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“Schatzi.”
He swallowed some Riesling, then winked as he walked outside, saying, “You ought to have named him Adolf.”
The first night she’d stayed in Haus Wachenfeld, Hitler had given his niece a framed photograph of himself—his favorite gift to friends—and the first volume of Mein Kampf. She had happily put the photograph on her night table and had taken the book with her to bed, but had fallen asleep within a few minutes. She’d tried it again the next afternoon but found the prose so atrocious, the thought so vitriolic and contradictory, the tone so whining—when it wasn’t pompous—that she couldn’t get farther than the first chapter about his childhood in Linz. Each night for two weeks after that her uncle asked her how she liked his memoir, presumably trying to humiliate her into finally finishing it. She told him she was still reading, but so far it seemed quite good.
They celebrated Geli’s last night in Haus Wachenfeld on September 27th, but Angela got so sleepy from Riesling that she went to bed at nine. Hitler just watched Geli reading a serialized romance as he finished his coffee, then he went upstairs, and when he walked back into the Winter Garden he had his glasses on and the first volume of Mein Kampf in his hand. Dragging a chair until it was facing his niece, he sat in it heavily and began questioning her. “Where was I born, Geli?”
“Braunau am Inn,” she said. “1889.”
“Why did I not attend a Gymnasium?”
“They didn’t teach drawing there.”
“And how old was I when my father died?”
“Thirteen, I think.”
“What do I say in this of my mother’s death?”
She couldn’t recall. “Hardly anything,” she said.
“My one regret,” her uncle said. “But I was dictating the book to Hess, and it seemed too private and important under those circumstances.”
“Naturally.”
“‘Chapter Two,’” he read. “‘Years of Learning and Suffering in Wien.’ A quotation, Fräulein Raubal: ‘X was my faithful attendant, the only one that almost never left me, dividing with me share and share alike. Every book I bought roused his interest; one trip to the opera would give me his company for days; it was a never-ending battle with my unsympathetic friend.’ To whom am I referring?”
She shook her head.
“Well, it’s not a whom but a what. Hunger. Making hunger seem a human being was for me a fascinating literary conceit. I find it odd that you wouldn’t remember that passage.” Hitler hunted further through his pages and inquired, “Who produces nine tenths of all the literary filth, artistic trash, and theatrical nonsense in the world?”
She hesitated.
He held up his book and pointed to a block of print. “I say it on page sixty-eight.”
“America?” she guessed.
“The Jews,” he said. “And the finest things in art, science, or technology are produced by…?”
She thought of galling him by saying, “The Jews,” but he was in a tricky mood. “I have no idea,” she said.
“Oh? Why is that, I wonder?” And then he told her, “The Aryan.” Considering other pages, he halted and focused on one paragraph, asking, “The highest purpose of a man’s existence is not the maintenance of a state or government, but…what?”
“I only have the answer from religion class.”
“We’re talking about my ideas. My Struggle. A book that will one day be the Bible of the German people. The highest purpose of a man’s existence is the preservation of his own kind. Chapter Three.” Hitler offered one of his false smiles. “But we both know you didn’t read that far.”
She icily stared at him. “Shall I tell you precisely how far I got?”
With the suddenness of a gunshot he was white with rage, and he shouted, “You dare to talk to me in that tone? You dare?”
At once she was near tears, while he was giant and ancient and uncontrolled, a hurricane of wrath. She felt her stomach growing wobbly with an onset of terror and uncertainty as she folded her arms and humbled her head. She felt he’d turned her bones into wax. She told him, “I’m sorry, Uncle Adolf. You were embarrassing me.”
“And you have offended me! You have had the temerity to challenge me? Adolf Hitler!”
She knew that so much was now so out of proportion that anything was possible. She’d be sent back to Austria. She’d be locked away. She’d be denied. In a faint, thin voice she offered, “I can only say I’m sorry.”
“Walk over here to me,” he said.
