by Jane Thynne
‘Am I right in thinking that you are Clara Vine?’
He had an upper-class English accent. How clever of them to choose someone so unthreatening. A genial English gentleman. She squared her shoulders and turned to face him. He wore a tartan scarf round his neck, and a heavy overcoat that looked a little too large for him. He blinked at her through wire-rimmed spectacles.
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so. You know, I was back there in the station looking at your picture in Filmwoche. Upcoming talent, it said. I recognized you at once.’
He held out his hand. He had an extravagant manner and a slight lisp.
‘I’m sorry. I should have introduced myself. My name’s Max Townsend. Friend of Rupert Allingham. I’ve only just arrived, actually. Got rather caught up in London.’
‘You’re Max Townsend?’
‘Weren’t we going to meet up about this film I’m planning? Would you like to come for a drink? I see you’ve got off to an awfully good start.’
Chapter Fifty-seven
Berlin, June 1933
It had rained again that morning. Lightning cracked the charcoal sky and brought rain drumming on the ground, drenching the air and bringing the scent of the Grunewald deep into the city’s heart. It spattered on the statues, ran down the awnings of the shops and soaked the geraniums in the municipal beds. At midday, as sunlight warmed the chalky air, Clara walked slowly along the side of the canal.
The day before, news had come that the bullet-ridden body of Victor Arlosoroff had been found on a beach in Tel Aviv. The death was attributed to a feud between factions of the Zionist movement. At least that was what the Jüdische Rundschau said. She had found the newspaper in her dressing room, tucked into a basket of fruit and inked with a stamp that said “Property of the Office of the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda”. When she read the report the familiar fist of fear balled up in her stomach once again, and the tears welled in her eyes. But by the time she was called on set, her expression was as sunny and carefree as any heroine of a Nazi spy caper should be.
She wondered how the news would affect Magda, but guessed that whatever she privately thought, her demeanour would not betray a dent. The moment Clara told her that Arlosoroff had no reply to her letter, her expression had hardened and she turned away, dismissing Clara from her presence with a terse wave. In the weeks that followed, it was as though Magda had decided she was now inescapably bound to her fate. Life with Joseph and the baby. Perhaps even a little sister for the child, but preferably a brother, as her husband so publicly hoped, because a man always wanted sons. There even began to be a detectable show of affection between the two of them. Joseph was “Engelchen” again. They had just returned from a holiday in Heiligendamn on the Baltic. Very soon they were off to Rome.
Soon after Arlosoroff left a man called Archie Dyson had telephoned Clara, asking to meet up. He had an instant familiarity. He reminded her of Angela’s friends, right down to the tan, which suggested a year-round presence on the tennis court, the smooth Etonian self-assurance and the name-checking of mutual acquaintances. They had met at a bar up west, a place full of hothouse flowers and pale leather furniture, and Dyson ordered her a gin and tonic without asking before outlining his request. He thanked her for everything she had done so far and was interested to know if Clara intended to stay in Berlin? If so, whether she might continue to help them? He avoided specifics but Clara detected the deadly seriousness beneath the veneer of charm. She told Dyson she would think about it.
Leo’s proposition, however, was rather different.
They had spent the previous night at the new apartment, in a yellow-painted nineteenth century block in the east of the city in Friedrichshain, rented indirectly by His Majesty’s Government. It had a hallway of speckled marble, heavy brass lamps and a grandly sweeping staircase. It was bigger than the place in Xantener Strasse, boasting two rooms and a separate kitchen, but the bed was just as narrow.
It was the first night they had spent together for weeks, and it had been a joyful reunion, folded in each other’s arms. Yet in the morning Leo seemed preoccupied, dawdling over his coffee and glancing up at her from time to time with a frown. Eventually he told Clara that he had something to say and she need not answer right away. The apartment was safe, of course, but he still turned on the radio, filling the room with a burst of Viennese dance music, before he spoke. She should have guessed right then, but Leo was always exceptionally hard to read, even when he standing before her in his shirt and braces, regarding her with that unwavering, deep green gaze.
He asked her to marry him. But if she did, they couldn’t live here. She should leave Germany and return to London. In time, when the flood of refugees had abated, he would take another job, and escape the fevered violence that pervaded daily life in Berlin. Meanwhile, he would go over to London and rent a flat for them. She could get in contact with the people at the Gaumont-British, where other German exiles had headed, because with one film already under her belt and Gerhard Lamprecht’s recommendation it wouldn’t be hard to resume her career, and then as soon as he possibly could he would join her.
Marriage. England. Peace. Or Berlin, where Max Townsend had finally announced that work was due to start on Black Roses. Where the studio executives had been admiring of her cameo in Ein gewisser Herr Gran. Fresh scripts had been sent to her and Gerhard Lamprecht was talking seriously about a role he had for her in his next film. And where death was all around.
As she was about to speak Leo placed a finger on her lips.
‘Don’t answer straight away.’
He held her tightly, so she felt his breath on her cheek, and the slow drumbeat of his heart. They stood frozen as the music whirled around them, like dancers moving to their own, silent tune.
She said, ‘I haven’t told you about Erich, have I?’
‘Who’s Erich?’
Clara pulled the postcard from her pocket, the one she had taken from Helga’s room. The face of Marlene Dietrich had acquired an uncharacteristic number of wrinkles from being carried around so long.
‘ “Dear Mutti”,’ she read, ‘ “I have an interview for the Napola school! It will be on Saturday 24 June in Berlin. Can you meet me off the train from Havelberg, 2 p.m.?” Erich is Helga’s son. He’s ten years old. I found this postcard in Helga’s apartment, the day she died. He lives with his grandmother. I want to tell him how much his mother loved him, Leo, and that she wanted him to study hard and do well. That’s where I’m going this morning. To meet Erich from the train and take him to the interview.’
By one o’clock she realized she still had plenty of time before Erich’s train arrived. At Magdeburger Platz there was a small park with scuffed grass and benches set beneath the linden trees so she sat for a moment and shut her eyes. The air was like a soft blue veil, pierced by the sharp cries of thrushes in the branches around. Sitting there, with the sun’s warmth on her face and its tangled scarlet on her eyelids, the breeze saturated with the scent of grass, the clip-clip sound of a gardener’s shears and a child’s laugh against the city’s rumble, it was possible to remember the peace that came before this tumult, and would come after it.
A gentle brush against her arm caused her to open her eyes. She hadn’t heard him coming, but she guessed she would never be able to match his soundless tread or invisible approach. Leo must have followed her all the way from Friedrichshain without her noticing. He sat beside her and his hand closed briefly over hers.
‘One day you must teach me how you do that,’ she said.
‘I’m beginning to doubt I could teach you anything.’
‘You’ll have to promise you won’t make a habit of this.’
‘I won’t. Just this once. I’d like to see Erich, that’s all.’
He squeezed her hand, crossed the park, slipped behind the railings and was gone.
As she got nearer the station Clara passed more building work and was obliged to skirt round the edge of the scaffolding.
There was so much construction going on now. Another huge block was being erected in the Government quarter, alongside Goebbels’ planned new ministry and the proposed new Reich Chancellery in Voss Strasse. There probably hadn’t been this much scaffolding here since Gothic times. It was said that Hitler was planning to turn Berlin into the Welthauptstadt, the capital of the world, and that his new young architect Speer was planning enormous arches that would make the Brandeburg Tor look like a children’s plaything. Monstrous edifices that would rise above the baroque skyline with its delicate verdigris, dwarfing the human scale and making the inhabitants feel even more insignificant than they already did. Already these blank-faced towers were carving a deep, indelible groove in the surface of the earth. Something about their solidity, their dense metal and steel, made human flesh more fragile, and the crowds that surrounded them more transitory, like passing clouds reflected in a flat bronze facade. Clara wondered how long Hitler’s monuments would be erected in this city. Would it be decades? Or even centuries? Would Hitler be like Ozymandias? ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ She wondered what would have to happen to cause these monuments to fall.
Author’s Note
Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, is most notorious for killing her six children in Hitler’s bunker at the end of the war. But her life was a dramatic one before then and much of this novel is based on genuine events. In 1933, shortly after coming to power, Hitler decreed the establishment of a Deutsches Modeamt, a Reich Fashion Bureau, with the aim of creating “independent and tasteful German fashion products”. He appointed Magda Goebbels as honorary president, and although her association with it was ended some months later by her husband, the Bureau continued.
Magda Goebbels did have a youthful liaison with Victor Chaim Arlosoroff. Arlosoroff, a prominent Zionist, who was involved in the establishment of the State of Israel, returned to Berlin in April 1933 with the aim of encouraging the regime to contribute to Jewish emigration to Palestine, to no avail. He got in touch with Magda again, and though the substance of their conversation is unknown and I have fictionalized their subsequent exchanges, she did tell him she feared for her own life. Historical sources suggest that British Intelligence was alerted to his plan for an armed uprising in Palestine, although nothing came of it. He was gunned down on a beach in Tel Aviv in June of 1933. Joseph Goebbels was suspected of involvement in his murder, although that remains unproven.
Magda Goebbels, Joseph Goebbels and their six children died on 1 May 1945 as Berlin was overrun by the Red Army. The day after Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves, Magda drugged the children and broke cyanide capsules into their mouths. She wrote to her older son, Harald Quant, who was in a prisoner of war camp in north Africa, that the children were “too good for the life that would follow.” She and Joseph then committed suicide.
Magda’s stepfather, Richard Friedlander, died in Buchenwald concentration camp. There is no record of her intervening to save him.
Emmy Sonneman married Hermann Goering in 1935. She survived the war and wrote a biography, My Life With Goering, which provided this author with much incidental detail.
The heroic achievement of Frank Foley in rescuing thousands of Jews from Berlin under the auspices of British Passport Control won him the accolade of Righteous Among the Nations from Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Centre. His story is superbly told by Michael Smith in Foley, the Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews.
Ein gewisser Herr Gran was produced by Ufa in 1933, directed by Gerhard Lamprecht. Schwarze Rosen starring Lilian Harvey, came out in 1935.
This era of German history is richly documented. Amongst books which I have used for research, Nazi Chic?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Dress, Body, Culture) by Irene Guenther, was invaluable, exploring how the Third Reich attempted to construct German women’s identity through fashion. Anja Klabunde’s comprehensive biography of Magda Goebbels was also excellent, as were Anna Maria Sigmund’s Women of the Third Reich and Guido Kopp’s Hitler’s Women. Hans Otto Meissner’s Magda Goebbels, First Lady of the Third Reich contains an interesting first-hand account from a man who knew his subject for many years and Bella Fromm’s Blood and Banquets, A Berlin Social Diary, 1930-1938 is an astonishing eyewitness testimony of the doings of the Nazi élite in the increasingly brutal lead-up to war.
Thank you so much to Caradoc King for his unstinting encouragement and to his colleagues at A.P. Watt. I am in awe of Suzanne Baboneau for her inspiring editing and wonderful enthusiasm, and grateful to all at Simon & Schuster. And, as ever, thanks and love to Philip.
Table of Contents
Half-title page
By the same author
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication page
Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-one
Chapter Fifty-two
Chapter Fifty-three
Chapter Fifty-four
Chapter Fifty-five
Chapter Fifty-six
Chapter Fifty-seven
Author’s Note