by Ron Hansen
She was in the flat at Prinzregentenplatz in September when she finally saw her uncle again. Three weeks had passed. She was just leaving the breakfast room as he came down the hallway in his jackboots and Brownshirt uniform, and he bowed forward from the waist as he asked, “And how was your summer?”
“Quite calm,” she said.
“Fully rested?”
“I slept well. And you?”
“Anni!” he called, and walked by her.
Anni Winter brought out his tea and biscuit tray from the kitchen.
There was a formality to their chance meetings in the flat, as if they were acquaintances who found they shared a floor in a grand luxe hotel. She still overheard him interrogating the Winters about what she’d done that day, and she noticed men she took to be SS who’d loiter for hours outside the Drogerie on Grillparzerstrasse, or walk a hundred meters behind her as she strolled along the River Isar to Müller’s Public Baths.
A friend from the university named Elfi Samthaber telephoned her one noontime and Geli told Frau Reichert she’d take the call in Hitler’s office. She sat in his chair as she chatted, and then she found in his wastebasket a handwritten note on orchid-scented Wedgwood blue paper that was just like the stationery she’d been given for her birthday. She read:
Dear Herr Hitler,
Thank you again for the wonderful invitation to the theater. It was a memorable evening. I am most grateful to you for your kindness. I am counting the hours until I may have the joy of another meeting.
Yours,
Eva
She tore the note into four pieces and in spite left it on the ink blotter. She continued her conversation.
She felt a flow of cold air river over her as she fitfully slept that night, and she reached for a fallen blanket until frustration woke her. And she saw that her uncle was kneeling on the floor beside her, fully dressed, and that it was he who’d folded the covers back, who’d softly worked the nightgown up to her waist. His hand found her mouth and held it shut as he bristled the skin of her buttock with smacking kisses.
“She means nothing to me,” he whispered. “You do.” His free hand forced itself between her clenched thighs and she felt chilled as he fluttered her sex. Worming his face into her flesh, he asked in the hushed voice of a lover, “Tell me what you want, Geli.” And he lifted the hand that was quieting her.
She felt the hot slide of tears on her cheeks. She told him, “To get away from you.”
Hitler halted for a second, and she was afraid he’d hit her, but then he continued as if she’d encouraged him. “Would you like to go to Wien?”
She felt like a child given a choice of presents. She said yes.
“Will you let me do what I want?”
She had no choice. She nodded.
On September 11th she went to the Brown House with Hitler for a short visit before the afternoon showing of a mountaineering film, The White Hell of Mount Palü, costarring Luis Trenker and Leni Riefenstahl. But the führer was in his office so infrequently that Rudolf Hess and Franz Xaver Schwarz hurried to take advantage of his being there to finally get his signature and have him review a calendar of forthcoming events.
Waiting in the hallway, she looked at an unskilled watercolor of Feldherrnhalle on November 9, 1923, featuring a fearless and far taller Hitler, his fist raised defiantly as he faced a fusillade from green-uniformed police and as his fellow putschists fell at his feet. Other faces were hard to make out, though the furtive, smallish man behind him seemed to be Erich Ludendorff. The quartermaster general and her uncle were not now on speaking terms, she knew, and she supposed the picture had been hung in the hallway to alter the memory of the putsch, when Ludendorff was the heroic one and some foreign correspondents had dismissed her uncle as “Ludendorff’s noisy lieutenant.” The facts, for her uncle, were instruments that merely needed management.
Carrying his leather portfolio, a jovial Heinrich Hoffmann walked down from the upstairs offices with the seemingly giant Putzi Hanfstaengl, whose hand was on the far shorter man’s shoulder, but their faces fell when they saw Geli, they failed to offer greetings, and she thought she heard Putzi whisper, “Empty-headed slut,” as they exited the building.
An officious Rudolf Hess found her in the hallway. “We have many transactions and deliberations that require the indispensable wisdom of the leader. With profound regrets he suggests you go on to the cinema without him.”
Hiding her pleasure, she said, “Certainly.”
The film had been his idea. She instead strolled south in fine weather to the fruit vendors’ stands of the Viktualien Markt and to the hundreds of shops surrounding the gray bricks of city hall and Marienplatz. She was audience to fire-eaters, jugglers, accordion players, an old man who grinned as he chewed bottle glass, and a blond, burly woman who called herself “Madame Nobody” and would bend iron bars in her hands for ten pfennigs. At a bookstall she bought Erich Maria Remarque’s best-selling antiwar novel All Quiet on the Western Front, and she was reading it with a tankard of Franziskaner at an outside table on Neuhauserstrasse, just across from St. Michael’s Church, when she heard a man say, “We meet again!”
She shaded her eyes but at first couldn’t find the man’s face because of the fierce sun behind him. And then he limped to the shade and she saw that it was a tall, soldierly priest in his fifties wearing a black wool coat and fedora, the Jesuit she’d seen years before in the Hofbräuhaus, the one who’d regretted to say that her uncle was a dangerous man.
“Are you a Nazi now?” he asked.
She told him she wasn’t. She then remembered his name: Rupert Mayer.
“The jewelry gives the wrong impression,” he said.
She fingered the gold swastika at her throat. “A gift. Won’t you sit?”
“I have confessions soon.” With firmness the Jesuit said, “A Catholic cannot be an anti-Semite. Are you aware of that?”
She affirmed him with friendly uncertainty.
“Many aren’t,” Mayer said. He folded his hands. “And so, in spite of the political climate, are you liking Germany?”
“Yes. I find it beautiful.”
“Good. You have been here for how long now?”
“Four years.”
He frowned with further assessment. “Are you happy?”
She felt affronted in some way, and said, “Why do you ask, Pater Mayer?”
“The fräulein is not the woman I first met.”
“I’m older,” she said.
“No. I can tell. The yoke isn’t easy.”
Tears blurred her eyes, and she turned away to stall them. She seemed ready to cry at anything now. She heard the priest ask, “Are you all right, Fräulein Raubal?” and she nodded and fluttered her hand. Waving him off. She finished her Franziskaner and slid the tankard aside as he touched his fedora in good-bye and tilted on his cane in order to cross Neuhauserstrasse to St. Michael’s. She watched him waiting for a fleet of trucks to pass, and she got up and hesitantly walked to him.
He smiled. “Traffic.”
She told him, “It’s true. I’m unhappy.”
With sympathy, he said, “I’m not surprised.”
“Would you please hear my confession?” she asked.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
SEPTEMBER 18, 1931
She’d decided. Although Hitler snidely objected, she was given his grudging permission to go to Mass at St. Michael’s Church on Sunday, and afterward walked the few blocks to Adolf Vogl’s house to cancel her September lessons and to inquire whether he knew of anyone she could study with in Wien. Because he was a party member, she told him she’d be there for just a few months. Vogl thought she should audition for his own former voice teacher, Professor Otto Ro, and he gave her a letter of introduction.
On Monday, September 15th, Willi Schmidt, an important music critic in München, welcomed Geli into his office and leaned to his side in his high-backed writing chair as he listened to her sing “Domine Jesu” from the Requiem of Mo
zart, and “Lacrymosa” from the Requiem of Verdi. And then he penned a three-paragraph recommendation that called the young lady delightful, graciously praised the beauty of her voice and the evenness of her breathing, and offered the opinion that she would be far better suited to lieder.
She agreed. She told Schmidt, who was not a party member, that she would be in Wien permanently.
“What a pity,” he said. “Why are you leaving Germany?”
She frankly told him, “My uncle is molesting me,” but she took no joy in Schmidt’s surprise. She hurried out.
She strolled down Briennerstrasse to the Brown House, waving, as she went inside, to the SS man who’d been shadowing her. She found Hitler in the oak-and-gold elegance of the cellar restaurant just under an oversize portrait of Dietrich Eckart and holding forth to Otto Wagener, the party’s economic adviser, whom he seemed to be striving to impress with his phenomenal memory of agricultural, financial, and industrial statistics. Without looking at his niece, Hitler condescendingly patted a spot beside him on the upholstered horseshoe bench. She seated herself and slid over.
Otto Wagener was a fat, friendly, chain-smoker with a face that would look fairly similar if it were upside down on his head. Changing the subject for fear of boring the fräulein, Wagener asked if she were a university student.
With false excitement, Geli said, “I was. But Uncle Alf always knows the right thing to do, and he decided I should be a singer.”
“A singer!” Wagener said. “Really, Herr Hitler, it isn’t fair. An abundance of talents have been apportioned to your family, leaving little for the rest of us.”
In the famished, never-enough of his vanity, Hitler found a moment in which to smile. “We are good stock,” he said. “It’s true.”
“And he is so generous,” Geli said, “that Uncle Alf is sending me to Wien for lessons.” She saw her uncle try not to look startled.
Wagener said, “There’s no place like Wien for an opera singer. Are you leaving soon, Fräulein Raubal?”
“Wednesday,” she said. She felt the scald of Hitler’s eyes, but then a waiter was there, softly putting a saucer and teacup and spoon in front of her, and she paid attention to that.
Wearing a black SS uniform, a frail Heinrich Himmler hurried in and sidled up behind Hitler to whisper in his ear. His face seemed as wan and featureless as the sand dunes of the Chiemsee, and his pince-nez flashed with chandelier light so that they huddled against his nose like silver coins.
Staring at his niece, Hitler asked Himmler, “Who?”
Himmler said the name again in hushed tones.
And Geli turned to Wagener to say, “I have introductions to the finest teachers there, and the famous music critic Willie Schmidt has flattered me with a letter of recommendation.”
With formality, Himmler offered a secret idea to his leader, and Hitler smiled. “She is going to Wien for a few weeks,” he told Wagener, “for finishing touches only. And then, if she finds the courage, she’ll be performing at the Prinzregenten Theater in December.”
Wagener was not ignorant. Choosing to ignore the intriguing on both sides, he asked, “And what do you foresee in the crude-oil markets, Herr Hitler?”
Hitler expatiated. Calmly, Geli sipped tea.
Wednesday, September 16th, she left München with just one suitcase in order to make it seem she was indeed on a journey of only a few weeks. She had no savings; she’d given no thought to a job. She just wanted out.
She took the railway to Berchtesgaden, where Angela picked her up in the Wanderer automobile she’d gotten from her half-brother in January, and they talked about three women’s boardinghouses where she could stay, if not with Aunt Paula. To hide her intentions from her mother, Geli packed only a few fall and winter clothes from the upstairs closet at Haus Wachenfeld, and she waited until after dinner to nonchalantly telephone the Salzburg railway station to find out about Thursday departure times for Wien. She whistled as she helped with the dishes.
Angela found a place for the leftover oxtail soup in the icebox and said, “I haven’t seen you this happy in months.”
Geli fanned the wetness from the dish towel, and folded and hung it as she fraudulently answered, “I was so homesick for Wien.”
Angela smiled. “I ought to tag along with you and add some old-fashioned gloom just for balance.”
“Oh, you needn’t, really,” Geli said. “I hear they have Nazis there, too.”
Angela shifted a chair under the kitchen table. “We’ll have none of that,” she said. “I’m a Nazi.”
“You’re deluded, Mother.”
“Oh, you. You think you know everything, you.”
She smiled falsely and confessed, “Everything about Uncle Adolf, yes.”
A flint of confusion nettled her mother’s face, and then she got the meaning. She seemed staggered as she turned away from Geli and leaned over the kitchen table, flooding with grief, her red hands so flat on the oak she could have felt the whorls of the grain. “He’s a great man,” Angela said. “A genius.”
“He isn’t. He’s evil. They all are. Don’t you see how Uncle Adolf buys us off? If we like the good things, the money and fame, we have to forgive the bad. We say, ‘Oh, that’s just him,’ as if it doesn’t matter. But it all matters: the hating, the lying, the bullying—”
“Don’t say anything more,” Angela said, and tightly held her hands to her ears.
“The things he makes me do,” she said, but softly, so it wouldn’t be heard.
On Thursday morning they were just about to leave for the train when Angela got a telephone call from a frantic Adolf who said he’d changed his mind, he was too lonely already, Geli was not to go to Austria just yet. Julius Schaub, he said, was on his way to collect her.
Angela hung up the receiver and felt a pang when she saw Geli’s face. In a weak effort to console her, she offered, “If he changed his mind once, he can change it again.”
Crying with frustration, Geli tried, “We could go to Salzburg right now. Schaub won’t be here for an hour, and by then I’d be on my way to Wien.”
Angela hugged her and said, “I hear they have Nazis there, too.”
She fumed in the front seat of the Mercedes as Schaub took his truant back to München. With fiercely crossed arms, she frowned out the side window at skies as gray as prison blankets and at fields of hay swaying beneath the Föhn, the hot, humid wind from the south. A farmer was waiting on a haymower and a hired man was holding the harnesses of the horse team as an old woman in a shroud of a dress hastily shuffled toward them carrying handled grocery bags that were so heavy with food her fingers seemed to drain from her hands. Geli told Schaub, “She looks just like me.”
With his customary seriousness, Schaub considered the woman and decided Geli was joking. “Other women are begging to change places with you,” Schaub said.
“Let them,” she said. “I have had my turn.”
“It isn’t all bad,” Schaub said.
“I am in chains.”
With disdain, he said, “A Communist slogan.” Intently watching the highway, he added, “The fact is, the folk don’t know what to do with freedom. Choices confuse them. They wander aimlessly. They gain nothing but headaches and debts. They need a Hitler to think for them and tell them what to do. To force them to do it, if they object.”
“And was it he who told you that?”
“Well, he’s right,” Schaub said. “The leader is always right.”
She sighed. “You’re hopeless. All of you.”
Schaub seemed genuinely baffled. “We are full of hope!”
With effort, she fell asleep. She awoke in front of the flat at Prinzregentenplatz and found her uncle in his Brownshirt uniform, just outside her car window, worriedly staring in. Ever alert to her, her uncle seemed to notice she’d gotten rid of his gift of the gold swastika and was now wearing a crucifix at her neck. “Are you well?” he asked.
She didn’t say. She opened the door and got out. She fe
lt the sting of his mustache as he formally kissed her cheek and in a hushed voice asked, “Can I be the leader of a great nation if even my niece will not obey me?”
“All I do is obey you!”
“Oh, but using your feminine wiles is the disobedience of women.” Avoiding touching her, Hitler sat where she’d been. “I have to prepare a speech,” he told her. “We’re going up to Hamburg tomorrow to launch my presidential campaign.”
“We?”
“Well, not you.”
Geli was outraged. “You brought me back so you could leave?”
Hitler failed to see the difficulty. “This way I’ll know where you are.”
“Alone, in the flat.”
Schaub was finishing setting Geli’s suitcase down on the sidewalk. Without turning to him, Hitler shouted, “Schaub! Are you available tonight?”
“If you wish.”
“Take your wife and my niece to a movie palace.” And then he grinned as if, in a flash, he’d solved everything; he’d even amazed himself.
She’d heard that Hitler objected to it, so she insisted the Schaubs take her to see M, a Fritz Lang film starring Peter Lorre as a child murderer. Schaub later claimed his wife had noticed Geli was “inattentive, sad, indeed almost tearful.” She’d gotten chocolate with Geli at the refreshment stall and had asked what the problem was, but Geli failed to confide in her, merely replying, “I’m upset.” Schaub himself was forced to return to the Brown House for Hitler, so when the film ended his wife and Geli shared a taxi to the flat at Prinzregentenplatz 16 where Geli seemed not to want to go inside. She took a long time saying good-bye to Frau Schaub and asked “what she was going to do in the next few days because she was alone, too.” Schaub’s wife told her to telephone their flat and, after a handshake, Geli headed into the building, whistling just as Peter Lorre did. She never called.