HHhH

by Laurent Binet

  The exhibition surpassed all my expectations. Here, there really was everything: as well as photos, letters, posters, and various documents, I saw the parachutists’ guns and personal effects, their dossiers filled out by the British commanders, with notes, appraisals, and reports. I saw Heydrich’s Mercedes, with its blown tire and the hole in the right rear door, and the fatal letter from the lover to his mistress that led to the massacre at Lidice. I saw their passports and their photos, and a great number of other authentic, deeply moving traces of what happened. I took notes feverishly, knowing full well that there were way too many names, dates, details. As I was leaving, I asked the lady if it was possible to buy the guidebook that she’d lent me, in which all the captions and commentaries had been transcribed. Sounding very sorry, she said no. The book was handbound and clearly not intended for general sale. Seeing that I was at a loss, and probably touched by my jabbering attempts to speak Czech, she ended up taking the book from my hands and stuffing it determinedly into Natacha’s handbag. She signaled us not to say a word, and to leave. We parted effusively. It’s true that given the number of visitors to the museum, the guidebook was unlikely to be missed by anyone. But even so, it was really kind. Two days later, an hour before our bus left for Paris, I went back to the museum to give the little lady some chocolates. She was embarrassed and didn’t want to accept them. The guidebook she gave me is so important that without it—and therefore without her—this book probably wouldn’t exist in the form it’s going to take. I regret not having dared ask her name, so that I could have thanked her a bit more ceremoniously.

  9

  When she was sixteen or seventeen, Natacha took part two years running in a national essay-writing contest about the Resistance, and both times she finished first—a feat that as far as I know has never been matched, before or since. This double victory gave her the opportunity to be a standard-bearer in a commemorative parade and to visit a concentration camp in Alsace. During the bus journey she sat next to an old Resistance fighter who took a liking to her. He lent her some books and documents, but afterward they lost touch. Ten years later, when she told me this story—somewhat guiltily as you’d imagine, seeing that she still had his documents and that she didn’t even know if he was alive—I encouraged her to contact him again. And even though he’d moved to the other end of France, I managed to track him down.

  That’s how we came to visit him in his beautiful white house near Perpignan, where he lived with his wife.

  Sipping sweet muscat wine, we listened as he told us how he had joined the Resistance, how he’d gone underground, all the things he’d done. In 1943, aged nineteen, he was working at his uncle’s dairy farm. Being of Swiss origin, this uncle spoke such good German that the soldiers who came to get fresh supplies had taken to hanging around in order to chat with someone who spoke their language. First of all, our young Resistance fighter was asked if he could glean any interesting information from the talks between the soldiers and his uncle, about troop movements, for example. Then they put him on parachute duty, where he helped to pick up the boxes of materials parachuted down at night from Allied airplanes. When he became old enough to be drafted by the STO—which meant he was under threat of being sent to work in Germany—he went underground, serving in combat units and taking part in the liberation of Burgundy. Actively, it would seem, judging by the number of Germans he claims to have killed.

  I was genuinely interested in his story, but I also hoped to learn something that could be useful for my book on Heydrich. What exactly, I had no idea.

  I asked him if he’d received any military instruction after going underground. None, he told me. Later, they taught him how to handle a heavy machine gun, and he had a few training sessions: dismantling and reassembling the gun blindfolded, and shooting practice. But when he first arrived, they stuck a machine gun in his hands and that was it. It was a British machine gun, a Sten. A completely unreliable weapon, so he told me: all you had to do was hit the ground with the butt and it went off. A piece of junk. “The Sten was shit, there’s no other way of saying it.”

  You might wish to remember this. It turns out to be important.

  10

  I said before that one of the characters in Chaplin’s Great Dictator was based on Heydrich, but it’s not true. Let’s ignore the fact that in 1940 Heydrich was a shadowy figure, largely unknown to the majority of people—Americans most of all. That is obviously not the problem: Chaplin could have guessed at his existence, and somehow got it exactly right. But while it’s true that the dictator’s henchman in the film is depicted as a snake—whose intelligence contrasts with the ridiculousness of the actor parodying big fat Göring—he is equally a caricature of buffoonery and spinelessness. And in those characteristics we cannot recognize the future Hangman of Prague at all.

  On the subject of screen portrayals of Heydrich, I’ve just seen an old film on TV entitled Hitler’s Madman. It’s directed by Douglas Sirk, who was of Czech origin, and it’s an American propaganda film, shot in a single week and released in 1943, just before Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! The story, which is (like Lang’s) utterly fanciful, places the heart of the Resistance in Lidice, the village of martyrs that would end up like Oradour.[1] The film is about a parachutist flown in from London and the dilemma of the villagers who find him. Are they going to help him or keep away from him—or even betray him? The problem with the film is that it reduces the organization of the attack to a local scheme, based on a series of coincidences (Heydrich happens to be passing through Lidice, which happens to be sheltering a parachutist, who in turn happens to find out what time the Protector’s car will go past). The plot is therefore much weaker than that of Lang’s film, where, with Brecht writing the screenplay, the dramatic power of this one event is used to create a genuine national epic.

  On the other hand, the actor who plays Heydrich in the Douglas Sirk film is excellent. For a start, there is a physical resemblance. But he also manages to convey the character’s brutality without overdoing the facial tics—whereas Lang sacrificed subtlety in order to emphasize Heydrich’s degenerate soul. Now, it’s true that Heydrich was an evil, pitiless swine, but he wasn’t Richard III. The actor in Sirk’s film is John Carradine, the father of David Carradine, alias Bill in the Tarantino films. The most successful scene is that of Heydrich on his deathbed: eaten away by fever, he delivers a cynical speech to Himmler that is not without a kind of Shakespearean resonance, but which seems at the same time quite plausible. Neither cowardly nor heroic, the Hangman of Prague passes away without repentance, without fanaticism, regretting only that he must leave a life to which he felt attached—his own.

  I did say plausible.

  11

  Months flow past, they become years, and all that time this story keeps growing inside me. And while my life passes—made up, like everyone’s, of private joys, dramas, hopes, and disappointments—the shelves of my apartment fill up with books on the Second World War. I devour everything I can find, in every possible language. I go to see all the films that come out—The Pianist, Downfall, The Counterfeiters, Black Book—and my TV remains stuck on the History Channel. I learn loads of things, some with only a distant connection to Heydrich, but I tell myself that everything can be useful, that I must immerse myself in a period to understand its spirit—and the thread of knowledge, once you pull at it, continues unraveling on its own. The vastness of the information I amass ends up frightening me. I write two pages for every thousand I read. At this rate, I will die without even having mentioned the preparations for the attack. I get the feeling that my thirst for documentation, healthy to begin with, is becoming a little bit dangerous—a pretext, basically, for putting off the moment when I have to start writing.

  At the same time, I have the impression that everything in my daily life is bringing me back to this story. Natacha rents a studio apartment in Montmartre: the entry code for the door is 4206; I think straightaway of June 42. Natacha tells me the date of her sister�
��s wedding: I yell cheerfully, “May twenty-seventh? Unbelievable! The day of the assassination!” Natacha shakes her head. Going through Munich last summer on our way back from Budapest, we witness something staggering in the main square of the old town: a neo-Nazi rally. The shamefaced locals tell me they’ve never seen such a thing. I don’t know if I believe them. I watch, for the first time, an Eric Rohmer film on DVD: the main character, a double agent in the 1930s, meets Heydrich in person. In a Rohmer film! It’s funny how, as soon as you take a close interest in a subject, everything seems to bring you back to it.

  I also read lots of historical novels, to see how others deal with the genre’s constraints. Some are keen to demonstrate their extreme accuracy, others don’t bother, and a few manage skillfully to skirt around the historical truth without inventing too much. I am struck all the same by the fact that, in every case, fiction wins out over history. It’s logical, I suppose, but I have trouble getting my head around it.

  One successful model, in my opinion, is The Bloody Baron, by Vladimir Pozner, which tells the story of Baron Ungern—the one encountered by Corto Maltese in Corto Maltese in Siberia. Pozner’s novel is divided into two parts: the first takes place in Paris and recounts the author’s research as he collects various accounts of his character. The second plunges us into the heart of Mongolia, and we find ourselves all at once in the novel itself. I reread this passage from time to time. In fact, the two parts are separated by a short transitional chapter entitled “Three Pages of History,” which ends with the line “1920 had just begun.”

  I think that’s brilliant.

  12

  Maria has been clumsily trying to play the piano for perhaps an hour when she hears her parents return. Bruno, the father, opens the door for his wife, Elizabeth, who is carrying a baby in her arms. They call the little girl: “Come and see, Maria! Look, it’s your little brother. He’s very small and you have to be really nice to him. His name is Reinhardt.” Maria nods distractedly. Bruno leans gently over the newborn: “How handsome he is!” he says. “How blond he is!” says Elizabeth. “He will be a musician.”

  13

  Of course I could, perhaps I should—to be like Victor Hugo, for example—describe at length, by way of introduction, over ten pages or so, the town of Halle, where Heydrich was born in 1904. I would talk of the streets, the shops, the statues, of all the local curiosities, of the municipal government, the town’s infrastructure, of the culinary specialities, of the inhabitants and the way they think, their political tendencies, their tastes, of what they do in their spare time. Then I would zoom in on the Heydrichs’ house: the color of its shutters and its curtains, the layout of the rooms, the wood from which the living-room table is made. Following this would be a minutely detailed description of the piano, accompanied by a long disquisition on German music at the beginning of the century, its role in society, its composers and how their works were received, the importance of Wagner… and there, only at that point, would my actual story begin. I remember one interminable digression in The Hunchback of Notre Dame on the workings of judicial institutions in the Middle Ages. I thought that was very clever. But I skipped the passage.

  So I’ve decided not to overstylize my story. That suits me fine because, even if for later episodes I’ll have to resist the temptation to flaunt my knowledge by writing too many details for this or that scene that I’ve researched too much, I must admit that in this case—regarding Heydrich’s birthplace—my knowledge is a bit sketchy. There are two towns in Germany called Halle, and I don’t even know which one I’m talking about. For the time being, I think it’s not important. We’ll see.

  14

  The teacher calls the pupils one by one: “Reinhardt Heydrich!” Reinhardt steps forward, but another child raises a hand: “Sir! Why don’t you call him by his real name?” A shiver of pleasure spreads through the class. “His name is Süss, everyone knows that!” The class explodes, the pupils roar. Reinhardt says nothing: he clenches his fists. He never says anything. He has the best marks in the class. Later that day, he will be the best at P.E. And he’s not a Jew. At least he hopes not. His grandmother remarried a Jew, apparently, but that’s got nothing to do with his family. This, at least, is what he’s understood from the public rumors and his father’s indignant denials. But in all honesty he’s not really sure. In the meantime, he’s going to shut them all up in P.E. And this evening, when he gets home, before his father gives him his violin lesson, he’ll be able to boast that he was top of the class again. And his father will be proud, and congratulate him.

  But this evening the violin lesson won’t happen and Reinhardt won’t even be able to tell his father about school. When he gets home, he will learn that the country is at war.

  “Why is there a war, Father?”

  “Because France and England are jealous of Germany, my son.”

  “Why are they jealous?”

  “Because the Germans are stronger than they are.”

  15

  There is nothing more artificial in a historical narrative than this kind of dialogue—reconstructed from more or less firsthand accounts with the idea of breathing life into the dead pages of history. In stylistic terms, this process has certain similarities with hypotyposis, which means making a scene so lifelike that it gives the reader the impression he can see it with his own eyes. When a writer tries to bring a conversation back to life in this way, the result is often contrived and the effect the opposite of that desired: you see too clearly the strings controlling the puppets, you hear too distinctly the author’s voice in the mouths of these historical figures.

  There are only three ways you can faithfully reconstruct a dialogue: from an audio recording, from a video recording, or from shorthand notes. And even with this last method, there is no absolute guarantee that the contents of the conversation will be recorded exactly, down to the last comma. Indeed, the stenographer will often condense, summarize, reformulate, synthesize. But let’s assume that the spirit and tone are reconstructed in a generally satisfactory manner.

  If my dialogues can’t be based on precise, faithful, word-perfect sources, they will be invented. However, if that’s the case, they will function not as a hypotyposis but as a parable. They will be either extremely accurate or extremely illustrative. And just so there’s no confusion, all the dialogues I invent (there won’t be many) will be written like scenes from a play. A stylistic drop in an ocean of reality.

  16

  Little Heydrich—cute, blond, studious, hardworking, loved by his parents. Violinist, pianist, junior chemist. A boy with a shrill voice which earns him a nickname, the first in a long list: at school, they call him “the Goat.”

  At this point in his life, it is still possible to mock him without risking death. But it is during this delicate period of childhood that one learns resentment.

  17

  In Death Is My Trade, Robert Merle creates a novelized biography of Rudolph Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, based on firsthand accounts and on notes that Höss himself wrote in prison before being hanged in 1947. The whole of the first part is given over to his childhood and his unbelievably deadening upbringing at the hands of an ultraconservative and emotionally crippled father. It’s obvious what the author is trying to do: find the causes, if not the explanations, for the path this man would later take. Robert Merle attempts to guess—I say guess, not understand—how someone becomes commandant of Auschwitz.

  This is not my intention—I say intention, not ambition—with regard to Heydrich. I do not claim that Heydrich ended up in charge of the Final Solution because his schoolmates called him “the Goat” when he was ten years old. Nor do I think that the ragging he took because they thought he was a Jew should necessarily explain anything. I mention these facts only for the ironic coloring they give to his destiny: “the Goat” will grow up to be the man called, at the height of his power, “the most dangerous man in the Third Reich.” And the Jew, Süss, will become the Great Architect of the Ho
locaust. Who could have guessed such a thing?

  18

  I picture the scene:

  Reinhardt and his father, bent over a map of Europe spread out on the large living-room table, moving little flags around. They are concentrating hard because this is a critical time—the situation has become very serious. Mutinies have weakened the glorious army of Wilhelm II. But they have also devastated the French army. And Russia has been swept away by the Bolshevik revolution. Thankfully, Germany is not such a backward country. German civilization rests upon pillars so solid that Communists could never destroy it. Not them, and not the French either. Nor the Jews, obviously. In Kiel, Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, and Berlin, German discipline will take back the reins of reason, of power, and of the war.

  But the door opens. Elizabeth, the mother, bursts in. She’s in a mad panic. The Kaiser has abdicated. They’ve proclaimed the Republic. A Socialist has been named chancellor. They want to sign the peace agreement.

  Reinhardt, dumbstruck and goggle-eyed, turns toward his father. And he, after an awful pause, can mumble only one phrase: “It’s not possible.” It is November 9, 1918.

  19