Charles Bukowsky and the Myth of Hitler’s Survival.

“Swastika” is a short story, an ucrony first published in the late 1960s in an American underground magazine, whose name I haven’t managed to track down. The version I’m presenting here should date from 1971. It was folded into the collection Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (City Lights, 1972), which the Italian edition trimmed down to the more modest Storie di ordinaria follia, without including (how odd!) this very story. Expunged, censored. I had to dig it out of a bootleg ‘Millelire’ edition, or else I’d have been stuck translating it by hand.

The story draws on the urban legend of Hitler surviving the bunker in 1945 and living out his days somewhere overseas. It’s actually a conspiracy theory, decades of research and ironclad documentary evidence have put to rest. It grew out of a series of gray areas surrounding the disappearance of the body: when the Red Army took Berlin, the soldiers found only a charred corpse and a few bone fragments, which made identification difficult at first. Stalin fanned the doubt, claiming the Americans had spirited Hitler away in time to protect him. The suspicion got a boost from the (real) fact that several high-ranking Nazis were captured in South America during the Nuremberg era and in the decades after, Eichmann and Mengele being the famous cases, having escaped through the so-called “rat lines,” a route with a vast literature of its own.

The question has resurfaced periodically. A 1955 CIA report relayed the unverified account of a former SS man,Phillip Citroen, who claimed to be in personal contact with Hitler, hiding somewhere in Colombia. Film and television picked up the rumor in Hunting Hitler and similar programs, which normalized it and reduced it to infotainment. It still echoes around social media today, courtesy of the usual crowd of people proudly discovering hot water. In reality, the evidence for Hitler’s death is more than satisfactory, and in recent decades it has been backed up by lab work: in 2017 a French research team examined jaw and tooth fragments held in Moscow and concluded that they unmistakably belonged to Hitler. Analysis of the skull revealed a bullet hole, confirming the suicide; several eyewitnesses who were in the bunker in those final days, including his adjutant Otto Günsche and his valet Heinz Linge, confirmed the sequence of events, the suicide and the cremation that followed.

The international community of historians is unanimous: Hitler died in Berlin on April 30, 1945, and the theories of his escape are classed as conspiracist myths without any foundation. Some have tried to debunk-the-debunking, spinning in a vicious circle of hermetic semiosis, but the scientific consensus remains that the hoax of a flight to the Americas is just a consp“Swastika” is a short story, an ucrony first published in the late 1960s in an American underground magazine, whose name I haven’t managed to track down. The version I’m presenting here should date from 1971. It was folded into the collection Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness (City Lights, 1972), which the Italian edition trimmed down to the more modest Storie di ordinaria follia, without including (how odd!) this very story. Expunged, censored. I had to dig it out of a bootleg ‘Millelire’ edition, or else I’d have been stuck translating it by hand.

The story draws on the urban legend of Hitler surviving the bunker in 1945 and living out his days somewhere overseas. It’s actually a conspiracy theory, decades of research and ironclad documentary evidence have put to rest. It grew out of a series of gray areas surrounding the disappearance of the body: when the Red Army took Berlin, the soldiers found only a charred corpse and a few bone fragments, which made identification difficult at first. Stalin fanned the doubt, claiming the Americans had spirited Hitler away in time to protect him. The suspicion got a boost from the (real) fact that several high-ranking Nazis were captured in South America during the Nuremberg era and in the decades after, Eichmann and Mengele being the famous cases, having escaped through the so-called “rat lines,” a route with a vast literature of its own.

The question has resurfaced periodically. A 1955 CIA report relayed the unverified account of a former SS man,Phillip Citroen, who claimed to be in personal contact with Hitler, hiding somewhere in Colombia. Film and television picked up the rumor in Hunting Hitler and similar programs, which normalized it and reduced it to infotainment. It still echoes around social media today, courtesy of the usual crowd of people proudly discovering hot water. In reality, the evidence for Hitler’s death is more than satisfactory, and in recent decades it has been backed up by lab work: in 2017 a French research team examined jaw and tooth fragments held in Moscow and concluded that they unmistakably belonged to Hitler. Analysis of the skull revealed a bullet hole, confirming the suicide; several eyewitnesses who were in the bunker in those final days, including his adjutant Otto Günsche and his valet Heinz Linge, confirmed the sequence of events, the suicide and the cremation that followed.

The international community of historians is unanimous: Hitler died in Berlin on April 30, 1945, and the theories of his escape are classed as conspiracist myths without any foundation. Some have tried to debunk-the-debunking, spinning in a vicious circle of hermetic semiosis, but the scientific consensus remains that the hoax of a flight to the Americas is just a conspiracist delusion.

As for Bukowski’s story, though, I should say thatThe Myth of Hitler’s Survival, Retold, great storyteller that he is, he goes far beyond the urban legend: he reworks it in an original way that edges into what would become cyberpunk, with the old Hitler’s brain literally implanted into the head of the sitting President of the United States. The cover is especially striking: an American flag whose rows of stars gradually morph, from top to bottom, into swastikas.

The message that comes through Bukowski’s fantasy isn’t really whether Hitler did or didn’t survive the Berlin bunker. It’s that his way of thinking somehow replicated itself at the top of America’s institutions during the Cold War. An ontological survival, more than a physical one. In essence, the America of his day kept brooding over the serpent’s egg of supremacism and the mental illness of Nazi-fascism, and perhaps, all things considered, he wasn’t so wrong to say so, if the results are what we see today. The story should therefore be read in a purely symbolic, metaphorical sense. That’s why I put Obama’s face on the audiobook cover: to underline its allegorical nature and its extraordinary, unsettling modernity. The eternal fascism that lives on inside our own heads. Happy listening.iracist delusion.

As for Bukowski’s story, though, I should say thatThe Myth of Hitler’s Survival, Retold, great storyteller that he is, he goes far beyond the urban legend: he reworks it in an original way that edges into what would become cyberpunk, with the old Hitler’s brain literally implanted into the head of the sitting President of the United States. The cover is especially striking: an American flag whose rows of stars gradually morph, from top to bottom, into swastikas.

The message that comes through Bukowski’s fantasy isn’t really whether Hitler did or didn’t survive the Berlin bunker. It’s that his way of thinking somehow replicated itself at the top of America’s institutions during the Cold War. An ontological survival, more than a physical one. In essence, the America of his day kept brooding over the serpent’s egg of supremacism and the mental illness of Nazi-fascism, and perhaps, all things considered, he wasn’t so wrong to say so, if the results are what we see today. The story should therefore be read in a purely symbolic, metaphorical sense. That’s why I put Obama’s face on the audiobook cover: to underline its allegorical nature and its extraordinary, unsettling modernity. The eternal fascism that lives on inside our own heads. Happy listening.