Lavonne Mueller - The Patient Ecstasy of Fräulein Braun

“Oh, yes, I’ve heard that. It sounds defeatist,” I said.

“Not necessarily, my dear. It’s the only front-line knowledge we have. And women would do well to enjoy my each and every crate.”

“Perhaps, Hermie, perhaps it’s not in bed but on the way to bed that we learn the lessons of love.” Suddenly I became afraid that in just a few moments, I had revealed more of myself to Göring then I had ever revealed to Adi.

“Dearest, you mustn’t be profound. It’s unnecessary. And never over-sentimentalize. You know what happened to lovely Madame Bovary.”

“What happened?”

“I can’t get in to that. The Führer must get calmness from you; it makes the war easier to cope with. Don’t you know he’s constantly bombarded by reports? The only difference between the battle reports and you is that you should be completely believable.”

“I don’t see how I can have that much bearing on the war,” I said modestly.

“You may not see, but Clausewitz does.”

“And how does this Clause come to such conclusions?”

“You persevere. In your love for him.”

“A permanent love for him is always inside me.”

“Perseverance! That’s the warrior thing. Do you believe he’d let a mere woman persevere better than himself? Even an Eva Braun?”

“Are you trying to flatter me? Because I’d like that.”

“I’m only instructing you in Clausewitz who tells us that there’s a certain limitlessness in war because both sides continue to escalate in violence. Is that not so in love?”

“You mean something like Himmler’s order requiring all men to be shot in any house flying a white flag?”

“An order, no doubt, given in that awful Alsatian dialect he sometimes uses. That idiot pushes decisions down the chain of command trusting subordinates.”

“He also wants everything written on rice paper so it can be eaten if his men are captured,” I scoffed, displaying my studied insight.

“That fool. He should listen to Fats Waller. Now there’s a genius I’ve come to appreciate. Fats could probably win a war, too.”

“I always hope that generals might discuss important things with me. But like any discussions they’re likely to have with their wives, most of them won’t talk to me about anything of importance, either.”

“Be like Desdemona who tells her lover-general, Othello, that she understands a fury in his words but not the words.”

“Still, Hermie, it’s so delicious to understand and read what nobody wants you to.”

“What does such a pretty girl like you read?”

“Hemingway.”

“How did you come across Herr Hemingway?”

“Goebbels. He likes the fact that Hemingway ate monkey brains right out of monkey skulls when he was a reporter in China.”

“China? I had no idea China was Hemingway country.”

“Hemingway liked any place once he got there, Goebbels said.”

“Oh, Goebbels! And that awful wife of his! Vacuous breeders. Their libidinous energy whelping six kids while performing political arabesques.” Hermie threw his head back and laughed. “All those postcard images he cranks out for the war effort.”

“Hermie, when you drive down Unter den Linden on the way to speak at the Kroll Opera House, you toss those postcards out the car window to the crowds. You pass out those postcards of yourself at every dinner party.”

“At least they don’t contain Goebbels’ pulpit rhetoric and self-imposed idiotic nimbus. Ah, my pleasurable loathing.”

“But Hermie, Goebbels was smart enough to make Heil Hitler! the official greeting.”

“That was easy. It could have come from anyone.”

“And even with the Russians who are now our enemy, Goebbels talks about Tolstoy,” I said. “So lovingly does he talk about Tolstoy that I can’t stop reading War and Peace.”

“Your taste in reading is quite unbourgeois, Evie. But keep in mind the counterintuitive fact that it’s the number of wars that control the number of peaces.”

“Goebbels once tried to get Adi to reconsider Russia. Because of Tolstoy.”

“Evie, Goebbels never had the balls to talk the Führer out of anything. And certainly not Russia. Everyone knows that Tolstoy is more a Communist in his thinking than Lenin. Oh, Goebbels thinks of himself as an artist. He likes to hang out in literary places like Schwannecke where the men wear pencils behind their ears and have minds as small as the tables they sit behind. But he couldn’t get his book published. And he doesn’t pretend to read Proust. In the Proustian use of three adjectives, Goebbels is dull-duller-dullest.”

“I heard Proust was Jewish.”

“No excuse, my dear, for not reading Swann’s Way. Leave the undesirables to Gestapo Chief Heinrich Müller and his PrinzAlbrecht Strasse thugs along with the hopelessly inept International Committee of the Red Cross.”

“I’ve seen lines of women and children waiting at the Berlin-Grunewald Station for a deportation train. Is it true what they say? They’re going to a concentration camp?”

“Geheime Reichssache. Secret matters of the Reich. One can go back as far as 1297 and read a Berlin decree that forbids weavers to buy yarn from Jews. Didn’t the British start camps in their colonies in the Boer War? Americans put their Indians on reservations. And don’t forget the Armenians. Their demise inspired us. We only copied these inventions. You must not say concentration camp, Eva. Think of resettlement. Besides, wounded Jewish veterans from the trenches of World War I are not sent east but instead to Theresienstadt. And I understand Eichmann’s office sometimes issues a collective passport for many of them. It’s an honor for Jews to wear the yellow star. The yellow patch is patterned after times and places in the Middle Ages. It’s nothing new.”

“And yellow park benches?”

“I’m so proud that we consider the smallest detail. Jews, my dear, are carriers of cancer.”

“Aren’t Jews some kind of nation?”

“A nation unified by money. Rassenfeinden. The enemy race. I’ll quote Nietzsche as the Führer approves of me talking to you about a philosopher so practical. Nietzsche, my dearest, questions morality itself. All our moral babbling comes from stupid Christian tradition. If the Führer were a Christian, he could never have written Mein Kampf, a book advocating salvation without the false consolation of religion. As a good Nazi woman, you know that God is dead. It’s the lamb, Nietzsche tells us, that decides the birds of prey are bad. Jews are afraid of us because they carry around a fear—a Jewish Mojre. Washed gloves hide muddy hands.”

“Didn’t a Jew reserve-officer recommend the Führer for his Iron Cross First Class in World War I?” I asked.

“I prefer to call that Jew an Israélite.” Hermie helped himself to his usual bowl of fig laxatives. “And isn’t resettlement not reward enough? For the Jews have the honor of contributing to the greater good. We must all submit to a genetic obedience. Repeat after me… destroy… vernichten.”

“Vernichten,” I said softly. “And will it always be that way for the Jews?”

“Dearest, you need to see the stone walls of Mauthausen. Those walls are extremely thick. Built to last for centuries. This is no passing theory; it’s essential to our New Order. Now, getting back to Proust.”

“I heard Proust was homosexual,” I said.

“They don’t breed. But that’s no excuse for Goebbels not to have tasted a Madeleine. And Proust did publish an article in France’s Nouvelle Revue saying Tristan and Die Meistersinge were great, and any angry nationalism was not to be used in matters of aesthetics.”

“I don’t think it’s disloyal to read remote literature. We’re not at war with Tolstoy or Hemingway. What harm can they do?”

“Literature is death, my sweet.”

“How do you know, Hermie?”

“Shakespeare says so. Though he says it in such a bland language. Romeo and Juliet. Gott! One has to learn English in German to find any beauty in their patter.”

“Romeo and Juliet killed themselves.”

“Ja. And we likewise burned them. But they rest together. Forever. Death is a paramour, dearest.”

Hermie unzipped his pants, undid his cummerbund and wire corset saying he knew I wasn’t squeamish, not about something as patriotic as his putsch. He loved to call his manhood “putsch” because doing so seemed heroic. He took out his small shining giblet rouged as bright as his ears. Pink powder, the color of forced roses, was thick all around the fat corded little neck down there. Rousseau, he said, once complained that the poor went without bread because face powder was made of wheat flour. In that sense, it was uncivilized. Now, powder comes from uneatable fluff.

Trying not to look between his legs, I was determined to be like Magda, worldly and amused. But my eyes would not be diverted from what he called his fleshy “council of war.”

“I wasn’t a child who played airplanes. Pilots were never my heroes. I didn’t run around with my arms out like fluttering wings. A large plane was a woman. Something I could fit into and control. Watch her speed. Knowing when to roll her over. A little one-seater was a boy jerking, skidding into turns, but finally coming to an end in a bounce and roll.“

Hermie took off his jodphur boots with silver spurs on the heels and threw them at the door. “Oh, where those little spurs have been,” he said as two young and very thin boys came in, their parachute harnesses clinking on the floor. “They’re from the Youth Battalion. Being a pilot, I like a couple of willowy sticks at my side. May I introduce Falk and Jurgen.”