Adolf H. Two lives

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Adolf H. Two Lives (French: La Part de l'autre ) is a novel by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt , which was published in 2001. It describes an alternative life story of Adolf Hitler . Schmitt puts forward the thesis that the dictator would have developed differently if he had been accepted at the art academy. Just one word, “passed”, would have changed the fate of an entire people and the history of the twentieth century.

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The book is divided into two parallel storylines:

The life of Adolf Hitler from October 8, 1908 until his death on April 30, 1945 is described, which also includes the consequences of the Hitler dictatorship, such as the Cold War , the division of Germany and the founding of Israel .

The fictional plot depicts an opposing life path of Adolf H.

Hitler, always named Adolf H. in this act, was admitted to the Vienna Art Academy on October 8, 1908 . During drawing lessons with nude models, however, he faints. Desperate, he consults his family doctor Eduard Bloch , who sends him to a certain Sigmund Freud . He diagnosed Adolf H. with an Oedipus conflict , which can be traced back to the fact that H's mother was repeatedly beaten by his father. After the death of the father and then the mother too, H. felt double guilty. After a few sessions, Freud manages to successfully treat his patient. Through various love affairs in Vienna's nightlife, Adolf H. completely overcomes his sexual inhibitions.

When the war broke out in 1914, Adolf H. was called up and sent to the French front. In the course of the war, H. developed into a pacifist .

After the war he emigrated to Paris to resume his life as an artist. He joined the group around André Breton , turned to surrealism and became a respected painter of this art direction. He also has a passionate relationship with a French woman. Due to the death of his beloved by illness, Adolf H. gives up his active career as an artist. He moves to Berlin and becomes an art professor there .

In Berlin, Adolf H. meets a friend from Paris, the successful perfumer Sarah Rubinstein, again. This encourages him to devote himself to painting again. A passionate relationship develops between the two, which leads to a marriage. This connection gives birth to twins.

During the 1940s and 1950s, Adolf H. became a world-famous artist. His son Rembrandt becomes a famous physicist who works on the German space program, his daughter Sophie marries an American and enters the film business in the USA. After the death of his wife and the sinking of his star in the 1960s, Adolf H. emigrated to California. He spends his old age devoting himself to lithography and giving much of his time to his three grandchildren. In 1970 Adolf H. dies peacefully with his family.

World events

Political map of Europe after the German-Polish War

Due to the non-existence of the Hitler dictatorship, world political events proceed differently, which is described relatively briefly in the book.

In Germany in the early 1930s, for example, it was not the National Socialists who seized power, but a conservative , military-backed government with Ludwig Beck as Reich Chancellor . The regime, though not totalitarian , but authoritarian, enjoys only moderate approval from the German people.

Austria and Czechoslovakia are not annexed by Germany, but rather its most important economic partners. However, Germany attacked Poland in 1939 and defeated it in a short war. With Britain and France remaining neutral, the conflict does not expand and World War II never takes place.

Poland must cede the territories gained in the Versailles Treaty to Germany. Since most Germans see the honor of their country restored in this way, the radical political groups lose their ground. As a result, the country is gradually developing again into a democracy and one of the world's most successful states in integrating Jews . Anti-Semitism , of which Joseph Goebbels is one of the best-known exponents , is becoming an “embarrassing marginal phenomenon” in Germany.

Germany is developing into the economically strongest country in the world and Berlin is becoming a multicultural metropolis . In addition, the Germans sent the first satellite into space and carried out the first moon landing in 1970 .

The founding of Israel will never take place without the Holocaust . Despite many supporters of Zionism , the British stopped the immigration of Jews to Palestine under pressure from the Arab population .

In the Soviet Union , the communist regime was overthrown in a popular uprising in the early 1960s .

The United States did not reach the status of a World War II without superpower and are considered rather old-fashioned country.

Statements about and about the book

Schmitt himself noted about his book: "By showing that Hitler could have become someone else, I will let every reader feel that he too could have become Hitler."

Andreas Platthaus poses the question in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung : “What is it that fascinates authors from France so much about the motivation of the National Socialist murderers?” And explains that this is “completely different, much more speculative and also much more banal, but also the one Readers more challenging approach than Jonathan Littell's in ' The Well-Minded ' ”. Here, "regardless of Schmitt's provocative thesis of Hitler's potential in all of us, a hopeful story is told: how the changed life path of a single person would have changed the whole story". Platthaus then explains that Tolstoy may have turned in his grave, because in his novel War and Peace , "the ideal of the genre of the historical novel, he postulated the inevitability of world events and rejected any explanation by individual actors."

Thomas Laux from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung is of the opinion that the fictional Hitler figure is “completely overlaid by the reality of the historical figure” and that it “becomes an artificial hypostatization; the monstrosity of the real Hitler “cannot be put into perspective, which is also a reception problem of reasonableness”. The plot about the fictional Adolf H. seems "constructed to excess, kitschy and convoluted". Laux believes that “sublimation” is “definitely not” for Schmitt. Laux's conclusion is: "No, Schmitt shouldn't have done this book to himself, we readers have a comparatively easy decision."

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Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Andreas Platthaus : Adolf H. Two Lives The Human Hitler In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 8, 2008. Retrieved on August 13, 2018.
  2. ↑ Thomas Laux: Sympathy for the devil In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , January 19, 2008. Retrieved August 13, 2018.