Making History (1996) is the third novel by Stephen Fry. Its plot involves the creation of an alternative historical timeline in which Adolf Hitler never existed. While most of the book is written in standard prose, a couple of chapters are written in the format of a screenplay. The book won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.

Plot

Changing history

The story is told in first person by Michael "Puppy" Young, a young history student at Cambridge University on the verge of completing his doctoral thesis on the early life of Adolf Hitler and his mother. He meets Professor Leo Zuckerman, a physicist who has a strong personal interest in Hitler, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Michael assumes this is due to his Jewish heritage. However, it is later revealed that Leo was born Axil Bauer, the son of Dietrich Bauer, a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz who – when the Nazi defeat became certain – gave his son the identity of a Jewish doctor that he murdered. Leo has developed a machine that enables the past to be viewed—but it is of no practical use as the image is not resolvable into details. Together, they hatch a plan to modify the machine such that it can be used to send something back in time. They decide to use a permanent male contraceptive pill, stolen from Michael's girlfriend (a biochemistry researcher), who, due to his continual distraction, has left him to take a position at Princeton University. They decide to send the pill back in time to the well in Braunau am Inn so that Hitler's father will drink from it and become infertile, with the result that Hitler will never be born.

Consequences

The result of preventing the birth of Adolf Hitler with the contraceptive pill is that history has become worse. The Nazi leadership develops nuclear weapons and commits genocide against Jews using a sterilizing water based on the contraceptive pill.

Israeli researcher Asaf Ben Vered noted that "The protagonist of Making History gets told that "There are no Jews left in Europe". That result could not have been achieved solely by sterilizing Jewish men through the "Braunau Water". 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. Plus, if only Jewish men were sterilized, at least some Jewish women would have let themselves be impregnated by non-Jewish men; in fact, Jewish religious law specifically stipulates that such children would be considered Jewish. (...) Anyway, why would Gloder do it at all? To be sure, he is an anti-semite, like many Germans of his time. But as seen from his cynically frank wartime diary, he is above all a completely ruthless and totally unprincipled opportunist, for whom German Nationalism and wartime heroism are simply tools to be used or discarded. He needed the Jewish nuclear scientists to develop nuclear bombs by 1938. He still needs them when entering a nuclear arms race with the US. Were the Jewish scientists and their families exempted from deportation to the "Jewish Free State"? Would they go on working for him when all other Jews were deported? (...) 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. Suppose the opportunist Gloder had altogether avoided the Final Solution, and contented himself with some anti-Jewish rhetoric. Which world would be worse? Our world – or a world with an entrenched Nazi dictatorship in Europe and a racist and homophobic America, but no gas chambers and ovens, six million Jews able to live out their life, even if under Nazi rule? Putting it this way, the protagonist would have needed at least some serious thinking and inner debate before proceeding as he does in the final chapters."

See also

  • Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II

:(There are numerous World War II alternative history texts wherein events during the war occurred differently from those in history. The most common variant of these detail the victory and survival of Nazi Germany.)

References

  • "The World Hitler Never Made"
  • "Making History Cover Art History"
  • Making History Even Worse by Doreen Klahold