Discuss @RyanF 's latest review here
Great review, I wasn’t really into AH when I read Fatherland, nor was I that aware of Robert Harris but now I’m big fans of both it’s always going to be special for me. I think that whilst you point out the Nazi victory scenario was arguably overdone even prior to its release Fatherland has arguably shaped the scope of such scenarios more than any other work. It’s no coincidence that so many Nazi victory TLs seem to stall around 1964.
On Heydrich, I’ve seen it theorised that his survival is actually the PoD with him going on to influence the discovery that Enigma had been cracked. Plausibility wise the scenario doesn’t really hold up but Nazi victory scenarios are always going to suffer from that, and it’s vague enough to imply that Harris was aware of this, or at least was more focused on telling an interesting story in a well crafted dystopia than proving that the Nazis could have won the war.
I think one failing point is how Harris acknowledges that the Nazis were never going to make General Plan Ost work properly with most of the settlers either returning home or being murdered and the new border with the rump USSR being far too massive to effectively control but holds back on portraying it as a disaster zone or that important.
If the cornerstone of Nazi policy is acknowledged as a failure and the death toll in trying to make it happen is high enough for the freaking Nazis to worry about the public losing faith and so subtly pretend nothing is really happening one way or the other...I think that could use more exploration.
The world building is rather interesting but I think that as great as the book is (and it is great) plausibility is not the only short coming, the setting is bit underwhelming. Total Nazi domination of Europe is portrayed as kind of tame, the colonization efforts of the east have failed but aren't worth expanding on at all and suddenly the Holocaust is the thing that threatens to break it all apart? I guess its just I feel even on its own terms the book doesn't live up to its promise.
There's plenty of other aspects of the world Harris created I'd like to see more on. The coming generation of Germans that did not live through either World War strikes me as being a great idea as well. The fact that the Fab Four are playing in Hamburg and are big enough to make the papers but similar enough to their OTL counterparts to be decried, the fact the White Rose is active again, that there's a new crop of university educated SS technocrats in ascendancy. What's life like in the UK of this TL twenty years after being starved into surrender is another? Was there ever a Hungarian Revolution type situation ITTL with one of the Nazi puppet states?
With regard to the Holocaust breaking everything apart, we only have March's final hallucination that Maguire made it out. Even if it breaks the international news it will still be very difficult for it to penetrate the Reich proper or even Europe. Even if they did I wonder if it would break it apart more than inspire the new generation of White Rose et al. into some direct action akin to our own 1960s student movements.
I mean it could be that the combination of these two leads to an attempt at *Prague in London.
Huh, I had never noticed until now that the first UK edition of the book featured the flag of the European Union next to the Nazi one on its cover. Because why waste an opportunity to associate European integration with Nazi Germany, it's not like that will ever be taken seriously by anyone down the line.
It's called the Community in the book is it? I mean, that's even odder in some ways.It's the flag of the European Community, which is described in the book to be the same as that of the EU. Harris himself was a fervent remainer so I wouldn't try to read anything into it.
It's called the Community in the book is it? I mean, that's even odder in some ways.
Why would any Nazi-backed pan-European organisation use that same symbolism given its OTL origins? I know even otherwise intelligent authors can have absurdly convergent things, but it really did feel like it was making some kind of very unsubtle political point - so Harris' actual views just knock the last prop away from a distasteful but at least logical explanation of its use.
The Nazis in Harris' book were making nice to the Americans and there was rumblings about Europeans all being one big family so send conscripts to the urals please.It's called the Community in the book is it? I mean, that's even odder in some ways.
Why would any Nazi-backed pan-European organisation use that same symbolism given its OTL origins? I know even otherwise intelligent authors can have absurdly convergent things, but it really did feel like it was making some kind of very unsubtle political point - so Harris' actual views just knock the last prop away from a distasteful but at least logical explanation of its use.
I'm not blaming Harris, but in the story the alternate European Community is a completely incidental detail, so what I wonder about is the ulterior motive of featuring the flag prominently on the cover, when it would have been just as good to have the swastika alone. Not to mention that a European organization of states in a victorious Nazi TL would have absolutely nothing in common with its OTL counterpart, whose founders were all former opponents to Nazism. So the flag would be different too.It's the flag of the European Community, which is described in the book to be the same as that of the EU. Harris himself was a fervent remainer so I wouldn't try to read anything into it.
Um.. the European organisation of states was partly the brainchild of the Reich foreign office as mentioned above. Rudolph Hess and the Haushofers were also among its intellectual fathers and Josef Burkel was a very keen euro federalist who kept Robert Schumann as his personal prisoner for most of the war (presumably with a view to making use of him). And I read a very good book on the Speer Bichelonne talks twenty years ago which traced the histories of a lot of the minor participants. The odious but influential and euro federalist Ernst Aschenbach was one and two others- the legal counsel to the German army of occupation and one of the top men in the French railways (who to be fair was also a Resistant by night) went on to be European Commissioners. And a lot of the others went on to head up either French or German industry organisations or big corporations.I'm not blaming Harris, but in the story the alternate European Community is a completely incidental detail, so what I wonder about is the ulterior motive of featuring the flag prominently on the cover, when it would have been just as good to have the swastika alone. Not to mention that a European organization of states in a victorious Nazi TL would have absolutely nothing in common with its OTL counterpart, whose founders were all former opponents to Nazism. So the flag would be different too.
I mean, none of the other editions of the book do it, so why this one?
I'm not blaming Harris, but in the story the alternate European Community is a completely incidental detail, so what I wonder about is the ulterior motive of featuring the flag prominently on the cover,
Not to mention that a European organization of states in a victorious Nazi TL would have absolutely nothing in common with its OTL counterpart, whose founders were all former opponents to Nazism. So the flag would be different too.
This is getting dangerously similar to those Christians who analyze random rock lyrics to prove that the artists are in league with Satan.I'm not blaming Harris, but in the story the alternate European Community is a completely incidental detail, so what I wonder about is the ulterior motive of featuring the flag prominently on the cover, when it would have been just as good to have the swastika alone. Not to mention that a European organization of states in a victorious Nazi TL would have absolutely nothing in common with its OTL counterpart, whose founders were all former opponents to Nazism. So the flag would be different too.
I mean, none of the other editions of the book do it, so why this one?
This is getting dangerously similar to those Christians who analyze random rock lyrics to prove that the artists are in league with Satan.
"The Number of the Beast"? Satanic? Never!