Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  It was the last home of the Nazis, their inner refuge, their own place. It was here that they all intended to survive. They wanted to be here if the end should ever come for them. They could not imagine that retribution would ever track them down here. Whenever discussions of the situation and new reports from the front made them a little uneasy they would think of the Berghof and how close they were to it, of its full cellars, its flower-bedecked balconies, the stocks of wood behind the building. Nothing could happen to them. Not really, not while they knew of a place of total security for themselves. After all, what did the reports from the front have to do with them?

  No, we didn’t need a radio. We were the message ourselves. If there was anything we thought of in connection with the vision of victory, which we called not just victory but “the final victory”— why “final”? Doesn’t that suggest the end of victory, the diabolical converse of everything conveyed by “victory” itself?—if there was anything we thought of then it was a whole series of Berghofs scattered over the wide expanses of the East, their dark battlements lit by torches held in iron shafts, with the shafts fitted to tall walls built of mighty blocks of stone. The next fort would always be visible on the horizon, set on rising ground, a day’s journey away by horseback, while the outworks around these forts spread over the plains, blameless areas of the agrarian economy where a servile people would do the work for which it was fit: tilling the soil, hard physical labor carried out under the stern direction of their natural masters. They, too, would be content, oh yes, they would be grateful.

  Ah, the life on those Berghofs! One imagined it well-disciplined, severe, ornamented by gentle women in dirndls with their hair wreathing around their heads: harvest festivals, midsummer bonfires, winter evenings by the blazing hearth, to the accompaniment of melancholy songs for which Slavonic throats and German feeling would be cultivated. A soldier needs something to fight for, something worth giving his life for. It was the Berghof idea for which they died. It stalked ghostlike through the speeches of Joseph Goebbels, it had echoes in the modest, rhetorically simple addresses made to the troops by their officers before battle.

  Something hallowed by time, cozy as a tiled stove, solid, reliable, fortified by shutters over the windows, something Alpine, Sunday-smart, summer-flowered, something built in natural stone, crafted of straw and wood carving, with old folk costumes and the lusty singing of brand-new tunes—the Berghof ideal was their defense against the affronts of modernity.

  They discovered that the word Gemütlichkeit, a term for that very German sense of being snug and comfortable, existed only in their own language. They shivered at the thought of a world pressing closer, rootless, homeless, brand new—a world of the future. They had been so far from home for so long that their homesickness weighed more heavily on them than their fear of dying. All the Ungemütlichkeit, the lack of home comforts to which they were exposed, that life in dirt and danger and humiliation was tolerable only while they had a purpose in the war such as the defense of the Berghof before their eyes. Something warm and comfortable, something snug.

  We were there. We lived at the one place in the universe for which they all longed, a fortified refuge and the aim of the war combined. The still center. We didn’t need a radio.

  From now on our walks to the Mooslahner Kopf were made in the cause of our inquiries. I loved them. I loved this leak in the hermetically sealed world surrounding us. It was surprising to discover that the self-contained system within which we lived could be infiltrated. Was that what attracted me to the Tea House? Was that the reason why I began to imagine myself living there in my fantasies?

  It was a pretty place, small, as if made specially for me. There was a room for the guards, as there was everywhere—a room the tyrant himself used to frequent—a small bedroom, the kitchen, an anteroom leading to the round structure beyond, built as a massive tower and containing the tea salon itself, with its tall, narrow, panoramic windows. It was the ideal of a small private house, and that part of me which likes the idea of a hermitage, a house on a mountain slope built with its back to the forest and its front high above the valley, with the human world lying at my feet like a toy, a little house where I can be just myself and I am entirely alone at home, that part of me had its beginning here, and even today I sometimes find myself settling into Hitler’s Tea House in my mind. One of the secret rooms of my heart is built in its image. I go in. I am not afraid. I feel safe there. I am alone, although I know there is someone else in the place with me. I am not alarmed when I find myself facing him. My secret and I live in the house together.

  The dwellings of our life are built in the image of the dwellings in our minds, and whenever we suddenly feel at home in a strange place, in tents, in inns, beside a lake by night, we have entered one of our inner rooms, and sometimes we see a house at the far end of the street in a strange town and know we still carry the key to it, we could go in and find everything just as if we had never left.

  Hitler’s Tea House is more than a memory to me. I can go into it. I still have the key. I unlock the door and go through it. I open a window. Like all houses not constantly inhabited, it smells of itself. I have access to this house at any time. One of my unlived lives was played out in it. And sometimes I am alarmed by the clarity with which something reminds me of it: a slab of snow slides off the roof, a linen curtain with flowers on a pale background moves in the wind. I hear someone breathing but there’s no one there . . .

  The detective game soon seemed to lose its charm for Eva, like everything else on which she embarked, particularly as we found nothing else suspicious on our visits to the Mooslahner Kopf. Or at least, so Eva thought, since for some reason or other I did not tell her that the next time we went there I found a towel lying on the bathroom floor. I retrieved it and hung it up again. It felt damp. Someone had used it. Perhaps the cleaning women had simply forgotten it.

  On another occasion Eva was looking for the chocolates that, she assured me, were always here. Mountains of chocolates. Hitler loved to present lady visitors with gifts of sweets. It suited his notion of gallantry, his idea that women lived in a café society world of the mind. But there were no stocks of chocolates left, only a box that had been opened.

  But we always throw chocolates away once the box is opened, she said, as if stating a basic principle of Hitlerian policy.

  I’d like one all the same, I said.

  She watched me eat it with an expression of distaste on her face.

  August was over, and the days were getting perceptibly shorter. Summer in Berchtesgaden comes to an early end. The sun now reached us only in the afternoon, and soon the Berghof would be sunless throughout the day. Hitler was a creature of the night. He went to bed in the small hours of the morning, when day was approaching. Autumn was his season, and the Berghof, built on a slope facing northwest, was his house. While Göring’s and Bormann’s houses basked in the midday sun on the west-facing side of the mountain, the Berghof lay entirely in the shadow of winter. It didn’t trouble Hitler. He did not realize what was missing, and when autumn began to approach he couldn’t understand Eva, a natural sun-worshiper who suffered severely from melancholia at that time of year.

  Let’s go to Munich, she said, more heroically determined than ever to have fun.

  Can we?

  You silly little thing, she said, we can do anything we like.

  I clearly still hadn’t understood the rules of the game governing our life here.

  Tomorrow? I said.

  Tomorrow . . . she said. Well, that depends.

  What do you mean? I asked.

  Wait and see, said Eva.

  Hitler phoned that evening.

  We’re off tomorrow, Eva said later. I’ve ordered us a car.

  I thought she had asked Hitler’s permission. Only later did I realize what it was all about. If he rang one evening, then his next call could be expected two evenings later at the earliest, so that until then we were more or less at liberty. After t
hat, however, Eva must be back at her post. It was simply unthinkable that she wouldn’t be, and I believe it never once happened.

  She was as much afraid of him as everyone else was. Like all true despots, he had the ability to spread fear that ultimately was not the fear of any threatened punishment, not fear of him but fear for him, fear for his injured feelings. It was so terrible to disappoint him, to fail to come up to his expectations. He could be so inordinately, uncomprehendingly disappointed in someone that his uncontrolled anger, the quivering indignation that filled him, seemed justified, and by comparison with the suffering caused in Hitler himself by inadequacy and disobedience, the suffering of the person punished, however pitilessly inflicted, seemed hardly worth mentioning. Nothing takes more courage than to disappoint a despot. Nothing inflicts more cruel pain on him. Should he ever discover that free human beings with free will exist, it would surely be the death of him.

  And he would certainly not discover it through his mistress. So we improvised.

  Next morning there was a car ready for us. They actually did take us where we wanted to go, on our own orders. So we were not prisoners.

  Suppose we wanted to go to Paris? I said.

  I realized that this was a stupid remark in the September of 1944.

  Or Berlin?

  When I go to Berlin it will be without you, said Eva.

  Munich, she told the chauffeur, and we set off as if for a nice drive into town, a little escapade of the kind Eva liked so much. We were just two young women who, after a stay of some length in the country, wanted to breathe a little of the big-city air.

  SEPTEMBER 1944: the air of Munich smells of the aftermath of fire. It smells of wet lime, of smoldering beams, of the odors rising from cellars that have filled up with groundwater. It smells of death.

  The way to Wasserburger Strasse is like an obstacle course. Whole streets are blocked, impassable, clogged with mountains of rubble, metal, glass, broken tiles, bent metal girders. The buildings still standing look uninhabited, most of their windows boarded up, including the shop display windows. There are no shops left. Only the old names from another time: Ladies’ Outerwear, Delicatessen, Oriental Rugs. They stand there like the inscriptions in a desecrated grave-yard. The city is gray. The end product of every act of destruction is the dust that settles on everything.

  The people are gray, too. They appear singly, separately, moving as if in flight. A race of beings coming up from the cellars, venturing briefly into the light to perform rapid tasks, eyes lowered to the ground, making haste about it, disappearing down into the cellars again. They snatch up something to take with them, some pathetic possession that they intend to hide away. Something retrieved from the rubble, something acquired for an incalculable price. This is how thieves move. But they are not thieves. They have stopped appearing to be what they are. They are indifferent to it now.

  The only way you push a pram is at a run. The wheels of the prams wobble. The little bodies inside them are shaken all over the place. But not every pram contains a baby. It could hold cabbages, old clothes, cooking utensils. You’re lucky if you can wheel a cabbage home. The ruined city of Munich is a city full of prams. They are the prime method of transport. They are low-built white wicker baby carriages, with massive wheels and hard rubber tires. When they have been wheeled to the point of disintegration you snatch up their contents, whether a baby or some other item, and just abandon them. Someone or other will chuck it on top of the rubble pile along with broken grandfather clocks, shattered lavatory pans, and bathroom fittings.

  The fate of the trees: Here and there a tree stands defoliated, shattered, violated, dead. They share in our experiences. I am instantly aware of the monstrosity of it. The one thing I take in on our drive through Munich is the monstrosity inherent in the death of the trees along with us. Birds sit in their scorched branches like messengers from another world. It is an image from the mind’s picture book of horror, clear and grisly, although these are not ravens but the migratory birds that visit Munich every year at this season.

  The triumphal gate is barred by the fallen masonry lying around. One of the bronze lions is lying on its back. Our pity could not be greater if it were an animal of flesh and blood.

  We still wax indignant over the suffering of animals and trees. When the elephant Wastl died buried under the ruins of the Berlin Zoo after an air raid in November 1943, the whole country grieved. The picture of the dying colossus, lying helpless on his side crushed under several steel girders, once again embodying in death all the awkward, beguiling charm of a baby mammal, was printed in all the papers, and if the people were ever united by a single emotion it was by their indignation at the death of Wastl as a result of the Allied air raids on Berlin. None of the fallen soldiers was mourned so much. None of the suffering of those buried in the ruins touched us so closely. Would we let war be waged on animals in the zoo? Bombs on Hellabrunn? Never! We suddenly understand the meaning of human suffering through the suffering of our fellow creatures.

  Eva’s house is intact. Everything in Wasserburger Strasse is still just as it was. The fridge is full. The SS provide for us here, too. No sooner are we through the door than the protective cocoon closes around us again. We are invulnerable. In the gray world of death surrounding us we are the colorful exception, enclosed in a shimmering little soap bubble floating merrily along. Nothing can happen to us. We’re having fun.

  We exercise with the gyro-wheel in the garden. Eva is proficient with the gyro-wheel. She goes the whole way around the circular lawn with the cherry tree in the middle of it, whereas I am happy if I can perform a single revolution on the device. Our cheerful squeals echo through the neighborhood.

  The Führer’s lady-love is back.

  We invite Eva’s friends around. Mitzi comes, Mandi, Kathi, and Schorsch. They come at midday and stay well into the evening. Their conversation is all about clothes, people, fashion magazines. There are chocolates in the afternoon, and for supper we have the dry-cured beef we found in the fridge. We drink champagne with it. There’s always chilled champagne ready when Eva comes here.

  Got anything? they asked as soon as they were through the door.

  Of course, said Eva, I always have something nice for you.

  Mitzi bites the chocolates, tries them, and if they have centers she doesn’t like she deposits them in the ashtrays with the cigarette ends. I spend some time struggling with myself, wondering whether to speak up.

  Finally I say: There’s butter in those, you know.

  Yes, I know, says Mitzi. Fact is, I don’t like butter.

  In 1944 that sounds like blasphemy.

  The air-raid warning sounds in the afternoon. It’s the second that day.

  We must go down to the shelter, I say.

  You go, says Mitzi, you’re just a scaredy-cat, nothing’s going to happen.

  I don’t see why we can’t stay up here, says Schorsch, it’s cozy up here, he says. Cozy and cheerful, that’s the ticket.

  They sing. It’s a drinking song claiming that the cozy cheerfulness of Munich will never die, not as long as Old Peter, the name of the bell tower of the church of St. Peter’s, still stands . . .

  But as far as I am aware it isn’t standing now.

  I try to cast Eva meaningful glances, but she doesn’t respond. I get the feeling that when she’s with her friends she shuts me out. I feel excluded. I don’t know what they’re laughing at. They laugh almost all the time. I feel my face contorting into a grimace, as if I were laughing, too. The women’s laughter, as I sense without being precisely able to account for it to myself, is a sign of their sexual readiness. It is unbridled, shrill coloratura laughter, giving evidence at its height of their own ability to climax in orgasm. I have heard it since then in many other women, particularly in middle age. It stops after sixty at the latest. Even today hearing it still makes me angry. It makes me angry because I feel that it exposes me.

  At the time I watch, with the inward wrath of the excluded,
to see if I can catch Eva joining in this laughter. The expression on my face is intended to stifle it in her throat.

  But I don’t catch her at it. Nonetheless, my fear of air raids takes the form of a sense of deep injury, of exclusion.

  I’m going down now, I say.

  My sense of injury is so strong that it almost paralyzes me, and I make for the cellar entrance with stiff, unsteady steps.

  Off you go, then, says Eva. Come back when the all-clear sounds.

  The hell with her.

  While I sit in Eva’s bunker, that expensive luxurious air-raid shelter fitted out especially for her, I think of Hitler. If he only knew, I think. She’s insulting us both, Hitler and me alike. Neither Hitler nor I feel happy with the company she keeps in Munich. But I realize that Hitler has other things on his mind just now. I have to endure this on my own.

  And as if mocking me, the all-clear comes quite soon.

  Hey, look, says Schorsch. Here’s our little chickabiddy again.

  Out of every thirty or forty air-raid warnings and alerts, only one portends a real raid. I’m a little chickabiddy because I didn’t know that. I’m a provincial, with my correct High German accent contrasting with the Berlin dialect. I’m a Prussian. I’m just a nuisance and a hanger-on.

  Cheers, says Schorsch to me. Have a drink, love.

  All I know about Schorsch is that his work is important to the war effort, so he is exempt from service in the national army or even the territorial army. Later I learn that he is in the wines and spirits trade. It’s a job that suits his natural inclinations. I wonder whether it’s my patriotic duty to inform Hitler.