Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  We meet again, he said.

  I saw the look of amusement in Eva’s eyes, and I knew I had blushed.

  Well, well, said her eyes.

  And my nervous system had gone crazy, some kind of uncontrollable signal set my reactions going, my blood pressure shot up, the sensitive vessels just under the skin of my face expanded, filling with the blood that rose inside me in a huge wave and carrying me away with it, washing me up far, far from myself on shores where I was safe and could not be found, while my other self, delivered up, exposed to view, stayed where it was.

  I ought to have told Eva: That’s not it at all. You’re wrong.

  But appearances are always working against those of us who blush easily. It gives us away. And where something appears to be given away, it means that there is something to hide. That’s the dilemma of blushing, and at the same time it’s what sets the blushing signal off.

  May I escort you back to the Berghof? asked the Obersturmbannführer.

  By all means, said Eva, while I returned from the momentary fit of distraction induced by my blushing.

  So the three of us walked out into the starry winter night. Above us rose the vault of the same clear sky that would decide the outcome of Hitler’s Western offensive in the Ardennes: Once the cloud cover that initially favored Operation Autumn Mist had given way to an area of high pressure, the enemy fighter-bombers were able to attack the Panzer divisions moving westward. Eva’s dream of a reunion with Hitler in Berlin in the near future was being crushed at this very moment by Allied bomber formations attacking von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army at Bastogne.

  I don’t remember what we talked about as we walked to the Hintereck above the barracks, the place where all the roads of the Obersalzberg met and radiated out in a star shape, the road to the Kehlstein house, the roads to the residential estates of Klaushöhe and Buchenhöhe, the roads to the private houses of the Göring and Bormann families. We turned left into the road toward the valley, passed the Obersalzberg administrative offices, the building known as the Kindergartenhaus, the former Zum Türken inn, which now accommodated the SS Reich Security Service, and soon afterward we reached the access road to the Berghof. No one had followed us. Our usual companions had obviously been sent off by this higher-ranking officer, countermanding the law that said we must not be left unguarded. I did not yet know exactly what the consequences of this incident would be, and for the time being I registered what was going on with a certain uneasiness. Even unpleasantness begins to become acceptable when you know what it’s about.

  I could have murdered Eva when she asked me, as we came to the flight of steps:

  Well, little one (little one, indeed!), are you coming in?

  Which obliged me to say that I was staying not at the Berghof but in the Tea House on the Mooslahner Kopf.

  Hadn’t I ever spent the evening in the Berghof, then?

  Yes, of course, I said.

  And suddenly I knew what was making me uneasy.

  What? said our escort. All alone in the Tea House on the Mooslahner Kopf? By Jove! he said, an expression that, like many others, has since gone out of fashion. Like “a good sport.” Like “a dashing blade.” Like “amazing.” Like addressing girls as Fräulein. Like speaking of a man as a real pal—all of them terms once loaded with more or less emotional weight, all of them once components of the mental luggage with which we traveled through the Nazi period, a period that is not just part of our political history but also of our minds, a part of our consciousness.

  By Jove, says Obersturmbannführer Hans. Aren’t you afraid of anything at all?

  Now I sense the danger. Someone is on my scent. Someone wants to get on the track of me and my secret.

  But why? he asks. Doesn’t your cousin have enough room for you at the Berghof?

  Here we go.

  Yes, I say. But she doesn’t want me there.

  That’s not true! cries Eva. Her eyes dart fire at me. Don’t you believe her! She’s lying! Ooh, she’s dangerous! You just watch out for her.

  We have reached the steps up to Hitler’s house. The December stars sparkle in the sky above us. Snow crunches underfoot.

  I explain that I spend the mornings studying physics. I like the quiet there, I say. The peace. The lovely view. The whole atmosphere, I say.

  I can sense how unsatisfactory my remarks sound.

  The Obersturmbannführer wants to know more. What exactly am I studying?

  Heisenberg, I say. The physical principles of the quantum theory.

  I say it not without some vanity. Not without a wish to impress him. I want him to respect me. I would like to build a wall around myself too high for him to climb.

  But at the same time I am aware that I’ve already given myself away. It happened so quickly. My most sacred secret, coded in my amateurish way, is already told. I go quite hot with alarm.

  Would you like to come in with us for a moment? I ask.

  I say it to lull any suspicion that I’m hiding anything. Please, it means, take a look around, but take it here. And I say it because I expect that otherwise Eva will say the same thing in the next minute. It’s meant to show that I am just as adult as she is.

  No, thanks very much, he says. Oh no (with a little smile), certainly not.

  I can tell from his tone of voice that I have made a mistake. We quickly say good-bye. This time he salutes me in as military a manner as he does taking his leave of Eva.

  At the top of the steps, still breathless, she snaps at me:

  Are you out of your mind? Did you have to throw yourself at the man’s head like that? He saw us home. That was all. Don’t you know one says good-bye to men outside the front door?

  I know I have committed a faux pas. It’s a recurrent experience of mine. As a woman, I have gone too far and I regret it. My regret makes itself felt as shame, remorse, a sense of humiliation. I am surrounded by invisible walls against which I bump, injuring myself, until I have understood that on principle you behave coolly toward men. You are standoffish on principle, you take offense on principle. The rules of courtesy, indeed of common humanity, do not apply to men unless your relationship with them is that of a working assistant. You may also be ministering angels as nurses, and again you have a dispensation from the duty of being standoffish. The way lies open to you there. In hospitals you bend over the feverish, stroke the damp hair back from the brows of groaning men, hear their stammering, their murmured confessions, understand what they are begging for, and say nothing but a soothing “There, there,” or “No, it’s all right”—a world of physical affection surprisingly opening up, a world where the conventions are no longer in force, a subliminal sphere of desperate passions, extravagant dreams, final obsessions, all coming up against only one obstacle, death, in the vicinity of which, like every true passion, they thrive. This was the dark, concealed origin of many postwar liaisons.

  But for me on the Obersalzberg, where my presence was tolerated as the guest of Hitler’s mistress, and she herself was not much more than a tolerated guest, for me there were no dispensations from the convention requiring me to be standoffish. The undefined nature of our position as women in the male-dominated world of the Obersalzberg allowed no deviation, however slight, from the rules of the game. Our proximity to the SS, which saw itself as a kind of male order vowed to the ideal of uncompromising masculinity, made that position precarious. Eva knew it, and relied on my understanding it, too. Her reprimand was well deserved, or anyway so I felt. Among women, it is other women who check that the rules of the game are being kept, and they do not mince their words.

  If you don’t know how to behave here, she said, as the door of the Berghof opened for us, you’d better leave.

  That struck home. I got the message.

  I knew it anyway. Like all young women, I knew it in all its ambiguity. I knew I was attractive. I knew I only had to be around to be sure of the attention of men. Part of them was always intent on me when I entered a room. When I left it. W
hen I was silent. When I laughed. As soon as I opened my eyes I saw theirs turning away in pretended indifference, or not, as the case might be. I knew that, as every young woman knows it. The knowledge of it was expressed not in my consciousness but in the movement with which I put the hair back from my brow, or crossed my legs. It relaxed my hips, spread my fingers, lent my carriage a certain victorious suppleness.

  Much of it was imitation, both conscious and unconscious. I had begun imitating Eva at the age of fourteen, and I was still doing it. Eva herself got it from the films we watched. With every step we took we were Greta Garbo or Lida Baarová, about whose scandalous affair with Goebbels we knew. We were simultaneously lascivious and innocent, a perfect mixture that we Nazi women embodied better than any generation before or after us.

  Eva dreamed of a postwar career as a film actress. What part did she want to play?

  She wanted to be Hitler’s lover in a big Hollywood movie. That was her dream, the utmost to which the former shop-girl aspired in her fantasies. The life of Hitler’s mistress as a screen melodrama. She made no secret of it. She came back to the subject again and again.

  I just hope it doesn’t take us too long to beat the Americans. Don’t you see? she said. Then we won’t just have the Ufa film studios. Hollywood will belong to us. All those studios! Warner Bros., Otto Selznik. Oh, you know what I mean! she said. It was clear to her that these places were the Mount Olympus of the movie world. It was clear to all of us. She just hoped that when the time came she wouldn’t be too old to play herself.

  She had grasped the principle of the reality show at an early date. You play the part of yourself. The idea was that life and movies come to the same thing. The great soap opera of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. She knew it would run and run. She was planning the grand finale, already working on it. It would be a mixture of melodrama and Wagnerian opera.

  When it really happened, she must have been aware that no cameras were running. And yet, and yet . . . I know what she was like. She knew she was being filmed live as she died. She was wearing the long, dark blue taffeta dress she had worn for her wedding shortly before. The setting was right, so was her partner. Filmed live in death. History on the air. She knew it.

  At the very end, then, she got the leading role she had dreamed of in the movie of her life after all. Only it was not the society comedy with just a touch of pathos that she considered her genre. As it happened, she was acting in the drama of the century. A Grand Guignol piece.

  Young as I was, I had chosen her as my instructor, but a dangerous instructor, from whom I learned how to perform effectively while observing the rules of the game.

  Oh yes, we Nazi women knew we were sexy. But we also knew that it was imperative not to know what sex meant. We consistently behaved as if there were no such thing as sex. We never talked about it. Not among women, and certainly not to men. When it happened we abandoned ourselves to it as if to a force of nature at whose existence we had not previously guessed. We acted as if surprised by the desire that came over us, carrying us away, leaving us defenseless. As you may imagine, this was not without its appeal. Not without a certain degree of theatricality that did wonders for our sexual performance.

  We hardly talked at all during sex. It wouldn’t have suited the style of performance that said we were overwhelmed. We closed our eyes. We arched backward. We sighed. We let ourselves slip into a state of reverie that could rise to ecstasy at will. We had to be out of our right minds, because if we had been in them how could we have answered for the fact that we were having sex? This way, however, we knew nothing of what we were doing. To a certain degree we weren’t there at all when we made love.

  I suspect we were delightful lovers. Well, of course, all women are. But when I think of our consistent pretense of innocence, the inner urge to experience ecstasy which was all that helped us to do something so strictly forbidden, without exception, I know we deserved applause.

  Oh, it was a great time for love when love was still forbidden. When it was still something of a dirty secret. That made it all the more compelling. What actually happened was the same as it is today. But what had happened was indescribable. Indescribably filthy. Indescribably wonderful. We lowered our eyes when we met the man with whom we shared such a secret. We blushed to think that he had the same memory of it. We felt bound to him by it, as only an indescribably shameful secret can bind people together. And so dependency, anxiety, susceptibility to blackmail throve along with love. Insincerity was triumphant. Among us women, too.

  With mendacity bordering on self-denial, we maintained our claim to know nothing about it in front of each other. Even Eva, whose bedroom at the Berghof was next to a bathroom that also had a door to Hitler’s bedroom on the other side, a more or less concealed but unambiguous zone of intimacy, would never have mentioned her intimate relationship with the Führer to me. It was not just that it would have been unthinkable for her to hold forth about the details; she did all she could to give the impression that there were none.

  Only once did she ever hint at something, in an entirely incidental manner, which cast a revealing light on her sexual relationship with him and showed it as what it probably was: a perfectly normal if intermittent love affair, presumably monogamous (on Eva’s side anyway). A love affair centering on bed, both frustrated and given new impetus by frequent separations. Nothing else.

  You know, Eva said to me one day when I had severe period pain—menstruation, although an intimate subject, was one that we women did discuss openly at the time—you know, she said, I always feel worse when I’ve put it off.

  Put it off? I said.

  Yes, said Eva. When I’m going to have the curse and the Führer’s coming, I ask the doctor for something to put it off.

  Can you do that? I asked.

  Yes, certainly, said Eva. I can’t recommend it, it’s worse afterward. Still, what wouldn’t one do!

  This was the only risqué remark I ever heard Eva make: Still, what wouldn’t one do! I feel as if it summed up her entire love for Hitler in a nutshell: What wouldn’t one do!

  Otherwise she said nothing on the subject.

  (As for love, Hitler is supposed to have said, I keep a girl in Munich for that kind of thing.)

  It was as simple as that.

  We never discussed love, never. Yet love had us in a stranglehold. And I would never have confided in my cousin, older and more experienced in matters of the heart as she was, when I myself came to feel the power of that stranglehold soon afterward. It’s the way we were.

  WHEN I WENT MY USUAL WAY to the Mooslahner Kopf late that evening, the bag over my shoulder full of bread and cold roast meat, I saw them with a certain sense of relief: my escorts, who emerged out of nowhere as usual and followed me.

  The path to the Tea House had to be shoveled clear of snow every day now. Two men from the work squads were made available for the job, guarded by two more men from the security service.

  We never felt bothered about giving other people extra work. At the time it seemed to me hardly worth a thought. Now, however, I find it incredible that at a time when all hands were allegedly needed, when scarcely anyone who could still move at all was not obliged to do war work, when an exhausted, starving population was being required to make a mighty collective effort, four men were occupied every day in keeping a path at least five hundred meters long free of snow so that a young student could read her textbooks in her favorite place. No one saw anything odd about it.

  Winter is a good time for the hunted, for people who have gone underground. Provided they are in the warm. Winter holds them fast, protects them against their own carelessness, and stops pursuers in their tracks. Once the snow was thick enough, the guards no longer patrolled around the Tea House but only approached along the path, often turning back once they were within sight of it.

  We ourselves were careless, Mikhail and I. He spent more and more time in the rooms above the cellar now. The greatest danger was still the cleaning women. I
t was because of them that he had to spend the afternoons in the cellar. I had told them the cellar door was always locked, and only the security men had the key. I indicated that there was something secret there, and even I was not allowed to go down.

  The cleaning women understood this kind of language very well. There were secrets everywhere on the Obersalzberg. Locked doors. Inaccessible rooms that were presumed to contain important files, valuable treasures, loot taken in war. The whole mountain was a secret. I was a part of it myself. Incomprehensible, mysterious, and inscrutable, at least so far as the reasons for my presence affected the cleaning women.

  Later, when the fortress was laid open, the locked doors blown up, the walls reduced to rubble, all those women from Berchtesgaden and its surroundings were the first to come and gape at what had been concealed from them. It was curiosity rather than greed that drove them here. But when they saw what lay behind the doors, and realized it was not so much mysterious as tempting and valuable, all those stocks so industriously hoarded, the silver, the pictures, the linen, the appurtenances of the powerful, they were quick to seize upon it.

  At the time, however, in that last Nazi winter, they still firmly believed that not every door could be opened. When I think back to it now, it was extraordinarily easy to hide a human being in Hitler’s Tea House, here at the very center of his power, his favorite place; perhaps easier here than anywhere else. It was like wearing the beast of prey’s own skin to prevent it from finding you.

  We were living in a state of temporary security that had a certain sense of comfort about it. When I sat over my books in the morning, with the winter outside and Mikhail inside with me, leaning back against the hearth, squatting on the floor and carving a piece of the wood that I brought him now and then at his request, I sometimes thought this would go on forever.