Siegfried: A Black Idyll

A distinguished Dutch author, Rudolf Herter, is in Vienna, having been invited to read from his new masterwork. In a television interview, he muses about Vienna's most notorious son, asserting that it is only through fiction that the uniquely evil figure of Hitler may be truly comprehended. After the reading, he is approached by an elderly couple, the Falks, who have a story of their own, more terrible than anything Herter could have imagined. As domestic servants at Hitler's Bavarian retreat in the waning years of the war, they were witnesses to the jealously guarded birth of Siegfried-the son of Hitler and Eva Braun. For more than fifty years they have kept a secret concerning the child they once raised as their own-and whom they were eventually forced to murder. Only now and only to Herter are they willing to reveal their astonishing story. A shocking, deeply moving evocation of the human heart and the burden of the past, Siegfried is one of Harry Mulisch's most powerful novels and a virtuoso distillation of twentieth-century history and thought.