Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  And when the train finally comes in, and there is a crush that will carry off Ernst-Günther with the others, it’s too late to kiss. I’m suddenly left alone, listening to someone saying, don’t cry, don’t cry, and I realize that means me and try to put the last of those do-you-remember jokes out of my head, because otherwise I think I’ll go crazy.

  That was the farewell I remembered. How was I to understand my cousin Eva’s distress? The rage of a woman left behind, without comfort, without a glance or a touch, without anything . . .

  Her feelings were hurt. She had a great talent for hurt feelings. In every other way she was moderate, reasonable, average. Only when it came to feeling hurt was it granted to her to break the mold. She was extraordinarily good at it. And in Hitler she had met her master, the man who would give her the occasion for hurt feelings on a grand scale.

  He was seldom at home, had little time for her, liked and indeed preferred to be seen with other women: Magda Goebbels, Winifred Wagner, Annie Ondra, Leni Riefenstahl . . . women with whom my cousin could not compete in any way at all. He neglected her, although it was not certain that he betrayed her. In fact, I am inclined to think he was faithful. But she had plenty of opportunity for hurt feelings. In Berlin she had to use a back door to the private rooms in the Reich Chancellery. On the Obersalzberg she was expected to make herself scarce when official visitors were announced. She could show herself only in Hitler’s most intimate circle. He did not take her traveling with him.

  The one time she did accompany him, on his visit to Rome, she had smuggled herself into the retinue of secretaries without his knowledge, and was consequently excluded even from the official program arranged for the ladies until she let the Italian organizers know who she was: Hitler’s companion. So she did watch a parade of warships in the Gulf of Naples, an event ladies were not really supposed to attend at all, with the result that she had to be explained away once again as a secretary and had yet another reason for hurt feelings.

  As a macho man, in fact, Adolf Hitler was only average. Albert Speer records such comments as: “Highly intelligent men should choose a simple, stupid woman. . . . I want peace and quiet in my leisure time.”

  Remarks such as this, made in Eva’s presence, could nonetheless have been made by any factory owner, any editor of a provincial paper, any university professor.

  The unusual aspect of their relationship was entirely Eva’s. She was a heroic and accomplished exponent of the art of putting up with things. She toed the line, she stayed in her room when there were married couples present—Goebbels and Magda, the Görings. She very correctly avoided even meeting them on the stairs. The film clips that exist of her show that as soon as Hitler came on the scene she stepped back. She is never seen coming to his side, she is always retreating from the picture, airbrushing herself out.

  Wait a moment, she seems to be saying, and then I’ll be gone. Don’t put yourselves to the trouble of noticing my existence.

  But she stepped aside in the hope of being called back. That was what she was waiting for. She was the kind of woman who never puts out a hand to take what she wants, the kind who always waits to have it offered to her, and who is mortally injured if it never is.

  Eva was absolutely unbeatable in the art of nursing hurt feelings. All the passion, all the gravity, all the endurance of which she was capable showed in that skill. She swallowed humiliations, compressed them into a small space inside her to make room for more, swallowed those, too, compressed them again, she couldn’t get enough of them. Until the pressure inside her rose to such a pitch, became so intolerable, that she was ready for the next suicide attempt. In November 1932 she had shot herself with her father’s service revolver, just missing her carotid artery. In May 1935 she took fifteen Vanodorm tablets—too few to kill her. I don’t know about the other times, but I suspect they were even more symbolic in nature.

  Yet she had experience. She was no amateur suicide. Suicide was the one profession she had really mastered, the only skill she had made her own. Extinction of the self. And I am sure that at the end it was she who taught Hitler the art of suicide, she who, with the solicitude and readiness to oblige peculiar to her, showed him how to set about it.

  When I met her again she was a case of hurt feelings at an advanced stage. They’re a strain. They take all a person’s strength. She needed support at this time. She needed company, and I think now that this was the reason for her invitation. I was to be a diversion. I was her excuse for going out and about, on expeditions to Munich or to bathe in the Königssee.

  For, you see, Gretl had married, or rather had been married off. Women like Gretl, born to be the shadows of their sisters, don’t marry of their own volition. It takes persuasion, intrigue, not to mention a hint of threat and coercion, to bring them to the point of marriage. They finally agree for fear of harming their sisters if they don’t.

  So Gretl Braun married a courtier, Hermann Fegelein of the SS, Himmler’s liaison officer at the Führer’s headquarters. She had lived at court too long to escape the fate of being handed over to a courtier. The function of courtiers is to do their masters bidding, out of the loyalty and assiduity with which they pursue their careers at court. Fegelein was prepared to marry the favorite’s sister, a fact that said nothing about any feelings he might entertain for her, but a great deal about the ambition driving him. According to certain rumors it wasn’t even clear if he preferred women at all, let alone the pale and rather timid Gretl.

  At the time, of course, I knew nothing about any of that. Nor did I know how much Eva feared life without Gretl. She hated Fegelein. She hated him as one hates a victorious rival in love. He had taken away what was dearest to her, the companion of her empty life, her comrade in the isolation of her days and the luxury that was too much for her to bear alone. She wanted a substitute sister, she wanted me, because her friend Hertha Schneider, who normally took that role, had been hurt in a motor accident when she was flung out of her car and had to stay in bed. That was why, on a sudden whim, I had been invited. That was why I was here now.

  WHERE THE ROAD TO THE BERGHOF turned off to the left there was a little lodge for the guards. They came out and stopped the car. My assumption that my two companions were sufficient guarantee of my identity turned out to be wrong. I was asked to get out and go into the guardroom while the two men stayed in the car. Clearly what happened next was none of their business.

  It was the first but not the last time in my life that my things were searched. Not that there’s anything so bad about that, is there? They unpack your case and pack it up again. There’s even something slightly flattering about it. One’s indignation is always mingled with a sense of importance. Here’s someone who takes me seriously. Who’s looking for a secret behind my facade. Who thinks there’s something to be found out.

  And perhaps it’s this terrible confusion that makes the whole business so horrible. You feel like laughing: What on earth do you suspect? Do you think I’m traveling with my luggage full of explosives, weapons, heroin (it would have been morphine in those days)? Do you really think me brazen enough for that? At the same time you have to watch them exposing your most intimate, personal things to the light of day. Between the two sets of feelings, you very soon lose your personal dignity. You let your unsuitability to play your part show. And then, but always too late, you realize: that’s what they were after.

  The men did their job well—that is, they did it thoroughly. They unrolled my silk stockings, let them drop to the floor like obscene and lascivious snakes, unfolded my knickers and held them up in front of their faces. (These days, although some people condemn the infiltration of the German language by anglicisms, we use the pretty little monosyllable slip for that item of underwear, but we didn’t have it at the time; we had only the coarser-sounding word Schlüpfer for knickers.) They came to my bras, and dropped them, too, on the floor, where they lay like dirty little remnants of snow. Finally they even opened my toilet bag and found some sanitary
towels in it. (They were the washable kind we used then. Only a few old women like me still remember them. You took them down to the cellar and hung them up there in the most secret corner to dry. Only sluts dried them out on the balcony.)

  You can pack your things again, they said.

  Their tone of voice said: We’re not used to rubbish like this.

  Then they gave me a piece of paper with a signature and a stamp to show that I was a “guest of the Führer,” and could pass.

  Right, gnädiges Fräulein, said the men, holding the door open for me and carrying my case back to the car. The piece of paper seemed to have transformed me. I was now the Führer’s guest.

  My escorts dropped me off at the foot of the steps up to the Berghof, putting my case down beside me. I carried it up the steps. I was exhausted and breathless when I finally stood at the door to Hitler’s house.

  I didn’t know that once you have got to that point, the doors of a tyrant’s castle will open of themselves to let you in. I was looking for something in the nature of a doorbell, some means of drawing attention to myself, but the guards had phoned up long ago to say I was on the way, and now, when the door opened, I felt sure that Eva had been looking out for me, waiting impatiently.

  But for the second time I was disappointed to find it wasn’t Eva who welcomed me in. It was the housekeeper, wife of the domestic manager of the Berghof. She greeted me with the routine, casual friendliness of a well-trained hotel manageress.

  When I asked where Eva was, she told me the gnädiges Fraülein had gone for a swim in the Königssee. She sent her love and would be back soon.

  A housemaid took my case, and I was led up a broad, carpeted wooden staircase to the second floor.

  The guestroom was like something out of a middle-class Alpine hotel. Geraniums at the windows. The famous view of the Watzmann.

  I’ve never reached the end of any journey without feeling disappointment. It’s a kind of reflex: I didn’t want to come here at all! An elemental homesickness, a black melancholy overcomes me on my arrival in hotel bedrooms and holiday cottages. The place may be delightful, luxurious, wonderful, the sea may be blue and the beach white, yet I still feel like going straight home. Very likely the dominant, home-loving part of me is simply rejecting having a change of scene forced on it. It hates traveling, but as soon as it realizes its protests are useless it starts making itself at home in this strange place. Since we’ve fetched up here, it says, we might as well build ourselves some huts. Come on, settle in. Put some roots down. Imagine you’ll be staying here forever. This is your table, your bed, your chair. Your view out of the window forever and ever.

  But I hadn’t reached that point on this first afternoon, and if I was ever disappointed by arriving at my journey’s end it was then, at the Berghof. I thought of nothing but whether to leave again at once, or maybe spend one night in this admittedly hospitable bed, soft as down, fragrant, made up with white sheets. Just a single night.

  I wasn’t as familiar as I am now with my impulse to take flight when I reach the end of a journey. When you’re young you take your own moods at face value. Tomorrow morning, I thought. I’ll get those men to drive me back to Munich tomorrow. Or I’ll take a train. Or I’ll walk. I must be able to get away from here again somehow. I was already practicing the anecdotal version of my experiences that I would give when I was home.

  Guess where I slept the night!

  But then Eva arrived.

  Oh, you’re crying, she said. Why are you crying?

  I’m so glad to see you, I said.

  She was even more beautiful than ever. Even blonder, livelier, more high-spirited than I remembered her. She was bronzed by the sun.

  The fashion for a suntan was just coming in at the time. When our mothers were young they still valued a delicate, white skin. But we felt ourselves the daughters of a new age, daughters of the light and the earth, breaking out of the constraints of city life, capable, strong, close to nature. Turning to the sun. Eva was a trendsetter of this new image. Trends are always thought up by people with the time for them. The image of the strong, healthy woman, efficient at work and a good mother, is best embodied by women with no children and no job. By women like Eva. She had all the time in the world for sun-bathing and sport.

  You’re so pale, little one, she said. You need fresh air! Sunlight! You look like such a little stay-at-home! Is it really true you’re studying physics? Oh, you clever girl! You must tell me all about yourself.

  She kept saying that: Tell me about yourself! I want to know every single little thing about you! But whenever I started talking, something would distract her. There was a will-o’-the-wisp restlessness about her. Her mind was always in flight, looking for something new, something different. As if it were deadly dangerous to linger more than a few seconds on any one subject. I never knew anyone with such a craving for novelty. And never again did I know anyone with such restless eyes.

  She had something of the look of a bullfighter, seeming to test the wind all the time, as if to counter the danger that something might escape her. When something did claim her attention for a second or so, her glance went straight to it. She opened her eyes wide, stared as if she intended to penetrate the object with her piercing gaze. It was meant to be comical, but wasn’t. I didn’t remember her being like that before, and all of a sudden I felt afraid she might have gone mad. I dismissed the idea, but it kept coming back to me over the next few months. It kept coming back until at last it stayed for good.

  Good heavens! she cried, that piercing gaze on my feet. For a moment she really did look like a bullfighter raising both spears to the level of his head and taking aim before attacking. Good heavens, what on earth are you wearing? Platform soles! Take those shoes off this minute, little one! Nobody, but nobody wears platform soles anymore! What’s more, they make you almost as tall as me, and that will never do!

  I was very proud of my shoes, which my father had brought back for me from Budapest. They really did make me taller, and at the time I still hated being short. At the age of twenty, I still hoped I might grow a little more. I liked those shoes, and up to that moment I’d thought them acceptably elegant, too. But how could I contradict Eva in matters of fashion?

  She pressed a bell beside my bed, and gave orders to the maid who soon appeared. The girl came back with a laundry basket full of shoes and put it down in front of me—it held boots, sandals, pumps, oxfords, ankle boots, all very smart but much too small for me.

  Oh, don’t worry, said Eva, you’ll walk them in. Now then, which do you like?

  Perhaps I ought to say how valuable shoes were to us at that time, in the sixth year of the war. It was ages since shoes had been available at all. Not to us women, anyway, unimportant to the war effort as we were. We went on wearing our prewar shoes, and as my feet had grown a size larger since the beginning of the war that meant I usually wore a pair of my mother’s old flatties. I’d been saving my platform-soled sandals specially for this visit.

  Here, have these, said Eva, handing me a pair of low-heeled white pumps. At least I could just about squeeze into them.

  And I was far too exhausted that first evening to contradict. We went for a walk to the Tea House on the projecting crag of the Mooslahner Kopf, a few hundred meters from the Berghof. I didn’t yet know that we would be taking this walk every evening, and every evening Eva would announce it with the same brisk enthusiasm:

  I tell you what, little one! Let’s go to the Mooslahner Kopf! There’s a simply wonderful view from there, especially in weather like this (sunset, rain, snow, the alpenglow, or whatever . . .). You’ve never seen anything like it!

  And every evening she would change her clothes first. Always a new outfit for a familiar old habit. Beautiful coats and skirts with just a touch of traditional Bavarian costume about them. Braid, staghorn buttons, collars lined with flowered fabric. And dirndls, full, drawn in at the waist, the bodice with a deep décolleté. Or smart plain gray suits cleverly set off
by pastel-colored blouses. She ordered them from the most expensive tailors in Berlin. Imagine what a Jena country bumpkin I looked beside my cousin!

  That first evening I walked my feet sore in her shoes, which were much too small. I had raw blisters on my heels and bleeding toes.

  Next morning I leave my room in my mother’s oxfords, themselves slightly too large for me. The house seems deserted, quiet. I don’t know where I’m supposed to go. My footsteps, which I can’t muffle because my heels hurt so bad, echo like an intruder’s as I go downstairs.

  On the second floor I suddenly find myself outside a room with double doors standing wide open. I go in, with a sense that this is forbidden territory. A massive desk dominates the room, the walls are paneled in wood, with bookshelves built into them. Gilt-framed paintings hang between the windows. I don’t know who the painters are, but I suspect these are artistic treasures. There’s a corner seat with red-and-green-flowered upholstery. A round faience stove on the inside wall. Hitler has a very comfortable place here. This must be his study. The books piled on the edges of the desk, presumably reference works, suggest that a scholar who usually works here has gone away but will soon be back. There are vases of carnations. The whole Berghof is in suspended animation, ready to welcome back its owner. Soon this will seem as natural to me as it does to everyone else. It’s as if he might suddenly spring out of the ground.

  All at once the telephone on Hitler’s desk rings.

  Should I pick up the phone? Is it for me?

  There’s something urgent, something imperious about the sound.

  Suppose it’s Stalin? Or Churchill? Or Roosevelt. Shouldn’t someone tell them Hitler isn’t at home?

  As I move toward it, I hear the footsteps of someone entering the room behind me, making haste to the telephone.