So she sets off on the last stage with them. The path now leads almost smoothly over a narrow ridge from which steep scree slopes drop almost vertically on both sides.
This is really beautiful, says Mama Fegelein, this wonderful view of the Hohen Tauern with the Dachstein range in the distance. Striding out with a firm step, she looks all around them, pointing out the rugged beauty of the Leoganger and Loferer Steinberge.
There, look! she cries. Just look at that! Isn’t it grand?
Fantastic, murmurs the young woman, wonderful, as she keeps her gaze fixed, with superhuman watchfulness, on the path in front of her. She is concentrating entirely on staying alive, while Mama Fegelein is obviously one of those people who never suffer from vertigo at all. She dwells securely in the middle of her rounded corporeality, steering it skillfully and purposefully through life, her lack of imagination never allowing her to think how far you could fall.
Careful, their companion sometimes says as he goes ahead of them.
Then there will be a few loose stones on the path, or with increasing frequency it shows little fissures, cracks reaching into the middle of it, small ravines over which they must step and which go all the way down to the infernal chasms below.
All her life she will dream of this climb, will walk that path above the abyss, ahead of her the back of a man she does not know but who nonetheless provides her with protection and support, the only protection and support she has. And behind her someone else will be walking, someone pushing her and urging her on, preventing her from turning back. In these dreams she will suffer a terrible sense of vertigo, a perception of a danger that is also a temptation, and while she follows the dark back the word Obersturmbannführer will take shape in her dreams, a monstrous word, a word full of dark violence, full of lurking danger. The name for a mysterious, disguised, faceless masculinity, which she is following.
In the mountains, evening, although predictable, always comes as an unpleasant surprise. It falls quickly. A shadow races up the mountain slopes from valley to summit, and like the finger of God it changes what it finds, as if someone had said: Let there be darkness.
Like all lowlanders, she has always thought the climb down from an ascent must be child’s play, something that would come of itself, you would simply have to let yourself go downhill along the path without making any effort. Like all lowlanders, she is obliged to discover that this is not the case. All the same, she thinks someone might have warned her in advance.
Oh, my dear, says Mama Fegelein, surely you don’t seriously want to go back today? We’re nearly at the hut. We’ll stay the night there.
This is not the back of a horse off which you can slip and land on the other side, this is the top of the Hundstein, and the young woman realizes that she is going to spend the night in a mountain hut with these two strangers.
They are the only climbers out today. They find the key to the hut, and their companion lights a fire on the hearth. Until now she has avoided addressing him by his rank, as is usual down in the valley. Now, to her surprise, she discovers that Mama Fegelein calls him Hans. A relation, perhaps? Only now does the familiarity of the two with each other strike her, a familiarity in which she feels she would like to be included. She is too tired to be as watchful as she was in the morning. Up here, after all, they are a kind of mountaineering team, relying on one another, alone beneath the stars like the remnants of a tribe that has fled from war in the valleys to safety among the mountain peaks.
And enthusiasm takes hold of the young woman, too, an ecstatic sense of being so close to the sky. The deceptive purity in which you feel removed from everything that would soil you and drag you down. Now, sitting outside the hut, eating their provisions and watching the night as it falls fast, she cannot maintain her sulkiness and reserve.
Mama Fegelein finds some gentian spirit in the hut. They all drink from the same bottle, an act that brings them closer to one another. The Obersturmbannführer talks about his childhood on the banks of a river. Stories of wild duck, beaver lodges, and perch-fishing. Not a word about Vilna, Kiev, and Minsk. You travel light in the mountains. And anyway, the war doesn’t reach up here.
Isn’t it beautiful, children? says Mama Fegelein. She has the world below her at her disposal, as if it were her front garden. She has the night at her disposal, too, and the stars and the firmament.
It is early August, a night of shooting stars. The little miracle of light comes with increasing frequency. Far out in space worlds are in movement, opportunities are open.
Are you making a wish? asks Mama Fegelein.
Yes, says the young woman.
What are you wishing for? asks the Obersturmbannführer.
A husband, says Mama Fegelein.
She says it in a voice that suggests she is the authorized recipient of wishes made when you see a shooting star. As if it depended on her alone whether they were granted.
A lovely girl like you must take good care of herself, she says. It must be the right man. Watch out for yourself! Don’t throw yourself away, my child! As a German woman your responsibility is not just to yourself but to our country, you see.
Then she withdraws for the night, irrevocably, as firmly as she has spoken.
Good-night, children.
Rather bemused, the young woman is left with the Obersturmbannführer under the starry night sky. Then she, too, rises to her feet.
There is one room containing four beds in the hut, and one single bedroom. The single bedroom is for the older lady, as befits her status. The young woman lies down on the bed next to the wall, in silence. She keeps on everything she is wearing except her boots, and pulls the dark woolen blanket up to her chin. A faint red light comes from the hearth in the main room, where the fire is still burning.
Would you leave the door open, please, she says to the man who follows her into the room. It’s so cold in here.
She shuts her eyes, with her eyes closed she hears the click of his belt buckle, a sound so familiar to many women of her time, but this is the first time she has heard it, soon after that comes the noise as it falls to the floor, the hollow thud of the boots, the sound of fabric against fabric, the rustling of a straw mattress as a male body lies down on it. She smells the strange odor of a strange man near her, an odor that also rises from the straw and the blanket of the bed on which she herself is lying. She holds her breath, hears him breathing all the louder beside her. She tries to form a shelter around her out of her held breath, her stillness, her closed eyes, she tries to simulate absence.
But she can do nothing about the presence of the man near her.
A kind of breathing duel develops. The quieter and more shallow her own breath, the more audible and deeper is his. And there is the whispering and rustling of the straw in the mattress on which he is lying. She knows that a single long-drawn breath, the faintest movement from her could decide the duel in his favor. Any rustling of the straw beneath her would deliver her up to him.
It is a long struggle. Her muscles are cramped, the blood pulses in her with muffled beats echoing so noisily between her temples that she cannot believe they are not audible outside her body as well. Sometimes she thinks she hears him hold his breath and listen quietly to see if she will give herself away. Then his breath, the movement beside her that she dreads, start again.
She tries all night not to go to sleep, but her wakefulness keeps slipping into a dream, a dream the subject of which is that she mustn’t go to sleep, a curious, light hovering above herself as she lies on her bed, sleeping deeply, exhausted after the unaccustomed climb.
When she wakes up she is startled by the beauty of the world outside. Mountain peaks tinged with rosy pink in the morning sun, the sky changing from the blue of night to the blue of day, one last star fading as it stands above the mountains. The bed beside hers is empty, the blanket neatly folded, as if no one had spent the night there.
She goes out, washes her face in a channel of water that now, in high summer, contain
s only a trickle running into a hollow beside the hut.
No one around.
Soon afterward, Mama Fegelein comes out of the hut.
Oh, you young people, she says. Up already?
The young woman walks around behind the hut and goes a little way along a path through the scree and mountain thistles. With amazement, she drinks in the overwhelming purity of the world up here, the magic of a perfectly white light that seems to emerge from the rock itself. Nothing is dirty when you have made your way so far up. Around a bend, a black figure appears in the white light, the man beside whom she spent the night. She cannot avoid him, and does not want to go back. So she goes toward him, just as she would rather go toward a danger than turn her back to it.
Good morning, says the Obersturmbannführer.
Good morning, she says.
I’ve been over to the lake, he says. Did you know there’s a little lake in the cirque up here?
No, she says.
Would you like to see it? It’s not far from here.
Is there anything but water to see? she asks.
Take a look for yourself, he says.
Around the next bend she sees the lake a little way below the path. It is deep black in color, a black slowly tending toward green as she looks down on it, an ever-open eye gazing straight at the sky above.
Then she sees that she is alone. Her companion is climbing a scree slope to the left of the path. She goes down to the bank of the lake. She wants just to dip her hand in the water and look into its black and green depths. It is icy cold, much too cold for bathing. As usual, she immediately loses interest in any stretch of water once it turns out unsuitable for bathing.
As she goes back to the path she realizes, with surprise, that the Obersturmbannführer has begun climbing the rock wall rising above the scree.
She wonders: Does he have a rope?
This is the one thing that, as a lowlander, she knows about mountaineering: You need a rope to climb a vertical rock wall.
Then she takes no more notice of him and goes back to the hut, where Mama Fegelein is already having breakfast.
Do you know where Hans is? she asks her.
See that? says the young woman. That black dot up on the rock face? I think that’s him.
For heaven’s sake! cries Mama Fegelein. Is he out of his mind? She jumps up and runs along the path.
The young woman sits down calmly and eats her breakfast. Bread. Milk. Cheese. A hard-boiled egg from her rucksack. She keeps her eye on the rock wall as if watching some kind of sport that does not interest her, with rules she doesn’t want to understand. She has no idea how she got into this Luis Trenker movie, but at least she is now playing the right part, the part of an observer, and she is relying on the story line that keeps characters alive if they are still needed for the plot, just as she relies on it at the cinema.
Slowly, the black dot moves onward and upward, finally disappearing from her sight, and Mama Fegelein reappears, bosom heaving, struggling for composure.
I can’t understand it, she says. I just can’t understand what’s come over Hans.
When he comes back he places an edelweiss in front of the young woman without a word.
The Führer’s favorite flower! cries Mama Fegelein, quite transported. My dear child, it looks to me as if you’ve made a conquest!
Oh, but how could you run such a risk, how could you be so careless? she adds, turning to him with pretended indignation.
She is captivated, delighted, girlishly flattered, as if it were for her that he had ventured up the rock wall.
Are you cross with me? he asks the young woman.
Let’s go now, she says.
On the way down she is silent, refuses the helping hand reached out to her now and then, and she leaves Schloss Fischhorn that same evening.
She has mislaid the edelweiss on the way down. On purpose? By accident? She is not sure herself. Most things just happen.
LATER, BACK AT THE BERGHOF, I understood what had happened to me. Or rather, I never entirely understood it. It remained mere supposition, and the longer I thought the less sense there seemed to be in it.
Why had Eva sent me away at all?
What was I supposed to be doing at Schloss Fischhorn?
Why was Mama Fegelein so extraordinarily concerned about me as to subject herself to the strain of a climb in the mountains?
When I came back, dropped off by the drivers from the motor pool at the front door of the Berghof, which was opened to me in a moment by one of the housemaids, I was told that my cousin was in her room waiting for me. She had been anxious, and was just telephoning Schloss Fischhorn to find out when I had left.
I could hear her talking through the closed door, and quickly entered the room without knocking, sure she would be relieved at the sight of me.
I heard her saying, in agitation: And suppose she’s pregnant?
Then, suddenly lowering her voice: Well, I must ring off now.
Our conversation on meeting again was dull and meaningless. I told her I was tired after my mountain climb.
Only later in my room did a suspicion occur to me, one that haunted me for the next few days. I tried to suppress it whenever it came into my mind, but suddenly, while reading one of the novellas by Storm I was enjoying at the time, or swimming in the lake, or in the middle of watching one of the films they screened for us in the great hall, I would think of something, something that would not leave me in peace, like a dog pushing its muzzle against you now and then to make sure it is not forgotten. There was something else. And I knew what it was. Eva had been trying to marry me off.
I turned the hypothesis this way and that, tested it against all my experiences, and saw that it made sense. I had been on offer to one of the courtiers.
Poor Eva. She could think of nothing but to weave a little web of relationships and spin herself into it. Since she couldn’t have the big wedding she had longed for herself, was she trying to make up for it with a couple of lesser weddings? Did she perhaps hope Hitler, too, would be caught in her web? Or did she want to consolidate her own position at court independently of him?
It was the only intrigue upon which she ever ventured, her single and fundamentally misconceived attempt to meddle in domestic power politics, marriage being the only means to the end she had in mind. Just as she could think of no other aim for herself but to marry Hitler. No other dream. No other plans. Only this one fixed idea: to be Hitler’s wife.
And she was not even concerned for her position, or the power it would give her, or the wealth she would acquire by the marriage. She wasn’t thinking of any of that. Except perhaps sometimes in weak moments, after suffering a snub, when she was told to use one of the side entrances to the Reich Chancellery while Frau Goebbels swept in at the front in a grand dress, or when she was sent to her room at the Berghof, and looking through the curtains she could see Emmy Göring standing at the top of the steps beside Hitler to receive distinguished guests. At such moments she may perhaps have dreamed of saying to those ladies some day, with a little smile: Oh, my dear, that hat, don’t you think it’s just a bit out of date? We’re wearing those little hats that perch on the side of the head now, don’t you know?
But her imagination would reach no farther when it came to avenging herself for injustices suffered. Her ardent wish to marry Hitler was only loosely connected with a desire for social rehabilitation, it was more of a pipe dream of the definitive, unreserved, great affirmative! Her ardent wish to marry the worst man in the world was romantic through and through.
It was a wish straight out of the movies. It fed on the films we watched. Films by Veit Harlan, Carl Froelich, and the other directors of our collective lifestyle fantasies. They were the masters who taught us the art of love. They had dreamed our dreams before us. We dreamed them again in the directors’ versions every evening at the Berghof.
We were given the list of rolls of film in the Berghof archives at breakfast in the morning. We knew it all b
y heart. Still, we went through it solemnly, often agreeing on the film we would watch that evening only after long discussions.
There were about two hundred films for us to choose from, but we watched only a handful. We always plumped for the same favorite movies, spelling out the same enchanting dreams, when the projectionist arrived in the evening—the only man in civilian clothes I remember seeing there—to roll up the large tapestry in the hall and reveal the screen of Hitler’s private cinema behind it, whereupon he disappeared into the cabin behind the opposite wall, and a bright light would soon shine from its projection window.
I remember the flickering white light, the soft hum of the projector, the first notes of the choruses we heard when the opening credits rolled. I close my eyes. I still remember those films. I remember them frame by frame, take by take, line of dialogue by line of dialogue. I have a small movie house inside me with a Nazi repertory, a cinema that will show me films of love and death night after night if I want.
And yet again I am Kristina Söderbaum. I am a wild creature. Un-tameable. A child-woman. My voice is shrill, high, piercing. I get everything I want, and what isn’t freely given I simply take. Men like me. My childish innocence arouses their protective instincts. I can flirt, but I am not a femme fatale, never that. In the end I make myself rather than them unhappy.
I’m greedy for life. I want all of it. I want it without making compromises, an impossible dream. The child in me can be incredibly happy. I am direct, wildly enthusiastic, vulnerable. I can be radiant with happiness like a match flaring up.
I must hold my heart in place or it will jump out! I cry at the sight of the Hradschin, the river Vltava, the whole city of Prague.
After this scene, obviously, my director will fling his arms around me and praise me for my intensity of expression. In real life he is my husband. He doesn’t ask me to be more withdrawn, more reserved, he encourages me to come out of my shell.
I am not beautiful. It’s just that I’m so intense. There is something strongly muscular, powerful, earthy about me. But you see that only when, at the same time, you realize that I carry the germ of a tragic illness deep inside me, a mortal illness that will afflict me in almost all my films and make me prone to feel a great, all-consuming love.
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