Siegfried Read online

“But it was an interesting one. At least for those who have lived to tell the tale. Let’s say that it was an unforgettable century.”

  In reply to Herter’s question about his background, Falk told him that his father had been a baker’s assistant at Dehmel on the Kohlmarkt. He had scarcely known him: he had been killed in the First World War on the Somme, after which Falk’s mother earned her living as a cleaner for rich families on the Ringstrasse. He had gotten no further than primary school. He found a job as a postman, and, while working for the post office, he followed a course at the secondary hotel school, as he wanted to do better in life than his father. By the time he gained his diploma at the age of twenty, his mother had already died.

  “And so you became a headwaiter.”

  “Among other things.”

  “What else, then?”

  Falk looked at him out of the corner of his eye. “A Nazi.”

  Herter burst out laughing, so that some crumbs of sponge cake flew out of his mouth. “That must have been a strange school.”

  But it was not through the school. He changed jobs a few times, and in 1933—the year when Hitler came to power in Germany—he found work in a café frequented by right-wing radicals of the recently banned Nazi Party, as happened in countless places in Austria under the direction of NSDAP headquarters in Munich. Using a card club as cover, they made their revolutionary plans in a back room full of cigar smoke, with their cards on the table in front of them. Even Dr. Arthur Seyss-Inquart was present on one occasion, a lawyer who was to become Austrian chancellor and was to ask Hitler formally to annex Austria.

  “And who two years later was rewarded by being appointed commissioner of the occupied Netherlands,” added Herter, “but by then I expect he had disappeared from your horizon. For what he got up to with us, especially with the Jews, he was hanged at Nuremberg.”

  “I know,” said Falk. “For the last six months of the war, we worked in his household, in The Hague.”

  Herter looked at him in astonishment but suppressed his inclination to ask him more questions. “Well, then you know all the gentlemen. Like Rauter, the supreme commander of the SS and the police in the Netherlands, also a compatriot of yours. Looked at closely, we were actually occupied by Austria. All Vienna’s finest, if I can put it like that. Sometimes I think that the annexation of Austria by Germany was in fact an annexation of Germany by Austria. And in the same year of 1892, all those Austrians were lying as delightful babies at their mothers’ breasts—Seyss, Rauter, down to my own father, who didn’t behave too well in the war either. I simply mention this for the record.” He was about to add “. . . so that you don’t feel guilty,” but he swallowed the remark; it remained to be seen how guilty Falk should feel.

  Falk was silent for a moment and exchanged a glance with Julia, who stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. Politics did not interest him, he continued; to begin with, it meant nothing to him—his job was to put beer and wine and sausage on the table. But that changed when he met Julia.

  “Yes, blame it on me,” said Julia. It was the first time that she had joined in the conversation. In a stagy way, she tried to create the impression that she was indignant, but the look in her eyes said something different. With a motion of the head, she pointed to her Ullrich. “Look at him sitting there. You won’t believe it, but in those days he was a golden blond Germanic god, four inches taller than he is now, straight as a die, and with big blue eyes. I fell for him right away.”

  She was the daughter of one of the fascist leaders, a book-keeper in the municipal transport company; one evening she met him after work—and what do you know, they’d been together for sixty-six years. Ullrich came regularly to her house, where her father gave him Mein Kampf to read and in no time won him over to National Socialist thinking.

  “These days it is all seen from the perspective of Auschwitz,” said Falk apologetically, “but that didn’t exist at that time. I looked at it from the perspective of that miserable Austria of Dollfuss, in which my mother had to work herself to death.”

  Herter nodded in silence. Falk knew how to build up his story, beginning with the background to what really concerned him. He had obviously prepared.

  He married Julia and no longer participated only as a waiter in the illegal meetings, designed to put an end to Austria. A year later, in July 1934, he took part in a risky armed-coup attempt in the Chancellery, in which Dollfuss was murdered—a day of blunders and misunderstandings on both sides. In the complete confusion he was able to escape and avoid his punishment.

  Two years later, in 1936, his career unexpectedly took off. One spring day, wearing a crumpled suit, one of Hitler’s adjutants appeared at a subversive evening of cards in the café. He explained that there was a vacancy at Hitler’s country home, the Berghof, for an experienced waiter-cum-butler, whose wife could work in the household. Everyone immediately looked his way. That summer, after the Gestapo in Munich had checked their backgrounds—in collaboration with the Austrian police, of course—and after the Registry Office had confirmed that they were of pure Aryan blood, Ullrich and Julia boarded the train and traveled to Berchtesgaden.

  “No small matter,” said Herter. “Weren’t you trembling with fear?”

  “Fear . . . fear . . .” repeated Falk. “There wasn’t so much cause for that at the time. The real nightmare was still to come. For us, too. At that moment I was mainly relieved to be able to get out of Austria, as it was still possible they might discover that I had taken part in the coup. There was a minimum sentence of fifteen years for that. Dollfuss had been canonized. I might even be strung up.”

  “It was as if we had stumbled into a dream,” said Julia. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, but . . . Today everyone vacations abroad at least two or three times a year, but we had never been out of Vienna, and suddenly we were standing there in that fairy-tale alpine landscape. In fine weather you could see Salzburg in the distance.”

  “Hitler liked that bit of Germany because it’s actually Austria,” said Falk. “Even at the beginning of the 1920s, he went there regularly to relax and think. If you look on the map, you can see that it sticks into Austria like . . . like . . .”

  Like a penis, Herter was going to add, but he said, “It was obviously something like his ideal place. He recognized himself in that romantic wilderness more than in the modern traffic jams of Munich or Berlin. Perhaps everyone has such an absolute spot. What would yours be, Mrs. Falk?”

  When she did not immediately understand what he meant, Falk said, “We haven’t seen that much of the world, Mr. Herter. We’re just ordinary people. What about you?”

  Herter looked at the ceiling, at a brown damp patch in the shape of a hedgehog. “Perhaps in Egypt, in that special piece of desert where the pyramids and the Sphinx are.”

  The adjutant, Krause, now in a tight-fitting black SS uniform, picked them up from the station in a car and took them past a series of barriers and sentry posts to the Obersalzberg. They were not yet shown the actual villa, designed by Hitler himself. Behind it, not visible from the road, was a huge complex of barracks, bunkers, firing ranges, garages, a hotel for high-ranking guests, barracks for workers, staff housing, even a nursery school; everywhere, day and night, building continued, and roads were being constructed. In a block of flats, where the other domestic staff also lived, they were assigned a small apartment. In the office of the majordomo, SS Lieutenant General Brückner, a huge old warhorse who had taken part in Hitler’s failed coup in Munich in 1923, they had to swear an oath of secrecy to the Führer regarding everything they heard or saw at the Berghof; nor were they allowed to keep a diary. If they were to break that oath, at the very least they would face a concentration camp.

  So he is going to break that oath after more than sixty years, thought Herter. He said nothing, but Falk had read his thoughts.

  “I don’t know whether an oath applies beyond the grave. Now that all those people are dead, a lot has come to light. But not everything.”
Falk looked for words. “I don’t know if such a thing is possible, but we’d like you to take over the oath from us. At least for the little time we have left; afterward you can do what you like with it. It’s something we don’t want to take with us to our graves.”

  “I accept,” swore Herter with his fingers raised—realizing that he had now entered a satanic domain: the oath linked him to Falk, just as it had linked Falk to Hitler himself.

  NINE

  “When was the first time you saw him?” he asked Falk, giving Julia another light.

  “Not until a week later. He was in Berlin at the Chancellery. We were introduced to Miss Braun the next day, though.”

  “The lady of the house.”

  “We didn’t know that at the time,” said Julia. “Almost no one knew, only a very small circle. She was supposedly one of his secretaries, but everyone referred to her as the ‘Lady Chief.’ After a few days, when I had to take up her breakfast and the morning newspaper, I saw what things were really like. The secretaries all lived elsewhere on the site—”

  “Much to the pleasure of the SS officers,” interjected Falk.

  “And not forgetting Bormann.” Julia’s face still expressed contempt. “But her bedroom was in the Berghof itself, on the first floor, and separated from Hitler’s only by a shared bathroom.”

  Miss Braun was a lonely, unhappy creature, who must be kept hidden for political reasons, since the Chief wanted to belong to all German women. A peroxided, pretty, sporty woman of twenty-four, always good humored in company, she was two years older than Julia, with whom she was immediately on excellent terms. She was alone a lot; sometimes she did nothing for weeks on end except read novels, play records, and keep her diary up to date. As there was no one else she could talk to, she soon took Julia into her confidence. When the Chief was not there, they would secretly smoke cigarettes, flat Egyptian ones, Stambul brand; if Hitler had known that Miss Eva smoked, he would have put an immediate end to their relationship. Even in winter they opened the window wide, since one of the SS bodyguards might smell it and report it to Brückner, who might mention it to Bormann, who would definitely see to it that the Chief got to hear. Head of Chancellery Bormann was his powerful, half-anonymous secretary, who controlled his diary and his finances. Miss Braun hated him. In her opinion that big-boned fellow on whose arm she always had to go from the great hall to the dining room in company, had far too much influence on her Adi—while he in turn disliked her because she escaped his control. But he knew how to make himself indispensable. Once the Chief had complained that during the periodical parades of admirers—many of them women—he often found the sun a problem, the following day a tree with thick foliage was standing there. On another occasion he had remarked that a farmhouse in the distance actually spoiled the pristine quality of the view—the following day the farmhouse was gone.

  Yes, thought Herter, that is absolute power. He did not need to give Bormann any orders to have it done; he had the kind of power over people that others have only over their own bodies. If someone wants to take a glass off the table, he does not have to order his hand to do so first: he simply does it. Compared with Hitler, everyone was paralyzed.

  Miss Braun had known Hitler since she was seventeen, even before he assumed power, when she worked in the shop of Hitler’s personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann; she had once told Julia that she liked working in the darkroom best. Her work in the photographic archive had obviously led to the strange habit of keeping a meticulous record of her extensive wardrobe, with detailed descriptions, drawings, and attached samples of material. Anyway, she changed outfits four or five times a day, even when there was no reason at all. She liked sunbathing, but the Chief had banned that, too, since he disliked tanned skin. Hitler, interrupted Falk, hated the sun. Even in summer he always wore his uniform cap or a hat. The Berghof lay on the north slope of a huge alp, so that in the winter it was already bitterly cold by afternoon, and that was of course intentional. In the new Chancellery in Berlin, his rooms also faced north. He could not stand bright electric light either. There was never more than a single table lamp. He did not wish to be photographed with a flash.

  The Enemy of Light, thought Herter—might that be a suitable title for his story? Or why not go the whole hog: The Prince of Darkness? No, that was too much of a good thing.

  In those Munich days, Miss Braun confided to Julia, Hitler had an affair with his niece, who committed suicide when he had a short flirtation with Eva. Four out of five other girlfriends of his had made suicide attempts, but only this one had succeeded. Hitler had wanted to do away with himself, too, at the time, Falk had once heard from the mouth of Rudolf Hess, at the time his deputy, who had to wrench the pistol from his hand. Around the Berghof it was whispered that his niece was pregnant at the time; whatever the truth of this, he had become a vegetarian from then on. So that, thought Herter, was the reaction of a necrophiliac. Every day Julia had to place fresh flowers by the niece’s portrait in the great reception room. During that period, when because of his hectic schedule he neglected her for months, Miss Braun had also clumsily shot a bullet into her neck, which bound him to her forever. For that matter, a year before she herself arrived at the Berghof, Miss Braun had made a second suicide attempt in Munich for the same reason, after which he had her move in with him on the Obersalzberg.

  “So he was capable of love,” Herter said, nodding, “but at the same time, even in his private life he exuded death.”

  “I don’t know if it was love,” said Falk with a deadpan expression.

  “Wasn’t there a grain of goodness in him somewhere?”

  “No.”

  “He loved his dog.”

  “At the end he tried out the poison on it, before giving it to Miss Braun.”

  “But Miss Braun was capable of love,” said Julia. “If he was not at the Berghof and she had to eat alone, she always wanted me to put his photo by her plate.”

  Herter remained looking at her in silence for a moment, while he saw the scene before him: that lonely woman at the table with the portrait of her lover, through whose agency hundreds were already dying, a bit later thousands, and finally millions.

  “But she ate very little and irregularly,” said Falk. “In fact, after meals she always took a purgative. She was terrified of becoming fat.”

  “So that means she suffered from anorexia; but maybe the symptoms were not familiar at the time. And Hitler himself? What was your first impression of the Führer?”

  Falk paid no attention to the ironic note with which he spoke the word “Führer.” His eyes wandered to the window, which looked out over a neglected courtyard. There was something there that only he could see. The rather sleepy passing of the days, in which he had been shown the ropes at the Berghof, had given way to a nervous, agitated atmosphere. In the afternoon a column of open Mercedeses appeared in the drive and stopped in front of the formal steps. It was as if, said Falk—and he knew that it could not be explained—everything had suddenly gone icy cold and frozen. Through a kitchen window he saw Hitler getting out and looking around for a moment at the overwhelming alpine panorama, while he pulled his belt down a little with a slight tug. The peak of his uniform cap was larger than those of the others and was also farther over his eyes. There he stood, the Führer, exactly where he stood and nowhere else. He was smaller than Falk had imagined. His body language, at once supple and stiff, gave him the air of a living bronze statue, so that a strange emptiness hung around him, as if he were not there. Every bronze statue was hollow and empty—but in his case that emptiness had a sucking attraction, like the center of a whirlpool. An indescribable sensation.

  “All theater,” said Julia, shrugging her shoulders. “In public he was always acting. Especially when he was in uniform.”

  “So perhaps you can say that Hitler was playing Hitler,” ventured Herter, “like an actor plays a murderous Shakespearean king, but in his case with real murders. When he goes into the wings between the acts,
he changes into an unobtrusive man who lights up a cigarette.”

  Julia burst out laughing. “Hitler and a cigarette!”

  “I’m not sure,” said Falk. “Perhaps it’s as you say. But that’s not all. I’ve been thinking about him all my life, but there’s always a last remaining bit that I can’t explain even today, over half a century later. In two years’ time, he will have been dead for as long as he lived.” He had obviously taken the trouble to work this out. He shook his head. “For me he becomes more incomprehensible by the day.”

  Apart from that, the only figure Falk recognized in Hitler’s entourage was the thickset figure of Bormann. Hitler’s German shepherd Blondi raced joyfully down the steps and, yelping with joy, rested her front paws against his belt, whereupon he took her head in his gloved hand and gave it a brief kiss. At the top of the steps stood Miss Braun in an airy short-sleeved summer dress. . . .

  “I knew,” said Julia, interrupting him, “that she had stuffed a couple of handkerchiefs in her bra for the occasion.”

  A few yards behind her stood a group of officers from Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard, in black, with white belts and right arms extended stiffly, hands in white gloves. He took off his hat, so that his strikingly pale forehead became visible, and gave her a gallant kiss on the hand; he greeted the others by loosely raising the palm of his right hand, as if preparing to carry a tray, after which he went inside via the gallery with Blondi, Braun, and her two Scottish terriers, Stasi and Negus. Eva’s dearest wish, Julia knew, was a dachshund, but Hitler found dachshunds too stubborn and disobedient. He did not like those kinds of qualities.

  “No one will ever understand,” said Falk, his eyes downcast, while he slowly shook his head. “It was very unnerving. Every movement showed perfect control and precision, like with an acrobat, a trapeze artist. Of course he was a human being like everyone else, but at the same time he wasn’t, more something like a work of art, a . . .” He shook his head. “I can’t put it into words. Something horrible.”