A War of Flowers (2014) (23 page)

‘That’s because he’s in town,’ said the other, shielding his eyes against the sun.

It was not just the sun which had come out for the Führer. As Clara headed towards Prinzregentenplatz, she saw that a bevy of SS honour guards in black steel helmets and uniforms was
positioned outside Hitler’s luxurious second-floor apartment. Barriers had been erected all around the square in happy anticipation of the Hitler circus, with its drums and banners and flags,
plus, of course, its star performer.

She walked quickly past, heading towards the centre of town, but as she approached, she found herself swept up in a larger crowd and allowed herself to be pulled along in its stream. There were
dozens of people thronging joyfully, pouring along the street with a hum of excited anticipation. The crowd passed tall blocks with heavy wooden doors studded with ironwork and window boxes where
massed ranks of geraniums stood to attention, before slowing to a halt beside the gigantic, neoclassical House of German Art. They stood there, a sea of happy faces pinned behind sleek-jacketed
troops, as the air rang with shouts and the distant sound of marching boots. Black uniforms moved like an oil slick through the crowd. A man was selling periscopes with mirrors that allowed people
at the back to see what was happening and a detachment of BDM girls with triangular swastika flags were arranged at the front, giggling hysterically.

Suddenly the murmuring of the crowd intensified to a roar and the people in front of Clara surged forward, arms rising, as a six-wheeled black Mercedes, as sleek and magisterial as a cruise
liner, flanked by SS motorcycle outriders, approached slowly, the sun glancing off its chrome hubs. Simultaneously she registered that the band was playing the British National Anthem and saw
through the car’s window a bowler hat and wing collar, the sparkle of a watch chain and a pair of beady eyes peering out above a toothbrush moustache. A face as ashen as a pine coffin.

‘It’s Chamberlain!’ cried the man next to her. ‘The British Prime Minister.’

Bewildered, she turned. ‘Mr Chamberlain is here?’

‘He came by aeroplane this morning. He’s going to meet the Führer at the Berghof!’

As Chamberlain’s car approached, two women edged forward and threw something into the road and a frisson of alarm ran through the crowd until they saw that it was only a scatter of
long-stemmed chrysanthemums, their white petals wheeling in a confetti of joy. Eyes travelled upwards, following the stems as they sailed into the air before they whirled back to the ground again
and were crushed by the fat, oblivious tyres of the Mercedes, leaving a bruise of flowers on the road behind.

Rosa Winter had a new typewriter. Everyone did, in fact. All official typewriters throughout the Reich were being replaced with keys that could spell SS in Gothic script. Rosa
rather liked the look of hers, squared precisely, gleaming and shiny on her orderly desk, alongside the stacked carbons and the official NS Frauenschaft notepaper with its eagle letterhead
signifying the offices of the Führerin, and a row of pencils ranked in order of size. Every morning the Führerin glanced at the pencils on Rosa’s desk as she passed, as though
inspecting a stormtrooper honour guard, and that morning she had murmured an approving ‘Ja’ which would have gladdened the heart of any other secretary.

Tidiness was, Rosa knew, the main reason the Führerin liked her. To Gertrud Scholtz-Klink tidiness was not just a virtue but a political act. In fact, Rosa realized, her habit of putting
everything in its correct place was a microcosm of the entire Reich. Nazi Germany was like her own orderly drawers, but on a massive scale. There was a file for every part of society –
Mothers, Bund Deutscher Mädel, Hitler Youth. Everything neat and everyone in their place. An identity card for every citizen. A labour service for all ages. A Party file for every part of
society. Germany was like one vast filing system, the kind the Gestapo were said to be assembling for every person in the Reich, with all citizens noted, annotated, sorted and accounted for. Every
activity categorized and evaluated with a department allocated to it, or an association or a club.
Alles in Ordnung
.

Perhaps that was why Rosa liked keeping her Observations. Journalists looked at the messy parts of life, after all. The bits which didn’t fit with the official picture. People who stepped
out of line, or slipped through the cracks. People who couldn’t be tidied away. She kept her blue leather notebook tucked at the bottom of the filing cabinet; she couldn’t risk leaving
it at home. Her mother rifled through her belongings routinely like a domestic branch of the Gestapo, searching for evidence of something she suspected but could not quite pin down, so Rosa brought
the notebook to work every day and tucked it at the bottom of her drawer, between the files on Childbirth Targets in the Brandenburg area and a list of the Frauenschaft leaders in the local
districts. It was safer that way.

Rosa didn’t mind living with her parents, even if her school-friends had long since set up home with office clerks and bank managers and produced families of their own. Anselm and Katrin
Winter lived in Bamberger Strasse in Wilmersdorf, a tree-lined street of beautiful, turn-of-the-century houses with elaborate decorative plasterwork and wrought-iron balconies, in an area called
the Bayerisches Viertel. Their building had stucco of bone ivory with a pea-green balcony and inside a marbled foyer with a twisty walnut banister and high ceilings, swirled with plaster at the
cornices like cake icing. The idea of cake was intensified by the smell of cinnamon and nuts that emanated from the Winters’ stove, a marvel of blue and white porcelain tiles, mingling with
the aroma of hot cotton from her mother’s ironing and the musky smell of Brummer, Rosa’s dog. Brummer was a cross between a Schnauzer and a louche, anonymous stray who had contributed
melting brown eyes and one folded ear. By some subliminal canine instinct, Brummer knew to the minute when his mistress would be home, and would stand ready at the door to greet her, whereupon Rosa
would bury her face in his neck and inhale his aroma of warm fur, which was to her the loveliest perfume in the world.

Rosa’s father worked at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, an imposing building of pale, porticoed stone on Unter Den Linden, yet although he was a scientist by profession he was a great
lover of literature. He had schooled Rosa in his beloved Schiller, as well as writers now considered degenerate like Heine and Mann, and when the Nazis burned these writers on the Opernplatz in
1933, Rosa’s father had wrapped their books in waxed paper and hidden them in the garden, under the pretext of burying a dead pet rabbit. It was he who had first read Rosa the fairy stories
that she now passed on to Hans-Otto. ‘Fairy tales teach us what science and philosophy can’t,’ he would say. ‘They teach us the mystery and the truth of life.’

It was possible, too, Rosa guessed, that Anselm Winter regarded her continued presence as mitigation against the abrasive personality of his wife, who came from a line of country farmers and
considered spinsterhood an anomaly of nature. The Winters were themselves an anomaly in the Bayerisches Viertel, where most of the residents were Jewish, but Rosa’s father had been a friend
of Albert Einstein, who lived just streets away before he left the country, and he made no distinction between his Jewish neighbours and those who were, in the terminology of the new Reich,
genuinely German. Although Herr Doktor Winter endured most of his wife’s criticisms with good cheer, his refusal to join the Nazi Party was one shortcoming she knew better than to berate him
for – out loud, at any rate – and she had to content herself with talking wistfully of the pleasures of various friends whose husbands had been more politically astute. When Rosa had
landed the job at the Frauenschaft she had been overjoyed.

The great love of Katrin Winter’s life was the cinema. She would spend hours poring over quizzes in the celebrity magazines.
Stern
was her favourite and she liked to read out items
such as ‘Could You Be A Star?’ which centred on whether readers were ‘as photogenic as Brigitte Horney’, ‘as expressive as Olga Chekhova’ or as
‘disciplined a worker as Marika Rökk’. Rosa’s father endured this, but he could not be persuaded to accompany her to the cinema itself, so every week Rosa would be roped into
an outing to watch whatever her mother chose – usually romantic comedies. The type of storyline Katrin preferred featured young women in reduced circumstances – singers and flower girls
– who found themselves unexpectedly wooed by attractive and wealthy men. Last week’s outing,
Es leuchten die Sterne
, in which a young secretary travelled to Berlin to seek work
and was mistaken for a famous dancer, ending up as the lead in a star-studded musical, conformed precisely to this ideal.

In truth, though Rosa found many of the plots risible and she would prefer to be at home with a good novel, it was relaxing to sit there in the flickering dark, watching the actresses with their
glamorous costumes and silken skin. They made such a contrast to the members of the Reichsmütterdienst she saw at the office every day, whose idea of fashion was flannel coats buttoned to the
chin, black fedora and clumpy boots, and for whom a flower on the lapel represented transgressive glamour. Sometimes Rosa wondered what it must be like to wear a satin dress and feel it move like
liquid with your body, rather than riding up and prickling against your skin as her woollen vests and underclothes were wont to do, the suspender belt digging into her waist like a mediaeval
instrument of torture.

It was after one of those evenings that it had happened. Katrin Winter had already bought the evening’s tickets to
Festival of Beauty
, the second half of Leni Riefenstahl’s
film of the 1936 Olympic Games, which was showing at the Paris Kino on the corner of Uhlandstrasse. The film had been premiered on the Führer’s birthday and had tremendous reviews, but
Katrin was suffering from a heavy cold so Rosa called on her sister Susi, who was busy with Hans-Otto, and in the end she decided to go alone. It had been a tiring day, so she was glad to sink down
in the warmth of the stalls in a trance-like state, watching the synchronized swimmers sleek as seals in their shiny costumes and the gymnasts like statues from some ancient Greek temple, their
skin like perfectly carved marble. The audience was overwhelmingly female, so a lone male was noticeable, especially one with a smart grey suit, a sharp face and a thin, pencil moustache, not
unlike an American film star himself. She saw him first when they were settling down for the feature, sitting on his own a few rows back and diagonally along from her, brushing a hank of oiled hair
out of his eyes. She was aware that throughout the movie he kept shooting her glances. He was there again as the crowd streamed out of the cinema into the street and when she joined the queue for
the tram he came up next to her, tipped his hat and said, ‘Lovely film.’

He thrust a hand towards her. August Gerlach was his name and he hoped she wouldn’t think him presumptuous if he said she reminded him of Zarah Leander in
Heimat
? He hoped that
didn’t sound forward. Did she go to the movies often? What were her favourites? He cupped a cigarette to light it and offered her one too.

Rosa was so startled by these unexpected attentions she hardly knew how to respond. She half-wondered if the man was making fun of her, or chatting to her for a bet, but when she glanced around
she could see no cohort of sniggering friends behind him so she carried on the conversation, swapping details of favourite movie stars and recent films, praying for her tram to arrive. When it
came, it turned out that Herr Gerlach was travelling in the same direction, so he sat himself comfortably beside her, spreading out on the seat and obliging her to shrink to avoid physical contact.
She reasoned that maybe he was lonely. People who weren’t used to being on their own did, apparently, find it difficult and would seek out anyone, even strangers, for the sake of human
company. Rosa had never remotely felt that way, but she supposed she could sympathize, even if on closer acquaintance Herr Gerlach, with his hard-edged face and loud laugh, looked more at home in a
beer cellar than a Hollywood love story.

There was only one costume in the Third Reich as popular as the brown shirt, breeches and jackboot ensemble, and that was anything from the era of Frederick the Great. Movies
glorifying Frederick the Great – Hitler’s longtime hero and role model – formed a genre all of their own, and no fancy dress party was complete without several guests parading in
silken crinolines, embroidered frock coats, white stockings and Prussian wigs. Hermann Goering thought nothing of raiding the costume rails of the Ufa studios for his own dressing-up parties, and
any actor cast in an eighteenth-century movie knew that at the very least they would have plenty of charming outfits to choose from. But as Ursula Schilling waited alongside Clara in the costume
department of the Geiselgasteig studios a few days later, it was another kind of fashion that was occupying her.

‘You’ve seen this, I suppose.’

Ursula was holding a magazine at arm’s length, as though it was something unpleasant she had picked off the pavement. Clara saw it was the current edition of the Nazi women’s
magazine, the
NS-Frauen-Warte
.

‘I never miss it.’

‘Don’t joke, I mean it. Take a look.’

She pointed a disdainful crimson fingertip at a two-page spread of actresses who had appeared in recent films. On one side were vamps and chorus girls, platinum blondes who made up for in
cosmetics what they lacked in clothing, cavorting in deliberately sleazy poses. On the other side were ranged young women in peasant costumes and braids with faces as blank and clean as starched
cotton. Beneath this group a caption read,
You think: boring, We think: healthy and beautiful!

Clara leant across and read the accompanying editorial. ‘
Contemporary films do not pay enough attention to idealizing the family, and there are too many childless women featured. The
demi-monde type, hostile to marriage and family, is the living embodiment of the sterility of the previous epoch of decay.
’