ABSTRACT
I According to Hannah Arendt, contemplating the trial of Eichmann, Nazi evil is essentially banal, ‘uninteresting’. According to the bestselling novel of the 1970s it is immensely glamorous, inexhaustibly interesting. Fiction, usually packaged in shiny SS black with prominent Nazi insignia, expresses a romantic fascination with the evil of the Third Reich. It also expresses a belief that Nazism, despite the victory of 1945, is ineradicable-a serpent’s egg. Time and again these novels assert that the Nazi bacillus can never be exterminated, that it will return victorious and erect a Fourth Reich. The belief is evidently paranoid. Robert Ludlum, whose bestselling string of novels constantly deal with the installation of the next Reich and the evils of the last, declares himself frankly pathological on the subject of Nazis:
Far from it. Ludlum’s fiction like that of William Goldman (Marathon Man), Ira Levin (The Boys From Brazil) and Forsyth (The Odessa File), revels in the paranoid’s capacity for wild inventiveness, the discovery of plots and conspiracies in the face of all the historical evidence. The Boys From Brazil, for example, has a wonderfully extravagant conspiracy plot. Conspiracy is the mainspring of all Levin’s fiction. In the best known of his works the devil, through a diabolist sect, fathers a child on the world via unsuspecting Rosemary. In The Stepford Wives husbands conspire to convert their wives into robots. In The Boys From Brazil the Angel of Death (Mengele-a favourite villain) conspires to resurrect not one, but close on 100 cloned Hitlers. Cuckoo-egg Führers are adopted out on to unsuspecting parents and childhood circumstances just like little Adolf’s are arranged. (This, for instance, involves the assassination of ninety-four drunken fathers at
the appropriate idiogenetic moment.) The plot is uncovered single-handedly by a Simon Wiesenthal figure (Wiesenthal, with his ‘Vienna Documentation Centre’ appears directly, or in thin disguise, in many of these fantasies). The novel ends with the list of the Hitler clones and their hosts discovered. But rather than give the names to the Israeli secret service, Liebermann destroys the record. The Manichaean game must be played out. The Hitler seed must again be scattered through the world. The Boys From Brazil finishes with a shot of one of the embryonic Hitlers drawing a stadium (he has inherited his genetic father’s love of banal neoclassical architecture with the dictatorial megalomania):
For most of its course, Levin’s book is a clever exercise in reader-hoaxing. The mystery as to why a random selection of men are being simultaneously murdered around the world is sustained until well into the narrative. The truth of the Nazi comeback plot is revealed as an effective coup de théâtre. A less effective string of novels on Levin’s pattern have followed up the best selling success of The Boys From Brazil (many inspired, as Levin seems to have been, by a prurient interest in SS eugenic experiments). In Golden Girl, the athlete heroine is ‘a bright, beautiful manufactured monster, bred from Nazi stud-farm stock’. Her victories at Moscow will reestablish Aryan racial superiority. The link between the Moscow Olympics and Nazi Germany is similarly exploited in James Patterson’s The Jericho Commandment (the fact that 1980 was the first setting of the games in a totalitarian state since 1936 clearly occurred to several novelists): ‘A ghastly secret, born in the extermination camps of Nazi Germany… a mysterious need for vengeance…a horrifying ultimatum delivered at the 1980 Moscow Olympics.’ Spawn, by Robert Holles, again takes the ‘Nazi stud farm’ idea (and treats it rather better than Lear did in Golden Girl):
As well as cloned and implanted offspring, Hitler is fantasized in these novels as having natural and adoptive children. In Gus Weill’s The Führer Seed:
John Gardner’s The Werewolf Trace (‘stunning story of a nightmare that would never die’) conceives a more apostolic relation between the old and new Hitler:
All these novels take as their donnée the idea that Nazism is waiting to hatch again; that the fight against it is never-ending. Typically, it is assumed that Nazism can survive its democratic opponent. This is expressed in a nice twist to the end of The Valhalla Exchange when Bormann-or possibly his doppelgänger-lives to send a flower ‘as promised’ to the funeral of the Wiesenthal-like American Nazi-hunter who has been tracking him down, and has died in a mysterious plane explosion. In The Strasbourg Legacy, while Nato has a ‘top level conference’ its great opposite ‘the Brotherhood’ confer with ‘their hideous plans of a fourth Reich about to become reality’. Ben Stein’s The Croesus Conspiracy has a reverse ‘Protocols of Zionism’ plot:
In The Odessa File, without the mass of the similarly unsuspecting West German population having the slightest inkling, the remnant of the SS has assumed sufficient power to start the Third World War (by means of rockets, equipped with bubonic plague bacillus and nuclear waste, launched against Israel). It typically requires only the slightest stimulus to galvanize the still existing frame of Nazism back to violent life. Thus in George Markstein’s The Goering Testament:
In Ludlum’s The Holcroft Covenant one signature is enough to release the $780 m. of Swiss-held Nazi booty, which will permit the Neuaufbau of the Reich.
