Eva Braun in close-up

By LINDA HERRICK*

Several years ago Knauss, a German film scriptwriting professor and author of eight novels, told Der Spiegel magazine she was interested in Eva Braun, Hitler's co-suicidal lover who died with him in a Berlin bunker at the end of April, 1945.

Braun's name is forever entwined with Hitler's domain of evil, yet she was never a Nazi nor even political. Her main interest in life was clothes and shopping. So what did she and Hitler talk about, and what was behind the brittle facade of fashion?

Little of real substance was known about Braun, if there was anything to know. But she has always represented the unpalatable truth that Hitler was lovable. Whether he loved her in return remains unanswerable.

After the Der Spiegel interview, to Knauss' surprise, a woman called Gertrude Weisker contacted her. "I am the cousin of Eva Braun and I could tell you a lot."

She did, and the result is this fascinating, if gruelling, "partly true fiction" about the last months of Braun's life as told by her cousin, "Marlene".

Marlene, a naive 20-year-old, was thrilled when her glamorous older (32-year-old) cousin Eva invited her to come and stay. Eva was lonely, almost completely isolated in the Fuhrer's mountain-top retreat, the Berghof, where the staff treated her with barely concealed disdain because she was a mistress, not a wife.

She had no status beyond being Hitler's woman; she was never allowed to attend official functions and, as becomes clear here, he was fond of the cruel lover's torture, unreliability.

Marlene's alpine "holiday" had an unusual itinerary: her tour guides were SS men. Eva was not even at the notoriously precipitous front steps of the Berghof to greet Marlene. And, just as politicians like Chamberlain had succumbed earlier to the building's psychology, the girl fell prey to the Berghof's "malicious" architecture; she likened its atmosphere to James Bond film sets she saw many years later - the bad guy's luxury lair.

Marlene's perception of Eva's persona soon sharpened, becoming wary of a depressive "absolutely unbeatable in the art of nursing grievances". Eva's life revolved solely around Hitler's random visits or phone calls, and as the war worsened (for Germany) it was obvious Eva might be a little mad, with "something not quite right about her eyes".

The younger cousin politely distanced herself from "them", the Nazis, and took up residence in the property's Tea House, where she discovered a terrible secret. Her life was also endangered by the amorous demands of a top Nazi official, with whom she had to comply for the sake of survival - and not just of herself.

While Marlene continued to regard herself as "us" and the Nazis as "them", by the time the end came her internal moral defensiveness meant nothing. After the final bombing of the Berghof, she emerged from the ruins to discover one of Eva's two lapdogs alive - but like its mistress, driven crazy, "circling round itself ... as if looking for some way out of the scenario in which it finds itself".

Eva's Cousin is devastating in its sparingly wrought, often beautiful narrative by an elderly woman looking back, judged for her so-called collusion with an evil regime which set "humans" against "non-humans". Some reviewers have taken it as straight biography; it is not. It is imaginative truth.

Hitler never visited the Berghof while Marlene was there, yet his boring, terrifying presence hung like a wraith in every corner. And Weisker never escaped from her association with him by proxy of Eva. She later married and had children but as her husband told her, "Never tell anyone". Highly recommended.

By Sibylle Knauss; translated from the German by Anthea Bell:Eva's Cousin

Doubleday

$45


* Linda Herrick is the Herald arts editor.