Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich

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“I’m fighting a losing battle.” I can’t tell this story the way it should be told. This whole hotchpotch of characters, events, dates, and the infinite branching of cause and effect—and these people, these real people who existed. I’m barely able to mention a tiny fragment of their lives, their actions, their thoughts. I keep banging my head against the wall of history. And I look up and see, growing all over it—even higher and denser, like a creeping ivy—the unmappable pattern
of causality.”

I commiserate. Penned originally in French by Laurent Binet—author of HHhH, a masterful novel ostensibly detailing the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich—the above portrays a central problem with writing historical fiction. Where Binet saw wartime heroism and struggled to divulge it without resorting to “cheap literary effects,” I saw the financial crisis of 2008 in -retrospect—and a story that refused to boil itself down to a simple lineage of cause and effect, faulted and failed.

It has been five years, this September 15, since Lehman Brothers fell. Should we not have figured it all out by now?

I started the search for a cause by attempting to map a relatively robust outline of the financial system, the result of which you’ll see on page 36. I then asked many people—politicians, journalists,- CIOs, asset managers, consultants, random people in bars—where they would locate “the bomb,” the place it all began. Would it be in ratings agencies that turned dirt into gold? In government programs promoting home ownership? In AIG’s appetite for the wrong side of credit-default swap trades?

I knew there would be disagreement between parties, but the amount surprised even me. Little, if any, consensus emerged—and parties on various sides of the debate so strongly believed their positions that I was swayed more than once. The exercise, as it progressed, seemed increasingly futile. What’s more, the question itself refused to stay in one place: It went from what to how to why and back again, adding to my confusion.

And so I had an intensely difficult time writing this cover story. We’ll see how it turns out. Why the future tense? Because, as I write this, I have yet to put pen to paper on the actual article, an order of production new to me. In the words of Binet: “This scene is not really useful, and on top of that I practically made it up. I don’t think I’m going to keep it.”

Note: In English, “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”—the Nazi-era phrase behind Binet’s unusual title.