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“Your meaning?” Geli asked him.
“I was just looking for something to say.”
“And there was an interesting question,” Hitler said. “A mother interferes when a father is beating their child. Women consider her…what? Angela?”
Without hesitation she said, “A bad wife.”
“Oh, very enlightened,” Geli said.
“Ah, but Angela is correct,” Hitler said. “And seventy-five percent of the women in Germany agree.”
With a scolding glare, Angela told her daughter, “You still have much to learn.” And then she got up from her chair to gather their dishware.
Ostensibly to reward Emil for his hours of driving, Hitler took him to the Gasthof Hintereck for snifters of Asbach Uralt cognac. The girls washed and dried the dishes as Angela took the weight off her feet at the kitchen table and sipped from a jigger of schnapps. “Are you still seeing Emil?” she asked.
Henny elbowed Geli; Geli silently elbowed her back. Henny turned to Frau Raubal. “You can’t tell, can you. Emil’s as amorous as a mole.”
“Were I just looking,” Angela said, “I’d say it was Adolf who was in love with you.”
The sixteen-year-old vigorously nodded. “The hurt feelings. The jealousy. The mooncalf look when she’s near.”
Angela smiled. “Women in Germany agree.”
“My father’s models are wild about him.”
Geli sloshed water on her friend as she forcefully handed her a dish.
Angela got up from the table. “Don’t be too choosy,” she said. “There are more evergreens than cedars.” And she headed for her room.
“She meant what by that?” Henny asked.
“Uncle Adolf’s as rare as a cedar. It’s true.”
With financial assistance from Fritz Thyssen, Hitler found the cash to purchase as the new headquarters of the National Socialist German Workers Party the fenced and gardened, three-story Barlow Palace on fashionable Briennerstrasse. He would name it the “Brown House” in honor of his SA and would hire Professor Paul Ludwig Troost, one of Germany’s grand old architects, to handle the interior and exterior renovations, so his afternoons were often given over to visits to Troost’s atelier, where he would venerate the architect’s skill and feel jubilant whenever consultated on fabrics, furniture, hardware, and masonry.
Geli sang through all the soprano parts in Wagner, she walked Prinz when her uncle couldn’t, she shopped with Elsa Bruckmann, she practiced English with Helene Hanfstaengl, she took up photography under the guidance of Heinrich Hoffmann, she celebrated the final day of Starkbierzeit with Christof Fritsch because Emil Maurice had taken her uncle north to a quarry. But then on a Wednesday in May her uncle found her upstairs in the Bruckmann’s town house reading Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, and he insisted she put away the book in order to join him and Fräulein Hoffmann on a cultural tour of the Pinakothek.
He avoided the halls of Italian and Spanish art as “far too religious” and concentrated on a highly opinionated survey of the paintings of Flanders and Germany. He forced them to stare at Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Lucretia for five minutes, then hurried them to Albrecht Dürer’s Lucretia. Executed just six years apart, each picture featured an unfortunate female nude with a Roman face and waist-length auburn hair who for some fabled reason was stabbing herself with a dagger. Which, he asked, was superior?
“Cranach’s,” Henny guessed.
Hitler frowned. “Why?”
Geli said, “She’s prettier. She’s complex.”
“And Dürer’s?”
“Well, it’s so austere.”
Hitler focused again on Dürer’s version, found confirmation of his judgment, and told them, “You’re both quite wrong. Albrecht Dürer’s is far better. The coldness is intentional. Look at the equilibrium in the limbs. The rigor in the face. She’s architecture. This,” he said, “is the most virtuous nude in the history of art.”
“Which is a good thing,” Geli informed her friend.
Abruptly Hitler strode forward and they followed him to the French wing where he hunted out François Boucher’s rococo and sentimental Nude on a Sofa, which featured a sweet, pink-rumped girl, front forward and seemingly falling off a fainting couch. Geli secretly thought she’d been having sex and was watching her lover leave, but her uncle saw the allusions differently. “She’s your age,” he told them. “Unspoiled, feminine, and naïve. A debutante of pedigree. Wistful. Unsuspecting. Do you see how disorderly the sheets and curtains are? She’s been in emotional torment. Even now, with that far-off gaze, that finger delicately touching her chin, she’s possibly dreaming of one day falling in love. This is the finest art: sensual yet chaste.”
In a hushed voice Henny asked her friend, “Why are her knees so wide apart?,” and Geli fought off a giggle.
“You two,” Hitler said, but he smiled.
