In the Presence of Mine Enemies [Mass Market Paperback]

Harry Turtledove (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 2, 2004

In the twenty-first century, Germany's Third Reich continues to thrive after its victory in World War II-keeping most of Europe and North America under its heel. But within the heart of the Nazi regime, a secret lives. Under a perfect Aryan facade, Jews survive-living their lives, raising their families, and fearing discovery...

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Despite its intriguing alternative premise, Turtledove's lengthy tale of Berlin's Jews hiding in the open long after the Nazis defeated all their WWII enemies plods along in a series of vignettes told from the viewpoints of six different Jewish characters passing as "good Germans": Wehrmacht analyst Heinrich Gimpel, his wife, Lise, and their precocious 10-year-old daughter, Alicia; medieval English scholar Susanna Weiss; and physician's receptionist Esther Stutzman and her husband, Walther, whose computer expertise has helped many Berlin Jews shed their "unclean" ancestry. But as the Gimpels and their friends struggle to keep their secret culture alive, all around them chinks are appearing in the very foundations of the Reich, starting with the death of Hitler's second successor and the selection of a progressive new Fuhrer. Tepid characterizations, clumsy plot devices, interminable bridge sessions between the Gimpels and their Aryan friends, even some dialogue seemingly better suited to a drawling John Wayne than a Wehrmacht panzer commander (who defies the SS with "you're going to be mighty sorry"), all dilute the author's message of hope for these downtrodden remnants of the Chosen People. Closing on a curiously inconclusive note-or is it a lead-in to an equally ponderous sequel?-this account of an unlikely political thaw dribbles off into a puddle of cliches, sentiment and unconvincing coincidence.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Another magisterial alternate-history novel from the master of the form features a modest, middle-class family in near-future Berlin: Heinrich Gimpel; his wife, Lise; and their daughters Alicia, Francesca, and Roxane. He is a middle-level, civilian bureaucrat at army headquarters, and the only wrong note to contemporary this-world ears is that Heinrich's Berlin is the capital of a world-spanning Third Reich. The Gimpels, however, are covert Jews. From this dissonance, Turtledove builds a complete symphony expressing how the Third Reich's remaining Jews hide in plain sight, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. Heinrich's disguise nearly shatters when a coworker's impeccably Aryan wife tries to escape her troubled marriage by seducing him. Fortunately, the authorities soon not only lack evidence of his Jewishness but also have other fish to fry, one of them the new fuhrer, Heinz Buckliger, who remarkably resembles Mikhail Gorbachev. The countermeasures that the SS and the party hacks take against Buckliger resemble the efforts to overthrow the aforesaid Gorbachev, but even when one grasps the resemblance, the suspense of the confrontation of good and evil remains intense in Turtledove's hands. So does the impact of his handling of more cerebral matters such as the devolution of dictatorships and the survival of Jews and Jewish identity. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Roc (November 2, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451459598
• ISBN-13: 978-0451459596
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 4.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (51 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #959,770 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #35 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Authors, A-Z > ( T ) > Turtledove, Harry
  • #83 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Alternate History

More About the Author

Harry Turtledove is the award-winning author of the alternate-history works The Man with the Iron Heart; The Guns of the South; How Few Remain (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel); the Worldwar saga: In the Balance, Tilting the Balance, Upsetting the Balance, and Striking the Balance; the Colonization books: Second Contact, Down to Earth, and Aftershocks; the Great War epics: American Front, Walk in Hell, and Breakthroughs; the American Empire novels: Blood & Iron, The Center Cannot Hold, and Victorious Opposition; and the Settling Accounts series: Return Engagement, Drive to the East, The Grapple, and In at the Death. Turtledove is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters: Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The eighty year Reich, November 10, 2003

By 

Maddi Hausmann Sojourner "madhaus" (Silicon Valley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the Presence of Mine Enemies (Hardcover)

When reading reviews of any Harry Turtledove book, it's difficult to miss the phrase "The Master of Alternate History." Once again, Turtledove shows us why that label keeps getting pinned on. _In the Presence of Mine Enemies_ is a new standalone book, from a writer who specializes in multivolume series. And it is his most personal work yet. I had the priviledge to meet Turtledove at WorldCon 2002 in San Jose, and he described this upcoming novel in very emotional terms. Another fan seemed distinterested, and asked when one of his series would be returned to, and Turtledove went on to explain that given his family's history, this work compelled him to finish it. The Master of Alternate History brings us the eightieth year of the German Reich, and no one will accuse him of stealing anything from Phillip K. Dick's _The Man in the High Castle_. This work is clearly Turtledove's own.

An expansion of a novella of the same name, most of the first chapter is identical to its roots. We meet Heinrich Gimpel, who works in the army's budget analysis unit. His job is to predict whether the United States will pay all its tribute, and with how much fuss. Since the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht has multiple bases occupying the US, these calculations will determine whether panzers roll. His office mate, Willi Deutsch, performs a similar job, but while Heinrich keeps his head down and revels in calculations, Willi is loud, boisterous, and loves the ladies.

We'll meet many more people over the course of the book; Walter and Esther Stutzman; he's a software developer for Zeiss (which is Microsoft and Intel in one in this timeline), she's a part-time receptionist for a pediatrician. Susanna Weiss, an unmarried professor of Medieval English in a "kueche, kirch, kinder" world; and the Gimpel and Stutzman children. As in most Turtledove novels, there are several viewpoint characters. In this one, the rotating point of view moves among six people, but they all have the same secret: right in Berlin, the capital of the German empire, all are secretly Jews. Hidden in plain sight by their quietude, their fitting in, and by Walter Stutzman's hacking the geneological records database, their biggest fear is what their children will do when they are old enough to learn who they really are.

Did I mention how personal a story this is for Turtledove? Heinrich Gimpel clearly IS Harry Turtledove. Gimpel means "bullfinch" (Turtledove already writes historical novels under the German equivalent Turteltaub). Heinrich's wife is the former Lise Frank; Harry's wife is named Laura Frankos. Both couples have three daughters. And Heinrich, just like Ealstan in Derlavai, and so many other characters in his other novels, always does an excellent job, and values rational thought over emotional reactions. Lise is just as level-headed, but more empathetic, while oldest daughter Alicia is exactly like her dad. And the book begins with Alicia, at age ten, discovering that most of what she's learned in school is a complete lie.

Gimpel is one of those characters who cannot stay out of trouble no matter how hard he tries to. Willi Deutsch's wife Erika is determined to have an affair with Heinrich, no matter how often he refuses. Erika and her husband's marital spats are destined to splatter all over Gimpel. Heinrich also has his work profile raised uncomfortably high when the new Fuhrer seeks him out to decide whether to remove more German troops from the US. Everyone wants to talk politics with him, while all he wants to do is keep from being noticed.

We learn plenty about the German Reich through Alicia Gimpel. The only young viewpoint character, we overhear her school lessons in politics, geography, and anthropology (Aryan vs. Untermann). She observes that some of her classmates would do better at school if they didn't spend all their time watching the "televisor." (And even a frequently used wooden paddle on the butt doesn't change their actions.) Politics are a constant thrum throughout the novel. While this society was set up for leaders to lead and everyone else to cheerfully obey, the new Fuhrer is determined to change this. So what begins as a frightening analog of 21st century USA, with computers, television ads, and evening newscasts, soon morphs into 1989-91 Russia. Leader Buckliger begins questioning how things were always done, which threatens some and excites most others.

Reading any Turtledove novel always leads to bad puns and name remapping. The old fuhrer is named Kurt Haldweim, get it? The new fuhrer is named Buckliger, which means "hunchback." And since the latter half of the book was so suggetive of Moscow in 1991, I looked up hunchback in Russian; it's "gorbin." (Gorbachov + Putin?) While I can't equate the names Stolle and Yeltsin, it's pretty clear the mayor of Berlin is modeled after the one from Moscow.

Despite the too-rigid mapping of '91 Moscow to 2003 Berlin, this book is incredibly nuanced and detailed. The head of the KGB, whoops, the SS, will deal with a very determined hacker. Gimpel and his children are accused of being Jews and become unwilling guests of the Security Police. Offhand comments of death and destruction rained down on the US, Poland, Russia, and many other lands are far more chilling than many battle scenes could be. Warsaw-style ghettoes in New York and Los Angeles, mentioned in the same manner, also brought a shiver.

Read, enjoy, and be very glad for what did not happen.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but flawed, alternate history, November 24, 2003

By 

Gary M. Greenbaum (Fairfax, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the Presence of Mine Enemies (Hardcover)

In a world in which Nazi Germany won World War II, defeated America later on, and with its allies occupies the world, the few Jews remaining in Berlin have no option but to be more German than the Germans to avoid detection and state-sanctioned murder. They eat pork, they are uncircumcised, and they can pass on only what is not written--paper being too risky in the event of an SS search.

It's 2009. The last of the WWII generation to become Fuhrer, Austrian-born Kurt Haldweim (guess who that is) has died, and a new, reform-minded Fuhrer has taken control. The six Jews who are the point of view characters in this stand-alone novel look on with hope which has been extinguished almost as thoroughly as their co-religionists as they look towards a new day when they might, just might, be able to live open lives. In the meantime, they must continue to face, and seemingly agree with, the unending anti-Jewish propaganda which lives on even though (as most Germans think) the Jews do not.

An interesting novel. Unfortunately, Turtledove quickly finds himself trapped behind the fact that characters in such a situation do NOT want exciting things happening to them, but to live quiet lives, and therefore the first two-thirds of the book are very slow-moving. Perhaps the worst moments are the repeated bridge games (a hommage to Heinlein's "Farnham's Freehold"?) which go on for pages and pages, during which nothing much happens, and which are completely lost on the reader if you don't know much about bridge. Much of the rest is very reminiscent of certain events in Russia in recent years, together with a Yeltsin-like character.

Turtledove never ceases to amuse with interesting parallels from our own reality (a play is mentioned like "The Producers" but focusing on Churchill and Stalin, the Czech delegation at one point is led by "a playwright" (Havel), and, of course, the Haldweim-Waldheim parallel).

In case you're interested, the title is taken from Psalm 23.

But ultimately, Turtledove is too much trapped by his own conception to make much of this alternate history.

Recommended to those who have already read Turtledove. If you are new to alternate history, go read Turtledove's "The Guns of the South." It's much, much better.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Ideas, not a great novel, January 30, 2004

By 

Christopher R. Magee "fenryswulf" (Naperville, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In the Presence of Mine Enemies (Hardcover)

I've read the majority of Harry Turtledove's novels, and I've noticed on his more recent efforts that he is either getting worse as a writer or my tastes are becoming more refined. Turtledove has good ideas in all of his books, and this is no exception. He just isn't a very good writer. For some reason, he feels like he has to beat everything to death. About once every three pages he reminds the reader that these people are Jews and if they get caught, they're done for. He repeats things like this ad nauseum. I wish he would try to be a little more subtle and let the reader read between the lines. He has the same problem in his American Empire series.

Also, as someone else said, there really isn't a lot that happens in this book. I was hoping for some more action. There are way too many bridge scenes, and if you don't know how to play bridge, you won't understand these.

I always find myself buying Turtledove's books even though I can't stand his style because his ideas are interesting. So this book has some things going for it, but be prepared to sift through a lot of filler.