by Timur Vermes
“Can I help you?” asked a pimply boy with a confused expression.
“What do you think?” I said coldly.
“Have you got a permit to film?”
“What sort of dreadful whining is that?” I shouted at him. “Since when has a national movement ever hidden behind such oily, southern tricks?” I forced the door wide open. “Get out of my way, boy! You are a disgrace to the German Volk! Where is your superior?”
“I, er … hang on a sec, I’ll go and fetch someone.”
The youth disappeared, leaving us in some sort of reception room. I looked around. The place could have done with a paint and it smelled of stale smoke. A few party programmes were lying about, bearing absurd slogans. “Step on the gas” read one in inverted commas, as if one were in fact being urged to do the exact opposite. One sticker said: “Millions of foreigners are costing us billions”. Of course it failed to mention who would then manufacture the bullets and grenades for our troops, or who was supposed to excavate the bunkers for the soldiers at the front. Not the boy that I had seen, at any rate; he would have been just as useless with a shovel as he would in the field.
Never have I felt so ashamed of a nationalist party. I had to brace myself at the prospect of the camera filming all this, to prevent tears of rage from welling in my eyes. Ulrich Graf would not have taken eleven bullets to the body for these vermin; von Scheubner-Richter would not have fallen under the fire of the Munich police so that these scoundrels in their squalid dump could exploit the blood of outstanding men. I heard the bewildered youth stammering into a telephone next door. The camera recorded everything, all the incompetence. It was a bitter experience, but there was nothing for it but to muck out this cesspit once and for all. In the end I could bear it no longer; seething with wrath, I marched into the next-door room.
“… Yeah, I would’ve chucked him out, but somehow … He looks like Adolf Hitler, he’s got the uniform …”
I tore the receiver from the urchin’s hand and screamed down the line, “Which lame duck is in charge of these premises?”
It was astonishing how nimbly Assistant Director Bronner managed to slip around the table and with unashamed delight press a button on the telephone. Now, thanks to a loudspeaker on the device, one could hear the answers perfectly well in the room.
“Please allow me …” the loudspeaker said.
“If I allow anything here, you’ll know about it,” I bellowed. “Why is there no supervisor in the office? Why is this four-eyed pipsqueak holding the fort? Get here at the double and account for yourself!”
“Who on earth is that?” the loudspeaker said. “Are you that madman off YouTube?”
I admit that certain recent events may not be easy for the man on the street to comprehend. But we need to apply different standards in this instance. Anybody wishing to lead a nationalist movement must be able to react to the most unpredictable turns of fate. And when Fate comes knocking at his door, he cannot ask, “Are you that madman off YouTube?”
“Right,” I said. “I’m assuming that you haven’t read my book.”
“No comment,” the loudspeaker said. “And now you’re going to leave the offices or I’ll have you thrown out.” I laughed.
“I marched into France,” I said. “I marched into Poland. I marched into Holland and into Belgium. I encircled hundreds of thousands of Russians before they could even make a peep. And now I find myself in your so-called offices. If you had a residue of sympathy for the nationalist cause then you would get down here at once and explain why you are frittering away our magnificent racial heritage.”
“I’m going to—”
“You would have the Führer of the Greater German Reich removed by force, would you?” I asked with great composure.
“But you’re not the Führer.”
For reasons I could not wholly comprehend, Assistant Director Bronner clenched his fist at that moment and gave a very expansive grin.
“What I mean, of course, is: Hitler,” the loudspeaker stammered. “You’re not Hitler.”
“I see, I see,” I said calmly, extremely calmly, so calmly that Bormann would have been handing round the protective helmets. “But if,” I continued politely. “But if I were, then would I have the honour of being able to count on your unconditional loyalty to, and support for, the National Socialist movement?”
“I …”
“I expect to see the appropriate Reichsleiter. At once!”
“At the moment he …”
“I have time,” I told him. “Whenever I glance at my diary I see that I have an inordinate amount of time.” I hung up.
The youth gave me a look of utter bafflement.
“You’re not being serious, are you?” asked the worried-looking cameraman.
“I’m sorry?”
“Well, I don’t have an inordinate amount of time, mate. I’m off at four.”
“It’s O.K., it’s O.K.,” Bronner reassured him. “If necessary we’ll find a replacement. We’re getting some great material here!” He took his portable telephone from his pocket and set about making arrangements.
I sat on one of the empty chairs. “Do you have any literature I could read?” I asked the youth.
“Er … I’ll have a look, Herr …”
“The name’s Hitler,” I said soberly. “I must say, the last time I found it such an effort to introduce myself was in a Turkish dry cleaner’s. I say, are you related to these Anatolians in any way?”
“No, it’s just that – we …” the youth babbled.
“Listen. I do not see a great future for you in this party!”
The telephone rang, interrupting the boy’s hunt for reading material. He picked up the receiver and braced himself.
“Yes,” he said into the receiver. “Yes, he’s still here.” Then he turned to me. “It’s the national party chairman for you.”
“I’m not free to talk. The time for telephone conversations is over. I want to see the man in person.”
The scrawny youth looked no better bathed in sweat. This was no graduate from one of the boarding schools we had established, nor could the weed have been anywhere near a military training ground; in fact sport seemed to have passed him by altogether. Even a cretin would find it hard to fathom that such a racial reject had not been sifted out in the party’s admission process. The youth whispered something into the telephone receiver, and then hung up.
“The chairman asks for your patience?” the boy said. “He’ll be here as soon as he can? This is for MyTV, isn’t it?”
“This is for Germany,” I set him straight.
“In the meantime, can I offer you a drink at all?”
“In the meantime you can take a seat,” I said, giving him a long, concerned look. “Do you play any sport?”
“I’d rather not …” he said. “And the chairman’s going to be here any moment now?”
“Cut the whimpering,” I said. “Swift as a greyhound, tough as leather, hard as steel. Ring a bell?”
He gave a tentative nod.
“Then all is not lost,” I said, somewhat indulgently. “You may be afraid to talk. But all you have to do is use your head. Swift as a greyhound, tough as leather, hard as steel – would you say that these are advantageous qualities when pursuing one’s targets?”
“I’d say they couldn’t hurt?” he said guardedly.
“Well,” I asked. “Are you as swift as a greyhound? Are you as hard as steel?”
“I …”
“No you are not. You are as slow as a snail, as fragile as an old man’s bones, and as soft as butter. Behind the front line that you are purportedly defending, women and children need to be evacuated at once. The next time we meet you will be in better shape! Dismissed.”
He walked away sheepishly.
“And stop smoking,” I yelled after him. “You smell like cheap ham!”
I picked up one of the amateurish brochures, but could not bring myself to read it.
“We�
�re no longer alone,” Bronner said, peering out of the window.
“Eh?” the cameraman said.
“God knows who tipped them off, but there’s a whole gaggle of T.V. crews out there.”
“I bet it was a copper,” the cameraman conjectured. “That’s why they’re not slinging us out. You don’t look like a good Nazi if you throw out the Führer when the cameras are running.”
“But he’s not the Führer,” Bronner pondered.
“Not at present,” I corrected him harshly. “The first task is to unite the national movement and dispose of these harmful imbeciles. And here,” I said, glancing over at the youth, “we are in a veritable nest of harmful imbeciles.”
“Ooh, now someone’s here, guys!” Bronner said. “I think that’s the big cheese.”
The door opened and a wimpish-looking figure entered. “How nice,” he said, short of breath, and offered me his chubby hand. “Herr Hitler. My name is Apfel, Holger Apfel. Federal Chairman of the National Democratic Party of Germany. I watch your programmes with great interest.”
I looked this bizarre figure up and down. Bombed-out Berlin had not presented a sorrier picture. His voice sounded as if he were permanently chewing on a salami roll, and he looked like it too. I ignored his hand and asked, “Can’t you salute me like an upstanding German?”
He gave me a confused look, like a dog to whom one has issued two instructions simultaneously.
“Take a seat,” I told him. “We need to talk.”
Huffing and puffing, he sank into the chair opposite me.
“So,” I said, “you represent the national cause here, do you?”
“I have to,” he said with a half-smile. “I mean, it’s a long time since you were looking after things.”
“I have to manage my time carefully,” I said brusquely. “The question is: What have you been doing in the interim?”
“I don’t think we have to hide our achievements,” he said. “Now we represent Germans in Mecklenburg–Western Pomerania and Saxony, and our comrades in—”
“Who?”
“Our comrades.”
“We call them fellow Germans,” I said. “A comrade is someone beside whom one fought in the trenches. Apart from my humble self I see nobody here to whom that applies. Do you?”
“For us National Democrats …”
“National Democracy?” I sneered. “What is that supposed to be? National Socialist policy requires a concept of democracy that does not lend itself to being named. When the Führer is appointed, democracy is brought to an end, but there you are still going around with the word in your name! How stupid can people be?”
“As National Democrats we are of course fully committed to the constitution …”
“You do not appear to have been in the S.S.,” I said, “but have you at least read my book?”
He looked a little unsure, then said, “Well, I think you have to read as broadly as possible, and although the book is not easy to come by in Germany …”
“What is that supposed to mean? Are you apologising for having read my book? Or for not having done so? Or for not having understood it?”
“Come on, this is going too far now. Couldn’t we just turn off the cameras for a bit?”
“No,” I said stonily. “You have frittered away too much time already. You are a fraudster trying to cook his soup on the neglected embers of Greater German nationalism and love of Heimat, but each word that falls from your inept mouth throws the movement back decades. It would come as no surprise to me if in the end you were nothing more than a hostel for national traitors, infiltrated by Bolshevists.”
He attempted to lean back so as to cast me a superior smile, but I was not going to let the man get off that easily.
“Where,” I said icily, “in your ‘brochures’ is there any mention of the racial idea? The idea of German blood and racial purity?”
“Look, only recently I was stressing that Germany should be for the—”
“Germany?! This ‘Germany’ is a dwarf of a state compared to the country I established,” I thundered. “And even the Greater German Reich was too small for its population. We need more than Germany. How are we going to get it?”
“We, er … we dispute the, er … legitimacy of the treaties recognising the borders, imposed on us by the victorious powers …”
I could not suppress my laughter, although I grant you it was the laughter of despair. This man was a joke, pure and simple. A hopeless idiot who was leading the largest national association on German soil. I bent forward and snapped my fingers.
“Do you know what that is?”
He gave me a quizzical look.
“That is the amount of time needed to quit the League of Nations. ‘We dispute the legitimacy blah blah blah’ – what snivelling nonsense! Quit the League of Nations, arm yourself, then take what you need. And if you have a racially pure German Volk ready to fight with a fanatical will, then everything will come to you on this earth. So, let’s hear it again. Where do you stand on the racial question?”
“O.K. then. Having a German passport doesn’t make you a German; you’re German by birth, that’s what it says in our—”
“A true German does not wriggle around in legal formulations; he talks straight! The racial idea is the fundament for the preservation of the German Volk. If this is not impressed on the Volk time and again, in fifty years we will no longer have an army, but a bunch of layabouts like the Habsburg Empire.” Shaking my head, I turned to the youth.
“Tell me, did you vote for this so-called democratic dumpling?”
The youth made an uncertain movement with his head.
“Was he really the best man available?”
The youth shrugged. I stood up in resignation. “Let’s go,” I said bitterly. “I’m not surprised this party doesn’t spread any terror.”
“What about Zwickau?” This was Bronner.
“What do you mean, ‘Zwickau’?” I said. “What has that got to do with terror? My, we knew how to bring terror to the streets back then! In 1933 we exploited it to enormous success. But there was a reason for that. The S.A. drove around in trucks, breaking bones and flourishing banners. Did you hear me? Banners!” I yelled so wildly at this doughball that he recoiled.
“Banners! The most important things of all! When a deluded Bolshevist nincompoop is sitting there in his wheel-chair he ought to know who knocked the stuffing out of him, and why! And what does that trio of idiots in Zwickau do? They kill one foreigner after another – without any banners. Everyone thinks these must be random attacks or the Mafia. So what is there to be frightened of? The only reason we know these damp squibs existed at all is by the fact that two of the buffoons killed themselves.” I threw my arms skywards in dismay. “If I had got my hands on these gentlemen in time I would have rolled out a euthanasia programme just for them!”
In a rage I turned to the doughball. “Or I would have trained them for as long as it took for them to work effectively. Did you at least offer assistance to any of the three cretins?”
“I had nothing to do with the matter,” he said hesitantly.
“And I expect you’re proud of that!” I screamed. If the man had been wearing epaulettes I would have torn them from his jacket in front of the camera. I marched to the door in disgust and stormed outside.
Before me lay a sea of microphones.
“What have you been talking about?”
“Are you going to stand for the N.P.D.?”
“Are you a member?”
“A bunch of sissies,” I said disappointedly. “I’ll just say one thing: this is no place for an upstanding German.”
xxiv
That’s pure gold!” Madame Bellini said when, heavy-hearted, I showed her the report on the “National Democrats” alongside others we had filmed. “That’s quite special,” she gushed. “It’ll only need the lightest of edits. This will be the next step on the path to consolidating the Hitler brand! We’ll put it out at New Ye
ar! Or Epiphany, when everyone’s lounging around at home, desperate to find something to watch other than ‘Die Hard 64’, or the hundredth repeat of ‘Star Wars’.” This was our last meeting prior to what they called the Christmas break. For now there was nothing to do but wait for the broadcast dates, for the Bild interview to appear, and for this time of peace and goodwill to all men to pass.
I have never been a great advocate of Christmas. In the old days many Bavarians found this hard to understand; there they celebrate the run-up to it with what they call “Yuletide”. Had it been down to me, I would have eliminated the lot of it, including Advent and St Nicholas. Nor am I an advocate of this roast goose business, not on St Martin’s Day, not at Christmas and definitely not at Candlemas. In any case, during my first tenure as Führer I had no time to waste as I prepared for the final victory. In fact, I was willing to give Christmas a miss altogether, but Goebbels always held me back and said we had to take the needs of the Volk into consideration. At least in the beginning.
Well, Goebbels was a family man. And I think it’s no bad thing to have at least one man in the party who is able to bury his antennae deep into the soul of the Volk; one shouldn’t ignore such currents of feeling. Although, in retrospect, perhaps the idea of using golden swastikas as tree decorations was a touch excessive. It is never a simple undertaking to put a new gloss on an old idea – one should rather offer up something entirely new, something of one’s own creation. Although I never checked, I don’t imagine that Goebbels used the swastika baubles himself; at most he may have hung up the odd one out of politeness or good manners. Himmler, on the other hand …
