Who knew that Adolf Hitler was such a wishy-washy geek?
After all, he was a vegetarian teetotaler who snapped up the dictatorship of a war-ravaged country and turned its bureaucracy into a machinery of death, hyper-organizing the populace via rhetoric and a proto-computer system using index cards. So it seems as though he can be described in at least one way with confidence.
But Norman Mailer paints a different picture in his new fictionalized account of Hitler's youth and adolescence, The Castle in the Forest. He starts the story even before Hitler's birth. Adolf's father, Alois, is a bastard, literally. He grows up in his step-uncle's home, testing his seductive powers on his three cousins. Over the years, those powers grow formidable enough to produce countless liaisons and suspected illegitimate children of Alois' own, as well as getting him ensnared with a couple of unwanted wives.
In the midst of romancing maids, cooks and rich old ladies, he rises with speed through the ranks as a customs official. He secures himself in the upper-middle class, and takes his step-niece/possible illegitimate daughter/former maid as his third (and final) wife. After early tragedy, his young wife, Klara, gives birth to her husband's acknowledged third-born, Adolf.
Adolf's life is much less passionate than his father's. He grows up an insecure middle child of an over-protective mother and egocentric father, one of the only two children to live to adulthood out of the six born to Klara.
Only hints of his later infamy are given. Adolf likes playing war games with other children, bossing them around if possible and is vaguely interested in his father's utilitarian management of bee colonies. It is only near the end of the novel, as he earns the grades to graduate from high school, that Mailer starts to turn Adolf into Hitler, thrusting ultra-patriotic books into his hands and pro-eugenic quotes into his mouth.
In contrast to the relatively apolitical nature of the novel, the story is framed by a narration by an ostensible SS officer. This representation is misleading: we learn that the Nazi is a minion of Satan, sent to corrupt Adolf as a "client" with special potential.
Readers are limited by the same bounds placed on that satanic minion's ability to understand and guide Adolf. We only hear the report of a devil, dictated by the reports of his superior devils, dictated by only Satan knows who. And by the time Adolf reaches adulthood, we've realized, along with the fiend who's guided us, that Hitler's soul is only his own: independent and unknown.
Mailer's focus is not on Hitler himself: he doesn't really seem too interested in the man. His interest is instead in the ultimate unfathomability of the soul.
All of this adds up to a book that is sure to leave a person thinking. It's well written and mystical enough to keep up a steady, if slow, momentum: "Usually, I can call upon keen senses that enable me to take in the spiritual weight of a human being. From the far end of a large room, I can perceive flaws of character in the corner of a nostril or the ridges of an ear." It may be dense and intense, but the novel ultimately offers a fine intellectual payoff.
That thematic payoff doesn't come until the last couple paragraphs of a 467-page book, however. And it's too bad that the characterizations of Adolf and his family remain flat and vague. Though we observe this unlikable family for decades, our observations rarely include such specifics as what they say, or how they move. Stuck in a world in which the individual is a discrete, isolated quantity, we are not even given a chance to infer character from observation. Mailer's eloquent, mythical style may help weave a spell, but no spell lasts long enough to stick in such a dry world for such a cerebral payoff!
Norman Mailer is a master, and this book is an intricately constructed edifice. But it doesn't have much humanity. It's no mistake that the novel's humans rarely speak, and that they never seem to have any verve.
It's a stretch to say that Mailer should have made Hitler more sympathetic. But, well, maybe he should have. Unlike the devilish narrator, we humans can get a read on someone by what we observe. And from all that's been said and all that's been written about the man, it seems sure that Hitler had a little more passion, and was a lot more (creepily) recognizable and human than Mailer presents him here.
The Castle in the Forest is a book that really makes a person think. Too bad it doesn't really make a person feel.
