Mister Wolf

I write in the expectation of you never reading this, my dear August, as we shall probably never meet and it shan’t be sent, and, besides, I am using it as an excuse to address myself, at a remove.

I am mostly homosexual by nature though not exclusively as I married and produced you. I did not serve in the 1914 war, being in Shanghai where I acquired an English bride who was boyish and flatchested, well-connected and a crashing snob, which I didn’t mind as I still take a detached interest in society’s foibles. Colonial life was more European than Europe, the meticulous recreation of a halfremembered dream, delineated by the tyranny of distance. Our house looked like it could have been in any European stockbroker belt, but especially English, with the addition of craven but untrustworthy Chinese servants.

I had gone to Shanghai to avoid the 1914 war because I possessed enough foresight to anticipate the bloodbath. I was not a patriot. I was familiar with my homosexuality, having practiced it and been fiddled with from an early age, including a mutual liaison with a school teacher, a man with gentle hands. The disadvantage of Shanghai was lack of opportunity for significant extracurricular activity. Chinese boys didn’t appeal. Some British public schoolboys kept their hand in but tended to be pink and flabby, with parts to match. So I packed up my family and returned to Germany, to throw myself into Berlin’s emerging single-sex nightlife, with its hard-up young men willing to sell themselves in lively, easygoing ways. My dear wife was otherwise engaged learning her excellent German and cultivating her own affairs. We came to a broad understanding and although sexual relations were maintained – but no little sister produced – we both knew our private interests lay elsewhere.

As for my subsequent disappearance, a scandal would make most sense – being caught with my pants down, buggering in the boardroom – but the reasons are boredom, dear boy, and insider trading, plus extensive borrowing at a time of hyperinflation, creating a fortune, hedged via accounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg. I soon created a platform that allowed me to do as I wished . . . The child bored me. I have to remind myself by that I mean you – it is too late not to be honest. You must be twelve now. I am afraid I had no aptitude for, or interest in, being a father. An insecure and clingy brat, not that our schedules coincided to any extent. Your mother showed as little concern and sometimes I wondered why we bothered with such a cumbersome asset.

I was curious about Argentina and told my wife I was thinking of scouting it out in terms of a move.

Your beloved mother was not convinced. Having worked hard to master her German, she wasn’t sure she wanted or needed to add Spanish. My reason was pursuit of a young diplomat from the Argentinian embassy who was being posted home, with whom I was smitten, or so I told myself. I was quite steadfast about making the trip until I fell in with a young visitor from Munich – a military lad and brownshirt, of easy passage and exquisite orgasms.

I decided to follow him to Munich, for what I thought would be a short stopover before departing for Buenos Aires. I had already decided Munich was sufficiently diverting to dally when I received news from my Argentinian paramour that he had decided to marry, making any continued liaison difficult while not out of the question. I in turn decided I wasn’t willing to play second fiddle.

I rented a house out in Feldafing where I entertained a succession of young men, for a week or two at most until I tired of them.

In many ways, I am an unassuming man of good grace and manners, possessing excellent taste, in clothes, in shoes, in the furniture I choose, the paintings I buy, and with my afternoons free I soon found myself entertained in the salons of Munich’s haut-bourgeois matrons. I could talk persuasively on most subjects and only very occasionally was found out. It was an idle, pleasant and indulgent life. I enjoyed its shallowness. Depth doesn’t interest me. I indulged in fashionable drugs and drank moderately, so was in no danger of going off the rails, but I knew I was already thinking of the next adventure.

As it happened, I had already been acquainted with that new adventure for several weeks without realising; what my afternoon matrons called ‘that delightful, funny little man’. One of my boys had dragged me along to what he called a political evening – a gathering of the great unwashed in a fifth-rate beer hall, getting drunk and disorderly until a small man with a greasy forelock walked in surrounded by brownshirt thugs, who winked suggestively at my lad. Scuffles broke out. Clubs were wielded, heads cracked. It seemed almost to be a reflex action of the herd.

I at once understood the attraction of terror. Fear costs nothing. Brutality is always respected. The realisation marked the start of a personal recklessness. My boy let me take him in a toilet cubicle to the accompaniment of shouts and screams and the sharp reports of bone on bone.

The strange man smooths his hair into a parted fringe and before speaking spends a long time searching the audience, which grows suspenseful and expectant. He starts slowly, almost too quiet to be heard, in great rolling sentences – despondency, anger, betrayal, hope. Word for word it doesn’t add up to much but the effect is transformative, in a guttural way. The voice cranks up a register, cracks with emotion. Sharp chopping gestures to emphasise a point. If he speaks with notes he seems not to refer to them. It is as though the man is the vessel of the voice, which twitches him this way and that, like a storm-tossed cork, as the response grows more tumultuous. It is the bark of the underdog, the unheard, the voice of riot; that much is blindingly obvious to everyone in the room, which roars back its approval. Huge crescendo, the man flaying his vocal chords chasing a rapturous, barnstorming climax, showers of spittle as the rage grows uncontainable and the promise of delivery is screamed out to foot-stomping applause. It was as though a heavy artillery bombardment – which many of those in the room would have been familiar with – had found its way into words. The audience reeled shellshocked.

Afterwards he looked like someone had switched him off. His clothes were soaked and he repeated the hair smoothing gesture.

There was no getting near him with his bodyguard wrapped around him like a cloak. He appeared so spent and insignificant I doubted I would recognise him if he walked past in the street.

I became friendly with Ernst Röhm, who called himself the head queer in town. We were bound to meet, given my liking for his hard boys. Ernst sniffed out my Feldafing home and approved. Well-appointed, not too comfortable. He said it looked like I was capable of walking out at a moment’s notice.

That initial meeting with Ernst was in November 1923. Herr Wolf, as he liked to call himself, I didn’t encounter until later, because of the failed Party uprising and his trial and imprisonment. After his release at the end of 1924 Herr Wolf was, in effect, voiceless, being banned from public speaking. A strange first meeting in the January of the following year, organised by Ernst bringing him to Feldafing, revealed a tongue-tied man of few social graces, gormless in repose, but with a feral whiff and a marked air – the fancied runner with the longest odds.

way round is impossible to say. He will no doubt fulfil his political destiny regardless, but there was perhaps a brief period when my influence held sway – as an arbiter of etiquette and taste. I said, ‘I can teach you all the boring things you will need to get on with the boring people. However much you despise them they will be your backbone.’ I saw neediness and greed in his eyes.

Your affectionate father, A. S.

In the early stages of their friendship, Herr Wolf told Anton Schlegel that he found him like clear water over which he could skim his pebbles and watch in admiration as they skipped away.

People generally found Anton receptive, even when he wasn’t that interested in them. They seemed to want to tell him their stories and he seemed to satisfy some primitive urge whereby those confessing went away with a better understanding, even though he, Anton, like a fashionable shrink, contributed nothing and, unlike a shrink, didn’t charge. He decided his talent lay in the art of saying nothing or not very much.

Herr Wolf complained that he had no one else who would just listen. Everyone looked to him instead. The relationship with Röhm was breaking up.

Not long after they met, Anton became mildly obsessed on Herr Wolf’s behalf with the case of Therese Neumann, a local farm girl who took to her bed paralysed and went into an ecstatic trance. Visions included Jesus on the Cross. Neumann’s hands and feet wept Jesus’s blood, as did her side and even her eyes: the tears of Christ indeed. She received visitations from the Blessed Virgin, purveyor of dire warnings about the state of things. Neumann declared her only nourishment was Eucharistic wafers. Fed by the body of Christ!

Neumann became a celebrated event, even among men who should have known better – including Fredi Huber. With Fredi it was sometimes difficult to tell how much he bought into the story rather than merely reporting it, but he was superstitious, and susceptible, being Bavarian and Roman Catholic and living too close to the dark forests of wild imagination.

The ostensible reason for his interest was a political dimension to Neumann’s utterances: warnings that could have been written by a press office for the Roman Catholic Church trembling before godless Communism and the devil’s disciples. Deep sceptics came to Neumann’s bed and departed converted. Grown men left bathed in their own tears of forgiveness.

Herr Wolf was interested in Neumann as a crowd puller and asked Anton if he should visit. He considered her his antithesis and wanted to know, ‘How does she do it, the business with the blood?’ ‘Vials probably.’ ‘Real blood or fake blood?’ ‘They live on a farm. The parents are probably in on it too.’ ‘We are both spoken through. My blood is the symbolic blood of racial purity, not some cheap trick. We are not fooling anyone into believing.’

Herr Wolf asked Anton to attend on his behalf and report back. Anton duly made the journey and found an austere, cell-like room with wooden shutters and whitewashed walls, full of the pervasive and honest stench of country cattle dung.

The visits were supervised by the parents. A crowd of fifteen or so was waiting that day. The mother made a show of humility, fingering her rosary beads. Her rough husband, hat clutched in both hands, announced that their daughter was ‘resting’ and no one should communicate with or disturb her. Three at a time, they were told, and no more than two minutes; all donations gratefully received afterwards. Anton Schlegel suspected the husband and wife operated a canny double act, which of an evening saw them sitting around with their feet up, counting their coins and joking about it. When Anton Schlegel’s turn came he shuffled in with a bent-double crone in black and a fidgety girl of maybe seventeen.

Surrounded by religious accoutrements – holy water, crucifix, rosaries and tallow candles – a pale young woman lay abed, spectral in the wax white of her complexion, sculpted lids over closed eyes and only the slightest rise and fall of bedcovers to say she was alive.

Anton loitered after the wife came to say time was up. He listened to coins being dropped into a brass bowl by the departing visitors.

Perhaps thinking she was alone Neumann woke and blinked in surprise to find Anton staring back. They viewed each other for an eternal second with naked eyes. The woman closed hers, and sighed in contentment, relieved perhaps to have been seen through by such another perfect dissembler.

Anton left without tipping, and reported to Herr Wolf that the parents might as well open a restaurant as part of the business. The fleece of the Lamb of God against fleecing the lambs. What was the difference?

Anton was reminded of the Neumann visitation some months after Geli Raubal’s death, on the last occasion that he and Herr Wolf met socially. It was early in 1932, the location a beer garden, on the first day of the year that it was warm enough to sit out. While waiting for his habitually late companion Anton passed the time reading newspapers, including a book review about Genghis Khan, which casually wrote off the millions of deaths for which the warlord was responsible as meaningless within the larger context of historical progress. Herr Wolf, when shown the review, devoured it rapaciously and laid the newspaper aside with a dreamy look while Anton thought to himself: On such moments history turns.

Hoffmann was always telling an extravagant story of a secret nocturnal drive to visit her grave immediately after the funeral, and how on returning to the car the Führer’s voice was restored, as if he had received a message sent by her from beyond, instructing him to proceed with his mission, for he immediately said, ‘So now let the struggle begin, which must and shall be crowned with success.’

What tosh Hoffmann talked, thought Anton. Hoffmann’s pretty secretary was, by the by, now ensconced as Herr Wolf’s latest little secret. No danger of anything getting out of hand there.

With the whole sad business of Geli Raubal, Anton looked back at his own role as arbiter of what at first had been a diverting and unlikely experiment in romantic Gothic – the monster ambushed by love – until the night of Herr Wolf’s drunken call when for the first time Anton saw him for what he might become: the beast unleashed.

Anton Schlegel had been the unannounced presence in Herr Wolf’s reception room during the early hours of Friday, 18 September, noted by Hoffmann. Anton was the first to be summoned by a hysterical Herr Wolf shouting down the telephone that his niece had been attacked by an intruder. He arrived to be met by the astonishing sight of the virtually teetotal Herr Wolf staggering around blind drunk, hissing, ‘A Jew has killed her!’

Herr Wolf seemed scarcely to comprehend, repeating only that the girl must have forgotten to lock the front door. She was the one with the keys as he didn’t bother himself with such minor inconveniences. Anton called in Bormann, who had the Party connections.

Anton did not share with Bormann what his immediate thoughts had been upon being confronted by such a wildly deranged Herr Wolf. He told himself: First, the decadent scene, with which the Party and you are too closely associated, must be jettisoned and transcended. The vociferous opposition of the press must be tamed, after being drawn. A scandal must be provoked followed by what public relations companies call an image makeover.

He addressed the pathetic, collapsed man: ‘Herr Wolf, the risks are huge but they can be overcome and you will become unstoppable. The opposition will be exposed and can be disposed of when the time comes. It will be like lancing a boil.’

Herr Wolf looked up at him with crazed eyes. Nevertheless, Anton Schlegel suspected that in one of the darker recesses of the man’s mind he understood perfectly what was being said.

Standing there in the chaos of that night, it was blindingly clear to Anton Schlegel that a sacrifice was needed and what that sacrifice had to be.

In the storm-tossed days that followed, everyone agreed it was a tragedy with the girl gone so young. Anton saw how they were all compelled to share in her death, claiming it for themselves as though she were the sacrificial victim. The tight clique surrounding Herr Wolf reflected the wider feeding frenzy, partaking in private ceremonies that Anton came to regard as acts of symbolic cannibalism. But of greatest significance was the calculated effect of Herr Wolf’s grief. For all the man’s devastation and suicidal state, Anton watched him coming to realise that the tragedy gave him the one element previously missing.

Anton understood what the rest were too busy scurrying to realise: how their glorious leader needed to love, be loved and rendered loveless. The mysteries surrounding the death were irrelevant beyond the fact of her being gone: the casting asunder of Geli was the last piece in the making of Herr Wolf. Love lost forged the alchemical solution and little more than a year later he was in power.

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