The Fox in the Attic

  “Putzi”—or Dr. Ernst Hanfstaengl, to give him his proper title—as a half-American had taken no part in the war. Before it broke out he had been a student at Harvard and later he had married a German-American girl in New York. Here in peacetime Germany, naturally this gifted and musical German-American German couple moved in circles more intelligent and civilized than any their park-bench protégé had previously known: yet they didn’t seem to see Hitler at all like the nasty caricature Dr. Reinhold and his cronies elected to see. True, when they tried to introduce into those circles of the wealthier Munich intelligentzia this tiresome but vital, this incredibly naïf yet incredibly gifted and indeed sometimes entrancing performing pet of theirs, then things tended to happen which embarrassed and galled Hitler, so that Hitler was never really at ease there and retaliated with an assumed contempt. But on musical weekends here at Uffing with Putzi and Helene themselves (alone or with only the clammy gloomy young Rosenberg for a foil) he could always entirely uncurl. He could be then all soul and wit: and how they responded! Baby Egon in particular adored his “Funny Uncle Dolf”: for Hitler could always be marvelous with children (which seems to be a common corollary of an addiction to chastity, even so secret and compulsive and perverse a chastity as his).

  The mother’s pretty farm was ten minutes out in the country, beyond the sawmill and the river. But the young couple’s was a neat and homely little house close to the maypole and the church: it was plumb in the middle of the village, though backing onto fields: squarish, and unlike its neighbors built of stone. Moreover with some vague premonition of trouble Putzi had surrounded his pocket-size property with a five-foot stone wall as if to turn it into a dwarves’ castle; and Hitler had only the happiest memories of this friendly little fort.

  Helene had been alone at this “villa” except for her two-year-old child and the maids when Hitler had himself secretly dumped there, arriving on foot, through the fields, after dark, late that Black Friday evening, muddy and hatless and his shoulder queerly drooping and with a man each side of him holding him on his feet. “Also, doch!” she greeted him: for Helene herself had been in Munich that very morning yet had heard nothing there of that disastrous march, and only after her return had heard (and till now, disbelieved) the village rumors.

  Helene learned little factual now, except what was to be gleaned from incoherent ramblings about the Residenzstrasse and the bullets and the blood. “—But Putzi ... ?” she asked him. Putzi was all right, Hitler assured her with unconvincing conviction. Ludendorff was dead, though: the credulous old fool who had trusted the “honorable” von Lossow! You should never trust generals: with his own eyes (he said) he had seen Ludendorff killed ...

  But the Hitler must be mad (thought Helene) to have come here! This house was bound to be searched (yes, and the nearby farm as well) even if only for Putzi! Once the police came meaning business Putzi’s pitiful stone wall would hardly keep them out—it was only an added advertisement of mystery. Perhaps the Bechsteins would help? Ah, but it would be crazy to use the phone ... All the same, Herr Hitler had to be got away again somehow and smuggled into Austria (yes, why on earth hadn’t he already crossed into Austria long ago?).

  Now, though, the man looked half fainting: for the moment the one thing he needed above all else was a bed. So she told his two friends to take him away upstairs.

  Hitler went up with them docilely, in a miserable daze, and they took him to the big attic he knew so well of old—all full of Putzi’s books. But not to bed! For once they had got him alone up there they stretched him out on the floor and knelt on him. One was a doctor, and they wrestled again and again with that dislocated shoulder to get it back into joint. They had no anesthetics and for a long time even downstairs and with the doors shut Helene could hear him: while the frightened baby woke and wailed.

  But it was all too inflamed by now to discover that as well as the dislocation the collarbone was broken; and so, for all the doctor’s skill, they failed—and finally they gave it up and left him.

  Hitler was left, all among Putzi’s books: but he was much too distraught to read. He was panting, and for a moment he leaned against an incongruous open flour-barrel which these queer Hanfstaengls kept too in this attic-bedroom study; but then he saw the bed, and the bed had Putzi’s English travelingrug folded on it. So Hitler rolled himself in the rug as tight as a cocoon to ease the pain, and lay there in the corner with his face to the wall.

  Hitler had been already half-delirious with pain and frustration when he arrived: now he was growing more feverish still. The torn and twisted sinews were shrinking, the broken bone grated, and pain was piled on pain. If only Putzi had been there to play Wagner to him, as David’s harp soothed Saul! It was faithless of Putzi to absent himself now just when he was needed; and mentally Hitler chalked a bad mark against him.

  Hitler was alone, in the dark, and could not hope to sleep. His mind was wandering. From below came the interminable rise and fall of voices like the sound of rain (for the doctor in his excitement was sitting up to tell Helene his whole life-story). It sounded like rain ... or like a river ... like the Danube flooding its banks in the spring rising, gurgling into cellars, murmuring, menacing, still rising. The sounds from downstairs woke in Hitler his obsessional fear of water, but he could not escape for the barrage of perpetual pain whined low overhead like the English shells and pinned him down.

  So, after an immeasurable time without sleep, daylight had at last come again: the same Saturday daylight that at Lorienburg had found Lies kneeling on the cold stairs. For Hitler it began a Saturday of conferences and alarms and futile planning. Even at this stage of history Hitler had already developed his famous technique of that kind of “leadership” which divines uncannily what most of the conference wants and propounds that as the Leader’s own inexorable will: thus today he presently heard himself propounding that the Bechsteins must instantly send their closed car to drive him into Austria (he could never go to Austria, of course, or he’d have fled there in the first place like those others. But time enough to cope with that when the car did come: meanwhile, conferences and aircastle planning at least helped to hold captive his ballooning fevered mind).

  Noon: at Lorienburg the knightly duel among the feathers, and at Uffing the unquiet doctor starting for Munich to fetch a confrère. Hitler himself had already dispatched the other man to contact the Bechsteins: so this left Hitler alone with Helene (and the maids of course, and the child). Hitler wanted to keep her always with him, talking: but she dared not leave for long the equally excited child: twice she had just caught little Egon outside trying to climb the wall, for he wanted to shout to the whole world the good news that Uncle Dolf had arrived.

  Dusk again. Why had the Bechstein car not come yet? Hitler had forgotten by now it could do no good if it did come: he had sent for it and so it MUST come.

  Dusk again, and the baby at last safe in bed. Presently a car did come but still this wasn’t from the Bechsteins: it was only the two medicos from Munich (so once more two angels wrestled with their wretched Jacob, and once more in vain). Finally the doctor swathed Hitler as he was in bandages like swaddling-bands, and the car took them both off again (for good, this time).

  Thus began Hitler’s second night at Uffing. He was again alone. Outside in the darkness and out of due time a village cock crowed. Then came the knocking ... or was it only in a dream that there was a strange man trying to get in, saying he had a message from Ludendorff “for your visitor here”? But Ludendorff was dead ... a messenger from the shades, then—or a Judas? Helene “had no visitor,” and sent the man away.

  Midnight, and still no Bechstein car had come; but so far, neither had the police.

  Suddenly Hitler started out of a half-doze, for a calm Sibylline “voice” was ringing in his ears. It had only spoken six words and those as if the whole thing was ancient history, over and done with. But what it had said was, “In the end he shot himself.”

  It was only a dream, of cour
se.

  10

  With Sunday’s daylight the man who had knocked was back again. Hitler found he knew him by sight so this time he was let in; but he had suspiciously little to say (except that Ludendorff was certainly alive), and soon went off again no one knew whither. Why worry, though, where the man went or what he told? For after questioning him Hitler was overwhelmed with such a nausea of fatigue he went back to his bed behind the barrel: he must, must get some sleep.

  Ever since the “March” Hitler had never quite slept: yet he was never quite awake, and this second day at Uffing found it difficult to speak coherently or even think. He must rest: and yet it was even worse alone, more difficult to keep hold. Now, as he lay there on his side sleepless and poring over the past, even his own legs would no longer obey him: they kept trying to run of their own volition like a dreaming dog’s. Indeed his whole nervous system seemed to be dissevering itself from central control; that superb instrument he had been used to playing on at will now twanged suddenly and discordantly like a concert-piano when a cat jumps on the keys. He couldn’t stay long in one position. He couldn’t keep his eyes either open or shut, and whenever his eyes opened they saw books leaning over him in their cases. Hey presto before his very eyes those books had started exchanging titles like jugglers throwing balls to each other! They were doing this to distract his attention: once they managed that they were planning to fall on him, leaning cases and all.

  It was at this moment that suddenly the bells started ringing: the Sunday bells of Uffing, beating on his ears with their frightful jarring tintinnabulation. Whereon somebody must have started pulling a clapper in Hitler’s own head too, for his own head started chiming with the bells of Uffing. His head was rocking with the weight of its own terrible tolling.

  Flinging back the blanket Hitler gazed desperately round. His trusty whip stood just out of reach, but how he longed to hear again instead of those clanging bells the whirr of its clean singing thong of rhinoceros-hide—the whirring, and the crack! If he had given those three traitors a taste of it instead of letting them through his fingers he’d have been in Berlin by now—yes, in BERLIN!

  “Woe to the bloody city! It is all full of lies and robbery ... the noise of a whip ... ” (To think that this very hour he should have been riding triumphant through Berlin!) “... the noise of a whip, and the noise of the rattling of the wheels, and of the prancing horses, and of the jumping chariots ...” (In Berlin, scourging the money-lenders from the temple! A city in flames!) “There is a multitude of the slain, and a great number of carcases; there is none end of their corpses, they stumble upon their corpses ...”

  Scourging the hollow barons ... scourging the puking communists ... scourging the Lesbians and the nancy-boys with that rhinoceros-thong!

  But that barrel—it was changing shape: now tall now short, now fat now lean ... erect, and swelling ... and out of the swelling barrel a remembered figure was rising—smooth, and gross, and swaying and nodding like a tree. It was a man’s figure from his own penurious teen-age in Vienna: it was that smooth-faced beast at the Hotel Kummer, bribing the bright-eyed hard-up boy with cream puffs, promising him all the pastries he could eat and daring to make passes at him, at Adolfus Hitler!

  Then under the hammering of the bells the figure collapsed—suddenly as it had risen.

  Scourging the whores, the Jews ... scourging the little flash jew-girls till they screamed ...

  Now the dark corners of the room were filling with soft naked legs: those young Viennese harlots sitting half-naked in the lighted windows all along the Spittelberggasse (between the dark windows where “it” was already being done). For once upon a time the young Hitler used to go there, to the Spittelberggasse: to ... just to look at them. To harden his will; for except by such tests as these how can a lad with the hair new on him be assured that his will is strong? The boy would stare, and walk on a few yards; then come back as “strong” as ever—back to the most attractive and most nearly naked and stare her out again, pop-eyed.

  He called it “the Flame of Life,” that holy flame of sex in the center of a man; and he knew that all his whole life his “Flame” had to be kept burning without fuel for at the first real touch of human, female fuel it must turn smoky, fill his whole Vessel with soot. This was Destiny’s revealed dictate: if ever Hitler did “it” the unique Power would go out of him, like Samson and his hair. No, at most if the adult male flesh itched intolerably it might be deviously relieved.

  After all, how could that monistic “I” of Hitler’s ever without forfeit succumb to the entire act of sex, the whole essence of which is recognition of one “Other”? Without damage I mean to his fixed conviction that he was the universe’s unique sentient center, the sole authentic incarnate Will it contained or had ever contained? Because this of course was the rationale of his supernal inner “Power”: Hitler existed alone. “I am, none else beside me.” The universe contained no other persons than him, only things; and thus for him the whole gamut of the “personal” pronouns lacked wholly its normal emotional content. This left Hitler’s designing and creating motions enormous and without curb: it was only natural for this architect to turn also politician for he saw no real distinction in the new things to be handled: these “men” were merely him-mimicking “things,” in the same category as other tools and stones. All tools have handles—this sort was fitted with ears. And it is nonsensical to love or hate or pity (or tell the truth to) stones.

  Hitler’s then was that rare diseased state of the personality, an ego virtually without penumbra: rare and diseased, that is, when abnormally such an ego survives in an otherwise mature adult intelligence clinically sane (for in the new-born doubtless it is a beginning normal enough and even surviving into the young child). Hitler’s adult “I” had developed thus—into a larger but still undifferentiated structure, as a malignant growth does.

  In Mitzi—as could perhaps happen to you or me—with the shock of her crisis the central “I” had become dislodged: it had dwindled to a cloudlet no bigger than a man’s hand beneath the whole zenith of God. But in this suffering man always and unalterably his “I” must blacken the whole vault from pole to pole.

  The tortured, demented creature tossed on his bed ...

  “Rienzi-night,” that night on the Freinberg over Linz after the opera: that surely had been the climactic night of his boyhood for it was then he had first confirmed that lonely omnipotence within him. Impelled to go up there in the darkness into that high place had he not been shown there all earthly kingdoms in a moment of time? And facing there the ancient gospel question had not his whole being been one assenting Yea? Had he not struck the everlasting bargain there on the high mountain under the witnessing November stars? Yet now ... now, when he had seemed to be riding Rienzi-like the crest of the wave, the irresistible wave which with mounting force should have carried him to Berlin, that crest had begun to curl: it had curled and broken and toppled on him, thrusting him down, down in the green thundering water, deep.

  Tossing desperately on his bed, he gasped—he was drowning (what of all things always Hitler most feared). Drowning? Then ... then that suicidal boyhood moment’s teetering long ago on the Danube bridge at Linz ... after all the melancholic boy had leaped that long-ago day, and everything since was dream! Then this noise now was the mighty Danube singing in his dreaming drowning ears.

  In the green watery light surrounding him a dead face was floating towards him upturned: a dead face with his own slightly-bulging eyes in it unclosed: his dead Mother’s face as he had last seen it with unclosed eyes white on the white pillow. Dead, and white, and vacant even of its love for him.

  But now that face was multiplied—it was all around him in the water. So his Mother was this water, these waters drowning him!

  At that he ceased to struggle. He drew up his knees to his chin in the primal attitude and lay there, letting himself drown.

  So Hitler slept at last.

  11

  The ser
geant had hayseed down his sweaty neck and had taken off his cap for a good scratch. What lovely clear cold weather this was! The invisible frost fell on his baldness out of the bright sky like minute pinpricks, and he stood for a moment relishing it before putting his cap on again. The snowy mountains above Garmisch glittered in the evening sun: it was early for really good snow, but how he wished he was off up there now for a Sunday’s skiing! The Ettaler-Mandl above Oberammergau was caught in a particular gleam.

  “No rest for the wicked,” they say, but it’s the wicked rather who allow policemen no rest. They had spent half this lovely Sunday afternoon searching the American lady’s farm: they had probed haystacks, turned over the fodder in the mangers, crawled through apple-lofts, climbed in and out of cornbins, tunneled under woodpiles (which fell in on them), crept under the beds of maidservants (who boxed their ears), ransacked cupboards and tapped walls: and now those damned dogs of theirs had broken into the beehouse and the whole lot were howling. Lord, what a din! All the same, through the open door he could still hear the Lieutenant bawling the old girl out for trying to telephone—the silly old trout.

  When her mother-in-law’s voice was suddenly cut off like that Helene put back the receiver slowly. So this was the end! They had left it too late now.

  Today she couldn’t make Herr Hitler out. At lunch he had seemed better after his rest: he had joked with little Egon, who was much impressed with the figure Funny Uncle cut in the vast old blue bathrobe of Daddy’s he was wrapped in. Then when the baby had gone to rest Hitler had begun to wax furious about the Bechstein car not coming: yet, when she offered to have him whisked over the pass to Austria with the plumber’s motor-bike concealed in the sidecar (transport far less likely to be searched at the frontier than the big Bechstein Limousine), he would have none of it. So she had thought up all sorts of plans for hiding him in the forest, in some wood man’s hut the police would never think of; but he would still have none of it. It was the Bechstein car in style, or nothing.