Spring Break
Norman Mailer: The Castle in the Forest
Issue date: 4/26/07
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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.
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.
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