by Jane Thynne
‘Apparently Goebbels was forced to spend Christmas in the guest house,’ said Shirer. ‘She won’t have him in the house.’
Since her husband’s affair with a Czech actress the previous year, Magda had resorted to her own style of revenge. It involved the conventional combination of a makeover, an affair and an awful lot of alcohol. Her wheat-blonde hair was now ashy and stiffly strained into rolls against her head. Her slinky plum dress – an elegant design by Paul Kuhnen – was ostentatiously modern, though its slender silhouette did her bulky form no favours. And the Elizabeth Arden foundation she had always favoured was now painted as thickly as a Van Gogh sunflower.
‘She’s in nightclubs several nights a week around town,’ murmured Cavendish waspishly. ‘She likes to invite young men to share her bar stool. She even asks sailors home.’
There was a malicious gleam in his eye at Magda Goebbels’ predicament – a malice that was, thought Clara, not too far from the savage laughter of the SA youths with the barmaids. She thought back over the years she had known the Propaganda Minister’s wife, a brittle, nerve-wracked, unsympathetic figure, locked into the gilded cage of a Nazi wife by her own disastrous choices. So what if Magda chose to play out her misery on the public stage? Who could blame her, given the horror of her marriage and the remorseless barbarity that her husband’s regime perpetrated? She was about to reply when Magda Goebbels turned in her direction and lurched to her feet.
‘Bad luck,’ said Cavendish. ‘Looks like she’s seen you.’
Magda, it was immediately clear, was drunk. Very drunk. Drifts of powder had collected in the crevices of her face and her lipstick might have been applied by one of her own little girls. The depths of her cleavage glistened with sweat. Yet beneath the blowsy exterior she was more agitated than Clara had ever seen her. The gold-tipped Sobranie trembled in her hand and her address was far more familiar than she would allow herself in daylight hours.
‘Fräulein Vine. Our own little actress. Fancy seeing you here.’ She swayed to a stop. ‘I wouldn’t have thought this was the kind of place you frequented. They tell jokes against Party leaders here, didn’t you know? I always had you down as a loyal member of the Chamber of Culture.’
‘As I am.’
‘Not so loyal as to sleep with my husband, I hope.’
‘Certainly not.’
‘Well you can always join the queue,’ she said with a harsh laugh, which brought a sour gust of schnapps and tobacco. ‘Though there’s quite a waiting list.’
A hush had descended. Faces turned in their direction, agog with expectation, if not surprise. Magda Goebbels had, in recent months, become an alternative cabaret. She was a living, breathing one-woman stand-up, firing off unspeakable quips about the Nazi leaders. An act like that from anyone else would be closed down instantly, and the performer sent to a camp the same evening, but who would dare denounce the Propaganda Minister’s wife? In what newspaper or magazine could the allegation be printed and what court would hear the accusations? Besides, why denounce her, when you could laugh at her instead?
‘I’ve been told to think of that girl as a hiccup in our marriage,’ Magda continued, as though her husband’s recent affair with a Czech actress was common knowledge, as indeed it was. ‘I say, not so much a hiccup, more of a belch.’
Clara felt a wave of sympathy.
‘Why don’t we sit down? There’s a seat over there. In that alcove.’
‘Don’t let me take you away from your friends. Especially not that handsome young man,’ commented Magda, eyeing Hugh Lindsey.
‘They’re not really my friends,’ said Clara hastily. ‘Just some journalists.’
She hoped the mention of journalists would be enough. Surely Magda was not so reckless she would get drunk in front of the cream of the foreign press? God forbid she should ask to be introduced to Hugh, or perhaps even invite him back to the Goebbels’ villa for a drink.
‘I barely know them,’ she added.
But Magda’s interest had flagged, and all her attention turned inwards again, to her own troubles. She plumped herself down on the banquette with a sigh.
‘I have a terrible headache. You have no idea how much I suffer, Fräulein Vine.’
‘I have aspirin—’ Clara began to fumble in her bag, but Magda waved her away.
‘It’s a spiritual suffering. There’s no pill for that, no matter how much my husband keeps booking me into clinics and sending the frightful Doktor Morell around with his prescriptions.’
Theo Morell was Hitler’s own doctor, who had been slavishly taken up by all the senior Nazis and as a consequence enjoyed lavish premises on the Kurfürstendamm and a country villa on the Wannsee. The contents of his pills were top secret, but generally thought to be amphetamines, designed to combat the sleepless nights of the top men.
‘God knows what he has in those tablets. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I ended up poisoned one day. At least Joseph would be pleased.’
So they had reached the heart of the matter, in one easy step.
‘How is the Herr Doktor?’
‘How should I know? He’s barely speaking to me. The Führer might have ordered him to break up with that marriage-wrecker, but you wouldn’t know it. He went on a grand tour of Europe to “soothe his wounded heart” but when he came back it was just as bad. Do you know what he’s done now?’
Clara could only imagine.
‘He’s commissioned a film from Veit Harlan to tell the story of his affair.’
‘I heard a little about that.’
It was, of course, the talk of the studios. Veit Harlan, a former actor turned successful director, had been allocated an eye-popping budget for his latest project, Die Reise nach Tilsen. It told the story of an honourable man, torn between his exquisitely beautiful mistress and his dumpy wife, struggling to resolve the conflict between head and heart. The lovelorn Goebbels was constantly popping in to watch the action or examine the rushes with manic attention to detail.
‘Joseph denies it’s about himself of course. And he refuses to discuss our marriage. Whenever I complain he stuffs his ears and shouts, “It’s the same old song! Even Bormann is allowed a mistress!” Apparently Bormann has taken up with one of your little actress friends. I expect you know her.’
Clara did, slightly. Manja Behrens was a dental assistant whose aspirations to a film and stage career had undergone a meteoric rise since she had come under the eye of Hitler’s enforcer, the vicious, bull-necked Martin Bormann. In a grotesque parallel of Magda Goebbels’ own plight the previous year, it was rumoured that Bormann was planning to move Manja under his own roof. Only the browbeaten Gerda Bormann might prove more amenable than Magda, who had tolerated the ménage à trois precisely one week before storming off to Hitler and demanding a divorce.
‘Joseph may have a broken heart, but it hasn’t stopped him, of course. He’s built a new villa for his whores, out at Lanke. It cost three million marks and it’s supposed to be the property of the German Film Industry. Though I suppose that makes sense, given the number of German actresses who are put up there.’ Her face hardened. ‘In a few weeks it’s our annual trip to Salzburg for the Wagner. I can see it already. All that operatic passion, and Joseph snuffling away next to me, moaning about his wounded heart.’
Magda sniffed, blinking away the tears of alcohol and self-pity in her eyes. Despite a prickle of sympathy, Clara knew she must not pass up the opportunity of this confessional mood.
‘Have you heard much of Frau von Ribbentrop?’
‘Unfortunately, I never hear the end of her.’
Since their first encounter in 1933, Magda Goebbels had not bothered to conceal her view of Annelies von Ribbentrop as a nouveau riche social climber and despite the fact that she had now achieved the dizzy heights of Wilhelmstrasse, Magda saw little reason to revise her opinion.
‘I went on tour to Italy with Albert Speer. I was desperately in need of a break and we went all round the Doric temples of Sicily and
southern Italy. It should have been so fascinating but all anyone could talk about was the von Ribbentrops. He’s bordering on insanity, they say, and Annelies is goading him on to all sorts of rash decisions.’
She leaned forward confidentially.
‘In fact they worry that von Ribbentrop’s advice is badly misleading the Führer in his military planning. Some of the senior men have been consulting a psychic to find out if the auspices are right for what Hitler has planned.’
Clara could barely believe it.
‘They’re asking a fortune teller?’
‘A good one. Her name is Annie Krauss. She has a place up in Wilmersdorf. She read my hand once actually and it was completely accurate. Every bit of it. She said if I stay with Joseph I’ll be dead by the age of forty-five. I can well believe it. I feel half dead already.’
The clatter of percussion and a roar from the audience alerted them to the beginning of the cabaret. As the performers made their entrance on stage, Magda rose unsteadily to her feet.
‘My friends will be wondering where I’ve got to.’
Clara picked up her bag.
‘Of course. Mine too.’
‘I thought you said they weren’t your friends.’
Magda lurched forward and gripped Clara’s wrist so hard that she flinched. Flushed and sweating, she loomed in Clara’s face.
‘What is it about you, Fräulein Vine? I’ve known you on and off for what is it, six years, and I don’t think I have ever seen you with a proper boyfriend. Not even my husband, which is quite an achievement, given his penchant for brunettes. And I’ve never heard scandal attached to your name until now.’
Clara felt the blood freeze inside her, but on the surface she was merely cool.
‘Scandal?’
‘You want to watch out . . .’ Magda smiled cruelly. ‘People are keeping an eye on you. Somebody has been saying some very unkind things about you.’
‘I wonder who?’
‘I can’t tell you. And I’d be lying if I said I cared. But for the sake of our long acquaintance, I’d advise you to be careful. Unless you want to spend more time enjoying your own company.’
At the bar Mary was still deeply ensconced with Hugh Lindsey and he had taken her arm to emphasize some point, making her flush with unexpected pleasure. Clara’s encounter, however, had not escaped her notice.
‘I didn’t realize you and Magda Goebbels were so close.’
‘It was just a friendly chat.’
‘I’ve seen friendlier Alsatians.’
‘She says some of the regime are consulting a fortune teller about their military plans.’
‘Astonishing,’ said Hugh.
‘You’d better believe it,’ said Mary. ‘Most of them are intensely superstitious. Even Hitler had his own astrologer until the SA discovered the man was Jewish and shot him in a field outside Berlin. Goebbels was joking about it for years afterwards.’
‘Our Minister enjoys jokes, doesn’t he?’ said Hugh drily. ‘I heard today he’s appointed his own joke-writer in the Ministry.’
‘He certainly needs something to improve those speeches.’
‘It’s not for the speeches. It’s rather more ingenious than that. The idea is to create jokes about the senior men and then track their spread across the country. Apparently it’s an effective way of monitoring dissent.’
‘Aren’t these people incredible?’ said Mary. ‘They’re more of a joke than any cabaret act.’
‘If the Nazis are a joke,’ said Hugh, ‘I’d hate to hear the punchline.’
The rest of the evening passed in a blur. As Clara laughed along with the cabaret, her mind was scrolling through the conversation with Magda Goebbels, analysing her parting words from every angle. Somebody has been saying some very unkind things about you. To be the subject of gossip was never a surprise in Nazi Germany, but a warning from the Propaganda Minister’s wife was far more worrying.
As she made her way back through the shadowed streets, she distracted herself with thoughts of the fortune teller, Annie Krauss. Berliners were famously superstitious. The city was thick with psychics and hand readers. Their advertisements peppered every newspaper and advertising column. Nor was a tendency to superstition limited to the general populace. Not only Hitler but Himmler firmly believed that psychic forces controlled his destiny. How perilous that the future of Europe might hinge on the prognostications of a palm reader or astrologer.
And yet, thought Clara, as she boarded the last S-Bahn and sat in the warm, rumbling darkness, was she not herself in thrall to a kind of superstition? Wasn’t she also longing to believe her own personal faith? That unexplained sixth sense, like a quiet flame in her heart, that told her that while Leo Quinn was missing, while he had disappeared without trace, he might yet not be dead?
Chapter Seventeen
Hedwig was sitting in the cramped front room of the apartment with her five brothers, quizzing Reiner on Air Raids. It was Reiner’s homework, but all the boys were listening – all except one-year-old Kurt, who was drifting off to sleep on her lap. Kurt was too young to understand about bombs or fire or death, and when he had been given a picture book about air raids, he had torn it up and cheerfully stuffed the pieces into his mouth. Hedwig wished she could do the same with Reiner’s quiz.
As she ran through the list of questions, she was trying to keep order as the three others attempted to compete. Wolfgang, who at eleven was younger than Reiner, but brighter, kept butting in. The oldest, Peter, bent over his schoolwork, contributing answers in a tone of bored superiority that infuriated his younger brother. Even little Ludi, who at five was too small even for the Pimpf, the junior section of the Hitler Youth, but had regular air-raid lessons at kindergarten, kept jumping up and trying to interrupt.
‘Stop it, Ludi. It’s my homework!’ shouted Reiner, with a mounting flush on his cheeks. ‘I need to get it right because there’s a big drill coming up!’
Reiner always found himself left behind by his cleverer brothers. He was hopeless at school. Perhaps that was why the HJ meant so much to him. It played to his strengths, which were running, fighting and swimming. Placing a soothing hand on Ludi’s head, Hedwig continued.
‘What do you do if you see a fire, Reiner? Who would be the right person to tell? What do you do if someone’s injured? How would you deal with poison gas?’
War was by far the boys’ favourite subject. It occupied their every thought. Even when they weren’t studying it, they were playing it in a variety of military board games: Tanks Forward, Without a Propeller, We Sail Against England – a new one involving U-Boats – and Bombs Over England, a game where Heinkel bombers attacked London Bridge. That was Wolfgang’s favourite and when Hedwig told him she had seen London Bridge and hoped it wouldn’t be bombed, he stared at her in disbelief.
But who needed board games now that the whole of the city had turned into one big practice site? Mock air raids and blackouts went on all the time in Berlin. In a recent drill, soldiers trussed up in decontamination suits had hosed down the streets as if clearing poison gas. The Luftwaffe had been co-opted to drop smoke bombs for a more realistic effect and fire engines raised their ladders up the side of buildings to stage rescues. The Hitler Youth dedicated a couple of evenings every week to air-raid drill and Reiner’s battalion had a large-scale exercise coming up. When war came, it would be the HJ that the city relied on to coordinate the air-raid precautions, check the blackouts and sirens and cope with the casualties. That was why Reiner’s homework mattered so much, and why Hedwig needed to drum the answers into his head.
She was devoted to her brood of brothers. Sometimes she felt she was never happier than when ensconced in this drab and cramped apartment, parrying their backchat and adjudicating over their arguments. There was Peter, at seventeen serious and ambitious, Reiner and Wolfgang always fighting, Ludi, a burly miniature of their father, and tiny, boisterous Kurt, who called for Hedwig before his mother and whose care Mutti seemed quite happy to deleg
ate.
Perhaps that was why she loved Kurt with a special passion. With his little jutting chin and his air of absolute confidence, it was clear that he would not stay a baby for long. The way he slammed his palms on the table of his high chair, demanding attention, he might have been commanding a battalion of soldiers, rather than a single harried sister. Yet although he was fast leaving infancy behind, his nails were still tiny pink shells and his hair soft as feathers. He watched his brothers constantly, observing their playing and their fights, clamouring to be included. He rarely cried and Hedwig’s possessive pride manifested itself in small acts of preferential treatment. She saved the lumps of sugar that were provided with tea for staff at the Ahnenerbe and crumbled them up for Kurt when his brothers were not looking.
In the evenings when she was not taking Faith and Beauty classes, Hedwig cooked and washed the plates, and after her father departed for the nearest Kneipe, divided her time between homework, storytelling and keeping order. Not to mention patching Kurt’s clothes, which had been shed by four brothers before him like the skins of a snake. This humdrum existence could not be less like the gracious, elegant life that the Faith and Beauty Society was preparing her for. Here in Moabit there was no art, or dancing, or conversation to speak of, unless you counted their father bellowing at the children or Mutti moaning about the amount of washing she had to do. There was no music, apart from the light dance music on the radio that Mutti used to drown out the squabbling of the boys. And yet it could not suit Hedwig better.
Ploughing through the pages of questions on Reiner’s list Hedwig felt a pang of sympathy for him. It had been the same for her in the BDM – endless lists of questions that she could still reel off like some leaden poetry imprinted forever in her mind. What is the date and place of the birth of the Führer? What are the clauses of the Treaty of Versailles? What is the date of the Beer Hall Putsch? What is the significance of 10th November? – the answer to that was Martin Luther’s birthday, rather than Kristallnacht, which had raged through the city last year.
