The weather’s getting hotter and hotter. The days are long. They’re stretching out, and so am I because I’m growing. It will soon be summer. I can’t wait for our vacation at Uncle Heinrich’s house, where I hope we can visit the Mad King’s castle. Rosie’s been packing our bags since the start of the week. She folds the laundry and arranges it in piles that she separates and puts away, some in the drawers of the dresser in my bedroom, others in the suitcases and trunks waiting side by side in the corridor, lined up like soldiers. Mama checks, rummages, dismantles the piles of clothes, puts them together again, unfolds things and folds them back up, hesitates, chooses, changes her mind. And when Papa comes home from work in the evening, she discusses the packing with him, asking his opinion. I get the feeling he answers without really hearing her. Like when I’m asleep and Mama or Rosie talks to me: I can hear their voices but I keep on dreaming.
I saw Uncle Heinrich park under my window this morning. The car door opened, he stepped out and lit a cigarette, watching the building opposite the whole time. The lights were on upstairs in Hitler’s house. But the sun was already up. I could see a shadow moving behind the gray curtains. I wondered whether Hitler could see me and whether he knew I was going away on vacation. The doorbell startled me, and suddenly Uncle Heinrich was there. I ran to kiss him. Everyone was in a good mood. We took the suitcases downstairs and tied them to the roof-rack. Rosie, who isn’t coming on vacation with us, kissed me and hugged me so tightly I couldn’t breathe. Everyone laughed at me and, as usual, I blushed. Then we set off.
We’ve been traveling for hours. Uncle Heinrich is telling us that Richard Strauss, whom he works for, is writing an opera that will be called Arabella. I know who Richard Strauss is. There’s a piece I know because Mama sings it to me, Salome. One evening she performed the “Dance of the Seven Veils” when she was dressed up as a princess for a masked ball. She promised me that when I’m a big boy we’ll go to see it at the opera, next to Hitler’s house. They’re all smoking in the car and it makes me feel sick. Uncle Heinrich is saying Richard Strauss loves money and has a little palace in the mountains, at Garmisch in the Alps, looking out over the Zugspitze.
“That old lunatic is utterly tireless,” Uncle Heinrich says. “When he’s not composing, he has a constant stream of family coming and going, musicians come to stay in his vast villa, and he sings and plays the piano for them, and he also loves conducting other people’s operas, Mozart’s Così fan tutte and Wagner’s Tristan. He’s like a metronome, unstoppable, right hand in the air, baton extended, left hand in his pocket. Never seen anything like it. At sixty-five he has more energy than his singers. He goes skating sometimes when the lakes freeze over. He’s a forbidding-looking man but you should see him playing skat! There’s no holding him!”
Mama explains that skat’s a card game.
“And what are his political leanings?” my father asks.
“He’s certainly not a Nazi,” Uncle Heinrich replies. “In fact, his son Franz has just married the ravishing Alice Grab, who, like us, my dear brother-in-law, is a noble descendant of Abraham. She’s the daughter of Emanuel von Grab, a Czech industrialist and an old friend.”
“Jews, Nazis…can’t you talk about something else, for goodness’ sake!” Mama pleads irritably. “You’ll frighten Edgar.”
I fall asleep. I’m not frightened. In my dream I’m the Red Baron. I’m Manfred von Richthofen, a flying ace. I’m flying a three-winged Fokker Dr1. My plane is red with a large German cross painted on the tail. I’ve already shot down eighty enemy planes. I attack the French, pursue the English and drive off the Canadians and Americans. I pepper them with machine-gun fire. My enemies’ planes nose-dive and crash, and the pilots parachute down. I chase the RAF ace Arthur Roy Brown through the clouds. With every victory I draw a cross on my cockpit. I’m wearing a leather helmet and big goggles. I fly over the Alps and Richard Strauss’s house. A little girl performs the “Dance of the Seven Veils” for me. She sings. I can smell her perfume, it’s blue, I hear a horn sounding, and I’m not sure whether I’m still dreaming.
I wake in a large wood-paneled bedroom. I get up and open the curtains. There’s a big gray lake and the sky’s gray too, with a hint of pink on the horizon mingling with the color of the lake. In the mountains in the distance I see a castle with towers tapering up into the clouds. The Mad King’s castle. I realize we must have arrived at Uncle Heinrich’s house. I open the bedroom door and go downstairs. Uncle Heinrich is in the large drawing room, wearing a silk dressing gown over a striped shirt and a beautiful scarf. I can hear music, and spot the gramophone. It’s a contraption with a sort of trumpet, or rather a kind of large shell, and the music comes out of there. A black record is spinning on the turntable. The “Dance of the Seven Veils” again. I recognize it immediately and Uncle Heinrich says I have a musical ear. Mama and Papa come in and I run to kiss them. Uncle Heinrich tells them I have a gift for music and I can tell they’re pleased. But I’d rather be a flying ace.
We’ve been on vacation for a long time now. I’d like to stay here my whole life. It’s better than Munich. We play a board game called the Game of the Goose in the large drawing room. We play croquet in the garden, using mallets to strike different-colored wooden balls that roll through arches planted in the soft grass. We look for four-leaf clovers. One afternoon my mother read my palm and told me I’d live to at least a hundred. That would be 2024. We go down to the lake every day to swim, except I don’t because I can’t swim yet. I’m frightened I’ll drown like the Mad King. I stay playing with my little boats on the shore, and Mama watches me, then we go back up to the house for lunch. In the afternoon I have to take a nap. I’m not sleepy, I lie there thinking, looking at the things in my bedroom, wondering whether they can see me, then I fall asleep. My father and Uncle Heinrich work in Munich during the week and join us on Friday. They never stop talking about the Nazis and our neighbor Hitler, and I’ve had enough of it, it’s no fun. And Mama definitely agrees with me about that!
That vacation was a long time ago. I’m a big boy now. When we came home Rosie’s eyes were red and shiny. I thought she was going to cry. I told her not to be sad, and she said she had tears in her eyes because she was happy to see me again. I was touched.
The next day I noticed Herr Hitler was there. He’d come home too. Did he go for a vacation with his family? Did they have picnics?
The telephone didn’t stop ringing all day. Papa came home from the office early with a pile of newspapers under his arm. Uncle Heinrich stopped by the house, looking worried. I didn’t dare say hello to him because he looked so sad. In the evening, after I’d had my bath and my supper, Papa explained that Uncle Heinrich had lost almost all his money, and would have to sell the villa by the lake. I thought about our swimming trips, the gramophone, our games of croquet, the Mad King’s castle, four-leaf clovers and my wood-paneled bedroom. I asked Papa whether it was something to do with this “Black Thursday” I’d heard Uncle Heinrich talking about.
“Yes,” he said with a smile. “That’s what they’re calling yesterday because it was like a day of mourning for people who lost all their savings, sometimes their homes.”
I asked whether we had been ruined. He kissed me and laughed: their wealth was their little boy, and no one could take that away from them.
* * *
*Sturmabteilung: a paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party.
While the Goddess of Suffering took me in her arms, often threatening to crush me, my will to resistance grew, and in the end this will was victorious.
I owe it to that period that I grew hard and am still capable of being hard. And even more, I exalt it for tearing me away from the hollowness of comfortable life; for drawing the mother’s darling out of his soft downy bed and giving him “Dame Care” for a new mother; for hurling me, despite all resistance, into a world of misery and poverty, thus making me acquainted with those for whom I was later to fight.
—ADOLF HITLER, MEIN KAMPF, ON HI
S TROUBLES AS A YOUNG ARTIST IN VIENNA
Snowflakes have been dancing in the sky since this morning. We can’t see the building opposite. Santa Claus came a few days ago. I guess he came in his sleigh. He left me masses of presents again, but I’m bored because I’m all alone. I wish I had a real brother or sister at home with me every day. My sister, Dorle, came for Christmas. She and her mother came from Berlin by train. I watched from my window as they stepped out of the taxi laden with suitcases and presents. I thought the presents must be for me. Strangely, by the time they reached our floor the presents had disappeared! I was disappointed although I tried not to show it. Luckily we all had lots of presents under the tree the next morning, and some of them looked peculiarly like the parcels I’d seen Dorle and her mother carrying the day before.
Dorle’s mother is called Lilly. I call her Aunt Lilly. She and my mother have fun teasing Papa. They say he’s lazy and scatterbrained and doesn’t know how to dress. It makes him laugh. Me too. We all had lunch together, then Aunt Lilly left and Dorle unpacked her bags in my bedroom. I love it when she lives at our house. I watched everything. She had a bag full of books with no pictures as well as magazines.
During her stay Dorle liked to read the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, which my father keeps protectively in his study. I looked through it with her and asked questions. I wasn’t allowed to touch the pages in case I dirtied them or tore them, so she turned them. She knew all the movie actresses. Marlene Dietrich was the most beautiful. Dorle dressed up as her sometimes: she put on lipstick, a hat of my father’s, a little jacket and no pants. Just panty hose. She sang, “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf liebe eingestellt” (I’m made for love from head to toe).
Dorle read me an article about the Vampire of Düsseldorf, a criminal who prowls the city by night and kills children. He offers them candy and carries them away, and their bodies are found hidden later. He’s killed dozens of children. He stabs them and strangles them, and the police haven’t managed to find him. No one knows who he is. The people of Düsseldorf all suspect their neighbors and won’t let their children out. Even in Munich people are advised to keep an eye on their little ones. Mama scolded Dorle and told me not to believe such stories. But I know newspapers tell the truth and Dorle never lies. Now I’m frightened the Vampire of Düsseldorf will come to Munich.
Dorle showed me photographs of beggars but I didn’t recognize the ones who came to our house. She told me there were even more of them in Berlin, especially since Black Thursday. On one page I recognized our neighbor Adolf Hitler. I pointed through the window to show Dorle where he lives.
Dorle read magazines to me all week. She told me she’d like to be an actress and live in America, in Hollywood. She told me about her favorite films. When she was little like me, her favorite actor was Charlie Chaplin. She showed me a picture. I thought he looked like Hitler. They have the same little mustache. In the photo, Charlie Chaplin was dressed as a beggar. He was sitting beside a child my age. Dorle told me that in Hollywood you could be an actor from as young as five, and that this child actor, Jackie Coogan, was richer than his parents by the time he was seven. I’ll be seven soon myself. Then she showed me Mickey Mouse, a comic strip. Mickey is a black and white mouse who stands on his hind legs, walks down the street and goes to the movies. Everything in the book is in color except for Mickey Mouse, as if the cartoonist forgot to color him in. I asked my mother to take me to the movies. I want to see Charlie Chaplin. I want to watch cartoons. I want to see Mickey Mouse. She promised me we’d go soon.
When we went for our walk yesterday we passed his house. Dorle wanted to see the name Adolf Hitler on the door. The guard stared at her insistently; Rosie took her hand and hurried away. Farther up the street she told Dorle she shouldn’t have looked.
“It’s not forbidden,” Dorle replied tartly. “And anyway, his name isn’t written on the door. It says ‘Winter,’ not ‘Hitler’!”
It was the first time I’d seen a child talk back to an adult. Rosie didn’t say anything. The guard was watching us. Rosie turned away and we walked on. It was cold, it was still snowing. Passersby walked carefully so as not to fall.
We were meeting my father at the Fürstenhof Café. We waited for the tram on the other side of the street, under the watchful eye of the man outside Hitler’s house. I was relieved to hear the sound of wheels on the metal rails snaking along the cobbled street. The driver rang his bell. We stepped back to let passengers off, and then we climbed in. Everyone in the car was smoking, and we huddled in tight. Dorle wanted to sit on one of the black benches but a stern-faced Rosie told her to leave the seats for grown-ups.
We alighted just opposite the café. It has a huge room and I’m always afraid I’ll be trodden underfoot there. The waiters run backward and forward with trays laden with pints of beer, holding them above their heads. My father was sitting at the back, with his brother the veteran, my soldier uncle, Berthold. Papa told Rosie she could go for a little walk, and he ordered us our favorite snack. Dorle and I always have the same thing: chocolate ice cream smothered with whipped cream and molten chocolate. Dorle launched straight into telling them that Hitler had a false name on his door. But Papa knew that already.
“Yes, yes, I know,” he said. “It’s his cleaner’s name. He’s worried people will come and bother him. He’s a coward.”
“But, Luidgie,” said Uncle Berthold, “you know perfectly well he lived through the trenches like me. Why would he be afraid of his own shadow? He just doesn’t want to be pestered by all those women who keep pursuing him.”
“Oh yes, the trenches! He moans about them all the way through his tedious doorstop, Mein Kampf. He wails. Laments. Cries. Shrieks. You can picture him rolling on the floor like a baby as he writes the book. He resents the whole world, he really does. The French, the generals, his corporal, the Jews, the rats…Besides, he doesn’t make any distinction between those last two categories—because, oh yes, according to him, anyone who practices the Jewish religion is quite simply a different species. A subspecies, he says. A bit like ‘vermin,’ to use one of his writerly terms. Charming, wouldn’t you say? And what do we do to vermin? I’ll leave you to work that out.”
“Yes, Hitler’s a bastard. But the world’s in a mess, you know. What will happen here? What will become of us? What future is there for Germany? We need to do something!”
“But can’t you see what Hitler’s like?” my father retorts. “He hates the Jews, he hates the whole world, and so do all his cronies. He’s disturbed, bitter, paranoid, violent and—most of all—dangerous. Did you know Lion’s publishing a book about him in a few days’ time? Success, it charts the rise of a wretch just like him. It’s very funny.
“He describes him as a sort of hysteric who rants nineteen to the dozen. In his last book, Jud Süß, Lion was already talking about upstarts in the past who whipped up the crowds to massacre our ancestors in our country. It’s the only book beating Mein Kampf hands down in terms of sales. Success should make even more of a stir because it so obviously caricatures him. Lion wants Hitler’s readers to see that this failed artist is really a usurper and, more importantly, a very dangerous character who’s dragging us back several centuries.”
“Oh, come on, Lion’s got too much imagination,” Berthold protested. “This isn’t the Middle Ages, after all. People travel. You can get to Rome or Paris overnight. Even Hitler wasn’t born in a cave. He admires Wagner and he’s read the great philosophers. Actually, I thought you knew him when you were younger…”
“Knew? That’s a strong word. He hung around the area. We came across each other. But we never exchanged a word. He was the one who came to say hello to Lion and Bertolt Brecht at the Café Stefanie one time. That was before he got so frenzied, before he tried his putsch in 1924. In fact, the only good thing about that putsch business was that he lost sixteen of his henchmen and was condemned to six years in prison. To think he was let out on parole after just nine months, what a blunder! As if someon
e like that could be taken at their word. Did you know he pledged to keep out of politics? If his sentence had been properly implemented he wouldn’t have come out of prison till last year. We need only have applied the law and we’d have been rid of him and his party. Now he knows how to go about it. He doesn’t put himself in the firing line anymore. He stays on the brink of legitimacy, hiding behind his curtains in his apartment. He’s even taken to looking like his new targets, the lesser bourgeoisie who are so terrified of losing everything and finding themselves on the street. He’s just as bourgeois as the next man. He’s just like me. Like any of us. He lives in the same neighborhood, wears the same suits and listens to the same music. But that’s only his outward appearance, a disguise. In the shadows his sidekicks have changed none of their methods or their objectives. Hitler’s our neighbor but he’s a dangerous man. Do you know he now likes to be called the ‘King of Munich’?”
“Well, his party’s nothing now,” Berthold said dismissively. “They’ll be slaughtered at the elections.”
“Do you think? I can tell you plenty of people go past here in the street every day saluting him with their outstretched arms, like gladiators before a Roman emperor. We can see him from our drawing room, watching from his balcony, admiring this crowd of thugs prostrating themselves before him and cheering him like some demigod. He’s perfectly capable of getting everyone on the planet to wear togas again and bring back slavery. He must dream about that! And so must his troops! I see them getting drunk every evening in brasseries, around the back of where we live, celebrating their patron saint’s famous failed putsch, toasting their sixteen martyrs and dreaming of success next time. Anyone would think we’ve rewound the clock several centuries. Anyone would think they were tribes of warriors, savages and sadists. The SA dress up like bogus soldiers and terrorize people in the street, men, women, children, the elderly. They wander about, often drunk, bellowing that they’re pure-blooded superhumans, only ever operating in groups, herds, packs. Oh, if they take power, like their barbaric acolytes in Italy, I wouldn’t give our dear democracy long, nor our wonderful republic, which, alas, lets these carnivores roam free. Yes, they’re preparing for carnage.”
Hitler, My Neighbor Page 3