Tuesday, April 21, 1998 | 9:11 a.m.
Remember "Springtime for Hitler," the campy, mock-Nazi musical in Mel Brooks's film "The Producers"? It's hard to imagine such a tasteless idea actually getting off the ground in real life, but that is exactly what the new novel by the British writer and actor Stephen Fry aspires to do. "Making History," which is being promoted as "a thriller with a funny streak," uses Hitler and the Holocaust as fodder for an antic comedy about time travel and academic high-jinks: the subject matter of "Shoah" seen through the lens, if you can believe it, of "Back to the Future" and "Lucky Jim." The resulting novel is both shockingly tasteless and deeply offensive.
The plot of "Making History" goes like this: a bumbling graduate student in history named Michael Young and a professor of physics named Leo Zuckermann decide that the world would be a better place if Hitler never existed, and with the help of a time machine they use a male contraceptive to insure that Hitler is never born. As in a Ray Bradbury story, the results are not what they expected: with no Hitler to stand in his way, a charismatic maniac named Rudolf Gloder (a character invented by Fry) assumes leadership of the Nazi Party and uses the atomic bomb to take over Europe and the Soviet Union. He eventually concocts a monstrously evil plan, using the same contraceptives Michael used to prevent Hitler's birth, to wipe out all the Jews of Europe.
Faced with the horrifying consequences of their actions, Michael and Leo decide that they must reverse the events they set in motion. The remainder of the novel chronicles their efforts to "make the world a better place by insuring that Adolf Hitler lived and prospered." It is a premise that inadvertently suggests that all evil is relative and that the six million Jews who died in the real-life Holocaust were an unfortunate but somehow acceptable number.
As his earlier novels like "The Hippopotamus" have demonstrated, Fry possesses ample comic talents, but in this volume he uses them to try to put a humorous gloss on one of history's darkest moments. The doctoral thesis, written by his hero Michael, for instance, treats Hitler's life story as a schlocky comic novel. It depicts the sexual union between Hitler's parents that led to his conception; it shows the young Hitler trying to stand up to his domineering father, and it suggests that much of Hitler's character was simply a function of his dysfunctional family.
Michael's faculty adviser quite rightly wonders whether Michael was high on drugs when he wrote this "perfectly disgusting" thesis, but Fry urges the reader to see this adviser as a pompous old coot and Michael as a likable if feckless hero.
This, despite the fact that Michael reacts like a self-absorbed moron when he learns that his escapades have led to the sterilization of all the Jews in Europe: "It was one hell of a Big Wednesday for Keanu Young, PhDude," Michael thinks. "The history surfer, hanging nine on the point break of yesterday. Tubing it through the big rollers of tide and time. Why had I agreed to help Leo in the first place? Cockiness? A desire to feel big? No, it was simpler than that, I decided. Stupidity. It was just plain stupidity. Or perhaps, at a pinch, stupidity's sweet baby brother, innocence. Maybe even cowardice. The world I lived in was too scary for me, so why not make another?"
Indeed, Gloder's destruction of the Jews is treated as just another consequence of Michael and Leo's tinkering with history, along with such amusing consequences as the disappearance of the Beatles and movies like "Casablanca" and "The Third Man." Other consequences of Hitler's nonbirth, Fry speculates, include: the suppression of homosexuality, the lack of affirmative action programs for blacks and other minorities, and the three-term presidency of Richard M. Nixon. So the real, untinkered-with world (complete with Hitler, the Holocaust and World War II) isn't so bad, Michael concludes, even though "it's not all one long party" since "Ecstasy is illegal" and children can't say certain obscenities "in front of their parents."
This flippant, tongue-in-cheek tone is typical of "Making History": the novel is peppered with jokes about the rock band Oasis, comic asides about Michael's reluctance to grow up, humorous comparisons of American and English slang and slapstick set pieces involving fire ants and dead rats. For that matter, the voice that Fry employs in this novel is not so different from the one he used in his earlier comic novels, a voice that's one part Waugh, one part Wilde and one part Monty Python, a voice that says to the reader: hey, be a sport, this is all a goof - can't you take a joke?
The problem is that this time Fry has tried to make the death of six million people part of his joke, and the joke isn't funny - it's repellent.
PUBLICATION NOTES
MAKING HISTORY
By Stephen Fry
380 pages. Random House. $24.
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