Look Who’s Back

by Timur Vermes

  Now it is I who am criticised

  in that paper

  for a number of remarks which …

  were in the same vein.

  Then ‘questions’ were raised,

  such as who am I?

  To cite only the most inane of the lot.

  It was enough to make me ask:

  What sort of newspaper is this?

  What sort of rag?

  I have asked my colleagues.

  My colleagues know of it,

  but do they read it?

  No!

  I have asked people on the street.

  Do you know this paper?

  They know it,

  But do they read it?

  No!

  No-one reads this rag.

  And yet … millions of people buy it.

  Well … nobody knows better than I

  that there can be no greater praise for a newspaper.

  This was the case

  with the Völkischer Beobachter”

  Here the audience signalled their passionate approval for the first time. Appreciatively, I let them continue for a while, before I called for silence with a wave of my hand.

  “By contrast …

  the Völkischer Beobachter had a boss

  who was a real man.

  A lieutenant.

  A fighter pilot

  who lost his leg for

  the Fatherland.

  Who is running this Bild?

  A lieutenant too.

  Well, well, well!

  So … what is wrong with this man?

  Perhaps he is lacking in ideological leadership.

  When the lieutenant and editor-in-chief

  of the Völkischer Beobachter

  was ever in doubt,

  he would ask me

  what I thought.

  But no-one from this Bild paper

  has ever solicited my opinion.

  At first I thought the man might be one of those principled idealists,

  who keep all politics at arm’s length.

  Then I realised.

  He does indeed call when he needs moral support.

  But he does not call me.

  He calls Herr Kohl.

  Another politician.

  If one can call him that.

  The very Herr Kohl who was a witness at his wedding.

  I have made my enquiries at the lieutenant’s publishing house.

  They said it was all above board and there was no comparison with the Völkischer Beobachter.

  And yet,

  this politician was the former chancellor of united Germany.

  And that

  is precisely what I cannot understand.

  For after all, I am an even more former chancellor of united Germany.

  But I doubt that the united Germany of this Herr Kohl

  is as united as mine was.

  Quite a few pieces are missing.

  Alsace.

  Lorraine.

  Austria.

  The Sudetenland.

  Posen.

  West Prussia.

  Danzig.

  East Upper Silesia.

  The Memel Territory.

  I have no desire to go into too much detail here.

  But there is one thing I should like to say:

  If the editor wants well-informed opinions

  he ought to seek out the organ grinder

  rather than the monkey.”

  Once more the studio exploded with applause, which I acknowledged with a solemn nod of the head before continuing.

  “But perhaps

  this editor is not in search of well-informed opinions.

  As people say so beautifully these days,

  I ‘googled’ this man.

  I found a photograph of him.

  Then everything fell into place.

  You see, this is the advantage of having a thorough grounding in racial theory.

  One glance is enough.

  This ‘editor’

  goes by the name of Diekmann.

  Of course, this is not a real editor at all,

  but a walking suit with a pound of lard in his hair.”

  A further blast of cheering told me that in Editor Diekmann I had hit upon exactly the right target. I gave the audience less time to show their elation this time, to draw out the tension.

  “But ultimately, it is the deed which determines

  the truth

  and the lie.

  The lie is: this newspaper is trying to convince its readers

  that it is my bitter enemy. The truth you can see here.”

  I imagine it had taken all manner of photographic skill to process the detail of the image on my telephone, but nothing had been manipulated and the facts remained unchanged. One could clearly see Frau Kassler paying the bill at the Adlon. And then the picture was overlaid with Sawatzki’s headline:

  “Bild financed the Führer.”

  I have to say, I had not been applauded like that since the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. But the real show of support was seen in the visitor numbers to my special address on the Internetwork. At times my speech was not accessible – such bungling incompetence; in the past I’d have had Sensenbrink dispatched to the front for that. His skin was saved by the fact that Sawatzki’s slogan had ensured excellent sales of “Bild financed the Führer” sports jerseys, coffee cups, key rings and many such items. And the shops had been more than adequately stocked in advance.

  Which made me adopt an even more conciliatory attitude towards Sensenbrink.

  xxvii

  It took three days for them to surrender.

  On the first day they failed with their temporary injunction. The court rejected it on the perfectly reasonable grounds that Bild did not exist at the time of the Führer, which meant that the only possible reference was to the T.V. Führer. And the fact that the newspaper had financed him was incontrovertible. The court remarked, moreover, that the embellishment of facts in the headline was a stylistic device often employed by the paper, and thus Bild could not complain if such a tactic were used against it.

  On the second day they realised that all revisionist aspirations were hopeless, and they were obliged to acknowledge the sales figures of sports jerseys, stickers and cups bearing the slogan. Some upstanding young Germans even staged a protest outside the publisher’s offices, albeit in a far more avuncular mood than I would have considered apt.

  For the time being I could no longer complain that other publications were ignoring me. When it began, the quarrel had got me onto the occasional gossip page, but now I was starting to make inroads into the arts sections. Sixty years ago I wouldn’t have set the slightest store on being discussed cheek by jowl with all those unattractive and unintelligible contrivances of so-called “culture”. In the meantime, however, a movement has evolved, according to which virtually anything can pass for culture or is extolled as such. Hence my appearance in these pages was to be welcomed as part of a transitional process stamping me with a seal of political seriousness that exceeded the norms of broadcast entertainment. The intellectual gobbledygook of this writing had not changed in sixty years, suggesting that readers still regarded as highbrow only material which they themselves found incomprehensible, and surmised the basic substance of these articles from the discernibly positive tone.

  And there was no doubting the positive tone. The Süd-deutsche Zeitung praised the “Potemkin-like retrospective” which “behind the apparent refraction of neo-fascist mono-structures” suggested “the vehemence of an ardent plea for pluralistic or direct democratic processes”. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung welcomed the “superb manipulation of inherent paradoxes in the sheep’s clothing of the nationalist wolf”. And the Mirror Online word-games section referred to my causing a “Führ-ore”, which no doubt was meant well.

  On the third day, as I later learned, the editor received a call from the widow of Bild’s publisher, who demanded to know how much longer the p
aper was going to put up with this violation of her late husband’s memory. She thought it had gone on far too long already and insisted that this harrowing affair be brought to a swift conclusion the following day.

  How he would achieve this was his own business, she added.

  When I arrived at my office in the early afternoon, I could see Sawatzki in the distance, bounding down the corridor towards me. In a rather adolescent gesture he was shaking his fist and shouting “Yes! Yes! Yes!” in English. I found his manner somewhat unbecoming, but could understand the enthusiasm. The surrender had been virtually unconditional. The negotiations, personally conducted by Madame Bellini in constant contact with me, first brought a ceasefire in reporting of several days, during which I was twice feted on the front page as that day’s “mover and shaker” or “winner”. After every retreat of theirs we would in response withdraw one item of merchandise from the market.

  For the next edition of the programme the paper duly sent their best scribe, a sycophantic old soak by the name of Robert or Herbert Körzdörfer, who stuck to his task impeccably when he pronounced me the funniest German since a certain Herr Loriot. I read that behind the mask of the Nazi leader I “articulated intelligent ideas and was a true representative of the Volk”. From Herr Sawatzki’s unorthodox gymnastics I could infer that this was an excellent result.

  But best of all I instructed the paper to do me a small favour and exploit some of its contacts. Just for once the idea came from Sensenbrink, who until then had been at his wits’ end. A fortnight later there appeared a tear-jerking story about the bitter fate of my official documents, which had perished in some conflagration. Before another fortnight went by I was the proud owner of a passport. I have no idea by which legal or illegal channels this was acquired, but now I am lawfully registered in Berlin. I merely had to change my date of birth, which is now officially 30 April, 1954. Here Fate intervened once more by getting the numbers the wrong way round. I should have written 1945, of course, but 1954 is far more appropriate, given my age.

  The only concession I made was that I had to forgo my intended visit to the Bild editorial board. My original demand was for the entire team to greet me with the Nazi salute while singing the Horst Wessel song in a round.

  Ah well. You can’t have it all.

  Otherwise, everything turned out splendidly. The visitor numbers to the “Führer Headquarters” Internetwork site necessitated ever more technological resources, requests for interviews mounted up, and on the recommendation of Sensenbrink and Madame Bellini, the visit to the “National Democratic” ne’er-do-wells was produced as a special transmission to satisfy the huge popular demand.

  By the end of that day I was in the mood to clink glasses with Sawatzki again; maybe he would be able to conjure up some of that very agreeable Bellini drink. But Herr Sawatzki was nowhere to be found, even though he could not have left the building. And nor was Fräulein Krömeier, as I established when I returned to my office.

  I decided against seeking out the two of them. This hour belonged to the victors, of which Herr Sawatzki was one; truly, he had made a not insignificant contribution to our triumph. And oh, how a warrior drunk on victory can enchant a young woman. In Norway, in France, in Austria, hearts flew to our soldiers. I am convinced that in the first few weeks following our invasion of each country, between four and six divisions were begotten from the loins of first-rate purebloods. How many new soldiers would we have produced had the older, not so pure-blooded generation been able to withstand the enemy for a paltry ten or fifteen years more?

  The youth is our future. Which is why I made do with Madame Bellini and another glass of sour sparkling wine.

  xxviii

  I had never seen Sensenbrink look so ashen. Sure, the man had never been a hero, but his face now bore a colour I had not witnessed since the trenches in 1917, in that rainy autumn when stumps of legs stuck up out of the muddy earth. It might have been the result of unaccustomed exertion, for instead of telephoning me the man had come to my office in person to request my presence in the conference room. But Sensenbrink looked like the sporty type.

  “It’s unbelievable,” he said repeatedly. “It’s unbelievable. This has never happened in the entire history of the company.” Reaching for the door handle with a sweaty hand, he turned round and said, “If I could have known when I met you at that bloody kiosk …” and then he smacked his head on the door frame as he made to leave the office.

  Helpful Fräulein Krömeier jumped to her feet at once, but Sensenbrink staggered into the corridor, holding his head as if in a trance and interspersing several more “unbelievables” with a couple of “It’s fine, I’ll be O.K.”s. Fräulein Krömeier cast me a look of such shock, as if the Russians were suddenly back at the Seelow Heights, but I gave her a reassuring nod. The past weeks and months had taught me not to take Herr Sensenbrink’s fears especially seriously. Some anxious bureaucrat, or democrat, had probably sent another letter of protest to a state prosecutor; even now such complaints were being filed on a daily basis, and each time the investigation was abandoned as inconclusive and preposterous. Maybe this time it was a little different and they would send an official to the office, but I doubted there was anything to worry about. In any case I was always prepared to go to prison for my convictions.

  I must admit, however, that a certain curiosity gnawed at me as I made my way to the conference room. Not only were Herr Sawatzki and Madame Bellini also striding towards the room, but a general sense of nervousness or tension was palpable in the corridors. Colleagues were huddled in doorways in small groups, chatting in hushed tones and casting me furtive, quizzical or unsettled looks. I decided to take a minor detour and pay a visit to the in-house cafeteria to acquire some glucose. Whatever was going on in that conference room, I resolved to strengthen my own position by making them wait.

  “I say, you’ve got balls,” said Frau Schmackes, who ran the cafeteria.

  “I know,” I said amicably. “That’s why no-one but I was able to enter the Rhineland.”

  “Oooh, stop exaggerating! I’ve been there too, you know,” Frau Schmackes said. “But I can’t stand that Cologne lot. What can I get you, love?”

  “A packet of your glucose, please.”

  “That’ll be 80 cents, love,” she said before bending forward almost conspiratorially. “Kärrner’s come in specially, you know? He’s already in the meeting room, so I’ve heard.”

  “I see,” I said, paying. “Who is this Kärrner?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” Frau Schmackes said. “He’s the big cheese, the boss of the whole set-up. You don’t see him much, because normally it’s Bellini running the show, and if you ask me she’s got a better handle on things. But when there’s a major disaster, Kärrner comes in himself.” She pushed my 20 cents change across the table. “Also when there’s some special announcement, of course. But it has to be pretty big, I mean Flashlight’s not doing bad, you know.”

  I carefully took out a tablet of glucose and placed it in my mouth.

  “Shouldn’t you be on your way, love?”

  “That’s what they all said in winter 1941,” I told her, and then finally headed with measured step in the right direction. I didn’t want to give the impression that I was trying to avoid the conference.

  The groups of people in the corridors had grown. It was almost as if my colleagues were standing on parade and I was inspecting them. I gave a friendly smile to a few young women and jerked my arm back in greeting. There was the occasional giggle, but also a “You’ll do it!”

  Of course. The only question was: What?

  The door to the conference room was ajar and Sawatzki was standing in the entrance. When he saw me approaching from a distance he gestured with his hand, urging me to hurry. And yet this was clearly no reprimand; his expression of confidence immediately signalled that he desperately, really desperately wanted to know what it was all about. I slackened my pace ever so slightly again to pay a passing complim
ent to a young woman for her pretty summer dress. My speed reminded me of the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise he can never overtake.

  “Good morning, Herr Sawatzki,” I said firmly. “Is this the first time we’ve seen each other today?”

  “Go in,” he beseeched, gently pushing me. “In, in, in. Or I’ll die of curiosity.”

  “There he is,” Sensenbrink said from inside the room. “At last!”

  A few other men were seated around the conference table. More than at my first conference, and sitting beside Madame Bellini was apparently that Kärrner character. A slightly corpulent, but definitely sporty type of around forty years old.

  “You all know Herr Hitler, of course,” said Sensenbrink, who was still as white as a sheet, but at least no longer bathed in sweat. “But the converse is not necessarily true, despite the fact that he’s been working with us for quite a while now. So, as we’ve got the top brass – if I may put it like that – of our company around the table today, I’d like just to introduce you guys briefly.”

  Sensenbrink reeled off a list of names and functions, a colourful array of Senior and Vice Account Managing Executives and whatever else they have these days. The titles and faces were all so interchangeable that I knew at once that the only name worthy of note was Kärrner’s. Accordingly, he was the only man I acknowledged with a discreet nod of the head. “Fine,” Kärrner said. “Now that we all know who we are, could we please throw some light on this surprise? I’ve got another meeting straight after this one.”

  “Sure thing,” Sensenbrink said. I realised that I had not been offered a seat. And yet there was no rehearsal stage as there had been on my first visit to the company. One might assume that my position was unchallenged. I looked over at Sawatzki. He had balled his right hand into a fist and was nibbling away at his knuckles.

  “This isn’t official yet,” Sensenbrink said. “So I’d ask you to keep the cone of silence on it for the moment. But I have it from an absolutely reliable source. Or, more accurately, from two absolutely reliable sources. It’s because of the N.P.D. special, the extra programme we put on straight after the Bild coup.”

  “Well, what about it?” Kärrner asked impatiently.

  “Herr Hitler’s getting the Grimme Prize.”