Laurent Binet's Novel "HHhH" and a Woman's View of History

© Silke Hesse 2013

Laurent Binet’s Novel HHhH  and a Woman’s View of History

Silke Hesse

I have just read Laurent Binet’s “novel” HHhH (from: Himmler’s Hirn heißt Heydrich, i.e. Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich). It was given to me in appreciation of its passionately ethical approach to history writing. Binet places the emphasis on honesty (he avoids inventing details or dialogues and where he does, he owns up to his inventions), on accuracy and range of research (virtually none of his research findings are ignored as irrelevant even where he can’t himself work out their significance), and on an admission of the writer’s own biases. So why does this non-fiction book describe itself as a novel? My answer would be because it chooses a naturally novelistic story arranged around  memorable characters, an exciting action that comes to a climax and closes with finality, and a story in which several strands come together in a way to be guessed at but not completely predictable, i.e. a story that arouses a great deal of suspense. In other words, Binet extracts and dwells on the novelistic elements in a factually true story. He also occasionally uses techniques of the novel like dialogue, individual perspective, and description to bring events to life, but always with a firm grounding of factuality and with an introductory alert to readers. I am full of admiration for this truly novel conception of the historical novel, though for me factual accuracy alone is not of such overweening importance.

What I felt uncomfortable with is Binet’s personal view of events which he is honest enough to admit. It is a young man’s view and the view of a Frenchman brought up with an enthusiasm for patriotism, heroism, revolution, and a warrior’s combativeness, where the courage to resist and fight back is worth more than common sense, patience and the survival of thousands. In Binet’s view, a pacifist is an “idiot”. He is, of course, in good company among the male historians of World War II . For me, however, it came as a shock that somebody so knowledgeable about World War II could hold such opinions without seriously questioning them. I am a woman with a woman’s point of view.

My observation of boys, young men, mature men and older men has left me in no doubt (and biologists too have no doubts) that male animals, including human males, have a different psychological make-up from women. In primitive times it was important that some of the tribe were defenders of territory, conquerors of new and better lands, and protectors of pregnant or nursing females and their vulnerable young. Males were biologically predetermined to be fighters, dispensable should they die in battle as one male could impregnate many females; they were also providers who could roam far afield as hunters and kill the game that the women could not risk stalking. But human culture has significantly modified the world we live in; nowadays we rarely need hunters or fighters or alpha-males. In contrast, the female human’s biological purpose in life has not changed nearly as much. Children are still conceived, born, nurtured and raised in much the way they always were. Because biological predispositions change far more slowly than cultures, men are now on the whole less well adapted than women. It might be an impermissible simplification to say that men are the problem in our modern world, but there is nevertheless a grain of truth in this statement.

Human society has been grappling with the problem of men for millennia. Where there was no genuine need to fight, religions and ideologies have artificially created conflict: wars and crusades in which large numbers of aggressive and superfluous men were annihilated for little but imaginary benefit. But most religions also came up with more moderate solutions: monasteries and ritual associations that plucked men out of normal society, imposed discipline and celibacy on them, while often preserving their useful working power as farmers, teachers or charitable carers. In compensation, such monks were usually granted higher spiritual status. This could of course ultimately lead to considerable power that allowed male aggressiveness to come to the fore once again.

We are today still grappling with the role of men in our society. Team sports are a way in which we can admire strength, courage, discipline, aggressiveness, physical competence, competitiveness, group loyalty and other characteristic male virtues in a harmless form. We are trying to convert our armies into peace-keeping rather than conquering forces and they now include women, also for their mitigating influence. Almost all professions, even politics, are becoming open to both men and women. In our modern concept of marriage both partners are conceived as carers of the young, as creators and upholders of the home, and as providers, causing men to discard many of their masculine characteristics and become more womanly in their approach. We have begun to be tolerant of homosexuals, partnerships that modify traditional gender roles towards greater caring and cooperation and that generally refrain from procreation in an over-populated world. Moreover, contraception has made possible kinder, less harmful and less repressive forms of sexuality, more particularly of male sexuality. And in social situations the man is now often the clown and teller of stories and jokes, the prankster and larrikin and entertainer which gives him a status more appropriate to our times than that of the hero. Men’s traditionally greater skill with technical instruments can be harvested in our technological world. Men’s aggressiveness has often been diverted to business practices where it may, of course, also need some curbing. But in the occasional emergency it still tends to be men and boys who risk their lives to save weaker members of the community.  

Much has changed and will continue to change in the twenty-first century. While the women’s movement fought for the right of women to be like men, their more important achievement was to modify the traditional behavior and dominance of men, partly by minimizing gender differences. The first half of the twentieth century was the last great era of rampant masculinity. World War I, initiated by old men with nostalgic memories of the battles of their youth, called on the young, who had by then almost forgotten the warrior role, to fight and die by the millions, often in brave individual trench combat. It was a type of warfare which few of the surviving combatants wanted to see repeated: a war to end all wars. In World War II it was then masculinity itself in its most brutal forms that assumed dictatorial power. Ideology, be it nationalist, racist or socialist, became rampant: any excuse was excuse enough to fight. Women were excluded from politics and wherever possible also from public life. Jews, denigrated as unmanly, were persecuted. Brutality was seen as strength; killing became a way of life; dictatorial power excluded all moderates from public life and sought out and instated the cave-men that had survived in the crevices of modern society. And soon ordinary men also followed their traditional calling of soldiering as they had throughout the ages. Right around the world brutality was answered with brutality. The warlike, masculine religions of primitive societies, which barred women from their heroes’ Walhallas, flourished once more and many millions of men, women and children became victims.

The histories of the World Wars have nearly always been written by men and there seems to be complete agreement among them that Hitler’s aggression could only have been answered with aggression and that Churchill was the one politician who got it right. Few have asked whether six million Jews could have or would have been murdered without the cover and the panic of war. (The Turks too required WWI to hide their Armenian genocide which provided such a useful precedent for Hitler.) Few have asked how long Germans would have tolerated their government without the emergency of war. In spite of Gandhi’s example, few have wondered how great the power of passive resistance might have been. And it is impossible to establish whether occupied countries suffered more under Hitler or under Stalin. While one can consider such things in retrospect, they can of course never be examined with any scholarly precision. But it seems to me that altogether too many people were duped into focusing on the contents of ideology rather than on seeing it as a provocation to enter the world of war, a provocation that should not have been responded to. And far too many twentieth century Europeans thought in terms of  “traditional enemies”, outmoded balance of power politics, exclusive rights to colonial domination, and Central Europe’s fairly recent passion for ethnic particularity; all such concerns quickly evaporated once the war was over. To me, these wars were a last attempt of the human male to recover his “true” primitive animal nature.

People will say there were also women among concentration camp guards, though on the whole Hitler made sure women were excluded from politics, the army, the law or any influential public office. For him it was women’s duty to supply the cannon fodder, the sons who would fight in his battles. But I am, of course, not interested in individuals here but in genetic predispositions. The world for which women were genetically designed was the family and in it equality of opportunity, sharing, cooperation and the right of the individual to be him- or herself were the natural guidelines. In a family it is intended that all children survive and develop their different capabilities that will eventually make them useful to society. In contrast, the genetic men’s world is one of competitiveness, team work, ambitiousness, excellence and aggressive conquest. These are qualities we would not want to miss; but they must not take over and they have a tendency to do so.

I said earlier that men were the number one problem human society had to deal with. I would suggest that it is also masculine nature with its lure of eternal progress and the urge of one group to win the competitive edge over all others and leave them for dead, if not literally dead, that has brought us the perils of man-made climate change. A woman’s ethos of sharing and of making sure that all can survive would perhaps have been more cautious with resources. This essay should, however, not be read as a diatribe against men. Men are a part of our lives; we love them and we cannot exist without them. But in our rapidly changing modern society men are the ones that need to change more radically, the ones that have the harder tasks of self-modification to perform. And it is in their interests that we should not again allow an ethos of heroism to influence our evaluation of political events, as it does in Binet’s novel about Heydrich and his assassins.