For book eleven, I was given the choice between:
‘Anno Dracula’ by Kim Newman
‘The Golden Notebook’ by Doris Lessing
‘Look Who’s Back’ by Timur Vermes
Having sat on my (electronic) book shelf for a long time, as well as being a favourite film of my stepdad (he doesn’t read books), I choose ‘Look Who’s Back’, a book that I believed would be too competently satirical to encapsulate a lot of what is wrong with modern society.
Goodreads summary: Berlin, Summer 2011. Adolf Hitler wakes up from a 66-year sleep in his subterranean Berlin bunker to find the Germany he knew entirely changed: Internet-driven media spreads ideas in minutes and fumes celebrity obsession; immigration has produced multicultural neighborhoods bringing together people of varying race, ethnicity, and religion; and the most powerful person in government is a woman. Hitler is immediately recognized . . . as an impersonator of uncommon skill. The public assumes the fulminating leader of the Nazi party is a performer who is always in character, and soon his inevitable viral appeal begets YouTube stardom, begets television celebrity on a Turkish-born comedian’s show. His bigoted rants are mistaken for a theatrical satire–exposing prejudice and misrepresentation–and his media success emboldens Hitler to start his own political party and set the country he finds a shambles back to rights. With daring and dark humor, Look Who’s Back skewers the absurdity and depravity of the cult of personality in modern media culture.
‘Look Who’s Back’ is somewhat of a thought experiment – what would happen if Hitler came back to life in 2011, a Hitler that still maintained all his Hitler-y notions of the German Volk, Lebensraum and massacring millions of people who didn’t fit his ideal of the Aryan race. The answer? He’d become a successful media star who commanded millions of views both on television and on the internet. What this suggests about modern society, the cult of celebrity and the value of shock is concerning in its all too scarily accurate representation by Timur Vermes.
Before exploring the social and moral message of the narrative, it is worth mentioning that the book is genuinely funny. Your mileage may vary depending on whether you feel a book involving Hitler as the main protagonist should allow to exist at all, not least in the realms of comedic fiction. Naturally, this is not something that necessarily perturbs me, especially as his role is to shine a light on wider issues about celebrity and the media rather than to champion anything he was involved in within real life. However, if that is not something that concerns you, the confusions caused by a near-seventy year hiatus from the world are legitimately funny and for the most part, Hitler is often played as somewhat of an idiot; it is the media at large who are what gives him power beyond that which his old fashioned world view deserve.
The nature of this book also makes me wonder as to whether my views would be altered if I was German, rather than English. Some of the political and social references probably passed me by, but the narrative also gave a feeling that an underlying racial tension stills exists in Germany, as it does in many a country. Hitler’s rise to prominence in the novel is a combination of being perceived to having a nationalist view that speaks to some, as well as being edgy enough to get traction in a world of soundbites and streaming video.
Without wanting to spoil the ending, there is a moment as the novel draws to its conclusion that spoke volumes about the world of politics in the world of modern media. One incident that occurs to Hitler is suddenly claimed as being representative of every ideas promoted by each individual political party, no matter the ideals that Hitler meant to embody. That popularity triumphed moral values feels all too on the nose today and is all too indicative of a broken system.
‘Look Who’s Back’ is a thought provoking read if nothing else, whilst those who can get past the perhaps questionable choice of topic should also find a genuinely funny book that is also worrying in how very little of this seems out of the ordinary or impossible. Well, apart from Hitler coming back from the dead…I’m pretty sure that won’t happen.
Scaling the TBR Pile 