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Written by
Walter Grünzweig

Norman Mailer’s The Castle in the Forest is a special experience for an Austrian.In his latest book in the Henry Bech series, John Updike has his Jewish author-protagonist say on the occasion of a visit to Czechoslovakia: “Hitler.To come to Europe is somehow to pay him a visit.” In his latest book, Norman Mailer has paid a visit to the two Austrian regions which are home to the Hitler family.

On one level, Castle is a book about life of the lower classes of the German-speaking section of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy and about one man, Alois Hitler, who manages to rise above the humble origins of his family. It looks at the daily life of the peasants,the education of their children,their sexual relationships,and their sometimes desperate attempts to improve their limiting life conditions.But the family that is followed in this novel in great detail on almost five hundred pages is not an ordinary family.It is the family of a man who would fatally change the course of history causing a catastrophe whose terrible consequences we are still far from having overcome.

Norman Mailer has written another novel which functions very much the same way. In Oswald’s Tale ~1995!, he and his collaborators have sifted through and generated an incredible amount of material relating to Oswald’s time in the Soviet Union, his wife,Marina,and her family and friends.Reading through the hundreds of pages of this book, one comes to understand the tragic history of the Soviet Union and the way this history has shaped her citizens. Although readers are at times lost in the wealth of this material,at no time do they forget that the whole book has one focal point,namely the assassination of President John F.Kennedy on 22 November 1963 in Dallas. From none of the many things we find out about Marina and her development can it be excluded that it may have influenced her in a particular way which may have contributed to the negative development of her marriage with Lee, and thus to Lee’s frustrated megalomania—or whichever else formative characteristic—which ultimately may have caused the murder of Kennedy.“This is,” says Mailer,“after all, a book that depends upon the small revelation of separate points of view.We are, in effect, studying an object... as he tumbles through the prisms of a kaleidoscope. It is as if by such means we hope to penetrate into the psychology of Lee Harvey Oswald.”

In readers’minds, the massive quantity of information Castle provides concerning Hitler’s family and early childhood is equally focused on a later historicaldevelopment,althoughinamuchdifferentmanner.Thecatastrophe is not the murder of a man with large possibilities and the meaning of thatdeathforhisculture,butrathertheextinctionof awholecultureitself, agenocidalhorrorunequalledinhumanhistory.Mailer,byfocusingonHitler’s family and early life,seems to suggest that there must be some explanatory potential here for what happened later on. Oneapproachtothisnovel,thoughtiresomeanduninspired,wouldbeto lookatthesourcesMailerhimselfhasusedandlistedinhisbibliographyand investigatewherehisnarrativeintervenesintotheHitlerstoryusingthefictional,novelistic mode.Clearly,this is not what this paper can or wants to do,although it would be of some interest if one wanted to look at Mailer’s strategyof fictionalization.Thereisonemajorthemeof thenovel,however, where a comparison with the sources in order to understand their significance,namely that of incest.