Paul Scraton reviews a ‘non-fiction novel’ that looks at Hitler’s life as a young man…
Using real, historical figures as characters in a novel is not completely unusual; nor is the concept of the ‘non-fiction novel,’ which by most accounts began with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood.
So the premise of Claus Hant’s Young Hitler should not necessarily be a problematic one. Over three hundred pages, Hant tells the story of Adolf Hitler from the age of sixteen in 1905 up to his thirty-first year in 1920. The story, somewhat oddly, is not narrated by Hitler but by his best friend, for whom the friendship with young Adolf—from their childhood in Linz to Munich up to World War One—is a defining and often troubling experience.
The fact that no such friend existed (the narrator is an amalgam of Hitler’s four best friends during that period) is part of what makes this a novel. The pain-staking research and commitment to historical fact, as laid out in the 130 pages of appendices and references that come at the end of the novel, is what makes it non-fiction. Whether it works is another question altogether.
Hant argues that “the non-fiction novel lets me tell a complex, fact-based story in a way that is still accessible to the reader,” and in this respect he has achieved his goal. The book is well-written, and as a scriptwriter who made his name with a detective series in Germany, he knows how to craft a well-paced and engaging story. But there is a wider difficulty with the book and its form: the subject matter.
The question that kept returning to me time and again as I was reading Young Hitler was not whether Claus Hant made the right choice when melding historical fact with novelistic techniques, but whether it could work when the historical facts centre on the life of a man who cast arguably the longest, darkest shadow of the twentieth century. Is Adolf Hitler simply too difficult and problematic a subject for such a technique?