Hitler's Niece

She watched him seem to watch the moon, and she realized she was as alone as she’d ever been. She asked, “Are you crossing to the other side, Herr Hoffmann?”

“All my belongings are there,” he said.

All through April and May she and Anni Winter screamed at each other; she scorned Maria Reichert as she cleaned; she claimed she’d seen Frau Dachs sleepwalking in the hallway with an ice pick in her hand; she sang so poorly that Adolf Vogl telephoned Hitler to report that he was wasting his money; she was felled by headaches or menstrual cramps whenever her uncle was free for the night. She was becoming so contrary that he began introducing her to cronies not as meine Nichte (my niece), but mein nicht (my not); she finally got what she wanted when Hitler shouted, “We have no peace in this apartment!” And it was he who suggested they go to Obersalzberg three weeks early.

With Angela, in Obersalzberg, she figured she’d be safe, and she was right. Angela shunted Hitler out of the kitchen, was there in the Winter Garden each night, was even pleased to be invited by her daughter on their picnics and hikes and afternoon outings in the Mercedes. Wholly absorbed in his niece, his hands flying onto her whenever he found an occasion, his hot eyes frequently communicating grievance and forsakenness and a hunger he thought was heartache, Adolf Hitler was nevertheless too pompous and self-conscious to be fully vulnerable to the foolishness of the lovelorn, and by the time Henny joined the family in Haus Wachenfeld for Geli’s twenty-third birthday on June 4th, he’d sublimated his desire and seemed to Henny merely preoccupied, finicky, and avuncular, just a cross politician shouting into the telephone, shaking out a newspaper on the terrace, scouring medical journals to find out the names of his maladies and to discover which new chronic disease would next be poisoning him.

Angela was steeping orange pekoe tea for him when she heard her half-brother shyly hint at his interest in joining Geli and Henny for an afternoon at the movie palace in Berchtesgaden. And Geli oh so sweetly said, “Well, I really doubt you’d like it, Uncle Adolf. Girls in Uniform? An all-female cast? About a tyrannical headmistress in a Prussian boarding school?” And she added in the slang she’d gotten from Willie Hitler, “Not your cup of tea.”

She saw his face reef with the hurts of isolation and dismissal that he must have felt as a child, and then he turned from her as quick as an affront, and loudly trudged up the stairs.

When they returned that night, Angela was standing in the kitchen with folded arms. “Your fiancé is on his way to Berlin,” she said.

“We’re not engaged. We’re just related.”

“Well, he’s in a fury.”

Rolling her eyes, Geli said, “What a rarity.”

“I have no idea what you’re doing, but I don’t like it.”

“We went to see a movie,” Geli said.

Angela bent over and opened the oven where she was heating blinis for them, food as always her comfort and way out of a storm. She said, “The girls in your Gymnasium class are married now. Many already have more than one child. Are you trying to destroy your future?”

“I’m trying to determine it.”

Angela shut the oven door and straightened up. “Don’t toy with him, Geli,” she said. “We’ll find ourselves out on the street.”

“We’re already selling ourselves. Maybe we belong there.”

Angela theatrically lifted a hand as if, were she any other mother, she’d have long since slapped her. And then she ordered, “Up to your room!”

“Oh please,” Geli said, but she did as she was told, hearing her mother shout, as she found the upstairs landing, “He is the patriarch!”

She smirked at Henny. Who was solemn.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” Henny said.

She still walked the Alsatians to the Hotel zum Türken each morning to buy her uncle’s newspapers, but now she’d linger there long enough to scan the front section of the leftist Münchener Post, or “The Poison Kitchen” as her uncle called it because of its frequent satiric attacks on National Socialism. She found in it weekly reports of cold-blooded political murders by factions within “the Hitler Party,” whose crimes generally went unpunished or received insufficient jail sentences because of a justice system that favored the Nationalist right. She also read in the Münchener Post her uncle’s self-praise that, “Nothing happens in the movement without my knowledge, without my approval. Even more, nothing happens without my wish.”

And she was cleaning his upstairs room in late July when she found hidden under his bed an illustrated book by Dr. Joachim Welzl called Woman as Slave: The Sexual-Psychology of the Masochist.

She couldn’t say precisely what the connection was between the book and the newspaper articles she’d read, but she was confident there was one, and she was sick.

In June the failing economy had forced Chancellor Heinrich Brün-ing to issue an emergency finance decree that further slashed unemployment and welfare payments to millions who were already hard-pressed by the worldwide depression. Workers were soon calling him “Chancellor Hunger” and Hitler was finding many reasons to travel north and stir up further protests.

Probably at Hitler’s behest, Doktor Goebbels mailed a friendly letter to Geli describing their frantic political tour of Germany. “Endless traveling,” he wrote her. “Work is accomplished while standing, driving, and flying. Important conversations are held in doorways or on the way to the railroad station. We turn up in a city a half hour before the speech is scheduled, he climbs to the platform and speaks. By the time he’s done he’s in a state, as if he’d just been pulled out of a hot bath fully dressed. Then we get into the car and drive another two hours. We need rest.”

In August Hitler telephoned Edwin and Helene Bechstein to say he’d holiday at the Wagner Festival in Bayreuth, and he’d be staying at Wahnfried, the home of his old friend Winifred Wagner. And it was Edwin Bechstein who called Haus Wachenfeld and insisted that Geli join them for the festival, saying, “It really is the place to be seen.” And then he insinuated that it was her uncle who was inviting her; he’d decided on a conciliation and accord.

On the way to Bayreuth, three hours

north of München by car, Direktor Bechstein, as he liked to be called, stiffly sat across from Geli in his limousine, his spectacles on and his attention fixed on a sheaf of accounting papers in his lap. Next to her was Helene Bechstein’s solidifying flesh, trussed in the strong barrel of a corset whose whalebones ribbed her navy blue dress, her softening face the color of lard and her voice just this side of a shriek as she chided Geli for the pain and anguish she’d caused her uncle. “Oh, how your heart would break if you’d heard him wailing as I did! Threatening to shoot himself! The indecency of putting our Wolf through all that! And you! Who are you? A girl who scoffs at her own good fortune, is who. A Slavic girl whose charm wears thin and whose beauty won’t last. Who’ll soon be back in Wien near the west railway station if she doesn’t watch out.”

Sighing, Geli asked, “Are you going to go on berating me like this?”

“We can,” Direktor Bechstein said. “We’re your hosts.”