The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down

by Jesse Browner

  The first object of any host must be to put his guests at their ease. From the moment they step through the door, they should want to be precisely where they are and nowhere else. If they are not relaxed, comfortable, and suggestible, all a host's other hard work cooking, making seating assignments, or rearranging the guest room will have been futile. This may seem like a perfectly obvious point, but it is one that is neither automatic nor easy.

  There's always an edge of trepidation and discomfort in standing on a threshold, no matter how intimate the host and the guest may believe themselves to be. The guest is entrusting herself to the host's benevolence, but we all understand instinctively that few of us even know what is in our own best interests, let alone those of a disparate group of others. In The Rituals of Dinner, Margaret Visser goes so far as to suggest that, ultimately, table manners evolved as a way of reassuring the guest that he would not be eaten, or at least murdered, by the host. I'm not sure that she intends for us to take this literally, but there is no doubt that, as she says, "hosts are, at least ritually and temporally, more powerful than guests." This is true for guests at a meal where the host dispenses the food, and even more so for overnight guests, who are at their most vulnerable asleep in a strange bed. We know this to be so but dismiss our ancient instincts. We are animals, but we hardly ever listen to, or even hear, what our animal natures are telling us about our immediate environment. Eating and crossing territorial boundaries are fraught with dangers and anxieties that even we civilized beasts continue to sense and respond to, although we may be only dimly conscious of them.

  Unable to grasp what these instinctive feelings are saying, we translate our heightened awareness of danger into an emotional idiom that we are more familiar with. What kind of mood is the host in? Has he had another fight with his wife? Does their apartment still stink of wet dog? What will they be serving? Who else is coming? Who will I be asked to sit next to? How is my breath? Am I going to make a fool of myself? Even if the host is our oldest friend in the world, at least one of these questions or something similar will be in the back of our minds as we ring the doorbell. We may not even be aware of it, but we are edgy and waiting to be relieved of our natural anxieties.

  The host must have a firm grasp of this issue and address it robustly from the outset. There is scant margin for error - if the guests' anxieties cannot be assuaged in the first three minutes after their arrival, it is unlikely that anything the host may do thereafter will fully succeed in dispelling them. This, too, is perfectly natural. We arrive expecting to be made to feel welcome, safe, and among the like-minded. When this does not happen immediately - and, as it were, organically - we cannot help but sense that something is subtly amiss. For the rest of our stay, no matter what happens, we will be on our guard, perhaps only subliminally, anticipating trouble. It's the difference between the emotional status of a predator who has killed his prey and owns it, and that of a scavenger who finds his meal laid out for him by an unknown benefactor who may return at any moment to claim it. In other words, the host's first task is to make the guest forget that she is a guest, a scavenger. Forget about fancy cooking and radish-carving; forget about rare burgundies and the perfectly caramelized tarte Tatin; forget about Frette sheets and Ralph Lauren hand towels. These assets collectively may make for a decent meal or country weekend, but it is the ability to put guests at their ease that distinguishes a good host from a great one.

  Every host has his or her own way of making this happen. There is no right way, and I would never presume to offer advice. In any case, there is a multibillion-dollar industry of magazines, television channels, and pundits ever willing to take your money for their so-called expertise if you insist on believing that such knowledge can be bought. It is, of course, an alchemical equation, dependent as much on instinct as on skill and experience. I am not even sure that it is something that can be taught. Any idiot can master the rules of poker in five minutes; consistent success requires a keen eye for weakness, an exquisite grasp of human nature, and the ruthless will to exploit them to your own advantage. The same is true of hospitality. Your guests must be made to bend to your will or else you are lost.

  The psychologists, chefs, and generals of the German Ober­kommando had a fine understanding of the guest mentality. How pleased they must have been, in that fall of 1938, to stand in the mess hall doorway and watch their strapping lads tuck into their Konigsberg meatballs in caper sauce, as lusty and boisterous as if they were back home at mother's kitchen table. What a grand party the next few years were going to be! How golden was the autumn sun on the vast fields of ripening soy in East Prussia and the Ukraine! Those Nazi caterers had every reason to be pleased with themselves - they had learned at the feet of the greatest master of them all.

  In 1922, thirty-three year-old Adolf Hitler went hiking with his friend Dietrich Eckart in the Obersalzburg, a region of bucolic pastures and Alpine peaks in southern Bavaria. On a steep slope above the town of Berchtesgaden, he was enchanted by a modest cottage, the Haus Wachenfeld, built in 1916. Hitler never forgot the discovery. Upon his release from Landsberg Prison in 1924, he returned to Berchtesgaden and rented a nearby chalet, a peaceful refuge in which to finish the second volume of Mein Kampf. In 1928, drawing on financing that remains murky to this day, he purchased Haus Wachenfeld and brought in his stepsister, Angela Raubal, and her daughter Geli to tend to the household. For the next seventeen years, it was to remain his favorite home, a cherished retreat, the place to which he planned to retire after he had completed his monumental mission. It was also his favored venue for personal and official hospitality, invitations to which were coveted and eagerly sought by the Nazi elite, members of the international diplomatic corps, and journalists.

  By 1933, the chalet had been extensively rebuilt and renamed Berghof - "mountain court." Surrounding farms were annexed, either by purchase or coercion, to ensure Hitler's privacy. Eventually, Rudolf Hess fenced the compound to keep the growing hordes of Hitler's idolizers at arm's length. It ultimately incorporated some ten square kilometers, including homes for the Gdrings and the Goebbelses, SS barracks, the luxurious Platter-hof hotel, civil service offices, and a vast underground network of bunkers outfitted with inlaid floors, wainscoting, bathrooms, kitchens, and kennels. The Eagle's Nest, a teahouse built for the fiihrer by Martin Bormann on the fifty-five-hundred-foot Kehlstein, was accessible only by a tortuous five-mile road lined with machine-gun nests, leading through a 170-yard tunnel to a two-hundred-foot elevator shaft blasted into the stone and fitted with hidden poison-gas nozzles. The entire compound was protected against air raids by giant smoke machines that could shroud it in dense fog at a moment's notice. It was to this place, his country home, that Hitler yearned to flee whenever the pressures of Berlin grew too burdensome.

  The Berghof itself was designed as an official residence. Its most famous feature was the imposing conference hall, with its hardwood coffering and an enormous picture window that could be lowered into the floor at the flick of a switch to turn the great room into a covered veranda. The hall was provided with Biedermeier and baroque furnishings, Persian carpets, and an ornate Bechstein piano and decorated with paintings and tapestries, one of which concealed a large movie screen. There was a well-appointed dining room, paneled in cembra pine, with a table that sat twenty-four and a more intimate breakfast nook. There was Hitler's personal library, from which guests were free to borrow. There was a lovely winter garden enclosed in glass and terraces with sweeping views. The basement held a bowling alley. Upstairs was Hitler's private study, equipped with electric alarms on every door and canisters of tear gas that the fuhrer could release at the press of a button. Sleeping quarters were available for members of the household and guests. Hitler's modest bedroom connected to Eva Braun's via a bathroom that was hidden from view to maintain decorum. Every guest room had a copy of Mein Kampf and French pornographic books at the bedside.

  Very few aspirants ever made it through the gates of the Berghof complex.
Wealthy industrialists and well-connected party officials might be lucky enough to rank a stay at the pricey Platterhof - originally conceived as a low-cost "people's hotel" for ordinaiy Germans seeking the thrill of proximity with their führer - but only the most exalted elite ever enjoyed access to the Berghof proper, let alone a room for the night. Still, there was no mistaking the fact that, once in, you were a private guest in Hitler's home, and Hitler prided himself on his hospitality. An invitation to the Berghof was the ultimate billet-doux in the Third Reich.

  Many readers may find it distasteful that a writer should undertake an assessment of Hitler based solely on his abilities as a private host. And yet, because we all have a tendency to give what we most want to receive, a person is likely to be at his most self-revealing when he is acting as a host. Our gifts are models of our own desires. It is not that, in slaving away all day on an immaculate chicken potpie or authentic cassoulet, I am telling my guests that I expect them to work just as hard when I come to their house. It is not that, in bringing strangers together who will go on to form lasting friendships, I am expressing unspoken disappointment in the friends I already have. Nor, in opening my doors to foreign travelers, am I signaling my intention of descending upon them one day in an unbridled orgy of reciprocation. What I am offering is a privileged peek into my psyche. I am saying: "This is my vision of a perfect world. This magnificent chicken potpie, this charming Ivy League professor, these fragrant sheets of Egyptian cotton - all produced for your pleasure without any apparent effort on my part - are the shibboleths of my desire. I have worked so hard for so long; the things I want, the respect that is my due, the love I crave should fall to me now without toil. I deserve to be a guest in my own life." An observant guest can learn an awful lot about her host from what he offers.

  This is especially true of Hitler because, although consumed at all times with affairs of state, even while at the Berghof, he prided himself on being a gracious and attentive host, offering his guests what he believed they wanted while controlling every aspect of their stay under his roof. The extension of hospitality was for Hitler, as it is for us all, an unparalleled opportunity to model Utopia, the world as it would be if we were in full control of our environment and company. What you can never learn about Hitler the politician, Hitler the military strategist, Hitler the genocidal monster, you can be sure to learn about Hitler the affable host.

  Guests at the Berghof lived according to the host's schedule. They tiptoed around the house while the fuhrer slept in, often until noon. They bided their time until lunch while he worked in camera with his military and political advisers. Hitler would then appear, leading his guests in procession to the dining room, where the table had been set with Rosenthal porcelain (or solid silver for important guests) and the place settings meticulously inspected by the host himself. After lunch, Hitler led a walking party to the teahouse - not the Eagle's Nest but one just up the hill through the woods - where tea and cakes were served. If the fuhrer happened to doze off there, the guests would rush outside for a smoke. After his official nap back at the Berghof, Hitler returned to work, leaving the guests to their own devices. Supper was at eight; the ladies wore evening dresses, the men wore uniforms, and the SS waiters wore white jackets. After supper, he worked again, often until midnight, but the guests were now required to wait for him in the conference hall. When their leader finally joined them, they might settle in for a late-night movie, following which they could expect him to indulge in lengthy monologues on a variety of subjects, some extending to several hours. Hitler drank hot chocolate with whipped cream while his guests took coffee or brandy. Those who could slipped away to the terrace for a smoke, but they were called back when their absence was noticed. Some time around four or five in the morning the fuhrer finally wore himself down and went off to bed, leaving the guests free to smoke and drink at their leisure.

  Very few guests, with the possible exception of some official spouses, were compelled against their will to attend upon the fuhrer. Grouse as they might about the restraints and enforced idleness, they were all there because they had actively petitioned to be there, and for every invitee who might be asked up for the last time, there were tens of thousands waiting to take his place. To that extent, Hitler had no need to extend the graces of a traditional host. Simply by allowing them into his presence he was giving them precisely what they sought. If you were stupid enough to offend the host - as Henriette von Schirach learned after she deplored the plight of Jewish refugees she had seen in Holland - you risked being summarily banished by an adjutant ("You have made him very angry. Please leave at once!"), but you really had no one to blame but yourself.

  And yet, by all accounts, Hitler could be the very model of charm and graciousness when he chose to. Many were the guests who, having driven up the steep and often icy road from Berchtesgaden and past the forbidding SS barracks, were amazed to find the fuhrer himself awaiting them at the head of the Berghof stairs. He was always concerned with their health and ready with medical and nutritional advice. And while he neither smoked nor drank, and was never too tired to launch into a numbing diatribe against these vices, he had a ready supply of beer, wine, and liquor for his guests and tolerated their smoking on the terraces. Only Eva Braun felt it strictly necessary to pop a breath mint before slipping back inside. Hitler clearly saw himself as a congenial and tolerant man, his hospitality reflecting his vision of an Aryan society so ethnically pure that it could afford to indulge a few, relatively harmless vices. The Berghof was his prototype for postwar Germany, and his hospitality the model of the tolerant system by which it would be governed.

  This "tolerance" is most tellingly highlighted by his attitude toward meat and meat-eating. If you run the words "Hitler" and "vegetarian" through an Internet search engine, you will find any number of essays by prominent vegetarian intellectuals denying that Hitler was one of theirs. Their principal argument seems to be that, because Hitler may not have been a perfect vegetarian, he was not one at all. In fact, all of the evidence points to his having been a committed vegetarian and a vocal defender of vegetarianism. Joseph Goebbels in his diary records several pro-vegetarian rants, while Doctor Theodor Morell, Hitler's personal physician, who spent an inordinate amount of time recording his patient's eating habits and analyzing his bowel movements, never once indicates the presence of any meat in his diet and explicitly calls him a vegetarian. It is true that Hitler came to vegetarianism gradually, only slowly losing his taste for liver dumplings, but after the 1931 suicide of his beloved niece and paramour Geli Raubal, he seems to have abandoned meat-eating altogether. "It is like eating a corpse!" he said of his breakfast ham the day after her death. The famous 1936 photo of Hitler sharing a meat-laden Eintopf with Goebbels at the Chancellery in Berlin has been identified as having been posed for propaganda purposes.

  In fact, there had been a venerable association in Germany between vegetarianism, anti-Semitism, and virulent nationalism since the mid-nineteenth century. Gustav von Struve and Richard Wagner were both passionate animal-rights activists whose "sympathy with all that lives" did not extend to Jews. Goebbels, Hermann Goring, and Heinrich Himmler were all dedicated to advancing animal rights. As Master of the German Hunt, Goring tightened laws on hunting, restocked forests, prohibited vivisection, and banned cruel hunting practices. "He who tortures animals wounds the feelings of the German people," he insisted with touching empathy. Hitler, of course, was an ardent admirer of Wagner and subscribed to his theory that human migration northward had led to "that thirst [for flesh and blood] which history teaches us can never be slaked, and fills its victims with a raging madness, not with courage." This was the kind of paradox with which Hitler was apparently comfortable; another was his conviction that meat-eating caused chronic constipation and flatulence, from which he nevertheless suffered mightily throughout his vegetarian years. "After eating a vegetable plat­ter," Morell noted of Hitler in his dairy, "constipation and colossal flatulence occurred on a scale I have seldo
m encountered before."

  I also happen to believe - admittedly without direct evidence that Hitler at some point fell under the influence of the renowned Swiss nutritionist Dr. Max Bircher-Benner, the inventor of muesli. Hitler's view that energy came from a vegetarian diet, that "meat-eating is harmful to humanity," and that "much of the decay of our civilization [can be attributed] to meat-eating" largely parallels Bircher-Benner's theory that "All kinds of meat, as well as fish and poultry, bring about a slow decay of the vital tissues of the human organism," and that "MEAT THEREFORE DOES NOT GIVE STRENGTH." The 1934 cookbook of "health-giving dishes" served at Bircher-Benner's sanatorium lists innumerable recipes known to be among Hitler's favorites. Despite almost relentless epigastric pain, Hitler ate a great deal of raw vegetables, a practice highly endorsed by Bircher-Benner. In view of their mutual obsession with "poisoning of the juices," it is easy to see how theories on the purity of body and the purity of blood were conflated. It is no coincidence that, under a vegetarian dictator, the National Health Department adopted as its slogan "The wholesome life is a national duty."

  Like ideologues of every stripe, militant vegetarians can be as judgmentally superior and as absolutist in their rejection of relative values as any ayatollah. One might therefore be forgiven for expecting a brutal Nazi megalomaniacal vegetarian despot to exploit his powers to enforce his views, especially to the benefit of the entire Volk. In fact, Hitler did nothing of the kind. He was remarkably forbearing and accommodating with meat-eaters, who naturally made up the majority of his guests. At the Chancellery and at the Berghof, there were always two menus, one vegetarian, the other not, served with mineral water, beer, and wine.

  In The Vegetable Passion: A History of the Vegetarian State of Mind, Janet Barkas quotes from Berghof menu cards that she obtained from a privileged source. The meals, hardly haute cuisine, seem to have been quite typical of both dining rooms: