New York City

New York City holds a charged, ambivalent place in the world of the novel. Once the proud capital of American publishing and a symbol of the nation's cultural and economic might, it has fallen under German occupation after the Axis victory in World War II. The city is never directly visited in the narrative, but it looms in the memories and conversations of characters scattered across the Pacific States of America and the Rocky Mountain States, serving as a constant reminder of what was lost and what the Reich has made of the former United States.

A City Transformed by Occupation

New York's transformation is most vividly evoked through the recollections of Joe Cinnadella, a Swiss-born agent of the SD who has lived under Nazi rule for nearly fifteen years. He describes a city where the publishing industry has been reduced to a cartel operating out of Munich, with New York serving merely as a printing center. The theater, once celebrated for its vitality, has been replaced by the same state-controlled productions as the movie industry, all directed from Berlin. Joe recalls that in his thirteen years in New York, not one good new musical or play ever opened, only the heavy, bombastic spectacles of Wagner and Orff, and the compulsory Nazi Party dramatic performances at Madison Square Garden, with their flags, drums, and chanted histories of the Gothic tribes. The city's cultural life, once the envy of the world, has been flattened into propaganda.

The occupation has also reshaped the city's social and racial order. Joe, who worked for the Organization Todt in Upper State New York, remembers living in work camps "out there in the woods" with other laborers, singing songs and marching to work, rebuilding the city block by block. He speaks of the "best days" of rebuilding after the war, when he and others erected long rows of public buildings and whole new downtowns in New York and Baltimore. But this period of reconstruction gave way to the dominance of big cartels like New Jersey Krupp and Sohnen, and the city became a place where racial laws, such as the Nuremberg Law, were enforced. The fry cook at Tasty Charley's Broiled Hamburgers in Canon City, Colorado, recalls seeing Jewish refugees fleeing the United States in 1949, driven out of New York by that very law, and expresses his disgust at the Nazi racial legislation being passed in the U.S. even after the defeat.

A Symbol of Lost American Vitality

For characters who remember the prewar world, New York represents a lost era of freedom and creativity. Robert Childan, the San Francisco dealer in American historical artifacts, thinks of the city as the former home of the "plutocratic U.S. publishing industry," once supported by "Jewish and Communist gold." He imagines that in the alternate world depicted in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, where the Allies won the war, New York would have remained a center of publishing and culture, and the United States would have been a gleaming sole power. The novel's fictional account of a victorious America describes the U.S. as having the highest standard of living in the world by 1960, with factories in Detroit and Chicago humming to supply the vast markets of China, and the workingman in Baltimore or Los Angeles or Atlanta enjoying prosperity. This imagined New York, vibrant and free, stands in stark contrast to the occupied city of the actual timeline.

Frank Frink, a Jew born in New York, carries the city's memory as part of his identity. He was born on the East Coast, in New York, and drafted into the U.S. Army in 1941. After the war, he found himself on the Japanese side of the settlement line, unable to return to his birthplace. His Jewishness, tied to his New York origins, becomes a source of danger when he is arrested and the police identify him as a "kike" and a "refugee from Europe," threatening to hand him over to the German consul for trial under Reichs law. New York, for Frink, is both a lost home and a mark of persecution.

The Reich's Grip on the City

The novel also shows how the Reich's economic and technological power extends to New York. The city is the site of the I.G. Farben cartel, which holds a world monopoly on synthetic fibers like nylon, and it is where the great German chemical companies operate. The article in Life magazine about television in Europe mentions that by 1970, a television station would be built in New York, with Reich electronic engineers helping local personnel. This detail underscores the city's subordination to German technology and planning. Even the economic revival of the U.S. is credited to Albert Speer, who, according to Wyndam-Matson, "got all those businesses and corporations and factories—everything!—going again" in the eastern United States, including New York. The city, once a symbol of American enterprise, is now a showcase of German efficiency and control.

A Place of Memory and Loss

New York City functions in the novel as a repository of memory and a measure of loss. For those who remember it as it was, it is a place of vanished possibility, a reminder of the world that might have been. For those who live under the Reich, it is a place of constraint and surveillance, where even reading a banned book like The Grasshopper Lies Heavy must be done in secret, hidden in a pillow or read in the toilet. The city's fate mirrors the larger tragedy of the novel's world: a once-great nation reduced to a colony, its culture commodified, its people divided by race and ideology. New York, in its absence from the narrative's present, becomes a haunting presence, a ghost of the American dream that the Axis victory has extinguished.