The Best Fictional Adolph Hitler

The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. is a 1981 literary and philosophical novella by George Steiner. The story is about Jewish Nazi hunters who find a fictional Adolf Hitler (A.H.) alive in the Amazon jungle thirty years after the end of World War II. The book was controversial, particularly among reviewers and Jewish scholars, because the author allows Hitler to defend himself when he is put on trial in the jungle by his captors. There Hitler maintains that Israel owes its existence to the Holocaust and that he is the "benefactor of the Jews".

The novella was first published in the United Kingdom in May 1981 as a paperback original by Faber and Faber, and in the United States in hardcover in April 1982 by Simon & Schuster. Adapted for the theatre by British playwright Christopher Hampton, it was staged in London in 1982 and in Hartford, Connecticut a year later. The productions generated further controversy, resulting in public pickets and condemnation being levelled against Steiner.

A central theme of The Portage is the nature of language, and revolves around Steiner's lifelong work on the subject and his fascination in the power and terror of human speech. Other themes include the philosophical and moral analysis of history, justice, guilt and revenge. Steiner makes no attempt to explain Hitler, but rather enters into a dialogue with him.

Reaction to the book was mixed: in a review in Time magazine, Otto Friedrich described it as "a philosophic fantasy of remarkable intensity", whereas John Leonard of The New York Times called Hitler's speech at the end of the book "obscene", and said Steiner's decision to leave it unchallenged "makes me sick to my stomach." Similarly, many readers and theatre-goers were disturbed by Steiner's fictional Hitler, and the author admitted that his character had gotten the better of him. Despite the controversy, The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. was a 1983 finalist in the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Plot Summary

From his base in Tel Aviv, Holocaust survivor Emmanuel Lieber directs a group of Jewish Nazi hunters in search of Adolf Hitler. Lieber believes that the former Führer is still alive, and following rumours and hearsay, he tracks Hitler's movements through South America. After months of wading through swamps in the Amazon jungle, the search party finds the 90-year-old alive in a clearing. Lieber flies to San Cristóbal where he awaits the group's return with their captive. But getting the old man out of the jungle alive is more difficult than getting in, and their progress is further hampered by heavy thunderstorms.

Meanwhile, broken and incoherent radio messages between Lieber and the search party are intercepted by intelligence agents tracking their progress, and rumours begin to spread across the world of Hitler's capture. Debates flare up over his impending trial, where it will be held and under whose jurisdiction. Orosso is identified as the nearest airfield to the last known location of the search party, and aircraft begin arriving at the hitherto unknown town. But when the search party loses radio contact with Lieber, they must make a decision to either wait out the storms and deliver their captive to Lieber later, or try Hitler in the jungle. They choose the latter, given that they would likely lose control of the situation if they attempted to transport their prisoner. Against Lieber's advice ("You must not let him speak ... his tongue is like no other") they prepare for a trial with a judge, prosecution and defence attorneys selected from the members of the search party. Teku, a local Indian tracker, is asked to observe the trial as an independent witness.

The attention Hitler receives, however, renews his strength, and when the trial begins, he brushes aside his "defence attorney" and begins a long speech in four parts in his own defence:

1. Firstly, Hitler claims he took his doctrines from the Jews and copied the notion of the master race from the Chosen people and their need to separate themselves from the "unclean". "My racism is a parody of yours, a hungry imitation."
2. Hitler justifies the Final Solution by maintaining that the Jews' God, purer than any other, enslaves its subjects, continually demanding more than they can give and "blackmailing" them with ideals that cannot be attained. The "virus of utopia" had to be stopped.
3. Hitler states that he was not the originator of evil. "[Stalin] had perfected genocide when I was still a nameless scribbler in Munich.” Further, Hitler asserts that the number of lives lost due to his actions are dwarfed by various world atrocities, including those in Russia, China and Africa.
4. Lastly, Hitler maintains that the Reich begat Israel and suggests that he is the Messiah "whose infamous deeds were allowed by God in order to bring His people home." He closes by asking, "Should you not honour me who have made ... Zion a reality?"

At the end of his speech, Teku, who "had not understood the words, only their meaning", is the first to react and jumps up shouting "Proven". But he is drowned out by the appearance of a helicopter over the clearing.

Background to Publication of the Book

George Steiner, academic, philosopher, writer and literary critic for The New Yorker and The New York Times, had written about the Holocaust in some of his previous books, including Anno Domini (1964), Language and Silence (1967) and In Bluebeard's Castle (1971). Many of the ideas Steiner expresses in The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. were drawn from these earlier works. Steiner told New York Times editor D. J. R. Bruckner that this book arose out of his lifelong work on language. "Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment ... that you can use human speech both to bless, to love, to build, to forgive and also to torture, to hate, to destroy and to annihilate."

Steiner wrote The Portage in 1975 and 1976 in Geneva, Switzerland, and the 120-page work originally appeared in the Spring 1979 issue of the US literary magazine, The Kenyon Review. An abridged version was published in the Spring 1980 issue of Granta, the British literary magazine. Its first publication in book form, with minor revisions by Steiner, was in May 1981 by Faber and Faber in the UK and, as requested by Steiner, it was a paperback original. The first US edition was published in hardcover in April 1982 by Simon & Schuster. The Portage has been translated into several languages, including French, German, Hebrew, Italian and Swedish.

Commenting on the controversy the book generated, Steiner admitted to literary journalist and critic Ron Rosenbaum (author of Explaining Hitler) that he too was disturbed by it, adding that his fictional Hitler had gotten the better of him, "golem- or Frankenstein-like". He said that it felt like the book "wrote me". Steiner also pointed out that the novella is not only about his thoughts on the Holocaust, but also about the horrific events that took place in countries like Cambodia, Vietnam, El Salvador and Burundi: "My feeling is that one has to grapple with the abyss if one can." In his 1997 memoir, Errata: An Examined Life, Steiner remarked that had he known what the response to The Portage and its stage interpretation would be, he would have made the novella "my foremost business".

Themes

A central theme of The Portage is the nature of language. Rosenbaum says that Steiner's "fascination and ... distrust of speech, the love and hate for the power and terror of language, has been at the very heart of [his] remarkable career as literary prodigy and prodigal." Steiner told Rosenbaum that "in the German language, Hitler drew on a kind of rhetorical power which, in a way that is perhaps a little bit peculiar to German, allies highly abstract concepts with political, physical violence in a most unusual way". Hitler's genius lay "not so much in the written word, but the embodied voice", which Steiner described as "mesmeric".  Rosenbaum notes that Steiner describes Hitler as "a kind of medium for the evil genius of the German language itself" and that his language is "like 'antimatter' to ordinary language".

Margaret Burton sees the language in the book as polarised between "a venue for truth" and "a source of destruction", with Lieber representing the former, and Hitler the latter. Bryan Cheyette considers that Steiner is not contrasting Lieber and Hitler, but is "portraying them as part of the same dialect", and that they reflect a dichotomy in Steiner himself. Alexander M. Sidorkin argues that Steiner's approach to Hitler was not to attempt to explain him, but rather to "enter ... into a dialogue" with him, a "dialogue with evil". Sidorkin suggests that Steiner had to "explore his own inner Hitler", his suppressed prejudices, to bring Hitler's speech to life.

Other themes in The Portage include the philosophical and moral analysis of history, justice, guilt and revenge. Having captured one of the world's greatest enemies, his Jewish captors are forced to examine their feelings on the situation they find themselves in. Hitler's historical significance features prominently in the book, and the recurring questions surrounding the meaning of Hitler, which Steiner makes no attempt to answer, surface periodically. Norwegian literary scholar Jakob Lothe felt, however, that Steiner's attempts to dramatize these complex issues fail because his fiction "is too poor" for it to be effective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Portage_to_San_Cristobal_of_A.H.