by Jane Thynne
“There he is.”
Standing in the midst of a group of Luftwaffe officers, Albert had the regulation blonde clamped to his arm. Clara had not seen this one before. She had a hard, calculating face with high arched eyebrows, which gave her an expression of permanent surprise. Or perhaps she was genuinely surprised at being the date of a man like Albert, Clara thought. He was holding forth, slightly drunkenly, on the subject of film production.
“We’re a nation of engineers. Germans are the best engineers in the world. You people are making airplanes, we are making films.”
Another officer, with shaved flaxen hair, guffawed. “Forgive me, Herr Lindemann, but with Goebbels in charge you’re not exactly producing Junkers.”
Udet gave Clara a complicit wink. “Clara, meet Oberst Heinrich von Kleist, Oberst Horst Schilling, and Oberstleutnants Rudolf Fleischer and Hans Schwarzkopf. Heinrich and Horst are test pilots, and Hans and Rudolf work for me in the Technical Division. We often have a refreshing exchange of opinions. Take no notice. It’s nothing serious. Just men’s talk.”
The four officers acknowledged her with nods. They towered over Albert with an air of confidence and authority that was enhanced by their Luftwaffe uniforms.
“Say what you like, but Goebbels is an emotional engineer,” persisted Albert. “Films produce emotions, and Goebbels believes in engineering the right films to produce the right emotions.”
“Poisonous little propaganda runt,” said von Kleist, but under his breath.
“In terms of understanding the value of propaganda, Doktor Goebbels stands head and shoulders above the others,” asserted Albert, his voice slightly slurred.
“Goebbels couldn’t stand head and shoulders above my dick!” announced Schilling to general laughter.
“Wait, gentlemen. I will advance one defense of Doktor Goebbels,” volunteered Fleischer. “He’s made some attempt to sort out the art from the trash. I was down in Munich the other day, and I decided to take a look at that revolting Degenerate Art exhibition. All the rubbish they confiscated from museums.”
“I heard about that,” said Schilling languidly, puffing on a cigar. “Jew art, isn’t it? You can see that kind of thing on the walls of any public lavatory. I don’t understand why it needs a museum.”
“The interest was phenomenal. There were queues stretching down the street.”
“There you are then! The genius of Goebbels!” interceded Udet. “It must be a great exhibition!”
Fleischer eyed him coldly. The way the skin stretched over the Oberstleutnant’s bullet head made Clara think about the skulls at the Berlin Natural History Museum, lined up in rows according to their ethnicity. His eyes were as pale and flat as highly polished steel.
“Goebbels was right to gather it up, but he should have made a bonfire of it, just like he did with the books. Those paintings are really disgusting. They’re rotten, depraved works by human effluent. The message is always the same: Man is bestial. Berlin is a sink of depravity. Germany is poisoned. Everyone is for sale. All that Bolshevik crap.”
“So which artists are appearing in this Degenerate exhibition then?” inquired Clara.
“As Horst says, mostly Jews. Paul Klee, Picasso, Joan Miró, Emil Nolde, Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, Bruno Weiss. I saw him actually, Weiss. Standing there bold as brass, looking at his own filthy artwork.”
Bruno Weiss! The shock went through Clara like a knife. This man had seen her friend Bruno. Alive, in Munich, and recently, too. The surprise caused the glass to tremble in her hand. In an effort not to betray her amazement, Clara kept her eyes fixed rigidly on Fleischer’s bony face.
“In fact,” he continued, “he was lucky I didn’t have him arrested immediately.”
“On what grounds?” asked Schwarzkopf. He was by far the handsomest of the group, with a high aristocratic brow and eyes of hard Aryan blue.
Fleischer shrugged. “Endangering public morality, encouraging disrespect of the National Socialist state. Any fucking grounds you like. The police have a list of those offenses as long as your arm, so they’re bound to be able to find a few to suit a piece of Jewish garbage like Bruno Weiss. As it was, I reported him to the local authorities. He’s likely to find himself answering some questions very soon.”
“And they won’t be questions on the meaning of art,” sneered Schilling.
Schwarzkopf laughed. “More like the kinds of questions where if he gets them right, he’ll be in a camp and if he gets them wrong, he’ll be wearing a wooden overcoat.”
“What were you doing there, Fleischer?” teased Udet. “Do you have a taste for that kind of thing yourself? Decadent art?”
“I was visiting family,” answered the Oberstleutnant stiffly.
“Well, I come from Munich too. Perhaps I should drop in on my next visit.”
Udet grinned at Clara, but she scarcely noticed. She was still struggling to conceal her astonishment. So Bruno was in Munich. He wasn’t in a camp, or dead, because this man had seen him standing in front of his own artwork. Such a notion was incredible. It would be rash, bold, and recklessly ill-advised. And exactly the kind of thing Bruno would do.
In her torrent of emotion it was hard to focus on the fact that Udet was attempting to introduce another officer.
“And this, Clara dear, is my right-hand man. Oberst Arno Strauss. Arno, you must meet my new wife. She has eyes you could drown in, don’t you think?”
While Udet’s face bore an alcoholic flush and there could only be room for a few more cocktails inside him, Oberst Arno Strauss was manifestly sober. He was ramrod straight, with an athletic frame and tightly cropped dark hair. In profile, his hawkish nose and lean cheek suggested a chiseled perfection. But when he turned his head, Clara had to repress a gasp. The whole left side of his face was crumpled, as though it had once melted, with a long scar that ripped and puckered the flesh from the side of his eye along the cheekbone to the corner of his mouth, drawing down the eye and raising the skin of his cheek in a silvery welt. As a result of this disfigurement, it was hard to tell whether the curl of his lip was expressive or accidental. Perhaps it was both.
Strauss clicked his heels gallantly, bowed, and kissed her hand. “So this is the Pilot’s Wife.”
“Arno Strauss is the only man in Germany who can outperform me in the sky,” slurred Udet.
“Only in the sky?” taunted Strauss.
“And who can drink me under the table, of course.” Udet leaned confidentially towards Clara, exuding alcohol like the fumes of a Mercedes’ exhaust. “Arno makes excellent brandy cocktails. His Angel’s Wing has to be tasted to be believed. Brandy, cream, and crème de cacao, served without mixing. Superb. He would make the best bartender in Berlin, but the work he’s engaged in at the moment is a little more useful to the Fatherland.”
“So what’s this film about?” queried Strauss.
Udet rolled his eyes, then lowered his head like a naughty schoolboy. “To be absolutely honest…”
“Don’t tell me you didn’t read the script?”
“I read as far as the part where I did the first stunt. I told them I’d take it. I don’t need to know the story.”
In a strange way, Udet was right. Each Ufa film now followed such a predictable template one could pretty much guess after the first few minutes how it would turn out. In this case an audience could tell that a heroic Luftwaffe pilot would almost certainly have survived the downing of his plane, and that his wife’s bravery in going in search of her husband would be rewarded, allowing her to return to housewifely duties. The conflict in which Udet was supposedly fighting was not specified, but no one looking at the flat, sandy plains that had been painted on sets in the studio could mistake the landscape of Spain.
At that moment, three girls came and dragged Udet away, pleading with him to perform a juggling trick. Finding herself standing next to Strauss, Clara felt obliged to continue the conversation.
“And…where do you work?”
His
chill gray eyes flickered over her as though he could barely be bothered to reply. Clara noticed a navy-blue cuff band on his arm, which read LEGION CONDOR.
“I suppose you know the Reichsluftfahrtministerium?”
It would be hard to miss it. Goering’s new Air Ministry on Wilhelmstrasse at the intersection with Leipziger Strasse was as gargantuan as its chief, though rather more sober in its décor. Indeed, the building was starkly austere. It was popularly called Haus der Tausend Fenster, but in reality the granite slab had not one thousand but four thousand windows, extending seemingly endlessly across the cliff face of its façade. Inside there was a lift without doors, which never stopped, so that staff had to step out as it passed their floor.
“Ernst has room 231 and I have room 232.”
“Do all these officers work with you?”
“Somewhere.” He cast a dismissive glance at them. “On a lower floor.”
“Do you fly much?”
He gave a bored smile. “I get out as much as I can. Like Ernst, I’m not made for desk work.”
Clara willed herself to keep the conversation going. “So what’s this work for the Fatherland you’re engaged in?”
His laugh was as desiccated as leaves blowing down a blind alley. “Ernst exaggerates. It’s technical stuff. It may as well be me as anyone.”
He was plainly unwilling to talk, but Clara plowed on, trying to look at him without staring at the scar. His face was like a sculpture on some old Roman temple, half perfect and half decayed.
“Have you known Ernst for long?”
“We met in 1916. We were assigned to the same unit flying single-seater Fokkers. We were out one day, making a routine patrol, when we came under heavy fire from British and French aircraft. We were hugely outnumbered, but Ernst managed to down a French plane and I downed another. These fellows made forced landings and Ernst decided to land beside them and take the men prisoner. They were terrified, as you can imagine, but Ernst strode over and shook hands with them, like a proper gentleman. When they were later imprisoned, he brought them cigarettes. I thought, That’s the kind of man I would like for a friend. After the war I continued flying commercially, and when Goering got the Luftwaffe going again, I rejoined.”
All the time he told her this, Strauss had kept his head averted, as though conscious that she might not like to look at him, his gaze fixed on the middle distance. Eventually, he seemed to remember where he was. “But enough of my work, Fräulein Vine,” he said stiffly. “Yours is far more exciting.”
“It’s quiet at the moment. We have a short break before we start rehearsals.”
“You’re going to enjoy working with Ernst. He has a taste for fun. Look at him over there.”
Udet was juggling with a couple of empty wine bottles. A space had cleared around him, but his ability was hampered by a drunken girl who kept getting too close, trying to hang on his neck.
“Everyone’s looking forward to working with him. I hear he makes paper airplanes that fly as well as the real thing.”
“Just one of his many accomplishments,” commented Strauss drily. “He also spins plates and does cartoons as well as a street artist. Women find him irresistible. And he usually sees little reason to resist them.”
Was this meant to include herself? Clara wondered.
“He’s promised to organize a flight for me,” she volunteered. “I need to fly to understand my character properly. And to tell the truth, I’ve always wanted to go up in a plane.”
“Why?”
“It sounds fascinating.”
“Does it? I’ll take you then.”
His offer surprised her. “Do you mean it?”
“I have a test flight to make from Tempelhof on Thursday. A Henschel Hs 126. You can come up with me if you like. As long as you sit tight and wear something warm. No female hysterics in my cockpit. Can you manage that?”
“Certainly.”
“Good then. It’ll have to be early, mind. Be there at nine.”
From across the room, Udet could be heard mocking the grand new art gallery the Führer had opened in Munich. In contrast to the Degenerate exhibition, the Haus der Deutschen Kunst was a long-held ambition of Hitler’s to showcase the best of German art. Udet, his face glowing with drink and wreathed in smiles, was telling an indiscreet joke about his boss. “So Goering is visiting the House of German Art and he’s enraged to find a portrait of himself as a pig. He starts to complain, but the museum director says, ‘Oh no, Herr Reichsminister, can’t you see that’s a mirror?’ ”
There was a gale of laughter, but Strauss turned away and stared out the window towards the dim confines of the park. From there, the ugliness of his disfigurement was hidden, yet the shade of stubble on his face seemed to echo a deeper shadow in his eyes. Clara tried to read his emotions. But it was impossible to tell what he was thinking until he said quietly, “I fear my friend Ernst has a dangerous condition.”
“What’s that?”
“He damaged his hearing in the war. It means he speaks too loudly for his own good.”
There was a crash from across the room. Udet, with a tablecloth tied around his waist, was dancing the cancan on a tabletop.
CHAPTER
9
“Why must we study healthy eating?” inquired the teacher, a woman with hair wound in tight braids around a face that could split wood.
“Because our bodies belong to the Reich and we have a responsibility to nurture them?”
“Good. Anything else?”
A forest of hands. “Because we are the bearers of children and children are the building blocks of the German Reich.”
In a sun-dappled room, with a stunning view overlooking the lake, twenty young women sat in rows, dressed identically in gray dirndls over white blouses and blue checked head scarves. Ahead of them, her feet planted wide and a rod in her hand, the teacher pointed at the board.
Mary always felt a little ripple of nausea when she set foot in a school—a souvenir of her days in a New Jersey boarding establishment battling alternately with algebra and the American Civil War. But the Bride School brought on a lurch of full-scale queasiness in the pit of her stomach. There was no smoking inside—God, how did they cope?—and the corridors were infused with an institutional cocktail of cabbage and carbolic. Indeed, it would be hard to find a more spotless institution than the Bride School. The garden looked like it had been tidied with tweezers. The gravel drive was combed, and the path ran down the lawn like perfectly parted hair. Even the birds were like tiny mechanical toys, hopping like clockwork on the shaven grass.
“This really is an inconvenient time for a journalist’s visit,” complained the woman alongside her, who was named Fräulein Wolff.
“Why inconvenient?” asked Mary disingenuously, but if she had hoped to eke some information out of the woman, she was disappointed.
“We have an administrative examination,” she replied blandly. “There is to be a visit from the ministry. We are planning demonstrations of the various classes. Child Care, Sewing, Obedience in Marriage, and so on. Also there is to be a talk on how to be a good German woman.”
“That all sounds fascinating,” said Mary encouragingly. “Perhaps I could sit in.”
“I doubt it.”
She tried again. “Do all SS brides come to a school like this?”
“All SS marriages must be authorized to prevent SS men marrying unsuitable women.”
“In what way unsuitable?”
Fräulein Wolff gave a sniff of exasperation at being required to answer unsolicited questions.
“Health, for a start. The brides must complete forms giving all family history of tuberculosis, psychopathy, and gynecological records. If an SS man is found to have contracted an unauthorized marriage, he will be immediately expelled from the SS.”
“Expelled? Just because he doesn’t have a certificate?”
The woman looked as if she would dearly like to expel Mary there and then.
�
��Follow me.”
She led Mary through a pair of high double doors into the marble hallway. Above the mantelpiece, facing the Führer’s picture like a pair of grisly betrothal portraits, was a painting of Gertrude Scholtz-Klink, the leader of the Woman’s Bureau, in gray worsted jacket, shirt, and tie.
“It’s Frau Scholtz-Klink you need to see. She’s away just now. I shouldn’t really be the one to talk. Can I see your journalist permit again, please?”
Mary flourished the pass that had been issued to her with punctilious efficiency on the day of her arrival. The Germans were still, fortunately, eager to assist American journalists in every particular in the hope of cementing an international alliance. Fräulein Wolff’s face creased with dismay.
“As I tried to explain, this is not a convenient day for you to visit, Fräulein. Perhaps you could return tomorrow…”
“Tomorrow I will be attending a speech by the Führer,” lied Mary. “But I don’t need much. I wonder if I could interview one of the brides? Perhaps there’s somewhere I could talk with one of the women in private?”
The idea of brides enjoying private conversations was plainly unheard of here. Fräulein Wolff seemed about to refuse, then the demands of the day overtook her.
“Very well. Come in here. They’re preparing a wedding breakfast for one of the brides. I’ll see if anyone can help.”
They entered a large, sparkling kitchen, crowded with a bevy of brides in white aprons. Either the warmth of the ovens or the proximity of food made the atmosphere jollier here than in the rest of the house. There was a hum of chatter and a mouthwatering smell of spices and baking. In the shafts of sunlight, clouds of flour floated over a worktop where brides were bent attentively, in the act of what looked like braiding strands of dough. Others were weaving ivy and orange blossoms into table settings in the shape of a swastika with a candle at each corner. In the middle of the wide pine table, glistening in the sunshine, stood the wedding cake. It was a glorious two-tier effort. Then Mary looked closer. On its snowy top, instead of a bride and groom, a tiny, black-suited effigy of the Führer stood at attention, rendered in marzipan right down to his little mustache, and surrounded by sugar roses.
