Look Who’s Back, A Novel about Hitler Coming Back to Life: Some Comments

   Look Who's Back, the English translation of the German novel Er ist wieder da (literally: He’s here again) by Timur Vermes is a runaway best seller in Germany. It would not have had this success half a century ago (and probably would not have been written, not to mention published) when a good part of the German population had experienced the real Hitler, the Führer, ruthless and fanatical head of a nation that had gone profoundly astray. The closest this book comes to follow an actual model is that of the picture of Hitler conveyed by Traudl Junge, his secretary in the Berlin bunker, when he was essentially powerless and implicitly expecting a self-inflicted end, to avoid far worse were he to be caught. That almost kindly, ruminating Hitler is whom we get in the novel, including a mild sense of humor of which few if any were aware when he was in power or on the way there.

   I have read a few reviews (only ones in English) and was surprised that none of them mentions the book’s pretty important trait, that the person who relates its story is Adolf Hitler himself. I will get to the several important consequences of that fact after very briefly outlining the book’s plot. In 2011, Hitler wakes up in an empty lot in Berlin, dressed in the uniform he wore during his last days that ended in his 1945 suicide. The owner of a nearby newspaper kiosk takes him to be an actor, brilliantly impersonating the long-since-dead Führer and connects him up with some TV people who, also believing that they are confronted with a brilliant impersonator, put him on the air, where he delivers impromptu rants that are lapped up as hilarious by all but a few naysayers. (His entire audience takes him to be a very skillful and knowledgeable actor. Needless to say, no one takes him to be a 122-year-od real thing.) While I was getting to the latter part of the book, I kept wondering about how Herr Vermes would end it and found out, when I got to the last page (or the Kindle equivalent) that he wasn’t ending it at all. Things would go on with a bigger and better television series.

   As I see it, the book has essentially three themes, if you don’t count the reactions of others to Hitler’s talk and actions, since most of them are in the entertainment business, playing along with their profitable find. One important theme actually has nothing much to do with Hitler, though if it were omitted, Look Who’s Back would be a much shorter book. I am speaking of the reactions to the country—its people, its customs, its stores, its gadgets, and much more—of someone returning to the scene after an absence of sixty-six years. Maybe not a brave new world but certainly a new and wondrous one, not to mention that in those olden days Berlin was lying in ruins. A few reviewers mention Rip Van Winkle. The second theme has Hitler parcel out bits of the history of his time, by referring—just about always very briefly—to (well known) events of his life and of the contemporaneous history of Germany and World War II.  In the course of remarks on these themes, he mentions numerous colleagues and subordinates, putting tiny dobs of flesh, so to speak, on the occasional historical bones. In an appendix, Jamie Bulloch, the translator of the book into English, gives brief sketches of 36 such historical actors and while I recognized well over half of them, I suspect that much younger German readers would no doubt benefit from such a crib. But on the other hand, the sense of authenticity is not undermined if the reader does not know who all these characters are, while the names of a few, such as Göring and Goebbels are still familiar to most readers.

   The heart of the novel is of course Hitler’s rants. They are fun to read—anyway, most of them—but quite a few of them are not those of the founder and leader of the NSDAP, the Nazi party, but those of an old-school gentlemen talking about marriage, and proper behavior in a variety of contexts. Foreigners living in Germany are repeatedly “treated,” Turks above all. But Hitler’s discussions of such themes is as much puzzled as censorious.

   Of course Jews come in and out of these disquisitions, the Jewish theme is made up of conventional clichés, without the venom with which Hitler expressed his anti-Semitism. There is no mention of the Holocaust, except for a single incident that is not particularly well handled. When the secretary who was assigned to him—whom he likes and thinks well of—tells her grandmother about her dealings with “Hitler,” the grandmother doesn’t only disapprove, but reveals—showing a precious old photograph—that her family who was Jewish, were “gassed.” That brief scene sort of sits there. Serious scenes are not Vermes’s forte.

   Finally, I want to take up the question as to why this book has been so immensely popular in Germany. It’s well written (I sampled the German), smoothly and with light humor. (Though I agree with one reviewer, that in patches it’s just a bit boring.) Further, the novel is built around a genuinely good idea; Hitler is not just anyone coming back from the dead. But most important, Vermes found a way to talk about a grim past with humor. Germans have been made to feel guilty about that past, even though a person born in 1965, say, might rightly respond with “I’ve not had anything to do with the crimes of the Nazis.” Look Who’s Back in effect whitewashes the past with an invisible brush. All those references to real people and events proclaim wie es eigentlich gewesen war without doing any such thing. It’s a case of have your cake and eat it too. Who wouldn’t be for that?

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