Howard Jacobson: Read more literature and less history. That's the lesson of Hitler's deformity

So Hitler actually did have only one ball. I call that a pity. Not for Hitler, or even for Mrs Hitler, who might have thought that half a Hitler was better than none. But a pity for history. A pity for psychoanalysis. A pity for satire. And a pity for popular verse.

Of course, it Is just possible that someone is pulling our leg. Missing or deformed parts exercise jokers, especially when they are the parts of people who have made an impression on the world. Cromwell's head or Einstein's brain or Thomas Hardy's heart or Byron's club foot. There is always someone who has just stumbled upon it, or discovered an account by a doctor who was there at the autopsy, where he either found it missing or made it missing. Think of it as a higher – or should that be a lower – form of souvenir hunting. Hard to resist if you happen to be at the bedside and no one's looking. Even the Catholic Church has done it, preserving the Holy Prepuce in pickling jars in crypts and sacristies throughout Christendom.

But there's something upsettingly straight about the just reported conversation between Johan Jambor and Franciszek Pawlar, a surgeon and a priest respectively, in which the former described treating Hitler for wounds sustained in the Battle of the Somme: to wit injuries to the abdomen and the loss of one testicle.

It appears that Jambor took the priest into his confidence, some 50 years after the event, by way of confessing to the crime of whatever the word is for keeping a deranged dictator alive. "I should," there is no record of him saying, "have cut the little bastard's other ball off and left him to bleed to death." But that was what he implied. Easy, though, isn't it, to be wise after the event.

The other interesting piece of information now come to light is that Hitler's hospital nickname was the "Screamer" on account of his lying in bed and screaming out "Help! Help!" or rather "Hilfe! Hilfe!" every 10 seconds – as though losing a ball is all that painful, the wuss. But it's one impressive career trajectory however you view it – from the "Screamer" to the "Führer" in 20 short years. Doesn't that teach you never to give up? It's not over until it's over, children. Not until the fat lady sings or the man with the little moustache and only one ball puts his hand in the air.

Monorchic is apparently the word for being reduced to a single testis. A term I haven't hitherto encountered, though I do know monorhine, meaning having only one nasal passage, which must be even more of a liability if your chosen profession is oratory. Thus, anyway, do we improve our stock of knowledge. Hitler was monorchic, the rest of us diorcic, and one or two people, I am prepared to wager, stereonorchic.

But you see what happens once you have a name for something. Suddenly it's explicable, and what we can explain we can understand. Empathy next. The poor schmuck was monorchic, what do you expect? And soon it will be the Jews' fault again. A Jew shot it off. There were Jewish doctors in the field hospital who specialised in sewing back testes but wouldn't sew back his. Some Jew in the next bed was given a testis transplant thanks to the the generosity of another Jew, a stereonorch who had one to spare, but not for Adolf. After Final Solution denial, Final Solution justification. Hitler was just trying to get his ball back.

You can know too much. This is my beef with history which appears to tell you everything but essentially tells you nothing. All any grown-up wants to read at the moment, history. Which means there is a fear of intuitive intelligence out there. You can see how it will look in the history books a hundred years from now: "Adolf Hitler, who lost a testicle fighting for his country in the Battle of the Somme, a loss he attributed to the heinous influence of the Semitic races, decided, after a period of convalescence and reflection..." In this way, a temperamental failure – Hitler was in his heart one-balled, never mind what happened on the battle field – becomes a rational motive.

The popular song knows this. Hitler has only got one ball / The other is in the Free Trade Hall – or the Albert Hall if you're a Londoner, but of course, it doesn't matter where the other one is. It's in the Somme if you're going to be literal about it, but what does Somme rhyme with? Bomb? Giving us Hitler has only got one bomb / The other is lying in the Somme. But while that too would have been good for wartime morale, it could have worn a trifle thin if a thousand bombs an hour were still falling on Coventry. Too factual, you see. Too open to the refutations of history. The beauty of Hitler having only one ball is that it is metaphorical – he is hyperbolically not actually one cherry short of a bunch – and so beyond the reach of evidence. Which is why the last thing we want is testimony from a conscience-stricken surgeon.

At a stroke, a grand gesture of comic defiance, issuing not from known fact but our indomitable high spirits, is shrunk to arguable proportions. Where, by sheer imaginative exuberance and strength of will, we all but castrated him, Hitler is now merely one more victim of a wartime accident. You could say that shrinks him as well as us, but it suited our purposes and made us feel safe to see him as a monster so long as he was a monster we had the power to deflate.

Here is the advantage of the imagination over everything else, and thus the reason we should read more literature and less history. There is a mystifying exchange in the last scene of Antony And Cleopatra in which Cleopatra defends the heroic Antony of her imagination against the mundane view of him as a man diminished at the last. "Nature wants stuff / To vie strange forms with fancy" Cleopatra declares, meaning, I suppose, that reality won't provide half the man that fancy will; "yet, t'imagine / An Antony, were nature's piece 'gainst fancy, / Condemning shadows quite" – meaning that the masterpieces of the imagination become a superior reality. Or something like.

Thus the Hitler of popular song, a ball short, and made that way by us. Let us hope that more surgeons don't come along to tell us that Himmler was similar, or that the crazed Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels did in boring old reality have no balls at all.

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