Prize Goncourt for Debut Novel
National Book Critics Circle Award
The New York Times Best Book of the Year
The Second World War is a huge tragedy, in which there is such a concentrate of passions, crimes and heroism that it will be a guide for many generations to come. It's like... a modern Trojan War.
HHhH is a German saying from the time of the Third Reich: Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich (Himmler's brain is called Heydrich). Reinhard Heydrich was the most feared man in Hitler's cabinet. Monster from the lair of monsters. “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich,” the SS joked; this man had incredible power and even greater ruthlessness. There were incredible rumors about him, each more terrible than the other. And every rumor was true. Heydrich was one of the ideologists of the Holocaust. It was Heydrich who developed the plan for a false Polish attack on German residents, which became the reason for the outbreak of World War II. It was he who ruled Czechoslovakia after its occupation. Heydrich was mortally wounded on May 27, 1942 by two desperate Czechoslovaks, Josef Gabcek and Jan Kubis, who became national heroes of the Czech Republic. The assassination attempt on Heydrich made a deep impression on the Reich leadership. On the day of Heydrich's death, the Nazis began a campaign of mass terror against the Czech people. It was announced that anyone who knew the whereabouts of the protector’s killers and who did not hand them over would be shot along with his entire family. 1,331 Czechs were shot. After Heydrich's funeral, the village of Lidice was destroyed, all the men were killed and all the women were sent to a concentration camp. After the assassination attempt, Gabcek, Kubis and their comrades hid in the Orthodox Church of Cyril and Methodius. Their location was revealed by a traitor. The church was surrounded by a whole army of soldiers, SS men, and Gestapo men. Seven Czechs fought for long hours against more than a hundred heavily armed Nazis.
Laurent Binet's novel, which won the Prix Goncourt for his debut novel, tells this story, one of the most heroic and desperate of the Second World War. The book became a huge international bestseller and has been translated into more than twenty languages.
According to French critics, what makes Laurent Binet’s almost documentary text a real novel is not the interweaving of truth with fiction, not the artistic description of historical figures, but “the author’s passionate attitude towards history as a constant source of reflection and self-knowledge.”
HHhH blew me away. Binet's style combines neutral and honest journalism with the instinct of a natural storyteller and the passion of a novelist. This is one of the best non-fiction novels I have ever read.
Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho
Brilliantly. Told with elegant grace. A modern masterpiece.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize winner in literature
Literary race for survival. A captivating novel that immerses us in true history, showing us how everything really happened.
The New York Times Book Review
Laurent Binet twists the novel style onto a documentary basis, without inventing a single fact. Postmodern documentary at its best.
The New Yorker
One of the best and most original novels about the war. It reads at the same pace as a thriller, but the fate of the world is at stake in this story.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Binet has a vivid dramatic talent as a storyteller. By the time you reach the incredible conclusion of this true story, you will be completely at the mercy of his understated and completely trustworthy intonation.
The Guardian
We wouldn't go too far from the truth by saying this is a masterpiece.
ABC
Binet has written a rare book in which there is no fiction at all, but it is more captivating than the work of a novelist with an uncontrollable imagination.
Plain-Dealer
There are few books in the world that combine entertainment and deep insight into documentary with such virtuosity.
New Zealand Herald
An incredibly ambitious novel. Triumph.
Colum McCann
Having reached the last page of Binet's masterpiece, I closed my eyes and froze, trying to comprehend what I had read. For many days afterwards I returned in my thoughts to this amazing book again and again.
Gary Shteyngart
Laurent Binet set a completely new standard for the documentary novel, interweaving the writer's passion and personal intonation with extremely accurate factual information. The story keeps you in constant suspense, and the ending is absolutely unforgettable.
David Lodge
HHhH Laurent Binet
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Title: HHhH
About the book “HHhH” by Laurent Binet
French writer Laurent Binet spent years researching the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, with the goal of retelling the story as a thriller. But however, she decided that it was unfair to invent descriptions, dialogues, thoughts and feelings. The best he could do was to come to the conclusion of using commentary on the true facts that he found in the course of his historical research.
By placing himself in a story involving real-life killers from the Third Reich, the narrator challenges the traditional ways of presenting facts in historical fiction. We join the author of “HHhH” on his research trip to Prague; we learn his reactions to documents, books and films. And in the end, his historical novel brings raw truth. And his literary talent, revealed in all its glory in his debut novel, allowed Laurent Binet to receive the Prix Goncourt in 2010.
Laurent Binet takes us through Heydrich's early years - introducing him to his musical talent, his brief naval career and his rapid rise as a favorite of SS chief Heinrich Himmler. As head of the SS security service, he became a real gift to the bureaucracy: his motto became “Documents! Documentation! There’s always a lot of paperwork.” Nazis love burning books, but not documents.
In September 1941, at age 37, he became provisional leader of Bohemia and Moravia, where he soon became known as the "Butcher of Prague". It was he who organized the infamous Kristallnacht in November 1938, forming death squads and setting in motion a movement to exterminate the Jews of Europe. In some Nazi circles, he received the nickname HHhH, Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich, which translates as "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich."
In all things, Laurent Binet concludes, Heydrich was the ideal prototype of a Nazi, but he too had to pay for it. The amazing story of the murder of one of the main SS men is the main thing in this novel.
Binet will tell you a little about the lives of Heydrich's killers, Josef Gabčík, a Slovak factory worker, and Jan Kubiš, a Czech soldier. It took a long time before they could take action, but there was one thing that worked in their favor - and you will only find out about it by reading Laurent Binet's novel HHhH. This is a fascinating work that will bring you closer to the answer to the question of how everything really happened.
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The abbreviation HHhH stands for Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich, which means “Himmler's brain is called Heydrich.” This is what the SS joked about during the Third Reich. There were rumors about Reinhard Heydrich, one worse than the other. He was one of the ideologists of the Holocaust. It was he who developed the plan for a fake Polish attack on German residents, which was the reason for the outbreak of World War II. It was he who ruled Czechoslovakia after its occupation. It was he who was nicknamed the Prague executioner. Heydrich was assassinated on May 27, 1942 by Josef Gabčík and Jan Kubis, who became national heroes of the Czech Republic. After the assassination attempt, Gabchik and Kubis hid in the Orthodox Church of Cyril and Methodius. Laurent Binet's book HHhH, which tells the story of this assassination attempt, won the Prix Goncourt for his debut novel and has been translated into more than thirty languages. It was published in Russian by the publishing house Phantom Press. Lenta.ru publishes a fragment of the novel.
When exactly my father first spoke to me about this - I don’t remember, but I still see him in the room that I occupied in a modest municipal house, and I hear the words “partisans”, “Czechoslovaks”, it seems - “attempt”, absolutely - "destroy" And he also named the date: 1942. I then found Jacques Delarue’s “History of the Gestapo” in my father’s bookcase and began to read it, and my father, passing by, saw the book in my hands and told me something. About the Reichsführer SS Himmler, about his right hand, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia Heydrich and, finally, about the paratroopers-saboteurs sent by London and about the assassination attempt itself. My father did not know the details (and there was no need for me to ask him about the details then, since this historical event had not yet occupied the place in my imagination that it occupies now), but I noticed the slight excitement that overcame him as he stood (usually on the hundredth once - either it’s his professional deformation, or a natural inclination, but his father loves to repeat himself)... as soon as he starts talking about something that, for one reason or another, touched him to the quick. It seems to me that my father never realized how important this whole story was for himself, because recently, when I shared with him my intention to write a book about the assassination of Heydrich, my words did not excite him at all, he showed polite curiosity - and that’s all. But even if this story did not affect my father as much as it affected me, it always attracted him, and I am taking on this book partly to thank him. My book will grow out of a few words thrown casually at a teenager by his father, then not even a history teacher, but simply a man who knew how to tell about an event in a few awkward phrases.
Not history - History.
Even as a child, long before the “velvet divorce”, when this country split into two, thanks to tennis, I could already distinguish between Czechs and Slovaks. For example, I knew that Ivan Lendl was Czech, and Miroslav Mechirz was Slovak. And one more thing - that the Czech Lendl, hardworking, cold-blooded and unpleasant (although he held the title of the first racket of the world for two hundred and seventy weeks - a record that was broken only by Pete Sampras, who held this title for two hundred and eighty-six weeks), was a much less inventive player , talented and handsome than the Slovakian Mechir. But I learned about Czechs and Slovaks in general from my father: during the war, he said, the Slovaks collaborated with the Germans, and the Czechs resisted.
For me, whose ability to appreciate the amazing complexity of the world was very limited at that time, this meant that all Czechs were members of the Resistance, and all Slovaks were collaborators, as if nature itself had made them that way. I didn’t think for a second then that the history of France makes such simplistic thinking untenable: didn’t we, the French, have resistance and collaboration at the same time? To tell the truth, only after I learned that Tito was a Croat (so not all Croats were collaborators, then maybe not all Serbs participated in the Resistance?), I was able to see more clearly the situation in Czechoslovakia during the war. On the one hand, there were Bohemia and Moravia, in other words, the modern Czech Republic, which the Germans occupied and annexed to the Reich (and which received the not-so-enviable status of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, which was part of great Germany), and on the other, the Slovak a republic, theoretically independent, but completely under Nazi control. But this, of course, in no way predetermined the behavior of individuals.
Arriving in Bratislava in 1996 to teach French at the Military Academy of Eastern Slovakia, I almost immediately (after inquiring about my luggage, which for some reason had been sent to Istanbul) began asking the assistant defense attache about this very story of the assassination attempt. It was from him, a nice man who once specialized in wiretapping telephone conversations in Czechoslovakia and who switched to the diplomatic service after the end of the Cold War, that I learned the first details. Including the main one: the operation was entrusted to two people - a Czech and a Slovak. The participation in it of a person from the country where I came to work (therefore, there was Resistance in Slovakia!), made me happy, but the assistant attaché said little about the operation itself, it seems, even only that one of the saboteurs at the moment, when the car with Heydrich drove past them, the submachine gun jammed (this is how I also learned that Heydrich was driving in the car at the time of the assassination attempt). No, there was a continuation of the story, which turned out to be much more interesting: how the paratroopers who attempted to kill the protector managed to hide with their comrades in the crypt of an Orthodox cathedral and how the Gestapo tried to drown them in this dungeon... Now that’s it. Amazing story! I wanted more, more and more details. But the assistant attaché knew nothing more.
Soon after my arrival, I met a young and very beautiful Slovak woman, fell madly in love with her, and our love, I would even say passion, lasted almost five years. It was thanks to my beloved that I was able to obtain additional information. To begin with, I learned the names of the main characters: Josef Gabčík and Jan Kubis. Gabčík was a Slovak, Kubiš was a Czech, it seems that this could be unmistakably guessed by their surnames. In any case, these people seemed to constitute not just an important, but an integral part of the historical landscape - Aurelia (that was the name of the young woman whom I fell in love with then) learned their names as a schoolgirl, like, I think, all little Czechs and all little Slovaks her generation. Of course, she knew everything only in the most general terms, that is, she knew no more than the assistant military attaché, so it took me another two or three years to truly realize what I had always suspected - the truly novelistic power of this real the story surpassed any, even the most incredible, fiction. And what made me realize it came to me almost by accident.
I rented an apartment for Aurelia in the center of Prague, between Visegrad and Charles Square. A street runs from this square to the river, at its intersection with the embankment there is an outlandish glass building, as if flowing in the air, nicknamed by the Czechs “Dancing House”, and on this Resslovaya street itself, on its right side, if you go to the bridge, there is a church with a rectangular window cut into the side wall. Around this basement window there are numerous traces of bullets, above it there is a memorial plaque, where, among others, the names of Gabchik, Kubiš and... Heydrich are mentioned - their destinies were forever linked. I walked past the Orthodox church on Resslova dozens of times, past the window - and did not see any traces of bullets or a board. But one day I froze in front of him: this is the church in the basement of which the paratroopers were hiding after the assassination attempt, I found it!
Aurelia and I returned to Resslova during the hours when the church was open and were able to go down to the crypt.
And this dungeon had everything.
There are still terribly fresh traces of the tragedy that ended in the crypt sixty years ago: the inside of the window that I saw from the street, a dug tunnel several meters long, bullet holes on the walls and ceiling vaults, two small wooden doors. And besides, there were the faces of the paratroopers in the photographs and their names in the texts - in Czech and in English, there was the name of the traitor, there was a waterproof raincoat buttoned up with all the buttons on hangers, two briefcases and a lady's bicycle between the raincoat and the poster, there was the same Sten, an English submachine gun with a folding stock - it jammed at the most inopportune moment; there were women and indiscretions that the paratroopers recalled and mentioned, there was London, there was France, there were legionnaires, there was a government in exile, there was a village called Lidice, there was Walczyk who signaled the approach of the car, there there was a tram - it was passing by, and also at the most unfortunate moment; there was a death mask, there was a reward of ten million crowns to whoever gave up, there were capsules of potassium cyanide, there were grenades and grenade launchers, there were radio transmitters and encrypted messages, there was a sprained ankle, there was penicillin, which then they only got it in England, there was a whole city that was in the grip of a monster who was nicknamed the Executioner of Prague, there were banners with swastikas and insignia with skulls, there were German spies working for England, there was a black Mercedes with a flat tire, there was a driver, there was a butcher, there was an honor guard at the coffin, there were policemen bending over the corpses, there were monstrous repressions, there was greatness and madness, weakness and betrayal, courage and fear, hope and sorrow, there were all the passions human, fitting into a few square meters, there was war and there was death, there were Jews in concentration camps, there were exterminated families, there were sacrificed soldiers, there was revenge and political calculation, there was a man who, among other things , played the violin and fenced, there was a mechanic who was never able to do his job, there was the spirit of the Resistance, forever imprinted on these walls, there were traces of the struggle between the forces of life and the forces of death, there were Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia , there - in a few stones - was the entire history of mankind...
Seven hundred SS men were outside.
Photo: B. Boury/Three Lions/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
After searching the Internet, I discovered that there is such a film - “Conspiracy”, and Heydrich was played in this film by Kenneth Branagh. Five euros, including postage, and three days later the DVD I ordered was delivered to me.
The film reenacted the Wannsee Conference, which took place on January 20, 1942. Heydrich organized the conference, Eichmann took the minutes. In an hour and a half, one of the main architects of the Holocaust managed to outline to the audience the options for measures necessary for the “final solution to the Jewish question,” after which purely technical issues were discussed.
By this time, mass murders of Jews had already begun in Poland and the USSR, and the Einsatzgruppen, Einsatzgruppen, SS death squads operating in the occupied territories, were entrusted with carrying out these murders. For quite a long time, the SS men simply herded hundreds, if not thousands of their victims into a field or forest, where they shot them, but this method had a major drawback: it seriously tested the nerves of the executioners and reduced the morale of the troops, even those as seasoned as the security service ( SD) or Gestapo. Himmler himself once nearly fainted while attending a mass execution. Therefore, later, people doomed to death began to be driven into specially equipped gas chamber trucks and exhaust gases were pumped through a pipe into the sealed body. But in general, the technology of murder remained rather artisanal, and only after the Wannsee Conference Heydrich, with the help of his faithful Eichmann, began to implement a very large-scale project, fully providing him with logistical, technical, social and economic support.
Photo: National Archives/Newsmakers/Getty Images
Kenneth Branagh plays Heydrich with great subtlety. The actor managed to endow his character with not only arrogance and lust for power - the fascist executioner in his performance is smiling, and moreover, he can be very friendly and kind, which somewhat confuses the viewer. I myself have not found information anywhere that the real Heydrich, under any circumstances, even if pretending, showed himself to be friendly and amiable. We also need to talk about this discovery of the film’s authors: one of the episodes, very short, shows us Branagh’s character on a full historical and psychological scale. I mean a quiet, quiet conversation between two conference participants. One tells the other that he heard that Heydrich “has a little Jewish blood,” and wonders if this is true. “And you ask him yourself!” - the interlocutor suggests, not without malice, and the one who asked the question turns pale at the mere thought of such a possibility. In fact, persistent rumors that Heydrich’s father was a Jew haunted the high-ranking functionary of Nazi Germany for a very long time and, one might say, poisoned his youth. It seems that there were no grounds for such gossip, but, on the other hand, Heydrich, being the head of the Main Directorate of Imperial Security (RSHA), could easily cover up all traces and destroy forever any suspicious details of his pedigree.
By the way, I soon found out that in “The Conspiracy” Heydrich appeared on screen not for the first time: not even a year had passed after the assassination attempt, and Fritz Lang had already directed the propaganda film “Executioners Also Die” in 1943, based on the script by Bertolt Brecht. Everything we see on the screen is a figment of the imagination of the creators (they, of course, could not have known at that time what was really happening in Prague, and if they had known, they naturally would not have wanted to make the information public), but The plot is masterfully constructed, and what happens is exciting. A Czech doctor, a member of the Resistance, kills Heydrich, after which he finds refuge with a young girl, the daughter of a university professor, who, along with others, is taken hostage by the occupiers, threatening them with execution if the killer does not show up. The turning point in events, shown as a high-intensity tragedy (this is Brecht!), comes when the Resistance manages to find a traitor-collaborator in its ranks and hand him over to the authorities. His death ends both the “attempt case” in the film and the film itself. In reality, neither the conspirators nor the Czech population got off so easily.
Photo: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
Fritz Lang - apparently in order to emphasize both the cruelty of Heydrich and his depravity - decided to portray the protector quite roughly and made him in the film an effeminate pervert, a complete degenerate, every now and then playing with a stack. In reality, Heydrich was indeed known as a sexual pervert, he indeed spoke in a falsetto voice, which did not at all fit with his appearance, but the swagger of this man, his toughness, his impeccably Aryan appearance had nothing in common with what was shown on the screen. In truth, if the reader wants to see a character much closer to reality, it is best to re-watch Chaplin's The Dictator. The dictator Hynkel has two henchmen there - a fat dandy, for whom Goering clearly served as a model, and a skinny brute, much more cold-blooded, insidious and inflexible. This is not Himmler, who was short, frail, mustachioed and uncouth - this is most likely Heydrich, Hitler's right hand, a more than dangerous man.
