THE PORTAGE TO SAN CRISTOBAL OF A.H. by George Steiner Simon & Schuster; 128 pages; $13.50
If Adolf Hitler were finally found alive in the jungles of Brazil, what should be done with him? If he were brought into the room, what would you do? Would you rise?
That bitter game has long fascinated George Steiner, 52, polymathic professor of literature and author of brilliant essays ranging from Homer to Schoenberg and Heidegger. So when he heard that Nazi Hunter Simon Wiesenthal had found the spoor of Mass Murderer Martin Bormann, he began to concoct a scenario: What might happen if a group of Jewish avengers located the Führer? The resulting novel, The Portage to San Cristóbal of A.H., has already aroused angry controversy in Britain ("Astonishing," Anthony Burgess wrote in the Observer, but the New Statesman charged "subversive admiration for Hitler"). The controversy grew last month when Playwright Christopher Hampton presented a stage version now playing at London's Mermaid theater, that Steiner thought was "too faithful" to his book. That fidelity made the aging Hitler, played by Alec McCowen, a rigid, then suddenly raucous figure, declaiming a justification of his past. "It is a tour de force ... to freeze the blood," said the Daily Mail. "A dramatic fraud," claimed the Financial Times. U.S. publication of the novel, which is due on April 30, the anniversary of Hitler's suicide, is certain to prolong and intensify the furor.
What indeed should be done about A.H.? Burn him at the stake, says one of Steiner's Jewish hunters. That kind of revenge is pointless, argues another. "I'd let him go wherever he wanted inside Israel. With only the clothing on his back. Every single time he wanted food or water or shelter, he'd have to ask for it and say who he was."
The malign indifference of the great powers is an inevitable part of the portage. In Paris, a French official worries lest the half-forgotten crimes of the Vichy regime be embarrassingly exposed. A German veteran, now a government lawyer, wonders who will have jurisdiction over the prisoner. A boisterous American who flies to Brazil and starts prattling about television syndication turns out to be a representative of the CIA.
Far more interesting is Steiner's belief that Hitler wielded language as an almost supernatural force. In one of his celebrated early essays, The Hollow Miracle (1959), Steiner argued that just as speech can create, it can destroy; that the language of Luther and Goethe "was not innocent of the horrors of Nazism," that Hitler found in it "the latent hysteria, the confusion, the quality of hypnotic trance." He now gives that view a theological turn, an adaptation of the opening statement in St. John: "In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was God."