Tangential trivia note: The guy playing Hitler also previously played the submarine captain in the first Raiders. Per the script, this character was supposed to have a bigger part, but it all got cut down, so Spielberg apologized and said he’d find something else for him to do in a future movie. Hence, Hitler.
Regarding the thread: I’ll add the example of the movie Little Big Man, wherein Dustin Hoffman’s character interacts with a few historical characters and incidents, most memorably General Custer at Little Big Horn. The movie was based on a novel from the mid-60s, just to put it in context for the discussion.
James P. Hogan’s novel The Proteus Operation is a time-travel novel in which several historical characters exist. Hogan claimed in the intro that he actually asked permission of the surviving people (which I think consisted only of Isaac Asimov and Edward Teller) if he could use them in his book. It’s the only such case I’m aware of.
By comparison, W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe (the book on which the movie Field of Dreams was based) includes several real-life people (including, of course, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson), significantly including novelist J.D. Salinger, whose permission Kinsella did not ask.
Said Kinsella : “I made sure to make him a nice character so that he couldn’t sue me.”
Field of Dreams changed the Salinger character to the fictional Terence Mann, because they didn’t want to get sued, either.
Kinsella was apparently inspired to use Salinger because Salinger used characters surnamed “Kinsella” in some of his works.
I’m guessing from all the examples that this a modern trope, that while in early historical fiction there would be fictional characters they would not be revealed to have had any impact on actual history.
Dennis Wheatley’s WW2 British spy Gregory Sallust seems to fit the bill.
"Sallust is ruthless and charming, a connoisseur of rare wines and rare women. Most important, he speaks German like a native. In book after book, Sallust dons a German uniform and infiltrates the Nazi machine—in one case, stealing the identity of the head of the Gestapo’s foreign section.
As you might expect in books like these, Sallust pretty much singlehandedly wins the war. During a long drunken night dissecting the map of Europe with Hitler’s foreign minister, Herman Goering, Sallust steals a document that keeps Britain from surrender in her darkest days. He tricks Hitler into invading the Soviet Union. He dazzles Goering, and everyone else he meets, with his military assessments. His knowledge is encyclopedic, his strategic analysis brilliant. He is a master of deception."
In the TimeWars series of books by Simon Hawke, The Dracula Caper takes place in Victorian London. The main characters travel back in time and meet Bram Stoker, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells, inspiring in one way or another many of their literary works. There are a few other examples in the books, but mostly the main characters are trying to reduce the amount of influence the future has on characters from the past.
Also with H.G. Wells was Time After Time, but in that case he was the main character.
This reminded me of an episode of Bonanza in which Charles Dickens (played by Jonathon Harris, better known as Dr. Zachary Smith) showed up in Virginia City on a reading tour. If I recall, he was kind of a dick at first, looking down his nose at what he considered the backward citizens of the town, but Ben Cartwright and sons eventually convinced him that the folks west of Mississippi weren’t all that bad.
Another Bonanza episode also featured a strapping young Mark Twain, back when he was still Samuel Clemens the newspaper reporter. He did a stint at the Virginia City newspaper, and wasn’t afraid to get into a gun battle alongside the Cartwright boys when bad guys showed up (I think a rich guy was trying to stop a damaging article about him, and hired some guns to do it). I think the Cartwrights somehow gave Clemens the idea to take on ‘Mark Twain’ as a pseudonym.
