![]() ![]() ![]() The assassination, dubbed Operation Anthropoid, was the brainchild of Beneš, head of the Czech government-in-exile in London. This monster was Himmler’s deputy in the SS (the goofy title refers to the belief that he was also Himmler’s brain) and the principal architect of the Final Solution. He convincingly profiles Heydrich, aka the Blond Beast and the Hangman of Prague. He excoriates the spinelessness of the British and French governments in acceding to Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia. Yet in fact he does a good job of putting the assassination in a geopolitical context. He retracts some of his assertions he regrets his inadequacy as a historian. “I’ve been talking rubbish,” he exclaims. Like all amateurs, he makes mistakes disarmingly, he admits them. Binet’s alter ego narrator is a zealous amateur historian. “Two men have to kill a third man.” Simple, no? But the narration is not. His projected assassination is Binet’s story, and Heydrich’s would-be assassins (Gabcík the Slovak and Kubiš the Czech) are Binet’s heroes. This is Heydrich in Prague in 1942: the Nazi Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, supremely powerful, supremely vulnerable. He is feared and loathed by passersby, yet he has no bodyguard. Picture a man being driven to work in an open-top car, taking the same route every day. The evergreen allure of Nazis as the embodiment of evil is what drives this French author’s soul-stirring work: a hybrid of fact and meta-fiction that won the Prix Goncourt in 2010. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |