Eva's Cousin Book

In the summer of 1944 Gertraud Weisker was twenty years old when her older cousin Eva Braun invited her to come and keep her company at Berchtesgaden, the Fuhrer's mountain retreat. Flattered and seduced by her glamorous cousin's interest, she went, defying her anti-Nazi father, and stayed until Eva left to share Hitler's fate in his Berlin bunker. After the war, Gertraud's husband forbade her to talk about her connection to Braun, and so she kept quiet for over fifty years. It was only in her seventies, after her husband's death, that she decided to break her silence and told her story, to Sybille Knauss, who used it to create a novel based on Gertraud's memories. EVA'S COUSIN recalls that summer of 1944 and the carefree yet sinister idyll of life at Hitler's huge house on the Oberslzberg, 'the country house of evil'. The Fuhrer is away directing the war, and young Gertraud is dazzled by the glamour of her cousin, and the sex appeal of the Nazi officials she finds herself at table with every evening. She falls for a young SS officer, and they embark on a torrid affair. But in a pavilion in the grounds, she encounters an escaped thirteen-year-old Ukranian slave labourer, and after clandestinely listening to BBC radio reports, she can't prevent her eyes from gradually opening to the atrocities unfolding outside her cloistered world, and the mystery of her cousin's obsessive love for the Fuhrer. Told through the eyes of an innocent, young girl, EVA'S COUSIN illuminates the banality of the domestic face of evil, and looking back from the perspective of more than half a century, tries to come to make sense of a deeply disturbed and disturbing time. Like Bernard Schlink's THE READER and Rachel Seiffert's THE DARK ROOM, it throws a special and sensitive light on the issues of innocence and complicity that are the legacy of Nazism for ordinary Germans to this day.