Late that night Frieda grew suddenly, horribly worse and they wrapped the almost inanimate little body in a blanket and rushed in a taxi to the nearest hospital, a Catholic one. Pneumonia was diagnosed. ‘She’s a very sick little girl,’ the doctor said, as if somehow they were to blame.
Ursula didn’t leave Frieda’s bedside for two days and nights, holding on to the little hand to keep her in this world. ‘If only I could have it for her,’ Jürgen whispered across the starchy white sheets that were also helping to pin Frieda to this world. Nuns floated around the ward like galleons in their enormous, complicated wimples. How long, Ursula wondered in an absent moment when all her attention wasn’t focused on Frieda, did it take them to put these contraptions on in the morning? Ursula was sure she would never have managed without making a mess of it. The headdress alone seemed a good enough reason not to be a nun.
They willed Frieda to live and she did. Triumph des Willens. The crisis passed and she started the long road to recovery. Pale and weak, she was going to need to convalesce and one evening when Ursula returned home from the hospital she found an envelope, hand-delivered to their door.
‘From Eva,’ she said to Jürgen, showing him the letter when he returned from work.
‘Who’s Eva?’ he asked.
‘Smile!’ Click, click, click. Anything to help keep Eva amused, she supposed. She didn’t mind. Eva had been very kind to invite them so that Frieda could breathe good mountain air and eat the fresh vegetables and eggs and milk from the Gutshof, the model farm on the slopes beneath the Berghof.
‘Is it a royal command?’ Jürgen asked. ‘Can you say no? Do you want to say no? I hope not. And it will do your headaches good too.’ She’d noticed recently that the more he rose through the echelons in the ministry, the more one-sided their conversations had become. He made statements, raised questions, answered the questions and drew conclusions without ever needing to involve her in the exchange. (A lawyer’s way perhaps.) He didn’t even seem to be aware that he was doing it.
‘The old goat has a woman after all then, does he? Who would have guessed? Did you know? No, you would have said. And to think you know her. It can only be good for us, can’t it? To be so close to the throne. For my career, which is the same thing as us. Liebling,’ he added, rather perfunctorily.
Ursula thought that being close to a throne was a rather dangerous place to be. ‘I don’t know Eva,’ Ursula said. ‘I’ve never met her. It’s Frau Brenner who knows her, knows her mother, Frau Braun. Klara used to work at Hoffmann’s sometimes, with Eva. They were at kindergarten together.’
‘Impressive,’ Jürgen said, ‘from Kaffeeklatsch to the seat of power in three easy moves. Does Fräulein Eva Braun know her old kindergarten pal, Klara, is married to a Jew?’ It was the way he said the word that surprised her. Jude. She’d never heard him say it that way before – sneering and dismissive. It drove a nail into her heart. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘I am not part of the Kaffeeklatsch, as you call it.’
The Führer took up so much room in Eva’s life that when he wasn’t here she was an empty vessel. Eva kept nightly telephone vigils when her lover was absent and was like a dog, one ear fretfully cocked every evening for the call that brought her master’s voice to her.
And there was so little to do up here. After a while all the tramping along forest paths and swimming in the (freezing cold) Königsee became enervating rather than invigorating. There were only so many wildflowers you could pick, only so much sunbathing on the loungers on the terrace before you went slightly mad. There were battalions of nursemaids and nannies on the Berg, all eager to be with Frieda, and Ursula found herself with much of the same empty time on her hands as Eva. She had, stupidly, packed only one book, at least it was a long one, Mann’s Der Zauberberg. She hadn’t realized it was on the banned list. A Wehrmacht officer saw her reading it and said, ‘You’re very bold, that’s one of their forbidden books, you know.’ She supposed the way he said ‘their’ implied he wasn’t one of ‘them’. What was the worst they could do? Take the book off her and put it in the kitchen stove?
He was nice, the Wehrmacht officer. His grandmother was Scottish, he said, and he had spent many happy holidays in ‘the Highlands’.
Im Grunde hat es eine merkwürdige Bewandtnis mit diesem Sicheinleben an fremdem Orte, dieser – sei es auch – mühseligen Anpassung und Umgewöhnung, she read and translated laboriously and rather badly – ‘There is something strange about getting this settling in to a new place, the laborious adaptation and familiarization …’ How true, she thought. Mann was hard work. She would have preferred a boxload of Bridget’s gothic romances. She was sure they wouldn’t be verboten.
The mountain air had done her headaches no good at all (nor had Thomas Mann). They were, if anything, worse. Kopfschmerzen, the very word made her head sore. ‘I can’t find anything wrong with you,’ the doctor at the hospital told her. ‘It must be your nerves.’ He gave her a prescription for veronal.
Eva herself had no intellect to sustain her but then the Berg wasn’t exactly the court of an intelligentsia. The only person whom you might have called a thinker was Speer. It wasn’t that Eva led an un-examined life, far from it, Ursula suspected. You could sense the depression and neuroses hidden beneath all that Lebenslust, but anxiety wasn’t what a man looked for in a mistress.
Ursula supposed that to be a successful mistress (although she had never been one herself, either successful or unsuccessful) a woman should be a comfort and a relief, a restful pillow for the weary head. Gemütlichkeit. Eva was amiable, she chatted about inconsequential things and made no attempt to be brainy or astute. Powerful men needed their women to be unchallenging, the home should not be an arena for intellectual debate. ‘My own husband told me this so it must be true!’ she wrote to Pamela. He hadn’t meant it in the context of himself – he was not a powerful man. ‘Not yet, anyway,’ he laughed.
The political world was of concern only in that it took the object of Eva’s devotion away from her. She was shunted rudely out of the public eye, allowed no official status, allowed no status at all, as loyal as a dog but with less recognition than a dog. Blondi was higher in the hierarchy than Eva. Her greatest regret, Eva said, was not being allowed to meet the duchess when the Windsors visited the Berghof.
Ursula frowned on hearing this. ‘But she’s a Nazi, you know,’ she said unthinkingly. (‘I suppose I should be more careful in what I say!’ she wrote to Pamela.) Eva had merely replied, ‘Yes, of course, she is,’ as if it were the most natural thing in the world for the consort of the once and never again King of England to be a Hitlerite.
The Führer must be seen to tread a noble, solitary path of chastity, he couldn’t marry because he was wedded to Germany. He had sacrificed himself to his country’s destiny – at least that was the gist of it, Ursula thought she might have discreetly nodded off at this point. (It was one of his endless after-dinner monologues.) Like our own Virgin Queen, she thought, but didn’t say so, as she expected the Führer would not like to be compared to a woman, even an English aristocratic one with the heart and stomach of a king. At school, Ursula had had a history teacher who had been particularly fond of quoting Elizabeth I. Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.
Eva would have been happier back in Munich, in the little bourgeois house that the Führer had bought for her, where she could lead a normal social life. Here, in her gilded cage, she had to amuse herself, flicking through magazines, discussing the latest hairstyles and love lives of film stars (as if Ursula knew anything on the subject), and parading one outfit after another like a quick-change artist. Ursula had been in her bedroom several times, a pretty, feminine boudoir quite different from the heavy-handed décor of the rest of the Berghof, spoilt only by the portrait of the Führer that was given pride of place on the wall. Her hero. The Führer had not hung a reciprocal portrait of his mistress in his rooms. Instead of Eva’s face smiling at him from the wall he w
as challenged by the stern features of his own beloved hero, Frederick the Great. Friedrich der Grosse.
‘I always mishear “grocer” for “great”,’ she wrote to Pamela. Grocers were not, generally speaking, warmongers and conquerors. What had the Führer’s apprenticeship for greatness been? Eva shrugged, she didn’t know. ‘He’s always been a politician. He was born a politician.’ No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.
The Führer’s bedroom, adjoining Eva’s bathroom, was out of bounds. Ursula had seen him sleeping though, not in that sacrosanct bedroom but in the warm post-prandial sunshine on the Berghof’s terrace, the great warrior’s mouth slackly open in lèse-majesté. He looked vulnerable but there were no assassins on the Berg. Plenty of guns, thought Ursula, easy enough to get hold of a Luger and shoot him through the heart or the head. But then what would happen to her? Worse, what would happen to Frieda?
Eva sat next to him, watching fondly as one might a child. In sleep he belonged to no one but her.
She was, fundamentally, nothing more nor less than a nice young woman. You couldn’t necessarily judge a woman by the man she slept with. (Or could you?)
Eva had a wonderful athletic figure, one that Ursula felt quite envious of. She was a healthy, physical girl – a swimmer, a skier, a skater, a dancer, a gymnast – who loved the outdoors, who loved movement. And yet she had attached herself like a limpet to an indolent middle-aged man, a creature of the night, literally, who didn’t rise from his bed before midday (and yet who could still take an afternoon nap), who didn’t smoke or drink or dance or overindulge – spartan in his habits although not his vigour. A man who had never been seen stripped off further than his Lederhosen (comically un-attractive to the non-Bavarian eye), whose halitosis had repelled Ursula on first meeting and who swallowed tablets like sweets for his ‘gas problem’ (‘I hear he farts,’ Jürgen said, ‘be warned. Must be all those vegetables’). He was concerned for his dignity but he wasn’t really vain, as such. ‘Merely a megalomaniac,’ she wrote to Pamela.
A car and a driver had been sent for them and when they arrived at the Berghof the Führer himself had greeted them – on the great steps, where he welcomed dignitaries, where he had welcomed Chamberlain last year. When Chamberlain returned to Britain he said that he ‘now knew what was in Herr Hitler’s mind’. Ursula doubted that anyone knew that, not even Eva. Particularly not Eva.
‘You’re very welcome here, gnädiges Frau,’ he said. ‘You should stay until the liebe Kleine is better.’
‘He likes women, children, dogs, really what can you fault?’ Pamela wrote. ‘It’s just a shame he’s a dictator with no respect for the law or common humanity.’ Pamela had quite a few friends in Germany from her university days, many of them Jewish. She had a full house (well, three of a kind) of boisterous boys (quiet little Frieda would be quite overwhelmed in Finchley) and now wrote that she was pregnant again, ‘fingers crossed for a girl’. Ursula missed Pammy.
Pamela would not fare well under this regime. Her sense of moral outrage would be too great for her to remain silent. She wouldn’t be able to bite her tongue like Ursula did (a scold’s bridle). They also serve who only stand and wait. Did that apply to one’s ethics? Is this my defence, Ursula wondered? It might be better to misquote Edmund Burke rather than Milton. All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good women to do nothing.
The day after they arrived there had been a children’s tea-party for someone’s birthday, a little Goebbels or Bormann, Ursula wasn’t sure – there were so many of them and they were so similar. She was reminded of the ranks of the military at the Führer’s birthday parade. Scrubbed and polished, each one had a special word from Uncle Wolf before they were allowed to indulge in the cake that was set out on a long table. Poor sweet-toothed Frieda (who undoubtedly took after her mother in this respect) was too heavy-lidded with fatigue to eat any. There was always cake on the Berghof, poppyseed Streusel and cinnamon and plum Tortes, puff pastries filled with cream, chocolate cake – great domes of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte – Ursula wondered who ate all this cake. She herself certainly did her best to get through it.
If a day with Eva could be tedious it was as nothing compared to an evening when the Führer was present. Interminable hours after dinner were spent in the Great Hall – a vast, ugly room where they listened to the gramophone or watched films (or, often, both). The Führer naturally dictated the choices. For music, Die Fledermaus and Die lustige Witwe were favourites. On the first evening, Ursula thought it would be hard to forget the sight of Bormann, Himmler, Goebbels (and their savage helpmeets) all wearing their thin-lipped snake smiles (more Lippenbekenntnis, perhaps) while listening to Die lustige Witwe. Ursula had seen a student production of The Merry Widow when she was at university. She had been good friends with the girl who played Hanna, the lead. She could never have guessed then that the next time she would hear ‘Vilja, O Vilja! the witch of the wood’, it would be in German and in this strangest of company. That production had taken place in ’31. She hadn’t seen what her own future held, let alone that of Europe.
Films were shown nearly every evening in the Great Hall. The projectionist would arrive and the great Gobelin tapestry on one wall would be rolled up mechanically, like a blind, to reveal a screen behind it. Then they would have to sit through some awful romantic schmaltz or American adventure, or worse, a mountain film. In this way Ursula had seen King Kong, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Der Berg ruft. On the first evening it had been Der heilige Berg (more mountains, more Leni). The Führer’s favourite film, Eva confided, was Snow White. And which character did he identify with, Ursula wondered – the wicked witch, the dwarves? Not Snow White surely? It must be the Prince, she concluded (did he have a name? Did they ever, was it enough simply to be the role?). The Prince who awoke the sleeping girl, just as the Führer had woken Germany. But not with a kiss.
When Frieda was born, Klara had given her a beautiful edition of Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’, illustrated by Franz Jüttner. Klara’s professor had long since been barred from teaching at the art school. They had planned to leave in ’35 and then again in ’36. After Kristallnacht, Pamela had written to Klara directly, although she had never met her, offering her a home in Finchley. But that inertia, that damned tendency everyone seemed to have to wait … and then her professor had been part of a round-up and had been transported east – to work in a factory, the authorities said. ‘His beautiful sculptor’s hands,’ Klara said sadly.
(‘They’re not really factories, you know,’ Pamela wrote.)
Ursula remembered being an avid reader of fairy tales as a child. She had put great faith not so much in the happy ending as in the restoration of justice to the world. She suspected she had been duped by die Brüder Grimm. Spieglein, Spieglein, an der Wand / Wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land? Not this lot, that was for sure, Ursula thought, looking around the Great Hall during her first wearisome evening on the Berg.
The Führer was a man who preferred operetta to opera, cartoons to highbrow culture. Watching him holding Eva’s hand while humming along to Lehar, Ursula was struck by how ordinary (even silly) he was, more Mickey Mouse than Siegfried. Sylvie would have made short work of him. Izzie would have eaten him up and spat him out. Mrs Glover – what would Mrs Glover have done, Ursula wondered? This was her new favourite game, deciding how the people she knew would have dealt with the Nazi oligarchs. Mrs Glover, she concluded, would probably have beaten them all soundly with her meat hammer. (What would Bridget do? Ignore him completely probably.)
When the film was finished the Führer settled down to expound (for hours) on his pet subjects – German art and architecture (he perceived himself to be an architect-manqué), Blut und Boden (the land, always the land), his solitary, noble path (the wolf again). He was the saviour of Germany, and poor Germany, his Schneewittchen, would be saved by him wheth
er she wanted it or not. He droned on about healthy German art and music, about Wagner, Die Meistersinger, his favourite line from the libretto – Wacht auf, es nahet gen den Tag – ‘Awake, the morning is here’ (it would be if he went on much longer, she thought). Back to destiny – his – how it was intertwined with the destiny of the Volk. Heimat, Boden, victory or downfall (What victory, Ursula wondered? Against whom?). Then something about Frederick the Great that she didn’t catch, something about Roman architecture, then the Fatherland. (For the Russians it was ‘the Motherland’, was there something to be made of that, Ursula wondered? What was it for the English? Just ‘England’, she supposed. Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ at a pinch.)
Then back to destiny and the Tausendjähriges. On and on so that the headache that had begun before dinner as a dull ache was a crown of thorns by now. She imagined Hugh saying, ‘Oh, do shut up, Herr Hitler,’ and suddenly felt so homesick she thought she was going to cry.
She wanted to go home. She wanted to go to Fox Corner.
As with kings and their courtiers, they could not leave until dismissed, until the monarch himself decided to ascend to the bedchamber. At one point Ursula caught Eva yawning theatrically at him as if to say, ‘That’s enough now, Wolfi’ (her imagination was becoming rather lurid, she knew, forgivable given the circumstances). And then at last, finally, thank God, he made a move and the exhausted company rustled to its feet.
Women in particular seemed to love the Führer. They wrote him letters in the thousands, baked him cakes, embroidered swastikas on to cushions and pillows for him, and, like Hilde and Hanne’s BDM troop, lined the steep road up to the Obersalzberg to catch a delirious glimpse of him in the big black Mercedes. Many women shouted to him that they wanted to have his baby. ‘But what do they see in him?’ Sylvie puzzled. Ursula had taken her to a parade, one of the interminable flag-waving, banner-toting ones in Berlin, because she wanted to ‘find out for myself what all the fuss is about’. (How very British of Sylvie to reduce the Third Reich to a ‘fuss’.)
Life After Life Page 29