I don’t know about that, said Aunt Fanny.
And what about Gretl? I asked.
Gretl’s gone to stay with her, said Aunt Fanny. So that Eva won’t be alone so much.
But she’s got Hitler, I said.
Yes, well, said Aunt Fanny.
Oh, I said.
Is it a nice house? I asked, to put Aunt Fanny’s mind on a different track. I loved her. Secretly, I wished my mother were like Aunt Fanny.
I don’t know, she said. Uncle Fritz has forbidden me to visit them.
I had never seen her so upset before.
Only later, many years later, did I understand the sorrow of Aunt Fanny and Uncle Fritz.
Uncle Fritz shut himself up in his room and wrote letters to the Führer saying nothing about the way he missed his daughters, nothing about the silent meals he shared with his wife at the kitchen table now that the girls weren’t there, nothing about the nights he spent in agitated conversation with himself until his indignant murmuring rose to such a volume that Aunt Fanny heard it in her lonely conjugal bedroom next door, where she herself was directing pleas, complaints, and adjurations at her absent husband, she, too, was involved in a hopeless conversation with herself every night.
So Aunt Fanny implored Uncle Fritz, and Uncle Fritz implored Hitler, and no one paid any attention, even though Uncle Fritz did sometimes send off one of the letters he wrote with a trembling hand in the pale light of dawn to the Reich Chancellor and Führer in Berlin. These letters went on at length about masculine honor and civic pride, and the fact that even the great of this world were subject to the moral commandments laid down since time immemorial.
Fritz Braun never received a single answer to these letters, and in the still hours of the night that silence revealed to him all the annihilating scorn and deep contempt felt for senior teacher Fritz Braun, retired, the contempt so present in his mind. He felt dishonored, crushed, exposed. His adversary had triumphed over him. Both of them, Fritz Braun and Adolf Hitler, knew what it was all about. As always when a daughter is seduced, it was about the question of satisfaction, which can be offered only in the form of marriage.
So all the letters Uncle Fritz wrote to Hitler were nothing but an unspoken plea. All his verbose appeals to honor and morality and decency just meant: Marry her! For heaven’s sake marry her! And in the silence of the night Uncle Fritz himself knew it. Hitler spoke very clearly to him by preserving his silence. Herr Braun, Hitler was saying, let’s put an end to this farce. I know you’d be glad to have the Reich Chancellor of Germany and your doubtlessly beloved Führer as a son-in-law. Well, what senior teacher wouldn’t? But you see, I just don’t have time to answer your letter about this matter. And what makes you think I’d have the time, or shall we say the inclination, for the matter itself, or come to that even the faintest intention of doing it? Herr Braun, may I please ask you to stop bothering me? My uncle Fritz contemplated shooting himself through the head. But for one thing, he lacked the courage, and for another, who would look after his daughters’ lost honor if he was gone?
So he shut himself up in his room. He said very little and he hardly ate. He was dying of shame.
It had not, perhaps, been very wise of my mother to send me to their home, a place incomprehension haunted like a ghost, dividing spouses, destroying sleep, silencing conversations, closing doors, making daughters into remote, fleeting visitors. For the first time I felt that behind everything I saw that something else was hidden, something the grown-ups did not merely seek to hide from me but in fact kept secret from themselves and each other.
And here was Eva. She was wearing a pale blue coat and looked a vision. I have wanted a pale blue coat like hers all my life. I did own such a coat once, but I hardly ever wore it. It got dirty very quickly, and always somehow looked as if I had borrowed it. A handsome article of clothing hanging in my wardrobe, no doubt about that, but not so good on me. It hung there for years, and finally, at some point, I gave it to my husband’s secretary. But I don’t think she wore it either.
Eva looked breathtaking in her pale blue coat. Like a film star, I thought. A touch of Marika Rökk, a touch of Kristina Söderbaum. Women who come into a room, fling their coats down on the first chair to hand, and turn everything upside down within a few seconds before dashing off again, always at top speed, leaving some indefinable trace of themselves behind, a breath of perfume and perplexity . . .
She called, “Mami!” Mami. Nobody said “Mami” at the time. She could only have got it from a film. I made a note of it at once, but later decided it didn’t suit my own mother. Nor Aunt Fanny, to be honest. Eva burst into the kitchen, opened all the cupboards, looked for the “secret hoard,” as she called it. Finally she found it: a tin in which Aunt Fanny always kept a supply of peppermint creams obviously intended for Eva. She immediately fell on them greedily.
I realized that she was Aunt Fanny’s darling, the daughter for whose visits she was always hoping, and for whom she jealously guarded a little treasure. Her tomboy, her whirlwind girl, her princess. I could tell from the way Aunt Fanny hastily took off her apron and closed the doors of the kitchen cupboards again. I could tell from the frank pleasure with which she watched the peppermint creams disappear.
Would you like one, too? she asked me.
Then it turned out that it was because of me Eva had come.
Let’s have a look at you, little one, she said. I still had a bit of puppy fat, too, when I was your age. Well? Aren’t you bored? What do you do here with the old folk all day? It must be awful!
And she invited me to come and stay with her for a few days.
In . . . in that house?
Yes, she said, Gretl’s there, too. We have no end of fun. There’s a gramophone, a wireless, a telephone. You can phone your mother in Jena every day if you like. I phone my own mother almost every day, when Father isn’t around . . .
Oh, how I wanted to accept!
We must ask Father, said Aunt Fanny. I don’t think he’ll let her.
Mother, said Eva, it’s nothing to do with Father. She’s your niece.
At that moment I saw the figure of Uncle Fritz in the doorway. I don’t know how long he had been standing there.
Well, I don’t care, said Eva, putting a bitten peppermint cream down on the table.
I think . . . , said Aunt Fanny. But she didn’t know what she thought.
Oh, do as you all please, said Uncle Fritz, waving us aside and going away again.
I think this was the only kind of contact he still had with Eva; his manner of greeting her when she came home.
She can come back here to sleep, said Eva, loud enough, perhaps, for her father to hear, too.
So we came to a working compromise. I could go to my cousins in Wasserburger Strasse for the day, but I must be back in Hohenzollernplatz in the evening. I would spend the night in one of my cousins’ formerly virginal beds. By day, however, I would see the place where Hitler came visiting. At last I would know what a favorite’s life was like.
I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT MALMAISON, but I had imagined some kind of palace. Mirrored halls. Servants . . .
However, what Hitler had given my cousin was an ordinary family house, the kind with a front garden where crocuses flower in spring, where leisure, freedom from care, and a reasonable amount of prosperity seem to dwell behind the net curtains. At the time such a house was given the grand name of a villa only by those for whom possession of anything like it was an unattainable dream. Wasserburger Strasse was inhabited by people who had done rather better in life than my uncle Fritz. It was an address beyond the reach of senior teachers.
Perhaps that was one reason why he never visited his daughters there. In what character would he mix with the neighbors? As Hitler’s father-in-law? He wasn’t Hitler’s father-in-law. On the other hand, no one could have approached him without the greatest respect, because in a way he was, all the same. No one could slight him with impunity. Fritz Braun was deeply sensitive to the scorn that wa
s equally inherent in either respect or disrespect for his person.
He did not know that his daughter Eva felt that scorn just as deeply. If she met her neighbors she greeted them with an almost obsequious friendliness that had in it something like a plea to be forgiven for living here among them—she, a mere office girl, not even a secretary, as she was described in the telephone book entry. Only a former assistant in Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographic business, employed sometimes in his studio, sometimes in the office, sometimes in the shop—where one day, when she was sixteen, a dark, gruff-spoken man had come in and asked her for something in a low and husky voice. She served him as obligingly as she could. He intimidated her, and the familiar and expected shyness of her manner was irresistible. For the first time she felt her shyness giving her power, and when she fetched a ladder to look for what he wanted on the top shelves she did it in the full awareness that she was obeying an order, and let him get a look at her legs under her skirt.
She knew who Adolf Hitler was. In 1929 he was already the most important customer a man like Heinrich Hoffmann could have— Hoffmann could even sometimes refer to him as a friend. But there was no calculation or ambition to rise in the world involved when she immediately offered herself to him for the first time. It was not that. As some people are brilliant at dissembling, or friendship, or business, others are brilliant in their timidity. They are looking for a master, and once they have found him they can hold him by a degree of self-abnegation that even the most experienced men of power, those most practiced in the subjugation of other human beings, would scarcely think possible. And sometimes a bond develops between the timid and their masters that looks like the bond of love yet is something quite different, such a perfect interplay of command and obedience, subjugation and submission, always and unresistingly in collusion, that the submissive partner acquires as much power as the dominant partner, the timid woman finds herself suddenly facing an intimidated man, the master faces a mistress, and they both recognize themselves in each other, and demand both timidly and imperiously to be loved.
At the time, of course, I knew nothing about any of this. I did not know that tyrants are in fact shy people and like to entrust themselves to the shiest women they can find, in order to be dominated by them. Nor did I know how severely they blame themselves for turning to women of this kind in their timidity, still less how many other people must suffer for the fact that such a woman knows them for what they are.
I thought shyness was my own problem and mine alone. Like all girls of fourteen, I was tormented by the idea that I was the only girl in the world who felt insecure, inhibited, and lacked the selfconfidence that everyone else seemed to display, while I dreamed of someday seeing the world at my feet, offering me respect and admiration.
For only the shy entertain a wish to make a big splash at some point. My cousin Eva had done it, or so I thought at the time.
But I was severely disappointed when I first saw her house. A porch, a small entrance hall, a kitchen, a living-dining room with a sliding door separating the two halves, two bedrooms on the first floor and another in the loft. The furniture could have come straight from a furnishing showroom, every room complete in itself like a little in-store display, the dining room furnished in mahogany, the living room in dark oak, the sisters’ bedrooms matte-lacquered white with a bed, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe, a dressing table, and flowered bedspreads. This was how young families set up house at the time if they had the money. It was clearly the deceptive realization of Eva’s idea of an average, self-contained, manageable lifestyle. This was the setting in which she had dreamed of living. And her friends, Beppo, Kathi, Mitzi, Mandi, and the others all fitted in here.
The idea of Hitler entering this house seemed to me unthinkable even at the time, and to this day I think he didn’t often go there. It was very much Eva’s house, a present, the only present from the dictator that she made entirely her own, regarding it as a present he had given her of life. A large portrait photograph of Hitler did hang in the hall, and you faced it the moment you came through the front door, but all of Eva’s friends thought he looked very strange and ghostly in it, pale and unreal, with a curious gaze that cast its spell on the observer, seeming to come from another world into which he would spirit us some day.
It must have been one of those photographs by Hoffmann that had pleased its subject, or he would probably not have given it to his mistress. To me, however, it seemed then, and still seems in my memory today, like an evil phantom, not a real likeness, a ghostly apparition that would come to life in the middle of the night, step out of its frame, and visit nightmares on the occupants of the house.
I was glad Aunt Fanny had said I couldn’t stay overnight with my cousins, and whenever I came back in the evening to the Hohenzollernplatz apartment, where one of the three abandoned beds of the daughters of the house awaited me, I felt a sense of relief and security.
And how are my girls? Aunt Fanny would ask me if Uncle Fritz’s door was shut.
Terrific! I replied. It was a favorite word among the young people in my class, so I made it my favorite, too.
I mean are they well? asked Aunt Fanny.
Yes, I told her.
In the afternoon we played the card game Eleven Out. I don’t know if they played it when I wasn’t there, or just to kill time with me. It’s a stupid game, and I hated it. All the same, I got caught up in the tempo that even pointless games can generate, a kind of compulsive repetition, a paroxysm of pedantry in which you submit yourself to a strict system of rules. No sooner was a game over than we reached for the cards again like addicts to reshuffle them.
Eva sometimes went out of the room and came back a little later in another dress. Even then she had a mania for changing her clothes, and did it six or seven times a day, often for no perceptible reason. It was as if she were working on some major and difficult task that called on all her powers and sometimes exceeded them: the necessity of finding more and more ways of dressing, more and more attempts to be herself. If you ever saw her at the time thinking hard about something, you could be sure she was wondering what to wear next, and every impressive entrance always outdid its predecessor.
I was particularly fascinated by her blouses. Silk had a sinful charm at the time. The blouses my mother wore and those she bought for me were made of cotton, and provided evidence of meticulous domesticity. You soaked the collars, then you bleached them and starched them. They rubbed your neck sore. Eva’s blouses were soft and shining, a second skin clinging gently and perfectly to her shoulders and breasts. A higher form of nakedness. I wanted nothing more than to touch them.
One day she came back into the room with a blue-gray wool dress over her arm.
Take your clothes off, little one, she said.
When you are fourteen there’s nothing worse.
Come on, take your clothes off, little one, don’t be shy. It’s only us.
She wanted me to try the dress on.
Not for the world. I had my reasons. Take my clothes off? Never!
Look, said Gretl, you can’t go around in that pleated skirt and those terrible blouses the whole time. It’s just not chic.
Gretl herself looked like a rather blurred copy of her sister. She was three years younger than Eva, and neither as beautiful nor as elegant. In fact, she had only one outstanding quality: devotion, and her devotion was exclusively to Eva. She lived with her, wore her cast-off clothes, and was kept out of the allowance that Hitler gave to Eva. She was a professional younger sister, having broken off her training as a photographer—in this again resembling Eva. She seemed happy to share her sister’s life and did not, as far as I know, have a lover of her own. She was the woman who comes into the relationship as part of the deal when a man marries her sister.
Men never develop an appetite for such bargains. They have too little appeal to the male as conqueror, since such women will come into his possession anyway. With time, men may perhaps feel at ease with them through the habit
of familiarity, and will appreciate their boundless loyalty to themselves so long as they, the husbands, respect the marriage.
For professional sisters keep a fanatically watchful eye on the marriage, like little guard dogs, and the only savagery of which they are capable is aroused if their sisters are betrayed. Then they become avenging goddesses. Their own husbands, if they have them, have nothing to fear. Their husbands are free to do as they like, and if they take advantage of that freedom it is no more than their wives expect, considering themselves not worth the trouble of fidelity.
If Eva had been fated to grow old she would have grown old with her sister. They would have lived in her house on Wasserburger Strasse, and after many years they would have looked like elderly twins holding hands as they went out for a walk, offering hesitant greetings, afraid of not sounding friendly enough, although they know no one except themselves anymore, two old ladies with the same dismal hats on their heads, clinging to each other with the identical movement when a gust of wind blows. . . .
It could just as well have been a salesman, a teacher, or a chimney sweep who came along and wanted one of them for himself. But it was Adolf Hitler.
There I stood, clutching my blouse with both hands, as my cousins had fun trying to undress me. I didn’t think it was funny at all. I had something to hide. I defended myself with all my might from letting them reveal my source of deep physical shame. They almost ripped my blouse. Then they let go of me.
Whatever is the matter, little one? said Eva suddenly, in the changed voice I can still sometimes hear today if I try hard. I have only to think of that moment as I stood there facing my cousins, rigid with outrage, tense with resistance—and I hear Eva’s voice as it was then, as I can still conjure it up, recorded somewhere on the hidden audio system of my memory.
What’s the matter, little one?
And suddenly, at her tone of voice, the ice of my outrage and resistance melted, I surrendered, and I showed my cousins the instrument of torture that I wore. Suddenly I even felt I very much wanted them as my confidantes. I didn’t yet know that having confidantes is the first step toward liberty in a woman’s life. That evening I would leave Wasserburger Strasse as the woman I was to become, the woman I am now.
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