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    In the Presence of Mine Enemies
    In the Presence of Mine Enemies
    In the Presence of Mine Enemies
    Audiobook18 hours

    In the Presence of Mine Enemies

    Written by Harry Turtledove

    Narrated by Michael Page

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    In the twenty-first century, Germany's Third Reich continues to thrive after its victory in World War II-keeping most of Europe and North America under its heel. But within the heart of the Nazi regime, a secret lives. Under a perfect Aryan facade, Jews survive-living their lives, raising their families, and fearing discovery . . .
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 26, 2019
    ISBN9781977332592
    In the Presence of Mine Enemies
    Author

    Harry Turtledove

    Harry Turtledove is an American novelist of science fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy. Publishers Weekly has called him the “master of alternate history,” and he is best known for his work in that genre. Some of his most popular titles include The Guns of the South, the novels of the Worldwar series, and the books in the Great War trilogy. In addition to many other honors and nominations, Turtledove has received the Hugo Award, the Sidewise Award for Alternate History, and the Prometheus Award. He attended the University of California, Los Angeles, earning a PhD in Byzantine history. Turtledove is married to mystery writer Laura Frankos, and together they have three daughters. The family lives in Southern California.

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    Reviews for In the Presence of Mine Enemies

    3.5/5

    97 ratings10 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A really good premise but let down by lacklustre pacing in places, as well as a plot that centres around too little, yet in the most well thought out and terrifying background. Good, but not brilliant.
    • 2/5
      I was a little disappointing with this book. First of all, it took me ages. I kept picking it up and putting it down. That's never a good sign. Parts were great, others just dragged and dragged. I realize the point of all the card games, but I don't think that I needed to have a rundown on the rules, or who was pulling what card. It was way too much detail.

      The alternate world Turtledove set up was very good. In fact, I wouldn't have minded having more of that. I, however, was rather disappointed with the ending. It had a very unfinished feeling about it. But, I was happy to have finished the book. I was sick to death of having it stare at me from my bedside table!
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this novelette much more than the later novel with the same title.
    • 1/5
      Having Jews secretly surviving in the alternate Nazi empire is an interesting and well- executed twist on the old alt.history cliche, but Turtledove yet again fails to come up with any alternative history - just retreads of the real thing. Just as the Jake Featherstone saga follows Hitler's career to the letter so the fall of the Nazi empire follows the fall of the USSR. To the letter. As soon as I read that the Fuhrer and his wife were off on holiday in Croatia I knew exactly what would ensue, and lo, it did. This kind of killed the suspense. Oh, and I could have seriously done without the blow-by-blow accounts of bridge games. One star for the idea, but shoddy plotting.
    • 1/5
      In the presence of mine enemies has a great concept: Jews are hiding in the midst of the Third Reich and trying to survive after the Axis victory in the WW II. It depicts the everyday life under the shadow of the Germanic Empire that is a not too subtle allusion to the Soviet Union in the last years. I liked it in the beginning, but quite soon became dull and so badly executed - because of the hammered repetitions - that I didn't finish it. The worse parts were the the long descriptions of bridge playing that for me - I don't play bridge nor know the rules of this game - were like a chore.
    • 3/5
      Germany won the Second World War and twenty years later a Third. In 2009, the US, like most of Europe, is a vassal state, paying reparations to avoid the panzers rolling out from their bases in US cities. The British Union of Fascists holds sway in a Britain also in thrall to Germany.In Berlin, the Gimpel family lets its eldest daughter into a secret. They are Jews, and must keep their origins hidden, speaking of it only to those in their immediate circle. Meanwhile the old Führer, a character whose real world model is only thinly disguised by the name Kurt Haldweim, has died and the new one, Heinz Buckliger, starts to loosen the strings of dictatorship. This strand of the plot hinges on textual differences between the first and subsequent editions of Mein Kampf, a subject on which I have to take Turtledove on trust.Parallels with our world are one of the delights of altered histories. Nice touches here are a stage production featuring the baddies Churchill and Stalin which is so awful that it’s a smash hit and a delegation from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, asking for autonomy for the region, being led by a grey-haired Czech playwright.(Slight spoiler alert:-The thousand year Reich (had it survived World War II) would no doubt have collapsed under its internal contradictions at some point long before a millennium had passed but perhaps not quite so quickly and easily as portrayed here. The parallel with the Soviet Union of our own world which Turtledove implicitly outlines by having the Gauleiter of Berlin face down SS tanks in front of his residence does not really hold. In the world of the novel there was no Cold War to sap and counter its ideology – Japan is not presented as too great a rival to Germany – and hence any decay would likely have been much slower.)This may be the story Turtledove always wanted to tell – Jewishness has unsurprisingly featured prominently in his altered worlds and this is the ultimate scenario to deploy in order to explore it. I’m afraid his writing does not do this particular theme justice, though. It has his usual multiple viewpoints, but all are Jewish here. Other familiar traits are too prevalent; the tendency to reiterate characters’ thoughts or peccadilloes, to labour a point, and here he doesn’t so much foreshadow future events as telegraph them. Plus he is too kind to his viewpoint characters and the book’s Nazis are cardboard – all the really evil deeds are in the novel’s past – which is a shame because this could have been a powerful indictment of man’s inhumanity to man.The idea for In The Presence Of Mine Enemies worked much better at the short story length in which it first appeared in 1992.
    • 5/5
      This is probably my favourite Turtledove novel of the ones I have so far read. The setting is Berlin in a Third Reich that in 2010 covers much of the Eurasian landmass and the United States. The main characters are some of the very few surviving Jews who have lasted so long only by totally concealing their identities, not only from the authorities but also from their own neighbours and even from dear friends and other family members. The novel creates a very stark and believable atmosphere of repression and the horror of Jews knowing that even close friends would wish them dead if they knew of their racial identity. The course of the plot follows attempts at limited reform within the Nazi system following the coming to power of Heinz Buckliger as Fuhrer, the first of the new generation born after the original Nazi seizure of power and the Second World War. The parallel here is clearly with Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union with his perestroika and glasnost, attempts to democratise the system from within. Rolf Stolle, the Gauleiter of Berlin in this novel, is clearly the Boris Yeltsin of this world, pushing the leader on to reform faster and more deeply, but with his own character flaws (Yeltsin was also originally appointed the first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party for the early period of Gorbachev's rule, so occupies a very similar hierarchical position as Stolle). I wasn't surprised when Buckliger was overthrown in a coup while on holiday and returned after the coup was crushed, having lost moral authority to Stolle, mirroring the Soviet events of August 1991.As with other Turtledove novels, while a good writer, he does hammer small character points repeatedly, to the point of minor irritation. While understandable in the context of Jews constantly fearing discovery and exposure, it is particularly annoying in the case of the doctor whose inability to use a coffeemaker is hammered home in every scene in his surgery in which he appears.
    • 5/5
      Many people consider Harry Turtledove to be the master of alternate history. This book proves that he is just that. Any author can write an alternate history; all you need to do is pick a point in time and imagine what differences would have happened had an event occurred differently. The problem is that very few authors present a world that feels plausible, let alone probable. Harry Turtledove's worlds feel absolutely authentic; they feel "right" (or in this case, horribly, terribly "wrong"). The setup is simple: Nazi Germany won World War II. Jump forward to 2009 and the family life of Heinrich Gimpel, a Nazi bureaucrat. In the opening chapter, Gimpel goes about his daily work (he's in charge of overseeing tributes from a defeated America), rides home on the bus with his best friend, and has a nice meal with his family and some friends and relatives. But at the end of dinner, we discover the genius of Turtledove's vision as Gimpel and family reveal to their 10-year old daughter (after the younger daughters have gone to sleep) that she is a Jew, to which she responds that she can't be. This book is not an action thriller and if you read it hoping to see a small band of Jews overthrow the Nazi regime you will be disappointed. But the book does present a terrifying picture of what life could have been like. I don't know if this book would be as powerful to a Gentile. To me, the emotional bond that I felt with the characters was probably greater than any character that I can recall from recent (or even longer) memory. Very highly recommended; just be patient and let the story develop at Turtledove's pace.
    • 3/5
      Too wordy. How many times can you say the same thing?
    • 3/5
      This novel is a fascinating history of a group of individuals living in the heart of the Greater German Reich at the beginning of the 21st Century. In this alternate present, the Final Solution has been implemented throughout Europe, Eastern Europe has been cleared of indigenous populations and the US and the British Empire have been militarily subdued. Following the death of the last of the Old Guard Fuhrers, change is beginning to come to the Reich and its protectorates. Turtledove has an extraordinary gift for constructing alternative histories, not only tracing the major political and social movements, but commenting on their impact on technology, economics, fashion, families, social norms, and media.Although he can be repetitive (in this novel, he spends too much time reminding the reader how hard it is to live as a hidden Jew in Berlin), the geopolitical and social themes are thought-provoking and, in the end, rewarding.