LOOK WHO'S BACK
Author: Timur Vermes
Publisher: MacLehose Press
Pages: 352
Price: $25.99
Look Who's Back, a satirical novel by the German author Timur Vermes, imagines Adolf Hitler waking up, Rip Van Winkle-style, on the streets of Berlin in 2011. He's mistaken for an actor and becomes a talk-show host and a YouTube phenomenon.
Since it first appeared in Germany in 2012, the book has sold two million copies in that country, where it topped best-seller lists for 20 weeks. It has been translated into 42 languages, including Hebrew. A film version is scheduled for release in Germany this fall, and Vermes says fans are clamoring for a sequel.
The book's success - especially in Germany, where it received minimal attention and some unfavorable reviews from the mainstream media - has surprised even its author, a former political reporter for German tabloids and sometime ghostwriter for "minor celebrities", as he puts it.
"This is something like a social experiment with two million participants; it must say something," says Vermes at a cafe in Munich.
Just blocks away, the Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism has just been inaugurated on the site of the former Nazi Party headquarters. This comes after decades of reluctance to highlight the dark past of this city, where Hitler's political career was born.
But for Vermes and for other German commentators, the success of Look Who's Back is also evidence of a generational shift, a sense that 70 years after the end of World War II, it's time for a new approach that goes beyond monuments and uses dark humour to address the Nazi past.
"You have to tell the same story but in a different way," says Vermes. Since the 1990s, "Most people were sick of hearing all this serious guilty stuff," he says. "We'll tell the same story but we'll make fun of it."
That desire to confront the past by mocking it, then question whether one should really be laughing, also comes through in the book's clever jacket, which shows only a swish of black hair against a white background, with the book's title forming a small black mustache. It was designed by the Munich graphic designer Johannes Wiebel, and is also being used for the United States edition and most other translations.
There's a long tradition of Hitler satire, mostly from outside Germany - from Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator to Mel Brooks's The Producers. But Vermes pushes into new territory in Germany, where authors and artists have been more hesitant to satirise him.
In Look Who's Back, Vermes takes pleasure in imagining how Hitler might view contemporary Germany, including his perspective on the leading tabloid, Bild, which is impatient with the European Union.
The book also talks about the state of Jews in Germany today. "Only one thing was gratifying: German Jewry remained decimated, even after 60 years," the Hitler character says. "Around 100,000 Jews were left, a fifth of the 1933 figure - public regret over this fact was moderate, which seemed to me perfectly logical but not entirely predictable."
With jokes like this, isn't there a risk of trivialising the Holocaust, or absolving readers of German complicity in the Nazi past? Vermes says no. "We're not laughing about Hitler, we're laughing with him, and we notice the difference," he says. "This gives us sort of a creepy feeling."
Vermes said that he was inspired by the 1992 Belgian mockumentary, Man Bites Dog, in which a television crew follows a serial killer and eventually becomes involved in murder. "I wanted to go to that point, where you feel the possibility" of affinity for the villain, says Vermes.
Others find the humour limited, and the phenomenon more intriguing. Yascha Mounk, who wrote the 2014 book Stranger in My Own Country, about growing up Jewish in Germany in the 1980s and '90s, said that the Vermes book's success speaks to "the allure of the forbidden", and that putting it on your shelf signals defiance at the notion that you shouldn't laugh at the Nazis.
Felix Rudloff, the publisher of Eichborn Verlag, which put out the book in Germany, says many leading publishing houses in the United States had passed on the book; Quercus, the parent company of MacLehose Press, the book's British publisher, is releasing it.
In a favourable review in The New York Times, the critic Janet Maslin wrote, "This book isn't sharp-fanged, but it's able to remain both humorous and disturbing after the initial jokiness has passed." The German news media was less kind. In a review, the newspaper Die Tageszeitung called the book "incredibly boring and not in the least bit funny." Die Welt called the humour stale. "Is the realisation, that the media has already long been cultivating a 'Hitler brand,' still revealing?" it asked.
Back at the Munich cafe, Vermes says he felt his book proved that Germany needed a new conversation about the past. By making readers uncomfortable, by making them question their leanings, he said, "This experience can maybe be more helpful than hearing for the hundredth time that you shouldn't kill Jews."
© 2015 The New York Times
