A War of Flowers (2014)

by Thynne, Jane

  Though Clara was rarely able to avoid Rudi, she always ensured that she was carrying something in both hands so she didn’t have to return the Führergruss. That day she had a rolled-up magazine in one hand and her handbag in the other.

  ‘Is that mail for me?’

  She might just as well have asked what was in it too, given that Rudi had almost certainly had a look. If ever her letters escaped the attentions of the censors, which was unlikely, they faced a second censor in the person of Rudi. Clara knew he would not hesitate to steam her post open if he thought it contained anything incriminating.

  ‘By the way, we have a new resident in the block. A Herr Engel. A very pleasant gentleman. He has the apartment next to yours.’

  ‘So Herr Kaufmann’s not expected back?’

  Rudi gave her a look which signalled that Herr Kaufmann would be as welcome as a case of typhoid if and when he ever made it out of the camp. Accepting her letters, Clara ascended in the rickety elevator to the top floor, closed the door of her apartment behind her and felt her whole body relax.

  This apartment was her refuge, the place where she tried to instil a sense of security that was so lacking in the city outside. She had laid thick rugs on the floor and painted the walls a soothing pale grey. Even in the heat of a stifling summer, it was cool. The narrow hall opened into a wide space, lined on one side with bookcases and on the other a large mirror reflected back the light from the window which looked over the crooked roofs towards Nollendorfplatz. There was a desk with a wobbly leg, a gramophone and a red velvet armchair, with a new English novel that her sister had sent her, Rebecca, lying invitingly open beside a pile of scripts. On the mantelpiece a signed photograph of the entire cast of Es leuchten die Sterne, Clara’s most recent film, stood beside a picture of her late mother, and one of Erich aged six. At the times when she felt almost resigned to being alone, this place was her solace, as familiar to her as the face of an old friend. Even the air in the apartment was distilled with the fragrances that spelt comfort; from the row of herbs on the kitchen windowsill to the bowl of apples on the table and the tang of the tar melting on the asphalt outside.

  Putting on the kettle and sitting at the kitchen table, she took out of her bag the identity cards she carried at all times. The grey, standard identity document certifying that she was Clara Vine, born 1907, with her fingerprint and photograph and the purple stamp of the Ministry of the Interior. The other was a red cardboard document with an eagle on the cover and inside an Aryan certificate, the Ariernachweis, confirming that Fräulein Clara Vine was a member of the Aryan race, possessing birth and baptismal records of her parents and grandparents and a genealogy table in which the Jewish ancestry of her mother and grandmother was replaced with Christian blood. It was a forgery, produced not by the government race office but by an underground printer in a basement in Wedding equipped with a variety of inks and papers, a knife and a set of stamps intricately carved from champagne corks. By day this man printed musical manuscripts and by night he risked execution working for British Intelligence. This document, which Clara carried with her everywhere, was the last communication she had received from Leo Quinn. It was tattered now, and dog-eared, but still essential. Her entire life in Germany, and her whole film career, depended on it. No one with Jewish blood could work in any part of the Reich Chamber of Culture, be it film, radio, theatre or newspapers. Every time she handled that document she thought of Leo. His presence still lingered in her life, the image of him always at the edge of her thoughts. The document, like the pale blue book of Rilke’s poems he had left her, was yet another way that he had made her who she was.

  But Leo was gone now, resettled in England, no doubt with a pretty wife in tow. And Ralph Sommers, the man she had met the previous year, wanted her to forget him. ‘Your work matters more than personal happiness, Clara. It matters more than ever.’ By work, he didn’t mean acting. Clara felt a sudden, painful shaft of longing and, sifting through her wallet, extracted a couple of photographs, one of her brother Kenneth in school uniform – grey shorts, blazer and cap – eyes squinting into the sun, grubby legs almost visibly twitching with an eagerness to escape, and the other of herself with Angela, three years older than Clara and far more beautiful. Where had it come from, the distance between them? They hadn’t always been adversaries. As a child Clara had adored her, and Angela took her responsibilities in shepherding her younger sister seriously. She had taught her the piano and coaxed her at chess, giving up hastily when Clara started to beat her. Angela directed Kenneth and Clara in the plays they staged for their parents, and it was Angela who taught her always to carry a handkerchief stuffed in her left knicker leg, instructed her on applying foundation and eye shadow long before Clara was old enough to wear it, and who explained, albeit enigmatically, what happened on a girl’s wedding night. Her description, though vague and couched in terms of Kenneth’s dogs, provided Clara with a lot more information than any of her friends had at the time.

  She sighed and turned at last to the thick, vanilla-coloured envelope, franked with the Big Ben logo of London Films which had come with her mail. Her fingers trembled slightly as she opened it. The immensity of the task ahead of her was still daunting.

  Inside was a card with a perfectly bland instruction.

  Dear Fellow Member of the Reich Chamber of Film,

  You are invited to audition with Herr Fritz Gutmann for the role of Sophia in Good King George, to be made at the Bavaria Film studios at Geiselgasteig, Munich. Initial meetings will be held at the Artists’ House on Lenbachplatz in Munich, 8th September. Please report to reception at 3 pm.

  Heil Hitler!

  Two days away! Clara’s heart sank. She had never expected it would be so soon.

  She flicked quickly through the rest of the mail. There was a postcard from Vienna with a photograph of Ringstrasse and the suggestion of a drink the following day. The card carried no signature but Clara instantly recognized the handwriting of Rupert Allingham, a British journalist who always dropped her postcards on his travels and never signed them. The other letter was a reminder from her friend Sabine, manager of the Elizabeth Arden salon on the Ku’damm, to pay a visit. Across the bottom of the card she had scrawled:

  ‘Please come soon, Fräulein Vine, it’s important.’

  What on earth could be important about a session at the beauty parlour? People in the world of fashion and beauty seemed incapable of getting their priorities right. As if the whole business of creams and potions was anything other than utterly trivial at a time like this.

  On the other hand, if she was attending an audition, it might be a good idea to arrive looking her best. And, as Clara never forgot, sexual allure was an essential weapon in her secret work. Lipstick, mascara and perfume were all important items in the toolkit of a female spy, and her favourite lipstick, Elizabeth Arden’s Velvet Red, in its prettily engraved gold tube, was right down to a stub. However much the Führer might hate cosmetics, the female citizens of the Reich liked them even more at a time when new clothes were hard to come by. Yet lipstick, like coffee and butter and oranges, was getting scarcer and fresh supplies were difficult to find. On reflection, Clara resolved to visit the salon that afternoon.

  Chapter Seven

  Rosa Winter flinched and tried valiantly to shut her ears to the shrieking children in the adjacent room as she carried on with her typing. Secretarial duties were dull enough without children being brought into the office to disrupt everything. When their mother had arrived that morning for her interview, hands clamped on the shoulders of her offspring – two boys of around eight and ten years old – she had shrugged apologetically and Rosa had smiled and nodded towards the empty office next door. The boys had brought a board game with them, the mother explained, which would keep them quiet for at least twenty minutes. Instead it was having the opposite effect. The game was the current craze, Juden Raus and it looked fairly normal – in that it involved a dice and playing pieces in the shape of large pointed ha
ts, with ‘Jewish’ faces on them – but in terms of the aggression it aroused it was more like a boxing match than a board game and every few moments the boys punctuated the air with cries of victory and howls of dismay. Rosa was developing a splitting headache. It would be distracting at any time, let alone at ten o’ clock in the morning.

  She sighed. She liked children, indeed she often identified with them, but she had no intention of having any of her own. Not yet, at any rate, or for a good long time. That was something she had never told anyone. It was not the sort of thing a twenty-five-year-old woman confessed in Germany in 1938, not out loud, not to friends, not even to her own parents. Not now, when children were the chief justification of a woman’s existence and having more than four of them – being ‘kinderreich’ – was every woman’s ambition. Not when being voluntarily childless was deemed ‘deliberately harmful to the German nation’, which sounded an awful lot like treason if you thought about it. And most of all, not if your workplace, this drab office packed with filing cabinets and smelling of carbolic and unwashed clothes, happened to be the very epicentre of the family in Germany, a veritable shrine to the place of women as housewives and mothers – the headquarters of the National Socialist Women’s League, the NS Frauenschaft. Whose leader, installed within close barking distance in the office next to Rosa’s, was Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, universally known as the Führerin, the most important woman in the entire Reich.

  With six children of her own and ten million German women at her polish-free fingertips, the female Führer was described by Hitler as ‘the perfect Nazi woman’. She wore her hair snaked round her head in braids, a field-grey uniform shirt buttoned to the neck and an expression like thunder, exacerbated by the fact that she was currently going through a divorce, because she deemed her country doctor husband insufficiently Nazified. Rosa sometimes wondered if Hitler himself was frightened of the Führerin, given that everyone else was. Rosa had met the Führer once. He had paid a visit to the office and talked about his mother and the importance of women to the future of the Fatherland. He was much less intimidating than the Führerin herself. He had a pudgy, pale face and strangely penetrating eyes that looked at you as though they were looking through you. He was so different from the shrieking figure on the platform she had seen on the newsreel, rattling away like a machine gun, that she could almost understand those women who were said to turn up at the Reich Chancellery offering to carry his baby. But not quite.

  The only person who was certainly not scared of the Führerin was the SS-Reichsführer Himmler, who had responsibility for coordinating the activities of the Woman’s Bureau at ministerial level because no women were allowed in Hitler’s cabinet. Rosa had picked up the telephone once to Himmler and the sound of his soft, menacing rasp almost caused her to drop the receiver. The idea that he too might pop in for a courtesy visit was frankly terrifying. She couldn’t help imagining Himmler with his moon face and receding chin standing over the desk, peering at her like an owl eyeing its prey, interrogating her about why she, Rosa Winter, was risking treason and actively weakening her nation by refusing to become kinderreich.

  What Rosa did want, and had always wanted, was to become a journalist. She had no intention of following her elder sister Susi into marriage and downtrodden motherhood, especially not to a thuggish civil servant who was not averse to the occasional bout of wife-beating. After leaving school Rosa had taken a typing course in preparation, quickly became a skilled and fluent typist, and readied herself for an exciting career. Growing up in Berlin there had been a hundred newspapers – it was a city that loved journalism and Germany, her father often reminded her, had more newspapers than Britain, France and Italy put together. But after Hitler came to power in 1933, closing opposition papers and dragging the journalists off to concentration camps, the press grew cautious. The number of newspapers halved, and government directives on saving meat or mending socks had far more chance of getting into the news pages than murders or burglaries. To Rosa’s dismay, getting a break as a journalist turned out to be next to impossible. She traipsed around the newspaper district for months but whenever she applied for jobs, the editor, either apologetic or dismissive, would explain that male employees must now take priority. Each time she returned disheartened to the apartment she still shared with her parents, her mother would say, ‘Never mind. No one in our family has ever been a journalist . . .’ But it didn’t mean Rosa’s typing skills need go to waste. There were always secretarial positions to be filled. Journalism could wait. But I don’t want to be a secretary! Rosa screamed inside. Yet sure enough, eight years after leaving school, here she was in front of a typewriter, with a stack of letters on one side and a dictation pad on the other. The Führerin had taken one look at the skinny girl, mousy hair parted dead down the middle, bitten nails and grey, blinking eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, and hired Fräulein Winter on the spot. The fact was, she looked infinitely more convincing as secretary than a journalist.

  Even then, despite her role, the first time Rosa had sat behind this typewriter her fingers had flitted over it with a visceral thrill, as though perhaps on this machine she might still get the chance to type dispatches, personal reports, maybe a newsletter for her new employers. That was until she had received her first letter to type – a report on the marriage allowance scheme to the Interior Ministry – and she felt the excitement in her fingers drain away. Instead she had taken to feeding her passion by keeping a notebook of what she called her ‘Observations’ – articles based on the kind of essays she used to read in the newspapers by famous writers like Joseph Roth, made up of eyewitness observations of Berlin. Not earth-shattering events, but little things about life in the city; people she noticed, small incidents in the streets. She liked to watch people and work out what she could tell about them from the trivial details they gave away. The fact that Rosa herself was shy and self-effacing by nature meant no one gave her a second look. Who took any notice of a drab young woman in a headscarf, peering at them through meek, secretarial spectacles? Rosa wrote up her Observations at night, letting her imagination run wild. Writing was where her soul revealed itself.

  The boys let out another volley of shouts and Rosa shot a quick glance at the closed door, behind which the Führerin was interviewing their mother. Perhaps it was punishment for her unnatural desire to forego children that she should now get to spend her days with a portrait of the flaxen-haired Goebbels family staring down at her desk. It was the standard, Party-issue photograph and whenever she looked up from her typewriter, or ate her sandwiches during busy lunch hours, or paused to wonder whether she might actually spend her entire life here, the Goebbels family would return her gaze. Being the model family, they had produced an entire marching squad of children for the Führer, little girls in pigtails and the boy in Lederhosen, flanked by their mother, Magda, with a jaw clenched like an industrial vice, and the minister himself, with a smile as sharp as a broken bottle.

  Rosa squinted across to the opposite wall, to a map of Germany complete with flags bearing tiny swastikas, each one signalling the presence of an office of the NS Frauenschaft in that vicinity. It looked like something a general might use, charting the progress of Panzer divisions across hostile terrain. The hostile terrain in this case being anyone who attempted to frustrate the aim of providing ever bigger families for the Reich. Occasionally the Führerin would enter the office and stab a fresh flag in the map, proving that the doctrine of increasing the birth rate was being carried to the farthest corners of the Reich.

  The door opened and the job candidate walked dejectedly past Rosa’s desk to retrieve her children, yanking both boys up by their arms in a practised gesture that provoked howls of protest. As Rosa understood it, the woman’s husband had recently been killed in Spain and she was keen to return to work, but Rosa didn’t fancy her chances here. Rosa’s predecessor had been obliged to leave when she got engaged. It wouldn’t do for the head of the entire Nazi women’s service to contravene all Party doctri
ne by employing a married woman, let alone one with children.

  Rosa, on the other hand, gave no impression of having a boyfriend at all, which obviously suited the Führerin very well. After all, she had just given Rosa the trip of a lifetime – two weeks in the sun, with negligible duties and no typing at all. The Kraft durch Freude organization was organizing a Congress of Physical Fitness next month which would welcome delegations from thirty-two countries, and top guests, including Heinrich Himmler himself, were to be accommodated on the KdF flagship vessel, the Wilhelm Gustloff. Therefore it had been deemed useful for Rosa to undertake a little reconnaissance. She was briefed to sample the ship’s amenities and provide a report to the Führerin which would avert any potential embarrassments and ensure that nothing would compromise the smooth running of the event. Rosa’s colleagues had been jealous, especially when she put a framed photograph of herself on the desk, standing in front of the ship with hair blown in her face, wearing a new peach-coloured sundress and straw hat and a most unlikely tan on her skin. Smiling, as much as Rosa ever smiled, with her lip bitten in one corner and an elusive look in her eye. All the girls at work stopped at her desk and marvelled. She must have had the time of her life, they cooed.