Hitler's Niece

Continuing his self-flattery, Hitler only paused here and there to say, “Aren’t you lovely” and “Yes, those, too” and “Slowly please.” The film actress said once, “Unhook me” otherwise she said nothing, or spoke so quietly she couldn’t be heard.

“Walk to me now,” Hitler said.

There were voices outside, and Geli saw Frau Maria Reichert, the landlady, holding a wool coat shut at her throat at the glass foyer door as she helped her frail old Mutti up the stairs and inside. Fat snowflakes were fluttering down like torn paper. The old mother must have asked the time because Frau Reichert said, “Midnight,” and then Geli clicked past the women in her heels, offering them a Grüss Gott.

She hung up the mink in the vestibule and found Hugo Bruckmann sitting in the first-floor parlor in his pajamas, striking a match and holding it to the bowl of a calabash pipe. She was thankful his mood was unfit for conversation, and that the Princess Cantacuzène was sleeping poutily under an eye mask, the door ajar and a vigil candle burning just as she’d insisted on since childhood—a hex against the Wichtelmänner, who steal children from their beds and put changelings in their places.

She’d forgotten to cover the canaries so they were fretfully awake, sidling and turning on their perches and chewing the golden cage. She called them each by name, Honzi and Hansi, then gave them night and sang Brahm’s “Lullaby” to them as she got out of her clothes. She again heard her uncle saying, “Walk to me now,” and she watched the faint jiggle of her full breasts in the mirror as she did so. Wide as a gate in the hips. The chunkiness of her thighs. She was surprised by her jealousy, her loneliness, her feelings of inadequacy.

She was still far from sleep under her feather-filled comforter when she heard the foyer door slam next door, and she hurried to her fourth-floor window to see the film actress stalking through fresh snow in her heels. Geli wanted to see her face, and when she walked under a streetlight she did.

And Geli smiled, for the face was fraught and ashen and filled with confusion, as if Hitler had found the will to confess whom he truly loved.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

LIFE STUDIES, 1929

With singing lessons at Vogl’s her sole obligation, Geli was generally available to Hitler, and more than ever he sought her out. They took cold-weather strolls with Prinz around Kleinhesselohersee in the Englischer Garten, huddled with Bahlsen biscuits and steaming tea from a vacuum bottle in the Apollo Temple at Nymphenburger Park, watched old men in ski caps and many sweaters sweep snow from the frozen canals and slide red and yellow and green curling stones across steel-blue lanes of ice. The fields and sidewalks were white with snow, shrubs and trees were just strokes of black, and the skies were the gray of cigarette smoke with no more than a faint hint of white where the hidden sun was; but she loved it that the children carried skates to school, painted their faces, wore masks, and that the Volk in general were as motley and costumed and festively gay as the huntsmen in paintings by Pieter Brueghel.

The Sturmabteilung and the Hitler Youth hosted many parties and masquerades during January’s Carnival and Lent’s week of Starkbierzeit, or strong beer time, and the organizations took care to invite Hitler’s famous niece, but Geli was generally forbidden to attend the affairs for Hitler’s fear that she’d fall into what he called “a misalliance,” and she supposed Hitler felt that his political fortunes were still too precarious to risk having his voluptuous, twenty-year-old niece by his side at formal party functions. She joined him only for opera nights at the Kammerspiele or the Cuvilliés Theater, or for full days at the cinema where he could sit in stillness and joy and fascination as he watched three feature films in succession.

Workdays for him could be little more than a noontime conference with Amann and Rosenberg in the Schwabing office, followed by Italian food at the Osteria Bavaria; an interview with a journalist at the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten and dessert with Putzi and Hess in the Carlton Tearoom; a change into his tuxedo to hear Wagner’s Lohen-grin at the Prinzregenten Theater, then a four-course dinner with the faithful at the Café Heck, with him holding forth on any subject he fancied until closing time at two.

Weeks of leisure would inevitably be interrupted by public speaking and the pursuit of money, however, and there could be long strings of days when Geli wouldn’t see him at all: He was talking to a party cell in Münster; he was rallying trade unionists in Düsseldorf; he was staying in the castle of a coal tycoon named Emil Kir-dorf; he was in Mühlheim conferring with Fritz Thyssen of the United Steel Works; or he was in Essen, touring the Krupp factories with Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach. And then he’d be in München again, saying nothing of his week to Geli, offering her a stroll through the Residenz of the Wittelsbach rulers or an afternoon at the Glyptothek on Königsplatz where he stood for a full twenty minutes before the Aeginetan sculptures, or hunched forward, his hands locked behind his back, his spectacles far down his nose as from all sides he examined the Hellenistic figure of a sleeping satyr that was known as The Barberini Faun.

In March she and Henny were taken downhill skiing by him—just in time, he promised, for the finest snowfall of winter on the majestic Zugspitze, the highest mountain in Germany. Emil drove them all to Garmisch, ninety-five kilometers southwest of München, but he would not ski. And Hitler feared the party would be hurt if he himself were seen falling on the runs, so he let the girls go alone up the slopes on the condition that they stuff their telltale hair under stocking caps and fasten face scarves under their ski goggles. They then looked so much like boys that Hilter laughed until he ached, and Henny later took a Leica shot of Geli at the summit, with her hands obstinately on her hips and a scold like a lumberjack’s. “And now do Gary Cooper,” Henny said.

Wildly flapping her arms, she joked, “Wings.”

Emil and Hitler hiked through the forest in snowshoes until four p.m., when they raced each other back to the ski lodge, choosing different routes—the führer, Emil was sure, taking the wrong one. At twilight Emil was still alone, slouched in his heaviest coat on a rattan chair near the lift, finding the girls in binoculars as they slalomed down. And the three of them were still there at nightfall in flying sleet when they finally saw a furious Hitler on the blue hill, his snowshoes tossed in his wrath, tilting alternately from side to side as he sank as high as his knees in drifts, his clothing white from his many humiliating falls. Even when he was a hundred meters away, they heard him yell in forewarning, “It is not funny!”

Though he’d promised the girls a night in a Garmisch spa, and had filled an hour on the road lauding the health benefits of saunas, Hitler suddenly found the high prices there and in Partenkirchen outrageous, and so he sat in the front seat fuming as they headed due east to Haus Wachenfeld, getting there just before nine.

Geli had alerted her mother to their coming with a telephone call, and Angela was ready with one of Hitler’s favorite Austrian dinners of Wiener Schnitzel and poppyseed cake, which he praised her for. And then Hitler shoved his plate forward and sought to embarrass both Emil and his niece by talking about a poll on feminity in a women’s magazine.

“Women are agreed,” he said, “that a girl should never go on a first date with a boy without female friends along. Or hold his hand until the fourth or fifth date. Are you aware of that, Sunshine?”

“I have it in needlepoint,” Henny said.

“Women agree that kissing, just kissing, nothing further, ought to be a sign that the couple will soon become engaged.” He smiled. “Are you counting your marriages, Emil?”

Emil stared into his coffee.

“Women in Germany think that a girl who smokes cigarettes is a whore. Their opinion, not mine. And that a good wife will be pregnant within the first year of marriage.”

“I find this fascinating,” Geli said.

?

??And that’s why I brought it up,” Hitler said. “Who is the happiest of men?” he asked. “Again, I am reporting the consensus of the poll.”

Angela thought aloud that it might be a haughty Austrian with Wiener Schnitzel in his stomach.

“Close,” Hitler said. “Women consider a fat husband with four children the happiest of men.”

“And the happiest of women?” Henny asked.

“Who can tell?” Emil said.