Slippery slopes | 1 November 2012

Being sent to finishing school in Bavaria in 1936 was a dream for some English girls: there were winter sports and sachertorte, opera and sausages, and troupes of handsome Nazis in shorts. In Rachel Johnson’s new book, Daphne Linden and Betsy Barton-Hill, 18-year-old beauties who’ve never properly met any boys, find themselves at large in Munich.

In a museum 70 years later, Daphne’s grand-daughter Francie spots a picture of Hitler with her grandmother. She begins to make enquiries into Daphne’s National Socialist phase. Francie’s life has its own complications (she’s in love with her boss, and wondering whether or not to have children with her husband), and these develop as her investigation progresses.

Betsy and Daphne are not well-equipped to spot the signs of an impending  cruel regime. When the zealous Siegmund Huber suspects his cousin Otto might not be keen on Hitler, he remarks: ‘If you weren’t my cousin I’d send you to Dachau.’ The girls are satisfied with the translation that it’s a ‘sort of lovely holiday camp’. At the end of a happy morning’s skiing, Otto loses his temper on seeing a sign saying Juden Zutritt Verboten, and the girls have a twinge of anxiety, but it’s social anxiety: ‘They’d all been having such fun up to now. It seemed such a shame, to spoil things over a silly little flag.’

Johnson builds up a picture of the sinister glamour of Nazism and of the small group of ex-pats who blithely made the most of the Nazis’ grand cars and well-stocked drinks cabinets. As Betsy says years later, ‘there was some sort of Putsch a few streets away, but we were so engrossed in ourselves, we barely noticed.’

The Francie sections are about London before Lehman Brothers: trendy restaurants and bankers’ bonuses, house prices and cappuccinos.