Look Who’s Back

by Timur Vermes

  “Hello,” she said, holding out her hand. “I’m Jenny. And you must be …” She faltered slightly. “Adolf … ?”

  For a moment I wondered what to make of this direct, even clumsy familiarity, but nobody appeared to be shocked by it. In fact this was my first encounter with television industry jargon. As it later emerged, people here evidently believed that the broadcasting experience was similar to the common struggle in the trenches, and that henceforth one belonged to a fraternity of veterans whose members swore allegiance to each other until death, or at least until that particular programme was discontinued. Initially I found such an approach inappropriate, but in mitigation one had to consider that Jenny’s generation had never had the opportunity to experience life at the front. I intended to change this in the future, but for the time being I decided to meet familiarity with familiarity and said reassuringly to the young thing, “You can call me Uncle Wolf.”

  She frowned momentarily and then said, “O.K., Herr … I mean … Uncle … will you come with me to make-up?”

  “Of course,” I said, following her through the broadcasting catacombs, while she pressed her microphone to her mouth and said, “Elke, we’re coming over.” We made our way down the corridors in silence.

  “Have you been on television before?” she asked. I got the impression that she was being slightly more reserved with me. I expect she felt awed by the Führer’s aura.

  “On several occasions,” I said. “But rather a long time ago now.”

  “Right,” she said. “Might I have seen you in something before?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “It was also here in Berlin, at the Olympic Stadium.”

  “Were you the warm-up for Mario Barth?”

  “What?” I asked, but she seemed no longer to be listening.

  “You caught my attention straight away, that skit of yours was brilliant. I think it’s amazing that you put it all together yourself. But you’ll be doing something different now, won’t you?”

  “Something … quite different,” I said hesitantly. “The time for games is long past …”

  “Here we are,” Fräulein Jenny said, opening a door behind which was a make-up table. “I’m going to leave you in the hands of Elke. Elke, this is … erm … Uncle Rolf.”

  “Wolf,” I corrected her. “Uncle Wolf.”

  Elke, a tidy-looking woman of around forty, knitted her brow, looked at me and then at a note that lay next to her cosmetics. “I can’t see any Wolf here. My list says I should have Hitler now,” she smiled. Then she offered me her hand and said, “My name’s Elke. What’s yours, darling … ?”

  Here once more was the familiar comradeship of the trenches, although Frau Elke seemed a little too old for Uncle Wolf. So I settled for: “Herr Hitler.”

  “Right then, Herr Hitler,” Frau Elke said. “Take a seat, sweetheart. Any special requests? Or should I just do as I see fit?”

  “I have full confidence in you,” I said, sitting down. “After all, I cannot attend to everything myself.”

  “You’re not wrong,” Frau Elke said, putting a smock over me to protect my uniform. Then she examined my face. “You’ve got fabulous skin, babe,” she said, reaching for a powder compact. “Many people of your age just don’t drink enough. You should see the complexion of some of the others I get in here …”

  “I like to drink a lot of water,” I said. “Damaging the vigour of our race is the height of irresponsibility.”

  Frau Elke snorted, engulfing the tiny room and the both of us in a massive cloud of powder. “Sorry about that, hon,” she said. “I’ll clear it up in a jiffy.” Then she vacuumed away the cloud and cleaned the trousers of my uniform with a small suction device. As she was dusting off my hair, the door opened. In the mirror I could see Ali Gagmez enter the room. He coughed.

  “Is the smoke mortar part of the programme?” he smirked.

  “No,” I said.

  “It was my fault,” Frau Elke said. “But we’ll have him right as rain in no time.” I liked that. No prevaricating, no excuses, just an unswerving acknowledgement of one’s errors, and a promise to make amends for these autonomously. I never failed to find it gratifying that over the past few decades the German racial inheritance had not been fully swamped by the genetic soup of democracy.

  “Excellent,” Gagmez said, holding out his hand. “I hear from Frau Bellini that you come out with these firecrackers. I’m Ali.”

  I worked my unpowdered hand out from under the smock and shook his. Tiny avalanches trickled from my hair.

  “Pleased to meet you. Hitler.”

  “So? How’s it going, mate? Everything O.K.?”

  “I think so. Frau Elke?”

  “I’m almost done, pet,” Frau Elke said.

  “Great uniform,” Gagmez said. “It looks totally authentic! Where do you pick up things like that?”

  “Well, it’s not that simple,” I said, giving the matter some thought. “My most recent visits were usually to Josef Landolt in Munich.”

  “Landolt,” Gagmez pondered. “Never heard of him. But Munich … that must be with Pro Sieben. They’ve got some ace costume designers.”

  “I expect he’s retired in the meantime,” I said.

  “I can see it’s going to work brilliantly – you with your Nazi piece, and me. Even though Nazi routines aren’t exactly new.”

  “And?” I asked suspiciously.

  “No, sure, it’ll be great anyway,” he said. “It always is. Not a problem, mate. Everything’s been done before … I picked up the foreigner routine in New York, it was all the rage in the nineties. Where do you get your Führer thing from?”

  “From the Germanic peoples, ultimately.”

  Gagmez laughed. “Bellini’s right, you really carry your part through all the way. O.K., mate, see you later. Do you need a cue? Should I start on a particular subject before I introduce you?”

  “That is quite unnecessary,” I said.

  “I couldn’t do that,” Gagmez said. “You know, without any sort of script. I’d be up shit creek. But I’ve never really had much time for improvisation … Anyway, mate – later.” And he left the room.

  In truth I had been expecting further instructions.

  “What now?” I asked Frau Elke.

  “Fancy that,” she laughed. “I thought the Führer would know which way to go.”

  “There is no need for arrogance,” I rebuked her. “As the Führer of the German Reich my business is to conduct the affairs of state, not tuppenny tours.”

  With a snort she swiftly removed the powder compact from the vicinity of her nose. “You’re not getting me this time,” she said, sounding somewhat cooler. She pointed to a corner of the room. “See that? You can follow the programme on the screen. There’s plenty of them around the place, in wardrobe and down in the canteen. Jenny will come to collect you, to be sure you make your entrance on time.”

  The programme was exactly as I had expected, given what I had already seen and heard of it. Gagmez introduced a few film snippets in which he appeared as a Pole or a Turk and translated their various shortcomings into stage routines. This man was no Charlie Chaplin, but in fact that was no bad thing. The audience gave his tomfoolery a sympathetic reception, and if one stretched the concept far enough one might say that at least part of his performance had a political awareness at its core. Which meant it was incontestable that what I had to say would fall on fertile soil.

  The handover was effected by means of a fixed phrase, uttered by Gagmez without further ado: “And now, a topical piece from Adolf Hitler.” And so for the first time I stepped out from the wings and into the glare of the spotlights.

  It was as if I were returning home to the Sportpalast after years of hardship in a foreign land. The heat from the lights burned into my skin, I could make out the youthful faces of the audience. There may have been several hundred of them, representing the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands in front of their television sets. Here wa
s the future of the Reich, here were the people with which I was going to build my Germany. I could feel the tension within me, and the joy, too. If ever I had harboured doubts, these vanished in the rapture of this build-up. I was accustomed to speaking for hours on end; now I had but five minutes.

  I stepped up to the lectern and stood there without saying a word.

  My gaze wandered from one side of the recording studio to the other. I listened to the silence, eager to discover whether decades of democracy had, as I expected, left behind little more than faint traces in these young minds. Laughter had erupted in the audience as my name was announced, but it quickly subsided; my physical presence unleashed a hush across the assembled crowd. From their expressions I could see that they were trying to compare my countenance with the faces of professional performers more familiar to them; I could see the uncertainty triggered by nothing more than simple eye contact in that breathless silence. My concerns about heckling were unfounded – at each and every gathering in the Hofbräukeller the reception had been more hostile.

  I moved forward and readied myself to speak, but then merely crossed my arms – at a stroke the noise level dropped further by one hundred times, one thousand times even. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Gagmez the dilettante starting to sweat as he watched apparently nothing happening. I realised straight away that this man feared silence, and knew nothing of its power. His eyebrows contorted into a grimace, as if I had forgotten my script. An assistant tried to give me a sign, tapping furiously on her wristwatch. I prolonged the silence even further by slowly raising my head. The tension in the room was palpable, as was Gagmez’s anxiety. I enjoyed it. I let the air flow into my lungs, straightened up and broke the silence with a barely audible sound. When everyone is listening for cannon fire, a falling pin can suffice.

  “My fellow Germans!

  What I,

  what we

  have just seen

  in numerous routines,

  is perfectly true.

  It is true

  that the Turk has no creative genius

  and nor

  will he ever have.

  True

  that he is a hawker,

  a peddler,

  a huckster

  whose intellectual abilities

  will rarely surpass those

  of one of our kinsmen.

  True

  that the Indian

  is a garrulous type

  befuddled by his religion.

  True

  that the relationship

  between the Pole and property

  has been

  ruined

  for good!

  These are all

  general truths,

  manifest to every fellow German,

  man or woman,

  needing no further

  explanation.

  And yet,

  it is a disgrace to our nation

  that here,

  on German soil,

  only

  a Turkish! follower of our movement

  dares to say these things

  out loud.

  My fellow Germans,

  looking at our country today,

  this comes as no surprise.

  Germans today

  keep their waste more thoroughly separated

  than their races,

  with one single exception.

  In the field of humour.

  Here,

  only

  the German makes jokes about Germans,

  the Turk makes jokes about Turks.

  The house-mouse makes jokes about the house-mouse

  and

  the field-mouse jokes about the field-mouse.

  This has to change

  and this will change.

  From today, at 22.45,

  the house-mouse will joke about the field mouse,

  the badger about the deer,

  and the German about the Turk.

  And so

  I concur fully

  with the criticism of foreigners

  expressed by the previous speaker.”

  I stepped back.

  The silence was astounding.

  I marched off stage. Still no sound from the audience. Madame Bellini was whispering something into a colleague’s ear. I stood beside her and observed the audience once more. People’s eyes were deranged; their gaze searched the stage for something to alight on, then darted back to the presenter’s desk. Gagmez sat there, his mouth opening and closing like a puppet as he struggled to find a witty line with which to conclude the programme. It was this conspicuous show of impotence which set off a volley of laughter in the audience. Not without some satisfaction I watched his utter helplessness, which ultimately petered out in an indifferent “Till next time – tune in again.” Madame Bellini cleared her throat. She seemed uncertain, so I decided to reassure her.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I told her.

  “Oh?” she said.

  “Do you now?”

  “Of course,” I replied. “The same happened to me once. We had hired out the Circus Krone building and it was not clear whether—”

  “Excuse me,” Madame Bellini said. “That’s my phone.”

  She retired to a corner of the backstage area and put her mobile telephone to her ear. She did not appear to like what was being said. As I was trying to make out her expression I felt a hand on my uniform. Gagmez was collaring me. His face had lost all of its earlier cheeriness. As he shoved me against the set and hissed at me through gritted teeth I was once again made painfully aware of how much I missed my S.S.

  “What do you think you’re playing at, you stupid prick? You and your concurring with the previous speaker can fuck right off!”

  Over his shoulder I spotted some stewards rushing towards us. Gagmez pushed me against the wall again, then let go. His face was purple. Then he turned around and screamed, “What the fuck is going on here? I thought this arsehole was going to do his Nazi shit!” He turned to Hotel Reserver Sawatzki and, without lowering the volume, said, “Where is Carmen? Where? Is? Carmen?”

  Pale but undiminished, Madame Bellini hurried over. I wondered whether I would be able to count on her loyalty, but could not reach a definitive conclusion. She waved her hands about in an effort to defuse the situation and opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out.

  “At last! Carmen! That was one major fuck-up. Did you see it? Did you fucking well see it? Where did you dig up this arse-hole? You said I’d do my foreigner routine and he’d follow with his Nazi crap. You said he’d disagree with me. He’d get all uptight about Turks on the telly and that sort of shit! And now this! What the fuck do you mean by ‘follower of our movement’? What fucking movement? And how am I a follower? Where the fuck does that leave me?”

  “I did tell you he was a bit different,” Madame Bellini said. She had regained her composure with astonishing rapidity.

  “I don’t give a fuck,” Gagmez frothed. “Let me tell you right here: I want this cunt off my programme now. He doesn’t stick to his agreements. I’m not having this arsehole shit all over my programme and ruin it.”

  “Calm down,” Madame Bellini said in a curious tone, which was at once soft and energetic. “It didn’t go that badly.”

  “Is everything O.K.?” one of the two stewards enquired.

  “Absolutely fine,” Madame Bellini said, reassuring him. “I’ve got it all under control. Calm down, Ali.”

  “I’m not going to fucking well calm down,” Gagmez howled, and then dug his index finger under my shoulder strap. “You are not going to fuck me over, matey,” he said, hammering repeatedly on my chest with his finger like a woodpecker. “You think you can just swan up here with your ridiculous Hitler uniform and your oh-so-fucking inscrutable manner. But let me tell you: it’s nothing new; it’s old fucking hat. You’re an amateur. What the fuck do you think you’re doing here? You turn up and think you’ve got it all sewn up
. But you’re not going anywhere, matey, you can fucking kiss this one goodbye! If there’s anyone here who’s got followers, it’s me! This is my audience, those are my fans – keep your filthy little hands off! You are a pathetic amateur. Your uniform and your routine – it’s all a heap of shit. With that toss you might be able to do the odd beer tent or rifle club, but let me tell you: you’re never going to be anybody.”

  “I have no need,” I said calmly. “Behind me are millions of fellow Germans, who—”

  “Cut the crap,” Gagmez shrieked. “You’re not on the fucking telly now! Do you think you can wind me up? You’re not going to wind me up! Not! Me!!”

  “Cool it, both of you,” Bellini said, now raising her voice. “Sure, we need to work at it a bit. There’s still a little fine-tuning to be done. But it wasn’t that bad. Just something new. Now, let’s all calm down and wait and see what the critics say …”

  If I had ever felt certain of my calling since my reappearance in this modern epoch, it was at this moment.

  xv

  It is in times of crisis that the true Führer is revealed. When he shows his nerve, persistence and sheer determination, though the world be set against him. If I had not been at Germany’s helm, nobody would have marched into the Rhineland in 1936. They were all quivering in their boots; there was nothing we could have done if the enemy had decided to attack. We had five divisions at the ready; the French alone had six times as many. And yet I risked it. Nobody else would have dared, and at the time I watched carefully to see who was standing by me, with their feet or their heart, side by side, sword in hand.

  It is also in those times of crisis that Destiny reveals the true loyalists. Those moments of doubt when a hazardous venture gives rise to success if – but only if – the fanatical belief remains unbroken. The occasions when one can identify those who lack this belief, but who watch the situation unfold in uneasy expectation, to determine on which side they should fight. A Führer must keep a close eye on these people. Although they can be manipulated, one must never make the success of the movement dependent on them. Sensenbrink was one of their ilk.