be made at the Bavaria Film studios at Geiselgasteig, Munich. Initial meetings
will be held at the Artists’ House on Lenbachplatz in Munich, 8th September. Please report to reception at 3 pm.
Heil Hitler!
Two days away! Clara’s heart sank. She had never expected it would be so soon.
She flicked quickly through the rest of the mail. There was a postcard from Vienna with a photograph of Ringstrasse and the suggestion of a drink the following day. The card carried no signature
but Clara instantly recognized the handwriting of Rupert Allingham, a British journalist who always dropped her postcards on his travels and never signed them. The other letter was a reminder from
her friend Sabine, manager of the Elizabeth Arden salon on the Ku’damm, to pay a visit. Across the bottom of the card she had scrawled:
‘
Please come soon, Fräulein Vine, it’s important.
’
What on earth could be important about a session at the beauty parlour? People in the world of fashion and beauty seemed incapable of getting their priorities right. As if the whole business of
creams and potions was anything other than utterly trivial at a time like this.
On the other hand, if she was attending an audition, it might be a good idea to arrive looking her best. And, as Clara never forgot, sexual allure was an essential weapon in her secret work.
Lipstick, mascara and perfume were all important items in the toolkit of a female spy, and her favourite lipstick, Elizabeth Arden’s Velvet Red, in its prettily engraved gold tube, was right
down to a stub. However much the Führer might hate cosmetics, the female citizens of the Reich liked them even more at a time when new clothes were hard to come by. Yet lipstick, like coffee
and butter and oranges, was getting scarcer and fresh supplies were difficult to find. On reflection, Clara resolved to visit the salon that afternoon.
Chapter Seven
Rosa Winter flinched and tried valiantly to shut her ears to the shrieking children in the adjacent room as she carried on with her typing. Secretarial duties were dull enough
without children being brought into the office to disrupt everything. When their mother had arrived that morning for her interview, hands clamped on the shoulders of her offspring – two boys
of around eight and ten years old – she had shrugged apologetically and Rosa had smiled and nodded towards the empty office next door. The boys had brought a board game with them, the mother
explained, which would keep them quiet for at least twenty minutes. Instead it was having the opposite effect. The game was the current craze,
Juden Raus
and it looked fairly normal –
in that it involved a dice and playing pieces in the shape of large pointed hats, with ‘Jewish’ faces on them – but in terms of the aggression it aroused it was more like a boxing
match than a board game and every few moments the boys punctuated the air with cries of victory and howls of dismay. Rosa was developing a splitting headache. It would be distracting at any time,
let alone at ten o’ clock in the morning.
She sighed. She liked children, indeed she often identified with them, but she had no intention of having any of her own. Not yet, at any rate, or for a good long time. That was something she
had never told anyone. It was not the sort of thing a twenty-five-year-old woman confessed in Germany in 1938, not out loud, not to friends, not even to her own parents. Not now, when children were
the chief justification of a woman’s existence and having more than four of them – being ‘kinderreich’ – was every woman’s ambition. Not when being voluntarily
childless was deemed ‘deliberately harmful to the German nation’, which sounded an awful lot like treason if you thought about it. And most of all, not if your workplace, this drab
office packed with filing cabinets and smelling of carbolic and unwashed clothes, happened to be the very epicentre of the family in Germany, a veritable
will be held at the Artists’ House on Lenbachplatz in Munich, 8th September. Please report to reception at 3 pm.
Heil Hitler!
Two days away! Clara’s heart sank. She had never expected it would be so soon.
She flicked quickly through the rest of the mail. There was a postcard from Vienna with a photograph of Ringstrasse and the suggestion of a drink the following day. The card carried no signature
but Clara instantly recognized the handwriting of Rupert Allingham, a British journalist who always dropped her postcards on his travels and never signed them. The other letter was a reminder from
her friend Sabine, manager of the Elizabeth Arden salon on the Ku’damm, to pay a visit. Across the bottom of the card she had scrawled:
‘
Please come soon, Fräulein Vine, it’s important.
’
What on earth could be important about a session at the beauty parlour? People in the world of fashion and beauty seemed incapable of getting their priorities right. As if the whole business of
creams and potions was anything other than utterly trivial at a time like this.
On the other hand, if she was attending an audition, it might be a good idea to arrive looking her best. And, as Clara never forgot, sexual allure was an essential weapon in her secret work.
Lipstick, mascara and perfume were all important items in the toolkit of a female spy, and her favourite lipstick, Elizabeth Arden’s Velvet Red, in its prettily engraved gold tube, was right
down to a stub. However much the Führer might hate cosmetics, the female citizens of the Reich liked them even more at a time when new clothes were hard to come by. Yet lipstick, like coffee
and butter and oranges, was getting scarcer and fresh supplies were difficult to find. On reflection, Clara resolved to visit the salon that afternoon.
Chapter Seven
Rosa Winter flinched and tried valiantly to shut her ears to the shrieking children in the adjacent room as she carried on with her typing. Secretarial duties were dull enough
without children being brought into the office to disrupt everything. When their mother had arrived that morning for her interview, hands clamped on the shoulders of her offspring – two boys
of around eight and ten years old – she had shrugged apologetically and Rosa had smiled and nodded towards the empty office next door. The boys had brought a board game with them, the mother
explained, which would keep them quiet for at least twenty minutes. Instead it was having the opposite effect. The game was the current craze,
Juden Raus
and it looked fairly normal –
in that it involved a dice and playing pieces in the shape of large pointed hats, with ‘Jewish’ faces on them – but in terms of the aggression it aroused it was more like a boxing
match than a board game and every few moments the boys punctuated the air with cries of victory and howls of dismay. Rosa was developing a splitting headache. It would be distracting at any time,
let alone at ten o’ clock in the morning.
She sighed. She liked children, indeed she often identified with them, but she had no intention of having any of her own. Not yet, at any rate, or for a good long time. That was something she
had never told anyone. It was not the sort of thing a twenty-five-year-old woman confessed in Germany in 1938, not out loud, not to friends, not even to her own parents. Not now, when children were
the chief justification of a woman’s existence and having more than four of them – being ‘kinderreich’ – was every woman’s ambition. Not when being voluntarily
childless was deemed ‘deliberately harmful to the German nation’, which sounded an awful lot like treason if you thought about it. And most of all, not if your workplace, this drab
office packed with filing cabinets and smelling of carbolic and unwashed clothes, happened to be the very epicentre of the family in Germany, a veritable
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