E. M. Forster makes a limitlessly useful distinction, in “Aspects of the Novel,” between the novelist and the historian: “The historian,” he explains, “deals with actions, and with the characters of men only so far as he can deduce them from their actions.” On the other hand, “it is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.”
Forster’s book began as a series of lectures at Cambridge in 1927, sometime between Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch and the rise of Nazism. It’s hard to know what he would have made of a novelist who dared to resurrect Adolf Hitler himself — but that’s exactly what the German satirist Timur Vermes has done in his first novel, “Look Who’s Back,” which has already sold more than 1.5 million copies in the Fatherland. The novel’s conceit is easily summarized, less easily parsed. In 2011, Hitler awakes (apparently not from uneasy dreams, as Gregor Samsa does) in a field in Berlin. “I remember waking up,” he says. “I was lying on an area of undeveloped land, surrounded by terraces of houses.” He has no memory of his suicide. He has no idea how he’s gotten here. Soon enough he is taken with watching “modern-day television,” but when he finds only cooking shows, he is angered that “Providence had presented the German Volk with this wonderful, magnificent opportunity for propaganda, and it was being squandered on the production of leek rings.”
For the next 250 pages, Vermes walks us through months during which Hitler, resurrected by unexplained means, overcomes every presented obstacle. A newspaper vendor discovers him in uniform and assumes he must be an impersonator playing for dark comedy — the word Galgenhumor belongs, after all, to the Germans — and gives him a bed. Producers from an “Ali G”-style comedy show (hosted by the unimaginatively named “Ali Gagmez”) offer him a spot on the program. His first appearance quickly accrues hundreds of thousands of YouTube views. Soon Hitler gets his own show, website, production studio, even a back-alley beating by right-wingers who assume he’s making fun of himself. Eventually he also has a deal to write about his life. “I’m calling to ask whether you’d like to write a book?” the editor says. “I already have,” Hitler replies. “Two, in fact.”Vermes plays all of this straight, or at least deadpan. He is not a historian, but his presentation of the minutiae of Hitler’s life amounts to an impressive feat of historical research. Dozens of the Führer’s intimates arise in his mind over the course of the novel (though he makes no effort to track down their descendants, a missed comic opportunity if nothing else), as do his observations about the state of Germany today. The most striking and provocative feature of the narrative, in fact, is not the decision to resurrect Hitler but the choice to use him as a first-person narrator — to risk telling us more about Hitler than could be known, in Forster’s phrase.
Early on, Vermes hits on a formula for a kind of gag that works surprisingly well, when Hitler gives himself a long pep talk for dealing with the modern world. “Despite being afflicted by poverty, abject poverty,” he thinks, “did not a brilliant orator emerge from the desperate multitudes, from where one might have least expected?” As this act hits its highest pitch, over the course of four pages, Hitler starts speaking to himself out loud. “The night answered with black silence,” Vermes writes. “Then, close by, a lonesome voice hollered, ‘Exactly!’ ” We’ve been plunged deep into Hitler’s thoughts, only to have some vagabond break in to agree with him. We’re startled into a genuine laugh.
This device works a couple of times before Vermes recognizes it has grown tired and retires it. The rest of the book’s humor is taken mainly with descriptions of Hitler’s shock at the development of: newspapers, dog walkers, computers, ringtones (his, predictably, is Wagner), earbuds, the Internet (he calls it the “Internetwork”), Angela Merkel and those cooking shows. This elicits far fewer laughs. As impressive as Vermes’s research is, the ironies are really a single relatively unironic joke: Rather than somehow recognizing that Hitler has mysteriously arisen from the dead (why would they?), Germans think he’s an absurdist performance artist. The yogic backbends Vermes is forced to employ to keep that conceit going start to feel more like a “Three’s Company” marathon than an avant-garde cartoon. The German public’s acceptance of the artist they think they’re watching provides a critique of pop culture. But it feels like bringing the Luftwaffe to a knife fight. Television viewership and modern comedy can be facile in their tastes. Vermes needed to resurrect Hitler to make that point?
Which brings us to the second part of Forster’s equation: the question of how “Look Who’s Back” functions as a novel, in its ability to set forth its main character’s interior life. I can’t pretend to know much about Hitler’s deranged psychology — I’ve actively avoided reading “Mein Kampf” my whole life, and plan to maintain that decision — but I assume the ventriloquism here is impressive. So what about the insights into Hitler’s mind? Well, it’s dubious far beyond the point of credibility that the first mention of the Jews doesn’t arrive until after Page 50. As aghast as I am to hear myself say it, the Hitler of “Look Who’s Back” is surprisingly light on the anti-Semitism. The reader can feel Vermes straining under the weight of that burden, and is unsure whether to thank him or censure him.
Late in the novel, Vermes attempts to see if the Führer could soften. Hitler develops an affinity for his young assistant, Vera Krömeier, who wears dark lipstick and whose every sentence “sounded as if it were a question.” After months as his assistant, she quits after learning her Jewish family was “gassed,” with the sole exception of her grandmother, who has told her of this history. Briefly, it seems Hitler might sympathize. But we watch him convince himself otherwise: “If the rest of the genetic material is of sufficiently high quality, the body can sustain a certain portion of Jewish blood. . . . Whenever Himmler disputed this, I reminded him of my splendid Emil Maurice. Having a Jewish great-grandfather did not prevent him from being my key man.”
This isn’t much in the way of comedy. Satire, either. Novels are about change in character, or anyway a character’s capacity for change. Timur Vermes doesn’t feel Hitler (even the fictional, resurrected Hitler) contains that capacity, and who can fault him? But alert readers will remember that E. M. Forster had a “Maurice” of his own. It was his final published novel. It was about a romantic love between two men. Whatever social circumstances existed in Britain in the 1920s and ’30s kept him from publishing it — and those circumstances were certainly nowhere near as malign as those Hitler perpetrated. The book was finally published, posthumously, in 1971. On his manuscript of “Maurice,” decades earlier, Forster had famously written: “Publishable. But worth it?” He decided against it in his lifetime. One cannot help wondering if Timur Vermes ever asked himself the same.
