Norman Mailer's novel about Hitler's childhood should have stayed locked in 'The Castle in the Forest'

Reviewed by Gregory Miller
January 28, 2007

McCLATCHEY TRIBUNE / illustration

Alone in his room, deep in prayer, standing on a stool and wearing his half-sister's dress, an 8-year-old choir boy experiences his first erection. A troubling intrusion of the flesh at such a pious moment – and now the boy is struck by the implications of the dress:

He “felt like a woman. It must have been the odor of Angela's dress. So, he threw it away from him, and jumped down from the stool, even kicked the dress, before he picked it up, sniffed it again, and was abominably disturbed. He still felt like a woman.” And so the boy resolves to become more “manly.” For a start, he will take up smoking, even though he loathes the smell of his father's pipe.

He will grow up to lead Nazi Germany.

Norman Mailer's thoroughly absurd new book is his first novel in 10 years. The last time out, in “The Gospel According to the Son,” Mailer gave us the first-person memoir of Jesus himself. “The Castle in the Forest” intends to say something about the nature of evil by portraying three generations of Hitlers; eventually, through the murk of sub-Freudian insights and feeble-minded attempts at philosophy, we witness the childhood and adolescence of Adolf Hitler.

In the right hands, this material could produce fascinating results, and there's no shortage of celebrated biographies. But Mailer's performance is reductively broad and tediously narcissistic. Finally, what we learn about Hitler is precisely what we learned about Jesus in his previous book – which is to say, nothing.

BOOK REVIEW The Castle in the Forest Norman Mailer; Random House, 477 pages, $27.95

It is depressing to see the accomplished author of “The Naked and the Dead” and “The Armies of the Night” become so indulged by publishers and magazine editors as to lose all critical sense in his old age. Despite such boosters as Lee Siegel, whose long review in last Sunday's New York Times Book Review was so bombastic that it might have been written by the novelist himself, Mailer has every reason to be ashamed of “The Castle in the Forest.”

Its narrator is an SS man named Dieter who soon reveals himself as Satan's employee. Satan – or “the Maestro,” as his minions call him – regularly dispatches an army of devils to prod humans into line with the designs of the Evil One. God, for his part, employs angels (or “Cudgels”) to lead humans toward good. The Maestro instructs his devils to refer to God as the “D.K.,” which stands for Dummkopf (“dumb head,” literally), in order, says Dieter, “to wean us from our greatest weakness – the unwilling admiration we feel for the Almighty.”

(“D.K.,” by the way, only holds for devils in German-speaking lands; in America, for instance, the Almighty is referred to as the “D.A.” I leave it to readers to decipher for themselves this further example of Mailer's wit.)

Excerpt from The Castle in the Forest He [Alois, Hitler's father] gave Adolf a severe whipping. It was the worst since they moved into the house in Leonding. But this time, Adolf was determined to make no sound at all ... Between each blow, Adolf thought of how Alois Junior had run away. It was the one memory he could use to make no sound. He could be and must be as strong as Alois Junior. If he did not cry, then his own strength might become great enough to justify whatever he might yet want to do next. Strength created its own kind of strength. He called upon the force of command that had been near to him after the fire in the forest. He had ordered them all then never to speak of it, and they had obeyed. Yes, he had been full of fear then, but he had called on his force of command. Then he had lived for days in the fear someone would talk. He could hardly know it, but I had been with him in that turmoil, and I was with him now. Adolf's confidence was so fragile that, metaphorically speaking, I had to maintain his ego at full erection. (Egos are prey to the same weakness that erections exhibit when unsure of what comes next.) So yes, I was there to monitor the whipping of Adolf, and fortify his resolve. If it was most important to him that he not weep, I had to be ready to diminish the intensity of Alois' blows whenever the boy might break. Equally, I was ready to increase his father's force, whenever it flagged. There were moments when Alois' fear of overstraining his heart was in direct opposition to my desire to salt Adolf's will. Let his hatred for Alois become intense enough to serve many an uncommon purpose ahead.

But the narrator admits, with frustration and some affection, that people are too complex to be fully controlled by either side. Frequently, and with all the narrative punch of the instructions for Dungeons & Dragons, Dieter interrupts the ridiculous plot to explain the intricacies of this ridiculously conceived eternal battle between the forces of Good and Evil.

Mailer's narrator tells us that devils are strictly forbidden to divulge trade secrets. He reckons that his employer will catch up with him in time but, for now, “in these latter-day American years, [the Maestro] is more attuned to electronics than to print.” Perhaps this is Mailer's sideways acknowledgment of his increasing irrelevance. While Satan and the rest of us are busy downloading the latest podcasts, Mailer continues valiantly to carve out one literary monument after another. Confusingly, though, a few pages earlier we were informed, in the course of a digression on “Paradise Lost,” that “devils are obliged to be devoted to good writing.”

If the devils are on the side of good writing, Mailer is batting cleanup for the angels. “I know that I will sail into a sea of turbulence,” declares Dieter at the outset, “for I must uproot many a conventional belief.” This mixed metaphor inaugurates a novel of remarkable sloppiness, from needless double and even triple negatives to the tone-deaf tic of beginning almost as many sentences with “Indeed” as there are pages. (This tic increases to the point of self-parody in the book's second half; was Mailer's editor asleep?) When Adolf's father decides to grow sideburns, Mailer helpfully explains that “he grew sideburns on each side of his face.” We are made to endure indulgent digressions of little relevance and less interest, as the narrator reveals his involvement in the trial of Oscar Wilde and in the assassination of Empress Elisabeth by the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni, while in the middle of the story Mailer makes the perplexing decision – even for this novel – to take us to Russia for a 50-page account of the coronation of Nicholas II.

Then there is Mailer's fondness for the exclamation point – fitting, I suppose, given that it's the most phallic of punctuation marks. For Mailer is nothing if not phallocentric. Doubtless he sees himself as an honest diagnostician of the centrality of sex in human history, but several of his observations might have issued from of an adolescent boy in heat. “The Castle in the Forest” is a treasure chest of puerile descriptions of sexual intercourse or, as Mailer has it, “the ham-handed naturalness of the most agreeable work of all – that hard-breathing feverish meat-heavy run up the hills of physical joy.”

Predictably, Mailer cannot resist making a centerpiece of Adolf's conception. Mailer seems to be aiming for something out of Walpurgisnacht, but it plays more like a heavy-metal fantasy: Behold Klara performing oral sex upon Alois Hitler “with an avidity that could come only from the Evil One”! It gets worse.

Mailer has Dieter recycle as fact the rumor that Hitler had only one testicle. We are also unsurprised that Mailer accepts historian Lothar Machtan's contention in “The Hidden Hitler” that Hitler was homosexual (early in the novel Dieter refers to “that little gesture that Hitler used to employ – one prissy flip of the wrist”). The Holocaust as compensation, then?

Meanwhile, even as Dieter criticizes Freud (“Indeed, we smile at the superficiality of so many of Freud's analyses”), the novel is full of sophomoric applications of Freudian theory. Mailer assiduously chronicles the masturbation habits of the future Fuhrer. The digression about Luigi Lucheni receives a clumsy validation when Adolf pleasures himself while gazing at a newspaper photograph: “It was the assassin's small mustache, fixed to his upper lip just below his nostrils, a dark little daub of a mustache. That certainly excited Adolf.”

The young Hitler becomes interested in some crumbling forts left over from the Austrian defense against Napoleon. On his walk home one morning, “thinking of the workers who had put them up, and the soldiers who had inhabited them, he became so excited that he had an ejaculation. Afterward, he was languid, but joyous.” At the end of the novel, Dieter informs us that “Adolf's style of masturbation [has] altered.” Now, he forsakes the spontaneity of the forest for sessions behind locked doors – less joyful, to be sure, though one imagines that afterward he was still languid. Reflecting on his more conventionally masculine schoolmates, Adolf concludes that “[they] might have their two testicles and he only had one, but he could keep his arm erect on high, and they could not.”

A six-page bibliography provides an apt coda to this nonsense. A large number of Hitler biographies appear), along with some apiary books (Mailer makes much of Hitler's father's disastrous post-retirement foray into beekeeping, and the hard-hearted worldview the son derived from observing the single-minded bees). One will also find two works by Heidegger and seven (!) by Nietzsche, though such titles seem mostly for show. Mailer also credits Tolstoy's “Anna Karenina” and “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” along with “Paradise Lost” and “Faust.” The Bible does not make the cut. Tough luck for the Dummkopf.

 Gregory Miller teaches English at UC Davis.

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