"He notices I have a cough and makes sure I have a Schnapps [a spirit] and a glass of Gluhwein [hot spiced wine]. I end up a little drunk." The diaries of Unity Valkyrie Mitford, the English friend of Hitler who may have been his lover, have emerged from the depths of history to be published in the pages of a British newspaper, the Daily Mail, not the most prestigious one but presented endorsed by several historians as a real document. What can be said about her entries? Unity's texts are full of scenes like these, pages that portray the soul of a 22-year-old girl, platonically in love (with Hitler, let's not trivialize) and a bit scatterbrained.
Unity saw Adolf and felt the presence of the sublime in the mundane. She wrote things like "he invited me to his table, and then the waitress, Rosa, told me he never does such things"; or "he gave me a Wagner record"; or "I saw him a bit sickly but in good spirits" or "it was the best day of my life" (written in emphatic capitals). When referring to Hitler with a pronoun, Unity also wrote in uppercase He, His, Him...
Were they lovers? That is the question everyone hopes to see answered in such a document, and the official answer is that we still do not know for certain. But, let's be honest, that more likely means they were not. Unity was a gossipy diarist who would hardly have overlooked the detail of an intimate relationship with the man she idolized, the most famous in the world. Well: there are also accounts portraying Unity as a sexual predator of SS officers in Munich, and that does not appear in her diaries either. Eva Braun also wrote her notebooks and referred to Unity as a particularly unpleasant rival, but it is not clear whether Braun and Hitler ever consummated their long and strange courtship.
A quote from Oscar Wilde inspired Unity's generation and social class (1914-1944) and her sisters, the famous Mitford sisters (born between 1904 and 1920): what matters in life is not being good or bad, but being charming or tedious. For the past 85 years, half the world has considered Unity Mitford's infamy as the consequence of that ethical renunciation. In her effort not to be boring, Unity would have gone down in history as the girl who committed suicide out of love for the Führer and who embarrassed those who loved her in the worst possible way. That, more or less, is the official version that has been crafted of her since 1939, the moment she took her own life because the imminent war between Germany and the British Empire put her in an impossible situation (Unity took five years to die from her wounds). In parallel, another version romanticized Unity, presenting her as a fragile creature who never fit into the world and was more a victim of herself than anything else.
What do her diaries say about this ambiguity? That both aspects are compatible, that Unity's image in Munich in 1936 is equally odious for its frivolity and heartbreaking for its loneliness. Unity was the ugly duckling in a family of very charming and never boring women whose story is extensively narrated from within. The Mitford family left behind 1,200 letters of their private correspondence and diaries and books, among which stand out, obviously, those of Nancy Mitford, the sister who knew how to distance herself and tell her life through self-parody. What kind of people keep such a quantity of letters if not expecting to be narrated? Therefore, Unity's diaries are actually a small extension of the great literary collage of the Mitfords with their fascinating characters: Diana, the glamorous fascist; Deborah, the one who was determined to survive; Jessica, the anti-fascist who went to fight for the Spanish Republic; Nancy, the writer who ennobled the ridiculous with literature, Pamela... Unity, on the other hand, was left with the role of the not-so-bright girl who always lagged behind amidst her sisters' jokes.
Stories like these exist everywhere, right? But people don't become Nazis because they have smart and beautiful sisters. So, the story of the Mitfords and Unity's figure have also been interpreted in socio-political terms. Their time was that of the flappers and Brideshead Revisited, the end of the era of aristocracy, mansions, and a life of luxury. After World War I, the service that maintained the manors realized they would fare better in cities, in industries.
Lords like the Mitfords lost the servants who sustained their upstairs-downstairs game. A tax reform made their way of life unviable, which, deep down, was starting to become somewhat shameful. The aristocracy's children were sent to boarding schools. The girls were left in their rooms, entrusted to the staff, with no education other than a few French lessons. Some girls became brilliant self-taught individuals like Nancy Mitford, and others became odious creatures deserving of our compassion, like Unity.
Poor Unity, whose parents gave her the middle name Valkyrie and gleefully recounted that she was conceived in a place in Canada called Swastika. Who tells such things? The Mitford father, David Freeman-Mitford, was a character almost contemporary to us in his ambiguity. He realized that the world of aristocrats was ending and decided to expose himself to the world as a buffoonish performer, as a self-promoter who parodied his world because that was his business. He also insisted on making money, and for those two decisions, he was heavily criticized among his peers.
Her daughters grew up like castaways on a deserted island. They developed a private dialect, called honish, which was a mix of the servants' speech and that of their parents, and it had even more private subdialects. The hen was the honish spoken by Unity and Jessica, for example. Evelyn Waugh met the Mitford girls and was fascinated by their solipsism, which ended up permeating the character of Lord Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead. For that character, the abyss that attracted him was that of sexual and alcoholic depravity. For Unity, Germany played that role. In 1933, she traveled to Munich, heard a speech by the leader of the NSDAP by chance, and was captivated. When she returned to Germany, she conspired to enter his world. According to her diaries, they met 138 times. So, did they meet 138 times and never sleep together? Hitler also had his issues, as they say now.