Hitler's Niece

Angela thought she’d had about as much fun as she could stand, so she gave Geli permission to go out with him, provided Julius Schaub went along.

“Oh, Mother!”

Angela held up her hand, brooking no further argument. “Adolf wishes it,” she said. “And in Wien once, I was a girl.”

Wearing a double-breasted suit to widen his body, Doktor Goebbels was sitting in the front seat of an unfamiliar car when a characteristically gloomy Julius Schaub honked the horn for Geli in front of the Gasthof Ascanischer. The Doktor, as he called himself, gaily got into the rear with her and stayed allergically far away on the ride to the fashionable Charlottenburg district, filling the time with vanity about his doctorate in Romanticist drama from Heidelberg University, as if she’d arranged the night just to talk about the playwright Wilhelm von Schütz. They headed first to a filled restaurant where the Tyrolean chef, himself a Nazi, insisted they have his Colchester oysters and Adlon, a honey-glazed breast of duck. And then the Doktor had Schaub ferry them to a nightclub where they drank the Berlin specialty of Weisse mit Schuss, or wheat beer with a shot of raspberry juice, and watched an American Negerin sing “Madiana” and “La Petite Tonkinoise” while all but naked.

Doktor Goebbels confessed, “Any female excites me to the marrow. It’s horrible. Like a hungry wolf, I prowl around them in pursuit of satisfaction. I can be at an elegant dinner, completely engaged in conversation, but in my fantasies I find myself assessing the attributes of the female guests or imagining how my host’s wife or daughter would be, nude and in bed.”

“And here I am, wearing you out again.”

He smiled. “At the same time, I am timid, like a child. Afraid of rejection. I do not understand myself.”

“Why don’t you get married?” she asked.

“And become bourgeois? And hang myself within eight days?” Doktor Goebbels waved to a cigarette girl, bought a pack of Aristokrats, lit two in his mouth with the flame of a backhanded match, and attached one of the cigarettes to Geli’s mouth in a vaguely sexual gesture that seemed so glamorous the fine hairs stood up on her forearms.

Inhaling his cigarette deeply, he expelled wisps of smoke as he asked, “Haven’t you found me to be completely amiable and charming, Fräulein Raubal?”

“Were you trying to make a good impression?”

“Certainly. You are Hitler’s niece.”

She fetchingly asked, “And what have you been resisting?”

“It’s far too shocking for words.”

On the nightclub stage a female troupe in headdresses and gauze see-through tunics was now performing an Egyptian dance to the music of Erik Satie.

“Would you like to go back to my flat?” he asked, and his tone was so silky and enticing that she flushed with nervousness. “I’ll only fantasize, I promise you.”

“Will Herr Schaub be joining us?” she asked.

“Must he?”

“I feel so sorry for him, just waiting for us in the car.”

Doktor Goebbels sighed.

Julius Schaub took off his jacket as soon as they got to the flat, and he found a bottle of Schultheiss beer in the icebox as the Doktor popped open Taittinger champagne. Schaub squatted by a high stack of thick RCA Victor records, hunting for “Yats,” or jazz, and, finding none, tuned an American Crosley radio to a station that was playing Bix Beiderbecke and the New Orleans Rhythm Kings. And then he dourly sat on the floor by the speaker as if he were alone in the world.

Doktor Goebbels was like Hitler in thinking the highest order of entertainment was his talking about himself. And so Geli learned that he was from the Rhineland; that his childhood nickname had been Ulex, short for Ulixes, the shrewd hero of the Trojan wars; that his family was petit bourgeois—his father was a factory accountant—and had fervently hoped he’d become a priest, and that he was estranged from them now because of his hostility to the Catholic Church. Like Hitler and others in the party, he’d volunteered for military service in the Great War, but unlike them he’d been rejected because of his “infirmity” and was so frustrated and ashamed that he’d tried to kill himself with a hunger strike but had been rescued by his mother. And then his dream had become that of being a journalist for the Berliner Tageblatt, and he’d sent the editor-in-chief, a Jew, twenty or more articles. And each of them had been rejected. “I’ll have the last laugh, though. I’ll be humiliated no more.” While he had once been a radical socialist, he told her, hearing Hitler talk had forced him to further examine his political thinking, and now the conversion was complete.

Watching him talk she’d had to shake from her head the anti-Nazi doggerel she’d heard: “Oh God, make me blind / that I may Goebbels Aryan find.” She asked, as a distraction, “Were you recruited by my uncle?”

“In a way. Are you aware of the writings of Johann Wolfgang von-Goethe?”

She said she was even though she wasn’t.

The Doktor quoted, “‘Half did she drag him / Half he gave himself to her.’”

She wondered at the oddness of the feminine pronoun, but simply said, “Ah-hah.”

Julius Schaub was hugging his knees like a boy, his eyes tightly shut, listening hard to Mamie Smith singing “Crazy Blues,” though he could not have understood a word.

“And what do you do for the party?” Geli asked.

Doktor Goebbels gave it long thought and said, “I orchestrate opinion. I offer the masses the savior they have been yearning for, and I offer Hitler confirmation of his call to greatness.” Tugging himself up from the sofa, he lurched across the flat in his hard-swaying gait, his left leg seemingly no more than a cane as he hitched along. “Shall I read to you from my diary?” he asked.