In
Neal Stephenson's novel
Cryptonomicon, Rudolf von Hacklheber, or Rudy as many people call him, is a
homosexual German mathematician. Rudy is a friend to
Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse and
Alan Turing while he is
studying at
Princeton before
World War II.
In the beginning of the book, he and his other two mathematically inclined
friends enjoy
bicycling and
camping while discussing
advanced mathematics, including but not limited to
Gödel,
Liebniz,
Principia Mathematica,
cryptology, and designs, concepts, and abstract ideas about
mechanical computation devices.
Later, Turing graduates and Waterhouse heads back to his home
state once his year-long
scholarship runs out to finish school. Rudolf himself, however, is
called back to
Germany to
assist in the
war effort. Rudy isn't a fan of the
Third Reich or the
Nazi Party, and finds
Hitler to be
apalling in and of himself.
Fortunately, Herr von Hacklheber's mathematical
expertise lands him an
important job in the
government, including prewar work under
Karl Dönitz at the
Beobachtung Dienst of the
Kriegsmarine, and later was moved to Referat Iva of
Gruppe IV, which was part of
Hauptgruppe B,
Cryptananlysis, and thoroughly confuses and
tortures
Bobby Shaftoe with even more detail concerning the
structure of the Third Reich, especially with words like "
Wehrmachtnachrichtungenverbindungen" and other (unspecified in the book) incredibly long German
compound words.
While a
character of great
import to the
plot,
Herr von Hacklheber is in a surprisingly small number of pages himself. It is important to note, while some characters in this novel are not fictional (i.e.
Alan Turing and
Lieutenant Ronald Reagan), the vast majority of them (i.e.
Randy Waterhouse, Rudolf von Hacklheber,
Enoch Root) are completely
fictitious.