I watch them from my position next to the fireplace, my back pleasantly warmed by the lively fire burning in the grate. Oma, dressed in black, is seated in the centre of the room in Vati’s armchair, sipping sherry and resting her swollen ankles on the ottoman while Mutti, her sweep of hair midnight dark against the claret red of her dress, a thin smile painted on her pale face, moves between her guests. My bubbly Aunt Adèle is there with her rather dour daughter, Eva, and Eva’s fiancé, a fair-haired SS officer. Lord Mayor Otto Schultz, his wife, and three grown-up children, stand together with Judge Fuchs and two other men. I recognise the editor, Josef, from the newspaper, Vati’s secretary and a few of Mutti’s closest friends and their husbands. I was permitted two guests and I chose Erna and Tomas, who stand together with Eva, her intended, and Adèle.

I have no wish to talk with anyone in the room at all. A glass of champagne hangs in my hand in readiness to usher in the New Year. I’ve not yet touched a drop.

Vati, resplendent in his velvet dinner jacket, rushes into the room.

‘Friends, guests, look at the time! We must listen to Herr Goebbels make his New Year address.’ He turns on the radio and someone lifts the arm to silence the gramophone. It has already begun.

‘… 1938 a year of miracles. With the Anschluss of Austria, eighty million Germans have been united in one great Reich, with the return of ten million in just one miraculous year. It would be easy to forget the magnitude of what we have achieved in such a short space of time. It would be easy to forget the impossibility such achievements would have seemed before they happened, which appear almost easy, now that they have. The doubters amongst us, of which a few remain, scoff and point to the inevitable small and trivial problems which crop up from time to time. These doubters, this minority, with their money and education, trust more in their cold reason than in the warm, idealistic hearts of the masses. They dwell in the past, hardly in the present and not at all in the future, lacking the imagination to see the greatness of our national German future. For these weak and quivering doubters, problems are there to be surrendered to, not mastered and surpassed. We will not win these complainers over. But the masses want nothing to do with them. At the close of this momentous year, the people can be delighted with what has been achieved, and we can look forward with confidence and courage to 1939…’

Tomas is suddenly at my elbow. He smiles down at me, then leans in and laps into my ear, ‘I have some particular hopes for 1939.’

‘Oh…’ I veer my head away.

He slurps champagne from his glass in a way which makes me think he hasn’t drunk any before. I smile at him and he rocks back on his heels, his face a poster of optimism.