Making History

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There are numerous World War II alternative history texts wherein events during the war occurred differently from those in history. The storyline is a fairly classic one, What would happen if you travelled back in time and prevented Hitler from being born? Later chapters take place in the trenches of WWI, told from the point of view of Hitler's comrades in arms: ordinary German combat soldiers, completely unaware of the hidden power struggle going on around them between the two potential leaders of the future Nazi Germany—Adolf Hitler and the charismatic officer Rudi Gloder.

His epic dissertation, 200,000 words on Hitler's early childhood, is finally done, printed out and ready to deliver. This amazing novel is a blend of science fiction, history, and time travel, and I thought it brilliant. In this way Fry reaffirms what is most important: the close, personal relationship between two human beings, and the reminder that we are responsible for making a better world. I found the chapters that were written to mimic a movie scripts were very distracting, and don't really understand its use as a literary style. It had a huge group of children in it, and I recognised my grandfather in the middle, surrounded by all kinds of people looking fabulous in furs.I think the major mistake I made at the time was that I didn't put it all over the book that I'm Jewish.

I found myself really enjoying Stephen Fry's delve into a different history and the effects on the present. One requires a certain level of hubris to think that one should be responsible for changing history, and Michael certainly has that. The book avoids the real moral dilemma which it could have easily posed and which would have made it a far more profound and thought-provoking work. Young and Leo Zuckerman - the young British historian and the elderly German physicist at the centre of the story - are engaging, believable, and well-rounded characters, and the situations into which they are thrown are, as I said, thrilling and involving and page-turning stuff. In that case, in the 1990s there should have still been a big number of sad old and middle aged Jews with no progeny, and the Nazis could not have kept them completely hidden from the world.I liked how Michael and Steve's relationship evolved, although I'd have liked to see a bit more of it. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times found the comic tone of the book "shockingly tasteless" and "deeply offensive" given the subject matter. Stephen Fry's working is admittedly engaging and smart and, not least of all, funny, but somehow Fry's famous wit does not work in this work of fiction. The only interesting approach is that Fry tries to imagine what the consequences would be of attempts to change history, but even that is poorly executed.