what if we were lied to? a sci-fi bleg

I am racking my brain and memory to no avail – I need to recall the autor and name of the short story set in an alternate history where the Nazis win World War II. The Germans roll over Europe, conquer Britain, win in Russia. The Japanese expand into China and Asia, and the two axis powers swallow the entire globe. Then they turn on each other, and fight World War III, and the Nazis are ultimately (barely) victorious. At this point the Nazis break out the old Holocaust Instruction Manual and turn the resources of the planet towards genetic purification and the glory of the Aryan race. And they succeed. And centuries after World War II, the true Third Reich becomes a pure race indeed on white-skinned, blue-eyed, golden-haired people. As the centuries pass, the Reich liberalizes, moderates, and eventually becomes a Republic. True learning and democracy again flourish as the homogeneity of the Aryan race – now the entirety of the human race – ensures peace and prosperity and minimal conflict. The horror of the past centuries is increasingly edited out and ultimately forgotten entirely, lost in myth. A new history emerges, one scrubbed clean of any messy reference to wars or races, and after a few generations this new narrative has become set in the collectve stone of human memory.

And one day, a full millenium after the dark prehistory that gave rise to what has now become a human utopia, two students at the University of Tokyo, Hans and Franz (names may be different from my recollection) are eating lunch. Hans turns to Franz and asks him., “do you ever get the feeling we were lied to?”

if you thought that was a cool summary, the original was 10^6 times better. Help me figure out who wrote it! I think I might have read it on one of these, but I’m not sure.

3 thoughts on “what if we were lied to? a sci-fi bleg”

  1. Though at first was either the man in the high castle by Phillip K Dick or Fatherland by Robert Harris, but neither go that far into the future so no idead I’m afraid

  2. It feels like something from Galaxy. There was some stuff from H. Beam Piper which seems similar, but it ain’t that. Maybe Asimov?

  3. I felt like I’d read this somewhere before but it took me more than a week to figure out where. Read “Ishmael” by Daniel Quinn. It’s in chapter one, part 7.

    It’s a considerably truncated version of the synopsis you presented in your post, the details of which must have come from SOMEWHERE. But still, Quinn cites all sorts of outside work in his stories and I think he would have given credit where credit was due if someone else had come up with the idea (which the narrator in the story claims to have written himself in a college paper). Anyway, that’s all I’ve got.

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