“I REMEMBER waking up,” Adolf Hitler says. “I was lying on an area of undeveloped land, surrounded by terraces of houses.” The year is 2011, somewhere in Berlin, and Hitler, uniformed as he was when he committed suicide, cannot account for how he got where he is. That’s OK with him, because he can’t really account for how he, impoverished and undereducated, became the absolute ruler of Germany, either. Fate has always looked out for him.
“Look Who’s Back,” the Timur Vermes book on which this is based, was a huge best-seller in Germany and now, in America, it has been politely if not extravagantly reviewed. Here and there a grumpy critic has wondered about the propriety of writing a book in which Hitler speaks in the first person and we get into the mind of a man whose name is synonymous with evil. Hitler, however, does not think; he spouts and erupts -- a walking placard. He’s a bore.
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