Comic novel imagining Hitler’s return a bestseller in Germany

BERLIN: Eighty years after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, a novel that imagines his return to modern-day Berlin has become a bestseller in Germany, though a comedy about the Fuehrer is not to everyone’s taste.

Instead of committing suicide in his bunker on April 30, 1945, in He’s Back ( Er Ist Wieder Da), Hitler wakes up in 2011 without the slightest idea what has happened in the intervening 66 years.

He stumbles through Berlin, dazed by the fact that Germany is now ruled by a woman and is home to millions of Turks.

In one scene, the Nazi leader asks a group of boys for directions, addressing them as “Ronaldo Hitler youth”. He has mistaken their football shirts bearing the name of the soccer star as some kind of military uniform.

“Who’s the old guy?” the boys ask each other.

Such is the tone in the nearly 400page novel by Timur Vermes, a 45year-old journalist.

In a celebrity-obsessed society where success is often gauged by follower numbers on social networks or YouTube views, Hitler soon becomes the star of an entertainment show with a Turkish host.

Bild, Europe’s widest circulation newspaper, complains: “He killed millions of people. Today, millions cheer him on YouTube.”

A farce in poor taste to some, a political satire to others, He’s Back has done well in bookstores. With a print run of 360,000, the book recently made Germany’s bestseller list and is set to be published in English and more than a dozen other languages.