Philip Dick - The Shifting Realities of PK Dick

The Zionists drove one million Arabs out of Israel, and those Arabs, supported -- i.e., kept from starving -- by the Quakers, are the greatest single lot of displaced persons on earth today. And don't let anyone tell you that those Arabs (i.e., non-Jews and hence aliens, although their people had lived there for two thousand years) wanted to leave. They were terrorized into leaving, and they cannot return. So the victims of World War Two have become the arrogant nationalists, ready to go to war (vide the Suez crisis) with their neighbors as soon as assured of adequate military support (and again it is Britain who gives it, Britain and France).

This is all dreadful. In the Jewish refugee settlements in the Far East under the Japanese during World War Two, many Jews set up Hitler organizations, including the Nazi (or Roman, if you prefer) salute.

We like to think of the victims of tyranny and cruelty as innocent (e.g., Chessman). But often the victim is blood-stained, too; i.e., he has participated actively in the situation that has at last claimed his life. Many Jews today won't ride in a VW, and some won't even listen to the music of Beethoven; is this not as neurotic and "sick" as was the nineteenth-century ideologies of blood, race, and land being taught by both Germans and Jewish-Germans? Personally, I enjoy telling fanatical nationalistic, blood-oriented Jewish friends a fact they generally don't know: Many of the medieval German knight-poets, the minnesingers, were -- Jewish.

So, Dr. Friedrich Foerster, "the greatest modern critic of Germany" to the contrary, there are now, have always been, at least two, and probably three, seven, nine Germanics; i.e., worldviews held by Germans. J. S. Bach considered himself a Pole (his monarch was under fief to a Polish king.) But we call Bach a German because he spoke German. Tony Boucher speaks German, and perfectly; is he, therefore, a German, hence a Nazi? The German Jews spoke German... and remember, a Jewish violinist's hand was broken by a Zionist fanatic swinging a lead pipe because that violinist dared to play a Richard Strauss piece in concert in Israel... . Is this not the Brown Shirts of the thirties once more, or is it not?

When a Jewish fanatic friend of mine calls me a "gentile" I simply say, "Call me a goy and let it go at that." Because, if I am a "gentile," then two thousand years of evolution in human thought has been abandoned.

And if he won't ride in my VW -- which was probably made in New York, not Germany, and was certainly, for sure, sold me by a Jewish person, Leon Felton of San Rafael -- then I will not allow him to eat a bagel in my presence. (I am, of course, joking; I am trying to show this: That we can no more hold a people responsible than we can hold any other mythical, semantic, nonactual entity responsible; German1 is not German2 and German2 is not German3, and so forth. Just as, in this country, you and I did not bomb those little Negro schoolchildren in that church Sunday school... you know goddamn well we did not, and if we, you and I, could catch the white bastards -- or rather just plain bastards -- who did it, we would work just as much and quick vengeance on them as any Negro mob would or could.)

I am not a "white man." My German friends are not "Germans," nor my Jewish friends "Jews." I am a nominalist. To me, there are only individual entities, not group entities such as race, blood, people, etc. For example, I am an Anglo-Catholic; yet my views differ from those of my vicar, and his do -- enormously -- from the bishop of the diocese -- whose views I happen to agree with, Bishop Pike. And so forth.

I will not walk out of a room when a German enters any more than I would have walked out of a room when a Jew entered. Nor will I allow myself to be a "gentile" -- i.e., a member of a race -- to my Jewish friends. If they don't like me, let them hit me , as an individual, one right in the eye; let's see them hit a race -- as the Nazis tried to do -- one right in the eye. It won't work; the Nazis failed: Israel exists, and Jews exist. And -- let us face it: Germany exists. Let's live in the present and for the future, not dwelling neurotically on the outrages of the past. Ludwig von Beethoven did not light the fires at Dachau. Leonard Bernstein did not hit that Jewish violinist on the hand with a piece of lead pipe. Okay? And salve , as the Romans used to say. Or, as we Anglo-Catholics say, may the peace and love of God be with you. Germans included. And, please, Jews, too.

I am, of course, one of Mr. Abendsen's admirers; my own works, such as they are, have been influenced strongly by his, in particular my novel Man in the High Castle (Berkley Books, U.S.A., 1974 [a reprint paperback edition]).

It goes without saying that The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (its German title, Schwer Liegt die Heuschrecke [Miinchen: Konig Verlag, 1974] is perhaps more familiar to us) has become Hawthorne Abendsen's most renowned book, although "underground" both in printing and distribution, due to its political and religious nature. Although Grasshopper offended the Authorities, they themselves studied it with keen professional intent, for it outlines major historic "possibilities" of an "alternate world," of a sort familiar to SF readers, in which the Axis is not favorably described, thus causing Mr. Abendsen and his family to seek an uneasy and certainly temporary sanctuary in the Rocky Mountain states between the two more militant zones of the United States, partitioned off by treaty after the defeat of the Communist-Plutocrat Alliance.

Further writing by Mr. Abendsen, who lives as modest and conventional a family life as possible, in view of his vulnerability to police reprisal for his famous underground novel in which the Axis lost the war, is meager; most appear in the form of hasty letters printed in nonprofit "fanzines," as they are called, outside the United States -- for obvious reasons.

The Two Completed Chapters of a Proposed Sequel to The Man in the High Castle (1964)

ONE

On the morning of August fifth, 1956, Reichsmarshal Hermann Goring flew north from the big Luftwaffe base located at Miami, Florida. He had not wakened in a good mood; on his mind, like an iron press, rested the recent memory of the Little Doktor' s appointment as chancellor of Germany and all German-occupied territory. And when one ponders, Goring thought, it was after all my bombers that defeated England and won for us the war; the Ministry of Propaganda did nothing more than whip up and excoriate the people to a useless but fashionable enthusiasm.

Below him the Gau of Virginia passed; his R-15 Messerschmitt rocket flew low enough for him to glimpse black specks: slaves working the fields in the God-ordained manner, both timeless and circular. It appealed to reason and to good sense. But nothing could please him today.

He had not properly anticipated the death of the old chancellor, Bormann. Others had, as, for example, Goebbels himself -- not to mention the eager eggheads in the higher SS. Keeping politically alert, however, had not benefited the Reichsfuhrer SS, Reinhardt Heydrich, who chafed, fumed, and wrote many memos at his permanent headquarters on Prinz-Albrechstrasse, home in Berlin. I wonder what he intends? the Reichsmarshal mused. Supposedly a concentration of Waffen-SS troops and armor, specifically the Leibstandarte Division, commanded by old, dependable Sepp Dietrich, had gathered in order to protect Heydrich from removal -- Dr. Goebbels had certainly by now considered that -- and in addition to threaten the party, should it fish for a loyalty oath to the new chancellor by the generals, something Bormann had been unable to do. And then, meditating, he wondered once again if he had been wise to leave the Miami Luftwaffe base, his center of protection throughout the current crisis. After all, Baldur von Scherach, the head of the Hitler Youth, had been arrested on Goebbels' order. But Goebbels had been jealous of von Scherach since the success of Project Farmland: the draining of the Mediterranean. The project -- Scherach's one achievement -- had been popular with the masses whom Goebbels appealed to, so there lay a conflict of interests... resolved a few days ago by von Sherach's arrest.