Last Stop Vienna

by Andrew Nagorski

  “Come in, Private. What’s your name?”

  “Naumann, sir, Karl Naumann.”

  “Well, Naumann, you’ve been doing a good job. I’ve seen you in action, defending me and my right to speak at our meetings.”

  I flushed.

  “Just a moment,” he continued, quickly reading the note. “I’ll give you a reply right away for your captain.”

  Hitler sat down at his small desk, and I remained standing near the door. As he wrote, his head drooping over the paper in an almost birdlike position, I took in the surroundings. The room was small and narrow, no more than three yards wide, with a window overlooking the street and the tops of the trams as they rumbled by. There was nothing here to suggest wealth or power. A simple linoleum covered the floor. A bed. A desk and chair. A couple of bookshelves, with only a few books I recognized: Clausewitz’s On War, Treitschke’s German History, Spamer’s Illustrated World History.

  Hitler pushed back his chair and handed me an envelope. “Keep up the good work, Private.”

  As I leaned forward to take it, I was hit by a pungent, sour smell. It startled me, but my main thought was to salute and turn as smartly on my heels as I could before walking out the door.

  —

  Sabine and I rarely talked about politics. During our first few meetings, she expressed some interest, but more in the nature of the people I had become involved with than in their program.

  “Your friend Uwe scares me,” she told me. “I wouldn’t want to be caught with him alone somewhere.”

  “He looks meaner than he is. Really. Of course, you have to be tough to be in the SA, but it’s for a good cause.”

  Sabine arched her eyebrows and spooned more sugar into her coffee. She loved anything sweet, the sweeter the better. “You mean Hitler’s cause? Whatever that is. All that ranting about Germany’s enemies and German pride? What does it all add up to except the fantasies of a strange-looking man who wants to be kaiser?”

  “What are you talking about?” I replied huffily. “I’ve watched Hitler. I’ve been to his apartment. It’s one simple room. This isn’t a man who is after personal glorification and wealth. He wants Germany to get back on its feet. To be proud again.”

  She laughed, and any offense I had taken melted away. “You’re still so naive,” she said, reaching over and rumpling my hair. “Only a couple of years between us, and I sometimes think I should be your mother.”

  “Some mother.”

  “Some child,” she retorted, and we both laughed.

  We met several times a week, whenever I could get away from my duties. Sometimes in cafés, where, to my relief, she immediately offered to pay her share of the bill. “I’m a working woman,” she pointed out when I reached for the bill the first time. She made more money than I did, but, unlike me, she had to provide for her own living expenses. We went to the movies a few times. But mostly we just walked in the English Gardens or in the city center. Neither of us could afford much more.

  If we had little in common in terms of politics, we quickly discovered a different bond. She was an only child, and her father had died, as mine had, in the war. Her mother had suffered from tuberculosis and died a couple of years later.

  “You mean your mother is living and you don’t keep in touch with her?” she asked accusingly. It was the one time in those early meetings when she looked genuinely angry with me.

  “So what? You don’t know what it was like in my house. She never stood up for me when my father hit me. What do I owe her?”

  “Everything,” she shot back without hesitation. “Absolutely everything. You have to promise me that you’ll get back in touch with her.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “Promise.”

  “All right, maybe. Maybe next time I go to Berlin. At some point I will, you know.”

  Sabine took this vague statement as concession enough, and she didn’t push me further. We saw more and more of each other. We designated a willow tree in the English Gardens as our meeting spot and began our walks from there. I learned that her surviving family member was a sick grandmother who shared her small attic apartment in a drab three-story building across the river from the English Gardens. Aside from feeding herself, Sabine had to feed and care for her. I felt worse about not being able to pay for even the small things, like a cup of coffee.

  When it was time for me to report back to my barracks, I would walk her home. The second or third time, I worked up the nerve to kiss her on the cheek. “You can kiss both cheeks,” she said with a soft laugh. And that became our regular good-bye.

  Until a cold winter afternoon when she said she had to go home earlier than usual to check on the coal in the stove. At the door to the building, I leaned over to kiss her on the cheek and banged my mouth against hers instead, teeth against teeth. I drew back.

  Sabine’s eyes met mine. “I wanted a different kind of kiss.”

  “Oh, you mean . . .”

  “Don’t worry, I don’t bite—yet.”

  She reached up and drew my face to hers, putting her lips firmly on mine.

  “I know,” I responded, and pulled her to me, kissing her again.

  She looked up, her hands holding me lightly by the waist. “Look, it’s cold. You should warm up upstairs.”

  I hesitated. “What about your grandmother?”

  “She’ll be asleep. Don’t worry.”

  She took me by the hand and led me up the darkened staircase to the top floor. She unlocked the small door, and we went in. It was nearly dusk outside, and everything inside was already in semidarkness.

  The apartment was no more than a room divided by a curtain. A slightly irritating odor filled my nostrils, a mix of coal dust and something else that I gradually identified as coming from the cot where the head of a small white-haired woman barely emerged from the covers. Sabine added a few coals to the oven, and we went to her side of the curtain, which also contained a cot, a small table and a washbasin. There wasn’t room for anything else.

  “I know it isn’t much,” she said, looking around nervously. “If you’re hungry, I can offer you a bit of bread and cheese.”

  She turned toward me, and this time I drew her close. Our mouths met, and I felt the softness of her body pressing against mine, welcoming the reaction I couldn’t hide. Then she sat down on the cot and reached both hands to me, pulling me down beside her.

  “Sabine, I . . .”

  “Shhh,” she said, putting her forefinger on my lips. She took my right hand and placed it on her breast. “Grandma won’t hear anything. She’s asleep and almost deaf.”

  I reached into her blouse, and she pulled it off, loosening my shirt at the same time. “Wait,” she said, sliding under the covers of the narrow bed. A moment later she pulled out her skirt and tossed it on the floor. “I’ll turn around. You can throw your pants on that chair.”

  Awkwardly I took off my shoes and my trousers. I slid under the covers with my underwear still on.

  Sabine pulled them down as she covered my mouth with hers, her tongue working itself around my lips and then meeting mine. Within a moment I felt a familiar panic, then the surge that left both of us sticky wet.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, desperately trying to pull away. “I’m really sorry. I wanted to tell you.”

  Sabine held me tighter than ever, pulling my head against her chest. “It’s all right, it’s fine. I’m glad you’re here. Relax, just relax. Has any girl ever told you how handsome you are?”

  I shook my head. In school, the girls were always more interested in the tough boys I had tried woefully to emulate.

  “Well, they should have,” she said, running her fingers down my face from top to bottom. “Let me be the first, then.”

  I suddenly remembered the “pretty boy” remark of the prostitute in Berlin. That only deepened my gloom.

  We lay pressed against each other in the dark, but I couldn’t shake my sense of shame. Again, I thought. How could this happen? Was I a norma
l man? Was I born with something wrong, something that could never be made right?

  I must have fallen asleep, a remarkably deep sleep even if it turned out to be short. Still half asleep, I felt Sabine’s gentle stroking and myself growing hard. She rolled me over, and as I came wide awake, she was astride me, her hands grasping my chest. This time I felt the surge within me rising gradually and then erupting, deep inside her. She leaned forward, her breasts brushing my body as she kissed me again.

  “Feel better?”

  I thought I would explode again with joy.

  —

  Back in the barracks, I wanted to say something to show that I was now one of the men in a way I hadn’t been before. I told myself that I wasn’t going to boast about what I did with Sabine the way some of the men talked about going out on the town. I won’t tell, I can’t tell. But it turned out I didn’t need to say anything directly. I guess my self-confidence was evident, decipherable, to my companions.

  “Hey, guys, I think Karl is getting laid,” Uwe announced one afternoon.

  I turned red, trying to decide whether I should take a swing at him or simply admit that he was right.

  “Sure is,” Stefan chimed in. “About time.”

  I couldn’t help but grin. If I thought I had full membership in the club before, I knew that I was definitely in now.

  For all the banter, the barracks still had their share of tensions. Our public shows of discipline at party meetings didn’t always carry over; fights kept breaking out, and three troopers were stripped of their armbands and banished for knifings. One of their victims died in the hospital, and our superiors had to work hard to ensure that word didn’t leak out to our enemies. Luckily, the authorities seemed inclined to look the other way whenever we were involved in violent incidents; they were used to covering up for us. There was little doubt that we had secret sympathizers in higher Munich and Bavarian circles who hated the reds more than they distrusted us.

  Hitler understood those sentiments and was determined to use them to his advantage. Our meetings were fine as far as they went, keeping his supporters enthusiastic and attracting recruits to the movement. But he remained eager to prove that he could defeat the reds and drive them off the local political stage.

  The opportunity, it seemed, would be on May 1, 1923, the traditional day for the left to mount a show of strength. The Bavarian government had given the communists and socialists permission to hold their May Day demonstrations, but Hitler announced that this would be an insult to the patriotic Germans who saw the red flags as “the painful symbol of the collapsing fatherland.”

  Early in the morning, all the SA troops in Munich assembled at Oberwiesenfeld north of the city. Several armed units from other regions joined us, bringing our number to over thirteen hundred men. Among them was Gregor Strasser, looking fit and very much in command of his troops from Landshut. We were well armed with rifles and machine guns, and we had a couple of horse-drawn cannons that I had never seen before. We shot out our right arms and shouted in unison, “Heil Hitler!” This was our new salute.

  But any sense of security those numbers might have provided us gave way to nervousness as we realized that regular Bavarian troops had effectively surrounded us. Hitler looked more agitated than usual, pacing back and forth in a steel helmet. When he would take it off, we saw that sweat was streaming down his face. He looked uncharacteristically undecided. When he cast his glance in the direction of Munich to the south, he seemed to have no idea how to get us there.

  At around eleven A.M., Reichswehr troops marched onto the field. In their midst, I recognized the face of Captain Ernst Röhm. At the time, I knew only that Röhm had served in the Army District Command in Munich, and he had joined the National Socialists even before Hitler. Later he had backed Hitler’s efforts to take over the small party from the inside, and he encouraged Free Corps men to join and become part of SA units like ours.

  But Röhm was now representing the Bavarian authorities, and Hitler was startled to see him. “Whose side are you on? Are you a traitor?” Hitler asked. “Why are you trying to stop us from dealing with the reds?”

  Röhm looked him calmly in the eyes. “This isn’t the right moment for what you have in mind. The government and the Reichswehr have decided that the May Day demonstrations can take place. No one is to interfere with them—no one.”

  Hitler fumed and resumed his pacing. I saw Gregor Strasser approach and argue vehemently with him. Later I learned that Strasser had urged him to open fire on the government troops and to proceed with his plan to attack the reds. Hitler did nothing. Finally he agreed to the government troop’s order that we hand in our weapons to them.

  Stunned, we obeyed. As we surrendered our weapons, Hitler tried to reassure us. “We’ve already shown the reds what we are capable of,” he declared. “There’s no need to shed blood now. Our day will come soon.” Then we marched off the field.

  On our way back through Schwabing, we spotted a couple of reds carrying a May Day flag. “Let’s get them,” Uwe shouted, and I joined in the brief melee that followed. The two reds never had a chance. By the time I reached them, Uwe was kicking one of them, already flat on the ground. The other terrified man was trying to retreat, his face bloodied. I punched him in the face and the gut, and he went down. I felt my blood pumping as I kicked him in his ribs, just as Uwe had done to his companion. “Here’s the traitors’ flag,” I yelled, holding up their red banner. Someone struck a match and set it alight. Shouting, we tossed the burning banner on the ground next to the writhing bodies. But even as we celebrated our paltry victory, we couldn’t hide our frustration. We had been humiliated that day. Publicly.

  Chapter Four

  Sabine and I began going back to her apartment almost every afternoon or evening that I could get away. Her grandmother seemed to do nothing but sleep. We would walk in as quietly as we could and jump in under the covers. The first time that Sabine moaned loudly, I froze momentarily.

  “No, no, don’t stop,” she pleaded.

  I put my mouth to her ear. “What about her?”

  She giggled and tightened her arms around my back. “I told you, she’s almost deaf.”

  I finally met her grandmother one evening after we had made love and Sabine was brewing tea. “I’d like some, too,” the old woman said, her voice carrying from behind the curtain.

  “Oh, Grandma, you’re up,” Sabine said, pulling back the curtain. “I want you to meet Karl.”

  A shriveled, tiny woman was sitting up on the bed, her face a mass of lines and furrows, her short, thin white hair pointing in myriad directions. But her eyes were a bright blue. They must have looked like Sabine’s when she was young: lively, with a glint of amusement as she looked me over. I found myself blushing.

  “Well, young man, I’m very pleased to meet you. Sabine has told me so much about you—and, if I’m not betraying any secrets here, I think she likes you. A lot, I’d say.”

  Sabine laughed. “Grandma, how do you figure such things out?”

  “Just the wisdom of age, you know. Now, help me get up and over to that chair.”

  We sat down at the apartment’s rickety table, and I was relieved that the two of them kept talking. Sabine must have sensed that I didn’t know what to say. But her grandmother wasn’t about to let me sit there.

  “So what is it that you plan to do with your life?” she asked.

  “For now I’m a soldier.”

  “What did you say?”

  Sabine signaled for me to speak louder.

  “I’m a soldier,” I almost yelled.

  The old woman broke into a broad grin, showing her gums and very few teeth. “I’m hard of hearing, not deaf.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That’s all right,” she said. “But I already know you’re involved with a bunch of rowdies. That’s what boys who think they are men do.”

  “Grandma,” Sabine interjected. “Please.”

  But Grandma wasn’t about to be stop
ped. “You know it, too, Sabine. Now let me finish. I was just asking what you really intend to do with your life once this business is over.”

  “I haven’t thought about it much,” I responded. “I guess my feeling is that it’ll take quite a while before we straighten this country out. But then maybe I’d like to learn a trade. I’d like to fix automobiles or something.”

  “And you and your friends are going to fix this country first?”

  “Grandma, not again.”

  I realized they must have quarreled about me before.

  “I’m not starting anything,” the old woman insisted. “And Lord knows this country could use some fixing. But even if I don’t have much of an idea what’s happening outside anymore, I know enough not to trust a bunch of boys running around playing soldiers.”

  She began to cough, a deep hacking that made her face flush red, then purple. Sabine rushed over and put a handkerchief up to her mouth; as the cough subsided, she gently wiped the spittle from her chin and cheeks.

  “I’d better rest a bit more now,” Grandma said hoarsely. “My apologies. And Karl, don’t you mind anything I said. You look like a very nice boy, and I’m so happy for Sabine.”

  I stood up. “Thank you, Frau Koch.”

  Sabine led her grandmother back to bed, tucked her in and drew the curtain. “I’ll be back soon,” she said. “Get some rest.”

  We walked silently down the stairs. As we stepped outside, Sabine put her arm in mine. “She means well, she really does.”

  “I know,” I said, although my pride had been wounded. “She can’t understand what we’re doing.”

  We walked to the corner where we normally parted before Sabine replied: “I’m not sure I understand sometimes, either.” Then she quickly kissed me on the cheek. “But I love you, you know I do.”

  “Yes, I know. Someday you’ll also understand why we have to do things we do—why Germany needs the help we’re giving it.”

  When I recall those words now, I wonder what kind of a person I was not to hear how they sounded. And how Sabine put up with me at those times. But then I took my words seriously, very seriously. I was under Hitler’s spell.