I have just finished reading “Fatherland” by Robert Harris, a police procederal set in 1964 in a Germany that has won the war. The idea for the book came to him while covering the “Hitler Diaries” affair as a journalist. Here is the synopsis of the book from Amazon:
Berlin, 1964. The Greater German Reich stretches from the Rhine to the Urals, and keeps an uneasy peace with its nuclear rival, the United States. As the Fatherland prepares for a grand celebration honoring Adolf Hitler’s seventy-fifth birthday and anticipates a conciliatory visit from U.S. president Joseph Kennedy and ambassador Charles Lindbergh, a detective of the Kriminalpolizei is called out to investigate the discovery of a dead body in a lake near Berlin’s most prestigious suburb.
But when Xavier March discovers the identity of the body, he also uncovers signs of a conspiracy that could go to the very top of the German Reich. And, with the Gestapo just one step behind, March, together with the American journalist Charlotte Maguire, is caught up in a race to discover and reveal the truth—a truth that has already killed, a truth that could topple governments, a truth that will change history.
It was a fascinating read, with historical actors at a time when outside fiction they had already been dead for varying timespans. The book does not distort history: No historically bad guys were white-washed, and no historically good guys were turned into monsters. The most surprising aspect of the book is that the world seems so far unaware of what has become of Europe’s Jews – they are assumed to have vanished into the vast territories somewhere to the east.
I was impressed with the care the author took with the German words used throughout the book — he’s the first English-speaking author I have come across to use the proper plural of “Autobahn“: “Autobahnen“, not “Autobahns“.
The book became an instant bestseller in the English-speaking world; its reception in Germany was initially rather negative it was widely considered anti-German (Der Spiegel: a “demonization of the Federal Republic”), and no German publisher wanted to touch it; it was published in Switzerland, and only years later the paperback was published by a German publisher. I did not think it was anti-German nor a demonization, but this shows how hard and painful it still is for Germans and Austrians[1] to be reminded of their guilty national heritage. Eventually a more objective reception prevailed.
I shall not bother to find and watchthe movie version: according to Wikipedia it does not faithfully follow the original, and has a totally different ending.
Fatherland, by Robert Harris, Hutchinson, London, 1992, https://a.co/d/2vJ1Kl8
__________- (I explicitly mention Austria here because, contrary to the popular myth in this country that Austria was the first victim of the Nazis, many Austrians were involved in the atrocities of the Third Reich, starting with Hitler himself. One of the main figures in the book is the Carinthian Odilo Globocnik, Gauleiter in Vienna and then SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district of the General Government (Poland).[↩]