The Alternative Hypothesis

The Alternative Hypothesis (in French, La Part de l'autre, also rendered as The Part of the Other) is a 2001 novel by the French writer Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt, in which the author uses an alternate-history scenario to explore moral philosophy. Its starting point is a single moment: on 8 October 1908, a member of the jury of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts writes the words «Adolf Hitler: failed». Schmitt argues that this minute changed the course of world history, and the novel asks what would have happened had the jury accepted him instead.

The book runs two biographies in parallel. The first follows the historical Hitler from that rejection to his death on 30 April 1945, tracing his resentment, his rise within the Nazi movement and his dictatorship. The second follows an invented figure, Adolf H., admitted to the Academy, who discovers a world of feelings and ideas the real Hitler never knew and who eventually becomes a world-famous painter. His story includes a fainting spell during a life-drawing class, a referral by his family doctor to Sigmund Freud, and a diagnosis of an Oedipus complex that Freud helps him overcome. After the First World War, whose trench warfare turns him into a lifelong pacifist, he settles in Paris, joins the surrealists and later moves to Berlin, where he marries and has twin children.

The alternate world is sketched in the background. Germany does not fall to National Socialism: in the early 1930s a conservative, authoritarian but not totalitarian government takes power, and the country eventually becomes a democracy. There is no Holocaust and no Second World War, the Soviet Union is far weaker than in our history, and Zionism ends in failure.

The structure rests on the constant contrast between the two lives, which makes the reader's unease grow steadily. The central idea is that every human being contains the possibility of evil, and that nothing is predestined: each person decides at every moment how to orient his or her life. The novel thus aligns with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the view that humans continually reinvent themselves. Schmitt does not seek to excuse Hitler but to understand him, so that such a tragedy will not be repeated.

The novel was well received for its original premise and reflective tone, and it is often read as a work halfway between the philosophical novel and historical fiction.