Magda may think she’s the only one who knows all about social graces, but I taught the Führer how to eat an artichoke. We were at the Berghof when Fräulein Manzialy decided to provide the Führer with a little variety in his stable of vegetables. When she placed the artichoke before him, Adi gave a loud “Achtung! How am I supposed to eat this thing?”
I quickly took a fold, dipped it in butter, and put it in his mouth. He loved the taste and I began plucking each flap one by one and placing it between his lips. Soon he continued on his own so passionately that I became jealous. I wanted to be an artichoke. Later, he would devour the layers of an artichoke to the spirited chords of Die Meistersinger on a record that Marshal Italo Balbo, the much-decorated flier and Italian minister of aviation, gave him.
It’s strongly rumored that Magda was first married to an “aryanized” Jew she met at the smoky Sterneckerbrau Beer Tavern in Munich shortly after she had bedded a Hohenzollern prince for six months. Being so impressed with uniforms, she was instantly dazzled by this Jew’s field gray jacket with the bronze lion of the Freikorps Epp. Even at the beginning, he was different. He had a great deal of money and had to have sex three times a day. Just like food. And sometimes snacks. It wore her out though she got used to it and after a while enjoyed such frequent romps. Being a Jew, he had a mysterious way about him, so she plucked all her pubic hair and buffed her vulva to a high shine for him. He just put it in and took it out. He didn’t pump. Slowly… in. Slowly… out. Then he gushed, usually on the floor. So there was no dripping, no lingering drool, regular as their meals and teatime. If he was fully satisfied, she didn’t know. That was no concern of hers. He was a busy man making money. And she had no mess sticking to her thighs, no contraceptives to worry about. They did have a “possible” child, so the “drool” could have gotten in at least once. But nobody thinks her first child was from this Jew, however, as she’s had so many lovers.
This man, Magda tells me referring to her present husband, Josef, wants hours of what he calls foreshadowing. Hours. After his breakfast soup, he smears jam on her breasts, licking them off—two breasts along with two toasts and two coffees. In between meetings, he gallops to her room, dips a finger in her, a toe, a shoehorn, what does it matter. Later, it’s those dangly ears of his, thick and crude like sandpaper, propaganda ears meant only to hear what he wants. “I have to listen to his jealous tirade about Luther, the first real and only Minister of Propaganda whose theses posted on the door at Wittenberg spread around the country in 10 days. Think of it, Magda, he whines—10 days. What have I done in 10 days?” Finally, at bedtime, he jumps on her. This time there’s his cream clotting her carefully trimmed small hairs. Magda’s shiny painted lips are tense as she sneers. Who would have thought it possible that a Jew could please her more than a Reichsminister?
What’s it like to be rammed all the time, so finely tuned? Of course Goebbels is far from being the Führer. “Josef does that all the time?” I asked.
“All the damn time. And you?”
“With the Führer?”
“Eva, who else would I mean?”
Magda longs for Adi, sleeping at night with Mein Kampf between her legs and telling me how she dreams about licking his mustache. She tried to be with him all the time at official dinners before the Bunker days, when I was invisible and the lucky nobody. She would sit next to him in one of her shimmery beaded dresses with glass buttons, her one eyelid tinted pink and the other light green. Not known to the people of Germany, I was bad publicity. But Magda is the correct one who looks like a woman who gets her hair done more than anybody else and represents what is good in the German housewife. She was the official hostess, everywhere but at the Berghof. Even there she tried to win Adi’s attention, charm him, be clever for him… once holding up a stamp with his picture saying she was sending it to Roosevelt for his stamp collection.
When Goebbels said he respects his wife so much that he and his officers always get up and stand when Magda walks by, Göring once said in my ear: “She’d rather have those men lie down for her.”
For Adi’s birthday two years ago, Magda asked Josef to compose a pageant about the bravery of German soldiers. After it was written, she discovered the scenes took place on the battlefield. Magda cast the play using real war wounded from our hospitals to portray the heroic sick and dying in the script. Didn’t Riefenstahl select peasants from villages for her movies?
The Goebbels’ gardener from her summer home cleared the early April grass for a massive outdoor performance. At SS hospitals, Magda sought theatrical examples of suffering. Doctors objected to their patients being moved, even for a one evening performance. When she promised them an invitation to the pageant with a chance to meet the Führer, they usually gave way and even helped her find the most damaged men. She discovered an old blind vet of World War I who continuously hallucinated and raved all day from his bed about the Turnip Winter when his parents starved to death. Josef wrote a special Greek-like chorus for him.
Magda got distracted by the handsome doctors in their black and silver uniforms with twin serpents on the shoulders. Stopping by a florist shop on the Potsdammerplatz, she’d send mauve orchids to some of them. One in particular was Dr. Egon Pfennig who stated that he was in no way to be considered a putschist and was merely a simple doctor-soldier of Germany who knew what was going on in his country but didn’t understand it. From the old Swabian nobility, he once belonged to a student dueling fraternity at the University of Berlin and could list the scar on his neck as an identifying mark on his passport. She imagined his strong muscular back to be striped in craters deep enough for her long sculpted fingernails to travel down. Dr. Pfennig’s father was a Pour le Merite pilot of World War I, and he and his son wrote letters to each other in Latin, and she dreamed of Latin love letters.
Dr. Pfennig, handsome in a bloodstained rubber apron over his uniform, was cooperative in allowing his patients to be actors for the pageant although he did refuse to let them walk in a procession Goebbels proposed before the performance. Dr. Pfennig thought the drama might be helpful in the recovery process as so much research in medicine was discovering that the mind is capable of healing the body. What better way to be healed than to lie sprawled before their Führer?
Fearful of deserters from the front, Magda would brutally rip the bandages off the wounded when the doctors and nurses were not around in order to make sure she was not casting malingerers—even though each man displayed a wounded receipt with dates stamped and fastened to his chest. It created a lot of re-bandaging for the nurses.
But Dr. Pfennig had one curious fault. He was faithful to his wife, Lilo. Magda had never come across such a thing before.
There were attractive wounded to choose from. I would accompany Magda and Dr. Pfennig on audition tours. We found a captain with one arm and half a lung who insisted on wearing a regulation Foreign Office parade uniform designed by Ribbentrop instead of the hospital gown. Then there were the dreary young boys in drab brown Party uniforms who sat listlessly in the clinic halls flapping their empty sleeves to pass the time. Magda dismissed these with a regal smile. But she was excited about a colonel with one leg who was in the Sixth SS Panzer Army and had seized at least two bridges and one crossroad and complained that his only regret was not being able to march in the future victory parade through Brandenburg Gate. Another good choice was the major from the Africa Corps who had fought with Rommel and claimed cooking breakfast eggs with him on sizzling tanks’ tops. Dr. Pfenning, ever the scientist, said such eggs could only be fried with a blowtorch.