This book is thought-provoking and fascinating, and I can't say that I know how to start reviewing it. There are so many things to say about this book, and it made me feel a lot of strong emotions. Based on that alone, it should be obvious that I recommend it to everyone, but before you dive into it, you need to know what you are getting into, because this can be a very tough read at times.
This is at once a historical novel, and a clever work of speculative fiction, or alternate history. What if Hitler had been accepted at the Fine Arts school in Vienna? What if he had travelled a bit, gotten to know all kinds of people, struggled with life in general, and art and relationships more specifically? Perhaps then he wouldn't have been the angry megalomaniac who perpetrated the horros of WWII.
The narrative structure shows us two parallel stories: the historical version of what happened in Hitler's life, and the speculative version of what could have happened to a young man named Adolf H. Most people know the story of Hitler, his family background, his creative frustrations, his stint in the army during WWI, his eventual rise to power, the coup that he orchestrated to take charge of what he considered to be a weak government… and of course the ultimate dénoument: the Third Reich, the war and it's atrocities. There are retold here in vignettes, assuming the reader is well-informed. They are intertwined with another story: that of a young, struggling artist who is deadly intimidated by the nude models he must draw in class, who dreams of and eventually moves to Paris, to be part of the Montmartre art scene he has always wanted to be a part of. This young man meets love, looses it, lives on. What Schmitt shows the reader is the life of a perfectly normal man unfold before our eyes; what might have been.
Certainly, Schmitt makes things relatively easy for Adolf H. He faces hurdles, but falls back on his feet pretty systematically. I think that while this might feel a little easy at times, when you look at the big picture of the work produced by Schmitt for this novel, I am happy to cut him some slack for having wished a good, happy life for his fictional character. But even despite the general fortunate life of Adolf H., the contrast to the historical reality creates a deep unease as the book progresses. Everyone knows how this story ends, but Schmitt keeps the reader on the edge of their seat until the last page.
Which leads me to remark that this book is written with great compassion, and this might be the aspect fo it that moved me the most. Schmitt provides part of his reading journal at the end of the novel, to help the reader understand his process as he was writing, and in those notes he mentions how important it is to not dehumanize Hitler, who did terrible things because he unleashed the darkness within himself, but that we also can't forget that every human being has such darkness in them. The choices he made, how he reacted to the challenges he had to face: these are the things Schmitt wants to draw the reader's attention to, because that's where the root of how history unfolded lies. The potential to become Hitler is in every human being. The difference between him and Adolf H. is that the latter acknowledges his darkness and worked on himself.
I mentionned before that I think Schmitt wanted his fictional character to be happy: through the historical chapters, at no point do we ever get the feeling that Hitler was in any way a happy man. There's no room for happiness when hatred and power are the only things that matter.
A great, deeply disturbing, important novel.