Hitler’s thoughts on the Euro

I’m halfway through Look Who’s Back, a book in which Hitler wakes up in 2011 and, homeless and friendless, is believed to be a destitute divorce lawsuit/restraining order defendant (see the International chapter for a section on German family law). The defrosted Führer has some thoughts on the Euro:

The Reichsmark was no longer legal tender, even though others—probably some clueless dilettantes on the side of the victorious powers—had clearly adapted my plan to turn it into a European-wide currency. At any rate, transactions were now being carried out in an artificial currency called “euro,” regarded, as one would expect, with a high level of mistrust. I could have told those responsible that this would be the case.

A Portuguese, a Greek, and a Spaniard go into a brothel. Who pays? Germany.

Hitler gets a job with a TV production company but there are some problems with HR paperwork:

Papers—German bourgeois officialdom with its petty, mean-spirited rules and regulations. Once more this perfidious millstone around the neck of the German people was throwing a wrench in the works. “Don’t you have a passport? No ID card? How’s that possible?” “I never had need of one.” “Haven’t you ever been abroad?” “Well, obviously: Poland, France, Hungary . . .” “OK, they’re inside the EU.” “And the Soviet Union.” “You got in there without a passport?” I thought about it for a moment. “I cannot recollect anybody having asked me for one,” I replied confidently.

21st century customs are remarked upon:

I sighed deeply and gazed out the window. It overlooked a parking lot with garbage bins in an array of colors, the reason for this being that waste was carefully separated, no doubt another consequence of the raw materials shortage. Then I chuckled to myself at Destiny’s bitter irony. If only the Volk had made a greater effort at the right time, there would be no need to collect refuse in this manner, given the wealth of raw materials in the East. All kinds of waste could have been happily tipped into just two trash bins, or even a single one.

I went back into my office and closed the door. On each desk stood a typewriter without a cylinder, in front of a television set that must have been placed there by mistake.

Out of the corner of my eye I spied a madwoman on the edge of the park who was gathering up what her dog had just deposited.

Hitler delves into the history of the PC:

And that Douglas Engelbart, well, his father had already emigrated to Washington, which is farther south than one thinks, but young Engelbart then goes to California, which is even farther south; there his Germanic blood begins to roil, and he promptly invents this mouse apparatus.

He answers questions from readers of his web site:

“Dear Herr Bertzel,” I began. “Dog breeding has in fact advanced further than the reproduction and development of human beings. … Around the world there are—and I cannot help but put it as bluntly as this—more elite dogs than elite humans, a deficit that might have been eliminated by now had the German Volk shown greater perseverance in the mid-Forties of the previous century. … Dogs are under the authority of humans, humans control their nutrition and reproduction, which means that dogs will never have a problem with Lebensraum. For this reason the aims of breeding are not always oriented toward a future battle for world domination. Consequently, the question of what dogs might look like had they been fighting for global supremacy over millions of years must remain pure speculation. What goes without saying is that they would have larger teeth. And better weaponry. … Nevertheless, the racial differences are not so dissimilar to those of human beings. Which justifies the question as to whether the canine world has its own Jew, the Jewhound, so to speak. The answer is: Of course there is a Jewhound.”

It can be none other than the dachshund. Yes, I can hear many dog owners, especially those from Munich, protesting, ‘How can this be? Isn’t the dachshund the most German of all dogs?’ “The answer is: no. “The most German of all dogs is the Alsatian, followed in descending order by the Great Dane, the Dobermann, the Swiss mountain dog (but only those from German-speaking Switzerland), the Rottweiler, all schnauzers, Münsterländers, and—why not?—the spitz, which even finds a mention in the illustrated books of Wilhelm Busch. Degenerate dogs, on the other hand—apart from those foreign introductions such as terriers, bassets, and other canine riffraff—are the Weimaraner (the name says it all!), the vain spaniel, the unsporty pug, as well as all types of ornamental dogs.”