Angela walked her daughter through Haus Wachenfeld’s interior, showing her the front porch enclosed in tall, uncurtained windows to form a sunroom that was called the Winter Garden and was furnished with a heating stove, a gramophone, a grandfather clock, green ferns, succulents, palms, a crooked and hang-necked rubber tree, and soft, floral-patterned armchairs facing a round oak table. A fine hemp rug of geometric design was on the floor. All were gifts from Helene Bechstein.
The dining room was wainscotted in oak and fussily decorated with green-leafed drapes, four watercolor cityscapes by Hitler, hanging plates of ornate design, old-fashioned and rustic chairs, and pillowed corner benches that formed half the seating for a square oak dining table with inlaid green marble. And there was more to dislike everywhere else. Slurring the window panoramas were the dimity curtains of the peasantry; a fake cactus and a far too literal painting of a huge-buttocked female nude were in Hitler’s upstairs room; on a kitchen wall where a crucifix usually was in Bavaria there was a tin tray with a picture on it of three jolly fat men hoisting steins of foaming beer; in the bathroom was a lantern that when lit depicted a little boy urinating; and here and there about the house were hand-stitched pillows, dish towels, and doilies, all with swastikas or the initials “A.H.” or fancily embroidered expressions of undying loyalty. “Aren’t they ugly,” Geli said.
Angela looked below to the terrace in a precautionary way and found Hitler strolling head down with his Alsatian, Prinz, and Julius Schaub, Hitler holding a dog whip of hippopotamus hide behind his back as he talked and talked. “Ugly as sin,” she told Geli. “Adolf knows they’re not beautiful things, but they’re gifts from party members, so he finds it hard to let go of them, out of loyalty.” She sighed as she went back downstairs. “Our father was the same,” she said. “He shoots for love, but the arrow falls, and he only hits sentimentality.”
Geli was given the chores of a handmaid. Each morning she got up with her mother at eight and helped Angela in the kitchen with vanilla pancakes, plum cakes with cinnamon, or Austrian puff pastries. She let Prinz out of her uncle’s room and watched him sniff and sign the forest trees as she walked to the Hotel zum Türken to buy newspapers from Austria and Germany. She got the mail from the post office box on the walk back and put what she’d collected on a red-painted chair just outside Hitler’s door. On Sundays and holy days of obligation, she and Angela would join other workers for a ride down to Berchtesgaden and the ten a.m. Mass at the twelfth-century Stiftskirche, or Abbey Church, next to the Wittelsbach castle. On weekdays she and Angela would simply wait for Adolf to wake up. Around eleven Geli would generally see his forearm and hand as he got the mail and papers from the red chair, and then she would go make a fresh pot of coffee, peel and section an orange, and carry his breakfast to him on a fine silver coffee service that had been a gift from Princess Cantacuzène. When she got up to his room, Hitler would have shaved with two blades, patted his face with a liniment of aloe, and fully dressed in lederhosen, a white shirt and tie, knee-high stockings, and hiking boots, though if company were expected he generally wore his black dress shoes and a light gray woolen suit. She’d watch as he soaked his hair with Dr. Dralle’s Birkenwasser, then tilted forward and combed his wet, dark hair flat to his forehead, fastidiously parted it, stood upright, and jerked his head so that his forelock fell to the left. Only then would he acknowledge her, often kissing her hand and saying how pretty she looked, at other times sulking as if she’d offended him, once shrieking in terrifying wrath because he’d found a spiderweb wobbling frailly inside the upper sash of his window.
Rudolf Hess was now Hitler’s private secretary and was paid three hundred reichsmarks per month. Each day Hess would stroll up from the Pension Moritz at noon, find Hitler’s reading glasses, fondly steam them with his breath, dry them with his handkerchief, then solemnly and patiently stand beside his leader on the terrace, saying not a word until Hitler had finished perusing the newspapers. Geli would carry out a tray of Apfelstrudel and apple peel tea, then the men would talk politics and economics while Geli folded her uncle’s pajamas, tightened the blankets on his bed, collected laundry, vacuumed the floor, and wiped the furniture with linseed oil, or the window glass, mirrors, and bathroom fixtures with watered ammonia.
After that she was free for the afternoon. While listening to operas on the gramophone, she sang with the sopranos and sewed her own clothing or filled in crossword puzzles or read the continuations of serialized romances in five or six magazines. Often there were picnics with sandwiches, fruit, and mineral water; or a frowning Schaub would be forced to take her down to the Königsee for a cold swim; or she’d walk in the shade with her uncle and Prinz, and Hitler would show her how he’d used fried chicken gizzards to teach the Wolfshund to climb a ladder, walk on a railing, jump over a two-meter fence, heel, sit, roll over, crawl, beg with praying paws, and play dead. Each afternoon he strolled with Prinz to the same corner of his lot, picked up the same stick, and threw it in the same direction until the Alsatian had fetched it six times and they could head back to the house.
Evening chores began at eight as she and Angela cooked a late dinner. She set the dining room table with Rosenthal porcelain and Irish linen napkins, then put wildflowers in a Steuben vase that had been a gift from Frau von Seidlitz. She and Angela ate in the kitchen when guests were there, with him when the three were alone. With dinner they’d have a Liebfraumilch or a Moselblüm-chen wine, or, if they were dining on Zungenwurst, a strong Salvator beer. When they’d tidied the kitchen, they would loll in the Winter Garden with coffee and dessert and quietly listen to Wagner, or to Hitler’s flood of opinions on Charlemagne, the childishness of Mozart, the physics of flight, Karl May’s Westerns, future pharmaceuticals, horses—which he hated, and never rode—lipstick, which he insisted was made from wax and sewage, why red cabbage was far superior to green, why champagne caused headaches, why the children of geniuses have far less talent, of his plan to fully employ Germany in the construction of a network of Autobahnen, of his hopes of having a factory produce for ordinary people an inexpensive automobile that he would call the Volkswagen.
But Hitler generally avoided harangues about Jews and political strife when he was at Haus Wachenfeld, and only once that first summer was he visited by a party official other than Rudolf Hess. That official was Franz Xaver Schwarz, a former accountant in the finance section of the München city hall who had lost his job after the putsch and was now party treasurer. Clenched in his hands was a valise that stayed with Hitler when Schwarz went away that evening. Geli presumed it held the money that financed Hitler’s lazy life of interrupted unemployment.
Schwarz was in his fifties and far older than other Nazis she’d met, a graying, dour man with a high forehead, owlish black glasses, and a little gray mustache. Like Hess, he was wholly and wistfully subordinate to Hitler; like Prinz, he willingly subjected himself to Hitler’s gallery show for Geli, in his head multiplying two five-digit numbers, adding the populations of Germany, Austria, and England, and subtracting from them Belgium and France. Hess dutifully checked the sums on paper, found them correct, and Hitler slapped his thighs with joy, saying Schwarz was just what the party needed, the sheer intellect of an adding machine and the spirit of a Knicker, or skinflint.
Schwarz flushed at the scorn behind the praise and sought to change the subject by asking, “Are you going to join the party, Fräulein Raubal?”
She was trying to think of a tactful reply when Hitler fretfully waved a hand and said, “My niece is not interested in politics.”
She’d never felt so fortunate, so reprieved. When their talk finally turned to foreign affairs, Geli promptly got up from the terrace table and gleefully hurried back to the house.
She began calling him Uncle Alf, and at his fondest he called her Princess. She would look up from reading and find him just glancing away, or she’d turn when she was walking and find him intently watching the sway of her dress. At times she felt unclothed by him. At ot
her times she felt protected, cherished, and adored. She was his quiet den, his twilight stroll, his hobby. She knew Hitler was carrying her in his humming mind like a tune that would not be lost. Like a beautiful sentence from an ancient book that he’d turned into his motto.
In fair weather, Angela would shift their late-morning breakfasts outside to the terrace, and, when Hitler did not shoo them, big black jackdaws would fly down from their high mountain aeries and wait for gifts of pastry. Within a few days, to fight boredom, Geli was making a game of it, first testing how close the jackdaws would come, then flicking out a winding trail of pine kernels to see how far the jackdaws would strut through Haus Wachenfeld for more food.
She found out that the one who stayed inside longest had a hurt wing hanging so low that its right feather tips dragged on the floor. She couldn’t heal him, but she named him Schatzi, Little Treasure, and trained him to hop and spin for crumbs as she whistled Strauss so it looked like the jackdaw was waltzing.
It was just the kind of slightly cruel trick to make Hitler laugh until his sides ached, and he wanted his niece to show it off to Helene Bechstein when she visited them for afternoon tea on August 12th, his dead mother’s birthday; but an hour beforehand her housekeeper telephoned Angela to say Frau Bechstein preferred that they visit her.
And so in his finest navy blue suit a frustrated Hitler hiked and skidded three hundred meters down the hillside with Angela and Geli until they got to the fabulous Villa Bechstein, which would later be taken over and turned into a guest house for Joseph Goebbels, other high party leaders, and Benito Mussolini. “They also own Weissenlehen,” Hitler said with enthusiasm, and hunched to point through the forest to a fine house across the road.
Angela rolled her eyes at Geli. Such a child.
Ilse Meirer, the housekeeper, was a friend of Angela’s now. She greeted all of them at the front door, and then she and Angela stayed behind to have caraway seed tea in the huge white kitchen while, as if this were a fairy tale and their future precarious, Hitler firmly took Geli’s hand to guide her upstairs to Frau Bechstein’s huge, all-white sitting room.
She was a handsome, square-bodied, matronly woman in her late forties and was lying on a fainting couch en grande toilette, wearing only a yellow silk nightgown beneath a yellow silk robe and perhaps four hundred carats in diamonds. She offered a falsely thrilled hello to Adolf and held out both hands to him, which he kissed on the knuckles. And then with stiff formality, he introduced his niece.
“Oh, I’m so glad to finally meet you,” Frau Bechstein said, but she did not hide the rivalry in her tone.
And so, in rivalry, Geli curtsied.
“Aren’t you a sweet girl,” Frau Bechstein said.
“At times.”
Frau Bechstein hugged Hitler around the thighs and brought him forcibly against her face. “And this is my sweet boy.” She let go and glided her hand along the fainting couch. “Won’t you sit, Adolf?”
Obediently, he did so, his hands primly on his knees and his knees tightly together. Geli sat, too, in an Empire chair, but felt the urge to ask a history question just to see the sweet boy raise his hand. Worried and sheepish, Hitler explained to his niece, “We have known each other for seven years now.”
“Oh, how he thrilled us in those first days,” Frau Bechstein said. She angled her head against his chest and inhaled his smell. “Our shy young messiah,” she told Geli. “We put him up in a deluxe hotel, and my husband wore tails for dinner, all the servants were in livery, and Adolf was there in his shabby blue suit, talking away half the evening about the faucet handles in his bathroom that could regulate the heat of the water. And then—it was so funny, really—when Adolf spoke to us about National Socialism, he stood up and shouted intemperately for an hour, his face contorting, his hands flying this way and that, as if our salon were a giant beer hall. And when he finished, he sat down again, thoroughly spent.”
With just a hint of his threatening tone, Hitler said, “You are embarrassing me in front of my niece, Frau Bechstein.”
She prettily slapped his forearm. “Oh, Wolf. Don’t call me that. Call me Mommy.”
Worming his eyes toward Geli, he said, “Don’t humiliate me.”
“We tried to adopt him as our child,” she told Geli, “but were afraid there’d be a stink. Instead we showered him with money, jewels, objets d’art. And for a while I had such hopes that Adolf would fall in love with our daughter Lotte.”
“I shall not marry. You know that.”
She smiled. “Whenever I see him, I melt in his presence.” A hand crawled through his forelock as she admired his sullen face. “You know I would do anything for you, don’t you, Wolf?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, Mommy,” she prompted.
She saw his head hanging in silence and seemed to remember that Geli was there. “And do you play piano, Fräulein?”
She shook her head. “I sing.”
She looked at Hitler. “Would it be impertinent of me to offer her a Bechstein pianoforte?”
Waggling pianist’s fingers in front of her waist, Geli said, “I’m afraid I lack a Bechstein talent.”
“She hates me,” Helene Bechstein said.
“Who could do that?” Hitler asked.
“Will you lie with me like we do?”
“My niece is here.”
Geli stood. “I’ll just be going downstairs. My mother’s there.”
“And so, you see?” Helene Bechstein said. She then fell back on the fainting couch and Hitler scooted forward and cuddled until his head was on the flattened pillow of her bosom. And she was gently petting his hair and humming a Brahms lullaby as Geli fled, quietly shutting the door behind her.
She hurried down to the first floor of the villa, then to the kitchen where the women were, and said, “I feel sick.”
Angela looked up and understood. “Aren’t they a pair?”
Geli shrugged in a gruesome shiver. “Mommy! Wolf!”
Ilse Meirer got up. “Shall I get you some cake?”
“I’m too busy trying not to imagine what they’re doing up there.”
“Or not doing,” Angela said.
“Yes, that’s worse, isn’t it?” Ilse asked. And the older women chuckled as Ilse got Geli some tea.
Wearing a sleeveless and belted white linen dress in the late August heat, Geli was on the northern terrace and trying to humor her uncle by finally reading Karl May’s Winnetou when she shaded her eyes from a shock of sunshine, and saw a green Daimler flow down the pebbled drive to the underground garage. Heinrich Hoffmann got out in white tennis shirt, white flannel trousers, and white shoes, and shouted up to the terrace, “We’re here!”
“Welcome!”
“Wake up your uncle!” he said, and hauled from the floor of the car a high stack of dark photographic plates, a carpenter’s hammer, and a handled leather portfolio as Henrietta got out in a pleated white tennis skirt, a frilly white blouse, and a fine white cashmere sweater tied at her neck. Hurrying up the garden path with two bottles of Kupferberg Sekt, she called, “It’s me!”
“Just as I thought!” Geli called back. She then turned and saw her uncle on the upstairs balcony in his brown woolen suit and purple tie, a foam of Chlorodont toothpaste on his mouth and a hint of blood on his toothbrush. She couldn’t tell if he’d been staring at his houseguests or at her. He ambled back inside.
Geli went through the Winter Garden and dining room and into the kitchen where Angela was helping the girl jam the champagne bottles into the icebox. Henny had styled her chestnut-brown hair in a fashionable bob just below her ears, and she was a full inch taller and far more developed since she and Geli had first met. Even Hitler noticed, for he walked in and watched Henny fitting Angela’s ham sandwiches next to a package of flank steaks and said, “Why, you’re fully grown, Fräulein Hoffmann!”
She fetchingly turned in such a way that the fabric of her blouse was strained. “You missed me, Herr Hitler?”
“
Oh, my Sunshine. Each day is night without you.”
She grinned and held out her right hand for his kiss. She childishly scolded, “You have stayed away from München too long.”
“But why not?” he asked. “Look at all I have here!”
Widening his hands to solicit praise for his property, he seemed to include his niece, and Henny’s pretty face fell into a pout. Whether from jealousy or wild speculation, Geli wasn’t sure.
Wanting some sentence to tidy up the awkwardness, Geli tried, “I have been here only two months.”
Henny flatly stated, “We met your mother up here in May.”
Angela said, “So they know absolutely everything about you.”
And then Heinrich Hoffmann sidled in with his hammer, plates, and portfolio. “Where shall we?” he asked.
“The dining room,” Hitler said. “Would you girls like to see?”
Angela brought in a tin waste can as the photographer filled the table with public relations shots of Hitler in his famous trench coat, on a field of snow, hectoring an audience; dining at the Café Heck; shaking the hands of children; striding down Thierschstrasse with Prinz; holding opera glasses as he chatted with an older woman in a fox stole; worrying over an item in the Münchener Zeitung.
Hitler bent low over the photographs, leaning on his hands. Without looking up, he said, “You have a picture of me in spectacles here.”
“Where?”
Hitler jabbed at it. “There! Didn’t I tell you?”