She would see him agitatedly glancing around the café even as he talked, hunting for some sign of his niece, and as soon as he saw her, Hitler’s face would shine with glee and he would promptly stand up, as would the others. “And here is my Princess at last,” he’d say, and kiss her on both hands. All talk of politics would cease—“We do not mix business and family,” Hitler had objected once—and he would order a late lunch for them both while courteously inquiring about her classes. She’d practice English with Herr Hanfstaengl, she’d say nothing to Herr Rosenberg, who fiddled with his fork or wristwatch whenever she was around, she’d ask Herr Hess about Ilse, whom he’d just married; she’d hear from Herr Hoffmann about Henny’s high school functions, and she’d perhaps be introduced to a visiting Gauleiter (a party regional governor) from Essen or Mecklenburg. She’d try to be charming and Hitler’s men would try to seem enchanted and after she’d eaten she’d find a reason to exit so they could all get back to their worries and scheming.
She’d study from four until eight if her uncle was free for the evening, or until ten if he was giving a speech, and then she’d put on a fine dress and talk with the other boarders in the parlor until Emil Maurice was impatiently there at the front door, Hitler’s Mercedes idling behind him on Königinstrasse and Hitler either in it, drumming his fingers, or still in his shabby bachelor’s flat on Thierschstrasse getting changed for their night on the town. After the cinema or opera, they’d dine at the Café Weichard, next to the Volkstheater, or the Osteria Bavaria, the garden restaurant in the Bayerischer Hof Hotel, or the Nürnberger Bratwurstglöckl am Dom, and then, well past midnight, Emil would return Geli to the pension and take his employer to the Café Neumaier near the Victuals Market where he’d talk with worshipful old friends until three or four in the morning.
Weekends she was Hitler’s from noon until night. Often Henny Hoffmann would join them and they’d lunch at the Carlton Tearoom on Briennerstrasse, and Hitler would flatter them with fulsome praise for their beauty, and charm them with funny imitations of his pompous subordinates. Then they’d stroll through the galleries and the jewelry, shoe, and millinery shops off the Odeonsplatz, or the high-fashion stores on Prinzregentenstrasse. Geli was new to luxuries and having money, and with a flirtatious tyranny forced her uncle to wait like a forbearing husband as she tried on twenty hats then settled on a beret, or dotted her wrists with French perfumes and held them to his fussy and defenseless nose.
With his niece Adolf Hitler was often affectionate, softhearted, and helpless. Emil Maurice would lean against a fender of the Mercedes-Benz with a cigarette and watch his otherwise fearsome boss bashfully follow the tittering girls as they went from one shop to the next, and in the late afternoon he’d be fascinated to find the führer tilting toward him under a high stack of parcels, chagrined but grinning—fatherly, flushed, and perfectly content.
Emil himself was enthralled by Geli, but at first he tried to give the impression that being with her was his duty when Hitler was away. But one Saturday morning in late October Emil simply showed up at the Pension Klein and told Geli her uncle was on party business in Berlin. And then he hesitantly asked if she’d like to visit the famous Auer Dult flea market at Mariahilfplatz, across the Isar river.
She wanted to further furnish her white room, so she went, and they found a Halali hat for Emil, and for Geli a fairly good Köhler sewing machine, a faintly worn Axminster rug, and a fine, gold-plated Tellus clock that wasn’t working, but that Emil, a former watchmaker, said he would fix, and did.
Emil drove her to the Haidhausen district and a pub called Löwen-Schänke where they shared a late lunch of hard rolls and salami and tall steins of Spatenbräu. He took off his white Halali hat and told Geli he’d been born in Westmoor in 1897, so he was eleven years older than she was, and a former Unterfeldwebel, or sergeant, on the western front, where he had been put in charge of a reconnaissance patrol because his family were originally French Hugenots and his father had forced his children to learn the language. Without a high school Abitur or even a lesser Matura, Emil had had few work prospects after the armistice; he was just one of the injured millions and had found and lost a dozen jobs—as a horse dealer, a butcher’s apprentice, a watchmaker, a nightclub bouncer. Anything. And whenever he was out of work, he was a street fighter for the Ehrhardt Naval Brigade, paid to heckle Communist speakers and disrupt rallies during Spartakus week. “What we wanted, we didn’t know,” he said. “But what we knew, we didn’t want.” And then that changed in 1920 when he’d first heard Adolf Hitler speak. Immediately he’d joined the party as number 19, and had been given the job of Ordnertruppe, whose duty it was to protect her uncle at mass meetings. “I was the first SA man,” he said. “The very first storm trooper. And I still would gladly die for him. A former soldier like I was, with no education, no money, no family, really, and he knew what I was feeling, the furies inside me, the fears and longings, the things that were ugly, and he made them seem right. Even glorious. It’s never intellectual or head-to-head when Hitler talks. Always heart-to-heart. And so I could feel how much he hated the same things I did: the Weimar Republic, Bolshevism, the Reichstag, unemployment, inflation, crime and disorder—”
“The Jews?” Geli asked.
Emil reddened with irritation. “Are you thinking I’m Jewish?”
She was stunned. “I just thought that was part of his program.”
“Are you an Anti-Semite?”
She shrugged. “No.”
Emil smiled as her uncle did, with falseness and condescension. “In time,” he said.
“Are you Aryan?” she asked.
“Naturally. But I hear party members talking. ‘Look at Emil Maurice,’ they say. ‘Look at that Alfred Rosenberg.’ And others, too. ‘They’re trying to hide that they’re Jews by hating them.’” Emil drank from his stein with his hot stare held on her. “Even about the leader they say that.”
She was fearless in the face of contention, but was fundamentally a conciliator. She slid off to friendlier terrain. “I remember when I first saw you at Landsberg am Lech,” she said. “Your skin was so dark. I thought you looked Corsican, or Greek.”
Emil grinned. “Yes? Is that good?”
“Excellent,” she said.
He hunched forward on the pub’s table, his chin on his hands, conquered by flattery. “Was it love at first sight?”
“Well, I was sixteen.”
“And easy to please? Tell me, Fräulein Raubal: What did you admire most about me?”
“Your eyes,” she said. “They seemed so big and gentle and chocolate brown.”
“Your eyes, too,” he said. “They’re like a poem.”
She laughed. “They rhyme? They’re a couplet?”
Emil flopped back in his chair and held up his hands in surrender. “I have no education; I told you.”
She reached over to him. “No, no. I’m sorry. I was embarrassed. You’re so sweet to put it that way.” She hesitated a little, then smiled demurely. “What else? You have to say more.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m the girl.”
Emil studied her from her head to her waist, frankly but tenderly. Without amusement. She’d never felt so caressed. Geli found herself thinking how her uncle’s stare could be a persecution, a mystery, a contest he always won.
“We’ll start with your hair. Wild and free, like a lion’s mane.”
She involuntarily put her hand to it. “And you like that?”
“Certainly.”
“Just checking.”
Emil squinted. “And your eyes. You’re right. They do rhyme.”
“They used to roll around like marbles, but then I got my diploma.”
“I have bad teeth. No money for dentists. But yours are beautiful.”
“Thank you.”
“White. Even. Everything fits together so nice. And that smile! Radiant! We could turn out all the lights and still read.”
“Well, maybe not you.”
>
“It’s true. Reading I don’t like much.”
“You’re lucky you’re a man,” she said. “You can just sit there and look pretty.”
“I haven’t finished worshiping you.”
“Sorry.”
Emil touched his own mouth as he looked at hers. “I’m thinking of those lips, so soft and pink and feminine—”
She smiled. “But this is too much, Herr Maurice!” She felt her flushed cheeks with her palms. “My face is getting so hot!”
“Eyes follow you when you walk by. Men and women. Have you seen that? The admiration?”
She shook her head.
“Shall I quit?”
“Yes. Enough. I’m dizzy.”
Emil’s stare fell to her chest, and he smiled. “But there’s so much more to describe!”
She blushed and crossed her forearms over her sweater. “And now we really can stop with the compliments, Herr Maurice.”
Emil was quiet for a minute. “Would he mind it if we saw each other?”
She tried not to seem as thrilled and breathless as she was. “Uncle Adolf? Why?”
“Haven’t you seen how he looks at you?”
“But he’s my uncle. And nineteen years older.” Ask, she thought.
“Would you like to go out with me tonight?”
She hesitated, then sighed, “Oh, I suppose so.”
Emil took her to the cinema and a government-financed Kulturfilm called Ways to Health and Beauty, a feature-length documentary urging the “regeneration of the human race” through calisthenics, dancing, “hygienic gymnastics,” and wrestling—a subject that might not have filled the theater had it not been for the fact that for much of the film the oiled actors and actresses were stark naked. Emil smirked at Geli’s shock, and she hit his shoulder. “You knew, didn’t you,” she said, but Emil just smiled and watched, pressing his forearm and knee against hers.
Walking to the Hofbräuhaus afterward, Emil said, “Don’t tell Uncle Adolf.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Has he talked to you about the flame of life and the sin of iniquity yet?”
“No.”
Emil smiled. “He will.”
At the Hofbräuhaus a waitress in a Tyrolean dirndl put gray porcelain steins of foaming Hofbräu in front of them, and Emil told Geli what it had been like chasing around Berlin in the old days. “We were all poor, but Hitler found party financing in Switzerland; just a few hundred francs, but a fortune with the exchange rate then, and we took it with us. We were in a cabaret and I was scouting for girls to join us at our table—that was my job as his driver—when a fellow introduced himself as a judge and told me he knew of a far more interesting nightspot. We took the underground with him and found ourselves in his home: fine furniture, family photographs of officers on the walls, and his wife serving us a champagne she’d made with spirits and lemonade. And then the judge brings out his two daughters, maybe fifteen and sixteen years old, and Hitler about faints because they’re naked. No clothes on at all, and they’re squirming around in front of us in some kind of Egyptian dance, and the judge is waiting for us to make him an offer. Well, Hitler jumps up and starts shouting that this was what he was going to change, this was how Germany was being destroyed by the Communists and the Weimar Republic and so on, a twenty-minute version of his speech. And pretty soon the whole family is weeping and wanting to join the party, and when we go out the judge insists we take his gift of Havana cigars. But this was Berlin in 1922 and the cigars turned out to be cabbage leaves soaked in nicotine.”
“And why are you telling me this?”
Emil blushed. “I’m not betraying him, if that’s what you’re thinking.” The horns of a band began blaring so loudly in the festival hall that Emil was forced to hunker forward to be heard. “We used to go watch bare-breasted girls in boxing matches. Hitler was thrilled. And that’s when I put it together. He likes to look, but won’t touch. Women and sex, they frighten him, I think, and so he’s standoffish, he seems a prude, a perpetual bachelor. At that judge’s house, with those naked girls, at first I was thinking how high-minded and moral he was, but then I saw that he was just squeamish.”
“And if he hadn’t been there, what would you have done?”
Emil smiled. “Oh, well; who knows?”
She fixed a cool stare on him. “That’s why I asked.”
“Watch? Yes. Offer money for more? Unlikely.”
“Do you always do what he says?”
“Sure. Naturally.”
“Why?”
Emil seemed honestly puzzled, then he grinned at her for a minute as if waiting for some telltale hint that she was joking. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t do what he says?”
She felt a guilty twinge saying it, as though it were a lie, but she insisted, “No. I do as I please.”
Emil considered her as if she were rebellion and will-of-its-own and whatever else it was he’d subtracted from his life. And finally he said, “Well, maybe that’s what he wants, then.”
They were in the parlor of the Pension Klein. The house lightly snored in the silence, and the flakes from the first snowfall of winter softly ticked against the windows. Chewing gum was the latest fad from America, and Emil gave her a stick of Wrigley’s Spearmint. Quoting the billboard ads, she said, “Pleasant and refreshing.”
Emil thought hard and remembered the other line, “The aroma lingers.”
She patted his knee to praise him.
Emil inched closer on the sofa and asked, “May I kiss you?”
And Geli said, “Yes, please.”
At first they didn’t tell Hitler they were seeing each other, but for a selfish, cold, and insensitive man he was fairly intuitive, and within a few days he seemed to have noticed a new significance in their glances, the way she would stay in the car just a little longer than necessary, as if Emil were her air, how she seemed to find her harbor not far from him when they were in a room. And so he started talking about the Nazi hierarchy and all the bachelors in it. “We need wives,” he told Emil, “families.” And as Emil drove and Hitler wore his leather flying cap in the front seat, he’d embarrass his niece by mentioning unmarried women whom Emil ought to consider. Fräulein Christa Schröder? A beauty. Or who was that contralto at the Cuvilliés Theater? Fräulein Marika Kleist? And what about that girl at the Carlton Tea Room? Fräulein Meiser, wasn’t it? Leni Meissner? Which?
“Leni Meiser, I think,” Emil said.
“And?”
Emil found them all wanting.
Hitler sighed in frustration. He turned to his niece, in the backseat. “Any ideas, Geli?” he asked.
“Well, it’s hard with him so ugly.”
“We’ll just keep looking,” Hitler said. “Surely there’s somebody you’d like, Herr Maurice. Somebody to have little Aryans with? We’ll go to city hall for the wedding. We’ll get Franz Gürtner to officiate. And we’ll all get to be such good friends. We’ll have spaghetti together at your house every night.”
Emil smiled. “She can’t cook, my leader. Women I like can’t cook.”
“But my Angelika, for instance! She cooks, she cleans, she sews her own clothes! And beautiful, too! Why not find a wife just like her?”
Emil found Geli in the rearview mirror. Geli gazed out the window.
Hitler folded up his itinerary and held his hands in his lap as he said, “I myself have overcome any need for women. But I find nothing more sacred than the flame of life awakened by holy love. We must remember, though, that the flame only burns when lit by a man and a woman who have kept themselves pure in body and soul. And when their love is magnified by the presence of children, the sins of iniquity that have destroyed our nation fairly scream out in their doom.”
“And the sins of iniquity would be?” Geli asked.
“Oh, that you would never learn,” Hitler said.
With nothing being mentioned, Emil and Geli began holding hands around Hitler’s friends, and one night took the risk of h
ugging as they strolled to his Stammtisch in the Café Heck after the cinema. Rudolf and Ilse Hess were there with Putzi and Helene Hanfstaengl and Heinrich Hoffmann and a photographer’s model named Kristina. She was wearing a swastika pin. The gentlemen were all in white ties and tails, and the ladies in sheath dresses and opera tiaras. And the party turned and beamed at Emil and Geli as if they were children shocked awake by hearty toasts from the dining room.
Winter was finally there in earnest. Geli’s cheeks were as wind-chilled as if she’d been skiing, and she’d gone without gloves so she could feel Emil’s hands in hers. Hitler formally stood up, kissed her knuckles, and was startled. “But your fingers are cold as silverware, Geli!”
“I feel warm,” she said.
“I’ll bet you do,” said Ilse Hess, and she watched with fascination as Emil went to the Herrens.
“What film did you see, Fräulein Raubal?” Putzi Hanfstaengl asked.
“Metropolis.”
Rudolf Hess tilted toward the führer to inform him. “About the alliance between labor and capital,” he said.
“And what Jew directed that?” Hitler asked.
Heinrich Hoffmann said, “Not a Jew. Fritz Lang. A first-rate director.”
“You liked it?” Hitler asked his niece.
“Oh yes. It was stunning.”
“Whose metropolis was it?”
She shrugged. “It’s imaginary, I think.”
With certainty, Heinrich Hoffmann said, “It’s Philadelphia.”
White-jacketed waiters brought over two highly ornamented dining chairs, and Hitler ordered Emil’s to be situated near his own, and his niece’s inserted farther away, between Ilse Hess and Helene Hanfstaengl so “the women can talk about hairdressers and clothes and romantic novels.”
“Oh do sit,” Putzi’s American wife said as she held out the chair to Geli. And then she added in English, “And fill us in on your love life.”