What if I told you that Hitler is back from the dead, and is now a social / political commentator and Youtube sensation, with millions of followers across the world supporting his slogan, “It wasn’t all bad”? Well if you were around for the last Pakistani elections, you won’t be surprised but that’s the long and short of Timur Vermes’ runaway success of a novel, now newly translated into English — Look Who’s Back.

Adolf Hitler wakes up in 2012, Berlin, and in a very short time is elevated from a shelter in a newspaper kiosk to a five-star hotel with his very own entourage — all part of the deal to be the next big television star (because of his uncanny resemblance to himself). Along the way, his adventures loosely parallel his meteoric rise to Führer of the Third Reich, only this time being Führer means being asked his “real name” an awful lot of times and which operations he’s undergone (he replies, “Sea Lion, Barbarossa, Cerberus...”). The Third Reich is now a tentacled media-zilla machine, emblazoning Hitler on television screens and the internet as the new voice of the people (the comedian who looks just like Hitler).

Vermes’ book is a rare event. Dead famous people, especially the mass murdering kind whose moustache’s mood could send you to Aushwitz or Majdanek, are fair fodder for a tale apiece. But Vermes has cut Hitler down to size (quite literally, even), and made him not a ruthless tyrant (well he was, but now he is conquering YouTube instead of Poland), but a regular fallible kind of guy figuring out how to make his mark in a completely alien world. Always the antichrist, here though Hitler is perhaps one of the few sane voices in the mad, bad world of media; marketing gimmicks, media mogul politics and the great shift of power from ammunitions on the battlefield to maximum YouTube hits and advertising revenue. The joke here is not so much on Hitler, but on the mindless fad-following, sensation mongering, amoral media. The satire also targets the audiences today to whom the media dictates how to think — an unthinking, confused mass of brains, waiting to be led by someone charismatic, who awakens in them the mighty Volk. Enter Adolf Hitler, megalomaniac.

Here’s what’s really great about this book — it is genuinely funny. Granted, sometimes it’s more of a caricature than a satire, but by and large it succeeds in infusing Hitler’s narration with good old-fashioned humour. And some of it is really quite clever, even if it is brutal. There is an embarrassingly funny scene when Hitler tries to convince the Jewish grandmother of his assistant to let her continue working for him: “[If you believe] that these devious parasites possess an extraordinary astuteness to match their allegedly superior intelligence — well, I am afraid I must disappoint you. Even back then, passing off a gas chamber as a shower room was not exactly the height of subtlety.”

Most of the humour is ironical — there is a massive gap between Hitler the narrator’s information about the modern world and the reader’s, which leads to a hilarious episode where Hitler discovers modern-day television complete with soap operas and lurid news channels, and declares “It was as if information was being retrieved from a lunatic asylum.” Another side-splitting instance is when Hitler’s assistant is setting up his email account with Hitler positively foaming at the mouth about having his name “taken” already as an email address.

The narrative is also sprinkled with anecdotes and recollections of Hitler’s former associates — Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels and other formidable Nazis, but remembered here as sometimes errant, sometimes devoted deputies, just as idiosyncratic as Herr Hitler. Himmler, for instance, is remembered for his “esoteric humbug, reincarnation and mysticism,” and Goebbels as the family man, with a certain aversion to swastikas. As a work of fiction, these little asides can’t be taken too seriously, but they work wonderfully in creating a dynamic background to build a robust narration.

The narrative voice is one of the strong points of the novel — it is quite singularly Hitler telling the story, but with warmth perhaps unexpected from the Führer. The narration is dictatorial in many regards; Hitler’s self-admiration and his passion for the Volk and the Great German Empire are foremost. But even so, the reportage of events is impeccable — not a single detail is missed from when he first wakes up in 2012. Of course, everything is commented upon — “Herr Starbucks owns a lot of coffee houses,” and the “proto-Germanic reference work called Vikepedia.” However, the real triumph here is that all other characters (and there is a whole array of them) are given a substantial part in the narration. Hitler’s constant reflections about his surroundings serve to flesh out otherwise peripheral characters into fully fledged people, whom the reader grows fond of, just as Hitler does. The personal tone of the narration also serves to form a connection with the reader, one that allows the reader to laugh at Hitler, but also to empathise with him — much like an old eccentric friend.

There are some aspects of the book that don’t work too well, but these are occupational hazards of writing about a figure so larger than life and one almost cast in stone. Vermes’ Hitler is tame, to say the least. He is a blustering, old fellow who is like everyone else over 60 today — reproving about mobile phone use, unable to understand teenage fads, easily exasperated with technology (but just as easily impressed), and so on. This chap, whom we grow to like quite early on, could not possibly have ordered millions of Jews to their death, and otherwise committed some of the most horrific actions in the 20th century. This discrepancy is most likely intentional — Vermes may have wanted to humanise Hitler instead of demonise him. But a demon he is, and to read this is almost like reading a caricature, someone you obviously can’t take seriously.

Hitler’s curse, or rather the curse of writing about him, is that the Holocaust always looms definitively over him. To not address it leaves a gaping blank in the believability of the story. Of course, one can always argue that it was not Vermes’ intention to try to justify it, or perhaps this book is a deliberate attempt to give Hitler an identity apart from his rather odious diversion. Be what it may, for me that refusal to address the most critical role of the narrator is frustrating. Given that it is illegal to give the Nazi salute in Germany today, and also that the swastika, the legacy of the camps, and even the Nuremberg trials are a national nightmare, how does Hitler get away with just a few cavalier asides about it? Being identified as a spoof is perhaps the most convenient solution to all this — it requires him to assume all the pomp, regalia and some diluted opinions of his former life, but none of the repercussions or taboos. It’s just too easy.

That being said, there are a few sections in the book where in his television show, Hitler’s opinions about Jews, Turks, and all kinds of foreigners (“the parasites”) are made quite clear but because the platform he uses is one of a comedian, the terror central to such rhetoric is lost in the humour. And yet, the irony is that Hitler is using that rhetoric to “cleanse” the German Volk and that very Volk, in this day and age, is responding to him by making him a man-of-the-masses kind of figure. In the postmodern media-framed world, kitsch can even be used to sell the rhetoric of genocide. There are some astute observations in this about postmodern madness — that people are always going to respond to charisma and a powerful personality, even if he is the worst criminal in the country’s history, and the media is instrumental in flipping (off) entire historical records to recreate whatever it wishes from that history. There is no more information anymore — it is all propaganda. And the only one who completely gets that is Hitler.

There is a certain complexity in the narration however, that does make this more than just the average comedy. Towards the end, Hitler informs us that he has been asked to write a book about his experiences in his second coming, and it is meant to be the truth. That’s when you realise that you have been reading a memoir of Adolf Hitler. Playing with and eventually bringing down the fourth wall in writing here adds a wicked flourish at the end, turning the novel on its head, and if he didn’t have your attention earlier, Hitler’s definitely got it now. Writing about an otherwise sensitive figure and all the baggage that comes with him really works because of this irreverence. Vermes shows you the proverbial finger — Hitler is back and there is nothing that you can do about it.

Look Who’s Back

(Novel)

By Timur Vermes

MacLehose, London

ISBN 0857052926

400pp.