The History of History

THIRTEEN • Face Tattoos


There was a day in January that began in the yellow phone booth outside the supermarket on Gleditschstrasse. Margaret pulled open its heavy door. She needed a phone book.

She opened the city phone book in the sweaty little box, and when her finger hit his name, it jumped. There was Arthur Prell, Hitler’s own bodyguard, woven into modern Berlin by the good offices of the telephone book. In 2005, his name stood in blameless black letters. Beside it, an equally modest number stood, only five digits. She dialed. The phone rang. It rang until the possibility of an answering machine was eliminated.

A faraway voice sounded—the cottony, warbling voice Margaret remembered, the voice of a very old man.

“Hallo?” said the distant voice.

“Yes, hello.” Margaret invented herself on the spot. “I’m Margarethe Taub, journalist.”

“Yeah?” the voice said, sounding childish and confused.

“Yes. I write for—Smithsonian magazine,” Margaret said, haltingly. She wondered if the publication still existed. “I’d like to know if you’d be willing to give an interview.”

“Give a what?”

“Give an interview.”

“Why?”

“My understanding is that you were one of Adolf Hitler’s bodyguards,” Margaret said.

“Oh, yes. That’s true. So you want an interview. They all come to me for that. Well, I don’t have much time. But I can fit you in I guess, I can probably fit you in.” He sounded resigned and proud. His words, even more than when she had heard him at the bunker, were soggy and mucous-filled.

“Would you like to meet at the bunker?” Margaret asked.

“What?”

“Whether you’d like to meet at the bunker,” Margaret said loudly into the receiver. “I’ve seen you there before.”

“No.” He paused, and seemed to swallow thickly. He badly needed to clear his throat. “No, no. My knees, you see.” Margaret didn’t tell him that she had seen him there, hopping about on spry feet.

“Where would you like to meet for the interview, Herr Prell?”

“Well, I guess we can meet here at my place.”

And they set up a time to meet at his house, in Rudow.

Margaret went home triumphant. She discovered, online, that Prell was selling a CD: Songs from the Berghof, to raise money for his cause—the support of old SS officers who were “denied a pension” by the German government.

She reread several detailed accounts of Hitler’s last days in the bunker.

Later, she went to an electronics store down on the Kurfürstendamm and bought a cheap microcassette recorder.

After that, still feeling incomplete, she went to a brilliantly lit department store and walked around the candy department. She should bring Prell some small token, she thought. She decided on chocolates, but couldn’t decide what size box. There were small ones, and then there were large ones that cost a pretty penny. She spent a long time making up her mind. She chose a small one in the end. Waiting in line at the cash register, however, she looked at it and thought it appeared trifling, insulting even. She darted back to the glass wall and got an impressive tin of individually wrapped truffles.

The day of the interview arrived. Margaret spent a long time deciding what to wear. The skirt she eventually chose was short, but at the same time, very becoming.

A long and oppressive subway ride followed. Prell lived all the way at the far eastern end of the U7 line.

In Rudow, Margaret hauled her racing bike off the train. She peddled through the settlement of little homes, the gabled houses, the towering pine trees. The streets were named for flowers. She turned in at Eucalyptus, found the house number on the gate, and there it was, Prell’s little house. It had plastic white lace curtains, the wont of the elderly East, and a low wall around a little garden, with a gate that opened and closed on a remotely controlled lock. Margaret pressed the buzzer.

All was quiet.

She pressed again.

A door on the side of the house sprang open, and Prell appeared. He took the stairs sideways, apparently with a bad knee after all, but still he lunged toward her quickly, on spry, stilt legs, and opened the gate. They shook hands. Margaret blushed. She followed him inside. He took her coat.

She looked about the living room—artificial flowers in abundance, the smell of gumdrops and potpourri, paintings of spring bouquets and clowns dotting the walls in sloughs of stale color.

At the table, Margaret fumbled to get out her tape recorder. Prell’s eyes gleamed hungrily at the sight of it.

She took a deep breath. She asked a question, and they began.


It should have been interesting, the things he said. But the old man began to drone. He recited empty things, things that sounded as though they were memorized from books—freezer-burned, senseless chatter, and, most troubling of all, his answers did not correspond to her questions. She asked about his life before the war—he talked about the bunker. She asked about the bunker—he talked about his life before the war. He pulled out a shoebox that at first appeared to be full of photographs but was actually piles of laminated photocopies of photographs—of himself, at Berchtesgaden, with the Hitler-Braun dogs, in front of the door to the Berlin bunker, and at the Wolf’s Lair, in East Prussia. The only point of interest to Margaret was this: it was easy to recognize the face of the old man in the face of the young one at Berchtesgaden.

He was a drone, but he was not an imposter.

Through great effort, Margaret managed to finally steer the conversation to the Goebbels family. Prell began to speak of them, and at long last, Margaret became interested. Ever and again, she was the yo-yo and Magda Goebbels was the hand holding the string. Margaret sometimes flew away, but always she zinged back into that woman’s tight palm.

“Well, let me see,” said the old man, moving his lips thickly. “Goebbels and the kids arrived suddenly, about fourteen days before the end. Then Hitler’s doctor, Dr. Morell, had to move out so that Dr. Goebbels could move in, and his wife lived one story higher in the connecting bunker, with the children. But the children came down to play all the time, you know? When they were too loud we sent them back up.”

He laughed.

“Usually they were up in the New Chancellery; there were people around up there and they had freedom to move about. Anyway, I went up there too, shortly before the end, because the big kitchen was there. Goebbels sat down at a long table with the children. A young man played the harmonica. And Goebbels was saying goodbye to the civilians with the children; there were so many people there up in the New Chancellery, people looking to take shelter there. And it occurred to me for the first time that maybe I should say goodbye, too. That was the moment it became clear to me that Hitler and Goebbels would stay. And Eva Braun and Frau Goebbels had agreed they wouldn’t abandon their men either. They would stay to the end too. And then plans were made for the children. The other women in the bunker all offered—Frau Rindell for example, from the office, she said, ‘Frau Goebbels, if you want to stay here, that’s your business, but the children can’t possibly stay here—’ and Frau Graf said, ‘I’ll take them to Darmstadt to my sister, she can’t have children—she would be happy. Please!’ and she cried.

“You know, we, the service people, we all knew that the children were meant to stay, and what would happen. They would stay and they would die.”

Prell spoke so loudly Margaret had to draw her head back.

“Oh, and then of course the aviator, Hanna Reitsch, offered to fly them out. She said even if she had to fly back and forth twenty times, she would fly them out. Of course, that’s not what happened.” He paused.

“Frau Goebbels, she had to come down to my room to get the children ready.”

“What do you mean?” Margaret interrupted. Her eyes dropped. She felt a glass hand on her shoulder.

“Well, she was going to give them a soft finish.”

“In your room?”

“Oh yeah.”

“Why there?” Margaret’s voice came out as a purr. It was not how she meant it at all.

“Up above there were so many people around, but down in our rooms there was no one. We ourselves weren’t even down there. We only slept there. So she could take care of them on her own. I went out of the room and waited outside. After a little while Dr. Naumann came out of the room. He said to me—he whispered in my ear—that if it had been up to him, Dr. Goebbels he meant, then the children wouldn’t still be in the bunker, they would be evacuated. And I had seen Naumann talking with Goebbels up above before, and he was probably right. I took him as a trustworthy representative. Goebbels didn’t want it. It was Frau Goebbels who wanted it. One must stick with the truth. That’s how it was!” Prell yelled, as though Margaret had challenged him.

Margaret breathed out. She looked at him. She saw his flashing eyes; she saw that he thought he was on trial.

But he was making it too easy for her. Because she wasn’t putting him on trial. He was waiting for her to rise up against him, but she—she didn’t know what she was doing at all. She looked at him.


When Margaret thought about the interview afterward, it was that moment, with Prell yelling, “That’s how it was!” which she would always remember as the point at which a blue sky went yellow-black. Because as far as Margaret was concerned, it was at that moment when it began to be not Prell who was on trial. Not Prell, but Margaret herself.

And Magda Goebbels, suddenly, was everywhere in the room. She was hovering against the walls and in the jars of potpourri; she was a black fume around the curtains and darkening the craft-fair paintings on the walls.

If Margaret were going to take a stand against Magda Goebbels, it must be right now.

Margaret stuttered, buying time. “Did you—?” she began, uncertainly.

Again, however, Prell did not wait to hear the rest. He cried out as though she had already accused him outright: “It wasn’t for me! I did as I was told.”

He was helping her along.

Margaret was quiet, her palms burning. Her muscles locked.

Prell gambled: “But sure, it was a shame.” Margaret sat with her head down.

Prell began again. “Next to the site of the bunker they’re putting up the big memorial for the Jews right now. Two thousand seven hundred concrete blocks—they’re allowed that. But I say, how would it be if over there around the corner by the bunker, we put in six blocks, just six? The children of Goebbels were murdered, killed, deliberately murdered. Couldn’t they be honored, the children? It won’t do them any good now, but at least we could honor them, put up a sign that says, ‘Here died six murdered children.’ Two thousand seven hundred blocks for the Jews, but six children can’t be honored?”

“What about the neo-Nazis who would make it into a shrine?” Margaret’s voice came out in a squeak. She began to dash lines on her notepad. She drew a lighthouse with a black stripe twisting around it.

Oh, if Margaret were going to grab the demon and pull it by the nose, it must be now.

“Ach, ‘neo-Nazi.’ No such thing,” said Prell. “What does neo-Nazi mean? New Nazi, right? There aren’t any. That’s just a buzzword. What you have are nationally conscious people, people who say, ‘my fatherland,’ right or wrong. ‘My fatherland,’ nothing more, am I right? You Americans say it, the Swiss say it, the Israelis say it—‘My country,’ they say. ‘And I’ll fight for it.’ The Israelis are nationalistic people, they defend their territory, they defend their people. They have as much right as anyone.”

He looked at Margaret over the tin of chocolates she had brought him. Then he tilted his head toward her conspiratorially.

“I’ve got an idea for what the memorial for the kids could look like. A sort of design. I do some of that on the side.”

Margaret’s face was red. She was breathing hard. She didn’t look at him.

“I’m thinking there would be six blocks and each one would be the height of the respective kid when it died. So one meter thirty, one meter ten, and so on. Pretty good, I think.”

Margaret started to cough. The air in the room was very dry.

Prell was on a roll. “You can’t talk about guilt, you know.” (But she had not.) “All these things they write about Hitler nowadays. If he had really done all the terrible things they say he did, how could he have been our Führer?”

Margaret coughed harder. Prell ignored her. “Let’s think about it. I’m telling you, one way or another, the war would have come, the war would have come ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, it didn’t take Hitler to make the war, the Jews now, they declared war on Germany in the 1920s, and then again at the end of the 1930s, The war right now in Iraq isn’t about Saddam Hussein, it’s about Israel! That Israel, it can’t exist on avocadoes and oranges, a nation lives from business, they have to have money, and the Americans always pay in, don’t they? This is just my opinion, but why did they occupy Iraq? Supposedly because of atomic bombs!” He laughed straight from the belly. “In my opinion Iraq is a wealthy oil region, and with this money they can support Israel; they can’t keep pumping in their own money forever. There’s something I’ll tell you about Israel …”

And on and on he talked. Margaret looked at the tin of chocolates she had brought him. These sat next to the artificial roses, petals adorned in drops of plastic dew. I bought him expensive chocolates, she thought to herself. It was a tough bludgeon and knocked his voice right out of her head. And foggily, it seemed the blood and dust that rose in the cloud afterward dampened her will to fight. The chocolates—bought before she ever arrived at this house—were a pivotal battle already lost days before, on some distant front, news of it coming back to the capital over the radio only now.

She lifted her head. He was still moving his jaw muscles, his thick tongue flickering in and out of his mouth.

She watched him, but his voice was whitening out, a volume dial had been rotated down, and now not only could she not hear him, but even his physical form grew blurry in her eyes. When she strained to bring him back into focus, bulging her eyes out of her head, she saw him before her again, but this time his clothes had begun to drip off his body in scales. He was molting. Finally, the hulking, chanting body sat before her in its slate-white skin.

As Margaret looked on, tattoos began to appear in his skin, rising to the surface like water mammals fountaining up for breath. Intricate tattoos they were—high-contrast black-and-white photographs. All over his body, the photographs began to nose up. Photographs of faces, almost mug shots, laid out like a map. A woman’s high cheekbones here and a child’s large cranium there.

Margaret squeezed her eyes shut.

She breathed in and out of her nose. Finally she felt herself coming down. She opened her eyes again and there he was before her in his polyester golf coat and cardigan. He reminded her of her grandfather. She smiled brightly and he smiled back.


By the time she got home to the Grunewaldstrasse, she had only one question. Why had she given him chocolates?

Margaret had not been able to stand up to him. Her spaniel fidelity meekly fed the tortoise-man chocolates!

She had not asked the key questions, she had not begged for the key answers. The next day, she would go to the university, continuing her search for the Meissner biography, bumptiously searching for Magda Goebbels’s “true” character; yes, this she knew she would do, but none of it would have anything in the balance. She had given Arthur Prell chocolates, and the results were already in.

It was the chocolates, in the end, that wore the yoke of her shame.