Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes

Author:Timur Vermes [Vermes, Timur]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, General, Satire
ISBN: 9781471263675
Google: C2_nAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1471263673
Publisher: Quercus
Published: 2014-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

xviii

The Führer is nothing without his Volk. That is to say, the Führer is of course something, even without his Volk, but nobody can see what he is. Any person sound of mind can be made to understand this; it is as if you had sat Mozart down and not given him a piano – how would anyone have noticed that he was a genius? He would not even have been the performing Wunderkind alongside his sister. True, she would have had her violin, but if we take the violin away too, then what is left? Two children who can at most recite poems in the Salzburg dialect or perform other such displays of cuteness. But who would pay to watch what takes place in any parlour at Christmastime? The Führer’s violin, however, is the Volk.

And his cohorts.

Yes, I know, one can already predict the response of the sceptics, those smart alecs who prattle on about how one cannot play two violins at the same time. But let us examine their perspective on reality. That which must not, cannot be. But what if it is? A large number of even truly great Führers have foundered on this very point! Take Napoleon, for example. The man was a genius, no question about it. But only on his military “violin”. He foundered on account of his cohorts. And so of every genius one must ask: what sort of cohorts has he chosen? Take Frederick the Great. He had Kurt Christoph Graf von Schwerin, a general who was shot from his horse for his country, banner still in hand. Or Hans Karl von Winterfeldt, chopped to bits by sabres in 1757. My goodness, those were cohorts! But Napoleon?

It must be said he was dealt an unfortunate hand, and that is putting it politely. Nepotism of the worst sort; his relations were queuing up for jobs. His halfwit brother Joseph sits there in Spain, Bernadotte marries his sister-in-law, Jérôme acquires Westphalia, the sisters are furnished with an array of principalities in Italy. And does anybody thank him? But the most egregious parasite of all was Louis, whom Napoleon had installed as King of Holland, and who spent his time there honing his royal career to his heart’s content, as if he had conquered the place himself! With leeches such as these, how can one possibly wage war or rule the world? Not only have I always set great store by having impeccable cohorts, for the most part I have found them too.

I mean, just look at the Siege of Leningrad!

Two million civilians trapped without food. A certain sense of duty was required to drop thousands of bombs each day, especially targeting the food stores. In the end the burghers of Leningrad reached the point where they smashed in each other’s skulls, only to be able to gobble up the soil into which the burned sugar had melted. Naturally, from a racial standpoint, these civilians were not worth preserving, but the simple soldier might easily

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