History, according to Binet, is much more romantic and intense than fantasy, but how to make history after so many decades alive again, how to create dialogues and imagine the inner feelings of real-life characters?īinet’s book depicts what happened in 1942 and at the same time it is a sort of literary manifesto and a critique on the book of fellow writer, Jonathan Littell, who wrote the provocative novel The Kindly Ones (2009) from the viewpoint of imagined SS officer Max Aue. Fascinatingly, the work is not just a narrative on a historic event, it also is an author’s self-reflection on how to write on historical reality without transforming it into fiction. Binet wins the prestigious Prix Goncourt 2010, the novel is translated in many languages and becomes a bestseller. More than 60 years later French author Laurent Binet (1972) writes a novel on the event of Heydrich’s ambush, entitled HHhH, or Himmler’s Hirn heisst Heydrich as the Nazis joked. Heydrich died one week after the attack, the Nazis in revenge murdered many boys and men from two villages.
Four months earlier he had chaired the Wannsee conference in which the decision about the ‘ Endlösung der Judenfrage’ was taken. On a surprise attack was made on Reinhard Heydrich, the ‘Butcher of Prague’ and Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia. Historical facts evoked and described by a literary author, and then presented in a television programme in which documentary material and the performance of an actor are intertwined: this is how history is kept alive, this is the perfect modus of remembering World War II.
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