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Summary
Summary
"A textured picture of Hitler's histrionic personality and his insane mission for glory, presaging the genocide to come in the cold-blooded obliteration of one young woman." -- Publishers Weekly
Hitler's Niece tells the story of the intense and disturbing relationship between Adolf Hitler and the daughter of his only half-sister, Angela, a drama that evolves against the backdrop of Hitler's rise to prominence and power from particularly inauspicious beginnings. The story follows Geli from her birth in Linz, Austria, through the years in Berchtesgaden and Munich, to her tragic death in 1932 in Hitler's apartment in Munich. Through the eyes of a favorite niece who has been all but lost to history, we see the frightening rise in prestige and political power of a vain, vulgar, sinister man who thrived on cruelty and hate and would stop at nothing to keep the horror of his inner life hidden from the world.
Author Notes
Ron Hansen was born in Omaha Nebraska in 1947.He received a BA degree in English from Creighton University in Nebraska in 1970. He is the author of more than 20 books, stories, and anthologies. He received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for his book Nebraska, a collection of short fiction, in 1989. Some of his other works include Mariette in Ecstasy; the children's book, The Shadowmaker; Desperadoes; the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which won the John Edgar Wideman Award in 1984; and the novel Atticus, a suspenseful murder mystery detailing a father's fierce love for his son. Atticus was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1996.
Among the anthologies written by Hansen are The Sun So Hot I Froze To Death, Can I Just Sit Here For A While?, and True Romance. His short stories, with titles ranging from "His Dog" to "Playland," have appeared in the Stanford Alumni Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, the Iowa Review, Esquire, and many others.
Besides holding Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, Hansen has received a Lyndhurst Foundation Grant and is a fellow of the University of Michigan Society of Fellows. Hansen has also held the position of Gerald Manley Hopkins S.J. Professor of Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University.
In May 2006 he was inducted into the College of Fellows at Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology. Also in that year The Assasination of Jesse James was adapted for the screen. In 2009 Mariette In Ecstasy was adapted for the stage at Lifetime Theater in Chicago.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Writing about major historical figures is always a risk for a serious novelist; one must imagine thoughts and conversations for which no record exists, and integrate pertinent facts about peripheral people who figure in the story. For the first few chapters of Hansen's (Atticus) ambitious, provocative new novel, this problem seems likely to overwhelm his attempt to plumb the narrative's central question: what really happened to Hitler's 23-year-old niece, Geli Raubal, who was found dead, purportedly a suicide, in her room in Hitler's apartment, in 1931. Hansen has another task here as well: to convey how a mentally unstable, self-pitying failed painter became chancellor of Germany. He introduces the 19-year-old Hitler at the nadir of his fortunes in 1908, the year his niece Geli was born, traces the source of Hitler's monomaniacal mission to "save Germany" to a battlefield experience in WWI and portrays the effects of his spellbinding oratory and instinctive grasp of mass psychology on a shamed and economically devastated populace. Sometimes the sheer mass of information Hansen must provide results in a listless series of mini-bios of people who became Nazi stalwarts, in off-stage action scenes and in the past perfect tense: "the police had hesitated... had fired a salvo... Scheubner-Richter had been killed," a device that dangerously slows narrative momentum. But always the drama swings back to high-spirited, fun-loving, irreverent Geli, and Hitler's sexually deviant need to dominate her. Midway through the novel, the confluence of historical event and personal destiny becomes mesmerizing, as we perceive the torment of a sexually molested, psychologically manipulated woman, isolated and virtually imprisoned by a jealously possessive monster. The finale imagines Geli's death in a completely credible way, and leaves us with fresh insights into Hitler's twisted personality. The reader forgives the occasional longueurs in this textured picture of Hitler's histrionic personality and his insane mission for glory, presaging the genocide to come in the cold-blooded obliteration of one young woman's life. 8-city author tour; simultaneous audio. (Sept.) FYI: Ronald Hayman's Hitler and Geli will be released by Bloomsbury in August. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
From Hansen (Mariette in Ecstasy, 1991; Atticus, 1995; etc.), a microscopically researched narrative of Hitler's Munich years, hung on the hook of the Fhrer's 'love' affair with his gorgeous (and real-life) half-niece. Angela ('Geli') Raubal was born in 1908, and when her father died two years later, her little family moved to Vienna, the mother becoming a chambermaid. Even in poverty, Geli's mother remained concerned about her eccentric half-brother, however distant things remained from his side; once she even traveled to Munich just to look him up'in poverty of his own'and make sure he was well. After his attempted putsch of 1923 and time in prison, though, things began to change. Mein Kampf started selling, money came in to the party'and Hitler offered to employ Geli's mother, pay her brother's tuition, and keep a flat in Munich for 19-year-old Geli so she could go to the university. And so it began: as the years creep by, uncle Adolf becomes less Geli's guardian than potential lover; grows increasingly jealous; and by the time 1930 rolls around keeps her confined, isolated, even shadowed by brownshirts. The maturing Geli now despises him'especially as he introduces her to his notions of lovemaking'and when she reveals to a leaky party-member just how repugnant Hitler truly is, there's nothing else to be done to keep a scandal from erupting and destroying the party, except . . . well, read and see. At times, moving toward its grim catastrophe, the book feels more like history than novel ('In February 1924, Adolf Hitler, Erich Ludendorff, Ernst Rohm, and seven codefendants went on trial for . . . high treason . . . '), but meanwhile readers will hear the brand names of beers drunk, see the clothing worn, feel the air, hear the songs'and cringe at the inevitability of the horror to come. Down to the smallest detail ('a hint of blood on his toothbrush'), a fictional rendering of the love-life and psychology of the historic monster. (Literary Guild alternate; author tour)
Booklist Review
Rooted in historical fact, Hansen's riveting portrait of the century's most malevolent figure blossoms in the realm of fiction, a true flower of evil. The story begins in 1908. Hitler is 19, and his niece, Geli, has just been born to his half-sister, Angela. A manipulative, hate-filled, lazy, and pretentious bohemian who fails to get into art school, Hitler demands money from his struggling family. The visit ends disastrously, and Hitler and Angela have no contact until, widowed and poor, she tracks him down five years later, Geli at her side. The future fuhrer--a scrawny lice-infested anti-Semitic rabble-rouser with a taste for the occult and the pornographic--enjoys the company of his pretty little niece and, after a triumphant spell in jail launches his political career, summons Angela and Geli to his luxurious new home to work as his servants. Now a vain and ruthless lederhosen-wearing pasha, Hitler accelerates his ascent to power, collecting his menagerie of grotesque henchmen (all chillingly portrayed) and expressing his increasingly perverse adoration for his now beautiful niece. Bright, pragmatic, caustic, and emboldened by her erotic power, Geli seriously misjudges Hitler's capacity for sexual deviance and violence. The exact circumstances of her death are still unclear, but Hansen's imagined version feels right, and as his suspenseful novel reaches its shattering conclusion, the monster Geli called Uncle Alf is poised to unleash his insanity on a world every bit as complacent and vulnerable as his deluded niece. Hansen's insightful, brilliantly interpretative, and frightening novel does more to illuminate the welter of evil that fueled Hitler than a dozen biographies. --Donna Seaman
Library Journal Review
The author of such noteworthy works as Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus, Hansen here tries to account for the mysterious death of Hitler's niece. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| 1. Linz, 1908 | p. 1 |
| 2. Schleissheimerstrasse 34, 1913 | p. 14 |
| 3. The Corporal and the Schatzkammer, 1919 | p. 27 |
| 4. The Beer Hall Putsch, 1923 | p. 37 |
| 5. The Merry Widow, 1923 | p. 47 |
| 6. Landsberg Fortress, 1924 | p. 56 |
| 7. Munchen, 1925 | p. 69 |
| 8. Haus Wachenfeld, 1927 | p. 95 |
| 9. The Pension Klein, 1927 | p. 115 |
| 10. Hitler's Friends, 1928 | p. 132 |
| 11. Picnic, 1928 | p. 152 |
| 12. Next Door, 1929 | p. 170 |
| 13. Life Studies, 1929 | p. 186 |
| 14. Prinzregentenplatz 16, 1929 | p. 197 |
| 15. Elections, 1930 | p. 217 |
| 16. Das Braune Haus, 1931 | p. 235 |
| 17. Confessions, 1931 | p. 250 |
| 18. September 18, 1931 | p. 267 |
| 19. Afterward | p. 282 |
| Author's Note | p. 307 |
