Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  I did see him again. He was there, too. He was one of those capable of still believing, to the very end, that something can be saved. The kind of men who supervise their own ruin with the same circumspection, the same diligence, they once used in the service of a terrible power.

  The victors need such men. They let them continue operating a little longer, watch them directing the work of dissolution with practiced hands, and then arrest them.

  At such a place as this the triumph of the victors looks like an act of refined courtesy. It is conducted in the form of conversations on the terrace, where champagne and biscuits are served. Think of Göring after his departure from Schloss Fischhorn, on the balcony of a Kitzbühel hotel, laughing, champagne glass in hand, surrounded by American generals. . . .

  I knew a mountain hut, and spent a few days there entirely alone. Then it suddenly filled up with men and women who had exchanged their wristwatches, fur coats, and rings for lederhosen, dirndls, and Alpine jackets: mountain farmers and farmers’ wives rather conspicuously speaking standard High German. Mountain huts were highly desirable temporary residences then.

  I spent some time on a farm in Thumersbach on the eastern side of the Zeller See. I worked in the stables. This was when I bartered a nightdress of Eva’s for a packet of cigarettes. I crumbled up the tobacco and steeped it in water. When I had laid a boiling hot hot-water bottle on my stomach, along with an old heater that I had left switched on for a while first, I drank the brown liquid to the dregs. I knew that if this didn’t work I would have to die. But it worked.

  I would never have told you about that, Father, not while you were alive, and I tell you now only to explain why I didn’t come home sooner, in time to see you again. I still don’t know if I was really pregnant or whether the horrors of our downfall had upset my menstrual cycle, in the same way as some dreadful event can make the heartbeat falter.

  This was the time when I saw my lover again. I call him that, Father, although I know the word would not please you. But I could never bring myself to call him by his name.

  Once, in a bookshop, I picked up a volume entitled Biographical Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. I opened it very quickly, as you might open a forbidden book, and looked to see if his name was there. I was greatly relieved to find that it wasn’t. Not that it made any difference. I remember the cover of the book. It was black. And I thought of those stupid old sayings about black books, and about a golden, invisible, celestial book of accounts in which the balance of good and evil is drawn up. It’s a naive idea, but hard to refute. So there was this black book, available on sale in any bookshop . . .

  When I saw him again he was sitting by the roadside. They had let the prisoners keep their uniforms, but removed the signs of rank. A lieutenant strode up and down in front of them, smoking. There were about fifteen of them, former SS men, probably the last to be taken away from Schloss Fischhorn.

  My lover looked strangely bored as he was being taken away. Very likely it was the expression he had practiced for this situation. It did not allow him to look up and take notice of his surroundings, or he would have seen me.

  Perhaps he did see me. Perhaps I, too, had that deliberately bored expression on my face. You don’t have to tell the whole truth to the very end.

  A GI with the safety catch off his pistol stood behind the prisoners, along with two armed young men wearing the leather jackets of German fighter pilots and American peaked caps. I knew one of them. A young Ukrainian who had worked on the Obersalzberg. A boy, almost a child still. Crazy with fear, with hunger, with homesickness. With hatred for us.

  I was surprised to see him. I had thought he would be well on his way back to his native land. But obviously someone had told him that the Russians were there now, and had also told him what they did to men returning from Germany. And perhaps the lure of a gun had been too tempting for him. The gun and the power it gave him over his former tormentors.

  Why am I telling you all this, Father? Because that was the end of the war for me: an army truck stopping on the other side of the road. The lieutenant spitting out his cigarette and treading it into the dust. The men seated there rising at his command, getting into line and crossing the road, where they climb up into the truck one by one. My lover getting in last. The Ukrainian’s pistol pushing against his back. The black fabric of his uniform wrinkling where the muzzle of the gun prods him rather more firmly than is permitted. His failing to turn to look at me as he gets into the truck. The way he lowers himself down inside the wall of the truck with the same rigid, bored expression. The way it all takes longer than necessary, and they wait, for no good reason, before driving the prisoners away. The two boys placing themselves at the very back of the truck. The GI putting the tarpaulin up. The Ukrainian suddenly turning and looking me in the face. Briefly showing me his pistol, showing me his pride, showing a contempt that includes me, too. Intentionally letting me know that he is a man now. And I myself understand that from now on I would be afraid of him. The truck driving off, enveloping me in a cloud of golden dust. And my own relief at knowing that I need never see either of them again, realizing that it is all over.

  For each of us there was this moment of knowing that it was over. It was different for everyone, unique, a moment that could not be relived. Millions of untold stories of the end of the war. Each of us was alone in experiencing it, just as we are alone when we wake up in the morning. Defenseless, vulnerable, and blinking, the world still upside down. Then comes a rapid, desperate attempt to find your way into a new world, a new day. The shameful, irritating, incredulous memory of your dream, something monstrous and profoundly wrong from which you have just emerged. Something incredible. Something that demands suppression. Something that it is entirely impossible to speak, because every dream is different when you have finished dreaming it, entirely different; is experienced in quite a different way once you can describe it. Indeed, the most precise language in which a dream is narrated suddenly means something quite different when it is told. It is something that cannot really be told, something that may never be spoken. And the familiar and commonplace, which came so naturally when we were dreaming it—was so near, so close, as close as we can be only to ourselves—this familiar world to which a part of us would like to return, the tired, sleeping part of us that is unwilling to be surprised by day, suddenly shows itself in all its obscene horror.

  I wonder whether there was such an awakening for Eva. A moment when she understood who it was beside whom she was sitting on the sofa when she died, and whose hand she tried to grasp as she bit unhesitatingly into the capsule, hurrying on ahead rather overassiduously, in her usual way.

  She was carefully groomed and made up. And if she still felt any regret it will have been to know that there would be no funeral procession for her, no lying in state, no farewell except for the immediate burning of their bodies in the Reich Chancellery garden.

  Did she guess at any of the huge relief felt in the bunker as soon as they had retired to Hitler’s rooms after what was unmistakably a farewell ceremony? Did she know anything about the party already in progress in the other part of the bunker? Did she know that they were dancing there?

  Death by cyanide is instant. An extreme sensation of burning lasting a second. Did she have time to understand anything else? Was it time enough? Or did she reach eternity like that, in her blue wedding dress and understanding nothing? Was the fact that she understood nothing to the very last her share in eternal damnation?

  We all have our dead, with whom we are fated to talk. To whom we still owe explanations, and of whom we would like to know one last thing. You are one of them for me, Father, and Eva is another.

  Once, years ago in Munich, I saw an old bag lady. It was summer, but she was wearing a fur coat and pulling a handcart full of old rags behind her. The first thing I noticed about her was her yellowed old sealskin coat. These days you can pick something of that sort up off a tip. In our time it was still a genuine fashion item. It probably rep
resented something like home to her, her only asylum.

  When she raised her head I suddenly saw in her a kind of similarity to myself. She looked like a bad, blurred copy of me. The incarnation of all the misery I have carefully steered clear of and avoided in my life. Like one of the many variants of my own existence that I have not lived—like the worst of them.

  As I took my next step I suddenly realized that Eva as an old woman would have looked like that. My likeness to her had misled me, the likeness between us that people so often pointed out. It was the most wretched, failed variant of Eva imaginable who was walking toward me then.

  I must have stopped and stared at her. I saw how unwilling she was to meet my glance, I saw the lifting of the brows, the touchy, incalculable anger of an old alcoholic, the sudden bullfighter look flaring up in her eyes.

  Go away, will you, go away, she said. You don’t know me.

  She used the familiar du pronoun.

  And I felt my betrayal as I turned away and walked on. I felt her contempt, the contempt of an outcast for those on the inside, of one who has become conspicuous for those who look normal. No one sees through us as well as the wretched. No one knows us better than they do. You could be me, says their glance, if we have not yet looked away. You could be me, and you know it, it says. They know all about us. They know everything we have done to keep from being like them.

  I didn’t think for a moment that she was really Eva. And yet I was as shocked as if she had been. The dead don’t die again. The past does not come to pass once more, and our letters to you who are dead come to no ending.

  At some point I stopped wondering why she had said: You don’t know me.

  Oughtn’t she to have said: I don’t know you?

  Or, We don’t know each other?

  And why did she say du to me? Is that just the language of the streets? And ought I to have followed her?

  I have stopped thinking about it. I must stop thinking about it.

  EVA’S COUSIN

  SIBYLLE KNAUSS

  Translated by Anthea Bell

  A READER’S GUIDE

  A CONVERSATION WITH SIBYLLE KNAUSS

  Why did Gertrude Weisker decide to tell you her story, after fifty years of telling no one?

  SK: This is a question she could answer better than me. I can only guess. She read an interview with me in the German magazine Der Spiegel , in which I said I would like to write something about Eva Braun. She called me, saying “I could tell you a lot about her, I’m her cousin.” We met, and I think she felt she could trust me. Maybe she also felt that the time had come to break her silence about those long-ago Nazi days. The situation has changed indeed in Germany. Strange to say, old people now begin to talk about their memories of before 1945, and the media seem interested, there are a lot of TV shows and books about World War II, more than ever before. Not to forget that those who have got memories of those times are becoming really old nowadays and soon will be gone.

  What did you learn about the nature of confession when she told you her story? Why do people confess to others?

  SK: Our bad memories are as much a part of our lives as the good ones are, as is the evil that we became a part of. Denying it means to deny a part of yourself. Perhaps growing older and approaching the end of life increases the longing to feel complete, to look back on a complete biography. I think this is how Gertrude Weisker must have felt, when she told me about her stay at Hitler’s home in 1944.

  As she told you her story, you came to occupy a curious position, as witness, confessor, accomplice, and writer. Did moral judgment on your part ever enter into this position? If so, how did you deal with your judgments through these various roles you played?

  SK: It was a curious position. But I did not feel like a confessor or an accomplice. I felt only like a writer on the track of a fascinating story. And a writer is never interested in moral judgment, only in coming close to understanding human acts that are hard to understand. Besides, I remember being a twenty-year-old girl and how stupid I was and politically unsuspecting. I do not expect a young woman in 1944 to be more judicious.

  Why did you decide to write a novel instead of a biography? Was this a decision you reached with Gertrude Weisker, or did she tell you her story and leave it up to you to decide how it would be recorded?

  SK: I never thought about writing anything but a novel. First, I am a novelist and deeply convinced that writing fiction is a way to get to a truth that can never be found at the surface of so-called reality. Second, what Gertrude told me were memories from a strictly personal point of view. A lot of privacy, a lot of intimacy, atmosphere, details. No matters of great historical concern. Those are all well known. This was the subject of a narrative: two young ladies in Hitler’s living room, waiting for him to call. Gertrude knew from the beginning that I was going to write a novel, and she agreed.

  In your dedication, you write, “This is as true as the facts on which it is based—and as fictional as any novel.” What does that mean? Where do fiction and fact converge, and where do they split apart? Does the writer’s responsibility to his/her audience change depending on whether or not he/she is writing fiction or nonfiction?

  SK: If you write a novel, you mix up fiction and reality to create something new, which neither reader nor the author herself can separate into parts like right or wrong, truth or fantasy. It has its own truth. The reader who feels: Yes. That’s what she is acting like. That’s what she feels like. Can’t be anything else—he has got it. When I read about my book in The New York Times, and they called it “a novel that feels like the truth,” it meant so much to me. It meant that somebody had read it and sensed the fictional truth, although knowing that facts may have been different. For example, Gertrude Weisker did not save the life of a Ukrainian laborer. But I have been told the story of this boy by someone else, who experienced the tortures of being captured and brought as a slave laborer to Germany, though not to Obersalzberg. Besides, it is of no use for readers to know such things. All that counts is the fictional truth: feeling what it feels like for someone who goes through such experiences.

  Marlene’s fear of being caught—both while at the Berchtesgaden and for the rest of her life after the war—pulses at the heart of your novel. In a way, she defines herself in opposition to the person who may, one day, discover the truth. How, then, does the reader of the novel relate to Marlene’s silence? What role does the reader play in her confession, and what is the writer’s contribution to shaping that role?

  SK: You know, Marlene in the book is a fictional person. Of course she borrows some features and characteristics from my informant and shares details of her biography. But also, as any novelist does, I gave her traits of my own and of some other people. This fictional arrangement includes the idea of the secret confession of what she had experienced as a close relative of Eva Braun. The more secret and private confessions are, the more they are meant to be read by many readers. That is one of the games authors and readers are used to playing with each other.

  Whose stories constitute history? Hitler’s story, of power and military command and ultimate defeat, or Gertrude’s story, the life of a young German woman during dark times? Or is history some combination of both types?

  SK: Of course it is. And that is why there is no history without literature. Historiography is only one part of the historical tradition. How much do we know about Nazi times when we know everything about Hitler’s crimes or the progress of World War II? I want to know how they dressed and danced and had love affairs and what it felt like to be in a bunker during bomb attacks, as well as what it felt like to miss people in the neighborhood who happened to be Jews. (“We always were so hungry. We only cared about what we would eat next,” my mother used to say.)

  How does Gertrude’s story contribute to our understanding of World War II?

  SK: It seems to me I answered this question by answering the former one.

  By writing Eva’s Cousin, you chose to tackle serious
subject matter that is still, in many ways, taboo, and, at the least, deeply political. Can you imagine any Germans reacting negatively to your depictions of this pocket of Germany during the war? How aware were you of such possible reactions while you were writing the novel, and was this a very different sort of experience from writing your previous novels?

  SK: I always tried to investigate unknown territories of consciousness while writing my books. But this was a special thing. I knew I would have to tackle taboos, writing about the perpetrators of Nazi crimes instead of the victims and by saying “we,” “we Nazis.” You know, there are many books in postwar German literature dealing with the subject of Nazi crimes, but they never say “we,” they say “them,” that those who did it were not aware of their crimes. But, you see, my parents happened to be Nazis, just as nearly everybody was, so why not say “we Nazis” when dealing with our past and when trying to tell one of the millions of stories that remain untold? No, there were no negative reactions to the book in Germany. Most readers liked it, and many of them liked it very much. But some did not know exactly if they were allowed to like it. You understand? We Germans are still very cautious, when talking about those times. I am not.

  Marlene’s life at Berchtesgaden evokes difficult questions of complicity, guilt, naïveté, and forgiveness. Do you see her story as unique, or do you see her story as emblematic of Germany as a whole during the war? Please explain your reasons.

  SK: When Marlene came to visit her cousin Eva at Berchtesgaden, she felt like an extraordinary person, keen on visiting Hitler’s home, pleased by the attention of the servants, proud to be one of the happy few of Nazi society to be admitted to the center of Nazi power, which was also the center of Nazi elegance, Nazi lifestyle, the very heart of it. Meanwhile, everywhere else, the world was perishing. She was excited enough to be ashamed of it for the rest of her life. She did not commit any crime herself but had been so eager to be part of a criminal world. Thus her story is unique and emblematic as well. Most of the Germans were eager to participate in the crimes of the century. I think it was not the feeling of guilt that closed their mouths for such a long time afterward but shame. Not everybody succeeded in approaching the heart of Nazism as closely as Marlene did. But they all had been too close to it.