Lavonne Mueller - The Patient Ecstasy of Fräulein Braun

When we had a surplus of flour, I use to sprinkle it over the walls, letting the flour seep in the cracks to blur the concrete and give it an antique look, a warm weathered surface you might see in Greece or Italy. Even Marie Antoinette had a taste for ancient Rome. I’ve never been to Greece, but I did go to Venice, and I met Musso at the Berghof. Could that man eat and drink. Adi came to admire him saying Mussolini was the only Roman among a whole pack of Italians. Musso would have been a lot more successful if he had some solid German snow now and then—to harden him up. He pampered himself too much. Comes from all that Italian sun. Comes from being waited on by his mother, sisters, and aunts in that silly peasant village of Predappio.

Musso was intimidated by the Italian monarchy and said the Führer ranted and raved like a gramophone with seven records even though he himself gave speeches that Adi felt were so much pasta from the International Lodge of Princes. Yet Adi had an affection for him.

Standing on the terrace at Berchtesgaden, his legs widespread, hands on his hips, Adi would imitate the silly ranting and raving of Musso for me and Goebbels: “Salata! Pesce fresca bel canto alfredo . Resotto spinaci! Minestrina biscotti branzino basta!”

Laughing until tears streamed down our cheeks, Goebbels would add: “The Italian Navy has wash flying from their mast.” Then we’d beg Adi to give more Musso speeches… more speeches… until Blondi came bounding in arching a blubbery lip at me and demanding one of her selfish walks.

Musso. Wearing white all the time, he showed poor people that he could afford to have his clothes constantly cleaned for he perspired through five shirts a day from all the food he ate. He sweated so much he had to be toweled by his aides at every available moment.

Adi once took Musso to a good Munich restaurant and even ordered an orchestra to play the Italian fascist anthem “Giovinezza” before dinner. An illiterate eater, the Duce consumed two eel pies for an appetizer, drank a dozen large foaming steins of Salvator Block, ordered the main dish of fish cakes in goose fat five times—two times eating three courses in reverse order. Once he plunged his fat hands into his favorite lamb stew scooping up the meaty liquid around his clunky nose, nearly rinsing his nostrils. He recited one canto of Dante after each course to aid digestion, though it was hard for him to stop at one. So he dispensed with his savagely boring recitation for the sake of a congenial conversation with the Führer. However, in his crude elementary German, he did mention a character named Tacitus who claimed ancient Germans were savage and crude.

“What kind of polite history is that?” I asked Adi.

Adi countered by reciting for him what Tacitus once said: “You don’t know what war is really like until you have fought the Germans.”

“Wonderful! Perfect response! Now if you want a happy vision,” I ventured, “imagine seeing obese Mussolini and Göring side by side in a tiny opera box at La Scala.”

Adi laughed, and it pleased me to see him amused and happy.

After dinner one night at the Berghof, Musso presented us with a gift of one hundred bottles of Olio Sasso, an Italian olive oil much prized in Germany. Then he announced: “I plan to deliver to your New National Museum at Linz the Plague in Florence . A valuable Makart, as you well know. Perhaps I will fly it there myself.”

No doubt this painting was truly authentic since Goebbels told me that Musso had the good taste to loot a fourth century obelisk from Ethiopia that’s now in Rome. Yet fat Musso flying a plane? His adjutant said he was a good pilot, but what else could a lowly adjutant say?

“Why do you hate Barlach’s sculptures so much?” Musso asked in a tone of forced innocence. “He’s not a Jew.”

“We have placed a great importance on art, and his work is too close to the edge of expressionism… though I was quite taken with his The Berserker,” Goebbels replied.

“It’s the brutal title that impresses you.” This from Adi.

“But I believe his woodcuts are often compared to primitive art, a relative of your German Gothic wood carvers,” Musso added.

“We don’t approve of his Animal people,” I put in, remembering the drawings Goebbels showed me… awful hairy charcoals.

“Yet you tolerate houses patterned after the Ringstrasse style—flaunting their elaborate, senseless Gothic baroque,” Musso offered.

“Merely the taste of scattered individuals,” I replied.

“Art is the measure of racial health,” Adi announced. “There is a great bond between art and politics, and we strive for that which declares our race and fatherland into a trusted Volksgemeinschaft. No society outlives the history of their culture.”

Musso, suddenly bored with banter on art, stood looking around for another fruit bowl while splitting open a melon and extracting two tubes of my lipstick from its juicy center. Smiling, he handed them to me all slimy with seeds. An accomplished pickpocket, he had taken them from my purse that was hanging over a chair. Soon he was flaunting a scarf he had stolen from my neck. He entertained us with his cleverness that surprisingly made Adi smile and even chuckle. Though I was happy to see Adi amused, I secretly found Musso superficial.

“Other works can possibly be sent to your Führerbauten in Munich,” Musso announced. “I have a few things in mind for your Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. Easy for me to acquire, like a stroll on the Passo Romano. I only request, as a small favor that you secure for me a Shirley Temple doll for a dear lady friend.” He balanced a sprig of grapes in front of his puffy lips and passed me a swollen apple under his chin. “Tell me, Mein Dear Führer, what comes after the Third Reich? The Fourth? And so on?” He gave a sinister laugh.

Adi had long desired the Plague in Florence , so he made light of Musso’s quip. “It’s the Third that will get you Shirley temple.” He handed Musso three bananas and two oranges. To prove the extent of his good nature, Adi went to the kitchen himself and returned with a basket of plums, pears, peaches, apricots and seven different kinds of mustard. It was important that the Fascist State stay loyal to him.

“Are you bothered that the press calls you Germany’s Mussolini?” Musso asked.

“Not when you’re called Italy’s Hitler.”

Both men chuckled with an edge of mistrust.

With gravy sliding down his chin, Musso bowed and told me I must come to the German Embassy in Rome. He didn’t bend at the waist but all over like a cucumber. He put his plump sweaty hand on mine. “Von Mackensen, your Ambassador there, would be proud to display a beautiful German woman.”

“I’ve been to Venice. That’s all the Rome I need.” I took his hand away from mine and placed it firmly on a hairy peach. Didn’t Goebbels tell me that most Italian officers are still loyal to the King not the Dictator?

“Venice?” Musso asked. “How did I miss you? Was that during my launch on Greece?”

Adi had no intention of explaining my invisibility though the Duce was free to parade his mistress, Clara Petacci, all around. It was the Führer who projected no private life. Adi was more intent on why Musso didn’t come down hard on the Anglophiles and Americanophile tendencies in Italy. The whole Greece thing was a mistake with the Italians being pushed back into Albania. Adi had to get them out of that mess as he had a fondness for the “fat one,” meeting him for conferences at the Brenner Pass where both their trains were shunted into a specially made railway tunnel.

“Remember, Greece rose to great cultural glory by Aryan settlers,” Goebbels boasted.