It is
1964, and Nazi Germany, having won the war eighteen years ago, dominates the
world.
To be sure, the war isn’t quite over. Far to the east, the USSR
may have been pushed back beyond the Urals, but partisans carry on a vicious
guerrilla war and regularly raid and massacre German settler families. Train loads
of corpses of German troops return stealthily in the dead of night, hidden from
the eyes of the common citizenry. But for the average German, the war is long
since won.
Berlin, reconstructed after the end of the
war, is the greatest city in history. The immense domes and gates of Albert
Speer’s architecture tower over the skyline, while the streets are crowded with
tourists from Western Europe and Japan. All the other nations of Europe,
barring neutral Switzerland, are ruled by German vassals. Germany’s post war
victory seems complete.
The only competition for Germany from
anywhere is the United States of America, which is covertly aiding the Soviet
guerrillas and which, having nuked Japan into surrender in 1945, was forced to
a reluctant peace the following year only when Hitler exploded a nuclear
missile over New York City to prove that he could retaliate effectively. But in 1964, the USA is looking for an
opportunity to make peace with Germany, too.
It is April 1964, and it’s almost time for
the greatest annual holiday, Adolf Hitler’s birthday on the 20th.
The Führer of the Reich will be 75, and from all over the land, people are
pouring in to celebrate the occasion. And as a further proof of how well things
are going, an announcement is made that President Joseph Kennedy will be
arriving in Berlin to meet the aging Hitler and sign an agreement solidifying
the detente between the two remaining powers and an end to the Cold War between
them.
By this time, the old order is passing.
Though Hitler still lives, most of his cronies have disappeared from the scene.
Hermann Göring, Reichsmarschall of the Luftwaffe, is long dead, and his name
adorns Berlin’s main airport. Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer of the SS, the
Gestapo, and the entire German security apparatus, was killed in a plane
crash/explosion a couple of years before (which would
have actually been a compelling story in itself). His erstwhile
deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, is Reichsführer now, but all along the line the old
thugs are being replaced by younger, smoother, well-educated Aryan supermen who
dislike soiling their hands with blood.
German society is also changing. Though the
Nazi Party’s hold is unchallenged, liberalism is sneaking in with long hair,
jeans, pop music (a “group from Liverpool” has apparently held a concert
recently in Hamburg); anti-Nazi graffiti tends to appear on walls, though how
it does so given the overwhelming presence of the security state is an
unexplained mystery. Uniforms are everywhere; every two bit organisation (even
one of falconers, and another of German mothers) has its own uniform. And the
educational system is geared towards making Hitler a demigod from the early school
level, despite which the “Negroid” pop music and other liberal influences still
have managed to take hold.
It is at this point that the corpse of a
minor Nazi official is found washed up on the shore of a lake in a posh Berlin
suburb, and Xavier March, investigator with the Criminal Police (Kriminalpolizei, or Kripo), is given
charge of the case...
An interesting set-up, wouldn’t you think?
Something that could be made into a really good examination of how things might
have turned out?
So did I when I started reading Robert
Harris’ Fatherland. And that’s why I am
reviewing it at all – I only review books I really, really like or really,
really dislike. I’ll leave you to guess which category this one falls into.
Before I go on further, let’s discuss the
story in a little more detail.
********************************************************
Xavier March,
the “hero” of the book, a former U Boat officer turned policeman, is
increasingly embittered and disenchanted with his masters. His career has
flatlined because he refuses to join the Nazi Party – apparently a prerequisite
for promotion – contribute to Nazi fund raising drives, or even show sufficient
enthusiasm for his son Pili’s activities in the junior wing of the Hitler
Youth. He has even made the solecism of asking about the whereabouts of a
Jewish family whose photograph he found; in the world of this book, the Jews of
Europe have vanished, and nobody cares to ask where they went or what happened
to them.
The mother of his son, March’s ex-wife, is
seeing another man and resents her former partner’s right to spend any time
with Pili at all. March lives in a cheerless flat, smokes compulsively (the
book’s favourite line, endlessly repeated, seems to be “He lit another
cigarette”) and is aware that he’s being watched by the Gestapo as a likely
undesirable. That he holds the rank of Major (Sturmbannführer) in the SS is immaterial; all Kripo investigators
are automatically given that rank as a matter of course.
When he’s called out in the early hours of
the morning, by mistake – the duty officer has mixed up rosters and it’s his
partner Jäger (or Jaeger) who was to have taken the call – March finds the
obese, almost naked body of the dead man, who had apparently gone swimming, by
the lakeside. The corpse was found by a young SS trainee called Jost who was
out on his morning jog.
A clear open and shut case of drowning, one
might have thought. However, if that were so, the book would have stopped right
there, so of course it’s not a clear open and shut case of drowning.
March soon discovers that the dead body was
of one Josef Buhler, formerly part of the Nazi government in the German colony
of Poland, and that he was a recluse who lived in an opulent fortified
residence on an island in the lake which is also inhabited by numerous other
top Nazi officials. As soon as he’s identified the body, though, he’s ordered
off the case by the Gestapo, which proclaims that it’s taking over the
investigation.
Incredibly, this disaffected cop with so
much on his mind does not give up the
investigation, despite a clear order, and insists – knowing he is already under
suspicion – on continuing the case by himself. One would have thought he was
looking for a way to get himself into a concentration camp, something his son
has already told him is likely to happen. He totally illegally breaks into
Buhler’s residence, as illegally searches it, and discovers clues that the
death was more suspicious than appeared at first sight; Buhler, a teetotaller,
had apparently been drinking heavily, someone had clubbed his dog unconscious
and left it confined in the kitchen, and his artificial foot – the legacy of a
Russian guerrilla attack – is floating by the side of his private dock. While he’s
looking at all this, the house is visited by three high ranking SS officers,
one of whom is a general whom he recognises as Odilo Globocnik (“Globus”) – an
Austrian SS thug who actually existed in real life, by the way.
Having managed to get away from Globus and
the others, March visits Jost at the barracks, and accuses him of being a
homosexual; his “evidence” is that Jost took far too long to run the three
kilometres that he claimed to have run before discovering Buhler’s body, so
there’s a gap of fifteen minutes which is unexplained unless the trainee had
been secretly meeting a lover. It’s obvious to anyone who actually understands
the metric system that this is only evidence that Robert Harris has no idea
what a “kilometre” is or how long it might take to run one. In any case, Jost
breaks down and admits that he actually saw Globus and his men planting Buhler’s
corpse in the water. Shortly after this, Jost disappears, sent off to the
Russian front by Globus to get rid of the witness.
Carrying on the investigation on his own
bat, March discovers that Buhler was part of a four man group of ex-Nazi
officials, all of whom retired, quite affluently, in the mid-1950s and of whom
two others have recently met with sticky ends. The body of one of these,
Stuckart, was discovered by an American journalist named Charlotte “Charlie”
Maguire (who is, needless to say, brave, young, and beautiful; I will have something
to say about this young, beautiful, brave American trope later on in this
review) who was on her way to “interview” the dead man and arrived only just in
time to see his killers leaving. Officially, however, Stuckart has committed
suicide.
Meeting Maguire, March without any great
difficulty “persuades” her to join in – again (illegally) breaking into the dead
man’s flat, where they then recruit the services of a safecracker and March’s
partner Jaeger to (illegally) crack the dead man’s safe, which for some reason
the Gestapo investigators seem to have failed to discover. Astonishing how many
things the Gestapo fails to find in the world of this book, just like how many
illegal things March, who is aware that he’s already under suspicion, seems to
do compulsively. They discover a key to a bank locker in Zurich, in the neutral
state of Switzerland, but Jaeger and March are arrested by the Gestapo before
they can escape. The Kripo chief, Arthur (or Artur) Nebe, Globus’ rival, gets
them out of the SS’ clutches and gives March a 24 hour exit visa to go to Switzerland
and find out what the locker contains. This locker is jointly owned by the four
Nazi officials mentioned, of whom by now three are dead, one, Martin Luther, is
missing and presumably on the run, and all of whom are implicated in an art
theft racket dating back when they were members of the Nazi regime in Poland.
Maguire attaches herself to March for this
trip to Zurich, initially strongly against his wishes, and they end up finally
and very predictably sleeping together. The bank locker is empty except for a
painting, but Martin Luther was there a few days earlier and presumably removed
something.
To cut a long and rambling story short, it
turns out that the four Nazis were part of a 14 man group which was invited to
a conference in Wannsee in January 1942 – a conference which actually happened –
at which the order was passed for the “Final Solution” (Endlösung) of the “Jewish Problem”. Actually, as any historian will
tell you, the organised extermination of the Jews had begun directly after the
invasion of the USSR in June 1941, but in the world of this book it all boiled
down to this conference. Apparently, ever since the end of the war, these 14
officials are being killed one by one, in order to silence them; it seems that
to Harris, killing 14 men is quite sufficient to make all the evidence of the
organised mass murder of the Jews (the so-called “Holocaust”, a term I no
longer use owing to its employment as a shield by the illegitimate Zionist colonial
apartheid regime in Occupied Palestine) disappear. The commandants, guards and
executioners at the camps, the drivers and staff of the trains carrying the
Jews to the camps (Harris actually exhaustively discusses the railway timetables) don’t matter. The only thing
that’s necessary is to kill these 14, and all evidence of the mass murder
evaporates like the morning mist. And Globocnik, acting under the orders of
Himmler’s successor Reinhard Heydrich, is determined to make that happen.
And why should
the evidence be made to vanish anyway? Well, President Kennedy is coming to
town, and if the news of the Jews’ fate got out, it seems that the entire
detente and the end of the Cold War would be called off...
As an insurance against being made
scapegoats for the massacre of the Jews, Luther and the other three had
apparently got together a file of “evidence”, including such incontrovertible, unimpeachable proof as
affidavits, rail timetables and a crudely drawn map of the long since destroyed
camp at Auschwitz, and are planning to use this as a way to get themselves
asylum in America. You know, the kind of evidence which will make or break
history. March and Maguire plan to get this file to Switzerland and then to
America, where it would be made public and blow the end of the Cold War apart.
I’d like to say that I won’t include
spoilers, but ask yourself this: in a contest between the Evil Nazis and a
young! brave!! beautiful!!! American!!!! heroine, exactly how likely is it that she will not win?
********************************************************
In the
genre of Alternate History tales, the Nazi Germany Won WWII subtrope is
probably the most dominant. I’ve read others of the genre, and the quality has
varied wildly from the very, very bad, to the passable. But they all seem to
have some features in common.
The first of those features seems to be a
compulsory attempt to show that the regime is doomed as a direct consequence of
the actions of the protagonists. Apparently, this enormously successful
political movement and military machine, having destroyed all competition and
assimilated most of Europe, is also so fragile that it can be brought down by
the actions of a few people, among whom is a Compulsory Heroic American.
I’m serious. The inclusion of a heroic
American, even in a story very much not
written by an American, seems to be essential for this kind of tale. Len
Deighton’s SS-GB, about a
German-occupied Britain, had one; so did even the otherwise good science
fiction story The Pacific Mystery by Stephen Baxter, which however played
with the formula enough to make the American hero though young and brave, male and not particularly handsome, and also had the temerity to make him fail at his appointed task (though it
ends up making no difference either way to the plot). But that’s a major
subversion. The typical American in these Nazi-fighting books is almost always
a dashing young beauty who is incredibly adept at all she does (Maguire has
lightning fast reflexes, can fight off a Gestapo assassin, is an expert at disguising
herself with make-up, and has dissimulation skills at the equivalent of a
trained propagandist), and will let nothing come in her way.
In fact so annoying is this character type,
and so prevalent, that I have pretty much made up my mind to write my own
Alternate History Nazi story which will not only not exclude any such woman,
but will have no room for any American
citizen whatsoever.
The second is the conceit that there’s always
one nation which stands against Nazi domination of the world, and that nation
is always America. For instance, here in this book, as I said, it’s the
remarkable idea that America will instantly rise up in anger at the idea of a
detente with Nazi Germany if only it finds out what really happened to the Jews
that’s at the core of the plot, the driving force.
More than anything else, it’s this which in
my mind is the book’s biggest failure. If there’s anything at all we know about
the United States of America – more properly called the Imperialist States of
Amerikastan – it’s that it’s more than happy, nay, ecstatic, to ally with
criminal genocidal regimes as long as the end results benefit Wall Street.
Nothing, but nothing, comes in the way of Wall Street profit, and as for the
Jews, one ought to recall that Amerikastan turned back Jewish refugees from
Europe in the 1930s, and that when the Red Army actually liberated Auschwitz in
January 1945 and revealed its horrors to the world, the Western part of the
Allies at first treated the news as “Russian propaganda”.
Of course, in reality, nothing as
unimportant as the mass murder of Jews – already finished decades ago in the
world of this book – would influence an American detente with Germany where
trade and profits were at stake. Since there would not be any so-called state
of “Israel” (as the Zionist colonial racist settler project in Occupied
Palestine is known) that would not be in the calculations at all. Even today,
keeping the American people supporting “Israel” requires an enormous, and
increasingly ineffective, amount of money and effort. It’s beyond laughable
that they would turn away with revulsion from Nazi Germany if they knew the
Jews were dead, when they hadn’t when said Nazi Germany reduced most of Europe
to vassal status and was fighting an endless genocidal imperialistic war in the
East.
It’s more than obvious that these Nazi Alternate
History books are written for the American market, and to please America. There’s
absolutely never an evil American character in these books; they’re all good
people. Even here, there is an embassy staffer who turns out to be a good guy despite
spending half the book under suspicion of collaboration with the Germans. In
this case it’s especially glaring because the edition I read (thankfully a copy
borrowed from the library, which means none of my money went to pay for it) was
an American edition. Each time I read a book that was translated from English
to Americanish, I want to ask why the reverse process never seems to occur. Why
do British publishers, when they republish American books, never seem to want
to translate them into English?
It’s not just the language; even the dates
are flipped around into Americanish from the normal (and European) day/month/year
configuration, and American “units” of measurement are painfully jacked in wherever the book
can manage it. That’s in addition to the fact, as I said, that the author
himself apparently has little understanding of the metric system.
Normally, I’d have not bothered reviewing
this book, relegating it to the trash file. But what made it unforgivable was
the author’s setting up this wonderful backdrop, and then screwing it up so
totally.
Can you imagine what he might have done
with the following plot line, for
instance?
As the 75th birthday of Adolf
Hitler approaches, with the Führer becoming increasingly infirm in health, it’s
obvious that he isn’t much longer for this world. The struggle for succession,
in abeyance for years, heats up again. Then, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, one
of the top men in the regime and the presumptive heir, is killed in a
mysterious plane crash. Who did it? Communist guerrillas? Reichsmarschall
Hermann Göring, still officially a member of the Nazi inner circle though
insignificant for years? Field Marshal Rommel, the increasingly marginalised
head of the Army? Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Gestapo chief and Reinhard Heydrich’s
second in command (and an even more ruthless and brutal character than Heydrich
himself)? Martin Bormann, Hitler’s secretary and the de facto dictator of
Germany, desperate to preserve his own power by eliminating all rivals?
Xavier March, an investigator with the
Kripo, is called in by the chief of police, Arthur Nebe – acting under direct
orders of Hitler – and given the job of investigating. Armed with little more
than his own intelligence and a letter from Hitler himself demanding that
the bearer be given full assistance, he goes to work...
No American characters. No irrelevant
ultra-accomplished heroines. Just a detective story, which, as it goes,
explores the world of a Nazi-run Germany.
How easily this book could have been that
book, and how unforgivable that it was not.
Note: There
is, it seems, a film of this book, starring Rutger Hauer as Xavier March. I can
wait to watch it...I can wait forever.
