Eva's Cousin Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Praise

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  EVA’S COUSIN

  A CONVERSATION WITH SIBYLLE KNAUSS

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For G.W., who had the courage to face her past.

  With my gratitude to her for trusting me, and for her wise advice during my work on this book.

  This story is as true as the facts on which it is based—and as fictional as any novel.

  For readers who know and respect the mystery of fiction.

  More praise for Eva’s Cousin

  “Sibylle Knauss’s hallucinatory novel shows how people might sleep-walk into complicity in the worst crimes of the twentieth century. It extends the scope of human understanding in a deeply disturbing way. I was hugely impressed by it.”

  —JILL PATON WALSH

  Author of Knowledge of Angels

  “Elegantly told, Knauss’s thought-provoking novel explores Marlene’s conflicted thoughts about her cousin, the war, and the SS officer who becomes her lover. Both passively complicit and helpless, Marlene is nonetheless a character who commands the reader’s sympathy and interest.”

  —Booklist

  “Over the intervening fifty-seven years the real Gertrude burnished her experiences and with Knauss as her voice (and in Bell’s inspired translation) produced a work of painful honesty and chilling revulsion.”

  —Library Journal

  “[Knauss’s] sparely poetic and intense portrait of a young girl caught between her own ethical code and the promise of power is unrelentingly powerful.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  PROLOGUE

  BEYOND MUNICH YOU SEEM TO PASS THROUGH a gateway into another world. A world of more beauty and greater promise. You feel it at your first sight of the mountains: You look forward to arriving, staying here, waking up the next morning with that view of the snow-covered peaks. Even if you are only passing through you sense something of it.

  I take the Bad Reichenhall exit road. Who now remembers the seductive power such place-names once had over us? Bad Reichenhall . . . Berchtesgaden . . . Our yearning for the extraordinary pleasure to be found only in traveling used to be directed that way. When you are as old as I am, you see that humanity’s desire to travel is itself in transit, restlessly wandering from place to place, over the Alps, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, all over the world, with the crowd following on behind. I am a part of the history of twentieth-century tourism myself, and that history begins in Berchtesgaden.

  A very popular destination. Long before the period I am about to describe it was fashionable to go to Berchtesgaden, and if possible to make a home there. Trendsetting city dwellers like Carl Linde the refrigerator manufacturer and Carl Bechstein of the piano-making firm bought holiday houses in the area. So, unwisely, did a manufacturer called Eichengrün. Could he have picked a worse summer holiday resort? He must have been happy here, with exactly the kind of happiness he dreamed of: wooden balconies with geraniums, Alpine sunsets and sunrises in the sky above the house. He wanted his children to breathe plenty of healthy mountain air. People swore by mountain air at the time. It was a remedy against tuberculosis, chlorosis, and other evils of city life. It was no remedy for an evil that forced the Eichengrüns to leave their refuge a couple of decades later, selling their house at far below its market price. Only then did Berchtesgaden enter its prime.

  It is a beautiful place. Set among the gentle meadow-clad slopes of the hills rising to the sheer heights beyond them, the bare mountain peaks. A broad valley with the little river Ache running through it. The river name means “water,” and is evidence that the place was inhabited in primeval times, that people settled beside the water and for a long while did not even know that there were any other rivers in the world, finding everything they needed to sustain life here: shelter, food, wood, rich meadows. A Garden of Eden. The valley narrows toward the south, where it is closed, sealed off. The steep mountain walls approach each other here, the Watzmann, the Jenner, beyond them the Kahlersberg, and between them the lake, the Königssee— narrow, deep green, surrounded by steep rock walls, as good as inaccessible except at its northern extremity. A place at the end of the world. If you take the boat from Schönau to the southern tip of the lake you find yourself facing it.

  This place used to be the ultimate goal of tourist ambition. I still remember seeing framed photographs in people’s living rooms showing the church of St. Bartholomä with its onion domes on the solitary promontory jutting from the foot of the Watzmann, which cannot be reached except by boat. Once a legendary spot on the sight-seeing map, on a par with the Blue Grotto of Capri or the Eiffel Tower, it, too, is forgotten now and has been crossed off our private wish lists. The great flood of tourists, although it has swelled to immeasurable proportions, is diverted elsewhere. Not that the place is entirely unvisited today, but only the stragglers come. Pensioners, day-trippers. Me.

  I drive over the Ache. To the left of me lies the center of Berchtesgaden. I know I must keep right. The woods come down to the valley here, and I see the signpost directing me to “Obersalzberg,” as if it were some kind of village like all the others around it. And so I know it once was. I savor the sound of the old name, its lost innocence, its innocuity. Then the road begins to rise at an inclination of first seven, then eleven, then twenty-one percent. On my left all of a sudden, and sooner than expected, I see the corpse of a hotel, as empty of humanity as the world after a nuclear war, abandoned, emptied, doors locked, shutters closed, with pale plaster the color of bleached animal bones peeling away here and there.

  “Guests Only” says a notice beside the entrance. They must mean rats or ghosts.

  Ghosts. Balls held night after night at the Hotel Platterhof. Do the lights come on? Do the old bands play? Softly, softly, a sound like the worn grooves of gramophone records, a hiss indistinguishable from the sound of passing time, the inaudible falling of the dust to which all will return in the end. Is that Dr. Morell leading the lovely Frau Bormann out on the dance floor? The lenses of his glasses shine as if to hide the absence of eyes behind them. And Gerda Bormann herself, hair parted in the middle, a gentle figure, is eyeless as well, has only two black sockets with something implanted deep inside staring out of them, something eerie, horrible, indescribable. There goes Albert Speer. He’s carrying a roll of architectural drawings under his arm, as if on his way to renovate Hell. Just behind him comes Hermann Göring in his white uniform, red socks, and the order Pour le mérite on his breast. He is leading a lioness whom he calls Emmy by her collar. And there’s Heinrich Hoffmann. And Eva. And all the others. All of them; they’re all there. How they love the fun. Parties all the time. Champagne. Lavish wardrobes. Nights full of music, romantic affairs, passion. A ball at the Hotel Platterhof. Shall I be there, too?

  The car park in front of the hotel is empty. It’s early in the afternoon. The winter season is over now, the fourteenth of April, and the summer tourists won’t begin arriving until the middle of May when the road to the Kehlstein is open again. Dirty remnants of snow are piled around the sides of the car park. Nature is still holding back up here, lingering in a kind of interim season that is neither winter nor spring, for spring will come late and then turn swiftly, headlong, into early summer. A few warm May days and the meadow grass will be tall and full of flowers. April is a gray month in this place, with the snow retreating but spring not yet on its heels. A month full of the past, ful
l of grief and rage. Full of memory.

  As I am about to switch off the engine of my car my eye falls on the signpost saying “Hintereck.” Suddenly all the weariness of my long drive drops away. I must go on. I haven’t arrived yet. The Stone Age art of reading tracks preprogrammed into us is activated. I am wide awake and ready to look for signs in everything around me, secret indications to be interpreted only by the expert, the well-informed.

  I follow the signpost left, a little way downhill. The ground is remarkably level below the little road. A sports field? An exercise ground? A barracks square. I go on. There’s something close. Very close. Trying to hide. But I am here to track it down in its hiding place. After fifty-four years I am on my way.

  The Café Hintereck looks as if it were waiting in vain for customers today. The buses up to the building on the Kehlstein aren’t running, but the barrier to the car park is up, and the car park attendant’s little hut is empty. Parking is still free at this time of year. Nonetheless, I am not the only person to have parked my car below the concrete wall, once the foundations of the greenhouses where food was grown for Hitler’s vegetarian diet. Biologically cultivated vegetables, irrigated with the purest mountain spring water.

  Who else is here besides me? I look at the numbers of the cars. A Mercedes from Darmstadt. A VW Passat from Munich. What are they doing here?

  It’s a strange place for a tourist outing in the year 1999. There is no indication of its nature. No commemorative plaques, nothing to help you get your bearings. No explanation of exactly where you are. A chance-come visitor would assume that people had come for the sake of the Kehlstein itself. A mountain station like so many in the Alps. Unsuitable for winter sports, too perilously sited for that, too much like an eagle’s nest perched on the narrow peak. A place for a summer outing, a viewing area to be reached only by the elevator that runs the last 126 meters up through the rock.

  From there you can view the world from the Titans’ vantage point: the Berchtesgadener Land, with its valleys shrunk to toylike dimensions, the Königssee a puddle, Salzburg a hazy blur barely perceptible to the north. But close to the observer and clear as day is the imperious manner in which its architects imposed their structure on the mountain. Their defiance. The terrifying statement that it was a present for Hitler’s fiftieth birthday. A present from whom? From those who fell to their death in the shaft? Who exactly paid the thirty million Reichsmarks said to have been swallowed up by the building costs?

  A giant’s toy. A thing millions of years old set down in 1939 by visitors from outer space, on a mountain almost two thousand meters high. Perhaps a secret space ship disguised as a mountaintop dwelling, in which the aliens found at the last moment that they could not take off again? A tearoom, a study for Hitler, the octagonal hall for social gatherings, a dining room—surely that can’t have been all. The presumptuous violence of the act, building that road up the mountain, overcoming eight hundred meters of gradient, the blasting, the tunnels, the consolidation of the slopes, the building of bridges, all for this?

  Come in, come in, enjoy the Nazis’ view. You have to admit it is magnificent.

  The Kehlstein house is a magnet for tourists. But now, in April, it still lies spectral and abandoned on the mountainside.

  I leave the car park, walk a little way farther along the former greenhouse at the foot of the wall, and come up against a barrier beyond which a sloping meadow rises to the top of a gently rounded hill. I wonder why the road should be closed to me just here.

  Not that it was really a road up to this point either, more of a beaten track that has come into being because so many people insist on walking this way. In time they tread a path that continues beyond the barrier. Is there anything to be found here?

  I realize that this is the way in which modern visitors take possession of Hitler’s Berghof.

  There’s nothing here, claims the absence of plaques, signposts, any other clues.

  Oh, but there is something here, say the beaten tracks bearing witness, all too clearly, of the presence of many curious visitors. There must be something here somewhere.

  And I know what it is, too. I know what I am looking for as I set off up the hill. They’ve planted trees where Göring’s house once stood; you can make out nothing but its concrete foundations. A little farther downhill you can see the leveled site of the pool, which was not called a pool at the time but a swimming-bath. The Görings had a swimming-bath, and their house stood on easily the most beautiful spot on the Berg.

  We just said “the Berg” at the time, in the same way people used to say “Monte” instead of Monte Carlo if they wanted to show they belonged. This is the language of courtiers, of those still almost unable to absorb the fact that they have actually made it to the place they believe to be the center of the inhabited world. Here. The inner clique of the court itself does not need to use it.

  When Hermann Göring came he unerringly appropriated the best piece of the Obersalzberg cake for himself, the Eckerbichl, also known as the Göring Hill. He saw it lying there, seized on it, and in no time at all had made it his own, as he did with everything he desired. Never the shadow of a doubt that they were rightfully his. He grabbed them all like a happy baby, convinced that people liked to watch him stuff himself to the point of satiation. A fine example of a greedy baby. A little monster who grew and thrived until it was an enormous monster. The Eckerbichl was only a small appetizer on the menu of his life.

  From up here Hitler’s Berghof, that bombastic cross between a barracks and an Alpine chalet, looked like a garden summerhouse, and Bormann’s villa, situated a little below the boundaries of Göring’s property, like its adjunct. The view moves on, like the simulation of a bird’s flight, not just down to the valley and over to the walls of the mountain range in the west, but southwards along the valley, too. Smaller hills move into the foreground of the picture, with little groups of trees growing on them. This is where the royal palace of the little kingdom of the Obersalzberg ought to have stood, basking in the morning sunlight, catching the last light in the west, whereas in fact the Berghof was always bathed in evening shadows early.

  I suddenly see that I’m not alone up here. A man is standing over there beyond the site of an old ski lift, glancing my way. He may be a hundred meters away from me, yet I feel that he is looking at me.

  Now that I have grown old people do not often look at me. There’s something to be said for it. After all, it can be a nuisance to be the center of as much attention as younger women are. The target of so many questions: What’s she doing here? Who is she expecting? Is she waiting for someone? You have more freedom when you’re old. The young probably don’t know that.

  But this man is looking at me. He does it openly, shielding his eyes with his hand and staring in my direction. He is asking the crucial question: What is she doing here?

  I continue on my way as if I hadn’t seen him. But in my own turn I have begun asking myself what he is doing here. A tourist on the track of memories? A souvenir hunter? A man who will bend down and then straighten up with a surreptitious handful of the soil of the Obersalzberg? A pilgrim, perhaps? Can you trust anyone who travels from Darmstadt or Munich to this of all places?

  And what does the man think of me? Has he assessed my age? Has he worked out how old I would have been when the Obersalzberg was in its prime? What does he think may have brought me here?

  I realize that something of the spirit of the place arouses this distrust, this latent readiness to feel mutual suspicion. What business do we have here, that young man and I, an old woman? Listen, I feel like calling out to him, it’s not what you think!

  But is it, after all?

  I slowly retrace my steps without looking around. My pace is uncertain. I know that I have fallen out of step with myself. It happens, as I remember, when I know that someone is staring at me.

  A little way below my parked car I see the hotel Zum Türken, on the other side of the road leading down the valley. The place lo
oks deserted. Only the faded national flags in front of the main entrance, European flags and the flag of the United States, seem to indicate any readiness to accommodate guests.

  But the guestrooms are empty. Obviously not much has changed here since the place was rebuilt after the war. Even the artificial flowers on the tables look as if they date back to that time. Checkered tablecloths and curtains made of some artificial fiber resembling wool have gone slightly grubby, even in the pure mountain air. No, thank you, I don’t want to see one of the single rooms with a view down the valley. I try ordering a coffee.

  They’re not serving coffee at the moment.

  But the bunkers are open, the landlady tells me. Would you like to see the bunkers?

  I don’t know what it is about her that makes me uneasy. She is by no means unfriendly. She tells me to feel free to walk around the building. That’s where the entrance to the bunker will be, and sure enough, here it is. Still no information, no plaque, nothing. But then, suddenly, you are where they want you to be. In a kind of museum foyer, with brochures, videos, a grating over the entrance to the bunker. It can be opened with a token for which you pay five marks. This place is a little gold mine to the landlord and landlady of the hotel Zum Türken. They don’t need to renovate their premises; this is what people come for. They’ll come in any case. And now I know what I didn’t like about the woman: She was waiting for me. She’d known I would come some day. Everyone comes some day, says her expression; I’ve stopped asking why, it says, I just have to wait and take their five marks. They all want to see it.

  But I am the only one today. I start on the downward climb. I am still impelled by a curious hunting instinct, as if I had to find and then follow a trail. The whole place is a system of signs and symbols, but no sooner have you spotted them than they seem to blur again. However, it is different underground. Here they address visitors in plain language. The staircases and passages are adequately lit. Notices on the walls tell you where you are.