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Fatherland Mass Market Paperback – April 1, 1993

by Robert Harris (Author)

4.3 7,995 ratings

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It is twenty years after Nazi Germany's triumphant victory in World War II and the entire country is preparing for the grand celebration of the Führer's seventy-fifth birthday, as well as the imminent peacemaking visit from President Kennedy.

Meanwhile, Berlin Detective Xavier March -- a disillusioned but talented investigation of a corpse washed up on the shore of a lake. When a dead man turns out to be a high-ranking Nazi commander, the Gestapo orders March off the case immediately. Suddenly other unrelated deaths are anything but routine.

Now obsessed by the case, March teams up with a beautiful, young American journalist and starts asking questions...dangerous questions. What they uncover is a terrifying and long-concealed conspiracy of such astonding and mind-numbing terror that is it certain to spell the end of the Third Reich -- if they can live long enough to tell the world about it.

About the Author

Robert J. Harris was born and raised in Scotland. He studied Greek and Latin at university and has had a varied career as a bartender, salesman, nurse, actor, game designer, and writer. He designed the best-selling fantasy board game Talisman and is the author of numerous short stories, as well as two historical fiction novels with Jane Yolen: Queen's Own Fool and Girl in a Cage. He lives in St. Andrews, Scotland, with his wife, fantasy author Deborah Turner Harris, and their three sons.

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

HarperTorch
Publication date

April 1, 1993
Dimensions

4.19 x 1 x 6.75 inches
ISBN-10

9780061006623
ISBN-13

978-0061006623
Lexile measure

720L
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Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0061006629
Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperTorch (April 1, 1993)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Mass Market Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780061006623
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0061006623
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 720L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 4.19 x 1 x 6.75 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,983,911 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #9,321 in Historical Fantasy (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.3 7,995 ratings

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Robert Harris

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Robert Harris is the author of Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland. He has been a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for the London Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. His novels have sold more than ten million copies and been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Berkshire, England, with his wife and four children.

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Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2023

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How does an author create such a captivating, grounded fictional universe that its timeline feels like it actually unfolded? i feel like i am only being given piecemeal -- albeit very detailed accounts -- of this world. it's everything i was hoping for and more.

the allied forces are not portrayed as some kind of benevolent saviors. this author has studied history extensively, Germany exhaustively, and writing/sociology exuberantly. it's also hilarious somehow...

What a quandary!

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2009

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Where to begin? Well, the book is alt his: in it, Germany won WW2 (although she's still fighting a lower-intensity war with the USSR somewhere along what would seem from a map to be the Volga, although a casual remark in p. 18 mentions "American -backed Soviet guerrillas east of the Urals", and there's another reference to "the dull struggle with the Reds on the Urals Front" in p. 84), developed the atomic bomb roughly at the same time as the US and ICBMs much earlier, and controls Europe trough a German-dominated European Community based on a Rome Treaty (in the West she has formally annexed only Luxembourg, and of course Alsace-Lorraine). Goering died in 1951, Himmler in 1962 (his successor is Heydrich, not assassinated in the Protectorate in this timeline, and rumored to be slated for succeeding the 75-year-old Hitler). Basically, the US having defeated Japan, and China being apparently a shambles, this is a bipolar world (German-led Europe and the US), complete with a nuclear stalemate and a Cold War (whence a to-be-held-summit, to seek détente).
Against this backdrop, on April 14, 1964, six days before Hitler's birthday celebrations and with the US President Joseph Kennedy (yes, the father) coming to Berlin in September for summit, a man is found drowned in the Havel. The case is investigated by Reichskriminalpolizei Investigator Xavier March, and what follows leads him to the realization, at the end of the book, that the Holocaust has indeed taken place: in Germany the official line is that "the Jews were sent East", but nevertheless mothers threaten rebellious sons with a "behave or you'll go up the chimney".

To say more is useless, as the book from then on becomes a mix of PP and thriller interspeded with seamlessly integrated flashbacks that permit you to partially reconstruct what has happened between mid-1942 (it's clear that the Germans captured Stalingrad and their summer Caucasus offensive succeeded) and the present murder, and then proceeds, always in a deftly depicted rigidly dictatorial police-state Greater German Empire, and at a stedily accelerating pace, to its (I would say open and deeply moving) conclusion.

I enjoyed the book enormously: for anyone intererested enough in the history of the period, finding names like Globocnic (who for example is mentioned -with a different spelling- once by Jodl, I think, to Hitler as a "real scoundrel", in Guderian's "Panzer Leader"), or allusions to episodes like the theft of Veit Stoss' altarpiece from Cracow's (Krakau in the book) Church of Our Lady, is to become aware of some as it were unknown intellectual friend (in this case Harris) who shares your interests, at least as far as having done -for a non-historian- an enormous amount of research, and with whom you could talk and learn from. For me, that's the key of my delight in the story: the amount of subtle details of a period that fascinates me. As for the purely PP part of the plot, that is, if you abstract from its subject matter, I agree there are some technically better books around, but not many with such a degree of suspense: this one is a real page turner.

Just to give you an idea of my tastes, I've read part of one of Turtledove's alt his series (the one that begins with "So Few Remain", in which the South wins the Civil War), but gave up after the 3rd or 4th volume ("Walk in Hell" or "Blood and Iron", I don't remember the titles, I gave them away): I just wasn't interested in the myriad subplots involving ordinary people, and there was too little macrohistory. I also read the first two books of a WW2 series in which the Japanese sink three US aircraft carriers and occupy Pearl Harbour, but loose the war anyway, which however lasts two years longer (I've forgotten the author's and the books' names). I quit for the same reason. But Harris' book is in a completely different league from them, and also from the scores of more detailed military alt his of the European theater of operations, Eastern or Western (by, say, Tsouras and his colleagues or imitators), or the fewer fully professional mil his, although for me they are more interesting than Tutledove's & alia microhistorical approch as they are more concise. It may seem a contradiction to downplay Turtledove's microhistory and praise Harris' subtle detail, but in the former events just happen, whereas in the latter there is a reason, a cause and and a fierce determination. Also, "Fatherland" is told in a very old-fashioned way: the good guys are clearly set apart from the bad ones, and there are no antiheroes; in the others, alt his is like real his, full of greynesses, contradictions and ambiguities.

Charlene Vickers and Justine Cardello have written however thoughtful one-star reviews, and they have valid points. So what's happening?

(1) As for the improbability of Charlotte Maguire's being a female "star reporter" in 1964 (not 1967 as CV writes), I agree it's a weakness in the plot. However, Maguire does say that nobody has heard of her agency, World European Features, and that it's an outfit with just two men with a telex machine in an office in the wrong side of town, and that she was picked as correspondent because she was the only one that could get a German visa. Besides, her father was a Liberal Undersecretary of State, so she must have got some political education and known some people. This doesn't detract from the value of CV's point, but shows Harris was aware of the problem and tried to minimize it.

(2) I think what they (and other reviewers) say about the Holocaust being impossible to conceal is debatable; it may be so in our world (but wait for the current crisis to deepen and the depression to really bite; then we'll see a dramatic increase in the revisionists' numbers). Remember also that even now most (I think) Muslims genuinely believe it didn't happen, as Turks to this day sincerely believe that the Armenian genocide is a fabrication. And European liberal intellectuals believed Stalin's gulags were a Western propaganda invention until the secret Khrushev speech. And how many US citizens are aware of the atrocities committed, say, in Vietnam? I'm not saying that they were due to a genocidal policy, but they were committed -and silenced-. How many are aware of Chomski's existence (again, I'm not saying that he's right, but his views about the US deserve a national debate). And how widespread was the American reaction to the French atrocities during the war for Algerian independence? And how many know that presumably 2 million Germans died when 16 million of them were expelled -whether justly or unjustly is beside the point- from their former homes? My point is, you CAN fool most of the people most of the time except in basic matters such as whether they have enough to eat or can repay their mortgage. I think media coverage determines what is considered to be PC or outrageous, independently of what's really going on. And this in our world! Think of another in which Germany had won the war! Everybody could have suspected (and did so) all right, but where would the aerial reconaissance planes have flown from? How many outside people would the Polish partisans have been able to contact? Who would have been admitted to the four Eastern Komissariats to count how many Jews, if any, really remained? And where would the archival evidence of the Nuremberg Trials have come from? Reread p. 206 of the MMP edition, where March questions Charlotte about the real fate of the "vanished" millions of Jews. The only info available in an mildly anti-semitic US comes from some half-deranged fugitives beyond the Urals, but the German Ambassador flatly denies their claims. "Pure propaganda", he says (and the Germans, after the British entirely false construction of the child-maiming, nun-raping, village-burning "Hun" image of WW1, had every reason to distrust foreign propaganda). Besides, deep inside, as is expressed several times, everybody more or less knows (i.e. Fiebes, in page 96: "A lot of [racial legislation] refers to Jews, and the Jews, as we know" -he gave a wink- "have all gone east"). And, most inportant of all, nobody, except a few very decent people like Marsh and Maguire, really cares, as Charlotte herself says. As for the US Jews not receiving news of/from their relatives, the Nazis never kept their racial laws secret: it was common knowledge that Jews were grossly abused, interned in concentration camps, deported, etc. The only secret was their systematic mass extermination. In our timeline, 2 million Gypsies were murdered alongside a maximum of 6 million Jews (not 14 million, as JC writes). Have you ever heard anything about it, dear average reader?
So I think that point, while controversial, shouldn't be considered an important flaw in the plot.

(3) Both CV and JC say that the characters are cutouts, flat, they don'e evoke any empathy. Well, that's a personal opinion. I really cared for March (although rather less for Maguire), Nebe didn't seem to be such a detestable german, and I even detected a mellowing of the regime in Krebs, the new-generation "gone soft" Nazi. De gustibus non est disputandum.

(4) Some other reviewers write that this story is a bad rehash of Orwell's "1984". Though to be compared with such a masterpiece would be no demerit, IMO Orwell's is a deeply philosophical novel (for me, its most important parts are the chapters of Goldstein's mythical book), whereas Harris' is an unabashedly alt his thriller, and nothing else. They belong to two entirely different genres. Furthermore, it's true that Orwell took his inspiration from Nazi Germany and the USSR, but his was a wild extrapolation towards power gone mad, whereas Harris pictures an earthy state governed by corrupt leaders and already in the process of being further corrupted by "softness" and boredom, March's son attitude and deeds notwithstanding.

(5) There are some inconsistencies (as for example the timing of Kennedy's visit, which at times seem inminent although it's 5 months away), but they are minor.

Summary: if you're like me, (definitely) buy and (hopefully) enjoy this book as much as I did a few years ago.

16 people found this helpful

"You throw food to the beast in man."

Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2005

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Fatherland is an absolutely brilliant novel and one of the most exciting and thought-provoking books I have every read. If this sounds like gushy over-praise, please trust me; it isn't. This book simply fires on all cylinders. If you are looking for a thrilling, nail-biter that will keep you turning pages past you bedtime, this is it. If you are looking for a novel with rich characters that will move you in their believability, here it is. If you are looking for a work that will fire up your intellect, order this book now. You will not be disappointed. Superbly conceived mystery? You got it. All rendered at a pitch-perfect pace that doesn't drag for a single paragraph.

Harris is simply a great writer. I don't mean a good thriller writer (though that would certainly be enough); I mean he is a writer that has that little bit extra that makes you remember his work years later. The conception and sweep of this novel is extraordinary. The time frame for the work is the early sixties. Germany has won WWII, and American President Kennedy is scheduled to meet Adolph Hitler at a summit in Berlin to discuss a détente between the two nations. Against this backdrop, Berlin detective, Xavier March, is called in to investigate a death. What happens after that unfolds in ever darkening layers of danger. March begins to move through the bleak, nightmare world of Berlin, where massive, Teutonic architecture towers over the streets and records are kept of skull shapes to insure racial purity.

I don't want to give away too much. This is the kind of work a reader should discover for themselves. When I read the back jacket of this paperback, which describes a "disillusioned but talented investigator" solving a mystery with the help of a "beautiful American journalist," it sounded slightly hackneyed, but it was just a case of some publicity genius at Ballintine underselling both the book's readership and the author. Xavier March is one of the most vivid, heroic, and memorable characters I've come across in fiction. By the end of the book, I was right there with him, pulling for him so hard it made my teeth ache. As for "Charlie" Maguire, her physical appearance is the last thing that comes to mind. What I remember is her quick temper, her stubbornness, and the brave way she manages to control her growing fear as she comes to realize she is onto much more than a good story. Her terror is palpable, and so is her strength. "I hated you on sight," she tells Detective March at one point, and means it. Her growing love for this rigid, Nazi detective, and his need for her, is done in expert, subtle strokes. By the end of the novel, and after considering it for a bit, I realized I had just read one of the most moving love stories in memory.

I found this book, much to my surprise, profound. You will, too. -Mykal Banta

17 people found this helpful

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Helen Musson

Brilliant!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 21, 2024

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Brilliant!

Amazon Customer

Amazing

Reviewed in India on September 3, 2023

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A very good and engrossing read

Paprskarova

Doporučuji

Reviewed in Germany on January 15, 2023

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Doporučuji.

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Anthony Hogger (Author: Warrior King Legacy)

Gripping

Reviewed in Spain on November 28, 2022

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As someone very interested in the monster, Hitler’s, war, I found this a marvellous read. Gripping from the first page until the nail biting end. My first Robert Harris novel, surprisingly, it will most certainly not be the last.

One person found this helpful

almurar

Avvincente

Reviewed in Italy on September 26, 2017

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E' un libro che si legge tutto d'un fiato, con una trama per nulla scontata. Siamo negli anni '60 e si sta festeggiando il 75mo compleanno del Fuher dopo che la Germania ha vinto la seconda guerra mondiale...

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