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Hitler bent low over the photographs, leaning on his hands. Without looking up, he said, “You have a picture of me in spectacles here.”
“Where?”
Hitler jabbed at it. “There! Didn’t I tell you?”
Hoffmann flipped through his plates, found the offending negative, and smashed it with his carpenter’s hammer over the waste can.
“And here. My face is puffy,” Hitler said, and ticked a photograph off the dining room table.
Hoffmann got the negative and destroyed it, the glass clanging against the tin as it fell.
Hitler then held up to all of them a stark close-up of himself in a dark brown shirt and a black tie, furrows between his shark-cold eyes, his mouth held in the opposite of a smile, his facial expression that of a hate-filled man whose fierce vengeance is even now being silkily enjoyed. “This is good,” he said.
Winking with irony, Hoffmann told Geli, “We’re never too old to learn.”
And then Hitler put together four different shots of himself as he posed in the brown hat and uniform of the Sturmabteilung.
Geli thought he looked foolish, like a child playing dress up.
“They go or they stay?” Hoffmann asked. Hitler’s glare swung toward him like a farmer’s scythe in wheat, and the photographer hunted for the negatives.
“Let me do it,” Henny said. Her father handed her the hammer and she took joy in crashing the hammer into Hitler’s face in the darkened glass, the shards raining loudly from her hand as she told them, “I’m having fun.”
Angela called from the kitchen, “Ouch, such a racket!” while Geli winced at the noise and held her ears. But her uncle watched with fascination and zeal as the girl shattered the plates, urging her on by handing Henny even good negatives and seemingly growing ever more excited by the wreckage until at last the photographer angrily took the hammer from his daughter. “We seem to be hungry,” he said.
Angela stayed behind at Haus Wachenfeld to have tea with friends as Hoffmann conveyed the four of them in his Daimler seven kilometers west of Berchtesgaden to the village of Ramsau and the green lake called Hintersee. Henny and Geli shook out red tartan blankets beneath linden trees and they all had a picnic of champagne and caviar, then lemonade and ham sandwiches as they watched fly fishermen in green hip waders hook trout and saibling, wrap them in seaweed, and stuff them inside their creels.
With his slouch hat cocked on his head and his purple tie flipped over his right shoulder for fear of staining it, Hitler ate salted radishes as he lazed in the shade, his brown trousers twisted high enough that Geli could glimpse the stocking garters pinking the hairless white skin of his calves. Tilting up on his elbows to watch Henny toy with a child’s kitten, he told his niece the folklore that Emperor Frederick, the Antichrist of the Middle Ages, was thought to be sleeping beneath the holy mountain of Untersberg, patiently awaiting a flight of ravens that would herald the hour of victory over all of Germany’s enemies and the final, long-sought unification of the Aryan nations. And there was some truth to it, of that he was sure. The first time he’d visited Obersalzberg he’d felt a magnetic force urging him to stay, and he knew that he, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, was meant to live in these mountains for ten years, to become hard here, hard and cold as ice, rejoicing in his loneliness, forging a spirit of steel. “I will have reached my peak,” he said, “when I can observe my former self with loathing and pity, and spit on the fate my stars had determined I should have.”
Such pomposity, Geli thought, but she said, “You have it all worked out, then.”
“I do,” he agreed, and held himself up on his right elbow as he faced her, locking his hands together with the plum satisfaction of a fortunate banker. “Are you aware of the origins of the name Adolf?” he asked.
“Adolfus, I thought.”
“Athalwolfa,” he corrected. “Athal means ‘noble,’ Wolfa, ‘wolf.’ And now a noble wolf has been born who shall shred into bloody pieces the herd of seducers and deceivers of the people.” And then he grinned with his fanged, ugly, and generally hidden smile, and she was alarmed to find that with such strange talk her famous uncle was trying to woo her.
She was confused by his flirtation and she flicked her dress farther toward her knees as she felt him float his stare from her sun-bleached hair to her suntanned neck and full breasts and waist and then to the fine blond hairs on her forearm. “Oh, listen, Uncle Alf,” she said. “Singing.” And she got up from the blanket to pretend she needed to find out who it was.
Wholly unaware of their führer, ten meters away on the other side of the linden trees were five roaring and sunburnt Brownshirts hoisting steins and hollering Trinklieder at a picnic table with two tipsy prostitutes who seemed already to have been much used. Geli was stunned as a brassy, singing woman whose hair was the color of Weissbier allowed the hankering man beside her to furtively hunt under her skirt as she linked the fingers of both her hands with those of the man she was facing.
“Are we invisible here?” Geli asked, but no one answered.
When the song was just about finished, a drunken practical joker farther down the table quickly hoisted up the sweater of a heavier, bleached-blond woman whose breasts seemed as huge as world globes. She hurriedly hid herself again, but Heinrich Hoffmann ostentatiously gaped and then grinned at Hitler over his filled glass of champagne. “Where are we?” he asked. “In Berlin?”
Hitler flushed as with a disclosed secret, and looked far out to a racing scull on the Hintersee. He tore up blades of grass and chewed them. Henny was still staring at the five men and the prostitutes, as if this were an important moment whose details she’d want to recall.
Ill at ease, her face hot with embarrassment, Geli kicked off her shoes and walked through a door she’d made in her mind, strolling a hundred meters from their afternoon picnic in shaded grass that was plush and cool under her feet. Sunshine whitened the denim blue of the sky and flashed off the green water as if it were a jeweler’s case holding tumbled rows of gold bracelets. She joined the lukewarm slosh of the lake, lifting up the hem of her dress to wade farther out and holding still enough that she could watch with childish amusement as sudden minnows schooled by her ankles and softly tickled her skin with nibbles.
“Aren’t you gorgeous!” Heinrich Hoffmann said.
She turned and saw the short, blond, wide-shouldered photographer waist high in the gray reeds of the bank, winding forward the film in his Stirnschen camera. “You took my picture?”
“Of course. Don’t move.” Hoffmann hunkered forward a little and took another. Winding the film, he said, “I’m getting my shoes wet.” Squinting through the viewfinder, he urged Geli, “Look into the water as you were doing, but then you hear a noise and you just turn your face with surprise.” Hoffmann performed it in a feminine way. “Like so.”
“Like this?”
“Exactly. Twinkling eyes. Try to flip your hair.”
