The Boy at The Top of the Mountain

Throughout The Boy at the Top of the Mountain, the arts in general and literature in particular provide contrasts to destructive ideologies and actions. They are consistently connected to ideas like home, emotional expression, and personal identity. While Hitler and his Nazi ideology inspire fear and violence, literature and the other arts suggest freedom and kindness.

In their youth, Anshel and Pierrot are devoted to the creation of stories, with Anshel serving as the primary writer and Pierrot as his first reader and editor. The stories they create together symbolize the closeness between the two friends and the powerful sense of home and belonging they share: “[s]o close was their friendship that Pierrot was the only person Anshel allowed to read the stories he wrote” (4).  Later, after the death of his parents and his arrival at the orphanage, Pierrot loses this sense of comfort and security. The book Simone gives him as he departs for Salzburg, Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives, becomes a kind of surrogate; he identifies closely with the protagonist and references to the novel turn up throughout the rest of The Boy at the Top of the Mountain. Thus, it is a literary work that reminds him of “the person he used to be” (72).

As he becomes closer to Hitler, Pierrot eventually rejects Emil, symbolically severing ties with his roots. Just before American soldiers capture him, he miraculously rediscovers the book, symbolizing the start of the return to his roots. References to other literary works appear throughout The Boy at the Top of the Mountain, including Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Alexandre Dumas’ Three Musketeers (Pierrot’s dog D’Artagnan is named after a character from this novel). In an ironic twist, Hitler turns out to appreciate literature as well; he, too, knows Dumas, for instance. He also encourages Pierrot to read, but his suggestions are dogmatic, bigoted works—including Hitler’s own manifesto Mein Kampf and Henry Ford’s anti-Semitic The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem—instead of works of literature inspiring freedom.

References to other arts are present in the novel as well. For instance, Pierrot’s father is a skilled musician, able to bring “tears to the eyes of visitors,” and when he runs into Katarina years later in Amsterdam, she is playing a violin (6). Likewise, Hitler is an aspiring artist, and Berghof is decorated in his paintings, which Katarina mocks. Yet, in the end, literature is primary. The road to Pierrot’s reconciliation with Anshel begins when he passes by a bookstore and discovers the novel written by his old friend. Moreover, the reconciliation between the two friends takes place in the space of literature, as Anshel writes Pierrot’s story.