A War of Flowers (2014) (11 page)

With six children of her own and ten million German women at her polish-free fingertips, the female Führer was described by Hitler as ‘the perfect Nazi woman’. She wore her hair
snaked round her head in braids, a field-grey uniform shirt buttoned to the neck and an expression like thunder, exacerbated by the fact that she was currently going through a divorce, because she
deemed her country doctor husband insufficiently Nazified. Rosa sometimes wondered if Hitler himself was frightened of the Führerin, given that everyone else was. Rosa had met the Führer
once. He had paid a visit to the office and talked about his mother and the importance of women to the future of the Fatherland. He was much less intimidating than the Führerin herself. He had
a pudgy, pale face and strangely penetrating eyes that looked at you as though they were looking through you. He was so different from the shrieking figure on the platform she had seen on the
newsreel, rattling away like a machine gun, that she could almost understand those women who were said to turn up at the Reich Chancellery offering to carry his baby. But not quite.

The only person who was certainly not scared of the Führerin was the SS-Reichsführer Himmler, who had responsibility for coordinating the activities of the Woman’s Bureau at
ministerial level because no women were allowed in Hitler’s cabinet. Rosa had picked up the telephone once to Himmler and the sound of his soft, menacing rasp almost caused her to drop the
receiver. The idea that he too might pop in for a courtesy visit was frankly terrifying. She couldn’t help imagining Himmler with his moon face and receding chin standing over the desk,
peering at her like an owl eyeing its prey, interrogating her about why she, Rosa Winter, was risking treason and actively weakening her nation by refusing to become kinderreich.

What Rosa did want, and had always wanted, was to become a journalist. She had no intention of following her elder sister Susi into marriage and downtrodden motherhood, especially not to a
thuggish civil servant who was not averse to the occasional bout of wife-beating. After leaving school Rosa had taken a typing course in preparation, quickly became a skilled and fluent typist, and
readied herself for an exciting career. Growing up in Berlin there had been a hundred newspapers – it was a city that loved journalism and Germany, her father often reminded her, had more
newspapers than Britain, France and Italy put together. But after Hitler came to power in 1933, closing opposition papers and dragging the journalists off to concentration camps, the press grew
cautious. The number of newspapers halved, and government directives on saving meat or mending socks had far more chance of getting into the news pages than murders or burglaries. To Rosa’s
dismay, getting a break as a journalist turned out to be next to impossible. She traipsed around the newspaper district for months but whenever she applied for jobs, the editor, either apologetic
or dismissive, would explain that male employees must now take priority. Each time she returned disheartened to the apartment she still shared with her parents, her mother would say,
‘
Never mind. No one in our family has ever been a journalist . . .
’ But it didn’t mean Rosa’s typing skills need go to waste. There were always secretarial positions
to be filled. Journalism could wait.
But I don’t want to be a secretary!
Rosa screamed inside. Yet sure enough, eight years after leaving school, here she was in front of a typewriter,
with a stack of letters on one side and a dictation pad on the other. The Führerin had taken one look at the skinny girl, mousy hair parted dead down the middle, bitten nails and grey,
blinking eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, and hired Fräulein Winter on the spot. The fact was, she looked infinitely more convincing as secretary than a journalist.

Even then, despite her role, the first time Rosa had sat behind this typewriter her fingers had flitted over it with a visceral thrill, as though perhaps on this machine she might still get the
chance to type dispatches, personal reports, maybe a newsletter for her new employers. That was until she had received her first letter to type – a report on the marriage allowance scheme to
the Interior Ministry – and she felt the excitement in her fingers drain away. Instead she had taken to feeding her passion by keeping a notebook of what she called her
‘Observations’ – articles based on the kind of essays she used to read in the newspapers by famous writers like Joseph Roth, made up of eyewitness observations of Berlin. Not
earth-shattering events, but little things about life in the city; people she noticed, small incidents in the streets. She liked to watch people and work out what she could tell about them from the
trivial details they gave away. The fact that Rosa herself was shy and self-effacing by nature meant no one gave her a second look. Who took any notice of a drab young woman in a headscarf, peering
at them through meek, secretarial spectacles? Rosa wrote up her Observations at night, letting her imagination run wild. Writing was where her soul revealed itself.

The boys let out another volley of shouts and Rosa shot a quick glance at the closed door, behind which the Führerin was interviewing their mother. Perhaps it was punishment for her
unnatural desire to forego children that she should now get to spend her days with a portrait of the flaxen-haired Goebbels family staring down at her desk. It was the standard, Party-issue
photograph and whenever she looked up from her typewriter, or ate her sandwiches during busy lunch hours, or paused to wonder whether she might actually spend her entire life here, the Goebbels
family would return her gaze. Being the model family, they had produced an entire marching squad of children for the Führer, little girls in pigtails and the boy in Lederhosen, flanked by
their mother, Magda, with a jaw clenched like an industrial vice, and the minister himself, with a smile as sharp as a broken bottle.

Rosa squinted across to the opposite wall, to a map of Germany complete with flags bearing tiny swastikas, each one signalling the presence of an office of the NS Frauenschaft in that vicinity.
It looked like something a general might use, charting the progress of Panzer divisions across hostile terrain. The hostile terrain in this case being anyone who attempted to frustrate the aim of
providing ever bigger families for the Reich. Occasionally the Führerin would enter the office and stab a fresh flag in the map, proving that the doctrine of increasing the birth rate was
being carried to the farthest corners of the Reich.

The door opened and the job candidate walked dejectedly past Rosa’s desk to retrieve her children, yanking both boys up by their arms in a practised gesture that provoked howls of protest.
As Rosa understood it, the woman’s husband had recently been killed in Spain and she was keen to return to work, but Rosa didn’t fancy her chances here. Rosa’s predecessor had
been obliged to leave when she got engaged. It wouldn’t do for the head of the entire Nazi women’s service to contravene all Party doctrine by employing a married woman, let alone one
with children.

Rosa, on the other hand, gave no impression of having a boyfriend at all, which obviously suited the Führerin very well. After all, she had just given Rosa the trip of a lifetime –
two weeks in the sun, with negligible duties and no typing at all. The Kraft durch Freude organization was organizing a Congress of Physical Fitness next month which would welcome delegations from
thirty-two countries, and top guests, including Heinrich Himmler himself, were to be accommodated on the KdF flagship vessel, the
Wilhelm Gustloff
. Therefore it had been deemed useful for
Rosa to undertake a little reconnaissance. She was briefed to sample the ship’s amenities and provide a report to the Führerin which would avert any potential embarrassments and ensure
that nothing would compromise the smooth running of the event. Rosa’s colleagues had been jealous, especially when she put a framed photograph of herself on the desk, standing in front of the
ship with hair blown in her face, wearing a new peach-coloured sundress and straw hat and a most unlikely tan on her skin. Smiling, as much as Rosa ever smiled, with her lip bitten in one corner
and an elusive look in her eye. All the girls at work stopped at her desk and marvelled. She must have had the time of her life, they cooed.

Instead, Rosa Winter bitterly wished that she had never gone.

The Goebbels family had a new address. Only technically though; they still lived in the same imposing villa on the corner of Behrenstrasse and Hermann Goering Strasse that they
had occupied for the past five years, but having undergone a three-and-a-half-million-mark refurbishment the residence was now officially designated a palace. The grounds running down to the
Tiergarten were clipped and pruned, the lawns laid with gravelled paths and statuary, and the interior had been entirely updated. The parquet floors and ornate ceilings were still there, but in
keeping with the house’s elevated status carpets had been imported from Berlin’s Art History Museum to match the National Gallery Old Masters on the walls, and marquetry tables and
Louis XIV furniture had been acquired from a villa of a Jewish banker in return for his passage out of the country. In front of a glass display case of antique china, recently liberated from the
Schloss Charlottenburg, a vase of lilies and roses scented the air. But it was going to take more than flowers, plush furniture and rich tapestries to warm the frigid atmosphere of the Goebbels
family home.

Magda Goebbels didn’t seem especially grateful to receive her gift of Chanel No. 5. She unravelled the packaging listlessly, drawing aside the black ribbons as though unwrapping a parcel
of socks sent in for the Winterhilfswerk rather than a hundred marks’ worth of perfume. After a quick glance at the opulent glass bottle reeking of wealth and luxury, she gave it a brief
squirt, and put it aside.

‘Thank you for fetching this. It’s kind of you to spare the time,’ she said with a martyred sigh. ‘I suppose I’ll be buying all my own perfume from now
on.’

‘It’s a good choice,’ replied Clara politely, choosing not to point out that the perfume had cost Frau Doktor Goebbels precisely nothing.

‘Yes. It’s a new one for me, and at least it’s not Drachenfutter.’

Clara grimaced despite herself.
Drachenfutter
, dragon fodder, was slang for presents given by
men to pacify their wives. From what she had heard of relations between the Propaganda Minister and his wife over the past summer, Magda must have received Drachenfutter by the kilo, but it was
having little effect. Clara took a sip of the tea she had been offered and hunted for some small talk.

‘Madame Chanel was flattered you’d chosen her perfume.’

Magda shrugged. ‘Was she? I thought it would make a change. We all have to embrace change sometimes, don’t we? At least, that’s what I’m told. And I understand this
perfume is very popular in certain quarters.’

That seemed like a strange thing to say about the world’s most famous perfume, but Clara had grown used to Magda’s gnomic utterances, with their peculiar, bitter subtext, in the
years that she had known the Propaganda Minister’s wife. Back in 1933, Magda’s request that Clara model for the Reich Fashion Bureau had given her unrivalled access to the gossip and
feuds of the senior Nazi wives, not to mention an insight into the tortured relationship between Magda and her relentlessly unfaithful husband. Now, Clara guessed, Magda was ruminating on a new low
in the relationship, wrought by Goebbels’ fraught love affair with the Czech actress Lída Baarová.

Magda aside, there were enough comic aspects to the affair to keep everyone else amused. It was on the set of the aptly named movie
Hour of Temptation
that the pair met and Goebbels
immediately succumbed. Unfortunately, Lída Baarová was living with another Ufa heartthrob, Gustav Fröhlich, at the time, in a house just a few doors down from the Goebbels’
country villa in Schwanenwerder. On finding the lovers together, Fröhlich had punched the Propaganda Minister in the face, blackening his eye and forcing him to pretend he had injured himself
in a car accident, but Fröhlich’s resistance proved futile. The delicate brunette with high, Slavic cheekbones was referred to everywhere, with a liberal dose of Berliner humour, as
Goebbels’ ‘Czech conquest’ and her latest film,
A Prussian Love Story
, provoked yet more laughter. While the Nazi hierarchy were plotting their entry to Czechoslovakia,
Goebbels was fighting to keep hold of both his wife and his Czech mistress, and according to recent rumours, it was a battle he was losing.

‘I meant to say, congratulations, Frau Doktor, on your new daughter!’

‘Thank you. She’s sweet. She’s four months already.’

‘So you have five children now!’

‘Six,’ Magda replied tersely, as if correcting the asperities of an especially forward maid. ‘You forget the son of my first marriage, Harald.’

Unlike other wives of the leading Nazis, Magda Goebbels had always been surrounded by a miasma of nerves, but now her complexion was cracked with anxiety, like paint, and there was a grim set to
her mouth. She was beautifully dressed in a cobalt-blue dress by Hilda Romatzki, one of Berlin’s leading designers, but her eyes were hollow from lack of sleep and the latest baby had left
another layer of flesh around her waist.

She stared at Clara without speaking, then suddenly she looked away.

‘There’s no point pretending, Fräulein Vine. I’ve confided in you before, after all. Things are very bad here.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that, Frau Doktor.’

‘Oh, I know people think it’s always bad, but they have no idea. First, my husband insisted on building an annexe at Schwanenwerder where he could take his actresses “to play
records to them”. That was awkward enough but I didn’t object. I know a man in his position, under a lot of pressure, sometimes falls victim to predatory women and imagines himself
infatuated. I thought the best thing I could do was try to contain it until it wore itself out. Keep them away from the children, but otherwise try to put up with it. That was until his latest
request.’ She cast Clara a savage glance. ‘You’ve heard about this woman, I’m sure. I daresay it’s the talk of the studios.’