Hitler’s do-over in modern-day Berlin, now in Hebrew

The Holocaust in alive and well in Israel: victims are remembered, survivors are honored, the music of German composer Wagner is still debated.

But Hitler? He doesn’t have much presence in the Holy Land.

Until now. The best-selling German novel, “Look Who’s Back,” Timur Vermes’s satirical look at what happens when Hitler wakes up in 2011 Berlin, has now been translated into Hebrew.

The book was published in 2012 and made into a movie in 2015. It has been translated into 41 languages. But it took until this year for the humorous, thought-provoking piece of fiction to be published in Hebrew.

No one seemed to want to touch it, said publisher Rotem Sella, whose Jerusalem-based publishing house, Sella Meir Publishing, handled the Hebrew translation and Israeli publication of “Look Who’s Back.”

Rotem Sella, whose boutique publishing company handled the translation and publication of ‘Look Who’s Back’ in Israel (Courtesy Sella Meir Publishing)

“You could say that it’s because of the Holocaust that people wouldn’t read the book, but Carl Schmidt has been published and Wagner has been performed,” said Sella, who brought Vermes to Israel for a book tour last week. “What this book is doing no one else has done; it’s a look at German society in a complex way. It criticizes, it asks if there is a new Germany. He does it from the inside.”

The premise of the book is that Hitler wakes up homeless and amnesiac in modern-day Berlin, with no knowledge of anything that took place after 1945. He still interprets everything from a Nazi perspective, and although he’s easily recognizable, everyone believes he’s a comedian or actor playing Adolf Hitler. He becomes hugely popular on YouTube for his angry rants, achieves celebrity status and goes into politics again.

Vermes, a former ghostwriter, said at a small gathering at Sella Meir’s offices in Jerusalem last week that he was hoping the book would provoke people into examining the precepts and concepts of democracy. He started his research, he said, by reading “Mein Kampf,” Hitler’s autobiographical, anti-Semitic manifesto.

“I hadn’t read it before and didn’t know what to expect,” said Vermes, a balding man with a short beard, dressed in a charcoal-gray flowered shirt and black jeans. “The book is so dangerous, you wonder if it can hurt you.”

Written during Adolf Hitler’s 1924 imprisonment for leading a failed coup, “Mein Kampf” became a bestseller with more than five million copies sold. (A new edition of “Mein Kampf” has recently been published in Germany, again becoming a bestseller.)

“Maybe it wasn’t the truth, but it was the way he wanted to be seen and it showed the means he tried to achieve that,” said Vermes. “It basically shows a man writing a book who has never written a book before, and he tries to show people that he can think, that he is an intellectual. He’s making very long sentences to show that he can write very long sentences.”

That remark brought a burst of laughter from the listeners around the table.

It also showed Vermes how Hitler accomplished everything he set out to accomplish.

The novel, translated into 41 languages, was very popular in the United Kingdom, said Vermes (Courtesy Amazon)

He wondered, said Vermes, how many readers of “Mein Kampf” thought Hitler’s ideas were good, or tolerated the parts they didn’t like — exterminating the Jews, for instance — because of the parts they did like, such as rejuvenating Germany’s failing economy.

“He must have been attractive and able to play different roles, to be charming,” said Vermes. “We know that he was able to hold ugly rants about the Jews and able to talk about other things when necessary.”

For Vermes, the understanding of Hitler he gained translated into wanting to confront his own Hitler character with the Holocaust, albeit after the fact. He wanted to bring his Hitler into situations where he would have to apologize or say he didn’t like the Holocaust, and see if he could get out of the situation.

“I wanted a real Hitler, an authentic Hitler,” he said.

“Are we allowed to laugh about Hitler?” asked Vermes. “There’s no law. It’s a free world — if you want to laugh, you can.”

Most of his friends, however, urged him not to write the book.

“I’d be on the phone with a friend, and he’d say, ‘Why are you working on that? Try something else,’” he said.

By that point, however, he was a writer with a mission. He wanted to poke and prod at the German mindset, as well as at Hitler, and try and understand how it had all happened.

“Not every nation would be able to produce a quality Holocaust the way it produces quality cars,” he said. “We are able to. I don’t know why, but Germany can do this very thoroughly. I guess this is a German specialty.”

Ba-da-bum.

That kind of insight has made the book a success, surmised Vermes. He said he’s not bothered by the criticism.

“It’s a free country, I don’t care,” he said. “I can do that.”

Vermes also worked on the first draft of the screenplay but later removed himself from the film. The movie version of “Look Who’s Back” was recently sold to Netflix and will soon be aired on the Israeli version of Netflix, said Sella.

There are advantages to making fun of his fellow Germans as well as Hitler, said Vermes.

German high school students are now reading his book rather than the usual “boring” history books. More importantly, he said, he reminds people who believe they would never follow someone like Hitler that they probably would do just that, as most Germans did in the 1930s.

“It’s not the problem of other people, or stupid people,” he said. “The problem will probably be you, because you will be following it.”

Vermes spent a week in Israel, said Sella, traveling and meeting with other writers and thinkers to gain a better understanding of Israeli society.

“It was an amazing week,” he said.

Now, said Sella, Sella Meir has become the publisher covering the complexities of German society, having published “Look Who’s Back,” and Tuvia Tenenbom’s “I Sleep in Hitler’s Room,” his 2011 travelogue around Germany in which he asked Germans how they feel about Jews.

“It wasn’t my goal, but what I’m doing is publishing ideas relevant to Israeli discourse,” he said.