Looking at the 'Unexplained'...

I always remember the feeling of horror I felt both when I read Ira Levin’s novel and when I watched Boys from Brazil (1978), which was adapted from it: the idea that a monster like Josef Mengele, nicknamed the ‘angel of death’ for his horrific experiments on Jews and Gypsies – especially children – at Auschwitz-Birkenau, could live on, unaccounted for, prosperous and perpetuating his evil, is like a nightmare from which you wake up drenched in sweat; you wake up, but somehow the nightmare still continues…

In Children of the Wild , we watch a Nazi hunter named Ezra Lieberman track down Mengele, who has fled to South America, and uncover how Adolf Hitler used a DNA sample to create mini Adolfs. At the heart of the horror this story evokes, I believe, lies the "inexplicable": So much time has passed, the Nazi horror has been exposed in all its details, the period between 1933 and 1945 has taken its place in the shameful pages of human history, in other words, the whole world acknowledges how horrific it was. Even the faces of captured German soldiers in photographs of the moments when they were shown images from the concentration camps after the war ended say the same thing—"How? How could we do this?"—and despite all this knowledge of the horror, some still try to repeat it... How can such a thing even be explained by logic?

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Children of the Wild was written and filmed during a period when right-wing politics were on the rise globally. In his novel The Stepford Wives (1975), Ira Levin, who depicted the male system that forced women into "voluntary slavery" to domestic and family duties, attempted in this novel to explain the ruthless rise of right-wing violence alongside neoliberal policies through its root fascism. Sure, everyone understands that much; the horrors of what happened before and after 1970, and the Maraş and Çorum massacres, for example, can be explained from this perspective. But how do people reach that state of fascist consciousness (or lack thereof!), to the point where they will kill their neighbors without batting an eyelid, committing "crimes against humanity" because of their ethnicity, skin color, or religion? Please spare us the mention of Hannah Arendt or Erich Fromm! I have great respect for anyone who attempts to answer this question, but the result is always the same: Answers are mortal, questions are immortal...

And there are explanations that do not take capitalism into account at all, and they die at birth.

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A few years after Children of the Wild , another novel was published in 1979: The Führer Seed. The plot of this novel, which I recently read and is not widely known for some reason, opens with information announced to the world by Martin Bormann, a Nazi war criminal living in Argentina, via the Reuters News Agency: “Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun have a son, he is currently living in Germany, and if he does not reveal his identity, I will.” Bormann died in 1945, but we see that he lives on in the world of the novel.

After this threatening statement, we meet a young man in West Berlin: Kurt Hitler, who has lived under the name Kurt Hauser. Kurt is a young politician and mayoral candidate for West Berlin, much admired by everyone in the ruling Liberal Party. He claims to be ashamed of his father's actions and therefore conceals his identity. However, we see that the operation to "take back Germany" is meticulously planned, from the election of Reuters to the libertarian lover.

The one who will prevent this fascist return, aided by anti-Semitic leaders like Gaddafi with all their might, is, as one might expect, Mossad agent Max Levy, living a quiet life on a kibbutz in Israel. After a long struggle, Levy kills Hitler, the world is saved, and Levy returns to his kibbutz.

The Führer Seed is not only less aesthetically pleasing than Levin's novel, but it also presents fascism from an extremely naive perspective. For example, in one scene, while discussing the potential developments following Kurt's revelation to Liberal Party officials, a senator says: "According to the Ministry's report, sir, I am pleased to say that Nazism has been eradicated forever in West Germany." They later realize their mistake, of course, but the terrifying ahistorical nature of both these characters and the novel's perspective on history remains unchanged: They believe fascism is something that can come with one man and go with another.

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The religious neo-fascist regime didn't rule this country solely because of one man. Putin, Erdoğan, Trump, and Netanyahu are at the helm thanks to their conjunctural convenience and availability; they don't actually steer the ship. However, when you analyze all the structural elements of the ship, how it was built from its bilge to its most luxurious cabin, and the dialectical relationship between those in the boiler room and those in the wheelhouse, something begins to become clear. Although this doesn't fully explain the relationship between "human beings" and fascism. But that's the way it is; since an immortal answer seems unlikely in human history, we'll proceed with the best answer we have.