It’s a truismamong 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 withthe production of a biography of Adolph Hitler is a rather worryingquestion.  Only a propagandist would beginat the position above. Or do you reverse the process, start by hating and findthat lurid attention to mind-defying evil has begun to fray your edges? 

In thelatest edition of our bookchat readers’ podcast For Whom The Book Tolls,fellow-writer DK Powell and I discuss Professor Ian Kershaw’s numbinglycomprehensive and enlightening biography ‘Hitler’.  We also consider how historical fiction hasapproached the problem of depicting monstrosity.  In ‘Young Adolf’ the great Beryl Bainbridge fictionaliseda just-possibly-historical visit by Hitler to his half-brother in Liverpool in1912, and we look at  Timur Vermes’merciless satire of sweet-talking  fascismin the age of infotainment ‘Look Who’s Back’. 

You canfind the podcast here –

https://youtu.be/Si3wR8n0sEo

and afurther 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 shouldadd that I’m more than a little sceptical of the tendency to pathologise Hitleras a form of reassurance – a canter through the bibliography suggests that atone time or another a diagnosis of practically every disease in the medicaldictionary has been proposed as a means of explaining him.  (Housemaid’s Knee an honourable but unsurprisingomission given the preternatural levels of feckless, narcissistic inactivitythat according to Kershaw characterised much of his private life).  Bainbridge seems to me to get closest to aplausible psychological necromancy while avoiding the trap – just - of archlyanachronistic anticipation.  Vermes’satire plays very clever games with first-person voice, asking the readerwhether they think they’re clever enough to see through the comically re-animatedmonster and therefore ‘in’ on the joke, or actually complicit.  Even before the events of 5thNovember 2024, it’s a deeply uncomfortable read for all its comic frisson.

If you wantto follow this up by reading any of the books we discuss or refer to, you canfind them here:

Hitler,by Ian Kershaw (Penguin, 2013);

YoungAdolf, by Beryl Bainbridge (Abacus, 2010);

LookWho’s Back, by Tibur Vermes, trans by Jamie Bulloch (MacLehose Press, 2014);

The Danzig Trilogy, by GunterGrass, trans by Breon Mitchell (Vintage Digital, 2017).