Exile (Europa Reich Book 4) by James Philip

Author:James Philip [Philip, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Saturday 3rd September 1977

Grounds of the Schloss Charlottenburg

Germania

The Frau des Führers – the Leader’s wife – had guided Martha Stalheim around the palace and the gardens, and proudly re-introduced her daughters and the family’s dogs to her to provide footage for the opening segment of the following interview.

These shots included sequences in which the Führer – apparently informally called out of his study – had greeted Martha Stalheim, all smiles and bonhomie before making his excuses, claiming that ‘duty calls’, leaving the two women to carry on about their business. Although, not before exchanging scripted but marvellously spontaneous cheerful small talk about Martha’s husband’s daredevil exploits orbiting the Moon, making inquiries after the Stalheim children and looking forward to the intrepid astronaut’s safe return to earth next week.

That had been in the morning.

Now, in the late afternoon, both women were carefully informal in their dress and manner, forsaking the airbrushed, catwalk couture perfection with which all the women close to the Reich’s first two leaders had been required to attain and maintain in public, as befitted mere adornments on the arms of their god-like Führer.

Today, the agreed standard was ‘upper middle-class working mother’ not ‘blond bombshell’ because this was not a scatter-gun event targeted at the faithful, rather it was tailored to appeal to the women of the Western Reich who just wanted to know that somebody, somewhere understood what they were going through and had a plan to get life back to what it had been not so long ago. A life with certainties, a life in which one could know what staple foods, household goods, or toys for one’s children would cost in a week’s time, in which one’s husband was not liable to be made redundant at the drop of a hat, or that one of the new middle-ranking military robber barons was not about to expropriate one’s family home at a ridiculously low price based on regulations for home defence promulgated in the late 1940s.

The Reich had swapped a million little closely-regulated Führers in Party or SS black for freebooting regiments of new little Führers in Wehrmacht grey or Luftwaffe blue; significantly, it was only in the big naval base ports did the Kriegsmarine maintain a rigorous status quo from earlier times.

So, both women knew exactly who they were talking to; middle class women from backgrounds not unlike the ones from which they had emerged two decades ago who had believed, until now, that nobody listened to, or spoke for them.

Well, that was about the change!

Although there was no set script; the women had agreed on a ‘formula’, rehearsed several different ‘treatments’, and made sure that they set the right tone.

The women were on collegiate, almost but not quite, friendly ‘Martha’ and ‘Angela’ terms although that might not be long delayed.

The Führer bustled in while they were having a coffee break, his broad smile blowing away the Reich Broadcasting Service’s leading lady’s last, vestigial doubts that she was doing the right thing playing Angela Eckhardt-Schmidt’s ‘game’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.