The Nazi Next Door: The Man in the High Castle and the Problem of Evil

The Man In The High Castle invites us to contemplate a disturbing mirror image, not only of America, but of ourselves

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Premise: In an alternative 1960s, Nazi Germany and imperial Japan have won World War II and split the world between them. The United States is divided into three zones: the “Japanese Pacific States,” which broadly corresponds with the Pacific time zone; the “Greater German Reich,” which includes the states on eastern and central time zones; and the anarchic “Neutral Zone,” straddling the Rocky Mountains. Life in these divided states of America is a choice between different flavors of totalitarian autocracy, garnished with a side of anarchy.

What’s more, in this alternative reality, resistance is not only futile; it is all but unthinkable.

That begins to change when series hero Julianna Crain (Alexa Davalos) discovers newsreels from an alternative history in which the Allies won. The four seasons of Man In the High Castle follow Julianna as she avoids the authorities in the form of Chief Inspector Takeshi Kido (Joel de la Fuente) of the Japanese Pacific States and Obergruppenführer / Reichsmarschall John Smith (Rufus Sewell) of the Greater German Reich. She teams up with various resistance groups and the eponymous “man in the high castle,” who is the curator of these films that have crossed the border from alternate realities, to use the films to awaken the consciousness of the enslaved American people with the awareness that the way that things are is not the way that they have to be.

Analysis: Most narrative art (stories, shows, films, etc.) is plot-driven; they tell a story and the characters are simply vehicles to move that story along. The greatest narrative art is generally character-driven; it provides a compelling window into the human soul and experience, and the events that happen in the plot simply happen to provide that window. (Russian novels like those of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy exemplify this approach). However, there is a third category of narrative art: what I would call the “concept-driven.” In it, both characters and plots are secondary considerations; the primary focus is to imagine the world as it could be under different circumstances. Science fiction, more than any other genre, tends to fall into this category, and Man in the High Castle (though the series is very light on the “science” behind the fiction) is no exception.

The plot of Man in the High Castle is too convoluted to even try to summarize, and is riddled with holes and implausibilities (especially in the last two seasons). But these shortcomings do not matter overmuch for the purposes of this series. Man in the High Castle does not tell a story so much as to show a funhouse mirror to our world: a world in which students pledge personal allegiance to Adolph Hitler before the beginning of school each day; where churches are decked with swastikas instead of crosses, and hymns are sung (in German) to their fallen comrades rather than their risen savior; where “victory in America day” celebrates the Nazi defeat of the American forces, which culminated in the devastation of Washington, DC, with a nuclear bomb. It is a world where Bibles are illegal the basic assumptions found within them about the dignity and value of human beings found have been utterly rejected. Life is cheap in this world, and being the wrong kind of person (such as a disabled person or “useless eaters” in a phrase chillingly translated from actual Nazi propaganda), or doing the wrong kinds of activities, or associating with the wrong kind of people, or even thinking the wrong kinds of thoughts could be an automatic death sentence. It is an intoxicating world, at once familiar and alien, like a Dali painting.

Within this surrealistic authoritarian nightmare-scape, characters come and go. Most are well-acted but not very thoroughly developed. However, there is one exception: the central villain John Smith (masterfully played by Rufus Sewell). When we first meet Smith, he seems the quintessentially soulless Nazi, fearlessly facing down a would-be assassin like a Terminator, and coolly ordering a subordinate to beat a prisoner to death with the same tone he might request that a fresh pot of coffee be brewed. He indoctrinates his children with Nazi beliefs with what seems to be utter sincerity.

However, quickly we learn that this is not all there is to John Smith. He was a war hero originally, decorated for bravery and leadership fighting the Japanese in the Pacific theater. His best friend was Jewish. He loved his country. He loved his family.

Therein lay his downfall. CS Lewis wrote that any good, elevated to the status of a god, becomes a devil. John Smith shows us what that process looks like.

For John Smith, family was everything. He was willing to do whatever it took to make sure they were okay. Even betray his country, or the values that had once been his country’s. Even betray his best friend. Even espouse an ideology that he knew was evil. I see him make each of these calculated decisions, and he has good reasons for each one. Yet each of these understandable choices takes him one step further down a path from which there is no retreat. By the end of the series, he has become literally a man who has gained the whole world (or, in his case, at least the Western Hemisphere) and yet lost his soul.

Reflections: Like many Americans, World War II occupies an outsized place in my imagination and historical consciousness. My grandfather was a bomber pilot in the Pacific theater. I grew up reading histories of World War II, watching World War II movies (often starring John Wayne), playing with GI Joes designed with World War II-era uniforms and weapons, and, in my free time, writing an analysis of how Hitler’s timing of the invasion of the Soviet Union cost him the war as a freshman in high school. (I did not have many friends then; dead people made a lot more sense to me than living ones).

Why did this war exercise such a pull on me?

Beyond the simple fact that I was a boy and boys (generally speaking) like things that explode, I think that the great allure of World War II was the moral clarity—or at least the illusion of moral clarity—that it offered. I don’t know if it is a universal trait or one conditioned by the Judeo-Christian heritage of Western civilization, but our culture seems to have an almost obsessive need to divide the world into “good guys” and “bad guys.” (From the age they could talk, my daughters have wanted to know who they should root for before I begin telling a story). World War II seemed the historical proof par excellence that that dualistic worldview was fundamentally correct: there are good guys, there are bad guys, it is easy to tell the difference, and the good guys win in the end.

What was more, to my 14-year-old brain, the Nazis, ironically, by being evidence of the devil, were also unwitting evidence for God.

Now, the problem of evil is a rock on which many a faith has run aground; Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft has called it “the biggest problem to which we have no good answer.” The seemingly insolvable question of how an ostensibly good and all-powerful God could allow the mass slaughter of millions of innocent men, women, and children has led many to conclude that no such loving, all-powerful deity must exist. (It is no coincidence that the film God on Trial is set in Auschwitz).

It is a good question that should trouble any serious person of faith.

However, for me, the more interesting question was the existence of “evil” itself. I have seen goodness explained away in many different ways, whether as calculated self-interest (“do this now and get rewarded in the afterlife!”) or an evolutionarily designed mechanism to promote the spread of your “selfish genes” by protecting your kin, even if you yourself do not survive. In his attempted takedown of Mother Teresa (snarkily entitled The Missionary Position), the late Christopher Hitchens even tried to argue that the Sisters of Charity were in fact acting selfishly in their attempts to care for the dead and dying paupers of Calcutta because they thought they would get a heavenly reward. To me, his arguments were not convincing, but the point is that goodness by itself does not constitute a proof of the existence of some perfect “Good”; there is enough selfishness inside each human heart that even the most apparently loving act will be tainted somehow.

However, I have not yet encountered similar arguments to explain away pure evil. Most evil is simply selfishness: the prioritizing of one’s own interests to the detriment or exclusion of others. This may not be pretty or inspiring, but it is perfectly understandable. However, if there was a malevolence so powerful that it could drive otherwise rational beings to act directly contrary to their own self-interests simply to inflict pain and suffering on others, that seemed to imply that supernatural forces were indeed at work. Consequently, when I read how, even in the closing days of the war with his armies collapsing all around him and the Soviets closing in on the eastern front, Hitler still diverted trains from resupplying his troops in order to ship as many Jews as possible to the death camps, and I could not think of a satisfactory natural explanation for this behavior, the absence of a natural explanation seemed to me to beg for a supernatural one. And if one could establish that evil existed, then good must exist as well.

Whether or not you see this argument as compelling, I am far from alone in seeing the Nazis as providing a kind of dark-light beacon of moral clarity in what feels like the increasingly nebulous world of murky greys, where there are no clear “good guys” and “bad guys”—only different guys acting selfishly to promote their own interests. In fact, as belief in an actual devil has declined (aided no doubt by endless cartoons of Satan as a fat man in red pajamas with a tail and horns, which makes any such belief seem ridiculous), Hitler has largely supplanted Satan as the apotheosis of evil. Godwin’s Law claims (with the unfortunate justification of experience) that the longer an online argument continues the probability that one of the parties will compare the other to Hitler rises to 100%. Pop culture tropes from Hellboy to Call of Duty: Nazi Zombies reflect this tendency to reduce Nazis and Nazism to a simple shorthand for pure evil. It is comforting to think of people who would commit such atrocities as devils in human form. Such fiends have nothing to do with us. We are the good guys.

The Man in the High Castle provides an uncomfortable but necessary antidote to these conceits in the person of John Smith. He demonstrates that the boundary between a “good guy” and a “bad guy” is far more nebulous than we would like to think. By showing how a good man becomes pure evil—with understandable and even admirable intentions at every step of the way—it reminds us that all of us carry within the seeds of a Nazi.