Late one night last week, after I’d finished reading one book and was looking for another, I decided that I should read the second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. The third volume had appeared in paper, and I had it, so it would be safe to read the second — safe, that is, to expose myself to the possibility that, when I got to the end, I’d be mad to continue with the third. This has been known to happen. (I could expect that, if gratified, this madness would wear off within a hundred pages of the third book.) The problem was, I couldn’t find the second volume, or any of My Struggle. Worse, I knew that I’d moved the three books to a new location, just the week before. They weren’t where they ought to be, so I checked out other possible places. After twenty minutes of fruitless search, and determined not to be thrown into tantrumland by fury at my incompetence (both now and then), I obliged myself to settle on something else. This something else, not very surprisingly, was William Maxwell’s The Château, a lovely book that I read years ago, right after a trip to Paris.

I sat down with Le Château, but I couldn’t settle down. Within ten minutes, I was on my feet again, looking for Knausgaard. This time, I got down on my knees to take a closeer look at the bookcase where the books ought to be — and there they were. I had missed them earlier for the usual reason. It’s idiotic, really, but it happens again and again. This usual reason dates to my radio days, when LPs were shelved by label (this makes a lot of sense in the classical-music world, even with today’s CDs), and the different labels printed the spines of the record jackets in their uniform (but different) ways, using different (but uniform) colors. EMI was red. DG was yellow and white. Columbia (later Sony) was white with a hatch of black lines between the record number and its title. Long reliance upon this retrieval device has sensitized me to the spines of books as well. But not always reliably. I “remembered” the spines of the Knausgaards as being off-white, which is indeed the color of their covers. The spines, however, are differently colored, in rather poisonous hues. I hadn’t been looking for those. On my knees, I quickly saw the three books whose spines were printed in the same manner. More relieved that I had indeed done what I ought to have done when moving the books to a new location than to have the book itself, I returned to my chair and settled down with Knausgaard.

The opening episode of My Struggle: Book 2 is extraordinary for the degree of emotional realism with which a visit, with three small children, to a shabby amusement park is captured. For that very reason, it is extraordinarily tedious. I turned out the lights and went to bed, midway.

A few days later, I carried the book with me to Duane Reade, the ubiquitous drugstore, to pick up a prescription. It turned out that another medicine, whose renewal was impending, would be available if I could wait for twenty minutes. Armed with the book, I decided that this would not be inconvenient, so I took a seat and returned to the amusement park. Almost immediately, the tedium of the amusement park was doubled by the arrival upon the scene of a man and a woman a bit younger than myself. They, too, were waiting for something, and, had they waited quietly, I’d have ignored them. But they weren’t quiet. The man spoke querulously, in incomplete phrases, and even though I was sitting right next to him, I could make out not the half of what he said. The woman murmured in a low voice — reassuringly, I supposed, but I couldn’t be sure. It was impossible to determine their relation, and that only made me more curious. I noticed that they were dressed very differently. The woman, who was slight and small, wore tight, dark clothes: a shirt buttoned at the wrists and long pants. She wore a dark hat, too, which gave her the air of a vacationing fashion editor, or maybe a cartoon witch. The man, who was at least an order of magnitude larger, was simply a slob: straw hat, T shirt under an unbuttoned sports shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. What had brought them to Duane Reade was the offer of a free blood-pressure reading, of which the man was apparently in need. Whose idea this was was unclear. I don’t think that it was the woman’s. She seemed to be acting as an interpreter, between the real world and the slob, who was slow. He might have been mentally defective, or he might have been like me, incapacitated by an unfamiliar setting. Of course, no one would call me slow when I’m in these situations. I’m prone to extreme agitation and hyperarticulate paranoia. This man was not agitated in the least. He repeatedly made a statement of what was meant as a question: they do it for free. Yes, they take your blood pressure without charge.

I tried to imagine the preceding scenes. Where had they been, and what had they been doing, when it occurred to someone that the man ought to know what his blood pressure was? The idea of blood pressure seemed like a new one, to the man at least. He was not alarmed; he had the air, rather, of someone who had been told that if your blood pressure is 120/80, you may qualify for a valuable prize!

I sat through all this, helpless eavesdropper than I am, wondering which amusement park was worse. I found myself re-reading the same paragraph, and always finding something new in it. By the time I left Duane Reade — the couple had left for the small room where blood-pressure is taken; the slob had returned, and the woman, who had apparently decided to have her blood pressure taken, was just coming out — it was clear that I was going to have to begin Book 2 from the beginning.

Yesterday, in the middle of the afternoon, I finished another book. This time, casting about for what to read next, I passed over Knausgaard, for whom I was no longer in the mood, and very happily settled on Maxwell. The pleasure with which I am coursing through Le Château has obliterated the desperation with which, just a few days ago, I pulled it down from the shelf, only to find that it wouldn’t do.

***

The book that I finished reading yesterday afternoon was Look Who’s Back, by Timur Vermes — translated from the German, Er Ist Wieder Da, by Jamie Bulloch. The first thing to be said about this remarkable fantasy is that it is executed with a judicious aplomb that completely carries it off. There is the author, way up on the high dive. He announces that Adolf Hitler has just awoken, in the middle of Berlin on a late-summer afternoon, in the year 2011. He does this, moreover, in Hitler’s voice. And then he springs off the board. How easy it would be to belly-flop into bad taste! Or, almost as bad, into the kind of Hitler imitation that begins by the placement of an index finger under a nose. How inevitably, one would think, the joke must bog down after a while — for, after all, Hitler is not funny. And any book that makes him out to be funny is morally bankrupt. Although Look Who’s Back got at least one good review — that’s how I heard about it — I don’t know anybody who’s reading it. With its highly stylized cover — Hitler’s toupee-like wave, with the title standing in for the mustache, all black on a white background — Look Who’s Back is almost untouchable.

Well, Vermes’s book never bogs down, and it never sours. It is very funny.

And! It makes you think!

Hitler is not funny, but the modern world certainly is, and the book’s extraordinary bid is to present it as no less disorderly, confused, and open to Utopian siren calls than it was in the aftermath of World War I.

The Adolf Hitler of Look Who’s Back is pretty much like what we’re told about the historical Hitler, when he wasn’t on stage. A serious, somewhat prudish man, self-possessed and self-contained and somehow too correct to be a real gentleman; not entirely without a sense of humor but too kindly for the cruelties of wit. Up close, at least when he wasn’t screaming in the prosecution of official business, Hitler was bafflingly nice. Was this an act? I don’t think so. Hitler strikes me as a cult leader who, prudently if for no other reason, leads an exemplary life, at least as a private person. The problem is that the cult is monstrous, but not its leading exponent. This happens more often in politics than people think. Consider Robespierre, that prim dandy whose ideas wrought no end of havoc. He is the template for all the others who followed in the churning wake of the French Revolution, two centuries of upheaval that has subsided in the West and in the other great powers but that still needles the poorer parts of the world. We would be much more aware of Robespierre if he, like Hitler, had had a twelve-year career at the summit, instead of one that lasted barely two. (Ho Chi Minh comes to mind as another exemplary fellow.) Unlike a lot of these fundamentalist christianist omedhauns on the American scene, who turn out again and again to be prone to grievous carnal lapses, Hitler may even have been a virgin. No hypocrite he! If he ordered the extermination of the Jews, he sincerely believed that this was the right thing to do — as did plenty of other people, at least among those who never got their hands dirty.

You would think that, if Hitler were to “come back,” he’d be slapped in jail at once. But of course Hitler is not going to come back. He has been dead for seventy years now, and the modern Berliners who encounter him in 2011 don’t for a moment regard him as a resurrected dictator. They see him as the very dedicated imitator of a very dedicated man, so dedicated that they actually listen to what he has to say. Again. Does it matter if he’s “really Hitler”? No. This time around, there are no mass rallies, but Hitler is nothing if not adaptable: he conquers the television screen. How he accomplishes this feat is a story about modern media, not Hitler, and Vermes tells it very convincingly, not because he wants to rehabilitate Hitler (by suggesting that Hitler was, at least in some ways, an admirable man), but because he wants to show how badly our entertainments have distracted us from things of value. Hitler succeeds on TV because he exploits the shock value of his “act” to remind people of values. As he did the last time, he preaches these values by eliding the less digestible aspects of his program. That he succeeds may be a measure of his ability to deceive, but it is far more worryingly a measure of our society’s vulnerability to a demagogue who insists that life is a serious and important business.

The most breathtaking, makes-you-think passages in Look Who’s Back are Hitler’s speeches, which are presented as blank verse — punctuation is everything. Everybody acknowledges that Hitler was a magnificent orator, but his artistry is not studied as such: to consider Hitler as an artist would be even worse than enforcing Adorno’s ban on poetry after Auschwitz. And besides, it was probably a highly dated artistry, one attuned to the speech of Germany at the time. In any case, only Germans speak German. Nevertheless, one gets more than a glimpse of Hitler’s public-speaking power from Vermes’s recreations. In the following passage, Hitler is speaking out against the editor of the popular newspaper Das Bild, which has been challenging him to prove that he is not an imposter. Hitler complains that the editor of this newspaper discusses important issues of the day not with he, Hitler himself, but with former chancellor Helmut Kohl.

And yet,
this politician was the former chancellor united Germany
and that
is precisely what I cannot understand.
For after all, I am an even more former chancellor of united Germany.
But I doubt that the united Germany of this Herr Kohl
is as united as mine was.
Quite a few pieces are missing.
Alsace.
Lorraine.
The Sudetenland.
Posen.
West Prussia.
Danzig.
East Upper Silesia.
The Memel Territory.
I have no desire to go into too much detail here.
But there is one thing I should like to say:
If the editor wants well-informed opinions
he ought to seek out the organ grinder
rather than the monkey.

Once more the studio exploded with applause, which I acknowledged with a solemn nod of the head before continuing. (222-3)

There are two kinds of funny in Look Who’s Back. There’s the cognitive slapstick of a Rip van Winkle trying to make sense of computers and self-service stores. In theory, you could create this kind of funny by having anybody wake up from a long-ago death, but Hitler is funnier because he has opinions about everything. Then there is the outrageous kind of funny that Mel Brooks explored so brilliantly in The Producers. It’s the horrible black humor of the man at the premiere of Springtime for Hitler who shouts, “Wait! He’s funny!” In Look Who’s Back, what people shout, or at least say, is “He’s got a point!” The effect is the same. You laugh because Vermes sets things up to make you laugh, the nightmare notwithstanding. In one of my favorite passages, the two kinds of funny blend seamlessly.

The publishing house has supplied me with a dictation machine. Sawatzki wanted me to use my mobile telephone, but in the end I’ve found the dictation machine easier to operate. Press a button — it records; press a button — it stops. In general I’m very much against this multiplication of tasks. The wireless  has to play these silver disks, too, the razor machine has to work fr both wet and dry shaving, the gas pump attendant doubles up as a grocer, while the telephone has to be a telephone, a calendar, a camera and everything else besides. This is dangerous nonsense, the only possible consequence of which is that thousands of our young people will be mown down on the roads because they cannot stop staring into their screens. One of my first undertakings will be to outlaw such telephone devices or to allow them only for those inferior racial elements remaining in our society — for the  latter I may even make them compulsory. Then they will litter the main thoroughfares of Berlin like squashed hedgehogs. So they do have their practical uses. But otherwise utter nonsense! Certainly it would be far more advantageous for the state finances if the Luftwaffe could also assume the task of refuse collection. But what sort of a Luftwaffe would be have then?

A good idea. I will dictate it immediately into the device. (301-2)

Bearing in the mind the Darwin Awards, I think, as the last line of the novel has it, we can work with that.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2015 at 3:42 pm.