I’ve been a fan of Harry Turtledove’s alternate history novels for some time, and I recently picked up a copy of his latest, “In The Face of Mine Enemies”. In this book, Turtledove introduces a world where America stayed out of WWII, leaving Germany to eventually become the dominant global superpower. As the book opens in the early months of 2010, we learn that the current Fuhrer is a 91-year-old WWII vet named “Kurt Haldweim”.
Though he faded from the public spotlight before I was born, I recognized this name as a play on that of Kurt Waldheim, former UN Secretary General. Upon checking an encyclopedia, the similarities became more apparent - Waldheim and Haldweim are the same age and have the same birthdate, both were German officers in WWII, and both had bloody reputations - whereas the real Waldheim was accused of war crimes in Yugoslavia a generation later, the fictitious Haldweim is renowned as an aggressive and zealous exterminator of Slavic Jews. It quickly became obvious that, in Turtledove’s work, Waldheim = Haldweim, but for some reason he had chosen to transpose the two letters.
My question is this - why? I imagine that Mr. Waldheim might be a bit irked by being portrayed as the ruler of a cruel and oppressive militaristic empire, but could he really sue Turtledove over that portrayal? And does transposing two letters in the surname actually protect Turtledove from such a lawsuit? In other words, if I were to write a novel about a certain Irish Catholic senator from Massachusetts, whose brother was an assassinated president, and I portryed this senator as a bloodthirsty vampire, would it protect me from prosecution if I called him “Ted Denneky”?