Dark Shadows

On Sept. 18, 1931, Hitler’s favorite niece, Geli Raubal, was shot and killed, with her uncle’s Walther pistol, in the bedroom she occupied in his Munich apartment. She was 23 years old. The door was locked from the inside, and her death was, with uncommon speed, ruled a suicide. Rumors, then and later, abounded. Uncle and niece had been involved, Svengali to Trilby, in an incestuous sexual relationship with kinky undertones. The relationship had soured, or become embarrassing or exposed the increasingly prominent Nazi leader--then aiming for supreme power--to the risk of blackmail. As a result, Hitler was thought either to have had Geli murdered or to have done the job himself in a fit of screaming passion (oddly for a suicide, the bridge of her nose was broken). Nothing was ever proved, but circumstantial evidence makes this thesis chillingly plausible, and it was recently argued in a nonfiction study, “Hitler & Geli” by Ronald Hayman, to which Ron Hansen makes due acknowledgment in “Hitler’s Niece.”

Hansen clearly felt that such a crime of passion revealed a dimension of human behavior that the novelist was better equipped to explore than the historian, and he’s probably right. Like Simon Schama, with whose investigative techniques his own have much in common, Hansen has researched not only the case itself but its political and social background in meticulous detail. Only upon a bedrock of scrupulously observed fact does he hazard those psychological guesses that form the novelist’s major weapon in dealing with actual historical characters.

Pre-1914 Vienna, the crumbling and inflation-ridden Weimar Republic, the poverty and curdling shame in defeat that sparked the Munich beer-hall putsch of 1923, German resentment at the punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles, the hectic decadence of Berlin in the late 1920s, loopy Aryan racial supremacist theories--all this Hansen evokes as well as I’ve ever seen it done, with a wealth of vivid local detail that carries complete conviction. Here indeed was a country ripe for revolution, and National Socialism must have seemed to many a passport to the Promised Land.

So much for the background: The real problem here, as has long been recognized, is the drab, and often comic, nastiness of the main protagonists: Goering’s gross epicenity, the lame and dwarfish Goebbels (known behind his back as Mickey Mouse), Himmler the bourgeois sadist with his pince-nez and prissy sensitivities, Hess the mad mystagogue, Rosenberg the Jew-baiter. How, even with those staged and theatrical rallies, did they ever get away with it? Above all, what was it about the Austrian former lance corporal, with his cowlick of hair and ridiculous postage-stamp mustache, that inspired such hysterical mass devotion, culminating in his suicidal Wagnerian gotterdammerung as the Russians closed in on Berlin? Countless biographers and historians have failed to solve the puzzle. Can a novelist do better?

Hansen has obviously taken to heart Hannah Arendt’s famous remarks about the banality of evil. The Hitler he offers us is a nervous, narcissistic, lower-middle-class prude and egomaniac (always the assumption that there can be nothing people enjoy more than forming a rapt audience as he speaks endlessly about himself) with a whole clutch of sexual hang-ups and a habit of whining when he doesn’t get what he wants. His one great talent is his spellbinding oratory, and even here he ends up soaked with sweat and smelling like a mixture of skunk and decaying offal. For most of the book his attitude toward Geli is one of soupy no-touching sentimentality. For her he’s the sugar daddy who provides rich clothes, cars, fashionable nightspots: Geli has her eye on the good life, no innocent she. These two deserve each other. When he finally gets around to sex, he doesn’t even need intercourse, just a little mild S & M involving jackboots (of course), with onanism on the side. Geli has it easy, you might think.

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But that isn’t how Hansen sees it. Geli is a good Catholic girl at heart, and deviant sex is a no-no that finally kicks her, after long abstention, into going back to confession, not to mention forbidding Uncle from future fun. Hence wrath, tears and a macabre final scene in which the Walther pistol and sex get inextricably mixed up. What then transpired between Fuhrer and baby doll will never be known for sure: The party faithful muddied the trail very successfully. Still, Hansen’s version should come as no surprise to his readers, though the notion of Geli as a martyr to the Vatican’s line on sex I took with a very large grain of salt. And there’s still the unsolved problem of how the sniveling if sadistic sentimentalist here portrayed ever rose to supreme power, let alone came within an ace of destroying Europe for all time.