Look Who's Back

Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes Page B

Book: Look Who's Back by Timur Vermes Read Free Book Online
Authors: Timur Vermes
Tags: Fiction, General, Satire
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it in other ways, whether this be with better weapons, smarter generals or, as in this case, the advantage of superior morale. At first glance, the simple fighter pilot may consider it a near-hopeless task to take three bombers out of the sky with every shot, but with superior morale, with an unwavering, fanatical spirit, everything is possible!
    This holds as true today as it did back then. And now I came across an example of fanaticism that even I would have thought impossible. And yet it was perfectly genuine. I observed a man – an employee of my hotel, I presume – who was engaged in a fascinating new activity. In fact, I cannot be absolutely sure that this activity
is
new; it is just that I remember it being performed differently, that is to say, with a broom or a rake. This man wielded a completely new type of portable leaf-blowingmachine. A mesmerising apparatus with extraordinary blowing power, which I expect had become necessary to confront the more resistant forms of foliage that evolution must have given rise to over the intervening years.
    I was able to infer from this that the racial struggle is far from over; on the contrary, it continues to surge in nature with greater intensity. Not even today’s bourgeois-liberal press dares to deny it. One reads of the American grey squirrel supplanting the indigenous red species, so beloved of the German Volk; of tribes of African ants marching across the Iberian Peninsula; of Indo-Germanic balsams naturalising and spreading in this country. This last development is to be welcomed, of course; Aryan plants have every right to colonise the space which is their due. Now, I had not seen this novel, more combative foliage at close quarters – the leaves on the hotel’s motor park seemed perfectly normal to me – but the blowing apparatus could just as easily be deployed against traditional leaves. After all, when driving a Königstiger tank you do not restrict yourself to taking on T-34s; if necessary you engage the old BT-7s too.
    When for the first time I observed the man I was indignant. I had been woken that morning – it may have been around nine-thirty – by an infernal din, as if my pillow were nestling against a Soviet rocket launcher. I rose in a fury, hurried to the window, glared out and spotted that very man busily operating his blowing device. My wrath was only multiplied when I looked at the surrounding trees and saw that it was gusting. How absolutely preposterous it was to blow leaves from one place to another on a day like this! My first instinct was to raceoutside, vent my anger and give him a proper dressing-down. But I thought better of it. For I was in the wrong.
    The man had been issued with an order. And he was executing the order. With a fanatical loyalty my leading generals would have done well to imitate. A man was following orders – it was as simple as that. Was he complaining? Was he moaning that it was a pointless task in this wind? No, he was performing his ear-splitting duty bravely and stoically. Like a loyal S.S. man. Thousands of these had completed their tasks regardless of the burden placed on them, even though they could have easily complained, “What are we to do with all these Jews? It makes no sense anymore; they’re being delivered faster than we can load them into the gas chambers!”
    I was so moved that I dressed swiftly, hurried out to the worker, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “My good man, I should like to thank you. It is for people like you that I will continue my struggle. For I know that from this leaf-blasting apparatus, indeed from every leaf-blasting apparatus in the Reich, blows the red-hot breath of National Socialism.”
    That
is the fanatical will this country requires. And I hoped that I had aroused it in Sensenbrink too.

xi
    O n the morning I strode into the office put at my disposal, I was reminded again of the long path down which I yet had to travel. I entered a room which was perhaps five by

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