Gretchen Muller is about 18 years old, living in Germany in the 1930s.  Her uncle Dolf is better known as the leader of the National Socialist party, Adolf Hitler.  Her father died when she was younger, saving the leader from an assassination attempt.  She is proud of him, so she is troubled when a Jewish reporter communicates with her to suggest that her father’s death was in fact a murder by those not by opponents of Hitler, but rather by friends of Hitler.  She is at first outraged, and it just confirms her prejudices about Jews.  But then she starts to realize that the journalist is trustworthy while those around her are unreliable and untrustworthy.  This is a story about how Gretchen’s understanding of her uncle and the Nazi party is transformed and her loyalties are turned around as she comes to learn the truth about what is really going on in her country.  She starts to investigate for herself, and she ends up in all sorts of danger. 

The story provides some of the history of the rise of the Nazi Party in 1920s and 1930s Germany and especially the scene in Munich.  But there is also plenty of fiction, and the mix of fact of fiction verges on the problematic.  One of the characters is a British psychoanalyst who comes to do research on Hitler, and we learn results of supposed psychological tests on Hitler.  Both of these suggest that he was a psychopath.  There are a couple of problems with this.  First, the term psychopath has undergone changes in meaning through the last hundred years, and so it is far from clear what it might mean to say that he was a psychopath.  Second, retrospective psychiatric diagnoses of people long since dead is inherently speculative and uncertain.  So a young adult novel that conveys the information that Hitler was a psychopath may do more harm than good.  It is certainly not a plot move that is innocuous.

What is good about this novel is its ability to give a picture of the internal division within Germany during this period and the passions that drove hatred.  The characterization of most of the major figures in this novel is wooden, but the plot moves along quickly. 

The unabridged audiobook is performed by Heather Wilds, who has the unenviable job of reading English sentences in a German accent.  Maybe it was necessary to do this to keep the reader reminded that this story is set in Germany, but it still sounds silly. 

© 2014 Christian Perring

Christian Perring, Professor of Philosophy, Dowling College, New York