Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia

by Mariusz Szczygieł

  He squeezed her hand tightly. The visit only lasted a short while.

  Three days later, Lída received word that Hitler was inviting her to the Reich Chancellery for tea. Gustav and the director said she had to go. She was so frightened that she had an attack of diarrhea. Some people were saying that thanks to the Führer there was no unemployment, and that he would defend Germany against the Bolsheviks, while others said he was a monster.

  “What a lovely little hat you have,” said Hitler.

  There was a fire in the grate.

  “Would you like to be German?”

  “I am Czech. Does it bother you?”

  “No. But I’d be pleased if you were German.”

  Hitler’s secretary left the room, and they were alone.

  “When I saw you at the studio,” he began, “I was stunned. Your face reminds me of a woman who played an important role in my life. Suddenly she was alive before me.”

  She didn’t know whom she resembled.

  Only later did she hear the story of Geli—Angela Raubal, Hitler’s niece from Vienna, with whom he fell hopelessly in love as soon as she reached the age of sixteen. Geli had nothing in common with the Nordic race: like Lída, she had dark eyes, black hair and high cheekbones. She was found dead on the carpet in his apartment in Munich. She had shot herself through the heart for reasons which were never explained.

  Hitler felt responsible for Geli, so, since her death in 1931, to atone for his spiritual part in her suicide, he had stopped eating meat.

  “The photograph that stands always on my desk came to life,” he told Lída in 1934. “That is to your credit.”

  “I’m extremely sorry …” she replied helplessly.

  He said nothing more and allowed her to leave.

  As we all know, each item that is processed by the memory becomes something completely new. Stress releases chemical compounds in the brain, which immediately impoverish our future memories. Moreover, after the war Lída could have told lies on purpose.

  Thus we don’t know how many times she actually had tea with Hitler. In her diary, she wrote that she went twice, but towards the end of her life she maintained she only went once.

  However, she told the Security Service that she went four times.

  The second man to favor her with a penetrating, lingering gaze had one leg shorter than the other.

  His shorter, right leg was twisted to the inside, and his right knee was one and a half inches smaller in circumference than the left.

  His long hands did not fit his short arms.

  He was a slight figure, the height of a boy.

  All through his childhood, the other children had teased him, and his father had ignored him.

  He had sexual intercourse for the first time at the age of thirty-three.

  He enrolled at five different universities.

  He only went to a Nazi Party meeting to keep warm, because he had no winter overcoat.

  The first time he saw Hitler, he wrote: “Those large blue eyes of his! Like stars! He is pleased to see me!”

  The first time Lída Baarová saw this man, she was struck by how unattractive he was.

  It was said that his brilliant intelligence made him doubly unlikeable.

  The most famous idea that he engendered, “If you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth,” had long since been put into action.

  Publishing photographs in which his shorter leg was visible carried the risk of death. According to a writer who had a private meeting with him during the war, “the Minister of Propaganda was surrounded by a demonic aura: anyone who came close to him felt the sort of fear that accompanies a man crossing a high-voltage zone.”

  Then Lída Baarová heard his voice. “I felt as if it had entirely pervaded me. As if it were warming and stroking me all at once,” she said.

  She met Goebbels by accident in the street. He invited her to come and see what a lovely house he had and what beautiful children. He boasted that all of them had names beginning with H, in honor of Hitler.

  Then he kept inviting her and Gustav to parties and premieres. Whenever they were ready to leave, it would turn out that the minister had a movie at home containing something he didn’t like, and he wanted Lída and Gustav to see it before the premiere. They were actors. They couldn’t refuse the minister who was personally in charge of cinema. Just like the Führer, he believed the radio, the automobile and the cinema would help the Reich to ultimate victory. After the war, historians worked out that the minister had had sexual relations with thirty-six performers of lead and supporting roles.

  Finally, he invited her to his office for tea on her own.

  He asked what her husband was filming today.

  She replied that she didn’t have a husband, and Goebbels got a shock.

  When the Czechs arrested her after the war, she refused to acknowledge having been his guest at a Nazi rally in Nuremberg.

  Two days after her twenty-second birthday (September 9, 1936), following a reception that evening, Goebbels asked her to go with him to the hotel where Hitler was staying. In the restaurant they heard someone singing: “I am so very much in love …”

  “So am I,” he whispered in her ear.

  In reply she told him how unhappy she was with Gustav, who was refusing to marry her. He would appear with her in public, but only to draw attention to himself. He would put jewelry on her before going out, but when they arrived home he would immediately take it off her, so that nothing would happen to it. On top of that, at night he’d get confused and call her by another woman’s name.

  “Please stay until tomorrow,” said Goebbels. “At noon I have an important speech to make—please watch me closely as I do so.”

  He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket. “I shall touch it to my lips as a sign that I am thinking about you.”

  Lída kissed him tenderly on the cheek.

  “The Jew is a parasite! A destroyer of culture! An enzyme of decay!” he said the next day, and reached for his handkerchief.

  She was shooting a movie version of Die Fledermaus for the UFA studio when the Austrian actress playing the role of Adela was banned from performing. The director asked Lída to intercede with Goebbels. The ban was withdrawn, and the crew were full of admiration for Baarová, but the gutter press described her as “the Herr Minister’s new girlfriend.”

  “You see,” he then said. “People are convinced we are intimate, but you keep running away from it.”

  He tried to embrace her; as usual at such moments, she burst into tears.

  “But you have children, and I have Gustav …”

  “No, you don’t, you can drop that idea. A beautiful woman is like a yacht on the open sea. Every gust of wind drives her in one direction or another—when the gale passes, there’s always a fine storm waiting for her.”

  “So if a woman is born beautiful, her beauty is a sin?”

  “Not a sin, but an inconvenience. A beautiful woman is tossed about like a reed.”

  “Whenever he phoned me at home he always introduced himself as Herr Müller. From day to day, ‘Herr Müller’ sounded more and more like an order.”

  “He calls her so often that Göring has had to hire an extra employee to tap her phone.”

  Richard Walther Darré, the pig-farming expert appointed Nazi minister of health, explained that women’s aspirations to be emancipated were due to a malfunction of the sex glands. He regarded woman as a daydreaming, ruminative domestic animal. The most desirable female characteristics were defined by a typical advertisement which read: “Fifty-two-year-old doctor, Aryan, wishing to settle in the countryside, desires male offspring in an official relationship with a healthy Aryan woman, a virgin, young, modest and frugal, capable of hard work, wide-hipped, who walks on flat heels and does not wear earrings, ideally of limited means.” Goebbels explained that the Nazis were removing women from public life in order to restore their dignity to them.

  When he invited Lída to the rall
y, Magda Goebbels—the Third Reich’s ideal woman—was thirty-five, and pregnant with her fifth child; after the fourth she had gained weight. She was still attractive. She was patron of the National Institute of Fashion, and proudly wore an Order of Motherhood.

  The authors of an American publication, Three in Love, in a chapter entitled “Ménage and the Holocaust,” note that: “Goebbels wished to move his mistress in with his wife and children. The Aryan for progeny, the Slav (or Jew) for illicit passion—such was the inherent contradiction of the Nazi’s erotic world.”

  On August 3, 1937, Goebbels wrote in his personal diary: “Bohemia is not a state,” and as Lída had agreed to come to the rally in Nuremberg, he noted that “a miracle has occurred.”

  On October 19, 1937, he wrote: “This state-for-a-season must disappear!” Sometime later, he added that when the first mild frost came he and Lída had been to the forest to feed the deer.

  On March 20, 1938, he noted: “All the Jews and Czechs must be quickly expelled from Vienna”; at the same time he was teaching her archery, and he was singing.

  On June 1, 1938, he quoted Hitler: “I am staying with the Führer. He characterizes the Czechs as brash, deceitful, and servile. By mobilizing their army they are placing a noose around their own necks. Now they are living only on fear.” He played the piano for Lída.

  A few days later, Magda Goebbels, who was twelve years older than Baarová, invited her to come and see her.

  She greeted her in a friendly way. According to Lída, in an over-friendly way. “I love my husband, but he is in love with you,” she said.

  “I would like to leave Germany. Could you help me?” asked Lída.

  “Let’s be on informal terms,” said Magda, pouring liqueur from a carafe and raising her glass to clink it against Lída’s. “You can’t do that. He is a great man. He needs you as well as me.”

  “I could never …”

  “You’ll have to.”

  The wife of Martin Bormann, head of the surveillance service—who had nine children with her and was in love with an actress called Manja Behrens—wrote about her husband’s lover: “M. is so nice that I can’t be angry. All the children adore her. She is even a better housewife than I am. She helped me to pack the china dinner service. Not a single saucer was broken.”

  Lída Baarová spent four weekends with the Goebbels family at their summer home on the Wannsee.

  After the final weekend, “Herr Müller” called her and uttered just two sentences: “My wife has gone to see the Führer. She is a devil.”

  Hitler summoned Goebbels and forbade him to communicate with Baarová. “I’ll get divorced,” announced the minister. “I can become ambassador to Japan and live there with her.”

  “That is not what the nation wants!” said Hitler, thumping his fist against the desk. “He who creates history has no right to a personal life.”

  “The Führer behaved like a father,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “I am grateful to him for that. Right now that’s just what I need. I have spent an hour in the car, driving a long way and to no purpose. Then I have one more long, sad phone call to make. I shall be tough, although my heart is breaking.”

  “He wept!” wrote Lída. “He wept like an ordinary person.”

  When he called to tell her it was over because he had given the Führer his word, she lost consciousness.

  The next day she was taken to a mental hospital.

  When she came out she was summoned by the police. “You are banned from performing in the movies or on stage,” she heard. “You cannot appear in public.”

  She fainted. After that, the only thing that could calm her down was a shot of morphine.

  She stopped receiving letters.

  A ban was imposed on showing any of the movies she had made for the UFA studio.

  She took only cash and her handbag.

  In Prague, she stood outside a house that was unfamiliar to her. It had been her parents’ job to spend her wages on a house, and they had bought a fantastic modernist villa—it resembled a ship, with a surrounding terrace that looked like a deck. There were no right angles; the kitchen was semicircular and the bedroom circular. The windows were round. Outside the house grew roses of the Lída variety.

  Her sister was cold towards her. “Do you know what we’ve been through?” she asked. “Do you know what the Germans did to us?”

  Seven years younger, her sister Zorka Babková—with the new surname Janů—was also an actress.

  By “us” she meant the country.

  When, as a result of the betrayal by Britain and France, Czech Sudetenland was suddenly occupied by Germany in fall 1938, Jews, Czechs and anti-fascist Germans fled from there deep into Bohemia. Those who ran away too late were arrested by the Nazis. Those who managed to escape earlier were left with no home, no food and no chance of employment. Agencies were set up which specialized in rapidly sending the refugees who had ended up in Prague abroad (“I can send doctors, lawyers, and Israelite tradesmen to the other hemisphere immediately. I have a permit.”)

  “Even the soldiers cried. Lída, do you know how unhappy people are who have to run away?”

  Lída didn’t know.

  “I’m very sorry,” she replied helplessly. “I had so many problems of my own,” she added, “that I could no longer picture your situation.”

  • • •

  The question which, during her conversations with Lída Baarová shortly before her death, had interested Helena Třeštíková, a filmmaker from Czech Television, and Stanislav Motl, a journalist for the TV Nova television station, as well as dozens of people who had once known her and, since the 1990s, were willing to talk about it, was this: was Lída Baarová stupid?

  She herself claimed that she was.

  But she was the last person to be believed. For her that could have been a very convenient answer.

  On the night of March 14 to 15, 1939, Hitler forced Czechoslovakia to capitulate. He demanded that President Emil Hácha come to Berlin, and threatened to bomb Prague if the Czechs did not submit. The country had been carved up after Munich, had no border defenses to the north and no chance of resistance. Early in the morning, before Hácha got back from Berlin (his train was held up at the border for a long time, supposedly because of a snowstorm), Hitler was already at the castle in Prague. From the start, it was clear that the Czechs wouldn’t defend themselves. Their closest friends, France and Great Britain, were siding with Hitler, so now they had two options: to follow the example of Jan Hus, thirteenth-century priest and martyr—save face and go up in flames—or capitulate and survive.

  At 8:15 a.m., the German army was driving down Prague’s National Avenue.

  There were crowds walking along the streets, but nobody stopped, nobody looked around. On Old Town Square, at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, people were laying piles of snowdrops and weeping.

  There was no fear in the air, no sounds of lament or despair. There was just sorrow.

  “Each one of us took a major task upon himself on the fifteenth of March,” the reporter Milena Jesenská wrote a few days later in the weekly Přítomnost.

  The task was this: to be Czech.

  “The only gesture which Czech men could have made on the fifteenth of March 1939 would have been a suicidal one. It may be a beautiful thing to shed blood for your homeland. I don’t even think it’s particularly hard to do that. But we must do something very different. We must live. We must save every person we have, every bit of strength, great and small. There are not enough of us to allow ourselves to make gestures. There are only eight million of us here—too few, far too few for suicide. But quite enough for life.”

  And so the task was to work as usual, and whenever possible, to cheat the regime. Above all, not to become German.

  Before noon, Lída Baarová was also driving down National Avenue. Even though she had been back in Prague for two-and-a-half months by now, she hadn’t yet removed the German license plates from her car. As soon as
she stopped the vehicle, the passers-by took one look at the plates and thumped their fists on the roof in anger.

  The summer of 1939 was not yet over. Lída went to a soccer match with the singer Ljuba Hermanová. By now everyone was talking about war. “But a while earlier Lída had started to speak Czech badly,” recalled her friend. “She was always mixing up Czech and German words. That day we were sitting in the stands, when she suddenly started shouting in an affected way: ‘Herrgott, now they could shoot a … wie sagt man das auf tschechisch?… yes, a goal!’ That should have given us, her friends, a clue. At least about how stupid she was. I can’t imagine anyone in the least bit intelligent destroying her own life to that extent.”

  At a later point, the director Otakar Vávra remembered her in Prague using a powder compact with a photo of Goebbels on it, though naturally he bore no grudge against her. She was just a woman. She lost her head. She was in love. She forgot her principles.

  Czech society was supposed to work solely for the benefit of the Third Reich.

  “How do you explain why so many Czechs come in here and greet us with ‘Heil Hitler’?” a German asked Milena Jesenská.

  “Czechs? You must be mistaken.”

  “No, I’m not. They come into our office, stretch out their right hand, and say: ‘Heil Hitler.’ Why is that? I could also tell you about a writer who makes a persistent effort to have his plays performed on the Berlin stage as soon as possible. I could tell you about all sorts of people who do far more than they have to—eagerly and tirelessly.”

  Perhaps Baarová wasn’t stupid, but just wanted to make life comfortable for herself? Perhaps because she believed that Hitler was bound to have the final word in Europe?

  “No, no. She was just a young woman, that’s the only explanation,” said her defenders years later.

  According to Stanislav Motl, the journalist who wrote a book about her: “As a star, she felt she was exempt from thinking about important things.”

  Later on, people kept saying that on March 15 Lída Baarová had welcomed Hitler at the castle in Prague—this is not true.