A Parody in Berlin: Reading the Obvious and the Ordinary in Historical Violence

Abstract

The popularity of Timur Vermes's Er ist wieder da (2012), its widespread translation, and the film version (2015) all raised critical hackles in Germany, provoking debate about the perceived risk of normalization associated with satirizing Hitler, or worse, inviting empathy by humanizing him. Hitler escapes his historical demise and awakes in the twenty-first century, where he is misrecognized as an actor and becomes popular on the internet. I read the texts against the grain of its public reception by critics and scholars for whom it offers an obvious critique of Germany's contemporary susceptibility to the allure of charismatic fascism. I argue that it is this obviousness itself that comes under pressure through the two texts: if critics worry that satirizing Hitler even for the sake of such a critique will normalize memory of the Holocaust, it is the ease with which even critics accept the central science fictional device-Hitler's inexplicable return to contemporary Berlin decades after his deaththat demands critical attention. Reading a film or a novel's reception anthropologically, in this paper, I make a case for an investigation into what is taken to be obvious and what it is that blocks such an inquiry. [popular culture; Holocaust; parody; public memory; alternative history] Parsing the Trivial, Obvious, Normal, and Ordinary Timur Verme's novel Er ist wieder da (2012) opens in the voice of a befuddled Hitler coming to terms with his surroundings and the apparent collapse of the Reich while he narrates recognizing elements in the city that surrounds him.Something was absolutely unusual. I found myself evidently still in Berlin. … I remembered the city being very dusty-or else field-grey, with considerable mountains of rubble and damage. But there was nothing of the sort before me now. The rubble had vanished, or at least had been removed, the streets cleaned. Instead, there stood along the edges of the streets numerous, even uncountable colorful wagons that were probably automobiles, but they were small, and seemingly so advanced in their design the Messerschmitt plant must have had a leading role in their manufacture. 1 (Vermes 2012, 13-14) The rhythm of Hitler's words is frenetic though their tone is self-assured, a pattern presumed by many to have been modeled on the verbosity of Mein