Wunderland(23)

“It’s amazing,” her friend Marta had rhapsodized last week, after seeing the film with her parents. “It’s hard to explain. But it captures exactly what we are doing. What the movement is all about.” Without an ounce of self-consciousness, she admitted that she’d spent the last half hour of the movie in tears. “Though I don’t imagine you will cry, Steel Girl,” she’d added. Stahlm?dchen is the nickname the other M?dchen gave Ilse last summer on a group hike in the German Alps: after turning an ankle, she’d marched on for eight kilometers, not even relinquishing the troop flag she’d been assigned to carry. She laughs gamely at the moniker, but like that stupid story about the U-Bahn burglar Renate claims she “fought off,” Ilse is never quite sure it is meant as a compliment.

Now she gazes gloomily at her reflection: the black beret pulled sportily over one ear. The white blouse she’d had Katinka iron, looking plain and barren without the colorful cord that runs from collar to breast pocket. Sighing, she pulls on her jacket and buttons it all the way up; she will simply have to keep it on throughout the two-hour documentary. Hopefully it won’t be too hot in the theater.

She’s just about to head out the door when it opens abruptly to reveal her mother, holding the missing lanyard out between two red-tipped fingers.

“Katinka did have it,” she says in triumph. “You left it in your pocket yesterday.”

Ilse all but snatches the accessory back, her annoyance that her mother was right briefly outweighing her relief that the cord has finally been located. “Can you please at least knock before just barging in?” she says feebly.

“You’re welcome, Liebling,” her mother says. And with a tight smile, she turns away.



* * *





An hour later Ilse sits with eleven of her charges, the other two having been kept home by the latest bout of influenza. After significant scolding, cajoling, and threatening (and four last-minute washroom trips), Ilse has finally gotten everyone in their velvet-covered chairs, a task made all the harder by the edgy excitement that fills the room like a palpable force. Even though the movie hasn’t yet started, it already feels like a momentous occasion. The theater has been accessorized with Hakenkreuz banners and flags. The speakers—which usually pipe out cheerily bland Volksmusik—tonight emit brass-heavy Party tunes like “Kampflied der Nationalsozialisten” and “Sieg Heil Viktoria.” Ilse casts a quick glance around the room for Rudi and is quietly relieved not to find him.

Then the lights dim, and the curtains sweep open, and a respectful hush rolls over the rows like a soft heavy wave. As the familiar chords of the Horst Wessel song sound, the first title cards roll: “On the 5th of September, 1934, 20 years after the outbreak of the World War, 16 years after the beginning of Germany’s suffering, 19 months after the beginning of the German rebirth, Adolf Hitler flew again to Nuremberg to review his faithful followers.”

And then suddenly, amazingly, they are in the clouds, soaring like angels above a field of shining white. As it becomes clear that they are on the Führer’s plane with him, the wonder is both immediate and palpable—most of them have never been on a plane. And as the clouds part to reveal old Nuremburg’s fairy-tale-perfect skyline, its gingerbread gables swathed in Imperial and Nazi flags, it’s as if every volume switch but the film’s has been turned off completely.

The plane lands to a sea of marching men in brown shirts, all perfectly united in rhythm and pace. Ilse knows all of this happened months ago, but her heart still pounds as the plane door opens and its passengers begin their descent: first Hitler himself, in his neat uniform and jackboots, his smile quiet and self-deprecating, almost shy. He is followed by a trench-coated Goebbels and then other members of the administration, mostly dressed in business suits.

But on the tarmac, as in the theater, the crowd clearly only has eyes for their Führer. The camera pans across the outstretched arms and beaming faces of old and young alike, and their love seems to pass through the screen like light passes through glass, filling the breathless theater with that same sense of worship. Ilse all but feels it in the air, an extra current of excitement and adoration, heightened by a startling sense of proximity. For while she’s seen the German leader’s countenance a thousand times, she has rarely seen it like this: so close, so casual, so entirely alive that it seems possible he might turn his head to address her personally.

Day turns to night, then back to day. They are now in a place so familiar that a murmur of recognition sweeps the rows of uniformed youths in the Palast: a Hitlerjugend campsite filled with circular tents, from which a thousand boys sleepily emerge and begin preparing for the day’s pageantry by bathing, eating, and doing calisthenics: a thousand Rudi Gerhardts joyously offering themselves up to Führer and Palast viewers alike. It’s so huge, Ilse finds herself thinking, and is unexpectedly awed by this realization. For how many times has she confided this in Renate: her desire to matter, to be part of something bigger? And yet even in her most hopeful moments, it never occurred to her that that something could ever be quite this big, this mammoth and panoramic in scale. It’s like spending one’s entire life knowing only a single constellation, then suddenly being shown an infinite universe full of stars.

On the screen, Hitler is now addressing legions of young men bearing shovels. But again, it feels as though he’s really speaking to the room: “The whole nation will be educated by you,” he tells them. “And at this moment, it is not merely we here in Nuremberg. All of Germany sees you for the first time.”