Hitler, My Neighbor

by Edgar Feuchtwanger

  The lights are all on across the street too. Who’s he with? Maybe he’s alone, because he has no family. Or with the housekeeper, Frau Winter, whose name appears next to the doorbell instead of his. His SS guards are doing their usual rounds. I recognize every one of them. The full moon picks out their black uniforms, the gleaming leather of their visors and boots, the glossy paintwork of their cars. They melt into the darkness with its smattering of stars. Shadows hover behind the curtains on the second floor, in his home, in that fateful apartment where, in 1931, his niece Angela Raubal shot herself through the heart with a revolver. There used to be all sorts of rumors about the Führer’s love affairs, and foreign journalists chronicled his life in papers that were by then banned in Germany. I still remember my parents talking about it in the evenings when they thought I was asleep. I think this niece, who was nicknamed “Geli,” was his girlfriend. She was his half sister’s daughter, and he hasn’t lived with another woman since. They say the girl’s room has been left just as it was the day she died. They also say she didn’t call him “Mein Führer” because that wasn’t yet his title. What did she call him? “Mein Onkel” perhaps, “Uncle Adolf” or maybe “Alf,” a diminutive of “Adolf”…I don’t know. People say he loved a girl called Jenny, the sister of one of his drivers, then Erna, a friend’s sister. He allegedly courted Henny, the daughter of his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, whose house I know; then Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law, Winifred. He may have contemplated a relationship with the Englishwoman Unity Freeman-Mitford. But in the end all these women married other men.

  When I was little my cousins told me they’d seen one of his women friends naked at the window of his apartment. She was his photographer’s assistant, still the same photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, who displays images of the Führer in his shop window. Then there was Dorle’s idol, Leni Riefenstahl, who tired of him—or perhaps he was the one who left her, when he realized one of her grandmothers had Jewish blood. Despite his successes with women, he still lives alone. And yet, every Wednesday, a bevy of twenty girls comes to have lunch with him. They’re sometimes seen arriving in traditional costume. Rumor has it that the girls sit at one table and he at another, eating his potatoes and vegetables alone. At concerts a spare seat is always left next to him. Hitler claims he has only one partner: Germany.

  He must be alone this evening, then. His window glows at the end of the street. Does he have a Christmas tree? We don’t.

  All week Mama’s been leafing through magazines, looking at advertisements that rave about the delights of palaces on the Italian Riviera, in San Remo or Campione, or on Lake Lugano. One has its own casino where you can play roulette, baccarat or thirty and forty. In the ballroom they put on operas, plays, reviews, symphonies, ballets, attractions and receptions. It has an eighteen-hole golf course. The advertisement says it is “Unique in Europe for the sheer quality of its club, restaurant and entertainment.” My mother lingers greedily over a photo of a young woman trying out an “inimitable” lipstick. I myself would love to have a mechanical pencil or a fountain pen where you can see the ink level and with a little reserve tank, or a “Kodatoy” for projecting real movies at home. If my parents had driving licenses we could buy a car, a racing car! On a salt lake in an American desert, a British driver called Sir Malcolm Campbell is hoping to break the 300 miles-per-hour barrier at the wheel of a car named Blue Bird. It will have a Rolls-Royce engine and could reach speeds of 350 miles per hour. I’d so love to see that machine!

  It’s Christmas tomorrow but I may not have any presents. Dorle’s had her baby now and won’t be with us this year. Our au pair has gone to have dinner with her fiancé’s parents. The three of us are here alone. We eat in silence, the only sounds the clink of cutlery on our plates and noises reaching us from outside. Mama has forbidden listening to the radio during meals and Papa doesn’t want us to talk politics. Which means no one says anything. I’d like to go to bed. Since my bar mitzvah I feel there’s no sense in celebrating Christmas: it’s not a religious festival, nor a traditional one because we Jews are no longer seen as part of the German nation. What’s the point in pretending?

  December 25 was just an ordinary day, with no presents. Our days are dreary and insipid. Any pleasure in life has evaporated. No one talks to anyone else in the building now. I’ve stopped going for tea with Funk, and he’s stopped coming up to our apartment. Aunt Bobbie hasn’t been to see us for a long time. There are rumors circulating, they reach us like the icy January wind that sneaks under the window.

  In Dachau camp, men are penned together by category. The Communists on one side, Catholics on the other, homosexuals in one bunkhouse, Gypsies and Romanies in another. Jews who complain are arrested. Some people say they’re killed, others that they’re not treated as badly as all that. Whom to believe?

  “And anyway,” I overhear an old lady telling her friend in the street, “Hitler’s been in prison himself! And he didn’t come off all that badly: he said it was better than university and he wrote Mein Kampf. So then? Why make such a fuss about everything?”

  My parents argue and keep changing their minds. One day one of them says we should leave and it doesn’t matter where we go, then the very next day they agree there’s nowhere we’d be any happier than here. One hundred and twenty thousand Jews, that’s one in five, have already left Germany. My mother wants to go to France or England.

  “A Jew can rise up to be prime minister there,” she says. “And twenty-five thousand of us have already settled there.”

  “My darling,” my father replies flatly, “most of them left without visas, terrified they’d be interned, Lion wrote and told me about it. And you must never idealize anything, you know that. Don’t forget that modern anti-Semitism was born in those countries: in France it was an unstable character called Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, then in England it was another madman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain. He’s the one who came up with the theory of the Aryan race. Adolf Hitler took his inspiration from him, conveniently forgetting that—according to his beloved Chamberlain—the Germans weren’t actually part of it.”

  My father would rather immigrate to the United States.

  “Fifteen thousand of our people have just emigrated there,” he adds to bolster his argument. “It now has more Jews than any other country in the world: four and a half million. They say one in every four New Yorkers is Jewish.”

  My father doesn’t know how to get visas for us. As he does every evening, he goes back through the list of countries where we could live.

  “In Poland, where there are three million Jews, that’s ten percent of the population, they’re bullied the whole time. There are only two hundred thousand in Austria but it’s much worse there. In Russia there are as many as two million seven hundred thousand and they’re being massacred—and it’s a Communist country. In Spain there are four thousand, but there’s a civil war going on.”

  My parents agree that the worst place would be Palestine. They read all sorts of publications that print our people’s statistics: there are 15,800,000 Jews in the world; 38.6 percent work in commerce, 36.4 percent in industry, 6.3 percent exercise a profession, 4 percent work in agriculture, 2 percent in domestic service, and 12.7 percent live off private incomes, are pensioners or in care.

  “How on earth can you trust figures like that!” my father cries.

  And nothing happens. I go to school and come home. Our neighbor keeps up his peregrinations: at home one day, in Berlin the next, then in his chalet in the Alps, the Eagle’s Nest. We hear him shrieking on the radio every evening. I sometimes come across him in the morning. As our world gradually shrinks, his expands. And I keep escaping inside my own head, reading, dreaming, traveling in my thoughts.

  The House of German Art, opposite the office of the dentist we share with Hitler, was completed last year, while I was in Berlin. Since then it has exhibited paintings by artists accused of perverting the noble German spirit with their “degenerate art.” My mother has b
een to see them, knowing she’ll never see such a concentration of paintings again. She described the line of people waiting that stretched the full length of the colossal building, and she told me about works by Dadaists, cubists, expressionists, fauvists, impressionists, surrealists and futurists, original works by artists I’d so often heard my parents discussing, Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.

  That same week our city celebrated the annual Spring Festival. Vintage floats moved in a procession through the streets, and girls in vestal virgins’ tunics scattered flower petals on the wind. Mama and I watched them go by, leaning on the windowsill, half hidden behind the awnings we put up every year for the Festival of German Art. Young men dressed as Roman citizens, wearing Spartan-style sandals, walked soundlessly in the gentle warmth of early summer. A pastel blue sky tended toward light pink. In my mind this memory has become confused with my mother’s descriptions of the paintings she saw. On the other side of the street, at the balcony of the building opposite, where the outstretched arms of those moving past converged, I saw our neighbor’s silhouette.

  Although he’s Austrian by birth, Adolf Hitler is running Germany. He grew up in the country and then studied fine art in Vienna, a place I’ve never visited. He wanted to be a painter, like the duke whose paintings adorned every wall of Aunt Bobbie’s apartment. I remember the duke allowing me to add to one of them with a paintbrush loaded with paint. He encouraged me to dip it into the color of my choice and put a smudge onto the impressionist work he was painting. Like the duke, and like all “degenerate” artists, Hitler enjoyed painting landscapes. He made artist friends in Vienna, some of them of Jewish faith. It was still in Vienna, after his mother died—he had already lost his father—that he experienced his first failures: he was poor and his work had little success. My father ascribes the reason for his violence to these humiliations. That would make Vienna the true cradle of Nazism. And the pro-Hitler crowds there are even more fanatical than here. For several days now, everyone’s been talking about Austria: my classmates, radio presenters, the newspapers that salesmen sell with loud cries in the street, my parents at home and passengers on the tram…world leaders are talking about it too.

  When I arrived home today, my father was chatting with a stranger in his study. They turned around when I opened the door.

  “My son,” Papa said, without introducing the other man. He was a very tall man and struck me as particularly elegant. His long slender hands rested on his long, crossed legs.

  “Hitler wants Austria and Germany to be reunited,” my father continued with their conversation, “as they used to be. He wants to annex Austria. He managed to do it with the Rhineland, and plenty of Austrians have converted to his megalomaniac opinions and share the fantasy. Mussolini used to oppose the idea—but no longer does. In fact, he seems to adhere a little more to our chancellor’s vision with each passing day: in Italy Jews no longer have the same rights as other citizens, just as they don’t here. France, Great Britain and the United States are officially against this annexing. But they did nothing when the Führer seized the Rhineland. Why would they react this time?”

  I slipped away to lie on my bed and read. When I heard the door click shut a little later, I knew my father’s workday was over. And went back to my reading.

  In the night I’m woken by a rumbling sound again.

  I once read that during an earthquake buildings sway, chandeliers swing and sometimes fall, windows break and shatter on the sidewalk. When the earth shakes like that, houses crumble, disintegrate and collapse, and so do larger buildings, and churches. On the night of June 30, 1934, when the SS deposed the SA and Adolf Hitler had Ernst Röhm arrested in his bed, the windowpanes in my bedroom shook, and I remember seeing raindrops accelerating down the glass. I got up to watch the soldiers busying in the street below, preparing cars. The roar of engines woke the neighborhood and people clustered at windows. On the other side of the street, the Führer’s apartment was lit up like a searchlight through the mist. I didn’t see him come out of his building or slip in beside the driver of his sedan and give the order to leave. The posse set off toward the lakes making a noise like thunder.

  This morning the windows are shaking to a metallic rumbling intercut with snapped orders, tired hoarse voices, the thunderous thrum of cars and the sputter of motorbikes. It’s like the night of June 30, 1934; the lights in the building opposite come on, and, hidden behind the curtains, silhouettes in other houses watch the corner of the street. On the left-hand side at the end, by Prinzregentenplatz, there’s a rotunda-shaped building, and behind the balustrade on the corner of that building, right where his living room is, his study, his bedroom, the lights are on too, as they are in everyone else’s house. Soldiers dressed in the characteristic caps and straps of their green uniforms load things into cars. I see my mother and father, now awake, watching furtively through a veil of tulle. All of a sudden, in an unimaginable blast of backfiring, one, then two cars, then the whole detachment sets off and disappears in a cloud of black smoke at the end of the street. The noise is still ringing in my ears. My mother buries her face in the crook of my father’s arm. I cling to them both. I feel Papa’s fingers in my hair, he strokes the back of my neck and I close my eyes.

  A few days ago, on Saturday, we invaded Austria. Our troops crossed the Austro-Hungarian border and went all the way to Vienna. The Austrians welcomed them with flowers and Nazi flags. Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg offered his resignation to the Austrian president, Wilhelm Miklas, who accepted it. Papa spoke von Schuschnigg’s words, imitating him in a mocking, nasal voice:

  “‘We surrendered because we refuse, even in this most terrible hour, to shed blood. And so we decided to order our Austrian troops to offer no resistance.’ ”

  Papa tells us that the leader of the Austrian Nazi Party, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, has been appointed chancellor. He gives us a summary of events drawn from what he’s read and from reports by his contacts in Austria, Berlin, London and Paris. It’s like a film. Standing at the front of the six-wheeled Mercedes-Benz G4 that we saw set off in the drizzle, Hitler reached Brannau, the village where he was born, at 4:00 p.m., drawing into that little border town on the Austrian side of the River Inn, where his father once worked as a customs officer.

  “They definitely have a thing about borders in that family!” my father is moved to say.

  Hitler continued on his way. At 7:00 p.m. he was in Linz, the place where he went to school from the age of nine to sixteen. That evening he stood on the balcony of the town hall overlooking the central square and was greeted with cheers. The next morning, on Sunday, he stayed in the Linz of his teenage years, visiting his childhood home in Leonding and laying flowers on his parents’ grave. On Monday he was back at the front of his car, sitting this time, bolt upright and with his arm raised, traveling through Melk and Sankt-Pölten, where the crowds chanted his name and waved little Nazi flags. He reached the Imperial Residence at 6:00 p.m.

  “Never again can anyone divide the German Reich as it is today,” he announced from the balcony.

  The next day, two hundred and fifty thousand people came to listen to his speech in Heldenplatz. Austria was to become a province of Germany, with the name “Ostmark,” and Arthur Seyss-Inquart was appointed as its governor. Earlier in the day, the Führer had visited the grave of Geli, his niece who committed suicide in his apartment. A simple wooden sign on her grave bears the words: “Here lies our beloved Geli in her final sleep. She was our ray of sunshine. Raubal family.” During the course of the day Viennese Jews were dragged out in front of their ransacked shops and made to kneel before passersby who shouted, “Death to Jews!”

  He came straight back to Munich. Barriers had been set up all the way from the train station to the street outside our house for his return. Through the window we saw the procession approach from far in the distance, and eventually stop outside his building. I was amazed to see so few people gathered to watch. It was a far cry from the tide
s of humanity in Austria that were still appearing on the front pages of all the papers.

  It’s nearly a month now since Austria was annexed. The British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, said this was not “a moment for hasty decisions or for careless words,” adding that “we must consider the new situation quickly, but with cool judgment.”

  “And he didn’t do a thing,” Papa says. “No more than the French or the Americans did.”

  A referendum was held in Austria and Germany. In answer to the question “Do you approve of the reunification of Austria with the German Reich that was decreed on March 13, 1938, and do you vote for our leader Adolf Hitler’s party?” 99.08 percent of Germans replied “yes.” The Austrians were even more convinced, with 99.75 percent voting “yes.”

  People are saying that in Austria Jews, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats and Communists are being arrested and sent to camps; others are transported to Germany and imprisoned in Dachau, near Munich. What becomes of them? How long will they be held? How are they treated? Their families have no news. Foreign newspapers report on the annexing of Austria, and major leaders worry about possible plans for other conquests. And no one ever does anything about us. Yesterday was German Art Day. As they do every year, men and women in costumes from past ages—representing the evolution of the Aryan race—processed through the city’s streets. On the same day the Nazis finished demolishing our synagogue.

  “It bothered Hitler. Having that building so near the Osteria gave him indigestion, and just turning his back on it while he ate wasn’t enough of a remedy,” Papa quips.