Conspiracy against America

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Conspiracy Against America (English original title The Plot Against America ) is a 2004 novel by the American writer Philip Roth . The German translation by Werner Schmitz was published by Hanser Verlag in Munich in August 2005 . The novel belongs to the genre of alternative world history. The fictional first-person narrator Philip Roth recalls his childhood, when he and his Jewish family were victims of a fascist takeover in the United States at the beginning of the Second World War .

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The novel traces the path of the Roth family in 1940-42. Initially, the family lived a very peaceful life in a predominantly Jewish district of Newark just outside New York City . Father Herman Roth has a modest livelihood as an insurance agent, the mother, as a housewife, cares for seven-year-old Philip, twelve-year-old Sandy and orphaned nephew Alvin, who has just come of age.

After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the Roth family got caught up in the country's political turmoil. Alvin volunteers for the Canadian Army for a war effort, loses a leg in the field and returns to Newark on crutches and tired of life. The Republican Party raises Meanwhile, President Franklin D. Roosevelt before to pursue a pro-interventionist policy, so to lead the US entry into the European war on the side of England in the way. The aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh , who was courted by Hitler and Göring in Germany in the 1930s and who subsequently spoke out in favor of German National Socialism , rose to be the party's presidential candidate.

With the famous Spirit of St. Louis , the plane with which he made the first non-stop single flight across the Atlantic in aviation history in 1927, Lindbergh is now touring all 48 states and advertising with the slogan Vote for Lindbergh or vote for war (“Vote Lindbergh or vote for war! ”) for his candidacy. Fear spreads among Newark's Jews, but one of the city's most respected rabbis, of all people, makes himself his advocate on Lindbergh's visit to Newark. This circumstance is also important for the Roth family, as this Rabbi Bengelsdorf married Evelyn, Philip Roth's aunt, shortly afterwards - the Roths stayed away from the wedding.

Lindbergh wins the election in a landslide victory and moves into the White House as the 33rd President of the United States , and the anti-Semitic mood in the country intensifies. The Roth family had to experience this first hand on a trip to the federal capital Washington, DC : The room they had booked in a hotel was denied them for no further reason, and in other places too, father Herman had to abuse himself as a “cheeky Jew” to let. There is no government-prescribed, but noticeable personality cult around Lindbergh, to which Philips older brother Sandy also falls. In Sandy's High School, the youth organization Just Folks campaigns to strengthen the American youth's bond with clods, and so Sandy is sent to a tobacco farm in Kentucky over the summer . After his return he internalized the quasi- ethnic ideology of the program and became increasingly estranged from his family.

This family conflict reached a climax when Sandy was invited to the White House by Rabbi Bengelsdorf and his wife Evelyn as a representative of Just Folks , where President Lindbergh was holding a celebratory dinner for German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop . Father Roth forbids Sandy's participation, and Mother Roth expels her sister Evelyn from the house.

Ribbentrop's visit is interpreted by many American Jews as preparation for the United States to enter the war on the side of the Axis powers , and a family friends of the Roths emigrate to Canada out of fear. They see their fears confirmed when a law called Homestead 42 initiated the resettlement of Jewish families from the Jewish settlement centers on the East Coast into the American hinterland. A separate federal agency is set up for this purpose, the Office of American Absorption , which Philips Aunt Evelyn also works for. The alleged goal of this resettlement, which touches on the success of the Homestead Act of 1862, is to end the isolation of the Jews within American society and to bring about harmonious assimilation, but in fact the rulers are concerned with the cohesion of the Jewish community and thus also its influence breaking in local elections. The Roths are to be relocated to Kentucky, but Father Herman resists. He quits his employer and works from then on as a warehouse assistant for his brother, Philips' uncle Monty.

The political opposition, in other words the Democratic Party , remained quite calm up to this point, but after the resettlement law was passed, the sharp-tongued Jewish newspaper and radio commentator Walter Winchell took the lead in a counter-movement. After he had ostracized Lindbergh and his followers as Fifth Column Hitler on his radio show, which was heard by millions of Americans , he was fired by his employer, William Randolph Hearst , but then declared his intention to run in the next presidential election. Winchell then begins his campaign tour in New York. His appearances in other cities lead to riots, assassinations and finally pogroms, until he is shot during one of his speeches.

His funeral in New York turns into a demonstration against President Lindbergh led by Mayor LaGuardia .

The Jewish community of Newark is also arming itself against a pogrom in their own city, when shortly afterwards Lindbergh disappears without a trace on his plane and the reports and rumors about Lindbergh's fate roll over.

Vice President Burton K. Wheeler takes office in what amounts to a fascist coup. Opponents of the regime such as New York Mayor LaGuardia and previous President Roosevelt are arrested. Lindbergh's wife , who always urged prudence, is taken to a psychiatric clinic. Rabbi Bengelsdorf is also arrested as Rabbi Rasputin ; his wife seeks refuge with the Roths.

Finally, Lindbergh's wife manages to escape. In a radio address, she calls on the Americans to refuse to follow Wheeler, and her reputation as a first lady helps the appeal to succeed.

Lindbergh and Wheeler's rule is exposed as a suspected Nazi conspiracy, and Roosevelt wins the next presidential election. After the attack on Pearl Harbor , the US enters the war - world history is back on track.

Fact and fiction

Poster for a stage adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here (around 1936)

The novel mixes historical facts and literary fiction. Particularly in the literature of American postmodernism (at about Thomas Pynchon or Robert Coover ) is counterfactuality a frequent mode. Roth's portrayal of his own family and himself also moves in this gray area. The fictionalization of oneself is a tradition in American literature. A famous example is Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night . Mailer made himself the protagonist of the novel; the subtitle of the work is “History as a novel; the novel as a story ”. For this type of literature Mailer suggested the generic term faction , a word creation from fact (fact) and fiction (fiction), and so, according to Mailer, Roth's novel could also be assigned to this genre. In fact, Roth has already put himself in the role of the first-person narrator more or less fictionally in other novels.

The scenario of a fascist takeover of power in the USA was portrayed by several writers as early as the 1930s. The best known is the novel It Can't Happen Here (" This is not possible with us ") by the Nobel Prize winner Sinclair Lewis . In Nathanael West's The Cool Million (1934), the fascist takeover of power in the USA succeeds. West, like Roth a Jewish American, is arguably closer to Roth's vision. West and Roth are united by the experience of being exposed to anti-Semitism in America as well, and therefore they distrust the alleged tolerance and enthusiasm for democracy of the Americans.

Many of Lindbergh's quotes, in particular, are factual; In order to clarify the boundary between fact and fiction for the interested reader, Roth has created an appendix to the novel in which he presents the actual biographies of some historical people he has fictionalized, as well as some excerpts from speeches by Lindbergh. Lindbergh was spokesman for the isolationist America First Committee and was awarded a medal by Goering. Roth stated in an interview that he got the idea for his novel when he read in Arthur M. Schlesinger's autobiography that Conservative Senators were actually considering nominating Lindbergh as a Republican presidential candidate around 1940.

There were also anti-Semitic riots in the 1940s. Especially in the industrial cities of the north (especially Detroit ) they grew into pogroms; here the anti-Semitism of Henry Ford and the Catholic priest Charles Coughlin fell on fertile ground.

Critical reception

Conspiracy against America was received by literary critics in the USA, if not euphoric, then mostly benevolent. However, the critics frequently criticized the end of the book - Roth's decision to make Lindbergh disappear without a trace seemed to them a deus ex machina .

Even the New York Times , with which Roth has had a deep love-hate relationship for years - and which also had to take a swipe in the novel itself - won touching moments from the novel. Michiko Kakutani criticized the elaboration of the political-historical tableau of the novel as being overdrawn like a comic and the resolution of the plot as grotesque, but praised the careful “microscopic” psychological representation of the Roth family and its members. Overall, however, the pieces did not fit into a whole - the novel ultimately failed due to the attempt to combine two incompatible genres - political thriller and development novel. Joan Acocella gave the novel a flawless testimonial in the New Yorker, emphasizing the comic elements of the novel. The ease with which Roth combines credible realism with nightmarish dystopia place him and his novel in the tradition of the great satirists of world literature - Swift , Gogol and Kafka .

Roth's novel has been read by various critics and readers as an allegory of the Bush administration . For example, Kakutani wrote that the novel could be read as a warning against the restriction of civil rights under the PATRIOT Act , but also as a warning against foreign policy isolationism . Roth, an avowed opponent of Bush, repeatedly rejected such an interpretation.

Awards

For Conspiracy Against America , Roth was honored with the Society of American Historians prize for the best historical novel on American subjects ( James Fenimore Cooper Prize ), and he also won the Sidewise Award for Alternate History in 2005.

In Great Britain the novel won the prestigious WH Smith Award . Roth became the first writer in 64 years to receive this award for the second time.

expenditure

English

German

  • Conspiracy against America . Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag: Reinbek 2007. ISBN 3499240874

The swastika above the Yosemite National Park postage stamp has been replaced by a simple cross on the cover of the German edition and also on the British print from 2005 (Vintage Verlag).

Adaptation as a television series

The novel was adapted as a six-part American television series called The Plot Against America and produced by HBO . The German version has been available on Sky Ticket since May 13, 2020 .

Secondary literature

Web links

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  1. ^ "A Pro-Nazi President, a Family Feeling the Effects," The New York Times, September 21, 2004
  2. ↑ Counterlives: Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America," The New Yorker, September 20, 2004
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Höbel : The US President as a Hitler fan. In: Der Spiegel , March 21, 2020, accessed on March 21, 2020