The Man in the High Castle: Criticisms of Reality and Dictatorship by Philip K. Dick“Reality is what, when you stop believing in it , don't don't go away." -Philip K. Dick Botwinick 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. Only at the end of the war did men like Martin Niemoeller and Elie Wiesel awakened the conscience of the world to the realization that the spectator cannot escape guilt or shame” (p. 45). In The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick writes of a world in which voices of Niemoeller and Wiesel would never have emerged and in which Germany would not only have never regretted the Holocaust, but would have been proud of it. Dick writes of a world in which this detached and innocent attitude prevails globally, a world in in which America clung to its isolationist policies, in which the Axis powers achieved world domination and effectively wiped the Jews from the surface, forcing all resistance and culture underground and allowing those living in the Nazi world of the 1960s they can live without questioning the hatred into which they were born. The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history novel set in a reality that diverges from our own when Franklin D. Roosevelt is assassinated in 1933. This way the United States will never enter World War II. The novel follows the stories of some 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 the culture, as well as questioning one's control of one's destiny, something that is not is reflected in the book. totalitarian i...... middle of paper ......The Man in the High Castle serves, like a science fiction novel, to make us question our values ​​and reality. It also involves the idea of ​​how Nazi ideals would integrate into a contemporary global society and how the practice of hatred would spread in a functioning, stabilized world. Botwinick writes that studying the Holocaust is invaluable in answering the question of whether or not it might happen again, whether or not humans might cross the lines between “civilized” and “savage.” Dick constructs a reality that is both opposite and necessary to ours, a reality in which hatred and oppression are not just law, but 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.