by Thynne, Jane
Instead, Rosa Winter bitterly wished that she had never gone.
Chapter Eight
The Goebbels family had a new address. Only technically though; they still lived in the same imposing villa on the corner of Behrenstrasse and Hermann Goering Strasse that they had occupied for the past five years, but having undergone a three-and-a-half-million-mark refurbishment the residence was now officially designated a palace. The grounds running down to the Tiergarten were clipped and pruned, the lawns laid with gravelled paths and statuary, and the interior had been entirely updated. The parquet floors and ornate ceilings were still there, but in keeping with the house’s elevated status carpets had been imported from Berlin’s Art History Museum to match the National Gallery Old Masters on the walls, and marquetry tables and Louis XIV furniture had been acquired from a villa of a Jewish banker in return for his passage out of the country. In front of a glass display case of antique china, recently liberated from the Schloss Charlottenburg, a vase of lilies and roses scented the air. But it was going to take more than flowers, plush furniture and rich tapestries to warm the frigid atmosphere of the Goebbels family home.
Magda Goebbels didn’t seem especially grateful to receive her gift of Chanel No. 5. She unravelled the packaging listlessly, drawing aside the black ribbons as though unwrapping a parcel of socks sent in for the Winterhilfswerk rather than a hundred marks’ worth of perfume. After a quick glance at the opulent glass bottle reeking of wealth and luxury, she gave it a brief squirt, and put it aside.
‘Thank you for fetching this. It’s kind of you to spare the time,’ she said with a martyred sigh. ‘I suppose I’ll be buying all my own perfume from now on.’
‘It’s a good choice,’ replied Clara politely, choosing not to point out that the perfume had cost Frau Doktor Goebbels precisely nothing.
‘Yes. It’s a new one for me, and at least it’s not Drachenfutter.’
Clara grimaced despite herself. Drachenfutter, dragon fodder, was slang for presents given by men to pacify their wives. From what she had heard of relations between the Propaganda Minister and his wife over the past summer, Magda must have received Drachenfutter by the kilo, but it was having little effect. Clara took a sip of the tea she had been offered and hunted for some small talk.
‘Madame Chanel was flattered you’d chosen her perfume.’
Magda shrugged. ‘Was she? I thought it would make a change. We all have to embrace change sometimes, don’t we? At least, that’s what I’m told. And I understand this perfume is very popular in certain quarters.’
That seemed like a strange thing to say about the world’s most famous perfume, but Clara had grown used to Magda’s gnomic utterances, with their peculiar, bitter subtext, in the years that she had known the Propaganda Minister’s wife. Back in 1933, Magda’s request that Clara model for the Reich Fashion Bureau had given her unrivalled access to the gossip and feuds of the senior Nazi wives, not to mention an insight into the tortured relationship between Magda and her relentlessly unfaithful husband. Now, Clara guessed, Magda was ruminating on a new low in the relationship, wrought by Goebbels’ fraught love affair with the Czech actress Lída Baarová.
Magda aside, there were enough comic aspects to the affair to keep everyone else amused. It was on the set of the aptly named movie Hour of Temptation that the pair met and Goebbels immediately succumbed. Unfortunately, Lída Baarová was living with another Ufa heartthrob, Gustav Fröhlich, at the time, in a house just a few doors down from the Goebbels’ country villa in Schwanenwerder. On finding the lovers together, Fröhlich had punched the Propaganda Minister in the face, blackening his eye and forcing him to pretend he had injured himself in a car accident, but Fröhlich’s resistance proved futile. The delicate brunette with high, Slavic cheekbones was referred to everywhere, with a liberal dose of Berliner humour, as Goebbels’ ‘Czech conquest’ and her latest film, A Prussian Love Story, provoked yet more laughter. While the Nazi hierarchy were plotting their entry to Czechoslovakia, Goebbels was fighting to keep hold of both his wife and his Czech mistress, and according to recent rumours, it was a battle he was losing.
‘I meant to say, congratulations, Frau Doktor, on your new daughter!’
‘Thank you. She’s sweet. She’s four months already.’
‘So you have five children now!’
‘Six,’ Magda replied tersely, as if correcting the asperities of an especially forward maid. ‘You forget the son of my first marriage, Harald.’
Unlike other wives of the leading Nazis, Magda Goebbels had always been surrounded by a miasma of nerves, but now her complexion was cracked with anxiety, like paint, and there was a grim set to her mouth. She was beautifully dressed in a cobalt-blue dress by Hilda Romatzki, one of Berlin’s leading designers, but her eyes were hollow from lack of sleep and the latest baby had left another layer of flesh around her waist.
She stared at Clara without speaking, then suddenly she looked away.
‘There’s no point pretending, Fräulein Vine. I’ve confided in you before, after all. Things are very bad here.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that, Frau Doktor.’
‘Oh, I know people think it’s always bad, but they have no idea. First, my husband insisted on building an annexe at Schwanenwerder where he could take his actresses “to play records to them”. That was awkward enough but I didn’t object. I know a man in his position, under a lot of pressure, sometimes falls victim to predatory women and imagines himself infatuated. I thought the best thing I could do was try to contain it until it wore itself out. Keep them away from the children, but otherwise try to put up with it. That was until his latest request.’ She cast Clara a savage glance. ‘You’ve heard about this woman, I’m sure. I daresay it’s the talk of the studios.’
It was, of course. Clara guessed the best response was to remain impassive.
‘He takes her everywhere, out on his yacht, on little trips in his car. He has no shame, but his latest proposition really astonished me. He asked me to have her over for a meeting where we would all agree to live in a ménage à trois. He’s a heartless devil. Can you believe such a thing?’
Clara could, but she was not about to say so. She confined herself to a sympathetic frown of assent.
‘I was so miserable I said yes, and he came back with this big diamond ring for me. What a fool I was. The moment she moved in, I discovered he’d given her one too. Exactly the same! He loves her more than any woman he has ever met.’
‘I’m sure, Frau Doktor, that . . .’
‘Oh yes he does! I read it in his infernal diary. It’s that diary he loves most of all, actually. He shuts himself away every night, noting down his thoughts and he has them preserved on photographic plates to be stored in the vaults of the Reichsbank. I never hear the end of that diary. It’s his testament for posterity. Well, posterity’s welcome to it.’ She stopped and gave a sniff. Like many women unburdening marital unhappiness, her misery, once unleashed, became a torrent that showed no sign of slacking.
‘Anyway, the ménage à trois was intolerable. I couldn’t stop crying – I even thought of killing myself and the children. I did, honestly. When we accompanied the Führer to Bayreuth in July, I sobbed all the way through Tristan und Isolde.’ Red patches had formed on the bands of her neck, as always when she was overwrought. ‘Then do you know what I did?’
Clara dreaded to think.
‘I got up the courage to go down to Berchtesgaden and ask the Führer for permission to divorce.’
‘Divorce?’ echoed Clara, instinctively wishing Magda would speak more softly. Even if all this was true, she doubted that the Propaganda Minister wanted his love life discussed in detail with casual callers, and everything she knew about Goebbels convinced her he was paranoid enough to bug his own home.
‘Exactly. And the Führer listened to me so kindly and was quite horrified to hear everything Joseph had done, but it was no good. He was furious of course, with my husband. He summoned Joseph and banged hi
s desk so hard all the pencils jumped in the air.’ At the idea of this, Magda’s voice hushed and she seemed to pale. Even if you were the favourite of the senior wives, even if he called you the First Lady of the Reich, there was no doubt that an interview with an enraged Führer would be traumatic.
‘But he wouldn’t hear of a divorce. He adamantly instructed us to reconcile. He said it would never do for the first family in the Reich to separate – in fact, quite the opposite. Joseph must increase the press focus on the importance of the family and run more photographs in the newspapers of our children. And the newspapers must be made to print articles about the home life of the Goebbels. Ha! We’re a model family, after all. The whole of the Reich looks up to us.’
Bitterly she dragged a moist handkerchief from her sleeve.
‘Joseph is to institute more cultural emphasis on large families and the importance of child-bearing.’
‘I thought that was SS Reichsführer Himmler’s domain?’
‘It is. But the Führer wants Joseph to find ways of encouraging women who have yet to have children. Addresses on film and radio and so on. What do I care? It’s of no concern to me.’
She stalked over to the mirror and pretended to adjust a lock of hair that had escaped from the stiff ranks of curls on her forehead.
‘Joseph’s livid with me, of course.’ She frowned at her reflection. ‘He hates me for blackening his name to the Führer. He actually cried. He said Hitler will only speak to him on official business and will only receive him in an outer room. He’s in deep disgrace. He sits there every night confiding his misery to his wretched diary and now he’s planning some eye-catching event to rehabilitate himself in Hitler’s eyes.’
‘You mean like a parade?’
A contemptuous shrug. ‘God knows what he’ll dream up. He’s been plotting it with his police chief friend, von Helldorf.’
‘Count von Helldorf?’
The chief of the Berlin police was a notable gambler and anti-Semite, who hosted sex parties on his yacht involving brigades of HJ boys.
‘Yes. He said it would make headlines but that doesn’t bother me. Anyhow,’ she turned to Clara defiantly, ‘some good did come out of it. The Führer barred that marriage-wrecker from appearing in any films or plays or attending any social functions. Her current effort is to be her last. She’s to be completely blacklisted. So that’s something at least!’
She smiled, grimly, at this triumph.
‘I’m so sorry, Frau Doktor . . .’
‘Oh, don’t imagine I’m looking for your sympathy, Fräulein,’ Magda snapped, her eyes flashing and her misery transformed to frank hostility. ‘I’m telling you all this for a reason. I want you to let all your little actress friends at Ufa know that the Führer has commanded my husband to remain faithful. If I’m to stay with him, they can keep that in their silly heads. If they’re tempted to stray they will be disobeying the orders of Adolf Hitler. It probably counts as treason. I will make sure the Führer knows their names and the punishment will be a camp, at the very least. Can you manage that?’
In the background a car door slammed, and then there was the sound of the front door closing and steps proceeding along the narrow hallway. It was a tread so distinctive that everyone recognized it, one foot firm, the other slightly dragging. The steps hesitated outside the drawing room, then suddenly, the door was thrown open and the diminutive figure of Joseph Goebbels stared into the room.
As always, when she encountered the Reich’s most vicious baiter of the Jews, an involuntary shudder ran through Clara and she had to work hard to control the tremble of her hands and paste a polite smile on her face. This was the man who had had her ordered in for questioning only the previous year, suspecting her motives and her allegiances. When their paths first crossed, Goebbels had thought Clara might be useful to him; he had summoned her to his ministry and asked her to keep a confidential eye on his wife. But all that was long ago. Now Joseph Goebbels no longer treated her with anything but suspicious distance. He had put his agents on her tail in the past and would do so again in an instant. He was probably as familiar with the contents of Clara’s underclothes drawer as she was herself.
Yet now his appearance shocked her. As a senior cabinet minister of a country on the precipice of war, one might expect Joseph Goebbels to look preoccupied, but beyond his natty white double-breasted suit and beige fedora, there was a wild air about him. His cadaverous face was deathly pale, his eyes red-rimmed and his crippled foot seemed more than usually pronounced. He was clearly in torment but whether it was over the hostilities in the Sudetenland or those in his private life, Clara couldn’t say.
She smiled a greeting but Goebbels didn’t bother to return it. Indeed he barely acknowledged her. He stood frozen in the doorway, a clutch of manila files under one arm, surveying the room with a frantic gleam in his eye, as though it must contain more than just Clara and his wife.
For a second, Clara was bewildered and a glance at Magda’s face puzzled her yet further. Magda’s expression was pure, malicious satisfaction.
‘Are you looking for someone, Joseph? It’s just myself and Fräulein Vine here, I’m afraid. Did you expect anyone else?’
Clearly Goebbels had assumed someone else was there, but why would he think that? There was no other voice but hers and Magda’s, and no car on the drive outside. What did Goebbels imagine was going on?
Suddenly her eye fell on the golden gleam of Chanel No.5 on the table beside Magda, and she realized why. It must be Lída’s perfume. Presumably Goebbels scented its distinctive rose-laden trail and hoped, against all hope, that his lover was present. Following her glance, he saw his mistake.
‘Fräulein Vine has brought me a delightful gift!’ said Magda with hideous brightness.
Goebbels glowered. ‘So I see,’ he said tightly. ‘That’s an interesting choice of perfume.’
‘We all have to make choices,’ said Magda, newly miserable now that her ploy had succeeded. ‘Isn’t that what you said? And I seem to recall this perfume is one of your favourites.’
Goebbels gave his wife a savage glance and Clara cursed silently, hoping that the Minister did not suspect her of a deliberate provocation. She couldn’t afford to get on his wrong side, but nor could she point out Magda’s machinations in this marital firefight.
‘Actually, Herr Doktor, it was a gift from Coco Chanel. I happened to see her in Paris.’
‘So you’ve been filming there?’
He knew already, she could tell that from the flatness of his eyes. Every movie schedule in the Ufa studios had to be submitted to his office before filming began.
‘Yes, I’m just back. I’m about to leave again for an audition in Munich.’
That did take him by surprise. Goebbels liked to think he knew everything that went on in the cultural life of the Reich and that included the movements of actresses.
‘Are you? What’s the film?’
‘It’s called Good King George.’
Goebbels raised an eyebrow, so Clara elaborated.
‘Not the current King of England, of course. George 1st. The Hanoverian who took the English throne.’
If England was ever to be represented in German film, Goebbels preferred a historical setting. He especially liked films about Britain which featured people in wigs. It was all part of his campaign to present England as old-fashioned and class-ridden beside a modern, dynamic Germany. With its setting of seventeenth-century Hanover coupled with the theme of a German succeeding to the English throne, Good King George might have been engineered specifically to appeal to the Propaganda Minister. Indeed it probably was.
‘It’s being directed by Fritz Gutmann. At the Bavaria Film studios at Geiselgasteig.’
‘Interesting. Sounds like an improvement on Gutmann’s usual sub-Expressionist tripe. What’s your role?’
‘I’m auditioning to play Sophia.’
‘The unfaithful wife. She dies, doesn’t she, at the end?’
‘I t
hink so.’
‘Fitting,’ he remarked briefly, but already his mind was on other things. A calculating flicker ran across his face.
‘Report to me, would you, when you get back. I have a task for you.’
‘A task, Herr Doktor?’
‘It’s to do with a new documentary I’m planning. Fräulein Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will has provoked a raging appetite around the world for German documentary – the Americans have been particularly complimentary. Our relationship with Hollywood is of great importance to the Reich, so it’s very gratifying that they love our documentaries. These Hollywood producers are so much more impressive than their rather poor British counterparts.’
Clara did not allow her smile to waver.
‘Anyhow, I’ve decided our next international effort will focus on the place of German families. There’s a new decoration for kinderreich mothers to be awarded by the National Socialist Frauenschaft – it’s a fresh initiative of Reich domestic policy I’m announcing this week – and that would be a good place to start. I sense a global excitement about our plans for German womanhood, and this documentary will satisfy that hunger. I think you would be ideal to narrate it.’
‘I’m flattered.’
‘Don’t be. I need an English speaker for the American version and there aren’t many of those around. I’ll be in touch.’
Without another glance at the kinderreich mother of his own children, who was staring stonily out of the window, he left the room.
Chapter Nine
Rupert Allingham, Berlin bureau chief of the Daily Chronicle, downed his Eiercognac as reverently as communion wine and signalled for another. These days his thirst seemed to increase in inverse proportion to the quality of the stuff on offer. And this cognac was unusually rough.
To all outward appearances, the Café Kottler on the leafy Motz Strasse in Schöneberg was a model restaurant of the Reich. Beneath the old-fashioned brass lamps its panelled oak walls and generous chairs glowed with a sense of comfort and security. It purveyed Swabian cuisine, the starchy food of southern Germany beloved of the Nazi top brass, and like many cafés it took the opportunity of a captive audience to hand out some worthy advice about smoking, for example, or not wasting food. That month the proprietor had hung a sign over the bar reminding customers of the importance of the Führer salute.
