4 ideas
In 1939 London, after Communists have taken Germany in 1933, Adolf Hitler has fled into exile, goes by the name Wolf, and ekes out a living as a down-at-heel private detective. A Jewish heiress hires him to find her missing sister, and he is drawn into a string of murders of prostitutes while Oswald Mosley's British fascists close in on power. The whole story is a fantasy dreamed up by Shomer, a Yiddish pulp writer held in Auschwitz.
The novel places Shomer, a former writer of cheap Yiddish pulp fiction, inside Auschwitz, where he makes up the Wolf story in his head to keep his mind intact under extermination conditions. Genre escapism works here as a deliberate act of mental resistance: formula plots, hardboiled voice and lurid thrills give the prisoner an inner space the camp cannot fully take over.
The novel does not fantasize about killing Hitler. It shrinks him into a petty, sexually repressed, self-pitying man who is broke, beaten and degraded, forced to take work from Jews, and surviving on sordid jobs. The revenge the story imagines is taking away his grandeur and historical importance, so that the perpetrator becomes pathetic rather than monstrous.
Even after Hitler is removed from German history, fascism still rises in Britain through Mosley's movement, backed by respectable antisemitism and political opportunism. The novel suggests that fascism does not depend on one leader. It grows out of widespread resentment and collaboration, and a different figurehead will fill the gap.