 = The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. = 
 
 The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. is a 1981 literary and philosophical novella by George Steiner , in which Jewish Nazi hunters find a fictional Adolf Hitler ( A.H. ) alive in the Amazon jungle thirty years after the end of World War II . The book generated considerable controversy after its publication because in it , Steiner , who is Jewish , allows Hitler to defend himself when he is put on trial in the jungle by his captors . There Hitler maintains that Israel owes its existence to the Holocaust and that he is the " benefactor of the Jews " . 
 The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. was a 1983 finalist in the PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction . It was adapted for the theatre by British playwright Christopher Hampton and was staged in London in April 1982 with Alec McCowen playing the part of Adolf Hitler . It was also staged in Hartford , Connecticut in the United States in 1983 and starred John Cullum as Hitler . 
 
 = = Plot summary = = 
 
 From his base in Tel Aviv , Holocaust survivor Emmanuel Lieber directs a group of Jewish Nazi hunters in search of Adolf Hitler . Lieber believes that the former Führer is still alive , and following rumours and hearsay , he tracks Hitler 's movements through South America , until after months of wading through swamps in the Amazon jungle , the search party finds the 90 @-@ year @-@ old alive in a clearing . Lieber flies to San Cristóbal where he awaits the group 's return with their captive . But getting the old man out of the jungle alive is more difficult than getting in , and their progress is further hampered by heavy thunderstorms . 
 Meanwhile , broken and incoherent radio messages between Lieber and the search party are intercepted by intelligence agents tracking their progress , and rumours begin to spread across the world of Hitler 's capture . Debates flare up over his impending trial , where it will be held and under whose jurisdiction . Orosso is identified as the nearest airfield to the last known location of the search party , and aircraft begin arriving at the hitherto unknown town . But when the search party loses radio contact with Lieber , they must make a decision : do they sit out the storms and deliver their captive to Lieber later , or do they try Hitler in the jungle before their prize is snatched from them by the world at large , who they know will be waiting ? Their decision is the latter , and against Lieber 's advice ( " You must not let him speak ... his tongue is like no other " ) they prepare for a trial with a judge , prosecution and defence attorneys selected from the members of the search party . Teku , a local Indian tracker , is asked to observe the trial as an independent witness . 
 The attention Hitler is receiving , however , renews his strength , and when the trial begins , he brushes aside his " defence attorney " and begins a long speech in four parts in his own defence : 
 Firstly , Hitler claims he took his doctrines from the Jews and copied the notion of the master race from the Chosen people and their need to separate themselves from the " unclean " . " My racism is a parody of yours , a hungry imitation . " 
 Hitler justifies the Final Solution by maintaining that the Jews ' God , purer than any other , enslaves its subjects , continually demanding more than they can give and " blackmailing " them with ideals that cannot be attained . The " virus of utopia " had to be stopped . 
 Hitler states that he was not the originator of evil . " [ Stalin ] had perfected genocide when I was still a nameless scribbler in Munich . " Further , Hitler asserts that the number of lives lost due to his actions are dwarfed by various world atrocities , including those in Russia , China and Africa . 
 Lastly , Hitler maintains that the Reich begat Israel and suggests that he is the Messiah " whose infamous deeds were allowed by God in order to bring His people home . " He closes by asking , " Should you not honour me who have made ... Zion a reality ? " 
 At the end of his speech , Teku is the first to react and jumps up shouting " Proven " , only to be drowned out by the appearance of a helicopter over the clearing . 
 
 = = Main characters = = 
 
 Emmanuel Lieber – Jewish Holocaust survivor and director of the search party to find Hitler ; after crawling out of a death pit in Bialka he never took the time to mend and embarked on a life @-@ consuming obsession to bring those responsible for the genocide to justice . 
 Search party ( all Jewish with family ties to the Holocaust , except for John Asher ) 
 Simeon – search party leader and " presiding judge " at Hitler 's trial ; he is Lieber 's confidant and torn between leading the party into " unmapped quicksand and green bogs " and turning his back on the " quiet mania of Lieber 's conviction " . 
 Gideon Benasseraf – falls ill and dies before the trial begins ; during one of his fever @-@ induced ramblings he suggests that Hitler is Jewish ; he had sought out Lieber after being released from a sanatorium and spending three years recuperating in Paris where the care @-@ free living consumed him with guilt . 
 Elie Barach – Orthodox Jew and " prosecution attorney " at the trial ; he is the moral compass of the group , but his convictions are disturbed by Gideon Benasseraf 's fever @-@ induced assertions that Hitler is Jewish and ends up believing that Hitler may be the second Messiah . 
 Isaac Amsel – an 18 @-@ year @-@ old boy and witness at the trial ; he is the son of Isaac Amsel senior , former member of the search party killed earlier in a skirmish in São Paulo ; he joined the party to avenge his father 's death . 
 John Asher – half @-@ Jewish and reluctant " defence attorney " at the trial ; fascinated by the capture of Bormann and the rumours circulating that Hitler may be alive , he had approached Nazi hunter Wiesenthal who directed him to Lieber ; despite being an " outsider " ( no ties to the Holocaust ) Lieber assigned him to the search party because of his military training and his clear @-@ headedness ( " no metaphysical lusts , no cravings for retribution " ) . 
 Teku – local Indian tracker and independent witness at the trial ; previously the search party 's guide who had abandoned them when they insisted on entering uncharted regions of the jungle , he continued tracking them from a distance before revealing himself . 
 Adolf Hitler – now 90 years old , the former leader of the Third Reich had not died in the Führerbunker in Berlin , but escaped to South America and hid in the Amazon jungle . 
 
 = = Background and publication = = 
 
 George Steiner , literary critic for The New Yorker and The New York Times , had written about the Holocaust in some of his previous books , including Anno Domini ( 1964 ) , Language and Silence ( 1967 ) and In Bluebeard 's Castle ( 1971 ) . Many of the ideas Steiner expresses in The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. were reworked from these earlier works . Steiner told New York Times editor D. J. R. Bruckner that this book arose out of his lifelong work on language . " Central to everything I am and believe and have written is my astonishment ... that you can use human speech both to bless , to love , to build , to forgive and also to torture , to hate , to destroy and to annihilate . " 
 Commenting on the controversy the book generated , Steiner admitted to literary journalist and critic Ron Rosenbaum ( author of Explaining Hitler ) that he too was disturbed by it , adding that his fictional Hitler had gotten the better of him , " golem- or Frankenstein @-@ like " . He said that it felt like the book " wrote me " . Steiner also pointed out that the novella is not only about his thoughts on the Holocaust , but also about the horrific events that took place in countries like Cambodia , Vietnam , El Salvador and Burundi : " My feeling is that one has to grapple with the abyss if one can . " 
 Steiner wrote The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. in 1975 and 1976 in Geneva , Switzerland , and the 120 @-@ page work originally appeared in the Spring 1979 issue of the United States literary magazine , The Kenyon Review . It also appeared in the Spring 1980 issue of Granta , the British literary magazine . Its first publication in book form , with minor revisions by Steiner , was in May 1981 by Faber and Faber in the United Kingdom — and as requested by Steiner , it was a paperback original . The first United States edition was published in hardcover in April 1982 by Simon & Schuster . 
 
 = = Adaptations = = 
 
 The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. was adapted for the theatre in 1982 by British playwright Christopher Hampton . It was staged in April 1982 at London 's Mermaid Theatre under the direction of John Dexter with Alec McCowen playing the part of Adolf Hitler . McCowen won the 1982 Evening Standard Theatre Award for best actor for this performance . In 1983 the production moved to the United States where it played at the Hartford Stage Company in Hartford , Connecticut , directed by Mark Lamos and starring John Cullum as Hitler . 
 This book is the only work of fiction by Steiner to have been adapted for the stage . 
 
 = = Reception = = 
 
 Reaction to The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. was mixed . Anthony Burgess in The Observer called it " astonishing " , Christopher Booker of The Daily Telegraph described it as a " powerful piece " , and English author A. S. Byatt said it was a " masterpiece " . In Explaining Hitler , Ron Rosenbaum called The Portage " A Frankenstein story " , referring to Steiner 's fictive Hitler has having taken on a life of its own . Writing in Time magazine , Otto Friedrich described the book " a philosophic fantasy of remarkable intensity " , adding that by not refuting Hitler 's speech , Steiner deviates from the horrors of traditional Holocaust literature and ends the book " on a note of bleak ambiguity " . 
 Morris Dickstein of The New York Times was more critical of the book , calling it " a misconceived and badly executed novel , a sideshow distraction from the serious business of thinking through the unspeakable horrors of the Nazi era . " He described it as " wearisome " that is " suffocate [ d ] " by too much " fine writing " ( belles @-@ lettres ) . He also complained that the characters are lifeless , and while they each have detailed histories , they are only " verbal figments " that do not separate them from one another . Finally Dickstein noted that because almost all the points of Hitler 's speech are drawn from some of Steiner 's earlier works , he " unwittingly creates sympathy for Hitler by making him old and pathetic yet also lucid and brilliant — at once absurdly harmless and unconvincingly dangerous . " 
 In another review in The New York Times John Leonard wrote that while the book has its strong points , " some wit , a catholic disdain , multiplicity of character and a South American swamp @-@ life that terrifies " , its weaknesses are that " the characters are really ideas , ... the symbols clash and there are too many echoes of better books by Kafka and Proust " . But Leonard 's biggest criticism of the book was Hitler 's speech , which he called " obscene " , and Steiner 's decision to end the book at that point , which Leonard said " not only denies the power of art to arrange and transcend , but ... makes me sick to my stomach . " 
 Writing in the American literary magazine Salmagundi , Alvin H. Rosenfeld called The Portage a " breakthrough work " that " astonishes " . He was struck by the book 's interplay between the landscape of swamp and jungle , and the " landscape of speech " — the former being " brilliantly registered " with its " immense feeling of physicality " , and the latter , " even more dramatic " in the way it exposes " the dark underside of words " and how its use and misuse reveals the true nature of a person . He was particularly impressed by the depiction of Nazi hunter Emmanuel Lieber and his role as representative of the Jewish consciousness . Rosenfeld noted that while Holocaust literature often either soars to " expostulation and apostrophe " , or sinks to " a dwindling sob of elegiac lament " , Steiner 's Lieber " mediates between these two extremes , ... simultaneously records and mourns , coldly enumerates yet carries an immense affect " . What did concern the reviewer , however , was the way Steiner used ideas from his earlier works , that he had put them " virtually verbatim " into Hitler 's mouth , creating the impression that " Steiner 's understanding of Hitler were identical with the latter 's self @-@ understanding " . Rosenfeld also questioned why the book had to end with Hitler 's speech . He said that Steiner 's fictive Hitler plays " the devil 's game of language subversion " , making " madness [ sound ] like music " , something the real Hitler had perfected . By stopping at this point , Rosenfeld felt that Steiner " succumb [ s ] , rhetorically , to the seductive eloquence of negation " , which undermines his own " high standards of moral intelligence " . But overall Rosenfeld said The Portage " must be counted among the most vigorous attempts to portray the presence and meaning of Hitler " , forcing us to confront him " in a way hardly seen before in fiction " . 
 The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H. was a finalist in the 1983 PEN / Faulkner Award for Fiction . 
 
 = = Controversy = = 
 
 The book generated considerable controversy because of its apparent " admiration for Hitler " . The controversy grew further when the faithful stage adaptation ( " too faithful " , according to Steiner ) was performed in the United Kingdom and the United States . 
 Hitler 's speech at the end of the book disturbed many readers and critics . Steiner not only lets Hitler justify his past , he allows him the ( almost ) last word before the outside world invades . The fact that Steiner is Jewish made this speech in particular even more contentious . One critic , while acknowledging that Steiner always saw Hitler as " the incarnation of unprecedented and unparalleled evil " , felt that there was no clear distinction in the book between Steiner 's own views and those of his fictional Hitler , even going so far as to accuse Steiner , who rejects Jewish nationalism and is a critic of Israel 's treatment of the Palestinians , of anti @-@ Semitism . 
 In contrast , a Time magazine article at the time felt that Steiner 's intention for the Hitler speech was to use it to explore his previously stated belief " that Hitler wielded language as an almost supernatural force " , drawing attention to Nazi hunter Emmanuel Lieber 's warning from the book regarding Hitler : " There shall come a man who ... will know the grammar of hell and teach it to others . He will know the sounds of madness and loathing and make them seem music . " 
 Steiner responded to criticism that Hitler 's speech in this book is unchallenged by saying that it had been done before : for example Satan 's speech in Milton 's Paradise Lost ( 1667 ) , and The Grand Inquisitor 's speech in Dostoyevsky 's The Brothers Karamazov ( 1880 ) . He also reminded the reader that Hitler 's speech is balanced out earlier in the book by Lieber 's long monologue on the horrors of the Holocaust . Finally , Steiner said that his Hitler ( A. H. ) is " a fictive figure " , and that it is not he who has the last word , but Teku , the Indian tracker , who shouts " Proven " . Teku is also the Hebrew word used to indicate that " there are issues here beyond our wisdom to answer or decide . " 
 
 