The man who refused to hate Hitler

Looking back over the beginning pages of Hans Keilson's "The Death of the Adversary," I see a few things more clearly: Keilson carefully establishes the novel as a way to present his own warm memoir, written in secret, in German, in a kind of code (calling Hitler "B," for example - not that it would have helped him had the Nazis found the manuscript). He begins with a narrator receiving the manuscript from an attorney, who says a client had left it to him - the few details of the client's life seem to match those of Keilson's. So he creates a frame around his own memoir, both distancing himself from it and making it more real? Why didn't he simply publish his memoir as such or even as a novel, without the frame? Because, I think, it was too painful and honest for him to bear. Most Holocaust novels (and memoirs), as noted in earlier post, are either about heroic resistance of plaintive and tragic submission to fate. Keilson's is not, it's a bit weirder - about a young man who refuses to hate B/Hitler, and rationalizes everything about Hitler's rise to power - comes up with a philosophical rationale that Hitler needs an enemy to clarify his position and to hate Hitler would be to fall victim to the same condition. Obviously, he is a young man filled with fear, guilt, and self-loathing. I kept waiting for him to act, to do something - he doesn't, but as I look over the beginning of the novel I see that in the first pages he does express his hatred of B/Hitler and his wish to see Hitler dead (as in the novel's title). The amazing thing is how long it took him to get there. So some aspect of the author's life - the element we never see in this novel, which drove him into hiding and exile - at last convinced him of the evil of Hitler (and for that matter, why blame only Hitler - why not the millions of Germans who embraced him?). A strange and provocative novel by any stretch.