Eva's Cousin - Hardcover

Sibylle Knauss

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385603606 ISBN 13: 9780385603607

Publisher: Doubleday

Synopsis

In the summer of 1944 Gertraud Weisker was twenty years old when her older cousin Eva Braun invited her to come and keep her company at Berchtesgaden, the Fuhrer's mountain retreat. Flattered and seduced by her glamorous cousin's interest, she went, defying her anti-Nazi father, and stayed until Eva left to share Hitler's fate in his Berlin bunker. After the war, Gertraud's husband forbade her to talk about her connection to Braun, and so she kept quiet for over fifty years. It was only in her seventies, after her husband's death, that she decided to break her silence and told her story, to Sybille Knauss, who used it to create a novel based on Gertraud's memories. EVA'S COUSIN recalls that summer of 1944 and the carefree yet sinister idyll of life at Hitler's huge house on the Oberslzberg, 'the country house of evil'. The Fuhrer is away directing the war, and young Gertraud is dazzled by the glamour of her cousin, and the sex appeal of the Nazi officials she finds herself at table with every evening. She falls for a young SS officer, and they embark on a torrid affair. But in a pavilion in the grounds, she encounters an escaped thirteen-year-old Ukranian slave labourer, and after clandestinely listening to BBC radio reports, she can't prevent her eyes from gradually opening to the atrocities unfolding outside her cloistered world, and the mystery of her cousin's obsessive love for the Fuhrer. Told through the eyes of an innocent, young girl, EVA'S COUSIN illuminates the banality of the domestic face of evil, and looking back from the perspective of more than half a century, tries to come to make sense of a deeply disturbed and disturbing time. Like Bernard Schlink's THE READER and Rachel Seiffert's THE DARK ROOM, it throws a special and sensitive light on the issues of innocence and complicity that are the legacy of Nazism for ordinary Germans to this day.

About this title

Review:

Eva Braun's cousin, Gertrude Weisker, was 20 years old when she played companion to Braun at the Berghof, Hitler's Bavarian aerie. Weisker kept silent about her time as a Nazi houseguest until she finally told all to German novelist Sibylle Knauss. Now Knauss has transformed Weisker's memories into the novel Eva's Cousin. While the novel's protagonist, Marlene, is a fictionalized version of Weisker, the rest of the infamous cast travel under their real names: Braun, Hitler, Goering, Speer. It's an odd and sometimes confusing project. As Marlene accompanies Eva through the final days of World War II--the days leading up to Braun's and Hitler's double suicide--we're never quite sure if we're witness to Weisker's memories or Knauss's invention. At its best, though, the book makes a compelling investigation into the mundanity of evil. Hitler is pathologized, but never diminished, as Marlene and Eva and all the rest tiptoe around him, careful not to upset him: "Nothing takes more courage than to disappoint a despot. Should he ever discover that free human beings with free will exist, it would surely be the death of him." Knauss cleverly counters Marlene's postadolescent musings with the mythically terrible world she inhabits: "I feel so lonely in Hitler's teahouse," she tells us. And "The only person who did understand me was Albert Speer." These juxtapositions indict Marlene for her very innocence, and make Eva's Cousin a powerful document of witness. --Claire Dederer

From the Inside Flap:

Berchtesgaden, Germany, is a beautiful place, set among the gentle meadow-clad hills rising to the sheer heights of bare Alpine peaks. It is here where an elderly woman arrives and recollects her past―and her peripheral role in a chapter of world history. She walks along a beaten path, which has come into being because so many tourists have ventured this way . . . to see something that exists only in her memory.

In the summer of 1944, twenty-year-old Marlene is thrilled when her older, more glamorous cousin, Eva Braun, Adolph Hitler’s mistress, invites her to come to the Fuhrer’s Bavarian mountain retreat. Against her father’s wishes, Marlene accepts, and immediately sets forth to Berghof.

There, while Hitler is away desperately trying to turn the tides of war, Marlene finds herself in a strange paradise, a world of opulence and imminent danger, of freedom and surveillance. The two women sneak off and skinny-dip in a nearby-lake, watch films in the Fuhrer’s private cinema, and flirt with the SS officers at the dinner table―one of whom will become Marlene’s first lover.

Initially delighted by Eva’s attentions, Marlene later tries to understand the elusive connection between her cousin and the man she loves.

In quiet defiance, she begins to commit her own acts of subversion, which include listening to BBC radio broadcasts, forbidden by the Fuhrer. But a clandestine mission of mercy will force her to question her allegiance to both her cousin and her country―and to face the chilling reality that exists outside her sheltered world.

Based on the true experiences of Eva Braun’s cousin, Gertrude Weisker, who has shared her memories with Sibylle Knauss after more than fifty years of silence, Eva’s Cousin is a novel that illuminates the banality of the domestic face of evil. It casts a special light on the profound questions of innocence and complicity that still haunt much of the world today.

About this edition

• Publisher: Doubleday
• ISBN 10: 0385603606
• ISBN 13: 9780385603607
• Binding: Hardcover