Last Stop Vienna
By Andrew Nagorski
Simon & Schuster, 269 pages, $25.
Some of the most compelling historical novels are “What if . . .” stories, rather than reconstructions of history as events determined it. In this intriguing tradition, journalist Andrew Nagorski brings us a first novel set in Germany at the time of Hitler’s rise to power. What if Hitler had never succeeded in seizing power? What if he had remained an obscure, derided fanatic? Or what if violence had terminated his career before the future fuehrer could make his mark on history?
Nagorski reminds us of the many forking paths that might so easily have derailed the fledgling Nazi Party and delivered it to leaders hostile to Hitler. (A man like the young Joseph Goebbels, as the author reminds us, could switch allegiances at the flip of a coin–the very means Goebbels supposedly used to decide whether to join the Nazis or the communists.) Finally Nagorski’s imaginary history follows one of these forking paths into a very different 1930s Europe whose consequences, and whose ultimate effect on the 21st Century political scene, the reader is left to ponder.
At the heart of “Last Stop Vienna” is the tortured relationship between Adolf Hitler and his niece Geli Raubal. Raubal was by all accounts a vivacious minx, smart enough to dally with careers in law and medicine but too eager for a good time to stick with one ambition–or one man. She caught the eye of many, including Hitler’s chauffeur, Emil Maurice, to whom Raubal was briefly engaged. There’s little doubt she caught her uncle’s eye, and although Eva Braun had come into Hitler’s life before Raubal’s untimely death at 23, the fuehrer’s
biographers generally agree that Raubal was the lasting love of Hitler’s life.
Yet what, precisely, were their physical relations, if any? And how did Raubal meet her end, under circumstances as obscure now as they were then? The Muenchener Post’s account ascribes to the dead girl a broken nose and other bruises, which lend little conviction to the official verdict of suicide by pistol shot. The weapon was Hitler’s own pistol.
By introducing a fictional narrator, Karl Naumann, who is one of Hitler’s devoted followers and one of Raubal’s devoted lovers, the author gives himself a means to answer at least the question of Raubal’s death, if not of her intimacy with Hitler. When pressed by Naumann, Raubal tearfully confirms the forms of erotic degradation most commonly ascribed to the fuehrer’s love life.
Beyond the pages of Nagorski’s novel, Hitler’s sexuality remains a matter of wide-ranging speculation, and although recent books have focused on what may have been the Nazi leader’s homosexual inclinations (a hypothesis that for years had been darkly founded on Hitler’s use of “Bubi,” an affectionate form of gay address, when speaking to Reichsleiter Martin Bormann), Nagorski opens no new doors. His purpose, in “Last Stop Vienna,” is to draw telling comparisons between his young hero’s tortured infatuation with an attractive, promiscuous flirt from Vienna, and the appeal, for this same young German, of the man from Vienna and his no-less-moody, promiscuous and unpredictable political party, the National Socialists.
We are nearly halfway through the book before we meet Raubal, and by then Nagorski has firmly established how it was that many Germans, impressed by the urgent need for their country to regain its pride, might have found in the Nazi Party their only vigorous champion. Nagorski’s imaginary hero is drawn to the party’s socialist wing and its leading proponents, Otto and Gregor Strasser. But Naumann displays little theoretical interest in socialism, and the reader must conclude that he is more keenly attracted to assertive personalities than he is to political theory. Before Raubal enters his life, Naumann courts and marries Sabine, a Catholic nurse whose wifely loyalty is stretched very thin, first by Nazi Party activities that Sabine abhors and regards as driven by hate rather than idealism, and later by her husband’s passion for Hitler’s niece.
Naumann, like all useful observers of major historical events, happens to be in the right place at the right time to give us an insider’s view: As a brownshirt he acts as Hitler’s bodyguard, then turns up as a personal messenger for the jailed fuehrer, following the Munich riot that nearly ended Hitler’s political ambitions; finally Naumann becomes a Hitler Youth leader. Running errands for Hitler brings Naumann into the company of Maurice, the fuehrer’s genial chauffeur, and allows Naumann to meet Maurice’s girlfriend, Raubal.
Unhappily for Naumann, but happily for “Last Stop Vienna” and its glimpses of Hitler’s private life, Raubal likes to play the field, and Naumann falls hard. Even as Naumann’s glimpses of the moody Hitler confirm his primary loyalty to the less fanatical Strasser brothers, and allow Naumann’s wife to hope that Naumann may be saved from Nazi ways, poor Sabine can only watch as another Hitler (Raubal was Hitler’s stepsister Angela’s daughter, to be exact) wins Naumann’s heart.
Naumann’s growing ambivalence toward “Uncle Alf,” Raubal’s incongruous term for Hitler, brews up into an agony of love-hate, stoked by Raubal’s increasingly graphic accounts of her uncle’s sexual habits and demands on her. When Naumann reads of Raubal’s death in the newspapers–the author shrinks from placing Naumann at the scene, though many readers may wish he had grasped this nettle–Naumann snaps and takes us into an eerily plausible fold of history, a parallel universe determined by the fictional postulates Nagorski has set in motion.
The novel’s ending is an intoxicating shock, and much the boldest stroke in a book that is limited by the author’s cautious style and his narrator’s relatively unimaginative nature. These elements lend plausibility to Naumann as a character and, by extension, to the jejune and simplistic view of 1920s Germany that helped bring the Nazis to power, but they lack the descriptive urgency, richness of detail and novelty of effect–evoking the strangeness of a bygone period–that illuminate the best historical writing.
Yet Nagorski’s honesty as a witness, alongside his central character’s believable surrender to fanaticism, makes this a timely book. History is always too easily absorbed as inevitability, in a way that obscures our full range of choices in the present. Books like “Last Stop Vienna” are precious reminders, guiding us through the stumbling wilderness of accidents that is the truth of history, that the future is at play at all times, and that it remains, to the last, in our own hands.
