Fatherland
First edition, 1992
Fatherland (1992) by Robert Harris is set in Berlin in April 1964, twenty years after a Nazi victory in World War II. Germany is preparing for Hitler's seventy-fifth birthday celebrations and a state visit from the American president, whose government is pursuing détente with the Reich in the manner of the Cold War thaw. Xavier March, a Kriminalpolizei homicide investigator, is called to investigate a body pulled from the Havel lake on the city's western outskirts. The dead man turns out to be a senior Nazi official, and the investigation leads March into a conspiracy that reaches the highest levels of the regime and concerns something the Nazi state has gone to extreme lengths to ensure the world never learns. Harris worked from the actual Wannsee Conference documents and the novel's historical framework is meticulously constructed. Adapted for HBO in 1994, directed by Christopher Menaul, with Rutger Hauer and Miranda Richardson.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, boards. London: Hutchinson, 1992. ISBN: 0091748275. #10699.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, boards. London: Hutchinson, 1992. ISBN: 0091748275. #10699.
Fine in fine dust jacket.
Additional Details
Fatherland is structured as a detective thriller, and Harris uses the conventions of that genre with considerable skill. Xavier March is a quietly dissenting figure within the system, a man whose instinct for procedural honesty exists at odds with a system built on concealment and institutional murder. His investigation begins as a routine drowning and widens, through a series of deaths that the SS works urgently to suppress, into something that connects the highest ranks of the Nazi hierarchy to events they have spent two decades keeping from the world.
The world Harris constructs is the novel's most impressive achievement. The Berlin of 1964 is recognizable as a plausible extrapolation of actual Nazi planning. Albert Speer's redesigned capital, the Germania project, is visible in the monumental architecture. The racial laws of the 1930s have been extended and formalized across occupied Europe, and the regime's relationship with the United States mirrors the real Cold War dynamic, with ideological hostility giving way to geopolitical pragmatism. Harris worked extensively with documents held at the Wiener Library in London to help create the novel's bureaucratic texture, with its paperwork and jurisdictional rivalries between the Kripo and the Gestapo. None of it feels like invention.
The conspiracy at the novel's center concerns the Wannsee Conference and what was decided there. Harris uses the actual conference documents, including Heydrich's invitation and Goering's order of July 1941, and the novel's climax involves March and an American journalist piecing together the evidence that the regime has systematically destroyed. The question the novel asks, quietly but consistently, is not whether the Holocaust happened but whether the world, given the geopolitical circumstances, would have wanted to know. The American détente subplot is the novel's most unsettling dimension, more so than the thriller mechanics, because it is the most plausible.
Fatherland was Robert Harris's first novel and remained his best-known for decades. It sits in a tradition of Nazi-victory alternate history that includes It Can't Happen Here (Lewis), SS-GB (Deighton), and The Man in the High Castle (Dick), but its closest literary relative is probably the detective fiction of le Carré.
The world Harris constructs is the novel's most impressive achievement. The Berlin of 1964 is recognizable as a plausible extrapolation of actual Nazi planning. Albert Speer's redesigned capital, the Germania project, is visible in the monumental architecture. The racial laws of the 1930s have been extended and formalized across occupied Europe, and the regime's relationship with the United States mirrors the real Cold War dynamic, with ideological hostility giving way to geopolitical pragmatism. Harris worked extensively with documents held at the Wiener Library in London to help create the novel's bureaucratic texture, with its paperwork and jurisdictional rivalries between the Kripo and the Gestapo. None of it feels like invention.
The conspiracy at the novel's center concerns the Wannsee Conference and what was decided there. Harris uses the actual conference documents, including Heydrich's invitation and Goering's order of July 1941, and the novel's climax involves March and an American journalist piecing together the evidence that the regime has systematically destroyed. The question the novel asks, quietly but consistently, is not whether the Holocaust happened but whether the world, given the geopolitical circumstances, would have wanted to know. The American détente subplot is the novel's most unsettling dimension, more so than the thriller mechanics, because it is the most plausible.
Fatherland was Robert Harris's first novel and remained his best-known for decades. It sits in a tradition of Nazi-victory alternate history that includes It Can't Happen Here (Lewis), SS-GB (Deighton), and The Man in the High Castle (Dick), but its closest literary relative is probably the detective fiction of le Carré.