Timur Vermes - Look Who's Back

I was about to order another mineral water when one was set on the table before me. “From the gentleman over there, with his compliments,” the waitress said, pointing into the distance. Peering through the throng of people, I saw, several tables away, a blonde figure whose face was the colour of a farmyard hen. His wrinkles gave him the appearance of an ancient Luis Trenker, all in all making him look as if he were pulling a bizarre grin. When he caught my gaze, the gentleman raised an arm in greeting, his fist balled and his thumb sticking upwards. He tried desperately to broaden his leathery smile, but to no avail.

I rubbed my eyes and resolved to decamp as soon as I could. It was conceivable that the drinks here were being adulterated. For right beside that gentleman sat a carbon copy of the wench who had just left the tent with a swastika on her chest.

It is amazing the paths that Providence will find to reach her goal. She allows one man to die in the trenches, and another to survive. She guides a simple corporal to the conference of a tiny splinter party, which he will later lead as it attracts millions of members. Some who are destined for greatness she sentences to a year of incarceration in the very middle of their life’s undertaking, so that they can find the time to write an illustrious book. She also makes provision for an indispensable Führer to fetch up on the programme of a Turkish imp, only to surpass the latter with such ease that he has his own programme thrust upon him. And I am also sure that it was down to Providence that Fräulein Krömeier knew nothing about razor blades.

Once more it was time to pause for thought. Although I had always believed in the significance of my return, in the onslaught of current events my quest to ascertain this significance had temporarily taken a back seat. And for the time being there were no other urgent matters to attend to; at present the Volk seemed to be free of the grosser hardships and humiliations. But now Fate resolved to open my eyes, as once it had in Vienna.

Hitherto I had engaged in minimal contact with everyday life; Fräulein Krömeier had relieved me of any minor chores. It was only when I decided to run a few errands myself that I discovered the extent to which many things had changed. Of late I had been missing my good old safety razor. Until now I’d had to familiarise myself with a makeshift plastic apparatus, the purported virtue of which was that it combined several inadequate blades which scraped the skin simultaneously, but unpleasantly. As I was able to discern from the packaging, this was regarded as major progress, especially in relation to the former version, which contained one fewer blade. But I could see no advantage vis-à-vis a single blade. I attempted to describe to Fräulein Krömeier what one of these looked like and how it functioned, in vain. And so I was forced to make the trip myself.

The last time I had properly gone shopping was back in 1924 or 1925. In those days one would go to a haberdashery or soap shop. To purchase a razor nowadays, one had to frequent the chemist’s; Fräulein Krömeier had told me how to get there, Rossmann was the name. Upon arrival I realised that the appearance of the chemist’s had changed out of all recognition. Once upon a time there was a counter, and behind this counter were the goods. Although there was still a counter, now it was situated close to the entrance. Behind it was nothing but a window display. The actual goods were stacked on an endless succession of shelves, for every man to help himself. My initial supposition was that there were dozens of sales assistants, all in informal dress. But it turned out that these were the customers, who wandered about collecting their items and then took these to the counter. It was most disconcerting. Rarely had I felt so impolitely treated. It was as if I had been told on the way in to look for the paltry razor blades myself, as the chemist had better things to do.

Gradually, however, I grasped the logistics inherent here. There were indeed a number of advantages to this system. First of all the chemist could make large sections of his sales depot accessible, thus affording him greater selling space. Furthermore, it was obvious that one hundred customers would serve themselves quicker than ten or even twenty shop assistants could have done. And, last but not least, one could save money by dispensing with these shop assistants. The benefits were crystal clear. I made a swift estimate that by introducing this principle across the board, 100,000 to 200,000 troops could be freed up for immediate deployment at the front. This was so impressive that I intended to congratulate the ingenious chemist straight away. I hurried over to one of the counters and asked for Herr Rossmann.

“Which Herr Rossmann?”

“For goodness’ sake, the man who owns this chemist’s!”

“He’s not here.”

This was a great shame, but I soon discovered my congratulations would have been premature, for clever Herr Rossmann did not, regrettably, sell my razor blades. I was sent to another chemist’s, one belonging to Herr Müller.

To be brief, Herr Müller had likewise implemented Herr Rossmann’s inspired idea. But he didn’t have my blades either, nor did Herr Schlecker, whose frightfully squalid premises were run according to an even more extreme principle: even the cash desk was unmanned here. Which in a way was perfectly logical because I couldn’t find my razor blades. The conclusion I drew from my dismal experience was that fewer shop assistants in Germany were selling no razor blades. It may not have been a happy state of affairs, but at least it was efficient.

At a loss, I continued to wander past parades of shops. Once again my decision to have worn a simple lounge suit had proved to be the right one. I was able to acquire at close quarters a genuine impression of the circumstances of the German Volk, their fears, their concerns and their razor-blade hardships. And now that I had been made aware of the fact, I realised that not only the chemist’s, but the whole of society had been organised according to this curious work principle. Every clothing shop, every bookshop, every shoe shop, every department store, even grocers and restaurants — all of these were virtually unstaffed. And money, it turned out, was no longer obtained from the bank, but from machines. Exactly the same was true of tickets for travel, and stamps — they were liquidating the post offices one and all. Packages, too, were pushed into a machine, from which they had to be fetched by the recipient. Given all this, the new Wehrmacht ought to have had an army of millions at its fingertips. In reality, however, it had with difficulty scraped together only twice the number to which we had been restricted by the scandalous Treaty of Versailles. It was puzzling.

Where were all those people?

My initial assumption had been that they must be building autobahns, draining swamps and suchlike. Yet this was not the case. Swamps were a rarity these days and tended to be refilled rather than drained. And autobahns were still being built by Poles, White Russians, Ukrainians and other foreign workers, for wages that were more cost-effective for the Reich than any war. Had I known back then just how cheap it was to employ Poles, I might as well have leapfrogged their country.

One lives and learns.

The thought did occur to me that the German Volk might have shrunk, with the result that all these extra people simply didn’t exist. The statistics, however, showed that there were 81 million living Germans. I expect you are wondering why I had not considered the possibility of unemployment. The reason being that my mind had a very different recollection of what unemployed men looked like.

The jobless man I remembered from the past went out onto the street with a placard around his neck that read “Looking for any type of work”. When he’d had enough of drifting fruitlessly around in this manner, he would remove the placard, grab a red flag handed to him by a loitering Bolshevist, and return to the street. An army of millions of angry jobless men was fertile ground for any radical party, and I was fortunate enough to have led the most radical of them all. But in the streets of today I could not see any unemployed men. Nor was there any evidence to substantiate the hypothesis that they had been rounded up for some labour service or sent to a camp. Instead, as I later discovered, the country had chosen the capricious solution of a certain Herr Hartz.