Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes

jazzabel · Mar 16, 2014

Has anyone read it? Is it good? Because the premise sounds very interesting.
(Click on the title for a link to the full article.)

How Germans have fallen back in love with Hitler
How did 'Look Who's Back', a comic novel starring a resurrected Hitler, become a bestseller in Germany? Sophie Hardach reports

Look who's back: Charlie Chaplin in 'The Great Dictator' Photo: Moviestore Collection/Rex

By Sophie Hardach
9:00AM GMT 15 Mar 2014

...
Vermes’s book, in which a resurrected Adolf Hitler wakes up in 2011 Berlin and proceeds to rise to prominence, became a surprise bestseller after its publication in 2012.

In the opening pages, Vermes’s Hitler is shocked to see the city still standing. After all, during his last days in the bunker, he gave instructions for everything to be destroyed: “Not just houses, but doors, too. And door handles. Then the screws, and not only the long ones. The screws must be unscrewed and then ruthlessly bent out of shape. The doors must be ground to sawdust. And then burned to cinders.”

This stuff of nightmares may seem an unlikely start for a novel praised by its fans as “hilarious” and “thigh-slappingly funny”. The plot is simple: after being mistaken for a Hitler impersonator by television executives looking for the next stand-up sensation, the Nazi leader makes a comeback thanks to his enduring populist touch. With cantankerous charm, he befriends his Jewish assistant, embraces the zeitgeist with his vegetarianism and hands out dating advice (“Women’s hearts are like battles. They are not won through hesitation.”)

Charting the awakened Hitler’s rise to TV stardom, Look Who’s Back has beaten Dan Brown on the German bestseller lists – so far, 1.3 million copies have been sold there – and will be translated into 35 languages including, next month, English.

The book’s trailer, in which a cartoon Hitler complains about various unsuitable moustaches and beards before finally being given the right one, has had more than 100,000 views on YouTube (in comparison, a trailer promoting the German version of Nineteen Minutes by bestselling writer Jodi Picoult, had 6,000). Vermes’s book has been the subject of talk shows (“Hitler as a standing joke – what is Germany allowed to laugh about?”) and is set to be turned into a film.

The book’s success is all the more surprising given that it is written in the rambling style of Mein Kampf, the real Hitler’s autobiographical manifesto, which is itself effectively banned in Germany, along with Nazi symbols such as the swastika.

...

It is hard to shake off the feeling that the author of Look Who’s Back bet on shock value rather than subversive wit, beginning with its eye-catching cover, blank but for the instantly recognisable black side-parting and moustache, and its original price of €19.33, a reference to the year Hitler came to power.

History reliably serves up the novel’s punchlines: “What irritates me most of all about these morning people is their horribly good temper, as if they had been up for three hours and already conquered France,” Vermes’s Hitler grumbles at one point. In another passage, he compares a man operating a leaf-blowing machine to SS men obeying their orders: “even though they could have easily complained, 'What are we to do with all these Jews?’ It makes no sense anymore; they’re being delivered faster than we can load them into the gas chambers!”

Most German critics initially ignored the book, and the reviews that eventually trickled in were mixed. The Left-wing Die Tageszeitung slammed it as “dead boring”. Other critics took issue with the fictional Hitler’s endearing qualities. “Too often the author depicts Hitler as a funny old chap, and that ultimately has the effect of making things seem more harmless than they were,” wrote the Süeddeutsche Zeitung.

Vermes, a 46-year-old former journalist and ghostwriter, has claimed that in refusing to portray Hitler as a monster, his novel forces the reader to consider why so many ordinary Germans helped him – and whether they might have done the same.

“Part of the book’s success is the surprising fact that you can see the attraction, in a way,” Vermes told the Stuttgarter Nachrichten. “You’re thrown off course a bit because you realise it’s possible for someone like Hitler to somehow be attractive. There are instances where you have to say, he’s kind of right.”

...

Occasionally, Vermes’s book does strike a note that rings terrifyingly true. The opening fantasy about a razed Germany captures a certain Nazi essence – that horrific and absurd combination of murderous megalomania and attention to the length of screws. There probably were loyal-to-the-last Nazi soldiers trying to fulfil their leader’s final orders, screwdriver in hand.

But on the whole, Vermes is too busy manufacturing one-liners to get to the heart of modern Germany’s contradictions. Nazi symbols are still banned to prevent a resurgence of Nazism and out of respect for its victims; yet a gang of neo-Nazi serial killers in East Germany went undetected for years because investigators blamed Turkish gangsters for their crimes.

Germans continue to be fascinated by Hitler, eagerly gobbling up documentaries, magazine features and books with titles such as Hitler’s Janitor; but this curiosity tends to fade when it comes to our own families. Growing up in Germany, where everyone’s grandparents were apparently somewhere between resistance fighter and innocent bystander, I often wondered how Hitler managed to murder millions all by himself.

Vermes does not try to make us laugh at Hitler. If anything, we are being encouraged to laugh with him. Vermes has described this as the next logical step in our understanding of the man: “First we tried not to mention him at all, then we made him into a monster. Then we poked fun at him. This is the next round,” he told the Stuttgarter Nachrichten.

...

Look Who’s Back by Timur Vermes (MacLehose Press, RRP £15) is published on April 1
Click to expand...

Log in or Sign up

jazzabel Agent Provocateur Contributor

Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes

Share This Page

Log in or Sign up

jazzabel Agent Provocateur Contributor

Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes

Share This Page

Useful Searches