Timur Vermes

In 2011, Adolf Hitler in full regalia wakes up on a patch of wasteland in Berlin. Having failed to find his bunker, he takes up temporary residence in a newspaper kiosk. There he is discovered by some TV producers, who take him to be a Hitler impersonator of rare method-acting genius. Soon he becomes the star of their satirical programme. His rants against foreigners and the welfare state are both consumed as comedy and secretly admired by a German public fed up with modern politics. Such is the set-up of Timur Vermes's satirical novel, translated by Jamie Bulloch, which has sold more than a million copies in Germany. But will it do what the Führer couldn't, and invade Britain too?

To this reader, the novel feels oddly cosy. No doubt it is much more thrillingly transgressive in Germany, where it remains a criminal offence to give a Nazi salute, as various characters do here with mounting enthusiasm. But Brits have been making fun of Hitler since the 1930s. And here he seems a cutely domesticated Adolf, one who could easily do a slightly amusing talking-head turn on Grumpy Old Men, complaining as he does about how young people don't look where they're going in the street because they are entranced by their smartphones.

Indeed, the joke on the novel's TV execs – who think Hitler is an actor being a clever satirist when in fact he is himself and deadly serious – seems at first also to be a joke on the novel itself, which rarely allows its antihero to be any more disturbing than an amiably provocative man of the people, a kind of Nigel Farage with added swastikas. Much is made of the TV boss cautioning her new star that "The Jews are no laughing matter" (meaning don't joke about them), and Hitler heartily agreeing (meaning they're a serious problem), but the occasional outbursts of antisemitic ranting in the narrative are carefully corralled set-dressing: the necessary minimum to give an impression of authenticity. And historical analogies with great moments in Nazi history, of which this Hitler is very fond, have become just a slightly naughty metaphorical currency. (Even WH Auden no doubt intended some comic effect when he spoke disapprovingly of the number of devout anti-fascists he knew who conducted their erotic lives as though they were invading Poland.)

But then it starts to look more likely that this very dilution of Hitler the virtuoso hater is meant deliberately, as another symptom of what the novel's fictional events diagnose – a widespread, wistful nostalgia for a strong leader who has clear ideas and bolsters national pride, a Hitler with the bad bits conveniently blurred by the passage of time. In one of the novel's rare and brief forays outside German politics, Hitler makes admiring mention of Vladimir Putin, though he can't condone the Russian's habit of going shirtless while parascending or wrestling crocodiles to death.

Such an interpretation, though, does nothing for the novel's larger problem, which is that it is, frankly, a bit boring. The social and political observations can be charmingly silly, but the satire is always blandly obvious in its cartoonish targets. (Media people are obsessed with ratings; modern politicians are opportunistic; people get falling-down drunk at Oktoberfest. Imagine!) More seriously, very little actually happens for ages beyond a multitude of contrived conversations in which the party who isn't Adolf Hitler marvels at Hitler's ability to stay in character, while Hitler himself is, well, Hitler. Farcical this isn't; a farce requires dense plotting.

And so one is left thinking that, in many ways, the YouTube genre of the resubtitled bunker scene from Downfall – in which Hitler, played by Bruno Ganz, is now ranting incredulously against the new ending of Watchmen or complaining that he has been locked out of his Xbox account – accomplishes quite a lot of what this novel hopes to achieve, at a fraction of the length. Thanks to an army of satirical remixers, Ganz's Hitler, too, expresses all our most trivial modern frustrations in a cathartic outburst of forbidden rage. And most of the time, he's funnier.