An American Princess: The Many Lives of Allene Tew(36)
Unemployment figures shot up, the government was powerless, and the battered country was hit by a paralyzing malaise in which extremist political ideals could easily take root—ideals such as those of Austrian-born Adolf Hitler, who in 1920 set up the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP), the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, in Munich, along with a group of other war vets. He said everything many Germans, embittered and robbed of their self-respect, wanted to hear: that the Jews were to blame for everything, that the Treaty of Versailles was criminal, and that the politicians of the Weimar Republic were traitors who had thrown away their country.
At first, the German aristocracy wanted little to do with the noisy demagogue from Munich. But Hitler successfully managed to give the impression that the former elite would rise again to eminence under his rule and, more important, that he was their only hope to exorcise the Bolshevik threat from the east. From 1930 onward, more and more German aristocrats began to sign up as members of the NSDAP.
Allene’s husband, Henry Reuss, was not yet a member—probably because he was a Freemason and the national socialist movement refused admission to that group’s members. But when the NSDAP became the largest party in 1932 and Adolf Hitler managed to secure the position of Reich chancellor, beginning a large-scale Nazification of Germany, Allene’s husband tried all kinds of ways to forge an alliance with his fatherland’s New Order.
In November 1933, living temporarily in Berlin, Henry wrote a letter in which he offered to work as an unpaid volunteer for Hitler’s right hand, Heinrich Himmler, at the Schutzstaffel, the NSDAP’s paramilitary organization. “The SS liaison staff would suit me,” he wrote, “leaving aside my affinities with the SS.” He omitted to mention that the French government had asked him to remain in his own country for the time being because of his, for a diplomat, rather fanatically vented fascist ideas.
Later Allene would tell her friends that it was mainly her husband’s political views that had led to the schism in their marriage. All totalitarian systems, whether communist or fascist, were alien to her—as a true-blue American and believer in a democratic republic, she couldn’t imagine any other political system. Henry even caused problems with the household staff. At a certain point, the staff, some of whom were Jewish, refused to wear livery with the Reuss coat of arms in protest of their employer’s virulent anti-Semitism.
In any case, Henry’s overtures seemed to have little effect on the Nazis. Now that Hitler held absolute power in Germany, he no longer needed the aristocracy to make him or his party socially acceptable, and the letter sent in November 1933 was never answered. In August 1934—Hitler had made short shrift of practically all of his political opponents less than five weeks earlier during a series of political executions, the bloody “Night of the Long Knives”—Henry tried again. He offered to put the Trebschen estate at the disposal of the esteemed führer, whom he presumed must be tired by “his burdens and responsibilities of the state,” in order for him to catch his breath. The estate was relatively close to Berlin, Henry wrote temptingly, and yet remote enough to guarantee the leader of the German Reich privacy and peace and quiet. “It’s very quiet but the most important thing is that one sleeps wonderfully here!”
The Nazis also disregarded this generous offer. And because Henry was no longer welcome in France or in the Rue Barbet, in the fall of 1934, out of desperation, he moved into his sister’s castle in Stonsdorf. There, to while away the hours, he painted a kind of Alpine landscape on the walls of the dining room, just as he’d decorated the drawing room in the Chateau de Suisnes.
As was her custom, Allene traveled to New York in October for a couple of months to settle her affairs and see her friends. Contrary to previous years, she boarded the cruise liner without a husband, a detail the ever-alert American press hounds immediately noted. In particular, Maury Paul—the most famous society reporter of the period, feared for his sharp tongue—wrote openly in his Cholly Knickerbocker columns about the Reusses’ marital crisis, with clear knowledge of the affair:
Henry had been a flat failure as a husband, judged from all angles, but Allene kept her nose tilted proudly and declined to confirm stories of marital discord.
Head proudly held high or not, somewhere in that dark, crisis-ridden winter, Allene must have realized that the fairy tale in which she played an American princess was over. Although she clung to her revised birth year of 1876, in fact she was already several years past sixty, and all the beauty specialists, plastic surgeons, and couturiers in the world could no longer disguise the fact that the days when she was commonly recognized as a beauty were now consigned to the past. The illusion of being the kind of beloved wife she’d been to Anson had been destroyed by the many often-humiliating scenes she’d had with Henry. Her dream of becoming a mother again also lay in pieces. Although her stepson, Heiner, still accepted her care and attention, his sister, Marlisa, still treated her with icy contempt.
To make matters worse, Allene’s brief illusion of finding happiness with Henry had cost her buckets of money. A divorce would undoubtedly cost much more—and this at the very moment when her finances were already under serious pressure from the economic crisis, which dragged on and by now had reduced half of America to poverty. Things were going so badly for the apartment complex on Park Avenue that its proprietors had been forced a year earlier to hand over the still mainly empty building to an insurance company, an event that transformed its owners into renters.