Black Roses (52 page)

‘ “Dear Mutti”,’ she read, ‘ “I have an interview for the Napola school! It will be on Saturday 24 June in Berlin. Can you meet me off the train from Havelberg, 2 p.m.?” Erich is Helga’s son. He’s ten years old. I found this postcard in Helga’s apartment, the day she died. He lives with his grandmother. I want to tell him how much his mother loved him, Leo, and that she wanted him to study hard and do well. That’s where I’m going this morning. To meet Erich from the train and take him to the interview.’

By one o’clock she realized she still had plenty of time before Erich’s train arrived. At Magdeburger Platz there was a small park with scuffed grass and benches set beneath the linden trees so she sat for a moment and shut her eyes. The air was like a soft blue veil, pierced by the sharp cries of thrushes in the branches around. Sitting there, with the sun’s warmth on her face and its tangled scarlet on her eyelids, the breeze saturated with the scent of grass, the clip-clip sound of a gardener’s shears and a child’s laugh against the city’s rumble, it was possible to remember the peace that came before this tumult, and would come after it.

A gentle brush against her arm caused her to open her eyes. She hadn’t heard him coming, but she guessed she would never be able to match his soundless tread or invisible approach. Leo must have followed her all the way from Friedrichshain without her noticing. He sat beside her and his hand closed briefly over hers.

‘One day you must teach me how you do that,’ she said.

‘I’m beginning to doubt I could teach you anything.’

‘You’ll have to promise you won’t make a habit of this.’

‘I won’t. Just this once. I’d like to see Erich, that’s all.’

He squeezed her hand, crossed the park, slipped behind the railings and was gone.

As she got nearer the station Clara passed more building work and was obliged to skirt round the edge of the scaffolding. There was so much construction going on now. Another huge block was being erected in the Government quarter, alongside Goebbels’ planned new ministry and the proposed new Reich Chancellery in Voss Strasse. There probably hadn’t been this much scaffolding here since Gothic times. It was said that Hitler was planning to turn Berlin into the
Welthauptstadt
, the capital of the world, and that his new young architect Speer was planning enormous arches that would make the Brandeburg Tor look like a children’s plaything. Monstrous edifices that would rise above the baroque skyline with its delicate verdigris, dwarfing the human scale and making the inhabitants feel even more insignificant than they already did. Already these blank-faced towers were carving a deep, indelible groove in the surface of the earth. Something about their solidity, their dense metal and steel, made human flesh more fragile, and the crowds that surrounded them more transitory, like passing clouds reflected in a flat bronze facade. Clara wondered how long Hitler’s monuments would be erected in this city. Would it be decades? Or even centuries? Would Hitler be like Ozymandias? ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ She wondered what would have to happen to cause these monuments to fall.

Magda Goebbels, the wife of Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, is most notorious for killing her six children in Hitler’s bunker at the end of the war. But her life was a dramatic one before then and much of this novel is based on genuine events. In 1933, shortly after coming to power, Hitler decreed the establishment of a
Deutsches Modeamt
, a Reich Fashion Bureau, with the aim of creating “independent and tasteful German fashion products”. He appointed Magda Goebbels as honorary president, and although her association with it was ended some months later by her husband, the Bureau continued.

Magda Goebbels did have a youthful liaison with Victor Chaim Arlosoroff. Arlosoroff, a prominent Zionist, who was involved in the establishment of the State of Israel, returned to Berlin in April 1933 with the aim of encouraging the regime to contribute to Jewish emigration to Palestine, to no avail. He got in touch with Magda again, and though the substance of their conversation is unknown and I have fictionalized their subsequent exchanges, she did tell him she feared for her own life. Historical sources suggest that British Intelligence was alerted to his plan for an armed uprising in Palestine, although nothing came of it. He was gunned down on a beach in Tel Aviv in June of 1933. Joseph Goebbels was suspected of involvement in his murder, although that remains unproven.

Magda Goebbels, Joseph Goebbels and their six children died on 1 May 1945 as Berlin was overrun by the Red Army. The day after Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves, Magda drugged the children and broke cyanide capsules into their mouths. She wrote to her older son, Harald Quant, who was in a prisoner of war camp in north Africa, that the children were “too good for the life that would follow.” She and Joseph then committed suicide.

Magda’s stepfather, Richard Friedlander, died in Buchenwald concentration camp. There is no record of her intervening to save him.

Emmy Sonneman married Hermann Goering in 1935. She survived the war and wrote a biography,
My Life With Goering,
which provided this author with much incidental detail.

The heroic achievement of Frank Foley in rescuing thousands of Jews from Berlin under the auspices of British Passport Control won him the accolade of Righteous Among the Nations from Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Centre. His story is superbly told by Michael Smith in
Foley, the Spy Who Saved 10,000 Jews.

Ein gewisser Herr Gran
was produced by Ufa in 1933, directed by Gerhard Lamprecht.
Schwarze Rosen
starring Lilian Harvey, came out in 1935.

This era of German history is richly documented. Amongst books which I have used for research,
Nazi Chic?: Fashioning Women in the Third Reich (Dress, Body, Culture)
by Irene Guenther, was invaluable, exploring how the Third Reich attempted to construct German women’s identity through fashion. Anja Klabunde’s comprehensive biography of Magda Goebbels was also excellent, as were Anna Maria Sigmund’s
Women of the Third Reich
and Guido Kopp’s
Hitler’s Women.
Hans Otto Meissner’s
Magda Goebbels, First Lady of the Third Reich
contains an interesting first-hand account from a man who knew his subject for many years and Bella Fromm’s
Blood and Banquets, A Berlin Social Diary, 1930-1938
is an astonishing eyewitness testimony of the doings of the Nazi élite in the increasingly brutal lead-up to war.

Thank you so much to Caradoc King for his unstinting encouragement and to his colleagues at A.P. Watt. I am in awe of Suzanne Baboneau for her inspiring editing and wonderful enthusiasm, and grateful to all at Simon & Schuster. And, as ever, thanks and love to Philip.