The early books were easily the best part. I think us Americans (northerners especially) tend to look back on the War of Secession and think that if it hadn't happened and the former Confederate States had stayed in the U.S. all along, everything would've been sunshine and roses. Who can blame us? Maybe I'm saying this because I just got back from a business trip to Texas, and took the time to visit the site of Camp Determination and what I saw there is still really fresh in my memory, but...I think we in the United States are really prone to guilt-based wishful thinking that if only one thing had happened differently, everything would be kosher (those of us from the north, at least. In the South, well...as you know, they don't like to talk about it at all).
But I've really got to give Turtledove credit for not indulging in any illusions. Sure, North America became a relatively peaceful part of the world TTL, but he did a lot to really show the race and class issues under the surface that would've gone unaddressed. I'm a died-in-the-wool Socialist and I'm proud of things like our national health care system, pensions, and limits on working hours, but this book does a lot to demonstrate that the only reason we turned to such a system in the first place was because of the trauma of the wars. Without them, Americans would have just complacently coasted along not doing anything about class inequality. And as for racial issues, well, that's of course an even more sensitive issue, but I thought it was really daring of Turtledove to show that even though the Negroes were not enslaved and did not suffer genocide, there still would've been a lot of institutional slavery without the lessons we learned in the 20th Century OTL.
Though I've got mixed feelings on the idea of transplanting the Holocaust from America to Germany. Don't get me wrong, I've met plenty of Germans, and most of them are good, decent people, but I've met more than a few who REALLY get on my nerves and act like they're God's fucking chosen people. When I'm in a bad mood about that, sometimes I think I'd like anything that would've smacked the smug condescension out of such people. But on the other hand, I think I'd prefer no Holocaust at all.
One thing, though, that didn't sit well with me: Adolf Hitler. a.k.a. Jake Featherston who needs an exorcism.
Hitler was fine in the early GW1 books, but everything after that really showed a streak of laziness on Turtledove's part. It was at that point where he stopped writing history and started writing a damn comic book. I understand that he was trying to tell a compelling story and up the ante, but this was just too much. Featherston was, to put it mildly, a monster and a prick, but it wasn't for nothing that he was so popular: he was charming. He was loyal to his followers. For all the things that could be said about him, there wasn't a cowardly bone in his body. He personally took care of wounded Confederate soldiers. In other words, for all the horrid things about him, he was, at the core, a human being. That's really the scary thing about his legacy: I've read almost all the biographies on him, and they agree that during the first war, for example, people liked him and considered him a fairly easygoing, competent officer whose army career was squashed through no fault of his own. He liked whiskey and cigars just like any other everyday Southerner. And yet a guy who could've just gone on to be an average guy with a decent life ended up becoming the worst human being in history.
Now compare that to this Hitler shmoe, who not only was a genocidal tyrant, but also an uptight tightass whose early life is a string of failures and living like a spoiled wannabe artist, got on the nerves of his GW1 comrades-in-arms because he wouldn't shut up and quit acting like a walking propaganda poster when almost every other German soldier was sick of that stupid war, was a non-smoker and vegetarian who tried to shove his personal tastes down his subordinate's throats, and a rageaholic who blamed his own failures on everyone around him. And a guy who ended the war not by planning to fight to his last breath, but by cowering in a bunker and taking his own life.
I just could not buy this. Stalin, the Russian communist dictator, I could take seriously, and as was just said, he at least gave the appearance that Turtledove was trying not to be too black and white. But I just could not take Hitler or the Nazis seriously as possible historical figures. For God's sake, there's even a part in one of the books (the SS "wedding") that touches on Nazi ideology's at least partial interest in paganism and occultism! Ooooooooooh, scaaaaaaaaaaary!!
