The Portage to San Cristóbal of A. H. by George Steiner

First published: 1979

Type of work: Alternate history; suspense

This work uses an alternative-history scenario—the search for and capture of Adolf Hitler more than thirty years after the end of World War II—to examine questions about the relationship between good and evil and the source of evil’s power.

Principal characters:

• Adolf Hitler, the former chancellor of Germany, now in his nineties and living in the Amazonian jungle
• Emmanuel Lieber, a Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter, the director of the team sent to capture Hitler
• Nikolai Maximovitch Gruzdev, a former Soviet military intelligence agent
• Gervinus Röthling, a government lawyer for the Federal Republic of Germany
• Marvin Crownbacker, an American CIA agent
• Teku, an Indian guide
• Isaac Amsel, an Israeli commando
• Elie Barach, an Israeli commando

Overview

The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H. is a philosophical fantasy and thriller about the capture of Adolf Hitler by an Israeli search team more than thirty years after the collapse of the Third Reich. By this time, Hitler has become a feeble old man in his nineties. The novel begins with the immediate discovery and capture of Hitler by the search party. The sight of Hitler creates a mixture of shock, disgust, and exultation in the search party. The commandos cannot believe their eyes, for the diabolical Hitler is now only a little old man. Two major themes will grow out of this epoch-making rediscovery of Hitler. The first problem deals with the challenge of getting Hitler out of the jungle, while the second is concerned with the vast implications caused by the capture of Hitler.

The search party is fiercely dedicated to braving the perils of the jungle to bring Hitler back to civilization, to the city of San Cristóbal, and then to Israel for a trial similar to that of Adolf Eichmann. A forgetful world must be reminded of the Holocaust one generation after the event. The Israelis communicate their amazing news to their government in code words of spiritual exaltation. While the Jews struggle to take Hitler out of the jungle, however, the American, British, French, and Soviet governments find out what has happened and scheme to capture Hitler for their own purposes. The Jews state their determination to try Hitler in Israel, for the Holocaust was primarily directed against the Jews of Europe while the world stood by.

The scene briefly shifts from the jungles of Brazil to London and Moscow. The British and the Russians have learned that Hitler is still alive, thus substantiating some past theories that the Nazis had killed Hitler’s double and that the real Hitler had been flown out of Berlin in 1945.

The story then switches back to the jungle. Emmanuel Lieber, the Nazi hunter and director of the search party, exhorts the commandos by radio to ignore any verbal tricks that Hitler might use to save himself. To strengthen the resolve of the search team, Lieber recounts some heartbreaking examples of the harrowing sufferings of individual Jews, particularly children, during the Holocaust. These passages are the most moving and eloquent in the novel, an example of how a gifted writer can conjure up the past and convey at least an inkling of what it was like to experience the Holocaust.

The locale shifts again, this time to a soldier of fortune and a CIA agent who seek to capture Hitler for themselves, turn the coup into a media event, and cash in on the Hitler mania. The story then quickly switches to West Germany, where a government lawyer recalls the moral corruption and cowardice of many Germans during the Third Reich and wonders whether Hitler can be prosecuted under West German law. The news of Hitler’s capture has also reached Paris. A representative of French intelligence concludes that the capture of Hitler is a matter for the great powers. He argues that a trial of Hitler at this time would be a farce, would reopen old wartime wounds in France, would promote morbid nostalgia and entertainment, and would be meaningless for the younger generation. When the news reaches the United States, the secretary of state calls a press conference concerning the whereabouts of Hitler and the question of a trial. Like the other government officials, the American expresses his doubts over the efficacy of the Nuremberg war crimes trials of 1945-1946 and the legality of a trial in Israel. Thus, even though the great powers want Hitler for themselves, they do not want to be reminded of Hitler’s crimes. The world wants to forget.

The Jews deep in the Amazon jungle remember. The members of the search team argue about the colossal implications of Hitler’s capture and trial. Why did God permit such evil to happen? Will the world care about a trial? Will a trial become a spectacle? Moreover, how can the death of six million people be avenged, let alone imagined? Is a simple hanging too good for Hitler? Could Hitler have done it alone without the malice and indifference of millions of other Germans and Europeans? Will the Jews be accused of vengeance and the execution of Hitler then clear the conscience of the world?

Toward the end of the story, the Israelis learn that the CIA, the KGB, and the major news networks are on the trail of Hitler. The commandos burrow deep into the Amazonian jungle and themselves put Hitler on trial.

As the trial begins and the novel ends, the hitherto silent Hitler finds his voice and launches into a familiar tirade. He accuses the Jews of bringing the Holocaust on themselves by inventing the unbearable spiritual demands of monotheistic conscience, Christian love, and social justice. He claims that he took the idea of the master race from the Jews themselves, enumerates the many horrors of the twentieth century to obscure the Holocaust, and even argues that through his actions he hastened the coming of the State of Israel.

Hitler has the last word. Just as his harangue is over, two helicopters arrive from the outside world. The odyssey ends with the helicopters suspended in midair; the identity of the helicopters and the outcome of Hitler’s capture are left to the imagination of the reader. So ends the novel—an invitation to ponder the significance of Hitlerism and the Holocaust to the end of time.

Because of the international implications of its subject, this novel of only 170 pages has a very long list of characters. The Israeli search team is a diverse group ranging from Holocaust survivors to young men who were not even born at the time of the catastrophe. It is given to Emmanuel Lieber, a Nazi hunter clearly modeled on Simon Wiesenthal, to narrate some moving episodes about the victims of the Holocaust. His stories are effective because they deal with individual people and not with numerical abstractions. The British, French, and American government officials are portrayed as cynical and morally obtuse spectators who are interested in capturing Hitler only after they find that the Jews are on his trail. They want Hitler for prestige and profit, not to stimulate memory and morality. They have no idea what they will do with Hitler after he is captured. Gervinus Röthling, the West German lawyer, is a former Nazi, now a smug government official who enjoys listening to music. Nikolai Maximovitch Gruzdev, the former Soviet military intelligence official, is portrayed as a sympathetic figure. In 1945, he had maintained that Hitler was still alive. Since this was different from the official Soviet position, Gruzdev was sent to a labor camp. Now that his theory has been proven right, the KGB interrogates him once again.

The central character of the novel is Hitler. When he is first captured and confronted with the charges against him, he lamely replies, “Ich?” As the trek through the jungle continues, Hitler is alternately shrewd and pathetic. At one point, he identifies a flock of vampire bats overhead. Is he devil or human, harmless or dangerous? The commandos cannot decide. When Hitler makes his speech at the end of the novel, some of his ideas, such as the assertion that the Jews invented conscience, come from Hitler’s writings. Hitler’s assertion that his idea of the Germans as a master race was borrowed from the Jewish conception of the chosen people, however, is George Steiner’s idea, not Adolf Hitler’s. Hitler’s self-controlled manner and his almost didactic oratorical style as portrayed by the novel are out of keeping with the veritable library of histories as well as eyewitness accounts of Hitler that are available.

Only Teku, an illiterate Indian guide, is swayed by Hitler’s words, even though he does not understand them. He makes a throne for Hitler and cries out in approval of what he has heard. At that point, the helicopters arrive. Steiner seems to imply here that Hitler will always find his admirers, especially among those who seek violent, simplistic solutions to the problems of the world. Indeed, there are those who secretly approve of the Holocaust even while maintaining that it never happened.

At the center of The Portage to San Cristóbal of A. H. is the reality of evil. Steiner’s novel, no flight of abstract theorizing, is rooted in the awful particulars of a single historical event—the Holocaust—yet it addresses questions that cannot be limited to any one time or place. What is the relationship between good and evil? What is the source of evil’s power? How is it possible for high culture to be complicit with inhuman cruelty? In wrestling with such questions, Steiner acknowledges their intractable difficulty yet insists that we must struggle to understand.

Steiner is also arguing for the necessity of historical memory. Mere forgetting, however, is not the only alternative he deplores. The Holocaust has been trivialized in countless shoddy books and films; Hitler, too, has been reduced to a caricature whose power to enthrall seems incomprehensible. Thus, in the novel’s climactic scene, Steiner’s Hitler is granted the authority of evil at its most seductive. Yet in his insidious arguments—his tracing of Nazi ideas about racial purity to the Jewish concept of the chosen people—Hitler reveals the ultimate poverty of evil: It can exist only as a travesty of the good.

George Steiner is a distinguished literary critic who has written important studies and collections of essays on the relationship between language and culture and between literature and the inhuman. His awareness of the Holocaust—a current that runs throughout his works, whatever their immediate subject—has given him an acute sense of the power of language to create both good and evil. Words can heal the world, but they can also beguile, maim, and kill. Hitler’s use of language helped to create hell on earth.

The Portage to San Cristóbal of A. H. is Steiner’s first and only novel. Shortly after it appeared, the novel was adapted by Christopher Hampton for the London stage. The book and its version for the stage caused much controversy. There is no doubt that it has great imaginative power and some memorable scenes. Its brief evocation of the sufferings of the victims of the Holocaust, for example, has been rarely surpassed. The play of ideas is brilliantly presented, and the moral issues are powerfully drawn.

The novel has some serious flaws, however. It is a thriller more in its challenge to the intellect than in its plot structure or narrative line; the gifts of the storyteller give way to the talents of the essayist. There is a lack of verisimilitude: The elegant language and brilliant points scored by the Israeli commandos resemble the speech of the academic with some slang thrown in to create an impression of realism. There is little of the suspense that one expects in a true thriller. There is no account of how Hitler has been found or of how the individuals and governments scheme to capture Hitler.

Hitler’s speech and behavior as presented in the novel do not correspond to the real written and spoken record. Hitler’s closing arguments that blame the victims will appear specious and self-serving to readers with some knowledge of Nazism and the Holocaust, but they might come across as completely plausible to those who are less knowledgeable or less sophisticated. Hitler thus threatens to become a mouthpiece for Steiner’s own theories rather than a unique historical character. Steiner’s book challenges the intellect, memory, and conscience, but it falls short as a satisfying work of fiction.

Sources for Further Study

Cheyette, Bryan. “Between Repulsion and Attraction: George Steiner’s Post-Holocaust Fiction.” In The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable, edited by Andrew Leak and George Paizis. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Knight, Christopher J. Uncommon Readers: Denis Donoghue, Frank Kermode, George Steiner, and the Tradition of the Common Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

Mehlman, Jeffrey. Émigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Scott, Nathan A., Jr., and Ronald A. Sharp, eds. Reading George Steiner. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.

Stavans, Ilan. The Inveterate Dreamer: Essays and Conversations on Jewish Culture. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Steiner, George. Errata: An Examined Life. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998.