Life after life

August 1939

DER ZAUBERBERG. THE magic mountain.

‘Aaw. Sie ist so niedlich.’ Click, click, click. Eva loved her Rolleiflex. Eva loved Frieda. She is so cute, she said. They were on the enormous terrace of the Berghof, bright with Alpine sun, waiting for lunch to be brought out. It was much nicer to eat out here, al fresco, rather than in the big, gloomy dining room, its massive window full of nothing but mountains. Dictators loved everything to be on a grand scale, even their scenery. Bitte lächeln! Big smile. Frieda obliged. She was an obliging child.

Eva had persuaded Frieda out of her serviceable English hand-smocked dress (Bourne and Hollingsworth, purchased by Sylvie and sent for Frieda’s birthday) and had arrayed her instead in Bavarian costume – dirndl, apron, knee-length white socks. To Ursula’s English eyes (more English every day, she felt) the outfit still looked as though it belonged in a dressing-up box, or perhaps a school play. Once, at her own school (how long ago and far away that seemed now), they had put on a performance of The Pied Piper of Hamelin and Ursula had played a village girl, clad in much the same get-up that Frieda was now attired in.

Millie had been King Rat, a bravura performance, and Sylvie said, ‘Those Shawcross girls thrive on attention, don’t they?’ There was something of Millie in Eva – a restless, empty gaiety that needed continual feeding. But then Eva was an actress too, playing the greatest part of her life. In fact her life was her part, there was no difference.

Frieda, lovely little Frieda, just five years old, with her blue eyes and stubby blonde plaits. Frieda’s complexion, so pale and wan when she had first arrived, now pink and gold from all the Alpine sunshine. When the Führer saw Frieda, Ursula caught the zealot gleam in his own blue eyes, as cold as the Königsee down below, and knew he was seeing the future of the Tausendjähriges Reich rolling out in front of him, Mädchen after Mädchen. (‘She doesn’t take after you, does she?’ Eva said, without malice, she had no malice.)

When she was a child – a period in her life that Ursula seemed to find herself returning to almost compulsively these days – she had read fairy tales of wronged princesses who saved themselves from lustful fathers and jealous stepmothers by smearing their fair faces with walnut juice and rubbing ashes in their hair to disguise themselves – as the gypsy, the outsider, the shunned. Ursula wondered how one obtained walnut juice, it didn’t seem the kind of thing you could just walk into a shop and buy. And it was no longer safe to be the nut-brown outsider, much better if one wanted to survive to be here, on Obersalzberg – Der Zauberberg – in the kingdom of make-believe, ‘the Berg’, as they called it with the intimacy of the elect.

What on earth was she doing here, Ursula wondered, and when could she leave? Frieda was well enough now, her convalescence drawing to a close. Ursula determined to say something to Eva today. After all, they weren’t prisoners, they could leave any time they chose.

Eva lit a cigarette. The Führer was away and the mouse was being naughty. He didn’t like her to smoke or drink, or wear make-up. Ursula rather admired Eva’s small acts of defiance. The Führer had come and gone twice since Ursula first arrived at the Berghof with Frieda two weeks ago, his arrivals and departures moments of heightened drama for Eva, for everyone. The Reich, Ursula had concluded a long time ago, was all pantomime and spectacle, ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,’ she wrote to Pamela. ‘But unfortunately not signifying nothing.’

Frieda, on a prompt from Eva, did a twirl and laughed. She was the molten core at the centre of Ursula’s heart, she was the better part of everything she did or thought. Ursula would be willing to walk on knives for the rest of her life if it would protect Frieda. Burn in the flames of hell to save her. Drown in the deepest of waters if it would buoy her up. (She had explored many extreme scenarios. Best to be prepared.) She had had no idea (Sylvie gave little indication) that maternal love could be so gut-achingly, painfully physical.

‘Oh, yes,’ Pamela said, as if it were the most casual thing in the world, ‘it turns you into a regular she-wolf.’ Ursula didn’t think of herself as a she-wolf, she was, after all, a bear.

There were real she-wolves prowling everywhere on the Berg – Magda, Emmy, Margarete, Gerda – the brood-wives of the senior party officials, all jostling for a little power of their own, producing endless babies from their fecund loins, for the Reich, for the Führer. These she-wolves were dangerous, predatory animals and they hated Eva, the ‘silly cow’ – die blöde Kuh – who somehow or other had managed to trump them all.

They, surely, would have given anything to be the mate of the glorious leader rather than insignificant Eva. Wasn’t a man of his stature worthy of a Brünnhilde – or at the very least a Magda or a Leni? Or perhaps the Valkyrie herself, ‘the Mitford woman’, das Fräulein Mitford, as Eva referred to her. The Führer admired England, especially aristocratic, imperial England, although Ursula doubted that his admiration would stop him from trying to destroy it if the time came.

Eva disliked all the Valkyries who might be a rival for the Führer’s attentions, her strongest emotions conceived in fear. Her greatest antipathy was reserved for Bormann, the éminence grise of the Berg. It was he who held the purse strings, he who shopped for Eva’s gifts from the Führer and who doled out the money for all those fur coats and Ferragamo shoes, reminding her in many subtle ways that she was merely a courtesan. Ursula wondered where the fur coats came from, most of the furriers she had seen in Berlin were Jewish.

How it must stick in the collective craw of the she-wolves that the Führer’s consort was a shop girl. When she first met him, Eva told Ursula, when she was working in Hoffmann’s Photohaus, she had addressed him as Herr Wolf. ‘Adolf means noble wolf in German,’ she said. How he must like that, Ursula thought. She had never heard anyone call him Adolf. (Did Eva call him mein Führer even in bed? It seemed perfectly possible.) ‘And do you know that his favourite song,’ Eva laughed, ‘is “Who’s Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf?”’

‘From the Disney film Three Little Pigs?’ Ursula said, incredulous.

‘Yes!’

Oh, thought Ursula, I cannot wait to tell that to Pamela.

‘And now one with Mutti,’ Eva said. ‘Hold her in your arms. Sehr schön. Smile!’ Ursula had watched Eva gleefully stalking the Führer with her camera, hunting down a photograph of him where he hadn’t turned away from the lens or pulled the brim of his hat down comically low, like a spy in poor disguise. He disliked having his photograph taken by her, preferring flattering studio lighting or a more heroic pose than the snaps Eva liked of him. Eva, on the other hand, loved being photographed. She didn’t just want to be in photographs, she wanted to be in a film. ‘Ein movie.’ She was going to go to Hollywood (‘one day’) and play herself, ‘the story of my life’, she said. (The camera made everything real somehow for Eva.) The Führer had promised, apparently. Of course, the Führer promised a lot of things. It was what had got him where he was today.

Eva refocused the Rolleiflex. Ursula was glad she hadn’t brought her old Kodak, it would hardly have stood up to comparison. ‘I’ll have copies made for you,’ Eva said. ‘You can send them to England, to your parents. It looks very pretty with the mountains in the background. Now give me a big smile. Jetzt lach doch mal richtig!’

The mountain panorama was the backdrop to every photo taken here, the backdrop to everything. At first Ursula had thought it beautiful, now she was beginning to find its magnificence oppressive. The great icy crags and the rushing waterfalls, the endless pine trees – nature and myth fused to form the Germanic sublimated soul. German Romanticism, it seemed to Ursula, was writ large and mystical, the English Lakes seemed tame by comparison. And the English soul, if it resided anywhere, was surely in some unheroic back garden – a patch of lawn, a bed of roses, a row of runner beans.

She should go home. Not to Berlin, to Savignyplatz, but to England. To Fox Corner.

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.’

She should have stayed in England. She should have stayed at Fox Corner, with the meadow and the copse and the stream that ran through the bluebell wood.

The machinery of war started to roll past. ‘Here come the tanks,’ Jürgen said in English, as the first of the Panzer appeared, carried on the back of lorries. His English was good, he had spent a year at Oxford (hence his knowledge of cricket). Then came the Panzer under their own steam, motorbikes with sidecars, armoured cars, the cavalry trotting smartly along (a particular crowd pleaser – Ursula woke Frieda up for the horses), and then the artillery, from light field guns to massive anti-aircraft guns and huge cannons.

‘K-3s,’ Jürgen said appreciatively, as if that would mean something to her.

The parade showed a love of order and geometry that was incomprehensible to Ursula. In this, it was no different from all the other parades and rallies – all that theatre – but this one seemed so bellicose. So much weaponry was staggering – the country was armed to the teeth! Ursula had had no idea. No wonder there were jobs for everyone. ‘If you want to rescue the economy you need a war, Maurice says,’ Pamela wrote. And what did you need weaponry for if not war?

‘Refitting the military has helped to rescue our psyche,’ Jürgen said, ‘given us back our pride in our country. When in 1918 the generals surrendered …’ Ursula stopped listening, it was an argument she had heard too many times. ‘They started the last war,’ she wrote crossly to Pamela. ‘And honestly, you would think they were the only ones who struggled afterwards, and that no other people were poor or hungry or bereaved.’ Frieda woke up again and was cranky. She fed her chocolate. Ursula was cranky too. Between them they finished the bar.

The finale was actually rather moving. The massed colours of the regiments formed a long file several ranks deep in front of Hitler’s podium – a formation so precise its edges might have been cut with a razor – and then they dipped their colours to the ground in honour of him. The crowd went wild.

‘What did you think?’ Jürgen asked as they shuffled out of the grandstand. He carried Frieda on his shoulders.

‘Magnificent,’ Ursula said. ‘It was magnificent.’ She could feel the beginnings of a headache worming its way into her temple.

Frieda’s illness had begun one morning several weeks ago with a raised temperature. ‘I feel sick,’ Frieda said. When Ursula felt her forehead it was clammy and she said, ‘You don’t have to go to kindergarten, you can stay home with me today.’

‘A summer cold,’ Jürgen said, when he came home. She was always a chesty child (‘Takes after my mother,’ Sylvie said gloomily) and they were accustomed to sniffling colds and sore throats but the cold got worse very quickly and Frieda turned feverish and listless. Her skin felt as though it were ready to catch fire. ‘Keep her cool,’ the doctor said and Ursula laid cold wet cloths on her forehead and read her stories but Frieda, try as she did, could summon no interest in them. Then she grew delirious and the doctor listened to her rattling lungs and said, ‘Bronchitis, you have to wait for it to pass.’

Late that night Frieda grew suddenly, horribly worse and they wrapped the almost inanimate little body in a blanket and rushed in a taxi to the nearest hospital, a Catholic one. Pneumonia was diagnosed. ‘She’s a very sick little girl,’ the doctor said, as if somehow they were to blame.

Ursula didn’t leave Frieda’s bedside for two days and nights, holding on to the little hand to keep her in this world. ‘If only I could have it for her,’ Jürgen whispered across the starchy white sheets that were also helping to pin Frieda to this world. Nuns floated around the ward like galleons in their enormous, complicated wimples. How long, Ursula wondered in an absent moment when all her attention wasn’t focused on Frieda, did it take them to put these contraptions on in the morning? Ursula was sure she would never have managed without making a mess of it. The headdress alone seemed a good enough reason not to be a nun.

They willed Frieda to live and she did. Triumph des Willens. The crisis passed and she started the long road to recovery. Pale and weak, she was going to need to convalesce and one evening when Ursula returned home from the hospital she found an envelope, hand-delivered to their door.

‘From Eva,’ she said to Jürgen, showing him the letter when he returned from work.

‘Who’s Eva?’ he asked.

‘Smile!’ Click, click, click. Anything to help keep Eva amused, she supposed. She didn’t mind. Eva had been very kind to invite them so that Frieda could breathe good mountain air and eat the fresh vegetables and eggs and milk from the Gutshof, the model farm on the slopes beneath the Berghof.

‘Is it a royal command?’ Jürgen asked. ‘Can you say no? Do you want to say no? I hope not. And it will do your headaches good too.’ She’d noticed recently that the more he rose through the echelons in the ministry, the more one-sided their conversations had become. He made statements, raised questions, answered the questions and drew conclusions without ever needing to involve her in the exchange. (A lawyer’s way perhaps.) He didn’t even seem to be aware that he was doing it.

‘The old goat has a woman after all then, does he? Who would have guessed? Did you know? No, you would have said. And to think you know her. It can only be good for us, can’t it? To be so close to the throne. For my career, which is the same thing as us. Liebling,’ he added, rather perfunctorily.

Ursula thought that being close to a throne was a rather dangerous place to be. ‘I don’t know Eva,’ Ursula said. ‘I’ve never met her. It’s Frau Brenner who knows her, knows her mother, Frau Braun. Klara used to work at Hoffmann’s sometimes, with Eva. They were at kindergarten together.’

‘Impressive,’ Jürgen said, ‘from Kaffeeklatsch to the seat of power in three easy moves. Does Fräulein Eva Braun know her old kindergarten pal, Klara, is married to a Jew?’ It was the way he said the word that surprised her. Jude. She’d never heard him say it that way before – sneering and dismissive. It drove a nail into her heart. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘I am not part of the Kaffeeklatsch, as you call it.’

The Führer took up so much room in Eva’s life that when he wasn’t here she was an empty vessel. Eva kept nightly telephone vigils when her lover was absent and was like a dog, one ear fretfully cocked every evening for the call that brought her master’s voice to her.

And there was so little to do up here. After a while all the tramping along forest paths and swimming in the (freezing cold) Königsee became enervating rather than invigorating. There were only so many wildflowers you could pick, only so much sunbathing on the loungers on the terrace before you went slightly mad. There were battalions of nursemaids and nannies on the Berg, all eager to be with Frieda, and Ursula found herself with much of the same empty time on her hands as Eva. She had, stupidly, packed only one book, at least it was a long one, Mann’s Der Zauberberg. She hadn’t realized it was on the banned list. A Wehrmacht officer saw her reading it and said, ‘You’re very bold, that’s one of their forbidden books, you know.’ She supposed the way he said ‘their’ implied he wasn’t one of ‘them’. What was the worst they could do? Take the book off her and put it in the kitchen stove?

He was nice, the Wehrmacht officer. His grandmother was Scottish, he said, and he had spent many happy holidays in ‘the Highlands’.

Im Grunde hat es eine merkwürdige Bewandtnis mit diesem Sicheinleben an fremdem Orte, dieser – sei es auch – mühseligen Anpassung und Umgewöhnung, she read and translated laboriously and rather badly – ‘There is something strange about getting this settling in to a new place, the laborious adaptation and familiarization …’ How true, she thought. Mann was hard work. She would have preferred a boxload of Bridget’s gothic romances. She was sure they wouldn’t be verboten.

The mountain air had done her headaches no good at all (nor had Thomas Mann). They were, if anything, worse. Kopfschmerzen, the very word made her head sore. ‘I can’t find anything wrong with you,’ the doctor at the hospital told her. ‘It must be your nerves.’ He gave her a prescription for veronal.

Eva herself had no intellect to sustain her but then the Berg wasn’t exactly the court of an intelligentsia. The only person whom you might have called a thinker was Speer. It wasn’t that Eva led an un-examined life, far from it, Ursula suspected. You could sense the depression and neuroses hidden beneath all that Lebenslust, but anxiety wasn’t what a man looked for in a mistress.

Ursula supposed that to be a successful mistress (although she had never been one herself, either successful or unsuccessful) a woman should be a comfort and a relief, a restful pillow for the weary head. Gemütlichkeit. Eva was amiable, she chatted about inconsequential things and made no attempt to be brainy or astute. Powerful men needed their women to be unchallenging, the home should not be an arena for intellectual debate. ‘My own husband told me this so it must be true!’ she wrote to Pamela. He hadn’t meant it in the context of himself – he was not a powerful man. ‘Not yet, anyway,’ he laughed.

The political world was of concern only in that it took the object of Eva’s devotion away from her. She was shunted rudely out of the public eye, allowed no official status, allowed no status at all, as loyal as a dog but with less recognition than a dog. Blondi was higher in the hierarchy than Eva. Her greatest regret, Eva said, was not being allowed to meet the duchess when the Windsors visited the Berghof.

Ursula frowned on hearing this. ‘But she’s a Nazi, you know,’ she said unthinkingly. (‘I suppose I should be more careful in what I say!’ she wrote to Pamela.) Eva had merely replied, ‘Yes, of course, she is,’ as if it were the most natural thing in the world for the consort of the once and never again King of England to be a Hitlerite.

The Führer must be seen to tread a noble, solitary path of chastity, he couldn’t marry because he was wedded to Germany. He had sacrificed himself to his country’s destiny – at least that was the gist of it, Ursula thought she might have discreetly nodded off at this point. (It was one of his endless after-dinner monologues.) Like our own Virgin Queen, she thought, but didn’t say so, as she expected the Führer would not like to be compared to a woman, even an English aristocratic one with the heart and stomach of a king. At school, Ursula had had a history teacher who had been particularly fond of quoting Elizabeth I. Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested.

Eva would have been happier back in Munich, in the little bourgeois house that the Führer had bought for her, where she could lead a normal social life. Here, in her gilded cage, she had to amuse herself, flicking through magazines, discussing the latest hairstyles and love lives of film stars (as if Ursula knew anything on the subject), and parading one outfit after another like a quick-change artist. Ursula had been in her bedroom several times, a pretty, feminine boudoir quite different from the heavy-handed décor of the rest of the Berghof, spoilt only by the portrait of the Führer that was given pride of place on the wall. Her hero. The Führer had not hung a reciprocal portrait of his mistress in his rooms. Instead of Eva’s face smiling at him from the wall he was challenged by the stern features of his own beloved hero, Frederick the Great. Friedrich der Grosse.

‘I always mishear “grocer” for “great”,’ she wrote to Pamela. Grocers were not, generally speaking, warmongers and conquerors. What had the Führer’s apprenticeship for greatness been? Eva shrugged, she didn’t know. ‘He’s always been a politician. He was born a politician.’ No, Ursula thought, he was born a baby, like everyone else. And this is what he has chosen to become.

The Führer’s bedroom, adjoining Eva’s bathroom, was out of bounds. Ursula had seen him sleeping though, not in that sacrosanct bedroom but in the warm post-prandial sunshine on the Berghof’s terrace, the great warrior’s mouth slackly open in lèse-majesté. He looked vulnerable but there were no assassins on the Berg. Plenty of guns, thought Ursula, easy enough to get hold of a Luger and shoot him through the heart or the head. But then what would happen to her? Worse, what would happen to Frieda?

Eva sat next to him, watching fondly as one might a child. In sleep he belonged to no one but her.

She was, fundamentally, nothing more nor less than a nice young woman. You couldn’t necessarily judge a woman by the man she slept with. (Or could you?)

Eva had a wonderful athletic figure, one that Ursula felt quite envious of. She was a healthy, physical girl – a swimmer, a skier, a skater, a dancer, a gymnast – who loved the outdoors, who loved movement. And yet she had attached herself like a limpet to an indolent middle-aged man, a creature of the night, literally, who didn’t rise from his bed before midday (and yet who could still take an afternoon nap), who didn’t smoke or drink or dance or overindulge – spartan in his habits although not his vigour. A man who had never been seen stripped off further than his Lederhosen (comically un-attractive to the non-Bavarian eye), whose halitosis had repelled Ursula on first meeting and who swallowed tablets like sweets for his ‘gas problem’ (‘I hear he farts,’ Jürgen said, ‘be warned. Must be all those vegetables’). He was concerned for his dignity but he wasn’t really vain, as such. ‘Merely a megalomaniac,’ she wrote to Pamela.

A car and a driver had been sent for them and when they arrived at the Berghof the Führer himself had greeted them – on the great steps, where he welcomed dignitaries, where he had welcomed Chamberlain last year. When Chamberlain returned to Britain he said that he ‘now knew what was in Herr Hitler’s mind’. Ursula doubted that anyone knew that, not even Eva. Particularly not Eva.

‘You’re very welcome here, gnädiges Frau,’ he said. ‘You should stay until the liebe Kleine is better.’

‘He likes women, children, dogs, really what can you fault?’ Pamela wrote. ‘It’s just a shame he’s a dictator with no respect for the law or common humanity.’ Pamela had quite a few friends in Germany from her university days, many of them Jewish. She had a full house (well, three of a kind) of boisterous boys (quiet little Frieda would be quite overwhelmed in Finchley) and now wrote that she was pregnant again, ‘fingers crossed for a girl’. Ursula missed Pammy.

Pamela would not fare well under this regime. Her sense of moral outrage would be too great for her to remain silent. She wouldn’t be able to bite her tongue like Ursula did (a scold’s bridle). They also serve who only stand and wait. Did that apply to one’s ethics? Is this my defence, Ursula wondered? It might be better to misquote Edmund Burke rather than Milton. All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good women to do nothing.

The day after they arrived there had been a children’s tea-party for someone’s birthday, a little Goebbels or Bormann, Ursula wasn’t sure – there were so many of them and they were so similar. She was reminded of the ranks of the military at the Führer’s birthday parade. Scrubbed and polished, each one had a special word from Uncle Wolf before they were allowed to indulge in the cake that was set out on a long table. Poor sweet-toothed Frieda (who undoubtedly took after her mother in this respect) was too heavy-lidded with fatigue to eat any. There was always cake on the Berghof, poppyseed Streusel and cinnamon and plum Tortes, puff pastries filled with cream, chocolate cake – great domes of Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte – Ursula wondered who ate all this cake. She herself certainly did her best to get through it.

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.

‘Me?’ the outraged flower of British womanhood replied.

‘Yes, you.’

Reluctantly, Sylvie raised her arm. Ursula thought that until the day she died she would remember the sight of her mother giving the Nazi salute. Of course, Ursula said to herself afterwards, this was in ’34, back when one’s conscience hadn’t been shrunk and muddled by fear, when she had been blind to what was truly afoot. Blinded by love perhaps, or just dumb stupidity. (Pamela had seen, unblinkered by anything.)

Sylvie had made the journey to Germany so that she could inspect Ursula’s unexpected husband. Ursula wondered what she had planned to do if she hadn’t found Jürgen suitable – drug and kidnap her and haul her on to the Schnellzug? They were still in Munich then, Jürgen hadn’t started working for the Ministry of Justice in Berlin, they hadn’t moved to the Savignyplatz or become parents to Frieda, although Ursula was cumbersome with pregnancy.

‘Fancy you becoming a mother,’ Sylvie said, as if it were something she had never expected. ‘To a German,’ she added thoughtfully.

‘To a baby,’ Ursula said.

‘It’s nice to get away,’ Sylvie said. From what, Ursula wondered?

Klara met them for lunch one day and afterwards said, ‘Your mother is rather chic.’ Ursula had never thought of Sylvie as stylish but she supposed that compared with Klara’s mother, Frau Brenner, as soft and doughy as a loaf of Kartoffelbrot, Sylvie was quite a fashion plate.

On the way back from lunch, Sylvie said she wanted to visit Oberpollingers and buy a present for Hugh. When they reached the department store they found the windows daubed with anti-Jewish slogans and Sylvie said, ‘Gracious, what a mess.’ The shop was open for business but a pair of grinning louts in SA uniform were loitering in front of the doors, putting people off from entering. Not Sylvie, who had marched past the Brownshirts while Ursula reluctantly trailed in her wake into the store and up the thickly carpeted staircase. In the face of the uniforms, Ursula had shrugged a cartoon helplessness and murmured rather shamefacedly, ‘She’s English.’ She thought that Sylvie didn’t understand what it was like living in Germany but in retrospect she thought that perhaps Sylvie had understood very well.

‘Ah, here’s lunch,’ Eva said, putting down the camera and taking Frieda’s hand. She led her to the table and then propped her up on an extra cushion before heaping her plate with food. Chicken, roast potatoes and a salad, all from the Gutshof. How well they ate here. Milchreis for Frieda’s pudding, the milk fresh that morning from the cows of the Gutshof. (A less childish Käsekuchen for Ursula, a cigarette for Eva.) Ursula remembered Mrs Glover’s rice pudding, a creamy, sticky yellow beneath its crisp brown skin. She could smell the nutmeg even though she knew there was none in Frieda’s dish. She couldn’t remember the German for nutmeg and thought it was too difficult to explain to Eva. The food was the only thing that she was going to miss about the Berghof so she might as well enjoy it while she could, she thought, and helped herself to more Käsekuchen.

Lunch was served to them by a small contingent of the army of staff who serviced the Berghof. The Berg was a curious combination of Alpine holiday chalet and military training camp. A small town really with a school, a post office, a theatre, a large SS barracks, a rifle range, a bowling alley, a Wehrmacht hospital and much more, everything but a church really. There were also plenty of young, handsome Wehrmacht officers who would have made better suitors for Eva.

After lunch they walked up to the Teehaus on the Mooslahner Kopf, Eva’s yappy, nippy dogs running along beside them. (If only one of them would fall off the parapet or from the outlook.) Ursula had the beginnings of a headache and sank gratefully into one of the armchairs with green-flowered linen upholstery that she found particularly offensive to the eye. Tea – and cake, naturally – were brought to them from the kitchen. Ursula swallowed a couple of codeine with her tea and said, ‘I think Frieda’s well enough to go home now.’

Ursula went to bed as early as she could, slipping in between the cool white sheets of the guest-room bed she shared with Frieda. Too tired to sleep, she found herself still awake at two in the morning so she put on the bedside light – Frieda slept the deep sleep of children, only illness could wake her – and she got out pen and paper and wrote to Pamela instead.

Of course, none of these letters to Pamela was ever posted. She couldn’t be completely sure that they wouldn’t be read by someone. You just didn’t know, that was the awful thing (how much more awful for others). Now she wished they weren’t in the dog-days of heat when the Kachelofen in the guest room was cold and unlit, as it would have been safer to burn the correspondence. Safer never to have written at all. One could no longer express one’s true thoughts. Truth is truth to the end of reckoning. What was that from? Measure for Measure? But perhaps truth was asleep until the end of reckoning. There was going to be an awful lot of reckoning when the time came.

She wanted to go home. She wanted to go to Fox Corner. She had planned to go back in May but then Frieda had become sick. She’d had it all planned, their suitcases were packed, stored beneath the bed, where they were usually kept empty so Jürgen had no reason to look inside them. She had the train tickets, the onward boat-train tickets, had told no one, not even Klara. She hadn’t wanted to move their passports – Frieda’s luckily still valid from their trip to England in ’35 – from the big porcupine-quill box where all their documents were kept. She had checked they were there almost every day but then the day before they were to go she looked in the box and there was no sign of them. She thought she was mistaken, rifled through birth and death and marriage certificates, through insurance and guarantees, Jürgen’s will (he was a lawyer, after all), all kinds of paperwork except for what mattered. In mounting panic she emptied the lot on to the carpet and went through everything one by one, again and again. No passports, only Jürgen’s. In desperation she went through every drawer in the house, searched inside every shoebox and cupboard, beneath sofa cushions and mattresses. Nothing.

They ate supper as normal. She could barely swallow. ‘Are you feeling ill?’ Jürgen asked, solicitously.

‘No,’ she said. Her voice sounded squeaky. What could she say? He knew, of course, he knew.

‘I thought we might take a holiday,’ he said. ‘On Sylt.’

‘Sylt?’

‘Sylt. We won’t need a passport for there,’ he said. Did he smile? Did he? And then Frieda was ill and nothing else mattered.

‘Er kommt!’ Eva said happily the next morning at breakfast. The Führer was coming.

‘When? Now?’

‘No, this afternoon.’

‘What a shame, we’ll be gone by then,’ Ursula said. Thank God, she thought. ‘Do thank him, won’t you?’

They were taken home in one of the fleet of black Mercedes from the Platterhof garage, driven by the same chauffeur who had brought them to the Berghof.

The next day Germany invaded Poland.