Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  That made them both weep dreadfully, and I wept, too, much worse than when I heard the news that he had fallen. They didn’t want me to go, and begged me to call them Mother and Father, which was not easy for me. But they had no one left to call them that, and they even wanted me to move in with them, although they realized that was going too far. Instead, I promised to come and have supper with them once a week. And although that wasn’t so bad, and in fact it was very generous of them since they had no ration card for me and it meant I could save up my rations at home, my decision to go to Munich was made partly so that I could escape the consequences of my well-meant lie.

  I didn’t want to be a widow yet. I was full of curiosity about living men. I was twenty years old. Twenty at a time when the men were being sent away to die. If just one of them had been left alive after the war, I’d have wanted him for myself.

  It was May 1944 when Ernst-Günther fell. I know that because of the cockchafer incident not long afterward. There were huge swarms of cockchafers that year. There have never been so many since. They’ve almost died out now anyway, and no one but us elderly folk can remember what it was like when they descended like a plague.

  It was during one of my grief-stricken wanderings, those long walks I took in memory of my dead school friends and in their honor. I was walking down an avenue of beech trees when all of a sudden I heard a strange whirring in the air. It was like an aircraft approaching to dive-bomb me. And then they descended on me in their thousands. They fell from the trees like rain. The street was covered with cockchafers. I couldn’t put my feet down anywhere without hearing them crunch underfoot. I walked over the corpses of countless cockchafers as their shiny brown chitinous shells cracked open. They bounced off my shoulders, they slipped down inside the neckline of my dress.

  But my hair was the worst. It was long, and I wore it pinned up in what we called the Gretchen style, a kind of wreath plaited around the forehead and the back of the neck. That was the fashion at the time. There was a suggestion of solstice bonfires about it, a suggestion of harvest festivals and Hitler Youth girls. It suited me. I never needed a perm. My hair is strong and quite curly to this day, and as resistant as the feet of the cockchafers that got caught in it. It was as if they had grown into my hair with their whirring and rustling and crackling. As if I were wearing an invisible fire on my head, and I could feel it constantly burning.

  At home they had to cut my hair off. There was no other way to get them out. Now I really did look like Gretchen, but in the last act of Faust, ready for her execution. A hairstyle of shame, my father called it, and I was indeed ashamed. Such a thing as shame existed in those days. Something somber, bad, secret, something that must never come to light. Defilement, racial impurity, and something else, too: One must not acknowledge or guess at its possibility, yet one feared it. This other thing lurked behind everything you saw and heard and knew, a shame so deep that no disgrace, no penance could ever atone for it.

  Sometimes we asked each other: What will happen if we lose the war?

  What would happen? They would come down on us like avengers; they would torture and kill us. They would enslave our unborn children and make them work in their mines. And God have mercy on you if you were a girl.

  So I was thankful to the soldiers for giving their lives for me. What would become of me if they didn’t? My life for the lives of Hans, Waldemar, Wilhelm, Klaus, Otto, Wilhelm the second, Ernst-Günther, Rudolf, Walter, Max? Not just my life, my honor. Was I worth it? And what exactly was my honor, also called innocence? What was I innocent of? Apart from the hairstyle I now wore, and there really was nothing I could do about that.

  She looks as if she’s been branded, said my father.

  I myself felt as if I’d been branded. As if I’d had my head shaved and been driven through the town so that everyone could see my shame, the way they did with women who slept with Jews or foreigners imported to do forced labor. Yet I hadn’t slept with anyone, even Ernst-Günther. And now that he was dead that seemed remarkably unimportant.

  Of course my hair soon grew back. But when I arrived to stay with Eva in July, I still saw something in her eyes like mocking amusement at my inability to be as pretty as she was. I knew that, as she saw it, I’d never learn. She was wrong there, however.

  Eva was a good teacher of the art of outshining other women by showing yourself off to fashionable advantage, not so much to impress men—that’s not the point, that’s more of a desirable side effect—as to make other women wonder what they’re doing wrong when they set eyes on you. Oh, my dear, don’t you know that headscarves are worn over the forehead now? No one, but no one ties them under the chin anymore! She was always catching you out in ignorance of this kind, as if you belonged to a banned political party and still bore its visible signs and tokens about your person. Such women do exist. All efforts made by others to be fashionable are poor copies. These women sweep their followers along with them this way and that, in a factional struggle that passes entirely unnoticed by men, and my cousin Eva was one of them. She was one of them to the very last hour of her life, for which she made herself beautiful.

  Good heavens, child, what do you look like? she said when we saw each other again. Well, there’s a good hairdresser here. I think I’d better make you an appointment with him straightaway.

  But I am running ahead of myself.

  When the train drew into Munich I was almost alone in it.

  Two days earlier there had been an air attack on the station and its surroundings. The main building had been partially destroyed. Rough board partitions separated the rubble from those areas where it was safe to walk. Notices were still hanging at an angle. Lighting had been torn out, the roof above the platforms was propped up on makeshift posts. I was probably risking my life when I got off the train, but we did that almost all the time anyway.

  Every farewell could be forever. Every arrival could be for the last time. Every departure could be final. The young Wehrmacht soldiers boarding the train on the opposite platform knew that many of them would never come back.

  I made my way through embracing couples, swaying as they stood there in sorrow and bewilderment, I passed mothers raising their hands lightly to wave good-bye, just sketching the gesture to spare their sons the sight of the collapse they would suffer as soon as the train began to move, one mother with her hand pressed to her mouth, another with her hand still raised in the air, as if she had spent years taming a hawk and had now let it fly free. And there it went, there it went, and who knew if it would ever be seen again?

  I tried to push through the crowds of people taking leave of each other. I sensed the pain and despair around me as you sense the climate on reaching your journey’s end, a breath of air in which alien and curiously familiar messages are mingled. I saw the train on the opposite platform begin to move, I saw the platform emptying, I braced myself against the current of people seeing travelers off who were now making for the exit. I stayed until I was the last person left. Only then did I realize that no one had come to meet me.

  I still remember my disappointment at Eva’s absence. It was partly shame, a hollow, mocking echo of my earlier misplaced delight. How could I have thought that seeing me was important enough to get Eva to the station on time?

  So there I stood with my suitcase, and I had overdone it there, too: The case was too big, too heavy, stuffed too full. Unable to make up my mind what to take, I had packed far too much. Now I wished I had an elegant little bag instead of this monster, a suitcase of my mother’s. I could already hear Eva’s mockery: Good heavens, little one, that’s a wardrobe!

  I didn’t yet know that she herself was in the habit of traveling with far too many bags. I think she felt the most important thing in life was always to have the right frock for the right occasion, and even on her last journey she took a wide assortment of clothes and several suitcases.

  Since then I have practiced the difficult art of traveling with hand baggage, less and less of it. A si
ngle unnecessary item in my case can spoil all my pleasure in a journey. I strive for the ideal of total, minimal, almost mathematically precise perfection in packing. Everything necessary must go in, everything unnecessary be left out. Perhaps this obsession began there in Munich, when I was conscious of both the excessive weight of my suitcase and my shame at not being met. I began to haul the case in the direction of the exit.

  Then I heard my name over the loudspeakers.

  It’s odd the way you react with alarm to the unexpected mention of your own name. You feel suddenly caught in the act of something, but also one of the elect. For a moment anything seems possible. Who’s that speaking? The god of railway stations? Who does he mean? Me? How does he know me? How does he know I’m here?

  All I could do was follow the instructions and go to the Holzkirchen station exit. Eva would be waiting for me there, I thought. My beautiful cousin. The only member of my family I admire. The only one I want to learn from. The woman whose riddle I would like to solve. Whose mystery interests me, just as love and passion and their forbidden side interest me. The woman who is Adolf Hitler’s lover.

  She’ll hug me. She’ll inspect me critically, with mocking amusement. She’ll notice that I have grown since we last met. (At least, I hope she’ll notice.) Her attention span is always short, so she’ll soon turn it to something else, and we’ll go back to her house in Wasserburger Strasse, and I shall be at my journey’s end.

  But she isn’t there.

  There’s an SS man waiting for me at the Holzkirchen station exit instead. He takes my case while another SS man opens the door of a gleaming black Mercedes-Benz. I sink into the leather upholstery of the backseat.

  All this happens with the startlingly heavy emphasis of the opening shots of a film, where the first scenes overpower you whether you like it or not, eliminating any other ideas from your mind and leaving nothing but a passionate interest in finding out what comes next. An absolute desire to decode what is going on. All beginnings are emphatic.

  We have instructions to take you to the Obersalzberg, says one of the men.

  They don’t seem to be expecting me to say whether I want to go or not.

  MUNICH HAD CHANGED since I was last there. All cities were changing at that time as they fell to dust and ashes before our eyes.

  Part of the station area was closed off. Squads of men were at work sorting out the ruins, putting steel with steel, wood with wood, broken glass with broken glass. The rest was still lying around: bits of masonry, splintered fragments, the ragged ends of electrical wiring. Doors boarded up, windowless facades with nothing left behind them. Stairways projecting into this void.

  Today, it seems to me incredible that I drove through such devastation and was still full of questions and expectations about the rest of my journey. Shouldn’t I have been more shaken? Shouldn’t what I saw have upset me enough to make me forget the aim of my journey, my fears, my hopes, my wish to find out what happened next? Shouldn’t it have canceled out my own restless ego?

  Several times we had to drive around roadblocks with towering mountains of rubble or bomb craters behind them. Several times people barred our way where the pavements were no longer passable: young antiaircraft personnel hurrying to their posts, Red Cross nurses on their way to the hospital, bent old ladies pulling little hand-carts behind them. They were all looking at the ground, as if there were a ban on looking up and seeing the destruction around them. They all seemed to be in a great hurry, as if they had to cross some no-man’s-land quickly, without delay. It was only when my driver hooted, as he frequently did, that they suddenly looked up and stared through the car windows at me. Not with hostility but with surprise, as if awakened from a dream. Where are we? their glances seemed to ask. And who are you? Where are they taking you?

  I saw in their eyes that I was important. Valuable, irreplaceable. Some kind of precious object. And I liked that, I liked it enormously.

  Where’s my cousin? I asked.

  The men sitting in front of me were just lighting cigarettes. Want one? the driver’s companion asked me.

  Yes please, I said.

  There was nothing I wanted more just then.

  Even today, memory can make a recidivist smoker of me. I remember how I leaned back. How I inhaled deeply, inhaling the poison of that moment.

  When did people ever smoke as greedily and fervently as we did then? If you watch old films today you can still feel something of the atmosphere. The fraternal tie between us addicts. The passing of half-smoked cigarettes from hand to hand. The way we carefully took them between thumb and forefinger and raised them to our lips. We smoked like chimneys. It was the fire that lured us, the fire to which we were addicted. Unhealthy? Yes, of course. As unhealthy as life itself; you can burn your fingers on life.

  Eva smoked, too, although the man she loved had forbidden her to do so. She smoked with the petty, illicit satisfaction of schoolboys smoking in the lavatory, relishing her forbidden freedom with every inhalation, enjoying the delicious giddiness it induced in her. There’s always a certain arrogance about smoking. A defiant attempt to snatch from life what it won’t give freely. In essence it is similar to lying: a nothingness that is still harmful.

  German women do not smoke, we had been told. German woman do not drink. German women do not wear makeup. What a laugh! If I’d been told I could have three wishes granted: A cigarette, I’d have said. One wish gone. A lipstick, and perhaps a cream cake if possible. Oh yes, I almost forgot: I wish the war would soon be over.

  How sad that this test of character was always bound to fail.

  Isn’t my cousin in Munich? I asked.

  Only when the men answered no did I remember that they had said we were going to the Obersalzberg.

  Did I know where they were taking me?

  Oh yes, I knew. We all knew about the Berghof. It was—how can I put it—a place as familiar as a childhood scene, yet at the same time strange and full of secrets.

  That towering flight of steps leading up to the reception terrace: We had seen Göring and Ribbentrop, Bormann, Himmler, Goebbels, and Speer climb it, eyes raised aloft; we’d seen them disappear to the right among the colonnades, where we assumed the entrance to the house must be. We were always left at the foot of the steps along with the common herd, the cameramen, the chauffeurs, the hangers-on. We were the infantry. The newsreel cinema audience. Now and then, from that vantage point, we had seen the master of the house emerge from the colonnades to welcome his guests, going a little way to meet them, a pace or so over the terrace, even down a few of the steps, depending on who they were, never too far, better not to go far enough. Lloyd George, Edward VIII and his lover Wallis Simpson, Mussolini, Chamberlain . . . we leaned back in the cinema seats. We were there. From far below we watched them climb the steps, a steep and sweeping flight that might have led the way to some mighty monument, an Aztec citadel, a place not made for mortal men unless they approached with the intention of offering prayers, bringing gifts, or accepting instructions from on high. And there he stood, the master of the house, watching their faces flush with the strain of the climb, hearing their chests wheezing. They were always out of breath when they reached him, while he was perfectly composed and at his ease.

  He went only as far as the top step even to meet Chamberlain. The old gentleman, almost seventy years of age, had traveled by air for the first time in his life in order to comply with Hitler’s wishes in every respect, and was still rather bemused by his bold and spirited venture into the modern age when he found himself at the foot of the steps, with Hitler high above him in the unexpected pose of a man waiting impatiently, as if he supposed that a visitor invited to see him might get a move on. And even as the British prime minister struggled to achieve the thin smile he habitually assumed for the photographers on such occasions—they were allowed up to the terrace in front of the house this time—Hitler had already turned his back with an economical gesture, a backward wave of his right hand, which appeared
strangely limp and undecided, as his gestures, surprisingly, often were, indicating that if his guest insisted on a discussion he had better follow him. You should never try appeasement with anyone who receives you in a place like that.

  Everyone who visited Hitler’s Berghof had to face the stairway trick at the start.

  I would never have thought I’d climb those steps myself hundreds of times in my life. They were not in fact as steep as I had always imagined them, but something of their inimical nature, the hostility inherent in them, was conveyed to me. If you wanted to run up a flight of steps two at a time, as I usually did in those days, they were recalcitrant. Sometimes the steps seemed too broad, sometimes too high. You couldn’t get any rhythm going. There was something malicious in that flight of steps, and it was the same going down. It seemed to have been built on purpose to make you stumble, and none of all the guests who went up and down it can have been spared occasional nightmares of falling farther than they had ever thought to fall, into an abyss of misfortune, a true inferno of defeat, with Hitler laughing scornfully from an unattainable height overhead. When they were descending the steps toward their waiting limousines they all carefully looked down, even Hitler himself kept his eyes on the toes of his shoes, and anyone authorized, as Mussolini was, to close ranks and walk beside him would voluntarily hold back slightly, carefully sounding out the stairway step by step, and shuffling a little.

  Even now I sometimes dream I have to climb down the flight of steps outside the Berghof. And there is no handrail, nothing. Only the endless steps going farther and farther down. It is one of those dreams that you can end only by casting yourself into a void. There is no other way of returning to the present and to waking life.

  Of course I knew where I was going. I knew about the huge mechanically operated window in the Führer’s great hall with its view of the Untersberg, looking toward Berchtesgaden and the Watzmann massif beyond. The window before which even the Führer himself looked forlorn and curiously small. This was his window on the world. The world presented itself to him there, a mighty stage set consisting of the sky and the mountains, high and lonely peaks, remote from mankind, cold, covered with snow most of the time, a wooded zone below, and farther down, very small and very far away, the tiny human world, scattered dwellings, ephemeral, marginal, of little importance in this image of impressive, overpowering force. A flicker of his eyelashes would wipe it out.