Chapter Seventeen
Berchtesgaden 1932
The road to Haus Wachenfeld led into the clouds. It looked like the summit of the world. Hess turned, with a sour expression on his face.
“Are you all right, frau?”
“Sehr gut, Herr Hess. Lead on.”
Hess resented being the packhorse, that was obvious, but Stefanie felt no pity for him. He was a saturnine, sullen man, entirely devoted to his leader in an unhealthy, village-idiot kind of way. Halfway up he paused to catch his breath. All around them the mists swirled, lifting here and there to reveal rock, a patch of dark green meadow, a peak as sharp as a stalagmite. The chilly air smelled of pine, and in the distance cowbells clinked.
Stefanie was surprised to learn that the fading beauty waiting for them at the top of the path was Frau Hess. She would have found it hard to imagine how a Frau Hess could compete with the prime object of Hess’s desire, namely, his Führer.
“Frau Lebel?”
“Ja. Also Fraulein von Rothenberg.”
“A fine German name,” said Hess, no doubt implying contrast to the French-sounding married name.
“It’s Austrian, in fact,” said Stefanie. “From just over there,” and she pointed east, toward the Salzburg highway along which that morning she had traveled in a Mercedes saloon that had been waiting for her at Salzburg station. The driver, a cheerful red-faced man named Kohler, had willingly dropped Ignace off at the Getreidegasse (“Birthplace of our own dear Mozartl, nicht wahr?”), where the boy’s grandmother was waiting. Startled, the elder Frau von Rothenberg saw the automobile and her daughter next to the driver, and in that moment she fully savored the alienation of parent from child that comes about by mere virtue of the years passing: Can that woman of the world be my own little schatz? A few minutes later, as they were speeding through Salzburg’s sparse suburbs toward the Bavarian border, Stefanie caught the echo of her mother’s sentiment, as it were, on the wind; and she shivered, as if that wind were a wintry one.
She shivered again on the Obersalzberg.
“My goodness! It’s cold,” she said to Herr und Frau Hess. “I’ve been away for too long. Vienna feels like the Riviera compared to this.” Frau Hess smiled wanly, uninterested in Vienna, the Riviera, Stefanie, or indeed anything at all, except possibly her husband, who deposited Stefanie’s bag and unceremoniously, but with evident relief, hailed an acquaintance in the parking lot and took himself off, mumbling an apology. Stefanie looked around. A bus labored up the narrow mountain road, its engine echoing off the walls. Two or three uniformed figures were standing at the foot of a broad stone staircase that led up to the main compound: the SA, Ernst Röhm’s Brownshirts. Stefanie felt their eyes on her, even at that distance.
“The Führer is expecting you?” inquired Frau Hess in the desultory manner of one seeking confirmation of a weather forecast.
“Well, I hope he is,” said Stefanie. “He invited me here.” She felt unaccountably superior to this woman, perhaps for her all-too-evident subservience to a man who was himself little more, as Stefanie had noted, than a cipher.
Frau Hess nodded and smiled nervously, then bustled off after her husband, glancing over her shoulder. Somewhat annoyed, Stefanie followed her gaze. The SA had scared away Frau Hess, it seemed. At least, one of its members had, the one approaching with a desultory swagger. He was young, beefy, and blond: the new ideal.
“Allow me, meine Frau,” he said, snatching up Stefanie’s bag disdainfully. “This way, please.”
A funicular railway ran up the side of the mountain atop which sprawled the Haus Wachenfeld compound. The composite main chalet was still a work-in-progress. Scaffolding encased one end, and bulldozers and cement mixers stood about amid patches of mud and marl. Construction workers, not strapping Aryans but swarthy foreigners—Croats or Slovaks—were getting off the bus. Somewhere, dogs barked. A security patrol strode by, giving Stefanie the once-over. The SA man motioned for her to precede him into the funicular. He stepped inside and pulled a lever. A bell clanged and the doors shut with a hydraulic sigh. Stefanie and the young thug were the only passengers. As the car jolted and shuddered slowly up the mountainside, she became uncomfortably aware that her companion was scrutinizing her. As if to admire the view on the other side of the car, she turned suddenly and caught his gaze, cold and lubricious, like that of a Saturday night teenager with too much to drink; and like such a teenager he was leaning against the wall, arms folded, feet crossed, the very incarnation of the untamed juvenile.
“Do you live here, junge?” she asked.
Languidly, he transferred his gaze upward until their eyes met; it was the slow insolence of a stupid man endowed with authority. Stefanie stiffened in annoyance. Was she not, after all, to be treated with respect, even as their Führer’s guest?
“Nah,” he said. “I’m from Mannheim. They sent me up here to help with the security.”
“You know that I’m a guest of Herr Hitler,” blurted Stefanie. She was certain that she was betraying her nervousness, but it hardly mattered: She was furious. Impudent young lout!
“Ah ja, but we’re all his guests here, Frau.” It sounded as if the boy were talking of God: the unnamed His.
The cable car jerked to a halt. “Here we are. Watch your step.”
Stefanie had to endure the boy’s company all the way up another, more manorial, flight of stairs. When they got to the entrance of the Berghof itself, he deposited her bag with a curt nod.
“You will be assigned your quarters shortly,” he said, and went off to join a small group of other Brownshirts standing around talking in undertones, heads bowed, their demeanour modest, quite unBrownshirtlike. Stefanie was surprised at such discreet behavior on the part of men she had read about in the press as being permanent brawlers and troublemakers. Then, noticing an equally subdued group of regular army officers standing a little way off, she followed with her eye the strands that led to the heart of the invisible, yet almost palpable, power-web from which this daunting influence emanated. Standing just inside the doorway, wearing a gunbelt, black shirt, swastika armband, and jackboots, was the Spider-King himself, their Führer, Stefanie’s one-time portrait painter, would-be ruler of the universe. Hitler had developed a martial way of standing, a militant pose she assumed was in some way associated with manliness and leadership, the right hand tucked into his waistband, the left on his hip, one foot jauntily in front of the other. Next to him, mimicking this pose, was a portly man with slicked-back hair and an expression of wilful joviality made sinister by his piercing blue eyes, wearing a Brownshirt uniform heavy with medals and shoulder-straps and tapering into knee-high boots polished to a high gloss: This was Goering, the air ace, commander of the SA. Stefanie remembered him from photographs and newspaper articles. A romance—him landing a Fokker biplane on the lawn of his wife’s estate—followed by a tragic death, his wife’s—some debilitating disease—came to mind with the sugary pang of cinematic emotion. So this was Goering. He was an important man, and looked it, and what’s more, judging by his stance, he knew it, too.
Various other bystanders, in uniform and out, milled about, talking in undertones. The whole scene was so staged that Stefanie looked around half-expecting to see a photographer or film crew but seeing only the reverential upturned faces of soldiers and Brownshirts. Hitler and Goering continued chatting, Goering doing all the laughing, Hitler with the rabbit-toothed grin on his face Stefanie remembered so well from Linz and Vienna, the grin he grinned when he was well into an anecdote, or caustic castigation of his enemies. She stared, briefly lost in her memories of the bizarre and mysterious journey that had brought the man from where she’d first known him to this literal and figurative pinnacle of his existence. She felt a faint half-swooning go through her, and hoped it heralded no visions. She wanted crystal-clear concentration, she wanted to talk, to instruct, to influence...She, influence him! The moment the thought crossed her mind a smothered laugh followed. Just as incredible as Adolf’s ascent, she thought, berating herself, was her exaggerated sense of her own importance, her grandiose notions of mission and God. Still, you couldn’t expect her to totally disregard the importance of her visions—not so much the visions themselves but the mere fact of her having had them at all (although this line was perhaps a little too Jungian for her liking); still, precious few had ever had visions unaided by artificial stimulants, least of all members of the blasé bourgeoisie, so if she was a little vain because of it, well, the progenitor (or progenitrix) of those visions would soon settle that (but not, she hoped, for good), she had no doubt...
“Fraulein von Rothenberg?”
The Summons had come. A valet took her carryall and led the way up the stairs. Hitler looked down at her from the top step, hands clasped in front of his crotch (she suddenly, briefly, remembered the Vienna Opera, 1912, Adolf meeting Helmuth, the same gesture...). She curtsied, awkwardly, with a hint of deference, but by this time he was beaming broadly and extending his hands in welcome.
“My dearest Fraulein von Rothenberg. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to Haus Wachenfeld.”
He bowed over her hand and clicked his heels, creating an audible impression among the murmuring onlookers; a flash bulb did, in fact, go off, and Goering lost no time in following his leader (amazing how much The Leader he already seemed to be, mere provincial politician that he still was) and muttered nonsensical expressions of greeting, taking her hand in both of his, presenting her with a brief view of his pomaded head on which each hair was visibly distinct from its fellows, all combed ruthlessly back.
“Ever so delighted to make your acquaintance, Fraulein von Rothenberg, the Führer speaks very highly of you.”
“That’s enough, Goering, you’ll embarrass the poor woman!”
Hitler’s easy high spirits were new to Stefanie. They came, no doubt, with the position, the stature, the adulation, the long-fought-for acknowledgment of his importance. “This way, dear lady.” He hurried with stiff jackbooted steps up another short flight of stairs and stood aside for her to enter. As she did so, slightly dazed, she imagined she heard from somewhere the exquisite rising note of the horn in the Prelude to Act I of Parsifal, the sublime music of an apotheosis, as if her own bodily assumption were at hand, the Life Eternal, Nazi cherubim frolicking in the castle-clouds of Heaven, a clear beam of light shining down upon the earth from the domain of the gods in which he now dwelled...operatically, he took her hand, and, bowing again, led her through the ornately Bavarian vestibule with its stags’ antlers and rustic motifs, past a tall window through which she caught a glimpse of mist flitting through valleys of near-Amazonian green, across a vast sea-floor of Tirolean tiles, up two more carpeted steps and into the main foyer at the opposite end of which stood two oaken double doors. Hitler gently let go of her hand, opened the doors, and stood aside like a conjuror eager to display an effect. Beyond the doors was a sitting room as vast as the promenade deck of an ocean liner, with red leather armchairs interspersed with coffee tables, newspaper racks, and canapé trays. Gilded paintings (Stefanie recognized Bismarck and Frederick the Great enframed on either side of a Titian nude) hung on the pale larchwood walls, and a bust of Wagner stood out prominently on a side table, but the dominant feature of the room—indeed, of the whole house—was the gigantic picture window which took up the best part of the north wall from the floor to the ceiling, that ceiling being very nearly as high as the house itself. Half of Bavaria and the entire Salzkammergut lay at their feet. Hundreds of meters below, sprinkled like dice on a tablecloth, were the huddled houses of Berchtesgaden, and a giant’s-leap away, across the mist-shrouded valley, soared the peaks of the Chiemgauer; farther south, the summits of the Watzmann, Hagengebirge, and the Koeningsstock lofted into misty oblivion. All of these mountains she, as a Salzburger, recognized, and she named them, pointing. Hitler followed her pointing finger with slight interest.
“Ja? H’m! I never knew these names,” he said. “I only knew the Zugspitze from geography class back in Leonding. We had a dreadful teacher, a Jew named Stein. And, speaking of the Zugspitze, you know it’s the highest peak in Germany, of course, but do you know exactly how high it is, my dear Fraulein von Rothenberg?”
She did, but forbore.
“Two thousand nine hundred and sixty two meters,” he said, beaming, as if he’d built every meter himself. “Ja.”
She knew not what to say. He was still smiling, hands behind his back, looking out the window. It was the moment, if there was to be one, to mention God, charity, Christian forgiveness, the greatness of a Christian Germany. Stefanie desperately cast about for a cue: Easter? The mountains, domains of the gods? The Führer, like Moses, on a mountaintop? The vanity of human wishes? She cleared her throat and turned towards him with the bright expression of an ingénue.
“It’s.”
But it was too late. He turned away. They were joined by the entourage, and the rest of the morning progressed snail-slowly amid suffocating pomp and bourgeois convention carried to an absurd degree. In a room adjoining the ship’s-promenade sitting room were two great dining tables, one round, like King Arthur’s, the other long and rectangular, like a picnic table. Promptly at twelve, Hitler and his guests proceeded to take luncheon in the lustiest Viennese tradition, with rich helpings of gravied noodles, braised cabbage, guglhupfen, gateaux à la crème, Linzertorten mit schlagober, and assorted petits fours. The lords of the party sat on either side of their master at the round table; the assorted uniformed guests and their spouses sat at the picnic table. Stefanie was positioned among the elect, next to a Herr und Frau Rosenberg (Jewish? she wondered, doubtfully), diagonally across from Hitler. Conversation was generally low-key, with a great deal of personal reminiscing from their host along the lines of My Years in Vienna; My Enemies, Jews One and All (“The Jews are definitely a race,” he thundered, “but they are not human,” eliciting uncertain titters): The New Art; My Talents as an Artist; German Women; Cars; Dogs; etc. Occasional thunderclaps of laughter erupted from Goering. Two liveried valets were on hand to serve, supervised by a worn-looking woman in her early forties with a face that hinted to Stefanie of familiarity, although she’d never seen the woman before—then, at a quick rabbit-grin, Stefanie caught the resemblance and realized the woman was Adolf’s sister Angela, mother of the recently deceased Geli. Adolf treated his sister in an offhand fashion that was fully as Austrian as the pastries. Most of the guests—Stefanie; Goering; the Hesses; the Rosenbergs; Herr von Ribbentrop, a former salesman of Sekt wine, “I’m convinced our German wines are quite as good as French champagne”—drank, in huge quantities, coffee and tea; but Adolf, she noticed, drank first milk, then elderberry juice, and ate a guglhupf and three large helpings of Linzer torte with dollops of schlag. After tea, the guests rose and mingled, genially dismissed by Hitler, who stayed seated, probing his teeth with a toothpick, and conferred with Hess and Herr Rosenberg, whose job was apparently to convey news of this or that political development: The party was doing unexpectedly well in the by-elections in Oberöstwanger gau in Thuringia, but the Reds were ahead in Berlin-Kreuzberg; the Duce had just received the French Prime Minister, M. Herriot, in the Quirinale in Rome; a donation of ten thousand reichsmarks had been received in the Party coffers from a certain Herr Krapf, a Bremerhaven industrialist (this enlivened Hitler more than all the other news together: “Give him honorary membership and a signed copy of the book—oh, and a guaranteed place at my table in Berlin, but make sure he understands the rules”); a lady in Schleswig-Holstein had bequeathed the National Socialist Party her estate, including a vineyard and three Horch touring cars (“Horch! A fine German automobile, if not quite as prestigious as Mercedes-Benz; but what would I do with a winery? Ribbentrop! This is your problem!”); the city council of Lörrach in Baden-Württemberg were inviting Herr Hitler to address them, on the occasion of the city’s six hundredth anniversary; Hitler’s rival for the Presidency, Feldmarschall von Hindenburg, had a cold but was going ahead with an appearance in Hamburg; und so weiter...
“You know, I remember him when he hadn’t two gröschen for a sandwich. I believe you do, too.” The words were Goering’s. He had materialized from the ether to stand beside Stefanie. As abruptly as he had spoken, he produced a gunmetal cigarette case. “I believe you smoke, Frau von Rothenberg?”
“Well, yes, actually. But I have my own, thanks...”
“Allow me to insist. But not in here. He’s a wonderful host in most things, but he can’t stand people smoking around him, especially women. Yes, I know, it’s very old-fashioned, but I daresay your father was like that, too. I know mine was. No, we have to go out there, discreetly, if we want so smoke. Discrètement, Madame,” he added, with a smile, proud of his French and the implied knowledge of her link to that culture. He pointed to the terrace that extended the length of the house; again, Stefanie was put in mind of an ocean liner sailing through the clouds...she followed Goering’s confident bulk through a silently sliding glass door onto the terrace and took the cigarette he was insistently proffering. A man in a black overcoat looked sharply around when they stepped onto the terrace but walked away in response to a curt nod from Goering, who then produced a brass cigarette lighter and lit their cigarettes, inhaling extravagantly.
“Ah, my first today,” he said. “Trying to cut back, you know. I was up to forty a day, and Turkish, if you please. I’m down to about ten now, and I aim to keep it at that. Brrr! Are you warm enough?”
Stefanie folded her arms and shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
“It’s quite bracing,” she said, not entirely sure what she was doing alone on a windy terrace with the gross yet charming ex-commander of the Richthofen Squadron and, if rumor had it right, somewhat self-indulgent fancier of women and gourmandise....
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” The comment was strictly pro forma; with a painfully obvious lack of interest, he waved a desultory hand at the mountains, the tattered clouds, the green meadows.
“Oh, it is,” she said. “It is. Of course, I’ve known these mountains since childhood, you know.”
“Of course. You’re a Salzburger. But your home is now in Paris, ja?” His face, folded into smiles, suddenly unfolded like an awning, and he gave Stefanie a stern, sharp stare that made her look nervously away; then, annoyed at herself, she forced herself to return his gaze, which was now clouded over with thought.
“I’m sure you are aware, Fraulein von Rothenberg, that the party is building its influence here and abroad. We intend to be ready to assume power when the moment comes, as it will very soon, perhaps later this year...and it is of capital importance to us to have friends—collaborators—compatriots—sympathizers, call them what you will” (“Spies,” thought Stefanie, “might be apt”) “in strategic places. Like for instance, London. Moscow. Or Paris.” Goering blinked through the smoke. “And of course you live in Paris, don’t you?
“Most of the time, yes.”
“And I understand your, shall we say, gentleman friend is a member of the Radical Party?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Of course, of course, he cooed, soothingly. Yes, they knew all about Sami—or should he say Schmuel Schoen? Mind you, he didn’t give a damn one way or the other, and as for Jews, quite frankly (and this was between him and her and the fencepost) he could take ‘em or leave ‘em, his feelings were quite neutral on the subject, not like some people’s...anyway, his fiancée, an actress, had plenty of Jewish friends who were always coming around to the house...yes, Stefanie’s cooperation would be very helpful, and moreover it would be an investment, he explained, smoothly deploying the argument to confront her predictable, if muted, indignation (she was shocked by the sudden intrusiveness, the unexpected laying bare of her private life, like dirty fingerprints on fresh linen). An investment in the future, he added. The National Socialist Party was coming to power sooner rather than later, that was certain, she had to see that. When they did, they would remember who had helped them, and those who had would reap huge benefits, and not merely financial (although there was that). The world was changing, Fraulein. The new world would be Germany’s, and Germany would be theirs.
“And after Germany...?”
“Ach, one war in a generation is enough! No, no, our people are peaceful enough. We only want the best for the Fatherland. We want the respect of our neighbors, especially France. But we need partners, collaborators, representatives. Agents of influence, I believe the Bolsheviks call them. Also, we can afford—because of recent generous endowments—to pay quite handsomely. I understand you are,” the creases returned, heralding a smile that, Stefanie saw, was quite automatic, “currently unemployed? And your son, is he well?”
“My goodness, Herr Goering, what you are saying is quite simply that you know everything about me, is that it?”
“Hardly everything. I have no idea, for example, what your amorous or cultural tastes are—except that you have, on occasion, attended the opera performances of Wagner. However, I do know that you claim to have seen visions of the Virgin Mary, or is it Jesus Christ? And now that I have met you, I am satisfied that you are not the raving lunatic I half-suspected you might be. Others, however, might think you were, if they learned of your visions outside the frame, so to say. You know what people are like. I can imagine that sort of thing not going down at all well with employers, colleagues, publishers, and so on, don’t you agree? Sad but true, eh?” How suavely Herr Goering made his threats! With what panache, style, and dash, and the kindliest sense of fellow-feeling! He drew deeply on his diminishing cigarette and looked down at Stefanie with an almost benign expression. “Please remember that you have in the past offered your services to us, and that the Führer has a very high opinion of you—and let me add that this is not the case with very many people, especially women. You are an old acquaintance from the Führer’s past, and you earned a place of honor when you visited him in his prison cell at Landsberg. You are, so to say, one of us, and we are the future of Germany, of Europe. Your spirituality has a place with us. We are keen on reviving some of the old ways—combining this and that, you know, all of Germany’s spiritual traditions! Having a visionary such as yourself to run the program might be just the thing. After all, this is a moment unlike any in history, Frau von Rothenberg.”
“You forget one thing, Herr Goering. I am an Austrian and your party is German.”
“Ha! Austrian, German? Is there a difference?” He strolled over to the balustrade and placed one jackbooted foot on the bottom rail. Looking down, he sent his cigarette end spiralling wildly into oblivion. “There’s one for the goats,” he said, chuckling, then swung around, arms folded, and gave Stefanie the frankest of open stares. “When you go to Munich, does it seem foreign? Augsburg, Bayreuth, my own hometown of Nürnberg? When I am in Salzburg, Graz, Linz, Vienna, I am in my own country, actually far more so than when I am in Rostock, or Danzig, or even Berlin. Blood is blood, Fraulein von Rothenberg. Austria and Germany are one, will be one, mark my words, one forever. This Dollfuss, the Austrian Republic...” he snapped his fingers, crisply, with a bloody insouciance that would have quite chilled Stefanie had she not already been chilled to the bone by the high mountain air and the man’s sinister charm. She shivered. He tut-tutted solicitously and rubbed his hands; like Hitler, he noticed everything, especially weakness. Again, the smile.
“Yes, even I am beginning to feel it, and I have more natural defenses than you!”
They returned to the turgid warmth of the chalet. The briefing session was over. Goering, heartily hailed, hailed heartily back and disappeared toward the front door. Stefanie, as in a daze, accepted more tea, but more urgently wanted a drink. She looked around for someone to whisper this to, but there were no friends among the invited. Only Hitler, standing next to the picture windows, was looking her way, smiling, and he would scarrcely be sympathetic to her need for a bracer. He beckoned to her. Simultaneously, Hess and another man, both of whom had been standing at Hitler’s side, sidled away like scolded dogs.
“What do you think of my house?” inquired their Führer as she approached.
“It’s magnificent,” she said.
“Ah, you remember the man I once was,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back. “More than anyone else, except for my own family, of course. Do you realize what a unique position that places you in, my dear Stefanie?”
“Ja, well, I suppose...” My dear Stefanie? Not since Linz, and not even then...! As for her, she avoided all modes of address, not knowing whether a simple “mein Herr” would suffice, but she was most reluctant to call him “Führer,” as his toadies did, and “Adolf,” in the circumstances, much less “Adi,” seemed quite unsuitable, and there was something suffocatingly bland and officious about “mein Herr” or “Herr Hitler.” Formality’s demands would have to be met with no more than the distinction between du and sie.
“You know,” she said, “Herr Goering said something similar to me, just now.”
“Did he,” said Hitler, not seeming terribly interested in what Goering had said. “That Goering, ja? Listen to me now, Fraulein Stefanie. Come,” and he led the way over to a pair of heavy armchairs. He sat, so she followed suit, but made sure not to sprawl as a man would into the chair’s plushness; instead, she perched, à la secretary or adoring mistress, on the edge of the seat, and gazed at him as he, without compunction, sank manfully and luxuriantly into the chair’s depths. Such an odd mixture, she thought; such a sybarite at heart, but such a jittery, fastidious, nervous man on the surface, so supernaturally aware of the thoughts and desires of others, like a quivering antenna’ed insect...They were, she noticed, being left alone. No valets or maidservants were near. Only Hess, at the far end of the great chamber, hovered, but out of earshot.
“I am not married, nor do I intend to be,” announced Hitler, his eyes fixed on the Chiemgauer range through the window. “I recall your asking me that when you came to see me at Landsberg—I never told you how important that visit was to me, did I, no, of course, not...well, it cemented our friendship. It was a bright light in the darkness of my years in the wilderness, which are, by the way, finally coming to an end, believe me. I know it, I feel it.” He clenched his fists close to his breast, then slowly relaxed. “And if I’ve not been in touch, well, you understand. For one thing, you were married to that Frenchman!” His gaze drifted downward and alighted on her. “No longer except in the eyes of the law, nicht wahr? But there you are, living with this other Frenchman,” he waved a deprecatory hand, “in Paris, possibly in a leaky garret, like some Mimi and Rodolfo couple, nein? Ach, it’s fine for students and romantic painters and poets. But not for Fraulein Stefanie von Rothenberg of Salzburg! Her country needs her. I need her.” Now the appeal was followed by the probing stare, the election-poster Hitler touting for votes, the Corporal versus the Field-Marshall.
“But I tried, I failed, it was a disaster. They shouted me down.”
“The meeting in Haidhausen, ja? You’re right, it was a disaster, and not because of you. I blamed others for that.” He glared at the distant Hess. “But I’m not talking about that. You’re a spiritualist, a visionary, in your own way a leader like me, but not a politician, or a people’s tribune like Rienzi. Of course, I should have realized that. But to come to the point. I would be very pleased if you would accept my offer of companionship.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Ah, I thought I was being sufficiently clear without having to be specific.”
A certain mincing coyness in the drift of the conversation, an awkwardness Stefanie recognized as old-fashioned Austrian petit-bourgeois code for “Please let’s get it over with as quickly as possible” (she was Austrian, she’d read her Schnitzler), pointed unavoidably to...
“You mean?”
She sank abruptly into the chair, aghast. The leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and putative future President of the Republic leaned forward to get a clear view of her from around the wings of the armchair, peering at her anxiously and pressing his fingertips together.
“Of course, I am speaking in terms of a semi-permanent arrangement, with your freedom of movement largely intact. And by the way this is quite separate from whatever Goering may have been talking about. Whatever that was, you must discuss with him, ja?”
Once or twice before she had trembled in Adolf Hitler’s proximity, but not from desire, or not desire alone, but more from of a combination of the desire she’d perhaps once felt, many years ago, and her own struggle against the natural yielding of the weaker to the stronger—and the visions had followed such moments, not visions of the Virgin, she reminded herself, but of the devil himself, and both times in Adolf Hitler’s company; easy to dismiss then, in the parlor of her aunt’s and uncle’s house, or in that Monchskeller in Linz (for why would the devil appear to nonentities?), but now that Adolf was on the mountaintop, the Guide and Leader, the next great shepherd of the Teutonic flock....
Or perhaps not. A provincial he was and a provincial he would remain. And how far did provincials get, in a world of silk-hatted globetrotters?
(Sallow, slick-haired, fidgety, odd-scented, with the staring eyes of an insomniac, and the ravenous dog-hunger beneath it all.)
But what better means could she find to influence the man, who was now on the brink of eternally placing himself beyond her or anyone’s influence...?
“I am honored,” blurted Stefanie, dishonored.
“And I,” he barked with laughter, “am honored that you are honored! Many women would have been insulted. My goodness, I was nervous, I can tell you!”
“But I cannot let you know yet.”
“Why not? You’ve seen the house, you know me. Ach, woman’s eternal shilly-shallying. A man’s not like that. A man, he decides, he makes up his mind, so!” He clapped his hands, once. Stefanie recalled the male ditherers she had known—her father, her uncle, her husband, her cousin—and recognized Adolf Hitler’s definition of manhood as something pure and artificial, the manhood aspired to by the man unsure of his own, the power complex of the sexually indigent (of course, there had been Geli). Perhaps his need of her fell into the same category. She was known, she was easy. It was a comfortable flirtation for him. And why not? Had they not strolled the streets of Linz together arm-in-arm, a quarter century past? Was he not the same awkward, impassioned artist she’d half-loved then? Was she not the same insecure, eternally questing, half-mad daughter of God?
Boldly, she said:
“I must remind you that my faith comes first.”
He waved a hand.
“Ja, ja, faith, faith. I had it too, once. Please don’t forget that I was an altar boy at Lambach Monastery. Ja, and what I wanted most was to be a priest. Did you know that?”
“Yes, you...”
“And I admired the abbot, a fine man, he had the right combination of knowledge and power, ah you should have seen the way he ruled those monks, you know I think it was the first time I had ever seen authority dispensed in so effective a fashion, it predisposed me to good opinions of the church,” and so he continued, picking up stray thoughts along the way as a broom picks up dust, weaving the half-baked thoughts of Mein Kampf into the cast-off nighttime ravings of Gobineau, Liebenfels and Nietzsche; in short, the purpose of their conversation was soon lost in a flood of speculation, contempt, reminiscence and criticism. Stefanie, still perching on the edge of her chair, watched fascinated as, quite oblivious to her, he lectured the empty air, his eyes, blinking rapidly, fixed on a point directly in front of him, his hands shaping arguments, counter-arguments, the pillars of the church, the two sides of the debates, his own inevitable victory, bells, hats, cats, and the devil himself...
(Who was standing on the terrace outside, watching them with eyes the size of dinnerplates and the rictus sardonicus of a dead man, but they saw him not, for they had eyes only for themselves.)
Andante
And so Stefanie von Rothenberg became, for a brief time, Adolf Hitler’s mistress, in the wake of Geli, and in between, as it were, Mimi and Eva. He was distant but considerate, at least in the early days. Materially, she lacked for nothing. She could at last afford to send money home, to her Mutti thirty kilometers away and to her baby boy Ignace back in Vienna. In the autumn, she told him, she hoped to enroll him at the Académie Werfel in Paris. To Sami she sent only regrets. He replied coldly, citing Pascal’s wager.
Sexually, Adolf Hitler was hasty, unimaginative, and—as in so many things—entirely a petit-bourgeois Austrian, with that class’s penchant for enemas, heavy underwear, and darkness. He indulged in some rather odd foreplay, involving much staring, heavy breathing and sudden movements, but Stefanie lived through the entire experience as in a trance. She felt the weight of penance, made heavier by the tiny thrill of being his woman, her Adi, not the Führer of the National Socialists: Her Linz and Braunau artist, her awkward suitor, Bohemian paramour. Hitler reciprocated at first, gruffly, clumsily, then slowly returned to the utter inwardness that was his normal state. He slept in his own room on the first floor; she, above the garage, adjacent to the room occasionally used by Johann Kohler, the number-two chauffeur, a genial duffer she chose mostly to ignore. Kohler seemed not to notice, and continued to greet her heartily, and with some deference, as she fulfilled the demands of her routine. They were few. She arose in the morning and breakfasted, then read, wrote, and drifted through the great ocean-liner rooms attended by the reticent Angela or one of her assistants. On the terrace when Hitler wasn’t around she stole a smoke. In the afternoons she took the bus down to Berchtesgaden, or went walking through the woods. In the evenings she dined, and occasionally joined the others in watching one of the inane American films Hitler prized, and read, and prayed, but her prayers went unheard: She knew it, she could feel the hostile silence from Heaven. Guiltily, she redoubled her efforts to speak to Hitler of her faith, but he was hardly ever at home, and Hess relished keeping her at arm’s length.
“Nein, Frau von Rothenburg,” he would say hoarsely, knitting his single brow-width eyebrow, “not today, not tomorrow, and probably not for the rest of the week. Go for a walk, read a good book. May I recommend Mein Kampf?”
Through the presidential election of 1932, lost by Hitler but not by much, and into the autumn campaign during which, it seemed, the Nazis’ support plunged, Stefanie stayed at the Haus Wachenfeld, invisible to the public (“no one must see you, no, no, they must think I live for Germany and Germany alone”), tormented by her adoration of God on one hand and the magnetism of her truculent human demigod on the other.
One rare morning, of perfect blueness above—rare too in his presence at the breakfast table (orange juice, fried bread)—emboldened by her menses and a sleepless night, she seized the initiative.
“What you are doing is irreligious,” she said. “What you are preaching is sacrilege. What you are planning is horrible.”
Like any irritated husband, he put down his paper (Volkischer Beobachter) and peered at her quizzically.
“What are you talking about?”
“I have heard you calling for the removal of the Jews. And the others. It is unChristian. It offends God. And me,” she added.
“UnChristian?” He barked with laughter, then became frowningly solemn, as if mulling it over. “Are you serious?”
“I have had visions, Adi.” (The mode of address question had been settled, in private; in public she called him nothing, with respect denoted only via the Sie.) “Bad visions. Visions of you. Of terrible things.”
“Visions, bah. Who knows what causes them. Feminine problems, no doubt. After all, why is it always women who have these visions? You never hear of some, of some guy in a field talking to Jesus Christ...”
“There were many men who had visions. John of the Cross, the English poet Blake...”
“Ach, now you talk of English poets. Please. I have things on my mind of such weight that you cannot conceive of them. Listen to me, liebchen. I follow my life with the precision and security of a sleepwalker. It’s all mapped out. So go and have your visions, but leave me out of them, all right?”
In September Sami came from Paris on his way to Munich to meet with Social Democrats. They had tea in Berchtesgaden.
“What can one say?” he exclaimed. “You are the most extraordinary woman, Stefanie. Casually you depart our home to attend your aunt’s funeral, and, next thing I know, you are living with Adolf Hitler in the Goddamned Bavarian Alps. And you complain that he doesn’t take you seriously! To me!”
“I never know where my life is going, Sami,” she said. “But I have faith in my heart, I follow its lead. I heed my heart. That is one thing you must understand.”
“Follow the lead, you’re not a dog, for goodness’ sake.” Sami looked and acted entirely out of place. All around him stout and rubicond Bavarians crunched on their apple torte and spätzle. Sami’s Jewishness stood on the table, it danced the hagana, it davened, it pleaded to be recognized. But his Frenchness was its equal, even its superior. Stefanie heard no “Jude,” but did hear a muttered “welsch,” and warned Sami with a glance; but he ignored her, and raised his voice slightly.
“These Germans,” he said, “what will they do next? recrucify Christ?” Glared at, he glared back, and quelled the onlookers, mustache bristling; he, after all, had faced down hecklers in the Assemblée Nationale, including Herriot and Fauche, and once had humbled great Poincaré himself. Cavalierly, he summoned a schnapps, and with it a cigar. The ladies at the next table arose and stalked out, muttering sentiments that were clearly anti-French and anti-cigar, and probably anti-male, as well. Stefanie watched them go, dreamily, unfocused, enjoying a moment’s respite from the madness of her life.
Sami chimed in.
“This is lunacy, Steffi, as you must know. Lunacy! Come home with me. If only for Ignace. Your Hitler is mad. He wants to get rid of Jews and foreigners, well you’ve heard him, is that his pillow talk, too?” With these words Sami made as if to spit.
“You don’t know him, Sami. He is like a force of nature. He will lead this country into a new age, I am convinced of it. He stands poised between all the good he might do and the evil he is tempted by.”
“Good. Fine.” Sami made dismissive gestures. “Let him lead his fucking country. Let them follow him like the Pied Piper. This is not your business. This is not even your country, pour l’amour de Dieu!”
And yet Berchtesgaden and the virgin-white Alps were beautiful that autumn day, with just a shiver in the shadowy valleys of the winter that was coming; the sky hummed with blueness, a Dornier flew overhead, birds squabbled, and the snowcapped peaks of the neighboring mountains shone blindingly white. Limpidly, a churchbell chimed down the valley, and the buses taking the construction crews snarled and growled back and forth, never stopping in the village.
Swastika flags had blossomed like zinnias, vying for space in the windowboxes and in the flowerpots on the quaint wooden balconies.
They walked. Sami shivered.
“Fucking Nazis,” he said. “I’m not a praying man, Stefanie, but I’m figuratively on my knees right now before you or God, whichever one does me the courtesy of listening. Please come home.”
She was moved. Sami returned to Munich by train from Salzburg, and thence to Paris. Stefanie stayed on at the Berghof, dressing in doll’s costume or (and this was her penance) dirndls for her master’s pleasure on the rare occasions when he was home, and for her own amusement reading, kite-flying, hiking. Once, not long after Sami had returned to France—leaving in his wake assorted regrets, longings, and nostalgic thoughts—she was on the balcony having a smoke and Hitler, unannounced except by the panting of his Alsatian dog Blondi, joined her. He was wearing a double-breasted suit with a small swastika button in the lapel. He looked like the assistant manager of a packing plant, but the light that burned in his eyes was the light of a crusader, and there was more than an assistant manager’s soul reflected in the restless mobility of his face.
“Things are going well. Sometimes it feels as if God Himself were dictating my program to me,” he said, with typical grandiloquence. He never said hello, or offered an inquiry after her health; usually he said nothing, or launched directly into a soliloquy. His only social abilities were concealed behind the formalities of the heel-clickings and hand-kissings of bourgeois practice. As in the past, intimacy was a foreign language to him; his mother tongue was bombast. Yet in certain circumstances, as Stefanie had discovered, he could be charm itself. For example, she had never seen an adult who so plainly enjoyed the company of children, with whom he could safely inhabit a sympathetic dream-realm. Ignace, on his two visits, had enticed Hitler to play cowboys and Indians behind the sofas of the grand sitting room for an hour or more each time, and had, since then, spoken fondly of his Onkel “Wolf.” Hitler was contradiction; Hitler was mad.
“I am sane. Everyone else is mad. I am the last hope for Germany, and Germany knows it. Wait and see, you just wait and see. The election results are mixed, ja. We have the Reds to contend with, especially in Berlin, but there will be ways. Blondi! Los!” He tossed a bone. The dog frolicked, well-trained. “Ja, they all feel it. There is a tremendous desire, a hunger, among the German people. Only I can appease them and take them to the heights of which they dream. Only I can mobilize their hatred for the alien, the Bolshevik, the traitor. The November criminals. The Jew.” He gazed at the Jew-free heights spread out before him: already he was the political god, the uncrowned king, the self-anointed savior of a nation. Stefanie stood aside, hoping he wouldn’t smell the tobacco smoke on her breath, not wishing to displease her lord and master. The impulse disgusted her, and she saw herself anew, and saw him for the new man he was. Gone forever was the hesitant, awkward Adolf of long ago, Stefanie’s Adolf, the earnest artist of Linz and Vienna, the sidling, sideways suitor. Gone, too, was any chance of her influencing him beyond what was on the menu at dinner. Gone, finally, was her own life. Looking down on the tumbling summits of the Bavarian Alps, she felt as if a fever had broken and found herself thinking of the cafes, the sidestreets, and the trees in the Luxembourg, of Paris, where her life might have continued unimpeded, had it not been for him, his mad magnetism, her own mad impulse. Paris: the Seine, sanity, Ignace, the Académie. Paris: lurching Citroëns, Sami’s robust rage. Paris: France, not Germany, not Hitler, not the Nazis. The thought was a momentary relief until it brought in its train, like a clunking goods wagon, the bulky image of Hermann Goering. The jovial air ace had been noticeably less of a presence recently, and word had it that between his fiancee and his recent election to a high position in the Reichstag, he had important business in Berlin. Stefanie hoped his new responsibilities might cause him to forget their conversation, and in any case she decided—on the spur of the moment, on which spur she made all her life-altering decisions—to confront Hitler with talk of departure.
“I want to go back to Paris,” she said, on that fifteenth day of December, 1932.
“Go,” he said, shrugging. “Go.”
She challenged him with a glare.
“Will you miss me?”
Blondi cantered up, gazed at her master, raced after the bone, tongue lolling. Hitler turned slowly and looked at Stefanie.
“Miss you?”
“Ja. Miss me.”
“I hardly know what you mean, Fraulein von Rothenberg. Your company has given me pleasure enough, but as you know, I don’t use such sentimental expressions. I seek in every way to harden myself, to be better prepared for the struggles of life. Hate unites men; love divides.”
“Ja.” Stefanie smiled. “But if Blondi went away, you would miss her, nein?”
“Of course. Blondi is my dog.”
“And I am—your bitch?”
His face darkened. He frowned. Expressions of great intensity chased each other across his face. Stefanie had never seen a face so mobile, so expressive of the turmoil within.
“I don’t understand your anger,” he said. “Aren’t you happy here?’
She chronicled the desolation: her humiliation; his bedroom games; the intellectual emptiness; the swarming sycophants; the endless talk, politics, politics, politics...
“Politics? But of course. Of course! All is politics. Your life, my life, all. Germany awaits us. The last election was not so good, admittedly. But we will assume power. Germany will be transformed. No more thirty-seven political parties. No more of the doddering Jew-financed cowards of Weimar. No more bending the knee to the French. No more decadent art. The world will learn where the repository of true civilization is. I will teach the world. As for the rest of your complaints, they are meaningless. Sex? It’s of no consequence. And when you speak of intellectual emptiness, I can only laugh! When was your most recent contribution to our intellectual life?”
The dog returned, the bone was thrown. He had his back to her. She hated him at that moment with a dry, visceral hatred. She thought how much she would give to be with him in an even higher place, the Kuhlstein rock behind the house for example, or the mountain opposite; and, once there, rush at him and push him over the side and rid the world of him forever. She thought crazily that she should do it, that it would be the best thing for her and for the world; and that it would meet with the instant approval of She who watched over her. She briefly remembered the vision she’d had, of him sprawled lifeless…was it a premonition? But she did nothing. She suddenly felt weak in the knees, and wanted to go.
Behind his back, after he had thrown the bone, his hands sought each other and clasped in a nervous union. Sadly, she remembered the swishing of his silver-topped cane along the Danube on a July afternoon in 1907.
“Thanks, Adi, for making things so clear.”
Leaving the Führer to survey the landscape he coveted for his own, she took the lift down and set about readying her things. Angela offered to help but Stefanie curtly said no, then ran after the woman and held her around the shoulders for a silent moment of understanding. Angela stood stiff, then relaxed and patted Stefanie’s shoulder.
“Thank you, Fraulein von Rothenberg.”
As Stefanie was locking her suitcase and glancing one last time around her dimly-lit room with its dark furniture and heavy drapes adorned with scenes from the Nibelungenlied, Johann Kohler appeared in the doorway, twirling a key attached to a swastika-shaped keychain.
“Going my way?”
“I will take the village bus, thanks.”
“His orders. I’m to drive you to Salzburg. Please say yes. I haven’t been out of the house all day, and it’s lovely weather for a drive.”
Stefanie saw no reason not to accede to his request, which was, after all, an “order.” They departed the house, Kohler with her bags underarm and overshoulder, through the great promenade deck and the baronial entrance hall with its view of plunging valleys far below.
“Not a bad place for a vacation, but as for living, I’ll take an apartment in the city any day, thank you very much,” said Johann.
Stefanie’s last sight of Haus Wachenfeld was of Frau und Herr Hess standing at the top of the stairs. Hess’s arms were folded, and he was nodding slightly, as if in confirmation of long-held suspicions. He raised a hand in languid salute. Frau Hess was standing so close to her husband that their shadow fell as one along the wall that bordered the stairs. Stefanie got into the Mercedes roadster without another backward glance.
“Yes, it’s a cheerful little place, isn’t it?” said Kohler, firing the twelve cylinders of the Benz into life. “Frankly, I’ve been in stockades that were more fun. At least you could smoke there. Oh, you’re well out of it, meine frau. Believe me. Cigarette?”
There was certainly something symbolic in that cigarette, which she accepted; and with the blue smoke wisping out of the car window went, for a short time, images of the past, worries about the future, and all manner of apprehension and fears.
The road to Haus Wachenfeld led into the clouds. It looked like the summit of the world. Hess turned, with a sour expression on his face.
“Are you all right, frau?”
“Sehr gut, Herr Hess. Lead on.”
Hess resented being the packhorse, that was obvious, but Stefanie felt no pity for him. He was a saturnine, sullen man, entirely devoted to his leader in an unhealthy, village-idiot kind of way. Halfway up he paused to catch his breath. All around them the mists swirled, lifting here and there to reveal rock, a patch of dark green meadow, a peak as sharp as a stalagmite. The chilly air smelled of pine, and in the distance cowbells clinked.
Stefanie was surprised to learn that the fading beauty waiting for them at the top of the path was Frau Hess. She would have found it hard to imagine how a Frau Hess could compete with the prime object of Hess’s desire, namely, his Führer.
“Frau Lebel?”
“Ja. Also Fraulein von Rothenberg.”
“A fine German name,” said Hess, no doubt implying contrast to the French-sounding married name.
“It’s Austrian, in fact,” said Stefanie. “From just over there,” and she pointed east, toward the Salzburg highway along which that morning she had traveled in a Mercedes saloon that had been waiting for her at Salzburg station. The driver, a cheerful red-faced man named Kohler, had willingly dropped Ignace off at the Getreidegasse (“Birthplace of our own dear Mozartl, nicht wahr?”), where the boy’s grandmother was waiting. Startled, the elder Frau von Rothenberg saw the automobile and her daughter next to the driver, and in that moment she fully savored the alienation of parent from child that comes about by mere virtue of the years passing: Can that woman of the world be my own little schatz? A few minutes later, as they were speeding through Salzburg’s sparse suburbs toward the Bavarian border, Stefanie caught the echo of her mother’s sentiment, as it were, on the wind; and she shivered, as if that wind were a wintry one.
She shivered again on the Obersalzberg.
“My goodness! It’s cold,” she said to Herr und Frau Hess. “I’ve been away for too long. Vienna feels like the Riviera compared to this.” Frau Hess smiled wanly, uninterested in Vienna, the Riviera, Stefanie, or indeed anything at all, except possibly her husband, who deposited Stefanie’s bag and unceremoniously, but with evident relief, hailed an acquaintance in the parking lot and took himself off, mumbling an apology. Stefanie looked around. A bus labored up the narrow mountain road, its engine echoing off the walls. Two or three uniformed figures were standing at the foot of a broad stone staircase that led up to the main compound: the SA, Ernst Röhm’s Brownshirts. Stefanie felt their eyes on her, even at that distance.
“The Führer is expecting you?” inquired Frau Hess in the desultory manner of one seeking confirmation of a weather forecast.
“Well, I hope he is,” said Stefanie. “He invited me here.” She felt unaccountably superior to this woman, perhaps for her all-too-evident subservience to a man who was himself little more, as Stefanie had noted, than a cipher.
Frau Hess nodded and smiled nervously, then bustled off after her husband, glancing over her shoulder. Somewhat annoyed, Stefanie followed her gaze. The SA had scared away Frau Hess, it seemed. At least, one of its members had, the one approaching with a desultory swagger. He was young, beefy, and blond: the new ideal.
“Allow me, meine Frau,” he said, snatching up Stefanie’s bag disdainfully. “This way, please.”
A funicular railway ran up the side of the mountain atop which sprawled the Haus Wachenfeld compound. The composite main chalet was still a work-in-progress. Scaffolding encased one end, and bulldozers and cement mixers stood about amid patches of mud and marl. Construction workers, not strapping Aryans but swarthy foreigners—Croats or Slovaks—were getting off the bus. Somewhere, dogs barked. A security patrol strode by, giving Stefanie the once-over. The SA man motioned for her to precede him into the funicular. He stepped inside and pulled a lever. A bell clanged and the doors shut with a hydraulic sigh. Stefanie and the young thug were the only passengers. As the car jolted and shuddered slowly up the mountainside, she became uncomfortably aware that her companion was scrutinizing her. As if to admire the view on the other side of the car, she turned suddenly and caught his gaze, cold and lubricious, like that of a Saturday night teenager with too much to drink; and like such a teenager he was leaning against the wall, arms folded, feet crossed, the very incarnation of the untamed juvenile.
“Do you live here, junge?” she asked.
Languidly, he transferred his gaze upward until their eyes met; it was the slow insolence of a stupid man endowed with authority. Stefanie stiffened in annoyance. Was she not, after all, to be treated with respect, even as their Führer’s guest?
“Nah,” he said. “I’m from Mannheim. They sent me up here to help with the security.”
“You know that I’m a guest of Herr Hitler,” blurted Stefanie. She was certain that she was betraying her nervousness, but it hardly mattered: She was furious. Impudent young lout!
“Ah ja, but we’re all his guests here, Frau.” It sounded as if the boy were talking of God: the unnamed His.
The cable car jerked to a halt. “Here we are. Watch your step.”
Stefanie had to endure the boy’s company all the way up another, more manorial, flight of stairs. When they got to the entrance of the Berghof itself, he deposited her bag with a curt nod.
“You will be assigned your quarters shortly,” he said, and went off to join a small group of other Brownshirts standing around talking in undertones, heads bowed, their demeanour modest, quite unBrownshirtlike. Stefanie was surprised at such discreet behavior on the part of men she had read about in the press as being permanent brawlers and troublemakers. Then, noticing an equally subdued group of regular army officers standing a little way off, she followed with her eye the strands that led to the heart of the invisible, yet almost palpable, power-web from which this daunting influence emanated. Standing just inside the doorway, wearing a gunbelt, black shirt, swastika armband, and jackboots, was the Spider-King himself, their Führer, Stefanie’s one-time portrait painter, would-be ruler of the universe. Hitler had developed a martial way of standing, a militant pose she assumed was in some way associated with manliness and leadership, the right hand tucked into his waistband, the left on his hip, one foot jauntily in front of the other. Next to him, mimicking this pose, was a portly man with slicked-back hair and an expression of wilful joviality made sinister by his piercing blue eyes, wearing a Brownshirt uniform heavy with medals and shoulder-straps and tapering into knee-high boots polished to a high gloss: This was Goering, the air ace, commander of the SA. Stefanie remembered him from photographs and newspaper articles. A romance—him landing a Fokker biplane on the lawn of his wife’s estate—followed by a tragic death, his wife’s—some debilitating disease—came to mind with the sugary pang of cinematic emotion. So this was Goering. He was an important man, and looked it, and what’s more, judging by his stance, he knew it, too.
Various other bystanders, in uniform and out, milled about, talking in undertones. The whole scene was so staged that Stefanie looked around half-expecting to see a photographer or film crew but seeing only the reverential upturned faces of soldiers and Brownshirts. Hitler and Goering continued chatting, Goering doing all the laughing, Hitler with the rabbit-toothed grin on his face Stefanie remembered so well from Linz and Vienna, the grin he grinned when he was well into an anecdote, or caustic castigation of his enemies. She stared, briefly lost in her memories of the bizarre and mysterious journey that had brought the man from where she’d first known him to this literal and figurative pinnacle of his existence. She felt a faint half-swooning go through her, and hoped it heralded no visions. She wanted crystal-clear concentration, she wanted to talk, to instruct, to influence...She, influence him! The moment the thought crossed her mind a smothered laugh followed. Just as incredible as Adolf’s ascent, she thought, berating herself, was her exaggerated sense of her own importance, her grandiose notions of mission and God. Still, you couldn’t expect her to totally disregard the importance of her visions—not so much the visions themselves but the mere fact of her having had them at all (although this line was perhaps a little too Jungian for her liking); still, precious few had ever had visions unaided by artificial stimulants, least of all members of the blasé bourgeoisie, so if she was a little vain because of it, well, the progenitor (or progenitrix) of those visions would soon settle that (but not, she hoped, for good), she had no doubt...
“Fraulein von Rothenberg?”
The Summons had come. A valet took her carryall and led the way up the stairs. Hitler looked down at her from the top step, hands clasped in front of his crotch (she suddenly, briefly, remembered the Vienna Opera, 1912, Adolf meeting Helmuth, the same gesture...). She curtsied, awkwardly, with a hint of deference, but by this time he was beaming broadly and extending his hands in welcome.
“My dearest Fraulein von Rothenberg. Welcome, welcome. Welcome to Haus Wachenfeld.”
He bowed over her hand and clicked his heels, creating an audible impression among the murmuring onlookers; a flash bulb did, in fact, go off, and Goering lost no time in following his leader (amazing how much The Leader he already seemed to be, mere provincial politician that he still was) and muttered nonsensical expressions of greeting, taking her hand in both of his, presenting her with a brief view of his pomaded head on which each hair was visibly distinct from its fellows, all combed ruthlessly back.
“Ever so delighted to make your acquaintance, Fraulein von Rothenberg, the Führer speaks very highly of you.”
“That’s enough, Goering, you’ll embarrass the poor woman!”
Hitler’s easy high spirits were new to Stefanie. They came, no doubt, with the position, the stature, the adulation, the long-fought-for acknowledgment of his importance. “This way, dear lady.” He hurried with stiff jackbooted steps up another short flight of stairs and stood aside for her to enter. As she did so, slightly dazed, she imagined she heard from somewhere the exquisite rising note of the horn in the Prelude to Act I of Parsifal, the sublime music of an apotheosis, as if her own bodily assumption were at hand, the Life Eternal, Nazi cherubim frolicking in the castle-clouds of Heaven, a clear beam of light shining down upon the earth from the domain of the gods in which he now dwelled...operatically, he took her hand, and, bowing again, led her through the ornately Bavarian vestibule with its stags’ antlers and rustic motifs, past a tall window through which she caught a glimpse of mist flitting through valleys of near-Amazonian green, across a vast sea-floor of Tirolean tiles, up two more carpeted steps and into the main foyer at the opposite end of which stood two oaken double doors. Hitler gently let go of her hand, opened the doors, and stood aside like a conjuror eager to display an effect. Beyond the doors was a sitting room as vast as the promenade deck of an ocean liner, with red leather armchairs interspersed with coffee tables, newspaper racks, and canapé trays. Gilded paintings (Stefanie recognized Bismarck and Frederick the Great enframed on either side of a Titian nude) hung on the pale larchwood walls, and a bust of Wagner stood out prominently on a side table, but the dominant feature of the room—indeed, of the whole house—was the gigantic picture window which took up the best part of the north wall from the floor to the ceiling, that ceiling being very nearly as high as the house itself. Half of Bavaria and the entire Salzkammergut lay at their feet. Hundreds of meters below, sprinkled like dice on a tablecloth, were the huddled houses of Berchtesgaden, and a giant’s-leap away, across the mist-shrouded valley, soared the peaks of the Chiemgauer; farther south, the summits of the Watzmann, Hagengebirge, and the Koeningsstock lofted into misty oblivion. All of these mountains she, as a Salzburger, recognized, and she named them, pointing. Hitler followed her pointing finger with slight interest.
“Ja? H’m! I never knew these names,” he said. “I only knew the Zugspitze from geography class back in Leonding. We had a dreadful teacher, a Jew named Stein. And, speaking of the Zugspitze, you know it’s the highest peak in Germany, of course, but do you know exactly how high it is, my dear Fraulein von Rothenberg?”
She did, but forbore.
“Two thousand nine hundred and sixty two meters,” he said, beaming, as if he’d built every meter himself. “Ja.”
She knew not what to say. He was still smiling, hands behind his back, looking out the window. It was the moment, if there was to be one, to mention God, charity, Christian forgiveness, the greatness of a Christian Germany. Stefanie desperately cast about for a cue: Easter? The mountains, domains of the gods? The Führer, like Moses, on a mountaintop? The vanity of human wishes? She cleared her throat and turned towards him with the bright expression of an ingénue.
“It’s.”
But it was too late. He turned away. They were joined by the entourage, and the rest of the morning progressed snail-slowly amid suffocating pomp and bourgeois convention carried to an absurd degree. In a room adjoining the ship’s-promenade sitting room were two great dining tables, one round, like King Arthur’s, the other long and rectangular, like a picnic table. Promptly at twelve, Hitler and his guests proceeded to take luncheon in the lustiest Viennese tradition, with rich helpings of gravied noodles, braised cabbage, guglhupfen, gateaux à la crème, Linzertorten mit schlagober, and assorted petits fours. The lords of the party sat on either side of their master at the round table; the assorted uniformed guests and their spouses sat at the picnic table. Stefanie was positioned among the elect, next to a Herr und Frau Rosenberg (Jewish? she wondered, doubtfully), diagonally across from Hitler. Conversation was generally low-key, with a great deal of personal reminiscing from their host along the lines of My Years in Vienna; My Enemies, Jews One and All (“The Jews are definitely a race,” he thundered, “but they are not human,” eliciting uncertain titters): The New Art; My Talents as an Artist; German Women; Cars; Dogs; etc. Occasional thunderclaps of laughter erupted from Goering. Two liveried valets were on hand to serve, supervised by a worn-looking woman in her early forties with a face that hinted to Stefanie of familiarity, although she’d never seen the woman before—then, at a quick rabbit-grin, Stefanie caught the resemblance and realized the woman was Adolf’s sister Angela, mother of the recently deceased Geli. Adolf treated his sister in an offhand fashion that was fully as Austrian as the pastries. Most of the guests—Stefanie; Goering; the Hesses; the Rosenbergs; Herr von Ribbentrop, a former salesman of Sekt wine, “I’m convinced our German wines are quite as good as French champagne”—drank, in huge quantities, coffee and tea; but Adolf, she noticed, drank first milk, then elderberry juice, and ate a guglhupf and three large helpings of Linzer torte with dollops of schlag. After tea, the guests rose and mingled, genially dismissed by Hitler, who stayed seated, probing his teeth with a toothpick, and conferred with Hess and Herr Rosenberg, whose job was apparently to convey news of this or that political development: The party was doing unexpectedly well in the by-elections in Oberöstwanger gau in Thuringia, but the Reds were ahead in Berlin-Kreuzberg; the Duce had just received the French Prime Minister, M. Herriot, in the Quirinale in Rome; a donation of ten thousand reichsmarks had been received in the Party coffers from a certain Herr Krapf, a Bremerhaven industrialist (this enlivened Hitler more than all the other news together: “Give him honorary membership and a signed copy of the book—oh, and a guaranteed place at my table in Berlin, but make sure he understands the rules”); a lady in Schleswig-Holstein had bequeathed the National Socialist Party her estate, including a vineyard and three Horch touring cars (“Horch! A fine German automobile, if not quite as prestigious as Mercedes-Benz; but what would I do with a winery? Ribbentrop! This is your problem!”); the city council of Lörrach in Baden-Württemberg were inviting Herr Hitler to address them, on the occasion of the city’s six hundredth anniversary; Hitler’s rival for the Presidency, Feldmarschall von Hindenburg, had a cold but was going ahead with an appearance in Hamburg; und so weiter...
“You know, I remember him when he hadn’t two gröschen for a sandwich. I believe you do, too.” The words were Goering’s. He had materialized from the ether to stand beside Stefanie. As abruptly as he had spoken, he produced a gunmetal cigarette case. “I believe you smoke, Frau von Rothenberg?”
“Well, yes, actually. But I have my own, thanks...”
“Allow me to insist. But not in here. He’s a wonderful host in most things, but he can’t stand people smoking around him, especially women. Yes, I know, it’s very old-fashioned, but I daresay your father was like that, too. I know mine was. No, we have to go out there, discreetly, if we want so smoke. Discrètement, Madame,” he added, with a smile, proud of his French and the implied knowledge of her link to that culture. He pointed to the terrace that extended the length of the house; again, Stefanie was put in mind of an ocean liner sailing through the clouds...she followed Goering’s confident bulk through a silently sliding glass door onto the terrace and took the cigarette he was insistently proffering. A man in a black overcoat looked sharply around when they stepped onto the terrace but walked away in response to a curt nod from Goering, who then produced a brass cigarette lighter and lit their cigarettes, inhaling extravagantly.
“Ah, my first today,” he said. “Trying to cut back, you know. I was up to forty a day, and Turkish, if you please. I’m down to about ten now, and I aim to keep it at that. Brrr! Are you warm enough?”
Stefanie folded her arms and shifted her weight from one foot to the other.
“It’s quite bracing,” she said, not entirely sure what she was doing alone on a windy terrace with the gross yet charming ex-commander of the Richthofen Squadron and, if rumor had it right, somewhat self-indulgent fancier of women and gourmandise....
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” The comment was strictly pro forma; with a painfully obvious lack of interest, he waved a desultory hand at the mountains, the tattered clouds, the green meadows.
“Oh, it is,” she said. “It is. Of course, I’ve known these mountains since childhood, you know.”
“Of course. You’re a Salzburger. But your home is now in Paris, ja?” His face, folded into smiles, suddenly unfolded like an awning, and he gave Stefanie a stern, sharp stare that made her look nervously away; then, annoyed at herself, she forced herself to return his gaze, which was now clouded over with thought.
“I’m sure you are aware, Fraulein von Rothenberg, that the party is building its influence here and abroad. We intend to be ready to assume power when the moment comes, as it will very soon, perhaps later this year...and it is of capital importance to us to have friends—collaborators—compatriots—sympathizers, call them what you will” (“Spies,” thought Stefanie, “might be apt”) “in strategic places. Like for instance, London. Moscow. Or Paris.” Goering blinked through the smoke. “And of course you live in Paris, don’t you?
“Most of the time, yes.”
“And I understand your, shall we say, gentleman friend is a member of the Radical Party?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Of course, of course, he cooed, soothingly. Yes, they knew all about Sami—or should he say Schmuel Schoen? Mind you, he didn’t give a damn one way or the other, and as for Jews, quite frankly (and this was between him and her and the fencepost) he could take ‘em or leave ‘em, his feelings were quite neutral on the subject, not like some people’s...anyway, his fiancée, an actress, had plenty of Jewish friends who were always coming around to the house...yes, Stefanie’s cooperation would be very helpful, and moreover it would be an investment, he explained, smoothly deploying the argument to confront her predictable, if muted, indignation (she was shocked by the sudden intrusiveness, the unexpected laying bare of her private life, like dirty fingerprints on fresh linen). An investment in the future, he added. The National Socialist Party was coming to power sooner rather than later, that was certain, she had to see that. When they did, they would remember who had helped them, and those who had would reap huge benefits, and not merely financial (although there was that). The world was changing, Fraulein. The new world would be Germany’s, and Germany would be theirs.
“And after Germany...?”
“Ach, one war in a generation is enough! No, no, our people are peaceful enough. We only want the best for the Fatherland. We want the respect of our neighbors, especially France. But we need partners, collaborators, representatives. Agents of influence, I believe the Bolsheviks call them. Also, we can afford—because of recent generous endowments—to pay quite handsomely. I understand you are,” the creases returned, heralding a smile that, Stefanie saw, was quite automatic, “currently unemployed? And your son, is he well?”
“My goodness, Herr Goering, what you are saying is quite simply that you know everything about me, is that it?”
“Hardly everything. I have no idea, for example, what your amorous or cultural tastes are—except that you have, on occasion, attended the opera performances of Wagner. However, I do know that you claim to have seen visions of the Virgin Mary, or is it Jesus Christ? And now that I have met you, I am satisfied that you are not the raving lunatic I half-suspected you might be. Others, however, might think you were, if they learned of your visions outside the frame, so to say. You know what people are like. I can imagine that sort of thing not going down at all well with employers, colleagues, publishers, and so on, don’t you agree? Sad but true, eh?” How suavely Herr Goering made his threats! With what panache, style, and dash, and the kindliest sense of fellow-feeling! He drew deeply on his diminishing cigarette and looked down at Stefanie with an almost benign expression. “Please remember that you have in the past offered your services to us, and that the Führer has a very high opinion of you—and let me add that this is not the case with very many people, especially women. You are an old acquaintance from the Führer’s past, and you earned a place of honor when you visited him in his prison cell at Landsberg. You are, so to say, one of us, and we are the future of Germany, of Europe. Your spirituality has a place with us. We are keen on reviving some of the old ways—combining this and that, you know, all of Germany’s spiritual traditions! Having a visionary such as yourself to run the program might be just the thing. After all, this is a moment unlike any in history, Frau von Rothenberg.”
“You forget one thing, Herr Goering. I am an Austrian and your party is German.”
“Ha! Austrian, German? Is there a difference?” He strolled over to the balustrade and placed one jackbooted foot on the bottom rail. Looking down, he sent his cigarette end spiralling wildly into oblivion. “There’s one for the goats,” he said, chuckling, then swung around, arms folded, and gave Stefanie the frankest of open stares. “When you go to Munich, does it seem foreign? Augsburg, Bayreuth, my own hometown of Nürnberg? When I am in Salzburg, Graz, Linz, Vienna, I am in my own country, actually far more so than when I am in Rostock, or Danzig, or even Berlin. Blood is blood, Fraulein von Rothenberg. Austria and Germany are one, will be one, mark my words, one forever. This Dollfuss, the Austrian Republic...” he snapped his fingers, crisply, with a bloody insouciance that would have quite chilled Stefanie had she not already been chilled to the bone by the high mountain air and the man’s sinister charm. She shivered. He tut-tutted solicitously and rubbed his hands; like Hitler, he noticed everything, especially weakness. Again, the smile.
“Yes, even I am beginning to feel it, and I have more natural defenses than you!”
They returned to the turgid warmth of the chalet. The briefing session was over. Goering, heartily hailed, hailed heartily back and disappeared toward the front door. Stefanie, as in a daze, accepted more tea, but more urgently wanted a drink. She looked around for someone to whisper this to, but there were no friends among the invited. Only Hitler, standing next to the picture windows, was looking her way, smiling, and he would scarrcely be sympathetic to her need for a bracer. He beckoned to her. Simultaneously, Hess and another man, both of whom had been standing at Hitler’s side, sidled away like scolded dogs.
“What do you think of my house?” inquired their Führer as she approached.
“It’s magnificent,” she said.
“Ah, you remember the man I once was,” he said, clasping his hands behind his back. “More than anyone else, except for my own family, of course. Do you realize what a unique position that places you in, my dear Stefanie?”
“Ja, well, I suppose...” My dear Stefanie? Not since Linz, and not even then...! As for her, she avoided all modes of address, not knowing whether a simple “mein Herr” would suffice, but she was most reluctant to call him “Führer,” as his toadies did, and “Adolf,” in the circumstances, much less “Adi,” seemed quite unsuitable, and there was something suffocatingly bland and officious about “mein Herr” or “Herr Hitler.” Formality’s demands would have to be met with no more than the distinction between du and sie.
“You know,” she said, “Herr Goering said something similar to me, just now.”
“Did he,” said Hitler, not seeming terribly interested in what Goering had said. “That Goering, ja? Listen to me now, Fraulein Stefanie. Come,” and he led the way over to a pair of heavy armchairs. He sat, so she followed suit, but made sure not to sprawl as a man would into the chair’s plushness; instead, she perched, à la secretary or adoring mistress, on the edge of the seat, and gazed at him as he, without compunction, sank manfully and luxuriantly into the chair’s depths. Such an odd mixture, she thought; such a sybarite at heart, but such a jittery, fastidious, nervous man on the surface, so supernaturally aware of the thoughts and desires of others, like a quivering antenna’ed insect...They were, she noticed, being left alone. No valets or maidservants were near. Only Hess, at the far end of the great chamber, hovered, but out of earshot.
“I am not married, nor do I intend to be,” announced Hitler, his eyes fixed on the Chiemgauer range through the window. “I recall your asking me that when you came to see me at Landsberg—I never told you how important that visit was to me, did I, no, of course, not...well, it cemented our friendship. It was a bright light in the darkness of my years in the wilderness, which are, by the way, finally coming to an end, believe me. I know it, I feel it.” He clenched his fists close to his breast, then slowly relaxed. “And if I’ve not been in touch, well, you understand. For one thing, you were married to that Frenchman!” His gaze drifted downward and alighted on her. “No longer except in the eyes of the law, nicht wahr? But there you are, living with this other Frenchman,” he waved a deprecatory hand, “in Paris, possibly in a leaky garret, like some Mimi and Rodolfo couple, nein? Ach, it’s fine for students and romantic painters and poets. But not for Fraulein Stefanie von Rothenberg of Salzburg! Her country needs her. I need her.” Now the appeal was followed by the probing stare, the election-poster Hitler touting for votes, the Corporal versus the Field-Marshall.
“But I tried, I failed, it was a disaster. They shouted me down.”
“The meeting in Haidhausen, ja? You’re right, it was a disaster, and not because of you. I blamed others for that.” He glared at the distant Hess. “But I’m not talking about that. You’re a spiritualist, a visionary, in your own way a leader like me, but not a politician, or a people’s tribune like Rienzi. Of course, I should have realized that. But to come to the point. I would be very pleased if you would accept my offer of companionship.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Ah, I thought I was being sufficiently clear without having to be specific.”
A certain mincing coyness in the drift of the conversation, an awkwardness Stefanie recognized as old-fashioned Austrian petit-bourgeois code for “Please let’s get it over with as quickly as possible” (she was Austrian, she’d read her Schnitzler), pointed unavoidably to...
“You mean?”
She sank abruptly into the chair, aghast. The leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and putative future President of the Republic leaned forward to get a clear view of her from around the wings of the armchair, peering at her anxiously and pressing his fingertips together.
“Of course, I am speaking in terms of a semi-permanent arrangement, with your freedom of movement largely intact. And by the way this is quite separate from whatever Goering may have been talking about. Whatever that was, you must discuss with him, ja?”
Once or twice before she had trembled in Adolf Hitler’s proximity, but not from desire, or not desire alone, but more from of a combination of the desire she’d perhaps once felt, many years ago, and her own struggle against the natural yielding of the weaker to the stronger—and the visions had followed such moments, not visions of the Virgin, she reminded herself, but of the devil himself, and both times in Adolf Hitler’s company; easy to dismiss then, in the parlor of her aunt’s and uncle’s house, or in that Monchskeller in Linz (for why would the devil appear to nonentities?), but now that Adolf was on the mountaintop, the Guide and Leader, the next great shepherd of the Teutonic flock....
Or perhaps not. A provincial he was and a provincial he would remain. And how far did provincials get, in a world of silk-hatted globetrotters?
(Sallow, slick-haired, fidgety, odd-scented, with the staring eyes of an insomniac, and the ravenous dog-hunger beneath it all.)
But what better means could she find to influence the man, who was now on the brink of eternally placing himself beyond her or anyone’s influence...?
“I am honored,” blurted Stefanie, dishonored.
“And I,” he barked with laughter, “am honored that you are honored! Many women would have been insulted. My goodness, I was nervous, I can tell you!”
“But I cannot let you know yet.”
“Why not? You’ve seen the house, you know me. Ach, woman’s eternal shilly-shallying. A man’s not like that. A man, he decides, he makes up his mind, so!” He clapped his hands, once. Stefanie recalled the male ditherers she had known—her father, her uncle, her husband, her cousin—and recognized Adolf Hitler’s definition of manhood as something pure and artificial, the manhood aspired to by the man unsure of his own, the power complex of the sexually indigent (of course, there had been Geli). Perhaps his need of her fell into the same category. She was known, she was easy. It was a comfortable flirtation for him. And why not? Had they not strolled the streets of Linz together arm-in-arm, a quarter century past? Was he not the same awkward, impassioned artist she’d half-loved then? Was she not the same insecure, eternally questing, half-mad daughter of God?
Boldly, she said:
“I must remind you that my faith comes first.”
He waved a hand.
“Ja, ja, faith, faith. I had it too, once. Please don’t forget that I was an altar boy at Lambach Monastery. Ja, and what I wanted most was to be a priest. Did you know that?”
“Yes, you...”
“And I admired the abbot, a fine man, he had the right combination of knowledge and power, ah you should have seen the way he ruled those monks, you know I think it was the first time I had ever seen authority dispensed in so effective a fashion, it predisposed me to good opinions of the church,” and so he continued, picking up stray thoughts along the way as a broom picks up dust, weaving the half-baked thoughts of Mein Kampf into the cast-off nighttime ravings of Gobineau, Liebenfels and Nietzsche; in short, the purpose of their conversation was soon lost in a flood of speculation, contempt, reminiscence and criticism. Stefanie, still perching on the edge of her chair, watched fascinated as, quite oblivious to her, he lectured the empty air, his eyes, blinking rapidly, fixed on a point directly in front of him, his hands shaping arguments, counter-arguments, the pillars of the church, the two sides of the debates, his own inevitable victory, bells, hats, cats, and the devil himself...
(Who was standing on the terrace outside, watching them with eyes the size of dinnerplates and the rictus sardonicus of a dead man, but they saw him not, for they had eyes only for themselves.)
Andante
And so Stefanie von Rothenberg became, for a brief time, Adolf Hitler’s mistress, in the wake of Geli, and in between, as it were, Mimi and Eva. He was distant but considerate, at least in the early days. Materially, she lacked for nothing. She could at last afford to send money home, to her Mutti thirty kilometers away and to her baby boy Ignace back in Vienna. In the autumn, she told him, she hoped to enroll him at the Académie Werfel in Paris. To Sami she sent only regrets. He replied coldly, citing Pascal’s wager.
Sexually, Adolf Hitler was hasty, unimaginative, and—as in so many things—entirely a petit-bourgeois Austrian, with that class’s penchant for enemas, heavy underwear, and darkness. He indulged in some rather odd foreplay, involving much staring, heavy breathing and sudden movements, but Stefanie lived through the entire experience as in a trance. She felt the weight of penance, made heavier by the tiny thrill of being his woman, her Adi, not the Führer of the National Socialists: Her Linz and Braunau artist, her awkward suitor, Bohemian paramour. Hitler reciprocated at first, gruffly, clumsily, then slowly returned to the utter inwardness that was his normal state. He slept in his own room on the first floor; she, above the garage, adjacent to the room occasionally used by Johann Kohler, the number-two chauffeur, a genial duffer she chose mostly to ignore. Kohler seemed not to notice, and continued to greet her heartily, and with some deference, as she fulfilled the demands of her routine. They were few. She arose in the morning and breakfasted, then read, wrote, and drifted through the great ocean-liner rooms attended by the reticent Angela or one of her assistants. On the terrace when Hitler wasn’t around she stole a smoke. In the afternoons she took the bus down to Berchtesgaden, or went walking through the woods. In the evenings she dined, and occasionally joined the others in watching one of the inane American films Hitler prized, and read, and prayed, but her prayers went unheard: She knew it, she could feel the hostile silence from Heaven. Guiltily, she redoubled her efforts to speak to Hitler of her faith, but he was hardly ever at home, and Hess relished keeping her at arm’s length.
“Nein, Frau von Rothenburg,” he would say hoarsely, knitting his single brow-width eyebrow, “not today, not tomorrow, and probably not for the rest of the week. Go for a walk, read a good book. May I recommend Mein Kampf?”
Through the presidential election of 1932, lost by Hitler but not by much, and into the autumn campaign during which, it seemed, the Nazis’ support plunged, Stefanie stayed at the Haus Wachenfeld, invisible to the public (“no one must see you, no, no, they must think I live for Germany and Germany alone”), tormented by her adoration of God on one hand and the magnetism of her truculent human demigod on the other.
One rare morning, of perfect blueness above—rare too in his presence at the breakfast table (orange juice, fried bread)—emboldened by her menses and a sleepless night, she seized the initiative.
“What you are doing is irreligious,” she said. “What you are preaching is sacrilege. What you are planning is horrible.”
Like any irritated husband, he put down his paper (Volkischer Beobachter) and peered at her quizzically.
“What are you talking about?”
“I have heard you calling for the removal of the Jews. And the others. It is unChristian. It offends God. And me,” she added.
“UnChristian?” He barked with laughter, then became frowningly solemn, as if mulling it over. “Are you serious?”
“I have had visions, Adi.” (The mode of address question had been settled, in private; in public she called him nothing, with respect denoted only via the Sie.) “Bad visions. Visions of you. Of terrible things.”
“Visions, bah. Who knows what causes them. Feminine problems, no doubt. After all, why is it always women who have these visions? You never hear of some, of some guy in a field talking to Jesus Christ...”
“There were many men who had visions. John of the Cross, the English poet Blake...”
“Ach, now you talk of English poets. Please. I have things on my mind of such weight that you cannot conceive of them. Listen to me, liebchen. I follow my life with the precision and security of a sleepwalker. It’s all mapped out. So go and have your visions, but leave me out of them, all right?”
In September Sami came from Paris on his way to Munich to meet with Social Democrats. They had tea in Berchtesgaden.
“What can one say?” he exclaimed. “You are the most extraordinary woman, Stefanie. Casually you depart our home to attend your aunt’s funeral, and, next thing I know, you are living with Adolf Hitler in the Goddamned Bavarian Alps. And you complain that he doesn’t take you seriously! To me!”
“I never know where my life is going, Sami,” she said. “But I have faith in my heart, I follow its lead. I heed my heart. That is one thing you must understand.”
“Follow the lead, you’re not a dog, for goodness’ sake.” Sami looked and acted entirely out of place. All around him stout and rubicond Bavarians crunched on their apple torte and spätzle. Sami’s Jewishness stood on the table, it danced the hagana, it davened, it pleaded to be recognized. But his Frenchness was its equal, even its superior. Stefanie heard no “Jude,” but did hear a muttered “welsch,” and warned Sami with a glance; but he ignored her, and raised his voice slightly.
“These Germans,” he said, “what will they do next? recrucify Christ?” Glared at, he glared back, and quelled the onlookers, mustache bristling; he, after all, had faced down hecklers in the Assemblée Nationale, including Herriot and Fauche, and once had humbled great Poincaré himself. Cavalierly, he summoned a schnapps, and with it a cigar. The ladies at the next table arose and stalked out, muttering sentiments that were clearly anti-French and anti-cigar, and probably anti-male, as well. Stefanie watched them go, dreamily, unfocused, enjoying a moment’s respite from the madness of her life.
Sami chimed in.
“This is lunacy, Steffi, as you must know. Lunacy! Come home with me. If only for Ignace. Your Hitler is mad. He wants to get rid of Jews and foreigners, well you’ve heard him, is that his pillow talk, too?” With these words Sami made as if to spit.
“You don’t know him, Sami. He is like a force of nature. He will lead this country into a new age, I am convinced of it. He stands poised between all the good he might do and the evil he is tempted by.”
“Good. Fine.” Sami made dismissive gestures. “Let him lead his fucking country. Let them follow him like the Pied Piper. This is not your business. This is not even your country, pour l’amour de Dieu!”
And yet Berchtesgaden and the virgin-white Alps were beautiful that autumn day, with just a shiver in the shadowy valleys of the winter that was coming; the sky hummed with blueness, a Dornier flew overhead, birds squabbled, and the snowcapped peaks of the neighboring mountains shone blindingly white. Limpidly, a churchbell chimed down the valley, and the buses taking the construction crews snarled and growled back and forth, never stopping in the village.
Swastika flags had blossomed like zinnias, vying for space in the windowboxes and in the flowerpots on the quaint wooden balconies.
They walked. Sami shivered.
“Fucking Nazis,” he said. “I’m not a praying man, Stefanie, but I’m figuratively on my knees right now before you or God, whichever one does me the courtesy of listening. Please come home.”
She was moved. Sami returned to Munich by train from Salzburg, and thence to Paris. Stefanie stayed on at the Berghof, dressing in doll’s costume or (and this was her penance) dirndls for her master’s pleasure on the rare occasions when he was home, and for her own amusement reading, kite-flying, hiking. Once, not long after Sami had returned to France—leaving in his wake assorted regrets, longings, and nostalgic thoughts—she was on the balcony having a smoke and Hitler, unannounced except by the panting of his Alsatian dog Blondi, joined her. He was wearing a double-breasted suit with a small swastika button in the lapel. He looked like the assistant manager of a packing plant, but the light that burned in his eyes was the light of a crusader, and there was more than an assistant manager’s soul reflected in the restless mobility of his face.
“Things are going well. Sometimes it feels as if God Himself were dictating my program to me,” he said, with typical grandiloquence. He never said hello, or offered an inquiry after her health; usually he said nothing, or launched directly into a soliloquy. His only social abilities were concealed behind the formalities of the heel-clickings and hand-kissings of bourgeois practice. As in the past, intimacy was a foreign language to him; his mother tongue was bombast. Yet in certain circumstances, as Stefanie had discovered, he could be charm itself. For example, she had never seen an adult who so plainly enjoyed the company of children, with whom he could safely inhabit a sympathetic dream-realm. Ignace, on his two visits, had enticed Hitler to play cowboys and Indians behind the sofas of the grand sitting room for an hour or more each time, and had, since then, spoken fondly of his Onkel “Wolf.” Hitler was contradiction; Hitler was mad.
“I am sane. Everyone else is mad. I am the last hope for Germany, and Germany knows it. Wait and see, you just wait and see. The election results are mixed, ja. We have the Reds to contend with, especially in Berlin, but there will be ways. Blondi! Los!” He tossed a bone. The dog frolicked, well-trained. “Ja, they all feel it. There is a tremendous desire, a hunger, among the German people. Only I can appease them and take them to the heights of which they dream. Only I can mobilize their hatred for the alien, the Bolshevik, the traitor. The November criminals. The Jew.” He gazed at the Jew-free heights spread out before him: already he was the political god, the uncrowned king, the self-anointed savior of a nation. Stefanie stood aside, hoping he wouldn’t smell the tobacco smoke on her breath, not wishing to displease her lord and master. The impulse disgusted her, and she saw herself anew, and saw him for the new man he was. Gone forever was the hesitant, awkward Adolf of long ago, Stefanie’s Adolf, the earnest artist of Linz and Vienna, the sidling, sideways suitor. Gone, too, was any chance of her influencing him beyond what was on the menu at dinner. Gone, finally, was her own life. Looking down on the tumbling summits of the Bavarian Alps, she felt as if a fever had broken and found herself thinking of the cafes, the sidestreets, and the trees in the Luxembourg, of Paris, where her life might have continued unimpeded, had it not been for him, his mad magnetism, her own mad impulse. Paris: the Seine, sanity, Ignace, the Académie. Paris: lurching Citroëns, Sami’s robust rage. Paris: France, not Germany, not Hitler, not the Nazis. The thought was a momentary relief until it brought in its train, like a clunking goods wagon, the bulky image of Hermann Goering. The jovial air ace had been noticeably less of a presence recently, and word had it that between his fiancee and his recent election to a high position in the Reichstag, he had important business in Berlin. Stefanie hoped his new responsibilities might cause him to forget their conversation, and in any case she decided—on the spur of the moment, on which spur she made all her life-altering decisions—to confront Hitler with talk of departure.
“I want to go back to Paris,” she said, on that fifteenth day of December, 1932.
“Go,” he said, shrugging. “Go.”
She challenged him with a glare.
“Will you miss me?”
Blondi cantered up, gazed at her master, raced after the bone, tongue lolling. Hitler turned slowly and looked at Stefanie.
“Miss you?”
“Ja. Miss me.”
“I hardly know what you mean, Fraulein von Rothenberg. Your company has given me pleasure enough, but as you know, I don’t use such sentimental expressions. I seek in every way to harden myself, to be better prepared for the struggles of life. Hate unites men; love divides.”
“Ja.” Stefanie smiled. “But if Blondi went away, you would miss her, nein?”
“Of course. Blondi is my dog.”
“And I am—your bitch?”
His face darkened. He frowned. Expressions of great intensity chased each other across his face. Stefanie had never seen a face so mobile, so expressive of the turmoil within.
“I don’t understand your anger,” he said. “Aren’t you happy here?’
She chronicled the desolation: her humiliation; his bedroom games; the intellectual emptiness; the swarming sycophants; the endless talk, politics, politics, politics...
“Politics? But of course. Of course! All is politics. Your life, my life, all. Germany awaits us. The last election was not so good, admittedly. But we will assume power. Germany will be transformed. No more thirty-seven political parties. No more of the doddering Jew-financed cowards of Weimar. No more bending the knee to the French. No more decadent art. The world will learn where the repository of true civilization is. I will teach the world. As for the rest of your complaints, they are meaningless. Sex? It’s of no consequence. And when you speak of intellectual emptiness, I can only laugh! When was your most recent contribution to our intellectual life?”
The dog returned, the bone was thrown. He had his back to her. She hated him at that moment with a dry, visceral hatred. She thought how much she would give to be with him in an even higher place, the Kuhlstein rock behind the house for example, or the mountain opposite; and, once there, rush at him and push him over the side and rid the world of him forever. She thought crazily that she should do it, that it would be the best thing for her and for the world; and that it would meet with the instant approval of She who watched over her. She briefly remembered the vision she’d had, of him sprawled lifeless…was it a premonition? But she did nothing. She suddenly felt weak in the knees, and wanted to go.
Behind his back, after he had thrown the bone, his hands sought each other and clasped in a nervous union. Sadly, she remembered the swishing of his silver-topped cane along the Danube on a July afternoon in 1907.
“Thanks, Adi, for making things so clear.”
Leaving the Führer to survey the landscape he coveted for his own, she took the lift down and set about readying her things. Angela offered to help but Stefanie curtly said no, then ran after the woman and held her around the shoulders for a silent moment of understanding. Angela stood stiff, then relaxed and patted Stefanie’s shoulder.
“Thank you, Fraulein von Rothenberg.”
As Stefanie was locking her suitcase and glancing one last time around her dimly-lit room with its dark furniture and heavy drapes adorned with scenes from the Nibelungenlied, Johann Kohler appeared in the doorway, twirling a key attached to a swastika-shaped keychain.
“Going my way?”
“I will take the village bus, thanks.”
“His orders. I’m to drive you to Salzburg. Please say yes. I haven’t been out of the house all day, and it’s lovely weather for a drive.”
Stefanie saw no reason not to accede to his request, which was, after all, an “order.” They departed the house, Kohler with her bags underarm and overshoulder, through the great promenade deck and the baronial entrance hall with its view of plunging valleys far below.
“Not a bad place for a vacation, but as for living, I’ll take an apartment in the city any day, thank you very much,” said Johann.
Stefanie’s last sight of Haus Wachenfeld was of Frau und Herr Hess standing at the top of the stairs. Hess’s arms were folded, and he was nodding slightly, as if in confirmation of long-held suspicions. He raised a hand in languid salute. Frau Hess was standing so close to her husband that their shadow fell as one along the wall that bordered the stairs. Stefanie got into the Mercedes roadster without another backward glance.
“Yes, it’s a cheerful little place, isn’t it?” said Kohler, firing the twelve cylinders of the Benz into life. “Frankly, I’ve been in stockades that were more fun. At least you could smoke there. Oh, you’re well out of it, meine frau. Believe me. Cigarette?”
There was certainly something symbolic in that cigarette, which she accepted; and with the blue smoke wisping out of the car window went, for a short time, images of the past, worries about the future, and all manner of apprehension and fears.