If a day with Eva could be tedious it was as nothing compared to an evening when the Führer was present. Interminable hours after dinner were spent in the Great Hall – a vast, ugly room where they listened to the gramophone or watched films (or, often, both). The Führer naturally dictated the choices. For music, Die Fledermaus and Die lustige Witwe were favourites. On the first evening, Ursula thought it would be hard to forget the sight of Bormann, Himmler, Goebbels (and their savage helpmeets) all wearing their thin-lipped snake smiles (more Lippenbekenntnis, perhaps) while listening to Die lustige Witwe. Ursula had seen a student production of The Merry Widow when she was at university. She had been good friends with the girl who played Hanna, the lead. She could never have guessed then that the next time she would hear ‘Vilja, O Vilja! the witch of the wood’, it would be in German and in this strangest of company. That production had taken place in ’31. She hadn’t seen what her own future held, let alone that of Europe.
Films were shown nearly every evening in the Great Hall. The projectionist would arrive and the great Gobelin tapestry on one wall would be rolled up mechanically, like a blind, to reveal a screen behind it. Then they would have to sit through some awful romantic schmaltz or American adventure, or worse, a mountain film. In this way Ursula had seen King Kong, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer and Der Berg ruft. On the first evening it had been Der heilige Berg (more mountains, more Leni). The Führer’s favourite film, Eva confided, was Snow White. And which character did he identify with, Ursula wondered – the wicked witch, the dwarves? Not Snow White surely? It must be the Prince, she concluded (did he have a name? Did they ever, was it enough simply to be the role?). The Prince who awoke the sleeping girl, just as the Führer had woken Germany. But not with a kiss.
When Frieda was born, Klara had given her a beautiful edition of Schneewittchen und die sieben Zwerge, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’, illustrated by Franz Jüttner. Klara’s professor had long since been barred from teaching at the art school. They had planned to leave in ’35 and then again in ’36. After Kristallnacht, Pamela had written to Klara directly, although she had never met her, offering her a home in Finchley. But that inertia, that damned tendency everyone seemed to have to wait … and then her professor had been part of a round-up and had been transported east – to work in a factory, the authorities said. ‘His beautiful sculptor’s hands,’ Klara said sadly.
(‘They’re not really factories, you know,’ Pamela wrote.)
Ursula remembered being an avid reader of fairy tales as a child. She had put great faith not so much in the happy ending as in the restoration of justice to the world. She suspected she had been duped by die Brüder Grimm. Spieglein, Spieglein, an der Wand / Wer ist die Schönste im ganzen Land? Not this lot, that was for sure, Ursula thought, looking around the Great Hall during her first wearisome evening on the Berg.
The Führer was a man who preferred operetta to opera, cartoons to highbrow culture. Watching him holding Eva’s hand while humming along to Lehar, Ursula was struck by how ordinary (even silly) he was, more Mickey Mouse than Siegfried. Sylvie would have made short work of him. Izzie would have eaten him up and spat him out. Mrs Glover – what would Mrs Glover have done, Ursula wondered? This was her new favourite game, deciding how the people she knew would have dealt with the Nazi oligarchs. Mrs Glover, she concluded, would probably have beaten them all soundly with her meat hammer. (What would Bridget do? Ignore him completely probably.)
When the film was finished the Führer settled down to expound (for hours) on his pet subjects – German art and architecture (he perceived himself to be an architect-manqué), Blut und Boden (the land, always the land), his solitary, noble path (the wolf again). He was the saviour of Germany, and poor Germany, his Schneewittchen, would be saved by him whether she wanted it or not. He droned on about healthy German art and music, about Wagner, Die Meistersinger, his favourite line from the libretto – Wacht auf, es nahet gen den Tag – ‘Awake, the morning is here’ (it would be if he went on much longer, she thought). Back to destiny – his – how it was intertwined with the destiny of the Volk. Heimat, Boden, victory or downfall (What victory, Ursula wondered? Against whom?). Then something about Frederick the Great that she didn’t catch, something about Roman architecture, then the Fatherland. (For the Russians it was ‘the Motherland’, was there something to be made of that, Ursula wondered? What was it for the English? Just ‘England’, she supposed. Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ at a pinch.)
Then back to destiny and the Tausendjähriges. On and on so that the headache that had begun before dinner as a dull ache was a crown of thorns by now. She imagined Hugh saying, ‘Oh, do shut up, Herr Hitler,’ and suddenly felt so homesick she thought she was going to cry.
She wanted to go home. She wanted to go to Fox Corner.
As with kings and their courtiers, they could not leave until dismissed, until the monarch himself decided to ascend to the bedchamber. At one point Ursula caught Eva yawning theatrically at him as if to say, ‘That’s enough now, Wolfi’ (her imagination was becoming rather lurid, she knew, forgivable given the circumstances). And then at last, finally, thank God, he made a move and the exhausted company rustled to its feet.
Women in particular seemed to love the Führer. They wrote him letters in the thousands, baked him cakes, embroidered swastikas on to cushions and pillows for him, and, like Hilde and Hanne’s BDM troop, lined the steep road up to the Obersalzberg to catch a delirious glimpse of him in the big black Mercedes. Many women shouted to him that they wanted to have his baby. ‘But what do they see in him?’ Sylvie puzzled. Ursula had taken her to a parade, one of the interminable flag-waving, banner-toting ones in Berlin, because she wanted to ‘find out for myself what all the fuss is about’. (How very British of Sylvie to reduce the Third Reich to a ‘fuss’.)
The street was a forest of red, black and white. ‘Their colours are very harsh,’ Sylvie said, as though she were considering asking the National Socialists to decorate her living room.
At the Führer’s approach the crowd’s excitement had grown to a rabid frenzy of Sieg Heil and Heil Hitler. ‘Am I the only one to be unmoved?’ Sylvie said. ‘What is it, do you suppose – mass hysteria of some kind?’
‘I know,’ Ursula said, ‘it’s like the Emperor’s new clothes. We’re the only ones who can see the naked man.’
‘He’s a clown,’ Sylvie said dismissively.
‘Shush,’ Ursula said. The English word was the same as the German and she didn’t want to attract the hostility of the people around them. ‘You should put your arm up,’ she said.