Fatherland by Robert Harris: Book Review

Fatherland, written by Robert Harris and published in 1992, is set in a world where Nazi Germany won the Second World War.

By the nineteen sixties, Germany dominates the whole of Europe. However, Hitler is nearing his seventy-fifth birthday and has made no public appearances for months. Germany is also embroiled in a long-running, unwinnable guerrilla war in Russia, against US-backed partisans and faces internal resistance. It hopes to end this ‘Cold War’ by staging a superpower summit, where Hitler will sign a co-operation agreement with US President Joseph Kennedy.

In this alternate world, the common understanding is that Europe’s Jews were ‘Resettled in the East’. Although many people recognise this as unlikely, the Jews’ true fate is unknown, and the Nazis claim tales of massacres are ‘communist propaganda’.

Fatherland: Title

The title uses a classic title archetype, the Setting, being a reference to Germany, which is often referred to as ‘The Fatherland’.

(For more on titles, see How to Choose a Title For Your Novel)

Fatherland: Logline

In a world where Nazi Germany won the Second World War, a German policeman investigates a conspiracy involving the deaths of high-ranking Nazis and must decide how much he is prepared to sacrifice in order to discover the darkest secrets of the victorious Third Reich.

(For more on loglines, see The Killogator Logline Formula)

Fatherland: Plot Summary

Note: Spoilers are blacked out like this [blackout]secret[/blackout] . To reveal a spoiler, just high­light it.

It’s 1964. Xavier March, an ex-Kriegsmarine U-boat captain, is now a detective in Berlin. He’s in the Kripo, the German criminal police, not the more famous Gestapo, who deal with ‘political crime’. Working late, March answers a colleague’s telephone and attends the recovery of a body from the Havel river.

The next day, March visits his ten-year-old son, Pili. March and his wife have separated, and Pili lives with his mother. To his father’s disappointment, Pili has become a fanatical junior Hitler Youth.

After identifying the corpse as Josef Buhler, a high-ranking Nazi, March goes to Buhler’s house. On the way, he learns the Gestapo has claimed jurisdiction over the case and ordered him to cease his investigation. Despite this, he continues and discovers Buhler’s diary, a suspicious envelope and evidence that suggests Buhler was murdered. A Gestapo Obergruppenführer, Odilo Globocnik, known as ‘Globus’, arrives. March senses danger and sneaks away without being seen.

The envelope March took from Buhler’s house contains a box of chocolates posted from Switzerland. The diary has a few cryptic markings and one reference to ‘Stuckart/Luther’, other high-ranking Nazis. March discovers Stuckart is also dead and Luther is missing.

Charlie

March interviews ‘Charlie’ Maguire, the 25-year-old American woman who discovered Stuckart’s body. March takes her to Stuckart’s apartment where they crack his safe and discover the keys to a safe deposit box in Switzerland. The Gestapo arrive and arrest March, although Charlie escapes.

The next day, Globus takes March to Buhler’s house and shows him a cellar full of looted art works. He claims Buhler, Stuckart and Luther were using their positions to loot European art works and had come under investigation. Obviously, he says, Buhler and Stuckart committed suicide and Luther went on the run to avoid capture and disgrace. March disagrees, believing the evidence points to murder and to Globus himself as the perpetrator. March’s boss, Arthur Nebe, the head of the Kripo, orders March to continue his investigation and gives him four days to make a case against Globus. Nebe appears to believe that the evidence may be useful as a political weapon against his enemies in the Nazi administration.

March and Charlie travel to Zürich to investigate the safety-deposit box. There is nothing in it except another painting, but March suspects Luther must have recently removed incriminating papers. Returning to Berlin he looks in the archive for a clue to what the documents might be and [blackout]discovers that Heydrich had invited fourteen senior officials including Buhler, Stuckart and Luther to a meeting in 1942 to discuss ‘a complete solution of the Jewish question’. Of the fourteen attendees, thirteen are already dead.[/blackout]

Luther

The police find found a body that appears to be Luther in the railway yard. March goes to Charlie’s apartment and discovers that Luther has phoned her trying to defect to the USA. He has tricked the Gestapo into thinking he’s dead using the body of a tramp dressed in his clothes. Charlie has agreed to meet Luther on the steps of the Great Hall of the Reich the next morning.

In the morning, Charlie goes to the meeting, but a sniper assassinates Luther. March realises Luther did not have any documents with him when the sniper shot him. He goes to the airport, reasoning that Luther must have left the documents in the lost luggage there, and retrieves a briefcase…

Inside [blackout] is documentary evidence of the planning and implementation of the Holocaust. March collapses at the horror of the atrocities revealed.[/blackout]

The conspiracy becomes clear: [blackout]Globus is eliminating the Nazi officials who planned the Holocaust at the Wannsee Conference in 1942. The goal of the conspiracy is to stop the Holocaust being discovered, as it would make détente with the USA impossible.[/blackout]

Escape

March and Charlie decide to escape to neutral Switzerland with the evidence. From there, they’ll travel to the USA [blackout]and expose the Holocaust to the world. March sends Charlie ahead, arranging to meet her at the border. He visits his son to say goodbye, but Pili, deluded by his Nazi upbringing, believes his father is ‘ill’ and betrays him to the Gestapo.[/blackout]

March [blackout]is arrested, held at the Gestapo headquarters and tortured, but the Gestapo fail to beat Charlie’s whereabouts out of him.[/blackout]

Nebe [blackout]rescues March and tells him to take a car and escape. Driving away, March realises that in fact Nebe has faked the rescue, hoping to tail him to the rendezvous with Charlie. Instead of heading there, he sacrifices himself by leading the Gestapo in the wrong direction.[/blackout]

The [blackout]Gestapo finally catch up with March at the site of Auschwitz, which has been razed to the ground. March searches for some sign that the death camp was real.[/blackout]

As [blackout]the Gestapo agents close in on him, March calculates Charlie will have had time to escape and imagines her doing so.[/blackout]

In [blackout]the undergrowth, March uncovers foundations. Auschwitz is real. He draws his gun for a last stand.[/blackout]

(For more on summarising stories, see How to Write a Novel Synopsis)

Fatherland: Analysis

Fatherland was the novel that got me into alternative history, so it has a special place in my heart. (It wasn’t the first alternative history book I’d read though. I read SS-GB by Len Deighton when I was about twelve, although I didn’t really understand it.) I’ve read all of Robert Harris’s books since and seen most of the films. Some are better than others, and I particularly like Archangel. But it’s Fatherland that’s the true classic.

The Alternative History of Fatherland

Fatherland is a great thriller, but it’s not great alternative history, technically. The problem is that Robert Harris never explicitly states his point of departure. He includes a passage in which he describes victory over the USSR and Great Britain and peace with the USA as:

A triumph for the Führer’s strategic genius… for the Führer’s counter-intelligence genius… for the Führer’s scientific genius!

Unfortunately, this passage raises as many questions as it answers. This makes Fatherland a ‘hand-waving’ alternative history (see What is Alternative History? for more explanation).

However, despite the lack of an obvious point of departure, alternative history enthusiasts have attempted to make sense of the alternative history of Fatherland. Analysing the hints in the book, it seems the point of departure is Reinhard Heydrich surviving the 1941 assassination attempt that in reality led to his death.

Characters frequently mention Heydrich in Fatherland as head of the SS, although he doesn’t appear in person, and his survival is the earliest change to history implied in the book. How Heydrich surviving could lead to the other changes is difficult to see, but perhaps it could be because he was more competent than a lot of the other high-ranking Nazis.

Fatherland Timeline

Alternative history specifically mentioned in Fatherland includes:

1941 Heydrich survives an assassination attempt

1942 On the Eastern Front, Operation Blue succeeds, and the German army captures the Baku oil fields. This is a huge strategic gain for Germany, as the Wehrmacht now doesn’t suffer from fuel shortages and the Soviets do.

1943 Moscow and Leningrad fall and the Wehrmacht pushes the Red Army back to the Ural Mountains.

1944 The Western Allies lose the Battle of the Atlantic after Germany realises the British are reading their codes. Starved into submission by the U-boat blockade, Britain surrenders. Churchill and King George VI go into exile in Canada and Edward VIII becomes king.

1946 The USA defeats Japan after dropping atomic bombs on them. Germany explodes a V3 (presumably the successor to the V2) missile over New York, deterring the USA from attacking Germany directly. A Cold War between Germany and the USA begins.

1950 Germany completes construction of the fifteen-storey-tall ‘Arch of Triumph’ in Berlin. ‘Day of National Reawakening’ celebrated.

1951 Hermann Goering dies.

1957 ‘Avenue of Victory’ and ‘Great Hall of the Reich’ completed in Berlin.

1960 Joseph P. Kennedy becomes US President.

1962 Heinrich Himmler dies in an air crash. Heydrich becomes head of the SS.

1964 US-German peace summit. Events of Fatherland.

Fatherland as Mystery

Fatherland has a hybrid plot, although it is mostly a Mystery (see Spy Novel Plots).

And as a Mystery, Fatherland works very well:

• The discovery of Buhler’s body in the first chapter sets the mystery up effectively.
• The antagonist, Globus, is suitably menacing and unpleasant.
• There’s a race against time: can March uncover the conspiracy in four days?
• March solves the clues one by one, leading the reader into the heart of the mystery.
• Harris handles the revelation of the conspiracy behind the murders very well.
• There are several twists.
• The final action sequences are tense.
• The open-ended finale works.

So, there’s little to criticise about the plot other than the ease with which March outwits the Gestapo and the fortuitousness of some of his guesswork as he follows the trail of clues. In particular, the leap of logic that gets March from the empty safe deposit box in Zürich to the archive in Berlin relies on nothing other than momentum to maintain the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

Motivation

Where the novel falls down a little is the question of character motivation. Why does March continue to investigate the murders, in a world where there is no possibility of justice? The murders are at least semi-official. The prime suspect is a high-ranking Gestapo officer who cannot possibly face justice. The murders are almost certainly occurring with the blessing of the head of the SS, one of the most powerful men in Germany. It’s clear almost from the start that the investigation can only lead to one thing: March’s death.

Robert Harris only makes one attempt at an explanation: March has nothing else to live for because of his estrangement from his son. And, well, he’s a detective, isn’t he?

And there was something else, the instinct that propelled him out of bed every morning into each unwelcoming day, and that was the desire to know.

This is perilously close to March announcing, ‘plot necessity compels me to investigate.’

Fatherland as Dystopian Nightmare

Robert Harris’s evocation of the post-war Nazi world is highly effective, and this to me is one of the main reasons the novel succeeds – it’s the great strength of the novel. Robert Harris was a journalist and had written only non-fiction previously. He had planned a non-fiction book about the post-war plans of the Nazi government. Harris’s agent however thought (rightly as it turned out) that a thriller would sell better. The research for the stillborn non-fiction book forms the bedrock of Fatherland’s appeal. Harris certainly packs a lot of atmosphere in, and he evokes the settings brilliantly.

The concepts may seem well-worn, ‘Nazi victory’ being almost a sub-genre of speculative fiction these days, but Fatherland was one of the first novels to use the setting well. The revelation of the conspiracy and use of extracts from historical documents to underscore the full horror of the Holocaust packs an incredible punch. It’s one of the most effective uses of alternative history to drive home real world lessons ever.

Alternative History Flag for Fatherland

The original cover of Robert Harris’s Fatherland showed the Nazi German Flag flying next to today’s blue and gold European Union flag. That makes no sense. Instead, I think a ‘European Union’ dominated by the German hegemony would take the colours of the Nazi Party — red, white and black. The four arrows, as well as being reminiscent of the swastika, represent the aggressive expansionism of Fatherland’s dystopian Europe.

Click here for more alternative history flags.

Alternative Fatherland Book Cover

I based my alternative cover on a photograph of the Brandenburg gate in Berlin. I wanted to avoid the cliché of having swastikas on the cover, and the book is enough of a classic that such cheap attention-grabbing is unnecessary. Instead, the simple black-and-white image contrasts with the bold red banner, the Germanic script further hints at the setting, and the glossy lettering suggests a more futuristic world than the 1940s.

(For more on designing novel covers, see How to Make a Book Cover)

Fatherland: My Verdict

One of the key alternate history novels. Anyone who is interested in alternative history should read this book.

Want to Read it?

Robert Harris’s Fatherland is available on Amazon US here, and Amazon UK here.

Radio Play

The BBC dramatised Fatherland for radio in 1997. The adaptation starred Anton Lesser as Xavier March and Angeline Ball as Charlie Maguire. The radio play is excellent, particularly Anton Lesser who is superb as March. The only issue I found was that some of the supporting characters sounded too similar, making it hard to follow at times. The play is a dramatisation and so abridged, but faithful to the novel’s plot. The only major change is that [blackout]Charlie Maguire definitely makes it across the border and escapes[/blackout]. The radio play is not as good as the book, but still worth a listen if you can find it (I got it off eBay).

Fatherland: the Movie

There was a TV movie too, starring Rutger Hauer. Don’t bother.

A Kill in the Morning

If you loved Fatherland you’ll probably also enjoy my novel A Kill in the Morning described as “Easily up there with Fatherland… utterly compelling.” by Manda Scott of the Historical Writers’ Association.

Read the opening of A Kill in the Morning for free by clicking here or on the cover:

Agree? Disagree?

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