man’s striped tie around her waist. She saw a naked man painted in gold. A fan dancer was entertaining fraternity boys in their booth. She heard Hoffmann shout, “Ernst!”
Ambling to their theater box was Captain Ernst Röhm, who’d just returned from Bolivia where he’d been schooling mercenaries in the art of war. Röhm smiled at her like they were old friends, and she presumed he felt that way because he’d been a friend and mentor to Hitler since 1919, one of the few men with whom her uncle ever used the familiar “Du” for “you.” She disliked him at once. Röhm was wearing the SA uniform at a fancy dress ball, for one thing, and he was a squat, fat, fanatical soldier with short brown hair, tiny eyes, and a flushed, round, piggish face made even uglier by the fact that the bridge of his nose had been shot off on the eastern front, and his left cheek had been cruelly torn by a Russian bullet. His shirt collar seemed to be choking him, and his handshake was moist as he told her, “So you are the famous niece. I have wondered if we would ever meet.”
“Well, it’s not like I’ve been hiding.”
“Oh no?”
“Won’t you join us for some champagne?” Amann asked.
Röhm did so, stiffly, as if he still carried a sword, and the former sergeant, Max Amann, who was all accounting and ambition, switched chairs to confer with him.
She couldn’t fathom the men’s fondness for Röhm, for she’d heard from Putzi Hanfstaengl, who hated him, that Röhm was an occultist who flaunted his predatory interest in boys, loved bloodshed and the heat of battle, and had many hatreds: Jews, Communism, Christianity, democracy, anyone in the officer corps above the rank of major, civilians in general, and females of any age. With the financial support of the Reichswehr and rich industrialists, she’d been told that Röhm had formed, just before the putsch, a civilian defense force of one hundred thousand former soldiers to crush any opposition and assassinate politicians, and a few years later he’d fled to Bolivia—she’d heard there was a threat of blackmail—and had only agreed to return to Germany when Hitler offered him the post of chief of staff of the Sturmabteilung.
Röhm finally turned to Geli. “And how is Leo?”
She was perplexed that they’d met, but then recalled her brother’s visit for Reich Party Day in January 1923. She said, “Leo’s fine. He’s a schoolteacher in Linz now.”
Röhm smiled with insinuation. “Of boys? What a pleasurable job that must be.
“Ernst!” Hoffmann said. “Manners.”
“And Emil Maurice?” Röhm asked.
“I haven’t seen him in months.”
Röhm seemed to sink into his flesh with satisfaction. “I have. Driving for the leader.”
“Really?”
“Really. A forgive-and-forget situation.”
With sarcasm she said, “Uncle Adolf is famous for those.”
Amann frowned at her until Röhm offered, “Emil told me you’re a model now.” And then Amann smiled.
Who else had seen her uncle’s sketches? Was she lewdly talked about at his Stammtisch? Her face hot with embarrassment and betrayal, she found that Hoffmann was finishing his flute of champagne, and she fervently asked him, “Shall we dance?”
“Why not?” he said.
Walking her downstairs, his hand held her waist in a fatherly way, and he confided, “I have seen that expression of yours in Adolf. We call it ‘seething rage.’”
With intensity she asked, “Will you please take me away from here?”
They were heading east, from Schwanthalerstrasse toward the flat, when Geli said, “Please, not home yet,” and he obligingly turned north into the Englischer Garten. There they got out of his car and he escorted her to a food stall where he got them Paulaner beers and the food seller flattered Geli for her feathered headband and her fine dress. And then they strolled under the soft loom of night to sit beneath the timbers and yellow lanterns of the five-level Chinese Tower. Hoffmann swallowed half his first beer and pounded on a firm joist with his fist as he peered up inside. “They tell me this is modeled on the Pagoda in London’s Kew Gardens.”
She was quiet. She drank her Paulaner.
Sitting next to her, he said, “We try to get Adolf to England, but he won’t travel outside Germany. Wants the world to visit him.”
She sighed.
“An American laid out these gardens,” Hoffmann said. “Benjamin something. Otherwise known as Count Rumford. My mother used to feed us Rumford soup when we were hard up. Mostly potatoes, just a hint of diced bacon, and barley, water, vinegar,
salt.”
She was silently crying, her tears shining under the lanterns.
“Oh now, what’s this about? Röhm’s just a fat pighound.”
“I’m so confined,” she said. “I have to make so many concessions. And they all hate me anyway.”
“Who?”
“All his cold, pitiless, stupid friends in the Brown House. Am I not hated?”
“Cordially disliked,” he admitted.
“Why?”
“There are those who think you confuse him,” he said. “Who think he’s distracted. Weak. And frankly there are hints of scandal. An uncle and his niece sharing a flat. We could be ruined.”
“Sharing a flat?”
Hoffmann was flummoxed. “Aren’t you?”
“My uncle’s a monster!”
“Well, that’s just the Communists—”
“Oh, you have no idea!”
She felt his discomfort and ambivalence, his wanting to flee with her accusations unheard, but the father in him said, “Tell me.”
She stanched her tears. She jaggedly inhaled. “The things he makes me do are disgusting.”
“Such as?”
“Whipping him and calling him names while he plays with himself. Wanting me to urinate on him. And worse. Unspeakable things.”
“And he forces you?”
She nodded.
“Often this happens?”
“Four times now. Almost monthly.” She saw that he wanted to question her further, but would not. Willfully, he stood and walked a few meters away, sifting what she’d confessed. After a while he seemed as stilled as a motor so long shut off that it would have felt cold to the touch.
Without facing her, Hoffmann said, “We all have secrets, Geli. I, for one, have not heard any of this. I shall never admit I have. And as a father I beg of you to say none of this to Henny.”
She watched him seem to watch the moon, and she realized she was as alone as she’d ever been. She asked, “Are you crossing to the other side, Herr Hoffmann?”
“All my belongings are there,” he said.
All through April and May she and Anni Winter screamed at each other; she scorned Maria Reichert as she cleaned; she claimed she’d seen Frau Dachs sleepwalking in the hallway with an ice pick in her hand; she sang so poorly that Adolf Vogl telephoned Hitler to report that he was wasting his money; she was felled by headaches or menstrual cramps whenever her uncle was free for the night. She was becoming so contrary that he began introducing her to cronies not as meine Nichte (my niece), but mein nicht (my not); she finally got what she wanted when Hitler shouted, “We have no peace in this apartment!” And it was he who suggested they go to Obersalzberg three weeks early.
With Angela, in Obersalzberg, she figured she’d be safe, and she was right. Angela shunted Hitler out of the kitchen, was there in the Winter Garden each night, was even pleased to be invited by her daughter on their picnics and hikes and afternoon outings in the Mercedes. Wholly absorbed in his niece, his hands flying onto her whenever he found an occasion, his hot eyes frequently communicating grievance and forsakenness and a hunger he thought was heartache, Adolf Hitler was nevertheless too pompous and self-conscious to be fully vulnerable to the foolishness of the lovelorn, and by the time Henny joined the family in Haus Wachenfeld for Geli’s twenty-third birthday on June 4th, he’d sublimated his desire and seemed to Henny merely preoccupied, finicky, and avuncular, just a cross politician shouting into the telephone, shaking out a newspaper on the terrace, scouring medical journals to find out the names of his maladies and to discover which new chronic disease would next be poisoning him.
Angela was steeping orange pekoe tea for him when she heard her half-brother shyly hint at his interest in joining Geli and Henny for an afternoon at the movie palace in Berchtesgaden. And Geli oh so sweetly said, “Well, I really doubt you’d like it, Uncle Adolf. Girls in Uniform? An all-female cast? About a tyrannical headmistress in a Prussian boarding school?” And she added in the slang she’d gotten from Willie Hitler, “Not your cup of tea.”
She saw his face reef with the hurts of isolation and dismissal that he must have felt as a child, and then he turned from her as quick as an affront, and loudly trudged up the stairs.
When they returned that night, Angela was standing in the kitchen with folded arms. “Your fiancé is on his way to Berlin,” she said.
“We’re not engaged. We’re just related.”
“Well, he’s in a fury.”
Rolling her eyes, Geli said, “What a rarity.”
“I have no idea what you’re doing, but I don’t like it.”
“We went to see a movie,” Geli said.
Angela bent over and opened the oven where she was heating blinis for them, food as always her comfort and way out of a storm. She said, “The girls in your Gymnasium class are married now. Many already have more than one child. Are you trying to destroy your future?”
“I’m trying to determine it.”
Angela shut the oven door and straightened up. “Don’t toy with him, Geli,” she said. “We’ll find ourselves out on the street.”
“We’re already selling ourselves. Maybe we belong there.”
Angela theatrically lifted a hand as if, were she any other mother, she’d have long since slapped her. And then she ordered, “Up to your room!”
“Oh please,” Geli said, but she did as she was told, hearing her mother shout, as she found the upstairs landing, “He is the patriarch!”
She smirked at Henny. Who was solemn.
“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Henny said.
She still walked the Alsatians to the Hotel zum Türken each morning to buy her uncle’s newspapers, but now she’d linger there long enough to scan the front section of the leftist Münchener Post, or “The Poison Kitchen” as her uncle called it because of its frequent satiric attacks on National Socialism. She found in it weekly reports of cold-blooded political murders by factions within “the Hitler Party,” whose crimes generally went unpunished or received insufficient jail sentences because of a justice system that favored the Nationalist right. She also read in the Münchener Post her uncle’s self-praise that, “Nothing happens in the movement without my knowledge, without my approval. Even more, nothing happens without my wish.”
And she was cleaning his upstairs room in late July when she found hidden under his bed an illustrated book by Dr. Joachim Welzl called Woman as Slave: The Sexual-Psychology of the Masochist.
She couldn’t say precisely what the connection was between the book and the newspaper articles she’d read, but she was confident there was one, and she was sick.
In June the failing economy had forced Chancellor Heinrich Brün-ing to issue an emergency finance decree that further slashed unemployment and welfare payments to millions who were already hard-pressed by the worldwide depression. Workers were soon calling him “Chancellor Hunger” and Hitler was finding many reasons to travel north and stir up further protests.
Probably at Hitler’s behest, Doktor Goebbels mailed a friendly letter to Geli describing their frantic political tour of Germany. “Endless traveling,” he wrote her. “Work is accomplished while standing, driving, and flying. Important conversations are held in doorways or on the way to the railroad station. We turn up in a city a half hour before the speech is scheduled, he climbs to the platform and speaks. By the time he’s done he’s in a state, as if he’d just been pulled out of a hot bath fully dressed. Then we get into the car and drive another two hours. We need rest.”
In August Hitler telephoned Edwin and Helene Bechstein to say he’d holiday at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, and he’d be staying at Wahnfried, the home of his old friend Winifred Wagner. And it was Edwin Bechstein who called Haus Wachenfeld and insisted that Geli join them for the festival, saying, “It really is the place to be seen.” And then he insinuated that it was her uncle who was inviting her; he’d decided on a conciliation and accord.
On the way to Bayreuth, three hours
north of München by car, Direktor Bechstein, as he liked to be called, stiffly sat across from Geli in his limousine, his spectacles on and his attention fixed on a sheaf of accounting papers in his lap. Next to her was Helene Bechstein’s solidifying flesh, trussed in the strong barrel of a corset whose whalebones ribbed her navy blue dress, her softening face the color of lard and her voice just this side of a shriek as she chided Geli for the pain and anguish she’d caused her uncle. “Oh, how your heart would break if you’d heard him wailing as I did! Threatening to shoot himself! The indecency of putting our Wolf through all that! And you! Who are you? A girl who scoffs at her own good fortune, is who. A Slavic girl whose charm wears thin and whose beauty won’t last. Who’ll soon be back in Wien near the west railway station if she doesn’t watch out.”
Sighing, Geli asked, “Are you going to go on berating me like this?”
“We can,” Direktor Bechstein said. “We’re your hosts.”
She laughed at the incongruousness of the statement, but Helene Bechstein forged ahead with, “Who is this Jewish boyfriend?”
“We’ve heard,” her husband added.
Geli was shocked. “There’s no one.”
“Are you pregnant?” Helene Bechstein asked.
“Isn’t it obligatory to have a male contribution?”
The old woman turned away. “Don’t be vulgar.”
“Wasn’t he a pianist?” Direktor Bechstein asked his wife.
With certainty, she said, “An art teacher in Linz.”
“I do hope he was good-looking,” Geli said. “I hate being linked with toads.”
Helene Bechstein stared. “Wolf urged us to bring you. To heal the wounds. Don’t you see that he desperately wants a détente?”
But the Wagner Festival filled Bayreuth with Germany’s rich and famous, and under those circumstances Hitler seemed to have qualms about associating himself with the scandal of his niece. She was avoided that afternoon as he waded through crowds, shaking hands and soliciting contributions. And so she visited Wahnfried just before the opera in a stunning red evening gown and red shoes and was told he was changing into his tails until finally she was told he was leaving. She was forced to share a box with the Bechsteins in the Festspielhaus for a flamboyant version of Die Götterdämmerung while she watched Winifred’s faraway opera box as Hitler swooned with the music and flattered Richard Wagner’s thirty-four-year-old daughter-in-law with affectionate hand pats, juvenile whispering, and the self-congratulatory talk that, for him, was flirtation. And then a message was sent to Geli’s room in the Goldener Anker Hotel that she was to go back to Obersalzberg by railway car in the morning.