Chapter Two Thousand Six Hundred Seventy
1st April 1978
Breslau, Silesia
Looking through the viewfinder of the video camera, Zella looked at the people packed into Saint Elizabeth’s Church in Central Breslau, the principle Lutheran and Protestant Church in Silesia best known for the 130-meter-tall spire that was visible throughout the city. She had been gathering material that would be rushed back to Berlin so that it could be edited into a documentary about the life of Manfred von Richthofen that would air tomorrow night. For years, there had been jokes about how the most dangerous place was between certain people and a camera. Manfred von Richthofen had been one of those people, so ARD had no shortage of materials in the archives. Everything from his opinions about politics, conservation efforts, or hunting expeditions were all there. If anything they had too much to go through in a very short period of time. Tributes had come in from all over the world and there was a whole lot of Military Brass present, so it was no surprise that ARD wanted footage of this.
It was figured by her Director at ARD that Zella’s title as Markgräfin and her family having been invited to the funeral would give her access where no one else would be allowed. As soon as Zella had arrived she had found that her ears getting filled with all the juicy gossip. With this being the largest gathering of notables in one place in decades, the gossips were going to have a lot to talk about.
When all of this had been thrown together, no one had noticed what day the funeral had just happened to fall on. Zella understood that must have been an oversight, but she wasn’t quite sure. Having met Manfred the Elder on a few different occasions, she suspected that having it be on April Fool’s Day was giving the occasion exactly the sort of gravity he would have felt it deserved. According to Aunt Kat and Aunt Ilse, he had never been one for too much formality. According to them, if they had really honored his actual wishes it would have been along the lines of dragging him out back and burning him with the rest of the trash, with many in his inner circle including a few of his own children and grandchildren perfectly prepared to carry that out even if they had to steal the corpse. Apparently opting for a Military Funeral, which was his right as a retired Field Marshal had been a compromise.
Manfred’s two youngest daughters, unrepentant social climbers who had inadvertently married into downwardly mobile Old Junker families had wanted an elaborate funeral. Presumably so that they could preen before the press. Ilse had vetoed that, stating that they would stick to the original plan. Then Sonje Louise and Cecilie had made the mistake of demanding to know who Ilse was other than a guttersnipe who had lucked out by marrying their brother. They had gotten a rather harsh lesson in just who Elisabeth “Ilse” Mischner really was. Yes, she was a guttersnipe and damn proud of it. She had endured years in Berlin’s Care System before the postwar reforms and neglect had reigned. Only the strongest and most vicious survived in that sort of environment. She had demonstrated exactly why those two wouldn’t have lasted a day. Ilse might not have picked the fight, but she had certainly finished it.
So, Ilse had gotten her way. Cecilie had ended up in the hospital getting treated for a concussion and Sonje had been told explicitly that everything in the Richthofen House had already been thoroughly inventoried, so if she had any ideas, Ilse was perfectly willing to have her arrested if anything turned up missing. Probably most shocking for them, Albrecht publicly took Ilse’s side. She was now the Queen Consort of Silesia, Sonje and Cecilie could either get used to that, or else they could get the Hell out. It was only then that the two of them got a belated glimpse of public opinion. Namely that the support that their father had enjoyed from the Silesian public, which involved the largely Urban Germans and Rural Poles, had been extended to Albrecht and Ilse. It didn’t take too much imagination to figure out which part of that equation had been ignored. Now they had discovered that many of the friends they thought they had, had suddenly gotten very scarce.
Handing the camera to Yuri when Zella saw Kiki get out of a car with Benjamin. Both were in uniform out of respect and Zella had heard that Ben had been one of Luftwaffe Officers invited to be a pallbearer. It was considered an honor. Zella and Kiki exchanged greetings while she did her best to keep things civil with Ben who still regarded her as a psychopath.
The night before, when Zella had spoken with John Lennon over the phone he had joked about coming to Silesia to witness this. According to him the church service part of the funeral was all about the collective snobbery of Europe being seen mourning the death of a man who they had always seen as an upstart. The same man who had ruthlessly bribed, blackmailed, and backstabbed his way to the top. Inside they would all be seething, having the knowledge that their grandchildren were going to be stuck calling his grandchildren “Sir.” Though that seemed incredibly cynical, it seemed to be one of the better reads on the situation that she had heard.