Why I Wrote... How Tall Is The Grass In Germany?

By Wm. Garrett Cothran.

The first version of the idea was not really Mad Men in a Nazi victory timeline. That became the larger shape later. The first version was closer to Columbo.

I always liked the structure of Columbo: you know who did it. You watch the murderer first. You see the confidence, the planning, the arrogance, the little mistake they do not realize is a mistake yet. Then Columbo appears. He is not there to discover the crime in the usual detective story way. He is there to make the murderer slowly understand that the world has already begun closing around him.

At first, I imagined something almost playful and grotesque: Nazi Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Two German investigators, Hubert and Bruno, traveling through a defeated America, solving cases between meals at roadside diners. They would argue over American food, sit in booths, ask questions, and wander into ugly little American crimes buried under the larger horror of history.

There was something funny in that. A Nazi detective story with diner food. A murder mystery interrupted by hamburgers, Reubens, fry sauce, bad coffee, and suspicious waitresses. But the more I wrote, the less interested I became in the cleverness of the format. The case itself began to matter less than one image.

A man drives up a gravel driveway.

He believes the past is dead.

He believes the war, the invasion, the crash, the confusion, and the sheer stupid violence of history have buried what he did.

Then he sees someone waiting for him.

Not just a police officer.

A Nazi police officer.

That was the story.

The murder itself came from an older sliver of an idea I had carried around: a husband killed by his wife and her lover on a Hawaiian honeymoon, only for the murder to be swallowed by the morning of December 7, 1941. A private crime vanishes inside a public catastrophe. The sirens, smoke, panic, and military disaster become accidental camouflage. The killers did not plan history. They were simply lucky enough to commit murder on a day when the world had something larger to look at.

For How Tall Is the Grass in Germany?, I changed the disaster. The murder happened on the day the Germans invaded America.

That changed everything. The killing was no longer only a crime. It became part of the moral landscape of the book. A man kills his wife with his mistress. Then a Nazi fighter jet crashes into his house and destroys the evidence. The body, the blood, the signs of guilt — all of it disappears under the wreckage of world history. He survives because evil, in that moment, is crowded out by larger evil. He is not innocent. He is not clever. He is lucky.

And years later, the Germans come back.

Not because they care about his wife. Not because they are servants of justice. Not because the world has corrected itself and decided the dead deserve the truth. They come back because there may be money owed. There may be liability. There may be a claim. The state wants to know what happened because paperwork has led them there.

That became the real heart of the story. A detective solves the crime, but solving the crime does not mean justice arrives. The murderer is caught, but not punished. He is exposed, but not destroyed. He remains free. He remains comfortable. He remains the same monster he always was.

Only now he knows something new.

They know.

That is what pulled me back from the cleaner detective story version. In a normal murder mystery, truth is supposed to matter. The detective reveals the secret, and the revelation restores order. But in the world I was writing, order itself is diseased. The people uncovering the truth are not good people. The state investigating the crime is not moral. The detective may be brilliant, but he serves a monstrous system. So what does it mean for him to solve the case?

It means the truth exists somewhere.

In a file. In a report. In a German office. In the mind of a man who may not care about the victim except as a solved problem.

That felt more frightening than a courtroom. Evil does not always get punished. Sometimes evil gets documented.

From there, the larger idea of the book began to form. I was not only writing a Nazi victory timeline. I was writing about bad men who survive inside bad systems. Men who are not punished because the world is too busy, too corrupt, too practical, or too invested in looking away. Men who do not need to become monsters because they were already monsters in socially acceptable ways.

That eventually led me to Calvin Reed and the Mad Men side of the book: the office, the advertising world, the sex, the racism, the class contempt, the polished language, the business deals, the way corporate America adapts to whatever power wins. Reed is not a soldier. He is not a fanatic in uniform. He is a businessman. He is vain, hungry, selfish, and cruel. He looks out over New York and thinks about status, women, contracts, money, and himself. The horror is not that fascism has made America unrecognizable. The horror is that so much of America remains recognizable. It has simply found new customers.

That was the point of the opening. Reed is not introduced through a grand villain speech. He is introduced in his office, with his secretary, his view of New York, his vanity, his affairs, and his paperwork. Around him are Coca-Cola contracts, Munich syrup shipments, Hitler’s birthday as a marketing opportunity, German agreements, and ordinary business files. Fascism has not replaced American ambition. It has given it new clients.

That was also why the worldbuilding mattered. I did not want the Nazi victory timeline to look like a grey military occupation forever. That would be too easy. I wanted it to be bright. Clean. Expensive. Modern. Sterile. A world of polished floors, shining towers, controlled traffic, efficient paperwork, spotless uniforms, beautiful trains, and perfect public plazas. The kind of world that photographs well. The kind of world that looks, at first glance, like progress.

That mattered because evil does not always present itself as decay. Sometimes evil presents itself as cleanliness.

In this world, the cities are impressive. The buildings are taller, whiter, smoother, more monumental. The trains are faster. The stations are grander. The advertisements are sharper. The public language is full of unity, order, health, family, and civilization. Everything has been designed to suggest that history has been settled and the winners have built something permanent. The world has all the fancy trappings of success: bullet trains, marble towers, German-engineered appliances, modern offices, international brands, clean sidewalks, public murals, schoolchildren with better toys and worse lessons.

But under that sterile surface is rot.

The slave labor is still there. It has just been made modern. It is not always chains anymore. It is remote shock collars. It is transport schedules. It is labor camps turned into “work colonies.” It is men and women moved through the economy like parts in a machine. The brutality has been upgraded, not abolished. The whole system has learned to speak in administrative language. People are not beaten in the street if they can be disciplined by a switch, filed under a number, and explained as a cost-control measure.

That is the kind of detail that makes the world more disturbing to me. It is not barbarism against modernity. It is barbarism using modernity.

The racism is not hidden. It is not whispered. It is not a shameful contradiction inside the system. It is the system’s organizing principle. People know where they stand because the state, schools, companies, and architecture tell them where they stand. There are neighborhoods you do not enter, jobs you cannot hold, trains you cannot ride, clubs you cannot join, and futures you are not supposed to imagine. Racism is not a private vice in this world. It is public policy, social etiquette, business practice, and common sense fused together.

I liked the idea of a bullet train that no one takes because it actually adds time to the trip home. It is such a perfect kind of fascist modernity: the state builds something enormous, sleek, and expensive because it proves a point. It proves power. It proves destiny. But in ordinary life, it does not work the way the posters promised. People avoid it. They grumble. They take the older route. The train exists less as transportation than as propaganda with wheels.

I also wanted the culture to keep mutating. A Nazi victory timeline would not freeze the world in 1945. Children would still grow up. Teenagers would still rebel. Fashion would still change. Slang would still develop. Stupidity would survive. That is where the teenage street toughs come in: leather jackets, attitude, petty crime, and Jewish head coverings worn as something “edgy.” Not respectful. Not political in any thoughtful sense. Just kids reaching for forbidden symbols because forbidden symbols have power. In this world, teenage rebellion is uglier and stranger because even rebellion is contaminated by the society that produces it.

Children still play with toys, too. That was important. The world is monstrous, but it is not empty. Children have toy soldiers, model rockets, plastic officers, little German tanks, miniature Unity Towers, board games about empire, lunchboxes, dolls, toy trains, and cheap tin airplanes. The propaganda is not only in speeches. It is in play. It is in what children are taught to admire before they understand admiration. They do not simply learn the regime from textbooks. They learn it from toys under Christmas trees and cartoons before dinner.

That is how a system lasts. It makes itself ordinary.

The same was true with smaller details. I liked writing scenes where men argue over food. A Reuben sandwich. Pink sauce on paper. A German asking if corned beef is “ja?” Someone confusing Thousand Island with fry sauce. That kind of thing mattered because empires are not only experienced through armies and speeches. They are experienced through menus, office jokes, brand names, imported habits, and little misunderstandings. The world feels more real when people in it are not always discussing history. Sometimes they are eating lunch. Sometimes the sauce drips on the floor. Sometimes the fascist world order sits in the background while someone tries to explain sauerkraut.

Those details make the darkness worse. If every scene is a parade, the reader can keep the horror at a distance. But if the world has lunch counters, secretaries, elevators, cheap napkins, business folders, affairs, nightclubs, and office gossip, then the horror has somewhere to live.

The big flashy world, then, is not decoration. It is part of the horror. The towers, trains, collars, toys, clean streets, and fancy restaurants all say the same thing: this society has had time to normalize itself. It is not in the first fever of conquest anymore. It has become mature. It has become consumer friendly. The violence is still there, but now it has infrastructure.

That is what I wanted the reader to feel. Not simply “the Nazis won.” Something worse: the Nazis won long enough for people to get used to it.

The more I read about the actual 1950s, the more that mattered. The 1950s have a mythology in America. It says the past was cleaner, safer, more orderly, more patriotic, more religious, more masculine, more feminine, more stable. It is the world of nice houses, single-income families, children outside, family dinners, strong fathers, elegant mothers, affordable homes, and a country that knew what it was.

I grew up hearing versions of that mythology.

My grandparents had their version of the past. To them, things were successful. Things were easier. People knew their place. The country worked. The past had few flaws, or so the story went. Even hardship was polished into virtue. If something was cruel, then that was simply how things were. If something was unfair, then people were tougher back then.

My father remembered something else.

He grew up poor. Not sentimental poor. Not television poor. Poor in ways people think are exaggerated if they did not grow up near it. Poor in ways that involved shame, hunger, bad housing, limited choices, and adults who were not ennobled by hardship but damaged by it. His version of the past did not sound like a commercial. It sounded like a warning.

So I grew up between two histories. One said the past was clean and successful. The other said the past was full of pain that people later pretended not to remember. One version turned the 1950s into paradise. The other asked the obvious question: paradise for whom?

That question became part of the book.

I did not want the alternate timeline to feel like science fiction with different flags. I wanted it to feel like a society where familiar American habits had been given permission to become uglier. The sexism, racism, class worship, fear of poverty, contempt for weakness, obsession with status, and worship of success were not inventions of Nazism. Fascism did not create those instincts from nothing. It fed on them. It organized them. It gave them uniforms, laws, slogans, and markets.

Writing this article in 2026 makes that harder to ignore. When I first imagined Americans admiring the Third Reich, it seemed grotesque and unreal. Now it feels less impossible than I wish it did. I do not mean history has repeated itself neatly. It never does. But certain ideas have become easier to hear in public. Cruelty has become easier to excuse. Strongman language has become easier to market. People flirt with authoritarianism and call it order. People confuse domination with competence. People talk about the “good old days” without asking who was being crushed underneath them.

That is why the 1950s mythology matters. Nostalgia is not harmless when it becomes a political weapon. There is a difference between liking old diners, old cars, old suits, and old music, and wanting to rebuild an imaginary world where fewer people had rights and fewer people could complain. The “perfect past” is often perfect because the people who suffered in it were not allowed to write the brochure.

My father’s stories punctured that brochure for me. They reminded me that every golden age has people trapped outside the glow. Every clean story has dirt swept under the rug. Every society has people who benefit from calling that dirt tradition.

So why did I write How Tall Is the Grass in Germany?

I wrote it because I did not trust the prettier version of the past. I wrote it because I wanted to examine the kind of American who would not resist a victorious fascist world but sell to it. I wrote it because evil is often ordinary before it is spectacular. I wrote it because paperwork can be more frightening than speeches. I wrote it because sometimes a man gets away with murder, and the only punishment he receives is knowing that someone, somewhere, has written down the truth.

Most of all, I wrote it because “it cannot happen here” has always sounded less like a fact than a prayer.

How Tall Is The Grass In Germany? is on sale from Amazon, Smashwords, and all Books2Read markets now.

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