Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler appears in the memoir less as a directly encountered character than as the intended target of an improbable assassination plan and the looming agent of a political catastrophe the narrator initially cannot imagine. The failed plan gives comic shape to his mother’s faith in her son’s destiny; later references to Hitler turn that private fantasy into a measure of the danger facing France and Europe.

Identity and Narrative Presence

The memoir supplies little description of Hitler as an individual. He is not met by the narrator, and the evidence here does not recount any direct exchange between them. Instead, Hitler enters the story through what others believe he represents: first, a target whose death might make the narrator a world-famous hero; later, a real and expanding threat whose military success exposes the narrator’s misplaced confidence and the failures of those meant to resist him.

That shift is central to Hitler’s narrative function. In the 1938 episode, the mother imagines his assassination as the climax of her son’s promised greatness. In the wartime passages, the narrator looks back on Hitler’s rise with the knowledge that the fantasy of a single decisive act had given way to a far broader struggle. Hitler’s importance therefore lies both in the political danger associated with him and in the contrast between his actual power and the family’s extravagant, affectionate vision of how that power might be stopped.

The Proposed Assassination in 1938

The plan takes shape after the narrator returns from Sweden to Nice, disappointed in love and preparing to enter the Air Force Academy. His mother receives him not with the homecoming he expects but with distressed sobbing. Once they are alone in the empty restaurant at the Hôtel-Pension Mermonts, she explains that he is to travel to Berlin and kill Hitler. In her account, the act would save France and civilization and establish her son as a champion of the world.

She has already imagined what would happen if he were caught. France, England, and America would demand his release under threat of war, she predicts, while Germany would collapse into confusion; her son would then enter Paris in triumph. The plan is not presented as the product of political or military calculation. Its logic belongs to the mother’s private system of heroic expectation, in which danger can be converted into recognition and her son’s future can be made to vindicate her faith in him.

The narrator does not respond with unqualified enthusiasm. He has just returned from a period of work and wants to remain near the Mediterranean rather than undertake a tiring journey to Berlin in midsummer. He imagines the discomforts of travelling third class, waiting in the streets, and preparing for the attack. Yet reluctance does not release him from the obligation he feels toward his mother: he cannot bring himself to disappoint her. The episode thus makes the proposed attack a test not only of courage but of filial duty, with the mother’s expectations supplying the immediate pressure to act.

Preparation and Abandonment

The narrator makes practical preparations despite his misgivings. He retrieves a revolver from the family box, relies on the pistol practice he had received from Lieutenant Sverdlovski, and obtains a train ticket. When newspapers report that Hitler is at Berchtesgaden, the narrator takes some comfort in the prospect of the Bavarian mountain air. He puts his manuscripts in order, oils the weapon, and borrows a jacket from a larger friend so that the revolver can be concealed more comfortably. The preparations make the scheme briefly concrete without making it an accomplished attempt: Hitler remains at a distance, while the narrator’s departure is still only anticipated.

On the eve of the planned journey, after a last swim at the Grande Bleue, the narrator finds his mother in tears and on her knees, begging him to abandon the project. Her sudden reversal answers the devotion that had first compelled him. When he points out that the ticket has already been paid for, she immediately insists that the money can be refunded. The narrator accepts the change of course. He does not go to Berlin, and Hitler is not killed. The narrative’s dry emphasis on how close the plan came to proceeding preserves the comic timing while acknowledging that the preparations had gone beyond a passing conversation.

From Private Fantasy to Public Threat

Later references to Hitler alter the scale and meaning of the episode. The narrator recalls that Hitler would soon become master of Europe and that French military stupidity helped open the way for German forces. This retrospective knowledge places the uncompleted 1938 plan beside a much larger historical failure: the imagined act that was supposed to save France never took place, while the danger his mother had made the centre of her scheme became an actual crisis.

During the collapse of France, the narrator had initially treated the German advance as a trap from which the French would recover at the last moment. His confidence in his country’s destiny made Hitler’s success difficult for him to credit. After the reversals became harder to ignore, he describes Hitler as close to winning the war while he searches for a plane or crew willing to continue the fight. Elsewhere, he recalls soldiers voicing appeasement and antisemitic scapegoating, evidence of the defeatist atmosphere surrounding the military crisis. These passages do not give Hitler a speaking role; they show how his power registers in the conduct, fears, and compromises of others.

Thematic Role

Hitler also becomes, in the narrator’s later reflection, a stark symbol of a world in which injustice may prevail before any hoped-for moral balance is restored. The narrator imagines the possibility that Hitler might become the emblem of such a world, a reversal of his earlier confidence that France and human decency would ultimately triumph. This is not a report of Hitler’s private character but a statement about the stakes the narrator attaches to his advance: political defeat threatens not only a country but the narrator’s faith that history can be answered by courage and solidarity.

The assassination story holds those meanings in tension. Its comedy comes from the mismatch between the mother’s sweeping prediction and the narrator’s practical reluctance, but the later wartime narrative prevents the episode from remaining a harmless family anecdote. Hitler is at once the absent target of a son’s unrealized mission and the increasingly powerful adversary against whom the son eventually continues to fight. The plan ends in a refunded ticket rather than a heroic arrival in Paris; the danger it sought to forestall, however, outgrows the family’s private drama and shapes the history through which the memoir is told.