The Annotated Ubermensch

Kim Newman's short story "Ubermensch!" first appeared in New Worlds 1 (Gollancz)

... in which the Nazi hunter Avram Blumenthal visits the superhuman Ubermensch, held prisoner for the past forty-five years in a castle fortified with glowing green radiation, the Ubermensch's only weakness. The two men discuss the Ubermensch's career and his position as a symbol of the Nazi regime. They agree that the world no longer needs heroes, and Avram presents Ubermensch with a way to end his imprisonment: a metal slug consisting of the fatally radioactive substance, coated with lead. In a last act of will, Ubermensch pops the slug in his mouth, biting through the lead casing. "He died like a man," Avram observes. "Which, all considered, was quite an achievement."

"Gleaming skyscrapers still rose to the clouds, aircars flitting awkwardly between them ... The robotrix on traffic duty ... had been limping ... sparks pouring from her burnished copper thigh. Standing on the tarmac, Avram had realised that the pounding in the ground was stilled. The subterranean factories and power plants had been destroyed or shut down during the war." -- this passage is evocative of the Fritz Lang film Metropolis.

"That used to be East Metropolis" -- the city we see is an amalgam of German Impressionist futurism and real-world Berlin reality.

"Captain Siegel called himself Jewish, and babbled sincere admiration. 'As a child, you were my hero, sir. That's why I'm here. When you caught Eichmann, Mengele, the Red Skull ... '" -- the character is named for Jerry Siegel, one of the original creators of Superman. The protagonist Avram Blumethal's history involves tracking down real-life war criminals as well as (other company's!) costumed villains.

"That's the lesson of this green lantern." -- the green lantern in question is a mediaeval castle which uses a Kryptonite force-field, although the word usage is doubtless not accidental.

"Avram remembered Rotwang ... toiling over the cyclotron, trying to wrestle free the secrets of the extra-terrestrial element [the word 'Kryptonite' is not actually used in the story]. Rotwang, with his metal hand and shock of hair ... another man of tomorrow raging against the imprisonment of yesterday." -- the name comes from the villain of the film Metropolis, so the character is in a sense a 'man of tomorrow' ... as is, implicitly, Ubermensch, using a common nickname for Superman. A later quote from the story refers to Rotwang's robots. He has plainly been placed as the Lex Luthor analog.

"Others had fathered the K-Bomb." -- the closest we get to a naming of Kryptonite.

"When the brought him in, he filled the room. His chest was a solid slab under his prison fatigues, and the jaw was an iron horseshoe. Not the faintest trace of grey in his blue-black hair, the kiss-curl still a jaunty comma. The horn-rimmed glasses couldn't disguise him." -- the iconic hero is always recognisable.

"Avram the Avenger" -- so the protagonist is called, though I don't know of any source material on him.

"He remembered the old uniform, so familiar in the thirties. The light brown body-stocking, with black trunks, boots and cloak. A black swastika in the red circle on the chest. He'd grinned down from a hundred propaganda posters like an Aryan demi-god, strode through the walkways of Metropolis as Siegfried reborn with x-ray eyes." -- this version of the uniform dispenses with the standard coloring, rather evoking the vigilante Brown Shirts of Nazi Germany.

"Maybe my dart should have struck the wheatfields of Kansas, or the jungles of Africa. I could have done worse than be raised by apes." -- a sad evocation of Ubermensch's other histories, and an allusion to Tarzan (and Karkan) as well.

"Curt Kessler was -- what is the American expression? -- 4F. A weakling who wouldn't be accepted, even in the last days when dotards and children were being slapped in uniform and tossed against the juggernaut." -- his secret identity utilising the same initials as Clark Kent, he also maintained the cowardly act.

"Do you remember my enemies? Dr. Mabuse? His criminal empire was like a spider's web. The Fuhrer himself asked me to root it out and destroy it. He poisoned young Germans with drugs and spiritualism. Was I wrong to persecute him? And the others? Graf von Orlok, the nosferatu? Dr. Caligari, and his somnambulist killers? The child-slayer they called 'M'? Stephen Orlac, the pianist with the murderer's hands?" -- rather than translating the standard Superman foes into German, Ubermensch's career pitted him against the great terrors of German Impressionist cinema ... one of my favorite touches in the story, as it gives the character a unique (and uniquely German) history.

"Avram remembered, the names bringing back Tages Welt headlines. Most of the stories had borne the Curt Kessler byline. Everyone had wondered how the reporter knew so many details." -- Tages Welt translates as Daily Planet, where Kessler is employed as a reporter.

"Mabuse was like the hydra. I'd think he was dead or hopelessly mad, but he'd always come back, always with new deviltry. Perhaps he'll return again. They never found the body." -- Mabuse, hopelessly mad at the end of the first film featuring the character, nevertheless returned in many sequals.

"Johann and Marte." -- Curt Kessler's adoptive parents, variants on Jonathan and Martha Kent.

"I was on Tages Welt when Per Weiss made it a Party paper." -- Per Weiss, variant on Perry White.

"Luise [Lang]? No, if anything, she followed me. The real me, that is. Not Curt. She always despised Curt Kessler." -- the script writer and reporter's alliterative name echoes both Lois Lane and Lana Lang, both of whom mocked Clark Kent while being devoted to Superman.

"There were no other darts, no tests with dogs or little girls. Since Professor Ten Brincken passed away, no one has even tried to duplicate me as a homunculus. That, I admit, was a battle. The distorted, bottle-grown image of me wore me out more than any of the others. More than Mackie Messer's green knives, more than Nosferatu's rat hordes, more even than Ten Brincken's artificial whore Alraune." -- noting the sad lack of companionship of a Krypto or a Supergirl analog. Ten Brincken was a dark scientist in the 1911 novel Alraune (first filmed in 1918) by Hanns Heinz Ewers, in which a dead murderer's sperm is injected into a prostitute, creating a beautiful and deadly femme fatale; here he also seems to have been responsible for a version of Bizarro. Mackie Messer is otherwise known as 'Mack the Knife', from Brecht's The Threepenny Opera.

"Your rabbi Judah ben Bezalel raised the [golem] from clay in Prague, then brought it to Metropolis to kill the Fuhrer. I smashed it." -- Judah Ben Bezalel was the name of the 16th century rabbi of Prague who created the golem; The Golem is another classic German film of the era.

"I saw the singer, Lola ... " -- this would be Lola Lola, The Blue Angel.

As an aside, the independent (alternate-world) superhero series Captain Confederacy referenced a character named Uberman who fought crime in Hauptstadt (a city near New York), in adventures delineated by his German creators "Siegel und Shuster." I speculate that one of these may be the same reality depicted in Batman Chronicles #14 in which Bruce Wayne, a prominent German citizen who is also secretly a Jew, dons a mask to fight fascism as the Fledermaus circa 1939.