Subtleties of Nazism seen through cousin of Hitler's mistress

After the Buchenwald concentration camp was liberated in 1945, Allied troops forced Germans from the nearby town of Weimar to walk through the camp. Film of the event records townspeople arriving there dressed fashionably, as if on a Sunday stroll. But their self-satisfied expressions soon collapse, and many cover their eyes rather than look at the stacked corpses or the starving survivors.

Typically, this is the way the Nazi legacy is served up for history: as an obvious horror, not an insidious one. But, as Sibylle Knauss demonstrates in her novel "Eva's Cousin," the Third Reich was not just built on brute force and murder. It also involved subtle forces, including hubris and ideological inflexibility.

"Eva's Cousin," translated from German by Anthea Bell, is a fictional adaptation of a true story that takes readers to the mystical and geographical center of Nazism. It's based on interviews with 78-year-old Gertrude Weisker, who several years ago revealed she was the cousin of Adolf Hitler's mistress, Eva Braun, as well as Eva's latter-day companion.

Knauss gives Gertrude a new name, Marlene, and uses the freedom of fiction to explore Nazism's soul. Her novel is a worthy read but one that needs some historical context.

The 20-year-old Marlene arrives at Hitler's Bavarian villa in July 1944 — a month after the D-Day invasion, and just days before the assassination attempt on Hitler at the Eastern front. With the Führer off trying to salvage his Reich, the 32-year-old Eva is lonely, and her young cousin, a physics student, is intended to fill the gap.

Although somewhat naive, Marlene has the distance and brains to see Eva's world more clearly than her cousin. She is surprised at its "martial virility" and observes how women are on the periphery, mainly serving as stern cooks and gatekeepers.

Eva, of course, is the exception: Hidden from public view, Hitler's blonde and seemingly vivacious companion (the gaiety masks her depression) is treated with a mix of contempt and deference.

Marlene paints Eva as incurious, an athletic woman who cares more about her clothes than the political intrigue around her. She lives for and depends on Hitler, whose hold over her is so great that she's already attempted suicide twice. (As history will record, her third try will be successful.)

Hitler, Marlene reports, feeds Eva's self-deception with lies and luxuries. "In the gray world of death surrounding us we are the colorful exception, enclosed in a shimmering little soap bubble floating merrily along." In this bubble, the values of German fascism are both the most pure and most easily violated. So the wine flows, the band plays, and Marlene engages in an affair with an SS officer, an emotionally sterile lover whose loyalty is to the State.

The book's real heat comes from Marlene's decision to conceal an escaped slave laborer, an act of defiance that could get her killed.

"Eva's Cousin" takes readers behind the stunning scenery and elegant furnishings of the place Hitler called home. More important, it uses Eva as a metaphor for the German people, trying to explain their twisted allegiance.

"Confused yearnings. Intertwined dependencies. Emptiness. Confusions, mistakes." Grasping for answers, Knauss evokes Hannah Arendt's famous phrase about the "banality of evil": Hitler, she concludes, was a "mole of a man" who appealed not to the noble parts of the German soul, but to its insecurities.

"Eva's Cousin" follows on the heels of two other exceptional novels that also explore the collective psyche that brought the Nazis to power, Bernhard Schlink's "The Reader" and Rachel Seiffert's "The Dark Room." Unlike the unwise folks at CBS who are planning a miniseries about the young Hitler's life, these writers remind us that understanding him is like looking at the sun: It's best done indirectly.

Ellen Emry Heltzel, a Portland writer, wrote the cover profile of Jean Auel in the May-June issue of Book Magazine.