Something to Remember Me By

For a brief period towards the end of the second world war, Heinz Linge was Hitler’s barber. He washes up in America with a few mementos of his life in Nazi Germany. He marries, has a family and settles down to a new life in his new country. His children are clever and compassionate, like him and his wife. There is a strong thread of biology running through this story. Linge confronts the echoes of Hitlerism in his new country. His children grow up and pursue careers in research and nursing. New initiatives in biology are explored and Hitler’s life is viewed through the prism of viral infection. The new biology unites Hitler with modern thought and grants fragments of him a place in the here and now. The role of viruses in human development is considered. There is more to humans than the mere transmission of parental genes from one generation to the next and Hitler embodies the inadequacy of this way of thinking. His mother and father do not prepare the world for the delivery of a monster into its midst. Hitler was not the ‘imago of Linz’. Christianity shines through and defeats Hitlerism. Linge’s daughter, Elizabeth, is the simple heroine of the story. There was never really a contest between Elizabeth’s Christianity and Hitler’s mad ravings, the outcome was never in doubt. There was no philosophy propounded by Hitler to set against Christianity. The man simply had no ideas other than fanciful, Wagnerian dreams of Germanic bliss, an enfeebled romanticism and a sick, twisted hatred of Jews and all things Jewish.His mind was fatally corrupted by an illness visited on him as a teenager. It left him a violent, essentially empty vessel. Read today,‘Mein Kampf’ is incomprehensible. It’s like a belch that contaminates the world with its foul emanations. Linge and his family are good people, even great people, who, between them, overcome the legacy of evil left to them by Hitler.