Chapter Twenty-One
A Summons
Since the glories of the Anschluss and the peripheral distraction of Kristallnacht (“Jews get out! That’s all we’ve been saying. How much clearer can we be? Tickets? Roadsigns? Engraved invitations?”), the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, vegetarian, philosopher (“all Jews are subhuman”; “the United States will sink under its miscegenation”; “it still astonishes me that so few in my younger years recognized in the shape of my profile the sign of my future genius”; “Strauss was a Jew, of course—no, not that Strauss, the other one”), animal-lover, and Time magazine’s Man of the Year, continued his inexorable progress toward becoming the world’s most monstrous artist. Food and drink, never very important to him, appealed less and less, except for Sachertorte and sweet tea, and the occasional sweet sherry. Cars he enjoyed, usually Mercedes-Benzes, but only if someone else was driving, usually Erich Kempka. Sex? Now and then, briefly. There was his funny little Tschapperl, a pallid creature called Eva Braun from Hoffmann’s picture studio in Munich who willingly submitted to the underwear game where others had not, but she smelled sometimes of cigarettes, and that spoiled the game’s mostly olfactory fun. He liked her, in his way, but he certainly didn’t admire or respect her. So his favorite pastime, his own earthly Valhalla, his portal of joy, had nothing of the pleasures of the table or the bedroom about it, nor did it derive from his former incarnation as an artist, except perhaps vicariously. This great pleasure was, quite simply, the private, nocturnal perusal of maps, which he ogled in the avid, secretive way of an adolescent perusing pornography. Maps, and the Map Room, were a true relaxation in the midst of the magnificent but somewhat cold expanse of the monumental new Reichskanzlerei (“ja, what a fine railroad station!” had been Goering’s first, muttered comment in response to Hitler’s enthusiastic, almost boyish “See, Goering? Isn’t it fine?”) Hitler’s pet architect Albert Speer—identified behind his back as “Grossarschkuesser Des Fuehrers” by those who should know one—had had the foresight or the instinct to set aside, on the mezzanine behind the gigantic lobby, an anteroom that was, by contrast with the stylized monumentalism of the rest of the place, almost relaxing, if not quite gemŸtlich, what with the network of exposed heating pipes that had yet to be covered over, either with a dropped-panel ceiling, or the carved, kitschy, neo-hunting lodge beams that adorned certain of the other rooms; Speer was inclining to the latter, with his Fuhrer’s approval…The room was called the “Map Room,” logically, for upon its floor-toceiling shelves were stacked approximately a hundred gazetteers, twenty atlases, and two hundred maps; ordinance survey, military, navigational, and touristic, maps new and old, mostly of Europe East and West. There were a few of Asia, a matched pair of Latin America, a half dozen of the United States, none of Canada, Australia and/or Antarctica, for who cared about those places? The Japanese? (Strange, copper-colored people, a bit like Red Indians; not really quite Aryan but possessed of a certain savage dignity; undefeated for a thousand years, after all! Still, it was good you didn’t have to deal with them every day.) But there were many maps (22, to be exact) of the FŸhrer’s favorite, his own native and—thanks to him since a year ago last March—nonexistent land: Austria. Specifically Linz, his not-quite-birthplace, of which more maps than ever before were now being printed by the Reich publishing house. Fine maps, too. But the old ones were the best. The most powerful artist in the world enthusiastically sandpapered dry palms together when first he set eyes on the Map Room with its soft lighting, its Turkmen carpet with swastika motif, its potted plants (native, of course), its Arno Breker painting of nearly-naked blondies against a tedious backdrop of theatrical clouds breaking apart to reveal the rising Aryan sun, and its mahogany mapshelves with brass railings. In his office upstairs that was bigger than all the churches in Braunau combined, in the midst of leading the nation that would soon lead the world, the former landscape painter often found himself anticipating with a premonitory frisson of delight a late night alone with imaginary landscapes evoked by the rustling maps in his hands: maps of Linz, soon-to-be capital of a New Europe, Weltstadt Linz (or another name: FŸhrerburg? Hitleropolis?), a German Budapest that would not commit Vienna’s error of turning its back to the Danube, along which a mighty autobahn would run. Great factories in Linz would turn out the world’s best machines. He saw a statue of himself in place of the pigeonshit-covered Holy Trinity Pillar on the Hauptplatz. And the Gau Haus, with his crypt down a wide somber flight of stairs. The Bruckner monument (how did it go, the Fourth Symphony? Da-da-da-da-da-DAAA? Or Da?). The Anschluss monument, Austria unchained. Art galleries for the works of Weichsler and Breker. A grand stadium, named after…well, him. Yes, he was rebuilding the world, but he would start with dear old Linz. It was a solitary passion. Only Speer was welcome to drop by, but Adolf suspected his young acolyte didn’t give a toss about Linz.
So at night, when the real business of running the German Reich straight to hell was over for the day, and the Chancellery’s three hundred minor and middle bureaucrats had rocked and swayed their way homeward aboard sundry buses and unreliable cars and rattling U-bahns; after the jackbooted and clean-uniformed sycophants of this or that security service had gone about their dirty business; after his personal secretaries, Fraulein Ulla Jungemann and Frau Christa Schršder and Fraulein Sieglinde (aber ja!) Rappersweiler had been granted permission to join the diminishing homeward trickle at eight p.m. or so (but they didn’t get in until just before noon, because HE was never there before then)…then the world was his. Of course, he intended to make that literally true, in due course; but for now the nighttime world of a boy’s fantasies would suffice.
It was 1939. He was a god. He would, shortly, be the god of war, he whose spirits are hurricane, his servants flames of fire! He who goes on the wings of the wind! He whose laugh is the mockery of Hell, whose love is a murderous lightning flash!
He who was once the laughingstock of the Heim fŸr MŠnner!
The ex-laughingstock’s profile, with its sloping Waldviertel-peasant forehead, prominent MitteleuropŠischer hooter and weak village-idiot chin, all straightened up and rendered stern and determined like the prow of a dreadnought, had become the silhouette of Germany on her postage stamps and party posters. He, Adolf the painter, Adolf the dosshouse dweller, Adolf the hapless suitor, Adolf the mamma’s boy, Adolf the streetcorner bawler: HE had become the mysterious deity whose mighty granite visage he had long imagined glaring from behind the clouds upon the so-imperfect world, upon the poor artist’s foot-aching inward-wailing pilgrimages around cold, aloof Vienna. And now glory was his. Vienna was his. There was justice in the world, if you made your own. The world was yielding to him, to his magnetism, his power, his aesthetic and military genius. Roehm was long gone, the Rhineland was wrested from the Frenchies, the ridiculous toy Czechoslovak pseudo-nation quite properly dismantled, the Sudetens brought back into the fold, nasal constipated old Chamberlain—who, as he’d told Mussolini, liked to take weekends in the country where he, Hitler, preferred to take countries in the weekend: Oh! Ha ha that was a good one, FŸhrer, said the Duce, slapping his thigh with a glove—Chamberlain, with his perpetual ahem! ahem! and look of a disheveled sheep, sent away with a flea in his ear and a boot in his baggy striped trousers, and (best of all) Austria—Adolf’s native land—Austria of bitter memory and the decadent Habsburgs—Austria of his humiliation—of pullulating Judaism—of a thousand lonely nights in Leonding and Vienna—Austria had been brought under control, tamed, muzzled, made docile, renamed Ostmark, made German. In his own, admittedly fine, words (one crawler had described his speech in Linz as “a sure sign that Germany has a new Pericles”): When I first set out from this town I felt in the depth of my soul that it was my vocation and my mission, given to me by destiny, that I should bring my home country back to the great German Reich. I have believed in this mission, and I have fulfilled it. Dixit!
And Vienna! Vienna was his now, as she deserved to be. Not that he wanted her, the old whore. The fabulous anteroom of Empire, as Metternich had it? No, no more now than a far-flung suburb of Budapest, as von Schirach had more felicitously put it. Yes, more than anything else in the magnificent, squalid, stirring, ludicrous and tragic story of Hitler’s life, he had savored that moment in the cold night air on the balcony of the Hotel Imperial, saluting the bestial adulation of the Viennese who had formerly and so often rejected him and all his works. There he savored his revenge, his triumph, his victory, there on the very Ringstrasse where he had once had (or maybe not—but it made for good reading in Mein Kampf, or so Hess had assured him) his life-changing revelation about the, well, excessive Jewishness of the Jews, specifically one malodorous old rabbi direct from the shtetl in greasy ringlets and beard who’d elbowed young Adolf rudely aside in the streetcar line, spilling his roasted chestnuts and spitting out through crooked yellow teeth some Yiddischer imprecation about “dummes hanswurst”—indeed, that precise streetcar stop was visible from the Imperial’s balcony, nicht wahr?—where the Fates, the Norns, the blondie-godlings of Teutonworld, had placed him, their anointed one, to receive the balm of Vienna’s abasement, soon to be followed by Europe’s, then the world’s….
And, with the help of all those fine Aryan citizens who wrote to him daily in their thousands to denounce this Jew, that gypsy, those suspected half-breeds (“Dear FŸhrer! It has come to my attention that the Jew Feldstein downstairs is having carnal relations with an Aryan woman named Schultz across the street, no doubt against her will!” “Dear FŸhrer! I have reason to suspect my supervisor of being a half-Jew!”), he would erase from the world all race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual criminals, especially those with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed deformed whole-and half-Jews, and a whole series of racially inferior types even he had never come across (Wends, Rhaeto-Romans, Moldavians, etc.)!! It would be a world conceived by him, painted by Arno Breker, scored by Richard Strauss!!!
Well, no. Forget Strausses, Richard and Johann. Wagner, now and always. (Except for Die Fledermaus, of course. Ah, the opening waltz…) Hitler heard in his mind, as he often did, the opening chords of Parsifal, Act One. Or the overture to Rienzi. Actually, on that night, the second night of the Anschluss, he had attended a performance of Tristan at the Vienna Opera for the first time since 1912. Not that he’d ever been that enamored of Tristan with its (as he said so often at table) Frenchified sentiments, swooning love carry-on and dying with a kiss and all that quatsch; but he had to admit the music itself was wonderful, stirring, magisterial. Almost as good as the peerless Rienzi. And how right, how just, to attend the same opera in the same opera house, with memories still vivid of spending that entire winter’s day in 1912 at the Heim fŸr MŠnner before the opera, assiduously brushing off those old hand-me-down trousers, only to be escorted by some pederast of a gypsy baron or snooty Hungarian-Jewish usher to the paupers’ gallery, the standing-room-only section of the theatre; then, after finally getting to his seat, meeting that friend of that friend of his…that Helmuth Meinl fellow, Jewish of course but he was one of those you had to watch, he didn’t really look like one, of course that was nearly thirty years ago and he might look like one now, and if he was still in Vienna well too bad for him…and as for her?
On this night Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich, holder of the Iron Cross First Class, with an excellent background in cheap lithographs and postcard design, raised his head from his maps, some of which were of Poland and would soon prove useful on the road to world conquest, when things would be set right, November ’18 avenged, the many slights of Vienna buried for good… The slights of an artist, a painter…no, not quite all. Gazing at the Breker portrait, he remembered the portrait he’d painted of Stefanie. Lieber Gott. A portrait, the only one he’d done. The reason the desiccated Jews at the Vienna Academy had turned him down had been because, allegedly, he couldn’t paint people; well, they’d never seen his portrait of Stefanie, it proved he could. But to make it public would be to destroy another myth while revealing too much about certain aspects of the past, so none could be permitted to see it, to speculate on its origins, to discover its Jewish connections, the normality of his infatuation with that girl…! Christus, there were so many tracks to cover, even now. But anything could be done if he willed it.
So, with the godlike decisiveness that had brought him so far, he picked up the telephone, pressed the Security button, listened to the despairing parp of the dial tone. Finally young Corporal Burger on the Sicherheitsdienst switchboard responded, breathlessly, with an almost audible clicking of the heels, having just realized Whose line was ringing...
“Heil Hitler,” said he to his caller, who was exempt from this formula.
“Ja, ja. Listen, knabe, I want you to connect me to Vienna. To Gauleiter Seyss-Inquart’s office.” The man stayed up late, he knew that. Telephonic clicks ensued, but suddenly, on second thoughts, Adi remembered how thoroughly he disliked Seyss-Inquart, his man on the Ringsstrasse; oh, a good administrator and all that, but a man with the soul of a bookkeeper and a voice like broken glass and no taste in music at all… “No, no, forget that,” as more confused clicks emanated from the earpiece, “just make sure Seyss-Inquart gets this message. Now, there’s a Baron Kahane somewhere there,” said ex-Corporal Hitler, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Reich, in the hoarse undertone he used on the telephone, to the nearly-comatose Corporal Burger, a mere staff corporal, for goodness’ sake, and only filling in for Oberst Hahne, who was with his mistress. “Ja. K-A-H-A-N-E… He’s a Jew, of course, but that’s beside the point. Listen, boy, there are two possibilities. One, they’ve already gone to his house; two, they haven’t. If they haven’t, tell them to make sure they get hold of a painting there. It’s a portrait of a woman, signed. Seyss-Inquart will know the details. Bring it here, to the Reichskanzlerei. No,” his voice rose slightly, “not the old Jew. His luck ran out. It’s the painting, blšdmann.”
He replaced the receiver, breathing heavily at the boy’s stupidity and at the thought of the portrait that from across the gulf of the years seemed to stare at him with a baleful gaze that spelled disaster…and he knew not why, when everything was falling into place otherwise. Well. Never mind. They would find it, bring it back. They’d found the others, the drawings of Geli, the Cranach forgeries. That portrait would be his to do with as he wished: burn, hide, even paint over, or cover with architectural plans he’d work on with Speer.
In a somewhat inevitable mental next step even for an utterly self-absorbed egomaniac like Adolf Hitler, he then thought of the portrait’s subject, Stefanie von Rothenberg, and he thought of her with all the limited tenderness of which he was capable. She had so nearly been entirely his own, ex-sweetheart and ex-mistress and the only woman he had ever loved to the admittedly very narrow degree that he was capable of love of anyone not himself—which meant that she’d pleased him at times, and had shown more of an understanding of his mission than most women, and he’d liked her at times, too, and even desired her, once or twice, certainly in Linz, where she was unattainable, and occasionally up at the Berghof, where she’d been less alluring by becoming attainable; but then she was gone, like so many passing ships on the limitless ocean of Adolf’s grand and lonely life. He couldn’t recall exactly how, or why, but he remembered where: Paris.
Next to him was an empty teacup that had contained sweetened chamomile. In it were sugar crystals, dissolving into a small residual tea-puddle. He stared at it fixedly, wishing for more but reluctant to summon Kannenberg, the valet. Next to the teacup was the internal Chancellery telephone; next to that, the external phone, with lines to Hess, Ribbentrop, Goering, Himmler, and Heydrich. A third phone linked to Bormann, directly. The FŸhrer cracked his knuckles, staring at the trio of telephones with a butterfly-leap of anticipation in his stomach and a dreamy sense of perfection in all: his war, his life, his mission. All except (he almost laughed; he was becoming mawkish) the right kind of woman to impress, behind the scenes (the Volk couldn’t know about women, they had to keep on desiring him, their solitary swain, their head wandervogel, their god; or the spell would break). Not silly Eva, who was only good at skiing and dancing and the underwear game. No, a woman who was Aryan and a lady and knew her place, one who was educated and discreet and who could understand the sacredness of his crusade, a kind of cross between a mother superior and a secretary but with a handsome appearance and a “von” in her name. Ach, that “von” was still important, even in the New Germany! And of course Stefanie had had it all. And he’d had her. And he could find her if he wanted. If she was still alive. Paris was a place much like Vienna, no doubt. Decadent to the hilt, a city not bad to look at, but rotten to the core. Artists, writers. Arno Breker, for one. He’d studied there…Adolf mused dreamily about garrets, stagelit rooftops, accordions…Yes, he’d take Arno with him, when he went. He wasn’t there yet, but he would be, lieber Gott, this he knew with as much certainty as he knew his own name. The French, hold out? The generals were dead wrong there, as they were on so many things. France’s time was past. Look: they’d even had a Jewish prime minister, that pathetic Blum. Paris quite soon, then. What would she think? He’d have to find out if she was still alive. Of course she was, why shouldn’t she be? She wasn’t Jewish, or Slavic. He picked up the phone connected to the Security Police. A quacking voice answered, soon hushed into reverence.
“The address of Frau or Madame Stefanie von Rothenberg in Paris. Ja. No, RothenBERG. Immediately.”
“Right away, mein fŸhrer.”
Then he rode the reverie, with a slight dreamy smile few ever saw. Would she remember their clandestine rendezvous, that day in Linz, thirty two years and a century or two ago? Surrounded by hussars and Hungarians and Habsburgs? Ach, ja. And now. He could make things easy for her, now. True, she had Jewish relations. Too bad for them, unless she insisted, as they’d done for that old fraud Freud, and Dr. Bloch. Because he could, if he wanted. He could do anything…
The external phone’s jangle slashed the velvet silence of the Map Room. Expecting Seyss-Inquart with a question about the Vienna portrait, or Heydrich of the Security Police with Stefanie’s address or the latest news on the secret maneuvers in Silesia that would unlock the gates of war (a dodge that had occasioned as much smug mirth and palm-rubbing in the inner circle as a small boy’s conker game), Hitler greedily snatched up the receiver. But if it was Heydrich the man was drunk or insubordinate, and he was too much of a sycophant to be either; and Seyss-Inquart didn’t drink, and was, if anything, a bigger arschkriecher than Heydrich.
Besides, there was something in the sound at the other end of the line that was familiar and very disturbing.
“Ja-a-a-a?” warily inquired the FŸhrer of the Greater German Reich.
Over the line came a phlegmy baritone laugh interspersed with a breathy whisper redolent of the most devastating sexuality and foulness and somehow also evocative of unpleasant places like overflowing public toilets and the damp and moldy corners of ruined houses and under stairwells and stained nighttime beds and dank groves and the trenches of the War.
“Hey ho, oh you, my Faustus,” said the voice. “Oh son of mine. My brother. My lover. Oh my gift to me, I sing your song but not as well as you sing mine.” And the voice—the sound, rather, less a voice than a rough wind from untold wastelands—emitted a long low gasp followed by a laugh to chill the blood, then the laughs grew shorter and shorter like a locomotive accelerating until an unnaturally high pitch was attained and the sound, all sounds in one, soared away like a distant rocket hastening to the heart of destruction—and vanished. Then came the hissing of a dead line and the mundane drone of a dial tone and the blood thundering in his ears.
Hitler jiggled the cradle until the operator, Oberst Hahne, who was back from his tryst, replied.
“Ja, mein FŸhrer.”
“Tell me who made that call.”
“What call, mein FŸhrer?”
“The one that just came into my office. Find out where it came from.”
He put down the phone. The odd thing was, it wasn’t the first time he had heard this sound. The last time had been, as a matter of fact, Vienna in March 1938, after the triumph, after the balcony speech, alone in the bathroom of his suite at the Imperial following much bowing and heel-clicking and handshaking and fending-off of lickspittles. Then, too, there had been a sudden presence, but a visual one, a kind of murky mist in the shaving mirror. And a smell, like matches being struck. He had ordered investigations, of course, but the hotel staff found nothing, and anyway he knew in his heart that the matter was beyond investigation, beyond the Gestapo, beyond even human agency, nonsensical as that seemed.
The phone rang. It was Hahne.
“I’m very sorry, mein FŸhrer, but we have no register of a Frau von Rothenburg in Paris.”
“That’s because it’s Rothenberg…oh, never mind. And the call?”
“We have no records of any calls coming into your office since just after six
p.m. when Gauleiter Mutschmann called from Dresden and the train company called from Hannover about your personal carriage at 8…”
“Good,” muttered Adolf. “Good. So. Ja.” He hung up. “Anyway, I knew that. Gott,” he muttered, suddenly aware of the inappropriateness of his usual repertory of curses—Gott, Christus, Heilige Mutter, and the rest… yes, it was as if, having risen so high, he, who had never in the conventional sense believed in God, the Trinity, etc., had encountered a spirit born of their belief, a spirit of the upper air at variance with lower-dwelling Mankind, believed in but unseen by the boring ones with jobs in offices who go to the shops and raise children...it was a daemon, a great rival, jealous of his power. After all, was he not a god? And did a god not need an opponent? Wotan—Alberich? Rienzi—Orsini? Winnetou—Old Shatterhand?
One thing he knew: He would never speak of it—him—the creature—his nemesis. No, for speaking of it would make it all the more real, and would lead it closer to him. And if he still had a shred of belief in a God Who was not him, he’d pray to that God to never hear the voice again.
Then Adolf Hitler, FŸhrer of the Greater German Reich, lowers his head as in, but not in, prayer, and…what is this? Can it be a tear welling up in his stern and steely eyes and falling on the map in front of him and trickling like the meandering Danube into the heart of Linz?
No, of course not: It is a drop of condensation from the ceiling-mounted pipes for the still-new heating system.
But:
“I’ve defeated them all,” he said. “I’ll defeat you, too.” And he made a fist of his right hand, as on the poster on which he appeared as Siegfried, holding a spear, with in the distance all the crenellated towers and high mountains of the future, perfect, Jew-free, sun-kissed New Germany.
Since the glories of the Anschluss and the peripheral distraction of Kristallnacht (“Jews get out! That’s all we’ve been saying. How much clearer can we be? Tickets? Roadsigns? Engraved invitations?”), the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, vegetarian, philosopher (“all Jews are subhuman”; “the United States will sink under its miscegenation”; “it still astonishes me that so few in my younger years recognized in the shape of my profile the sign of my future genius”; “Strauss was a Jew, of course—no, not that Strauss, the other one”), animal-lover, and Time magazine’s Man of the Year, continued his inexorable progress toward becoming the world’s most monstrous artist. Food and drink, never very important to him, appealed less and less, except for Sachertorte and sweet tea, and the occasional sweet sherry. Cars he enjoyed, usually Mercedes-Benzes, but only if someone else was driving, usually Erich Kempka. Sex? Now and then, briefly. There was his funny little Tschapperl, a pallid creature called Eva Braun from Hoffmann’s picture studio in Munich who willingly submitted to the underwear game where others had not, but she smelled sometimes of cigarettes, and that spoiled the game’s mostly olfactory fun. He liked her, in his way, but he certainly didn’t admire or respect her. So his favorite pastime, his own earthly Valhalla, his portal of joy, had nothing of the pleasures of the table or the bedroom about it, nor did it derive from his former incarnation as an artist, except perhaps vicariously. This great pleasure was, quite simply, the private, nocturnal perusal of maps, which he ogled in the avid, secretive way of an adolescent perusing pornography. Maps, and the Map Room, were a true relaxation in the midst of the magnificent but somewhat cold expanse of the monumental new Reichskanzlerei (“ja, what a fine railroad station!” had been Goering’s first, muttered comment in response to Hitler’s enthusiastic, almost boyish “See, Goering? Isn’t it fine?”) Hitler’s pet architect Albert Speer—identified behind his back as “Grossarschkuesser Des Fuehrers” by those who should know one—had had the foresight or the instinct to set aside, on the mezzanine behind the gigantic lobby, an anteroom that was, by contrast with the stylized monumentalism of the rest of the place, almost relaxing, if not quite gemŸtlich, what with the network of exposed heating pipes that had yet to be covered over, either with a dropped-panel ceiling, or the carved, kitschy, neo-hunting lodge beams that adorned certain of the other rooms; Speer was inclining to the latter, with his Fuhrer’s approval…The room was called the “Map Room,” logically, for upon its floor-toceiling shelves were stacked approximately a hundred gazetteers, twenty atlases, and two hundred maps; ordinance survey, military, navigational, and touristic, maps new and old, mostly of Europe East and West. There were a few of Asia, a matched pair of Latin America, a half dozen of the United States, none of Canada, Australia and/or Antarctica, for who cared about those places? The Japanese? (Strange, copper-colored people, a bit like Red Indians; not really quite Aryan but possessed of a certain savage dignity; undefeated for a thousand years, after all! Still, it was good you didn’t have to deal with them every day.) But there were many maps (22, to be exact) of the FŸhrer’s favorite, his own native and—thanks to him since a year ago last March—nonexistent land: Austria. Specifically Linz, his not-quite-birthplace, of which more maps than ever before were now being printed by the Reich publishing house. Fine maps, too. But the old ones were the best. The most powerful artist in the world enthusiastically sandpapered dry palms together when first he set eyes on the Map Room with its soft lighting, its Turkmen carpet with swastika motif, its potted plants (native, of course), its Arno Breker painting of nearly-naked blondies against a tedious backdrop of theatrical clouds breaking apart to reveal the rising Aryan sun, and its mahogany mapshelves with brass railings. In his office upstairs that was bigger than all the churches in Braunau combined, in the midst of leading the nation that would soon lead the world, the former landscape painter often found himself anticipating with a premonitory frisson of delight a late night alone with imaginary landscapes evoked by the rustling maps in his hands: maps of Linz, soon-to-be capital of a New Europe, Weltstadt Linz (or another name: FŸhrerburg? Hitleropolis?), a German Budapest that would not commit Vienna’s error of turning its back to the Danube, along which a mighty autobahn would run. Great factories in Linz would turn out the world’s best machines. He saw a statue of himself in place of the pigeonshit-covered Holy Trinity Pillar on the Hauptplatz. And the Gau Haus, with his crypt down a wide somber flight of stairs. The Bruckner monument (how did it go, the Fourth Symphony? Da-da-da-da-da-DAAA? Or Da?). The Anschluss monument, Austria unchained. Art galleries for the works of Weichsler and Breker. A grand stadium, named after…well, him. Yes, he was rebuilding the world, but he would start with dear old Linz. It was a solitary passion. Only Speer was welcome to drop by, but Adolf suspected his young acolyte didn’t give a toss about Linz.
So at night, when the real business of running the German Reich straight to hell was over for the day, and the Chancellery’s three hundred minor and middle bureaucrats had rocked and swayed their way homeward aboard sundry buses and unreliable cars and rattling U-bahns; after the jackbooted and clean-uniformed sycophants of this or that security service had gone about their dirty business; after his personal secretaries, Fraulein Ulla Jungemann and Frau Christa Schršder and Fraulein Sieglinde (aber ja!) Rappersweiler had been granted permission to join the diminishing homeward trickle at eight p.m. or so (but they didn’t get in until just before noon, because HE was never there before then)…then the world was his. Of course, he intended to make that literally true, in due course; but for now the nighttime world of a boy’s fantasies would suffice.
It was 1939. He was a god. He would, shortly, be the god of war, he whose spirits are hurricane, his servants flames of fire! He who goes on the wings of the wind! He whose laugh is the mockery of Hell, whose love is a murderous lightning flash!
He who was once the laughingstock of the Heim fŸr MŠnner!
The ex-laughingstock’s profile, with its sloping Waldviertel-peasant forehead, prominent MitteleuropŠischer hooter and weak village-idiot chin, all straightened up and rendered stern and determined like the prow of a dreadnought, had become the silhouette of Germany on her postage stamps and party posters. He, Adolf the painter, Adolf the dosshouse dweller, Adolf the hapless suitor, Adolf the mamma’s boy, Adolf the streetcorner bawler: HE had become the mysterious deity whose mighty granite visage he had long imagined glaring from behind the clouds upon the so-imperfect world, upon the poor artist’s foot-aching inward-wailing pilgrimages around cold, aloof Vienna. And now glory was his. Vienna was his. There was justice in the world, if you made your own. The world was yielding to him, to his magnetism, his power, his aesthetic and military genius. Roehm was long gone, the Rhineland was wrested from the Frenchies, the ridiculous toy Czechoslovak pseudo-nation quite properly dismantled, the Sudetens brought back into the fold, nasal constipated old Chamberlain—who, as he’d told Mussolini, liked to take weekends in the country where he, Hitler, preferred to take countries in the weekend: Oh! Ha ha that was a good one, FŸhrer, said the Duce, slapping his thigh with a glove—Chamberlain, with his perpetual ahem! ahem! and look of a disheveled sheep, sent away with a flea in his ear and a boot in his baggy striped trousers, and (best of all) Austria—Adolf’s native land—Austria of bitter memory and the decadent Habsburgs—Austria of his humiliation—of pullulating Judaism—of a thousand lonely nights in Leonding and Vienna—Austria had been brought under control, tamed, muzzled, made docile, renamed Ostmark, made German. In his own, admittedly fine, words (one crawler had described his speech in Linz as “a sure sign that Germany has a new Pericles”): When I first set out from this town I felt in the depth of my soul that it was my vocation and my mission, given to me by destiny, that I should bring my home country back to the great German Reich. I have believed in this mission, and I have fulfilled it. Dixit!
And Vienna! Vienna was his now, as she deserved to be. Not that he wanted her, the old whore. The fabulous anteroom of Empire, as Metternich had it? No, no more now than a far-flung suburb of Budapest, as von Schirach had more felicitously put it. Yes, more than anything else in the magnificent, squalid, stirring, ludicrous and tragic story of Hitler’s life, he had savored that moment in the cold night air on the balcony of the Hotel Imperial, saluting the bestial adulation of the Viennese who had formerly and so often rejected him and all his works. There he savored his revenge, his triumph, his victory, there on the very Ringstrasse where he had once had (or maybe not—but it made for good reading in Mein Kampf, or so Hess had assured him) his life-changing revelation about the, well, excessive Jewishness of the Jews, specifically one malodorous old rabbi direct from the shtetl in greasy ringlets and beard who’d elbowed young Adolf rudely aside in the streetcar line, spilling his roasted chestnuts and spitting out through crooked yellow teeth some Yiddischer imprecation about “dummes hanswurst”—indeed, that precise streetcar stop was visible from the Imperial’s balcony, nicht wahr?—where the Fates, the Norns, the blondie-godlings of Teutonworld, had placed him, their anointed one, to receive the balm of Vienna’s abasement, soon to be followed by Europe’s, then the world’s….
And, with the help of all those fine Aryan citizens who wrote to him daily in their thousands to denounce this Jew, that gypsy, those suspected half-breeds (“Dear FŸhrer! It has come to my attention that the Jew Feldstein downstairs is having carnal relations with an Aryan woman named Schultz across the street, no doubt against her will!” “Dear FŸhrer! I have reason to suspect my supervisor of being a half-Jew!”), he would erase from the world all race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual criminals, especially those with hydrocephalus, cross-eyed deformed whole-and half-Jews, and a whole series of racially inferior types even he had never come across (Wends, Rhaeto-Romans, Moldavians, etc.)!! It would be a world conceived by him, painted by Arno Breker, scored by Richard Strauss!!!
Well, no. Forget Strausses, Richard and Johann. Wagner, now and always. (Except for Die Fledermaus, of course. Ah, the opening waltz…) Hitler heard in his mind, as he often did, the opening chords of Parsifal, Act One. Or the overture to Rienzi. Actually, on that night, the second night of the Anschluss, he had attended a performance of Tristan at the Vienna Opera for the first time since 1912. Not that he’d ever been that enamored of Tristan with its (as he said so often at table) Frenchified sentiments, swooning love carry-on and dying with a kiss and all that quatsch; but he had to admit the music itself was wonderful, stirring, magisterial. Almost as good as the peerless Rienzi. And how right, how just, to attend the same opera in the same opera house, with memories still vivid of spending that entire winter’s day in 1912 at the Heim fŸr MŠnner before the opera, assiduously brushing off those old hand-me-down trousers, only to be escorted by some pederast of a gypsy baron or snooty Hungarian-Jewish usher to the paupers’ gallery, the standing-room-only section of the theatre; then, after finally getting to his seat, meeting that friend of that friend of his…that Helmuth Meinl fellow, Jewish of course but he was one of those you had to watch, he didn’t really look like one, of course that was nearly thirty years ago and he might look like one now, and if he was still in Vienna well too bad for him…and as for her?
On this night Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of the Greater German Reich, holder of the Iron Cross First Class, with an excellent background in cheap lithographs and postcard design, raised his head from his maps, some of which were of Poland and would soon prove useful on the road to world conquest, when things would be set right, November ’18 avenged, the many slights of Vienna buried for good… The slights of an artist, a painter…no, not quite all. Gazing at the Breker portrait, he remembered the portrait he’d painted of Stefanie. Lieber Gott. A portrait, the only one he’d done. The reason the desiccated Jews at the Vienna Academy had turned him down had been because, allegedly, he couldn’t paint people; well, they’d never seen his portrait of Stefanie, it proved he could. But to make it public would be to destroy another myth while revealing too much about certain aspects of the past, so none could be permitted to see it, to speculate on its origins, to discover its Jewish connections, the normality of his infatuation with that girl…! Christus, there were so many tracks to cover, even now. But anything could be done if he willed it.
So, with the godlike decisiveness that had brought him so far, he picked up the telephone, pressed the Security button, listened to the despairing parp of the dial tone. Finally young Corporal Burger on the Sicherheitsdienst switchboard responded, breathlessly, with an almost audible clicking of the heels, having just realized Whose line was ringing...
“Heil Hitler,” said he to his caller, who was exempt from this formula.
“Ja, ja. Listen, knabe, I want you to connect me to Vienna. To Gauleiter Seyss-Inquart’s office.” The man stayed up late, he knew that. Telephonic clicks ensued, but suddenly, on second thoughts, Adi remembered how thoroughly he disliked Seyss-Inquart, his man on the Ringsstrasse; oh, a good administrator and all that, but a man with the soul of a bookkeeper and a voice like broken glass and no taste in music at all… “No, no, forget that,” as more confused clicks emanated from the earpiece, “just make sure Seyss-Inquart gets this message. Now, there’s a Baron Kahane somewhere there,” said ex-Corporal Hitler, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Reich, in the hoarse undertone he used on the telephone, to the nearly-comatose Corporal Burger, a mere staff corporal, for goodness’ sake, and only filling in for Oberst Hahne, who was with his mistress. “Ja. K-A-H-A-N-E… He’s a Jew, of course, but that’s beside the point. Listen, boy, there are two possibilities. One, they’ve already gone to his house; two, they haven’t. If they haven’t, tell them to make sure they get hold of a painting there. It’s a portrait of a woman, signed. Seyss-Inquart will know the details. Bring it here, to the Reichskanzlerei. No,” his voice rose slightly, “not the old Jew. His luck ran out. It’s the painting, blšdmann.”
He replaced the receiver, breathing heavily at the boy’s stupidity and at the thought of the portrait that from across the gulf of the years seemed to stare at him with a baleful gaze that spelled disaster…and he knew not why, when everything was falling into place otherwise. Well. Never mind. They would find it, bring it back. They’d found the others, the drawings of Geli, the Cranach forgeries. That portrait would be his to do with as he wished: burn, hide, even paint over, or cover with architectural plans he’d work on with Speer.
In a somewhat inevitable mental next step even for an utterly self-absorbed egomaniac like Adolf Hitler, he then thought of the portrait’s subject, Stefanie von Rothenberg, and he thought of her with all the limited tenderness of which he was capable. She had so nearly been entirely his own, ex-sweetheart and ex-mistress and the only woman he had ever loved to the admittedly very narrow degree that he was capable of love of anyone not himself—which meant that she’d pleased him at times, and had shown more of an understanding of his mission than most women, and he’d liked her at times, too, and even desired her, once or twice, certainly in Linz, where she was unattainable, and occasionally up at the Berghof, where she’d been less alluring by becoming attainable; but then she was gone, like so many passing ships on the limitless ocean of Adolf’s grand and lonely life. He couldn’t recall exactly how, or why, but he remembered where: Paris.
Next to him was an empty teacup that had contained sweetened chamomile. In it were sugar crystals, dissolving into a small residual tea-puddle. He stared at it fixedly, wishing for more but reluctant to summon Kannenberg, the valet. Next to the teacup was the internal Chancellery telephone; next to that, the external phone, with lines to Hess, Ribbentrop, Goering, Himmler, and Heydrich. A third phone linked to Bormann, directly. The FŸhrer cracked his knuckles, staring at the trio of telephones with a butterfly-leap of anticipation in his stomach and a dreamy sense of perfection in all: his war, his life, his mission. All except (he almost laughed; he was becoming mawkish) the right kind of woman to impress, behind the scenes (the Volk couldn’t know about women, they had to keep on desiring him, their solitary swain, their head wandervogel, their god; or the spell would break). Not silly Eva, who was only good at skiing and dancing and the underwear game. No, a woman who was Aryan and a lady and knew her place, one who was educated and discreet and who could understand the sacredness of his crusade, a kind of cross between a mother superior and a secretary but with a handsome appearance and a “von” in her name. Ach, that “von” was still important, even in the New Germany! And of course Stefanie had had it all. And he’d had her. And he could find her if he wanted. If she was still alive. Paris was a place much like Vienna, no doubt. Decadent to the hilt, a city not bad to look at, but rotten to the core. Artists, writers. Arno Breker, for one. He’d studied there…Adolf mused dreamily about garrets, stagelit rooftops, accordions…Yes, he’d take Arno with him, when he went. He wasn’t there yet, but he would be, lieber Gott, this he knew with as much certainty as he knew his own name. The French, hold out? The generals were dead wrong there, as they were on so many things. France’s time was past. Look: they’d even had a Jewish prime minister, that pathetic Blum. Paris quite soon, then. What would she think? He’d have to find out if she was still alive. Of course she was, why shouldn’t she be? She wasn’t Jewish, or Slavic. He picked up the phone connected to the Security Police. A quacking voice answered, soon hushed into reverence.
“The address of Frau or Madame Stefanie von Rothenberg in Paris. Ja. No, RothenBERG. Immediately.”
“Right away, mein fŸhrer.”
Then he rode the reverie, with a slight dreamy smile few ever saw. Would she remember their clandestine rendezvous, that day in Linz, thirty two years and a century or two ago? Surrounded by hussars and Hungarians and Habsburgs? Ach, ja. And now. He could make things easy for her, now. True, she had Jewish relations. Too bad for them, unless she insisted, as they’d done for that old fraud Freud, and Dr. Bloch. Because he could, if he wanted. He could do anything…
The external phone’s jangle slashed the velvet silence of the Map Room. Expecting Seyss-Inquart with a question about the Vienna portrait, or Heydrich of the Security Police with Stefanie’s address or the latest news on the secret maneuvers in Silesia that would unlock the gates of war (a dodge that had occasioned as much smug mirth and palm-rubbing in the inner circle as a small boy’s conker game), Hitler greedily snatched up the receiver. But if it was Heydrich the man was drunk or insubordinate, and he was too much of a sycophant to be either; and Seyss-Inquart didn’t drink, and was, if anything, a bigger arschkriecher than Heydrich.
Besides, there was something in the sound at the other end of the line that was familiar and very disturbing.
“Ja-a-a-a?” warily inquired the FŸhrer of the Greater German Reich.
Over the line came a phlegmy baritone laugh interspersed with a breathy whisper redolent of the most devastating sexuality and foulness and somehow also evocative of unpleasant places like overflowing public toilets and the damp and moldy corners of ruined houses and under stairwells and stained nighttime beds and dank groves and the trenches of the War.
“Hey ho, oh you, my Faustus,” said the voice. “Oh son of mine. My brother. My lover. Oh my gift to me, I sing your song but not as well as you sing mine.” And the voice—the sound, rather, less a voice than a rough wind from untold wastelands—emitted a long low gasp followed by a laugh to chill the blood, then the laughs grew shorter and shorter like a locomotive accelerating until an unnaturally high pitch was attained and the sound, all sounds in one, soared away like a distant rocket hastening to the heart of destruction—and vanished. Then came the hissing of a dead line and the mundane drone of a dial tone and the blood thundering in his ears.
Hitler jiggled the cradle until the operator, Oberst Hahne, who was back from his tryst, replied.
“Ja, mein FŸhrer.”
“Tell me who made that call.”
“What call, mein FŸhrer?”
“The one that just came into my office. Find out where it came from.”
He put down the phone. The odd thing was, it wasn’t the first time he had heard this sound. The last time had been, as a matter of fact, Vienna in March 1938, after the triumph, after the balcony speech, alone in the bathroom of his suite at the Imperial following much bowing and heel-clicking and handshaking and fending-off of lickspittles. Then, too, there had been a sudden presence, but a visual one, a kind of murky mist in the shaving mirror. And a smell, like matches being struck. He had ordered investigations, of course, but the hotel staff found nothing, and anyway he knew in his heart that the matter was beyond investigation, beyond the Gestapo, beyond even human agency, nonsensical as that seemed.
The phone rang. It was Hahne.
“I’m very sorry, mein FŸhrer, but we have no register of a Frau von Rothenburg in Paris.”
“That’s because it’s Rothenberg…oh, never mind. And the call?”
“We have no records of any calls coming into your office since just after six
p.m. when Gauleiter Mutschmann called from Dresden and the train company called from Hannover about your personal carriage at 8…”
“Good,” muttered Adolf. “Good. So. Ja.” He hung up. “Anyway, I knew that. Gott,” he muttered, suddenly aware of the inappropriateness of his usual repertory of curses—Gott, Christus, Heilige Mutter, and the rest… yes, it was as if, having risen so high, he, who had never in the conventional sense believed in God, the Trinity, etc., had encountered a spirit born of their belief, a spirit of the upper air at variance with lower-dwelling Mankind, believed in but unseen by the boring ones with jobs in offices who go to the shops and raise children...it was a daemon, a great rival, jealous of his power. After all, was he not a god? And did a god not need an opponent? Wotan—Alberich? Rienzi—Orsini? Winnetou—Old Shatterhand?
One thing he knew: He would never speak of it—him—the creature—his nemesis. No, for speaking of it would make it all the more real, and would lead it closer to him. And if he still had a shred of belief in a God Who was not him, he’d pray to that God to never hear the voice again.
Then Adolf Hitler, FŸhrer of the Greater German Reich, lowers his head as in, but not in, prayer, and…what is this? Can it be a tear welling up in his stern and steely eyes and falling on the map in front of him and trickling like the meandering Danube into the heart of Linz?
No, of course not: It is a drop of condensation from the ceiling-mounted pipes for the still-new heating system.
But:
“I’ve defeated them all,” he said. “I’ll defeat you, too.” And he made a fist of his right hand, as on the poster on which he appeared as Siegfried, holding a spear, with in the distance all the crenellated towers and high mountains of the future, perfect, Jew-free, sun-kissed New Germany.