Hitler's Niece

“Are we going to see somebody?” Geli asked.

Angela said, “You don’t remember your uncle, do you?”

Geli shook her head.

Angela told her all about him. She was six years older than Adolf, she said, and had grown up up thinking of the tiny boy as her plaything, a favorite doll. She’d called him Schatzi, Sweetie. But he was a Muttersöhnchen, a mother’s darling; she often vied with Frau Klara Hitler to hold or coddle him, and both found it easiest to talk when Adolf was the subject. Klara Pölzl had been serving as Angela’s mother’s maid when she’d gotten pregnant, and she’d been four months along when Angela’s mother died and Klara married Alois Hitler, her uncle. Twenty-three years younger than Alois, the obedient girl never thought of him as less than a superior being and throughout their marriage addressed her tyrannical husband as “Uncle.” If he were away and she needed to scold, Klara would point to his rack of meerschaum and calabash pipes as a sign of authority. Angela told Geli that the family had lived for three years in Passau am Inn in southern Germany, and she’d frequently heard Adolf describe his childhood there as the happiest years of his life. You could still hear a hint of a Bavarian accent when he talked. She confessed that she’d taught herself to kiss at twelve by kissing him, and when she’d been flooded with love for a high school boy who’d hardly known she existed, she’d found a kind of self-fulfillment in offering her affections to Adolf, fondling him, telling him how handsome he was, how gifted and intelligent, how worthy of everything. Oh, how she had adored him then! Even their father, Alois, who was hard to please and had chased his first son, Alois Junior, away from home with his carping, was flamboyantly proud of Adolf, helping his friends remember the high grades his son won at the Benedictine school at Lambach, how he sang such a glorious tenor at the choirboys institute, how he had a head for facts of all kinds as well as a hand at art. But Adolf only recalled his father’s chidings, his criticisms, his canings. “And he recalls nothing but his mother’s saintliness,” Angela said. And then she added, “Will you always think of me as saintly?”

Geli smiled. “Uh-huh.”

At the Hauptbahnhof, the main railway station in München, Angela asked a woman selling used jewelry on a blanket where the writers and artists stayed. “Everything is in Schwabing,” she was told.

She therefore took her lit

tle girl on a six-block tram ride into the district and got off at the first café, where Angela began holding up to idlers there an old photograph of an unhappy Hitler in the Realschule at Steyr. Within the hour, in front of a Schwabing cabaret called The Eleven Executioners, she’d found a white-bearded sidewalk caricaturist who, once he’d ascertained that she was not a creditor, told Angela he was not particularly a friend but that he sometimes talked Communism with Adolf Hitler and thought he sold his watercolor versions of postcard scenes at the Kunsthandlung Stuffle on Maximilianstrasse. And at the gallery she finally learned that her half-brother lived at Schleissheimerstrasse 34, above the Josef Popp Tailor Shop.

A friendly Frau Elisabeth Popp welcomed Angela and Geli to Germany and, just to confirm that it was the same Herr Hitler, got out a registration form he’d filled in with his fast, slashing, handwriting style on May 25, 1913. “Adolf Hitler,” it read. “Architectural Painter from Wien.”

“An Austrian charmer, he is,” the landlady said. “Ever so gallant and funny. But can’t he be a mystery? You just never know what he’s thinking.” Frau Popp thought he was out now, but she took them up to his third-floor furnished room to wait for him there. She confided to Angela on the way up that she need not fear, Herr Hitler was quiet, pleasant, helpful, and fastidious, and she’d never once seen him with kangaroos.

Angela thought that rather faint praise until she determined that “kangaroo” was slang for “prostitute.”

The landlady unlocked his door with a skeleton key. “Often he stays home for days at a time, hardly eating or drinking, his head buried in those books of his. Shall I stay with you?”

“We’ll be fine,” Angela said, and Frau Popp walked sideways down the sheer cliff of stairs.

The flat was furnished with a feather bed, a lavender sofa, a petroleum lamp, a ladder-back chair and a dining table, and matching oleograph prints of a schnauzer and a dachshund. Angela installed Geli on the sofa where she swung her legs and dangled her unlaced shoes from her toes as her mother hunted for food for them. She found only a mostly finished tin of English biscuits and four chocolate-covered almonds in a box. She gave Geli a biscuit, then wandered to the dining table and its high stack of books on loan from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. She lifted off something titled Das Kapital and feared the worst as she flipped through the pages, but was relieved to find none of his crazy handwriting inside. She began reading the first chapter but found it hard going, then heard the flat’s door open.

Angela turned and tried to find Adolf the wolfish, skinny Artist there, five feet nine in height and no more than one hundred twenty pounds, with injustice in his milk-white face and his hand still theatrically on the door handle as if he would soon slam it. His fairly clean but unshorn hair was in avalanche at his frayed green collar, his first try at a full goatee was like a child’s crayoned jeer on a face in a poster, and his hand-me-down clothing was as weirdly pied as a jester’s: ankle-high shoes with broken laces, a yolk-yellow waistcoat underneath a too tight and short-wristed purple suit, a green shirt, a blood-red tie.

The landlady seemed to have prepared Hitler for his family being there, for he acknowledged the little girl on the sofa with flitting glances, then scowled at the book in Angela’s hand as he walked in, saying, “I have been immersing myself in a doctrine of destruction called Marxism.”

“Is it politics?” Angela asked.

“Everything. Economics, politics, culture. A world plague.”

Angela looked at the book beneath it, Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels’s The Book of German Psalms: The Prayerbook of Arios-Racial Mystics and Anti-Semites. And beneath that was a book by Berthold Otto, The Future State as a Socialist Monarchy. She heard in her head what her late husband would say and couldn’t help but ask it. “Will you make money with all this reading?”

“Dear Frau Raubal,” Adolf said with an insincere smile, “Who knows for certain what will or will not be of use to him in life?”

Geli was fiddling with a shoelace, and afraid to look at her uncle. Sitting jauntily next to the little girl, he waggled her knee with his hand. “And you are Angelika all grown up?”

With great seriousness she held up her right hand, her five fingers spread. “I’m this many.”

“So old! I am all my fingers and toes, two eyes, two ears, and not yet a nose. What is that?”

She giggled, but shrugged.

“Twenty-four,” he answered. Crossing his legs, he held his higher knee with his hands as he inquired of Geli, as of a waitress in the Löwenbräukeller, “And you, Fräulein Raubal. What have you been reading? Anything good?”

Geli seemed full of regret as she said, “I don’t know how to read yet.”

Angela asked, “You are liking München, Adolf?”

“Absolutely!” he said. “And Schwabing is the capital of the arts in Europe.”

Angela looked at his easel. On it was a half-finished painting of the Cuvilliés Theater. On the floor was a fine if academic rendering of the sixteenth-century St. Michael’s Church, where the Wittelsbach royalty were buried.

“I haven’t turned pious,” Hitler said. “Churches sell.”