Look Who’s Back

by Timur Vermes

  In the north of the country, meanwhile, Social Democracy had made great headway, expanding its dominion into a vast social–romantic clubhouse, in the process happily frittering away the nation’s wealth. The other characters running this republic were to my mind equally unworthy of mention; they were the usual windbags of sham parliamentary politics, the most nauseating representatives of which – as after the Great War – were appointed chancellor with the greatest urgency. Surely it was one of Destiny’s special “jokes” to have selected the most boorish and doughy of these intellectual dwarves and tossed the so-called reunification of Germany into his expansive lap.

  I have to concede that this supposed “reunification” was one of the few first-rate lies propagated by the republic. For how could they call it a proper reunification when essential components – such as the aforementioned Silesia granted to Poland, as well as Alsace-Lorraine or Austria – were missing? One can gauge the simple-mindedness of those monkeys in government by the fact that they were in a position to coax a few run-down square kilometres from the wavering Russians, but not a prosperous region from the French arch-enemy, which would have been a real boon for the nation.

  But the greater the lie, the more readily it is believed. Out of gratitude for his heroic “reunification” deeds, that stand-in chancellor was allowed to “govern” the country for sixteen years, four years longer than I. Inconceivable. And the man looked like Göring after a double dose of barbiturates. The very sight of him was debilitating. For fifteen years I laboured hard to hone the outward appearance of a powerful party; now I discovered that one could just as easily administer this country in a cardigan. I was only pleased that Goebbels was not here to see this. The poor man would be spinning so rapidly in his grave that smoke would be pouring from the soil.

  In the intervening years the French arch-enemy had become our closest friend. The fools in charge of the two countries flung their arms around each other’s necks at the slightest opportunity, swearing that never again would they fight each other like real men. This steadfast resolve was cemented in a European alliance, not dissimilar to a gang of schoolboys. The gang seemed to have spent its time arguing over who should be the leader and who had to contribute the most sweets. The eastern part of the continent, meanwhile, had endeavoured to match the inanities committed by the western half, albeit with a difference: arguments were entirely absent in the east, for the be-all and end-all was to drool after the Bolshevist dictators. I felt so ill as I read this that I felt like throwing up on several occasions. The reason the West was able to waste most of its time on childish squabbling was that the American-Jewish financiers, who ruled supreme over there, took care of the more important matters. From the remaining German masses at the end of the war they had secured the services of the acquiescent Sturmbannführer, Wernher von Braun, a highly suspicious opportunist from the day he was born. True to form, he was instantly willing to sell to the highest bidder the knowledge he had gained from developing our V-2 missiles. His rockets enabled the propulsion of American weapons of world destruction and thus world domination, which confusingly led to the bankruptcy of the Judeo–Bolshevist system in the east in scarcely forty-five years. I cannot conceal the fact that, to begin with, I found this utterly baffling.

  What sleight of hand was behind this?

  Since when did Jew ruin Jew?

  For the time being the puzzle would have to remain unsolved. What was indisputable was that, following the collapse of the Bolshevist system of rule, the German puppet regime had been handed a peace treaty as well as independence. Of course, one could hardly call it real independence without our own rocket weapons. On the contrary, governments of all shades strove not for strong armament, but for more intense involvement in European trade, which greatly simplified foreign policy; essentially there were dozens of people stipulating what you had to do – one might as well have entrusted the post to a five-year-old.

  The only prevailing ideology was a wholly unchecked expansion of the juvenile alliance, which meant that almost everybody was included, even the most backward inhabitants of peripheral European regions. If you permit all and sundry to join your club then membership ceases to be anything special. Then anybody seeking to gain advantage has to start a new club within the club. Unsurprisingly, efforts in this direction had already been initiated: the stronger members were considering whether to constitute their own club, or to force out the weakest ones, which naturally made a complete mockery of the original club.

  The current state of Germany painted a highly distressing picture. Running the country was a chunky woman with all the confidence and charisma of a weeping willow. She had blotted her copybook by having played along with the Bolshevist episode for thirty years, yet no-one in her entourage felt the slightest bit uneasy about this. She had joined forces with the Bavarian beer-swillers, whose party looked to me like a dismally pale imitation of National Socialism. It dressed up its half-baked, socially progressive elements not with nationalist conviction, but with an enslavement to the Vatican which was familiar from the Centre Party of old. Other holes in its programme were stuffed with alpine gun clubs and brass bands; the whole outfit was so wretched it made you want to give these fraudsters a good slap in the face.

  But as their support was insufficient to form a workable government, the Eastern lady chose another group made up of clueless and directionless youths, which employed as their mascot an utterly useless foreign minister. Common to all members of this party was the fact that, with each movement the youths made, insecurity and inexperience flowed from their every pore. No sane person would trust such cowards with a box of drawing pins were there even the hint of an alternative. But none existed.

  When I contemplated Social Democracy, tears welled in my eyes. I thought nostalgically of Otto Wels or Paul Löbe, unpatriotic fellows, blackguards, no question about it, but at least they were blackguards of stature. These days Social Democracy was led by a pushy blancmange and a petit bourgeois hen. Anybody seeking political salvation further to the left was forsaken altogether. There was not a single man on the left who knew how to smash a beer tankard against the skull of his political opponent; the leader of this pigsty was more concerned with the layers of varnish on his sports car than the needs of his supporters.

  The sole ray of light in this entire democratic shambles was a splendid party which went by the name of the “Greens”. It, too, had its share of unworldly, pacifist numbskulls, but even our movement had needed to offload its S.A. in 1934 – an unpleasant, but necessary affair, in which we had not exactly covered ourselves in glory, but there had been no room for Röhm in our plans. No, what was halfway gratifying about these “Greens” was that they had deep roots, although the N.S.D.A.P. could not possibly have been aware of them back in its day; nevertheless I found them admirable. After the war, major industrialisation and motorisation had caused considerable damage to the land, air, soil and Volk. The “Greens” had committed themselves to the protection of the German environment, including the Bavarian mountains for which I had developed such affection, and where German woodland had evidently suffered great harm. Their rejection of atomic energy, which was capable of such fabulous things, was utter nonsense, and particularly regrettable given that in the wake of incidents in Japan almost every party had now decided to renounce it, thereby also losing access to weapons-grade fissile material. But from a military standpoint the republic was a dead duck anyway.

  Over the course of a few decades this catalogue of political failures had run down the greatest army in the world, and to such an extent that one would be tempted to line them all up against a wall. Sure, I had preached again and again that one must never finish off the East for good, that a certain element of conflict must always remain, that a healthy Volk needs a war every twenty-five years for the renewal of its blood. But what was taking place in Afghanistan was no ongoing conflict to harden the troops; it was an outright joke. The exemplary casualty figures were not – as I had at first
suspected – a result of massive technological superiority, but of the fact that we had only sent a handful of men over there to begin with. One could see at first glance that, militarily, the whole affair was highly dubious; the number of troops sent was not calculated in relation to any particular goal, but – according to best parliamentary tradition – so as to avoid discontent amongst both the people and our “allies”. As one might have predicted, it failed on both counts. The sole outcome of this escapade was that the soldier’s heroic death, the most noble way a man can end his life, had been practically eliminated. Funeral services were held where celebrations would have been more appropriate; nowadays the German Volk thought it the most normal thing in the world for soldiers to return home from the front, and better still, unscathed!

  Only one thing was gratifying: German Jewry remained decimated, even after sixty years. 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. In view of the uproar which accompanies the disappearance of German woodland, one might have imagined a sort of Semitic “reforestation” to be possible, too. But to the best of my knowledge, new settlements and the nostalgic restoration of the past, especially beloved where buildings were concerned (e.g. the Church of Our Lady and the opera house in Dresden), had failed to materialise.

  Without a doubt the creation of a state of Israel had relieved the burden to some extent. Their positioning of this state in the middle of Arabic peoples was an eminently sensible move, as it meant that for decades and centuries all parties involved would be permanently busy with each other. The consequence of the decline of the Jews – no doubt an inadvertent one – was a so-called economic miracle. Democratic history-writing has ascribed this to podgy Erhard and his Anglo-American accomplices, but any normal person can see that this prosperity went hand in hand with the disappearance of the Jewish parasites. If you still refuse to believe this you need only to take a look at the eastern half of the country, where for decades they had – such imbecility! – specifically imported Bolshevism and its Jewish teachings.

  One might as well have let a troop of degenerate apes run the country; they would have done a better job. The so-called reunification had brought no improvement; at best one had the impression that apes had been swapped for other apes. There was an army of unemployed people, millions strong, and a silent anger in the population, a dissatisfaction with the prevailing circumstances which reminded me of 1930, except that back then we lacked the felicitous phrase “political apathy” – it implied that there are limits to the deception one can perpetrate against a Volk such as the Germans.

  To put it another way, conditions were absolutely perfect for me. So perfect that I resolved at once to examine the international situation in greater detail. Unfortunately I was detained from my research by an urgent communication. Someone with whom I was unacquainted had turned to me with a military problem, and as I was currently without a state to govern I decided to lend my comrade my support. Thus I spent the following three and a half hours engaged in a naval exercise by the name of “Minesweeper”.

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  Āt this juncture I can hear the chorus of those Reich sceptics howling, “How can the Führer of the National Socialist movement possibly take part in a telecast featuring one Ali Gagmez?” And I can well understand these doubts if they are motivated by artistic considerations, for great art must not be sullied by politics. One would never, after all, seek to embellish the Mona Lisa, not even with a swastika. But the ramblings of an emcee – and Herr Gagmez is no more than that – could never be ranked amongst the expressions of high culture, quite the opposite, in fact. If, however, the doubts are triggered by a fear that the national cause might suffer from being presented in such an inferior milieu, I must refute this by saying that there are things which most people can neither grasp nor judge simply through the application of their reason. This is one of those matters in which the people must have faith in their Führer.

  Here I must confess that I was labouring under a slight misapprehension. At the time I still assumed that Madame Bellini and I would work together to implement my programme for the greater good of the German nation. In fact, all that Madame Bellini ever spoke about was my stage programme. And this is precisely another example of how pure, innate talent – the Führer’s instinct – is far and away superior to acquired knowledge. Whereas the scientist with his painstaking calculations, or the highly ambitious parliamentarian, are all too easily distracted by superficial detail, the appointed one feels the subliminal call of Destiny, even though a name like Ali Gagmez might appear to contradict this. And I do believe that Providence has intervened once more, as she did back in 1941 when the early onset of a bitterly harsh winter brought our Russian offensive to a grinding halt before we could push too far, thereby gifting us victory.

  Or it would have done if my incompetent generals …

  But I’m not going to get worked up about this anymore.

  Next time I shall proceed quite differently, with a faithful and devoted general staff, bred and raised within the ranks of my S.S. Then it will be child’s play.

  In the case of Gagmez, on the other hand, Destiny employed misapprehension to expedite my decision. For I would have appeared on his telecast – let the hucksters take note here – even if I had known the true nature of the product being peddled. But only after lengthier consideration, which may have robbed me of the opportunity. Very early on I made it quite clear to Goebbels that I was prepared to play the fool if it enabled me to capture the attention of my fellow Germans. You won’t win over a single soul if nobody is listening. And that Gagmez had brought me an audience that numbered in the hundreds of thousands.

  From a critical perspective, Gagmez was one of those “artists” that only a bourgeois democracy can spawn. Crossbreeding had paired a southern, even Asiatic appearance with impeccable spoken German, albeit tainted with an excruciating dialect. This combination seemed to be the very thing which made Gagmez’s performance possible. It was not dissimilar to those white actors in America who blackened themselves up to win roles playing simple-minded negroes. The parallel was striking, except in this case the fare on offer was not negro jokes, but jokes about foreigners. These appeared to be in such demand that a number of racial comedians were now plying their trade. It was incomprehensible. In my eyes jokes about race or foreigners are a contradiction in themselves. A witticism related to me by a comrade in 1922 may serve to illustrate the point:

  Two veterans meet.

  “So where were you wounded, then?” one of them asks.

  “In the Dardanelles,” says the other.

  “Ooh, that must be painful!” the first one replies.

  A humorous misunderstanding, which any soldier can share without too much difficulty. And by substituting the characters, we can change the degree to which the joke is funny and even enlightening. It is amplified if, for example, the role of the interrogator is taken by a notorious know-all, such as Roosevelt or Bethmann-Hollweg. If, on the other hand, we assume that the brainless questioner is a silverfish, the humour vanishes at a stroke, for every listener will ask, “How can a silverfish know where the Dardanelles is?”

  An idiot who does idiotic things is not funny. A good joke needs the surprise element to unfurl its didactic effect to the full. How could it strike anyone as a surprise that a Turk is a nincompoop? Of course, if there were a joke about a Turk playing the role of a brilliant scientist, then the absurdity of this alone would raise a laugh. But neither Herr Gagmez, nor any of his colleagues, told such jokes. What seemed popular in this line of work were farcical anecdotes about poorly educated foreigners who stuttered away in double Dutch. The habitual democratic duplicity of this “liberal” society was manifest: whereas tarring all foreigners with the same brush was generally frowned upon – and thus German political humorists had endlessly to separate out the different varieties – Gagmez and his dubious consorts wer
e able to lump Indians, Arabs, Turks, Poles, Greeks and Italians all together.

  I was perfectly happy with the approach, more than happy, in fact. If Herr Gagmez enjoyed a large audience, this would ensure that I, too, received widespread attention. Moreover, by the very nature of his jokes I could assume with confidence that this audience was composed predominantly of true-blooded Germans. Not, regrettably, because German viewers might harbour a particular sense of national consciousness, but because the Turks are a simple, proud people, who may well enjoy watching real burlesque, with all those clowns, but they do not like to be lectured and teased by Turkish émigrés. The Turk needs to be certain that he commands the respect and esteem of the world around him, and this is incompatible with playing the fool.

  To my mind this form of humour was as pitiful as it was pointless. If you have rats in the house you don’t call a clown, you call the vermin exterminators. But if that was what was necessary then it was essential for me to demonstrate from my very first appearance that an upright German has no need of foreign henchmen to help him make jokes about inferior races.

  When I arrived at the studio I was approached by a young lady. She had such an athletic physique that one might have thought she was from an auxiliary unit, but since my experience with that Özlem girl, I had decided to be more cautious. The young woman was wired up to the hilt, wearing something by her mouth which must have been some kind of microphone, and gave the impression she had walked straight out of Luftwaffe control centre.