Hoffmann flipped through his plates, found the offending negative, and smashed it with his carpenter’s hammer over the waste can.
“And here. My face is puffy,” Hitler said, and ticked a photograph off the dining room table.
Hoffmann got the negative and destroyed it, the glass clanging against the tin as it fell.
Hitler then held up to all of them a stark close-up of himself in a dark brown shirt and a black tie, furrows between his shark-cold eyes, his mouth held in the opposite of a smile, his facial expression that of a hate-filled man whose fierce vengeance is even now being silkily enjoyed. “This is good,” he said.
Winking with irony, Hoffmann told Geli, “We’re never too old to learn.”
And then Hitler put together four different shots of himself as he posed in the brown hat and uniform of the Sturmabteilung.
Geli thought he looked foolish, like a child playing dress up.
“They go or they stay?” Hoffmann asked. Hitler’s glare swung toward him like a farmer’s scythe in wheat, and the photographer hunted for the negatives.
“Let me do it,” Henny said. Her father handed her the hammer and she took joy in crashing the hammer into Hitler’s face in the darkened glass, the shards raining loudly from her hand as she told them, “I’m having fun.”
Angela called from the kitchen, “Ouch, such a racket!” while Geli winced at the noise and held her ears. But her uncle watched with fascination and zeal as the girl shattered the plates, urging her on by handing Henny even good negatives and seemingly growing ever more excited by the wreckage until at last the photographer angrily took the hammer from his daughter. “We seem to be hungry,” he said.
Angela stayed behind at Haus Wachenfeld to have tea with friends as Hoffmann conveyed the four of them in his Daimler seven kilometers west of Berchtesgaden to the village of Ramsau and the green lake called Hintersee. Henny and Geli shook out red tartan blankets beneath linden trees and they all had a picnic of champagne and caviar, then lemonade and ham sandwiches as they watched fly fishermen in green hip waders hook trout and saibling, wrap them in seaweed, and stuff them inside their creels.
With his slouch hat cocked on his head and his purple tie flipped over his right shoulder for fear of staining it, Hitler ate salted radishes as he lazed in the shade, his brown trousers twisted high enough that Geli could glimpse the stocking garters pinking the hairless white skin of his calves. Tilting up on his elbows to watch Henny toy with a child’s kitten, he told his niece the folklore that Emperor Frederick, the Antichrist of the Middle Ages, was thought to be sleeping beneath the holy mountain of Untersberg, patiently awaiting a flight of ravens that would herald the hour of victory over all of Germany’s enemies and the final, long-sought unification of the Aryan nations. And there was some truth to it, of that he was sure. The first time he’d visited Obersalzberg he’d felt a magnetic force urging him to stay, and he knew that he, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, was meant to live in these mountains for ten years, to become hard here, hard and cold as ice, rejoicing in his loneliness, forging a spirit of steel. “I will have reached my peak,” he said, “when I can observe my former self with loathing and pity, and spit on the fate my stars had determined I should have.”
Such pomposity, Geli thought, but she said, “You have it all worked out, then.”
“I do,” he agreed, and held himself up on his right elbow as he faced her, locking his hands together with the plum satisfaction of a fortunate banker. “Are you aware of the origins of the name Adolf?” he asked.
“Adolfus, I thought.”
“Athalwolfa,” he corrected. “Athal means ‘noble,’ Wolfa, ‘wolf.’ And now a noble wolf has been born who shall shred into bloody pieces the herd of seducers and deceivers of the people.” And then he grinned with his fanged, ugly, and generally hidden smile, and she was alarmed to find that with such strange talk her famous uncle was trying to woo her.
She was confused by his flirtation and she flicked her dress farther toward her knees as she felt him float his stare from her sun-bleached hair to her suntanned neck and full breasts and waist and then to the fine blond hairs on her forearm. “Oh, listen, Uncle Alf,” she said. “Singing.” And she got up from the blanket to pretend she needed to find out who it was.
Wholly unaware of their führer, ten meters away on the other side of the linden trees were five roaring and sunburnt Brownshirts hoisting steins and hollering Trinklieder at a picnic table with two tipsy prostitutes who seemed already to have been much used. Geli was stunned as a brassy, singing woman whose hair was the color of Weissbier allowed the hankering man beside her to furtively hunt under her skirt as she linked the fingers of both her hands with those of the man she was facing.
“Are we invisible here?” Geli asked, but no one answered.
When the song was just about finished, a drunken practical joker farther down the table quickly hoisted up the sweater of a heavier, bleached-blond woman whose breasts seemed as huge as world globes. She hurriedly hid herself again, but Heinrich Hoffmann ostentatiously gaped and then grinned at Hitler over his filled glass of champagne. “Where are we?” he asked. “In Berlin?”
Hitler flushed as with a disclosed secret, and looked far out to a racing scull on the Hintersee. He tore up blades of grass and chewed them. Henny was still staring at the five men and the prostitutes, as if this were an important moment whose details she’d want to recall.
Ill at ease, her face hot with embarrassment, Geli kicked off her shoes and walked through a door she’d made in her mind, strolling a hundred meters from their afternoon picnic in shaded grass that was plush and cool under her feet. Sunshine whitened the denim blue of the sky and flashed off the green water as if it were a jeweler’s case holding tumbled rows of gold bracelets. She joined the lukewarm slosh of the lake, lifting up the hem of her dress to wade farther out and holding still enough that she could watch with childish amusement as sudden minnows schooled by her ankles and softly tickled her skin with nibbles.
“Aren’t you gorgeous!” Heinrich Hoffmann said.
She turned and saw the short, blond, wide-shouldered photographer waist high in the gray reeds of the bank, winding forward the film in his Stirnschen camera. “You took my picture?”
“Of course. Don’t move.” Hoffmann hunkered forward a little and took another. Winding the film, he said, “I’m getting my shoes wet.” Squinting through the viewfinder, he urged Geli, “Look into the water as you were doing, but then you hear a noise and you just turn your face with surprise.” Hoffmann performed it in a feminine way. “Like so.”
“Like this?”
“Exactly. Twinkling eyes. Try to flip your hair.”
She did so, and he took the picture.
“Excellent,” he said. “Are you comfortable?”
“Well, I’m not a model.”
He took another. “But you are! You’re an enchantress! With that height, that figure, those Slavic features, that perfect white smile.” Hoffmann hunched forward and she heard the shutter shear closed like a scissors. “And yet I wonder,” he said, mulling it over. “Could you show the camera some more, please?”
“More?”
Hoffmann held the Stirnschen in his right hand as his left instructed her by fiddling his fingers near his thigh. “Hike up your dress just a little higher, my darling.”
“Are you sure about this, Herr Hoffmann?”
“Quite sure.” She complied, but he said, “Higher still. You have panties on?”
She crossed her eyes at him.
“Then please raise the dress just to your panties, Geli. High as a bathing suit would be, so we can see the beauty in that sturdy young thigh, that womanly rump.”
“Womanly’ meaning fat?” She inched the hem of her dress up until she could feel it touching the joint of her thighbone.
“Alluring,” he said. “Enticing to hands. Will you bend over for me a little?”
She did. “I feel like I should be beating loinclot
hs on rocks.”
Hoffmann adjusted his shutter speed and stalked his pictures, walking sideways, crouching, getting up on his toes, even surging ankle high through the Hintersee in his white tennis flannels.
“Are you taking these photos for yourself?” she asked.
“For whom do you think?”
“Uncle Alf.”
She heard his silence, and the shutter again. And he said, “Worse than that. It’s for Röhm’s storm troopers. We’ll put one in every locker.”
She laughed at him then, and he got it on film.
That evening, when Hitler and the houseguests were waiting for dinner outside, Geli’s jackdaw flew down to the terrace and Hitler shouted for his niece to halt food preparations and show Henny and Heinrich one of the jackdaw’s tricks.
She hurried out to the terrace in a white apron and said, “We have flank steaks cooking.” She then got an inch-square piece of red fabric and affixed it to a chink in the wall. She cawed a few times and the jackdaw flew to the fabric and tugged it from the chink.
“Remarkable,” Hoffmann said.
“Shh,” Hitler hissed. “There’s more.”
She cawed again and the jackdaw flew over to the café table where Geli was sitting, hopped within a few inches of her face, and let the fabric fall from its beak. “And now our good-bye, Schatzi,” she said. The jackdaw held up his beak to be kissed, then took half a biscuit from her hand and flew off the terrace.
“Marvelous!” Hitler exclaimed. “Geli, that was fantastic!” And he wildly and thoroughly applauded her as she bowed first to him, then to the hoots and congratulations of Henny and her father, and then again to her uncle, whose hands were striking together long after the others had quit, his overjoyed eyes filling with tears as he raved, “She’s a miracle, isn’t she? She’s so beautiful, so gifted! Even birds have to obey her!”
“I have flank steaks in the oven,” she said, and went inside.
Within a few minutes Heinrich Hoffmann was in the kitchen, filling his wineglass beside her. They both could still hear her uncle praising her. “You’re quite a hit with Herr Hitler,” Hoffmann said.
She got butter from the icebox.
“You gave that jackdaw a name?” he asked.
“Schatzi.”
He swallowed some Riesling, then winked as he walked outside, saying, “You ought to have named him Adolf.”
The first night she’d stayed in Haus Wachenfeld, Hitler had given his niece a framed photograph of himself—his favorite gift to friends—and the first volume of Mein Kampf. She had happily put the photograph on her night table and had taken the book with her to bed, but had fallen asleep within a few minutes. She’d tried it again the next afternoon but found the prose so atrocious, the thought so vitriolic and contradictory, the tone so whining—when it wasn’t pompous—that she couldn’t get farther than the first chapter about his childhood in Linz. Each night for two weeks after that her uncle asked her how she liked his memoir, presumably trying to humiliate her into finally finishing it. She told him she was still reading, but so far it seemed quite good.
They celebrated Geli’s last night in Haus Wachenfeld on September 27th, but Angela got so sleepy from Riesling that she went to bed at nine. Hitler just watched Geli reading a serialized romance as he finished his coffee, then he went upstairs, and when he walked back into the Winter Garden he had his glasses on and the first volume of Mein Kampf in his hand. Dragging a chair until it was facing his niece, he sat in it heavily and began questioning her. “Where was I born, Geli?”
“Braunau am Inn,” she said. “1889.”
“Why did I not attend a Gymnasium?”
“They didn’t teach drawing there.”
“And how old was I when my father died?”
“Thirteen, I think.”
“What do I say in this of my mother’s death?”
She couldn’t recall. “Hardly anything,” she said.
“My one regret,” her uncle said. “But I was dictating the book to Hess, and it seemed too private and important under those circumstances.”
“Naturally.”
“‘Chapter Two,’” he read. “‘Years of Learning and Suffering in Wien.’ A quotation, Fräulein Raubal: ‘X was my faithful attendant, the only one that almost never left me, dividing with me share and share alike. Every book I bought roused his interest; one trip to the opera would give me his company for days; it was a never-ending battle with my unsympathetic friend.’ To whom am I referring?”
She shook her head.
“Well, it’s not a whom but a what. Hunger. Making hunger seem a human being was for me a fascinating literary conceit. I find it odd that you wouldn’t remember that passage.” Hitler hunted further through his pages and inquired, “Who produces nine tenths of all the literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical nonsense in the world?”
She hesitated.
He held up his book and pointed to a block of print. “I say it on page sixty-eight.”
“America?” she guessed.
“The Jews,” he said. “And the finest things in art, science, or technology are produced by…?”
She thought of galling him by saying, “The Jews,” but he was in a tricky mood. “I have no idea,” she said.
“Oh? Why is that, I wonder?” And then he told her, “The Aryan.” Considering other pages, he halted and focused on one paragraph, asking, “The highest purpose of a man’s existence is not the maintenance of a state or government, but…what?”
“I only have the answer from religion class.”
“We’re talking about my ideas. My Struggle. A book that will one day be the Bible of the German people. The highest purpose of a man’s existence is the preservation of his own kind. Chapter Three.” Hitler offered one of his false smiles. “But we both know you didn’t read that far.”
She icily stared at him. “Shall I tell you precisely how far I got?”
With the suddenness of a gunshot he was white with rage, and he shouted, “You dare to talk to me in that tone? You dare?”
At once she was near tears, while he was giant and ancient and uncontrolled, a hurricane of wrath. She felt her stomach growing wobbly with an onset of terror and uncertainty as she folded her arms and humbled her head. She felt he’d turned her bones into wax. She told him, “I’m sorry, Uncle Adolf. You were embarrassing me.”
“And you have offended me! You have had the temerity to challenge me? Adolf Hitler!”
She knew that so much was now so out of proportion that anything was possible. She’d be sent back to Austria. She’d be locked away. She’d be denied. In a faint, thin voice she offered, “I can only say I’m sorry.”
“Walk over here to me,” he said.
She obediently got up from the floral-patterned chair and nearly tipped with wooziness as she went to him. Would he strike her? Would he make her kneel? She felt he could slay her with a look. She saw his trousered knees lock together and heard him tell her to bend over them. She shocked herself by giggling with scorn as she asked, “You’re going to spank me?”
Then his left hand flashed up and he hauled her down so hurtfully by the hair that she did what he wanted, squinting her watering eyes tightly shut and locking her knees as she tilted forward, letting his left hand firmly grip her left wrist as his right flipped her pleated skirt up to her waist and struck her hard enough on the left buttock that she jolted forward. She was wearing pink satin panties and his hand seemed to scald through them with his second blow. And his third was like fire. But then he seemed to hesitate, and his fourth strike was far softer. She felt Hitler altering further as he hesitated again, and for a moment she was afraid he’d caress her. She felt sure his hand was floating over her panties, fondling a curve in the air, and then he gently tugged her pleated skirt until she was covered, and she knew the shift of power was complete.
She stood and faced him, but he shied away from her stare. “Have I learned my lesson?” she asked.
Hitler w
as not an unintelligent man. “Yes,” he said. “I’m afraid you have.” And then it was his turn to be embarrassed. Calling for Prinz, he escaped her watching by roughhousing with the hound, and he pretended not to notice when his niece walked haughtily upstairs.
CHAPTER NINE
THE PENSION KLEIN, 1927
In October she moved into a white, furnished room in the Pension Klein at Königinstrasse 43, in the Schwabing area of München. The house faced the west side of the Englischer Garten so she had a third-floor view of green lawns and horse paths from her desk, and it was just a short walk from the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, where Angelika Raubal was registered for premedical courses in biology, chemistry, zoology, and English.
Geli began each morning with a buffet breakfast of hard rolls, fruit, and hot chocolate in the pension’s dining room, then got her textbooks and, with a friend named Elfi Samthaber, walked up Veter-inärinstrasse to the first-floor lecture hall of the university for an eight o’clock biology class. She went upstairs for a far smaller class in English, and afterward was free for an hour, generally going to the Café Europa on Schellingstrasse, near Heinrich Hoffmann’s photography studio and the editorial offices of the Völkischer Beobachter. She did not try to find her uncle there, for it was not yet noon.
She was an affectionate, fun-loving woman with a gift for female friendship and an affability with men, so she would not have been without company for long anyway, but the fact that many of the university students were fanatically pro-Hitler meant she was often the focus of attention. She’d be offered Italian coffee, and handsome young men with fresh dueling scars would huddle around and tire her with questions about her Uncle Adolf—whom the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten was calling “the uncrowned king of Bavaria”—while her female classmates looked on with jealousy and Gauloise cigarettes held near their faces.
She freed herself from observation only by heading to the first-floor laboratory of the science wing for chemistry. She finished her English homework just before zoology class, and after that strolled to the south end of the Englischer Garten where her famous uncle would be in the fashionable Café Heck on Galerienstrasse, holding forth to a group of six or seven passive, reverential men at his Stammtisch, his reserved and increasingly popular table in the farthermost corner on the right.