Taboo-breaking reading?: "Look Who's Back" by Timur Vermes

About one and a half million copies of Timur Vermes' book Er ist wieder da have been sold in Germany, placing it firmly at the top of the best seller lists. The English publication, Look Who's Back, is one of dozens of translated versions sold around the world. For me, my eye was caught by the, um yes, eye-catching cover design (the same as the original German design), and the admonition of Nottingham Waterstones' staff that I should discover for myself what this publishing sensation was all about. 

The eye-catching cover

The premise is indeed a tempting one: Adolf Hitler mysteriously wakes on a patch of waste ground in 2011 Berlin, his last memory being a slightly unfocused one of the Führerbunker in 1945, showing his old pistol to Eva Braun. He now has to get used to his old capital 66 years on, and somehow make his way in it. So I overcame a certain hesitation I always feel about buying yet another Hitler/Third Reich-themed book, and picked the book up as a lighter antidote to the heavy read I was just completing (last post).

The story is told from Hitler's perspective, and much of its comic effect - it does have quite some comic effect - comes from the mismatch between his perceptions of modern Berlin and our modern understanding of the reality. He is for example gobsmacked by the prevalence of crazy women in Berlin's parks obsessively picking up their dogs' excrement, speculating that these are childless old spinsters paying the psychological price of failing to breed strong sons and daughters for the greater good of the Volk. The plot is driven by another misconception, that of those he meets that he is a particularly inspired, uncompromisingly method-acting Hitler impersonator. It is on this basis that he starts out with a short slot on a comedy show, warming up the show's Turkish-German host, soon becomes a YouTube sensation with his hitlerian rants about the state of Germany, and ultimately achieves stardom in his own right as a genius satirist of modern life and politics. Of course, there is an uneasy tension between the appreciation he receives from the media in-crowd and chattering classes for his "satire", and the, well just, appreciation his words receive from many others, this being the source of the book's more serious edge. 


The book is readable, has its funny moments and its properly uneasy moments when it sails close to the wind - generally on the subject of the Jews, which Hitler readily agrees with his media handlers to be "no laughing matter" - but I am left slightly underwhelmed by the whole experience. 

Making fun of Hitler has of course long been a staple of British humour, since it was a morale-booster in wartime and (to excess no doubt) ever since. So the mere act of making fun of him (or indeed allowing of some humanity) feels, I suspect, far less transgressive to a Brit than it does to postwar German readers. The taboos Vermes was breaking with his German original were thus, I am sure, far greater taboos than they are for an English language readership. Without that edge of general transgressiveness, Look Who's Back simply doesn't feel as big a deal as it seems to have done in Germany. Yes, it lands some telling punches, for example on the shallowness of modern media, the ineffectual and opportunistic politicians of mainstream parties and the brainlessness of far-right thugs, but ultimately, though diverting, for me it fails to satisfy either as a comedy or as a satire. It's not a bad book, it has its moments, but it might well be that history will consider a thousand YouTube remakes of Bruno Ganz's famous Hitler rant in Downfall (Der Untergang) more effective Hitler-satire than this.