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Summary
Summary
HHhH: "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich", or "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich". The most dangerous man in Hitler's cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the "Butcher of Prague." He was feared by all and loathed by most. With his cold Aryan features and implacable cruelty, Heydrich seemed indestructible--until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service, killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History.
Who were these men, arguably two of the most discreet heroes of the twentieth century? In Laurent Binet's captivating debut novel, we follow Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis from their dramatic escape of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to England; from their recruitment to their harrowing parachute drop into a war zone, from their stealth attack on Heydrich's car to their own brutal death in the basement of a Prague church.
A seemingly effortlessly blend of historical truth, personal memory, and Laurent Binet's remarkable imagination, HHhH --an international bestseller and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman--is a work at once thrilling and intellectually engrossing, a fast-paced novel of the Second World War that is also a profound meditation on the nature of writing and the debt we owe to history.
HHhH is one of The New York Times' Notable Books of 2012.
Author Notes
Laurent Binet was born in Paris, France, in 1972. He is the author of La Vie professionnelle de Laurent B. , a memoir of his experience teaching in secondary schools in Paris. In March 2010, his debut novel, HHhH , won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. Laurent Binet is a professor at the University of Paris III, where he lectures on French literature.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Taking its title from the German for "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich," Binet's tour de force debut tells two stories: primarily that of the daring mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the prominent Nazi Protector of Bohemia and Moravia known as "The Butcher" and "The Man with the Iron Heart" (a nickname of Hitler's creation) among other epithets. It is also, however, the metafictional tale of Binet's struggles with shaping the story. The novel's 257 short chapters allow for these two strands to advance and entwine in gripping and revealing ways. When Binet stamps a key scene with the progressive dates of the three weeks in 2008 that it took him to render the eight-hour standoff in 1942, for instance, it deepens an already intense scene with a sense of the author's reluctance to dispatch characters he admires. Those men, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, "authors of one of the greatest acts of resistance in human history," were trained in England and parachuted back into Nazi-occupied Bohemia on a mission they both knew might be suicidal. After months of planning, on May 27, 1942, they ambushed Heydrich in Prague. Weeks later they were cornered in a church basement, and Binet renders an almost unbearable account of their final hours fending off the SS. With history never in question, it is Binet's details (such as Heydrich succumbing to an infection from having "horsehairs from the Mercedes's seats" blasted into his spleen) and his compassion for the partisans that elevate these set pieces. His thoughts on the perils of the genre are also succinct and striking; inserting invented characters into historical novels is "like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence." Binet demonstrates without a doubt that a self aware, cerebral structure can be deployed in the service of a gripping historical read. A perfect fusion of action and the avante-garde that deserves a place as a great WWII novel. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The evergreen allure of Nazis as the embodiment of evil is what drives this French author's soul-stirring work: a hybrid of fact and meta-fiction that won the Prix Goncourt in 2010. Picture a man being driven to work in an open-top car, taking the same route every day. He is feared and loathed by passersby, yet he has no bodyguard. This is Heydrich in Prague in 1942: the Nazi Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, supremely powerful, supremely vulnerable. He is Binet's anti-hero. His projected assassination is Binet's story, and Heydrich's would-be assassins (Gabck the Slovak and Kubi the Czech) are Binet's heroes. "Two men have to kill a third man." Simple, no? But the narration is not. Binet's alter ego narrator is a zealous amateur historian. Like all amateurs, he makes mistakes; disarmingly, he admits them. "I've been talking rubbish," he exclaims. He retracts some of his assertions; he regrets his inadequacy as a historian. Yet in fact he does a good job of putting the assassination in a geopolitical context. He excoriates the spinelessness of the British and French governments in acceding to Hitler's takeover of Czechoslovakia. He convincingly profiles Heydrich, aka the Blond Beast and the Hangman of Prague. This monster was Himmler's deputy in the SS (the goofy title refers to the belief that he was also Himmler's brain) and the principal architect of the Final Solution. The assassination, dubbed Operation Anthropoid, was the brainchild of Bene, head of the Czech government-in-exile in London. He needed a coup to restore the morale of the Czech anti-Nazis. Gabck and Kubi parachute in. The arrival of these modest yet extraordinary patriots is like the first hint of dawn after a pitch-black night. They are embedded with the Czech resistance while they plan tactics. The account of the assassination attempt and its nail-biting aftermath is brilliantly suspenseful. Binet deserves great kudos for retrieving this fateful, half-forgotten episode, spotlighting Nazi infamy, celebrating its resisters, and delivering the whole with panache. ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The story of how two Czech agents recruited by the British secret service assassinated Hitler's ruthless lieutenant Reinhard Heydrich in broad daylight on a Prague street in 1942 has been told by the historian. Now it is the novelist's turn. And what a turn Binet delivers! Weaving together historical fact, fictional narrative, and authorial reflection in what he labels an infranovel, Binet gives readers a close-up look at the metamorphosis of documentary truth into literary art. It is an art that makes disturbingly real the cold cruelty of a Nazi titan intent on slaughtering innocent Jews and makes inspiringly luminous the courage of Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubia, the men who kill him. But it is also a curiously hybrid art that foregrounds the creative artist's own struggle to wrest meaning out of his anarchic material. Nowhere is this struggle more evident than in Binet's handling of the bizarre climax of his chronicle, when Gabcik stares down Heydrich's car, only to have his gun jam, forcing Kubia to lob a bomb, leaving the wounded Nazi leader to die days later of an infection. Readers will recognize why this brilliant work won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman and why an English translation was imperative!--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE nameless narrator of "HHhH" has serious misgivings about the novel he is writing. Like Laurent Binet, the book's French author, he has spent years examining the murder of the SS general Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942 with a view to retelling the story as a thriller. But now he decides it is dishonest to invent descriptions, dialogue, thoughts and feelings on a subject as serious as this. The best he can do, he concludes, is to provide a running commentary on the truth (or otherwise) of what he is writing. "I just hope that, however bright and blinding the veneer of fiction that covers this fabulous story," he writes, "you will still be able to see through it to the historical reality that lies behind." He need not sound apologetic. By placing himself in the story, alongside Heydrich and his assassins, the narrator challenges the traditional way historical fiction is written. We join him on his research trips to Prague; we learn his reactions to documents, books and movies; we hear him admit that he sometimes imagines what he cannot possibly know. And, in the end, his making of a historical novel brings a raw truth to an extraordinary act of resistance. This literary tour de force, now smoothly translated by Sam Taylor, earned Binet the Prix Concourt du Premier Roman in 2010. To set the stage, Binet guides us through Heydrich's early years - his musical talent, his brief naval career and his marriage to a Nazi sympathizer - to his rapid rise as a favorite of the SS chief Heinrich Himmler. As the head of the SS security service known as the SD, he showed a special gift for bureaucracy. "His motto could be: Files! Files! Always more files!" Binet writes, adding nicely: "The Nazis love burning books, but not files." In all, Binet concludes, "Heydrich is the perfect Nazi prototype: tall, blond, cruel, totally obedient and deadly efficient." In September 1941, still only 37, he became interim protector of Bohemia and Moravia, where he was soon known as the Butcher of Prague. His curriculum vitae included organizing the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938, forming the Einsatzgruppen death squads in September 1939 and leading the January 1942 Wannsee Conference that put in motion the extermination of Europe's Jews. In some Nazi circles, he earned the nickname "HHhH," "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich" - "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." Even as he writes, though, Binet (or the narrator) harbors doubts about his approach. He recounts a conversation between Heydrich and his father, then reprimands himself: "There is nothing more artificial in a historical narrative than this kind of dialogue." So he promises: "And just so there's no confusion, all the dialogues I invent (there won't be many) will be written like scenes from a play." Amid myriad other digressions, he also finds time to opine on movies and books about the Nazis - and there is no denying he has done his homework. Still, Binet learns little about the early lives of Heydrich's killers, Jozef Gabcik, a Slovak factory worker, and Jan Kubis, a Czech soldier. In their 20s, they were picked from a small army of Czechoslovaks who had escaped to Britain in the hope of fighting to free their country. (Germany had by then absorbed the Sudetenland, annexed Bohemia and Moravia, and installed a collaborationist regime in Slovakia.) The men knew they were likely to die. They did not know that Operation Anthropoid, as the plot was tagged, was driven by the need of the Czech government-in-exile to impress Churchill. After intense training, Gabcik and Kubis were given Czech clothes and new identities, as well as British-made Sten guns. In late December 1941, they parachuted from an R.A.F. plane into their occupied land. It would be five months before they were ready to act, but one thing worked in their favor: Every day, Heydrich was driven to his office in Prague Castle in an open Mercedes-Benz. On the morning of May 27, 1942, as Heydrich's car reached a hairpin bend, Gabcik opened fire, but his gun jammed. Heydrich jumped to his feet, pistol in hand, but Kubis threw a grenade that wounded him. While the two gunmen escaped, Heydrich was rushed to the hospital where, eight days later, he died of an infection. In reprisal, Hitler ordered the execution of 10,000 people, but he later accepted a lesser revenge: the destruction of the village of Lidice and the murder or deportation of its 500 inhabitants. Meanwhile, along with five other resistere, Gabcik and Kubis hid in the crypt of a Prague church. But their whereabouts was betrayed, and after a fierce assault by 800 SS storm troopers, three of the resistere were killed and the others committed suicide. "No one ever manages to persuade them that Heydrich's death was good for anything," our narrator tells us, without admitting that he is speculating. "Perhaps I am writing this book to make them understand that they are wrong." At the end of "HHhH," however, one intriguing question remains unanswered: Is this a true account of how Binet wrote his book or did he plan its unusual structure from the start? Either way, the result is a gripping novel that brings us closer to history as it really happened. Alan Riding is a former European cultural correspondent for The Times. His most recent book is "And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris."
Library Journal Review
Reinhard Heydrich was one of the most powerful and ruthless Nazis until his 1942 assassination. Binet skillfully blends history and fiction in this spellbinding novel, recounting the rise of Heydrich, the stories of the members of the Czech underground who plotted his death, and French collaboration with the Germans, mixing fact with imagined conversation. Binet's tale is a postmodern one as he skips back and forth between the historical figures and his account of how he wrote the book. HHhH, a German abbreviation for "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich," is unusually suited to audio as it consists mostly of short chapters, making it easy to break off at any point. John Lee's clipped delivery is perfect for material both horrifying, as with the planning of the Holocaust, and tongue-in-cheek, as with Binet's remarks about his messy love life. VERDICT Recommended for all listeners interested in the history of central Europe or in innovative historical fiction. ["Binet won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, France's most prestigious literary prize, for HHhH. This fluid translation by Taylor is a superb choice for lovers of historical literary works and even international thrillers," read the review of the Farrar hc, LJ 5/15/12.-Ed.]-Michael Adams, CUNY Graduate Ctr., New York (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.