Berlin, September 1936
There wasn’t a finger’s breadth between them. Paul’s eyes were closed, his chin resting on Margarethe’s black curls; Margarethe’s head was tucked into his chest, her arms draped round his shoulders.
Liese imagined her father choreographing the pose and spinning its caption: Paul and Margarethe Elfmann – the fashion genius and his beautiful muse. Two perfectly still figures forming one complete whole.
You’re a lucky girl to live with so much love. To have such a perfect family. They all said it – the dreamy-eyed seamstresses coveting Margarethe’s velvet-bowed shoes. Sometimes Liese considered puncturing their visions, pointing out how awkward it was to always be cast in the spectator’s role. It was easier, in the end, to stay silent.
The seconds dragged; the stillness grew stifling. Liese peeped at her watch: almost three o’clock. She willed the hands to hurry. Finally, the tiny gold pointer clicked into place and, exactly on cue, there it came: a knock on the door that pulled the Elfmanns apart like a knot unravelling. Whatever they whispered to each other was too soft to hear.
Margarethe was the first to untangle, her body reforming into a model’s precisely cut lines. She tripped past Liese without looking at her daughter; Liese let her go. Margarethe was never cruel to her daughter or, at least, not intentionally so – she was as perfectly pleasant to Liese when she noticed her as she was to anyone else. Margarethe’s life always had, and always would, revolve around herself and, since her marriage, it had also revolved around Paul; the rest of the world hovered somewhere on the edge of her attention. For years, Liese had refused to accept that. She had held fast to the belief that, one day, when she was older, she would finally achieve the close bond with her mother she longed for. But when Margarethe had forgotten her daughter’s fifteenth birthday as easily as she had forgotten her fifth, Liese decided it was time to be done with the hope that her mother might change her distant ways. Now, at sixteen, she finally understood Margarethe’s narrow limits: a child tidied away in a nursery, grateful for a kiss was one thing; a daughter whose height and curves made a lie of ‘she can’t be a day over thirty’ was quite another.
I’ll be a better kind of mother when it’s my turn. I’ll be everything my daughter wants me to be.
Liese watched Margarethe slink away and turned back to her father.
Paul’s eyes were wistful, his hand deliberately suspended where his wife had left it, the script of their encounter still running in his head.
Liese waited.
Paul blinked; he sighed; he snapped into action. Countdown. One hour before the salon opened its canopied doors and the 1936 Autumn/Winter collection was deemed a triumph. Or not.
As always, the flurry of preparations before the show had been fraught, the fear of failure tangible, despite the years of success that had gone before. Liese fancied she could see the thoughts tumbling round Paul’s head like a deck of cards falling. Would the shapes surprise? Would the colours dazzle? Was Haus Elfmann still ahead of the game? Every season, the same worries and now a new layer added.
Liese studied the names pinned to the spindly chairs. Helena Stahl, the fashion house’s Amazonian Head of Publicity, was right: the seats were labelled with some out-of-place and unwelcome faces.
Agnes Gerlach, the self-appointed mouthpiece of the Party-run German Women’s Culture Association (an organisation Helena dismissed as ‘beige-clad frumps with no concept of style’), had spent two years begging for an invitation to an Elfmann show. Helena had spent two years delightedly ignoring her. Paul had no more time for Agnes than Helena did: he took her loudly voiced opinions on the ‘vulgarity’ of Germans who insisted on ‘aping French fashion’ personally. Now, however, even the German Fashion Institute was subject to the beck and call of its new Party masters. That meant that, whether Paul liked it or not, the country’s fashion houses, who all operated under the GFI umbrella, had to sing to the Party’s tune. The frumps were in the ascendant, vulgarity the charge every salon feared. Agnes had claimed a front-row seat. Paul’s sulk had verged on Shakespearean.
Liese scanned the rest of the names while she waited for her father to stop fussing.
Agnes had been placed next to Frau Goebbels. That the Third Reich’s First Lady was allotted a VIP spot was nothing unusual, given how many pieces she normally bought. It was her request for a second seat that had caused the problems. This time, Frau Goebbels had her angry little husband in tow. What the Reich’s Minister for Propaganda wanted with a fashion show, Liese couldn’t imagine. Other than the buyers from the major department stores and the financiers, men rarely attended. Today, however, the stiff cream cards revealed a heavy number of Ober-this and Gruppen-that. Men who, Helena complained, would come in their black uniforms and stop everyone smiling. Liese had never known a show where the guest list was so out of Haus Elfmann’s control. And not only the list.
She picked up a programme as Paul flicked imaginary dust motes from the candlelit mirrors. The Party had put its stamp on the language the salon could use as strongly as it had dictated who sat in the audience. The new directives, which detailed how German collections could be described, had sent Helena into as much of a fury as the seat allocations. Berlin, not Paris, was now considered the centre of the fashion-world – in the Party’s eyes, at least. Hauptmode was therefore the mandated phrase, not haute couture; schick not chic the stamp of approval. Nobody could fit the clumsy terms comfortably across their tongues, but there they were in the programme, exactly as ordered. New faces and new words: small changes, but enough to trip them. Tension trickled through the building like sand through an hourglass.
Paul had finally stopped pacing. He stood in the centre of the room, his hands raised. Liese craned forward, her neck prickling, as he clapped three times in quick succession. No matter how many times she played a part in them, the show-day rituals had never lost their magic. With no son to succeed him, Liese was the salon’s heir and she had trotted behind him, hanging on his every syllable, since she was eight years old, not caring about anything except impressing him and understanding every strand of the business. On his final clap, the door reopened. Two of the youngest seamstresses scurried in, wrapped in white coveralls like Christmas sugar mice. They paused, one to the left of Paul, one to the right, crystal atomisers wobbling. Liese’s nose twitched. A finger click and they were off, releasing the scent from the bottles in precision-timed bursts. The perfume puffed out in a fragrant mist which hung in the air like chiffon. Her father’s eyes darted after the girls as they hopped from corner to corner.
Everything danced to the rhythm of the salon’s two annual collections. The rites the Haus observed reached their peak on the day each of those was launched. Whether it was the length of the owners’ silent embrace, or the number of flowers allotted to a vase, or the order the outfits appeared in, every decision and every moment held weight. And not only did each show have its own carefully calibrated theme, each show carried its own unique scent. The curtain-opener, Paul called it, the palate-tease. There were certain constants: Spring and Summer should be sweet with flowers or citrus-sharp; Autumn and Winter heavy with spices. Beyond that, no one but Paul and the perfumiers knew.
‘Do the audience understand it, Papa? How the perfume talks to the clothes?’
‘Not like we do.’
We. Liese’s skin fizzed.
‘But if we missed this step out everything would feel dull and our scene would not set. Why?’
‘Because this is theatre.’
A nod; he was too tightly wound to smile. Besides, how else would she answer? Other children grew up stuffed with fairy tales and nursery rhymes: Liese’s magic kingdoms were fashioned in the workrooms and showrooms she had learned to toddle and speak in.
You said the words ‘satin’ and ‘silk’ before Mother and Father. Delightful, but hardly a surprise. Minnie Elfmann, her much-missed grandmother, had woven that anecdote into family lore and never heard the sadness in it that Liese did. Minnie had been Liese’s shining light, a vision in feather-trimmed wraps and waist-length pearls; adored and never remote. And never Grandma.
‘Minnie, my sweet – nothing but Minnie. So much kinder for little mouths.’
‘And for old faces.’ Margarethe’s stage whispers had always been carefully pitched.
Mother and wife had circled each other since Paul had spotted Margarethe commanding the audience at a Paris salon and whisked her back to Berlin. Any kindness between the two women had been reserved for public use.
‘She’s as jealous as a cat!’
They both had hissed it.
As Liese grew older and more tuned to the spats, the root of their competition became clear: her father and his constant need to stand centre stage. Not that it mattered anymore who had scratched first at who. Minnie had blazed out four years ago, dying before anything as dull as old age could catch her, and left a hole Liese had struggled to climb out of. Now, there was no more Minnie to cover her with kisses, and no one else inclined to. There was no more Grandpa Nathan either, although he was so stern it was hard to miss his presence. Since Minnie’s death, he had shrivelled away like a hermit into his shuttered mansion, unable to step inside the fashion house that her flair had helped him found. One set of grandparents gone and neither Paul nor Margarethe had any brothers or sisters to offer. As for Margarethe’s parents – they were lost somewhere in the rural corners of Alsace on the French–German border, their country ways long cast aside by their elegant daughter.
‘So, our clan is a small one – what does it matter? Everyone in Berlin knows who we are.’
Another of Paul’s pronouncements. As if the public’s admiring gaze could make their sprawling mansion in Bergmannkiez any less echoing or empty.
Such a perfect family. Liese wished she could see it, or find it.
She had haunted friends’ noisier houses when she could. She had devoured books that described what she longed for. Stories filled with sisters who shared secrets, whose passionate squabbles collapsed into tearfully ecstatic declarations. Whose pretty heads were watched over by mothers with wide hearts and wide laps and spoiled by fathers whose pockets bulged with candy.
Not one of those stories resembled her own life. A mother and father wrapped up in themselves, aware of their daughter only as a part of the business. Uncle Otto, who was the salon’s Technical Director and not really an uncle at all. And Michael, Otto’s son, who was two years older than her and hovered somewhere between brother, friend and serious annoyance. As soon as she could toddle, Liese had stuck herself firmly to Michael. She had adored him, he had adored her and their business-breathing parents had been very grateful for the bond. Michael’s hand holding hers had been Liese’s anchor on the world; his grin a promise of adventure. They had built dens together, raided the kitchens together, dug up the gardens in search of buried treasure together. The Michael she had grown up with could collapse her into giggles with a look and spin a story out of thin air. His ‘just imagine if…’ had become her childhood’s favourite words. At twelve, even at fourteen, Liese would have said that the two of them knew each other inside out and everything was brighter when they shared it between them. Now, his life was outrunning hers, leading him to places she wasn’t ready to follow. There were days when loneliness sat on her like a second skin.
‘What do you smell?’
Paul was staring at her, frowning; Liese pulled herself back to the present.
‘Close your eyes. Remember what we’ve practised. Take a deeper breath. Tell me the notes you can sense. Then, put them together and tell me their story.’
She did as she was told. She let the chair’s padded back, the carpet’s plush, the tip-tap of footsteps on the floor above go. She shut her eyes and focused on the perfume’s music.
‘Cinnamon and cloves.’ Her nose prickled. ‘Oranges and gingerbread.’ Each layer carefully picked out and then, just as carefully, woven back together. ‘Christmas.’
No response. Her answer was too simple.
She pressed her lids tighter. She was good at this. Just as she was good at judging where a pleat should fold, or where a ruffle should gather. And, today of all days, she could not let her father down: her failure would be a bad omen.
She sniffed again, filling her lungs. A thicker note wriggled up through the spice-packed layers. Its smoky heaviness reminded her of the scent that wafted out when church doors opened. A scent she had never smelled in the synagogue Grandpa Nathan herded them all into, when he used to care about such things.
‘Incense.’
Her father released his breath in a gentle sigh.
Liese let her imagination dive back into the workrooms. She conjured up the muslin-draped costumes and pictured herself walking around them, picking out their details. The deep fur collar on an ankle-length coat; silver thread and crystal beads clustering the shoulders on a narrow bodice; filigreed gold worked in layered patterns. She let her thoughts wander past the dummies and over to the idea books that cluttered the studios: history and art collected in faded photographs and coloured plates. Books she had spent hours poring over on quiet afternoons.
Her eyes snapped open. Military frogging, not buttons, to close a jacket, white muffs hanging from jewelled chains like sleeping rabbits.
‘It’s not any Christmas – it’s a Russian one. At the Imperial Court. Girls ice-skating and riding in horse-drawn sledges at midnight. Trips to The Nutcracker and candlelit balls.’
‘You caught it. Well done.’
Paul’s smile at her cleverness lit up the room.
What was wrong with him? Why must he always be on a mission to spoil everything?
Michael had turned into the after-party’s bad fairy, all black looks and muttered curses. Liese watched his fists curl and wished, not for the first time, that the old mischief-loving Michael would come back, not this new version all stamped through with political understanding, whatever that might be. It certainly wasn’t any fun. He had grown spiky, and self-important, and in need of bursting. Once tonight was over, she would tell him that.
The show had been every bit the triumph everyone was praying for. Even Minister Goebbels had thawed when he saw the military touches. When he declared the collection ‘a timely homage to the beauties of Prussia’, no one was fool enough to correct him. Now, two hours after the last model had stalked through the applause, the champagne was flowing, and the order book was brimming. Haus Elfmann was toasting its future; all Michael could do was scowl.
‘How can they fawn like this? Your father’s drooling and mine’s as bad. They’ll both be wearing swastikas next.’
And here we go again.
Liese didn’t bother to hide her sigh. One sight of a uniform or a Party badge and this newly minted Michael flew into a tirade in a voice more suited to a parade ground. She should have been quicker to run down to the milling reception, not let him catch her off guard on the stairs.
‘Can’t you let it go for tonight? Yes, there are more Party officials and officers than we expected. But everyone’s praising the clothes and being perfectly civil.’
Another curse. Thank goodness the stairway’s curve meant Paul couldn’t hear him.
Liese wasn’t a fool, although Michael increasingly behaved as if she was. She knew there was a darker side to the National Socialists than the one currently on display. The Führer’s rise to power three years ago had, in her father’s words, made Germany ‘more secure and more hopeful’ for businessmen like him. It had also released gangs of brown-shirted thugs onto the streets and plastered the city with posters and placards that were unsettling and not to be dwelled on.
As the regime flexed its muscles, people everywhere, including in hard-to-fluster and Party-sceptical Berlin, were growing nervous. Even the Elfmanns, for all their wealth and status, had not escaped the chill.
Liese, to her increasing irritation, was no longer allowed to walk anywhere without a companion. She had also been pulled out of school long before she was due to leave, with no explanation beyond the excuse of ‘difficult times’. True, that was less of an upset than her curtailed freedom to visit the deer runs in Viktoriapark or the ice-cream parlours on Bergmanstraβe. She didn’t miss her lessons: she had learned everything she considered she needed to know in the salon. Pattern-cutting had made her mathematics precise. She spoke French prettily enough to delight French buyers and English clearly enough to charm American clients. Everything else her teachers judged important had been a distraction. It had been more difficult, however, to let go of her friends.
No matter how many invitations Liese sent out, no one came calling. She had thought her classmates must be as confined as she was, until she spied Christa and Anna strolling arm in arm as she sat alone in the car and wondered if she’d perhaps imagined their closeness. Paul was confident the current mood wouldn’t last.
‘All governments crack down in their early years. First, they get into power, then they get heady with it. Once the Führer has the communists and the criminals mopped up, he’ll rein in the excesses. In the meantime, we must all get on and work together. Whatever the Party’s vision for Germany turns out to be, it has to include clothes.’
In light of the salon’s continued success, Liese considered her father’s viewpoint perfectly reasonable, and yet here was Michael, eternally playing the prophet of gloom.
He was fidgeting now, staring at a group of black-uniformed officers as if he expected them to break out their guns and start shooting. ‘He watches too many gangster films’ was Uncle Otto’s excuse. ‘He spends too much time with that idiot group of hotheads and communists he calls friends’ was her father’s.
The company Michael kept was the only thing she ever heard the two men properly argue about. She knew Michael was involved with the KPD, the German Communist Party banned by the Führer. If Michael’s evenings were anything to go by, that group now conducted its business on street corners and in the worst kind of taverns. He could talk her to death about the ‘honesty of its values’ and ‘its understanding of the true meaning of society’ if she’d let him. He was desperate for her to join too, but he was hardly an advertisement for it: from what Liese could see, involvement with the KPD sucked the joy out of everything. Michael’s sense of humour had totally vanished; his all-encompassing allegiance had even managed to ruin their visit to the summer’s Olympic Games.
It was weeks now since the opening ceremony’s debacle, but she was still struggling to forgive him. She would tell him that tonight too. How the memory of its upset was still so raw she could slap him.
Berlin had been in a rising state of excitement ever since it was announced that the 1936 Olympic Games would be held in the city. By the time the first of August arrived, Liese was as obsessed as the rest.
The day itself had promised so much. Once Paul realised Berlin was decked out for a party he wanted to be seen at, he had sent the car on and agreed that the family could walk part of the way. Both Liese and her mother had new dresses: Liese’s in lemon; Margarethe’s in rose. The skirts were pleated to mimic a tennis dress and their discus-shaped bags were trimmed with the Olympic flag’s colours. The stares and whistles that Margarethe ignored had made Liese blush and Paul beam. As for the thronged streets they stepped into, they were as shiny as the buckles fastening Liese’s cream shoes.
Yes, thanks to Michael, she now knew that the city’s spruced-up appearance had been temporary, a ‘calculated sleight of hand’ as he put it, and that was disturbing, she couldn’t deny it. But then? Liese, like everyone around her, had revelled in the pageantry. She had liked that every paving stone gleamed, that every polished balcony tumbled in a riot of pansies and violets. It was hard not to be happy when speakers played music the length of Wilhelmstraβe. When there wasn’t an unpleasant poster or a forbidding sign to be seen. When, for the first time in two years, the newspaper boxes normally showcasing the Party paper Der Stürmer, whose hateful sketches of hook-nosed men drew the eye like a magnet, had disappeared. Berlin felt fresh and hopeful.
As for the stadium, its scale was impossible. ‘Three hundred and twenty-five acres and seating for a hundred thousand’, or so their guide boasted. As they shuffled in, the sun came out and made everything sparkle, from the white-robed choir lined up on the playing field to the huge copper bowl waiting for the torchbearer’s flame. Liese couldn’t stop grinning, and even hard-to-impress Margarethe declared it was splendid.
Michael had wriggled in beside her, late as usual, causing a disturbance as he pushed through. Liese had considered getting cross with him, until he produced a bag of her favourite chocolate kisses and grinned his Michael grin.
Soon, Liese was giggling so hard as he made up comic characters for the people sitting around them that her stomach muscles hurt from trying to stifle her laughter. She slipped her arm through Michael’s.
‘I’ve missed this. You and me, having fun and not fighting.’
He turned to her, smiling, but then a ripple ran round the packed terraces and jerked their attention back.
‘Michael, what’s happening?’
People were nudging each other, pointing.
Michael’s face hardened.
The crowd swivelled, craning towards the top of a long sweep of stairs, where a figure stood, silhouetted and tiny.
Liese jumped as a trumpet rang out.
‘What on earth!’
She bit her lip as backs in the row in front stiffened. The blast had plunged the stadium into a silence she knew instinctively it would be foolish to shatter.
The trumpet was joined by another and another, until a fanfare trilled. The figure moved down the steps, his entourage following. The arena rose as if it was operated by invisible strings, arms snapping into the air.
Paul slid back to his place and saluted; Margarethe mirrored him. Liese scrambled to her feet a second behind, pulled up by the crowd’s movement.
A roar flew through the stands as if everyone had learned a cue, three notes of a chant beating like a drum. Liese caught it up without thinking, her voice blending in with the deep-throated swell.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
Michael hadn’t moved, despite Otto’s frantic prodding. His arm had stayed firmly down.
‘Seriously, Liese, what’s got into you? Why are you shouting “Heil Hitler” like one of the Party faithful? Have you gone mad?’
Despite the gap growing between them, he had never spoken to her so harshly before. It brought Liese up with a jolt. She suddenly saw herself through Michael’s eyes, standing stiff as a statue, shouting with a passion they both knew she didn’t feel. It wasn’t a comfortable image. She meant to apologise, but then his lip curled into a sneer and she snapped back instead.
‘What’s wrong with you? It’s a politeness, a welcome. It doesn’t mean anything.’
The roar swept into a storm of clapping as the Führer took his seat; into a whooping cheer as the torchbearer ran into view.
‘Besides, everyone was doing it; I was just joining in.’
‘Oh, that’s all right then. If everyone’s doing it, there’s nothing to worry about. It’s me who’s the fool, not you. And it is a vision all right. The great and the good and their well-behaved wives, our pampered visitors from Europe and even America, all lifting their hands and howling for Hitler. Isn’t it marvellous how everyone loves him? Including today – heaven help us – the Jews.’
Liese cringed as the man in front turned round and tutted. She knew Michael’s patterns too well: he was about to launch into a tirade against the Party straight from his beloved KPD lecture, the one he could repeat word-perfect time after time, as if he’d swallowed a manual.
Liese was not, despite what she had just done, a devotee of Hitler, but it was clear from the profusion of lapel badges and flags surrounding them that plenty of the crowd were. This was no place for Michael to give full rein to his feelings, no matter how honestly held they were. She leaned towards him, her voice lowered to a whisper.
‘I don’t like it either, truly I don’t. But can’t we pick over this later, when we’re at home?’
She was too late. Michael was off in full spate and not listening.
‘The National Socialist Party is the enemy of the working man, and the communist and the Jew. To participate in, or cooperate with, the Party’s orders or their pageantry is an act of betrayal. No one can be allowed to forget that, not ever.’
The man in front nudged the man next to him; Liese saw fists starting to curl.
Why must he always be so loud?
She gritted her teeth as the runner lowered his torch and the copper bowl burst into flames. Whatever the truth of Michael’s words, all she wanted to do today was enjoy the spectacle, not become it.
‘Michael, please, not this again, not here. Fine, I got a bit carried away, but why do you have to be so patronising? I’m sick of hearing about the communists and how they’re going to save the world. And as for the Jews and this reclaimed religious heritage you’re all het up about, I’m sick of that too. Fine, be a communist if you want; be a Jew if that makes you happy. Don’t expect me to be either.’
She would have left it there, if he hadn’t raised his eyebrow.
‘What? Are you going to tell me I’m Jewish again? Saying it doesn’t make it real, you know. I don’t go to the synagogue; I don’t keep Jewish holidays; I don’t follow Jewish laws. None of us do, including you, the last time I checked. We’re Germans – good Germans, like everyone else here – and that’s all we are. Well, except you apparently: you’re also a bore.’
Michael’s answering snarl made her eyes smart.
‘Well, forgive me, Princess, for spoiling your day. It’s not like the Party are really that bad. And Jewish? You? What a crazy idea. How could the granddaughter of Nathan Elfmann, whose Jewish family fled the pogroms in Hungary, whose father made his fortune in the Jewish rag trade, possibly be Jewish?’
They were attracting more attention than ever – even Paul was looking along the row.
‘Michael, for Heaven’s sake, lower your voice!’
It was a waste of her breath; he grew louder.
‘Seriously, how could I be so dumb? It’s not as if anyone could think Elfmann is a Jewish name. Or Wasserman either. Remind me to tell that to the universities I’ve applied to, who seem less certain of our heritage than you. How great it must be to live in such denial. You’ll be telling me next that Jesse Owens is white. Fine, don’t be a communist, but don’t say you’re not Jewish, as if that makes it true.’
More heads were turning, none of them friendly.
‘Michael, this isn’t the place—’
It was like trying to calm a charging elephant with a wagging finger.
‘When did you become so accepting, Liese? You used to drive me crazy with your questions – what happened? Don’t you care about all the new rules and the curbs on our freedom? Don’t you wonder why you can’t walk anywhere alone anymore, or go to school?’
‘Of course I do, but Father says—’ But Michael’s hand was up.
‘Don’t bother, I can guess. He said it’s for your own safety, because the Brownshirts might not realise you’re a good German. Did he also tell you Hitler would bring his hooligan army back into line once the Party was secure? It’s horseshit. Hitler’s had power for three years – he’s as secure as a bank vault. Come on, Liese, you can do better than this. Our glorious new leaders don’t care much for Jews and they’re getting very skilled at spotting us. Why do they want to do that? Do you want to guess, or shall I tell you? It’s so they can remove us. So they can lift us out of our lives.’
People in the rows around had started to mutter. Otto, more conscious than Michael of the mood in the surrounding seats, grabbed his son’s arm. Michael shook him off. He was so focused on making Liese believe him, she doubted he could see anyone but her.
‘What do I have to say to persuade you that danger is coming? You must sense it. Didn’t you notice that there were no tramps or drunks on the streets today? All this nonsense about us being “safer in our beds under our new government”. More horseshit. The streets are empty because the Party’s rounding up everyone they don’t count as German anymore and dumping them in camps. There’s a massive one at Oranienburg, barely an hour from the city. There’s rumours of torture there, of killings.’
Someone yelled at him to shut up. Liese winced; Michael didn’t notice.
‘People I know, from the meetings I go to, have disappeared?
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