Hitler's Cosmopolitan Bastard

I haven't often had enough time to get involved in audiobook narration but I was delighted recently to be invited by former BBC correspondent and European diplomat Martyn Bond to narrate his magisterial 2021 biography Hitler's Cosmopolitan Bastard about Richard Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, someone of whom I'm ashamed to say I had never heard.

Known as “The Grandfather of Europe”, Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi was a personal friend of Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer and also served as the model for the fictional resistance hero Victor Laszlo in the film Casablanca.

It's a story of extraordinary resonance for our times. Following the devastation of the First World War the glamorous young Count, son of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat father and Japanese mother, set out on a political mission to create a United States of Europe with no internal borders, a common currency and a single passport. Thousands flocked to support his ideas, including leading European statesmen and members of the intelligentsia, among them Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein. The Count's message infuriated Adolf Hitler, who described him in Mein Kampf as a "cosmopolitan bastard", and he narrowly escaped capture and assassination by the Gestapo.

An inspirational figure and brilliant networker, the Count described himself as a “European patriot” who saw international relations in terms of continents, not countries. His vision has never seemed more relevant.

The section on Germany in the 1930's is particularly chilling for our current times, telling as it does the story of a charismatic leader who won an election by stirring up disaffection among working people and blaming an "enemy within" and then set about dismantling the offices of state and suppressing all independent voices. At the risk of spoiling the plot, things didn't end too well...

The audiobook has just been published on Amazon and Audible. Here's the prologue as a taster...