Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall

 

Spike Milligan Adolf Hitler - My Part in His Downfall (1971)
I read this - and this very same copy - when I was fifteen and doubtless pissed myself with laughter. I read it again at some point in the nineties and was left with a vague impression of it being relatively sober in comparison to Milligan's subsequent war memoirs, as though he was still trying to write a proper grown up autobiography without being quite sure why. Now I've read it again and have gone back to my initial reaction, or at least something more in that direction. I haven't actually pissed myself with laughter, but I've chuckled because it's often funny, and the humour has aged well for me. It may also be significant that the last Milligan I read was Puckoon, which mostly tried too hard and failed. However, Puckoon was a novel where Adolf is autobiography, and autobiography describing what must have been a truly terrifying time, freeing the author from the onus of delivering one gag after another, instead allowing his humour to settle in a more natural configuration across the events of the early forties.

It's fascinating for me because I lived within walking distance of the Milligan family home in south-east London for more than a decade, so the account opens on what is very much familiar territory. It's also fascinating because this is the second world war as seen from ground level, from what is very much an authentic working class perspective, part of a narrative which has become very much sidelined in recent times, not least by the current appetite for the past recontextualised as cutesy heritage product in service of some exhausting contemporary dialogue - and if you're waiting for the diatribe about momentary lapses of judgement such as Curry & Chips or the Pakistani Daleks, then you may actually be part of the problem.

There were the deaths of some of my friends, and therefore, no matter how funny I tried to make this book, that will always be at the back of my mind: but, were they alive today, they would have been first to join in the laughter, and that laughter was, I'm sure, the key to victory.

The victory he's referring to was - obviously - over Adolf Hitler, Fascism, screaming Nationalism, and the drive to reduce human society to a black and white world of good and evil with dogmatic and definitive answers to complex issues reducing the need for actual cognition. I'm sure we're all aware of the traditional role of the funny man as jester, the one who uses humour to express that which might be otherwise frowned upon. Well, Milligan's work still fulfils that role with devastating wit, humanity, chilling insight, and even poetry. We should try not to forget that.