‘Castle’ mixes facts with speculation
“The Castle in the Forest”
by Norman Mailer (Random House, 477 pages, $26.95)
The Devil made him do it.
Not his abusive father or his smothering mother or his repressed homosexuality or the deaths of his brothers and sisters.
Those individually or in combination might have made Adolf Hitler miserable, but they don’t suffice to explain World War II and the Holocaust. Not by a long shot. The Devil had to be behind it.
At least, that’s Norman Mailer’s take on it.
“The Castle in the Forest” is his first novel in 10 years and, because he is 83, it very well may be the last in a long and illustrious career.
A Jew who fought in the Pacific in World War II, Mailer has said he’s been wanting to write this book for 50 years.
Mailer has never been shy about charging headfirst into big topics: Jesus Christ, the CIA, Marilyn Monroe.
Like those others, “The Castle in the Forest” is a fictionalized history, a mix of fact and speculation that covers three generations of Hitler’s family and ends in 1906 with 16-year-old Adolf out of school and dreaming of becoming an artist.
Mailer largely sticks to the facts. Born April 20, 1889, in Branau am Inn, Austria, Hitler was the fourth child of Alois, a customs official, and Klara, his third wife. She was 25 years younger and also his niece – a relationship so close that the marriage required papal dispensation.
Here, Mailer departs from the official biography to make Klara the illegitimate daughter of Alois.
Alois was an incorrigible womanizer and dispensed beatings and lectures to his children in equal doses; Klara doted on her children and smothered them, particularly young Adolf, with affection. Three of Hitler’s older siblings died of diphtheria and a younger brother died of measles – which he contracted from Adolf.
Hitler might be the most psychoanalyzed person in history, but the answers always come up short of explaining the monster.
That’s because we’re asking psychiatry to explain the supernatural, according to Mailer. The real answer has been with us since the Beginning – the Devil.
“The Castle in the Forest” is dictated by a demon – not the Devil himself, but an underling – assigned to watch over young Adolf and nudge him toward the dark side.
Mailer gives this narrator – who for a while takes possession of an SS officer named Dieter – the dry language of a midlevel manager in an enormous, diabolical bureaucracy. Grousing over assignments and worried about future postings, he shakes his behorned head sadly at those men who think they decide their own fate:
“The first element of mutual recognition in the struggle between (God) and our leader – the Maestro – is their mutual understanding that no single splendid human quality is likely to prevail by itself, unaltered by His powers or ours. Even the noblest, most self-sacrificing and generous mother can produce a monster. Provided we are present.”
Compared to his bullying father and pathetic mother, young Adolf fades into the background for whole stretches of the novel. When he does emerge, it’s as an annoying, unpleasant boy with little promise of the monster he will become.
As a result, the book doesn’t work as an explanation, fairy tale or novel.
Among the works Mailer cites in the bibliography is a 1943 report from Dr. Walter Langer, a psychiatrist with the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA.
“No matter how long we study the available material we can find no rational explanation of (Hitler’s) present conduct,” Langer concluded.
Neither can Mailer.