A War of Flowers (2014) by Jane Thynne Page B

other. The Führerin had taken one look at the skinny girl, mousy hair parted dead down the middle, bitten nails and grey,
blinking eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses, and hired Fräulein Winter on the spot. The fact was, she looked infinitely more convincing as secretary than a journalist.
    Even then, despite her role, the first time Rosa had sat behind this typewriter her fingers had flitted over it with a visceral thrill, as though perhaps on this machine she might still get the
chance to type dispatches, personal reports, maybe a newsletter for her new employers. That was until she had received her first letter to type – a report on the marriage allowance scheme to
the Interior Ministry – and she felt the excitement in her fingers drain away. Instead she had taken to feeding her passion by keeping a notebook of what she called her
‘Observations’ – articles based on the kind of essays she used to read in the newspapers by famous writers like Joseph Roth, made up of eyewitness observations of Berlin. Not
earth-shattering events, but little things about life in the city; people she noticed, small incidents in the streets. She liked to watch people and work out what she could tell about them from the
trivial details they gave away. The fact that Rosa herself was shy and self-effacing by nature meant no one gave her a second look. Who took any notice of a drab young woman in a headscarf, peering
at them through meek, secretarial spectacles? Rosa wrote up her Observations at night, letting her imagination run wild. Writing was where her soul revealed itself.
    The boys let out another volley of shouts and Rosa shot a quick glance at the closed door, behind which the Führerin was interviewing their mother. Perhaps it was punishment for her
unnatural desire to forego children that she should now get to spend her days with a portrait of the flaxen-haired Goebbels family staring down at her desk. It was the standard, Party-issue
photograph and whenever she looked up from her typewriter, or ate her sandwiches during busy lunch hours, or paused to wonder whether she might actually spend her entire life here, the Goebbels
family would return her gaze. Being the model family, they had produced an entire marching squad of children for the Führer, little girls in pigtails and the boy in Lederhosen, flanked by
their mother, Magda, with a jaw clenched like an industrial vice, and the minister himself, with a smile as sharp as a broken bottle.
    Rosa squinted across to the opposite wall, to a map of Germany complete with flags bearing tiny swastikas, each one signalling the presence of an office of the NS Frauenschaft in that vicinity.
It looked like something a general might use, charting the progress of Panzer divisions across hostile terrain. The hostile terrain in this case being anyone who attempted to frustrate the aim of
providing ever bigger families for the Reich. Occasionally the Führerin would enter the office and stab a fresh flag in the map, proving that the doctrine of increasing the birth rate was
being carried to the farthest corners of the Reich.
    The door opened and the job candidate walked dejectedly past Rosa’s desk to retrieve her children, yanking both boys up by their arms in a practised gesture that provoked howls of protest.
As Rosa understood it, the woman’s husband had recently been killed in Spain and she was keen to return to work, but Rosa didn’t fancy her chances here. Rosa’s predecessor had
been obliged to leave when she got engaged. It wouldn’t do for the head of the entire Nazi women’s service to contravene all Party doctrine by employing a married woman, let alone one
with children.
    Rosa, on the other hand, gave no impression of having a boyfriend at all, which obviously suited the Führerin very well. After all, she had just given Rosa the trip of a lifetime –
two weeks in the sun, with negligible duties and no typing at all. The Kraft durch Freude organization was