Chapter Thirteen
Paris to Munich
One day in November 1923 Arthur, holding a well-filleted copy of Le Gros Parisien, came onto the balcony, where, in weather that was untypically clement for the time of year, Stefanie was breast-feeding Ignace. She looked up, smiling expectantly, as at an old and cherished but predictable friend.
“Your chum Rudolf Hitler,” said Arthur. “That’s the fellow, isn’t it? Or is it Adolf? The one who sent you that puppydog postcard? Well, he’s international news now.”
“Oh no.” She detached from her breast Ignace, whose face immediately collapsed in on itself, as if inhaled. “Did he assassinate someone?”
“Assassinate? No, no. No one. But I’m not sure it’s any better, what he’s done. See for yourself.”
Ignace emitted three moist burps, then a full-throated wail.
“All right, I’ll read it to you. Silence, you there!” And over the infant’s gurgling Arthur read to Stefanie the incomplete first reports (“Melodrama in Munich!”) of what history would call the Beer Hall Putsch, starring Stefanie’s old comrade and suitor, now, according to the newspaper, a wounded fugitive and a traitor to the German nation.
“There he was, in the center of Munich, marching shoulder to shoulder with General von Ludendorff and a certain Goering, ex-commander of the Richthofen squadron,” said Arthur. “After declaring himself the head of the new government and holding three ministers hostage in a beer hall, he took to the streets and caused a riot. Your pal is no longer a nobody, that’s clear, but he’s pushed his luck a little too far for the Germans, if you ask me. They don’t generally go in for this kind of Latin American caper.”
“How fortunate he wasn’t shot,” said Stefanie; but suddenly, as she spoke, the vision-haze passed before her eyes and she saw Adolf sprawled dead, blue eyes staring blankly in his pale bony face, lank forelock draped across his forehead...he was dressed, it seemed, in a gray-and-black uniform, and beyond him was a vast rocky landscape stretching away to the edges of her vision, and the rocks were dappled with blood.
Ignace screamed. Stefanie shook her head clear. Arthur was still reading.
“Shot, you say?”
“Actually, yes. But they don’t know where or by whom. He was seen to fall, and when the police started arresting people he was nowhere to be found. ‘Police are combing the city,’ it says. Sixteen of these so-called National Socialists and three Munich cops dead. My God, Steffi, so your petit ami Adolf tried to take over the government of Germany! Give him top marks for effort, eh? But he’s had it now, you mark my words.”
Arthur went on to read aloud about other world events, notably the opening of King Tutankhamen’s tomb and the prophecies that surrounded that event—good material, he said, for an opera; and, having mentioned opera, he fell silent and returned in body and spirit to the nurturing of his own. Stefanie, for her part, saw operatic potential, if only for opéra bouffe, in Adolf’s escapade, which, she was sure, he had planned as a Wagnerian conquest of the summits. Was he, then, an Alberich or a Wotan? She recalled his last plaintive letter, in which he had sworn to apprehend the “November criminals.” She had, of course, heard from her relatives, as well as from her students at the Académie Werfel, about Germany’s postwar woes, which were legion. For one thing, the French Army, as if determined to repay the hated Germans by earning the reciprocal hatred of every German, had occupied the Ruhr, and Paris was insisting on the murderous reparations schedule decided at Versailles, a demand that fueled throughout Germany the worst inflation in history and ushered in the brief, horrible era of the four-billion-mark kilo of potatoes and wheelbarrows full of money that wouldn’t buy a jam Berliner. Inflation wiped out thousands of families’ savings. Even Fritzl, in Munich, with his wife’s land holdings in the Allgäu, was hard up, according to a letter Stefanie had received, by coincidence, a couple of days earlier—the first letter, in fact, she had ever received from her indolent cousin, written at Aunt Liesl’s urging. She opened it and reread it, skipping over the perfunctory congratulations on the event of Ignace’s birth, etc., etc.:
“Ja, we’re on our uppers, and this damn arm doesn’t make things easier, of course, and the twins (Willi and Kurt, you will meet them soon, a real-life Max und Moritz, as Lotte calls them!) are no longer attending Dr. Novotny’s School. No, dear cuz, sad to say we are reduced to sending our kids to the Gymnasium, and you can imagine what kind of shape the schools are in these days! Their schedules are, to say the least, irregular. I think the boys went to school yesterday, but that was the first time in about a week, since the last food riots on the Marienplatz at which, by the way, a good friend of ours, Herr Blumberg, was seriously injured and taken to hospital—actually, we’re worried, dear Steffi. Thank God Lotte never sold her land in the Allgäu, which she was talking about doing just before the great inflation hit us, if you can believe it! Even so, it seems that everything’s falling apart, and nobody knows what’s going to happen next, it’s crazy and very upsetting for Germans, who love order and peace so much. Everyone’s looking for a strong man to take charge and make things better, and there are lots of people who think your friend Hitler is the one, but I’m not so sure, I’ve heard him speak and there’s something unnatural about him, please forgive me for saying so Steffi, I know how close you were to him....”
Not as close as Fritzl obviously believed, but, she thought, in an odd way (given the little she knew about him, really), as close as anyone had ever managed to get; and yet what was it, really, her relationship with Adolf Hitler? Sexually awakened as she had since become, she recognized it for an unconsummated male-female flirtation on one level, but go any deeper and strange feelings awoke, madness lurked (she remembered the satanic visions, trembling)...Driven, then, by a woman’s need for correctness and clarity, she accepted Fritzl’s invitation to come and stay with him and his family and went, fully intending also to visit Hitler in the fortress to which a court (as she had read in the foreign edition of the Süddeutscher Zeitung) had sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment.
Accordingly, with little Ignace in tow, in May, 1924, Stefanie went to Munich. Arthur was deeply enmeshed in the final rehearsals of The Mystic, with the assistance of the great Youzbine and a handful of budding acolytes, a good number of them female. Uncle Samuel, an ardent motorist, offered to drive Stefanie in a recently-purchased Delahaye touring car; but the prospect was too much of an adventure for her.
“I will meet you there, then, dear Stefanie.”
“Suit yourself, mon oncle.”
Stefanie and Ignace took the train from the Gare de l’Est, and as they passed through the ruined heartland of the Great War, she gazed long and hard at the mournful hills of Lorraine, source of all the poison of France’s wars; and when the train crossed into battered Germany at dusk Heine’s sad lines came to mind.
“Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht,
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht,
Ich kann nicht mehr die Augen schließen,
Und meine heißen Tränen fließen.”
And all through the journey Ignace wailed.
In Munich they stayed with Fritzl, now a heavyset one-armed beer drinker, his placid wife Lotte, and Willi and Kurt, their two sullen twin boys, in a still-respectable three-room apartment on the Leopoldstrasse. Once Stefanie and Ignace had settled in, she endured many an hour of Germanic griping, not that there wasn’t enough to gripe about in Germany in the spring of 1924, except that inflation was slightly better—down to the hundred-thousand level for daily purchases—and Munich’s mood was, in consequence, improving, overall; but the griping continued, for there was unease and uncertainty in the air, and stability was a thing of the past. Still, the former Wittelsbach capital had an immortality all its own, whatever the crisis. The northern face of Stefanie’s very own Salzkammergut Alps glistened on the far horizon; the fountains played at Nymphenburg; the birds chirped in the Englischer Garten; trolleycars clanged merrily through the Marienplatz; students roistered in the bierstuben of Schwabing; and the grotesque figures of the Rathaus clock still marked the hour, as they had for centuries, with their jerky clockwork gait. But in conversations at Fritzl’s home (and Fritzl himself, beer-flushed, presided over table talk with the bluff dominance of a true German burger) the mood was sour, and dire predictions were made, and the name Hitler came up once or twice, casually, as if in reference to a total stranger, before Fritzl and Lotte remembered, and acknowledged, Stefanie’s friendship with the man. This was the first real sign of Adolf’s growing fame, and it was somehow even more impressive over Fritzl’s dining table than in the newspapers; and when Stefanie thought about it she was still amazed that her dour, melancholy, artist friend from Linz and the Heim fur Männer, with his passionate, semi-articulate and deeply unoriginal view of the world, should have become a household name by instigating a silly political farce in the streets of a foreign city.
“What a crazy life,” she thought. Soon after arriving, she had applied to the Interior Ministry for permission to visit Adolf in the fortress-prison of Landsberg am Lech, a small farming town southwest of Munich. After due consultation with the prisoner, who expressed his surprise and consent, the authorities granted permission for a visit ten days from then, provided she came alone and stayed no longer than an hour between the hours of ten a.m. and one p.m.
“This person is a political detainee and as such is forbidden to send or receive missives or messages of any type,” cautioned the letter. “Violators will be dealt with in the strongest terms.”
“Rubbish,” was Fritzl’s comment. “Strongest terms my arse. The place is like a holiday resort. There are forty National Socialists staying there, all in near-palatial accommodations, as you’ll see.”
On the tenth day of her stay Stefanie answered the door to find Uncle Samuel, dressed in a motorist’s goggles and overcoat, standing on the step. He gave a sweeping bow.
“Greetings, my dear niece,” he said. “I have just arrived from Paris. My car and I are at your disposal.”
He was lodging at a Gasthaus nearby, and over the next few days he came to call whenever possible. Fritzl found in him a true arbiter of taste and style, and the two sat for hours in the parlor, discussing motor cars, seaside resorts, cigars, beer, France, Germany—or rather, Samuel lectured and Fritzl listened eagerly, nodding. Entrusting Ignace to Lotte (who, like many mothers of sullen older children, missed the early innocence of baby-care), Stefanie explored the Bavarian capital, rejoicing in a temporary sense of reprieve from the hauntings of ambition, mysticism, family and politics. She visited the Englischer Garten on the turbulent Isar and admired the quaintly undraped citizens taking the sun. She visited the Pinakothek to see the Dürers: They were spare, haunted, and Teutonic, and they did not disappoint. She stopped in at the Bavarian national museum, and the Asam church. It was good to be among German-speakers again. She became aware of a depth of fellow-feeling that surprised her; on the other hand, Munich was only one hundred and forty kilometers from Salzburg, and the dialect, the architecture, and the religion were the same, the spirit was Catholic and southern. She felt at home, and more than once, as she strolled hither and yon, she had to shake off the illusion that she was in Salzburg again, that her pappi’s house was just at the end of that street, on the corner of that square... she also saw the name Hitler, in florid Fraktur script, on posters, in headlines, and most dramatically on a pamphlet thrust into her hands by a hollow-eyed youth on the Odeonplatz who whispered hoarsely, as she recoiled, “Take it, lady. Germany Jew-free is Germany free!”
On the appointed day, after requesting a ride from Samuel, Stefanie went to visit Adolf in Landsberg Prison.
“Do you want me to give him a message?” she asked Lotte and Fritzl, half-jokingly.
“Ja. Tell him the anti-Semitism, the anti-foreign garbage, the equating of Jews with Bolsheviks,” said Fritzl, “it’s all stupid nonsense and it won’t wash.”
“Fritz, you can’t be serious,” said Lotte. “This is Bavaria. Of course it will wash.”
Ignace bawled when his mother left, but was soon placated by helpings of a nut-and-fruit mush prepared from a venerable southern Allgäu recipe.
The Delahaye was oiled and willing, and stood throbbing quietly in the wan autumn sun. Samuel put up the roof and away they went, out the Landsbergerstrasse past the rapid erosion of city into suburbs and suburbs into Bavarian pastureland. The bells in onion-domed churchtowers dinged and cowbells in the fields donged in reply. Horse-drawn carts plodded on their timeless ways. In villages with fachtwerk farmhouses and cowshit on the roads, small children stood and stared as they passed through. One old man in a coat and tie spat and shook his fist, seeing the French registration.
“Mon Dieu! Ils nous détestent,” said Uncle Samuel. “It’s a bad situation here, dear Stefanie. And your friend Herr Hitler will undoubtedly have a hand in making it worse.”
“Or better.”
“No, no. Worse. I’ve read the man’s speeches, my dear. He is of puny intellect and nonexistent morality, being entirely selfish; but he has drive, ambition and will, and he may yet succeed, although admittedly his present circumstances would seem to argue the contrary.”
“Yes, he’s in prison for five years. That’s long enough for people to forget about him.”
“Five years! If he serves more than a year, you can paint me yellow and call me Fu Manchu. Of course, your friend Hitler is merely one among many, and not only on the right. There are those on the left who are just as bad, but the left lacks the crucial ingredient to appeal to a German: nationalism. Oh yes, if you want to appeal to a German, you must do so through his confused sense of inferiority-superiority by telling him how great he is just to be a German. This country is an adolescent among nations, and these days, just like an adolescent, it’s sulking after its punishment. Now would be a good time for the rest of us to turn away and leave it alone; but no, on the contrary, we meddle all the more and make matters much, much worse. Mon Dieu. What is the answer, my dear Stefanie?”
(In the soaring aching sky, above the goiter-shaped church towers, Stefanie glimpsed her answer to everything—or was it merely the question?)
Shortly before ten, the crenellated profile of Landsberg Castle came into view, casting its shadow over the swift-flowing Lech below. The authorities at the Castle were disinclined at first to admit the urbane Frenchman and his coldly poised companion.
“Herr Hitler is at the other end of the prison,” said the sallow unteroffizier at the main gate. “He has very specific visiting hours. He is political, you know.”
“We know,” said Stefanie. “But we also know that those specific visiting hours are now.”
“The gentleman must stay in the guard office. The pass is for the lady only.”
“With pleasure,” said Uncle Samuel. He whipped a deck of cards out of his coat pocket. “Spielen sie, Herr Kommandant?” he inquired. “Für geld?” The guard’s eyes widened with interest, but he looked nervously around.
“All right, but if someone comes,” he said, “I blame you completely, ja?”
“A noble impulse,” said Samuel. “Truly, we are in Germany now.”
Stefanie signed her name and time of arrival in a registry and followed another, lesser guard through a vast echoing domed hallway encircled with catwalks up an iron staircase to the third floor of the prison. Around a couple of tight bends and a momentary pool of utter darkness was a heavy iron door in front of which a man was waiting, a saturnine individual with a single brow-width eyebrow above feral eyes. He introduced himself, with consummate awkwardness, half-bowing and forcing a nervous half-smile, as Rudolf Hess, presuming, he rambled on, to have the privilege of addressing Fraulein von Rothenburg...? But hidden ears were listening.
“Berg,” snapped a familiar, hoarse, querulous voice from inside the chamber. “Rothenberg. You may dismiss yourself now, Hess.”
And Adolf Hitler appeared, waving a dismissive hand. He inclined his head when he saw Stefanie. Stefanie suppressed a chuckle, for Adolf—heavier than before, and more weathered around the eyes, but instantly recognizable behind his mustache and forelock—sported the clichéd costume of a Bavarian or Tirolean peasant, knee-stockings and lederhosen, with floral patterns on the shoulder straps. She smiled, but he seemed deliberately to be withholding his welcome; instead, he set his jaw firmly and stared into Stefanie’s eyes like a policeman seeking to extract a confession.
“Fraulein von Rothenberg,” he said, executing a crisp bow. “I am honored. Welcome to Schloss Landsberg.”
“Hello, my dear Adolf,” she blurted. It was a palpable faux pas: Hess, shocked, paused in mid-exit. Hitler uttered one of his barks of laughter.
“Ja, look, Hess is shocked,” he said. “He’s probably never heard anyone call me by my first name. But surely my brother Alois does, eh, Hess? Anyhow, that’s all right, the lady and I are old friends. Come back in thirty minutes, Hess, do you hear me?” he said, raising his voice to the softly closing door; then, remembering his manners: “Please. Step into my Sitzecke.” He motioned to an armchair in a nook next to the window, from which there was a view, partially blocked by an incongruous potted rubber plant, of the winding Lech river between budding springtime fields and in the distance, against the serrated silhouette of the Alps, the gleaming lake-mirror of the Floggersee.
Stefanie sat down. With an exaggerated grimace, he sat down on a small wicker chair opposite.
“Shoulder injury,” he explained, patting his right shoulder. “My war wound from the Putsch.”
Awkwardness intruded. She looked out the window; he sat forward.
“Your parents are well?”
“Well, thank you.”
“And your esteemed uncle and aunt, the Baron and Baroness Ottoheinz, they are in good health, I trust?”
“Fair. Thank you.” And your mother, she almost asked, then she remembered that he’d been an orphan for years, and that she wasn’t sure whom he might consider family, or whom to inquire after: he was pretty much on his own, only now he had followers like the vulpine Hess, and forty others somewhere within the confines of the fortress...Stefanie sat back, affecting ease, and looked around. On the opposite wall, a pair of lithographs caught her eye: sentimental scenes, solid kitsch, one depicting the lamplit interior of a peasant dwelling wherein dwelt ruddy-cheeked Teutons, the other a pastoral landscape complete with dreamy clouds, cloud-reflecting brook, grazing (and no doubt lowing) kine. On the corner of the wall near the door hung a dried wreath looped in sashes, one of which was inscribed “In Eternal Thanks: Kampfbund Bayern.” Diagonally across from the alcove, on the right, was a neatly made camp bed. Next to the bed was a bedside table atop which were magazines and a book that Stefanie, peering, identified as a biography of Henry Ford. A dresser faced a washbasin at the far end of the room. Judging by the location of various doors, the cell even boasted its own bathroom and built-in wardrobe.
Hitler gazed thoughtfully out the window, chin on hand, as if posing for a portrait, but any dignity in his pose was negated by the naked knees and sandal-shod feet (white-stockinged, greyish in the instep); a slight ridge of hair ran up the side of his thigh, and a blue vein stood out against the pallor of his skin. He seemed stiff, uncomfortable, walled in by artifice. Stefanie momentarily had the feeling she was taking part in some kind of grim amateur theatrical.
“Should I then call you by another name?” she inquired. He turned slowly and considered her with a gaze in which all amicability was held at bay.
“Well, my title in the party is leader,” he said. “So that is what they call me: Führer.”
“Like a travel guidebook,” said Stefanie, perversely determined to jar the old Adolf out of the stern carapace of the new one, who was merely the old one with his defenses permanently up, and his innate prickliness elevated to arrogance. “A human Baedeker, ja?”
Mixed emotions invaded his features, and he wrestled briefly with his dignity, but in the end he smiled, uncrossed his legs, and clapped his hands: a small victory. She had broken the ice.
“Ja, ja, just like a travel guidebook, ha-ha, but instead of Herr Reiseführer Baedeker, I am hoping someday to be Herr Reichsführer Hitler!”
“That’s quite an ambition! But let us be frank, Adolf, here you are in prison, even if it is a quite comfortable one—this cell, by the way, is probably larger than my apartment in Paris...”
“Paris!” he exclaimed, diving for the tangent. “Of course. That’s where you live now, nicht wahr? Now you must tell me. Are the French entirely corrupt and degenerate? Do they all hate the Germans? How many Jews do you know?”
“Well, you must understand that I have a limited circle of acquaintances, but my husband is a composer, and he of course...” But it was fatal to circumlocute. Brief as Hitler’s attention span had been in days gone by, it was even briefer now, and during any momentary pause he yielded to the balm of angry perorations on whatever subject hovered vaguely at hand, guided by nothing resembling logic or reason, indeed seething with contradictions and paradox, and driven primarily by his own formidable force of character, the concentrated essence of his awkward charm.
“The French, I suppose you want to know what I think, well, they occupy our territory, they force us to our knees with their reparations, they humiliate us at every turn, so I only feel what any patriotic German feels. Of course, all you need do is examine for a moment the form of government they have in France. Riddled with Freemasonry, Jewry and Marxism, bound hand and foot by the Wall Street plutocrats, soft and syphilitic, incapable of firmness or decisiveness at home or abroad...”
Was there, then, no lingering scrap of romance, no regret for days gone by, no personal word for her alone? No fond memory of a day in Linz half an era ago, a morning in Vienna...? Was she merely a sounding board, an infinitely replaceable effigy who might as well be one of the guards, or Rudolf Hess, or one of the vacant smiling peasant-faces on the wall? While talking, Hitler blinked several times in rapid succession, then sustained an unblinking stare for as long as possible, while emphasizing his points with his right index finger alternately prodding his left palm and pointing heavenward; smiles automatically chased frowns, and the carefully-combed forelock kept detaching itself and falling across his forehead. This necessitated a nervous gesture of the right hand, eternally to replace the errant lock which would then promptly detach itself and slide downward again...
And yet! He smelled of lavender water, or cologne, or something sweetly astringent, lathered on with a heavy hand, and on a man that was on a woman’s behalf, and on whose behalf could it be but hers (Stefanie thought, with a faint feeling of triumph)? So, her existence had some small significance to him, after all! The so-called Führer of his own bizarre little fringe! And yet in his eyes she saw nothing but his own eccentricity, his own longing, his own zeal (or was she being too “feminine” about all this? too sentimental?)...with a shudder, she remembered her vision of his death, him sprawled on a rocky landscape, and involuntarily she looked down at the meadows outside; but there were no rocks there.
He paused. Stefanie launched a bold question.
“So you are not married, then? Obviously?”
He looked astonished.
“Married? Good heavens, no.”
“Yet you are very romantic, Adolf. Deep down.”
“Romantic? I hardly know what that means. Hardly, if you mean little precious glittery bijoux like the Russian ballet or clever-clever Jewish ideas or some sugary Straussian scenes from the Vienna Woods or smooching in a horse-drawn sleigh...”
“I mean individualism and idealism combined with love of high drama. Goethe and Lotte. Heloise and Abelard. Tristan and Isolde. Do you remember when we met at the opera, in Vienna?” And, she failed to add, when we subsequently met at that dosshouse you were living in?
“Ah, ja. The opera. That was where I met your friend Helmuth Meinl.”
Stefanie was astonished.
“Himmel Donner Wetter, Adolf, how do you remember his name? I had almost forgotten the incident, myself. I’m amazed that you can recall the name of a stranger you met for five minutes what, ten, twelve years ago!”
“I rarely forget a name. Especially a Jewish one.” He laughed flatly. “And it’s hard to avoid Jewish names in Vienna, isn’t it? Meinl, Cohen, Steinberg, Rosenblatt, Kahane...”
“Well, of course.” The haze passed across her eyes. “In so large a city, you will inevitably encounter people of all origins...as in Paris...” Kahane was her uncle Ernst’s birth name: was Hitler’s mention of it mere coincidence? or was he asserting himself in a newly bizarre and malicious way? and did it matter, with this foul mist clouding her eyesight...?
“Ah, Paris, of course,” boomed Hitler’s voice, hollowly, as from the far end of a tube. “A magnificent cultural capital, I don’t doubt. The Opera, the Conservatoire, and so on, but it’s still one of the world capitals from which our national humiliation was stage-managed and is still being stage-managed, behind the flimsy facade of the Dawes Plan,” und so weiter, oh God, thought Stefanie, looking out the window, firmly trying to hold on to the external world-image of mountains, lake, river, the domino-town scattered below; “...you must be acquainted with quite a few of them,” he was saying, but now the sun, as at Fatima, seemed momentarily to be revolving in the sky as a second sun gradually spun off into the middle distance, somewhere above the Floggersee, a small but piercingly bright light like the Morning Star spreading across the palette of the sky and actually reflected in the lake (did others see this, too?), revealing within itself a shimmering figure haloed in gold, quite the classic Mary vision, almost exactly like those Stefanie had had in the forest at Auerstadt, only bigger, brighter, and speaking in a voice Stefanie had never heard before...”...most German banks are run by Jews, that is a well-known fact, and I will not even mention Wall Street, which should be renamed Via Dolorosa, ah ha-ha, ach it’s a pity what they’ve done to America, but America has sold its soul to them, and I consider it my duty to see that the same does not happen to Germany...” no, not that voice...”I am here to direct you away from evil, my child, for where you go, others will follow...” THAT voice...
“Look!” cried Stefanie. It was like trying to force herself to wake up during a nightmare. Adolf paused, grasped his knobbly knees, followed her pointing finger.
“Can you see it?” she shouted.
“I direct you away, my child, for it is only with the greatest faith” (broad vowels: the vision was speaking Stefanie’s native Salzburg dialect, just as she had before, and as she had spoken to Bernadette in the patois of the Pyrenees) “that I who have appeared to you before do so again in place of the foulness from below: Turn to me and repent!”
“I have, for goodness’ sake,” cried Stefanie. “What more must I do?” she gasped. “Build a shrine in your honor?”
“A shrine? My dear Fraulein von Rothenberg, are you quite all right? Dear God, what an annoyance.” Hitler flapped his hands confusedly. “Do you want a glass of water? Hess!”
“Adolf, do you see it?”
“I see nothing, dear lady. Well, I see you, the mountains, the river...”
Suddenly, it had passed, and there was no longer a second sun reflected in the quiet Floggersee. Stefanie panted. Her head ached.
“I have visions,” she said, quietly, as to a confessor. “Like the medieval mystics. I see things.”
As she had once intuitively predicted, this intrigued Adolf almost to the exclusion of his own preoccupations. He at once began to interrogate her, and inquired whether her visions—the actual subject of which appeared not to interest him—had ever manifested themselves in front of a crowd, say in a stadium, or cathedral, or public square? Then, without waiting for an answer, he went on, “You know, this is very interesting, ja, highly remarkable in fact. You know that I, too, have had visions. In 1918, when I was lying in a hospital bed at Pasewalk in Pomerania, I had a vision of the future so intense that I felt as if someone had been pressing down on my head, here—” with forefinger and thumb, he made a delicate pincer around his temples—”and believe me, the sight was real, as utterly real as, well, as your vision, just now. I saw the mountaintop, the figure of Germania, the sacrifice of the Jews. Without that vision, I doubt if I should ever have known the way forward. And it makes me think, it reminds me of the events in that Spanish or Portuguese town in which a crowd of, ach, I don’t remember, eighty thousand or so were entirely convinced that they had seen miraculous visions in the sky, wasn’t it in 1917? Ja, Portugal, wasn’t it? A town called Fatima. I remember because I was on home leave at the time and read about it in the newspapers: what a propaganda coup for the Church, eh? Incredible, how the human masses are susceptible to delusion! No, no,” he said, hastily (he was on his feet now, pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind his back), “of course I am not suggesting that you yourself have been deluded, Fraulein Stefanie,” reverting involuntarily to the nomenclature of former times, “unlike the mountebanks who proliferate in Germany these days, the peasant girl Therese, the faith healer von Studenheim...ja, ja, undoubtedly some people have the ability to see what others cannot, that I can accept.” He paused and leaned forward, smiling the cautious smile of one too self-conscious to smile spontaneously. “I am one. Since that time at Pasewalk I have seen wondrous things in the sky and the clouds as well. But these visions are not like your visions. I see the future of this country. I see the sunlit meadows of our future. I see Germany reborn. Percival. The Grail. You see, well, you see...”
“I see the Virgin Mary,” said Stefanie, clear and composed. “And I thank God for it, for I also have seen her opposite. Twice, actually, both in your company.”
“Her opposite?”
“Yes. The devil.”
“The devil! And in my company?”
“Yes, long ago. In Linz. And the second time, in Vienna. While you were painting my portrait.”
This went down well with the former Catholic altar boy. He goggled, and spluttered a nervous laugh.
“Well, I have never been very good at portraits!”
No, no, he understood! Of course, as he said, he was having his own visions—although it would be blasphemous for you or me to use the name. Let us remember, though, that in 1924 his political career was, to all appearances, finished before it had begun; that he was famous, but only as a provincial laughingstock; that his main support came from half-witted goons like Hess; and that he was in a political backwater of his own making. Let us also remember (well, history will not let us forget it) that he had a native perspicacity amounting to genius; a downright uncanny ability, a paranoiac’s ability to probe the weaknesses of others; and a rock-solid (and rough-hewn by life’s sharp chisel) belief in himself über alles. He was, consequently, the most highly evolved of the genus homo politicus, stripped as he was of all morality, impelled solely by ambition, keenly aware of, but unsympathetic to, human frailty; and this political paragon found himself wondering if Stefanie von Rothenberg might not be an asset to his cause. In Stefanie, until now, he had always sensed strength, which jarred with his Waldviertel peasant’s view of women as inferior, yielding creatures, beasts of childbirth and burden. Indeed, this perception of Stefanie as iron-willed and self-sufficient had always blocked any open expression of his desire for her (expressed, as was typical of his kind, in the dark, alone and ashamed), but then came her sudden confession, and it revealed two weaknesses to him: hers, as a self-styled mystic; and his party’s, as a secular alternative to Christianity in a still-Christian nation. Would it not, he wondered, be a brilliant idea to synthesize? A spectacular move to produce a true believer in both the old religion and the new? On the one hand a genuine mystic, a holy fool, a link to the balladeers of Nuremberg, the Minnesingers, Wolfram von Eschenbach and the mystics of the Middle Ages; on the other a convert to the new church of National Socialism, a statuesque Aryan bearing a bold aristocratic name, with plenty of contacts in the upper classes of Austria and France? And, parenthetically, a contrast to the charlatans plaguing the Fatherland these days: a parallel to himself as antidote to quackery?
Serendipitously—or perhaps not—and unknown to Hitler, Stefanie wanted to save his soul: she found herself again at that most dangerous stage of womanly infatuation, when explanations proliferate and irrationality is rationalized. Truth to tell, there was a genuine religious impulse at the bottom of her feelings; if she interpreted the Virgin’s words at all, it was as an exhortation to convert, to proselytize, to intervene on the brink of atheism, to save a soul, but not, at that stage, her own...
It was also true that Stefanie was fascinated by the man Hitler, and she was egotist enough to believe that she could guide him where others could not. So a collaboration was born, based on mostly but not entirely false premises—it must be obvious to the reader by now, after all, that Hitler was the dark thread that ran through Stefanie’s life, tracing a course parallel to that other, godly, golden thread of Heaven, and that although Stefanie was a woman of some sense and great intelligence, she was in danger of finding herself in thrall not only to the man but also, and perhaps mostly, to his debased yet evocative romanticism, which in her mind complemented rather than opposed her love of God and her visions. When Hitler spoke, Stefanie (and this was to be the experience of an entire generation of Germans) overlooked his meanderings, threats and contradictory half-truths, paradoxically admiring him while ignoring his words, just as in Wagner’s operas she paid no attention to the leaden intricacies of plotting and dialogue but concentrated, she thought, on the glorious art of the whole. Through Hitler—his name, his person—she glimpsed a future that glamorized the past: the Postlingberg out the window of the Monchskeller; the Archduke, and the Danube, and the pealing bells of Linz; she relived that past, which was a place of longing, for it is not only to our generation that the world before the Great War seemed like another era. To its survivors, too, it shone in the receding distance like a dying bonfire. But on the future’s horizon flashed turrets of steel. National Socialism was in its youth, it was dynamic and futuristic yet romantic and history-laden; certainly no Wagner-lover could be indifferent to its appeal. Its clarion call was the call of Frederick Barbarossa at Kyffhäuser, the summons to the Teutonic Knights from atop Schloss Nürnberg, the whispering immanence in the pine forests of the Bohmer Wald. It was 1924, and Germany (and their own Austria, too) had suffered one terrible blow after another. Had she not the right to hope?
She bade Hitler farewell formally, with a solemnity that matched his own.
“I hope to see you again soon,” he said, searching her face with his penetrating gaze.
* * * * *
“Of course, you’re not Jewish,” said Samuel on the drive back to Munich. “If you were, it would help you understand the fellow’s craziness and the danger of these rightist parties. A nation isn’t like a kitchen you can scrub clean, and that’s what they all talk about, ‘cleaning up,’ the simpletons. In France we have the Croix de Feu; Italy has Mussolini, England Mosley and Churchill; in Germany, they have your chum Hitler. Sacrebleu, Stefanie, you should be ashamed of yourself. Think at least of Ignace.”
“Samuel,” said Stefanie. “I am not a fool. I know what it’s about. I think he can help the nation and I want to help him, God willing, before it’s too late.”
“But why, Stefanie? And how?”
“Because I now realize that he understands something about the Germans. In a way, he too is a mystic.”
“Bah! Quelle foutaise.”
“You may say so. But you haven’t known him for twenty years, as I have.”
“Well, well. And how are you proposing to bring about this transformation?”
“I will speak. I will travel. And I will try to have him bear witness to the glory of God at my side.”
"God? Oh, God. Bonne chance, ma vieille."
As they retraced their drive back to Munich (the same old man in the same run-down village came to life again to spit at them and shake his fist and exclaim Hinaus mit den Welschen plunder, chuck out the Froggie garbage), Samuel was for once neither avuncular nor flirtatious. Stefanie’s announcement, upon leaving Schloss Landsberg, that she was intending to do “a little work” for Hitler and the National Socialists, had taken him unawares. It seemed a contradiction of all he knew about her, but he reminded himself how many times he had discovered how little he knew about women. Then, in a second, she caught him off guard by taking his side. She agreed, she said, that the National Socialists appealed mainly to the slope-browed, ignorant, provincial bigot, yes; but this was precisely her reason for wanting to influence their leader, who was, she remained convinced, not fated to be a bad man at heart.
“He is an artist, Samuel. Remember, I know him. If he’s changed, it’s because of politics and the opportunity for power. It’s just amazing what politics will do to you, isn’t it,” she said (as if, thought Samuel, she had made a study of the subject). “Look at Lenin.”
Yes, said Samuel to himself, and Lenin too no doubt had been a thoroughgoing bastard before he took over, but an obscure one, like so many; and like him and so many others, Hitler had also been an embittered nonentity, but he was now prowling the backstage of actual power...
“And what better time to influence him than now? Anyway, realistically, I don’t think he’ll get any further than the local level, the Bavarian legislature perhaps. After all, the economy’s improving, isn’t it? And the world’s at peace!”
Brave words, in 1924.
* * * * *
One day in November 1923 Arthur, holding a well-filleted copy of Le Gros Parisien, came onto the balcony, where, in weather that was untypically clement for the time of year, Stefanie was breast-feeding Ignace. She looked up, smiling expectantly, as at an old and cherished but predictable friend.
“Your chum Rudolf Hitler,” said Arthur. “That’s the fellow, isn’t it? Or is it Adolf? The one who sent you that puppydog postcard? Well, he’s international news now.”
“Oh no.” She detached from her breast Ignace, whose face immediately collapsed in on itself, as if inhaled. “Did he assassinate someone?”
“Assassinate? No, no. No one. But I’m not sure it’s any better, what he’s done. See for yourself.”
Ignace emitted three moist burps, then a full-throated wail.
“All right, I’ll read it to you. Silence, you there!” And over the infant’s gurgling Arthur read to Stefanie the incomplete first reports (“Melodrama in Munich!”) of what history would call the Beer Hall Putsch, starring Stefanie’s old comrade and suitor, now, according to the newspaper, a wounded fugitive and a traitor to the German nation.
“There he was, in the center of Munich, marching shoulder to shoulder with General von Ludendorff and a certain Goering, ex-commander of the Richthofen squadron,” said Arthur. “After declaring himself the head of the new government and holding three ministers hostage in a beer hall, he took to the streets and caused a riot. Your pal is no longer a nobody, that’s clear, but he’s pushed his luck a little too far for the Germans, if you ask me. They don’t generally go in for this kind of Latin American caper.”
“How fortunate he wasn’t shot,” said Stefanie; but suddenly, as she spoke, the vision-haze passed before her eyes and she saw Adolf sprawled dead, blue eyes staring blankly in his pale bony face, lank forelock draped across his forehead...he was dressed, it seemed, in a gray-and-black uniform, and beyond him was a vast rocky landscape stretching away to the edges of her vision, and the rocks were dappled with blood.
Ignace screamed. Stefanie shook her head clear. Arthur was still reading.
“Shot, you say?”
“Actually, yes. But they don’t know where or by whom. He was seen to fall, and when the police started arresting people he was nowhere to be found. ‘Police are combing the city,’ it says. Sixteen of these so-called National Socialists and three Munich cops dead. My God, Steffi, so your petit ami Adolf tried to take over the government of Germany! Give him top marks for effort, eh? But he’s had it now, you mark my words.”
Arthur went on to read aloud about other world events, notably the opening of King Tutankhamen’s tomb and the prophecies that surrounded that event—good material, he said, for an opera; and, having mentioned opera, he fell silent and returned in body and spirit to the nurturing of his own. Stefanie, for her part, saw operatic potential, if only for opéra bouffe, in Adolf’s escapade, which, she was sure, he had planned as a Wagnerian conquest of the summits. Was he, then, an Alberich or a Wotan? She recalled his last plaintive letter, in which he had sworn to apprehend the “November criminals.” She had, of course, heard from her relatives, as well as from her students at the Académie Werfel, about Germany’s postwar woes, which were legion. For one thing, the French Army, as if determined to repay the hated Germans by earning the reciprocal hatred of every German, had occupied the Ruhr, and Paris was insisting on the murderous reparations schedule decided at Versailles, a demand that fueled throughout Germany the worst inflation in history and ushered in the brief, horrible era of the four-billion-mark kilo of potatoes and wheelbarrows full of money that wouldn’t buy a jam Berliner. Inflation wiped out thousands of families’ savings. Even Fritzl, in Munich, with his wife’s land holdings in the Allgäu, was hard up, according to a letter Stefanie had received, by coincidence, a couple of days earlier—the first letter, in fact, she had ever received from her indolent cousin, written at Aunt Liesl’s urging. She opened it and reread it, skipping over the perfunctory congratulations on the event of Ignace’s birth, etc., etc.:
“Ja, we’re on our uppers, and this damn arm doesn’t make things easier, of course, and the twins (Willi and Kurt, you will meet them soon, a real-life Max und Moritz, as Lotte calls them!) are no longer attending Dr. Novotny’s School. No, dear cuz, sad to say we are reduced to sending our kids to the Gymnasium, and you can imagine what kind of shape the schools are in these days! Their schedules are, to say the least, irregular. I think the boys went to school yesterday, but that was the first time in about a week, since the last food riots on the Marienplatz at which, by the way, a good friend of ours, Herr Blumberg, was seriously injured and taken to hospital—actually, we’re worried, dear Steffi. Thank God Lotte never sold her land in the Allgäu, which she was talking about doing just before the great inflation hit us, if you can believe it! Even so, it seems that everything’s falling apart, and nobody knows what’s going to happen next, it’s crazy and very upsetting for Germans, who love order and peace so much. Everyone’s looking for a strong man to take charge and make things better, and there are lots of people who think your friend Hitler is the one, but I’m not so sure, I’ve heard him speak and there’s something unnatural about him, please forgive me for saying so Steffi, I know how close you were to him....”
Not as close as Fritzl obviously believed, but, she thought, in an odd way (given the little she knew about him, really), as close as anyone had ever managed to get; and yet what was it, really, her relationship with Adolf Hitler? Sexually awakened as she had since become, she recognized it for an unconsummated male-female flirtation on one level, but go any deeper and strange feelings awoke, madness lurked (she remembered the satanic visions, trembling)...Driven, then, by a woman’s need for correctness and clarity, she accepted Fritzl’s invitation to come and stay with him and his family and went, fully intending also to visit Hitler in the fortress to which a court (as she had read in the foreign edition of the Süddeutscher Zeitung) had sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment.
Accordingly, with little Ignace in tow, in May, 1924, Stefanie went to Munich. Arthur was deeply enmeshed in the final rehearsals of The Mystic, with the assistance of the great Youzbine and a handful of budding acolytes, a good number of them female. Uncle Samuel, an ardent motorist, offered to drive Stefanie in a recently-purchased Delahaye touring car; but the prospect was too much of an adventure for her.
“I will meet you there, then, dear Stefanie.”
“Suit yourself, mon oncle.”
Stefanie and Ignace took the train from the Gare de l’Est, and as they passed through the ruined heartland of the Great War, she gazed long and hard at the mournful hills of Lorraine, source of all the poison of France’s wars; and when the train crossed into battered Germany at dusk Heine’s sad lines came to mind.
“Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht,
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht,
Ich kann nicht mehr die Augen schließen,
Und meine heißen Tränen fließen.”
And all through the journey Ignace wailed.
In Munich they stayed with Fritzl, now a heavyset one-armed beer drinker, his placid wife Lotte, and Willi and Kurt, their two sullen twin boys, in a still-respectable three-room apartment on the Leopoldstrasse. Once Stefanie and Ignace had settled in, she endured many an hour of Germanic griping, not that there wasn’t enough to gripe about in Germany in the spring of 1924, except that inflation was slightly better—down to the hundred-thousand level for daily purchases—and Munich’s mood was, in consequence, improving, overall; but the griping continued, for there was unease and uncertainty in the air, and stability was a thing of the past. Still, the former Wittelsbach capital had an immortality all its own, whatever the crisis. The northern face of Stefanie’s very own Salzkammergut Alps glistened on the far horizon; the fountains played at Nymphenburg; the birds chirped in the Englischer Garten; trolleycars clanged merrily through the Marienplatz; students roistered in the bierstuben of Schwabing; and the grotesque figures of the Rathaus clock still marked the hour, as they had for centuries, with their jerky clockwork gait. But in conversations at Fritzl’s home (and Fritzl himself, beer-flushed, presided over table talk with the bluff dominance of a true German burger) the mood was sour, and dire predictions were made, and the name Hitler came up once or twice, casually, as if in reference to a total stranger, before Fritzl and Lotte remembered, and acknowledged, Stefanie’s friendship with the man. This was the first real sign of Adolf’s growing fame, and it was somehow even more impressive over Fritzl’s dining table than in the newspapers; and when Stefanie thought about it she was still amazed that her dour, melancholy, artist friend from Linz and the Heim fur Männer, with his passionate, semi-articulate and deeply unoriginal view of the world, should have become a household name by instigating a silly political farce in the streets of a foreign city.
“What a crazy life,” she thought. Soon after arriving, she had applied to the Interior Ministry for permission to visit Adolf in the fortress-prison of Landsberg am Lech, a small farming town southwest of Munich. After due consultation with the prisoner, who expressed his surprise and consent, the authorities granted permission for a visit ten days from then, provided she came alone and stayed no longer than an hour between the hours of ten a.m. and one p.m.
“This person is a political detainee and as such is forbidden to send or receive missives or messages of any type,” cautioned the letter. “Violators will be dealt with in the strongest terms.”
“Rubbish,” was Fritzl’s comment. “Strongest terms my arse. The place is like a holiday resort. There are forty National Socialists staying there, all in near-palatial accommodations, as you’ll see.”
On the tenth day of her stay Stefanie answered the door to find Uncle Samuel, dressed in a motorist’s goggles and overcoat, standing on the step. He gave a sweeping bow.
“Greetings, my dear niece,” he said. “I have just arrived from Paris. My car and I are at your disposal.”
He was lodging at a Gasthaus nearby, and over the next few days he came to call whenever possible. Fritzl found in him a true arbiter of taste and style, and the two sat for hours in the parlor, discussing motor cars, seaside resorts, cigars, beer, France, Germany—or rather, Samuel lectured and Fritzl listened eagerly, nodding. Entrusting Ignace to Lotte (who, like many mothers of sullen older children, missed the early innocence of baby-care), Stefanie explored the Bavarian capital, rejoicing in a temporary sense of reprieve from the hauntings of ambition, mysticism, family and politics. She visited the Englischer Garten on the turbulent Isar and admired the quaintly undraped citizens taking the sun. She visited the Pinakothek to see the Dürers: They were spare, haunted, and Teutonic, and they did not disappoint. She stopped in at the Bavarian national museum, and the Asam church. It was good to be among German-speakers again. She became aware of a depth of fellow-feeling that surprised her; on the other hand, Munich was only one hundred and forty kilometers from Salzburg, and the dialect, the architecture, and the religion were the same, the spirit was Catholic and southern. She felt at home, and more than once, as she strolled hither and yon, she had to shake off the illusion that she was in Salzburg again, that her pappi’s house was just at the end of that street, on the corner of that square... she also saw the name Hitler, in florid Fraktur script, on posters, in headlines, and most dramatically on a pamphlet thrust into her hands by a hollow-eyed youth on the Odeonplatz who whispered hoarsely, as she recoiled, “Take it, lady. Germany Jew-free is Germany free!”
On the appointed day, after requesting a ride from Samuel, Stefanie went to visit Adolf in Landsberg Prison.
“Do you want me to give him a message?” she asked Lotte and Fritzl, half-jokingly.
“Ja. Tell him the anti-Semitism, the anti-foreign garbage, the equating of Jews with Bolsheviks,” said Fritzl, “it’s all stupid nonsense and it won’t wash.”
“Fritz, you can’t be serious,” said Lotte. “This is Bavaria. Of course it will wash.”
Ignace bawled when his mother left, but was soon placated by helpings of a nut-and-fruit mush prepared from a venerable southern Allgäu recipe.
The Delahaye was oiled and willing, and stood throbbing quietly in the wan autumn sun. Samuel put up the roof and away they went, out the Landsbergerstrasse past the rapid erosion of city into suburbs and suburbs into Bavarian pastureland. The bells in onion-domed churchtowers dinged and cowbells in the fields donged in reply. Horse-drawn carts plodded on their timeless ways. In villages with fachtwerk farmhouses and cowshit on the roads, small children stood and stared as they passed through. One old man in a coat and tie spat and shook his fist, seeing the French registration.
“Mon Dieu! Ils nous détestent,” said Uncle Samuel. “It’s a bad situation here, dear Stefanie. And your friend Herr Hitler will undoubtedly have a hand in making it worse.”
“Or better.”
“No, no. Worse. I’ve read the man’s speeches, my dear. He is of puny intellect and nonexistent morality, being entirely selfish; but he has drive, ambition and will, and he may yet succeed, although admittedly his present circumstances would seem to argue the contrary.”
“Yes, he’s in prison for five years. That’s long enough for people to forget about him.”
“Five years! If he serves more than a year, you can paint me yellow and call me Fu Manchu. Of course, your friend Hitler is merely one among many, and not only on the right. There are those on the left who are just as bad, but the left lacks the crucial ingredient to appeal to a German: nationalism. Oh yes, if you want to appeal to a German, you must do so through his confused sense of inferiority-superiority by telling him how great he is just to be a German. This country is an adolescent among nations, and these days, just like an adolescent, it’s sulking after its punishment. Now would be a good time for the rest of us to turn away and leave it alone; but no, on the contrary, we meddle all the more and make matters much, much worse. Mon Dieu. What is the answer, my dear Stefanie?”
(In the soaring aching sky, above the goiter-shaped church towers, Stefanie glimpsed her answer to everything—or was it merely the question?)
Shortly before ten, the crenellated profile of Landsberg Castle came into view, casting its shadow over the swift-flowing Lech below. The authorities at the Castle were disinclined at first to admit the urbane Frenchman and his coldly poised companion.
“Herr Hitler is at the other end of the prison,” said the sallow unteroffizier at the main gate. “He has very specific visiting hours. He is political, you know.”
“We know,” said Stefanie. “But we also know that those specific visiting hours are now.”
“The gentleman must stay in the guard office. The pass is for the lady only.”
“With pleasure,” said Uncle Samuel. He whipped a deck of cards out of his coat pocket. “Spielen sie, Herr Kommandant?” he inquired. “Für geld?” The guard’s eyes widened with interest, but he looked nervously around.
“All right, but if someone comes,” he said, “I blame you completely, ja?”
“A noble impulse,” said Samuel. “Truly, we are in Germany now.”
Stefanie signed her name and time of arrival in a registry and followed another, lesser guard through a vast echoing domed hallway encircled with catwalks up an iron staircase to the third floor of the prison. Around a couple of tight bends and a momentary pool of utter darkness was a heavy iron door in front of which a man was waiting, a saturnine individual with a single brow-width eyebrow above feral eyes. He introduced himself, with consummate awkwardness, half-bowing and forcing a nervous half-smile, as Rudolf Hess, presuming, he rambled on, to have the privilege of addressing Fraulein von Rothenburg...? But hidden ears were listening.
“Berg,” snapped a familiar, hoarse, querulous voice from inside the chamber. “Rothenberg. You may dismiss yourself now, Hess.”
And Adolf Hitler appeared, waving a dismissive hand. He inclined his head when he saw Stefanie. Stefanie suppressed a chuckle, for Adolf—heavier than before, and more weathered around the eyes, but instantly recognizable behind his mustache and forelock—sported the clichéd costume of a Bavarian or Tirolean peasant, knee-stockings and lederhosen, with floral patterns on the shoulder straps. She smiled, but he seemed deliberately to be withholding his welcome; instead, he set his jaw firmly and stared into Stefanie’s eyes like a policeman seeking to extract a confession.
“Fraulein von Rothenberg,” he said, executing a crisp bow. “I am honored. Welcome to Schloss Landsberg.”
“Hello, my dear Adolf,” she blurted. It was a palpable faux pas: Hess, shocked, paused in mid-exit. Hitler uttered one of his barks of laughter.
“Ja, look, Hess is shocked,” he said. “He’s probably never heard anyone call me by my first name. But surely my brother Alois does, eh, Hess? Anyhow, that’s all right, the lady and I are old friends. Come back in thirty minutes, Hess, do you hear me?” he said, raising his voice to the softly closing door; then, remembering his manners: “Please. Step into my Sitzecke.” He motioned to an armchair in a nook next to the window, from which there was a view, partially blocked by an incongruous potted rubber plant, of the winding Lech river between budding springtime fields and in the distance, against the serrated silhouette of the Alps, the gleaming lake-mirror of the Floggersee.
Stefanie sat down. With an exaggerated grimace, he sat down on a small wicker chair opposite.
“Shoulder injury,” he explained, patting his right shoulder. “My war wound from the Putsch.”
Awkwardness intruded. She looked out the window; he sat forward.
“Your parents are well?”
“Well, thank you.”
“And your esteemed uncle and aunt, the Baron and Baroness Ottoheinz, they are in good health, I trust?”
“Fair. Thank you.” And your mother, she almost asked, then she remembered that he’d been an orphan for years, and that she wasn’t sure whom he might consider family, or whom to inquire after: he was pretty much on his own, only now he had followers like the vulpine Hess, and forty others somewhere within the confines of the fortress...Stefanie sat back, affecting ease, and looked around. On the opposite wall, a pair of lithographs caught her eye: sentimental scenes, solid kitsch, one depicting the lamplit interior of a peasant dwelling wherein dwelt ruddy-cheeked Teutons, the other a pastoral landscape complete with dreamy clouds, cloud-reflecting brook, grazing (and no doubt lowing) kine. On the corner of the wall near the door hung a dried wreath looped in sashes, one of which was inscribed “In Eternal Thanks: Kampfbund Bayern.” Diagonally across from the alcove, on the right, was a neatly made camp bed. Next to the bed was a bedside table atop which were magazines and a book that Stefanie, peering, identified as a biography of Henry Ford. A dresser faced a washbasin at the far end of the room. Judging by the location of various doors, the cell even boasted its own bathroom and built-in wardrobe.
Hitler gazed thoughtfully out the window, chin on hand, as if posing for a portrait, but any dignity in his pose was negated by the naked knees and sandal-shod feet (white-stockinged, greyish in the instep); a slight ridge of hair ran up the side of his thigh, and a blue vein stood out against the pallor of his skin. He seemed stiff, uncomfortable, walled in by artifice. Stefanie momentarily had the feeling she was taking part in some kind of grim amateur theatrical.
“Should I then call you by another name?” she inquired. He turned slowly and considered her with a gaze in which all amicability was held at bay.
“Well, my title in the party is leader,” he said. “So that is what they call me: Führer.”
“Like a travel guidebook,” said Stefanie, perversely determined to jar the old Adolf out of the stern carapace of the new one, who was merely the old one with his defenses permanently up, and his innate prickliness elevated to arrogance. “A human Baedeker, ja?”
Mixed emotions invaded his features, and he wrestled briefly with his dignity, but in the end he smiled, uncrossed his legs, and clapped his hands: a small victory. She had broken the ice.
“Ja, ja, just like a travel guidebook, ha-ha, but instead of Herr Reiseführer Baedeker, I am hoping someday to be Herr Reichsführer Hitler!”
“That’s quite an ambition! But let us be frank, Adolf, here you are in prison, even if it is a quite comfortable one—this cell, by the way, is probably larger than my apartment in Paris...”
“Paris!” he exclaimed, diving for the tangent. “Of course. That’s where you live now, nicht wahr? Now you must tell me. Are the French entirely corrupt and degenerate? Do they all hate the Germans? How many Jews do you know?”
“Well, you must understand that I have a limited circle of acquaintances, but my husband is a composer, and he of course...” But it was fatal to circumlocute. Brief as Hitler’s attention span had been in days gone by, it was even briefer now, and during any momentary pause he yielded to the balm of angry perorations on whatever subject hovered vaguely at hand, guided by nothing resembling logic or reason, indeed seething with contradictions and paradox, and driven primarily by his own formidable force of character, the concentrated essence of his awkward charm.
“The French, I suppose you want to know what I think, well, they occupy our territory, they force us to our knees with their reparations, they humiliate us at every turn, so I only feel what any patriotic German feels. Of course, all you need do is examine for a moment the form of government they have in France. Riddled with Freemasonry, Jewry and Marxism, bound hand and foot by the Wall Street plutocrats, soft and syphilitic, incapable of firmness or decisiveness at home or abroad...”
Was there, then, no lingering scrap of romance, no regret for days gone by, no personal word for her alone? No fond memory of a day in Linz half an era ago, a morning in Vienna...? Was she merely a sounding board, an infinitely replaceable effigy who might as well be one of the guards, or Rudolf Hess, or one of the vacant smiling peasant-faces on the wall? While talking, Hitler blinked several times in rapid succession, then sustained an unblinking stare for as long as possible, while emphasizing his points with his right index finger alternately prodding his left palm and pointing heavenward; smiles automatically chased frowns, and the carefully-combed forelock kept detaching itself and falling across his forehead. This necessitated a nervous gesture of the right hand, eternally to replace the errant lock which would then promptly detach itself and slide downward again...
And yet! He smelled of lavender water, or cologne, or something sweetly astringent, lathered on with a heavy hand, and on a man that was on a woman’s behalf, and on whose behalf could it be but hers (Stefanie thought, with a faint feeling of triumph)? So, her existence had some small significance to him, after all! The so-called Führer of his own bizarre little fringe! And yet in his eyes she saw nothing but his own eccentricity, his own longing, his own zeal (or was she being too “feminine” about all this? too sentimental?)...with a shudder, she remembered her vision of his death, him sprawled on a rocky landscape, and involuntarily she looked down at the meadows outside; but there were no rocks there.
He paused. Stefanie launched a bold question.
“So you are not married, then? Obviously?”
He looked astonished.
“Married? Good heavens, no.”
“Yet you are very romantic, Adolf. Deep down.”
“Romantic? I hardly know what that means. Hardly, if you mean little precious glittery bijoux like the Russian ballet or clever-clever Jewish ideas or some sugary Straussian scenes from the Vienna Woods or smooching in a horse-drawn sleigh...”
“I mean individualism and idealism combined with love of high drama. Goethe and Lotte. Heloise and Abelard. Tristan and Isolde. Do you remember when we met at the opera, in Vienna?” And, she failed to add, when we subsequently met at that dosshouse you were living in?
“Ah, ja. The opera. That was where I met your friend Helmuth Meinl.”
Stefanie was astonished.
“Himmel Donner Wetter, Adolf, how do you remember his name? I had almost forgotten the incident, myself. I’m amazed that you can recall the name of a stranger you met for five minutes what, ten, twelve years ago!”
“I rarely forget a name. Especially a Jewish one.” He laughed flatly. “And it’s hard to avoid Jewish names in Vienna, isn’t it? Meinl, Cohen, Steinberg, Rosenblatt, Kahane...”
“Well, of course.” The haze passed across her eyes. “In so large a city, you will inevitably encounter people of all origins...as in Paris...” Kahane was her uncle Ernst’s birth name: was Hitler’s mention of it mere coincidence? or was he asserting himself in a newly bizarre and malicious way? and did it matter, with this foul mist clouding her eyesight...?
“Ah, Paris, of course,” boomed Hitler’s voice, hollowly, as from the far end of a tube. “A magnificent cultural capital, I don’t doubt. The Opera, the Conservatoire, and so on, but it’s still one of the world capitals from which our national humiliation was stage-managed and is still being stage-managed, behind the flimsy facade of the Dawes Plan,” und so weiter, oh God, thought Stefanie, looking out the window, firmly trying to hold on to the external world-image of mountains, lake, river, the domino-town scattered below; “...you must be acquainted with quite a few of them,” he was saying, but now the sun, as at Fatima, seemed momentarily to be revolving in the sky as a second sun gradually spun off into the middle distance, somewhere above the Floggersee, a small but piercingly bright light like the Morning Star spreading across the palette of the sky and actually reflected in the lake (did others see this, too?), revealing within itself a shimmering figure haloed in gold, quite the classic Mary vision, almost exactly like those Stefanie had had in the forest at Auerstadt, only bigger, brighter, and speaking in a voice Stefanie had never heard before...”...most German banks are run by Jews, that is a well-known fact, and I will not even mention Wall Street, which should be renamed Via Dolorosa, ah ha-ha, ach it’s a pity what they’ve done to America, but America has sold its soul to them, and I consider it my duty to see that the same does not happen to Germany...” no, not that voice...”I am here to direct you away from evil, my child, for where you go, others will follow...” THAT voice...
“Look!” cried Stefanie. It was like trying to force herself to wake up during a nightmare. Adolf paused, grasped his knobbly knees, followed her pointing finger.
“Can you see it?” she shouted.
“I direct you away, my child, for it is only with the greatest faith” (broad vowels: the vision was speaking Stefanie’s native Salzburg dialect, just as she had before, and as she had spoken to Bernadette in the patois of the Pyrenees) “that I who have appeared to you before do so again in place of the foulness from below: Turn to me and repent!”
“I have, for goodness’ sake,” cried Stefanie. “What more must I do?” she gasped. “Build a shrine in your honor?”
“A shrine? My dear Fraulein von Rothenberg, are you quite all right? Dear God, what an annoyance.” Hitler flapped his hands confusedly. “Do you want a glass of water? Hess!”
“Adolf, do you see it?”
“I see nothing, dear lady. Well, I see you, the mountains, the river...”
Suddenly, it had passed, and there was no longer a second sun reflected in the quiet Floggersee. Stefanie panted. Her head ached.
“I have visions,” she said, quietly, as to a confessor. “Like the medieval mystics. I see things.”
As she had once intuitively predicted, this intrigued Adolf almost to the exclusion of his own preoccupations. He at once began to interrogate her, and inquired whether her visions—the actual subject of which appeared not to interest him—had ever manifested themselves in front of a crowd, say in a stadium, or cathedral, or public square? Then, without waiting for an answer, he went on, “You know, this is very interesting, ja, highly remarkable in fact. You know that I, too, have had visions. In 1918, when I was lying in a hospital bed at Pasewalk in Pomerania, I had a vision of the future so intense that I felt as if someone had been pressing down on my head, here—” with forefinger and thumb, he made a delicate pincer around his temples—”and believe me, the sight was real, as utterly real as, well, as your vision, just now. I saw the mountaintop, the figure of Germania, the sacrifice of the Jews. Without that vision, I doubt if I should ever have known the way forward. And it makes me think, it reminds me of the events in that Spanish or Portuguese town in which a crowd of, ach, I don’t remember, eighty thousand or so were entirely convinced that they had seen miraculous visions in the sky, wasn’t it in 1917? Ja, Portugal, wasn’t it? A town called Fatima. I remember because I was on home leave at the time and read about it in the newspapers: what a propaganda coup for the Church, eh? Incredible, how the human masses are susceptible to delusion! No, no,” he said, hastily (he was on his feet now, pacing back and forth, hands clasped behind his back), “of course I am not suggesting that you yourself have been deluded, Fraulein Stefanie,” reverting involuntarily to the nomenclature of former times, “unlike the mountebanks who proliferate in Germany these days, the peasant girl Therese, the faith healer von Studenheim...ja, ja, undoubtedly some people have the ability to see what others cannot, that I can accept.” He paused and leaned forward, smiling the cautious smile of one too self-conscious to smile spontaneously. “I am one. Since that time at Pasewalk I have seen wondrous things in the sky and the clouds as well. But these visions are not like your visions. I see the future of this country. I see the sunlit meadows of our future. I see Germany reborn. Percival. The Grail. You see, well, you see...”
“I see the Virgin Mary,” said Stefanie, clear and composed. “And I thank God for it, for I also have seen her opposite. Twice, actually, both in your company.”
“Her opposite?”
“Yes. The devil.”
“The devil! And in my company?”
“Yes, long ago. In Linz. And the second time, in Vienna. While you were painting my portrait.”
This went down well with the former Catholic altar boy. He goggled, and spluttered a nervous laugh.
“Well, I have never been very good at portraits!”
No, no, he understood! Of course, as he said, he was having his own visions—although it would be blasphemous for you or me to use the name. Let us remember, though, that in 1924 his political career was, to all appearances, finished before it had begun; that he was famous, but only as a provincial laughingstock; that his main support came from half-witted goons like Hess; and that he was in a political backwater of his own making. Let us also remember (well, history will not let us forget it) that he had a native perspicacity amounting to genius; a downright uncanny ability, a paranoiac’s ability to probe the weaknesses of others; and a rock-solid (and rough-hewn by life’s sharp chisel) belief in himself über alles. He was, consequently, the most highly evolved of the genus homo politicus, stripped as he was of all morality, impelled solely by ambition, keenly aware of, but unsympathetic to, human frailty; and this political paragon found himself wondering if Stefanie von Rothenberg might not be an asset to his cause. In Stefanie, until now, he had always sensed strength, which jarred with his Waldviertel peasant’s view of women as inferior, yielding creatures, beasts of childbirth and burden. Indeed, this perception of Stefanie as iron-willed and self-sufficient had always blocked any open expression of his desire for her (expressed, as was typical of his kind, in the dark, alone and ashamed), but then came her sudden confession, and it revealed two weaknesses to him: hers, as a self-styled mystic; and his party’s, as a secular alternative to Christianity in a still-Christian nation. Would it not, he wondered, be a brilliant idea to synthesize? A spectacular move to produce a true believer in both the old religion and the new? On the one hand a genuine mystic, a holy fool, a link to the balladeers of Nuremberg, the Minnesingers, Wolfram von Eschenbach and the mystics of the Middle Ages; on the other a convert to the new church of National Socialism, a statuesque Aryan bearing a bold aristocratic name, with plenty of contacts in the upper classes of Austria and France? And, parenthetically, a contrast to the charlatans plaguing the Fatherland these days: a parallel to himself as antidote to quackery?
Serendipitously—or perhaps not—and unknown to Hitler, Stefanie wanted to save his soul: she found herself again at that most dangerous stage of womanly infatuation, when explanations proliferate and irrationality is rationalized. Truth to tell, there was a genuine religious impulse at the bottom of her feelings; if she interpreted the Virgin’s words at all, it was as an exhortation to convert, to proselytize, to intervene on the brink of atheism, to save a soul, but not, at that stage, her own...
It was also true that Stefanie was fascinated by the man Hitler, and she was egotist enough to believe that she could guide him where others could not. So a collaboration was born, based on mostly but not entirely false premises—it must be obvious to the reader by now, after all, that Hitler was the dark thread that ran through Stefanie’s life, tracing a course parallel to that other, godly, golden thread of Heaven, and that although Stefanie was a woman of some sense and great intelligence, she was in danger of finding herself in thrall not only to the man but also, and perhaps mostly, to his debased yet evocative romanticism, which in her mind complemented rather than opposed her love of God and her visions. When Hitler spoke, Stefanie (and this was to be the experience of an entire generation of Germans) overlooked his meanderings, threats and contradictory half-truths, paradoxically admiring him while ignoring his words, just as in Wagner’s operas she paid no attention to the leaden intricacies of plotting and dialogue but concentrated, she thought, on the glorious art of the whole. Through Hitler—his name, his person—she glimpsed a future that glamorized the past: the Postlingberg out the window of the Monchskeller; the Archduke, and the Danube, and the pealing bells of Linz; she relived that past, which was a place of longing, for it is not only to our generation that the world before the Great War seemed like another era. To its survivors, too, it shone in the receding distance like a dying bonfire. But on the future’s horizon flashed turrets of steel. National Socialism was in its youth, it was dynamic and futuristic yet romantic and history-laden; certainly no Wagner-lover could be indifferent to its appeal. Its clarion call was the call of Frederick Barbarossa at Kyffhäuser, the summons to the Teutonic Knights from atop Schloss Nürnberg, the whispering immanence in the pine forests of the Bohmer Wald. It was 1924, and Germany (and their own Austria, too) had suffered one terrible blow after another. Had she not the right to hope?
She bade Hitler farewell formally, with a solemnity that matched his own.
“I hope to see you again soon,” he said, searching her face with his penetrating gaze.
* * * * *
“Of course, you’re not Jewish,” said Samuel on the drive back to Munich. “If you were, it would help you understand the fellow’s craziness and the danger of these rightist parties. A nation isn’t like a kitchen you can scrub clean, and that’s what they all talk about, ‘cleaning up,’ the simpletons. In France we have the Croix de Feu; Italy has Mussolini, England Mosley and Churchill; in Germany, they have your chum Hitler. Sacrebleu, Stefanie, you should be ashamed of yourself. Think at least of Ignace.”
“Samuel,” said Stefanie. “I am not a fool. I know what it’s about. I think he can help the nation and I want to help him, God willing, before it’s too late.”
“But why, Stefanie? And how?”
“Because I now realize that he understands something about the Germans. In a way, he too is a mystic.”
“Bah! Quelle foutaise.”
“You may say so. But you haven’t known him for twenty years, as I have.”
“Well, well. And how are you proposing to bring about this transformation?”
“I will speak. I will travel. And I will try to have him bear witness to the glory of God at my side.”
"God? Oh, God. Bonne chance, ma vieille."
As they retraced their drive back to Munich (the same old man in the same run-down village came to life again to spit at them and shake his fist and exclaim Hinaus mit den Welschen plunder, chuck out the Froggie garbage), Samuel was for once neither avuncular nor flirtatious. Stefanie’s announcement, upon leaving Schloss Landsberg, that she was intending to do “a little work” for Hitler and the National Socialists, had taken him unawares. It seemed a contradiction of all he knew about her, but he reminded himself how many times he had discovered how little he knew about women. Then, in a second, she caught him off guard by taking his side. She agreed, she said, that the National Socialists appealed mainly to the slope-browed, ignorant, provincial bigot, yes; but this was precisely her reason for wanting to influence their leader, who was, she remained convinced, not fated to be a bad man at heart.
“He is an artist, Samuel. Remember, I know him. If he’s changed, it’s because of politics and the opportunity for power. It’s just amazing what politics will do to you, isn’t it,” she said (as if, thought Samuel, she had made a study of the subject). “Look at Lenin.”
Yes, said Samuel to himself, and Lenin too no doubt had been a thoroughgoing bastard before he took over, but an obscure one, like so many; and like him and so many others, Hitler had also been an embittered nonentity, but he was now prowling the backstage of actual power...
“And what better time to influence him than now? Anyway, realistically, I don’t think he’ll get any further than the local level, the Bavarian legislature perhaps. After all, the economy’s improving, isn’t it? And the world’s at peace!”
Brave words, in 1924.
* * * * *