Hitler has reappeared in Israel

We are five on the bed, leaning with our backs against the wall like people watching television. I'm in the middle of the bed. Hitler is at one end. He is about 20 years old, at the time he was moving from one cheap men's hostel in Vienna to another, an ambitious and unhappy young ne'er-do-well. A painter of landscapes and advertisements.

He places a box full of papers in the centre of the bed. He says to me: "I'm writing down all kinds of things for myself."

"Mein Kampf?" I ask.

He looks at me suspiciously, like someone who has just heard something that I couldn't possibly have known. The conversation is quiet but at the same time fraught in a strange way with everything that will happen. He gives me a friendly wink, as though to say: "I, Adolf, whose whole future is ahead of him, and you, the son of the Nashibirskis, who are marked out for death - ­ we're both of us artists; I am the one who will always rise up from the past and be with you like a member of your household."

I dreamt this dream early in 2007, in Oxford, when I was starting to write the novel Tender Hand, and it is the opening of the book that is now being published in Tel Aviv.

The name Hitler is no longer igniting fires in the land of the survivors who in the past would take to the streets because of a Wagner concert. The text exists in the city alongside the one-man show Adolf, in which a young actor plays Hitler at the Tmuna fringe theatre in Tel Aviv. "How a sensitive boy who dreams of becoming an artist turns into Hitler," says the programme. For the first time in the Israeli theatre, director Yagil Eliraz depicts how Hitler's personality is shaped from early childhood to adulthood.

And as for Mein Kampf, that immature work by the young Hitler, its publication was supported here this month by Ariana Melamed, the culture editor at the very popular internet magazine Ynet.

She described how, at the beginning of 1933, her grandfather, Isidor Albrecht, a decorated officer in German intelligence during World War I, received a gift book, bound in navy blue, adorned with gilded edges and entitled Mein Kampf. Chapter 11 particularly aroused his ire, so much so that he saw fit to send a sharp letter to his bosses, in which he wrote: "As a humanist and as a Jew, I am shocked to the depths of my soul by this hatred-laden nonsense."

"I, his granddaughter, support its re-publication," wrote Melamed, arousing a polemic in which many supported her and many opposed her. Selected chapters of Mein Kampf were translated into Hebrew in 2001 and published under the title 'Chapters from Adolf Hitler's My Struggle,' but copies are to be found only in the university libraries.

This year the Tel Aviv Cinematheque screened the fascinating film by Ari Libsker, Stalags: Holocaust and Pornography in Israel, about the phenomenon that I remember from my childhood in the 1960s, of a wave of erotic books in which male prisoners had sexual relations with female Nazi officers that won unprecedented popularity. This was a commercial success and agile Israeli publishers came out at that time with about 100 books that became part of the secret sexual education of adolescent children of Holocaust survivors.

Libsker's investigation probed deeply into this strange phenomenon and revealed the connection between this porn and the official position of the state that had inadvertently created an hallucinatory world of fatal attraction between the executioner and the victims. Thus, in boys' masturbatory daydreams in the Israel of the 1960s, the stars were curvaceous Hitlerist women alongside suntanned sabra girls.

It seems that now, 66 years after the slaughter of my grandfathers and grandmothers, the memory of the horror is freeing itself from the hermetical, mythical shell that was erected by the state that arose on the ruins. "Without the Holocaust and without Hitler, the dream of the visionary of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, would not have come true," wrote one of the 'talkbackists' - that's what they are called in Hebrew ­ - in the polemic on Mein Kampf.

In unbridled Israel the internet 'talkbackists' ­ have the status of the voice of the people and under the cover of anonymity they say what is not spoken aloud under the implicit rules of political correctness.

Berlin is once again a favoured destination of many young people here, like London was in the 1960s, even though a year earlier many of them might have gone on a roots trip to Auschwitz. Others are trying to renew their grandfathers' German citizenship. Everything exists together: the new Israeli is both a grandchild of the victims and also a soldier in the territories, aware of the dark side of his soul, and when my 18-year-old son wants to say of a movie that it is really bad, he says: "Shoa" - Holocaust. ·