The Marriage of Eva Braun: The Prequel

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A Book Review of:
EVA’S COUSIN
By Sibylle Knauss.
336 pp. New York:
Ballantine Books. $24.95.

Gertrude Weisker was just 20 in the summer of 1944 when she was summoned to Hitler’s Bavarian mountain retreat by her cousin, Eva Braun. Hitler’s mistress was bored. Her sister, Gretl, had just married a rising SS officer and Eva now wanted a new companion to amuse her during the lengthy stretches when Hitler was away from the Berghof. Weisker, a bright, impressionable physics student who was 12 years Braun’s junior, felt privileged to be chosen.

The experience would teach her more than she wanted to remember and more than she could forget. Nine months later, when she fled the smouldering Berghof, she had been transformed by love, life and death. In 1952, she made the mistake of revealing her past to prospective in-laws, and her engagement was promptly called off. When she did marry, she promised her husband she would never speak of it again. Only when he died in the late 1990’s could Weisker at last unburden herself.

The result is a strange, moving and disturbing book, “Eva’s Cousin,” by Sibylle Knauss, a German novelist. While written in the first person, the book is announced as a novel, with Gertrude’s name change to Marlene. But it is impossible to know where the fiction starts. Knauss’s dedication does not help: “For G.W., who had the courage to face her past. With my gratitude to her for trusting me, and for her wise advice during my work on this book. This story is as true as the facts on which it is based – and as fictional as any novel. For readers who know and respect the mystery of fiction.”


Yet while the mystery remains, it does not diminish the book’s power. The story is told more or less chronologically, with flashbacks to Marlene growing up under the daunting shadow of Braun’s beauty, elegance and renown. The narrative also pauses as Marlene reflects on her life between July 15, 1944, and May 4, 1945, with the self-knowledge she has acquired since then. But, above all, it is a confession a painful admission that she was, as Braun put it, “one of us.” In Anthea Bell’s excellent translation from the German, “Eva’s Cousin” is a novel that feels like the truth.

The book’s title is accurate: it is about Eva’s cousin, not about Eva Braun. Yet Braun floats through it, first as young Marlene’s role-model, then as the lonely, vain, loyal, and neglected mistress of a monster. Hitler is a more distant figure. He left the Berghof two days before Marlene arrived at the mountain-top fortress palace and never returned. Marlene knew him first through Nazi propaganda, then through Braun’s pining eyes, and finally by listening secretly to German-language radio broadcasts on the BBC.

When Marlene came to the Berghof, she embraced her role as Braun’s playmate. They would gossip, skinny-dip in a nearby lake, play cards, try on clothes, and watch romantic movies together. Braun’s “ardent wish to marry the worst man in the world was romantic through and through,” Marlene writes. And later she notes: “Eva dreamed of a postwar career as a film actress. What part did she want to play? She wanted to be Hitler’s lover in a big Hollywood movie.” After Germany conquered the United States, that is.

But Braun’s daily life was more banal. She was constantly anguished when Hitler was away and upset when he did not telephone her. “She had a great talent for hurt feelings,” Marlene recalls. “In every other way she was moderate, reasonable, average. Only when it came to feeling hurt was it granted to her to break the mold. She was extraordinarily good at it. And in Hitler she had met her master, the man who would give her the occasion for hurt feelings on a grand scale.”

After some weeks, Marlene moved from the Berghof itself to a nearby chalet, the Tea House, where Hitler would occasionally take an afternoon nap and where she now spent her mornings studying physics while Braun slept in late. And it was here one night that she found an emaciated boy of 16 cowering in her kitchen. He had escaped from a detachment of Eastern European slave workers who were building a new bunker below the Berghof. He gave his name as Mikhail. Without hesitation, Marlene offered him shelter.

In the months that followed, feeding and hiding Mikhail became her principal preoccupation, her silent protest against the dictator whose hospitality she enjoyed. At the same time, she was drawn into the Nazi web through her love of an SS officer whom she names as Oberstrumbannfuhrer Hans. To keep him away from the Tea House, she spent nights with him in a nearby hotel, but they did not make love. One day, he arrived unannounced at the Tea House and, in panic, she surrendered her virginity to distract him from Mikhail hiding in a corner of the room.

Soon afterwards, Braun left the Berghof to rejoin Hitler in Berlin. “For twenty-four hours I act like an husband whose wife has walked out on him,” Marlene writes. “I am indignant. I am baffled. I don’t believe it. I say: It’s not so much the fact that she’s gone. It’s the fact that she didn’t say good-bye to me. Imagine just leaving like that!” Instead of herself also leaving, however, Marlene still has Mikhail to look after. And as the BBC keeps reporting, the end is fast approaching.

Marlene’s final weeks at the retreat are indeed the stuff of novels. She and Mikhail are snowed in without food, Hans begins to suspect her behavior and reveals himself more Nazi than lover, she defies him by declaring “the truth is that we’re beaten” and is placed under house arrest, Mikhail manages to escape and Allied bombers target the Berghof. She learns that her cousin has at last achieved her dream of marrying Hitler, two days before they commit suicide. Then Marlene too is scrambling for her life.

The book concludes with Marlene’s final mea culpa, a letter written to her father, whom she last saw in July 1944 and who died in a Russian camp in 1946. She now knows he was right in opposing her move to the Berghof and that she misses him desperately. “Now I realize that to this day I never stopped looking for you,” she writes mournfully. And then she adds: “We all have our dead, with whom we are fated to talk. To whom we still owe our explanations, and of whom we would like to know one last thing. You are one of them for me, Father, and Eva is another.”

Alan Riding is the European Cultural Correspondent of The New York Times, based in Paris.

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