by Thynne, Jane
‘Your Orpheus. The one who fetched his wife. What happened to her?’
‘She was allowed to leave the underworld, following him, unless he looked back.’
‘What happened if he looked back?’
‘She stayed there.’
He leant over and kissed her again, deep and lingering.
‘It’s a story, Clara.’
She looked out at the dusk. Beyond the window a swirl of migrating birds was massing, wheeling and turning in the darkening sky. A susurration of starlings, that’s what it was called, a perfect aerial formation, tilting and diving through the early evening mist, changing direction abruptly like the whisk of a living cloak, narrowing to a twisting ribbon then bulging into a cloud. Gradually more and more birds joined the flock so that eventually a great throng speckled the sky like a single living thing, massing above the city rooftops, scattering and then rejoining, soaring up into the vault of clouds, preparing to journey to another latitude to seek shelter from the gathering winter storms.
Author’s note
The Oster Conspiracy was a wide-ranging military plot to oust Hitler in September 1938. The planned coup involved senior German military and intelligence leaders, members of the Berlin police and many other individuals. The plan was to mount a raid on the Reich Chancellery but it failed at the eleventh hour, stymied by Chamberlain’s decision to appease Hitler.
There has been great dispute about the whereabouts of Eva Braun’s missing diary. While her diary up to 1935 is attested, after that her writing has gone missing, and one document, published in 1949 purporting to be her diary, has been widely dismissed as a fake.
In 1939, Time Magazine published an article about the relationship between Eva Braun and Hitler, saying that Hitler had ‘at least partly supported’ Eva for several years and that she had confided to intimates that she expected to marry him within a year. Her suicide attempts are well known. Many of the women associated with Hitler attempted or committed suicide and Eva Braun made her first attempt in 1931 and then another in 1935.
The cruise liner the Wilhelm Gustloff may have started out in the service of pleasure, but it became a byword for tragedy in maritime history. When war broke out the Wilhelm Gustloff was used by the military as a hospital ship and U-Boat training school until 30th January 1945, when the captain was ordered to evacuate German refugees and military fleeing from the Red Army from the East Prussian port of Gotenhafen. The ship was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine and more than nine thousand people died in the freezing Baltic waters, making it the worst shipping disaster in history. The sinking of the pride of the Strength Through Joy programme, exactly twelve years to the day since Hitler seized power, seemed to symbolize the destruction of the Thousand-Year Reich.
On 9th November 1938, at the goading of Goebbels, a wave of violence against Jews and Jewish property was unleashed throughout Germany in the worst pogrom since the Middle Ages. It gained the name Kristallnacht from the amount of broken glass that littered the streets the next morning. The violence shocked the world and convinced many who had previously been complacent of the Nazis’ true intentions towards the Jews. It was said that Goebbels planned the violence in order to regain the Führer’s favour after the disgrace of his affair.
Acknowledgements
In writing A War of Flowers I am indebted to many people. I would like to thank my agent, Caradoc King, as well as Linda Shaughnessy at AP Watt/United Agents for their cheering enthusiasm. At Simon & Schuster I am grateful to my editor Suzanne Baboneau for her wise advice and suggestions as well as to Ian Chapman, Clare Hey and Hannah Corbett. In Berlin, the staff of the Adlon Hotel were superlatively helpful. Above all, thanks to Philip, William, Charlie and Naomi for spending more time discussing the Third Reich than most people would choose.
London, 2014