Make history

Making History ( Engl. "Making History") is a novel by British author Stephen Fry from the year 1996 .

action

The English student Michael Young is fascinated by the supposed German-born Jew and physics professor Zuckermann, who has succeeded in designing a machine with which you can send things through time. Driven by his irrepressible hatred of Adolf Hitler, he teams up with Michael, who has just written a paper about Hitler's youth. They manage to send a new kind of infertility- inducing drug through time and thus contaminate the well of the house of the Schicklgruber family (and their neighbors) so that their son Adolf is never conceived.

After the experiment, Michael wakes up and is astonished to find that he is no longer in England, but in America. After finding out where he is, the first thing he asks his friend Steven Burns about Hitler. However, he never heard the name. When Steve asks what Michael is excited about, Michael says he's glad Steve never heard of Hitler and the Nazis. Thereupon Steve says indignantly that he knows the Nazis, of course, and lists all known Nazi greats such as Himmler , Goebbels , etc., only instead of Hitler he refers to a Rudolf Gloder (1894–1966). Unlike before, when the life of Hitler could be read in short excerpts, Gloder now lived through brief excerpts from, for example, the First World War or joining the NSDAP . It becomes clear that due to the birth of Hitler, Gloder died in World War I, as the latter challenged him to retrieve a stolen helmet from the enemies. In Hitler's absence, Gloder survives and takes his place in history.

Michael finds out that, unlike Hitler, Gloder did not openly fight the Jews, but even had Einstein build the atom bomb. At the same time, Leo Zuckermann's father, who was not a Jew, but a Nazi doctor, found the diary of a village doctor from Braunau am Inn , in which it is reported that an entire street, including a Schickelgruber-Hitler family, had suddenly become sterile . During a water test they discovered the drug and forced all Jews in Europe to drink from it. A generation later there were no more Jews in Europe, except in an area in the former Soviet Union, where apparently a free Jewish state had been established. However, it never becomes clear whether this state really exists, since Jews who do not come from Europe are not allowed to enter Europe and they therefore cannot verify the existence of the so-called "Jewish Free State". At the same time, the Germans attacked the Soviets with nuclear weapons and killed Stalin; with the subsequent invasion of the Soviet Union, it collapsed. Afterwards, the Germans forced all of Europe, including Great Britain, to surrender by threatening nuclear weapons and invasions. In all states either puppet regimes were set up or they were incorporated into the German Reich. Since America also developed the atomic bomb at this time, a cold war broke out between the United States and "Nazi Europe," as it is now called. Michael's parents had to flee, hence his stay in America.

Michael is desperate because under these circumstances he can hardly expect to meet Zuckermann in America. To make matters worse, he is also interrogated by agents who want to know where Michael knows the names Braunau and Hitler from, because only the professor knows them. Because this (Zuckermann) is actually there because shortly before his father's death he received the secret of the so-called “Braunau water”, which makes it sterile, and found it so terrible that he simply had to overflow. Michael realizes that, despite avoiding the birth of Hitler, the world has changed for the worse in all respects, because life is not free in America either. Due to the constant friction with Europe, it could not change for the better domestically, since everything that is not originally American can be considered subversive. Blacks have hardly any rights and homosexuality is a capital crime punished with deportation to so-called “gay ghettos” and the withdrawal of all civil rights.

This is exactly where Michael has the biggest problem: He fell in love with his fellow student Steve, who also reciprocated these feelings. Together they find Professor Zuckermann, who lives under an alias, and convince him to repeat the experiment. They contaminate the Schicklgrubers' fountain with the carcasses of rats, so that nobody drinks from it anymore, Alois Schicklgruber never takes the drug and so Adolf Hitler can be born. Shortly before the experiment ends, however, Steve is shot by an agent and Michael can no longer do anything for him.

Back in his reality, he realizes that everything is back to normal, with one exception: he somehow managed to make his favorite band disappear. With the lyrics, other bands can certainly be served and it can be used to earn money, and then Steve shows up ...

criticism

“For Stephen Fry, disaster is not tied to a specific person. Hitler, so the thesis of the book, was only a placeholder. It is not individual people that are decisive, but historical framework conditions ... Fry implements this credibly in his bitterly angry novel. There is a lot of the blackest British humor for which one would crucify a German author on this subject. "

- Jürgen Wimmer

Prices

The book won the Sidewise Award for novels about alternative timelines.

expenditure

• Stephen Fry: Making History , Random House, 1996. ISBN 0091791413

• Stephen Fry: Making history , from the English by Ulrich Blumenbach, Haffmans Verlag, Zurich 1997 (German first edition). ISBN 978-3746623337
• Stephen Fry: Making history , from the English by Ulrich Blumenbach, Rowohlt-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1999 (German paperback edition). ISBN 3-499-22410-0 (current edition from Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-7466-2333-7 )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Wolfgang Jeschke (Ed.): Das Science Fiction Jahr 2000 , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag , Munich, ISBN 3-453-16183-1 , p. 798.