Alex Shephard: I’ve always wanted to say that our guest needs no introduction, but I have never been able to do so, because it has never been true. But now it is. Our guest is Michael Tomasky, the editor of The New Republic. Michael has written a funny, biting new novel, Killing Baby Hitler, that is more or less about just that, although it is a little more complicated. Set in a dystopian 2141, the world in the future looks a lot like ours, just worse; divided into spheres of political influence and ravaged by climate change. A group of scientists discover time travel, and they go back to late nineteenth-century Austria to try to set their worlds right by killing baby Hitler. What follows is a sharp and sometimes scathing satire, and a novel that hopscotches between genres— speculative sci-fi, thriller. It’s also just a fun and funny novel. I’m joined by my colleagues Emily Cooke and Kirsten Denker, and also Michael Tomasky. Welcome.
Michael Tomasky: Hey, that was great, thanks.
Alex: I was wondering if we can start just by talking about the genesis for the novel itself. When did you get this idea, and when did you start to work through it?
Michael: I seem to remember that I got the idea in late 2022 and I don’t remember exactly how. It just popped into my head one morning, I think, while I was exercising. The question obviously isn’t original to me. I did go and immediately Google to see if anybody had written a book about it. I didn’t turn up who anyone had, although I have subsequently been told that none other than Stephen Fry wrote a novel that was built around this idea back in 1996. I looked it up: It’s true, Michiko Kakutani absolutely savaged it in The New York Times. I haven’t even bothered to read it, because I’m just going to live with the idea that mine might actually be funnier than Stephen Fry’s. So anyway, I had the idea late 2022; it was my New Year’s resolution to sit down on New Year’s Day and just start writing and see what came out and see what happened. I was immediately confronted by the reality, which I hadn’t thought of, I admit, that if I’m going to write a novel about time travel, it probably needs to be set in the future when time travel might theoretically be plausible. So I just kind of picked 2141 randomly out of the air, and that’s when it’s set.
Then I realized I have to build this world of 2141. You referenced how dystopian it is, although the idea, for example, that men like Peter Thiel or his heirs literally own countries, which is the case in my novel—that seemed a lot more far-fetched in early 2023, when I was writing that bit, than it seems now. So anyway, I created this world of 2141, and then the characters travel back to 1889 Austria, or at least two of them do, so I had to create that world. I actually did a lot of reading and research about that world. It’s a novel, so I make a lot of stuff up, but a lot of it is grounded in reality, too. Then of course there’s the question of whether they succeed and so on, but we’re not going to give that away.
Emily Cooke: I’m curious—it’s essentially a comic novel. I found it really funny, but of course it describes all these very disturbing developments, not least the division of the world into these horrifying spheres owned by the mega-rich. Of course, it’s fiction, and also tonally it’s quite different from the sort of thing that you’re doing every day as the editor of this magazine and as a writer. I was wondering, was that difference part of the motivation to write it? Did you want a relief from the work that you normally do, or was there some way that engaging with this different form that performed that function for you?
Michael: Yeah, it’s a really good question. In some ways it was a release from what I do, and from thinking about Donald Trump for 14 hours a day, and it was fun. I wrote it in this chair where I’m sitting, and I would come down here on Saturday morning at 7 o’clock before other people in my house were awake and start pounding it out, and I had a lot of fun writing it and letting my imagination run in that way. At the same time, it wasn’t that different from the work I and we do at TNR. It’s still a pretty political novel, as we’ve already established, and it deals in a lot of the stuff that we all have to think about, the way the world is turning very dark on us very fast. I wrote an exaggerated version of that, and it was fun to write, but it’s also sort of frightening to think about the fact that the world that I conjure up in 2141 (and there’s another section that’s in the 2060s) is also really bad. My own daughter will still be alive then, presumably, so it was kind of unsettling in some ways too.
Kirsten Denker: You were saying how between your writing it and it being published, some things are actually seemingly a little bit less absurd than they were when you wrote them. I copyedited this book, but I also gave it another little read to sort of refresh my mind on the details before this session, and the thing that jumped out at me was this moment where you wrote about the Republicans’ decision to raze the Lincoln Memorial and build the Nathan Bedford Forrest mixed martial arts arena, and I think when I copyedited it just in October, that was a funny joke. Now it’s not so funny, actually. It’s a little like, Gosh, we’re living this now. Were you expecting that when you wrote it?
Michael: Not in the least, Kirsten, and that’s pretty on the nose, all right. I’m kind of proud of having come up with that. Based on where it is in the book, I must have written that in the first half of 2023. This is describing an American Republican Party in the late 2040s. Nathan Bedford Forrest, of course, was a Confederate general, so they tear down the Lincoln Memorial, they decide to build something that they name after a Confederate general, and it’s a mixed martial arts arena. Of course at that point I had no idea that Donald Trump was going to be president again, let alone have the kind of celebration that he had the weekend of his birthday and building an MMA octagon on the White House grounds. So yeah, I nailed that one.
Alex: I gotta say, he was also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. I don’t want to shift gears too much away from the politics, but there are a lot of funny cultural references. One of the things that stood out to me is you have a riff about the Beatles not existing in the post-world. I was wondering how you came across those. Were there just things that your own personal cultural interests would make you say, Would Paul McCartney exist in this alternate version of the 1960s? How did you come up with them?
Michael: That was one of the most fun things about the book. I’ll give this much away. The people who go back to kill the infant Hitler botch the job and don’t succeed. However, he does not become the Adolf Hitler we all came to know and hate in history. His life takes a very different course, and he indeed becomes somebody else, so there being no Hitler, history changes a lot, and so I have some sections toward the end of the novel that talk about those changes, and that was probably the most fun part of it to write. I don’t want to give away too much of what happens and doesn’t happen, but there is no World War II, there is no Holocaust. Interestingly, in Stephen Fry’s novel, the Nazi Party found somebody who was even more diabolical and powerful and intoxicating than Hitler, so it became worse. In my version, the Hitler-less Nazi party is nothing, and Joseph Goebbels is a history professor and a writer of novels—he did, in fact, write novels in his life—and Goering ran a flying circus—he was still a World War I hero, as he was in real life, he’s still a World War I hero in the non-Hitler reality—but never became a Nazi. The Nazi Party existed but was a minor thing.
So I had a lot of fun with stuff like that, and then, to get the Beatles in this reality, John Lennon and Paul McCartney didn’t meet on the fateful day, they met in July of 1957, they both separately formed bands. They met later as competing leaders of two local Liverpool bands, and they hated each other because they sensed prodigious talent in each other. So the Beatles never happened, and that had reverberations for Bob Dylan and for the rest of the culture, and it was just a ton of fun to write that stuff.
Kirsten: I especially like the bit about—was it Paul McCartney’s brother being in the loo too long?
Michael: Yeah, those kinds of details were just really fun to write. I’ll just add that there was a President Roosevelt in this non-Hitler reality, but he was a two-term president. Another American political figure becomes the dominant figure of the mid-twentieth century, and he was, in real life, in our reality, a senator, but somebody that very few people today have even heard of. I had fun with that too.
Kirsten: I feel as though you had fun throwing in a lot of cultural references that are just your favorite things, like there’s a Casablanca moment.
Michael: It’s just sort of unapologetically stuff that I like and I’m interested in and things like that, but there are also a number of jokes in there for people who know their history. You don’t even have to know that much history, you just have to know the basics of twentieth-century European history to get these jokes. There’s a point when my two time travelers encounter a police officer in 1889 Austria in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they finish their conversation, and one of my two protagonists stops and turns around and says, I want you to remember a name, and the officer says yes, and he goes, The name is Princip, Gavrilo Princip, and if you’re still wearing that badge in 1914 you want to find an excuse to arrest him. I thought that was really funny, and I drop all kinds of things like that in there.
Emily: In the profusion of references like these, but also for a lot of other things—the sprawling cast, the the madcap jaunts through history—I thought of Thomas Pynchon; Alex mentioned H.G. Wells, Kurt Vonnegut. Would you think of the book as being in conversation with particular writers? Who are your influences?
Michael: Those are apt, and I’m obviously quite flattered by them. H.G. Wells, for obvious reasons, is a point of comparison. I had a friend who said it’s very Pynchonesque in the way that it brings in all these different things.
Alex: The name Darius Shrike is also very Pynchonesque.
Michael: Yeah, I guess it is. Well, that’s cool. I’m glad to hear that. But yeah, the thing I’ve heard most often is Vonnegut. Kurt Anderson gave me a nice blurb, and he compared it to Vonnegut, and I have a friend who says he’s a big Vonnegut fan and told me that Killing Baby Hitler is as good as any Vonnegut, which I’ll take from him. That’s obviously really flattering. I read Vonnegut in high school and college, but it’s literally been that long, which is decades. I should go back and read Breakfast of Champions or something and see. I read three or four of his novels in those days, loved them. Was I conscious of Vonnegut while I was writing this? Not very. I thought it was kind of Vonnegutesque, but it’s been so long since I’ve read him that I really didn’t know.
Alex: You mentioned reading Vonnegut in high school, and it also made me think that one of the things that jumped out to the book as well is that there are various personal moments, or not-quite-autobiographical ones. Like the sections in Morgantown, West Virginia, where you grew up, are very lovingly written. I was wondering if that was something that was conscious, were you just looking for settings that you were familiar with, or are there other bits of Tomasky autobiography sprinkled throughout for those who know?
Michael: I think that’s the only bit that’s autobiographical. They say write what you know, and 90 percent of this novel is not that—I’m not German, I’ve never been to Munich, I wasn’t alive in 1889. I think I do a pretty serviceable job of evoking the smells and sounds of the nineteenth century, which are a lot grosser than you think, but obviously I wasn’t there, so I decided to, for those few pages, write what I know and put in something about a place that I know. Another protagonist is from Pittsburgh, which is just up the road from where I’m from. I’ve been to Pittsburgh a lot and I know Pittsburgh pretty well, but the rest of it is imagination. There are a lot of great novels where people write what they know, but I’m always a little bit more impressed as a reader when people write what they don’t know. It feels more adventurous to me.
Alex: You mentioned the research. I was wondering what that was like, actually. I understood a lot of the World War II references, but then I was like, Oh, you’re not writing World War II. You’re writing nineteenth-century Austria, a place about which I know nothing. So what did you go through to flesh that out?
Michael: Some Hitler biographies that talked about his youth and his upbringing, some books about the Habsburg Empire, and little specific things. There’s one thing in there involving a female character, Ulrica, who turns out to be an extremely important character in the book. When she’s introduced to readers, she’s sitting in a tavern reading a short tract by Nietzsche about Wagner. The casual reader of that paragraph could think I just made that all up, but I actually researched that. I was thrilled to find out that this pamphlet or short book that Nietzsche wrote was indeed published, I think, two years before the action in my novel is set. It’s entirely probable that this intellectual, bohemian, lefty young woman would be reading this book, in which Nietzsche denounces and announces his break from Wagner. It was indeed written just a year before Nietzsche went mad, so all that stuff’s true. I researched that, and I even read this book, which was really passionate and fascinating. I didn’t need to just to write this paragraph, but it was great.
Kirsten: You’ve created a world that’s dystopian, that is extremely dark at times, and I was struck by your tone as a writer. You have a fluid tone, and you’re able to say things in a very casual way that are actually horrific. A lot of this world you describe, it’s described in a very offhand way. I particularly noticed that when you’re weaving climate change into this dystopia you’ve imagined, it really figures in a large way, in terms of shaping how society works, and in its effects on characters. At one point you make a joke in the Jaipur section about a well-loved cricketer who’s struck down by heat stroke and dies in the middle of a speech or something. It’s a funny line, but it’s also dark, and it reflects the reality we’re all staring down the barrel of: the way we’ve had to accept discussing these things in a very quotidian way. This is now the reality we have to tell our kids about. That’s all normal. How would you say that your awareness of climate change and maybe even the coverage we do at The New Republic has fed into this?
Michael: I think we—led by Kate Aronoff, but a whole lot of other people too—do a really first-rate job on that topic, and I read our stuff, and I think about it, and it just struck me. I said, Well, if I’m creating a future world, I can’t ignore this, and it’s probably likely to be pretty bad, so let’s not sugarcoat it. But you’re right, I do try to present heavy things in a jokey way, just for the sake of the tone that I’m going for. I also try to do it not in terms of big pronouncements, but just little examples that make a reader go oh Christ. There’s one point where I say that alligators have migrated as far north as southern Illinois and grown to 30 feet. That’s like, Whoa, and another way of saying climate change has really had a massive impact on the world.
Emily: There are so many ways that the book is so prescient, but one of them is in these robot companions that many of the characters have. Again, when you were writing this, people were not keeping AI girlfriends and boyfriends, as far as I know, but what do you make of how well you envisioned what was about to soon happen?
Michael: I don’t know. I guess by the time 2141 actually rolls around—if it rolls around—things will be a lot freakier than I managed to portray in this novel, because it sounds like it’s all coming faster. One thing I ducked is this question of AI and how many people would be out of work. I did have one passage in there that said only about 30 percent—I forget the number, but only about 30 percent of the people had jobs anymore. But yeah, the robot assistance that people have—I don’t know, I was just trying to think of something science fiction-y, and I was thinking also in cinematic terms, and I could picture a person’s personal assistant—the word I came up with is filo. I don’t even remember why, but there’s some Greek root there that I forget, and you could picture people’s filos materializing and dematerializing and answering their questions, and being at their beck and call, and even in the case of at least one having intercourse with them.
Alex: There’s another similar element as well, with one of the things is very prescient in the book: its conception of a far right that is globalized, which was a trend when you were starting to work on it; but especially as we’re talking this week, it’s like, Elon Musk encourages what are essentially pogroms in Belfast and in parts of the U.K. It’s one of the parts of the book that scared me the most. As I say this, also, it’s 99 degrees in New York, so climate change would be one of those things as well, but that was something that I was wondering—if this was a means for you to think through some of the ways that you’re thinking about politics right now.
Michael: There’s a section—it’s not that long, maybe 12 pages or so—that discusses the breakup of the United States over the course of the mid-twenty-first century, and that’s something I’ve kind of thought a lot about. It seems to me like there’s decent odds that that’s going to happen. I’ve thought about how it might happen, and on what timetable, and what compromises people might have to make. To make a long story short, it doesn’t happen the way it happened in the 1860s, by these states going here and those states going there. It’s not geographically that simple in 2060 as it was in 1860. I’d like people to read it to see the details. The things that I describe the Republican Party of that period coming up with are pretty extreme, but also pretty plausible, and I’d also point out—in case any conservatives are actually watching this—that I don’t hold the left entirely blameless in what happens. There’s some, there’s some liberal shortsightedness in this story as well.
Emily: Well, we have a final question for you, a very important final question: Michael, would you kill baby Hitler?
Michael: I might do what my character did and chicken out, but I would certainly find a way to get him out of Braunau am Inn, which was his little hometown in Austria, right along the German border, and lead him to a to a different and better life. I just—I’m not sure I could. I thought about this a lot while I was writing it, and I might ask the three of you. I’m not sure I could kill an infant, even even if I knew it was that infant.
Alex: I would do it.
Kirsten: You have a joke at one point about babies, which did make me laugh, where I think Harry’s trying to decide whether he wants to be involved in bringing up baby Hitler, and he says, I don’t think I want to. Not because it’s Hitler, but just because it’s a baby. Anyone who’s brought up babies can understand that.
Alex: Well, thanks very much.
Michael: Yeah. I’m really grateful to all of you. Not just for this—everyone should know that I asked a handful of friends and colleagues to read this in advance to see if there was anything that struck them as weird and that I needed to be careful about, and I’m grateful to all three for doing this, and Kirsten copyedited it into the bargain, and knows German, which really came in handy here. So thank you all a whole lot.
