The story that inspired Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell’s ‘The New Adventures of Hitler’
In June 1989, Scottish arts magazine Cut published writer Grant Morrison and artist Steve Yeowell’s comic strip The New Adventures of Hitler; the strip was inspired by the dubious claim that Adolf Hitler had lived with his half-brother Alois Hitler’s family in Liverpool from November 1912 to April 1913. Intended as a satiric commentary on contemporary British politics, the strip was immediately controversial due to its provocative subject matter, but it was not the first fictional work to explore Hitler’s alleged “lost year” in Liverpool.
By the late 1980s, the acclaim of such works as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Alan Moore and Frank Gibbons’ Watchmen, among others, had broadened public perception and interest in comics. Responding to this interest, Cut offered its readers The New Adventures of Hitler, intended to be serialized as four-page chapters in each issue.
Previously, Morrison and Yeowell had collaborated on two other comics projects, the licensed toy feature Zoids for Marvel UK and the superhero strip Zenith in the British sci-fi anthology comic 2000 AD. Morrison was garnering acclaim in the American comics market with his work on the DC Comics titles Animal Man and Doom Patrol. His work with artist Dave McKean on the Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth would be published later in the year with huge critical and commercial success. Given Morrison’s comics output in the science fiction and superhero genres, his work on The New Adventures of Hitler is notable for its politics and controversial protagonist.
Morrison’s choice to write a strip showcasing a historic figure may have stemmed from his other, non-comics work. Morrison’s play Red King Rising had debuted in 1989, exploring the relationship between Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell. His play Depravity, about the life of occultist Aleister Crowley, would debut the following year. As a playwright, Morrison had experience writing historic figures in dramatic narratives, and this experience may have influenced his conception of the strip.
The origin of the strip’s premise is well-documented. The Dublin-born Bridget Dowling, former wife of Alois Hitler, had lived in Liverpool with her husband and their son, William. Alois would eventually abandon Bridget and William in England and immigrate to Germany, where his brother Adolf rose to political prominence. By 1939, William had begun a paid tour of America to talk about his now-infamous uncle, and Dowling accompanied him; around this time, she was inspired to write her memoir, My Brother-in-Law Adolf, in which she claimed that Adolf had lived with her, Alois, and William in Liverpool for about five months.
In 1912, Alois was an ambitious salesman of a new product — safety razors. According to Dowling, Alois had sent money to his sister Angela in Vienna so that she and her husband Leo Raubal could travel to Liverpool; Alois hoped to convince Leo to head up a central European office for the sale of safety razors. Alois and Bridget were surprised when Adolf (at this time, 23-years old) showed up instead; avoiding his required military service in Austria (using false documents identifying him as his deceased younger brother Edmund), Adolf had begged Angela to give him the money to travel to England and thereby elude the authorities.
Adolf’s arrival upset Alois; nevertheless, Alois and Bridget gave him lodging and clothing, with Adolf sleeping on their sofa most of the time. Bridget thought Adolf looked ill and impoverished, and found him unappreciative of their charity. He would sometimes play with William, then a two-year old, and sometimes pull out Alois’ collection of maps and lecture Bridget on his belief that Germany would one day dominate the world.
Bridget takes credit for introducing Adolf to astrology; she had an acquaintance named Mrs. Prentice who cast horoscopes, and Adolf frequently asked that Prentice cast his horoscope. She also takes credit for persuading Hitler to adopt his iconic trimmed mustache style. Although things were tense with Alois, the brothers did enjoy visiting London’s shipyards to admire the technology of Britain’s ships and bridges. Frustrated with Adolf’s extended stay, Alois eventually agreed to pay for Adolf’s travel to Munich, on the grounds that the city was culturally similar to Vienna and Adolf would not face extradition to Austria for avoiding his military service.
Dowling’s memoir was never finished, and it was never published in Dowling’s lifetime. Historians doubt the veracity of Dowling’s assertions, noting that early biographies of Hitler’s life observed that this period was a “lost year” in which nothing was known of Hitler’s activities in Vienna. Some argue that Dowling would have been aware of this “lost year” and that there was little risk in claiming Hitler visited Liverpool during this period in order to make money from potential book sales. The available historical documentation suggests that Hitler was in Vienna during the period of the alleged Liverpool visit.
However, writer Robert Payne’s popular 1973 biography The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler treats Dowling’s claims as credible, with a chapter devoted to Hitler’s stay in England. Indeed, Payne’s thesis is that Hitler’s English visit engendered an enduring respect for the British that shaped the dictator’s military decisions regarding Great Britain in the coming war:
“For four or five months Adolf Hitler lived in England like a ghost, solitary and unknown, haunting the docks and shipyards, living on handouts from a brother he regarded as a mortal enemy. He learned almost nothing about the English and made no English friends, yet to the very end of his life he retained an abiding respect for the English, then at the height of its power and glory. He saw their ships streaming along the Mersey and he saw their intricate machines and he saw their faces, and he never forgot them.”
In 1978, author Beryl Bainbridge’s Young Adolf was published. Inspired by Payne’s account of Hitler’s Liverpool visit, the satiric novel depicts Hitler’s alleged visit to England with humor. Feeling hunted by Austrian authorities for evading the draft, a hungry, sickly Adolf arrives in his domineering brother’s life, and he is soon involved in Liverpool’s small intrigues. Alois’ kindly and learned landlord, Meyer, takes Adolf under his wing and slowly exposes him to subversive, but minor, political activities, and Adolf encounters various odd characters in Liverpool.
Although referencing claims made by Dowling (Hitler’s evasion of military service, and an introduction to fortune telling via Mrs. Prentice, among others), Bainbridge’s novel adds a significant trait to Hitler that is absent from Dowling’s memoir — mental illness. Hitler is paranoid, with an irrational fear that Austrian authorities are pursuing him. He also sees strange things and people that are not there. Hitler’s mental illness would also feature in later fictional works exploring the Liverpool story, including Morrison’s strip.
Bainbridge also provides an impetus for Hitler to leave Liverpool. Working as a hotel bellhop, Hitler is unwittingly recruited into illegal activities by a hotel guest; as the police capture the perpetrators, Hitler decides that it would be best for him to leave England. With funds from his brother and Meyer, Hitler departs for Munich, promising himself never to reveal his embarrassing sojourn: “Never in all my life, thought Adolf, under torture or interrogation, will I mention that I have been to this accursed city, visited this lunatic island.”
The book is not meant to be a serious consideration of Hitler’s time in Liverpool, but a satire that explores why Hitler would never acknowledge his visit to England. As Bainbridge notes in her afterword:
“It could not be a solemn book about a penniless foreigner, deeply interested in politics: it had to deal with young Adolf in Liverpool and his involvement in such ludicrous and embarrassing situations that he would never, in the whole of his life, breathe a word of his visit to anyone. I intended, if anything, to make him as absurd a figure in words as Charlie Chaplin had made him on film.”
The book generated no controversy and received critical praise, and in 1981, Young Adolf was adapted to television as The Diary of Bridget Hitler. A year earlier, Hitler in Liverpool, by playwright John Antrobus, debuted in London, another fictional exploration of Hitler’s visit to Liverpool that preceded The New Adventures of Hitler.
Antrobus’ short play focuses primarily on the tense relationship between Alois and Bridget; Alois is a womanizer, with a comically obsessive desire to invest in safety razors. To minimize his shame and responsibilities, Alois attempts to arrange a marriage between his pregnant mistress, Annie Watkins, and Adolf — a sickly, mostly silent character haunted throughout the play by hallucinations of a crippled German baron, who commands him to masturbate.
Antrobus references several claims made by Dowling: Hitler visits England to evade Austrian military service; he travels to England using official papers identifying him as his dead brother Edmund; Adolf and Alois enjoy visiting the shipyards. As in Young Adolf, Hitler is mentally ill, and trouble with the police provides Hitler’s incentive to leave England.
The play ends tragically, and Hitler departs England under a cloud, suspected by the police of committing murder. Contrary to expectations, the play did not generate controversy, as noted by the theater director, Lou Stein: “…we didn’t get the expected hordes of protesters in Notting Hill against the play about the young Hitler…”
Although it has humorous moments, Antrobus’ play, unlike Young Adolf, is not a satire but a tragedy, commenting on Alois and Bridget’s fraught marriage and highlighting Hitler’s social alienation. But like Bainbridge, Antrobus depicts Hitler’s mental illness and hallucinations in the narrative, as does Morrison in The New Adventures of Hitler.
Morrison’s story opens on December 20, 1912, weeks after Hitler’s arrival in Liverpool. Morrison’s narrative has the young Hitler seeking the mythic Holy Grail, which he believes to be in England. The mentally troubled Hitler is on a quest, based on his belief that he is destined to find the Grail.
Hitler’s shaky mental health is critical to Morrison’s narrative, as it is the basis of the protagonist’s efforts to find a mythic artifact, and it explains the surreal, anachronistic hallucinations that Hitler experiences, which Morrison and Yeowell utilize to link the story to contemporary pop culture and British politics.
In the story’s first chapter, Hitler is haunted by an apparition who appears to be Morrissey, singing “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now.” Similarly, in chapter seven, he sees John Lennon singing “Working Class Hero.” Hitler imagines conversations with the fictional national personification of Great Britain, John Bull. The boorish Bull points out the hypocrisy of British democracy in light of the nation’s past colonial conquests and tyranny; at one point, a giant image of contemporary British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s face appears in a cafe window as Bull proclaims that what the country needs is “a mad vicious bitch in the driving seat.”
Guided by Bull, Hitler finds the Holy Grail; in its current symbolic guise, the Grail is not a cup, but a toilet, full of filth, that provides Hitler with a vision of his grand destiny.
At the end of the strip, Hitler departs England for Germany. Whereas Payne suggests that Hitler’s time in England left a positive impression on the young man, the English experiences of Morrison’s protagonist inspire contempt for the nation and democratic values; Hitler concludes that “England is a country of dogs,” its people manipulated and exploited by false ideas like “freedom,” which “is nothing more than the leash on which we allow the masses to run. They do not want to be free.”
It is unclear which sources influenced Morrison, but the story shares details and similarities found in other works. The story features claims made in Dowling’s memoir: Prentice giving astrological guidance to Hitler (in the strip, Prentice, not Bridget, advises Hitler to trim his mustache); Adolf playing with William; Hitler’s draft dodging leads to his stay in England. The strip’s ending seems a cynical rebuttal to Payne’s thesis regarding the inspiration Hitler took from his Liverpool visit. Hitler’s hallucinations are similar to the strange and frighting visions Hitler experiences in both Bainbridge and Antrobus’ fiction. But unlike the similar fiction that preceded it, Morrison’s narrative is unique for its contemporary pop culture references and political commentary.
The publication of The New Adventures of Hitler caused controversy when celebrity musician and Cut columnist Pat Kane resigned from the magazine in protest, expressing concerns that Morrison was exploiting the iconography of Nazism for a shock effect, and that the strip’s references to pop culture, along with its depiction of a pathetic protagonist, risked creating an image of Hitler that diminished his horrific history; some readers might even find Hitler appealing.
Morrison responded to Kane’s criticisms by acknowledging that the strip was intended to be provocative, noting that the strip was a satire commenting on contemporary politics. Among other arguments, Morrison referenced both Bainbridge and Antrobus’ previous works on the same subject, neither of which generated controversy. Along with other personal points directed at Kane’s character, Morrison also questioned Kane’s decision to resign based solely on the strip’s first chapter.
Kane’s resignation over the strip’s publication generated national press. Although Cut continued to publish the strip, the story was unfinished when Cut ceased publication in September 1989. However, in 1990, the full twelve-chapter series was later serialized as three-chapter installments in issues 46 through 49 of the 2000 AD spin-off anthology comic Crisis (although the Cut strip was originally rendered in black-and-white, the Crisis strip was colored by a variety of artists). Despite Morrison’s creative acclaim, to date the strip has not been collected or republished.
Regardless of its controversy, The New Adventures of Hitler is a significant, well-crafted creative work among a number of other notable historic and fictional works that ponder the implications of a young Adolf Hitler’s improbable visit to England.
NOTES AND FURTHER READING — The author references the following sources in the above article:
The Memoirs of Bridget Hitler (edited by Michael Unger, Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1979) — reprints Bridget Dowling’s unpublished memoir My Brother-in-Law Adolf and examines the claims made by Dowling.
Hitler in Liverpool and Other Plays (John Antrobus, Riverrun Press, 1983) — the quote from Lou Stein above is taken from the introduction to this volume.
The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler (Robert Payne, Praeger Publishers, 1973) — Payne’s chapter “A Journey to England” focuses on Hitler’s alleged stay in Liverpool with Alois and Bridget.
Young Adolf (Beryl Bainbridge, published in the United States by George Braziller, Inc., 1979; originally published by Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1978)
The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (Robert G. L. Waite, Da Capo Press, Inc., 1993; original edition published 1977) — pages 432 through 433 of this edition outline the evidence against Bridget Dowling’s claim that a young Hitler visited his family in Liverpool.
The New Adventures of Hitler (writer Grant Morrison and artist Steve Yeowell, lettering by Gordon Robson, Crisis, issues 46, 47, 48, and 49, Fleetway, June through August, 1990) NOTE: the colorists for the Crisis issues are identified in various issues as: The Spock Whitney Quartet (issue 46); Brian, Dougall and Mr. Rusty (issue 47); Your Mum (issue 48); Nick Abadzis, Steve Whitaker and John Buckle (issue 49)
“The Savage Sword of Grant Morrison — Pat Kane vs. the New Adventures of Hitler” (Ben Hansom, deepspacetransmissions. com, September 11, 2013) — this site provides images of the opinion columns penned by Pat Kane and Grant Morrison in Cut regarding The New Adventures of Hitler, and outlines the publication sequence of both the strip and these columns.
NOTE: Dowling’s memoir states that Alois sent money to his sister Angela and her husband, Leo Raubal, and that Bridget and Alois were expecting the couple to arrive in England, rather than Adolf, in 1912. However, this account is problematic, as Leo Raubal died in 1910; in their fiction, both Bainbridge and Antrobus indicate that only Angela was expected by Alois and Bridget.
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