The Nazi Occult and The Castle in the Forest: Raw History and Fictional Transformation

Abstract

In an interview with National Public Radio (27 January 2007) about his final novel The Castle in the Forest, Norman Mailer spoke of his attitude to the occult and his use of diabolism in his imagining of Hitler’s conception and childhood. The book, narrated by the putative SS man Dieter (D.T.)—in fact a demon assigned to monitor the spiritual and psychic development of young Adolf—presents a Hitler who is literally the progeny of the devil; his conception occurring in a primal scene at which the Maestro (Satan) is present. D.T. guides the reader not only through Hitler’s formative years, encouraging the child’s peccadilloes and fostering petty hatreds; he infiltrates Himmler’s inner circle, in which race, incest, and mysticism are researched in pursuit of the Übermensch (8). According to Mailer, the genesis of this extraordinary novel, in which he invites the reader to follow him into both serious and cryptohistorical thinking, was his reading of the journalist Ron Rosenbaum’s book Explaining Hitler. Rosenbaum considers the many and varied hypotheses surrounding the Fuehrer, ranging from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s mesmeric messiah to Christopher Browning’s dithering, hesitant Hitler, and what these hypotheses tell us about Hitler and the “Hitler explainers” (xii). Unconvinced by any of the theories he found here, or perhaps intrigued by the sense of inexplicability that pervades Rosenbaum’s book, Mailer says he sought an exceptional explanation for Hitler, one that he found in the occult (National Public Radio).