Book wrap-up: Look Who’s Back

I have finished Look Who’s Back, a book in which Hitler wakes up in 2011 (previous post). It is a slight work, but provokes some reflections on the extent to which the worlds of politics and the media have changed.

Hitler is stunned by what has turned out to be popular on television:

So this was a modern-day television set. It was black, with no switches or knobs, nothing. Holding the box in my left hand I pressed button number one, and the apparatus started up. The result was disappointing. The picture was of a chef, finely chopping vegetables. Unbelievable! Having developed such an advanced piece of technology, all they could feature on it was a cook! Admittedly, the Olympic Games could not take place every year, nor at every hour of the day, but surely something of greater import must be happening somewhere in Germany, or even in the world! Providence had presented the German Volk with this wonderful, magnificent opportunity for propaganda, and it was being squandered on the production of leek rings.

He struggles with a party at the TV production company:

What I find disagreeable about these informal yet important gatherings is that one cannot simply retire when one would like, unless one is waging war at the same time. If one is busy executing the Manstein Plan in northern France, or if one is launching a surprise attack to occupy Norway, then everybody is full of understanding, quite naturally. As they are if one retires to one’s study after the toast to look over U-boat designs or help develop high-speed bombers crucial to our final victory. In peacetime, however, one just stands around wasting one’s time drinking fruit pulp.

He is surprised at the comparatively easy life of a 21st century politician:

I have even read that a German war minister was recently photographed with a wench in a swimming pool. While his troops were in the field, or at least preparing for deployment. Had I been in charge, this would have been the gentleman’s last day in office. I wouldn’t have bothered with a letter of resignation—you lay a pistol on his desk, a bullet in the chamber, you leave the room, and if the blackguard has an ounce of decency he knows what he has to do. And if not, the following morning the bullet’s in his brain, and he’s facedown in the pool. Then everyone else in the ministry knows what to expect if you stab your troops in the back while wearing swimming trunks.

…. as well as the changed circumstances of the jobless:

The thought did occur to me that the German Volk might have shrunk, with the result that all these extra people simply didn’t exist. The statistics, however, showed that there were 81 million living Germans. I expect you are wondering why I had not considered the possibility of unemployment. The reason being that my mind had a very different recollection of what unemployed men looked like. The jobless man I remembered from the past went out onto the street with a placard around his neck that read “Looking for any type of work.” When he’d had enough of drifting fruitlessly around in this manner, he would remove the placard, grab a red flag handed to him by a loitering Bolshevist, and return to the street. An army of millions of angry jobless men was fertile ground for any radical party, and I was fortunate enough to have led the most radical of them all. But in the streets of today I could not see any unemployed men. Nor was there any evidence to substantiate the hypothesis that they had been rounded up for some labor service or sent to a camp. Instead, as I later discovered, the country had chosen the capricious solution of a certain Herr Hartz. At Volkswagen, this gentleman had established that one does not earn the favor of the workers only through higher wages and the like, but also by supplying their representatives with financial inducements and Brazilian lovers. Then, as an adviser to the government, Herr Hartz had extended this formula to the workers themselves, albeit with lesser enticements, of course. Rather than running to the millions, the sums were considerably more modest, and rather than real Brazilians, the workers had to make do with pictures of Hungarian or Romanian ladies of pleasure on the Internetwork, which presupposed that every jobless man was in possession of one or more computer. In this way, Herr Rossmann and Herr Müller were able to go on filling their pockets in their staff-less and razorblade-less trade without having to fear that the unemployed might smash their shop windows. The whole scheme was paid for out of the taxes of the small man from the munitions factory. And for the experienced National Socialist, everything pointed to a conspiracy of capital, of Jewish finance.

Hitler is gratified to find that German opinion regarding the Jews seems to have changed little:

“There’s just one thing I want to get straight,” Frau Bellini [TV producer, shortly before Hitler goes on the air] said, suddenly looking at me very seriously. “What is that?” “We’re all agreed that the Jews are no laughing matter.” “You are absolutely right,” I concurred, almost relieved. At last here was someone who knew what she was talking about.

Only one thing was gratifying: German Jewry remained decimated, even after sixty years. Around 100,000 Jews were left, a fifth of the 1933 figure—public regret over this fact was moderate, which seemed to me perfectly logical but not entirely predictable. In view of the uproar that accompanies the disappearance of German woodland, one might have imagined a sort of Semitic “reforestation” to be possible, too.

The book does raise some interesting questions. What kind of appeal would the real Adolf Hitler have today? In terms of telling people what they want to hear, it would seem that he is behind Hugo Chavez and other modern success stories, though if you look at the 1920 Nazi Party 25-point program, there are many parallels with what American politicians are promising. The middle class will be expanded; wealth will be redistributed, e.g., through expropriation of landholdings, confiscation of profits, and nationalization of trusts. The rich won’t be able to sit back and collect dividends and interest due to the “abolition of unearned incomes.” Immigration will be reformed. [The program also demands a return to the German common law that is the basis of English and American law, rather than the civil law that Germany had adopted (see this chapter for how those two systems differ when it comes to divorce, custody, and child support).] Like many politicians around the country, Hitler promised enhanced pension benefits (“an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare”).

What do readers think? After recasting it into modern language, how much of Hitler’s 1920 program could be sold to American voters right now?

[Shortly after this posting went live, Hillary Clinton announced a plan to encourage corporate profit-sharing (TIME), thus aligning with Hitler’s “We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.”]