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Stalag Comics Israel
Hitler Reappears in Israel
Igal Sarna, FirstPost.co.uk
W e are five on the bed, leaning with our backs against the wall like people watching television. I'm in the middle of the bed. Hitler is at one end. He is about 20 years old, at the time he was moving from one cheap men's hostel in Vienna to another, an ambitious and unhappy young ne'er-do-well. A painter of landscapes and advertisements.
He places a box full of papers in the centre of the bed. He says to me: "I'm writing down all kinds of things for myself."
"Mein Kampf?" I ask.
He looks at me suspiciously, like someone who has just heard something that I couldn't possibly have known. The conversation is quiet but at the same time fraught in a strange way with everything that will happen. He gives me a friendly wink, as though to say: "I, Adolf, whose whole future is ahead of him, and you, the son of the Nashibirskis, who are marked out for death - ¬ we're both of us artists; I am the one who will always rise up from the past and be with you like a member of your household."
I dreamt this dream early in 2007, in Oxford, when I was starting to write the novel Tender Hand, and it is the opening of the book that is now being published in Tel Aviv.
The name Hitler is no longer igniting fires in the land of the survivors who in the past would take to the streets because of a Wagner concert. The text exists in the city alongside the one-man show Adolf, in which a young actor plays Hitler at the Tmuna fringe theatre in Tel Aviv. "How a sensitive boy who dreams of becoming an artist turns into Hitler," says the programme. For the first time in the Israeli theatre, director Yagil Eliraz depicts how Hitler's personality is shaped from early childhood to adulthood.