Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  The caption in our cigarette card albums read: “The Führer has made great decisions here.” I had been a passionate collector of these cigarette cards. I owned the full set. I knew that Hitler’s living quarters in the Berghof were of gigantic dimensions, divided into two floors by a flight of dark-veined marble stairs. The lower story looked out on the valley through the great window, so that anyone coming down and into the hall from the upper story caught his breath, understanding how the world must look to a man when he has it at his feet. And I knew about the hearth at the far end of the hall, its surround made of the same marble as the stairs. I knew about the coffered ceiling of heavy, brown wood with elaborately staggered panels and the two gigantic chandeliers hanging from it, one in each part of the hall, encircled densely by tall, candle-shaped electric bulbs on round frames. It was these chandeliers that gave the room a perceptible suggestion of the Nibelungenlied, as if knights of the ancient chivalric orders gathered beside the fire by night to swear secret oaths and plan new acts of violence, revenants risen from their tombs of old, tombs that had never been entirely sealed, sworn brothers in arms like the men in Agnes Miegel’s poem, which we had learned by heart:

  In that hall sat many a lord While the flames burnt ever higher, Hagen Tronje with his sword, The kings assembled by the fire . . .

  I loved that poem. It sent shivers down my spine. It was an intoxicating singsong, chanting of strange things. Gold and blood, the flicker of flames. It contained all the sex appeal of downfall and ruin.

  Softly Lady Fiedel sighed, / rapt in thought and dreaming still; / Sang Volker: In the forests wide / flows a fount, flows a cool rill—I imagined Eva sitting in the flickering firelight of the hall, like Fair Kriemhild—Beside the flames Fair Kriemhild stood, / her slender hands held fast / the quivering light, like gold and blood, / which on the walls was cast . . .

  Oh yes, Eva fit into that picture. She fit into this hall. I knew it even before I saw her there. Its architect had shown a feeling for atmospheric detail. The paintings on the walls in their heavy gilt frames, the Feuerbachs, the Bordone, on the other hand, were like a concession to a more or less alien civilization. Like items of loot displayed in the conqueror’s palace to show everyone that they, too, were his.

  This was Hitler’s living room, no more and no less. The place where he felt at home. It covered 285 square meters and was furnished with comfortable sofas and armchairs. The domestic arena of his private world.

  Later I saw such places portrayed in James Bond films. The villains lived there, powerful and ruthless characters working on great projects for ruin. It was remarkable how easily I recognized the aura again.

  Those were remote dwellings: Goldfinger’s ranch, idyllic, close to nature, a place where privileged guests were received. Mettlesome cars and horses. All the harmless amusements of the rich and powerful. But the great wood-paneled hall, deceptively welcoming, can suddenly turn into a prison. At the touch of a button walls open and close, windows fold away and disappear, the floor moves. Beneath it lies a world of dangerous passages, unlit cells, subterranean dungeons. Woe to anyone who ventures in. A world of bunkers.

  Dr. No’s hideout in a nuclear reactor under the sea. The security airlocks that have to be overcome. The thickly armored doors through which you reach the living area, as if entering a huge refrigerator. The well-trained staff welcoming you, making you comfortable. The master of the house is expecting you. All the plush splendor of his private rooms, given the lie by plain granite-colored walls of natural stone. Gold-framed paintings. A touch of the rococo. Lace, tapestries, cut-crystal glasses. Brass candleholders. A whole battery of the choicest alcoholic beverages in the bar. And the view? A window about the same size as the window on Hitler’s panoramic mountain view, but with the creatures of the sea swimming beyond it, much magnified. Dr. No’s maritime zoo. His aquarium.

  Minnows pretending they’re whales, just like you and me, says James Bond. One feels safe in here, though.

  It depends, Mr. Bond, which side of the glass you’re on, replies the master of the house with grim humor.

  Back in the sixties, when I saw these films in the cinema, I knew I had once been in such a place myself. But how did Ian Fleming know so much about them? Or is the pattern an old one? As old as the dreams in which we must go down to the deep, dank dungeons of the underworld? Are the architects of evil habitual offenders, carrying out to the letter instructions that are always the same?

  I shall know the place again in Hell: seven square kilometers, guarded and enclosed by a double barbed-wire fence. The uniformed men. Their anonymity. Their omnipresence. The checks carried out before anyone was let in, the steep uphill climb, the breathless hesitancy with which you approached, that panic-stricken sense of being an intruder who cannot escape punishment. The friendly welcome from well-trained servants. The guestrooms that could have been in a hotel. The wooden paneling, the fireplaces and tiled stoves, the floral furnishing fabrics, the comfortable club chairs actually inducing a sense of discomfort. The aspirations to art and culture, the Bechstein grand, the brocade tablecloths on all the tables, the hothouse flowers always rising a little too far from narrow-necked curving vases, flowers fanning out in cobweb shapes, red tulips, white lilies, constantly replaced by fresh blooms like a statement that is no more valid for all its repetition. The underworld below, where no daylight could penetrate. The gratings over the shafts, the heavy armored doors, the fear of having to go down there some time or other.

  And you always do have to go down. There’s nowhere else to go once you arrive in the country house of Evil.

  IT WAS A HOT AFTERNOON in the middle of July—the fifteenth, I think. The sun blazed down on the roof of the black Mercedes, and I was sticking to the smooth upholstery. But I still felt that the airflow was uncomfortable, creating violent eddies where I sat in the back and making me shiver. However, I didn’t feel brave enough to ask the men to wind up one of their windows. Next day my tonsils would be swollen, and all the time I was on the Obersalzberg I felt I had a lump in my throat alternately swelling and subsiding again. My tonsils were taken out later, but that was years after the war, and even after the operation my throat was still sensitive and vulnerable to chills.

  We had left the city behind and were suddenly in the untouched peace of the foothills of the Alps. At first sight of the mountains the laws of the lowlands appear to be suspended, or so I felt then. It seemed unthinkable for the war to reach this place. Somewhere a herd of cows crossed our path, which my driver obviously saw as some kind of act of sabotage, an insult meant for him personally. The radiator grille pushed the mass of bovine flesh ahead of us out of the way with the merciless demeanor of a tank rolling forward. Bellowing cattle. Panic, cries of alarm from the lads herding the cows. Then we accelerated away again, tires squealing.

  This was the Führer’s domain, a kind of superior private road, although unavoidably available to the other residents of the area, too. Its surface was first class and its condition intact, something by no means to be taken for granted at the time. Our car had absolute right of way here. It was unwise to obstruct us.

  I saw the black backs in front of me. Those were not shoulders you could tap, saying: Please turn around. I don’t want to go where you’re taking me. I was not in a taxi. I was in an official SS car. It was much too late to resist anyway. What would be, would be. There was something curiously pleasant about slipping into the role of a woman abducted; it had a faint touch of the alluringly forbidden about it.

  I had felt it ever since I heard what Eva said on the phone when she invited me:

  The Führer would like you to come, too.

  I wasn’t wrong. That’s what she had really said. And every time I repeated it to myself it carried more weight, became more irresistible.

  He has to go away in the next day or so, she had said. To some ghastly spot in East Prussia where he’ll be closer to the war. He’s worried about me because I’m left on my own so much. . . .

&n
bsp; He was worried. He wanted a playmate for his mistress. Me. This would be my war work. I wasn’t fit for Reich Labor Service because of a knee injury. But now the Führer had summoned me.

  Father won’t let me, I told Eva. You know how he . . .

  It’ll be all right, she said firmly. I realized that this was the wrong telephone line on which to explain that my father was not a Nazi. And that was putting it mildly. The fact was that he regarded Hitler as he would go down in history: a monster, a criminal on a gigantic scale. Someone ought to assassinate the man, he used to say.

  To which my mother would respond: Oh, hush, you’ll get us into terrible trouble.

  We’re in it already, replied my father, hasn’t anyone noticed?

  He would be beside himself if he knew where I intended to go. My daughter is not going to enter the house of such a criminal, he’d say.

  So we only mentioned Munich.

  Do come, Eva had said. Then we can both stir the place up a bit.

  As if Munich hadn’t been stirred up enough by the war already. But I knew Father wouldn’t agree to that either.

  Munich! he cried angrily. There are air raids on Munich night after night!

  She has a bunker of her own under her house, I said, a proper air-raid shelter with a gas filter and power generators. The most modern air-raid shelter technology you can get.

  I knew the technology argument would carry weight with my father. He worked in the research and development department at Zeiss, and had invented a range-finder that was of great significance for war technology. At the time, however, he was trying to keep his invention secret, so that after the war, as he said, he could make it available for peaceful uses.

  Does that fellow think he can salvage his affair from the hostilities?

  Father, I said. She is my cousin.

  Anyway, there’s nothing to salvage, he said. Do you honestly think we can lose this war and everything will still go on as before?

  Everything always goes on somehow, said my mother, in the pacific tones with which she intervened in Father’s and my conversations.

  No, snapped Father. No. It will all be over. This time there’ll be no going on.

  I wish he’d take that back, I thought. I wish he’d take that back.

  For his words still had power over me. If he cursed me, then I was accursed. When you’re twenty you still need your parents’ blessing as you go on your way, you need them to believe in the future ahead of you.

  But there’s rebellion, too. You need that just as much. You need to march out, spurn prohibitions, set off into the unknown against all reason, making light of the dangers involved.

  You can’t forbid me to do anything! I said. I don’t need your permission!

  At heart I knew that I wouldn’t be coming back in a hurry. What began as a short family visit seems today to have been my great venture into adult life. My childhood was left behind. On that journey to Berchtesgaden my adult existence began. I am approaching the end of it now, and it started with a mistake. With naive misunderstanding and distorted ideas. But when did such a venture ever begin otherwise?

  Don’t go, said my father. Don’t do it.

  And the gentle tone of his voice, the deep sadness in it, really should have made me think again, should have touched me as it touches me today when I remember my father and how he said those words.

  I never saw him again.

  Later, after the war, when people spoke of guilt, an incomprehensible form of guilt beyond all normal criteria, a burden never to be lifted, I knew what they meant. I recognized my share of it. And I, too, had to learn, very slowly. I had to look back to understand what I had done when I ignored my father’s prohibition on a day in July 1944.

  I was going to see Eva. Wasn’t that what I wanted? Most of all I wanted to know why she hadn’t come to the station herself to fetch me, as she’d promised she would. Had she sent these men? She must have. Had she really forgotten that we were to meet in Munich? I mean, she’d invited me to her house in Munich. Perhaps she was waiting for me there now. In which case this was something like an abduction. Did they perhaps keep virgins down in subterranean dungeons in Hitler’s Alpine fortress, had I been chosen as an addition to the stocks they were laying in for coming times of shortage when they, the last of the faithful, besieged by the rest of the world, would defend themselves in the Berghof as, in my father’s view, they actually intended to do?

  The mountains closed in around us beyond Siegsdorf. We drove into their shadow. I was wearing a light summer dress. My jacket was in the trunk of the car, and my fantasies about virgins in freezing cellars were probably no more than symptoms of the chill I felt. I withdrew into myself around a hard, concentrated core, as you do when there is no other weapon against the cold outside. Only Eva’s embrace could save me now.

  As the car drove through Berchtesgaden I felt for the last time that I could still ask them to stop and let me out. I could have taken a room for the night with the money I had on me, and then gone home the next day. As if saying good-bye, I looked at people sitting on benches outside their houses with children on their laps, I saw young men raking hay, I saw farmers’ wives wearing big, shady hats and bending over the beds in their gardens.

  But the last houses in the place were behind us now, and our way wound up the mountain, far, far into the shadows of its northeast flank. Soon afterward we stopped at a barrier. We had reached something like a forbidden region. The carefully shielded, closely guarded home of the man my cousin loved.

  IT WAS SIX YEARS since I had last seen Eva. I was fourteen then, wearing lace-up shoes and hand-knitted kneesocks, a dark blue skirt with broad braces, and a bodice like a bib over my flat chest. I was to go and visit my aunt Fanny in Munich. Aunt Fanny felt so lonely now that her three daughters had left home.

  I must be nice to her, said my mother.

  She’s got Uncle Fritz, hasn’t she? I said.

  But I realized that Uncle Fritz was not much of an argument.

  So I went to Munich, and was bored. I imagined my absent cousins’ lives. I slept in their beds, sometime in Ilse’s, sometimes in Eva’s, sometimes in Gretl’s, and I thought of them as you think of beings inhabiting other worlds, worlds where wonderful, un-dreamed-of things happen. Ilse had just married, which as far as I was concerned raised her to a sphere of everlasting bliss into which, even in my wildest dreams, I could not follow her. But one day, of course, I, too, would infallibly reach that place.

  At the time I did not stop to wonder how bliss of such a nature leads at some point or other to life as I saw my mother or even Aunt Fanny leading it. Aunt Fanny who slept alone night after night in her stately double bed, while Uncle Fritz had withdrawn to a narrow, tunnel-shaped guestroom that he left only for meals, and in which he must never be disturbed. No, marriage as I envisaged it for Ilse and me was something quite different: the definitive happy ending. The ultimate freedom. Adulthood. Something surpassed only by Eva.

  Nobody had told me about Eva. Nobody discussed it with me. But of course I knew all about it. I knew about it just as I knew all about sex at the time. I knew everything. Heavens, when I think of the sex education of today! Did we get any back then? We didn’t even know a word like sex. Luckily my mother had never tried telling me the facts of life. Like any intelligent child, I worked them out from hints here and there, and had long since drawn my own conclusions.

  It was something like that with Eva.

  One day—I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine—I opened a newspaper and saw a photograph of my cousin. “Hitler’s current favorite Eva Braun,” said the caption under it, “daughter of a Munich teacher.” I was sure at once that this was the main news of the day.

  I went to my mother and asked her what a favorite was. Although I did not in fact have to guess; I knew perfectly well. I’d like to see the adult who can tell a child anything she doesn’t already know in answer to such questions.

  What do you mean? asked my mother sharply.r />
  I told her the circumstances.

  Such nonsense, cried my mother. Where did you get that newspaper? Who gave it to you? It’s not the sort of thing you ought to be reading! Give it to me at once!

  I said, guilelessly, that I had found the newspaper by chance and thrown it straight in a waste bin after reading it. In fact, I had been reading it in front of my mother’s very eyes in our dentist’s waiting room.

  All lies, she said.

  Thanks. I knew all I needed.

  Those were the hints I mean. Now I knew all about my cousin, just as I knew the things men and women keep secret from their children. No one could pretend to me any longer.

  Eva. Twelve years my senior. I couldn’t imagine anything more grown-up. Or anyone more beautiful than my beautiful cousin. Or anything more secret than her secret, which wasn’t a secret at all. Everyone knew it.

  One afternoon the bell at the door of the Hohenzollernplatz apartment was rung hard several times, and in burst Eva. Uncle Fritz, who had just come out of his room for tea, went back into it without a word and closed the door behind him.

  Uncle Fritz wasn’t speaking to Eva now that she was Hitler’s favorite.

  I couldn’t understand. Didn’t he think it an honor? Wasn’t he proud of her?

  No, said Aunt Fanny. Uncle Fritz would like the girls to come home. Unmarried daughters ought to be with their parents, you know, she added. Don’t you understand that?

  Where are they, then? I asked.

  That was how I found out that Hitler had given my cousin a house.

  But then he’s sure to marry her soon, I said. I mean, if they already have a house.