Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (6 page)

Her old first name didn’t suit her new surname.

In those days, in neighboring Germany, a man was gaining absolute power who—as somebody once noted—was most grateful to his father for dropping the common, rustic surname Schicklgruber.

It goes without saying. The greeting “Heil Schicklgruber” would have been too lengthy.

They made a movie, but the director realized that he should entrust seventeen-year-old Lída Baarová to better hands. He took her to see a younger colleague. It was 1931, and for two years the Bio Lucerna, the country’s first movie theater with sound, had been up and running in Prague. “When it comes to the talkies, I’m helpless,” the director confided to his colleague. “In the silent pictures, everything was simpler. When I didn’t know how to shoot a particular scene, I added a caption to say what the actress was thinking at that moment, and the audience could read it themselves.”

The younger colleague (the director Otakar Vávra, who was born in 1911 and died in 2011) took Lída on and directed her best Czech movies. He always used to say (well, perhaps not always, but in the 1990s, as he couldn’t have said it earlier) that she quickly became a star of a kind that the Czechs still don’t have, to this day. “Compared with Baarová, today’s actresses look like slatterns,” he wrote.

In the late 1930s, one of her fans named a new variety of rose after her. The flower had dark red petals in the middle, and delicate pink ones on the outside.

As someone wrote of her: “She knows how to act sincerely—hers is a face which only shows pure emotions.”

At a theater premiere in Prague she was spotted by the head of the German studio UFA, which the Germans regarded as
Europe’s equivalent of Hollywood. It was September 1934, and Lída was sitting in the auditorium with her mother.

From the next day on she was only allowed to eat three apples a day, and nothing else. “She has to slim down at any cost to get rid of her Slavic chubbiness,” the producer kept saying.

The movie was called
Barcarole
. They were looking for an actress to play the most beautiful woman in Venice. “I was twenty, and I was in heaven,” she said. “The leading role in a German movie. No Czech actress had ever achieved that before.”

There was one topic on which Lída said one thing to her friends, something else to the American investigators, something quite different to the Czechoslovak Security Service and something else again to the reporter who wrote a book about her called
The Curse of Lída Baarová
.

The way she spoke about this topic when she was drinking water was quite different from the way she spoke about it when drinking copious amounts of champagne mixed with Fernet.

The topic was love.

From here on, most of what we know about Baarová should be labeled with the first sentence from Kurt Vonnegut’s
Slaughterhouse-Five
, which goes: “All this happened, more or less.”

•   •   •

One day during filming, the gondolas on the artificial canals suddenly stopped moving. She saw the face of her costar Gustav Fröhlich—who for some days now had been her lover—take on a new, radiant expression.
^*

“The Führer is coming!” everyone kept saying excitedly.

She wanted to hide, but Hitler’s eyes came to rest on her.

“His eyes were blue-gray,” she later explained at her interrogation. “Eyes like the coldest steel. He was staring at me insistently, as if he were literally boring into me with those eyes of his.”

He squeezed her hand tightly. The visit only lasted a short while.

Three days later, Lída received word that Hitler was inviting her to the Reich Chancellery for tea. Gustav and the director said she had to go. She was so frightened that she had an attack of diarrhea. Some people were saying that thanks to the Führer there was no unemployment, and that he would defend Germany against the Bolsheviks, while others said he was a monster.

“What a lovely little hat you have,” said Hitler.

There was a fire in the grate.

“Would you like to be German?”

“I am Czech. Does it bother you?”

“No. But I’d be pleased if you were German.”

Hitler’s secretary left the room, and they were alone.

“When I saw you at the studio,” he began, “I was stunned.
Your face reminds me of a woman who played an important role in my life. Suddenly she was alive before me.”

She didn’t know whom she resembled.

Only later did she hear the story of Geli—Angela Raubal, Hitler’s niece from Vienna, with whom he fell hopelessly in love as soon as she reached the age of sixteen. Geli had nothing in common with the Nordic race: like Lída, she had dark eyes, black hair and high cheekbones. She was found dead on the carpet in his apartment in Munich. She had shot herself through the heart for reasons which were never explained.

Hitler felt responsible for Geli, so, since her death in 1931, to atone for his spiritual part in her suicide, he had stopped eating meat.

“The photograph that stands always on my desk came to life,” he told Lída in 1934. “That is to your credit.”

“I’m extremely sorry …” she replied helplessly.

He said nothing more and allowed her to leave.

As we all know, each item that is processed by the memory becomes something completely new. Stress releases chemical compounds in the brain, which immediately impoverish our future memories. Moreover, after the war Lída could have told lies on purpose.

Thus we don’t know how many times she actually had tea with Hitler. In her diary, she wrote that she went twice, but towards the end of her life she maintained she only went once.

However, she told the Security Service that she went four times.

The second man to favor her with a penetrating, lingering gaze had one leg shorter than the other.

His shorter, right leg was twisted to the inside, and his right knee was one and a half inches smaller in circumference than the left.

His long hands did not fit his short arms.

He was a slight figure, the height of a boy.

All through his childhood, the other children had teased him, and his father had ignored him.

He had sexual intercourse for the first time at the age of thirty-three.

He enrolled at five different universities.

He only went to a Nazi Party meeting to keep warm, because he had no winter overcoat.

The first time he saw Hitler, he wrote: “Those large blue eyes of his! Like stars! He is pleased to see me!”

The first time Lída Baarová saw this man, she was struck by how unattractive he was.

It was said that his brilliant intelligence made him doubly unlikeable.

The most famous idea that he engendered, “If you repeat a lie often enough it becomes the truth,” had long since been put into action.

Publishing photographs in which his shorter leg was visible carried the risk of death. According to a writer who had a private meeting with him during the war, “the Minister of
Propaganda was surrounded by a demonic aura: anyone who came close to him felt the sort of fear that accompanies a man crossing a high-voltage zone.”

Then Lída Baarová heard his voice. “I felt as if it had entirely pervaded me. As if it were warming and stroking me all at once,” she said.

She met Goebbels by accident in the street. He invited her to come and see what a lovely house he had and what beautiful children. He boasted that all of them had names beginning with H, in honor of Hitler.

Then he kept inviting her and Gustav to parties and premieres. Whenever they were ready to leave, it would turn out that the minister had a movie at home containing something he didn’t like, and he wanted Lída and Gustav to see it before the premiere. They were actors. They couldn’t refuse the minister who was personally in charge of cinema. Just like the Führer, he believed the radio, the automobile and the cinema would help the Reich to ultimate victory. After the war, historians worked out that the minister had had sexual relations with thirty-six performers of lead and supporting roles.

Finally, he invited her to his office for tea on her own.

He asked what her husband was filming today.

She replied that she didn’t have a husband, and Goebbels got a shock.

When the Czechs arrested her after the war, she refused to acknowledge having been his guest at a Nazi rally in Nuremberg.

Two days after her twenty-second birthday (September 9,
1936), following a reception that evening, Goebbels asked her to go with him to the hotel where Hitler was staying. In the restaurant they heard someone singing: “I am so very much in love …”

“So am I,” he whispered in her ear.

In reply she told him how unhappy she was with Gustav, who was refusing to marry her. He would appear with her in public, but only to draw attention to himself. He would put jewelry on her before going out, but when they arrived home he would immediately take it off her, so that nothing would happen to it. On top of that, at night he’d get confused and call her by another woman’s name.

“Please stay until tomorrow,” said Goebbels. “At noon I have an important speech to make—please watch me closely as I do so.”

He took a handkerchief from his breast pocket. “I shall touch it to my lips as a sign that I am thinking about you.”

Lída kissed him tenderly on the cheek.

“The Jew is a parasite! A destroyer of culture! An enzyme of decay!” he said the next day, and reached for his handkerchief.

She was shooting a movie version of
Die Fledermaus
for the UFA studio when the Austrian actress playing the role of Adela was banned from performing. The director asked Lída to intercede with Goebbels. The ban was withdrawn, and the crew were full of admiration for Baarová, but the gutter press described her as “the Herr Minister’s new girlfriend.”

“You see,” he then said. “People are convinced we are intimate, but you keep running away from it.”

He tried to embrace her; as usual at such moments, she burst into tears.

“But you have children, and I have Gustav …”

“No, you don’t, you can drop that idea. A beautiful woman is like a yacht on the open sea. Every gust of wind drives her in one direction or another—when the gale passes, there’s always a fine storm waiting for her.”

“So if a woman is born beautiful, her beauty is a sin?”

“Not a sin, but an inconvenience. A beautiful woman is tossed about like a reed.”

“Whenever he phoned me at home he always introduced himself as Herr Müller. From day to day, ‘Herr Müller’ sounded more and more like an order.”

“He calls her so often that Göring has had to hire an extra employee to tap her phone.”

Richard Walther Darré, the pig-farming expert appointed Nazi minister of health, explained that women’s aspirations to be emancipated were due to a malfunction of the sex glands. He regarded woman as a daydreaming, ruminative domestic animal. The most desirable female characteristics were defined by a typical advertisement which read: “Fifty-two-year-old doctor, Aryan, wishing to settle in the countryside, desires male offspring in an official relationship with a healthy Aryan woman, a virgin, young, modest and frugal, capable of hard work, wide-hipped, who walks on flat heels and does not wear earrings, ideally of limited means.” Goebbels explained
that the Nazis were removing women from public life in order to restore their dignity to them.

When he invited Lída to the rally, Magda Goebbels—the Third Reich’s ideal woman—was thirty-five, and pregnant with her fifth child; after the fourth she had gained weight. She was still attractive. She was patron of the National Institute of Fashion, and proudly wore an Order of Motherhood.

The authors of an American publication,
Three in Love
, in a chapter entitled “Ménage and the Holocaust,” note that: “Goebbels wished to move his mistress in with his wife and children. The Aryan for progeny, the Slav (or Jew) for illicit passion—such was the inherent contradiction of the Nazi’s erotic world.”

On August 3, 1937, Goebbels wrote in his personal diary: “Bohemia is not a state,” and as Lída had agreed to come to the rally in Nuremberg, he noted that “a miracle has occurred.”

On October 19, 1937, he wrote: “This state-for-a-season must disappear!” Sometime later, he added that when the first mild frost came he and Lída had been to the forest to feed the deer.

On March 20, 1938, he noted: “All the Jews and Czechs must be quickly expelled from Vienna”; at the same time he was teaching her archery, and he was singing.

On June 1, 1938, he quoted Hitler: “I am staying with the Führer. He characterizes the Czechs as brash, deceitful, and servile. By mobilizing their army they are placing a noose around their own necks. Now they are living only on fear.” He played the piano for Lída.

A few days later, Magda Goebbels, who was twelve years older than Baarová, invited her to come and see her.

She greeted her in a friendly way. According to Lída, in an over-friendly way. “I love my husband, but he is in love with you,” she said.

“I would like to leave Germany. Could you help me?” asked Lída.

“Let’s be on informal terms,” said Magda, pouring liqueur from a carafe and raising her glass to clink it against Lída’s. “You can’t do that. He is a great man. He needs you as well as me.”

“I could never …”

“You’ll have to.”

The wife of Martin Bormann, head of the surveillance service—who had nine children with her and was in love with an actress called Manja Behrens—wrote about her husband’s lover: “M. is so nice that I can’t be angry. All the children adore her. She is even a better housewife than I am. She helped me to pack the china dinner service. Not a single saucer was broken.”

Lída Baarová spent four weekends with the Goebbels family at their summer home on the Wannsee.

After the final weekend, “Herr Müller” called her and uttered just two sentences: “My wife has gone to see the Führer. She is a devil.”

Hitler summoned Goebbels and forbade him to communicate with Baarová. “I’ll get divorced,” announced the minister. “I can become ambassador to Japan and live there with her.”

“That is not what the nation wants!” said Hitler, thumping his fist against the desk. “He who creates history has no right to a personal life.”