The Hidden World

by Pam Wolfson

Murnau, Germany, 1933

1

Gabriele pressed her tongue into the basement door. She spat out the bitter taste. Leaning forward into the door with outstretched arms, she inhaled. Nothing but a slight musty smell. She bent her ear and listened. Only a faint dullness. She felt sensations coming off the cloaked paintings hidden inside. Art made by herself, by Wassily, created twenty years ago. (Was she called him when they were lovers.) These jeweled works, brilliant with rich colors and angled shapes. Wrapped beneath newspaper and twine now, crammed into a shallow dark space. Their beauty felt far away, and she missed it.

A peculiar sensation filled her stomach. She knew it wouldn’t be long—a matter of weeks, perhaps—before Hitler’s Brownshirts came snooping around. Rumors were flying in her rural village that they were searching homes for suspicious art. Art that the chancellor had called “un-German,” that deviated from clean lines and nature’s true colors. The minister of culture had spewed to the press that modern artists were “facile smearers of paint” who couldn’t see straight. What nonsense. Gabriele and her colleagues in Der Blaue Reiter movement had celebrated nature’s pure energy. Blaue, spoken slowly with a dip in its vowel-laden center, held the calm of a blue lake. Reiter, spitting consonants through the front teeth, summoned a body clasping a sprinting horse. The name held the verve that they felt inside.

Shutting her eyes, Gabriele sensed blue rising from the paintings before her. Turquoise, cobalt, ultramarine, and midnight dark spiraled out from the canvases. They coiled into the still air, swelling in shadow, breathing, tapping ever so slightly, asking, please, let us see the light. Blue, the color of infinity, Was said, “a heavenly color,” stirred a sense of transcendence. Blue, the color of hope. Blue that complemented the bright oranges, deep yellows, and greens that brought joy to their paintings. All that richness was in the past. Her Russian confidant, his name echoing as Vas in her head, was rapt.

* * *

Gabriele stepped backward and opened the cellar door. Jars of trapped gooseberries and red currants filled the shelves. Behind all that, the small room with the hidden artworks. Perhaps she should pry off the outer door to show she had nothing to hide if the Brownshirts came. Why not appear as the perfect German housewife who canned food and filled the coal bin? Gabriele had better discuss this idea with Finn. She always relied on her dear friend to come up with creative solutions.

Eager to leave the dank basement, Gabriele went outside. The warm air of this June day enveloped her as she strolled in her lush garden. She squatted to pluck greens and dig up new potatoes for dinner. Johannes, her confidant and lover of five years, was walking home from the village. She looked up. Knowing that a cool wind would sweep down later from the Alps yet not steer off the oncoming storm, Gabriele wondered what news he would bring today. Last week, he had seen the grocer’s wife cry because someone had smeared black paint all over her shop window. “It’s because my husband’s Jewish,” she had said. 

Gabriele had hit the wall hard with her hand. “How could they? Hurting good, honest folks.” 

In the distance, gray clouds shifted over the mountains. 

2

Two weeks later, after a full morning of sketching, Gabriele heard a determined knock. She opened the front door. A solitary man with close-cropped hair wore a brown shirt with big pockets over his chest, tight pants, and high black boots. A large mole pressed into his right cheek. He seemed oddly familiar. Maybe she had seen this young man in the village. His large feet caught her eye as if he was a puppy getting ready to grow into a beast.

“Mrs. Münter?”

She had never been married but she would not bother correcting him. 

“I hear you’re an artist.”

“Yes, I dabble with paint from time to time.”

He began to take notes, which irked her. “I’d like to look around.”

“Why, may I ask?”

“All art in Germany must be fitting and pure. Weak art must be weeded out. We need to steer Germany in the right direction and tend to the spiritual health of the nation.”

Such lofty words. Did this boy have some education, or was he merely mimicking puffy phrases?

Gabriele pushed wispy brown strands from her forehead. He must be noticing her hair, cut chin-length into a bob, just right for a woman in her mid-fifties. She wanted to shoo him away but outstretched her hand. “Please.”

He surveyed the living room silently and gazed approvingly at her still life. She had hung this simple scene with a teapot, cake, and painted Easter eggs as a decoy. Then he entered the kitchen. “Ah.” He pointed to Gabriele’s painting of the local village in winter. “Yours, right?”

Glowing patches of green, pink, and blue brightened the tilted buildings. Dark outlines, almost as if taken from stained-glass, held them together with dynamic energy. White clouds streaked the sky. She felt herself blush. Suddenly, she saw her painting through his eyes as having a fantastical look. She felt foolish.

“Best to get this down.” He stroked his chin and then rapped the canvas with his knuckles. As if it were his! “You don’t want this garish style. Do you?” He held the painting’s edge. “I can take it if you like.”

“Oh, no.” Gabriele felt like an admonished schoolgirl. She plucked the painting from its hook. “I’ll burn it out back tonight.”

“Well, then.” He tipped his cap. “A good day to you. Be mindful of what I said.”

She watched the young man walk down her curved driveway with a jaunty snap in his step. The upstart. Consider yourself warned or else, he might as well have said it. Fear pinched her chest. The Brownshirts must not cart away her work or, worse yet, ban it. 

That night, Johannes furled his gray brows. “I wish you hadn’t been here alone. We must be careful going forward.”

“We have to lead our lives.”

“Yes, but let’s be mindful of risks.”

Of course, he would worry. Gabriele had painted Johannes’s portrait and knew the precise modulations of his moods. His delicate nose flared slightly and his brown eyes, full of intelligence befitting an art historian, narrowed when he was concerned. He preferred decorum to risk; in cool weather, he loved to tuck his pale scarf neatly into his coat’s collar. 

Gabriele peered out the window. She remembered the night they had met, at a party in Berlin on New Year’s Eve, eighteen years ago. Glasses of gin were pressed into their hands in the crowded apartment. She wore a cloche hat and a black dress. Johannes pulled his wool scarf close to his chest in the chilly air. He asked politely if she was Gabriele Münter, the artist. 

“Indeed.” She smiled. 

“How do you begin your paintings?” His voice was full of respect. 

“I do a small sketch. Then I draw my idea on canvas with a black brush.”

“A bold move. Your background as a graphic designer shows.” 

He knew that? She felt flattered. 

They began to exchange letters and met up occasionally.

At first, she was charmed by Johannes’s caution. She needed ease after her ordeal with Was. Over time, their conversations grew richer. “Come to Murnau,” she said finally. After four years of courting her, he moved in.

3

In 1917, thirteen years before she settled with Johannes in Murnau, Gabriele felt cast off, without direction. Was had left her for good. Their twelve-year relationship had ended. Alone in Murnau, she forced herself to paint Meditation. A seated woman, a ghostly one, sat in her parlor. 

Gabriele gave the model a blanched face with stark black eyebrows. A blood-red stripe slashed her cheek. 

Gabriele drew the large window behind her figure to let in the fiery orange sky. As she worked, she felt a low-grade fever spread under her skin. What would become of her life and art now that Was, whom the world knew as Kandinsky, had vanished from her life? 

* * *

His departures had been a habit for years. At the start of World War 1, Was had left Gabriele abruptly. As a Russian, an “enemy alien,” he had fled to Germany. In his profuse letters that followed, he had lavished tenderness upon his “Ella.” I kiss your beloved hands and your dear lips. My foxy-woxy, my beast. I will come back and marry you. She had responded, My dear, good Wassi, my sweet one. They met up when they could in Switzerland.

Months later, his lawyer sent her a terse letter. Wassily had moved back to Russia and had wed a teenager, a general’s daughter. Gabriele felt furious at Was. You could not tell me yourself? You scoundrel! She screamed at the portrait she had painted of this proud man with his goatee and pince nez glasses. 

After weeks of silence, Was scribbled back one line. I misled you because I did not know myself. 

Did not know himself! He knew plenty about his selfish desires. How could he lust after a teenager? That Russian girl must have possessed an innocent purity that aroused his patriotism. 

* * *

In the parlor with her model, Gabriele squeezed blue paint onto her palette. She needed bluish-purple to create the flowers in the room. As she mixed pigments, Gabriele remembered how Was spoke passionately about colors. As a boy, he had lived with his aunt in Odesa by the Black Sea, music and art pulsing through his body. Sound and color had vibrated in his temples, fingertips, genitals, and toes. He saw waves and sea colors, shimmering or slurry, everywhere. For him, pigments and sound had magical powers. Later, he visited Russian churches. “The blues were heavenly,” he said. “I felt like I moved through a painting and a symphony. Some blues sounded like a flute, a thundering double bass, or an organ. I drifted in a trance.” Gabriele had reveled in his sensations back then and began to feel the landscape differently.

As she returned to her painting, the sunset began to fade. Blues began to deepen in the sky and in the sofa inside. If only Gabriele heard Was’s beautiful blue sounds. Instead the deep moan of an organ filled her head. The sound, a pitchy black, disturbed her soul. The instrument’s bellows and shadowy tones ripped at Gabriele’s loss.

The model broke her pose and coughed loudly, raising her hand to her mouth. Four black piano keys seemed to appear on the woman’s striped, ragged white sleeve, evoking a sad melody. Gabriele would add them to her painting. Around her model were the trappings of comfort—peaches on a plate, a vase, a red lamp—but the woman seemed listless. Her eyes were dull. 

Of course they were. She was sensing Gabriele’s sorrow. 

Gabriele stood back from her work and gasped. White tones filled her canvas. Blue-white on the table, gray-white at the window, and smoky-white on the model’s blouse. Just as Was had revealed to her long ago, white tones in paintings, just like pauses in music (silences that he found “deadly”) had disrupted any sense of desired calm. Gabriele’s fragile mood was mirrored everywhere.

She pulled off her apron. “Done for today.” 

“Really?” The model stretched her arms and crossed the room. “My,” she said, her breath too close to Gabriele’s cheek. “It doesn’t look like me, but like a sad you.” 

Gabriele stared at her “other” self on the canvas and agreed silently.

4

The morning after the Brownshirt visited her, Gabriele left the house early. Eager for fresh air, she walked briskly toward the village. As she neared the bakery, her gaze fell upon a flat box of Trommler cigarettes by the side of the road. The image of a young, erect soldier playing a drum on the yellow cover made her stop. His blondish hair and patriotic pride were so like her recent visitor’s. Gabriele squashed the box with her shoe. Hitler had made these cheap cigarettes the official choice for his paramilitary zealots. Sales, according to Finn, who had a unique access to scuttlebutt, funded the Nazi cause.

Finn often amazed her. He could blend in as a beer-drinking buddy in the village or step back as a critical observer of worldly affairs. Gabriele trusted him from the day she had met him in a lumber store. So warm and matter of fact. In no time, he felt like a brother, like the one she had lost, along with her mother and father, by the time she was twenty.

Craving something sweet, Gabriele pushed open the door to the bakery. The air smelled of rye and wheat. She glanced at the nearly empty hump-shaped glass case, missing the nut-filled pastries that used to be crowded inside it. Only a few townsfolk could afford these treats now. 

The owner, Sofie, a short woman in her mid-forties with dark eyes and wavy hair, stood behind the counter in a white apron. She slid two loaves of bread and a cookie into a bag and smiled. 

“Johannes told me that you have a traveling show. It’s going to six more cities? Good for you.”

Gabriele felt herself blush. “Oh, the credit goes to him. He’s clever at marketing my work. He presents me as a naïve German painter. The way I love Bavarian folk art and our local tradition of reverse painting on glass. He believes I celebrate the true and simple.” Gabriele winked. “If only I was so pure.” 

Sofie laughed. She was a good friend of Finn’s. Yet, tempted as Gabriele might be, she would not dare mention the Brownshirt visit. Such episodes were best kept private.

“Be back soon.” Gabriele waved as she left.

As she wandered toward home, Gabriele spied vestiges of a past march. A torn banner, a dropped cap, a crinkled can for collecting coins for the National Socialists. Imaginary voices echoed in her head. She envisioned the exuberant eyes of the Brownshirts, felt their brown ties choking their necks. 

A fog began to move across the deep blue of Lake Staffel, blurring its seven tree-covered islands. Fog had a way of unnerving her. She remembered the night last October when a truck’s lights had flooded the narrow road that led to her driveway. The driver had a special delivery. A movement of paintings Gabriele had planned for months, and the day, when it finally came, was marred by foul weather. Gabriele had worried that the trucker had lost his way in the thick fog. 

“Right spot?” the stocky man had asked as he pulled in. His breath smelled of booze. 

“Yes, indeed.” 

She brought out coffee and a beef sandwich to the driver’s window. Best to keep him busy in the truck. “Eat up while we unload.” 

Forming a trio, Gabriele, Johannes, and Finn had begun to move swiftly. They carted the Blue Rider’s paintings, their wrappings dampened by fog, into the basement. Although the truck had a tight bonnet over its engine, its back, open to the air, had only protective tarps. The wet air could have damaged the works. Over one hundred canvases by Was needed to come inside. As disgusted as Gabriele was with Was’s behavior, she could not abandon the art he hadn’t bothered to take when he left her. With her dwindling inheritance from her parents, she couldn’t afford to keep storing the hoard in a Munich warehouse. She needed to preserve Der Blaue Reiter movement in her home.

Only a few bites into his sandwich, the driver, licking his fingers, poked his head out of the truck’s window. “What’s inside those wraps?”

“Oh,” she said, startled, glad that her body was barely visible in the fog. “Old family photos, maps. You name it.” 

“Kind of a big haul for that.” The truck door wheezed open as if he planned to come take a look. 

“Wait,” she said. “I have something else for you.”

She motioned to Finn. “Go distract him, please.”

Johannes’s face tightened as he faced Gabriele. “We better act fast.”

As Finn offered the driver a cigarette and Johannes unloaded the last few paintings, Gabriele tipped her head into the trucker’s window and handed him an envelope. “For you.” 

He ruffled through the Reichsmark bills and smiled. 

“Safe travels. Please don’t call attention to yourself as you leave.” 

He waved both hands at her as if to say, “it’s nothing,” and sped off. 

Back in the basement, she sank down onto her knees and exhaled. She grabbed the sides of her long skirt and stood up, noting the strain on Johannes’s face. Her brave confidant. “Thank you.” She kissed his cheek. “You made all the difference. She pointed to the stairs. “Go on up. Finn and I will finish.”

But Johannes stayed, working beside them to unwrap and dry the haul. They covered each painting in new brown paper and bound it with twine. Then, as the men organized the small room behind the shelves of preserves, Gabriele released the last artwork. She let out a small cry as tears filled her eyes. Was had created an exuberant portrait of her as a young woman, painting a church outside. A blue cloak with a bright red collar flowed down her body. Was had adored her back then. 

Johannes, suddenly beside her, spoke softly yet sternly. “Don’t get caught up in the past, dear. Don’t let him infect your dreams.” She stiffened right up. She knew Johannes resented Was’s presence, “the black shadow,” he had said, “that seeped like night into our home.” 

5

The mid-June sunlight blazed outside, a few days after Gabriele had visited the bakery. The light contrasted starkly with the cellar’s dull interior. Gabriele and Finn leaned into the jagged fieldstone walls. A spotlight shone on the long cupboard door.

“So we’ll do it,” Finn said, waving his arm outward with bravado. “Let’s show these bastard Brownshirts that you have nothing to hide.” His gesture, so like her departed brother’s, amused her. 

“We’ll show off your jam jars,” he continued. “You should clean them so they’ll glisten.” 

Off went the hinges. Finn patched the holes and painted them a dull gray. 

“Now, let’s scuff up my paint job so it’ll blend with everything here.” 

With glee, Gabriele threw both of her shoes at the door frame and dented it with a rake. 

Finn laughed. “Don’t get too wild. The Chancellor won’t like it.”

“The Chancellor.” Gabriele spun on her heels. “How can his vision of art define our world? Hitler was never a real artist. The librarian told me he painted a city square with squat symmetrical buildings. He copied postcards of Vienna’s tourist sites. And sold them in taverns as cheap souvenirs.”

“There’s talk he’s burning his artworks now.”

“Really?” Once again, Gabriele marveled at the things Finn knew. He could move easily among crowds and eavesdrop, tasting a freedom that she, as a woman, never could. 

Finn’s round cheeks crinkled. “Our leader doesn’t want his awful stuff to be found.” His eyes shone a merry blue—the very blue that the Nazis favored. Yet Gabriele knew that he was nothing like them. 

 “Listen,” she said softly, hesitating. “Before you go, I need your opinion. Johannes wants me to apply to the Special German Art Exhibit to be held in Munich next year. He thinks if I’m accepted, we can sell more work.”

“He sure keeps his head on business.” 

“We need the money. I don’t know if I want to submit anything. My style won’t fit in with blandness.” 

“Then don’t do it. That form of expression isn’t you.” Finn reached for her hand and squeezed it. “Be careful. You’re too good to be stalled again.”

Again. Finn understood it. For ten years, after Gabriele created Meditation, she had rarely picked up a paintbrush. She had sketched objects but, sensing a void inside, felt no passion to paint.

“I began again because Johannes believed in me.”

“To his credit. Yet try to stay true to yourself.”

If only it were so easy. 

After he cleaned up and left, Gabriele leaned against the basement wall. All those spirited paintings of blue horses and yellow and orange villages hidden inside, their joy cut off from the world. Once again, the blue colors called out to her, asking please, let us see the light. 

6

By late June, the dogwoods and bigleaf blue hydrangeas were blooming in Murnau. And meadow buttercups filled the fields. As if that beauty mattered to the Brownshirts who charged up the two floors of Gabriele’s home. Had it been a month already since the one man had “visited” her? Now it was a troop. The men grabbed the handrails with their calloused hands. Their pounding boots kept rhythm with the painted horses sprinting up the side of the staircase. Was had created this jaunty small scene as a tribute to local folklore—an image the Nazis celebrated as patriotic.

Standing in the downstairs hallway, Gabriele followed the sounds above her. She heard men rummaging, searching, opening closets, crouching to look under beds, lifting her art off the wall to see if there was a trap door behind, never once shutting the wardrobes. These men, with their rough hands, offered no excuses. Every muscle in Gabriele’s body tensed. 

From the beat of their knee-high boots, Gabriele knew that the men had entered her green bedroom. She grasped her forearms until they hurt. These brutes had no right to be near her bed and private things, her father’s pocket watch and her mother’s journal. 

“Can you believe that wall color?” one sniped.

She paused at the bottom of the stairway, watching these “soldiers” march about in their buttoned-up brown shirts belted tightly into matching pants. Their chest pockets were pinched shut with lapels. Their uniformity irritated her. Of course the men had showed up mid-morning, after Johannes had left early to tend to her faltering family trust fund. As the shadows crossed and recrossed above her, Gabriele felt stomped on, of no consequence in the space that was hers, this home that belonged to her and Johannes, that she had first bought at Was’s urging. “Our place to retire,“ he had said. She stayed in the hallway, her breath uneven, as she spoke sternly to herself. Must not show fear, must be steady, must stand up tall.

A few men bounded back down the stairs, past her, into the living room. Their faces, infused with righteous belief, showed no compassion. She recognized the solitary one who had come to her house before. The hair atop his head was slicked back, and he pointed to his Swastika arm band with pride. He cocked his head. “Did you paint that room green when that Russian lived here. Kan—”

“Kandinsky,” she said. 

“Some nerve you had,” another chimed in. “Living together unmarried.”

“He was my teacher,” she said.

“Teacher of what?”

“Art.” Her cheeks burned. 

An older soldier with a big belly shooed off the upstart. He stayed near Gabriele in the hallway, and she appreciated his kinder eyes. Maybe not all the Brownshirts were awful. 

A young man with pockmarked skin and rolled-up sleeves entered the dining room and moved slowly through it, studying objects carefully, as if charmed. Gabriele felt relieved that she had made some changes since the first soldier had visited. She had thrown a dull navy rug on the floor and hung some more folk art paintings of holy objects and simple scenes that spoke to the common man. Yet he still found fault. 

“Well, will you look at that? A fancy chair, a crazy red lamp with fringes, and a fussy book about porcelain figurines.” 

Gabriele walked to the kitchen window and stared at the church spire, the mountains, and the village houses that her group loved to paint. She saw a corner of her home’s façade—yellow at its base, cream for the next two stories, and adorned with robin’s-egg blue shutters. The colors calmed her.

As four Brownshirts headed down to the cellar, Gabriele’s spine stiffened. She shut her mouth hard and focused her breath, only to make herself feel light-headed. She listened closely to the sounds below her. Moving feet, a turned knob, a kick. No lingering that she could tell. As she waited, she felt suspended as if floating outside, looking at herself within. A loud clank made her jump. The shovel or rake must have fallen. She could taste her morning tea at the base of her throat. Now stop, she told herself. She gathered her long skirt in her hands and rushed down the stairs. “Everything okay? Anyone hurt? I’m so sorry it’s dark down here.”

The men laughed, pointing to a line of black droppings in one corner. “Mouse markings, Frau Münter. You had best clean it up. We thought we saw the bugger take off and tried to kill it.”

“Not again?” her face reddened. “Those pests. Thank you for chasing it away. Come up and have a cold drink,” she said. The men, apparently satisfied, followed her into the kitchen. 

One held up a jar of gooseberry preserves taken from the shelf downstairs. “Helped myself. One for the wife.”

As she took down several glasses, she felt jittery. Thank God he had stopped at the jam. A warm, high-pitched laugh filled her throat. “Maybe the mouse can paint better than those degenerates out there,” she heard herself say.

She watched them gulp down their refreshment. She would throw out the glasses that the Brownshirts’ mouths had touched.

After they left, she watched a soldier pluck blueberries one by one from a bush and pop them into his mouth. She sat down and held her stomach. It had the nerve to announce itself with a grumble. “Shush,” she scolded. All she wanted for lunch was weak tea and a dry cracker. What she needed most was for Johannes to return to comfort her.

As she waited for him, lines from a Brownshirts’ song that she had heard in the village played in her head: For the struggle now, we stand ready. Soon will fly Hitler’s banners over every street. 

Her stomach roiling, Gabriele folded her hands together in a kind of prayer. She was not a religious woman but one of conviction. Her basement space was crowded, but she could find a way to hide even more work, if necessary. Now that the Brownshirts had tramped through the cellar, she could not make any noticeable changes. She would have to pack everything tighter in the small room behind the jars to save these paintings’ souls, to preserve a version of her beloved landscape, one that she could already feel being corrupted. 

7

That evening, Johannes paced the living room, acting stronger than she knew he felt. “They must have watched our house, waiting for me to leave. They came to scare you.”

He thrust his hands deep in his pants pockets. As he circled the floor, at first hunching his shoulders and then jerking them back, the top of his shirt came unbuttoned. His pale chest hair and the wounded look in his eyes touched her. She knew what he was thinking. I have failed you. 

His shame was needless. It was not his fault. 

“They must have learned more about Kandinsky,” Johannes said. 

She knew what he meant. Was, a Bolshevik in their eyes, posed a threat to Germany. Their home in Murnau had been known as the Russia House. 

“Believe me,” Johannes went on. “Kandinsky will never show art again in this country with this regime. But you can, Gabriele. You’re still within the lines of respectability. They want to bully you into conforming, but you are no outlaw.” 

She raised an eyebrow. Just give me a chance, she thought. But she held her tongue. 

“I may not be an artist,” he went on, “only an old academic. But I see your great talent.” 

“I know, and I love you for that.” She moved close to him and held his hand. 

“We’ll have to be very careful,” Johannes said. “We’ll deadbolt the front door, I’ll work at home much more instead of at the library. You’d better paint like the shadow of a Brownshirt is behind you.”

Gabriele felt her chest constrict at his new “rules.” Didn’t he understand that she needed her freedom and privacy? She let go of his fingers. “Head up to bed dear. I’ll join you later.”

She turned into the dining room and shut its glass doors. In one pane, she saw Was, in another Johannes. After all these years, these twin reflections of their faces competed for her attention. Was’s spirit stalked her in this house. She needed something from him now, an affirmation to quell her nerves. Opening her desk drawer, she plucked out a copy of his painting Several Circles. 

She pinned his work, created seven years ago, to the wall. It both irked and dazzled her. Was had abandoned their art—the tilted black lines, the bold colors, the race of their brushes across canvases in Murnau. He had painted an image of harmony, of pure abstraction, of radiant circles that floated in the night sky. She began to copy it; she drew a large white circle on black paper and within it a midnight blue one shaped like a waxing moon. She added smaller circles of yellow, pink, and lavender. The circle, Was had proclaimed in a treatise, was a synthesis of opposites that created equilibrium. 

Equilibrium? Hah. She felt nothing but anger. Their circle of intimacy—ruptured by him—had turned her life into an unrelenting zigzag. For four years after his marriage, their lawyers had struggled to negotiate a deal for his paintings left in Murnau. Was never wrote or spoke to Gabriele directly. She had stored his œuvre at her own expense and at great risk, and then, suddenly, he wanted most of it back.

No, she’d decided. They had built a life together. She needed her share. She’d better be compensated financially, and even more importantly, morally, for his acts. Yes, she’d preserve Der Blaue Reiter, even donate the movement’s works later to a museum. But she needed justice. Was had lied to her and upended her equilibrium.

Gabriele cut out each of her painted circles. Snip, snip, snip. She held the midnight blue, orange, and black orbs in her hands. These images of supposed perfection disgusted her, and she flung them upwards so they scattered around her like rubbish. They spoke of Was’s eternal entitlement. And she wouldn’t have it. 

8

The next morning, Gabriele reached out to Finn. A seething, burning sensation filled her throat as she ranted about the Brownshirts’ second visit. “I’ll never be safe in my own home again.” 

“Terrible. I’m sorry,” Finn said. “Remember, they found nothing. I think you’ll be safe.” 

“Come to dinner tomorrow?” she asked, hearing her voice fill with urgency. 

“Sure,” he said.

* * *

For dinner, Johannes brought out a steaming Eintopf—a stew of fish and garden vegetables, the kind of meal Hitler would have praised as hearty and cheap. He placed the dish on a trivet as Finn arrived with a bag of bread.

Finn kissed Gabriele’s cheek. “I hope you both aren’t too rattled.” 

“Hard not to be.” Gabriele said with a scowl. “One soldier had the nerve to tap my wrist and say, ‘Glad you’re not a Jew. They have a different smell. They’re a different breed.’” 

“I should have been here,” Johannes said, taking her arm protectively.

“Oh, they wouldn’t hurt me,” Gabriele scoffed, pulling away. “I know how to play a part. The demure Murnau Frau who lets the men do their job. Years ago, I used to be afraid to ask galleries to take my work. Was coached me. ‘Be nice, put on a brave face, and inquire quite innocently.’” Gabriele hooked her fingers into quotation marks. “Quite. A woman must be quite something to achieve what men do directly.”

Finn pushed his hands against the table’s edge. “Well put, my feisty one.” 

Johannes winced, a sharp reminder that he didn’t like Finn’s quick familiarity with her. She would remind him later that it was just brotherly chumminess.

Finn pulled the wrap off the warm Graubrot. Fermented with sourdough, this thick rye loaf was laden with caraway seeds, Sofie’s specialty at the bakery. 

“Things are getting out of control,” Finn said. “It scares me. Murnau has become a right-wing extremist stronghold. And now that racist engineer Feder keeps inviting Hitler here. He keeps sweetening our Chancellor’s taste for the Alps.”

“The last thing we need,” she replied.

While Finn tore into the dense chewy loaf and dipped it in the stew’s broth, Johannes cut his food carefully with a knife and listened.

Finn kept on. “Have you heard about the house that Hitler just bought in the Alps?”

She had not. Her face burned at these words.

“In Berchtesgaden. Give that bastard a little time. Rumor has it that he might add a large terrace and a dining room done in cembra pine. He’ll erect a big library, probably fattened with books about painting and architecture.”

“Wait a minute.” Johannes put down his fork. “It’s very unfortunate, yes. But it won’t affect our day-to-day lives.” 

Finn could not stop himself. “I bet his final touch will be a projector that he’ll store behind one wall to watch Hollywood reels. I hear he likes Mickey Mouse.”

“What?” Gabriele coughed out an unladylike laugh. 

Johannes cleared his throat. “Listen, we may not like Hitler, but we have to live and thrive here. We’ll have to compromise.”

“Compromise.” Finn clapped his chest. “A word I find hard to swallow. The National Socialists are seducing young people with brown propaganda and before you know it, all the Jews will be run out of Germany. We’ll live in a Fascist country where no one can think independently or act freely.”

“Finn,” Gabriele raised her hand. “Please grab three beers from the cellar, the Haase Bier.”

Johannes folded his hands. “You’ll have to change the way you paint, Gabriele. Tone down your colors. Make your work more commercial.” 

“More boring, you mean.”

Finn returned and looked at her sympathetically.

Gabriele’s hair fell over her face. She stabbed it back into place with a barrette. A familiar sensation of things falling to pieces haunted her. Years ago, she had found the breakup with Was hard to fathom. His shadowy exit, the way he did not explain himself. The loss of him deepening the profound ache she had felt after her parents and brother had died. All she wanted was to stay productive and happy, yet it was becoming impossible. She raised her beer bottle, staring at the hare’s striking white whiskers and cynical eyes on the label. She and the hare understood each other. She took a hard swallow, and the fullness hurt her throat. “I’m not going to retreat into silence.” 

“Your career will suffer,” Johannes cautioned.

“It already has.” 

“It won’t be forever. Trust me, you will earn your name back later.” Then he added, “What choice do we have?” 

* * *

Gabriele cleared the table, and then, as Johannes washed the dishes, she and Finn strolled into the garden. The air felt cool and welcoming, and the moon, at three-quarters, shone. The mountains had a blue-gray cast and indigo lingered in the darkening sky. When blue sinks almost to black, Was had written long ago, it echoes a grief that is hardly human. The prospect of tamping down her art even more filled her with dread. 

She slipped her arm into Finn’s. “How can our town with its lovely lake and its blue mountains become so spoiled?” 

“All it takes is a maniac in charge and a bad economy,” Finn replied.

“And loyal followers with a devil’s heart to carry out his wishes.”

They walked to the end of the garden plot. 

“Gabriele, paint as you must,” Finn said. “You have a real talent. If your art can’t find its home now, it will later. Don’t abandon the way you see the world.” 

He kissed Gabriele’s cheek and headed off down the lane, turning back twice to wave. She cradled her shoulders with her hands.

Not ready to go back inside, Gabriele dug her hand into the moist, heavy earth. As she raised the fertile soil to her nose in the growing darkness, she smelled a mix of fresh-cut apples and wet coffee grounds. She needed something to believe in. She licked the soil in her hand. Granules stuck to her tongue. She spat them out and thought of Was, years ago, in this very garden. Miming the Bavarian farmers, he had worn a white shirt and suspenders that held up his knee-length lederhosen. A cigar dangled from his mouth. Was had radiated contentment as he turned the mineral-rich soil to prepare their vegetable beds.

The clear Alpine light and fresh air had intoxicated the full Der Blaue Reiter circle. If only life had continued this way. Gabriele pinched her forearm. She had to find a way to carry on. 

9

By late July, red clover and yarrow filled the fields. The bigleaf hydrangeas’ blue blooms became mighty. During the hot days, their foliage wilted, yet the limp leaves revived in the cooler evenings. Tired of working inside, Gabriele brought her oils outside. Checking behind her to be sure she was alone, she painted black lines in large looping rhythms on her canvas. She filled her loose shapes with dark greens and heady oranges. Was’s bright urging from long ago spurred her on. Open your eyes. Stop thinking! Walk into an unknown world. Oh, the energy, the taste of freedom. 

Hearing a truck come up her driveway, Gabriele dropped her brush and snapped the lid of her paint box shut. That young cocky Brownshirt better not be returning. She could just hear him. Mrs. Münter. We had an agreement. Her heart raced. No one must catch her in an act of extravagant expression. She thrust her supplies and canvas behind a bush.

Finn raced up.

“Oh,” she said. She stared at his unshaven face, his rumpled hair. “What’s wrong?”

“Someone smashed the bakery window. I just left Sofie and it’s a sight in there—a huge jagged hole, shards of glass across the floor. Her display case is cracked beyond repair. We swept up and I brought her home. I’m heading back soon.” 

Gabriele clasped her hands. “What? Why would anyone do something this horrible?” 

“Sofie blurted it out right away. Someone figured out that she’s half-Jewish. On her dad’s side. She kept her late husband’s name to shield herself. She told no one.”

“She held this inside all these years. I couldn’t— ” 

Gabriele caught herself. She had buried so much of her own past—her lost family, Was’s cruel behavior, the art in her cellar—its hot colors hitting flagstone walls. Who was she to judge? Her life was privileged compared to Sofie’s. A house, a garden, art shows abroad, while Sofie lived alone in a small apartment above her bakery. 

Finn kicked the ground. “I can’t stand it. It’s awful to see Sofie cry. ‘After fifteen years of building good will here,’ she said, ‘this is what I get.’” 

Gabriele grasped his arm. “First the grocer, now Sofie. Everyone knew he was Jewish. But Sofie? Some official dug very deep to find out.” Would this happen to her hidden paintings?

“I asked Sofie if she’d be willing to leave here,” Finn said. “‘If I had somewhere to land,’ she shrugged, ‘I might.’” Finn pecked Gabriele’s cheek. “I must go. Need to figure out a way to help her.”

10

By mid-August, the Nazi stronghold in Bavaria was flourishing. Some afternoons, as on this shimmering day when her living room smelled of fresh-cut oregano and basil from her garden, Gabriele read the newspapers. The latest article proclaimed that all non-Nazi political parties were forbidden in Germany. Everyone had to “fall into line” under a single-party state. Fall into line, fall into line. The words drummed in her mind.

Just then, the staircase squeaked and footsteps fell in the hallway. She knew just what it was. Johannes needed his mid-afternoon coffee and cake. He entered with a letter in hand, his face drawn. 

“What is it?” she asked.

He read the official document aloud. “Your art will not be accepted into the Special German Art exhibit. It does not meet our standards and exemplify our moral values. We do not regard it as realistic.” 

Gabriele ripped the paper from his hands. She reread it and slammed it on the table. “The nerve. I changed my work.”

Hitler liked the laborer, the common man. Gabriele had painted construction workers as black silhouettes atop trucks and scaffolds in street scenes. She had captured the hard toil of road workers with ax picks in their hands. For hours, she had studied a smoking excavator that ingested rocks and dirt. She had muted her colors, made her forms more realistic—how she hated that word.

Johannes’s eyebrows lowered deep over his eyes, accentuating his high forehead and narrow face. “Yes, you changed it.”

Gabriele turned to the window. She could taste the bitter tea that had tickled her throat the day the Brownshirts came en masse to her home. She felt this coldness in her chest once again.

“I’m sorry,” Johannes added, his voice cracking. 

Gabriele faced him. “You tried. And I have been a fool. The compromises I made. For what? I’m not free to paint as I want. I can’t be what you wish. My art used to be received warmly. And now—it’s a threat.” She squeezed her hands into fists. “I’m a bad influence on what? People’s minds and morality. I’m not safe for others?”

Johannes bit his lip. She knew quite well what he was thinking. Hadn’t he been smart, so smart to pull off her multi-city show in Germany that began two years ago? He had highlighted her deep interest in native German traditions. This time around, he played the same tune and admired how her forms and colors were truer to nature. So much for that tactic.

Gabriele drew near him. “You tried.” Her breath hit his neck, and he kissed the crown of her head. 

She left the room and climbed the stairs to their bedroom, taking refuge in the bed she had painted for Was and herself. Long ago, its deep blue had brought a sense of peace, and the bed frame reached like a warm arm around her. Now she felt raw and exposed.

11

Gabriele could see it coming. Finn was more and more distracted by his need to help Sofie. He had a soft spot in his heart for her, for anyone who had been oppressed, and could not stand by and do nothing. 

“I may take her to Copenhagen,” he said. “My brother has a home there, a room to spare.”

“And what about you?” Gabriele asked.

“I’ll be fine.” Finn seemed impatient. “I should get Sofie out before things get worse.”

Gabriele looked to where the beech tree’s dark gray shadow fell across the meadow near her home. The wind made its small leaves flicker. She loved Finn, but he could be too eager to do right. She wanted him to slow down, to be as concerned about her as he was about Sofie. What would she do without him? 

“How long will you be gone?” Her question sounded needy, even selfish.

“A good while.” He hesitated as if words pained him. “I want some distance from Germany. I need time to think, to figure out what role I’ll play. Maybe it’s time to resist? Would you?”

“I can’t say.” Gabriele felt pierced. Finn was so much a part of her history, her world. “You will return?” she asked.

“I hope so.” Finn knocked his hands together. “I don’t mean to alarm you. But I’ve heard Hitler is imprisoning his political opponents at Dachau near Munich. Communists, Social Democrats. Who knows who’s next? Before long, he’ll go after ordinary people. I want to get Sofie out of here within a week.”

“That soon?” Gabriele’s head felt light.

“Don’t worry.” Finn touched her arm. “We’ll stay in touch.” He let go and pulled down the rim of his hat, readying to leave. “And keep on working, making your beautiful art.”

* * *

They left within a week. Gabriele drove Finn’s small truck an hour away to the railway station. She would care for it while he was gone, while he and Sofie made a patchwork journey to Copenhagen, partly by rail, partly by arranged rides. The afternoon was gray, the platform uncrowded, and they moved about with ease. When the train arrived, Finn helped Sofie manage her four bags. Gabriele embraced her friends and watched them board the train. They reached their hands out the narrow windows and waved.

As Gabriele watched the train rush down the tracks, she felt her eyes blur. A sharp scorn for Germany seized her spirit. After her parents died, when she was twenty-one, she had lived in the United States for two years. She had stayed with family members in Texas and Arkansas. Perhaps she should not have returned. But the itch to come home, to experience European culture, and to study art in Munich had won out. After the train disappeared, Gabriele stared at her hands, at the creases in her palms. She felt shame. Her country was being shaped by irrational views, by a bullying government. And dear people, like Sofie, were leaving for good.

12

Passing Lake Staffelsee on her early morning walk, Gabriele yearned to be enveloped in its blueness. The season was beginning to change; a few leaves had become red, and an autumn breeze cooled the air. In another month, orange reflections would shimmer on its surface. Gabriele stopped at the lake’s edge and imagined painting this scene the new German way. A beige cottage would angle toward the mountains: the water would be gray; the land muted brown. Two clouds would hover above the mountain’s curves. Gone would be her loose brush strokes, the reds that brought her joy, the range of blues that deepened the landscape’s mood. How boring. She felt a pull at her sternum, an inability to lift up her arms freely.

As she neared the village, she came upon a familiar scene. The streets were littered with pamphlets, remnants of a march, and banners. She sensed a tight suspicious air. Eyes, perhaps those of paid spies, seemed to observe her. Or was it an illusion? The bakery was empty. A sign on its boarded-up window read Dauerhaft geschlossen. Closed permanently. The chunky black letters made her eyes smart. 

Since Finn and Sofie had left, Gabriele felt more acutely alone. Days would pass when she spoke to no one. Finally, after four weeks, she received a note that they had made it to Denmark. “Sofie surprises me with her courage,” Finn wrote. His words gave Gabriele hope. If her friend could be strong, so could she. She could protect the hidden art and keep Der Blaue Reiter movement alive. Finn’s questions, asked before he left, circled in her mind. Would she and Johannes join a resistance movement? Not likely. She didn’t know how to and didn’t want to. Their future would be jeopardized. Would they leave Murnau? In her heart, she knew they would not. Johannes had bought the house from Gabriele, as her finances were dreadful. He had been generous and was resolute about staying. “We must wait out these times,” he said. 

If it came to it, she would contribute to their well-being by trading a new “safe” painting for two bags of food. 

Back home, with the front door bolted behind her, Gabriele sat at the dining room window and envisioned winter. She got out her easel and painted. A woman with a brown bob and a dark bathrobe (yes, it was her) appeared from behind. She gazed out at a snowy landscape, at robins perched on thick white branches. The dining room curtains were dull red, the walls brown. A plain tablecloth showed a teapot and bread. Just a bit of blue emerged in the sky outside. She might call this drab work Breakfast of the Birds.

Finished, Gabriele snorted and put down her paintbrush. “Do you like it?” she asked no one. 

Some of the paintings concealed in the cellar flickered before her eyes. It had been almost a year since she had seen them. If only she could tear off their wrappings to feel bold sensations, to let their colors blaze on the upstairs walls. 

The stark shadows of noon fell upon the dining room floor. If Gabriele were to paint “realistic” art now, she’d capture strident Brownshirts with evil eyes, their swastikas singed into their sleeves. She’d depict Nazis’ knives slashing artwork by Jews. She’d draw bodies, surrounded by shattered glass. No.

No. She could not chronicle these awful times. She stared at Breakfast of the Birds. Her creative life did not have to be dull, did it? With her rich mind, Gabriele could will her world differently. For every bland work she painted, she could conjure up a fiery companion. A double vision, a work solely of the imagination, not committed to canvas. Before her, a smartly dressed woman, seen only by her, could turn sideways, could view a bright blue sky. Birds could fly against branches full of green leaves. A yellow cow with creamy udders, a breed loved by Der Blaue Reiter circle, could jump high in the distance. A Bavarian cake of sugared, sliced dark plums, baked by Sofie, could grace the table. A shining teapot, a gift from Johannes, could stand beside it. It all felt grand.

She welcomed the attractive, imagined woman before her. The lady’s fingers looped a long pearl necklace tinged with pink. The red vase, right beside her, exploded with purple flowers. She and Gabriele heard flute music, the kind Was loved, and they both smiled.

About the author

Pam Wolfson is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her fiction has been published in several journals, including Prime Number Magazine, The Woven Tale Press, The Summerset Review, Vestal Review, and SLAB. Pam earned an M.A. in literature from the University of Toronto, attended Bread Loaf, and was awarded a merit scholarship to the Southampton Writers Conference. She has served as an art editor for Davis Press and Godine Press. Pam is both a painter and a writer who lives in Greater Boston. www.pamwolfson.com 

About the illustration

The illustration is Meditation, a painting by Gabriele Münter, 1917. In the collection of the Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany. In the public domain, via Wikiart.