Fatherland Read online

  Contents

  Praise for Fatherland

  About the Author

  Also by Robert Harris

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction to the 20th Anniversary edition of Fatherland

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Three

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Four

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Five

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Six

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Part Seven

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  Praise for

  FATHERLAND

  ‘A powerful and chilling story: the past rewritten. The plot is convincing in every detail, the characters are entirely believable’ MARTHA GELLHORN, Daily Telegraph

  ‘Clever and ingenious...Its breeding is by Orwell, out of P.D. James, a detective story inside a future shock’ Daily Mail

  ‘A writer who handles suspense like a literary Alfred Hitchcock’ NELSON MANDELA, Guardian

  ‘Robert Harris has recreated the whole structure of a totally corrupt society in a way that makes the flesh creep’ JOHN MORTIMER, Sunday Times

  ‘Not since The Day of the Jackal has a thriller captured the imagination of so many readers’ SHERIDAN MORLEY, judge of the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award

  ‘Gripping in the way John Buchan, Len Deighton and John LeCarré are. The writing is superb. This novel lifts its author into a new and superior class’ WOODROW WYATT, The Times

  ‘Tightly constructed . . . grips as tightly as a Nazi’s glove’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘A singular achievement displaying original and carefully wrought suspense all its own . . . Fatherland easily transcends convention’ Washington Post

  ‘A sly and scary page turner’ Los Angeles Times

  ‘Absorbing, expertly written’ New York Times

  ‘A fantastic thriller . . . The final solution is an utter surprise. Harris reaches it with speed, conveying a whole culture of grotesquery and kitsch’ Mail on Sunday

  ‘A formidable thriller . . . terse, involving and expertly constructed . . . It is five days since I finished Fatherland and it is still rumbling around my head’ London Review of Books

  ‘Fatherland works on all levels. It’s a triumph’ Washington Times

  ‘Robert Harris’s ingenious new thriller is a triumph . . . Suspenseful and elegant . . . a thoughtful, frightening story’ San Francisco Chronicle

  ‘Ingenious . . . fast-paced and beautifully written’ Esquire

  ‘Terrifying . . . A wonderful new novel’ Newsday

  ‘Fatherland is based on a brilliant idea . . . Not only do the intricacies of the plot make for compelling reading but the accuracy and detail of what a victorious Gemany might have been like are surprising coming from one who was not born when the War began’ MILTON SHULMAN

  ‘Truly captivating’ ROBERT LUDLUM

  ‘I picked it up at an airport bookstall the other day, and couldn’t put it down. Its depth, invention and characterisation lift it well into the realm of literature’ Independent on Sunday

  ‘Fatherland is, thankfully, fiction . . . an intriguing way to look at Germany’s never-buried past’ Newsweek

  ‘A world so chillingly realistic and controversial that Fatherland was initially turned down by every German publisher until even they could no longer ignore its commercial appeal’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘Fatherland is being compared to Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, but Harris’s narrative is more unsettling . . . His brooding, brown-and-black setting of a victorious Nazi regime is believable and troubling, the stuff of long nights of little sleep’ Time

  About the Author

  Since the publication of Fatherland 20 years ago, Robert Harris has written seven further bestselling novels – Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii, Imperium, The Ghost, Lustrum and The Fear Index. His work has been translated into thirty-seven languages. For his collaboration with Roman Polanski on the film version of The Ghost, he won both the French César and the European Film Award for best adapted screenplay.

  A graduate of Cambridge University, where he studied English, he joined the BBC and later wrote for the Observer, the Sunday Times and the Daily Telegraph. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

  He is married to Gill Hornby. They have four children and live in a village near Hungerford in West Berkshire.

  Also by Robert Harris

  ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ FICTION ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

  Enigma Archangel Pompeii

  Imperium The Ghost Lustrum

  ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ NON-FICTION ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

  A Higher Form of Killing (with Jeremy Paxman)

  Gotcha! The Making of Neil Kinnock

  Selling Hitler Good and Faithful Servant

  FATHERLAND

  Robert Harris

  To Gill

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I thank the Librarian and staff of the Wiener Library in London for their help over several years.

  I also wish to thank David Rosenthal and – especially – Robyn Sisman, without whom this book would never have been started, let alone finished.

  INTRODUCTION TO THE 20TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION OF FATHERLAND

  Adolf Hitler once remarked that ‘one good idea is worth a lifetime in an office’. I suppose you could say that Fatherland was my one good idea. I have written seven other novels in the twenty years since this book appeared – better novels, I hope, at least some of them – but none has had quite the impact of my first.

  The idea began to evolve in my mind in the mid- 1980s, when I was writing a book about the forged Hitler diaries (Selling Hitler, 1986). My research included Hitler’s Table Talk: the Führer’s droning monologues, recorded in 1941 and 1942, outlining his plans for the world after the Wehrmacht had won the war. This gargantuan vision – of a remodelled Berlin renamed Germania, of 25 million German settlers living thousands of miles away on the Steppes, of an empire linked to the Fatherland by double-decker railways and gleaming autobahnen – struck me as a wonderful subject for a nonfiction book. Indeed, I thought, perhaps I could write it unconventionally, and approach Hitler’s world as if it actually existed: it would be a kind of Baedecker’s Guide to Hell, using the actual maps and architectural models that had been produced by the planners in Berlin.

  The idea wasn’t bad, but I quickly realised it would only take me so far. It wouldn’t enable me to address the really crucial questions. For example, would ordinary Germans actually have wanted to have live in these ghastly colonial settlements, as bit-players in their Führer’s fervid, megalomaniac production? And what about the extermination of the Jews? How did Hitler plan to explain the disappearance of six – or, if the whole of Eur
ope had been conquered, ten – million people?

  This in turn raised a fascinating geopolitical ‘what if’. Assuming that Germany couldn’t have defeated the United States militarily, the world would presumably have settled into a prolonged Cold War. In which case, might some future US president have decided, like Richard Nixon, to pursue a policy of détente with Berlin? Would realpolitik then have ensured that Hitler’s victims were no more of an obstacle to such a process than those of Stalin, or of Mao? And if this Cold War had also led to a great thaw, would the Nazi empire have melted away with it, in the way of the old Soviet Union?

  Gradually I realised that if I was going to explore these concepts, I would have to create imaginary characters living in a victorious Third Reich, and devise a story that somehow would take the reader on a journey through that society. It meant that as an author, I too would have to travel into unfamiliar territory and pass through the looking-glass from fact into fiction: not because I wanted to (oddly enough, I was never one of those journalists who harboured a secret ambition to be a novelist) but simply because fiction was the only tool available to tackle what I wanted to do.

  I decided at the outset that the best form for my novel would be a police procedural. I liked the conceit of having an honest policeman working for a criminal regime: a detective investigating a single death in a society founded on the greatest act of mass-murder in history. I knew also that I would need to set it in the 1960s: close enough to the war for most of the senior Nazis, including Hitler, still to be alive, but near enough to our own time for it to be a world of television, jet travel and the Beatles illicitly playing a nightclub in Hamburg.

  I wrote the opening few pages – my first pages of fiction – on a Saturday afternoon in 1989, in a kind of ecstatic daze engendered by the realisation that I could imagine literally anything and set it down on paper – that a body with a leg missing could surface in a lake during a storm, or that a marching band could pass from one side of a square to another, watched by my sceptical hero through a rain-flecked windscreen. I felt as if a whole powerful section of my mind was switching on for the first time.

  Utterly defeated, I put the book aside for more than a year. That November, the Berlin Wall came down. Bizarrely, I regarded this as the final coup de grace for my abandoned novel. Who, I reasoned gloomily, would be intrigued by reading about a fictional unified Germany when one could turn on the television and see the real thing?

  Looking back, I recognise this now as a classic case of the terrible, irrational pessimism that afflicts most writers at some stage of a book. Because, of course, if there was one factor that suddenly gave my fantasy of a united Germany a harder edge, it was the news that exactly such an entity was unexpectedly returning to the heart of Europe.

  I resumed work on Fatherland, without much enthusiasm, at the beginning of 1991. As far as I was concerned I was giving it one last try. And now, at last, I did what I should have done in the first place: I tried to imagine the story right through to the end. A novel, I suddenly perceived, is essentially a recounting of something that has already happened: it is not a game of consequences in which one can simply make it up as one goes along. (Of course, one can write a novel extempore, just as one can embark on telling a joke without having thought up the punch line, but it’s a risky undertaking).

  In the original pages I had employed multiple points of view; re-reading the typescript I recognised that the book was only remotely interesting when the detective was centre-stage. Accordingly, I threw away more than half of what I had done and started again. In October 1991, amazingly, I finished.

  Looking at the picture of my younger self signing copies, I think one can at least safely say that my novel, whatever its faults, has worn better than its author. But then one of the great, paradoxical advantages of historical fiction is that it does not date. Fatherland in particular – set in an imagined past that is also a conjectured future – is doubly insulated against changes in fashion.

  Besides, the 140 year-old ‘German question’ – how can this great and industrious nation exist in the centre of Europe without dominating it? – is still awaiting an answer. The current problems in the Eurozone, like the fall of the Berlin Wall, have brought all kinds of ghosts out of the shadows. ‘Suddenly Europe is speaking German,’ one of Chancellor Merkel’s more tactless colleagues boasted recently – thus demonstrating, I suspect, precisely why Fatherland continues to attract readers who weren’t even born when it was first published.

  Robert Harris, April 2012.

  The hundred million self-confident German masters were to be brutally installed in Europe, and secured in power by a monopoly of technical civilisation and the slave-labour of a dwindling native population of neglected, diseased, illiterate cretins, in order that they might have leisure to buzz along infinite Autobahnen, admire the Strength-Through-Joy Hostel, the Party Headquarters, the Military Museum and the Planetarium which their Führer would have built in Linz (his new Hitleropolis), trot round local picture-galleries, and listen over their cream buns to endless recordings of The Merry Widow. This was to be the German Millennium, from which even the imagination was to have no means of escape.

  HUGH TREVOR-ROPER

  The Mind of Adolf Hitler

  People sometimes say to me: ‘Be careful! You will have twenty years of guerrilla warfare on your hands!’ I am delighted at the prospect . . . Germany will remain in a state of perpetual alertness.

  ADOLF HITLER

  29 August 1942

  PART ONE

  TUESDAY 14 APRIL 1964

  I swear to Thee, Adolf Hitler,

  As Führer and Chancellor of the German Reich,

  Loyalty and Bravery.

  I vow to Thee and to the superiors

  Whom Thou shalt appoint

  Obedience unto Death,

  So help me God.

  SS OATH

  ONE

  hick cloud had pressed down on Berlin all night, and now it was lingering into what passed for the morning. On the city’s western outskirts, plumes of rain drifted across the surface of Lake Havel, like smoke.

  Sky and water merged into a sheet of grey, broken only by the dark line of the opposite bank. Nothing stirred there. No lights showed.

  Xavier March, homicide investigator with the Berlin Kriminalpolizei – the Kripo – climbed out of his Volkswagen and tilted his face to the rain. He was a connoisseur of this particular rain. He knew the taste of it, the smell of it. It was Baltic rain, from the north, cold and sea-scented, tangy with salt. For an instant he was back twenty years, in the conning tower of a U-boat, slipping out of Wilhelmshaven, lights doused, into the darkness.

  He looked at his watch. It was just after seven in the morning.

  Drawn up on the roadside before him were three other cars. The occupants of two were asleep in the drivers’ seats. The third was a patrol car of the Ordnungspolizei – the Orpo, as every German called them. It was empty. Through its open window, sharp in the damp air, came the crackle of static, punctuated by jabbering bursts of speech. The revolving light on its roof lit up the forest beside the road: blue-black, blue-black, blue-black.

  March looked around for the Orpo patrolmen, and saw them sheltering by the lake under a dripping birch tree. Something gleamed pale in the mud at their feet. On a nearby log sat a young man in a black tracksuit, SS insignia on his breast pocket. He was hunched forward, elbows resting on his knees, hands pressed against the sides of his head – the image of misery.

  March took a last draw on his cigarette and flicked it away. It fizzed and died on the wet road.

  As he approached, one of the policemen raised his arm.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’

  March ignored him and slithered down the muddy bank to inspect the corpse.

  It was an old man’s body – cold, fat, hairless and shockingly white. From a distance, it could have been an alabaster statue dumped in the mud. Smeared with dirt, the corpse sprawled on its back half out of the water, arms
flung wide, head tilted back. One eye was screwed shut, the other squinted balefully at the filthy sky.

  ‘Your name, Unterwachtmeister?’ March had a soft voice. Without taking his eyes off the body, he addressed the Orpo man who had saluted.

  ‘Ratka, Herr Sturmbannführer.’

  Sturmbannführer was an SS title, equivalent in Wehrmacht rank to major, and Ratka – dog-tired and skin-soaked though he was – seemed eager to show respect. March knew his type without even looking round: three applications to transfer to the Kripo, all turned down; a dutiful wife who had produced a football team of children for the Führer; an income of 200 Reichsmarks a month. A life lived in hope.

  ‘Well, Ratka,’ said March, in that soft voice again. ‘What time was he discovered?’

  ‘Just over an hour ago, sir. We were at the end of our shift, patrolling in Nikolassee. We took the call. Priority One. We were here in five minutes.’

  ‘Who found him?’

  Ratka jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  The young man in the tracksuit rose to his feet. He could not have been more than eighteen. His hair was cropped so close the pink scalp showed through the dusting of light brown hair. March noticed how he avoided looking at the body.

  ‘Your name?’

  ‘SS-Schütze Hermann Jost, sir.’ He spoke with a Saxon accent – nervous, uncertain, anxious to please. ‘From the Sepp Dietrich training academy at Schlachtensee.’ March knew it: a monstrosity of concrete and asphalt built in the 1950s, just south of the Havel. ‘I run here most mornings. It was still dark. At first, I thought it was a swan,’ he added, helplessly.

  Ratka snorted, contempt on his face. An SS cadet scared of one dead old man! No wonder the war in the Urals was dragging on forever.

  ‘Did you see anyone else, Jost?’ March spoke in a kindly tone, like an uncle.

  ‘Nobody, sir. There’s a telephone box in the picnic area, half a kilometre back. I called, then came here and waited until the police arrived. There wasn’t a soul on the road.’