The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (17 page)

Olga’s sister, Ada, who had never enjoyed anything like her sister’s success, joined her former brother-in-law’s cast as ‘ist Witch’. Ada had clearly not accustomed herself to life outside Russia as easily as Olga. ‘I both accept the West and push it away with all my force,’ she wrote to Aunt Olya. ‘I am avoiding people here, they are all strangers... I’ve enrolled as an actress here, and can you imagine, it’s all going very successfully from the first play ... Misha is content, he says I’m a good actress.’

In her letter, Ada recounted that everybody at home in Berlin was fine, but they were hard up. ‘Olga only played in one film, in June.’ This comparatively lean period would not last long, and soon Olga was working again as hard as ever. Her most successful movie at this time,
Liebelei,
directed by Max Ophüls, was a tragic romance based on Arthur Schnitzler’s famous play about codes of honour in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. The storyline was typical of those inter-war years. A good-looking officer falls in love with a violinist’s daughter, but a past love affair with a baroness comes back to haunt him.

Yet even during the six-month period of little work, Olga had shown hardly any inclination to become seriously involved with a man. Perhaps seeing Misha again had reminded her of the disadvantages of men trying to run her life.

Her brother, Lev, on the other hand, had married quite suddenly the previous year. His choice of partner was surprising for a supposedly penitent White Guardist. His wife, Lyubov Sergeevna Zalesskaya, was the daughter of a famous architect of noble family. She was daring, intelligent and avant-garde, and looked the part with short hair and tennis shoes. At a time of developing Stalinist conformity, it was almost shocking.

Lyuba and Lev moved in with Aunt Olya at 23 Gogolevsky bulvar, and a year later their son, Andrei, was born. The population of the apartment even included Lev’s old nanny, Fanny Stangel, who still spoke only German. Lev himself, however, was hardly ever there. He was supposedly touring Central Asia, composing songs for the Red Army, to whose propaganda department he was now attached.

Lev’s apparent freedom to roam seems extraordinary at such a time of bureaucratic controls. In 1930, the year of his marriage, he travelled down the Caucasus, through South Ossetia and along the Black Sea coast. He was fascinated by the polyphonic singing he had heard on the way, but his real reason for vowing to return was a growing obsession with the mountains themselves. ‘I was addicted for ever,’ he wrote later. He argued that this love of rock climbing was not to conquer peaks, but to explore his own limits of endurance, to train his will and to survive everything that nature put in his path.

As the tensions of the Stalinist regime began to build in the 1930S, the dangers would not come on a cliff-face. Nobody would be safe, even in their own apartment. Fear took on a different dimension as people lay in bed before dawn, awakened by the footsteps of an arrest squad rushing up the communal staircase. They relaxed only after they heard the hammering on somebody else’s door.

14. The Totalitarian Years

On 30 January 1933, after a day of confusion and uncertainty, the evening paper in Berlin announced: ‘Hitler Reichschancellor’. A few hours later, massed ranks of SA Brown Shirts marched in a victory parade through the floodlit Brandenburg Gate. Their supporters on both sides of the Pariser Platz cheered and chanted, their arms erect in the Nazi salute.

From the windows of the Adlon Hotel, the rich looked on as if from theatre boxes, still unable to take such vulgar street drama seriously. But even those who could imagine what it signified experienced a sense of angry disbelief. There were many who loathed the Nazis in Berlin, a city which had always taken pride in its irreverent jokes. The Nazi vote, to the frustration of Goebbels, who had been put in charge of the party in the capital, had always been lower than anywhere else. But the parade that evening was a warning that electoral percentages were about to become as irrelevant as the rule of law.

Those who believed that such a grotesque political movement could not last long were rapidly disabused. Carnival in Berlin, a more nervous one than in previous years, was suddenly pushed aside by the Reichstag fire on 28 February. The Nazis had called the Reichstag a ‘hot air factory’, but Hitler, seizing the opportunity, promoted it to the symbol of German civilization. Well before dawn, the first Nazi snatch squads were on their way to arrest Communists and Socialists alike. Within hours, emergency legislation gave Hitler total power.

Even after the suspension of all civil liberties, many Berlin Jews still joked that they had passed through the Red Sea and that they would ‘pass through the brown shit’. Others had a clearer idea of what was at stake. Left-wingers and Jews in the theatre and cinema would never be allowed to work again. Ernst Toller and Max Reinhardt soon left for the United States. Altogether that year, 40,000 Jews left Germany, including twenty Nobel laureates, Einstein among them. Others in artistic and scientific circles waited much longer, in many cases until 1938, to see whether their world would return to its senses. Conrad Veidt, who in 1931 had starred with Olga Chekhova in
Die Nacht der Entscheidung (The Night of Decision),
left because his wife was Jewish. Yet he later became famous in the English-speaking world for his role as Major Strasser ‘of the Third Reich’ in
Casablanca.

The very fact of staying enforced a large degree of collaboration on actors who continued to work. Some of the theatrical anecdotes which tried to mitigate their complicity with the regime were less than convincing. Olga Chekhova recounted the following story. She and a friend, the elderly comic actress Adele Sandrock, who called her ‘Mouse’ (presumably because she was so unmouselike), were apparently invited to the propaganda ministry, known to Berliners as the Promi. ’Adele had some fluffy garment wrapped around her and had a huge embroidered handbag. Hitler appeared and started one of his monologues as always. He said that he knew the Burgtheater, where Adele was playing, and he had admired their previous plays, but he had to point out that in a recent performance Jewish actors had been enthusiastically applauded. Adele interrupted him. “Herr Reichschancellor,” she said. “Please drop this subject. I don’t want to hear about it. But between you and me, I must admit that my best lovers were Jewish.” Hitler was stunned into silence. Adele got up from her chair, turned to Olga Konstantinovna. “Mouse, can you take me home, please?”

“‘Of course, dear Adele,” she said, and bade Hitler and Goebbels farewell:
“Alles Gute, meine Herren.”’

This highly dubious vignette raises a question about Olga Chekhova’s first meeting with Hitler. Her version of events depended upon her audience. In her two post-war volumes of memoirs, she of course played down her contacts as much as possible. She was also a good deal less than frank in her written report for Abakumov, the chief of SMERSh, in Moscow in May 1945. Yet she did reveal in her first SMERSh interview in Berlin on 29 April, while the fighting still raged in the city, that she had been presented to Hitler very soon after the Nazi takeover:

Q [COLONEL SHKURIN]: Did you happen to meet leaders of the German fascist state?

A [OLGA CHEKHOVA]: When Hitler came to power in 1933 I was invited to a reception given by Propaganda Minister Goebbels where Hitler was also present. I and other actors were introduced to Hitler. He expressed his pleasure at meeting me. Also he expressed his interest in Russian art and in my aunt, Olga Leonardovna Chekhova.

It is a great pity that she did not record in more detail Hitler’s opinions on Russian art. Would he, like Lenin, have enjoyed the plays of Chekhov, while wanting to exterminate the human material in which they were set? Or was he, the arriviste dictator, simply fawning upon a star he had worshipped in his years as an outcast?

Both Hitler and Goebbels were obsessed with the cinema. Goebbels is estimated to have seen more than 1,100 films in the dozen years of the Nazi regime. On Hitler’s fiftieth birthday, Goebbels presented him with a collection of 120 movies for the screening room in the Fiihrer’s Alpine retreat, the Berghof. Albert Speer later recounted how Hitler used to keep them up into the early hours of the morning, lecturing them on what they had just seen as if he were a frustrated movie critic.

Hitler was also fascinated by the Swedish actress Zarah Leander, who was frequently compared to Olga Chekhova. Leander was famous for her singing in a low, husky voice. Hitler used to coax his adored dog, Blondi, to sing when he wanted to impress his inner circle of secretaries and officers at the Berghof. Then, when she began to give voice, he would say: ‘Sing lower, Blondi, sing like Zarah Leander!’ and she would howl like a wolf. It has recently emerged that Zarah Leander was probably a much more active agent for Soviet intelligence than Olga Chekhova. Leander, who was given the NKVD codename of ‘Rose-Marie’, had the advantage of being able to travel back to Sweden, where she could make contact unseen with her controller, Zoya Rybkina, the deputy rezident in Stockholm. Rybkina would not have been informed of Olga Chekhova at that time, but Beria made Rybkina Olga Chekhova’s controller in extraordinary circumstances in 1953, as will be seen later.

For Hitler and Goebbels, the movies were a make-believe world of intoxicating power. Nazism, like Communism, had copied much from the Church, but it owed just as big a debt to the artifical glamour and emotions of the
Kino.
It is highly significant that the Nazis saw nothing strange in the idea of politics imitating popular art. It was part of their breathtaking irresponsibility. Of course, Hitler and Goebbels also saw the cinema as a powerful weapon of propaganda and social engineering. The Nazification of the industry was vital for their purposes and UFA returned to the role originally planned for its prototype in 1917.

Yet this was not an entirely dramatic change of course. During the two years before Hitler’s assumption of power, the UFA studios, financed by right-wing money, had produced a series of strongly patriotic historical movies, such as Der
Choral von Leuthen,
another Frederick the Great film in which Olga Chekhova starred,
Yorck,
the hero of the Prussian volte-face against Napoleon, and
Der schwarze Husar (The Black Hussar).
Another film, the story of a heroic struggle by a German U-Boat crew against a British destroyer during the First World War, happened to be launched on the day after the Nazi assumption of power.

In the beginning, the new rulers of Germany also needed glamour, especially at their government receptions. Most of the heavily built Nazi wives constituted both an aesthetic and a social embarrassment. Some of the leaders themselves were little better. Himmler, according to Olga Chekhova, used to shuffle his feet. He was both gauche and uneasy in female company. The presence of movie stars, especially one like Olga Chekhova, famous for her roles as a baroness, was important for the
nouveaux puissants.
It was slightly reminiscent of Napoleon’s hope that the young émigré nobles whom he had allowed to return would raise the tone of his court. But the cosmopolitan sophistication of stars like Olga Chekhova was also needed to make the regime more acceptable internationally.

Olga’s mother, Baba Knipper, was indignant when an early-morning call summoned her daughter to an early-evening reception given by Goebbels. ‘What sort of manners is it to invite a lady by telephone in the morning to command her to come to something in the afternoon?’ she demanded. Olga Chekhova, a true professional, was far more concerned with the effect on the day’s filming, which did not finish until seven. Her director, however, told her that she must go. Nobody at Babelsberg could afford to thwart the Reichsminister for Propaganda and People’s Enlightenment. As Olga left the studio, she found a ‘little man’ from the propaganda ministry waiting to drive her in a sports car to the reception in the Wilhelm Strasse. On the way, she insisted that he stop so that she could buy a rose to smarten up her dress.

Magda Goebbels, the only
grande dame
the Nazi regime possessed, reproved her gently. ‘So late, Frau Chekhova.’

‘I came here straight from work, Frau Goebbels,’ she replied, ‘and I only received the invitation by telephone this morning.’

Hitler on this occasion was talking about what he expected from the arts, which led him on to the subject of his own painting as a young man. He spoke to Olga Chekhova about her movie
Burning Frontiers,
released in 1926. ‘Hitler flooded me with compliments,’ she recounted, and she remarked on his ‘Austrian courtesy’. In her view Hitler made an effort to be charming, while Dr Goebbels succeeded by dint of tremendous application, ‘a polished intellect’ and a sun-ray lamp. According to one of Hitler’s secretaries, her counterparts at the propaganda ministry used to rush to the window to watch him leave the building. ’Oh,‘ they gushed to her amazement, ’if you only knew what eyes Goebbels has, and what an enchanting smile!‘

Goebbels often described Olga Chekhova in his diaries as
‘eine charmanteFrau‘,
but how far he attempted to exercise his own charm with her is not known. The Reichsminister for Propaganda was so famous for his casting-couch tactics that starlets were known as
‘Goebbels-Gespielin’
or ’Goebbels play-things‘. Berliners used to joke that he did not sleep in his own bed, but in his own big mouth, because the slang word for mouth—’
Klappe
‘—also meant a clapperboard in the movies.

The diminutive and club-footed ‘Goat of Babelsberg’ was not, however, all-conquering. His pouncing was seen as an unpleasant rite of passage to be brushed off by those who had the courage. The actress Irene von Meyendorff said of him:
’Ach, der mit seinem Regenwurm!‘
(’Oh, him with his little worm!‘)

Goebbels probably did not really love women. He just needed to conquer them because he had a severe inferiority complex due to his physical limitations. One of the intriguing paradoxes is that Goebbels preferred exotic-looking women and was not attracted by the stereotypes of blonde Aryan beauty which he lauded in his propaganda films. Nevertheless, all that can be said in his favour is that his approach was less brutal than Beria’s technique of kidnap, rape and then Gulag for those who resisted.