The Ultimate Solution
OCLC 1281098 | |
The Ultimate Solution is a 1973
Plot
A
Former extermination camps are open to the public as "national shrines" – not to commemorate the victims, as in our world, but to glorify the murderers and present them as heroes. What we know as the inoffensive town of
"Respectable" society is murderous, but when the protagonist starts digging deeper into the underworld, he discovers, hidden but still there, (what we would call) decent or even heroic people: first, old men still playing
The "
Reception
Norden's book, along with others exploring an alternate history where Germany won World War II, has been cited as a work that "fulfilled an important moral function by underscoring the barbarism of Nazism and clearly reinforcing the prevailing view that a Nazi-ruled world would have been an utterly horrific place."[2]
Gavriel David Rosenfeld, in his book The World Hitler Never Made (2005), suggests that Norden might have been inspired to write his novel by a ten-day-long interview he conducted with Albert Speer, which was published in the June 1971 edition of Playboy. During the interview, Speer commented to Norden, "If the Nazis had won, [people] ... would be living in a nightmare". Rosenfeld sees Norden's novel as a morally informed critique of the 1970s "Hitler Wave" of renewed interest in Nazism which followed the publication of Speer's Inside the Third Reich.[3]
The book is criticized as being too "farfetched", as many subjects in the book contradict real-life Nazism and some find it hard to believe that America could be occupied so easily. In the view of some critics, Norden – a radical opponent of the Vietnam War and other aspects of official US policies – might have meant to present to fellow Americans their reflection in "a very dark mirror" rather than portray a realistic alternate scenario of how World War II might have ended.
In support of the latter view can be cited such features as that except for one German appearing briefly in the first chapter, all Nazis in the book are Americans, including the members of the
See also
- Hypothetical Axis victory in World War II, which includes an extensive list of other Wikipedia articles regarding works of Nazi Germany/Axis/World War II alternate history.
References
- ^ "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction".
- OCLC 70765743.
- ISBN 978-0-521-84706-3.