In another example he describes Goring as being “squeezed into a blue uniform”: He often shows his hand - for instance, when he says a German tank enters the city at 9am he adds that he doesn’t know if that’s true given that the “most advanced troops seem largely to have driven motorbikes with sidecars”. And I look up and see, growing all over it - ever higher and denser, like a creeping ivy - the unmappable pattern of causality.
I keep banging my head against the wall of history.
I’m barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect - and these people, these real people who actually existed. I can’t tell the story the way it should be told. He was widely believed to be the brains behind his boss, Heinrich Himmler - and this is the inspiration behind the title HHhH, an acronym of “ Himmlers Hirn heist Heydrich”, which is German for “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”.īut as Binet tells Heydrich’s story, he struggles to stick strictly to the facts: he wants to make things up, to add “colour” to situations, to fill in gaps, to create dialogue, to explain character’s motivations and desires: In literary terms, Heydrich is a wonderful character - “It’s as if a Dr Frankenstein novelist had mixed up the greatest monsters of literature to create a new and terrifying creature” - whose horrifying exploits earned him various names, including “The Butcher of Prague”, “ The Hangman of Europe” and “The Blond Beast”. In fact, he was regarded as the most dangerous man in the Reich and was seen as a natural successor to Hitler. The book focuses on a particular real-life event: the attempted assassination of Nazi SS officer Reinhard Heydrich in Prague on by two British-trained parachutists, one Czech and one Slovak, in a plot dubbed Operation Anthropoid.Īs well as exploring the parachutists’ exploits once they are behind enemy lines and all the events leading up to, and after, the planned assassination, it also looks at Heydrich’s stellar rise up the Nazi ranks to become acting Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, where he violently suppressed Czech culture and helped plan the “Final Solution”. What results is an intriguing hybrid, one that constantly reminds us that we can’t always trust the portrayal of history to be accurate or “truthful”, because there will always be elements that are confusing, ambiguous or simply unknowable. Laurent Binet’s HHhH is a unique take on the historical novel: it not only blends fact with fiction, the narrative includes the author’s own thoughts on researching and writing the story. Translated from the French by Sam Taylor. Fiction – paperback Vintage 336 pages 2013.
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