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Several characters in The Man in the High Castle read the popular novel The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, by Hawthorne Abendsen, whose title is assumed or supposed to have come from the Bible[1]:70 verse "The grasshopper shall be a burden" (Ecclesiastes 12:5). Thus, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy constitutes a novel within a novel, wherein Abendsen writes of an alternative universe, where the Axis Powers lost World War II (1939–1947). For this reason, the Germans have banned the novel in the occupied US,[1]:91 but it is widely read in the Pacific, and its publication is legal in the neutral countries.
The Grasshopper Lies Heavy postulates that President Roosevelt survives an assassination attempt but forgoes re-election in 1940, honoring George Washington's two-term limit. The next president, Rexford Tugwell, removes the Pacific Fleet from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, saving it from Japanese attack, which ensures that the US enters the conflict a well-equipped naval power.[1]:70 The United Kingdom retains most of its military-industrial strength, contributing more to the Allied war effort, leading to Rommel's defeat in North Africa; the British advance through the Caucasus to fight alongside the Soviets to victory in the Battle of Stalingrad; Italy and Hungary renege on their membership in the Axis Powers and betray them; British tanks and the Red Army jointly conquer Berlin; at the end of the war, the Nazi leaders—including Adolf Hitler—are tried for their war crimes, and the Führer's last words are Deutsche, hier steh' ich ("Germans, here I stand"),[1]:131 in imitation of Martin Luther.
After the war, President Tugwell initiates the New Deal on a worldwide scale. With American assistance, China goes through a decade of rebuilding. People in lesser developed places in Africa and Asia are sent television kits, through which they learn how to read and receive instructions on practical skills such as digging wells and purifying water. In turn, these places become markets for American factories. In the British Empire, social and economic progress has also brought relief to the masses in India, Burma, Africa and the Middle East. In Europe, there is peace and harmony not only with itself but with the rest of the world. The Soviet Union, crippled by war losses, is divided up.[1]:165-168
Around ten years after the end of the war, the British Empire, still under the leadership of Winston Churchill, becomes more racist and expansionist, establishing "detention preserves" for disloyal Chinese in South Asia, and suspecting that the US is undermining its rule in South Asia. Meanwhile, the US has ended racial discrimination by the 1950s. Whites and Blacks are able to live and work shoulder by shoulder. These changes provoke racial-cultural tensions between the US and the UK, leading them to a Cold War for global hegemony between their two vaguely liberal, democratic, capitalist societies. Although the end of the novel is never depicted in the text, one character claims the book ends with the British Empire eventually defeating the US, becoming the sole world superpower
