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In the Presence of Mine Enemies

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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.

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.

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.

In the Presence of Mine Enemies allows Turtledove to take a break from his other series and do a self-contained novel set in the normally cliched world where the Germans won World War II and are dominating everything. I say "normally cliched" because Turtledove actually does a good job of making it seem fresh and interesting. It is the early 21st Century. The Germans and the Japanese won the war, cities in the USA were nuked in a second conflict after the European one ended, making the United States agree to be subjugated, paying tribute money every year to Berlin. Everybody figures that the next war will be against Japan for final control of the world, but for now an uneasy peace settles between the two empires.

Jews have been eliminated from most of Europe, but like the cockroaches the Germans in this novel think they are, hidden infestations are everywhere, including right under there noses. This provides most of the story, as we are told of a society of hidden Jews who are working amidst every-day Germans in Berlin and elsewhere. The main character, Heinrich Gimpel, works for the Wehrmacht (the German army) as the man in charge of keeping tabs on the American money that gets sent to Berlin every year. At the beginning of the book, the ritualistic revealing of the family Jewish secrets to 10-year-old Alicia Gimpel occurs. When the parents think they are ready, their ancestry is revealed and they are absorbed into the conspiracy of silence. The children have to adjust to the raging anti-Semitism around them as well as changing their own feelings, because they have been indoctrinated with all of the anti-Jewish hate and must learn that they are the people who most other Germans consider the devil.

Turtledove does an excellent job of telling the intensely personal story of this family along with the story of massive political change in Germany. Momentous events around the world sit beside the normal affairs and other personal problems that we all have, not to mention the secrets that the Gimpels and their friends are hiding. While sometimes kept to the background of the story, the specter of their ancestry is always hanging over them, even as events move to perhaps eventually allow them to admit in public what they've hidden for generations. Even when Turtledove seems to forget that aspect of the story as he tells of the politics (especially toward the end of the book), something often comes to the forefront as a harsh reminder of just what's at stake. Heinrich is caught up in the political changes but has to guard himself, lest he reveal their secrets in a rushed reaction to the world changing around him. He knows that with one misstep, extermination awaits him and his family.

I was really impressed with the economy of viewpoint characters Turtledove uses. He uses the three Gimpels who are aware of the secret (two younger children don't know, which provides a lot of the conflict for Alicia, as she can't tell them but has to put up with, in silence, the anti-Semitic statements made by them) along with three other Jews who are in their circle of friends. With these characters, he is able to tell their story, a story of political change, as well as the deeply personal story of a troubled marriage and the effects it has on the Gimpels as Heinrich becomes the object of affection for a frustrated wife. Usually, Turtledove has so many characters that it's hard to keep them straight. I have always felt that this is probably why Turtledove insists on introducing them constantly almost every time they appear in the book. However, that reasoning must be faulty, because there are only six of them and he still insists on doing that. It became very aggravating.

One thing I did find amazing is that Turtledove does manage to avoid most of the pitfalls his books usually fall in to. Sure, there is the introduction of characters mentioned above, but at least Turtledove makes every one of them interesting. It's almost heart-breaking watching Alicia struggle with the new knowledge she has gained, having to silently accept all of the statements made against her new-found people by her younger sisters as well as everybody in school. She finds it incredibly hard to absorb this new information and not reveal it to others through actions or, worse, inaction. Your nerves actually clench a little bit when the fighting between Heinrich's friend Willi and his wife Elena almost results in an affair that could jeopardize not only Heinrich's marriage but also accidentally reveal their secret. There are no useless characters in this one, and even the minor characters attract the reader's interest just enough to not be annoying. Turtledove also avoids the gratuitous, badly-written love scene. He effectively fades to black a couple of times and even the one that he does include doesn't concentrate on the details. I applaud him for this, as it really has been a weakness of his in the books that I've read.

His prose is still wooden enough to give a woodpecker a woody, but it's not too bad this time around, probably because he's avoided most of his other problems. The climax of the book, while pulse-pounding as change sweeps through Germany, is so obviously a copy of the fall of another Evil Empire that it becomes very predictable. It's to Turtledove's credit that he makes the book interesting despite this, though by this time you have enough invested in the characters that you want to keep reading despite knowing what's going to happen. Inertia perhaps?

In the Presence of Mine Enemies is an excellent book of alternate history, and probably the best book I've read by him. Give it a shot, even if you've found his other series to be a waste of time. This one isn't.

David Roy

Normally I anxiously await my new Turtledove book, especially anything to do with WW2 or Byzantium. This story however was not worth the wait. It feels like a too-long short story, with the revealing scene at dinner jogging my memory of a paperback collection I have. Reading this book gave me a strong sense of deja vu, and I believe that is the real problem I have with it. At its best, alternate history should move us away from our "normal" timeline, leading the reader to believe that common history can produce extraordinarily different outcomes. "In the Presence of Mine Enemies" does not achieve this goal. There is little more than a scene change from pre-Communist coup Moscow to Deutschland uber alles Berlin after a Nazi victory. I was disappointed by the same type of characters that seem to be a recurring theme, the earnest worker bee and his devoted wife/girlfriend, the jealous/nosy neighbor, and the guy who follows the party line whatever it may be. The bureaucratic excess of a National Socialist state ring the truest for me. Racial purity forms and doctors who will report any taint of "untermensch" blood gave me the feeling of all service to the Reich that a Nazi state engenders in its populace. The framework of the story has merit but the familiar characters need redrawing. I hoped for a crisp, exciting read but was disappointed in the execution.

This is a great book about a future that fortunately did not happen. It is also, in many ways about pasts that did happen in several places and throughout history. I know the "if the Nazis had won the second world war" theme has been beaten to death. I would however like to point out that this is NOT the theme of this book -- the theme of this book is hidden identity, public identity and the scary point at which the two merge. (It is also an interesting study in how dictatorships exploit what ANYONE has to hide. Any careful reader will notice that even the non-Jewish characters are afraid and have things they would like to hide.) As such, the fact that the fall of the Reich is much like the fall of the USSR (and really, we don't have any other models for the fall of a dictatorship in the modern age) didn't disturb me. The second half of the book is a tale of how the characters bring both their public and their secret identities into actualization and achieve some sort of coherent whole. It is a story of the characters -- Jewish and not -- finding their humanity with their freedom.

As such, I don't know a more relevant story for our time. A book worth buying, reading, re-reading and reading to your children.

As usual, Harry Turtledove has taken an interesting premise and filled it out nicely. The characters he creates are well-developed, and he exhibits his characteristic ability to make a compelling alternate reality, with a story that opens years after the pivotal event (the success of Nazi Germany in WWII) which makes it "alternate".
This story is about an interconnected group of Jews who live in Berlin in the early 21st century, some 60 years after the end of the war. They live in secret, blending in but observing a minimal subset of Judaism to keep their culture alive. And believe me, you can't miss this point, because it's brought up every few paragraphs, in thought bubbles above every Jewish character's head.
Here's an example: Jewish character "A" is being pursued romantically by the German wife of his best friend, German character "B", neither of whom know "A" is Jewish, of course. After thinking for a moment about how nice it might be, he declines because he loves his wife too much, and because he doesn't want to lose his friend. "If 'B' found out we were sleeping together", he thinks, "he'd really do something rash". Then he goes on: "and if he found out my REAL secret, he'd do something more than rash."
We get it, A: you're walking the razor's edge as a Jew in Nazi Berlin, and every decision you make has to be weighed in light of keeping that secret.
If you can handle the repetiveness of this, the story is really quite good. The various ways the Jews keep under cover is interesting, and it's intriguing to see how even Nazi Germany can change with time, mellowing in some respects but keeping some features very alive.

Almost every talented science fiction writer has been unable to resist at least a short-story about the ghastly question of what the world would have been like if Hitler had won WWII.

The first chapter or so of this book was originally written as a short story, and was first published some years ago in one of Turtledove's short story collections. Turtledove has now extended the short story into a full length novel.

Until now, far and away the best "What if the nazis had won" story was "Fatherland" by Robert Harris, but "In the presence of mine enemies" is in the same class. Harris has the edge in the meticulous quality of his research and the historical detail which made his novel chillingly believable: Turtledove wins points for his grasp of the sweep of history and how a fascist regime might have had to cope with the same pressures which a changing world presented to other totalitarian regimes.

And in telling his story through the eyes of a small group of Jews who have survived by posing as Aryans, he brings home to you what it must have been like to be a Jew hiding in the 1000 year Reich, knowing that one mistake would doom not just yourself but every member of your family.

Turtledove does not forget the seriousness of the subject - the book is dedicated to people who "helped ensure that this is alternate history" - but he displays a wicked sense of humour in suggesting what positions certain real-world modern politicians might have held in a world run by the nazis. One of the characters in the story is the chairman of the British Union of Fascists, Mosley's party, which has effectively become the British wing of the Nazi party. A certain very prominent real world British politican of about the same age and description has the name of this character as his middle names. (If you don't realise who it is, Google the name of the character in the book and the name of one of George W Bush's closest allies will come up.)

He also has fun creating the Nazi equivalents of Gorbachov and Boris Yeltsin ...

One of Harry Turtledove's other books was criticised as containing the same events as real history but with different actors. There's some truth in that, and the point certainly does apply to this book. However, even though most people will spot the parallels, Turtledove leaves you uncertain until almost the last page whether things will turn out the same way as happened to a certain totalitarian empire in real history. I couldn't put this book down.

I had been getting a little tired of Turtledove's work recently, phrases repeated, similar plots, but I think he has returned to his better early works.
I loved the story of a Jewish family hiding and the many concessions they had to make to their own faith to survive.
And I also loved the way the author retold the Gorbachev/Yeltsin years. It made me realize how lucky Russia was with the way things turned out. (Too bad Russia looks to be slipping back.)

This book has been a fun read for me. This is not the BEST book ever written but it is a great story and Turtledove knows how to pull you in and make you think. An enjoyable read.