“You can put it into words very well,” said Herter. “I myself have only to see him on film or in a photo, if necessary just his back, and I remember. He can’t be explained with psychology; you need theology instead. It has an expression that may be applicable to him: mysterium tremendum ac fascinans: ‘the at once horrific and fascinating secret.’”
Falk looked up in surprise. “Yes, it was something like that.”
“Of course it isn’t an explanation—the secret remains a secret—but perhaps it says something about the nature of the secret. That is, that he was actually nobody. A hollow statue, as you say. And the fascination he exerted and exerts to this day, and the power given him by the German people, was not despite the fact of his being soulless, but because of that fact.” Herter sighed. “We must of course be careful that we don’t deify him, even if it is with a negative sign. But if that one God (as history seems to indicate) does not exist, Hitler’s deification perhaps touches the heart of the matter. In that case he is the deification of something that doesn’t exist.”
From one moment to the next, Herter’s thoughts stumbled over each other like a pack of wolves in pursuit of a prey they have lost sight of. He would have preferred to make a few quick notes, but he was frightened that this would intimidate Falk. He heard Julia say something, but it did not get through to him. All inspired thinking happens in the blink of an eye, a flash from a threatening sky; only its thunderous development takes time. Shortly, today, he must take the time to record what he suddenly knew and at the same time did not know.
Because if all that were true, it might have a paradoxical consequence. If Hitler were the adored and cursed personification of nothingness, in whom there was nothing to restrain him from anything at all, his true face could not be revealed in a literary mirror, as Herter had suggested yesterday to Constant Ernst, since there was no face. In that case he was more comparable with Count Dracula, a vampire feeding on human blood: one of the “undead,” with no reflection. Hence he was different not in degree but in essence from other despots, like Nero, Napoleon, or Stalin. They were demonic figures, but even demons are still something positive, whereas Hitler’s essence was its absence. In a paradoxical way, precisely the lack of a “true face” was his true nature. Did that imply that Herter himself would have succeeded only if he did not manage to write his revelatory phantasm? In that case Hitler would have escaped for the umpteenth time, but he wouldn’t get the chance this time.
Herter was alarmed at himself. Into what regions was he venturing? Wasn’t he overstepping the mark? Danger was threatening. He must not shrink back. He had the feeling it was now or never; whatever must be, must be. If anyone on earth was qualified, it was himself. “Perhaps that’s why I’m on earth,” he had said to Maria yesterday—as if he, too, were an envoy from the Total Other.
But it seemed advisable to play it safe and insert a narrator between himself and his explosive story, as an insulator—a young man of about thirty-three, for whom the Second World War was further away than the First was for himself and who did not shrink from deifying Hitler, even if in some way he should become the victim of that. That would be his literary son—and his obvious first name was Otto: the product of the chemical reaction between “Rudolf Herter” and “Rudolf Otto,” the theologian from whom the term mysterium tremendum ac fascinans derived. In any case he would not let himself be held back by anything else. It was precisely to that nihilistic divinity that Hitler must be nailed at the end of the twentieth century—after that Herter would not waste another word on him.
TEN
“You look pale,” said Julia. “Are you feeling well?”
Herter looked up. “Not a hundred percent, to tell the truth. That’s quite common at our age.”
“Our? You’re still a young man.”
He took her wrinkled hand and pressed a kiss on it in traditional Austrian style. “Right,” he said to Falk, “so he went in—and then?”
After three-quarters of an hour, there was a call to the kitchen, obviously from Miss Braun. Accompanied by Krause, he went upstairs, his heart pounding, dressed in his black trousers and white vest with the gold epaulets and the SS runes on its lapel against a black diamond-shaped background, in his white-gloved hands a tray of tea and biscuits. The Hitler that he found there, in his low-beamed study with a tiled stove taller than a man, was suddenly a completely different character. Drained, amorphous, in a gray double-breasted civilian suit, with socks down around his ankles, his hair still wet from the bath, he was flopped in a flower-patterned armchair, no more than the shadow of the demonic acrobat who had arrived a short while ago—and totally unlike the rabble-rousing demagogue that the world knew. He was prodding his teeth with a toothpick.
“Obviously he was a kind of Unholy Trinity,” said Herter.
Miss Braun was sitting on the sofa with her legs pulled up, under the portrait of Hitler’s mother, long since dead, whom he closely resembled: the same Medusa look, the same small mouth. But he was not so exhausted that he had not immediately seen that Falk was new. While Krause, the heels of his boots together, introduced him with a few brief remarks, Hitler fixed him with his slightly bulging, dark blue eyes—and that look, said Falk, he would never forget.
“I think,” said Herter, “that with that famous look he was deliberately forcing you into complete subjugation. You represented a potential danger for him; you were in a position where you could poison him. But with that look, which you would never forget, he paralyzed you like a snake does a rabbit.”
As he suggested this, a phrase occurred to him that Thomas Mann had once used to characterize Hitler’s look: his “basilisk stare.” The basilisk, a winged creature of fable, consisting of a cockerel’s head with the body of a serpent, incinerates everything it looks at, and even stones shatter at its stare. The only way in which it can be killed is to hold up a mirror to it, so that its all-destroying look is reflected back on itself, which constitutes a forced suicide. But even a basilisk is something positive, which can be reflected, while Hitler was pure negativity. Whoever looked in his eyes, experienced horror vacui.
“If only I’d done it,” said Falk.
“If only you’d done what?”
“Poisoned him. But when I had reason to, it was no longer possible.”
Herter nodded in silence. It was clear that Falk was now getting to what was really on his mind, but he did not want to harass him by asking about it. Falk was ridding himself of something that he and Julia had carried around with them for over half a century, and they must be given time. Herter forced himself not to show his impatience by looking at his watch, since however furtively one did so, it never went unnoticed. The solution was to look at someone else’s watch, but neither Falk nor Julia was wearing one. He estimated that it was close to twelve.
Whenever the Chief fled the Wilhelmstrasse in hectic Berlin and with his arrival turned his country residence into his headquarters, other party high-ups would descend on the Obersalzberg with their families. There was Martin Bormann, of course, who lived in a large chalet in the inner circle of buildings and never lost sight of his master: he had had it built in such a way that from his balcony he could check with a telescope who came and went from Hitler’s quarters. Marshal Göring had a house there, as did Albert Speer, Hitler’s personal architect.
“With Speer he had his youthful Viennese dream within reach,” Herter said, nodding.
“His youthful dream?”
“Of becoming an architect.”
“Architect . . .” repeated Julia sarcastically. “Demolition man more like it. Because of him the whole of Germany was reduced to ash and rubble, and not only Germany.”
Life on the mountain had something strangely dead about it, Falk continued, particularly when the Chief was there. Because he always stayed up late, like the true bohemian he had always remained at heart, he could not be woken before eleven. Afterward, in the war, that had cost the lives of thousands of his soldiers. If a report came
in at eight o’clock that there had been a Russian offensive on the eastern front and a quick decision had to be taken whether to withdraw or counterattack, no one dared wake him, not even Field Marshal Keitel. The Führer was asleep! Generals were at their wits’ end in Russia, but the Führer was asleep and must not be woken.
Yes, yes, yes, thought Herter. And what did he dream about? He would give a lot to know that.
“Did he ever tell you a dream, Mr. Falk?”
Falk laughed a short laugh.
“Did you think he ever let anyone get close? That man was shut up in himself . . . like . . . like . . . But once, in the war, in the winter of 1942, I think, he must have had a nightmare. I was woken by the sound of his screams. I grabbed my revolver and ran to his bedroom.”
“You had a revolver?”
Falk looked up at him. “There were lots of weapons on the Obersalzberg, Mr. Herter. He was alone; Miss Braun was staying with relatives in Munich for a few days. Two of his SS bodyguards were already at the door with submachine guns, but they did not dare enter, even though someone might be murdering him. They were transferred to the eastern front the next day. I tore the door open and saw him standing bewildered in the middle of the room in his nightshirt, pouring with sweat; he looked at me with blue lips, his hair disheveled, his face contorted with fear. I shall never forget what he said: ‘He . . . he . . . he . . . was here. . . .’”
He? Herter raised his eyebrows. He, of whom everyone was afraid—whom could he have been afraid of himself? Who was that “he”? His father? Wagner? The devil?
“But how could you have heard his screams? Didn’t you say that you lived in an apartment building on the grounds?”
Falk exchanged a glance with Julia. “Not by this time.”
Hitler’s ascetic bedroom had no door to the corridor, only to his study. At eleven o’clock Falk would lay the morning papers and some telegrams on a chair there and call, “Good morning, my Führer! Time to get up!” The Chief would then usually appear in a long white nightshirt and slippers, but one time he had Falk come in. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, Miss Braun in a blue silk nightie on the floor; she was holding his foot in her lap and cutting his nails. Falk was struck by the whiteness of that foot.
“He was as white as that all over his body,” added Julia. “Before the war I once saw him naked. It must have been in 1938—”
“No,” Falk interrupted her, “in 1937.”
She stared at him for a moment and obviously suddenly understood what he was driving at.
“Yes, of course. In 1937.”
The Chief, he said, almost always stayed up far into the night, sometimes even till six or seven in the morning, surrounded by his usual clique: Bormann, Speer, his personal physician, his secretaries, his photographer, his chauffeur, his masseur, his young female vegetarian cook, a couple of orderlies, and other such staff, never the elite of his party, his armed forces, or his state.
“In that, too, he remained the Viennese bohemian,” said Herter. “What are we supposed to make of the man?”
Julia herself was often allowed to join them. While Ullrich provided drinks and snacks, they would watch a film in the main reception room with huge tapestries, Arno Breker’s gigantic bust of Wagner, and the largest window in the world, of which Hitler was so proud. Quite often it was a film banned by Goebbels. They also played records, Wagner of course, but also operettas like Franz Lehár’s Merry Widow, after which the Chief would embark on one of his endless monologues, stretching from the distant past to the distant future, while his guests could scarcely keep their eyes open, partly because they had heard it all before. Afterward he would pace his study for hours, while in the summer he would often sit on the balcony of his study till sunrise, thinking in the silence of the mountains and the stars.
“Or so as not to have to sleep,” said Herter, “because then he might have to deal with him again. Anyway, it doesn’t bear thinking about, what he brooded on, on that balcony.”
“That’s true,” said Falk. “It’s just as well that after the war that haunted castle, or what was left of it after the American bombing, was razed to the ground.”
But Miss Braun, continued Julia, withdrew to her room at about one o’clock, where Julia brought her a mug of hot chocolate. That night she knocked, but because Blondi was barking in Hitler’s study to gain the attention of her orating master, she did not hear whether Miss Braun had said “Come in” as always. She opened the door and saw them standing in the middle of the room, in an intimate embrace, she with her nightie hanging open, a black one this time, he with nothing on. His fleshy white body had something dead about it—it had never seen the sun—only his cheeks and neck had some color, but that stopped abruptly, so that it was as if his head came from another body. Julia could still remember that the door to the bathroom was open and that steam and the sound of splashing water was coming out. She could not see what they were doing, but he was standing with his back to the door and was obviously in a state of arousal. “Patscherl . . .” she heard him groan.
“Patscherl?” repeated Herter.
“He had lots of those affectionate names for her,” said Julia. “Feferl, for example.”
“Tschapperl,” added Falk with a deadpan expression. “Schnacksi.”
Miss Braun looked at her over his shoulder and opened her eyes wide in alarm, whereupon Julia closed the door quickly and silently. Thank God he had not noticed anything.
“Things could have gone badly wrong,” said Falk. “If they had been standing ninety degrees from where they were, that could have cost us our lives within ten minutes.” He dabbed his eyes with a handkerchief, but that had nothing to do with emotion, only old age.
Now there was a knock at the door, and, without waiting for an answer, a small, bearded man in a brown duster coat appeared. After a quick look into the room, he asked, with a smile that Herter did not like at all, “A visitor?”
“As you can see,” said Falk without looking at him.
The man waited for a moment for a fuller explanation; when none was forthcoming, he took a rubbish bag from the kitchen cupboard and disappeared without a word.
A silence fell that Herter deliberately did not break. For most people alive today, Hitler had by now become just a figure from violent films or farces, but here Julia and Ullrich Falk were up to their necks in memories of that submerged time. They had been on the spot, for them it was all yesterday, and they could go on talking endlessly about him, if only to put off what they really wanted to say. When the silence began to become embarrassing, what he had hoped for happened. The two exchanged a look, after which Falk got up and checked to see that no one was listening at the door.
He sat down again and said, “One day in May 1938, shortly after the annexation of Austria, we learned there were to be guests; with Mrs. Mittlstrasser, the wife of the head of domestic services, we were laying the table for lunch. That always had to be done carefully, as the Chief sometimes knelt down on one knee to check with one eye that all the glasses were in line.”
“That was his architect’s eye,” observed Herter. “That’s how he looked at Speer’s models of Germania and at his troops on parade.”
“Suddenly Linge appeared in the dining room and told us that the Führer wished to speak to us.”
“Linge?” asked Herter.
“He was the successor of Krause.”
“We were terrified,” said Julia. “If he wanted anything from us, he always phoned himself; we were never officially summoned.”
Upstairs, in his study, where he had forced whole countries to their knees with shouting and threats, a select company was sitting on the wide sofa and in the armchairs: the Chief and Miss Braun, Bormann, the massive majordomo Brückner, and the head of domestic services, also an officer. The two of them stood there intimidated; there was a tension in the room, but Brückner instructed Linge to fetch two chairs from the library. That was reassuring at least, but it made the situation all the more inc
omprehensible. What business had they, two humble domestic servants in their twenties, with all these bigwigs? When they were seated, on upright peasant chairs, Linge received a brief look from Brückner indicating that he should disappear instantly.
With his elegant hand resting on the neck of Blondi, who sat next to his armchair with her ears pricked like a proud creature from another, more innocent world, Hitler said that this was undoubtedly the most important day in their lives, since he had decided to place a responsibility of world-historical significance on their shoulders. He paused and glanced at the Lady Chief, who was sitting palely between the two officers Brückner and Mittlstrasser on the sofa.
“Mr. Falk, Mrs. Falk,” said Hitler formally, “I’m going to disclose a state secret to you: Miss Braun is expecting a child.”
ELEVEN
“No!” cried Herter. “It’s not true!”
Was this possible? In astonishment he tried to take it in. Had these two ancient people in this old-people’s home really heard those words over sixty years ago from that mouth below the square mustache? Perhaps it was not of world-historical significance, but it was certainly earth-shattering. Hitler—a child! It was the last thing Herter could have dreamed up himself—but obviously that was how reality worked: it was always one step ahead of the imagination. He would have most liked to know the rest of the story in ten sentences. Where was the child? Was it still alive? But his instinct told him that he must let them find their own tempo; they were old, and everything was slower then, including the telling of a story.
“We were just as shocked as you,” said Julia. “We did not understand a thing. The fact that Miss Braun was pregnant by the Chief was in itself nothing special. These things simply happen, even in royal circles, perhaps especially there. Anyway, it had struck me that in the last few weeks she was constantly craving herring and gherkins. But what was all that to do with us? What kind of responsibility was being put on our shoulders?”