From the back cover:
Japanese reporter Sohei Toge returns to his homeland, where he finally learns the secret that led to his brother’s brutal murder at the hands of the Gestapo. But now the Japanese secret police are on his tail, and the SS officer who tortured him in Germany has followed him to Japan to hush him up—permanently!

As fate would have it, Yukie Kaufmann, the Japanese widow of a high-ranking German Nazi, is Sohei’s only hope for survival. Meanwhile, Yukie’s son, Adolf, is being brainwashed by his teachers at an elite German school for the Hitler Youth. Why are they trying to make him hate Jews, including his best friend, Adolf Kamil!?

Review:
As the second volume of Tezuka’s masterful Adolf begins, two years have passed since the death of reporter Sohei Toge’s brother, Isao. Isao was in possession of documents that he believed would bring down Hitler, and Toge is trying to fulfill his promise to ensure that it happens.

Toge finally succeeds in locating the documents in the beginning of the volume, but his life rapidly deteriorates from there as Nazis, secret police, and foreign agents converge on him to try to claim the papers for themselves. He’s tortured, watched day and night, fired from his job, ousted from his residence, and ends up a destitute day laborer who experiences periodic visits from one especially determined investigator named Akabane.

All of this is quite riveting, but the accumulation of bad luck as hardship after hardship is heaped upon Toge makes for a painful read. When he’s mistakenly arrested for arson after losing the documents, his spirits are finally broken and he doesn’t even care if he’s charged and sent away. Of course, no rest waits for Toge, and after a brief interval in jail, he returns to a life of running, train-hopping, deserted islands, and shootouts, though with a kindly police detective on his side.

Most of this volume focuses on Toge, whose action-heavy story reads like a thriller and can be enjoyed extensively on that level. More disturbing and subtle are the glimpses we get of Adolf Kaufmann, whom we last saw as he was being unwillingly shipped off to the Adolf Hitler Schule to learn to be a good Nazi. While Adolf is doing exceptionally well academically, his tolerant attitude toward Jews doesn’t sit well with the school administrators. His top grades entitle him to receive an award from Hitler himself, and after a brief time in that charismatic man’s company, he comes out a changed boy, writing to his mother of his desire to shed blood for Germany, and beginning to parrot the rhetoric he’s read and heard about the inferiority of other races.

It was inevitable that Kaufmann’s innocence would be corrupted in this way, and there’s really nothing else he could do in such circumstances, but his transformation is, to me, a greater tragedy than the death of Isao or all of the misfortunes Toge endures. With his depiction of Kaufmann, Tezuka seems to have some sympathy for the regular citizens who were swept up in Nazi fervor, not unlike Americans who oppose the war but still support the troops who are waging it. We typically think of Nazis as the personification of evil, but the real truth is not so black-and-white.

My one regret with this volume is that it does not further the story of Adolf Kamil, the Jew living with his family in Kobe, at all. We know little of him, compared to Toge and Kaufmann, so perhaps he is not meant to be a star in his own right, but rather to represent a constant about which Kaufmann’s feelings will radically change through his experience in the Hitler Youth. The volume’s introduction does mention the racism he experiences as a non-Asian living in Japan, however, so perhaps there will be more to come later on.

I would not hesitate to call Adolf a manga classic. Like the best classics, it’s not only required reading, it’s also absorbing and unforgettable.

From the back cover:
On the eve of World War II, the destinies of three men named “Adolf”—including the infamous dictator of Germany’s Third Reich—became inexorably intertwined…

Review:
I had already requested Adolf via interlibrary loan when Connie posted her excellent review of the series at Manga Recon. You can see what she has to say about it here.

In this later work, serialized between 1983 and 1985, Tezuka masterfully intertwines the stories of three men (though two are technically boys) named Adolf. The story begins in the summer of 1936, when Japanese journalist Sohei Toge is in Berlin covering the Olympics. His brother, Isao, is enrolled at the university there and when a suspenseful competition keeps Sohei from making it to a prearranged meeting with his brother, he arrives a couple of hours late to find his Isao’s body in a tree with what seems to be plaster dust under his nails, a clue that reminds Toge of the murder of a geisha he reported on back in Japan. Some policemen promptly show up and carry the body off, but when Toge makes his own way to the precinct they claimed to be from, nobody knows anything about the incident.

Thus begins Toge’s quest to find out what happened, aided by some initials Isao left behind on a scrap of paper, anonymous phone calls, and a woman named Rita who claims she was in love with Isao until he became obsessed with some radical groups on campus. In a riveting sequence, Toge is captured by Nazis just as he locates his brother’s body in a shallow grave and is tortured because, it is revealed later, Isao didn’t have what they were looking for and they believe he managed to pass it on to his brother. Toge’s story comes to a pause in 1936 after he brutally beats and, it is implied, rapes Rita after discovering her true allegiances. Probably we are supposed to excuse this because of all of his anger, fear, and frustration, but it (and the aftermath) is really quite horrible.

Next, the setting shifts to Japan where we encounter two boys named Adolf living in the city of Kobe. Adolf Kaufmann is the son of a German father and Japanese mother. His dad is a staunch Nazi supporter and forbids his son from befriending Adolf Kamil, a Jewish boy whose family runs a bakery. Kauffman can’t understand why it isn’t okay to play with Adolf, since he’s German too, and some poignant moments ensue when people attempt to essentially destroy his innocence with their views of Jews as an inferior race. Kamil’s parents aren’t keen on his friendship with Kaufmann, either. The boys’ story intertwines with that of Toge because Kaufmann’s dad is involved both with the murder of the geisha as well as the search for the information Isao was supposedly in possession of, and when, in 1938, the boys stumble upon this revolutionary bit of information, the fallout isn’t pleasant and ultimately results in Kaufmann being reluctantly shipped off to Germany to attend a school for Hitler youth.

As Connie attested in her review, Adolf is quite amazing. Tezuka’s storytelling is supremely skilled, combining passages of narration with an economical and cinematic visual flow that sweeps one along quite effortlessly. There are no awkward moments, nothing unnecessary, and though one might wish for a little more time spent on, say, the anguish of Adolf Kaufmann’s mother as her world falls apart, the fact remains that she is but a small part of this epic tale. In this grim world, only the children are truly innocent, but one wonders how long that will last; although the boys plan to reunite and remain friends, Kaufmann will undoubtedly be changed by his experiences in Germany while the security of Kamil’s parents in Kobe might be in peril.

By reading only the first volume, I feel I’ve just barely scratched the surface on what will surely develop to be an incredible series. Some awful things occur here, and some awful things are set in motion, and yet reading Adolf ultimately is a pleasurable experience simply because it is so very well done. Rest assured that, even before I finished this volume, my ILL request for volume two was submitted.