Chapter Fifteen
The Thirties
A month after Stefanie’s visit, Adolf Hitler was released from Landsberg Castle. He had served nine months of his five-year prison term. Back in Paris, Stefanie first heard about it at the Académie Werfel, then, along with official notification of the event on Party stationary she received an official Party membership card and a signed photograph of Hitler. Arthur snatched it up and peered long and hard at it.
“What’s going on here, Steffi?”
“Arthur, I told you everything.”
“I don’t think so.”
He left, and only returned a week later. Soon he left for good. He had long had his suspicions, he said, and Hitler’s picture was the limit. He sent for his belongings, and in January 1926 Arthur and Stefanie separated, an Anglo-French contralto named Nancy Poirel being the proximate cause. No church divorce was possible, of course, and an annulment was unlikely; not that secular Jewish Arthur cared. But Stefanie endured a brief season in hell, then she shrugged her shoulders: so Arthur was gone. He’d really been gone for a long time. The modest success of his operas—especially, with the tired irony of these things, The Mystic—had transformed him into a socialite and womanizer, abetted in both by Ivan Youzbine and Youzbine’s entourage of Russian libertines. Sadly, the amorous flame of the Vienna Woods and the Auerstadt School had flickered out long ago, since when Stefanie’s true rivals had proliferated beyond counting: the operas; the girlfriends; her holy visions; Adolf Hitler; but perhaps most of all, her past and Arthur’s future.
Her only condition was that she keep their son, and Arthur, who had never taken to fatherhood, assented. Papers were drawn up and approved by a civil court, but Stefanie dreaded the idea of a fatherless son, so Samuel—no longer “uncle,” just “Samuel,” even “Sami”—moved into the neighboring flat on the Rue Soufflot, initially on the basis of guardianship and as a token masculine presence. In the spring of ‘26, having done well on the Bourse, he purchased both apartments and had a door installed in the adjoining wall, enabling him to come and go as he pleased. It was a fine Parisian arrangement, and in due course Stefanie realized that a cynical lover two decades her senior suited her far better than marriage to a man her age; the transient quality of such a loose arrangement, acknowledged from the start, matched her temperament and the world’s unruliness.
Her parents regretted Arthur’s removal from the family scene.
“I was happy that you married, Steffi,” said her mother over hissing phone lines. “Now you’re living apart from your husband. That’s very modern, I know. But in Salzburg we still prefer marriage. Look at your father and me. Thirty-four years.”
Shortly after their thirty-fifth anniversary, in July 1927, her father, depressed by the failure of Stefanie’s marriage and other malfeasances of life, died of a cancer of the pancreas. Stefanie returned to Salzburg for the funeral. She wept, for she had dearly loved her Pappi. She embraced her poor Mutti, and left little Ignace with her. Then, shortly afterward, she visited Munich, and spoke to a gathering of NaSos.
Hess was there, and introduced her as a worthy friend.
“Ja, kameraden,” he bayed, “this lady has been one of us at heart for many years. Let it not be said that our party excludes this man because of his low origins or that woman because she is upper-class! I, Rudolf Wilhelm Hess, and Fraulein Stefanie von Rothenburg, are living proof of that!”
The meeting hall, a converted Lutheran church in the suburb of Haidhausen, was packed, and full of working-class odors: sweat, cheap cigarettes, beer and schnapps. A poster hung at the far end of the hall, exhorting the faithful to march. On one of the walls was a portrait of Hitler against roiling Romantic storm clouds. The German that was spoken was coarse, guttural, Bavarian: Adolf’s German. These were his Germans, too, mostly men, small folk left behind by progress and democracy and the twentieth century. These were the Germans of the Wars of Religion, or the Middle Ages, rustics adrift in the city, restless barbarians, anomalies in the modern age, ignorant, brutish, and embittered. Yet they, too, had families to feed; they, too, needed to belong to a great crusade.
“Hello, comrades. I speak to you as a sister,” said Stefanie. Her voice was strong and clear, as if she were in front of a class. “Like you, I want the redemption of the German lands. I sincerely believe we have been mistreated. I live in Paris”—catcalls, boos, hisses—”and I have many French friends”—more booing, cries of “Welschen raus!”—”but I firmly believe that they must give us a chance. But we, too, must hold firm on principles of civilization and Christianity. I have come to you from the Greater German marches of Catholic Austria. Heed the call! We are yet a Christian land. Pay attention to She who loves you, for She is truly the voice of us all.”
She went on in like vein, rambling yet infectiously spontaneous, for another ten minutes or so, and toward the end she settled into a conversational style, trading one question for another, and the subject of Jews arose.
“It is absurd,” said Stefanie. “We are a Christian nation.”
“That’s why we have to get rid of them,” bawled a proud anti-Semite from the intellectual precincts of rural Bavaria. “Keep Germany pure and Christian!”
"Ja!" chorused some of his peers. "Throw them out!"
“But they are Germans, too,” said Stefanie, but her moment was over. Hess unctuously escorted her off the stage.
“We would like to thank, um, Fraulein Rothenburg,” he shouted hoarsely, outshouted by the Jew-haters.
“Where is Hitler?” inquired Stefanie, out of breath and ruffled.
“He is negotiating the purchase of land,” said Hess. “Near Berchtesgaden.”
Farcical as it was, Stefanie’s first public appearance before the NaSo faithful, and the vileness of their hatred, and the unplumbable depths of their provincialism, disturbed her. She realized that to these people “German” was not a mere expression of nationality, but a term of sanctity, of racial purity, that resolutely excluded whole swaths of Germans, notably Jews. They had no notion of civic nationalism. To them it was all blood. After all, if Jews were German, what was the virtue of being German?
She fretted and prayed, and was about to return to Paris when, while having breakfast in the Café Heck, she read an article in the Muenchener Post about the increasing fame of a local mystic called Therese Neumann, who had recently begun to show signs of the stigmata.
“This reporter,” said the article, “embarked on his investigation in a spirit of the most devout skepticism. However, confronted with the reality of the young woman’s personality, as well as the undeniable fact of her stigmata, he had a change of heart. Whether she is a saint is not for us to say, but there can be no doubt that she is one of the elect. In these perilous times for our country, we must listen to what she has to say if we are to survive.”
Therese Neumann lived in a convent in Konnersreuth, north of Munich. Stefanie visited her the day after reading the article. A nun ushered her into a dimly-lit bedroom. Therese’s stigmata were not in evidence, but the girl’s goodness emanated from her person like the Avilan scent of rose petals that also filled the small bedroom where she lay (and which Stefanie traced to a vase of the moldering flowers in a small nook near the door). Therese’s face was wan but not wasted, and she regarded Stefanie with shining eyes and clear recognition, as of a fellow sufferer.
“You have too much of the world with you,” she whispered. “Without it you would know better what you must do.”
“I too have visions,” murmured Stefanie. “I see both good and evil things.”
“And you consort with those of this world, which contains both good and evil,” said the peasant girl. “Take heed of this warning: You will be chosen to perform a great deed of cleansing. And remember: Your only friend is the Mother of God.”
With the words of the strange bright-eyed girl in her ears, Stefanie returned to Paris and the iron demands of life.
The teaching was going well, despite shortages, and the weather was mild, but a series of minor but annoying health problems (gastritis, tintinnus, heart palpitations), troubled Stefanie’s sleep, and life’s everydayness closed her mystical eye. Still, every Sunday she visited the shrine on the Rue du Bac where St. Catherine Labouré, a twenty-four-year-old novice, had had her first vision on the night of 18 July 1830, being politely escorted into the convent chapel by an usher-like figure surrounded in shimmering haloes of gold whom she later took to be the Archangel Michael himself.
[Gustavus Interruptus
Well, well. Speak of the…no, better not say that. See, I’m turning superstitious. Anyway, my Michael is less shimmering than quietly gleaming, but still recognizably the same chap, so add another name to the distinguished company of Archangel spotters: St. Catherine Labouré! Actually, I remember visiting that church once, after a boozy lunch at the Drouand with an editor who turned out to be a devout Old Catholic and fell to his knees at the saint’s grave, then, quite drunk, slowly arranged himself into a recumbent position and slept it off for the next four hours or so, oblivious to the steady stream of pilgrims, most of them hunchbacked Spanish grandmothers… honestly, this is becoming more and more absurd….]
A blaze of light above the altar resolved itself into the figure of Mother Mary, who descended the steps and sat, rather casually, in the spiritual director's chair and told Catherine, in fluent Parisian-accented French, that she had a mission for her. Bad times were to come, but she promised help and grace for those who prayed to the Miraculous Medal.
“Times are evil in France and in the world,” she said, “but do not fear; you will have the grace to do what is necessary.”
(So she spoke in Stefanie’s dreams, but in the dialect of Stefanie’s native Salzkammergut.)
At the shrine Stefanie prayed like any good Catholic, and like any good Catholic she heard and saw nothing in reply. She thought of the words of Therese Neumann and wondered uneasily (with a slight upsurge of hope, as of yearning for a normal life) if her visions were over, if she had offended the Holy Mother in some way.
“Forgive me, Mother Mary, but what do you expect? I’m no peasant girl. I’m no stigmatic. I’m a university graduate. I think, I argue, I dispute, and I cloud my faith with argument and reason.”
There was no reply that day (a Sunday), but somewhere outside a bell started pealing joyously.
Vienna Again
In early March, 1932, Uncle Ernst telephoned, grumbling all the while.
“Your aunt is going from bad to worse, ach ja Steffi it’s a terrible sight,” he declared, in the overly-loud tones of the hard-of-hearing. “But of course she might rally if you came to visit and of course I would be delighted to see you again, dear Steffi, and by all means bring your little boy Konrad. What? Ja, ja, or Ignaz.”
Samuel bid Stefanie and Ignace a formal farewell.
“Au revoir, mes petits,” he said. “Save a place for me at the Vienna Opera.”
Adieu, Papa Samuel,” said Ignace. He stood tall and proud, and already resembled a miniature Arthur, even at age eight, right down to the confident manners and the worldliness he absorbed from the Paris air.
Stefanie briefly kissed Samuel; then the whistle blew and the scenery shifted from the echoing quais of the Gare de l’Est to the gray suburbs and the sad green countryside under weeping gray skies.
The familiar scent of roast chestnuts and tealeaves filled the air. A band at the Westbahnhof was playing Cagliostro in Vienna. Uncle Ernst was waiting for them on the platform.
“We hired a nurse, two nurses, a therapiste,” he said. “Ach, the expense! It’s enough to drive a man mad! Never mind, we do what we must, not so? So! How is Paris? Things here in Austria are a little worse now, with Dollfuss and his fascists...hello, this must be Konrad.”
“Ignace Lebel. Enchanté, mon oncle.”
“We’re in Austria now, boy. Speak German.”
“Guten tag, Onkel Ernst.”
“That’s better. Good boy. How would you like to ride on the great big Prater wheel, Konrad?”
“Ignace, sir.”
“Bah! Ignaz, then.”
The Ottoheinzes were living in an apartment on the Wiedner Gürtel, next door to the Hotel Kongress, where Fritzl and Lotte were staying with the boys. Friztl was beer-bulkier and more brooding than ever, but spoke hopefully of acquiring a prosthetic arm. Lotte as always hovered in the background, part of the landscape, except when she ventured an opinion, which usually detonated like a small grenade.
“Steffi, how is that French Jewish uncle of yours?” inquired Fritzl. “Now there’s a man of the world.”
“Sami is quite well, although he has certain dubious financial holdings.”
“More to the point, how’s that Hitler friend of yours?” said Lotte. “Are you still on the NaSo after-dinner speaking circuit, Stefanie?”
“No. I have serious misgivings about the National Socialists.”
“Well, God be thanked. If only Germany were as wise.”
“Ach,” said Fritzl. “Germans are morons. Only Austrians are civilized. And maybe the French.”
Aunt Liesl was gaunt, glitter-eyed, cancer-ravaged. From her bedroom window she had a view, as she proudly showed Stefanie, of the Ostfriedhof, the main cemetery in the east of the city. In the distance towered the Prater wheel.
“All I can think of when I see it is the Buddhist wheel of life,” she said. “The mandala. Ironic, isn’t it, that I should be dying when for the first time ever I think of such a thing, such a serene symbol, so reassuring it might have been when things were better. Who knows, if I had been a Buddhist, with such symbols, I might never have fallen ill. It’s the worry, Steffi, listen to me now. Worry is the killer. Let worry eat your soul and before you know it cancer will be eating your flesh. Ja, ironic.” She pointed to the cemetery. “But when I’m gone, all you’ll have to do is pop me in the box and carry me across the street,” she said. “Isn’t that considerate of me? Ach! How healthy and voluptuous you are. If only you could spare some for me.”
She huddled into herself, as she did a great deal. The slightest draft was an arctic gale: She shivered almost constantly. The nurses gave her spoonfuls of hot soup, and warned the visitors against tiring her. She drifted in and out of a drugged doze. Soon she would be dead, thought Stefanie as she publicly hid behind the standard bromides of reassurance (“oh, you’ll be up and about,” “I say, you’re really looking quite well,” “now you just rest and you’ll be better in no time,” etc.); but she knew, and Liesl knew, and in the others’ guarded gazes there was the same foreknowledge of death. Stefanie caressed her aunt’s sleeping face, overwhelmed by the monstrous banality of extinction, the seeming pointlessness of persisting with life, of dragging oneself from A to B closer and closer to death year after year until the spark goes out and only bones remain, detached from the soul, the learning, the wit, the memories and the desires of the soft fleshly creature that had housed them for six decades, seven, eight...Aunt Liesl’s sleeping dying face had the noble but abandoned look of a ruined church. Why sleep, wondered Stefanie, when sleep is no longer restorative? Aunt Liesl was Death, she was the uninhabited realm to which, a week later, her soul finally fled.
As she had predicted, her journey across the street took no time at all, and Stefanie offered up a prayer to accompany her on her other, invisible journey. Liesl’s tombstone looked out over the city where she had spent all of her sixty-seven years: to the west the Belvedere, to the northeast the Kahlenberg’s woods and wine gardens, southwestwards the Prater’s great wheel of life and death. Twenty or so mourners attended. Fritzl sobbed loudly and theatrically, buttressed by Lotte on one side and Ernst on the other. Ernst’s eyes were dry but his mouth was set in a thin line of resignation. Fritzl’s boys, unmoved, nudged each other, glancing surreptitiously at Ignace, who stood apart, next to his mother, as she gazed aloft at Heaven, where Liesl now was, and at the fluffy pink Baroque clouds floating away eastward, toward the open marches of Burgenland and the galloping Hungarian steppe.
In the days following the funeral, Fritzl staved off collapse only by dint of deep consumption of Wiener Weissbier. Soon he and his family went back to Munich. Ernst and Stefanie were not sorry to see them go.
Uncle Ernst was depressed but oddly fit. He sniffed less, and stood taller and lean, as if, perversely, his wife’s vitality, when she was well, had sapped his own, but now that she was dead he had shed the extraneous and recovered his health. And in truth, although the Baron Ottoheinz might some day be quite gaga, it was good to see him in tolerable health, and he was firmly in command as he and Ignace planned their excursions. Stefanie was happy to leave her son in the old man’s care. She herself walked the streets of her beloved but now-mournful home town, uncertain if she should stay. Vienna, like the rest of Europe, was bracing itself. The Dollfuss fascists who were running Austria had clearly, Uncle Ernst said, taken against Jews, foreigners “and the like” (as he put it). Indeed, twice he had had problems from former customers and once from an ex-business partner (the one who had rented Stefanie her lodgekeeper’s room in Auerstadt): anti-Semitic comments made loudly, within earshot, blandly feigned ignorance of same when confronted...
“If they just had the courage of their convictions, however unsavory, it would be preferable,” said Ernst. “Swine! Jewish-born that I am, I’m still a Christian Austrian knight of the realm, so far above them in status it’s laughable. Miserable wretches. No class, no education. All they know is what they hate. Like the communists. And these people are all cowards, too, you know. But I greatly fear they will soon be in charge everywhere.”
And once again Stefanie found the name Hitler to be the refrain in the chorus of political complaint. The Viennese were keenly aware that the NaSo leader was an Austrian, an ex-Viennese, a onetime urban castaway on their streets, and that he was making news again in Germany, first, after the Geli Raubal suicide hit the newsstands, as the bereaved lover of Geli, his dead half-niece, then, more respectably, as the Coming Man of Destiny. In 1930 his National Socialist party swept the popular vote in the parliamentary elections, overtaking the Reds; for many, he was the knight, the visionary, the Guide. Stefanie listened as others talked of him, remembering her gaunt portraitist and awkward suitor. Hermann of Teutoburg, Siegfried, Frederick the Great: Every German mythological cliché was embodied in the man. Most spoke of him in favorable tones, even one or two Jews, Helmuth Meinl for one, who met Stefanie at Landtmann’s with his wife Grätel, a smiling porcelain doll of Friesian origin. The Meinls were prosperous, even in those lean times. They had three children, Helmuth said. All were in the charge of their nanny; one was about to go to boarding school in England. Helmuth had done rather well as a stockbroker and dealer in real estate futures, and from those blandly comfortable heights (Benz phaeton, villa in the suburbs, winters in Davos), he recalled with an easy laugh his once-burning notion of becoming a religious scholar and the shabby life of aching ambitions he had left so far behind.
“Ja, well, that was a long time ago, Stefanie,” he said. “Then I suddenly discovered I had a wife and family to feed! And believe me I had no intention of sacrificing comfort to scholarship. The dusty garret, the frayed sleeves, eh? The nervous ailments, the disrespect from everyone. So I went into business. I also converted to Christianity, you know. Ja, I’m no longer a Jew. Adieu, vie de shtetl!”
“He had to,” said Grätel. “If we were to get married. They’re like that where I come from. And now he’s a churchgoing Lutheran, nicht wahr, schatz?”
Steel beneath the porcelain. Helmuth chuckled as his wife leaned over and pinched his cheek in a proprietary and, Stefanie thought, patronizing fashion: Poor Helmuth! But there he was, the happy victim. And he looked well, still bony and loose-limbed but distinctively silver around the temples, with Habsburgian whiskers shaved an inch short of the jaw. The three of them drank a couple of Kapuziners and enjoyed a slice of guglhupf and talked of the world and its ways. When talk turned to politics, Helmuth dismissed the stark anti-Semitism of the Nazis, as the NaSos were coming to be called, and that of their Austrian cohorts as mere posturing long familiar to Germans and Austrians, Austrians especially, going back to the days of Mayor Karl Lueger.
“They’ll change when they get power, just like Lueger. He talked, but he never hurt anybody. This Hitler will be the same. You’ll see.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Stefanie. “I think it’s possible, from what I know of him, which is considerable. Actually, you met him once, Helmuth. Do you remember?”
Helmuth put on a good show of squeezing the memory from his wrinkled brow and twenty years.
“At the opera, yes, of course. The little man in the suit. That was before the war, wasn’t it? 1913 or so?”
“1912.”
“My goodness,” said Grätel. She held her coffee cup halfway to her lips. “You know Hitler, Fraulein von Rothenberg?”
“Oh ja,” said Stefanie, savoring the moment. “Old friends.”
Of course, Stefanie had not seen him since her visit to Landsberg in 1924; he had not written, nor had he summoned her to address any more party meetings after her brief disastrous appearance in Munich, since when her misgivings vis-à-vis Nazism had only deepened. In any case, spiritual anguish kept her away from political life. In politics even at the best of times there was a meretriciousness and moral grubbiness that repelled her. In Nazism, it was clear, malice was coming to dominate moderation. The socialist wing was weakening. Adolf was beginning to trumpet the nationalist call to the hordes.
“Our fatherland, free and pure,” he roared at a rally in Augsburg in April 1932, “our old Germany, rid of Jewry and the church, cleansed of Freemasons, gypsies, socially unproductive elements, and Bolshevism. Out with the foreigner! Out with the masonic Jew Bolshevik! Our old Germany, proud and pure, born again under our flag.”
Surely it was mere politicking, Stefanie thought. “Rid of Jewry and the church”! It was horrible, what he was saying. She considered writing him, then decided against. He probably would not answer a letter from her, he was becoming too prominent. He’d hardly remember her; anyway, what was she hoping for? He was on his way into another, greater arena, where her opinions wouldn’t matter. No conversion there. He’d always been his own man, an artist first and foremost, and he was now a kind of a master artist, a manipulator of destinies, a performer on a vast stage; but an artist, still, and beyond her grasp, or God’s. On the day after the Augsburg rally, however, Hitler issued a public statement of regret, addressed to the Archbishop of Munich “and all my fellow-Catholics of pure German origin” (no apology for promising to rid Germany of Jews, accordingly); and a few days later, in the ironic way of life’s happenings, quite unsolicited, he got in touch with Stefanie. Ernst was standing in the hallway one morning when she returned from fruitless job-hunting. He bustled, and there was a light in his old eyes.
“Steffi,” he said. “My goodness. You had a telephone call from Munich. This number.” He handed over a scrap of notepaper. “From Herr Hitler’s office in the Brown House. I believe I actually spoke to him. Such a strong accent he has, ja?”
“Are you sure?”
Stefanie dialed the number and navigated the powerful currents of secretaries, receptionists and other haughty underlings before she heard his voice announcing his name in a hoarse mumble. She imagined a large office with blinds drawn and a solitary desk in one corner. He sounded half asleep.
“Hitler.”
“Hallo, Herr Hitler! Here is Stefanie von Rothenberg.”
He had been half-asleep—he rarely rose before eleven, and it was barely that now—but his mood lifted when he heard the voice of she who was, in his mellower dreams, sister, mother, and lover to him. Her spirits sank when she remembered the long road behind, the steep climb ahead. Thus did they seem fated ever to play counterpoint to each other’s moods. But that moment, in April 1932, was one of Adolf Hitler’s rare moments of vulnerability, and one of the last he ever allowed himself to expose to an outsider; at that moment, at the crossroads of his life, with a sordid affair behind him in the most sordid way possible, and the limitless fearful future ahead, he needed to confide, to unburden himself, to be reassured. (And the Communists seemed to be taking away votes from the Nazis again, especially in Red Berlin and its suburbs.) Normally he would have turned to his half-niece Geli, or Geli’s mother, his sister Angela; but young (but by no means innocent, oh no, coarsened by men long before he’d met her) Geli had killed herself for love of him (so he said), and his native arrogance ruled out an apology to her mother, who would come around soon enough, anyway: People needed him, but he needed only The People. And yet, just this once, in the stark loneliness of days and nights spent in fitful sleep and brooding, in the chill hallways of Party Headquarters, in the little universe of his mind; this once, he needed a companion, a confidant, a caresser, a woman to make him laugh and remind him of his greatness.
He chose Stefanie. She understood. She had always loved him, he was sure. She would be at his side when others made excuses. She was the seer, the confidante, the one who saw God or what (or whom-) ever it was she saw; like him, she was accountable to no one for what made her different. He’d been disappointed, of course, by her (to all accounts) foolish speech in Munich, and Hess had recommended against asking her to any more party functions, saying (in his humorless way) that she was too sincere, too ladylike, too Christian, apologizing for the Jews, for God’s sake. Well, needless to say Adolf had agreed they couldn’t have that, but all that had happened seven years ago, she was a lady after all, things had changed, she was older now, and entirely (as far as he could ascertain) respectable, except for that Left-wing Frenchman she was living with; somewhat permanently at loose ends, though, as if unappreciated by the world for talents none shared—and how he could understand that!
Had she heard his news? He was, he said, at somewhat low ebb personally.
“Your niece?”
“Half. Yes. And they accuse me of murdering her.”
“That’s politics, Adolf. You need to have a thick hide.”
“She calls him Adolf!” whispered Ernst to Ignace as the two of them huddled behind the door and eavesdropped indiscreetly, Ernst struggling in vain to mute the sinus clearings that afflicted him at moments of excitement. “Hûûûûm!”
Her husband (Hitler said, disingenuously) in Paris had given him this number, her uncle and aunt’s . . . not her husband?
“Well, well. Who, then?”
“A friend.”
He offered no comment. She was still naive enough to think the omission might be from discretion. In fact, it was from indifference. But he feigned concern well enough when she said—in response to a banal question about Vienna—that the Baroness Ottoheinz was dead. Her aunt and uncle, he exclaimed. He remembered them: fine people, ja? Ah, so the Baroness was dead? So sorry. Nevertheless. He wanted to call, to talk. To invite her to visit him.
“An invitation?” she repeated. “To Munich?”
No. Not far from her dear old home town of Salzburg! Ja, he had, he explained, recently purchased a fine property on the Obersalzberg, near the resort town of Berchtesgaden, some thirty kilometers from Salzburg, on top of the world, clean vistas, no crowds . . . didn’t she read the papers? Not even the Austrian rags? Well, anyway, he was having some guests—the Hesses, the Goerings, the von Ribbentrops—over for a weekend to inaugurate the new house, the Haus Wachenfeld—...would she like to...? She would have her own room, with a splendid view of the Obersalzberg—and, by the way, she was the only one he had telephoned personally!
“Just like in the old days, ja?” he said, attempting a laugh. Stefanie laughed dutifully, not catching the reference until she remembered his hoarse stammering voice over her Aunt Marie’s telephone line in Linz, those many years ago. She was, once again, surprised by his ability to recall the seemingly insignificant, but she understood that recognizing the difference between what others saw as insignificant and what was truly so was the gift of the master strategist; and her scrawny artist from Linz was showing signs of being just that, wasn’t he? She wondered why he’d called, although she sensed his loneliness and that avid desire she’d felt in him before, a desire for closeness, praise, companionship. Reluctantly, she felt grateful. Now might be the moment, she thought, to influence him: like him, she felt the other’s weakness. Perhaps he wasn’t lost to God, after all.
“How do I get there?” she inquired.
“Ach, for you it’s easy. Just go to Salzburg and turn left!”
Arrangements were made, tickets and brochures mailed, a map enclosed. Many of the brochures bore the sign of the swastika, sign of the times, wheel of life, wheel of death-to-come; but Germany was still under the creaking yoke of the Weimar Republic, Hitler still a politician-in-waiting.
Stefanie made preparations. She gave thought to her appearance, a rare event. At forty-two she was full of figure, the von Rothenbergs being a stocky breed, but she was scarcely fuller than she had been ten years earlier, and by no means fat. Her introspective, melancholic character deprived her, much of the time, of an appetite, or any settled routine. Occasionally she drank a little too much, usually white wine, frequently Riesling. In the evenings, like so many of her kind, she smoked. Digestive problems plagued her from time to time, the consequence of a temperament unsuited to normality. But overall she was fit and looked less than her age.
“How do I look, Uncle Ernst?”
Old Ernst was proud. He was proud of Ignace, too, who was accompanying his mother as far as Salzburg, where he would spend a day or two with his grandmother. At the Westbahnhof Ernst and Ignace shook hands, and Ernst watched the train pull out. Through the puffs of steam he saw the blue sky above Vienna, and in that sea-sky the swallows swooped and sailed like fragile vessels tossed by the wind.
A month after Stefanie’s visit, Adolf Hitler was released from Landsberg Castle. He had served nine months of his five-year prison term. Back in Paris, Stefanie first heard about it at the Académie Werfel, then, along with official notification of the event on Party stationary she received an official Party membership card and a signed photograph of Hitler. Arthur snatched it up and peered long and hard at it.
“What’s going on here, Steffi?”
“Arthur, I told you everything.”
“I don’t think so.”
He left, and only returned a week later. Soon he left for good. He had long had his suspicions, he said, and Hitler’s picture was the limit. He sent for his belongings, and in January 1926 Arthur and Stefanie separated, an Anglo-French contralto named Nancy Poirel being the proximate cause. No church divorce was possible, of course, and an annulment was unlikely; not that secular Jewish Arthur cared. But Stefanie endured a brief season in hell, then she shrugged her shoulders: so Arthur was gone. He’d really been gone for a long time. The modest success of his operas—especially, with the tired irony of these things, The Mystic—had transformed him into a socialite and womanizer, abetted in both by Ivan Youzbine and Youzbine’s entourage of Russian libertines. Sadly, the amorous flame of the Vienna Woods and the Auerstadt School had flickered out long ago, since when Stefanie’s true rivals had proliferated beyond counting: the operas; the girlfriends; her holy visions; Adolf Hitler; but perhaps most of all, her past and Arthur’s future.
Her only condition was that she keep their son, and Arthur, who had never taken to fatherhood, assented. Papers were drawn up and approved by a civil court, but Stefanie dreaded the idea of a fatherless son, so Samuel—no longer “uncle,” just “Samuel,” even “Sami”—moved into the neighboring flat on the Rue Soufflot, initially on the basis of guardianship and as a token masculine presence. In the spring of ‘26, having done well on the Bourse, he purchased both apartments and had a door installed in the adjoining wall, enabling him to come and go as he pleased. It was a fine Parisian arrangement, and in due course Stefanie realized that a cynical lover two decades her senior suited her far better than marriage to a man her age; the transient quality of such a loose arrangement, acknowledged from the start, matched her temperament and the world’s unruliness.
Her parents regretted Arthur’s removal from the family scene.
“I was happy that you married, Steffi,” said her mother over hissing phone lines. “Now you’re living apart from your husband. That’s very modern, I know. But in Salzburg we still prefer marriage. Look at your father and me. Thirty-four years.”
Shortly after their thirty-fifth anniversary, in July 1927, her father, depressed by the failure of Stefanie’s marriage and other malfeasances of life, died of a cancer of the pancreas. Stefanie returned to Salzburg for the funeral. She wept, for she had dearly loved her Pappi. She embraced her poor Mutti, and left little Ignace with her. Then, shortly afterward, she visited Munich, and spoke to a gathering of NaSos.
Hess was there, and introduced her as a worthy friend.
“Ja, kameraden,” he bayed, “this lady has been one of us at heart for many years. Let it not be said that our party excludes this man because of his low origins or that woman because she is upper-class! I, Rudolf Wilhelm Hess, and Fraulein Stefanie von Rothenburg, are living proof of that!”
The meeting hall, a converted Lutheran church in the suburb of Haidhausen, was packed, and full of working-class odors: sweat, cheap cigarettes, beer and schnapps. A poster hung at the far end of the hall, exhorting the faithful to march. On one of the walls was a portrait of Hitler against roiling Romantic storm clouds. The German that was spoken was coarse, guttural, Bavarian: Adolf’s German. These were his Germans, too, mostly men, small folk left behind by progress and democracy and the twentieth century. These were the Germans of the Wars of Religion, or the Middle Ages, rustics adrift in the city, restless barbarians, anomalies in the modern age, ignorant, brutish, and embittered. Yet they, too, had families to feed; they, too, needed to belong to a great crusade.
“Hello, comrades. I speak to you as a sister,” said Stefanie. Her voice was strong and clear, as if she were in front of a class. “Like you, I want the redemption of the German lands. I sincerely believe we have been mistreated. I live in Paris”—catcalls, boos, hisses—”and I have many French friends”—more booing, cries of “Welschen raus!”—”but I firmly believe that they must give us a chance. But we, too, must hold firm on principles of civilization and Christianity. I have come to you from the Greater German marches of Catholic Austria. Heed the call! We are yet a Christian land. Pay attention to She who loves you, for She is truly the voice of us all.”
She went on in like vein, rambling yet infectiously spontaneous, for another ten minutes or so, and toward the end she settled into a conversational style, trading one question for another, and the subject of Jews arose.
“It is absurd,” said Stefanie. “We are a Christian nation.”
“That’s why we have to get rid of them,” bawled a proud anti-Semite from the intellectual precincts of rural Bavaria. “Keep Germany pure and Christian!”
"Ja!" chorused some of his peers. "Throw them out!"
“But they are Germans, too,” said Stefanie, but her moment was over. Hess unctuously escorted her off the stage.
“We would like to thank, um, Fraulein Rothenburg,” he shouted hoarsely, outshouted by the Jew-haters.
“Where is Hitler?” inquired Stefanie, out of breath and ruffled.
“He is negotiating the purchase of land,” said Hess. “Near Berchtesgaden.”
Farcical as it was, Stefanie’s first public appearance before the NaSo faithful, and the vileness of their hatred, and the unplumbable depths of their provincialism, disturbed her. She realized that to these people “German” was not a mere expression of nationality, but a term of sanctity, of racial purity, that resolutely excluded whole swaths of Germans, notably Jews. They had no notion of civic nationalism. To them it was all blood. After all, if Jews were German, what was the virtue of being German?
She fretted and prayed, and was about to return to Paris when, while having breakfast in the Café Heck, she read an article in the Muenchener Post about the increasing fame of a local mystic called Therese Neumann, who had recently begun to show signs of the stigmata.
“This reporter,” said the article, “embarked on his investigation in a spirit of the most devout skepticism. However, confronted with the reality of the young woman’s personality, as well as the undeniable fact of her stigmata, he had a change of heart. Whether she is a saint is not for us to say, but there can be no doubt that she is one of the elect. In these perilous times for our country, we must listen to what she has to say if we are to survive.”
Therese Neumann lived in a convent in Konnersreuth, north of Munich. Stefanie visited her the day after reading the article. A nun ushered her into a dimly-lit bedroom. Therese’s stigmata were not in evidence, but the girl’s goodness emanated from her person like the Avilan scent of rose petals that also filled the small bedroom where she lay (and which Stefanie traced to a vase of the moldering flowers in a small nook near the door). Therese’s face was wan but not wasted, and she regarded Stefanie with shining eyes and clear recognition, as of a fellow sufferer.
“You have too much of the world with you,” she whispered. “Without it you would know better what you must do.”
“I too have visions,” murmured Stefanie. “I see both good and evil things.”
“And you consort with those of this world, which contains both good and evil,” said the peasant girl. “Take heed of this warning: You will be chosen to perform a great deed of cleansing. And remember: Your only friend is the Mother of God.”
With the words of the strange bright-eyed girl in her ears, Stefanie returned to Paris and the iron demands of life.
The teaching was going well, despite shortages, and the weather was mild, but a series of minor but annoying health problems (gastritis, tintinnus, heart palpitations), troubled Stefanie’s sleep, and life’s everydayness closed her mystical eye. Still, every Sunday she visited the shrine on the Rue du Bac where St. Catherine Labouré, a twenty-four-year-old novice, had had her first vision on the night of 18 July 1830, being politely escorted into the convent chapel by an usher-like figure surrounded in shimmering haloes of gold whom she later took to be the Archangel Michael himself.
[Gustavus Interruptus
Well, well. Speak of the…no, better not say that. See, I’m turning superstitious. Anyway, my Michael is less shimmering than quietly gleaming, but still recognizably the same chap, so add another name to the distinguished company of Archangel spotters: St. Catherine Labouré! Actually, I remember visiting that church once, after a boozy lunch at the Drouand with an editor who turned out to be a devout Old Catholic and fell to his knees at the saint’s grave, then, quite drunk, slowly arranged himself into a recumbent position and slept it off for the next four hours or so, oblivious to the steady stream of pilgrims, most of them hunchbacked Spanish grandmothers… honestly, this is becoming more and more absurd….]
A blaze of light above the altar resolved itself into the figure of Mother Mary, who descended the steps and sat, rather casually, in the spiritual director's chair and told Catherine, in fluent Parisian-accented French, that she had a mission for her. Bad times were to come, but she promised help and grace for those who prayed to the Miraculous Medal.
“Times are evil in France and in the world,” she said, “but do not fear; you will have the grace to do what is necessary.”
(So she spoke in Stefanie’s dreams, but in the dialect of Stefanie’s native Salzkammergut.)
At the shrine Stefanie prayed like any good Catholic, and like any good Catholic she heard and saw nothing in reply. She thought of the words of Therese Neumann and wondered uneasily (with a slight upsurge of hope, as of yearning for a normal life) if her visions were over, if she had offended the Holy Mother in some way.
“Forgive me, Mother Mary, but what do you expect? I’m no peasant girl. I’m no stigmatic. I’m a university graduate. I think, I argue, I dispute, and I cloud my faith with argument and reason.”
There was no reply that day (a Sunday), but somewhere outside a bell started pealing joyously.
Vienna Again
In early March, 1932, Uncle Ernst telephoned, grumbling all the while.
“Your aunt is going from bad to worse, ach ja Steffi it’s a terrible sight,” he declared, in the overly-loud tones of the hard-of-hearing. “But of course she might rally if you came to visit and of course I would be delighted to see you again, dear Steffi, and by all means bring your little boy Konrad. What? Ja, ja, or Ignaz.”
Samuel bid Stefanie and Ignace a formal farewell.
“Au revoir, mes petits,” he said. “Save a place for me at the Vienna Opera.”
Adieu, Papa Samuel,” said Ignace. He stood tall and proud, and already resembled a miniature Arthur, even at age eight, right down to the confident manners and the worldliness he absorbed from the Paris air.
Stefanie briefly kissed Samuel; then the whistle blew and the scenery shifted from the echoing quais of the Gare de l’Est to the gray suburbs and the sad green countryside under weeping gray skies.
The familiar scent of roast chestnuts and tealeaves filled the air. A band at the Westbahnhof was playing Cagliostro in Vienna. Uncle Ernst was waiting for them on the platform.
“We hired a nurse, two nurses, a therapiste,” he said. “Ach, the expense! It’s enough to drive a man mad! Never mind, we do what we must, not so? So! How is Paris? Things here in Austria are a little worse now, with Dollfuss and his fascists...hello, this must be Konrad.”
“Ignace Lebel. Enchanté, mon oncle.”
“We’re in Austria now, boy. Speak German.”
“Guten tag, Onkel Ernst.”
“That’s better. Good boy. How would you like to ride on the great big Prater wheel, Konrad?”
“Ignace, sir.”
“Bah! Ignaz, then.”
The Ottoheinzes were living in an apartment on the Wiedner Gürtel, next door to the Hotel Kongress, where Fritzl and Lotte were staying with the boys. Friztl was beer-bulkier and more brooding than ever, but spoke hopefully of acquiring a prosthetic arm. Lotte as always hovered in the background, part of the landscape, except when she ventured an opinion, which usually detonated like a small grenade.
“Steffi, how is that French Jewish uncle of yours?” inquired Fritzl. “Now there’s a man of the world.”
“Sami is quite well, although he has certain dubious financial holdings.”
“More to the point, how’s that Hitler friend of yours?” said Lotte. “Are you still on the NaSo after-dinner speaking circuit, Stefanie?”
“No. I have serious misgivings about the National Socialists.”
“Well, God be thanked. If only Germany were as wise.”
“Ach,” said Fritzl. “Germans are morons. Only Austrians are civilized. And maybe the French.”
Aunt Liesl was gaunt, glitter-eyed, cancer-ravaged. From her bedroom window she had a view, as she proudly showed Stefanie, of the Ostfriedhof, the main cemetery in the east of the city. In the distance towered the Prater wheel.
“All I can think of when I see it is the Buddhist wheel of life,” she said. “The mandala. Ironic, isn’t it, that I should be dying when for the first time ever I think of such a thing, such a serene symbol, so reassuring it might have been when things were better. Who knows, if I had been a Buddhist, with such symbols, I might never have fallen ill. It’s the worry, Steffi, listen to me now. Worry is the killer. Let worry eat your soul and before you know it cancer will be eating your flesh. Ja, ironic.” She pointed to the cemetery. “But when I’m gone, all you’ll have to do is pop me in the box and carry me across the street,” she said. “Isn’t that considerate of me? Ach! How healthy and voluptuous you are. If only you could spare some for me.”
She huddled into herself, as she did a great deal. The slightest draft was an arctic gale: She shivered almost constantly. The nurses gave her spoonfuls of hot soup, and warned the visitors against tiring her. She drifted in and out of a drugged doze. Soon she would be dead, thought Stefanie as she publicly hid behind the standard bromides of reassurance (“oh, you’ll be up and about,” “I say, you’re really looking quite well,” “now you just rest and you’ll be better in no time,” etc.); but she knew, and Liesl knew, and in the others’ guarded gazes there was the same foreknowledge of death. Stefanie caressed her aunt’s sleeping face, overwhelmed by the monstrous banality of extinction, the seeming pointlessness of persisting with life, of dragging oneself from A to B closer and closer to death year after year until the spark goes out and only bones remain, detached from the soul, the learning, the wit, the memories and the desires of the soft fleshly creature that had housed them for six decades, seven, eight...Aunt Liesl’s sleeping dying face had the noble but abandoned look of a ruined church. Why sleep, wondered Stefanie, when sleep is no longer restorative? Aunt Liesl was Death, she was the uninhabited realm to which, a week later, her soul finally fled.
As she had predicted, her journey across the street took no time at all, and Stefanie offered up a prayer to accompany her on her other, invisible journey. Liesl’s tombstone looked out over the city where she had spent all of her sixty-seven years: to the west the Belvedere, to the northeast the Kahlenberg’s woods and wine gardens, southwestwards the Prater’s great wheel of life and death. Twenty or so mourners attended. Fritzl sobbed loudly and theatrically, buttressed by Lotte on one side and Ernst on the other. Ernst’s eyes were dry but his mouth was set in a thin line of resignation. Fritzl’s boys, unmoved, nudged each other, glancing surreptitiously at Ignace, who stood apart, next to his mother, as she gazed aloft at Heaven, where Liesl now was, and at the fluffy pink Baroque clouds floating away eastward, toward the open marches of Burgenland and the galloping Hungarian steppe.
In the days following the funeral, Fritzl staved off collapse only by dint of deep consumption of Wiener Weissbier. Soon he and his family went back to Munich. Ernst and Stefanie were not sorry to see them go.
Uncle Ernst was depressed but oddly fit. He sniffed less, and stood taller and lean, as if, perversely, his wife’s vitality, when she was well, had sapped his own, but now that she was dead he had shed the extraneous and recovered his health. And in truth, although the Baron Ottoheinz might some day be quite gaga, it was good to see him in tolerable health, and he was firmly in command as he and Ignace planned their excursions. Stefanie was happy to leave her son in the old man’s care. She herself walked the streets of her beloved but now-mournful home town, uncertain if she should stay. Vienna, like the rest of Europe, was bracing itself. The Dollfuss fascists who were running Austria had clearly, Uncle Ernst said, taken against Jews, foreigners “and the like” (as he put it). Indeed, twice he had had problems from former customers and once from an ex-business partner (the one who had rented Stefanie her lodgekeeper’s room in Auerstadt): anti-Semitic comments made loudly, within earshot, blandly feigned ignorance of same when confronted...
“If they just had the courage of their convictions, however unsavory, it would be preferable,” said Ernst. “Swine! Jewish-born that I am, I’m still a Christian Austrian knight of the realm, so far above them in status it’s laughable. Miserable wretches. No class, no education. All they know is what they hate. Like the communists. And these people are all cowards, too, you know. But I greatly fear they will soon be in charge everywhere.”
And once again Stefanie found the name Hitler to be the refrain in the chorus of political complaint. The Viennese were keenly aware that the NaSo leader was an Austrian, an ex-Viennese, a onetime urban castaway on their streets, and that he was making news again in Germany, first, after the Geli Raubal suicide hit the newsstands, as the bereaved lover of Geli, his dead half-niece, then, more respectably, as the Coming Man of Destiny. In 1930 his National Socialist party swept the popular vote in the parliamentary elections, overtaking the Reds; for many, he was the knight, the visionary, the Guide. Stefanie listened as others talked of him, remembering her gaunt portraitist and awkward suitor. Hermann of Teutoburg, Siegfried, Frederick the Great: Every German mythological cliché was embodied in the man. Most spoke of him in favorable tones, even one or two Jews, Helmuth Meinl for one, who met Stefanie at Landtmann’s with his wife Grätel, a smiling porcelain doll of Friesian origin. The Meinls were prosperous, even in those lean times. They had three children, Helmuth said. All were in the charge of their nanny; one was about to go to boarding school in England. Helmuth had done rather well as a stockbroker and dealer in real estate futures, and from those blandly comfortable heights (Benz phaeton, villa in the suburbs, winters in Davos), he recalled with an easy laugh his once-burning notion of becoming a religious scholar and the shabby life of aching ambitions he had left so far behind.
“Ja, well, that was a long time ago, Stefanie,” he said. “Then I suddenly discovered I had a wife and family to feed! And believe me I had no intention of sacrificing comfort to scholarship. The dusty garret, the frayed sleeves, eh? The nervous ailments, the disrespect from everyone. So I went into business. I also converted to Christianity, you know. Ja, I’m no longer a Jew. Adieu, vie de shtetl!”
“He had to,” said Grätel. “If we were to get married. They’re like that where I come from. And now he’s a churchgoing Lutheran, nicht wahr, schatz?”
Steel beneath the porcelain. Helmuth chuckled as his wife leaned over and pinched his cheek in a proprietary and, Stefanie thought, patronizing fashion: Poor Helmuth! But there he was, the happy victim. And he looked well, still bony and loose-limbed but distinctively silver around the temples, with Habsburgian whiskers shaved an inch short of the jaw. The three of them drank a couple of Kapuziners and enjoyed a slice of guglhupf and talked of the world and its ways. When talk turned to politics, Helmuth dismissed the stark anti-Semitism of the Nazis, as the NaSos were coming to be called, and that of their Austrian cohorts as mere posturing long familiar to Germans and Austrians, Austrians especially, going back to the days of Mayor Karl Lueger.
“They’ll change when they get power, just like Lueger. He talked, but he never hurt anybody. This Hitler will be the same. You’ll see.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Stefanie. “I think it’s possible, from what I know of him, which is considerable. Actually, you met him once, Helmuth. Do you remember?”
Helmuth put on a good show of squeezing the memory from his wrinkled brow and twenty years.
“At the opera, yes, of course. The little man in the suit. That was before the war, wasn’t it? 1913 or so?”
“1912.”
“My goodness,” said Grätel. She held her coffee cup halfway to her lips. “You know Hitler, Fraulein von Rothenberg?”
“Oh ja,” said Stefanie, savoring the moment. “Old friends.”
Of course, Stefanie had not seen him since her visit to Landsberg in 1924; he had not written, nor had he summoned her to address any more party meetings after her brief disastrous appearance in Munich, since when her misgivings vis-à-vis Nazism had only deepened. In any case, spiritual anguish kept her away from political life. In politics even at the best of times there was a meretriciousness and moral grubbiness that repelled her. In Nazism, it was clear, malice was coming to dominate moderation. The socialist wing was weakening. Adolf was beginning to trumpet the nationalist call to the hordes.
“Our fatherland, free and pure,” he roared at a rally in Augsburg in April 1932, “our old Germany, rid of Jewry and the church, cleansed of Freemasons, gypsies, socially unproductive elements, and Bolshevism. Out with the foreigner! Out with the masonic Jew Bolshevik! Our old Germany, proud and pure, born again under our flag.”
Surely it was mere politicking, Stefanie thought. “Rid of Jewry and the church”! It was horrible, what he was saying. She considered writing him, then decided against. He probably would not answer a letter from her, he was becoming too prominent. He’d hardly remember her; anyway, what was she hoping for? He was on his way into another, greater arena, where her opinions wouldn’t matter. No conversion there. He’d always been his own man, an artist first and foremost, and he was now a kind of a master artist, a manipulator of destinies, a performer on a vast stage; but an artist, still, and beyond her grasp, or God’s. On the day after the Augsburg rally, however, Hitler issued a public statement of regret, addressed to the Archbishop of Munich “and all my fellow-Catholics of pure German origin” (no apology for promising to rid Germany of Jews, accordingly); and a few days later, in the ironic way of life’s happenings, quite unsolicited, he got in touch with Stefanie. Ernst was standing in the hallway one morning when she returned from fruitless job-hunting. He bustled, and there was a light in his old eyes.
“Steffi,” he said. “My goodness. You had a telephone call from Munich. This number.” He handed over a scrap of notepaper. “From Herr Hitler’s office in the Brown House. I believe I actually spoke to him. Such a strong accent he has, ja?”
“Are you sure?”
Stefanie dialed the number and navigated the powerful currents of secretaries, receptionists and other haughty underlings before she heard his voice announcing his name in a hoarse mumble. She imagined a large office with blinds drawn and a solitary desk in one corner. He sounded half asleep.
“Hitler.”
“Hallo, Herr Hitler! Here is Stefanie von Rothenberg.”
He had been half-asleep—he rarely rose before eleven, and it was barely that now—but his mood lifted when he heard the voice of she who was, in his mellower dreams, sister, mother, and lover to him. Her spirits sank when she remembered the long road behind, the steep climb ahead. Thus did they seem fated ever to play counterpoint to each other’s moods. But that moment, in April 1932, was one of Adolf Hitler’s rare moments of vulnerability, and one of the last he ever allowed himself to expose to an outsider; at that moment, at the crossroads of his life, with a sordid affair behind him in the most sordid way possible, and the limitless fearful future ahead, he needed to confide, to unburden himself, to be reassured. (And the Communists seemed to be taking away votes from the Nazis again, especially in Red Berlin and its suburbs.) Normally he would have turned to his half-niece Geli, or Geli’s mother, his sister Angela; but young (but by no means innocent, oh no, coarsened by men long before he’d met her) Geli had killed herself for love of him (so he said), and his native arrogance ruled out an apology to her mother, who would come around soon enough, anyway: People needed him, but he needed only The People. And yet, just this once, in the stark loneliness of days and nights spent in fitful sleep and brooding, in the chill hallways of Party Headquarters, in the little universe of his mind; this once, he needed a companion, a confidant, a caresser, a woman to make him laugh and remind him of his greatness.
He chose Stefanie. She understood. She had always loved him, he was sure. She would be at his side when others made excuses. She was the seer, the confidante, the one who saw God or what (or whom-) ever it was she saw; like him, she was accountable to no one for what made her different. He’d been disappointed, of course, by her (to all accounts) foolish speech in Munich, and Hess had recommended against asking her to any more party functions, saying (in his humorless way) that she was too sincere, too ladylike, too Christian, apologizing for the Jews, for God’s sake. Well, needless to say Adolf had agreed they couldn’t have that, but all that had happened seven years ago, she was a lady after all, things had changed, she was older now, and entirely (as far as he could ascertain) respectable, except for that Left-wing Frenchman she was living with; somewhat permanently at loose ends, though, as if unappreciated by the world for talents none shared—and how he could understand that!
Had she heard his news? He was, he said, at somewhat low ebb personally.
“Your niece?”
“Half. Yes. And they accuse me of murdering her.”
“That’s politics, Adolf. You need to have a thick hide.”
“She calls him Adolf!” whispered Ernst to Ignace as the two of them huddled behind the door and eavesdropped indiscreetly, Ernst struggling in vain to mute the sinus clearings that afflicted him at moments of excitement. “Hûûûûm!”
Her husband (Hitler said, disingenuously) in Paris had given him this number, her uncle and aunt’s . . . not her husband?
“Well, well. Who, then?”
“A friend.”
He offered no comment. She was still naive enough to think the omission might be from discretion. In fact, it was from indifference. But he feigned concern well enough when she said—in response to a banal question about Vienna—that the Baroness Ottoheinz was dead. Her aunt and uncle, he exclaimed. He remembered them: fine people, ja? Ah, so the Baroness was dead? So sorry. Nevertheless. He wanted to call, to talk. To invite her to visit him.
“An invitation?” she repeated. “To Munich?”
No. Not far from her dear old home town of Salzburg! Ja, he had, he explained, recently purchased a fine property on the Obersalzberg, near the resort town of Berchtesgaden, some thirty kilometers from Salzburg, on top of the world, clean vistas, no crowds . . . didn’t she read the papers? Not even the Austrian rags? Well, anyway, he was having some guests—the Hesses, the Goerings, the von Ribbentrops—over for a weekend to inaugurate the new house, the Haus Wachenfeld—...would she like to...? She would have her own room, with a splendid view of the Obersalzberg—and, by the way, she was the only one he had telephoned personally!
“Just like in the old days, ja?” he said, attempting a laugh. Stefanie laughed dutifully, not catching the reference until she remembered his hoarse stammering voice over her Aunt Marie’s telephone line in Linz, those many years ago. She was, once again, surprised by his ability to recall the seemingly insignificant, but she understood that recognizing the difference between what others saw as insignificant and what was truly so was the gift of the master strategist; and her scrawny artist from Linz was showing signs of being just that, wasn’t he? She wondered why he’d called, although she sensed his loneliness and that avid desire she’d felt in him before, a desire for closeness, praise, companionship. Reluctantly, she felt grateful. Now might be the moment, she thought, to influence him: like him, she felt the other’s weakness. Perhaps he wasn’t lost to God, after all.
“How do I get there?” she inquired.
“Ach, for you it’s easy. Just go to Salzburg and turn left!”
Arrangements were made, tickets and brochures mailed, a map enclosed. Many of the brochures bore the sign of the swastika, sign of the times, wheel of life, wheel of death-to-come; but Germany was still under the creaking yoke of the Weimar Republic, Hitler still a politician-in-waiting.
Stefanie made preparations. She gave thought to her appearance, a rare event. At forty-two she was full of figure, the von Rothenbergs being a stocky breed, but she was scarcely fuller than she had been ten years earlier, and by no means fat. Her introspective, melancholic character deprived her, much of the time, of an appetite, or any settled routine. Occasionally she drank a little too much, usually white wine, frequently Riesling. In the evenings, like so many of her kind, she smoked. Digestive problems plagued her from time to time, the consequence of a temperament unsuited to normality. But overall she was fit and looked less than her age.
“How do I look, Uncle Ernst?”
Old Ernst was proud. He was proud of Ignace, too, who was accompanying his mother as far as Salzburg, where he would spend a day or two with his grandmother. At the Westbahnhof Ernst and Ignace shook hands, and Ernst watched the train pull out. Through the puffs of steam he saw the blue sky above Vienna, and in that sea-sky the swallows swooped and sailed like fragile vessels tossed by the wind.