Word: hitler
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...scenario: What might happen if a group of Jewish avengers located the Führer? The resulting novel, The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H., has already aroused angry controversy in Britain ("Astonishing," Anthony Burgess wrote in the Observer, but the New Statesman charged "subversive admiration for Hitler"). The controversy grew last month when Playwright Christopher Hampton presented a stage version now playing at London's Mermaid theater, that Steiner thought was "too faithful" to his book. That fidelity made the aging Hitler, played by Alec McCowen, a rigid, then suddenly raucous figure, declaiming a justification...
...more interesting is Steiner's belief that Hitler wielded language as an almost supernatural force. In one of his celebrated early essays, The Hollow Miracle (1959), Steiner argued that just as speech can create, it can destroy; that the language of Luther and Goethe "was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism," that Hitler found in it "the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance." He now gives that view a theological turn, an adaptation of the opening statement in St. John: "In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word...
...what started as a campaign for justice may end as a fight between rival intelligence agencies trying to kidnap or silence the Führer and rival media packagers trying to sell him. To forestall that, they head deeper into the jungle and put him on trial themselves. Hence Hitler's climactic defense speech, which turns into one long, hideous embrace...
...from the Jews, cries Steiner's Führer, that he learned everything: "To set a race apart. To keep it from defilement. To hold before it a promised land ..." What really enslaved mankind, Hitler raves on, was the Jewish invention of a God purer than any other, a God whose "inconceivable, unimaginable presence envelops us." Says he: "The Jew invented conscience and left man a guilty serf." The Nazi execution of such inventors brought secret rejoicing to the rest of the world, according to this judgment, but since the Holocaust ended in the creation of Israel, Hitler also...
Such views cry out for refutation in the novel. But after Hitler's Sturm und Drang, his captors and critics remain mute. In effect, Steiner allows A.H. the last word, and ends on a note of bleak ambiguity: the noisy arrival of the first helicopters from the waiting world beyond the jungle. Portage largely avoids both the satisfactions of the traditional novel and the horrifying details of Holocaust literature. Instead, Steiner has taken as his model the political imaginings of an Orwell or Koestler, and although he has not reached their challenging heights, he has produced a philosophic fantasy...