Last Stop Vienna

by Andrew Nagorski

  But when I described everything in a letter to Otto, he seemed less troubled than I was. He said that I should stay the course so long as we remained part of the same movement. But it didn’t take much reading between the lines to understand he was thinking this might not be the case for long.

  I couldn’t talk to Sabine about any of this. But when, after a much longer interval than usual, I saw Geli’s signal, I realized I wanted more from her this time than lovemaking, although I desperately wanted that. I wanted to know what she thought about the world around her, around us.

  We met at her Thierschstrasse apartment. Once again it was up the stairs two steps at a time, Geli opening up the door as soon as I lightly knocked and quickly leading me to her room, the solitary candle lit as always.

  “Geli, I—”

  “Later,” she whispered. Whatever resolve I had to ask the questions that I had suppressed for so long dissipated as her eyes focused on mine. She teasingly ran her tongue over my lips, and we collapsed onto the bed.

  Afterward, as she lay in my arms, Geli murmured, “Karl, I’ll be moving soon.”

  “Where?”

  “Not all that far. Prinzregentenplatz.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding. Only rich people live there.”

  “Maybe so, but Uncle Alf is getting a big apartment, and he’s asked me to move in with him.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Now she was up on one elbow, leaning over me. “I’m just moving in with my uncle.”

  “My God, what are you doing?”

  She kissed me lightly on the lips. “Don’t be angry with me, Karl, please.”

  “I’m not,” I said, and at that moment I realized I couldn’t be, not with her so close, not when I was still breathing her in. “But I just don’t understand anything.”

  “What is it that you want me to explain?”

  “About you, your uncle, Emil.” I hesitated. “About me.”

  “I’m not sure I can. I loved Emil, at least I thought I did, and maybe I still do, but he agreed so easily to Uncle Alf’s terms. To wait for two years, for God’s sake.”

  “I wouldn’t,” I blurted out, immediately feeling disloyal to my friend, all the more so because I obviously hadn’t during all the previous times I was with Geli, when we had both avoided mentioning him.

  “You’re different, Karl,” she said. “I don’t just like you, I’m crazy about you. But you have someone else, and who knows what will happen in my life. We’re friends, very special friends—whatever happens. None of this means I can’t love you forever.”

  “Like you love a friend? That’s all?”

  “I don’t know what to call it. Friendship, forbidden love—does it make a difference?”

  “To me it does.”

  “We can argue about it, but to me it isn’t a mistake.”

  “It isn’t for me, either.” I reached out my arm and pulled her toward me. When she dipped her chin, I kissed her forehead. But I wasn’t ready to let it go at that. “What about your uncle? I don’t know what to think of him anymore.”

  She didn’t respond at first, and I was about to talk about the attack on the printing shop, the woman there, my confused feelings. But she spoke up first. “He’s both nice to me and jealous. Sometimes I feel wonderful with him, sometimes horrible—especially when he tells me what I can or can’t do, like with Emil.”

  “So why are you moving into the same apartment with him, where he can control you more? Why don’t you tell him you can’t do it?”

  “Say no to him? Leave him? Karl, you have no idea what he’d do.” She was silent for a moment. “Or what he does.”

  “What?”

  She stopped me before I could ask anything more, nudged me gently but firmly out of the bed. “It’s getting late,” she said. Reluctantly, I picked up my clothes, scattered around the floor, and dressed. She watched me from under the covers.

  As I buttoned my shirt, I asked the question I had asked the first time and wasn’t supposed to ask again. “When can I come back?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “Then it’s not tomorrow?”

  She stood up, not bothering to reach for anything to cover herself. She put her arms around me, and I greedily ran my hands over her one more time. “We’ll find a way to see each other soon,” she murmured.

  “Promise?”

  She nodded, standing on her toes to kiss me again but at the same time pushing my hands away. “Don’t make this more difficult than it is—it’s so hard to let you go.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  She avoided me. At first I thought that she wasn’t able to spring loose to see me and was only waiting for the right occasion, arranging for another seemingly casual encounter. I made sure I passed by Thierschstrasse often, but the potted plant remained firmly rooted, and no red ribbon appeared. I had to be careful not to be seen by her uncle or, more likely—since Hitler was usually absorbed in his own thoughts when he went in and out of his building—Emil.

  I also lingered near her favorite cafés and did spot her on a couple of occasions—with Hitler. I hovered far in the background. Most of the time she looked as animated as ever, and every time I saw her laugh and her eyes sparkle, I felt longing. But sometimes I’d catch her in a moment when Hitler’s attention was turned elsewhere, and she’d have an unfocused, self-absorbed look that I couldn’t decipher. Her eyes never seemed to see me, even when I tried to position myself carefully in her line of vision. It was as if I were invisible. I finally realized she didn’t want to see me, which made me even more jealous. I couldn’t understand.

  I decided to confront her. Late one evening I retraced the steps into her building and up to her door. I stopped on the dark landing and listened for sounds. I thought I heard something from inside but wasn’t sure. I knocked softly. Nothing. I knocked again, this time a bit louder. Nothing again, except the creak of the door on the opposite side of the landing. I bolted down the stairs.

  The next day I saw her going into a café with Hitler. I tried to catch her eye, with no luck as usual. Feeling foolish and sorry for myself, I started walking away.

  “Karl, stop.”

  I turned around and there she was, standing on the sidewalk just outside the café, without her coat despite the cool weather. Her face was flushed, and her eyes bore into mine with not a hint of their usual flirtatiousness. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m not doing anything. I just want to see you.”

  “So knocking on my door at night—”

  “You said you’d let me know when we could see each other again.”

  “I have to get back inside before he starts wondering what I’m doing. But I want you to stop this. Don’t follow me, don’t knock on my door at night.”

  I could find no trace of sympathy in her determined expression. “Whatever you say,” I muttered.

  She took my hand, and her face softened. “There are some things you don’t understand, Karl.”

  “I understand that I want to see you again.”

  She dropped my hand. “If you keep acting like this, we won’t see each other at all anymore.”

  She reached for the café’s door, then hesitated. “Oh, Karl, I’d like to see you, too—and we will see each other. But nothing is ever as simple as it seems.” And then she was gone.

  It was simple enough to see that she was ensnared again in Hitler’s world, where she could play the princess, I thought bitterly. Where she could ignore me, act as if I didn’t exist, do whatever she did with her uncle, whatever it was that she didn’t want to talk about. Where she could be the escort of the man everybody in Munich, and increasingly all over Germany, was talking about.

  For, I had to admit, Hitler was reenergizing the party, which for so long had appeared to lapse into a low level of activity and support. It wasn’t an accident, I realized later, that this was happening precisely when the German economy, which had looked almost stable for several years, was
once again falling apart. Farmers had been protesting against deteriorating conditions for quite some time, but in 1929 everything began to unravel. There were the world crisis and the Wall Street crash, and in Germany we suddenly had more than four million unemployed, factories closing and wages dropping.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Geli, but I found myself busier than I had been in years. Hitler was determined to take advantage of the new situation, and the party mounted strong campaigns everywhere it could. Otto was redoubling his efforts in the north, saying this wasn’t the time to dwell on whatever internal differences we had with Hitler. Our job, he insisted, was winning converts, and foot soldiers like me could get the message out. I received instructions to take my Hitler Youth Movement members on trips to the areas where local elections were scheduled that fall: the state of Baden, the city of Lübeck and Thuringia.

  These trips were a far cry from my outings with the SA, from the displays of muscle and violent clashes. My charges and I were assigned much easier tasks. We’d paint swastikas all over the towns and villages we visited, and we’d hand out our party pamphlets. The leftists still taunted us, and occasionally we’d scuffle with their supporters, but usually we went about our jobs unimpeded. True, we painted a lot of the swastikas at night, when no one was looking, but we found more and more people willingly taking our propaganda.

  It helped that my kids had that clean-cut healthy look, and it helped that so many people felt so desperate. They had thought their lives were getting better, and now they were threatened once more with losing everything, which only made them angrier. The war had ended over a decade earlier, but here they were confronting impoverishment again. As we handed out the pamphlets, people would say: “Anything to get rid of the bastards who are doing this to us,” and “I’ll vote for anyone who can get us out of this mess.”

  Our results were still modest, but they showed that the party was winning supporters. In the Baden state elections, we won 7 percent of the vote; in Lübeck’s city elections, it was over 8 percent; and in Thuringia, it was an impressive 11.3 percent, the first occasion we broke into double digits. We didn’t do as well in the Berlin city elections. The party won 5.8 percent, but that still represented a big gain over the year before. I jokingly told my kids that maybe the party would have done better in my home city if we had gone there as well. We hadn’t been given that assignment. Somewhat to my surprise, I felt a genuine pride, which they shared, that we had contributed to some of the results.

  In Munich I heard encouraging bits of news. By the end of the year, the number of party members had risen to a hundred twenty thousand or more. I felt my old enthusiasm returning, my doubts receding. Maybe, I thought, this movement could really transform Germany. As ambivalent as my feelings were about Hitler, particularly when I thought about him with Geli, or about his followers like Erich, I found myself again impressed by his ability to move the crowds he attracted, by the sense he conveyed that he knew how to set things right.

  And there was something intriguing in all his talk about restoring the glory of the German nation, especially when I knew from people within the party that he still hadn’t succeeded in becoming a German himself. Legally, he remained an Austrian, unable to get the citizenship papers he craved despite his heroic service in the kaiser’s army.

  At home, Sabine was far from pleased by my renewed enthusiasm for my party work. She was upset when I traveled, and upset when, back in Munich one evening, I showed her some of the leaflets we had been distributing. “You can’t believe that your Hitler will suddenly find a miracle solution for all our problems,” she asked as she fried eggs for our dinner.

  “Maybe not, but he can’t do worse than the current crowd. At least he’ll restore German pride.”

  “Pride—or hate?”

  “We really shouldn’t talk about this, you know.”

  Sabine brought our plates to the table, sat down wearily and didn’t say anything. Finally she asked, “Karl, is there something else we should talk about?”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s not just that we disagree about politics; there’s something more—something that must explain why you avoid me, why things aren’t working between us.”

  “I’m not avoiding you, I’m just busy.”

  She listlessly mopped up her egg yolk with a piece of bread. “We both know it’s more than that.”

  I reached across the table, running my fingers over her face and across her lips. “Honestly, there’s nothing more.”

  She pushed my hand away. “I don’t believe you, Karl. You’re hiding something from me. Who is it?”

  “What? Who? Are you crazy?”

  Sabine stood up, knocking her chair over. I rose to pick it up, but she stood in my way. “Look, until you want to be honest about it, until you show you care something about us, you’d better sleep in Grandma’s bed.”

  “Sabine, believe me, there’s no one.” My indignation felt genuine, since at that moment there technically wasn’t.

  I saw a flicker of hesitation in her eyes, but then it vanished. “I wish I could believe you. But I don’t.”

  For the first time we slept in separate beds. Even on the nights when I returned from Geli, I had slipped in under the same blanket, wrapping Sabine in my arms, pretending that all was well between us. It wasn’t just a matter of pretending, I abruptly realized; I didn’t want to lose her or Geli. I wanted them both.

  As I dozed off, the thought occurred to me that maybe I was like Geli, who wanted it all—whatever it was that she had with her uncle, Emil and me. Should I be angry with her for refusing to make a choice?

  —

  Otto’s arrival in Munich signaled that the brief suspension of hostilities within the party was already over.

  I’d heard that Hitler had summoned Otto for a personal meeting, so I wasn’t surprised to hear from him. We met in one of the grimier beer halls, nothing like the cafés that Hitler frequented. Otto was as animated as ever, bringing news from Berlin that Goebbels was now propaganda chief, having replaced Gregor, whose new job put him in charge of organizational affairs within the party.

  The struggle for power was reaching its decisive moment, Otto told me. The deteriorating economic situation meant that the workers couldn’t endure their conditions much longer, and big strikes were inevitable. “This will be the real test of Hitler and the party. If the party is going to live up to the socialist part of its name, it has to back the workers,” he said. But he hadn’t been able to get Hitler’s assurance that it would do so. “You know why Hitler called me here?” he asked, grabbing my forearm and gripping it tightly.

  I shook my head.

  “He wanted me to sell him the Kampfverlag. He wasn’t interested in talking about the workers or the strikes, only about getting hold of our publishing operation in Berlin. You know what that means? He wants everyone and everything to be under his control. He’s furious that our Arbeitsblatt criticizes some of the party leaders in the south. He won’t accept criticism of any kind. He told me directly: ‘What I’m doing can’t be wrong because it is the will of history.’ Can you believe that?” Otto didn’t pause for an answer. “Well, I’ll only stay in the party as long as I have a weapon, our press, to fight for what I believe in.”

  Otto sat back and drank his beer, looking at me. “And what about you, Karl? Will you fight for what you believe in, for the workers?”

  “Of course I will,” I said, trying to summon more conviction than I felt. I no longer was sure what I thought, although I still liked and admired Otto.

  “Good,” he said. “I’ll need every supporter I can get. It won’t be easy.” And he added softly, almost to himself: “I wish Gregor wasn’t so blinded that I could count on him also. But I can’t, not at all. We’ll be on our own, completely on our own.”

  —

  I heard the knocking dimly through my sleep. Sabine must have left for work much earlier, but I had remained in bed—still in Grandma’s bed. When the knoc
king continued, I pulled myself up. “All right, I’m coming.”

  I opened the door a crack and saw Emil. He pushed it open the rest of the way. “The bourgeois life, as usual, I see,” he said, examining my bedraggled appearance and flashing his familiar grin. “The wife’s out working while the man sleeps.”

  “Not anymore, thanks to you,” I shot back, but I couldn’t help smiling. “What’s going on?”

  “Orders from the boss, what else. He told me to bring you to his apartment when I come to pick him up. Apparently he’s got an assignment for you.”

  “What kind of assignment?” I asked, reaching for my clothes and splashing my face with cold water.

  “He didn’t say.”

  I was ready within a few minutes and found myself sitting in the backseat of the black Mercedes for the first and only time. I wasn’t sure what to say to Emil, since I had no idea whether he suspected anything between Geli and me. Or whether he still was engaged to her. I inquired about our destination because I knew Hitler had moved out of his small room on Thierschstrasse. “Is the new place as big as they say?”

  “Bigger. It’s nine huge rooms, at least I think so. It’s so big it’s hard to keep track.”

  “And he lives there alone?” I couldn’t resist asking.

  “No,” he replied evenly, his eyes facing straight ahead as we swung left on Prinzregentenstrasse, a busy street that ran along the southern edge of the English Gardens. We crossed the Isar and swept by the gilded Angel of Peace on the other side. It was only as we glided between Prinzregentenplatz’s elegant buildings that he added, “Geli lives there, and he has people who cook and clean.”

  I couldn’t tell from his studiously neutral expression what that meant for their relationship. Emil parked the car in front of a cream-colored five-story building, Prinzregentenplatz 16. It wasn’t as fancy as some of the neighboring buildings with more dramatic curves and arches, but it was imposing enough. Emil pointed to the front windows situated in the middle of the building, above two lions’ heads carved into the facade. “That’s it, on the second floor. Go on in.”