It’s a truism among biographers that they all start by falling in love with their subjects – and end up hating them with a vengeance. Quite how this works out for the objective historian self-tasked with the production of a biography of Adolph Hitler is a rather worrying question. Only a propagandist would begin at the position above. Or do you reverse the process, start by hating and find that lurid attention to mind-defying evil has begun to fray your edges?
In the
latest edition of our bookchat readers’ podcast For Whom The Book Tolls,
fellow-writer DK Powell and I discuss Professor Ian Kershaw’s numbingly
comprehensive and enlightening biography ‘Hitler’. We also consider how historical fiction has
approached the problem of depicting monstrosity. In ‘Young Adolf’ the great Beryl Bainbridge fictionalised
a just-possibly-historical visit by Hitler to his half-brother in Liverpool in
1912, and we look at Timur Vermes’
merciless satire of sweet-talking fascism
in the age of infotainment ‘Look Who’s Back’.
You can
find the podcast here –
and a
further summary of our discussion on Ken’s excellent blog here –
https://writeoutloudblog.com/2024/11/03/for-whom-the-book-tolls-episode-2-hitler-by-ian-kershaw/
I should
add that I’m more than a little sceptical of the tendency to pathologise Hitler
as a form of reassurance – a canter through the bibliography suggests that at
one time or another a diagnosis of practically every disease in the medical
dictionary has been proposed as a means of explaining him. (Housemaid’s Knee an honourable but unsurprising
omission given the preternatural levels of feckless, narcissistic inactivity
that according to Kershaw characterised much of his private life). Bainbridge seems to me to get closest to a
plausible psychological necromancy while avoiding the trap – just - of archly
anachronistic anticipation. Vermes’
satire plays very clever games with first-person voice, asking the reader
whether they think they’re clever enough to see through the comically re-animated
monster and therefore ‘in’ on the joke, or actually complicit. Even before the events of 5th
November 2024, it’s a deeply uncomfortable read for all its comic frisson.
If you want
to follow this up by reading any of the books we discuss or refer to, you can
find them here:
Hitler,
by Ian Kershaw (Penguin, 2013);
Young
Adolf, by Beryl Bainbridge (Abacus, 2010);
Look
Who’s Back, by Tibur Vermes, trans by Jamie Bulloch (MacLehose Press, 2014);
The Danzig Trilogy, by Gunter
Grass, trans by Breon Mitchell (Vintage Digital, 2017).