Elsa Neuländer-Simon’s photography studio was in a tall stucco building in Schlüterstrasse, just off the Ku’damm in the west end of the city. For years, Studio Yva had been the most successful studio in Germany until the Nazi regime blacklisted the photographer and obliged her to carry out all her work under the supervision of an Aryan studio manager. It would take more than that to stop Yva working, however, and every part of the house, from its pillared entrance to its grand balconies and winding staircases, continued to be used as backdrop to her dramatic, sensual art. The door was opened by a fey young man in a sleeveless sweater and bow tie, who ushered Hedwig into a parquet hall and yelled, “Yva! Ein Fräulein to see you.”
A reply floated down from several floors above. “If it’s another one of those girls collecting for the Winterhilfswerk, tell them we don’t want to buy any more tanks.”
The young man gave a camp little shrug and said, “Follow me.”
The studio, a sparsely furnished, open space running the length of the house, had a vacant, abandoned air. It contained only two chairs, a cabinet, and a pile of dust sheets. In the middle a slight woman was kneeling on the floor dismantling a cumbersome tripod.
“You’ll have to wait.”
Awestruck, Hedwig looked around. The girls whose portraits hung on these walls were entirely different from the images of womanhood she had seen anywhere else in Germany. Here were no hearty, fresh-faced mothers, none of the wholesome members of the Faith and Beauty Society or the League of German Girls, but glacial blond goddesses who emitted a cool artifice that seemed to say although they might be advertising cosmetics, shoes, or jewelry, their bodies remained their own. Their limbs were hard as marble, their eyes heavy-lidded, and they had a smoldering erotic charge.
One picture in particular caught her attention. It was a young woman, platinum hair rippling in tight waves, fur coat flicked aside to reveal a slash of ivory flesh from the top of her stockinged leg to the snow of her exposed breast. The composition was all geometric lines and oblique perspectives, like an old silent movie, its dramatic lighting and edgy glamour breathing a sense of violence and danger. The expression on the girl’s face, the poise of her body, and the cigarette dangling from one hand were at once decadent and rigidly controlled. It was as though all the sex that had been suppressed in Germany was distilled in a single photograph.
The subject was Lottie Franke.
“Everyone loves that one. It was taken by my apprentice, Helmut Newton. He loved big blond girls in high heels,” said Yva, getting to her feet. “Especially naked ones. He’s left me now, unfortunately. He could have been quite a talent, but he would insist on emigrating. Perhaps he was right. I had an offer from Life magazine to go to New York, but I turned it down.”
“Why didn’t you go?”
“My husband hated the idea. Only now that he has lost his job and been given a new occupation as a street sweeper, he’s regretting his decision. But there we are.”
Yva finished folding away the tripod and began meticulously dismantling the camera. Her angular, intelligent face, framed by dark brows, looked in no mood to expend any niceties on Hedwig.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this studio is officially closed. They’ve given me a new job too, as it happens. A technician in the Jewish hospital, working with X-ray cameras. Is that a joke, do you think?”
“I think they have no sense of humor.”
“You’re probably right. Anyhow, if it’s photography you’re after, I’m unavailable.”
“That’s not what I came for.”
“Then…” The eyebrows lifted slightly.
Hedwig nodded towards the photograph on the wall. “Did you know her well? Lottie Franke?”
Yva’s voiced hardened with suspicion. “Who are you exactly?”
“My name is Hedwig Holz. I was her best friend.”
“Ah.” Yva abandoned her business with the tripod and rose. She made her way to the solitary cabinet. “In that case, perhaps you’ll share a drink with me.”
She poured two large whiskeys into cloudy tumblers and handed one to Hedwig, who gulped it like lemonade, the unfamiliar burn causing her to choke. Yva perched on one of the chairs, extended a long, fishnet-stockinged leg, and stroked it thoughtfully.
“I first met your friend Lottie a year ago. Perhaps she mentioned it.”
Hedwig nodded silently.
“She came to me with some sketches for clothes and wondered if I would photograph the finished products. Perhaps I would speed her progress as a designer. But though they were good, it wasn’t only the clothes I was interested in. I could see your friend had quite another talent. I said I would only photograph the clothes if she modeled them, and she agreed immediately. She had drive, that girl, and a hard ambition. I recognized something of myself in her. I was one of nine children—my mother was a milliner—so I knew what it was to work hard and graft. To use everything God gives you to succeed. Lottie was not ashamed of using her body if it helped her. Helmut Newton loved her. He said Lottie was his ideal woman. But then, with a body like that, I daresay she was a lot of men’s ideal woman. Even the Führer’s.”
Her needle-sharp glance grazed Hedwig’s own legs, causing her to blush fiercely. But Hedwig persisted. “The last time you saw Lottie, did she seem distracted by anything?”
“If she was, I wouldn’t have known it. She was far too professional.”
“The fact is…the day before she died she told me about something she had. And I wondered if perhaps she left it here.”
Yva continued to scrutinize Hedwig for a moment, as if trying to decide whether she was worth trusting. Then she nodded.
“She asked me to look after it. Just for a few days. She wouldn’t say what it was, or why she wanted me to take it, and my first instinct was to refuse. You don’t hide other people’s possessions without a very good reason nowadays. But your friend had the face of an angel, and I was not about to lose a model that good. Unfortunately, the next time I saw that face it was on the front page of the Berliner Tageblatt.”
Quietly, so quietly that her voice barely traveled across the narrow distance between them, Hedwig asked, “Where is it now?”
Yva remained motionless for a moment, then she stubbed her cigarette on the floor, ground out its embers with the toe of her shoe, and rose decisively. She crossed to the cupboard where she had found the whiskey bottle and rummaged behind rows of satin dresses until she retrieved it.
It was a light tan leather briefcase, expensive-looking but slightly scratched and worn at the corner, with brass fittings and the gilt letters H S L indented on the front. A smaller monogram on the clasp said ASPREY OF LONDON. Hedwig’s fingers trembled as she unlatched it. The air that escaped smelled of burning, the mustiness of an old fireplace, the ancient molecules of another era. And vacancy.
“There’s nothing here.”
“What were you looking for?”
“A book. A manuscript.”
“Oh, that. I disposed of it.”
To one accustomed to handling the manuscripts in the Ahnenerbe with white cotton gloves, Yva’s casual comment was devastating.
“You can’t have any idea what it was!”
“On the contrary, my dear. I knew exactly what it was. No good German can fail to be aware of the importance of the Germania. To me, it is the world’s most dangerous book.”
“But where is it?”
“As I think I mentioned before, I’m a Jew, Fräulein. I reasoned that the book belonged somewhere far away from the hands of those who would use it for their own purposes. Last Saturday I was taking a picnic out by Krumme Lanke. We go there to sunbathe and swim, though it is still not quite warm enough for my tastes. Anyhow, at one point I made my excuses and went into the woods. Your manuscript is there, somewhere. Don’t ask me where. I forget.”
In that instant, her shock evaporated, and Hedwig almost laughed at the little woman’s ingenuity. She was right; it couldn’t be more appropriate. The Germania. The work that meant so much to Doktor Kraus and SS Reichsführer Himmler and everyone at the Faith and Beauty Society. The key to the German people’s past. How fitting that old Roman Tacitus would have thought it, that his work on the ancient forest tribe should remain where it started, deep beneath the must and moldering leaves of the Grunewald.