One day in the next few decades, everyone who watched World War II happen will be dead: housewives, soldiers, taxi drivers. It's simple math—the addition of time plus mortality—but it feels like a crisis. If nobody is around to directly remember what it was like when a whole nation went mad and tried to take over the world, couldn't that mean the whole infernal nightmare is likelier to happen again?

In his debut novel, HHhH, French author Laurent Binet writes about the process of writing a book about Reinhard Heydrich, a real-life, high-level Nazi nicknamed "the Butcher of Prague." Heydrich was in many ways the psychopath behind the throne; he's widely regarded as the most brutal Nazi in Adolf Hitler's upper echelon of advisers and the intellect behind Heinrich Himmler, and he could be the man who came up with the Final Solution. (The title is an abbreviation for "Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich," which was a common saying in Germany that translates to "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich.")

Our narrator finds himself fascinated with Heydrich, so he immerses himself in all the books and movies in which Heydrich (or thinly veiled Heydrich analogs) make an appearance—a nearly forgotten Fritz Lang film, a film starring Kenneth Branagh, a TV miniseries based on a speculative novel written by Robert Harris. Soon he's hoarding secondary and tertiary sources as though they were stamped onto precious metal...

(Keep reading.)