by Thynne, Jane
Chapter Sixteen
Rosa Winter had a new typewriter. Everyone did, in fact. All official typewriters throughout the Reich were being replaced with keys that could spell SS in Gothic script. Rosa rather liked the look of hers, squared precisely, gleaming and shiny on her orderly desk, alongside the stacked carbons and the official NS Frauenschaft notepaper with its eagle letterhead signifying the offices of the Führerin, and a row of pencils ranked in order of size. Every morning the Führerin glanced at the pencils on Rosa’s desk as she passed, as though inspecting a stormtrooper honour guard, and that morning she had murmured an approving ‘Ja’ which would have gladdened the heart of any other secretary.
Tidiness was, Rosa knew, the main reason the Führerin liked her. To Gertrud Scholtz-Klink tidiness was not just a virtue but a political act. In fact, Rosa realized, her habit of putting everything in its correct place was a microcosm of the entire Reich. Nazi Germany was like her own orderly drawers, but on a massive scale. There was a file for every part of society – Mothers, Bund Deutscher Mädel, Hitler Youth. Everything neat and everyone in their place. An identity card for every citizen. A labour service for all ages. A Party file for every part of society. Germany was like one vast filing system, the kind the Gestapo were said to be assembling for every person in the Reich, with all citizens noted, annotated, sorted and accounted for. Every activity categorized and evaluated with a department allocated to it, or an association or a club. Alles in Ordnung.
Perhaps that was why Rosa liked keeping her Observations. Journalists looked at the messy parts of life, after all. The bits which didn’t fit with the official picture. People who stepped out of line, or slipped through the cracks. People who couldn’t be tidied away. She kept her blue leather notebook tucked at the bottom of the filing cabinet; she couldn’t risk leaving it at home. Her mother rifled through her belongings routinely like a domestic branch of the Gestapo, searching for evidence of something she suspected but could not quite pin down, so Rosa brought the notebook to work every day and tucked it at the bottom of her drawer, between the files on Childbirth Targets in the Brandenburg area and a list of the Frauenschaft leaders in the local districts. It was safer that way.
Rosa didn’t mind living with her parents, even if her school-friends had long since set up home with office clerks and bank managers and produced families of their own. Anselm and Katrin Winter lived in Bamberger Strasse in Wilmersdorf, a tree-lined street of beautiful, turn-of-the-century houses with elaborate decorative plasterwork and wrought-iron balconies, in an area called the Bayerisches Viertel. Their building had stucco of bone ivory with a pea-green balcony and inside a marbled foyer with a twisty walnut banister and high ceilings, swirled with plaster at the cornices like cake icing. The idea of cake was intensified by the smell of cinnamon and nuts that emanated from the Winters’ stove, a marvel of blue and white porcelain tiles, mingling with the aroma of hot cotton from her mother’s ironing and the musky smell of Brummer, Rosa’s dog. Brummer was a cross between a Schnauzer and a louche, anonymous stray who had contributed melting brown eyes and one folded ear. By some subliminal canine instinct, Brummer knew to the minute when his mistress would be home, and would stand ready at the door to greet her, whereupon Rosa would bury her face in his neck and inhale his aroma of warm fur, which was to her the loveliest perfume in the world.
Rosa’s father worked at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, an imposing building of pale, porticoed stone on Unter Den Linden, yet although he was a scientist by profession he was a great lover of literature. He had schooled Rosa in his beloved Schiller, as well as writers now considered degenerate like Heine and Mann, and when the Nazis burned these writers on the Opernplatz in 1933, Rosa’s father had wrapped their books in waxed paper and hidden them in the garden, under the pretext of burying a dead pet rabbit. It was he who had first read Rosa the fairy stories that she now passed on to Hans-Otto. ‘Fairy tales teach us what science and philosophy can’t,’ he would say. ‘They teach us the mystery and the truth of life.’
It was possible, too, Rosa guessed, that Anselm Winter regarded her continued presence as mitigation against the abrasive personality of his wife, who came from a line of country farmers and considered spinsterhood an anomaly of nature. The Winters were themselves an anomaly in the Bayerisches Viertel, where most of the residents were Jewish, but Rosa’s father had been a friend of Albert Einstein, who lived just streets away before he left the country, and he made no distinction between his Jewish neighbours and those who were, in the terminology of the new Reich, genuinely German. Although Herr Doktor Winter endured most of his wife’s criticisms with good cheer, his refusal to join the Nazi Party was one shortcoming she knew better than to berate him for – out loud, at any rate – and she had to content herself with talking wistfully of the pleasures of various friends whose husbands had been more politically astute. When Rosa had landed the job at the Frauenschaft she had been overjoyed.
The great love of Katrin Winter’s life was the cinema. She would spend hours poring over quizzes in the celebrity magazines. Stern was her favourite and she liked to read out items such as ‘Could You Be A Star?’ which centred on whether readers were ‘as photogenic as Brigitte Horney’, ‘as expressive as Olga Chekhova’ or as ‘disciplined a worker as Marika Rökk’. Rosa’s father endured this, but he could not be persuaded to accompany her to the cinema itself, so every week Rosa would be roped into an outing to watch whatever her mother chose – usually romantic comedies. The type of storyline Katrin preferred featured young women in reduced circumstances – singers and flower girls – who found themselves unexpectedly wooed by attractive and wealthy men. Last week’s outing, Es leuchten die Sterne, in which a young secretary travelled to Berlin to seek work and was mistaken for a famous dancer, ending up as the lead in a star-studded musical, conformed precisely to this ideal.
In truth, though Rosa found many of the plots risible and she would prefer to be at home with a good novel, it was relaxing to sit there in the flickering dark, watching the actresses with their glamorous costumes and silken skin. They made such a contrast to the members of the Reichsmütterdienst she saw at the office every day, whose idea of fashion was flannel coats buttoned to the chin, black fedora and clumpy boots, and for whom a flower on the lapel represented transgressive glamour. Sometimes Rosa wondered what it must be like to wear a satin dress and feel it move like liquid with your body, rather than riding up and prickling against your skin as her woollen vests and underclothes were wont to do, the suspender belt digging into her waist like a mediaeval instrument of torture.
It was after one of those evenings that it had happened. Katrin Winter had already bought the evening’s tickets to Festival of Beauty, the second half of Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the 1936 Olympic Games, which was showing at the Paris Kino on the corner of Uhlandstrasse. The film had been premiered on the Führer’s birthday and had tremendous reviews, but Katrin was suffering from a heavy cold so Rosa called on her sister Susi, who was busy with Hans-Otto, and in the end she decided to go alone. It had been a tiring day, so she was glad to sink down in the warmth of the stalls in a trance-like state, watching the synchronized swimmers sleek as seals in their shiny costumes and the gymnasts like statues from some ancient Greek temple, their skin like perfectly carved marble. The audience was overwhelmingly female, so a lone male was noticeable, especially one with a smart grey suit, a sharp face and a thin, pencil moustache, not unlike an American film star himself. She saw him first when they were settling down for the feature, sitting on his own a few rows back and diagonally along from her, brushing a hank of oiled hair out of his eyes. She was aware that throughout the movie he kept shooting her glances. He was there again as the crowd streamed out of the cinema into the street and when she joined the queue for the tram he came up next to her, tipped his hat and said, ‘Lovely film.’
He thrust a hand towards her. August Gerlach was his name and he hoped she wouldn’t think him presumptuous if he said she remind
ed him of Zarah Leander in Heimat? He hoped that didn’t sound forward. Did she go to the movies often? What were her favourites? He cupped a cigarette to light it and offered her one too.
Rosa was so startled by these unexpected attentions she hardly knew how to respond. She half-wondered if the man was making fun of her, or chatting to her for a bet, but when she glanced around she could see no cohort of sniggering friends behind him so she carried on the conversation, swapping details of favourite movie stars and recent films, praying for her tram to arrive. When it came, it turned out that Herr Gerlach was travelling in the same direction, so he sat himself comfortably beside her, spreading out on the seat and obliging her to shrink to avoid physical contact. She reasoned that maybe he was lonely. People who weren’t used to being on their own did, apparently, find it difficult and would seek out anyone, even strangers, for the sake of human company. Rosa had never remotely felt that way, but she supposed she could sympathize, even if on closer acquaintance Herr Gerlach, with his hard-edged face and loud laugh, looked more at home in a beer cellar than a Hollywood love story.
Chapter Seventeen
There was only one costume in the Third Reich as popular as the brown shirt, breeches and jackboot ensemble, and that was anything from the era of Frederick the Great. Movies glorifying Frederick the Great – Hitler’s longtime hero and role model – formed a genre all of their own, and no fancy dress party was complete without several guests parading in silken crinolines, embroidered frock coats, white stockings and Prussian wigs. Hermann Goering thought nothing of raiding the costume rails of the Ufa studios for his own dressing-up parties, and any actor cast in an eighteenth-century movie knew that at the very least they would have plenty of charming outfits to choose from. But as Ursula Schilling waited alongside Clara in the costume department of the Geiselgasteig studios a few days later, it was another kind of fashion that was occupying her.
‘You’ve seen this, I suppose.’
Ursula was holding a magazine at arm’s length, as though it was something unpleasant she had picked off the pavement. Clara saw it was the current edition of the Nazi women’s magazine, the NS-Frauen-Warte.
‘I never miss it.’
‘Don’t joke, I mean it. Take a look.’
She pointed a disdainful crimson fingertip at a two-page spread of actresses who had appeared in recent films. On one side were vamps and chorus girls, platinum blondes who made up for in cosmetics what they lacked in clothing, cavorting in deliberately sleazy poses. On the other side were ranged young women in peasant costumes and braids with faces as blank and clean as starched cotton. Beneath this group a caption read, You think: boring, We think: healthy and beautiful!
Clara leant across and read the accompanying editorial. ‘Contemporary films do not pay enough attention to idealizing the family, and there are too many childless women featured. The demi-monde type, hostile to marriage and family, is the living embodiment of the sterility of the previous epoch of decay.’
It was the kind of thing Joseph Goebbels dictated in his sleep.
She shrugged. ‘That’s just the usual, isn’t it? We’ve all heard it before.’
‘That’s not the point. Take a closer look.’
Clara did. And on closer inspection she realized the problem. One of the sterile vamps, poised on a barstool against a painted background of a cocktail bar, staring at the camera with smouldering eyes and clad in nothing more than a top hat, black stockings and a pout, was Ursula herself.
‘That’s me done for.’
‘I can’t believe it.’
‘It was freezing the day we did that shoot. A studio lot in January. I almost died from pneumonia. If I’d known this was going to happen I would never have bothered.’
Clara took the magazine from her in amazement. For all the years she had been at the Ufa studios, Ursula Schilling had been a rising star of the Reich, a goddess whose picture graced the foyer at Babelsberg and whose voluptuous figure was a staple at every Nazi reception and society party. Her curves, Schwarzkopf-dyed blonde hair and wholesome Aryan looks had made her a natural for the syrupy confections that were turned out like candy floss by the Ufa studios with the intention of taking the population’s mind off butter shortages and wars. She had a wardrobe full of mink coats and her photograph in a thousand soldiers’ wallets. She had been the ultimate pin-up of the Ufa studios, and now she was the poster girl for the scheming vamp.
‘It’s astonishing. But then, I have been wondering . . .’
‘Why I agreed to take a bit part in this dump?’ Ursula took out her patent leather handbag and lit a cigarette, then passed one over.
‘I suppose I ought to tell you.’
She gave Clara a look of scrutiny, as if assessing whether she could trust her, exhaled a long stream of smoke and said,
‘It started around a month ago. I had an unwanted visit. They turned up first thing in the morning, and it had been a rough night. Two of them, with faces like a wet Wednesday. I thought they were asking for my autograph so I slammed the door on them, but it didn’t work because they just stood there knocking until I opened up again.’
‘Police?’
She lowered her voice to a husky murmur. ‘That was my first thought too. But they said they weren’t policemen at all. They described themselves as civil servants.’
‘Civil servants?’
‘They worked for the government, apparently.’
‘What did they want?’
She crossed her perfect legs and flicked a languid tower of ash into a nearby hatbox.
‘They wanted to know if I had ever received a sexual advance from the Propaganda Minister. What kind of question is that for a girl at six o’clock in the morning?’
‘My God. What did you say?’
‘What do you think I said? I said of course I have! What girl hasn’t? It’s like breathing to him. Our Minister likes conquering women the way the Führer likes conquering countries.’
‘You actually said that?’ Whether Ursula was immensely brave, or entirely reckless, Clara couldn’t decide, but she couldn’t help being impressed.
Ursula sighed and raked her fingers through her ice-blonde locks.
‘I told you, it had been a rough night. I’d only had a couple of hours’ sleep. I was barely conscious.’
‘What happened?’
‘By the time they’d barged into my apartment and stamped their muddy boots all over my cream carpet, I’d come to my senses. I mean I’m used to giving interviews, but not the sort which end with a warrant for your arrest. I told them I had nothing more to say.’
‘Did they accept that?’
‘They said if I refused to talk it would constitute a refusal to help a government department with its enquiries and I might find my own activities investigated.’
‘Your activities?’
Ursula fitted another cigarette in her mother-of-pearl holder and raised a pair of exquisitely plucked eyebrows.
‘Precisely. You see the flaw in their argument, Clara. I have no activities. Not off screen anyway, and now it looks like I’ll have precious few on screen either. I knew I should have kept quiet. Remember poor Renate Müller?’
How could Clara forget? Renate Müller was a rising star who had the misfortune to come to the attention of the Führer himself. An evening alone at the Reich Chancellery with Herr Hitler had proved so eventful that Renate dined out for months on the eye-popping details, until Goebbels placed her under Gestapo surveillance. Eventually the girl was found dead, having fallen from a window in a clinic where she was being treated for anxiety.
‘I don’t want to go the way of Renate Müller. Or Helga Schmidt for that matter.’ She gave Clara a meaningful look.
‘I knew if I said a word about the Herr Doktor it wouldn’t go well for me. We all owe our careers to him and we’re fooling ourselves if we think otherwise. Anyhow, it turned out I was right – there’s been not a whisper of work since. Why else would I be playing in a low-budget histor
ical romp? And today I see this.’
She stared mournfully at the magazine again.
‘It’s a message from him. He might as well have sent me a postcard.’
‘I’m sure you’re worrying unduly,’ said Clara, who wasn’t sure. ‘Goebbels has plenty of other things on his mind at the moment.’
‘Him! The one thing you can say about him is that women are always on his mind.’
Ursula laughed, but there was fear in her eyes. She was far too skilled an actress to allow it to dominate, but there was too much fear in Germany now for Clara not to recognize when she saw it. You could read the signs like a gambler’s tell; the tremble of the hand which made Ursula replace her coffee cup too swiftly in its saucer, the toss of the head which disguised a discreet glance around the room.
‘It’s probably safer being a soldier than an actress these days. Whoever guessed we were signing on for such a dangerous job? If I’d known I’d have gone into something more secure. Stunt flying, perhaps, or doing the high-wire trapeze.’
‘What actually happened with Goebbels?’
‘Oh, that. It was fine to start with.’ She flexed out her fingers in front of her like a cat’s paw and studied the nails. ‘The day after our first . . . encounter . . . at the after party for one of my films, he called me to his office and said he had great plans for me. I was perfect material for the Reich – material, that’s what he called me, not flesh and blood – except that I needed to be “refashioned”. I liked that idea because it sounded, well, it sounded rather pleasant, you know? I love fashion, and clothes, what girl doesn’t, and the way he said it made me think I was going to get a whole new wardrobe. Ha!’
