The publisher Random House will use a separate cover for the German edition of Philip Roth's new novel "The Plot Against America," due to its use of a Nazi swastika on the cover. "Our people in Germany said you cannot have this here," Dan Franklin, the publishing director of Random House imprint Jonathan Cape, told the news agency AFP at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Two editions of the book will now be released, one featuring a postage stamp emblazoned with a simple black 'X' for English-language copies in the German and Hungarian markets, another with the swastika for the rest of Europe. Franklin said that whilst Hungary also had a ban on the Nazi symbol Austrian editions would carry the swastika. In Germany, the swastika is outlawed but can escape censorship if it is viewed as historically or educationally relevant in a given context.
Roth, one of America's most prominent writers, imagines in the new novel that flying ace Charles Lindbergh, who in real life had contacts with leading figures in Nazi Germany, is elected president of the United States. American Jews see their rights gradually curtailed until they are engulfed in a nightmarish wave of anti-Semitic pogroms. The "New York Times" quoted the book's publisher, Houghton Mifflin, as saying that a shipment of the novel was held up at German customs this week, apparently due to the swastika cover, and sent back to New York.
