Eva's Cousin

by Sibylle Knauss

  I cast Eva a warning glance, which she fails to notice, and go to bed.

  Before we drive back to the Berghof the next morning we go to see Eva’s parents. I am surprised by the warmth of Uncle Fritz’s welcome. No dour silence now, no reproachful withdrawal, as I have feared.

  In fact, he long ago forgave Hitler for loving his daughter. And Aunt Fanny even seems to have blossomed a little herself in the sun of power and its warming rays. She looks distinctly younger than six years ago. There’s something flirtatious, roguish about her. A kind of determination to be happy at any price, which stands up to the air raids now coming at shorter and shorter intervals.

  Now and then it does happen that the success of their daughters in love reflects so much on mothers that they become reconciled to their own modest lot and raise themselves, unasked, to their daughters’ social eminence. Aunt Fanny would not have been Aunt Fanny if she hadn’t eventually succeeded in persuading Uncle Fritz that there was no point in resisting good fortune, particularly when it is pursuing you so tenaciously. Any daughter can bring home a husband. But a Hitler is something else. Once, when Uncle Fritz finally showed himself ready to be a guest on the Obersalzberg from time to time, Aunt Fanny had rewarded him with herself, with an Aunt Fanny enjoying a second springtime, clearly rejuvenated and slimmed down in the air of her social and geographical high altitude.

  It was an act of seduction she performed on her husband, who no doubt would have tired of his celibacy in the guest bedroom at some point, and no longer felt like resisting the siren song of all the female voices in his family. He half sank, Aunt Fanny half dragged him back into the marriage bed, and there he was sleeping with her again. He joined the Party, a step that was rewarded with the honor of a membership number containing only a few digits, putting him on a par with the early members, the Party veterans. And if Fritz Braun did make a great effort to remember the past, he sometimes actually did believe he had always been a member, and after suffering a slight injury on the occasion of Georg Elser’s attempted assassination of Hitler in the Bürgerbraukeller in November 1939 he considered himself one of the martyrs of the movement. In other words, he gave up. He aged. No one took him very seriously.

  Not so Aunt Fanny. In the autumn of 1944 she still was in excellent form. The ship of her life had a favoring wind in its sails. She was long past dreaming of a wedding between her daughter Eva and the dictator. She liked the status quo. Indeed, she rather relished the risqué nature of the situation. It rubbed off on her, too. She flirted. She would talk to any men present in front of her daughters, and her comments were cogent and sometimes daringly irreverent. None of her daughters had inherited her native wit. Ilse, the cleverest of the three, came closest, but her cleverness had told her to leave the nest early, and she still kept well away. And Fanny Braun need not expect competition from her younger daughters, nor indeed did she expect much of anything else from them. She laughed a little too loud.

  The greatest day of her life was the wedding day of her youngest daughter and Fegelein. At heart, she herself was the bride. It was she who, with an air of inimitable confidence, received the congratulations of the powerful, which were as good as a promise of happiness, a kind of policy to be paid out when it matured.

  But it was not really material advantage that my aunt Fanny Braun expected to reap from her daughters’ connections; what she really liked was the fact that at last, if rather late in the day, she had a chance to show her talent for making a big entrance. Did she not feel the ground beginning to get hot beneath her feet?

  Eva urged her parents to join us on the Obersalzberg, where they would be safe from the bombs, and they arrived a few days later.

  My word, said Aunt Fanny, you girls are very comfortable up here.

  But I soon realized that we bored her. She lamented the days when Hitler held court here. State visits. Receptions. The whole circus, she said dreamily. Yet I felt fairly sure that Eva had seldom invited her when Hitler was at the Berghof. Women like Eva are considerate in love, considerate to an extent verging on self-denial. She would not have done anything to upset her lover in the least, anything that would have seemed like an imposition. If necessary, she was even ready to spare him the imposition she herself embodied.

  Her parents didn’t stay long this time either. After a few days, they decided to go on to Schloss Fischhorn and their younger daughter. I imagined Aunt Fanny taking riding lessons and flirting with the young SS officers. I could well believe it of her. The Fegeleins would have to revise their opinion of the women of the Braun family.

  In time Eva’s parents took to shuttling between Schloss Fischhorn and the Obersalzberg. When they returned to the Berghof, Aunt Fanny would indulge in peculiar references to me. I had made quite an impression, she said. I wasn’t forgotten at Fischhorn.

  I didn’t ask for details.

  I still loved her. I still wished my mother were like Aunt Fanny. But I was disappointed in her. Her inflexible determination to amuse herself, her alert cheerfulness, both fascinated and repelled me. I was surprised to recognize in them her similarity to her daughter Eva. The same determination to counter misfortune by claiming that one had never been happier. The same strength expended on proving that claim. I have seen it since in many other women.

  Yet at the time a day’s excursion to Munich should surely have been enough to mute the cheerfulness in which I myself shared. Didn’t we see the extent of the destruction? Weren’t we afraid? Had we no sympathy for the disabled, the injured, the victims buried under the rubble? Didn’t we feel for the starving? That meant almost everyone but us. For deportees bound for the camps? For the suffering of those who, to us, were nameless? And surely to be “nameless” is the worst anyone can suffer. We guessed it was so. Even my cousin Eva and my aunt Fanny guessed it was so.

  None of this, however, could rein in my aunt’s and my cousin’s desire to be out and about. Or put a damper on their pleasure in a boating expedition, a snowball fight, a day spent climbing. Or the childish enthusiasm with which they devoted themselves to a game of nine-men’s morris or pinned up the hem of a skirt Eva wanted to alter. Aunt Fanny could work magic with needle and thread. She was an expert dressmaker.

  All their passion, all the potential creativity in them, went into these trivial activities. All the serious thought of which they were capable was devoted to having fun. There was nothing left over for anything else. They made sure of that. And there was even a grain of heroism in their superficiality, their inexcusable lack of integrity and responsibility. Can I call it courage? The courage that keeps a child from bursting into tears although it has reason enough to weep?

  There’s nothing good in falsity, so no, not courage. Except, perhaps, with respect to the strength it cost them to be always good-humored, amusing, cheerful. Full of merriment and initiative. We laughed all day long. It was dreadful.

  THE HOUSE WHERE EVIL THINGS HAPPEN has the forest at its back. It is not isolated, yet it is some distance from other dwellings. You can see it is empty. The summer visitors it once sheltered left long ago. There is a feeling of neglect about it. The terrace and the steps leading up to it are covered with autumn leaves. The house is cold. Of its nature it cannot be warmed. Darkness lives within it, even by day. Sometimes the stairs creak softly. Horror lies in wait behind curtains, doors left ajar; it lurks in the corners between cupboard and wall. The house has a cellar that is better not thought about. All the same, it’s there. Perhaps it hides no secret. But you would have to go down there if you wanted to make sure of that.

  Sometimes, in the smiling south, close to a village full of grape-vines, barking dogs, pots of geraniums, and laughter you see such a house. It is hired out to tourists as a holiday villa. I recognize it at once. I know what it is like inside. Why am I so afraid of it? Why can I imagine nothing worse than to be on my own in it? It’s as if someone had a rendezvous with me there, someone I can’t remember, don’t want to remember, but that person remembers me and has known, all thi
s time, that I shall come sooner or later. He is waiting for me there. He has time. He is patient. Evil always has time.

  This is the other, the menacing side of the house on the Mooslahner Kopf. Like every house, it has a daytime and a nighttime aspect, it harbors its ghosts, its own darkness. It is a place of death.

  Wouldn’t you be scared to sleep there all on your own? Eva asks me.

  As soon as we got back from Munich I told her about my decision to go and stay in the Tea House.

  Scared? No. What of?

  Could any seven square kilometers in the world be better guarded than this place? (And yes, of course I’m scared.)

  Scared that someone will notice what broadcasting station you’re secretly listening to, says Eva, laughing.

  Of course she knows I want to listen to enemy broadcasts. I want to know what’s going on. Since we went to Munich it seems to me as if I had merely been dreaming in all the weeks I’ve been here on the Berg. How could I survive so long without news? To be honest, I must admit to myself that I’ve never read the newspapers or listened to the radio much. While I was living in Jena all my political information was derived from my father. It was through him that I learned what was going on. It was through him that I knew what to think about it. So I’m not weaned yet, I’m still unable to look after myself in such matters. Well, I have to learn, and now is the time for it. My decision to stay in the Tea House is a first step in that direction. I take it, as one takes any first step, with a certain overconfidence in my abilities. But I want to know what’s going on.

  I want to find out what our enemies are planning. I want to face the enemy. It’s better than having him behind you. I sense that instinctively rather than thinking it out. At heart I know that Eva is on my side. I’m her little scout, her spy. She can’t do it herself.

  What interests her, I realize later, is to find out not how to save herself but how to be there when the end comes. She doesn’t want to be deceived now, any more than I do. Through me, she wants to discover how far gone we are, how far advanced in the process of dying, annihilation, extinction. From now on she will be setting the clock of her life by the news I bring her over the next few weeks:

  Romania, formerly our ally, has declared war on Germany and agreed to an armistice with the Allies in Moscow.

  Bulgaria is changing sides.

  There’s a revolt against the German troops in Slovakia.

  A retreat from Greece.

  From Albania, Macedonia, Serbia. The Red Army takes Belgrade.

  Finland agrees to an armistice with the Russians and Great Britain.

  The Eastern Front is coming closer.

  The last German battleship, the Tirpitz, is sunk in Tromsö Fjord.

  And my cousin Eva is on her way to her marriage bed. As long as the war pursued a victorious course it was none of her business, just one of those wild, mysterious games that keep men away somewhere far from home. But now she must be vigilant. Now she must arm herself to be ready at the right moment. My cousin Eva is in her own state of mobilization now that she realizes Germany is losing the war. And I am her scout.

  So I know she will have no objection to my moving into the Tea House. She may even think I’m doing it for her sake. I have nothing to fear from her if I tune in to the BBC. Quite the contrary. When we meet she questions me. She wants to know all about everything.

  Be careful of the guards, she says. They patrol the woods around the house even at night.

  Of course I’ll be careful, I say.

  I put a blanket over myself and the radio. It’s like being in a tent, just the radio and me. We whisper. We conspire. The tuning button calls for great delicacy of touch as I move it. Our enemies’ voices can be heard only if you’re very careful. Move the tuner only a little farther, and all I get is a slight crackling. It’s not so easy to receive them up here in the mountains anyway. They are also disturbed, distorted, interfered with by our own transmitters. Often I can hear nothing but the rushing sound that contains all the frequencies audible to the human ear. The news I want to hear is hidden in there. I know it is. I listen for it. I feel that I can hear the music of time in the rushing sound. That white noise is the present. The present is entirely contained in it. Explosions, screams, orders, volleys of firing, sirens, the whistling sound just before a bomb drops, curses, groans, the roaring engines of the Lancaster bombers, psalms, prayers, lies both merciful and unmerciful, whispered words of farewell, marching songs, the cry of Sieg heil! Sieg heil! toward which they flow, the voice of a senior judge, high-pitched and furious, sweeping through the People’s Court like a whiplash: “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?”

  All this is hidden in the persistent rushing that I hear most of the time. But now and then, and always suddenly, I succeed in picking out individual voices:

  The curtain has risen on the last act of the German tragedy, says Hugh Carleton Greene, head of the German-language service of the BBC.

  He is talking about the territorials, the Volkssturm, our last reserve of men.

  The boys and old men of Germany, he continues, are being asked to face armies equipped with the keenest and most modern of weapons. The fact that everyone between sixteen and sixty is to be called up and sent into battle, he says, proves that Hitler and Himmler intend to drag the whole German nation down with them in a disastrous act of suicide.

  But thereby, says Hugh Carleton Greene in his correctly accented British German, thereby Hitler and Himmler have given the Germans a way out: Anyone who carries a gun, he says, is no longer defenseless, has no excuse left. Anyone who carries a gun can turn it against his real enemies, the enemies at home.

  The real enemies at home—he means me. In my mind I see an army of children and old men storming the Obersalzberg. A disorderly mob of madmen who have heard too many BBC broadcasts. They don’t even reach the lowest guard post. They fall to the machine-gun fire of our guards. They fall the way I’ve seen men fall in films of the First World War, jerkily, twitching, literally mown down. I hope, for their sakes, they resist the blandishments of Hugh Carleton Greene. They know, or so I hope, how well our position here “at home” is guarded and fortified.

  I think of Hugh Carleton Greene in his London studio. He’d better watch out for himself. We have been attacking London since September 8 with V2 rockets against which there is no defense. I am afraid for Hugh Carleton Greene, Lindley Fraser, and the others at the BBC, because I need them. I wish I could talk to them. I’d have so many questions to ask. I feel so lonely in Hitler’s Tea House. What will happen to me if we lose the war? Who will I be then? I wouldn’t mind being a domestic servant to Hugh Carleton Greene. That would be all right. But it could be worse, much worse. I simply cannot imagine what will happen when we lose the war. I hear my father saying: This time there’ll be no going on.

  But that’s not possible. I don’t believe Hugh Carleton Green wants me to be shot. I just don’t believe it. His voice sounds pleasant. I’m sure I’d get on well with him.

  Dear Mr. Greene, please may I ask you a question . . . ?

  I imagine him as a man of around fifty, old enough to be my father although a little younger than my real father. He might be stern with me.

  Do you have a gun? he would ask immediately.

  No, of course not.

  You should do something, all the same.

  But what, Mr. Greene? What can I do?

  Keep your eyes open.

  I’m trying to.

  Suppose he knew I’m here with Eva?

  What did you say? asks Hugh Carleton Greene. With Eva Braun? Hitler’s mistress? The woman he phones in the evening? And you ask me what you can do?

  I am afraid Hugh Carleton Greene takes too simple a view if he thinks Eva would resist the disastrous act of suicide of which he spoke. Eva will fling herself right into it, that’s what she’ll do.

  I ask her at supper: What will you do if the Allies come here?

  Here? she says. You mean here to the Berg?


  Yes.

  That amuses her.

  They won’t come here.

  But suppose they do?

  What will I do? Nothing. But do be careful no one hears you talking in that defeatist way.

  Eva laughs, and looks at the open door of the dining room.

  But seriously, I say. Don’t you think we’re losing the war?

  Yes, says Eva. I do.

  So what about you? I ask. Where will you go then?

  I’ll go to him, says Eva. Whatever happens.

  She follows this remark with a little laugh, the kind that says: I meant it seriously, but you can take it as a joke if you like.

  I tell her that Aachen has fallen. The Americans are outside Düren.

  Eva sighs.

  Do you know what Hugh Carleton Greene said? The city of Aachen no longer exists. And other German cities will go the same way. He says we ought to have surrendered them at once rather than risk such losses in what is a hopeless struggle anyway. An order leading to the destruction of our German homeland, said Hugh Carleton Greene, is a treasonable order.

  That’s enough, little one, says Eva. I think you’ve forgotten where you are.

  But she says it in the tone of cheerful banter that is usual between us.

  Now! says Mr. Greene. Now, he says. Do something!

  Do you think the Führer knows about all this, I ask Eva innocently.

  He knows everything, says Eva. You’d be surprised how much he knows.

  Because otherwise you’d tell him, wouldn’t you? I say to Eva, nodding as if there can be no doubt about that.

  For a moment I believe I have succeeded in setting up a link between Hugh Carleton Greene and Adolf Hitler, a kind of conference circuit through which they can talk to each other, so that Mr. Greene gets a chance to convince Herr Hitler.

  You’re out of your mind, says Eva, suddenly serious. You don’t think I talk politics to him, do you? How naive can you get!