Hitler's Niece

“Are you sure you really want to be an opera singer?”

“Why not?”

“To have to stand alone up there onstage in front of thousands, and sing every note perfectly by heart, and pretend you’re dying or lovelorn, and fall in a heap; and then, after the curtain rings down, to have to hop up and hold those roses and cherish all that applause.”

“And what were you thinking was the unpleasant part?”

“I’d hate it,” Henny said.

“Oh no, it’s wonderful. To be a Valkyrie on the flaming rocks, or Isolde, dying of love for Tristan. To be Salome and ask for John the Baptist’s head because you want to give him a final kiss.”

Wide-eyed, Henny said, “She just did. She kissed him.”

Geli fought off the need to turn. “On the mouth?”

“The cheek. She’s gone back inside.”

And then a fresh and excited Hitler was with them, his hands finding the skin of their backs as he guided them to the stalls. “I have had a sudden change of plans,” he had the effrontery to say. “Will you take a taxi home?”

Geli flushed with hurt feelings, but said nothing.

And when they were in their seats, Hitler leaned toward his niece. “One thing you ought to know about the male of the species is that for him there are two types of women: those he admires, such as those who are celebrated for fabulous wealth, social status, or fame; and those to whom he is strongly attracted, women who are less prominent and may even be beneath him socially, but with whom he feels he can be fully himself.”

“And where do I fit in?” she asked.

At once he was flustered and shifted away. “You belong in a special category,” he said.

Afterward, he did not even wait with them in the cold and slush of the filled taxi queue, but folded five reichsmarks into his niece’s palm and ducked into the front seat of his Mercedes. She saw him lean forward in order to show Julius Schaub an address he’d scrawled, and then he was majestically driven away.

“Are you in need of a ride then?” a man asked.

Geli turned and found it was Christof Fritsch in his charcoal beret and gray wool coat. She smiled.

Christof took them to the Max Emanuel Brauerei on Adalbert-strasse, where Geli bought four rounds of Löwenbräu beer with Hitler’s marks and Christof slammed into her as they danced a schottische and he finally fell on the floor in his drunkenness.

“Thunder weather,” he said, Alsatian slang for unhappiness and surprise. Still flat on his back, Christof twisted his fists into his eyes as if trying to erase them. And then he considered his feebleness as Geli and Henny hauled him up onto his hobnailed boots and helped him to their booth.

“We really have to be going, Christof,” Geli said.

“Another beer,” he insisted.

“Why don’t you stay? Drink coffee. Eat cake. We’ll get a taxi.”

In English he said, “Okay,” slang she’d taught him from an American song, and then waved good-bye while saying in German, “Much love.”

The taxi driver first went to Henny Hoffmann’s home in Bogenhausen, far east of the Englischer Garten, then steered west toward Schwabing where he let Geli off at Isartorplatz. And she was just walking to the Bruckmann’s town house in her snow-white mink and sheath dress and cold, high-heeled shoes when she saw Hitler and the film actress heading into his flat above the Drogerie at number 41.

She hid in a moon-shaded doorway until they were fully inside and then hurried forward to the farther, unshov

eled sidewalk so she could huddle in the wind and watch his front window as Hitler first switched on a lamp and took off his hat and trench coat before helping the film actress with her fur. At first he wanted to lay the fur on his bed, but hesitated and folded it over a chair back. Apparently offering her something to drink, he got a nod and a funny reply, for he laughed hard as he twisted out the cork in a half-finished bottle of Winkelhausen Deutscher cognac and poured an inch into each of two juice glasses. She took one juice glass from him and Hitler turned around the chair with the fur and hunched forward on it. The fur irritated him, though, so he laid it on the folding table and took his seat again.

And now where will she sit? Geli thought.

The film actress found there was no other furniture but the folding table and the bed. She softly settled onto the swaybacked mattress as if that were only natural and sourly took in Klara Hitler’s photograph above the headboard as she sipped her cognac. Geli jealously noticed that she had good legs, which she crossed at the knees, and she wore her blond hair in waves just like Lilian Harvey, an English actress famous in Germany. Hitler was formally upright in his chair, holding forth in his way, and the film actress was probably trying to understand why an internationally famous man lived so frugally. Still talking, Hitler got up, sidestepped to the front window, and jerked the floral drapes closed.

Shall I go in? Geli thought. Her feet were stones and her face felt as hard as stiff leather. And so she did, scuttling across the street to the Bruckmann town house, but then changing her mind and going up the stairs beside the druggist’s shop where she found the foyer door unlocked. Geli took off her heels to softly walk to Hitler’s flat. She couldn’t peek through the keyhole, but crouched at a newly painted door and heard her uncle’s baritone as he talked about his first disappointment with the party in 1920 and his fateful decision to join after all. And then he talked about his first successes as an orator, the firmness of his will in the face of opposition, how he’d conquered his enemies with the force of his personality and his revolutionary ideas. On and on he went, trying to woo her as he wooed the crowds, chronicling the National Socialist movement while the plainly bored film actress said little more than “Oh?” or “I see.” Then Hitler halted his lecture to say, “Won’t you take off your clothes?”

And a further shock was that the film actress apparently obeyed, lilting an unobjecting sentence of some sort and shifting from foot to foot as she tossed off her high-heeled shoes.