Review: "The Afrika Reich" by Guy Saville

Review - The Afrika Reich

Reading The Afrika Reich is a a bit like watching a movie made from over-the-top elements of James Bond, Schindler's List, and Die Hard.

A shady businessman hires a crack team of mercenaries to assassinate the Governor General of the German Africa territories, SS man Walter E. Hochburg, and their leader Burton has a personal score to settle with the target. They apparently succeed in killing him, but from there on everything goes wrong for the group, and one by one, the members of the team are hunted down until only the old comrades Whaler and Burton remain, both veterans of the Foreign Legion. And now they have to slip out of thousands of square miles of SS-controlled Africa...

The Afrika Reich presents the reader with a steady stream of action in an alien and yet familiar world of a 1950s Africa where the Black population has almost completely vanished, shipped off to the so-called Muspel zone in the Sahara.

Before you ask: yes, I'm German, and no, I have no idea what Muspel is supposed to mean.

The enemy is evil, over the top evil in a mustache-twirling way befitting of that fine best spy of Her Majesty's secret service. In the same way, he truly is as gutwrenchingly, unflinchingly evil as he is in the character of Amon Goeth in Schindler's List. Walter E. Hochburg is Saville's Goeth. Nearly everything screams of psychotic megalomania.

The Germans themselves – except for Field Marshal von Arnim – are all ugly or brutish, and going by Saville's description, all the people in The Afrika Reich seem to eat are sausages, sauerkraut and strudel, the “holy trinity of German cuisine”. Considering the immense variety of German foods (and the actually limited number of dishes I know that contain either sausages or sauerkraut), that's like saying British cuisine consists of plum pudding and fish'n'chips, but really, that's an irritating yet minor point.

Quick excursus on German cuisine, because that's one clichee that just does not want to die: where I'm from, sauerkraut is usually served only in an old feastday menu, together with mashed potatoes and salted pork and mustard or horseradish sauce. The same basic menu in some variations (added white beans, liver dumplings) can be found across central west Germany. However, it's not something served everyday: it's an oldschool feastday menu, served, for example, at the parish fair. Sausage also really isn't that common (except you really broaden the definition of what you still consider a "sausage"), and strudel is a decidedly Bavarian and Austrian thing. Chances to see it everywhere in 1952, real history or The Afrika Reich: nil.

And then there's the Die Hard aspect: that of the hero(es) who, no matter the pain and injury inflicted, can get out of his cuffs and into the fight again, for what feels like a dozen times throughout the book.

Africa, 1952

Which is one or two times to many, in my opinion. During the beginning of the last third, the book drags considerably. Here, Saville could have cut 50 pages with no great loss to the integrity of the central plot itself, or better, used them to expand on the revelations of that very last part.

The alternate history aspect is well-employed, taken as a matter of fact of how the world works. I feel this worked to the novel's advantage; delving deeper into the coming about of such backgrounds only opens the gates wide for doubts (like: where's the manpower just to control everything there coming from, why did the British still lose India so fast, etc.).

Some of the more cartoonish aspects of The Afrika Reich can be put down to an extrapolation of Himmler's schemes and the relative independence of Hochburg's Africa, but on the whole one gets the impression that there's really no reason why any sane German - or European in general - would want to live in The Afrika Reich, not with the pervasive presence of jackbooting thugs liable to ruin your day just because they think they can.

Final Verdict: B. Despite some flaws, The Afrika Reich is an entertaining first novel, both for Saville and for his planned trilogy. It's not perfect, coming across in parts more like an airport thriller in the tradition of Matthew Reilly rather than an alternate history novel. It does not question its setup and rolls with the flow, presenting the reader with non-stop action of heroes possessing over-the-top endurance, and with villains that would put Ernst Stavro Blofeld of James Bond fame to shame. You can check out the website of The Afrika Reich here. I, for one, am looking forward to more from Mr. Saville.

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The War Blogger hails from his lair over at, unsurprisingly, The War Blog. He also runs a Blip.tv channel and has published his first alternate history novel Wolf Hunt in 2011.