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WEDNESDAY

Talk about dysfunctional families: Nineteen-year-old Geli Raubal moved with her mother to her uncle’s apartment to keep house for him. He soon fell in love with his beautiful and charming niece and, since he thought himself something of an artist, persuaded her to pose nude for him. Perhaps inevitably, Uncle Alf let his desires get the better of him and began an affair that would end four years later with Geli’s mysterious death. Novelist Ron Hansen uses the historical facts of Geli’s life and Europe between the wars as the background over which he sketches a psychological portrait of a disturbed seducer whose life would also end in violence. Fourteen years after her death, Geli’s uncle—Adolf Hitler—hiding in his Berlin bunker, still called her the only woman he had ever really loved and wanted to marry. Hansen reads from and sign copies of Hitler’s Niece at 7 p.m. at Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. (202) 364-1919. (Janet Hopf)