The Man in the High Castle Chapter 15 Summary

  • Remember Baynes who was really Wegener? Well now he's traveling back to Germany under the name Conrad Goltz. That will be on the quiz.
  • Like Tagomi in the last chapter, Wegener isn't sure that he accomplished anything, but he did all he could to make the world a better place.
  • When they touch down in Germany, Wegener is met by a bunch of Nazis, who are here to keep him safe. (This is a big change from how we usually think about Nazis.)
  • Wegener realizes that this means that maybe Heydrich will win out and there will be no war with Japan. Yay?
  • Back with Juliana Frink, when she gets to Cheyenne, she learns from a newspaper that Joe Cinnadella is dead. Also, according to the paper, everyone thinks she is "Mrs. Cinnadella" and they don't know anything about her. So she got away with murder. Yay? Is this whole final chapter going to be full of half-hearted "yay" moments?
  • After finishing Grasshopper, she tries to call Frank (who isn't at home), and then drives over to the Abendsen home, which isn't a heavily fortified "castle" but just a normal home.
  • And they're having a party.
  • Wife Caroline Abendsen introduces Juliana to Hawthorne, which is a sentence with a lot of fun names.
  • Abendsen explains that they left the High Castle because he had a weird panic attack in an elevator once. He's not too worried about German assassins.
  • But he tries to avoid explaining how he wrote the book.
  • So Juliana plays her ace card: you should tell me about the book, because I killed a German (well, Swiss) assassin for you.
  • Caroline starts to explain that Hawthorne wrote his book with the I Ching. He asked the book lots of questions about what he should write about and then he wrote what the I Ching told him to.
  • Juliana then asks the obvious question: why did the I Ching want to write this particular book? The three of them go to ask the I Ching and get the answer "Inner Truth."
  • This means—hold on to your socks for this—the I Ching helped to write Grasshopper because that was the truth: Japan and Germany really did lose the war.
  • This kind of bothers Caroline and Hawthorne. It does kind of break their view of reality, we guess.
  • Juliana isn't sure what she'll do next. Maybe she'll go find Frank. But she's not as anxious as she once was. And just like that, Juliana walks out into the night—like Batman.