Over Christmas break, during a long drive from Ann Arbor, Michigan, to our vacation condo in Sarasota, Florida, there happened one of those coincidences that make life interesting and blogging easy. We were sitting in a positively charming little Scottish restaurant eating MacBreakfast when I leaned over to the Wifeösphere and asked, "did you notice the man who took our order was wearing a Hitler mustache?"
She had not noticed, although in her defense I'll mention the man was African-American; not only the low color contrast of black on brown, but the sheer culture shock of a Black Hitler made the mustache difficult to notice. Nevertheless, incidents like this one, or the
Adolf Hitler birthday cake that was in the news at Christmas time, serve as a reminder of the enduring toxicity of all things Hitlerian. Hitler owns the franchise on Evil. He
rules it. The attraction-slash-repugnance that surrounds Nazism, thanks in large part to the arrogance of the movement as well as its style sense (wouldn't communists be regarded with more dread if only they wore black leather decorated with skulls?) guarantees they will continue to be the first-call bogymen for novels, TV and films for the foreseeable future.
Have
you ever seen a Hitler mustache in the wild? Of course not. Have you ever wondered why they never call them Charlie Chaplin mustaches? Of course not.
Nazis calibrated ever detail of their movement to maximize both evil and the appearance of evil, so some people have reacted by trying to quarantine Hitler, defining him as a kind of unique, unrepeatable monster who cannot and must not be understood. If a movie or book examines him too closely, critics worry that Hitler may be "humanized."
Norman Spinrad is not worried. In order to write
The Iron Dream in 1972, he had to get inside Hitler's head in a way few would attempt and fewer could pull off.
The Iron Dream is nothing less than a novel from an alternative universe plus an "Afterword to the Second Edition by a fictional critic. In that alternate universe, a young, passionate veteran of WWI immigrates from Germany to New York City, becomes a science fiction illustrator and fanzine editor, then writes a Hugo-award-winning novel. That novel--which makes up the bulk of Norman Spinrad's book--is called
Lord of the Swastika. It's author is . . . you guessed it.
Think of the months Spinrad spent on this project! This
Lord of the Swastika is 240 pages long. All that time, he immersed--wallowed--in the Hitler mindset! I can think of only one comparable effort:
The Screwtape Letters, wherein author C. S. Lewis imaged how an experienced demon might mentor a rookie tempter through a series of advisory epistles. But Lewis' book is very short, and intentionally so, as he explained. "It almost smothered me before I was done. It would have smothered my readers if I had prolonged it."
How Spinrad maintained his oxygen supply while diving in the murk of Hitler's brain is anyone's guess.
Lord of the Swastika is a relentless cycling of a short list of obsessions: hygiene, manly strength, tight black leather, mass spectacle, and above all, violence. It is porny to a degree that I fondly hope has never been surpassed anywhere. It describes a future Earth despoiled by nuclear fallout and overrun by degenerate mutants who are dirty, smelly, ugly, weak, and surrounded by squalor. The burden of the story lies in the need of the true humans to purify themselves by destroying the mutant infiltrators and the mind-controlling "Dominators" who lead them. This the humans accomplish only when a hero of unusually pure genetic stock rises to take control of the government and launch an unspeakably bloody war against the whole world.
The battle scenes are especially self-indulgent. Although the warfare is mechanized, the climaxes inevitably require hand-to-hand combat, where the hero, named Feric Jagger, smashes the brains of his enemies with a giant metal truncheon of magical power.
The afterword, written by the fictional critic "Homer Whipple" has stolen much of my fun by making the most obvious points. There we find a catalog of Hitler's obsessions, with violence and hygiene battling for preeminence. There's also the kooky emphasis on the design of flags, buildings, pageants and uniforms, always attributed to the hero, which makes sense when you remember the attention Hitler paid to details like the cut of military uniforms.
We are also told of Hitler's reputation as a Don Juan at science fiction conventions, and this fact is compared with the subtext of passages like this:
He chanced to look at Best; the young hero was married to the controls of the tank and to his machine gun. His face was set in a steel grimace of determination; in his blue eyes was a fierce and iron ecstasy. For an instant their eyes met and they were united in the comradely communion of battle, transfigured together in a red mist beyond time or fatigue. Through the metal of the tank, the common weapon which they shared, their souls seemed to touch and merge for an instant in the greater communion that was the racial will. All this took place in the blink of an eye; their beings were not for an instant distracted from the sacred task.
Yowie. There are Freudianisms as well: the outstretched-arm salute, a tall reviewing stand, and a rocket that ends the novel "on a pillar of fire to fecundate the stars." All this is described by "Whipple" who then writes:
What is open to dispute is whether or not Hitler was consciously aware of what he was doing.
Great stuff, but marred slightly by the reader's sure knowledge that such a negative essay would never be included along side the novel it criticizes.
Still, verisimilitude is mostly maintained. The essay's author is ignorant where he ought to be. He firmly believes a society based on the violent enforcement of racial purity is impossible. He is not even sure Hitler is an anti-Semite. He suspects it, but Hitler's anti-communism argues against it in light of the communists' recent murder of five million Jews.
Also unnoticed by our friend Mr. Whipple is the pun in the name of the hero, Feric Jaggar. The first name obviously refers to the Latin
ferrum for "iron." But why Fer
ic? The naïve translation would "ironic." It looks like author Spinrad is sharing a joke with us over the head of his alter-ego Whipple.
Whipple cannot know the effect of his last sentence, described by Theodore Sturgeon in the book's (real) introduction, as "the most eloquent and penetrating shout of indignation I have ever experienced":
No, although the spectre of world Communist domination may cause the simpleminded to wish for a leader modeled on the hero of Lord of the Swastika, in an absolute sense we are fortunate that a monster like Feric Jaggar will forever remain confined to the pages of science fantasy, the fever dream of a neurotic science-fiction writer named Adolf Hitler.
Whipple is also unaware of the weird parallels between events in the novel and events in our own (real--at least, let's hope we're real) time line. Feric Jaggar's rise to power and conquest of the evil empire of the east follows Hitler's. Jaggar's lieutenants can be identified; Himmler, Röhm, and the amusing-yet-sinister Goebbels have fictional representatives. That Hitler, who moves to NYC in 1919 in the alternative time line, could
have anticipated these characters and their fates is impossibly prescient. Spinrad may have meant it as another sly joke, but it comes off as a bit lazy or self-indulgent.
The funniest page comes at the beginning, the one where "Other Science Fiction Novels by Adolf Hitler" are flogged. But the fact is, I chuckled on almost every page. That's why I'm surprised Theodore Sturgeon blasted a rival critic who wrote of
The Iron Dream that it "ceased to be funny after the first twenty pages" with a one-word paragraph leaden with sarcasm:
Funny!
They're both wrong. I found it hilarious from beginning to end. I suppose that means I'm a bad person. But we knew that already.
Labels: Culture, sci-fi
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