Robert Harris’s “Fatherland” (320 pages. Random House. $21) is, thankfully, fiction. His dystopian tale of a world under Nazi dominance has been a British best seller since May, and is climbing The New York Times list. In Harris’s scenario, the postwar Nazi regime is creaking and corrupt, the population dispirited by unending war against Russian partisans in the Urals. The novel’s improbable hero is SS detective Xavier March, a closet dissident who investigates a string of murders involving senior Nazi Party officials, falling in love along the way with a gutsy American correspondent and uncovering documents that prove the Holocaust occurred. Harris makes compelling use of historic evidence, casting the Nazi officials who came up with the plan for the Holocaust at the infamous 1942 Wannsee conference in Berlin as the murder victims in his novel. One of the most chilling passages in “Fatherland” is a genuine quote from an SS officer who says of the Holocaust: “If some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed.”
Harris also plays off contemporary fears of a resurgent Germany, describing a Europe where “people drove German cars … worked in German-owned factories, moaned about the behavior of German tourists.” While he was working on the book in the mid ’80s, Harris’s bold fantasy was overtaken by reality. Germany unified, the Soviet Union collapsed and the old Central European satellites were drawn back into their historical orbit around the powerful German economy. “One by one, Hitler’s war goals have been recognized,” says Harris. “You can’t overlook the historic similarities.”
Some Germans would like to. Twenty-five German publishers rejected the novel before a Swiss publisher bought German-language rights. One German newspaper accused Harris of confusing Germany’s attempts to come to terms with the past, with non-Germans’ difficulty in coming to terms with the present. Another called the book “frivolous tastelessness.” Still, the world’s fascination with the Third Reich seems insatiable. Last week London’s Sunday Times began excerpting the memoirs of Hitler’s propagandist Joseph Goebbels, after commissioning right-wing historian David Irving to transcribe his scrawl. And a German TV program set off a forensic scavenger hunt when it reported that Hitler’s and Goebbels’s remains were buried near the eastern German city of Magdeburg. For those who can’t get enough of the fuhrer, “Fatherland” provides an intriguing way to look at Germany’s never-buried past.
