Ah, Kristina Söderbaum, so golden-haired, blue-eyed and virtuous, the perfect incarnation of Aryan femininity in La Città d’Oro (Die Goldene Stadt), so cruelly punished for a small digression from the “natural” female environment, like Haya, isolated, rejected, abandoned, broken, because of dreams of another life. Oh God.
Haya knows nothing of Kristina Söderbaum, born in Stockholm in 1912, except that Kristina Söderbaum is beautiful the way she, Haya, would like to be beautiful and that Kristina is most certainly as happy and famous as she, Haya, would like to be happy and famous, or maybe only happy, that year, 1943, in her little Gorizian existence, built on the most ordinary of lives. Why should Haya back then, in 1943, have known that Kristina Söderbaum was starring in bad Nazi films, some of them shorts, others feature-length, all of them moralizing Nazi films of the Third Reich? Haya did not go to see the anti-Semitic historical melodrama Jud'Süss, because when it was released she was in Valona, and the movie Jud'Süss did not come to Valona; no, definitely not, because had the anti-Semitic historical melodrama been on the repertoire of the Valona cinema she, Haya, would definitely have gone to see it. And Haya doesn’t read the autobiography, Kristina Söderbaum’s autobiography, Nichts bleibt immer so, in which she counsels people to change, to move forward in life, especially after they have done their patriotic duty, made their patriotic efforts, no matter what these efforts might be, no matter how little, innocent and artistic, such as, for example, acting in the movies. Haya does not read this autobiography written much later, in 1983; in fact, after 1943, Haya no longer keeps track of Kristina Söderbaum’s life story, because after 1943 she gets her own life, a life altogether different from the life she had dreamed of. And when Haya learns, in 2001, already moored in her Gorizia outward calm, paralysed by her wait, which has been eating at her just as rust or salt eat little holes, soundlessly, in base metals, so, when from a German newspaper (she still reads the German papers) Haya learns that Kristina Söderbaum has died as an accomplished fashion photographer, that the post-war trial of her husband and director Veit Harlan has been completely forgotten, she merely rocks a bit harder, a little nervously in her rocking chair, One more yellowed page of history, she says, and that’s that.
But when, sitting under a hood dryer having her hair done at Marisa’s styling salon in 1973, Haya reads in a magazine that Hungarian-German-American diva Käthe von Nagy, born in Subotica in 1904, had died of cancer at the age of 69 in California, she lets out a brief glassy cry Oh Käthe! In her memory, there at the base of her skull, a long-preserved image, all fashioned of dreams — shatters.
Kristina Söderbaum was going to be the model for the famous “disinfected rubber doll in natural size” to be manufactured by Franz Tschakert and Company, the birth of which is the brainchild of Reichsführer-S.S. Heinrich Himmler, fanatic Catholic and poultry farmer, in order to preserve the health of his potent soldiers, so that they do not mate with the “infectious female herds” while dreaming far from home of their stolid and fertile spouses, who never unbraid the braids coiled around their ears, even when their legs are spread, so they won’t mess up their Schneckenfrisure. The doll could just as well be a brunette, suggests the Dane, S.S. physician Olen Hannussen, and psychiatrist Dr Rudolf Chargeheimer exclaims, Of course! What matters is that the doll offers our soldiers relief, because struggle and only struggle is their goal! So playful Käthe von Nagy enters the competition with Kristina Söderbaum, except that Käthe von Nagy says Out of the question. I am not giving my face away to anyone. So it is that athletics stars, Olympic medallists Wilhelmina von Bremen and Annette Walter, are ultimately selected. S.S. physician Joachim Mrugowsky is withdrawn from the Geheime Reichssache, the project cloaked in the highest level of secrecy, because he is off voluntarily to do the most important task of all — running medical experiments on prisoners from various concentration camps. Later, in 1947, he goes, though not voluntarily, to Nuremberg, where he is condemned (nevertheless) to die. When Mrugowsky leaves the project, the Dane Hannussen exclaims, But, no! Certainly not beauties! The doll must in no way supplant the honourable mother and the wife, the protectress of family sanctity, the family hearth, the angel of our tomorrows! When a soldier makes love to Borghild (is the doll called Borghild because she is female cyborg Hilda?), when a soldier copulates with Borghild, this has nothing to do with love! Borghild will have a boyish haircut — she is part and parcel of our armed forces. She is a field whore, not the Mother of our Homeland. Borghild is to be produced in three types: Type A (5’6"), Type B (5’9") and Type C (5’11"). They decide to start serial production with Borghild B first, but the members of the project are of two minds as to Borghild’s breasts. The S.S. favours them round and full, while Dr Hannussen says, I want little tits in a rosehip shape; tits that fit snugly in the hand. Hannussen prevails. In September 1941 Borghild B is born, a Nordic type par excellence. The première of Borghild in Berlin is greeted with enthusiasm by S.S. officials, and Himmler immediately orders fifty. Terrible things happen, however, on the Eastern front, and the Borghilds never reach the soldiers. The only Borghild throughout the war is the prototype, left to languish in the office of her father Franz Tschakert, without satisfying a single lusty soldier. Then, in February 1945, Borghild disappears in the rubble of Dresden.