by Jane Thynne
I can hardly believe I’ve been here for so long without writing to you. I have absolutely no excuse except that life is hectic. There are nonstop teas and dinners and receptions on account of the Olympic Games, and dear Ernst, as you know, adores socializing, so we’re out every night. We scarcely pause for breath and by the end of the evening I’m practically comatose. I have to make up for it in the daytime with long, solitary tramps around the city in which I don’t need to speak to another soul.
You’d be amazed how clean everything is. No one could accuse Berlin of being beautiful, but it puts London to shame—in fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some poor storm troopers were deputed to scrub the streets with toothbrushes every night, because the cobbles simply gleam and the streets are spotless! Every building is decked out with banners and flags, but please don’t listen to all that alarmist talk about the political situation—the only alarming thing I’ve seen is the fashion. The women are distinctly frumpy—shades of Aunt Alice—and all the girls dye their hair a frightful Schwarzkopf blond.
It’s hilarious how fervently everyone salutes. I almost died laughing when a fat man on a bicycle rode past Hitler’s Chancellery and fell off from trying to heil and steer at the same time.
And I’ve made my first friend. Her name is Martha Dodd, she’s the daughter of the American ambassador, and we’ve been horse riding together. Imagine me cantering through the Tiergarten on a sixteen-hand flea-bitten gray, the wind in my hair and the sand flying up from the path. It’s heaven. I can’t wait for you to meet Martha, but even more I can’t wait to see you.
Your impatient sister,
Irene
P.S. In case you were wondering, my verdict on marriage so far is that I thoroughly recommend it.
So this was marriage.
A house full of stolid, heavy furniture in blood-colored wood. Marble pillars and blue Delft tiles in the hall and petrified Dresden shepherdesses chivvying frozen sheep along the mantelpiece. Gigantic chests of drawers, sideboards of fretted wood, and glass-doored dressers where Meissen china that would never be used was stacked away. Snowfalls of linen in the armoire. Dull still lifes of fruit in colossal frames. Wardrobes the size of a horse. Everything was oversize, like the contents of a giant’s castle. Even the roses were fat, bulging buds of petals, whisked away as soon as they threatened to wither or fall. And everything, down to the last teacup or hand towel, was monogrammed with an italic W. All stamped or inked or marked with the Weissmuller name.
The Villa Weissmuller was among many large private houses that ran along the shores of the Wannsee, one of the necklace of shimmering lakes situated to the southwest of the city. A terraced patio lay beyond the drawing room, surrounded by a balustrade, with chairs for sitting out and contemplating the view. Because the view was the whole point of it. The lake was a sparkling expanse, rippling with light, so inviting you could almost feel the bracing freshness of diving in from the private jetty. In the distance the water turned pewter gray as it merged with the fringes of the Grunewald, the ancient forest where Berliners liked to hike and hunt for mushrooms.
At the weekend the Wannsee was crisscrossed by vessels of all kinds—yachts, canoes, dinghies, and rowing boats—and its sandy shores studded with young men and women in bathing costumes sunning themselves. The girls were uniformly blond, with skin the color of golden sandstone, and the men muscled and tan. Ernst’s friends all sported the same burnished glow, so different from the studious pallor of the men Irene knew back in England.
That wasn’t the only difference. Her husband’s friends were just as confident and self-assured as the men at home, but they had a belligerence about them, and all the talk of Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven that had seemed so entrancing back in London had given way to aggrieved discussions of the many wrongs that had been dealt their nation by the reviled Treaty of Versailles. When Irene met Ernst the previous year, he had never seemed remotely concerned with politics; it was Art they talked about. But now she discovered that he had joined the Nazi Party back in 1933 “for professional reasons” and was endlessly fascinated by the comings and goings of the senior men. It was vital to move in the right circles, he reminded her, and whatever one thought of the new regime, they were admirably business minded and utterly focused on putting Germany first.
Whenever they met at lunch parties or cocktails, at the exclusive Wannsee golf club or smart city nightclubs, the favorite topic of conversation among Ernst’s friends was Rasse—race. The word rose like braille from every conversation, in particular concerning the Jews and the problems they posed. The previous year, Irene learned, there had been a series of laws passed limiting the existence of Jews in German life, and imposing all kinds of bans. Jews could not marry gentiles, or teach in schools. They couldn’t even call themselves citizens, and must have the names Israel or Sara stamped on their papers so their origin could be more easily identified. Legally they could still work for Aryan families, but that hadn’t stopped Ernst letting go their Jewish maid, Edith, and his own secretary, Lili, after six years of service.
Lili was a slim, dark-eyed woman who had come to the house daily to deal with correspondence. Though she was the same age as Irene, it was Cordelia she resembled more, with her watchful gaze and sharp intelligence, and somehow this similarity created an easy intimacy between the two women. Irene would linger in the study, distracting Lili from her work with idle chat. Lili lived with her younger brother, Oskar, whose antics she would relate at the slightest encouragement. Oskar was an artistic genius, Lili claimed, and she proved it with a gift—a ravishing portrait of a girl poised at the top of a flight of stairs, her lovely face abstracted, her naked flesh gleaming like beeswax. Irene was captivated, but although Ernst admired the painting, he relegated it immediately to one of the back bedrooms on account of the nudity. Not everyone, he pointed out, was as broad-minded as himself.
One Saturday, two weeks after Lili’s departure, Irene tried questioning him.
“Why did Lili need to go? Did she suddenly become unable to do the job? It isn’t against the law to employ Jewish secretaries, is it? And frankly, why shouldn’t Jews be anything they like?”
Ernst paused. They were getting dressed for a lunch in Potsdam. There would be food on the terrace, then tennis, and boating on the lake. Irene was sitting at her dressing table, still in her cream silk negligee, brushing her hair with the silver-backed brush and comb that had been a wedding present from her new in-laws. Ernst himself had a separate dressing room with an adjoining bathroom as sterile as an operating theater, all marble tiles and bottles of cologne ranked symmetrically in order of size. At that moment he was standing in his underpants before the wardrobe, paying forensic attention to a pile of shirts stacked identically, like engine parts on a production line.
“That’s just how it is here, my darling. If you’re going to fit in, you’ll need to accept the way Germans do things. The laws are decided by politicians, and we like to respect the law.”
“But laws are only what people decide they should be.”
Ernst had his back to her, but in the dressing room mirror she saw him frown with irritation.
“You must admit there’s such a thing as a bad law,” she insisted.
“Within reason.”
He hated this kind of talk, she knew. He might have been a law professor, but that didn’t mean he wanted seminars at home.
“What about half Jews, or quarter Jews? Or Jews who fought in the war?”
“These are all distinctions to be considered by civil servants and ministers.”
How dismissive he sounded. As if Jews were no different from nuts and bolts and screws, to be sorted and categorized.
“And what if a Jew is married to an Aryan? What then?”
“All that is covered by a legal code.”
“Legal codes! There are legal codes for everything here! I read in the paper yo
u can’t even spell out names using D for David on the telephone, because the Post Ministry has decided that David is a Jewish name.”
Abandoning his search for a shirt, Ernst turned, drew Irene into his arms, and brought his face down close to hers. She caught a snatch of laundry starch and his favorite Harry Lehmann cologne, Russische—a bracing mix of wood, leather, and steel that smelled like a marching band.
“Darling. If I wanted to engage in legal debates, I’d have married one of my law students. Frankly, it’s not Lili’s job I care about but yours.”
“I don’t have a job.”
“You do. You’re my wife.”
He twirled a lock of her hair onto his finger like a ring. His eyes—those teasing eyes that had lured her from the moment she met him—creased suggestively and she felt herself weaken.
“It’s a job that you happen to be extremely good at.”
He pressed his body hard against hers.
“And I have no doubt you’ll get even better with practice. In fact, perhaps…”
He peeled the shoulder strap from her negligee. Even now, Irene was still getting used to the feel of a man’s bare flesh against her own, and the sight of Ernst’s nakedness, as well as the scratch of his mustache against her face, prompted a blind rush of physical desire that obliterated all the questions in her mind.
Their honeymoon had been blissful—a week on the island of Rügen, where light-dazzled sand dunes stretched white as a lunar landscape and the air was scented by pine trees and wildflowers. Every morning when they came down to breakfast Irene studied her new husband across the poppy seed rolls and marveled afresh at his good looks. His profile, with its aquiline nose, firm jaw, and high brow, could have been chiseled on a coin. He might have been Prince Albert, and herself a young Victoria. Would their children inherit Ernst’s stern features and absolute self-assurance? And if they did, might she be a little intimidated by them? Better that they receive her own conciliatory nature, or Cordelia’s impetuous exuberance.
Children could wait, though. Life was glorious with just the two of them. Sex was better than she had ever imagined; Ernst had the strength and stamina of a bull, and afterward he would hold her face between his hands with a softness that seared her. As they threaded their way each morning through the linen-draped breakfast tables, Irene knew the other guests were mentally undressing the honeymooners, imagining their lovemaking, and she blushed, which must have only confirmed it.
Once they returned to Berlin, however, these precious moments of intimacy grew scarce. Old Herr Weissmuller was bedeviled by gout and urged Ernst to resign his position as law lecturer in favor of full involvement in the family company, so her husband spent most of his waking hours, even at the weekend, on business. There was no choice. The Weissmuller steelworks were thriving and the associated engineering factory in Spandau working to full capacity. Contracts and orders and production numbers peppered his conversation, but whenever Irene asked him to explain the detail of his work—the steel production, the products they made—Ernst treated her interest with amusement.
“Nothing exciting, I assure you, Liebling. Machine parts. The cogs and wheels that keep German industry running. I’ll take you into the factory someday so you can see.”
“I’d like that.”
Yet he never followed up on the promise. Each morning he would depart while Irene was still sipping tea in bed, and she was left with the prospect of an entire day to amuse herself.
She wasn’t lonely exactly. The library, a cozy room walled with red damask and floor-to-ceiling mahogany shelves full of leather-bound books, contained plenty of English novels, and she could happily curl up in an armchair and lose herself for an hour. She adored the garden, and sketched out plans for a rose walk identical to the one at Birnham Park, with Gloire de Dijon roses, foxgloves, lupines, and delphiniums to remind her of England.
And she still had her art. Even if that exhibition of hers, and its precious write-up by Anthony Blunt in The Spectator, seemed an age ago.
Miss Capel, I suspect, has the capacity to surprise us.
Somehow, she doubted that now. Yet she still took her easel out to the veranda to paint the lake in all weathers—in the morning, when the sun pearled the edges of the clouds; and at midday as a yellow wash of light shimmered over the water; then in the evening, when the forest stood hunched and dormant like a sleeping animal and the lake’s surface turned from mauve to iodine. This was what she loved about art—every time you looked you saw something new. Even when the lake was at its deepest, most impenetrable black you could wrench some feeling from its charcoal depths. You could paint the same scene a hundred times, and each one would reveal a fresh perspective.
Like Monet’s water lilies, she hoped, laughing a little at her ambition.
Though Ernst’s father had retired to the family estate at Weimar, the elder Frau Weissmuller, her new mother-in-law, provided regular company in the form of Kaffeeklatsch, the ceremony of coffee and cake, whose most significant ingredient was gossip, though gossip was a misleadingly exciting description for the exhaustive rundown of the Weissmuller aunts, uncles, and cousins to which Irene was treated.
Her mother-in-law always brought a gift too—a cookery book called Erprobte Rezepte, Reliable Recipes, containing a hundred different ways with pork and cabbage. Or The National Socialist Woman at Home, a tome that paid a lot of attention to training servants, and, on better days, a bar of Trumpf chocolate, or one of her women’s magazines.
One morning as they were served coffee and aniseed biscuits on the veranda by Herta, the new Aryan maid, a squat widow with rings of sweat on her blouse, Frau Weissmuller pulled out the family Stammbuch. It was a hardcover volume depicting all Weissmuller births and marriages for several generations, stamped by a registrar and complete with a list of acceptable German names—Adolf, Ava, Axel, Hans, Hedwig, Horst. Irene flipped politely through until her mother-in-law’s crabbed finger indicated a decoratively patterned family tree and Irene saw her own name twined with Ernst’s already transformed into a branch, ready to burst forth and fruit.
She felt a shiver of apprehension, but said nothing.
Irene was beginning to learn how important it was to keep her emotions private here. Fortunately, concealing her thoughts behind an impassive façade had never been hard for her, unlike Cordelia. Everything had to be black and white to her sister. Dee would probably charge around Berlin telling everyone exactly what she thought of the Nazis’ rules and regulations.
Plainly no one in Germany was able to do that.
* * *
—
THE GERMAN REICH IS now a totalitarian state. National-Socialism, developed in bitter conflict with Marxism, has eliminated fruitless Parliamentarianism.
Irene’s Baedeker’s Guide to Germany, a fat red handbook crammed with maps and timetables that charted to the last yard the distances between museums and art galleries for intrepid tourists, laid out with similar precision the state of the political scene. And as if any visitor held on to lingering doubts, a stroll around the city confirmed it.
The Olympic Games had thrown Berlin into a state of medieval pageantry. On Pariser Platz, the flags of forty-nine nations were illuminated on huge masts and the Schloss was decorated with fifty-foot-high banners, billowing and shrinking in the breeze. Eagles with twisted heads and hooked beaks clawed the imposing frontage of government buildings.
The air was full of metal. Guns and steel-tipped boots, tramlines and S-Bahn elevations and ever-present brass bands. At Potsdamer Platz low-slung Mercedes and Opels, intercut with cream yellow trams, buzzed around the five-way traffic light like bees around a hive. Every so often an official motorcade passed, provoking a sea of raised right arms like corn bent before the wind. The salutes didn’t end there—shopkeepers saluted, theater audiences saluted, even children stuck out their arms as they toted small trays of pins and lap
el badges for the Nazi charity, the Winterhilfswerk.
One lunchtime, on a trip in the city’s glitziest shopping street, the Kurfürstendamm, Irene wandered past the glass car showrooms down to Olivaer Platz, a tree-shaded square prettily planted with geraniums, where two workmen were removing notices that had been fastened to some railings and stacking them in the back of a truck. She was still getting used to the ornate and prickly Gothic script, and had to peer closer to decipher what the signs said.
JEWS ARE NOT PERMITTED IN THIS PARK.
Even on a sunny day, it was enough to cloud her mood.
She entered and found a bench beside a pretzel trolley, its salty contents issuing savory steam into the air. Close by, another young woman, dressed in a smartly cut suit and blouse with a tie at the neck, sat reading a novel, the sun blazing on her sleek auburn hair. Guessing they were around the same age, Irene wondered, idly, what the other woman might be. A secretary? A Hausfrau? She closed her eyes, feeling the warmth on her throat and the inevitable flurry of sparrows pecking around her feet. She longed for a cigarette, but there were strict rules here about when and how often women could smoke. Never, ideally, but certainly not in public.
Digging out a magazine—a copy of The National Socialist Frauen-Warte donated by her mother-in-law—she flicked idly through a feature about the senior figures of the Reich. There were a few she didn’t know—a craggy, narrow-faced man with eyes too close together and a fat, florid creature with a cruel expression—but most were instantly recognizable; Hitler, with his inky slanting hair and awkward isosceles nose, and lofty Rudolf Hess, the Führer’s deputy, with a wide-eyed glare, like a lighthouse in uniform. She had to suppress a giggle. Why must politicians be so unattractive? They looked like the cast of a comic opera. Thank God Ernst was not in politics.
Just then a drift of military music came down the street, accompanied by the stirring sound of young male voices.
Now let our flags fly in the great dawn
