Invisible Man

You have to admire the confidence, the courage of a writer who, at the end of a very intense 152-page novel (without a single paragraph break), tells you: “Obviously, the book, short enough, needs to be read twice to savor the warp between (in the first reading) a dawning suspicion as to who might be talking and (in the second) the certainty that this is a new personage in charge.”

I say courage as well as confidence, because the person who seems to be talking, in the first reading of “The Dry Danube,” is Adolf Hitler, and trying to turn Hitler into a character in a novel (even through the scrim of a “new personage” imitating Hitler) can be a dicey, sometimes highly controversial affair. George Steiner tried it with a novel called “The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.” and found himself accused of giving us a Hitler who was too rhetorically seductive, a Hitler who spoke all too brilliantly, like a Steinerian intellectual.

Steiner’s Hitler tries to answer the question: Why the Jews? Beryl Bainbridge gave it a shot in a deft underrated novel called “Young Adolf,” which asks the question “Why Adolf?” Bainbridge gives us a Hitler-as-slacker, the Viennese artist wannabe of 1911 supposedly on a visit to relatives (yes, he actually had them but never visited them) in Liverpool. “Young Adolf” is a comic portrait of a “Hitler before he becomes Hitler” (in the words of Alvin Rosenfeld, whose valuable book, “Imagining Hitler,” cautions against problems raised by reducing Hitler to a fiction). Bainbridge’s Adolf is a lazy, insignificant layabout who shows nothing of the charismatic monster he became and forces us to wonder: How did it happen?

Paul West has chosen a slightly earlier moment in Hitler’s “Lost Years” than Bainbridge did--and a far more complex and difficult method of speculating about the Hitler mystery. He gives us an imagined Hitler from the Vienna period (1907-1913), from the starving artist years that are regarded by some (but not all) scholars asthe crucible of Hitler’s character, the period during which, some say, the seeds of the later Hitler, the incorrigible megalomaniacal hater, were sown in the seething bitterness of rejection by bourgeois Viennese culture as embodied in the stuffed shirts of the Vienna Academy of Visual Arts. (Contrary to popular myth, none of the Academy members who rejected Hitler was Jewish.)

The few facts we know about this period tell a story of a provincial youth coming unmoored in the big city. We know Hitler took up permanent residence in the city he would later call the “mother of incest,” a “sewer” of syphilis and Jews, in 1908, shortly after his mother died of cancer following an agonizing struggle he witnessed at her bedside. We know he’d already failed the entrance exam for the Vienna Academy once by then and that, after a second try, he denounced the academy as “a lot of old-fashioned fossilized civil servants, devoid of understanding, stupid lumps of officials. The whole academy ought to be blown up!” he raved to his boyhood friend Kubishek.

And we know that afterward he began to spiral down, from rented one-room apartments to flophouses and soon to sleeping in the streets and parks.

This is the Hitler who speaks in the 152-page-long paragraph that is “The Dry Danube.” Or is it Hitler?

The subtitle tells us the novel is “A Hitler Forgery,” and we learn at the end of the book (sorry--I just can’t do justice to a difficult book without spoiling the suspense) that it is not Hitler talking at all but rather a reconstruction of Hitler’s stream-of-consciousness by a Viennese painter named Kolberhoff who is himself a figure in the document, a figure young Hitler seems to be obsessively stalking. Technically, since West wrote that too, it’s not really a “forgery”; it’s a fiction of a forgery.

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To what end, you might ask, is this layering and distancing device deployed? For one thing, it allows West to disclaim responsibility for his unreliable forger’s unreliable construction of Hitler’s almost inconceivable stream of consciousness. He’s not giving us Hitler but the effect Hitler had on the forger, an academic painter apparently driven mad by the attempt to represent Hitler’s madness. In a way, this is less a novel that attempts to give us the historical Hitler than a novel that embodies and perhaps satirizes one tendency of Hitler explanation: the belief that he was a madman, a psychopath.

It’s an easy and obvious inference: He must have been crazy. But it’s the kind of conclusion that can, as the theologian Emil Fackenheim has argued, excuse Hitler from moral responsibility for his crimes in a Menendez brothers type “diminished capacity” defense.

If he was crazy, how did he come within a whisker--the easily swayed result of a couple of tank battles on the Eastern front--of winning the whole war? How did he--just 10 years after the apparent time period of this novel--manage to take a motley political party numbering a dozen or so cranks and lead it to power over a nation of 50 million in the short space of a dozen years and, in another dozen years, come close to conquering the world?

Could he have been as dysfunctional as West’s (or Kolberhoff’s) Hitler? Here’s a sample of this muddy stream--well, sewer--of consciousness, as “Hitler” begins to talk about a watercolor, then veers into an account of strangulation and cannibalism:

“It was a watercolor, really, but minus its colors so far, detained, as the British loved to say, about the condemned, during Her Majesty’s Pleasure, at least in the Victorian period, when they kept on falling through the drop with the big knot to one side of the neck. Little did the English know of the so-called Austrian method: strangulation with thin hempen cord, easily a twenty-minute procedure I was reserving for Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, only after we had poached their balls and eyeballs in those cute little purple cups you fill with boracic to bathe your eyes in. A poacher I would be.” And that is one of the more lucid moments, when he doesn’t spiral into interminable reveries in which he confuses the overlapping identities of two painters he seems to be stalking:

“[S]ometimes I would say to Kolberhoff what I wished to say to Treischnitt and to Treischnitt what I wanted to say to Kolberhoff. This was orderly. Sometimes, however, I would want to say something to Treischnitt when Treischnitt was not there, so I said it to Kolberhoff hoping, and sometimes I had to say, hoping to Treischnitt what I wanted to say to the missing Kolberhoff. At other times what I wished to say I wished to say to them both, to both Treischnitt and Kolberhoff, when I spoke more loudly if both were present, but when only one was present, say Treischnitt not Kolberhoff, or Kolberhoff not Treischnitt, I was reduced to the stance of talking to them indirectly although there was a world of difference between addressing myself to one or two, both present, and one of two, one being absent, thus reducing the chances of innuendo, mannerism or facial tic. Even worse sometimes they were both absent when I wanted to speak to either, or both, and the wise course would have been to leave a message in pencil or in blood on a shoe box but what I did instead quite often was address myself to vacancy.”

And this is only a sample. As a representation of madness, it may be a tour de force; there are passages of tormented eloquence. But is it Hitler? If it doesn’t even present itself as an attempt to conjure Hitler’s stream of consciousness, but rather that of an aging Viennese painter, admirers of Paul West’s previous work (myself included) might wonder what he’s up to.

In his deeply affecting novel “The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg,” West quite elegantly and movingly re-creates the persona of the German aristocrat who planted the bomb that almost killed Hitler on July 20, 1944. West knows the territory; he has a sense of the dread and the depths.

Perhaps in giving us this oppressively garrulous psychopath, by giving us the experience (as we attempt to read more than a few pages of “The Dry Danube” at a time) of being locked in a small room with a lunatic jabbering ceaselessly away, West is attempting to re-create the experience of what it was like living in Hitler’s realm, in the hell he created on Earth as well as the hell he created within himself.

But the terrible truth about the historical Hitler may lie less in his incoherence than in the repulsive coherence of his single-minded genocidal views and the way they seemed to make sense to so many of his accomplices.

Still, West is on to something in seeing a connection between Hitler’s seething and frustrated artistic ambitions in Vienna and his megalomaniacal drive to re-sculpt the human genome through selective extermination. The philosopher Berel Lang has argued that what makes the Nazi project unique is not the sheer number of its victims but the artistic hyper-consciousness its perpetrators brought to it: the concentration camp universe was the product of demonic aesthetes.

One has to admire West’s tremendous courage in giving us this “forgery” of a demonic aesthete. But he’s produced a work that doesn’t just take a courageous writer; it also takes a courageous reader.