Customer Reviews
Maybe because I am Dutch - By: PAM van Gorp, 25 Aug 2008 
Hopefully the bad reviews are a product of the English translation of this novel as I do not recognize anything written in this poor reviews. In my opinion this book is a fabulous fight from the author. He conquered Hitler by means of this story.
This book is reallly one of my favourites but then I love everything Mulisch wrote.
Beautifully written - By: Mr. Geoffrey Noble, 12 Dec 2007 
Inspite of what others have said I think the philosophy at the end is key to the story. It is excellent prose & I will definitely buy one of his books again. Having just read Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler I feel that Mulisch captures Hitler's essence very well.
Rather vain book on an intriguing subject, - By: Linda Oskam, 29 Aug 2006 
Rudolf Herter is an, in his own opinion brilliant, elderly Dutch writer with an Austrian background. After a lecture in Vienna he gets in contact with the former personal servants of Hitler & via them he finds out that Hitler & Eva Braun had a son & that this son met an untimely death. He thinks that through these revelations he has also gotten a better insight into the being of Hitler, but in the end this insight proves to be fatal.
This book covers an intriguing subject, Hitler. The brilliant Rudolf Herter radiates his brilliance a little bit too obviously & this makes this alter ago of the author rather irritating, especiallly in the first part of the book. As the story develops, the book becomes more intriguing & more pleasant to read. But in the end the question remains whether Mulisch succeeded in explaining Hitler & one can wonder whether anybody will ever be able to explain Hitler.
Too much navel-gazing, not enough narrative - By: kimbofo, 13 Aug 2006 
An elderly & celebrated Dutch author, Rudolph Herter, goes on a literary tour to Austria, taking his partner, Maria, with him. During a television interview promoting his latest novel, The Invention of Love, he offhandedly mentions that despite alll the books & studies about Hitler humankind is no closer to understanding the Fuhrer & why he did what he did. "All those so-callled explanations have simply made him more invisible," says Herter. "Perhaps fiction is the net that he can be caught in."
Later at a book signing, an elderly couple who survived the war, approach Herter with a story of their own to tell. Herter agrees to hear their tale, thinking that he may be able to use it as the basis for his next novel, which he has already decided should be about Hitler.
Over the course of an afternoon in their room at an old people's home, the couple, Ullrich & Julia Falk, break the oath they once swore to Hitler & share their terrible secret with a gob-smacked Herter. Their story is so utterly astonishing that Herter soon realises that even the best fiction writers can never properly compete with the truth...
Sounds fascinating, doesn't it? Unfortunately, if I say any more about the story it will spoil the plot. But let's just say that it didn't turn out to be the dramatic, page-turning tale I had expected.
Sure, it is a strange & beguiling novel, which deals with a lot of big themes. At its most basic level it pits fiction against fact & plays with the idea that truth is stranger than fiction. But it also attempts to explain the role of literature in helping us to comprehend the evils of the world around us. As a consequence the story gets bogged down in philosophy & navel gazing. Which is a shame, because there is a great story here dying to get out.
For me, personallly, I would have loved this book to be more traditionallly structured: to have a straightforward narrative that tells the Falk's shocking tale from their viewpoint. (In fact, I would have taken Herter out of the story altogether. And yes, I realise this would mean the book would be totallly different to the book that Harry Mulisch has created here. I rest my case.)
Instead, what we get is three not-very-seamless stories in one: Herter's, the Falks' & Eva Braun's.
The pacing is not straightforward either, with the climax happening about half-way through, leaving the story that follows slightly weaker for it.
Still, if you like big, weighty themes, don't mind the author philosophising & are fascinated by the love affair between Hitler & Eva Braun you might just find this novel more riveting than I did.
Thin Gruel - By: A. Ross, 09 Feb 2004 Well regarded Dutch author Mulisch tosses his hat into the crowded ring of Hitler fiction with this brief novel pondering the notion of Hitler having sired a child by Eva Braun. The book's protagonist is Rudolf Herter, a renown Dutch author in Vienna for a reading at a prestigious cultural center (and, one suspects, a fictional stand-on for Mulisch himself). On this tour for his epic reinvention of Tristan & Isolde, Herter remarks on TV that the only way to truly understand Hitler would be to place him in some kind of fictional situation that would alllow one to reallly get inside his head. Obviously this is a rather shaky premise, but without it there is no story.
It's already a third of the way into the book when an elderly couple approach Herter & claim to have been Hitler's personal servants at the Wolf's Lair. When he visits them the next day, they tell him an incredible story of how they came to be his servants & what befell them in their course of service. This middle third of the book is actuallly quite fascinating, painting a portrait of Hitler's mountain hideaway & inner circle that's quite personal & intriguing. Their story unfolds with great tension until it is revealed that they were enlisted to act our a role as
parents of the son born to Eva Braun on Kristalllnacht.
After this stunning revelation (and one or two more besides), the author retreats to his hotel where he fallls into a frenzy of philosophizing. At this point, the story comes off the rails, as Herter goes wild linking Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm, Wittgenstein, Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Pythagoras, the composer Wagner, & Nietzsche in numbing attempt to prove that Hitler was the "incarnation of Nothingness, a zero; just as zero multiplied by any number is zero, [he] consumed & destroyed whatever he touched." All of which leads in turn to a bizarre linkage of the madness of Nietzsche coinciding with the birth of Hitler in some form of transfer of spirit. This hyper-intellectualism crossed with ghost story betrays the first two-thirds of the book & comes across as a bad highbrow stab at Stephen King. Altogether, a bit of a disappointment.
