The series opens in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1994. It is not the Cambridge we know. The brick sidewalks still wind through Harvard Square, the elms still arch over Brattle Street, the Charles still slides dark and slow past the boat houses on the Cambridge side. But the flag that flies over the old State House is not the Stars and Stripes. It is the black, white, and red of the Greater Germanic Reich. The United States of America, which never entered the Second World War and never escaped the Great Depression, which watched the Reich’s rise from across the Atlantic with the detached unease of a neighbor observing a house fire, was invaded in 1985 and conquered in a decade-long war that ended with the formal dissolution of the American nation. The world that the Reich has made is a world of iron and silence, of occupied territories and pacified populations, of the thousand-year promise that is still in its first century and already showing its cracks. The kingdom where nobody dies is the Reich, and the Reich is everywhere, and the question that the series asks—quietly, persistently, in the spaces between the words—is what happens to the people who have to live in it.
