The Enigma of Hitler Counterfactual Perspectives
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IAN WALLACE The Enigma of Hitler Counterfactual Perspectives S ISAIAH BERLIN WAS THE FIRST TO ARGUE, plausibility is an essential requirement for any historian adopting a counterfactual A strategy.1 If it is to achieve any degree of legitimacy, counterfactual history must be based not on “mere fantasy” but on “calculations about the relative probability of plausible outcomes in a chaotic world.”2 Such a high degree of self-restraint may not be required of the writer of fiction, for whom a portion of fantasy is, in fact, an indispensable precondition for the imagina- tive exploration of any subject, including the historical, but I would argue that such fantasy is least likely to trivialize a subject such as Hitler where it is tem- pered by a concern for plausibility. Studies of the Nazi period continue to proliferate, but the figure of Hitler remains by common consent an enigma eluding final explanation.3 This is a situation which literature may be thought to have done relatively little to im- prove. Writing in 1975, J.P. Stern regretted “the failure of creative literature to add very much to our understanding of Hitler’s personality,” adding that, apart from a few pages by Richard Hughes and Günter Grass, “the literary imagination has on the whole found itself outstripped by the facts of the case” and that “the true nature of the man is trivialized and obscured rather than illuminated by the antics of Charles Chaplin and the deeply unfunny comedy 1 Cited in Niall Ferguson, “Introduction: Virtual History: Towards a ‘Chaotic’ Theory of the Past,” in Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, ed. Niall Ferguson (London: Pan, 2003): 83–84. 2 Ferguson, “Introduction: Virtual History,” 85. 3 Cf. Ron Rosenbaum, Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil (London: Macmillan, 1998). 364 IAN WALLACE of Bertolt Brecht.”4 The following analysis asks whether such a judgment can be significantly modified in the light of the three novels under consideration here, all of them published after 1975.5 Stephen Fry’s comic novel Making History (1996)6 asks the most radical question of all: what if Hitler had never existed? Can it be assumed that the erasure of his name from the pages of history would have made a fundamental difference to the face of the twentieth century? Fry explores this question through the adventures of the novel’s hapless hero, Michael Young, a doctoral student of history at Cambridge University who, as we first meet him, has just completed a thesis entitled “From Brunau to Vienna” in which he deals exhaustively with Hitler’s early years.7 He strikes up a relationship with a theoretical physicist, Professor Leo Zucker- 4 J.P. Stern, Hitler: The Führer and the People (Glasgow: William Collins/Fontana, 1975): 10, 13. 5 Among other texts which might be included in such an analysis are Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest (London: Little Brown, 2007), Harry Mulisch’s Siegfried, tr. Paul Vincent (New York: Viking, 2003), Kris Rusch’s Hitler’s Angel (New York: St Martin’s, 1998), George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H. (1981; Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999), and A.N. Wilson’s Winnie and Wolf (London: Arrow, 2008). 6 Stephen Fry, Making History (London: Hutchinson, 1996). Page references fol- lowing are in the main text. 7 Although a historian, Michael is fascinated by fiction, which he tentatively defines as “the true story of what never happened” (6) and as “something that makes you spin, wobble and weep” (5). In other words, fiction offers its own truth and this requires an emotional, empathetic response in contrast to the rational, objective claim to factual truth Michael associates with his own discipline. We soon discover that the border be- tween these two kinds of truth is blurred in his mind when it transpires that the short chapters in the early part of the novel which imaginatively reconstruct the details of Hitler’s upbringing are in fact extended quotations from the thesis itself – much to the disgust of Michael’s wildly excentric, though academically conventional supervisor, Dr. Fraser–Stuart, who demands the removal of “all fictitious and speculative imperti- nences” (63) from what he insists on calling Michael’s “faeces.” The fact that Michael in the end discards his thesis may be seen as an indication that in the competition be- tween the claims of history and fiction Fry ultimately plumps for the latter – at least on this occasion. .