'The Castle in the Forest' by Norman Mailer (Book review)

[icymist]

The Castle in the Forest: A Novel
Norman Mailer
Random House: 478 pp., $27.95

Ever since folklorist Lewis Spence published his "Occult Causes of the Present War" in 1940, historians have noted the Nazi hierarchy's loony dependence on runes, mysticism, esoteric rituals, worship of the war god Odin and even Satanism. High officials in the party justified eugenics and genocide with crackpot theories such as "theozoology," which maintained that interstellar deities electrically sired the so-called Aryan people while ethnically inferior races were the progeny of humans who had consorted with apes.

Adolf Hitler, who claimed that a paranormal voice had warned him to flee a crowded foxhole in World War I just before a shell exploded in it, credited his healing from the blindness caused by mustard gas with his awakening to his gifts as one of the Illuminati. And he counted among his associates the inner circle of the Thule Society, a group that sought a magical energy called Vril that could transform initiates into supermen. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS, considered himself the reincarnation of the 10th century Germanic king Heinrich the Fowler, employed a full-time astrologer and co-founded the Ahnenerbe Society to study the Aryan race's mythical roots.

Readers of even a few of Norman Mailer's 35 books will not be surprised that he found the evil and weirdness of Adolf Hitler irresistible as a topic for his 36th. Mailer is, after all, the most metaphysical of America's major novelists, author of a book of essays titled "Existential Errands" and another, on writing, called "The Spooky Art." His fictional protagonists have included a psychopathic ex-congressman "lost in a private kaleidoscope of death," whose actions are governed by the phases of the moon ("An American Dream"), and a mystical jive-talking soldier on an Alaskan bear hunt who proclaims himself "up tight with the essential animal insanity of things" ("Why Are We in Vietnam?").

"The Castle in the Forest" is narrated by an SS officer named Dieter, "a member of a matchless Intelligence group ... directly under the supervision of Heinrich Himmler." Sent in 1938 to the Waldviertel region of Austria, north of the Danube, to investigate the possibility that Hitler's paternal grandmother was impregnated by a Jew, Dieter is relieved to find that "there was no Jew in the Führer's bloodstream," that "his father and mother were uncle and niece by blood" and that Alois, Hitler's father, may have even sired his third wife, Klara Poelzl, Hitler's mother. The findings please Himmler too, for Hitler's status as a "First-Degree Incestuary" explained the "rare intensification" of character that had produced his unique properties of "Genius and Will."

Read the review

[MountainLaurel]

1. Thanks for posting

I just ordered this one for our library.