Observer photo by Max Ringswandl
Author Norman Mailer signs copies of his new book, “The Castle in the Forest,” at a book discussion in Washington.

‘Castle in the Forest’ adds interesting twist to former dictator’s story

by MAX RINGSWANDL

In Norman Mailer’s last book, Jesus Christ told the Gospel from his own perspective. Ten years later, Mailer has changed sides and recently published a book about “the Devil’s answer” to Jesus Christ — Adolf Hitler.

At a book talk in Washington on Monday March 26, Mailer said that one of his assumptions as a novelist is “that if you want to believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God, then you would believe that Hitler was the offspring of Satan.”

In the 467 pages of “The Castle in the Forest,” a narrator named Dieter tells Hitler’s family story in rural Austria from his grandparents in the nineteenth century, to his birth in 1889, until Hitler’s graduation from school in 1905. As it turns out, Dieter is not only a member of the SS, the Nazi party’s elite unit, but also an aid to the devil. The narrator comes from a “middle-management perspective,” as Mailer put it.

If you think this sounds like the setup for a strange and disturbing novel, you’re right. The story of Hitler’s procreation and how young “Adi” spent his first sixteen years is full of incest, sex and rage. In Mailer’s account, Hitler is the product of routine peasant incest in one of Austria’s poorest parts. Mailer’s narrator explains that Adolf Hitler’s father, Alois, was also the father and uncle of his mother Klara, who is the daughter of Alois and his half-sister Johanna.

Hitler scholars have thought about father-daughter incest in the Hitler family before, but there is no firm evidence for it, according to one of the first book reviews in The Washington Post. The German magazine Der Spiegel noted that Hitler’s roots were indeed from peasant folk “closely related after generations of in-breeding, giving them a reputation for being backward,” as the German historian Joachim Fest wrote in his Hitler biography. Mailer’s Hitler also has only one testicle, another rumor about Hitler.

Historians have written tons of books about the “Fuehrer,” or the leader, who led the world into World War II and fanatically initiated and supervised the Holocaust, killing approximately six million Jews in concentration camps across Europe.

Before writing his novel, Mailer said he read about 200 books about Hitler and the Nazis. The Jewish author told the 400 listeners who filled the Wesley United Methodist Church in Washington, that Hitler has been on his mind since he was nine years old. Back in 1932, his mother already knew that Hitler would be a disaster, Mailer recalled. “She kept saying he’s going to kill us all.” But it was not until four years ago, when a muse told him he should write a book about Hitler, that Mailer started to work on the topic.

Observer photo by Max Ringswandl
Norman Mailer, “The Castle in the Forest,” Random House, New York, $27.95.

Reviews for “The Castle in the Forest” have been mixed. The Washington Post wrote that the novel “is a baffling, meandering, self-indulgent curio of a book — at moments brilliantly insightful and fascinating but more often prompting jaw-dropping incredulity.”

The New York Times called it “a story about simple folk and good pagan brutes from the muddy barnyard, a tale narrated by a devil whose voice is soft as the silk of a sleeve, and written in the spirit of a corrective irony.”

A review in
the Jerusalem Post characterized the novel as “fascinating, exceptionally dirty book… Mailer believes that the world is run by a threesome — God, man and the devil — and that Hitler was the devil’s response to Jesus Christ.”

According to the Web site of ARD, a German public television channel, Mailer planned to first release his book in Germany. But although the rights to the book have been sold to more than 20 countries, Germany is not among them. Mailers’s new book was published in the United States only shortly after the debate about how art could portray Hitler came up in Germany. The discussion got heated after Dani Levy’s comedy “Mein Fuehrer” (My Leader) hit movie theaters. The well-known Jewish director got criticized for trivializing Hitler and his crimes. In Levy’s movie, for example, entertainer Helge Schneider, who portrays Hitler, is shown in the bathtub, playing with toy boats.

In the case of Mailer’s novel, a critic in Der Spiegel wrote that the idea that Satan fueled Hitler’s madness and channeled his beliefs, absolves the German people of any guilt. And it also absolves the Fuehrer, Der Spiegel wrote.

Another critical view on Mailer’s novel came from the Central Council of Jews in Germany. The ARD quotes its vice president Salomon Korn saying that although one can’t and shouldn’t forbid artists from dealing with Hitler, “art will never achieve an understanding of the phenomenon — it will rather be a distraction.”

Mailer addressed some of these concerns at the book talk. He said that clearing Hitler of his responsibility was not his point at all. The author outlined his belief that we’re not creatures of God and the Devil. However, Mailer said the Enlightenment notion, that humans have the answer to everything, is not true. “One of the dead ends we run into, is there’s no explanation for Hitler,” Mailer said.

His narrator, though, promises to shed light on the unanswerable questions that surround Adolf Hitler. “I live with the confidence that I am in a position to understand Adolf,” Dieter tells the reader. “The fact is that I know him. I must repeat. I know him top to bottom. To borrow from the Americans, given their rough grasp of vulgarity, I am prepared to say: ‘Yes, I know him from asshole to appetite.’”

Norman Mailer, “The Castle in the Forest,” Random House, New York, $27.95