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Timur Vermes: Look Who’s Back. Quercus, 2014. 375 pp.
For entire decades now, Hollywood has been busy dishing out World War II movies indoctrinating us that the Germans are humourless, even inhuman.
The typical German, we’ve been told time and again, is the archetypal baddy, the other on whom it’s okay to project all the evil inside us.
Read Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back (translated by Jamie Bulloch) and you get incontrovertible confirmation that Hollywood has been quite liberal with the truth.
This novel written in German by a German author is about the baddest of German baddies: the Führer himself. It’s a slapstick novel sprinkled with moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity and I doubt the humour was found in translation.
And for the unbelievers, here’s the good news: it’s German humour and the characters are strikingly human – normal people who want to live an ordinary life but who wind up meeting the most evil man of the 20th century.
The faux-autobiographical novel is not set in the 1920s or 1930s. The story opens when a strangely familiar chap wearing a funny moustache wakes up from a long slumber (it’s a German tale after all) and needs some time to orientate himself in a Berlin that is not quite as he remembers it.
He self-consciously describes what he observes around him, narcissistically reporting in detail how his behaviour is characterised by the triumph of logic and discipline and how trained his mind is. Until he reads the date on a newspaper and faints. It’s the year 2011.
In a serendipitous turn of ironic events, Herr Hitler gets employed by a television station as a Hitler impersonator.
The golden opportunity is not lost on him: he understands that, through it, he can rebuild the party, diffuse his message and carry out the mission entrusted to him by providence: saving Germany and the Aryan race, while solving ‘the Jewish problem’.
Some foreign critics have criticised the idea of a funny novel which breaks the ultimate taboo by portraying Hitler also as human rather than just as a monster
The station gives him a prime-time one-man show: he’s the best Hitler impersonator they’ve ever had and his viewership ratings skyrocket. His magnetic personality wins over his co-workers’ loyalty and the approval of the public: he goes viral on YouTube.
His secretary calls him, without any hint of irony, Mein Führer, because he gives her good advice. When asked about the Jews, he answers in a dead serious tone, “The Jews are no laughing matter”, silencing everybody.
The novel is craftily spun on this double entendre mechanism and alternates between moments of pure farce (one running gag is when Hitler sees different women gathering up piles of dog excrement – he considers them mad) and moments of wry, dark humour.
Everybody in showbiz is convinced the ‘actor’ has undergone plastic surgery; at one point, some neo-Nazi skinheads stab him for ridiculing their cause and hero. Those who visit him in hospital are the decent people who work at the station or who met him in their everyday lives.
The book – a bestseller in Germany and abroad – invites the reader to make out why extreme-right ideas attract decent folk. The invitation is surely topical.
Some foreign critics have criticised the idea of a funny novel which breaks the ultimate taboo by portraying Hitler also as human rather than just as a monster. I disagree.
Because the bottomline question is: if a man with piercing eyes and a funny moustache, but, essentially, likeable, were to appear one day and air his (outrageous) views, what would you (whether you’re German or not) do? Would you dismiss him as a nutcase?
Or would you succumb to his charming ways, his wit, the temerity with which he speaks the unspeakable? Would you follow the crowd? Does Europe remember the lessons of history, or does it want to play with fire again?
There’s a moment when Hitler’s secretary wants to quit the job because she told her Jewish grandmother she’s working with this satirical actor and her grandmother wisely retorted: “That’s not satire. He’s just the same as Hitler always was. And people laughed then, too.”
Look Who’s Back is a funny novel, provocative and actual, and at times, even a little bit philosophical. It affords a good laugh and its aftertaste will set you thinking about current events.
A book worth reading.