The Man in the High Castle: Critiques of Reality and Dictatorship by Philip K. Dick “Reality is what, when you stop to believe in it, I will not go away.” -Philip K. DickBotwinick writes in A History of the Holocaust: “The principle that resistance to evil was a moral duty did not exist for the vast majority of Germans. It was only at the end of the war that men like Martin Niemoeller and Elie Wiesel brought home to the world's conscience that the spectator cannot escape guilt or shame” (p. 45). In The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick speaks of a world in which the voices of Niemoeller and Wiesel would never have surfaced and in which Germany would not only never have repented of the Holocaust, but would have been proud of it. Dick writes about a world where this detached and innocent attitude prevailed globally, a world where America clung to its isolationist policies, where the Axis powers achieved world domination and effectively wiped out the Jews on the surface, forcing all resistance and culture underground and allowing those in the Nazi world of the 1960s to live without questioning the hatred they were born into. The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history novel set in a reality that moves away from ours when Franklin D. Roosevelt is assassinated in 1933. In this way, the United States will never enter the Second World War. The novel follows the stories of a few characters scattered across the now puppet America. Many character decisions in the book are made through the use of the I Ching oracle, a testament to the Axis powers' influence and control over culture as well as questioning the control of his own destiny, something that is not reflected in the book. totalitarian...... middle of paper ......Man in the High Castle serves, like a science fiction novel, to make us question our own values ​​and our reality. It also involves the idea of ​​how Nazi ideals would fit into a contemporary global society and how the practice of hatred would manifest in a functioning, stabilized world. Botwinick writes that the study of the Holocaust is invaluable in answering the question of whether or not it could happen again, whether or not humans could cross the boundaries from "civilized" to "savage" again. Dick constructs a reality both opposed and necessary to ours, in which hatred and oppression are not just a law, but a human tendency. Works Cited Dick, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle. New York, New York: Vintage Books (Random House), 1990. Botwinick, Rita Steinhardt. A History of the Holocaust. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2004.