In English alone, there are more than 50 novels in which Hitler plays a prominent role. Many of these are designed to capitalize on the hypnotic fascination their subject holds for so many. In Imagining Hitler (1985), the critic Alvin Rosenfeld (1938- ) examines the negative implications of this fascination and concludes on a despairing note: "No representations of Hitler, highbrow or low, seem adequately to present the man or satisfactorily to explain him." Rosenfeld sees Hitler fiction as guilty of either demonizing or domesticating its subject, most of it designed to capitalize on the perverse fascination the fuhrer holds for so many. He argues that even those novels with a more serious purpose, either to capture a particular point in his evolution or, more ambitiously, to explore questions about the meaning or nature of human evil, end up allowing Hitler to escape from the reality of history into the sphere of myth.

An example of a novel with the modest aim of capturing a particular phase of Hitler's life is Beryl Bainbridge's (1933- ) Young Adolph (1978). Young Adolph, 23 years old, flees possible conscription in the Austrian army to visit his half brother, Alois, and his brother's wife, Bridget, who are living, in a working-class section of Liverpool, England. Adolph turns out to be an unwanted guest, moody, hostile, clumsy, and lazy. In Bainbridge's hands, the future fuhrer exemplifies not so much "the banality of evil" as the banality that precedes evil. When his relatives have had enough of him, they buy him a ticket back home. Hitler's departure strikes the one menacing note in the novel. As the train pulls out, he leans out the window, calling out a German phrase to his brother, causing Alois to swear. Bridget says to her husband,

"What's wrong? He only said you'd get what he owed you."

"It has a double meaning," Alois tells her angrily. "It was a threat. He meant I'd get what was coming to me."

In an authorial afterword, Bainbridge explains that the plot is based upon an entry in what was reported to be Bridget Hitler's diary, claiming that Hitler had visited them in 1912. While it is true that Alois and Bridget Hitler were living in Liverpool at the time, historians have rejected the notion that the young Hitler visited them. But to the novelist, the fact that Hitler may have lived in the very neighborhood in which she grew up was an irresistible opportunity to see those surroundings in a new way. Hitler served as a catalyst, enabling her to pay homage to the neighborhood and the conduct of its people during World War II. In that sense, the book is less about Hitler than it is about Mr. Browning, a local, heroic air raid warden who does not even appear in the book.

Another novel capturing Hitler at a certain phase of his development is Ernst Weiss's (1882-1940) Eyewitness (1939). Weiss was a Jewish physician and novelist, forced into exile early in the Nazi years. He settled in Paris, where he lived a hand-to-mouth existence, finally committing suicide when France fell to the Germans. While in Paris, Weiss met Dr. Edmund Forster, a German psychiatrist who had treated Hitler at Pasewalk, the military hospital where he was a patient near the end of the First World War.

This section of Eyewitness deals with A. H., a soldier confined in a military hospital during World War I, suffering from blindness, presumably the result of a poison gas attack. The psychologist treating him puts him under hypnosis, making the suggestion that he must recover his sight since he is destined to become the savior of the German people. The suggestion works. Hitler recovers his sight, convinced that his recovery signifies the strength of his own iron will. Some historians accept the probability of this story, although any records relating to Hitler's stay in Pasewalk have long since been destroyed.

Two novels dealing with the Hitler of the 1920s are Richard Hughes's (1900-76) The Fox in the Attic (1961) and Ron Hansen's (1947- ) Hitler's Niece (1999). Hansen's work deals with the relationship between the future fuhrer and Angelica ("Geli") Raubal, the daughter of Hitler's half-sister, Angela. In Hitler's Niece, Hansen depicts Hitler's growing compulsion both to adore and dominate Geli. As depicted in the novel, his attraction to his niece begins in her infancy (she was born in 1908, when Hitler was 19). As he becomes more powerful throughout the 1920s, the psychopathic underside of his attraction becomes increasingly evident. As the petty, spoiled, self-involved loser, who fell apart in the Munich Putsch, steadily gains power and prestige, he attracts his share of female admirers, but that does little to deflect him from his obsession with his niece. Their less than healthy relationship gradually degenerates into sexual abuse.

Geli, early on a willing captive of her famous uncle, becomes increasingly unhappy, and by 1931 the 23-year-old announces her desire to return to Vienna and pursue a singing career. A quarrel ensues, during which Hitler, after breaking her nose with his fist, shoots her: "And then he was sure that Angelica Raubal was dead, and there was nothing further to do but cry with self-pity for his loss and love and misfortune." His aides, generally pleased to have her out of the picture, fabricate a story, depicting Geli as having committed suicide.

As with so many of the major questions surrounding Hitler's personal life, his murder of his niece remains a conjecture, but one that has also been advanced, independently of Hansen's novel, in a nonfictional study, Ronald Hayman's (1932- ) Hitler and Geli (1998). If the hypothesis proves to be true, it suggests an alternative possibility to Rosenfeld's pessimism about Hitler fiction, one in which the historical fact and the fictional imagination converge and confirm each other.

Another woman in Hitler's life, his mistress and, on the eve of their death, wife, Eva Braun, is the subject of Alison Gold's The Devil's Mistress (1997). Cast in the form of Eva Braun's diary (including a surviving fragment from an actual diary Braun kept in 1935), the novel offers only an indirect insight into Hitler's character, since the source of direct knowledge is Eva, a self-involved airhead who accurately describes herself as a "dumb, Bavarian blonde." As the story develops, coarsened by the people surrounding her and by her own self-indulgence, she becomes more assertive and more selfish, but no more aware of the historical forces at work around her than she was at the age of 17, when she first met Hitler. Nevertheless, as the end nears, she recognizes that her fate and that of the Kanzler (chancellor), as she constantly refers to him, are inextricable. Ordered to remain in the relative safety of Bavaria, she returns to Hitler's bunker, determined to die by his side. Touched by her loyalty, he decides to marry her prior to their mutual suicide. The day after the ceremony, as the novel imagines it, Eva shoots him at his request, immediately after he has bitten into a cyanide capsule. Before killing herself, she replaces the picture of Hitler's mother that he had placed on his chest with one of herself. Having displaced her rival, she dies content, "a thirty-three-year-old widow."

In her author's note concluding the novel, Alison Gold adopts the tone of one who is washing her hands after a dirty deed. She asserts that the novel makes no claim to historical accuracy; it is "a thick soup of speculation . . . whose morally reprehensible, soulless ingredients" are nevertheless based upon considerable research. Despite the titillation suggested by the title, The Devil's Mistress emerges as a depressingly realistic novel. The author's denial of historical accuracy notwithstanding, the reader has the feeling that her depiction of Eva Braun captures the spirit, if not the literal facts, of the woman's life. As for Eva's significance to Hitler, she appears to be an afterthought in his life, somewhat on a par with Blondi, his favorite dog.

At a considerable remove from Geli Raubal and Eva Braun was Gertrude Weisker, Eva's cousin, whom Eva invited to the Obersalzberg (Berchtesgaden), Hitler's house in the Bavarian mountains, outside of Munich. Gertrude's experiences that summer form the basis of Eva's Cousin (2000), a novel by the German novelist Sibylle Knauss (1944- ). The setting is the summer of 1944. Of the 22 boys who took the school-leaving exam with Marlene (Gertrude), 10 are already dead. But Marlene, with the unshakeable confidence of a 20-year-old, knows that she has "a most favored person clause in the contract of life." What more proof would she need than this opportunity to live in the house of the fuhrer. At first, although put off by Eva's condescension, Marlene is thrilled by the excitement and splendor of the retreat. But as the summer wears on and she becomes more intimately acquainted with her older cousin, sharing the life Eva leads, she sees the tacit contempt, in which the others, even some of the servants, hold her cousin.

Marlene also begins to understand the nature of the relationship between her cousin and the fuhrer. Eva is among those people who are "brilliant in their timidity. They are looking for a master, and, once they have found him, they can hold him by a degree of self-abnegation that even the most experienced men of power . . . would scarcely think possible. And sometimes a bond develops between the timid and their masters that looks like the bond of love, yet is something quite different, such a perfect interplay of command and obedience . . . that the submissive partner acquires as much power as the dominant partner." But this is a recollected observation by the mature Marlene, looking back. At the time of the novel, she is simply caught up in the luxury, ease, and sense of power that comes from the feeling of living at "the center of the world." Soon, however, this sense begins to erode, exacerbated in Marlene's case by her decision to hide an escaped Polish slave laborer in the cellar of a little cottage near the main house. This decision is not a conscious one: "All at once, I myself felt as if I was serving some kind of higher plan, a plan that had been made long ago and without my personal involvement." Like her complicity with Nazism, her rebellion against it is equally unconscious. But she does not look for exemption from guilt. For "We Nazis," she says, "The memory of a spurious emotion is horrible, shameful, humiliating. And hidden down, disguised and camouflaged out of all recognition, the evil of which we were capable lies in the same memory. That is where it hides."

Easily the most perversely brilliant--or brilliantly perverse--of the Hitler novels is the controversial The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. (1981) by the internationally known critic and man of letters, George Steiner (1929- ). A plot summary of The Portage reads like a conventional popular thriller: the capture of Hitler, now 90 years old, in the heart of the Brazilian rain forest by a group of Israeli Nazi hunters. The action focuses on the squad's efforts to bring their captive back to their home base through the densely packed jungle during the rainy season. The Israelis remain in radio contact with their leader, Emmanuel Lieber, a man who has dedicated his life to the capture of Hitler. Other chapters provide satirical, if not exactly comic, relief in their description of the English, French, Russian, and American reactions to the news, each nation responding to type.

Plot aside, the high points of the novel are two chapters that stand in vivid, dynamic contrast to each other. One takes the form of a lengthy radio message Lieber sends to his younger subordinates, warning them not to be seduced by Hitler's rhetoric, "the night side of language, a speech for hell. Whose words mean hatred and vomit of life." He commands them not to let Hitler speak, or to stop their ears if he does, and instead to remember what he did. There follows an extraordinary four-and-a-half-page sentence, a catalogue of individual atrocities suffered by Jews in the various countries where the Holocaust took place. The complexity of the novel's perspective is evident here in that Lieber's injunction to focus on the actions, not the words, occurs in a profoundly rhetorical sentence whose linguistic power matches Hitler's.

The most highly controversial chapter is the final one in the novel. Fearful that they will not be able to bring Hitler out alive, the captors decide to conduct the trial in the jungle, and, disobeying Lieber's instructions, allow Hitler to speak in his own defense. The last chapter is that speech, in which he makes his case against the Jews. He argues that the Jews are guilty of three major crimes against humanity, far greater than his. The first is that they, not he, created the myth of the master race--the chosen people--and along with it a tyrannical, vengeful God, who is both immeasurably remote and oppressively present. Second, that the Jews foisted on the world "the white faced Nazarene," who established an impossible ideal for humans to live up to and the terrors of hell for those who failed to do so. Third, the Jews developed the secular version of Christianity, Marxism, burdening the world with another impossible ideal, the just society: "Three times the Jews have pressed on us the blackmail of transcendence . . . infecting our blood and brains with the bacillus of perfection."

In an interview with Ron Rosenbaum, Steiner revealed that he wrote both of these chapters in a "fever dream" in three days while locked in a hotel room. Despite the serious criticism from many that his Hitler speech fuels the flames of anti-Semitism, Steiner stands by the speech, maintaining that Hitler's condemnation is in fact an unconscious tribute to the Jews. As Steiner argues in his memoir Errata (1998), anti-Semitism grows out of the fact that Jewish culture constantly reminds us of our failure to achieve the highest standards. The problem for many readers is that, in the novel, the speech goes unanswered.

Unanswered too is the call for the definitive Hitler novel. Perhaps it awaits a 21st-century Dostoyevsky, a master psychologist, with a touch of the demonic.

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