Excerpt: Hitler's Dream

Note: taIWWan will be sharing excerpts from David Barry Temple's sci-fi novel, A Western Metempsychosis, about time travelers who go back in history to rescue the human race from fascists, imperialists, and capitalists. 

In this scene, the time travelers work on Hitler's ideology with subliminal persuasion after his incarceration for the Beer Hall Putsch. With the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg and Samuel Wallenstein within, Hitler and Hess alter Mein Kampf.

At night, his conscience worked on him, relaxing him to doze off. In one dream, he was on a train within minutes of a Finland Station though he had never been to Finland. He was the main attraction when the train arrived with every eye upon him. He went out to stand on the caboose platform to wave. The station itself was gray and pink stucco held up by slim columns that branched where they met the roof. His last thought before awakening was that the station did not suit him well.

“This could be you,” he heard a female voice within him say, as he stood and shuttered peeing in the pot provided. He could quickly seize control of events, too, a wakeful voice said. “You could become a mench,” a third voice whispered as he returned to sit on the cot and contemplate his dream. Then, the penny dropped: he realized what he had dreamed: He was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin, steaming into St. Petersburg after an eight day trip from Zurich to start the socialist revolution.                              

“Rudolph, I had the strangest dream a few nights ago,” said Adolph during his confidant’s next visit to prison. “I know how to convert the German volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualism, the entrepreneurial and managerial classes left from Weimar liberalism.”

“The community of the volk, Herr Hitler?” asked Rudolph detecting a shift in Adolf’s philosophy.

“They should be used, not destroyed. The state could control without owning, guided by a single party, but could the economy be planned and directed without dispossessing the propertied classes.”

“Yes, I see your point. There cannot be socialism without a civil war.”

“Did I say that?” questioned Adolph.

“It sounded like that was what you meant,” retorted Rudolph looking askew.

“We cannot find and travel the road from individualism to socialism without revolution; that is what the dream told me.”

“Your dream, Herr Hitler?”

“I understand Lenin now,” Adolph went on, pacing the cell, hands clasped behind his back. “Marx and Lenin had the right goal, but had chosen the wrong route.”

“Instead of destroying the bourgeois and the kulak, they must use it and let it destroy itself as the workers bore from within, fire their bosses, and share the profits.”

“That is a marvelous idea, Herr Hitler.” Rudolph wrote down every word Adolph said on a pad. It would become Mein Kampf the way Rosa Luxemburg would have had it.

“Why the Jews aren’t Germany’s enemy at all! Their social awareness will help all volk realize our ideals. Bourgeois Jewish businessmen and women aside-“

“Let’s not forget the rising of the women!” interrupted Rudolph. 

“Of course not! All volk, men and women, will be appreciated by the rising proletariat so long as they are not blood-suckers,” said Adolf struck with the realization of what he was saying, yet dubious of it coming from his own mouth.

“But aren’t the Jews scum, Herr Hess?”

“Indeed not, Herr Hitler; they are part of the German fabric!” confirmed Rudolph himself perplexed by the contradiction Hitler expounded.

“Yes, I see,” replied Adolph, stopping in his tracks, looking as if he had bitten his tongue.

 In their heads, the dopamine was gushing through their brains like beer in a rathskeller, but like drunks in a midnight choir, when they awoke the next morning, they wondered what they had been thinking the night before.

      It was easier for the time traveler to sway Adolph in his prison confinement, isolated as he was from his followers, but Rudolph brought dissonance in with him. It was one step back for every two steps forward when they conversed and Mein Kampf was regularly edited from what Adolf thought he meant and what he really said. As Rudolph drew him back to fascist anti-Semitic ideals, the progressive influences in their consciousnesses usually prevailed.