from The Adorations      

                                                     

Linz on the Danube; Linz, third city of Austria; Linz, placid, contented, aloof; Linz, June 28, 1907. The city simmered in the heat of the summer morning. It was ten o’clock by the bells of the Martinskirche. After dutifully noting the hour, the bells started pealing their joy, in unison with the bells of the Pfarrkirche, the Minoritenkirche and the Cathedral: The Archduke was coming! Which Archduke? Why, the Heir Apparent, Franz Ferdinand, of course. He and his lady, the Duchess Sophie, were coming down from their Bohemian retreat at Konopiste to celebrate their seventh wedding anniversary by dining and regiment-reviewing and paying a visit to Leonding stables, just outside the city, where His Imperial Highness kept fine Lippizaners. Among the populace few knew and fewer cared, Linz being a pro-German town and the Archduke not being the popular idol his cousin Rudolf, darling of Mayerling, had been, despite which the joy broadcast by the pealing bells was quite genuinely felt by the townsfolk, at least in part. Truth to tell, as far as most Linzers were concerned it might as well have been Michaelmas, or St. Jude’s, or the birthday of the Sultan in Constantinople. No matter. Like all Linz holidays, it would be a day of slow strolling along the riverside promenade of the Donaulände; of the gentle clown-music of tubas by the Holy Trinity pillar on the Hauptplatz; of foamy steins in the beergardens of Urfahr; of grilled Bergsteiger Wurst and pläcke potato cakes; and Linzer torte, and the coarse Nuss-Zopf bread of the provinces; of laughter, and forlorn hopes, and piercing desire, and once-prim gazes suddenly burning with the unnamable. Only the carriage-horses would hate the day, but even for them there would be extra feed, and a good rub-down under the linden trees. As for the humans—well, there was time enough, tomorrow, to nurse the hangover and stammer apologies to earn the deeper opprobrium of Herr Direktor, or Herr Doktor, or Unser Vater im Himmel. Today, a holiday, was made to enjoy. Relax! Drink deep! Work has made you free (for a day) . . . ! 

At ten-ten the joyous pealing rippled into silence. The air was still. Along the Donaulände a few family groups were taking the air, working hard, in their Austrian way, at having a good time, and any one of them could have been any one of the others, all typically consisting of heavily-whiskered Pappi in his Sunday best, a Franz Josef in miniature striding ahead and making pontifical comments on the blindingly obvious while Mamma was leading, or carrying, the young ones, oblivious to Pappi’s dull discourse.

     “The boat to Vienna, Mutti,” he said. “Fifteen minutes late.”

         He paused, raised an expectant forefinger: the bell of the Pfarrkirche, newly returned to yeoman service, announced the quarter hour. The Vienna mailboat steamed by, downstream, under the Urfahr bridge.

     “Get along, Papi,” said Mutti. “We’ll be late for church.”

         On the bridge, looking down at the now-swift mail boat, a young man in artistic garb—floppy hat, neckerchief, ivory-tipped cane—consulted his pocket watch and, turning to the young woman beside him, he (being Austrian too) made the same predictable remark as our bürgerlich Pappi, but in his voice was a slight tremor, as if what he was saying were merely a salve to the nerves of a young man on a date.

     “Look at that. It’s nearly quarter of an hour late today.”

     She ignored the remark, admired the watch.

     “Oh, how pretty. Is it new?”

         “No, no. My father’s. Twenty years of service in the Habsburg civil service.” He said this sarcastically, yet with a hint of pride.

         “May I see?”

         She took the watch, turned it over. It was as big as an onion, gleamingly gold, or (more probably) gold-plated, with a smooth Swiss moonface (Audemars Piguet, Geneva) and Roman numerals.  On the back was an inscription: For Esteemed Colleague and Friend Alois Hitler! With Respect and Best Wishes, Office of the Royal and Imperial Customs, Braunau-am-Inn, the 27th of May, 1895.

         “It’s very fine, Adolf. It suits you, especially today.” She handed it back. “And that suit! Such respect for the Archduke!”

         “The Archduke, pah! But I have the greatest respect, ah, er, for.” He paused, wound the watch-stem once, and tucked the watch back into his vest pocket. “For certain distinguished young ladies.” Then, the Austrian male reflex: rapid coordination of heel-clicking and head-dip, hardly a bow, more a ritual tic. But Adolf, daringly, went further: “I mean, of course, for certain distinguished young ladies, in particular, ah, for you, Fraulein Stefanie.” Then, racked with nerves, he made sure the moment had passed, he hurried it on its way by abruptly raising the ivory-topped cane (a recent affectation) and pointing it, while uttering a hoarse bark of a laugh, at a straw-hatted cyclist passing them on the Donaulände.

         “Ha! My goodness, look. I believe it’s Gustl. Now him I can talk to. He respects me, I think. He agrees with me, anyway.”

         The cyclist waved, wobbled, nearly collided with the bürgerlich family in duck-procession (or another one just like it), regained his balance, waved again, laughed. Adolf frowned.

         “I wonder if he knows who you are,” he said. “I’m sure he’ll have many questions. Where is she from? How old is she? Is she rich?” He chuckled. “It’s his main fault, he’s too curious. I had to tell him more than once that the business he was inquiring about was mine, not his. Of course, I would never intrude on your business, Fraulein Stefanie.” Again the half-bow, the moment of peerless awkwardness that was, however, not unusual, neither with young Hitler nor in most Austrian middle-class circles, where formality generally forestalled grace. As the daughter of minor provincial nobility, Stefanie was used to it, but she sought release from it whenever possible, this time from a plume of smoke drifting skyward.

     “Look,” she said. “Isn’t that the Vienna train?”

     Adolf stiffened to attention.

         “Yes,” he said. “Ah yes yes. The 10:20 express. I will be taking that train. Actually, I took that very train last year when I went up to Vienna. Our imperial capital, ha! In fact, it is a splendid city, Fraulein Stefanie, a splendid city. The buildings! The music! The coffeecakes! A bit dirty, and there are human dregs everywhere, even in the most elegant neighborhoods, but Paris is like that, too, I hear, and London, of course, and even Berlin. Shall we walk on?”

         They did so. Anyway, it was a command rather than a suggestion. Adolf strode ahead, swinging his cane. Stefanie hurried after him like a meek hausfrau, somewhat resenting this (but he was a man, he was an Austrian...). He was talking over his shoulder as they descended the stairs from the bridge and came onto the Donaulände. Stefanie caught the tail end of his peroration.

         “Vienna in October, you know, to study at the Academy. Perhaps sooner, except I will be sitting the admittance exam then. In any case, after I pass the exam I plan to keep a studio there and maintain my residence here, in Urfahr, with my mother. My mother is not well, these days. Too much worrying about her children, but this is so typical of mothers, ja? Or perhaps I will take an apartment on the Graben, depending on the extent of my artistic success.” He slowed down, again aware of her. “You must come to visit me, Fraulein Stefanie!”

     “Yes. I’d like to.”

         Vienna! She’d been to Munich, a nice town and more worldly than Linz, certainly; but Vienna, she knew from her reading, and letters from her Kahane cousins, was on another scale entirely: Habsburgs and the Hofburg! glamor! the theater! the arts! Herrn Klimt, Schnitzler and Mahler! The Opera! Lehar!

         “Everything absolutely respectable, of course. Absolutely. Yes, I am an artist,” dreamy I-am-an-artist expression wafting across Adolf’s features, “above all I am an artist, God be thanked, but please don’t think that because of that I have no morals, no, no, I have the utmost respect, believe me. Not that I...”

         He slowed down to interrupt himself, gave her a sidelong glance, slyly. True to prim form, Stefanie smiled, placidly awaiting resumption of the monologue. Inwardly she was assessing him, responding to his peacock-display: almost handsome, with those blue eyes, that mobile mouth, but not quite, with that beak of a nose, that oddly weak chin; but he was hardly ugly, and by no means stupid, a bit self-important, in fact pompous in the extreme when he started on his ideas, like so many men she knew, but he was passionate, at least, unlike most men, and so utterly courteous when he was paying attention to her that he was almost like a character in the theater, as if he’d only rehearsed his good manners, never practiced them. Most of all, he was an artist, and a good one, judging by the watercolors he’d shown her with that same odd combination of self-effacement and arrogance: Pah, it’s nothing, only genius!  He was a real artist, anyway, not just a talker, although a talker he certainly was, too . . . of course this was all part of the artistic personality, or so she’d heard.

         “Not that I am incapable, or unaware,” he resumed, standing with his hands behind his back, wagging the cane gently from side to side like a headmaster about to administer punishment. “Of shall we say, oh I don’t know, deeper feelings? As in, as with—have you seen Tristan and Isolde, Fraulein Stefanie? I saw it last year in Vienna. Magnificent! But perhaps you are too young...?”

         (Another quality he had was that of conveying his own nervous energy, almost to a fault: She felt slightly giddy, unsure yet elated at the same time, as if a great wonderment awaited.)

         “No. No, I haven’t seen it, but not because I’m too young, Adolf. My father wouldn’t let me.”

         Young she was, barely eighteen, but eighteen, in that day and age, was young no longer; girls were mothers by then, and farmwives, and courtesans. Naivete was for the spoiled, ignorance for the extremes of rich and poor. Stefanie was neither especially naive nor ignorant, and, although spoiled, as is normal with an only child, she had sufficient grace and spiritual wherewithal to temper the effects. The worst that could be said of her was that she was, perhaps, overly hopeful and determined, but these were, for the most part, qualities derived from her solid stock, the von Rothenbergs of Salzburg and environs. Her father, Herr Doktor Hermann, physician and part-time church organist, claimed descent from the same minor nobility as the great poet and dramatist Hans von Rothenberg; yet “minor” was hardly apt in view of the way he carried on in all of Salzburg’s best salons, for all the world as if his name were Habsburg. It was arrogance, but it imbued his daughter with a self-confidence and assuredness well beyond her years, qualities that normally come, if at all, only in opposition to life’s unremitting tests. That self-confidence had enabled her to accept young Herr Hitler’s invitation. It hadn’t deserted her yet, but she felt it wavering at his mention of Tristan and Isolde, undermined by the suspicion that Adolf was, in his clumsy way, coming around to a declaration of some kind. Certainly mentioning that opera was a sign of unusual, not to say cosmopolitan, interests. Tristan and Isolde was still frowned upon in certain formal family circles like her own: Her father was wont to call Wagner “that Italian,” implying not the glories of that nationality but the perceived over-amorousness, the lack of restraint, emotional extravagance...in brief, she knew the story, the great sweep of romantic passion, Nordic sensibilities allied to universal demands of the flesh.

     Foolishly, her heart raced.

     “Of course I know what it’s about,” she said, lowering her gaze.

         “The great hymn of nationhood,” said Adolf. He relaxed his stance, resumed walking, swung his cane. Over his shoulder he shot her intermittent glances, as if to make sure she was still following him. “German culture. In opposition to French. Do you understand? It is the greatest art ever created. I cannot begin to tell you of the esteem in which I hold Wagner. I would give anything for a chance to visit Bayreuth. Actually, I wrote a letter last month to Frau Winifred Wagner, wife of the Master’s son Siegfried. Such a lady, ah, she is a lady of distinction. I have not received a reply, but I am hopeful. Of course, she has many correspondents. So, Fraulein Stefanie. May I invite you?” Another pause, a direct blue gaze, for once hoping to elicit a response. Oh he is an artist, she said to herself. Unpredictable, moody, passionate. A difficult man, but his good manners will keep him in check.

          "Well, invite me where?"

        “To the opera, of course! Next week the State Opera performs Wagner here. Kubizek is going, you can meet him.” (As if his friend Kubizek’s presence were an added attraction, the clincher, Adolf’s company by itself not being enough of a draw.) “They will be performing Rienzi, a truly magnificent work of art. Do you know it?” He paused just long enough to draw breath. “The story of a noble Roman senator who led the people against stupidity and tyranny. It’s not merely a great opera, Fraulein Stefanie. It’s a cause, a manifesto, a declaration! But most people don’t pay attention, you know. They think it should be all vulgar entertainment, like the music-hall. Unless you point it out to them.”

         They were walking again. As they approached the nearby Hofgasse, the sounds of thumping drums and burbling tubas could be heard coming from the Hauptplatz, the main square. A loudmouthed party of soldiers in leopardskin waistcoats and green-white-and-red regimental plumes headed past them in a disorganized way, intent upon the music and beer tents and ready—as suggested by their sly glances at Stefanie (and brief, loud sniggering at the sight of her dashing companion)—for recreation. 

     “I thought Tristan and Isolde was about love,” said Stefanie suddenly.

         “Ah yes, yes. Did you see those soldiers? Hungarians, pah. What kind of country is this. One wonders what business they could possibly have here in Upper Austria. Doesn’t Budapest need defending? Against gypsies, for example?”

         This was evidently a joke, to judge by Adolf’s subsequent cough of laughter. Stefanie ignored it and repeated her question.

         “Love?” said Adolf. “But many things are about love. Most works of art are about love. But you must ask yourself, is that all they are about? Do they not have secondary purposes, meanings for the intellect? Is Goethe about love? Is, ah. Schiller?” Startled, he turned. She was speaking; indeed, she had interrupted.

         “Oh yes,” she said, firmly. “Goethe is about love, Adolf. Read Elective Affinities! The love of man for woman, woman for man. ‘Eternal Womanhood Leads us on High,’ as he said.” At the Realschule, as Adolf would hardly know, having left the year before (a no doubt touchy point which she forbore to bring up), they had just finished with Elective Affinities. Amorous, intellectual, generous, oft-despairing yet ever-hopeful, the Sage of Weimar was for Stefanie the summit of male perfection, a classical genius with Romantic panache, spirit and flesh co-existing in classical harmony.

         “His love for Friederike of Sessenheim, Charlotte Buff, Maximiliane, Charlotte von Stein? Ach, Adolf, he was a great lover.”  

         Adolf sensed her sincerity, even knowledge. Von Rothenberg, after all. The name, when brooded upon, implied a world of formality and letters and breeding foreign to the young Hitler, customsman’s son of woodsman stock, from tight little Braunau and the deep wild weald of the Waldviertel. He turned sullen and uncommunicative, feeling spurned in favor of the glamorous dead, Goethe especially. Concerning German Nature and Art was the only Goethe piece he’d ever read in its entirety, hoping for a screed; in fact, he’d found it a bore, and parts of it decidedly unGerman. As for Young Werther, The Eternal Jew, Wilhelm Meister, Faust—yes, he’d dabbled, but the rigidity, the classicism, the wigs and silk stockings...he needed more. He needed paganism, but not Goethe’s genteel Hellenismus; Germanic paganism, brute force, kicking down the doors of the past; he longed for the purity of passion (blonde women like Stefanie), mountaintop bonfires, Nietzsche (except for the Frenchified later Nietzsche, gaga from syphilis anyway), Beethoven, Wagner. Especially Wagner. Adolf’s exposure to the great music-dramatist was of recent vintage, and his obsession had become quite dictatorial. In the absence of God, the ex-aspirant to the priesthood needed a God, and he’d found Wagner, who, in his opinion (however unfairly to Wagner), had it right, bringing together the pagan and the romantic, with a nod to Germanic Christiandom: the Teutonic Knights, Parsifal the Conqueror, the Grail-Seeker, the Avenger, the Hermann of Teutoburger Forest, Frederick Redbeard, Frederick the Great, Walpurgisnacht, every woman’s dream, every man’s inspiration, purity and manliness personified. Tristan? A masterpiece, undoubtedly, but Tristan himself was a bit too French, too languid, too much the sexual athlete. Typical of a woman to go for that one and overlook Parsifal and Rienzi, the real masterpieces...but this was no time, Adolf Hitler reminded himself, to tell her how wrong she was, she, Stefanie of his waking and sleeping dreams, his Minerva; she, Stefanie, glimpsed from afar on morning walks; Stefanie, whom his friend Kubizek had so often heard called “My lady” or “The goddess” (of course Kubizek must have recognized her on the bridge, how could he not, after weeks of hearing about her!) or even, with dubious jocularity, “My future missus”; incredibly, she’d responded, a month previously, when he’d approached her on the Kaiserplatz, more nervous than he’d ever been in his life but somehow carried along by that intoxicating confidence that came over him at odd times...and when Adolf had telephoned a week later she—instantly recognizing his guttural accent over the telephone at her aunt’s—had agreed to go out with him, without a chaperone, even! Well, she’d made inquiries, of course, and her Aunt Marie was acquainted, distantly, with Frau Hitler, through mutual relatives in Linz and Leonding, and of course the late Herr Alois had been a civil servant of unimpeachable probity and standing...young Adolf’s reputation was more uneven, however, and essentially came out as one of rebellious Bohemianism which Stefanie, aspiring actress-playwright-dancer-poet and general Woman of Letters, found sorely lacking in placid Linz and dull Leonding.

         So she’d lied to her aunt, or they’d have a chaperone now.

     “Kitty’s meeting me and we’re going to the Getreidegasse Theater.”

         Kitty would be apprised. Stefanie hated the deception, but she knew there were some things beyond the moral compass of her family. She was certain that meeting Adolf was one of them.