The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down

by Jesse Browner

  July 13, 1937

  Consomme with marrow dumplings

  Stuffed peppers

  Home-fried potatoes

  Green salad

  Vegetarian:

  Soup

  Noodles with cream of wheat

  Green salad

  Cheese - Fruit

  July 14, 1937 (Lunch)

  Potato soup

  Baked fish

  Stuffed breast of veal

  Potatoes

  Mixed salad

  Vegetarian:

  Consomme with noodles

  Baked squash

  Potato salad

  Filling made of rolls

  Salad

  Fruit tarts

  July 14, 1937 (Dinner)

  Asparagus soup

  Potato puffer

  Cranberries

  Mixed cold cuts

  Cheese - fruit

  Vegetarian:

  Consomme with noodles

  Home-fried dumplings made of rolls

  Green salad or potato puffer

  Applesauce

  Hitler often did lecture his guests on the evils of meat-eating, once turning the stomachs of an entire audience with his description of a slaughterhouse he had visited in the Ukraine. At mealtimes, however, he did not pressure them to follow his example, though many apparently abstained from meat-eating in his presence, only to later retire to another room to gorge on flesh out of his sight. It is not at all clear that such sycophancy was warranted. In her memoirs, Goring's wife Emmy relates a 1933 visit to the Berghof at which she made her distaste for vegetarianism apparent to the fuhrer:

  "It looks to me as though you would prefer a good steak."

  "I certainly would," I said. "I can not understand how you can get enough to eat just from all these vegetables."

  Everyone around the table looked at me reproachfully and shocked. It was as though I had committed a crime of Use majeste, for all the others were silently eating their raw vegetables.

  "Bring Frau Sonnemann a large beefsteak," said Adolf Hitler to the butler.

  "And one for me too," Hermann called out, "and above all a glass of beer."

  Hitler laughed heartily. From then on I was given both at mid-day and in the evenings such an enormous steak that I could hardly manage it.

  At the Berghof, Hitler himself did not partake of these meals. Instead, he ate dishes prepared exclusively from fruits and vegetables grown in Martin Bormann's model garden and greenhouses. His tastes in food hovered somewhere between the mundane and the revolting. All historians seem to agree that he had an inordinate passion for oatmeal gruel and linseed oil, which he doused liberally over his orange juice, baked potatoes, and cottage cheese. He was also fond of pea soup - which, served up as "Hindenburg grenades" during the First World War, must have been his madeleine, recalling his happiest days in the trenches - but dared not eat it because of his flatulence. Dr. Morell recalls Hitler being served "pickles without meat, all mashed up, but he doesn't feel like trying it yet, so it was stuffed empanadillos (Pfannkuchen-Taschen) with pureed carrots and mashed potatoes, rounded off with strawberries." According to Janet Barkas, his favorite dishes included asparagus tips and artichoke hearts in cream sauce. He also liked eggs, fried or boiled with mayonnaise, and rice pudding with herb sauce. Dessert was often an apple, stewed, baked, or in cake, or a slice of gooseberry pie. He never inflicted these preferences on his guests, for which they must have been truly grateful.

  Like any good host, Hitler knew his guests and what they would and would not tolerate, even from him. It was one thing to exhort, cajole, berate, and generally infantilize a nation of faceless worshippers; quite another to try it on his private guests, close personal associates who knew him far too well already. The last thing he wanted was to read their intimate opinion of him - a ruthless dictator who ate baby food; a bloodthirsty vegetarian; a commander of armies who looked at his breakfast and saw his lover's corpse - reflected in their eyes across the dining room table. The fear of being "recognized" may have been another source of his tolerance of meat-eaters in his own home when he was so intolerant of deviance in any other sphere.

  He had a reasonably realistic sense of his own limitations in another way, too. The Berghof was hard to reach, often frozen in, and comparatively modest in its fare and amenities. There is a limit, after all, to how often you can ask visiting statesmen to go bowling. Even had he wanted to offer something more, and saucier, his public image as the chaste, faithful, and eremitic bridegroom of the German people would never have permitted the least suggestion of decadence. When such decadence was called for, when he needed something more to impress and sweet-talk a foreign dignitary, Hitler turned to his Reichsmarschall and designated successor, Hermann Goring. In the game of Nazi hospitality, Goring was Hitler's alter-ego, Mr. Hyde to Hitler's Dr. Jekyll, with license to deploy the kind of opulence and excess that the fuhrer could never be seen to condone. In fact, Hitler not only sanctioned Goring's behavior, but also promoted it as an extension of his own hospitality into forbidden territory.

  Goring's "hunting lodge," Karinhall, stood some eighty-five kilometers northeast of Berlin in Schorfheide. Like the Berghof, Karinhall was a private residence converted at state expense into a semiofficial Nazi entertainment hall. When Hitler needed to soften up staunch adversaries or potential allies, he sent them to Goring, who often received guests in flamboyant silk robes or a full leather suit, his lips apparently painted and cheeks rouged. The front entrance was hung with massive oaken doors, like something out of The Hobbit. The dining hall was finished in white marble and hung with Gobelins tapestries. The house had its own cinema and the best Berlin caterer, Horcher, at its disposal. At least three notables - the Duke of Windsor, Charles Lindbergh, and Japanese foreign minister Yosuke Matsuoka - were treated to a delightful day playing with Goring's spectacular model train set, with salutary results for Nazi foreign policy.

  Unlike Hitler, Goring's tastes in catering ran to the excessive. His marriage to Emmy Sonnemann in 1935 included a seventy-five-plane flyover, a gala performance of Lohengrin, and a wedding breakfast at the Hotel Kaiserhof for 316 at which lobster, turtle soup, turbot, pate de foie gras, roast chicken, ices, and Welsh rarebit were served. For his party to celebrate the 1936 Olympics, Goring transformed the gardens of his palace on the Leipziger Platz into "a sort of Oktoberfest beer garden, with a fairground in the middle, helle and dunkel beer on tap (as well as champagne and liquors), sausages, roast game, corn on the cob, and mounds of potatoes and sauerkraut," according to historian Leonard Mosley. The guests were entertained with performances by the principal dancers and corps de ballet of the Berlin Opera and were later assembled on the lawns to enjoy an aerobatics display by the famed pilot Ernst Udet. The party broke up shortly before dawn.

  On January 12, 1945, Goring threw a lavish, desperate last party at Karinhall. "This is no time to deny ourselves," he said. "We will all be getting a Genickschuss (a shot in the neck) very soon now." While most Germans were scrambling for scraps, Goring's guests were treated to "caviar from Russia, duck and venison from the Schorfheide forests, Danzig salmon and the last of the French pate de foie gras." They also enjoyed "100 bottles of French Champagne, 180 bottles of vintage wines, eighty-five bottles of French Cognac, fifty bottles of imported liqueurs, 500 imported cigars and 4,000 cigarettes." Occupying American troops found twenty-five thousand bottles of champagne in the wine cellar of his home in Berchtesgaden the following May.

  Back at the Berghof, by January 1945 - with certain defeat in sight and Germany's cities already in smoldering ruins - the hospitality situation had deteriorated dramatically. As we have seen, at the height of his powers Hitler had a keen grasp of just how useful the subtle indulgence could be to a host's reputation and his guests' morale. Now, however, with his grip on reality fatally loosened, his hosting instincts were correspondingly dulled. He pared down the menu, serving spaghetti with ketchup, mushrooms, and curds, and decreed the Sunday meal to be Eintopfgeri
cht - leftovers served from a single pot. Eintopf was now represented by the state media as a "national meal of communitarian sacrifice and solidarity." Not surprisingly, guests stopped accepting invitations to the Berghof and he took to eating alone, the last refuge of a desperate man and, as I have indicated elsewhere, a clear indication of criminality.

  There is some anecdotal evidence to support the claim that Hitler had intended to address the problem of German meat-eating after his victory in the war. Goebbels explicitly refers to this plan in his diary entry of April 26, 1942: "Of course he knows that during the war we cannot completely upset our food system. After the war, however, he intends to tackle this problem also." He needn't have worried - by 1942, Germany was well on its way to becoming vegetarian by default. Although a German soldier's meat ration was three times that of a civilian's, it is safe to say that Cassel spareribs and roast venison were no longer on the menu.

  Watching German diners stuff themselves on sole and duck at the Tour d'Argent in occupied Paris in 1942, Ernst Jiinger noted, "In times like these, to eat well and to eat a lot gives a feeling of power." That may have been of some consolation to those on the homefront - who had been told "they have to go without food so that the starving people of Europe may be fed" - but I doubt it. By that time, they were drinking antifreeze or paying one hundred marks per pound for black-market tea. On April 22, 1942, the Nazi mouthpiece Volkischer Beobachter announced, "Less food will be offered, according to the simpler way of life introduced for the nation and a rationed cuisine . . . There are two meatless days a week." In June, the Westdeutscher Beobachter editorialized, "Caterers must compensate for small meat portions with larger portions of potatoes, vegetables or salads." Coupons for hotel meals were assessed down to the tiniest allotment of nutrition, "even as to how much fat is to be used for a certain dish and how much flour for thickening the sauce."

  The use of the word "ersatz" was forbidden; the patriotic euphemism "German" was endorsed for synthetic products, as in the joke "Germans buy German Van Goghs." But by then the quality of even these supplements was so awful that on April 24 the Deutsche Volkswirt was forced to announce, "Expressions like 'German' pepper, 'German' caviare are forbidden from now on because they are apt to injure the good reputation of German products in general." The ersatz "new flour" with which wartime bread was made was so hazardous to the public's health that eating it fresh could make a person sick; it had to be allowed to mature for several days before it was safe to eat. Heinz Pfennig, a German lieutenant at Stalingrad, lived on dried potato flakes. His rations for Christmas Day 1942 were one tablespoon of peas, two tablespoons of potato soup, and two squares of chocolate. No soy. This was a diet that even the fuhrer himself might have enjoyed.

  Needless to say, things were even worse by the end of the war. In 1946, civilians in occupied Germany were on starvation rations that could be as low as one thousand calories per day; by the next year, the official ration in the French sector was down to four hundred and fifty calories per day, half that of the Belsen concentration camp. Meat, it is to be assumed, was not a part of the ration.

  Hitler had managed to turn Germany into a nation of vegetarians after all. The vegetarianism that he had been unwilling to enforce in his role as the host of the Berghof was now the national practice. And, as Janet Barkas points out, it was roughly compatible with kosher dietary restrictions.

  CHAPTER II

  TEDDY BEARS' PICNIC

  But your passion is a lie . . . It isn't passion at all, it is your will. It's your bullying will. You want to clutch things and have them in your power. You want to have things in your power. And why? Because you haven't got any real body, any dark sensual body of life. You have no sensuality. You have only your will and your conceit of consciousness, and your lust for power, to know.

  D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love

  Once we have put our guests at their ease, another basic element essential to successful hospitality, at once apparently simple and treacherously subtle, is the ability to make them feel special. Each and every invitee should be made to feel that he or she has been included for reasons that are unique and particular and sought out for the singular contribution that he or she is able to make to the gathering. This is true even if we have only invited our inner circle of intimate friends; their egos, too, need petting and will not be satisfied to imagine that the requirement of their presence is based on pure sentiment, since being liked for the wrong reasons can be as enervating as being disliked. Let them suffer the torments of hell when they are alone with their insecurities and free-floating anxieties; at our house, they are members of a charmed circle, a privileged fellowship of exalted individuals.

  The problem is, few of us know enough exalted individuals to make up the guest list of even one dinner party, let alone an entire season's worth. And even if we did, a roomful of exalted individuals can be tiresome, loud, and competitive, like an orchestra made up exclusively of trumpets. Those who are more exalted, or consider themselves to be more exalted, may make those who are less exalted, or fear themselves to be less exalted, feel inadequate; the less exalted will be quick - and rightly so - to blame the host for their unfortunate condition. And a dinner attended by a hive of angry, more or less exalted individuals is not likely to prove a success.

  And so, as always, the host is called on to be manipulative, sly, and duplicitous - in other words, creative. After all, the party does not put itself together. Everything, including and especially a guest's sense of his own worth, is the host's responsibility. If two guests fail to see eye to eye, or a visitor's hypersensitive back goes into spasm after a night on the sofa bed, that, too, is nobody's fault but the host's. The trick, as always, is to ensure that the balance of power remains firmly tilted to the host's side. What every host would do well to keep in mind is that people are generally only too happy to find a dominant force to surrender to. When a host is fully in control of every aspect of her hospitality, and when she exerts that control with skill, tact, and sensitivity, she can be confident that her guests will deliver themselves willingly, gratefully, into her serene authority.

  My five-year-old daughter, Cora, displays an instinctive grasp of this challenge every time she holds a tea party for her dolls and teddy bears. She has a great many dolls and teddy bears, but only a select few are invited to any given entertainment. She compiles her list with such exquisite discrimination that the guests rarely quarrel or complain; when they do, she steps in between them and knows just what to say to smooth their ruffled fur. She seats them just so and after great deliberation. Only she is permitted to serve the tea and cakes. She speaks for each in turn and the conversation is always fluid and enlightened. She also knows just when to call it a night so that everyone leaves with the unspoiled impression of having enjoyed a delightful tea among a group of clever and amiable peers.

  Regrettably, you cannot treat your guests as if they were teddy bears. They tend to be self-centered, obtuse, and vituperative in ways that stuffed animals seldom are, and they will know it if we try openly to patronize them. But if, like most hosts, we secretly hope to be lavished with compliments and extolled for our virtue and wisdom, there is a way to get our guests to cooperate. It requires the resolve, patience, and determination to make them utterly dependent on our benevolence. Then they will fall in line like so many teddy bears. If we are clear about our priorities, and if we approach them just right, we can treat our guests just like our favorite toys, and they will reward us in ways that we - adults long since resigned to complex relationships of scant emotional immediacy - can scarcely allow ourselves to hope for. They may not love us unconditionally, admire us, praise us, pet us, hug and kiss us, or cling to us through the long, lonely night, as we might wish they would, but they will assume all of our pains and fears as their own, and they will never betray us.

  In the early twentieth century, there lived two women, born within a year of each other, who were internationally famous for their hospitality during their own lifetimes
. Each tried in her own way to make teddy bears of her guests, to line them up into a chorus of mouthpieces, and each needed more from her guests than she was willing or able to ask for directly. One may be said to have succeeded in all of her hopes and ambitions; the other, to have failed miserably. Their strangely parallel lives demonstrate the risks and rewards of hosting a teddy bears' picnic.

  * * *

  Lady Ottoline Violet Anne Cavendish Bentinck (1873-1938) was a sad and lonely child. Half-sister to the sixth duke of Portland and youngest sibling to four considerably older brothers who had little interest in her, she was raised at the family seat of Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, following the death of her beloved father when she was four. The fifth duke had been a notorious eccentric who had excavated miles of tunnels and ballrooms under the castle and decorated most of the rooms in pink and gold, with no furniture but an open commode in the corner of each. One chamber, eerily, was stockpiled floor-to-ceiling with brown wigs in green boxes. The kitchen was located in an outbuilding and meals were sent to the house on heated trucks via underground rail. Her mother was sickly and protective; her only adult friend, the duke's librarian, was sent away for smoking in the dining room. Ottoline spent a great deal of time alone in her room, which she divided in two with a curtain. She slept on one side of the curtain; on the other, she staged dramatic performances with her dolls, to which no one came.

  She grew into an awkward and pious teenager, horse-faced, six feet tall, and with hair the color of marmalade. She was already suffering the headaches that were to plague her for the rest of her life. Her favorite reading was Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ. She held Bible classes for the farmhands in her spare time. Her first mentor and heroine was the reclusive Mother Julian. Dancing lessons in London proved a dismal failure, for she was too shy to dance. She was sixteen when her brother the duke - to whom she referred exclusively as "Portland" - married, and she and her ailing mother retired to a family house in Chertsey, Surrey. Ottoline spent the next three years nursing the dying woman, the drear monotony broken only by a disastrous coming-out. A short trip to Italy was followed by her mother's death, upon which she was shipped off to her brother's house in Langwell, Scotland, where she was assiduously shunned by his hunting companions.