Speculative Pasts: Archaeology, alternate history, and excavating trauma
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-25

When Xavier March, the detective in Robert Harris’s bestselling alternate history thriller Fatherland (1992) reaches the site of the Auschwitz extermination camp, he is forced to rummage in the undergrowth to find a few stray bricks as proof of the genocide that has been committed there. In this alternate history, the Nazis have been victorious in Europe and have hidden the evidence of their crimes. In this final scene March moves from the role of police officer to that of archaeologist, mirroring the dual-role of the reader as both detective and historian. Drawing predominantly on Harris’s Fatherland and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962), this paper will examine the key prevalence of historical objects and archaeological imagery in alternate history, particularly examples centred on the Second World War, and will examine how alternate history, and its alternate archaeology, become a channel through which to uncover, examine, and communicate traumatic events such as the Holocaust. 

Glyn Morgan (University of Liverpool)