by Timur Vermes
What I did cherish, however, were the possibilities Christmas afforded. All the books I was able to get through in that period. And the designs I managed to draw. Half of Germania came into existence! For this reason I did not mind spending the time around the turn of the year more or less alone in my hotel room. Hotel management had given me a small gift of a bottle of wine and a few chocolates. They couldn’t have known that I don’t much care for alcohol.
For me, the only unhappy aspect of the Christmas period has been the constant reminder that I was never blessed with my own family. Reorganising a Reich, cultivating the national movement amongst the Volk, ensuring my order not to surrender a centimetre in the East was carried out with due fanaticism and an iron will – these are not the sorts of matters one can attend to with children, not even with a wife. It was difficult enough with Eva; a certain consideration of her needs was essential, but ultimately the increased or sometimes extreme demands on my time and person from party, politics and the Reich meant one could not rule out the possibility that in her distress she might once again try to …
I will concede, however, that on those days when in theory I had comparatively little to do, Eva’s company would have been most pleasant. Her happy disposition. Oh well: the strong man is mightiest alone. This also holds true at Christmas, especially so, in fact.
I looked at the bottle the hotel had given me. I would have preferred a sweet Beerenauslese.
Recently I had become accustomed to taking the occasional stroll to the kindergarten playground. I loved to watch the children romp around and squeal with excitement, and found it cleared my mind. But I discovered that the kindergarten was closed for Christmas. There are few gloomier sights than a deserted playground.
Then I took to the drawing board; after all, one never knows when one might find the time to sketch again. I drew a motorway network and a railway system – this time for the Lebensraum beyond the Urals – a few main train stations and a bridge over to England. They’ve dug a tunnel there now, but lately I’ve been more taken by solutions above ground. Perhaps I spent too much time in bunkers. Unsatisfied with my blueprint, I then designed two new opera houses for Berlin, each with 150,000 seats. But this task was executed more out of a sense of duty than any real desire – who would address these matters if I didn’t take care of them? In the end I was delighted when I was able to resume work for the production company at the beginning of January.
xxv
I had not expected anything different. In fact I was almost satisfied, for at least they had left Fräulein Krömeier alone this time. It was not, however, what one might call good journalism. On the other hand, I regard the term “good journalism” as an oxymoron. All the same, I had expected that my accommodating attitude towards the paper might have been better rewarded than with the headline:
Loony YouTube Hitler tells BILD:
“I am a Nazi”
Wearing an inoffensive lounge suit, he pretends to be the honest citizen: the Nazi “joker” who calls himself “Adolf Hitler”, while refusing to reveal his real name. All of Germany is discussing this “comedian” who parades as a monster. BILD interrogated the immigrant-baiter in an exclusive interview in Berlin’s €400-a-night Hotel Adlon.
BILD: What is your real name?
Adolf Hitler.
BILD: Why will you not tell the German people what your real name is?
It is my real name (he grins smugly).
BILD: Would you show us your passport?
No.
BILD: Are you a Nazi?
Of course! (He cynically takes a sip of his mineral water. Giving him no slack, we elicit from this wicked man his most outrageous confession.)
BILD: Do you condemn what the Nazis did?
No, why should I? I’m the one who’s responsible.
BILD: For the murder of six million Jews as well?
For them especially.
BILD says: This is no longer satire, it’s incitement to hatred. It’s high time we unmasked this bigot!
When is the law going to get involved?
“Are you insane?” Sensenbrink said, firing the newspaper onto the table. “If we go on like this we’ll end up in court in no time! Come on, guys, you were all here when Frau Bellini said that the Jews were no laughing matter!”
“That’s exactly what he told them,” Sawatzki interjected. “Literally. But they didn’t mention that.”
“Calm down,” Madame Bellini said. “I listened to the recording again. Everything Herr Hitler said he said as Adolf Hitler.”
“As I always do,” I added in astonishment, to emphasise just how ridiculous that comment was. Madame Bellini frowned at me briefly and then continued, “Er … yes, precisely. No-one can lay a finger on us legally. I want to stress once again that you’ve got to be careful when talking about the Jews. But I don’t see what’s false about the statement that Hitler was responsible for the death of six million Jews. Who else do you think was?”
“Don’t let Himmler hear you saying that,” I chuckled. I could see Reich Sceptic Sensenbrink’s hair stand on end, even if I couldn’t be sure why. I toyed with the idea that Himmler might also have woken up somewhere in Berlin, and that Sensenbrink was planning a television programme with him, too. But that was nonsense. Himmler did not have the face for television, and he never received a single letter from an admirer, or at least not to my knowledge. A decent administrator when needed, but his expression always harboured a slyness – pure treachery in spectacles, as it ultimately turned out. Nobody wants to see that kind of thing on their television set. Even Madame Bellini looked annoyed for a moment, but then her face relaxed and she said, “I hardly like to say it, but you’re already an expert at this sort of thing. Other people would need at least half a year’s media training.”
“That’s just great,” Sensenbrink ranted. “But it’s not just a legal thing. If they keep firing from both barrels our ratings could go south. Rapido. And there’s nothing else they can do.”
“Oh yes there is,” I said. “But they choose not to.”
“No,” Sensenbrink bellowed. “There isn’t. This is the Axel Springer Verlag we’re talking about! Have you seen their mission statement? Point two: “To bring about reconciliation between Germans and Jews, including supporting the right of the Israeli people to exist.” This isn’t any old tittle-tattle, it comes from Springer himself. It’s their Bible; every editor is given a copy when they’re appointed and Springer’s widow makes a point of checking that these principles are being adhered to!”
“And you’re only telling me this now?” I asked acidly.
“It’s not necessarily a bad thing if they give you no let-up,” Sawatzki butted in. “We could do with all the attention we can get.”
“Exactly,” Bellini said. “But we mustn’t let it go the wrong way. We must make sure that all our viewers know who the baddie is.”
“So who is the baddie, then?” Sensenbrink groaned. “Himmler?”
“Bild,” Madame Bellini and Hotel Reserver Sawatzki said in unison.
“I will clarify the situation in my next Führer address,” I promised. “It’s time that these parasites were named.”
“Do you really have to call them ‘parasites’?” Reich Sceptic Sensenbrink whimpered.
“We could accuse them of duplicity,” Sawatzki said, “if we had a little more in our budget. Have you looked at Hitler’s mobile?”
“Sure, he’s got the recording of the conversation,” Madame Bellini said.
“Not only that,” Sawatzki said. He bent forwards, picked up my telephone and fiddled about with it for a moment. Then he held the device in front of us so we had a good view of the screen. It showed a photograph.
This was the moment I first realised I no longer missed that genius Goebbels.
xxvi
There are always advantages to having reached a certain time in one’s life. I am most pleased that I did not come to politics until I was thirty, an age when a man fin
ds his peace physically and sexually, and thus can focus all his energies on his actual goals, without his time and steel forever being purloined by the impulses of physical love. It is also true that age determines the sorts of demands people will make of one. If the Volk elects a Führer who is twenty, let’s say, and he displays no interest in women, people will start talking right away. What a queer Führer, they’ll soon be saying, why doesn’t he take a wife? Has he no wish to? Isn’t he able? But if, like me, the Führer is forty-four and does not choose a wife immediately, the Volk will say, “Well, he doesn’t have to, maybe he’s got one already.” And, “How nice that he’s thinking only of us.” And so it continues. The older one becomes, the more one assumes the role of the wise man, without, incidentally, having to do anything oneself. Take Schmidt, that ancient “Federal Chancellor” from some years back. This man has no shame whatsoever; he goes on and on spouting utter rot. They sit him in a wheelchair, where he ceaselessly puffs on one cigarette after the other, and delivers the most cretinous platitudes in an intolerably monotonous tone of voice. This man has understood nothing at all, and by consulting a few books I have discovered that his fame is based on two silly deeds. One: when a storm surge hit Hamburg he called out the army to help – you don’t need to be a genius to do that. Two: he let the communist criminals keep the kidnapped industrialist Schleyer, which surely was no great sacrifice for him; indeed he may even have been broadly sympathetic to the end result, as Schleyer was for many years in my S.S. and no doubt a thorn in the side of the Social Democrat Schmidt. And now, barely forty years later, this chimney on wheels is paraded about the country as an all-knowing oracle. You would think the Lord God himself had descended from the heavens.
But back to my point: naturally nobody expects this man to be womanising anymore.
The advantage of being older than one hundred and twenty is chiefly tactical. One’s political opponent is not anticipating it, and so is completely ambushed. He expects one’s appearance or physical constitution to be quite different. So the truth of the situation is denied outright, because what must not cannot be. This has very “unpleasant” consequences. For example, shortly after the war, the deeds of the National Socialist regime were declared to have been crimes. This was highly perplexing, seeing as my government had been a legitimately elected one. And it was established that there would never be a statute of limitations for these “crimes”, which always sounds good to the ears of those sentimental parliamentary curs. But I’d like to see which of today’s scoundrels in government will be remembered in three hundred years’ time.
The Flashlight company had in fact received an official communication from the public prosecutor’s office, saying that they had been telephoned by a number of nitwits, and that several complaints had been lodged relating to the alleged crimes. The investigations were stopped dead in their tracks, of course, because I could not possibly be who I purported to be, they said, and as an artist I naturally had more licence, and so on and so on …
Once again we see that even simple souls in the public prosecutor’s office have a greater understanding of art than those professors at the Vienna Academy. Although public prosecutors today are like the blinkered legal experts of yesteryear, at least they recognise an artist when they see one.
Fräulein Krömeier informed me of all this when I arrived at my office just before lunch, and I construed it as a good start to the day on which I intended to bring my conflict with Bild to an end.
Irritatingly, I’d had to discuss my speech with Madame Bellini in advance, a state of affairs I found most objectionable, particularly as she had the company lawyer in tow, and we all know what we think of lawyers. To my great surprise the pedant had no reservations, or only very tiny ones, and these Madame Bellini swept from the table with a dynamic “We’ll do it anyway!”
I still had a little time afterwards, so I headed for my office and bumped into Sawatzki, who was just leaving. He had been looking for me, he said, he’d left some manufacturing prototypes on my desk, and was thoroughly looking forward to the day of reckoning and so on and so forth. What he said came across as surprisingly inconsequential. Especially as I had already seen the prototypes the previous day – coffee cups, stickers, sports jerseys which were now called T-shirts, following the American usage. Sawatzki’s enthusiasm, however, was one hundred per cent trustworthy.
“We will return fire at 22.57,” he said, full of vim.
Intrigued, I said nothing.
And then he added, “Henceforth syllable will be met with syllable!”
I gave a smile of satisfaction and went into my office, where Fräulein Krömeier was diligently trying out new typefaces for my speech. Then I wondered whether I ought not to develop my own typeface. After all, I had already designed medals and the N.S.D.A.P. flag, a swastika in a white circle on a red background. Logically, therefore, I should invent the ideal typeface for a national movement. Then it occurred to me that before long graphic designers in printers’ workshops would be discussing whether to set a text in “Hitler Black”, and I scrapped the idea.
“Is there anything new about the prototypes?” I asked casually.
“Which prototypes, mein Führer?”
“The ones Sawatzki just delivered.”
“Oh, I see!” she said. “Not really, there’s only a couple of cups?” She quickly grabbed a handkerchief and blew her nose very, very thoroughly. When she had finished her face was quite red. Not tear-stained, but certainly rather animated. Well, I wasn’t born yesterday.
“Tell me, Fräulein Krömeier,” I speculated. “Is it possible that you and Herr Sawatzki have got to know each other rather better of late?”
She smiled uncertainly. “Would that be a bad thing?”
“It is none of my business …”
“Well, seeing as you asked, it’s my turn to ask a question: What do you think of Herr Sawatzki, mein Führer?”
“Enterprising, enthusiastic …”
“You know what I mean, L.O.L. He’s been really friendly recently? And popping in a lot? But what do you think of him – as a man? Do you think he’s right for me?”
“Well,” I said, and Frau Junge momentarily came to mind. “It would not be the first time that two hearts have come together in my anteroom. You and Herr Sawatzki? I’m sure the two of you have a great deal of fun together …”
“So true!” Fräulein Krömeier beamed. “He’s a real sweetie! But O.M.G., don’t go telling him I told you that.”
I assured her that she could count on my discretion.
“What about you?” she asked, sounding a little concerned. “Aren’t you nervous?”
“Why should I be?”
“It’s so unbelievable?” she said. “I’ve seen some of these telly people? But you’re defo the coolest?”
“In my profession one must have veins of ice.”
“Give it to them,” she said firmly.
“Will you be watching?”
“I’ll be right behind the set,” she said. “And I’ve already got one of them T-shirts, mein Führer!” Before I could say a word she jauntily opened the zipper of her black jacket and proudly showed me the shirt.
“I beg you!” I snapped, and when she rapidly zipped up her jacket again, added more kindly, “Just for once wear something that isn’t black …”
“Whatever you say, mein Führer!”
I left the office and was brought to the studio by the chauffeur. Jenny was already waiting and greeted me with a sonorous “Hi, Uncle Ralf!” By now I’d given up correcting her, in part because I knew she was turning it into a running joke. Over the past few weeks I had been Uncle Wolf, Uncle Ulf, Uncle Golf, Uncle Hoof and Uncle Woof. I was not sure I should be able to depend on her when it came to the crunch; it was indisputable that her frivolity would undermine morale in the long term, and so I had made a mental note. If this sort of thing did not cease after the first wave of incarcerations, then I had her earmarked for the second wave. But for now, natu
rally, I wasn’t giving anything away as she led me to wardrobe and Frau Elke.
“Put the powder away, Herr Hitler’s here!” she laughed. “Today’s the big day, pet, so I’ve heard.”
“Yes, but perhaps not for everyone,” I said, taking a seat.
“We’re counting on you, my love.”
“Hitler – our last hope,” I said dreamily. “As it used to say on the placards …”
“That’s laying it on a bit thick,” she said.
“Well, take some off then,” I said anxiously. “I don’t want to look like a clown.”
“No, treasure, what I meant was … Forget it. You don’t need much. The man with the dream skin. Go on, honey, out you go and show them who’s boss.”
I went behind the set and waited for Gagmez to announce me. He now did this with increasing reluctance, although I had to admit that no outsider would have been able to detect it.
“Ladies and gentlemen. To preserve the multicultural balance, I give you Germany from the perspective of a German – Adolf Hitler!”
I was greeted by rapturous applause. With each programme I had found it easier to appear in front of the audience. A sort of ritual had evolved, as it had all those years ago in the Berlin Sportpalast: incessant cheering, which I subdued to absolute silence by not saying a word and looking deathly serious for minutes on end. Only then, in this tension between the expectation of the crowd and the iron will of the individual, did I begin to speak:
“Recently …
and on more than one occasion …
I have been obliged …
to read things written about me …
in the newspaper.
Of course …
I am used to that.
From the lying scum …
of the liberal press.
But now, too, in a paper …
which has lately printed some …
very pertinent comments about the Greeks.
Or about certain Turks.
And idlers.