I said before that one of the characters in Chaplin’s Great Dictator was based on Heydrich, but it’s not true. Let’s ignore the fact that in 1940 Heydrich was a shadowy figure, largely unknown to the majority of people—Americans most of all. That is obviously not the problem: Chaplin could have guessed at his existence, and somehow got it exactly right. But while it’s true that the dictator’s henchman in the film is depicted as a snake—whose intelligence contrasts with the ridiculousness of the actor parodying big fat Göring—he is equally a caricature of buffoonery and spinelessness. And in those characteristics we cannot recognize the future Hangman of Prague at all.
On the subject of screen portrayals of Heydrich, I’ve just seen an old film on TV entitled Hitler’s Madman. It’s directed by Douglas Sirk, who was of Czech origin, and it’s an American propaganda film, shot in a single week and released in 1943, just before Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! The story, which is (like Lang’s) utterly fanciful, places the heart of the Resistance in Lidice, the village of martyrs that would end up like Oradour.* The film is about a parachutist flown in from London and the dilemma of the villagers who find him. Are they going to help him or keep away from him—or even betray him? The problem with the film is that it reduces the organization of the attack to a local scheme, based on a series of coincidences (Heydrich happens to be passing through Lidice, which happens to be sheltering a parachutist, who in turn happens to find out what time the Protector’s car will go past). The plot is therefore much weaker than that of Lang’s film, where, with Brecht writing the screenplay, the dramatic power of this one event is used to create a genuine national epic.
On the other hand, the actor who plays Heydrich in the Douglas Sirk film is excellent. For a start, there is a physical resemblance. But he also manages to convey the character’s brutality without overdoing the facial tics—whereas Lang sacrificed subtlety in order to emphasize Heydrich’s degenerate soul. Now, it’s true that Heydrich was an evil, pitiless swine, but he wasn’t Richard III. The actor in Sirk’s film is John Carradine, the father of David Carradine, alias Bill in the Tarantino films. The most successful scene is that of Heydrich on his deathbed: eaten away by fever, he delivers a cynical speech to Himmler that is not without a kind of Shakespearean resonance, but which seems at the same time quite plausible. Neither cowardly nor heroic, the Hangman of Prague passes away without repentance, without fanaticism, regretting only that he must leave a life to which he felt attached—his own.
I did say plausible.
11
Months flow past, they become years, and all that time this story keeps growing inside me. And while my life passes—made up, like everyone’s, of private joys, dramas, hopes, and disappointments—the shelves of my apartment fill up with books on the Second World War. I devour everything I can find, in every possible language. I go to see all the films that come out—The Pianist, Downfall, The Counterfeiters, Black Book—and my TV remains stuck on the History Channel. I learn loads of things, some with only a distant connection to Heydrich, but I tell myself that everything can be useful, that I must immerse myself in a period to understand its spirit—and the thread of knowledge, once you pull at it, continues unraveling on its own. The vastness of the information I amass ends up frightening me. I write two pages for every thousand I read. At this rate, I will die without even having mentioned the preparations for the attack. I get the feeling that my thirst for documentation, healthy to begin with, is becoming a little bit dangerous—a pretext, basically, for putting off the moment when I have to start writing.
At the same time, I have the impression that everything in my daily life is bringing me back to this story. Natacha rents a studio apartment in Montmartre: the entry code for the door is 4206; I think straightaway of June 42. Natacha tells me the date of her sister’s wedding: I yell cheerfully, “May twenty-seventh? Unbelievable! The day of the assassination!” Natacha shakes her head. Going through Munich last summer on our way back from Budapest, we witness something staggering in the main square of the old town: a neo-Nazi rally. The shamefaced locals tell me they’ve never seen such a thing. I don’t know if I believe them. I watch, for the first time, an Eric Rohmer film on DVD: the main character, a double agent in the 1930s, meets Heydrich in person. In a Rohmer film! It’s funny how, as soon as you take a close interest in a subject, everything seems to bring you back to it.
