Understanding Hitler is obviously an impossible mission. However, we would like to succeed in doing so, in order to prevent his return. “If we do not do everything we can to understand the genesis of this hatred, the best-laid strategic agreements will not save us either,” wrote the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller (1923-2010) in 1984 in It’s for your own good (Champs, 2015), a brilliant essay in which she found in Hitler’s childhood the causes of his “destructive character.”
I immediately thought of this book while reading In Klara’s belly (Récamier, 2024, 256 pages), the disturbing novel by the Frenchman Régis Jauffret, which tells the story of the gestation of Hitler’s mother, from July 1888 to April 1889. For Miller, “the example of Adolf Hitler’s childhood allows us to study the genesis of a hatred whose effects claimed millions of victims.” Is it even possible, then, to go back even further to find in the womb of his poor mother the origin of the evil that animated the Führer?
A novelist, Jauffret does not present a thesis; he evokes, with striking mastery, the social and mental atmosphere in which Hitler’s mother lived her pregnancy. Fascinated by sordid news stories — the Fritzl affair, in particular, and that of the Sofitel in New York, implicating Dominique Strauss-Kahn —, Jauffret does not shy away from sinister subjects. He explores them, in the words of Raphaëlle Leyris, critic for the newspaper The worldwith “a mixture of chilling irony and virtuoso bile.”
Here, it is Hitler’s mother herself who speaks, who recounts her experience. She was 27 when she became pregnant with the future Nazi leader, after having lost her two previous children, although some sources mention three. Her husband, Alois, who some say was her cousin, but whom Jauffret presents as his uncle, is a domineering and pretentious brute. After the death of his first wife, he marries Klara, who worked for him as a servant and with whom he was already sleeping.
The atmosphere, as we can see, is threatening. A civil servant of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Alois, born to an unknown father, perhaps Jewish, before being adopted by an uncle, is a despotic and misogynistic husband, a man who loathes democracy, cherishes war and dreams of Austria’s annexation to Germany. Klara admires him.
Catholic to the point of bigotry, even to the point of delirium, the young woman compulsively confesses to a priest obsessed with original sin and seriously anti-Semitic or to her sister Johanna, hunchbacked and intellectually deficient, who spies on her at the priest’s request.
Confused in her devotions, not knowing which saint to turn to, Klara sometimes imagines the unborn child as a saint, “illuminated from within by His light, freed for a moment by the grace of God from original sin”, before, a few minutes later, wishing him an early death which would preserve him from the stain.
“A mother who truly loved her child would smother him on his way home from church before he could commit any sin,” she thought. […] If the Devil’s mother had killed her child immediately after baptism, he would not have spread misfortune throughout the world, and like the smoke of incense he would have risen delicately to Heaven.”
In her ramblings, and this is the originality of the novel and Jauffret’s stroke of genius, Klara suddenly has visions in which images of the Nazi tragedy that would occur a few decades later appear to her. She looks at her newborn, becomes moved by the thought of his future, when, suddenly, the shift occurs: ” […] and at any moment I could have suffocated him poisoned him stabbed him in his sleep instead of covering him with love brooding over him watching over him at night when he had caught a cold and I will remain forever guilty of having carried him made created and the flames of the ovens cast their light on my face […]. »
Jauffret, obviously, does not accuse Klara of anything and leaves us, at the end of the journey, a little too long in fact, with the mystery of evil.
Without wanting to explain everything, Alice Miller, for her part, sticks to her thesis according to which it is the child Hitler, beaten and humiliated by his father, who later takes revenge on the Jews, the outlet available to him in the Germany of the time, and who is not unrelated to his putative grandfather, and on the infirm and the mentally ill, like his troubling aunt Johanna, to express a hatred hitherto repressed.
“I am absolutely convinced,” Miller wrote, “that behind every crime there is a personal tragedy. If we would try to reconstruct exactly the history and prehistory of crimes, we would perhaps do more to prevent new ones than with our indignation and our sermons.”
You are not born a monster; you become one.