Making History (1996) is the third novel by Stephen Fry. Its plot involves the creation of an alternative historical timeline in which Adolf Hitler never existed. While most of the book is written in standard prose, a couple of chapters are written in the format of a screenplay. The book won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
Plot
Changing history
The story is told in first person by Michael "Puppy" Young, a young history student at Cambridge University on the verge of completing his doctoral thesis on the early life of Adolf Hitler and his mother. He meets Professor Leo Zuckerman, a physicist who has a strong personal interest in Hitler, the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. Michael assumes this is due to his Jewish heritage. However, it is later revealed that Leo was born Axil Bauer, the son of Dietrich Bauer, a Nazi doctor at Auschwitz who – when the Nazi defeat became certain – gave his son the identity of a Jewish doctor that he murdered. Leo has developed a machine that enables the past to be viewed—but it is of no practical use as the image...