Look Who’s Back

by Timur Vermes

  It is always exhilarating to watch our business leaders take fright. When the deal appears sufficiently tantalising, they hurry over with beaming smiles, scarcely able to throw enough money at you. When everything goes well, they are at the front of the queue to increase their share, suggesting that they would have borne the whole risk. But the moment something looks perilous, they are the first to foist this lucrative risk onto others.

  “If that is your concern,” I mocked her, “then it has come too late. Do you not think you ought to have asked these questions earlier?”

  Madame Bellini cleared her throat. “I’m afraid I have something to confess.”

  “Which is?”

  “We ran a check on you. Listen, don’t get me wrong, we didn’t have you tailed or anything like that. But we did hire a specialist agency. I mean, one needs to find out whether one is actually employing a devoted Nazi.”

  “Well,” I said peevishly, “I imagine the results will have reassured you.”

  “On the one hand, yes,” Madame Bellini said. “We didn’t find anything bad.”

  “And on the other?”

  “On the other hand, we didn’t find anything at all. It’s as if you didn’t exist.”

  “I see. So now you would like me to tell you whether I existed before?”

  Madame Bellini paused a moment.

  “Please don’t get the wrong end of the stick. We’re all in the same boat here; all we want to do is avoid the sort of situation where …” Here she let out a rather forced laugh. “… we end up – without knowing it, of course – having someone like the real Hitler on our books.” She paused again before adding, “I can hardly believe what I’m saying here.”

  “Me neither,” I said. “It’s high treason!”

  “Can’t you be serious for a minute?” she asked. “I want you to answer just one question for me – hand on heart, are you sure that the hacks at Bild won’t unearth anything they could use against you?”

  “Frau Bellini,” I said, “I have done nothing in my life of which I am ashamed. I have neither sought any unwarranted financial gain, nor have I ever acted purely in my own interest. This will be of little use in our dealings with the press, however. In this instance we must assume that Bild will concoct a whole heap of ugly lies. I expect they will falsely attribute an array of illegitimate children to me once again – we know this is the worst thing the scurrilous petit-bourgeois press can think of. But I can live with such accusations.”

  “Illegitimate children? Nothing else?”

  “What else do you imagine there might be?”

  “What about your political background, Nazi affiliation and that sort of thing?”

  “My political background is above reproach.”

  “So you were never a member of a right-wing party?” she probed.

  “What are you talking about?” I laughed at her clumsy trick question. “I was practically one of the party’s founders. Member number 555!”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I don’t want you to go around thinking I was just some hanger-on.”

  “Was that a youthful indiscretion, perhaps?” Once again Madame Bellini made an awkward attempt to undermine my unimpeachable convictions.

  “What are you saying? Think about it. In 1919 I was thirty. I even helped come up with the ruse. We invented the first 500 to make the numbers look better! It is a stunt I’m awfully proud of. Let me reassure you, the worst that this newspaper will be able to print about me is that Hitler falsified his membership number. I think I can live with that.”

  There was another pause on the other end of the line. Then Madame Bellini said, “1919?”

  “Of course. When else do you think? You can only join a party once, unless you leave it. And I certainly never left mine!”

  She laughed and sounded relieved. “I can live with that, too. ‘YouTube Hitler fudged party entry in 1919!’ I’d almost pay to see a headline like that.”

  “Return to your post, then, and hold your position. We will not surrender a metre!”

  “Jawohl, mein Führer,” I heard Madame Bellini laugh before hanging up. Dropping the newspaper onto the table I suddenly found myself staring into gleaming blue eyes set beneath a mop of blonde hair. A boy, with his hands clasped timidly behind his back.

  “Well, well,” I said. “Who do we have here? What is your name?”

  “My name is Reinhard,” the whippersnapper said. Really a delightful little chap.

  “How old are you?” I asked. Tentatively, he brought forth a hand and put up three fingers before eventually adding a fourth. Adorable.

  “I knew a Reinhard once,” I said, gently stroking his hair. “He lived in Prague. Such a beautiful city.”

  “Did you like him?” the lad asked.

  “I liked him very much indeed,” I said. “He was a very good man! He made sure that lots of wicked people can’t harm people like you and me anymore.”

  “How many?” the boy asked. I could see he was becoming more trustful.

  “A huge number! Thousands! A very good, brave man!” “Did he put them in prison?” “Yes,” I nodded. “That, too.”

  “I bet they got their bottoms smacked,” this enchanting scallywag chortled, taking his other hand out from behind his back. He held out a copy of Bild.

  “Did you bring this for me?” I asked.

  He nodded. “From Mummy! She’s sitting over there,” he said, pointing to a table in the distance. Then he pulled a felt-tipped pen from his trouser pocket. “Mummy said I have to ask you if you’ll draw a auto on it.”

  “A auto,” I laughed. “Are you sure? Or did Mummy say an autograph?”

  The boy pulled the sweetest frown imaginable and thought hard. Then he cast me a look of consternation: “I don’t know anymore. Will you draw me a auto?”

  “Why don’t we ask Mummy?” I stood up, took the little fellow by the hand and brought him back to his mother. I signed the newspaper for her and also drew on a piece of paper a picture of a beautiful automobile – a magnificent twelve-cylinder Maybach. As I returned to my seat the telephone rang. It was Madame Bellini.

  “You do that very well,” she said.

  “I like children,” I said. “I was unable to start my own family. But please stop watching everything I do!”

  “What do you mean, ‘children’?” she asked, sounding quite astonished. “No, I mean you argue well, you’re quick-witted. You’re so good that Herr Sensenbrink and I thought we could offer them an interview right away. The Bild people!”

  I pondered this for a few seconds, then said, “No, we’re not going to do that. And by not doing it we’ll feature more frequently on their front page. We will grant them their interview when it suits us. And on our terms.”

  xx

  I am not often mistaken. On the contrary, I am very seldom mistaken. This is one of the advantages of not entering the political fray until one has had some proper experience of life – and let me emphasise here the word “proper”. These days there seems to be no end of self-styled politicians who, having stood behind a shop counter for a whole quarter of an hour, or once peered through an open door into a factory hall, now think they know what real life looks like. To take an example I just have to think of that liberal Asiatic minister, who abandoned his medical studies to concentrate on his career as a political nonentity. This begs the question: Why? If, instead, he had said he was concentrating on completing his medical studies, then aiming to work as a doctor for ten or twenty years, fifty to sixty hours per week, so that afterwards, schooled by harsh reality, he could gradually form his own opinions and develop these into a view of the world, allowing him to embark on meaningful political work with a good conscience, he might have been somebody, given favourable enough circumstances. But no: this fellow is one of those ghastly modern types who think they should enter politics first and the ideas will somehow piece themselves together along the way. And indeed, this is precisely what it looks like. Today they state the c
ase for Jewish finance; tomorrow they’re chasing after Jewish Bolshevism. This stripling is no different; he is like the class dunce, forever running after the bus. All I can say is: ugh! Had he waited until his first experience on the front line, unemployment, the men’s hostel in Vienna, rejection by those professorial oafs of the academy, then he would know what he was talking about today. Errors would be committed only in exceptional circumstances. As with this Bild affair, in which I confess I had misread the situation.

  I had assumed that the press vermin would be all over me, my policies, my speeches. In fact they sent a horde of photographers. Two days later a large picture appeared of me drinking tea from a paper cup at the newspaper kiosk. The vendor stood beside me holding a bottle of lemonade, which might have resembled a beer bottle. Above the photograph in large type was written:

  Loony YouTube Hitler:

  Hanging out with his drinking buddies

  In the evenings he rails on telly against foreigners and our politicians; by day he hangs out with his drinking buddies: Germany’s most unsavoury “comedian”, who calls himself “Adolf Hitler” and still refuses to tell the country his real name (as reported in BILD). Having spruced himself up and put away his uniform, the Nazi “humorist” (left) is acting the innocent man on the street. Is he planning his next distasteful tirade?

  Watch this space.

  True, the newspaper vendor had not been having his best day sartorially. This was due to the fact that he had decided to undertake some renovations to his sales window, for which he had been wearing some decommissioned fatigues under a smock that he removed in his cigarette breaks. He had looked no shabbier than one would expect from someone in the middle of a painting job – nobody can judge this better than I. But the vendor was no “drinking buddy” of mine, not by a long shot; I had never sought the company of drinkers. I found the whole business most unpleasant; I mean, the newspaper seller really did not deserve to be treated like that. Fortunately he seemed to know how to deal with it. I had set off late morning to offer my apologies for the distress caused by the article. But he could barely spare me the time of day.

  I found him standing in front of the kiosk serving an extraordinarily large number of people, despite the cold, wet weather. A large sign hung above the sales window: “Buy Bild – today featuring me and the loony YouTube Hitler!”

  “Great timing!” he called out when he saw me.

  “I had come to apologise,” I called back. “But now I no longer know what for.”

  “Me neither,” the newspaper seller laughed. “Grab a felt tip and get signing! That’s the least you can do for your drinking buddy.”

  “Are you really him?” asked a labourer, thrusting his newspaper at me.

  “Indeed I am,” I said, signing my name.

  “When I saw it I ordered another batch of copies straight away,” the newspaper vendor told me, selling papers over people’s heads. “Yes, by all means go over. Herr Hitler will be glad to sign for you.”

  In truth I do not particularly like signing my name. You never know what people will do with a signature. You can sign a piece of paper in all innocence, but the next day someone else will paste a declaration above it, and suddenly you find you have given away Transylvania to some corrupt Balkan entity. Or surrendered unconditionally, even though your bunkers are still full of weapons of retaliation with which you could turn around the war whenever you fancied. In the end, however, my signature on a newspaper seemed harmless enough. I was delighted, moreover, that for the first time nobody was complaining that I wasn’t writing Herr Stromberger, or whoever, but my own name.

  “There, please, across the photo!”

  “Could you write ‘For Helga’?”

  “Could you say something bad about the Kurds next time?”

  “We should have gone to war together back then! We would have won!”

  A small girl was pushed to the front with her newspaper, and I took deliberate care to sign it slowly. Let them photograph this; young people trust the Führer as much now as they did in the past. And not only the young. An ancient woman approached me with one of those modern walking frames on wheels and a twinkle in her eye. She held out her newspaper and said in a quivering voice, “Do you remember? 1935, in Nuremberg. I was in the window, watching you march by! I always thought you were looking at me. We were so proud of you! And now – well, you haven’t changed one bit!”

  “Nor have you,” I gaily fibbed, shaking her hand. I felt touched. Not that I could remember this woman, obviously, but her sincere loyalty had a charm all of its own. At any event, when a nervous Sensenbrink telephoned me I was calmly able to allay his concerns by describing to him this demonstration of trust by the Volk, and could rebuff the demands that we make a legal response. Nor was I daunted the following day. Naturally, the paper had suppressed the photographs of the public’s affirmation; instead they printed the utterly irrelevant headline: “Loony YouTube Hitler: now Germany votes”. Beside this were several photographs from concentration camps, showing the unattractive, but alas necessary work of the S.S. This made me rather indignant.

  A thorough investigation of major operations should never focus on those petty isolated instances where the overall plan has caused a minor inconvenience; such an analysis lacks all gravity. Wherever there is a large motorway enabling the transport of tonne after tonne of German goods, you will inevitably find a sweet little rabbit trembling by the roadside. Or you build a canal, thereby creating hundreds of thousands of jobs, and of course you will encounter the occasional small farmer who sheds bitter tears because he has to relinquish his land. But for this I cannot, I must not ignore the future of the Volk. And when the need to eradicate millions of Jews – and there really were that many back then – has been recognised, you will always find the odd naïve, compassionate German who thinks, “Well, that Jew wasn’t so bad after all, surely we could have put up with this or that one for a few more years.” For this reason it is terribly easy for a newspaper to appeal to people’s sentimental side. It is an old refrain – everybody agrees that the rats must be exterminated, but when it comes down to it, sympathy for the individual rat is huge. Only sympathy, mind you; there is no desire to keep the rat. The two must not be confused. But it was precisely this confusion which knowingly underpinned the paper’s questionnaire. The poll, which I doubted was going to be an honest and fair one, offered three choices, eliciting from me a grim smile. I could have dreamed this up myself. The options were:

  Enough! Get the YouTube Hitler off our screens!

  No, he’s not funny, and MyTV doesn’t think so either.

  Never seen him. Not interested in that Nazi rubbish.

  This was entirely to have been expected. Such claptrap is the slanderous bread and butter of the bourgeois gutter press, which quite clearly is still infected by the spirit of the Jews. It was something I would have to live with, particularly as the necessary facilities to accommodate these lying vermin were lacking. From a cursory piece of research I had been able to establish that only two barracks were still standing in Dachau. A scandalous state of affairs – the crematoria would have to be fired up again after the first wave of arrests.

  Sensenbrink, of course, was in a high-velocity spin. It is always those “great strategists” whose nerves start to flutter first. “We’re toast,” he wailed repeatedly. “We’re toast. MyTV’ll be sweating bullets. We’ve got to give them an interview!” I signalled to Hotel Reserver Sawatzki that he should keep an eye on this loose cannon. By contrast, Madame Bellini was positively blooming. Nobody since Ernst Hanfstaengel had managed so successfully to sweet-talk the important and not-so-important people on my behalf. And she was a damn sight better looking, too, a thoroughly attractive woman.

  On the fourth day, however, I gave in.

  Even now it is the only thing I reproach myself for. I ought to have shown unyielding steeliness, but perhaps I was somewhat out of practice. And yet, in my wildest dreams I could never have imagined what might
happen.

  They had published a large photograph showing me accompanying my respectable secretary, Fräulein Krömeier, to the door of the offices. The photograph, snapped in the bright light of early evening, had – as I was able to conclude thanks to long conversations with Heinrich Hoffmann back in the day – been wantonly and deliberately distorted. The image was unnecessarily blurred, as well as greatly enlarged, and it was presented as if the services of a highly experienced spy had been engaged to take the picture. Which was utter nonsense, of course. On the day in question I had decided to take a short walk and had gone with Fräulein Krömeier to the exit, from where she caught the bus. In the photograph I was holding open the door. Printed in bold above the image was the following:

  Loony YouTube Hitler:

  Who is the mysterious woman at his side?

  They furtively creep out of a side door and then look around: the Nazi “comedian” and his mysterious beauty. The man, who still refuses to tell Germany his name and who rails against foreigners, this self-proclaimed champion of decency, is conducting his sordid affair at twilight.

  Who is the mysterious woman he is courting?

  From a close acquaintance, BILD learned the following:

  “That is punishment by association,” I said coldly. “And poor Fräulein Krömeier is not even related to me!”

  We were sitting in the conference room, Madame Bellini, Sensenbrink, Hotel Reserver Sawatzki and myself. Inevitably it was the great strategist Sensenbrink who asked, “Come on, open the kimono … is there anything going on between you and the Krömeier girl? Are you dipping your pen in company ink?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Madame Bellini cut in. “Herr Hitler has opened the door for me too on occasions. Do you intend to ask me the same question?”

  “We just need to proceed carefully,” Sensenbrink said with a shrug.

  “Proceed carefully?” Madame Bellini retorted. “With what? I’m not going to waste a moment’s thought on this distasteful business. Fräulein Krömeier can do as she pleases. Herr Hitler can do as he pleases. We’re not living in the Fifties.”