Plot Summary
Wehrmacht officer Heinrich Gimpel astonishes his 10-year-old daughter, Alicia, with a secret that has been hidden from her all her life: the family is Jewish. He explains that the Gimpels, friends Walther and Esther Stutzman, and their extended families all belong to those remnants of Jews who now survive by hiding in plain sight within the very society that wants them dead. Now old enough, by family tradition, to be trusted with this life-or-death deception, Alicia is obliged to hide the truth from her friends, her classmates, and even her younger sisters even as she is forced to regard her school's racist curriculum from a new perspective that leaves her sick and angry over all the anti-Semitic propaganda that she always learned and parroted without question.
Meanwhile, Heinrich finds himself caught in the marital strife between his co-worker, Willi Dorsch, and Willi's wife, Erika. Embittered by her husband's infidelity, Erika wants a retaliatory affair with Heinrich. He resists, which leads to Erika accusing him of being a Jew and Heinrich being arrested by the SS. Only after Erika realizes that her accusation caused Heinrich's children to be taken also, she confesses that she lied, unaware the entire time that Heinrich and his family really are Jewish.
Esther Stutzman, who works as a receptionist in a doctor's office, also experiences a close call with Nazi policies when her friends Richard and Maria Klein, closeted Jews like herself, bring their ailing eight-month-old baby, Paul, in for a checkup. The diagnosis, Tay-Sachs disease, is a disease known to be prevalent among Jews. A subsequent investigation into his family background would spell doom for his parents and any names they might be forced to reveal under torture. Although Esther's husband, Walther, is able to hack into the Reich's computer network and change the Klein's family history, it is the revelation that Reichsführer-SS Lothar Prützmann has a nephew with Tay-Sachs that brings the investigation to a halt.
All of this happens against the background of the events happening after the death of the current Führer, Kurt Haldweim. He is replaced by the reform-minded Heinz Buckliger, who relaxes the oppressive laws of the Reich. In a secret speech, with word-of-mouth spreading it to the populace, the new Führer denounced his predecessors, saying that the Reich committed crimes in the past. Reactionary opposition rallies around the SS, while the populist Gauleiter of Berlin, Rolf Stolle, champions accelerated reform.
Things come to a head with the announcement of (relatively) free elections: candidates need not be Nazi Party members, but they must be Aryan. Led by Reichsführer-SS Lothar Prützmann, the SS effect a conservative coup d'état, imprisoning the Führer, and installing former High Commissioner of Ostland Affairs, Odilo Globocnik, as the new Führer. However, Stolle instigates a people power movement, which the Wehrmacht supports. The coup d'état is defeated after Walther Stutzman salts the country's computer network with the information about Reichsführer-SS Prützmann's Tay-Sachs afflicted nephew. Soon, Berlin comes to the conclusion that Prützmann is a Jew, which definitively turns the tide against the coup. In the aftermath, Prützmann kills himself, and Globocnick is lynched.
Read more about this topic: In The Presence Of Mine Enemies
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