Eva perched Frieda on the parapet and Ursula promptly removed her. ‘She has no head for heights,’ she said. Eva was forever lolling precariously on this same parapet, or parading dogs or small children along it. The drop below was dizzying, all the way down past Berchtesgaden to the Königsee. Ursula felt rather sorry for little Berchtesgaden with its innocent window boxes of cheerful geraniums, its meadows sloping down to the lake. It seemed a long time since she was here in ’33 with Klara. Klara’s professor had divorced his wife and Klara was now married to him and they had two children.
‘The Nibelungen live up there,’ Eva told Frieda, pointing at the peaks all around them, ‘and demons and witches and evil dogs.’
‘Evil dogs?’ Frieda echoed uncertainly. She had already been scared by the irksome Negus and Stasi, Eva’s annoying Scotties, without needing to hear about dwarves and demons.
And I have heard, Ursula thought, that it was Charlemagne who hid out in the Untersberg, sleeping in a cave, waiting to be woken for the final battle between good and evil. She wondered when that would be. Soon perhaps.
‘And one more,’ Eva said. ‘Big smile!’ The Rolleiflex glinted relentlessly in the sun. Eva owned a cine camera too, an expensive gift from her own Mr Wolf, and Ursula supposed she should be glad that they weren’t being recorded for posterity in moving colour. Ursula imagined in a future time someone leafing through Eva’s (many) albums and wondering who Ursula was, mistaking her perhaps for Eva’s sister Gretl or her friend Herta, footnotes to history.
One day, of course, all this would be consigned to that same history, even the mountains – sand, after all, was the future of rocks. Most people muddled through events and only in retrospect realized their significance. The Führer was different, he was consciously making history for the future. Only a true narcissist could do that. And Speer was designing buildings for Berlin so that they would look good when they were in ruins a thousand years from now, his gift to the Führer. (To think on such a scale! Ursula lived hour by hour, another consequence of motherhood, the future as much a mystery as the past.)
Speer was the only one who was nice to Eva and therefore Ursula afforded him a latitude in her opinion that perhaps he didn’t deserve. He was also the only one of these would-be Teutonic knights who had good looks, who wasn’t gimpy or toad-squat or a corpulent pig, or – worse somehow – resembled a low-level bureaucrat. (‘And they are all in uniform!’ she wrote to Pammy. ‘But it’s all pretend. It’s like living in the pages of The Prisoner of Zenda. They’re awfully good at hogwash.’ How she wished Pammy was here by her side, how she would have enjoyed dissecting the characters of the Führer and his henchmen. She would conclude that they were all charlatans, spouting cant.)
In private, Jürgen claimed to find them all ‘tremendously’ flawed and yet in public he behaved like any good servant of the Reich. Lippenbekenntnis, he said. Lip service. (Needs must, Sylvie would have said.) This was how you got on in the world, he said. Ursula supposed in this respect he was rather like Maurice, who said you had to work with fools and donkeys to advance your career. Maurice was also a lawyer, of course. He was quite senior in the Home Office these days. If they went to war would this be a problem? Would the armour of German citizenship – donned so reluctantly – be enough to protect her? (If they went to war! Could she really countenance being on this side of the Channel?)
Jürgen was a lawyer. If he wanted to practise law he had to join the Party, he had no choice. Lippenbekenntnis. He worked for the Ministry of Justice in Berlin. At the time he proposed to her (‘a bit of a whirlwind courtship’, she wrote to Sylvie) he had barely ceased being a communist.
Now Jürgen had abandoned his Leftist politics and was staunch in his defence of what had been achieved – the country was working again – full employment, food, health, self-respect. New jobs, new roads, new factories, new hope – how else could they achieve this, he said? But it came with an ecstatic faux-religion and a wrathful false messiah. ‘Everything comes with a price,’ Jürgen said. Perhaps not as high as this one. (How had they done it, Ursula often wondered. Fear and stagecraft mostly. But where had all the money and jobs come from? Perhaps just from manufacturing flags and uniforms, enough of those around to rescue most economies. ‘The economy is recovering anyway,’ Pamela wrote, ‘it’s a happy coincidence for the Nazis that they can claim this recovery.’) Yes, he said, there was violence to begin with, but it was a spasm, a wave, the Sturmabteilung letting off steam. Everything, everybody, was more rational now.
In April they had attended the parade for the Führer’s fiftieth birthday in Berlin. Jürgen had been allotted seats, in the guests’ grandstand. ‘An honour, I suppose,’ he said. What had he done, she wondered, to deserve the ‘honour’? (Did he seem happy about it? It was hard to tell sometimes.) He hadn’t been able to get them tickets for the Olympics in ’36 yet here they were now, rubbing shoulders with the VIPs of the Reich. He was always busy these days. ‘Lawyers never sleep,’ he said. (Yet as far as Ursula could see they were prepared to sleep throughout the Thousand Years.)
The parade had gone on for ever, the greatest expression yet of Goebbels’s showmanship. A great deal of martial music and then the overture provided by the Luftwaffe – an impressive, noisy fly-past along the East–West Axis and over the Brandenburg Gate by squadrons of aircraft in formation, wave after wave. More sound and fury. ‘Heinkels and Messerschmitts,’ Jürgen said. How did he know? All boys know their planes, he said.
There followed the march-past of the regiments, a seemingly in-exhaustible supply of soldiers goose-stepping along the road. They reminded Ursula of high-kicking Tiller girls. ‘Stechschritt,’ Ursula said, ‘who on earth invented that?’
‘The Prussians,’ Jürgen laughed, ‘of course.’
She took out a bar of chocolate and broke off a piece and offered it to Jürgen. He frowned and shook his head as though she had showed a lack of respect to the assembled military might. She ate another piece. Small acts of defiance.
He leaned in close so she could hear him – the crowd were making an abominable racket – ‘You really have to admire their precision, if nothing else,’ he said. She did, she did admire it. It was extraordinary. Robotic in its perfection as if each member of each regiment was identical to the next, as if they had been produced on a factory line. It wasn’t quite human, but then it wasn’t the job of armies to look human, was it? (‘It was all so very masculine,’ she reported to Pamela.) Would the British army be capable of achieving such mechanical drilling on this scale? The Soviets perhaps, but the British were less committed somehow.
Frieda, on her knee, was already asleep and it had hardly begun yet. All the while Hitler took the salute, his arm stiff in front of him the whole time (she could catch a glimpse of him from where they were sitting, just the arm, like a poker). Power obviously provided a peculiar kind of stamina. If it was my fiftieth birthday, Ursula thought, I would like to spend it on the banks of the Thames, Bray or Henley or thereabouts, with a picnic, a very English picnic – a Thermos of tea, sausage rolls, egg and cress sandwiches, cake and scones. Her family was all there in this picture, but was Jürgen part of the idyll? He would fit in well enough, lounging on the grass in boating flannels, talking cricket with Hugh. They had met and got on well. They had gone to England, to Fox Corner, in ’35 for a visit. ‘He seems like a nice chap,’ Hugh said, although when he learned that she had taken German citizenship he wasn’t so keen. It had been an awful mistake, she knew that now. ‘Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,’ Klara said. ‘If we all had it there would be no history to write about.’