Steve Erickson: Tours of the Black Clock

GELI WAS TWENTY, WITH flowing blond hair, handsome features, a pleasant voice and a sunny disposition which made her attractive to men. Hitler soon fell in love with her. He took her everywhere, to meetings and conferences, on long walks in the mountains and to the cafes and theaters in Munich. When in 1929 he rented a luxurious nine-room apartment in the Prinzregentenstrasse, one of the most fashionable thoroughfares in Munich, Geli was given heir own room in it. …

It is probable that Hitler intended to marry his niece. Early party comrades who were close to him at that time subsequently told … that a marriage seemed inevitable. That Hitler was deeply in love with her they had no doubt. Her own feelings are a matter of conjecture. …Whether she reciprocated her uncle’s love is not known; probably not, and in the end certainly not. Some deep rift whose origins and nature have never been fully ascertained grew between them. …

Whatever it was that darkened the love between the uncle and his niece, their quarrels became more violent and at the end of the summer of 1931 Geli announced that she was returning to Vienna to resume her voice studies. Hitler forbade her to go. There was a scene between the two, witnessed by neighbors. …The next morning Geli Raubal was found shot dead in her room. The state’s attorney, after a thorough investigation, found that it was a suicide. …

Hitler himself was struck down by grief. Gregor Strasser later recounted that he had had to remain for the following two days and nights at Hitler’s side to prevent him from taking his own life. A week after Geli’s burial in Vienna, Hitler obtained special permission from the Austrian government to go there; he spent an evening weeping at the grave. For months he was inconsolable.

Three weeks after the death of Geli, Hitler had his first interview with [German President] Hindenburg. It was his first bid for the big stakes, for the chancellorship of the Reich. His distraction on this momentous occasion — some of his friends said he did not seem to be in full possession of his faculties during the conversation, which went badly for the Nazi leader — was put down by those who knew him as due to the shock of the loss of his beloved niece.

…He declared forever afterward that Geli Raubal was the only woman he ever loved, and he always spoke of her with the deepest reverence — and often in tears. …In the Chancellery in Berlin, portraits of the young woman always hung and when the anniversaries of her birth and death came around each year flowers were placed around them.

For a brutal, cynical man who always seemed to be incapable of love of any other human being, this passion of Hitler’s for the youthful Geli Raubal stands out as one of the mysteries of his strange life. As with all mysteries, it cannot be rationally explained, merely recounted. Thereafter, it is almost certain, Adolf Hitler never seriously contemplated marriage until the day before he took his own life fourteen years later.

WILLIAM L. SHIRER

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich

THERE WAS ALWAYS A moment, sailing between the boat-house on shore and Davenhall Island, when neither was in sight. There was nothing in this moment but his boat in the fog on the water; there might as well have been no sun in the sky or anything that called itself a country. He didn’t notice it when he first got the job working for the old man, transporting the tourists from the mainland to the island and back three times a day. Old Zeno died seven weeks later. The young man’s name was Marc. Marc took over the business and sailed into that moment his first trip out, when there on deck in the fog he almost said out loud, among the unsuspecting tourists, Where in the universe am I? Finally the outline of Davenhall Island emerged in the gray. In the days to come the moment might arrive at any point of the journey, halfway or when arrival was imminent, with the island appearing so suddenly Marc thought he might run the boat right up the banks of the river. Sometimes it happened so near the last moment he thought the moment wouldn’t come at all. There was never once he didn’t feel its fear and desolation. He’d look around the boat at the tourists poring over their itineraries, at this moment when no itinerary made any more sense than a scroll from the Dead Sea of some other hour, stolen from the clock of some other place. Perhaps the place that preceded this moment or the place of the moment to come; but not this particular moment anyway. Not this one.

THIS MOMENT WAS THE first lapse in a life of innocence. Marc grew up on Davenhall Island in Davenhall chinatown, the only white kid of the town’s only white woman and, it had to be presumed, one of the town’s fleeting transitory white men. One perhaps who’d come in as a tourist one night some twenty years before the night Marc left the island forever, or what he thought at the time would be forever. Marc’s eyes were green. His hair was white as noon, not yellow, white; it never darkened. When he was small he sat in front of the mirror in his mother’s room on the second floor of the hotel across from Greek Judy’s in the middle of mainstreet, and pulled his eyes at their corners to narrow them like the rest of the eyes in town. As though there was nothing amiss in the genes other than his having been born into a darkness before which he never had to squint, a dark that sucked into itself all the color of his hair. A dark like his mother must have been born into too, though not so fuliginous and depthless since her hair wasn’t the stark white of his, nothing of her was that white except the small scar at the upper corner of her mouth. Nothing about her came to characterize her for him so much as this small scar. He came to measure what she felt by it, or what he supposed the scar told him that she felt. When she caught him trying to look like a Chinese in the mirror of her room, the scar lifted to some expression between humor and alarm; he saw it and didn’t do it anymore.

At night she warmed some milk and read to him in her strange accent, the accent of many languages woven into a jungle of one. She read from books in which neither of them had any interest except for the sound of her reading them. It was a rare gesture of motherhood though this isn’t to say she didn’t feel like a mother to him even when she made no gestures. The fact was she couldn’t have been less prepared for him; when she had him she was at the age she could have been a grandmother. She had borne him after reaching a point where she supposed it was possible only in theory. Thus she regarded him as a bit of a theoretical child. She observed and considered him in the way she might observe and consider an extraordinary figment of her imagination. When she was most brutally honest with herself, she’d ask if, given this, it was possible she really loved him deeply; she was never so brutally honest she could bring herself to answer, though had she been that courageous it’s entirely conceivable the answer would have been yes. At any rate the milk and reading were acts by which she stepped into her own imagination and took part in it, with conviction.

THEN SHE’D FALL ASLEEP too, sometimes right there on his bed. There were times he thought she’d perhaps been drinking a little. On these occasions he’d lie awake thinking, just a kid staring at the black ceiling, and it was always then he heard the footsteps out in the hall. He’d sit up and look at the light through the crack beneath the door, and listen to the footsteps and how they paused outside the door. As far as he knew, nobody else lived in the hotel but the hotel’s manager, a small Chinese lady who never spoke and was never seen; anyway the steps in the hall were those of someone big. Someone very big. For years, in the middle of the night, he heard right outside his door the tread of this unseen giant. There’s someone else living in the hotel with us, he said to his mother. “Who?” she asked. If she’d simply said No, he would have known she was lying.