The Nazi's Wife

by Peter Watson

  “When Hermann delivers, you can choose the names of the pups. Is that fair?”

  “Thank you very much. I can tell you now that Walter will not be one of them. Now good night. One may keep a lady waiting but not a cognac.”

  I looked at my watch: 10:45 and too late to make the second call to Vienna that I had planned. It would have to wait until the next day. There were still some beers left on the table from the afternoon, so I opened one of them, lay on the bed and kicked off my shoes. I picked up the next batch of letters.

  4

  I read a few letters but nothing very significant happened for a while. I did learn that Konstanze’s favorite character in the Bible was Paul and her favorite story the one about his conversion. Again, I believe she found parallels with her own situation; in a way she was being converted also, from not loving Rudolf to loving him. And I found out that she had a sweet tooth for chocolate as well as nougat. These things meant little to me at the time; it was only later that I was able to make crucial use of facts like these.

  The next thing of real importance to be reported in the letters occurred in early 1938, when Konstanze found that she was pregnant. The child was very welcome, not least among their friends, who, I gathered, found a great deal of amusement in the couple’s behavior during Konstanze’s confinement. Instead of spending the usual amount of time that ordinary parents devote to the names they will give to their son or daughter, the von Zells expended their energy trying to decide what instrument he or she should play. Konstanze favored the oboe, whose creamy murmur probably satisfied some final vestige of the melancholic hidden inside her. Rudi preferred the cello, which, he said forthrightly in his letters, offered greater satisfaction, being a sensual instrument to play, using most of the body, with a broad range and producing the most “composed” of tones. That was the word he had used and, later, I was to pick it out as the word which best described his wife. Composed, Rudolf said in one of his lyrical sections, meant the best possible combination of independence and understanding for others. And that was why I applied it to Konstanze. But I am running ahead.

  Before Konstanze could give birth, their happy period of anticipation was roughly disturbed. Rudolf was promoted again, to full colonel. This meant a large pay raise but, more important, it also followed that he was admitted to an inner circle of men with great influence. It was 1938 and the world was preparing for war.

  He had to leave Munich, and his pregnant wife, for Berlin. Someone on Martin Bormann’s staff, an old friend of Rudolf’s from Worms, had recommended him. It meant an exciting life for Rudolf: power, prestige, fame even, if Germany were to win the coming war. But it also meant of course that he had to embrace the aims and ideals, if you can call them that, of the Nazi Party.

  Again, I had to reconstruct all this from later letters. This part was particularly difficult since Konstanze and Rudolf never discussed politics in their letters so I never had any real idea what sort of Nazi Rudolf was. I never knew whether he was an enthusiastic brute, someone who ran with the crowd, or a reluctant convert, though, I suppose, as a colonel, he couldn’t have been that.

  In the later letters Konstanze was also to describe their rending farewell at Munich’s hauptbahnhof. They had gifts for each other. She had bought him a new biography of Schubert; he had saved and secretly bought her a bracelet, tiny diamonds set in an ivory band, to go with the brooch his mother had given her. By this time, too, they had begun their practice of listening to concerts together on the radio and they promised each other they would continue to do so, each Thursday and Sunday, as a way of being together, even though Munich was nearly a thousand kilometers from Berlin.

  And so Rudolf left. Three weeks later Germany annexed Austria.

  With Konstanze separated from Rudi, pregnant, and the political situation constantly deteriorating, it was no surprise to find that the letters started up again.

  Konstanze’s letters were not so long now, compared with those she had written to Bruno, and they were less self-indulgent. Her sense of the tragic was absent. In one way, however, the letters were just as unreal—they had a pact never to mention the war. It was prompted by Konstanze but Rudolf didn’t need much persuading; it was something they both wanted. Whatever it meant, they agreed to keep the war and Nazism out of their private life.

  Konstanze wrote every week and so did Rudolf. I was surprised to find that his were handwritten, not dictated or typed. And I watched with interest as his style developed: stilted at first and not at all intimate; but, with Konstanze’s example, this undemonstrative German soldier blossomed to become in time more oblique, more lyrical.

  In one letter that I remember vividly Rudolf described the parts of his wife’s body that he missed the most. This is of course precisely the sort of letter that I should never have read. But I did.

  Stanzl, dearest … [He always started his letters differently, that was another original touch which I liked and admired.]

  It is 2:00 A.M. and I am having to snatch a few moments to write while I can. We are all busy, bobbing in and out of our offices just like those moorhens we watched on our first walk in Bernkastel. Anyone would think there was a war on.

  But busyness is all on the outside—what is going on inside my head is what counts. And my head cannot stop thinking about your body, swelling now with a little soul inside, someone who will grow up in a greater Germany, or else in an unthinkable wasteland.

  I picture you lying in bed, perhaps uncomfortable now, not knowing which way to hold yourself. And I miss you. You won’t know this yet, for I do not think I have ever told you, but since our first trip on the Danube, I have had my favorite places on your body. Just as when we were on our honeymoon, and you preferred Blois to Saumur, Sancerre to Quincy (or was it the other way around?), so there are parts of you that I prefer. Not that I loathe the others, of course, simply that some are what we would label here “For my eyes only.”

  One you have not even glimpsed, save perhaps in a mirror, is the deep, shapely runnel at the base of your back, the most sunken spinal column I have ever seen, deeper than I thought a spine ever could be, until I saw yours. It is more beautiful than anything I could find on the nudes in the Alta Pinakothek, which, as you know, are all I have to compare you with, not being a widely experienced man.

  Second, I miss your ankles—yes, don’t laugh. Women underrate ankles, I think. A woman who is glamorous, who has the kind of cheekbones you see on models, who has a good figure and the right sort of posture, is spoiled totally if her ankles are too thick or too thin. And the worst of it is—there is nothing to be done about it. A brassiere can help her figure; makeup can improve her skin and totally transform her eyes; the right shoes may—just—alter her overall proportions. But the ankles are there for all to see and cannot be changed.

  Third, I miss that horrible scar at the top of your thigh. Only a delightful tomboy who climbed trees to steal fruit, or got herself chased by a farmer because she had frightened his geese and then fell over a wire fence, could get a scar like that. Perhaps you have never noticed, but sometimes, when we make love, or rather before we make love, I touch your scar in the dark. When I do that I feel very tender toward you but sad, in a way, that I didn’t know you then, when, almost certainly, you were even lovelier than you are now. If we could have been lovers then, how much less time we would have wasted.

  I must go, but one last thing. You know what I think of A.H., but one thing I do agree with him about is the Bruckner center at Linz. In case I haven’t told you, Hitler wants to build a Bruckner hall on the Danube because B was an organist near Linz for ages and wrote most of his symphonies there. Rather like Bayreuth and Wagner. It’s a marvelous idea and it reminds me that there is a performance of B’s Mass, in E, being broadcast on Sunday. I shall listen here in Berlin. I now have a radio in my office. If you were to listen, I should feel very close to you.

  My love to you and a small prayer for the soul we and God are creating inside you. R.

&
nbsp; Rudolf, it appeared, managed to get away from Berlin every six weeks or so for a long weekend, when he would spend the time with Konstanze in Munich. Despite the war the couple were very happy. Each was now fulfilled by the other, complete and unambitious for anything, or anyone, else. As Konstanze became more knowledgeable about wine, the language of the wine snobs provided them with much amusement. For instance, when Rudolf was unusually pompous in one of his letters, or just plain wrong about something, she would refer to him as her little Goldtröpchen, a wine which, she wrote, was a bit like a Zurich banker, “safe but dull.” If she was coquettish, or a shade too persnickety in her letters, Rudolf would tell her to be more careful or she would go the way of Brunellesco, an Italian concoction which should not be touched for fifty years.

  And Rudi took up the piano. Which meant that, from then on, they started to occasionally enclose music with their letters and he would report progress on what he could play.

  The baby arrived. It was a boy and there were no serious complications or worrying delay. In the weeks that followed, both Konstanze and Rudolf appeared extravagantly, prodigiously happy, and for ages talk of the baby, its personality and its progress, took up nearly all of the ink in their correspondence. Rudolf went home immediately after the birth on special leave and accompanied by a magnum of champagne from Bormann himself. Konstanze was already back on her feet by the time he arrived so they left the infant with Rudolf’s mother, who was in Munich to visit her grandchild, and motored to the Isar to open the champagne there.

  I skipped across most of this domestic chatter, except for one point that did claim my attention.

  I had almost forgotten the existence of Bruno by this point, but, when it came to the christening of their son, he was given the names Dieter Anton Bruno von Zell. Dieter had been Rudolf’s father’s name, Anton was for Bruckner, and Bruno was for—Bruno.

  I didn’t know whether to feel touched by this or vaguely disturbed. I had assumed that by now Konstanze had put the pilot behind her, but here she was naming her child after him. Rudolf, as far as I could make out, never knew the real reason why she named their boy Bruno and I concluded that Konstanze always kept the existence and the fate of the pilot a secret from her husband.

  On the other hand, it was about this time that Konstanze told Rudolf that she had finally come to love him. It must have been some time in 1940 or thereabouts. The phony war, as it was called in Europe, when war had been declared but hostilities had not started in earnest, was over and the battle of Britain was just beginning. It was a very hectic time for Rudolf and, I noticed from the dates on the letters, he was not writing as regularly as he had been. Perhaps that was the first time Konstanze realized how much she depended on Rudolf emotionally, how much she liked him, how supportive of her he was.

  All sorts of things were probably going on inside her head. It occurred to me that the war may have reawakened in her some of her old tragic self-consciousness—her letters did get a shade indulgent, if not yet melancholic. Later, it also crossed my mind that naming her son after Bruno might have been the act that finally laid his memory to rest. Knowing Konstanze as I now felt I did, I thought that she might have harbored some need to pay a final tribute to him and giving his name to her son was that tribute. Bruno would live on, she had restored him to life after having had a hand in his death. And, once it was done, she could forget him and get on with the business of learning to love Rudolf.

  Later, in 1941, they visited the Rhône, then in Vichy France. In 1942 they went to Prague and traveled down the Elbe; also in that year they took in the Garonne and the canal du midi. Finally, in 1943 they visited Arezzo and followed the Arno to Florence and Pisa.

  With prodigious calmness, they kept up their letters, their concert-listening, their music-swapping. I found myself, not for the first time, envying them. True, in 1943, Konstanze complained that she was seeing less and less of Rudolf, but that was the only shadow.

  And that changed, or appeared to, late in the same year when Rudolf was transferred to Berchtesgaden. This was where Hitler’s own retreat was located, where he would sometimes spend his weekends, so the transfer did not mean that Rudolf was in any way demoted. Quite the contrary. I got the impression he had been sent because he was a man to be trusted outside Berlin, away from the entourage around the Führer.

  Rudolf was put in charge of the arrangements for the Führermuseum, which Hitler planned for Linz. As part of this, he also had to help arrange the administration of the salt mine at Alt Aussee in Austria, where all the so-called liberated art, from museums in France and Italy, and from the great Jewish collections of Paris, Vienna or Siena, was to be hidden until after the war.

  It was about this time that the couple found a house at Mondsee, on the edge of an enchanting small lake just outside of Salzburg in Austria. Konstanze had given up her job when Dieter was born and was delighted with the move to the country both for the boy’s sake; and her own. Also, she would be near Rudolf. I wasn’t so sure that he had bought the house simply for the convenience of his wife and child. I suspected that early in the game von Zell had begun to think that the war might go against Germany and that, afterward, living in Austria would be better than living in Germany. But nothing was ever said in the letters.

  Whatever the reason, things continued to go well for Rudolf and Konstanze after the move. He was able to get home every weekend and they would walk in the mountains and explore the Salzach River, not the least of whose attractions were the waterfalls at Krimml, which Konstanze once described as “crowded with light.”

  At this time, when they were seeing a lot of each other, relatively speaking, Konstanze took up cooking more seriously and took advantage also of the space they had in Mondsee to make a kitchen garden. They resurrected their Munich concept of music room cum wine cellar. Another advantage of Mondsee, so I learned, was the village church, which had an impressive organ, and the family became a familiar sight on Sundays.

  The love between them by now seemed to be fairly equal. Konstanze had at last “caught up.” Her letters to Rudi were very affectionate and sentimental. She would remind him of any anniversary to do with Dieter—when he had cut his first tooth, for instance, or taken his first steps. She even remembered Bormann’s birthday for Rudolf.

  They had, with enviable skill, transferred their happiness from Munich to Mondsee, and so it was ironic that no sooner had they settled into their new life than the Allies invaded France, soon to be followed by the push north, from Africa into Italy. The final squeeze had begun.

  The letter-writing continued, less frequently perhaps, but if so not by much. Shorter letters, but no less loving. In fact, the turning of the tide in military terms had mixed consequences for the von Zells. It meant that they saw less of each other, since Rudi was so busy, but they could look forward also to a time when the war would be over, when Rudolf could leave the Army and they could be completely on their own again.

  By now, I judged, the tables had been turned and Konstanze was, if anything, more in love with Rudi than he was with her. To prove it, the less they saw of each other, the more she took care to make her letters intimate, to show him how much she missed him. Dieter had developed a touch of TB and a slight problem with his eyes but nonetheless had expressed a wish to learn the piano! And so, Konstanze wrote, there would soon be three pianists in the family. Not even Schubert wrote pieces for six hands.

  Also, Konstanze’s letters took on a definite erotic flavor. In no way pornographic but merely more explicit in her tender expressions of longing. This may have been triggered by the increasingly bleak news about the conduct of the war, meaning that the sense of impermanence at last got to her. I don’t know. I’m not sure either whether I should have read those erotic letters of hers. But I did.

  One nickname she sometimes used for Rudi was “Musketeer,” which she thought had a proud romantic ring to it. I can remember at least one letter of this period which began like that.

  Dear Mad Musketeer,


  Dieter is asleep, more snow has fallen and everything is quiet. I listened to the concert tonight as, I hope, did you. Bruckner was never lovelier. Now I am alone, with just one light on in the whole house, so I may see to write to you. The light throws a yellow beam through the window onto the smooth snow, white and untouched, like the skin on my belly.

  I wonder why we have never made love in the snow. I laugh as I write this. I am sure it would be very uncomfortable. But wouldn’t it be lovely to be outside in the fresh air, surrounded by it, and warm? Do you remember the evening by the Elbe two years ago? There was no snow but it was very cold and our breath was like stabs of steam. The war will end soon and there will be snow every year. We have time.

  Do you know how I miss you, my darling? My prayers, tonight and every night, are for you and our dear son.

  I kiss you and put out the light. K.

  By Christmas 1944 the letters finally started to show signs of change. Rudolf’s got shorter and more irregular. Eventually he said he was returning her letters because, if there was a collapse, he didn’t know what would happen or how safe he would be.

  And that explained how Konstanze came to be in possession of the whole three-way correspondence.

  When the collapse did come and Rudolf disappeared, the letters stopped entirely for a while. Then something interesting happened. Just as she had done with Bruno, Konstanze took to writing letters but did not post them. What did that mean? I asked myself. Could it be that Rudolf was, after all, dead? Surely there would have been acknowledgment of the fact somewhere in the letters. No, he wasn’t dead.

  I examined these letters carefully. And, on inspection, I could see that they were not at all like her last letters had been to Bruno—they were more chatty, less tragic. She wrote about music, their son, about wine and their kitchen garden, and developments at the church in the village, where she was now deputy organist. As I read these letters I began to realize what was going on. No place names, other than those in the immediate vicinity of Mondsee, were ever mentioned. There was no reference to the future; everything was in the past tense. But, in fact, the letters of this period were written almost as a diary, as a record, a reminder of what took place. She continued to record Dieter’s progress, with his handwriting, his awareness of wildlife, the friends he had made. The fact that his TB got better but never disappeared entirely. Konstanze even included photographs to go with the chronology. And she included details of who had been born in the village, who had been married, whose funerals she had played at. She enclosed little snippets from the newspaper—where the fishing was particularly good on the lake, which stretches of the Salzach looked like they were becoming polluted, which of the locals was in favor of the new road planned to link Mondsee and Salzburg and which ones were against it. The politics of the local chamber of commerce.