Abstract
This chapter focuses on two ‘what if’ texts written by two popular novelists: the short story ‘Son Dernier Combat’ (1965) by Pierre Boulle and Ersatz (1974) by René Fallet. Both texts pose the same question: Would Hitler have become more human if he had survived the war? These two novels illustrate, moreover, how the Holocaust was becoming central to narratives of the Second World War. The mixed reception of Fallet’s light-hearted novel also reflects how this shift in perspectives, coupled with the uncovering of Vichy’s responsibility in the Holocaust, commanded a certain gravitas.
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Notes
- 1.
Four novels dealing with the deportation of the Jews and the Holocaust were actually awarded the prestigious Goncourt prize between 1953 and 1962: Les Bêtes—Le Temps des morts (1953) by Pierre Gascar, Les Eaux Mêlées (1955) by Roger Ikor, Le Dernier des Justes (1959) by André Schwarz-Bart, and Les Bagages de sable (1962) by Anna Langfus (Bragança 2014).
- 2.
He almost certainly died in 1945. His remains were found in 1972, identified empirically in 1973 and confirmed by DNA testing in 1998 (Karacs 1998).
- 3.
In fact, the media attention given to a recent biomedical analysis of Hitler’s remains carried out by a French team in Russia (Charlier et al. 2018) suggests that many people are still intrigued by the circumstances surrounding the death of the Nazi leader.
- 4.
References to the Second World War appear in other texts written by Boulle, most notably in the novel Le Jardin de Kanashima (1964) which evokes the post-war fate of the team that developed the V2 missiles in Germany.
- 5.
His first collection of short stories was in fact entitled Contes de l’absurde (1953, Tales of the Absurd).
- 6.
Paul Touvier was a zealous Nazi collaborator in the Lyon area during the war. In 1946, he was sentenced to death in absentia. He lived in hiding most of his life, until his capture in 1989. He was tried for crimes against humanity in 1994 and, sentenced for life imprisonment, died in prison of prostate cancer two years later (Conan and Rousso 1994; Jean and Salas 2002).
- 7.
The friendship between two old people in Ersatz offers many parallels with one of Fallet’s previous novels, Les Vieux de la vieille (1958, Old Guys) and, a few years later, in La Soupe aux choux (1980, Cabbage Soup) which would be his last novel and whose cinematic adaption would become a major success in 1983. This theme is so unmistakably prevalent in René Fallet’s oeuvre that the journalist Bernard Alliot called the novelist ‘l’académicien de l’amitié’ (the academician of friendship) in the obituary he wrote for him in Le Monde (Alliot 1983).
- 8.
In this specific passage, Held(-Carméli) tries to help his friend Müller(-Hitler) convince another inmate that Müller is (or was) the Führer.
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Bragança, M. (2019). What if Hitler Had Survived? On Pierre Boulle’s ‘Son Dernier Combat’ (1965) and René Fallet’s Ersatz (1974). In: Hitler’s French Literary Afterlives, 1945-2017. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21617-7_3
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