Imagining Adolf Hitler

Book adds to controversial literary genre

By Hillel Italie, Associated Press writer

NEW YORK -- The villain in Ron Hansen's latest novel holds a gun to his niece's neck and demands that she remove her dress. As she undoes the buttons he glides the barrel across her chest. She smiles. He strikes.

"And then his free fist flashed out and hit her face hard," Hansen writes. "Holding her hurting nose she flailed a fist at him, but she felt him catch her hair in one hand and yank her as he held the Walther pistol just above her heart, then fired down."

The setting is a Munich apartment, in 1931. The victim is 23-year-old Geli Raubal. Her assailant is Adolf Hitler.

"Hitler's Niece" investigates one of the greatest mysteries in Hitler's life before he came to power. There is still no definitive explanation for the death of Ms. Raubal, whom Hitler would say was the only woman he ever loved. Although police ruled the case a suicide, Hansen is among those who believe that Hitler, violently jealous, killed her.

Coming out in September, Hansen's book also continues a strange and controversial literary genre: the Hitler novel.

For decades, fiction writers have attempted what hundreds of biographers still haven't accomplished: to make sense of Hitler. Along with Jesus Christ, Hitler has been the most difficult to fictionalize -- the former because it's so hard to enter the mind of a god, the latter because it's so hard to enter the mind of a devil.

"I couldn't write that kind of book because I cannot see myself as Hitler," said novelist Aharon Appelfeld, a Holocaust survivor who lives in Israel. "You have to identify yourself with the character and how can you identify yourself with him? He's the essence of evil."

"That premise is hard for me to accept," said Hansen, a 51-year-old Nebraska native and author of five well-regarded previous works of fiction. "I've written about Jesse James and I never identified with him. I can imagine writing about people without stepping into their skins. I tried to observe Hitler like a cameraman."

Storytellers, from Shakespeare on down, have long dramatized the belief that even the worst of us share something with the rest. In spite (or because) of ourselves, we mourn the downfall of tyrants and gangsters.

But to "humanize" Hitler seems appalling. Details of his private life, no matter how touching or vile, seem overwhelmed by his public crimes. Hitler is so gross, so infernal a figure, he threatens a fundamental law among writers: that no subject is forbidden.

"I personally recoil at the idea of a novel about Hitler, but I know I haven't got permission. I have to put the principles of fiction writing above my personal feelings," said author-critic Cynthia Ozick, who wrote about the Holocaust in her acclaimed short story "The Shawl."

"The reason for my recoil is my own experience as a writer of fiction, which is that when you imaginatively recreate someone the whole complexity of the human being comes into play. Almost inevitably you're going to show a human side. We do know that Hitler loved his dogs, but I don't care if Hitler loved his dogs. Better if he had been bitten by one and died."

A leading critic has been Alvin Rosenfeld, author of "Imagining Hitler," a 1985 publication that analyzes dozens of Hitler fictionalizations. In the book's introduction, Rosenfeld argued that no author, "high brow or low," had been able to make him a true fictional character, both human and inhuman.

"Those works that demonize him distort through excess," he wrote, "making him into a creature altogether unlike any to be found in humankind, whereas those works that normalize him tend to minimize his wickedness and diminish or deny his destructive side.

"Between these contrasting images of the demonic and the domestic figure, the 'real' Hitler, one feels, somehow gets lost or slips away."

Hitler fiction began in his lifetime, when such books as Max Radin's "The Day of Reckoning" and Michael Young's "The Trial of Adolf Hitler" imagined the dictator duly proved guilty of his crimes. Ernst Weiss' "The Eyewitness," written in Paris in 1938, imagined the history of Hitler's rise from obscurity.

Since his death, in 1945, a common theme has been "what if" -- what if he survived. In Pierre Boulle's "His Last Battle," Hitler lives peacefully in the Peruvian mountains. Richard Grayson's story "With Hitler in New York" transforms him into a blue-jeaned backpacker with a Jewish girlfriend.

Even greater excess can be found in science fiction. In Roland Puccetti's "The Death of the Fuhrer," Hitler's brain is transplanted into what becomes the leader of the next German Reich. Hitler is granted a son in Gus Weill's "The Fuhrer Seed," in which "Kurt Hitler" becomes mayor of West Berlin and enjoys ravenous sex with his rich, Jewish lover.

The most controversial Hitler novel has been "The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.," by essayist-critic George Steiner. Published in 1981, Steiner's book imagined that Hitler survived the war and was hunted down by Israeli agents. At his trial he became the devil's advocate to end all devil's advocates, linking the Holocaust to the founding of the Zionist state.

"It was the Holocaust that gave you the courage of injustice," Steiner's Hitler argued, "that made you drive the Arab out of his home, out of his field because he was in your divinely ordered way. That made you endure knowing that those whom you had driven out were rotting in refugee camps not ten miles away, buried alive in despair and lunatic dreams of vengeance."

Although Steiner was clearly being ironic, Rosenfeld and others were offended both by the content of the speech and by his giving Hitler the final words of the story. Again, Hitler threatens the rules of literature. The author is supposed to withhold judgment and let the characters speak for themselves. But even in fiction, Hitler appears beyond objectivity.

"Narratives follow conventions that have developed over a long, long time and we learn how to read novels by reading other novels," Rosenfeld said. "But Hitler fits no character type that we know. And consequently, narrative conventions don't contain him. He bursts the bounds of such things."

Novels such as Hansen's and Beryl Bainbridge's "Young Adolf" are less provocative, and more realistic. They attempt to give us the Hitler of history, not of fantasy. The Hitler in Bainbridge's novel is pathetic rather than dangerous. He's lazy, clumsy, the choreographer of his own pratfalls. Observes a family friend: "It is a pity he will never amount to anything."'

Bainbridge's novel is set in 1912, when Hitler was a young idler. Hansen's novel takes place in the late '20s and early '30s. His Hitler, a quickly rising demagogue, is a far more potent figure: moody, charismatic, sadistic.

"My concern is that another Hitler doesn't happen, and that we recognize the signs of someone like him," Hansen said. "When you take a small part of him, like his treatment of Geli, you see what he's going to do to Germany and to the Jews.

"I wanted to demystify Hitler. A lot of people want to put him in a special category. They want to make him a devil incarnate, a monster. But the 20th century tells us there are a lot of evil people who have the same evil notions, and they just haven't been as successful carrying out their scheme of hate."

Although Hansen is getting his biggest-ever first printing in the United States, more than 50,000, no publisher in Germany has yet acquired rights. Hansen's agent, Peter Matson, said the response has been cautious.

"I don't think they like the idea of the characterization of Hitler in fiction. It gets a little bit too close to the bone," said Matson. "Ron's previous publisher (Fischer Verlag) has been dragging its feet."

Geli Raubal, the daughter of Hitler's half-sister, got to know her uncle in the mid-1920s. Then the head of a struggling Nazi party, Hitler became infatuated with his attractive, flirtatious niece and began escorting her to social outings.

The murder scene in "Hitler's Niece" is wholly imagined, but it's well established that Hitler had an intense, possessive relationship with Geli and that she lived in a Munich apartment he owned. Pictures exist of the two relaxing together and strong evidence exists that he made pornographic drawings of Geli.

According to "Hitler and Geli," a biography published last year, she was going to leave for Vienna at the time of her death. She was increasingly bored and unhappy and associates of Hitler's were worried that their relationship would become public knowledge.

On Sept. 19, 1931, her body was found on the floor of her apartment, a bullet wound near her heart and bruises on her face. One arm was stretched to a Walther pistol on the nearby couch. On her table was an unfinished letter, an apparently cheerful note to a friend she hoped to see in Vienna.

Many historians consider the suicide verdict a cover-up, and Hansen is among those who call it more than just a private tragedy. Hansen believes that if Hitler had been caught, his career would have been aborted and the Holocaust prevented.

"People just let him get away with lots of things, primarily because he was anti-Communist," said Hansen, who read "Hitler and Geli" and other Hitler biographies while researching for his novel.

"As people have said before, 'No Hitler. No Holocaust.' I think when he got away with murdering his niece, it made it possible for him to get away with other crimes and then start the second world war. The whole process was exponential."

"This is a benevolent hypothesis," Ozick responded, "but 'if only' doesn't hold. History has given us the answer.

"All through the history of that part of the world there has been pogrom after pogrom and the Holocaust really is just a great big pogrom. You can take the 'if onlys' all the way back through history. If only Jesus hadn't been born, there wouldn't be Christian persecution of Jews. These 'if onlys' just fade away before historical reality."

According to Ernst Hanfstaengel, a Nazi party official, Geli provided Hitler for "the first and only time in his life with a release to his nervous energy which only too soon was to find its final expression in ruthlessness and savagery." Herman Goering would later remark that "Geli's death had such a devastating effect on Hitler that it ... changed his relationship to everyone else."

A scene near the end of Hansen's novel is virtually all based on historical record. Hitler visited Geli's grave a few days after her death. He had hardly slept, refused food and was feared suicidal. He arrived at the cemetery at sundown, humming the funeral march from "Die Gotterdammerung" as he strolled through the tall iron gates.

"She's the only woman I'll ever love," Hitler said after laying down 23 red chrysanthemums, her favorite flower, one for each year she lived.

"Germany shall now be my only bride."

Photo by The Associated Press
Novelist Ron Hansen poses at home in Cupertino, Calif., with some of the books he used as source material for his new novel, "Hitler's Niece."