G is for the GOVERNOR OF MADAGASKAR

Early in the plotting of The Madagaskar Plan it became clear that I would need to include the GOVERNOR OF MADAGASKAR, not only to rule the island but also to thwart Hochburg. Three possibilities are mentioned in the narrative.

My research soon revealed that the Nazis had a candidate in mind as early as the 1930s: Philipp Bouhler, Head of Chancellery in Hitler’s personal office and an old comrade of the Führer’s. However, Bouhler didn’t make for a particularly dramatic character. He was too dry, a bureaucrat, so I decided to project the story beyond his governorship.

I considered a fictitious character but wanting to keep things grounded in reality I started looking at other, real possibilities. One name kept cropping up: Odilo Globocnik. He had run the Lublin Reservation in Poland (a precursor to the Madagascar Plan) and later built the death camps; he seemed a very likely contender.

Globocnik and Bouhler

Yet I was reluctant to use him because of Fatherland (where he is the main villain). It was only after I read a biography of him that I realised his potential. Although Robert Harris depicts the psychopathic qualities of his character well, he omitted lots of the bizarre details. I included many of these in Madagaskar: Globocnik’s two wedding rings, his alcoholism, womanising, horsemanship, love of Austrian folk music. All this is true and made him spring alive for me. So is the fact he never employed women older than twenty-four and that he used to speak to Himmler while lying on the floor, raising alternate legs as he agreed with the Reichsführer. As mentioned in my novel, Globocnik had a real breakdown in 1943.

[Spoiler alert.] In the final chapters of the book a replacement for Globus is mentioned – Herr Bischoff. Again he was a real person and was considered by Heydrich to run the island. Bischoff’s reign would have been different to Bouhler’s and especially Globus’s. He was an accountant and married to a half-Jewish wife. This illustrates well my feelings on alternative history. Often people say to me this or that couldn’t have happened, but how can they be certain? All of the three men above when credible candidates as Governor of Madagaskar. Each would have ruled the island in a very different manner.

V is for VANILLA JEWS (Book 2, update 2)

The original title for the sequel to Afrika Reich was THE VANILLA JEWS. However, my editor didn’t think it sounded commercial enough, so I changed it. For the past couple of years this blog has been about the original book, now it’s time to start looking forward (spoiler free... ish) to the next one.

So what to tell you? When I first started on Book 2, I meant it as a direct follow-up; as the years have passed, however, it has subtly shifted. I now see it as a ‘parallel sequel’ – although it continues events of the first book, and develops the existing story and characters, certain aspects of the original have been dropped. It is significantly more ambitious with an interweaving, multi-stranded narrative and more emphasis on the characters than action (though there’s still a healthy dose of the latter).

The one thing it is not is a rehash of the first book. There’s a lot of pressure in publishing to create a series and/or repeat an initial success – but I have scant interest in this. What engages me is the possibility of doing something different, something unexpected. As I was recently advised by a wily American film producer: ‘never go for the sure thing’. It could be a maxim for Book 2.

A propaganda poster from the 1930s

At the centre of the story is the Nazis’ plan to deport the Jews of Europe to Madagascar, an island off the east coast of Africa. Prior to the Holocaust this was to be their fate. Some historians argue that Madagascar was nothing more than a fantasy or smokescreen to cover up the real killing. However, my research shows detailed preparations were made by the Nazis and that the subject was discussed and approved at the highest level. When Hitler was shown the plan in the summer of 1940 he responded that it was ‘very good’. 

Perhaps more disturbingly, as early as 1938 the British were also in discussions to exile the Jews to Africa. We can never know the truth path of a speculative history but the thought of a Jewish Madagascar is not improbable. As an aside, Madagascar is the world’s largest producer of vanilla – hence the original title; vanilla remains of leitmotif throughout the text.

The odious Globus

With this as the background, other elements in the new book include a deepening of Burton’s back story; the fallout of Hochburg’s invasion of Northern Rhodesia; visiting new realms of German Africa such as the ‘pleasure city’ of Roscherhafen (again based on real plans); glimpsing WBU, the Nazis’ military zone in Siberia; as well as a slew of projected Nazi hardware and several new characters. Among these is Odilo ‘Globus’ Globocnik, a real historical character and the villain of Fatherland – though my depiction of him is very different (and dare I say, more accurate) than Robert Harris’s. Did you know, for instance, that Globocnik was a master horseman, drunkard and singer of Austrian folksongs?

Without wanting to be a hostage to the future the new book will be published in time for Christmas 2014. And the title? When my editor said The Vanilla Jews didn’t work I had an instant alternative (no pun intended). It has already been registered and ISBNed. You heard it here first:

THE

MADAGASKAR PLAN

Reflections & V is also for...

When I first began this A-Z of Afrika Reich I meant to publish an entry a week with the last, ‘V is for...’, going live as the UK paperback was published. As with the writing of Book 2, this schedule now seems rather optimistic. But as the A-Z draws to an end I thought it was a good opportunity to reflect on it.

In the two and a half years I’ve been writing this blog, more than 32 500 people have visited it; I hope some of them have read it and been intrigued and entertained by the contents. It has certainly been a revealing process for myself. I’ve learnt as much about the book dissecting it here as I did while writing, perhaps more. At the same time, trying to get a handle on it has been like sculpting steam: for every assertion I make, I’m immediately aware of several contradictions. I like to think, however, that I’ve shown that Afrika Reich is more than just Fatherland or SS-GB in the tropics.

The comparison with those books has been both a boon and a curse. The great advantage was that it created an association with existing bestsellers. Against that, I never saw Afrika Reich as being of the same ilk. A naturalism has crept into novels imagining a victorious Nazi Germany, something borne through SS-GB and Fatherland and continuing to this day with the recent Dominion. I wanted to move away from that, though the demands of marketing departments meant I often had to play to the gallery and define myself in terms of Deighton, Harris et al (not that they’re bad company to keep!).

Why the naturalism? It may partly reflect a general movement in fiction. I think it also comes from a sense that if an author captures certain details then he is accurately portraying what the world would have been like if Hitler had won. I remain unconvinced. The whole point of an alternative history is that we can never know what it would have been like. A more fantastical approach served earlier examples of the genre well, such as Swastika Night, The City on the Edge of Forever (for all the Star Trek fans I know who read this blog) and The Man in the High Castle. By tendency, I’m more comfortable in this camp.

This blog has allowed me to convey a sense of that and speak my mind more openly than the marketeers probably want me to. If you’ve read this far you’re in a better place to understand my intentions (yes, that word again); it’s something I plan to continue more explicitly in Book 2 – the subject of my next entry and the last in the series. While I leave you to speculate what the V can stand for, here’s the addendum in advance...

V is also for Violence

Along with the literal brigade (see ‘L is also for...’) the reaction that most surprised me about the book was how violent people found it. Obviously given its setting and subject it was never going to be a fluffy, rose-perfumed narrative, despite that I never felt the violence was as bad as some people protested. I’ve had grown men tell me they had to stop reading because they found it excessive. What this says about me I don’t know – though others have speculated (see here, for example).

All I can say is: 1) I didn’t want to shy away from the violence that was the reality of the Third Reich and continues to this day in central Africa; nevertheless I always perceived mine as a stylised, almost comic violence, not to be taken entirely seriously 2) before submitting the book for publication I made a conscious decision to tone things down. If you think the version that ended up in the shops is bad, you should see the earlier drafts!

F is for FANTASTIC REALISM

I’ve written about intent before. As this A-Z enters its twilight I thought I’d address the subject again. Those who prefer to think of Afrika Reich as a ‘straight’ thriller might want to look away now...

Prior to Afrika Reich, I wrote four unpublished novels on subjects as diverse as Barbary pirates and literary forgery. The one common thread was the mode of writing: FANTASTIC REALISM, something I continued in my tale of Nazi Africa.

So what is fantastic realism? It’s a rather amorphous term and unlike its better known cousin – magic realism – evades definition. Personally, I feel it employs realistic conventions but mixes them with elements of the fantastic, grotesque, comic and horrific. Perhaps it’s easier to explain with an example and so once again I reach for Sergio Leone, a great practitioner of fantastic realism. Here’s an image from his film, Giù la Testa:

It shows Sean, an IRA terrorist, having dinner with Juan, a bandit (off screen), in the Mexican desert. This combination of unexpected characters meeting in a realistic setting is already taking us into the realms of fantastic realism but the clincher is the details. They are sitting down to eat in the wilderness but are dining off porcelain plates with all the finery (the wingback chairs, the decanters of vinegar and oil) of a lord’s banqueting hall. I particularly like the crêpe suzette pan. It is a combination of unlikely elements – though crucially there is nothing supernatural about the scene.

My book begins its fusion of reality with the fantastical on page one with opening epigraphs that combine the real (Hitler’s quote) and the imagined/fantastic (Hochburg’s). Elsewhere we see two arch enemies overlooking a square paved with human skulls discussing Himmler’s constitution. Or Patrick tortured within a cement factory where the main production material is not mineral-based but a trough of human bodies. Sometimes it’s simply in the small details – the SS guards with their pink ladies parasols (a direct reference to Leone). Unlikely? Yes. Impossible? No.

Alternative history has always struck me as something of a fantastic genre – it posits an unknowable reality – so I felt it was an ideal match for fantastic realism. However, due to the success of books like Fatherland, and more recently Dominion, a naturalism seems to be creeping into the genre: the idea that a writer can accurately describe a speculative world that never existed. It certainly seems the mindset some people have tried to read my book in – no wonder they’ve been confused! But that is to miss the point. It’s not my book wasn’t thoroughly researched or employs real, historical details – it’s that I’m not a slave to verisimilitude. Indeed the notion of verisimilitude in alternative history must, by definition, be a contradiction.

What interests me most, what excites me enough to want to spend several years writing a book, is the point where reality and the fantastic meet – and the friction the two generate. That is what Afrika Reich is about: something a little more subversive than reality. 

G is for GERMANIA

GERMANIA – or to give the city its full title Welthaupstadt Germania (World Capital Germania) – was the name the Nazis planned to give Berlin if they won the war.

Along with Hitler not appearing in the book (see ‘H is also for…’) another early decision I had to make was whether any scenes would be set in the capital of the new German Empire. It is, of course, the primary location of Robert Harris’s Fatherland, indeed I’ve often wondered why he didn’t call his book Germania. In a rather sneaky exposition scene Harris has his hero and son take a bus tour of the city so the reader can become familiar with its sights: the Great Hall, Avenue of Victory, Arch of Triumph und so weiter.

Germania is brought to life so vividly in Fatherland that I didn’t see much point in revisiting it, so during the planning of Afrika Reich I chose not to use it as a setting. This also coincided with me exorcising anything in Britain/London, apart from the prologue. I liked the intensity of having the whole book set in Africa with no European ‘relief breaks’, something my agent initially pressed for. I’ll come back to this in ‘U is also for...’

Speer admiring a model of his planned city as seen in the film Downfall.

On a practical note, it’s unlikely Germania as envisioned by Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, could ever have been built. The planned buildings were so monumental that they required granite hard foundations; Berlin is built on marshy ground. To test whether such huge edifices could ever be erected several exploratory load bearing blocks were constructed. If they sank less than 6cm, the ground of Berlin would not have been capable of sustaining the structures Hitler imagined. They were built in 1941 and although they exist to this day, within three years had slipped 18cm!

Nevertheless there’s great appeal in the prospect of such a histrionic city with its Olympian architecture and convictions of grandeur. I was particularly struck by one, slightly apocryphal detail. Visiting dignitaries would arrive at Templehof airport, then drive directly through the city along the Avenue of Splendours to Hitler’s Palace and finally his study: an uninterrupted straight line of five kilometres from your plane to the desk of the Führer. Can you imagine such megalomania? In the earliest drafts of Book 2 Hochburg made this journey.

Unfortunately as I began developing the plot this scene became more and more unnecessary until finally I realised it had to be cut. Working on a novel, however, is a process of constant evolution, so even as Hochburg’s scene fell from the manuscript another scene in Germania presented itself. Something more gentle and unexpected. You’ll have to wait for the sequel to find out what, but it may just involve Burton... and ice cream!

See the next entry for a virtual tour of Hitler’s planned city.

D is for DIVERGENCE POINT

If you’re writing an alternative history sooner or later you have to settle on a ‘DIVERGENCE POINT’ – i.e. the moment when real, recorded history ends and a new, alternative one begins. In SS-GB it’s the successful invasion of Britain by the Nazis, in Fatherland when Hitler defeats the Soviet Union in 1943.

I settled upon Dunkirk and instead of giving the British a miraculous escape, I had them slaughtered on the beaches. Why did I choose this point?

One of the themes of the book is the myths we cling to (think of Burton and his mother) and I wanted to echo this in the larger structure of the narrative. Dunkirk is often seen as the epitome of British pluck; a defeat that has somehow morphed into a victory and is seen as one of the country’s finest hours. Indeed, newspapers still refer to the ‘Dunkirk spirit’ in a whole variety of situations – from Brits abroad coping with crises to the dreary comebacks of our national soccer team.

I was intrigued by debunking this notion and having Dunkirk as a disaster. Instead of being a narrow escape it was a coup de grace that led Britain to negotiate with Nazi Germany, leaving us with peace but less national pride. Of course, once I had changed this, other aspects of the alternative history fell into place as a consequence. With Britain out of the war much earlier there was less need for American involvement; having to fight on only one front meant Germany could concentrate all its forces against the USSR and win (though as a nod to Harris, I kept the same date of 1943).

In reality, the reasons behind Hitler’s decision not to annihilate the British at Dunkirk remain a mystery. Some historians think it was down to incompetence, others that it would appeal to Britain’s sense of fair play, making them more amenable to negotiation. In my world there’s a very specific reason why Hitler doesn’t attack... though you’ll have to wait till the Prologue of Book 3 to find out!

D is also for DAMBE

In action adventure stories the hero often has some skill in martial arts. I wanted to give Burton the same but felt something like kung fu or karate would be impossibly crass. So I went looking to see if there was an African equivalent. As it turns out there were several including: kokawa, musangwe, ‘nuba’. In the end I opted for dambe, a West Africa form of boxing because a) I’d already place Burton’s upbringing in that part of the continent b) it just looked vicious and chimed with the character’s more violent streak.

You can see an example of dambe on this clip from CNN.

Curiously both I and Burton seem to have out-grown dambe... so it may not be back in Book 2. What does everyone else think?

O is for OUT NOW IN PAPERBACK!

And here it is, the book the Telegraph is calling, ‘Fatherland for an action movie age’ and The Times, ‘An horrific reimagining of the Dark Continent’:

O is also for OPERATION NELKE

This is the name of Arnim’s operation to invade Angola in my book. Although plans for a Nazi occupation of Angola were discussed as early as 1937, no official operation name was ever designated to it (unlike Operations Banana and Sisal the proposed conquest of, respectively, West and Central Africa).

Despite having to make up a name for the operation, I wanted it to have some historical resonance. In 1974, there was a coup d’etat in Portugal that eventually led to Angola’s independence (and later civil war). This was known as the ‘Carnation Revolution’ because no shots were fired; instead flowers were put in the barrels of rifles. I liked the irony of that in relation to my alternative history, hence ‘Nelke’ – the German for carnation.

X is for XAVIER MARCH

If you’re reading this blog there’s a high chance you’re interested in alternative history. If you’re interested in alternative history then there’s an even higher chance you’re read Robert Harris’s Fatherland. In my opinion it’s the apogee of the genre and a damn fine thriller to boot.

(As a quick aside, I should say a word about alternative history. The ‘definitive’ novel of the genre is The Man in the High Castle and it’s noteworthy that this is a work of science fiction. Purists would argue that Fatherland isn’t really alternative history, only its milieu is. I tend to agree – which is why I see Afrika Reich as foremost a thriller, not alternative history.)

One of the reasons Fatherland is such a satisfying read is because of the main character: XAVIER MARCH, an investigator with Berlin’s criminal police (and a God send for author’s writing A-Zs and wondering what they’ll do with those tricky last letters of the alphabet). It was a lesson for me. If Afrika Reich was going to succeed beyond the setting and plot, the characters would have to be people readers cared for.

That said, there’s no Xavier March equivalent in my book. March is a more morally straightforward character than Burton. Although a member of the SS, he’s motivated by a desire to know the truth about the world he lives in, and uncovering corruption and murder at the heart of the Reich. In many ways he’s a crusader. Burton’s motives are entirely personal; he’s indifferent to the Nazis’ plans for Africa apart from when they intersect his individual needs. As I once said to my editor: ‘the bad guys are bad, but the good guys aren’t necessarily good’. I’ll come back to this subject in ‘E is for...’.

Returning to Fatherland, in essence it’s a crime thriller, you could even go so far as to say a whodunit. Harris’s book followed in the tradition of Len Deighton’s SS-GB which is an espionage thriller. It occurred to me that the victorious Third Reich element of these books (although intrinsic to the plot) is a backdrop to variations on thriller. Since the crime and spy sub-genre had already been done, I wanted to do something fresh with Afrika Reich – hence the reason I chose to make it an action/adventure thriller, more of which next time...

PS – just in case you’re wondering why I’ve included a picture of Rutger Hauer here dressed in black, he played Xavier March in the HBO adaptation of the novel.