Oh dear, no cinema, so here’s the anecdote (see previous post) in which, during WWII, Francoist propagandist, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, gets horny with Goebbels’ wife and attempts to marry José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s sister, Pilar, off to Hitler:
At the end of 1941, with the world war in full swing, there occurred one of the most surreal episodes of European politics, described extensively in [Giménez Caballero]’s Memorias de un dictador (1979). He had gone to Weimar, invited to [a conference of the Europäische Schriftsteller-Vereinigung] (23-26 October 1941), presided over by minister Goebbels. The Hispanist Arturo Farinelli presented him to Magda, Goebbels’ wife, “a wonderful woman who impressed me from the first moment”, whom he sounded out re his plans. One was “to catholicise Hitler” and to obtain peace by means of marriage. At Christmas he was already back in Berlin, having consulted Franco and the Vatican re his plan. “Two days before Christmas Eve, Goebbels invited me to have supper at his home, with his wife and their children.” Giménez Caballero had taken a [red torero’s] cape as a gift to Hitler’s lieutenant: “Before we sat down at the table, during the aperitifs, I showed the little, lame German propaganda chief how to use the cape, how to wear it for the parade [paseíllo] and how to make passes [veroniquear] with it. And I constructed a nativity scene next to the chimney for the children. Magda was radiant and moved.” After supper he remained alone with [Mrs Goebbels], and he had a brief chance to present to her his finished plan:
“She observed a brief silence which I embraced to commend the urgent resumption of the Spanish-Austrian line – which would bring armistice to Europe – with a link both traditional and revolutionary.
– And who was the candidate empress?
– There could only be one. In the line of Spanish princesses like Ingunda and Brunequilda and Gelesvinta and Eugenia… Only one, for her purity of blood, her deep Catholic faith, and, above all, because she would attract all the youth of Spain: José Antonio Primo de Rivera’s sister…
Magda didn’t respond. Suddenly, her eyes became moist. And she took my hands and gripped them. And, in very low voice, she said to me the following:
– Your vision is extraordinary… Your mission also… And, moreover, it is audacious, brave, and specific…
She was silent again, only to continue:
– My husband is delighted with you. And the Führer wants to get to know you. I spoke to them of that which you have now again proposed to me in a way that is already concrete and correctly fleshed out. And it would be possible…
– It would be possible?
– It would be possible… if Hitler did not have a First World War bullet wound in a genital… which has invalided him for ever… Impossible, great friend, impossible. There would be no succession!
– And Eva Braun?
– Pious camouflage for the gallery…
I rose. I took her hands.
– Then goodbye forever, Magda?
– And why forever?
And she placed her hands on my lips and then on hers.”
At last, something for which we can be grateful to Albert Hall. Imagine, if you will, the scene in Seville Cathedral. The only thing worse than crashing this party would have been being discovered.
Source: Filosofia.org. There’s a bullfighting vocabulary here. I know of no equivalent collection of chat-up lines for Nazi wives.
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