Book Reviews - Review 335

Adolf Hitler comes back to life in 21st-century Berlin and, after a brief period of confusion and adjustment, resumes the plans for world domination that he was forced to put on hold in 1945. Mistaken for an ultra-serious method actor, he is courted by a television production company, which lands him a regular slot on a show hosted by a Turkish comedian. Here, he holds forth on issues of race and national pride in provocative speeches that in essence differ from those he made while Führer only in that they are interpreted by a complacent, sensation-seeking media and public as ironic.

Following the success of his television performances, the production company gets Hitler set up with a web site (the "Führer Headquarters") and spins off short videos on YouTube. He becomes a media sensation, and it's only a matter of time before he acquires his own talk show - in which he renders a Green Party member tongue-tied by trying to get her to explain why her party's aims are incompatible with his:

Bit by bit, the public stops demanding to know the "actor"'s real identity, and starts to accept him at face value. Hitler explains his method to a television executive:

The blackly humorous narrative - told in the first person, in the style, I gather, of Mein Kampf - shows Hitler skillfully following his method through, so that by the end of it he is on the brink of making the jump from media star to politician. Timur Vermes brilliantly illustrates the slow process by which the opinion of the public can be softened and moulded by those who understand how to appeal to its insecurities, its vanities and its reluctance to stare facts in the face.

Cleverly, and disturbingly, the question arising within the narrative - "Is this a joke, or is it for real?" - applies to the novel itself. It is indeed very, very funny as a satire on the shallowness and complacency of our media-driven culture. Vermes finds a rich seam of comedy in the juxtaposition of Hitler's grandiose rhetoric and the banality of his attempts to get a hold on modern technology. The rendition of the Berlin dialect of his disaffected Goth secretary, Fräulein Krömeier, is also particularly funny. ("Is det Messed Ekting?" she asks on their first meeting. ("Is that method acting?"))

But this Hitler, like the historical one, wants to be taken seriously; and his carefully timed outbursts of contempt for the weak and the foreign are all the more disconcerting for the humorous scenario that they spring out of. They leave the reader unsure as to whether the book is making a moral point, or whether it is written to shock.

For this reason, Er ist Wieder Da has divided readers. One can say this much: whatever Vermes's motives, he lays his cards on the table, and forces the reader to think seriously about their commitment to liberal values. "Should I still be laughing?" one asks more and more frequently as the novel progresses, and the answer "Probably not" raises further, uncomfortable questions.

As disturbing as the book is, I give it four stars because it is so brilliantly written. At least in the German, the dry humour yields a constant stream of belly-laughs; and though some of the contemporary cultural references went over my head, one gets the drift of the satire easily enough. In addition, Vermes is superb with dialogue and description of physical mannerisms: the individual characters of the television executives come across particularly vividly. Despite the implausible premise, there are no caricatures in this novel - not even in the person of Hitler himself, who is portrayed as half-monster, but half-human: brutal in his general ambitions, but not insusciptible to selective accesses of sympathy (for animals, and for Fräulein Krömeier when her lover deserts her). Whether or not this was the "real" Hitler, it ought to give the reader food for thought. For all its superficial frivolity, this is a book written by someone with an acute eye for human behaviour and psychology.