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New Studies in European History
The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism
What if the Nazis had triumphed in World War II? What if Adolf Hitler had escaped Berlin for the jungles of Latin America in 1945? What if Hitler had become a successful artist instead of a politician? Originally published in 2005, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's pioneering study explores why such counterfactual questions on the subject of Nazism have proliferated within Western popular culture. Examining a wide range of novels, short stories, films, television programs, plays, comic books, and scholarly essays appearing in Great Britain, the United States, and Germany post-1945, Rosenfeld shows how the portrayal of historical events that never happened reflects the evolving memory of the Third Reich's real historical legacy. He concludes that the shifting representation of Nazism in works of alternate history, as well as the popular reactions to them, highlights their subversive role in promoting the normalisation of the Nazi past in Western memory.
540 pages, Hardcover
First published May 23, 2005
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208 people want to read
About the author
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
12 books20 followersGavriel David Rosenfeld is President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor of History at Fairfield University. His areas of academic specialization include the history of Nazi Germany, memory studies, and counterfactual history. He is an editor of The Journal of Holocaust Research and edits the blog, The Counterfactual History Review, which features news, analysis, and commentary from the world of counterfactual and alternate history.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
March 15, 2011
The problem here is that Rosenfeld, a historian of Jewish architecture and public memory regarding the Holocaust, appears to have little actual interest (and a good bit of disdain, actually) for alternate history as a form and the larger genre of speculative fiction in general, continually dismissing any kind of science-fictional plot points as "implausible" or "far-fetched." Instead, they just provide him with the most explicit example of what he calls "normalization," the cultural trend by which "a particular historical legacy (an era, an event, a figure, or a combination thereof) becomes viewed like any other" [16], representations of which increasingly lack a "moralistic emphasis" [19]. Rosenfeld, although he hints at "objectivity" from time to time, is clearly bothered by this trend, because he also spends a lot of time attacking the "universalization" of evil, whereby "[m]any writers, typically possessing left-liberal political views, have universalized the experience of the Nazi era in order to draw lessons from it that might help direct attention to present-day problems." [386] This... doesn't seem like such a bad thing to me? It definitely does to Rosenfeld, though, and don't even get him started on the fictional depiction of "good Germans" or even "good Nazis." He seems to have a rather monolithic, black-and-white view of things - not that I can blame him, entirely, but surely fiction is the place to work these ideas out?
He also spends an odd amount of time justifying examining material so blatantly "low culture"... he seems a bit guilty or embarrassed, hm? But really, this book came out in 2005, cultural history and American studies have been doing this stuff for decades, and if Rosenfeld was grounded in that literature at all, I think this would have been a very different (and superior) book.
And then the whole thing ends with a call to arms against "militant Islam."
He also spends an odd amount of time justifying examining material so blatantly "low culture"... he seems a bit guilty or embarrassed, hm? But really, this book came out in 2005, cultural history and American studies have been doing this stuff for decades, and if Rosenfeld was grounded in that literature at all, I think this would have been a very different (and superior) book.
And then the whole thing ends with a call to arms against "militant Islam."
February 10, 2013
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's new book The World Hitler Never Made is a triumph, perhaps the first academic historiography ever written about alternate history. As the book's title suggests, Rosenfeld is specifically interested in the vast array of stories--novels, short stories, comic books, television and film--set in worlds where Hitler and Naziism encountered fates as various as their complete victory to their early defeat. The author first took note of this flourishing subgenre of alternate history in reading Robert Harris' 1993 Fatherland, a novel set in a 1964 where a Greater Germany reigned triumphant over Europe if locked in a Cold War with the United States. Over the course of the 1990s, as the Internet spread and let alternate history gain a higher profile even as the counterfactual method gained legitimacy in academic history via the works of Niall Ferguson (Virtual History, The Pity of War, Empire) and others. The focus of Rosenfeld, a student of Germany and the Second World War, was more specific.
"What set of motivations or concerns had led people over the years to wonder "what if?" with respect to the Nazi era? How had they imagined that the world might have been different? What explained the growth of such accounts in recent years? Finally, and most importantly, what did alternate histories reveal about the evolving place of the Nazi past in Western memory?" (3)
Rosenfeld places alternate history and the counterfactual method, techniques which challenge accepted assumptions about the inevitability of events and the difficulty of determining the truly significant events, in the context of the post-1960s decay of authority in the West. In cultures where it was no longer possible to uncritically accept the claims of authorities, every claim became suspect. Unsurprisingly, the question of whether or not the Second World War was necessary was another newly opened topic. Examining the alternate histories produced by British, American, and German popular culture in the post-war era, Rosenfeld suggests that, starting in the 1960s, there has been a pronounced shift, from moralistic works which were preoccupied with Hitler's crimes and justifying the course of events to more contested and divided interpretations which reject an uncritical examination of the Nazi era. At present, after the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War in the late 1980s allowed alternate-history writers more freedom to consider different scenarios, combining post-war triumphialism with Cold War criticism. Four trends are seen as particularly important.
* Organic normalization. The simple passage of time makes Nazi crimes increasingly distant from the minds of those in the present day.
* Universalization. The fact that Nazi war crimes can be assimilated into the study of crimes against humanity in general decreases their uniqueness.
* Relativization. Nazi war crimes can be minimized, for domestic political purposes.
* Aestheticization. The most worrisome of Rosenfeld's four trends, the aestheticization of the Nazi era for psychological or commercial motives.
The relevant literature of each of the three countries studied by Rosenfeld manifests different trends. In the case of the United Kingdom, alternate histories seem to have been most often used to challenge the myth of the United Kingdom as a nation firmly opposed to the Nazis, often by suggesting that Britons would have collaborated had Nazi Germany managed Operation Sealion. Americans, for their part, more often question (as in Brad Linaweaver's Moon of Ice) whether American intervention was ever necessary, if a Nazi Europe would have been less threatening to the United States than the Cold War's Soviet empire. Germans, for their part, seem to be concerned with the question of how Naziism could be incorporated within German national identity, whether or not (for instance) Naziism and the Holocaust were inevitable products of German society in the 1930s.
As one would expect, the question of morality has remained quite potent. The first generation of alternate-history writers critical of the accepted story of Naziism retained the original emphasis on the singularity of Nazi crimes. For instance, Philip K. Dick's famous 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle describes Nazis as immensely evil and motivated by a will to power, willing to depopulate Africa and hunt down the last Jews; oddly enough, for an audience familiar with Unit 731 and the Rape of Nanjing, the Japanese are the only victorious Axis power that has resisted this purge of decency. Similarly, the script of Harlan Ellison's famous 1967 Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" was tweaked to make Edith Keeler's pacifism allow for a Nazi victory. In Germany, Otto Basil's 1965 novel Wenn das der Führer wiste and Arno Lubos' 1980 Schwiebus examine solitary characters left to fend for themselves in of a morally bankrupt and declining society.Later, however, Naziism's ruthless modernity was increasingly presented as something present in modern Western democracies, as in Brian Aldiss' 1970 short story "Swastika!".
A critical moment came in 1979 with the Saturday Night Live sketch "WI: Uberman", where Klaus Kent as portrayed by Dan Ackroyd saved the Führer from the 1944 bomb plot and went on to win the Second World War for the Nazis, taking Stalingrad, rounding up six million Jews, even "killing England." For perhaps the first time, the idea of a Nazi victory was presented as pure entertainment. The organic normalization of Nazi crimes, Rosenfeld argues, had by this time progressed to the point where a Nazi victory could be seen as funny. In the 1980s, almost anything was possible, with Linaweaver arguing in Moon of Ice that Nazi Germany would inevitably have succumbed to the superior libertarianism of the United States, and British poet Craig Raine's play 1953 making fascist Italy the leading villain and downgrading Nazi Germany to a second-rank power. Still later, Robert Harris' Fatherland, which critically examined the repression of the Holocaust in a Nazi Germany slowly succumbing to reality, was able to include a SS officer as hero of the plot. In 1995, German writer Alexander Demandt went so far as to conclude in his article "Wenn Hitler gewonnen hatte?" that even a worst-case Nazi Germany would be no worse and in many ways better than East Germany.
Other writers, taking a different angle have asked whether a world without Hitler would necessarily have been a better world: Stephen Fry's Making History and Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream are the most representative examples. Hitler, too, has been humanized, removed from a position of transcendant and inhuman evil to a simple human being produced by human choices. No writer has done a better job at this than George Steiner in his 1980 The Portage of A.H. to San Cristobal, a powerful text where Hitler presents his own arguments on his own terms: Jews developed the concept of the master race, Britons developed the concentration camp, the Soviets committed atrocities as bad as anything the Nazis did, he did create Israel. In the novel, Hitler was almost viscerally convincing; in the 1982 stage adaptation, Hitler was applauded after his final monologue.
In the end, Rosenfeld reluctantly concludes that the normalization of Naziism is inevitable, that the contextualization of Nazi crimes within a broader context is in fact a useful way to think of Nazi crimes in such a way as to prevent their recurrence, in any form. He's quite right, of course: There have been many other atrocities apart from those committed by the Nazis, and concentrating on Nazi crimes in such a way as to avoid examining the broader contexts and causes of crimes against humanity is counterproductive. Even so, I also think that the normalization of Naziism can proceed too far, ignoring the singular consequences of a victorious Nazi Germany. Ralph Giordano's argument, expressed, in 1989's Wenn Hitler der Krieg gewonnen hätte (If Hitler Had Won the War) argues that Germany would have first tried to conquer Africa, then desolate eastern Europe in the fashion laid out in the Generalplan Ost, and finally fight a war against the United States is unproven, of necessity. Even so, Naziism was uniquely radical, planning the wholesale reengineering of Europe's ethnicities and economies at enormous cost and managing to inflict quite a bit of damage on Europe in the six years that it had to act on the whole of that continent. Can we seriously expect that a regime led by Hitler and friends, people who welcomed Berlin's destruction on the grounds that the German people had proved itself weak and unworthy, would not have happily engaged in the most dangerous and nihilistic adventures? The post-Stalin Soviet Union, for all of its crimes, at least wasn't ready to desolate the planet on a whim.
Memory--in relation to Nazi crimes just as in relation to all crimes is key. Harry Turtledove's 2003 novel In the Presence of Mine Enemies does almost as much of a disservice to memory by slavishly patterning the Reich after the Gorbachev-era Soviet Union as John Ringo and Thomas Kratman's Watch on the Rhine does by making a rejeuvenated SS Germany's protectors against alien invasion. Pretending that Naziism was not, at its roots, an ideology that took gleeful pleasure in harm from its start, takes willful blindness. Richard Grayson's famous 1979 story "With Hitler in New York" takes note of this trend of selective ignorance, describing Hitler as a nondescript guy like any of the others, with a bit of a bad unmentioned history but with peers uninterested in starting a fuss and a Jewish girlfriend to boot.
"Grayson's tale imagines an alternate world that has largely forgiven Hitler for his crimes and forgotten them. Such a world--in which the story's narrator can ignore his grandfather's own death in order to get stoned with Hitler and can muse, "I wonder if I am beginning to fall in love with him"--is a callous, unfeeling one, in which historical consciousness has either atrophied completely or become irrelevant to most human beings. In short, it is a nightmarish world of total amnesia" (235).
Consciousness is nice indeed. Rosenfeld is to be praised for this important and interesting study.
"What set of motivations or concerns had led people over the years to wonder "what if?" with respect to the Nazi era? How had they imagined that the world might have been different? What explained the growth of such accounts in recent years? Finally, and most importantly, what did alternate histories reveal about the evolving place of the Nazi past in Western memory?" (3)
Rosenfeld places alternate history and the counterfactual method, techniques which challenge accepted assumptions about the inevitability of events and the difficulty of determining the truly significant events, in the context of the post-1960s decay of authority in the West. In cultures where it was no longer possible to uncritically accept the claims of authorities, every claim became suspect. Unsurprisingly, the question of whether or not the Second World War was necessary was another newly opened topic. Examining the alternate histories produced by British, American, and German popular culture in the post-war era, Rosenfeld suggests that, starting in the 1960s, there has been a pronounced shift, from moralistic works which were preoccupied with Hitler's crimes and justifying the course of events to more contested and divided interpretations which reject an uncritical examination of the Nazi era. At present, after the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War in the late 1980s allowed alternate-history writers more freedom to consider different scenarios, combining post-war triumphialism with Cold War criticism. Four trends are seen as particularly important.
* Organic normalization. The simple passage of time makes Nazi crimes increasingly distant from the minds of those in the present day.
* Universalization. The fact that Nazi war crimes can be assimilated into the study of crimes against humanity in general decreases their uniqueness.
* Relativization. Nazi war crimes can be minimized, for domestic political purposes.
* Aestheticization. The most worrisome of Rosenfeld's four trends, the aestheticization of the Nazi era for psychological or commercial motives.
The relevant literature of each of the three countries studied by Rosenfeld manifests different trends. In the case of the United Kingdom, alternate histories seem to have been most often used to challenge the myth of the United Kingdom as a nation firmly opposed to the Nazis, often by suggesting that Britons would have collaborated had Nazi Germany managed Operation Sealion. Americans, for their part, more often question (as in Brad Linaweaver's Moon of Ice) whether American intervention was ever necessary, if a Nazi Europe would have been less threatening to the United States than the Cold War's Soviet empire. Germans, for their part, seem to be concerned with the question of how Naziism could be incorporated within German national identity, whether or not (for instance) Naziism and the Holocaust were inevitable products of German society in the 1930s.
As one would expect, the question of morality has remained quite potent. The first generation of alternate-history writers critical of the accepted story of Naziism retained the original emphasis on the singularity of Nazi crimes. For instance, Philip K. Dick's famous 1962 novel The Man in the High Castle describes Nazis as immensely evil and motivated by a will to power, willing to depopulate Africa and hunt down the last Jews; oddly enough, for an audience familiar with Unit 731 and the Rape of Nanjing, the Japanese are the only victorious Axis power that has resisted this purge of decency. Similarly, the script of Harlan Ellison's famous 1967 Star Trek episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" was tweaked to make Edith Keeler's pacifism allow for a Nazi victory. In Germany, Otto Basil's 1965 novel Wenn das der Führer wiste and Arno Lubos' 1980 Schwiebus examine solitary characters left to fend for themselves in of a morally bankrupt and declining society.Later, however, Naziism's ruthless modernity was increasingly presented as something present in modern Western democracies, as in Brian Aldiss' 1970 short story "Swastika!".
A critical moment came in 1979 with the Saturday Night Live sketch "WI: Uberman", where Klaus Kent as portrayed by Dan Ackroyd saved the Führer from the 1944 bomb plot and went on to win the Second World War for the Nazis, taking Stalingrad, rounding up six million Jews, even "killing England." For perhaps the first time, the idea of a Nazi victory was presented as pure entertainment. The organic normalization of Nazi crimes, Rosenfeld argues, had by this time progressed to the point where a Nazi victory could be seen as funny. In the 1980s, almost anything was possible, with Linaweaver arguing in Moon of Ice that Nazi Germany would inevitably have succumbed to the superior libertarianism of the United States, and British poet Craig Raine's play 1953 making fascist Italy the leading villain and downgrading Nazi Germany to a second-rank power. Still later, Robert Harris' Fatherland, which critically examined the repression of the Holocaust in a Nazi Germany slowly succumbing to reality, was able to include a SS officer as hero of the plot. In 1995, German writer Alexander Demandt went so far as to conclude in his article "Wenn Hitler gewonnen hatte?" that even a worst-case Nazi Germany would be no worse and in many ways better than East Germany.
Other writers, taking a different angle have asked whether a world without Hitler would necessarily have been a better world: Stephen Fry's Making History and Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream are the most representative examples. Hitler, too, has been humanized, removed from a position of transcendant and inhuman evil to a simple human being produced by human choices. No writer has done a better job at this than George Steiner in his 1980 The Portage of A.H. to San Cristobal, a powerful text where Hitler presents his own arguments on his own terms: Jews developed the concept of the master race, Britons developed the concentration camp, the Soviets committed atrocities as bad as anything the Nazis did, he did create Israel. In the novel, Hitler was almost viscerally convincing; in the 1982 stage adaptation, Hitler was applauded after his final monologue.
In the end, Rosenfeld reluctantly concludes that the normalization of Naziism is inevitable, that the contextualization of Nazi crimes within a broader context is in fact a useful way to think of Nazi crimes in such a way as to prevent their recurrence, in any form. He's quite right, of course: There have been many other atrocities apart from those committed by the Nazis, and concentrating on Nazi crimes in such a way as to avoid examining the broader contexts and causes of crimes against humanity is counterproductive. Even so, I also think that the normalization of Naziism can proceed too far, ignoring the singular consequences of a victorious Nazi Germany. Ralph Giordano's argument, expressed, in 1989's Wenn Hitler der Krieg gewonnen hätte (If Hitler Had Won the War) argues that Germany would have first tried to conquer Africa, then desolate eastern Europe in the fashion laid out in the Generalplan Ost, and finally fight a war against the United States is unproven, of necessity. Even so, Naziism was uniquely radical, planning the wholesale reengineering of Europe's ethnicities and economies at enormous cost and managing to inflict quite a bit of damage on Europe in the six years that it had to act on the whole of that continent. Can we seriously expect that a regime led by Hitler and friends, people who welcomed Berlin's destruction on the grounds that the German people had proved itself weak and unworthy, would not have happily engaged in the most dangerous and nihilistic adventures? The post-Stalin Soviet Union, for all of its crimes, at least wasn't ready to desolate the planet on a whim.
Memory--in relation to Nazi crimes just as in relation to all crimes is key. Harry Turtledove's 2003 novel In the Presence of Mine Enemies does almost as much of a disservice to memory by slavishly patterning the Reich after the Gorbachev-era Soviet Union as John Ringo and Thomas Kratman's Watch on the Rhine does by making a rejeuvenated SS Germany's protectors against alien invasion. Pretending that Naziism was not, at its roots, an ideology that took gleeful pleasure in harm from its start, takes willful blindness. Richard Grayson's famous 1979 story "With Hitler in New York" takes note of this trend of selective ignorance, describing Hitler as a nondescript guy like any of the others, with a bit of a bad unmentioned history but with peers uninterested in starting a fuss and a Jewish girlfriend to boot.
"Grayson's tale imagines an alternate world that has largely forgiven Hitler for his crimes and forgotten them. Such a world--in which the story's narrator can ignore his grandfather's own death in order to get stoned with Hitler and can muse, "I wonder if I am beginning to fall in love with him"--is a callous, unfeeling one, in which historical consciousness has either atrophied completely or become irrelevant to most human beings. In short, it is a nightmarish world of total amnesia" (235).
Consciousness is nice indeed. Rosenfeld is to be praised for this important and interesting study.
March 10, 2011
This book is a survey and analysis of alternative histories linked to Adolf Hitler and the Second World War. Rosenfeld looks at four main themes; What if the Nazis had won, What if Hitler had escaped rather than died, What if Hitler's career had ended prior to the disaster of the Second World War, and What ifs relating to the Holocaust. Rosenberg looks at stories, films, productions and, mainly, novels produced by the English, Americans and Germans over three periods - immediately after the War whilst memories are still strong, during the Cold War and those produced after the collapse of Soviet Europe. This is an interesting book with flaws. The flaws are centred around the very repetitive analysis which, whilst at times quite interesting, does become monotonous when repeated ad nauseam. The real strength of the book lies in the descriptions of books etc and placing them within the context of their times. It is interesting to see the differences between the English and the Americans, for example, and also to be surprised at the naivety of some of the writers. Finally, the book makes one aware of how Western Society's perceptions of the Nazis and the Holocaust have changed. The great flaw is not just that of "forgetting" (or of not being aware) but of making the grave mistake of thinking that these people (the Nazis, and Germans of that era) were just like us and then to minimise the real horror of what they did. So, although it has its flaws, this is a book I would recommend to students of History, Society and Literature in the hope that they get to understand the dangers of "normalising" the evil men and events of the not-so-distant past.
July 5, 2020
While the exploration of the genre (alternative WW2 histories) is certainly entertaining (I discovered some titles I did not know before) the work is impaired by a myopic interpretation of 'normalization' as 'justification', in this way ignoring the similarities between the Holocaust and other historical events
September 17, 2016
Dont expect anything like Harris's Fatherland- its a summary of all the alternative history books about the WWII ever written.
February 2, 2024
What is “alternate history?" The term is all-encompassing, but debatably the most collective among many that we use to describe those works of historical fiction where the presented history differs in some substantial way from history as we know it. As you will see as you read these stories, alternate history sometimes incorporates time travel, but not always.
And it occasionally, but not permanently, emphases on a serious “hinge” point (every now and then called the Jonbar hinge, from an early Jack Williamson novel, The Legion of Time, which employed the procedure). And intermittently, but not constantly, alternate history involves parallel worlds, or “multiverse” stories where the antiquity differs from ours, often melodramatically but sometimes very delicately.
Sometimes called “allohistory,” or “counterfactual history,” or “uchronia,” the genre is by any of its names a popular one.
Alternate history is above all ‘fun’.
More than anything, this book shows how much alternate history can reflect a kind of wish fulfillment that discloses changing political and cultural attitudes.
As the author confesses early in his book, 'unlike conventional history, which remains largely constrained by the serious imperatives of analysis and enlightenment, alternate history's penchant for the unconventional, the sensationalistic, and the irreverent caters to the general public's hunger for pleasurable diversion. Alternate history, in a word, is "fun"' (p. 10).
In the Introduction to this book, the author asks:
“… What if Hitler had been assassinated or had never been born? What if the Holocaust had been completed or could somehow be undone?”
Such counterfactual queries may originally strike us as ridiculous, even meaningless. But they have been posed by an amazingly varied range of people and appeared in a dizzying array of venues.
He says, “Alternate histories on the subject of Nazism have been produced by high-brow writers like Philip Roth, prodigious mass-market novelists such as Harry Turtledove, playwrights like Noel Coward, politicians such as Newt Gingrich, filmmakers like Armin Mueller-Stahl, and historians such as John Lukacs. 'What if?'….”
Rosenfeld divides his book into three chief sections:
PART I THE NAZIS WIN WORLD WAR II
PART II ALTERNATE HITLERS
PART III HYPOTHETICAL HOLOCAUSTS
The first inspects works based on the foundation that the Nazis won the Second World War, with chapters on the British, US, and German literature, along with an ephemeral dialogue of works from other countries.
The second section deals explicitly with Hitler, analysing both works based on the idea of bringing Hitler to justice and those that consider the insinuations for humanity if Hitler was not born at all.
The last section offers a chapter on the Holocaust itself, in addition to a broad conclusion.
The book also includes a mesmerizing appendix listing and categorizing the variety of alternate histories, inviting readers to dip into this literature on their own.
In each chapter, the author not only offers comparatively thorough summaries of the works themselves, but also analyses their immediate reception, requiring him to conduct a great deal of research on reviews.
Rosenfeld concludes that, “time may not heal all wounds, but it does soften some moral judgements, even as it raises others.”
The only reason I am unable to award five-stars to this tome is owing to an atrocious amount of unassociated info-dumping. Even though it is a non-fiction, it makes reading a bit annoying occasionally.
4 on 5. Recommended.
And it occasionally, but not permanently, emphases on a serious “hinge” point (every now and then called the Jonbar hinge, from an early Jack Williamson novel, The Legion of Time, which employed the procedure). And intermittently, but not constantly, alternate history involves parallel worlds, or “multiverse” stories where the antiquity differs from ours, often melodramatically but sometimes very delicately.
Sometimes called “allohistory,” or “counterfactual history,” or “uchronia,” the genre is by any of its names a popular one.
Alternate history is above all ‘fun’.
More than anything, this book shows how much alternate history can reflect a kind of wish fulfillment that discloses changing political and cultural attitudes.
As the author confesses early in his book, 'unlike conventional history, which remains largely constrained by the serious imperatives of analysis and enlightenment, alternate history's penchant for the unconventional, the sensationalistic, and the irreverent caters to the general public's hunger for pleasurable diversion. Alternate history, in a word, is "fun"' (p. 10).
In the Introduction to this book, the author asks:
“… What if Hitler had been assassinated or had never been born? What if the Holocaust had been completed or could somehow be undone?”
Such counterfactual queries may originally strike us as ridiculous, even meaningless. But they have been posed by an amazingly varied range of people and appeared in a dizzying array of venues.
He says, “Alternate histories on the subject of Nazism have been produced by high-brow writers like Philip Roth, prodigious mass-market novelists such as Harry Turtledove, playwrights like Noel Coward, politicians such as Newt Gingrich, filmmakers like Armin Mueller-Stahl, and historians such as John Lukacs. 'What if?'….”
Rosenfeld divides his book into three chief sections:
PART I THE NAZIS WIN WORLD WAR II
PART II ALTERNATE HITLERS
PART III HYPOTHETICAL HOLOCAUSTS
The first inspects works based on the foundation that the Nazis won the Second World War, with chapters on the British, US, and German literature, along with an ephemeral dialogue of works from other countries.
The second section deals explicitly with Hitler, analysing both works based on the idea of bringing Hitler to justice and those that consider the insinuations for humanity if Hitler was not born at all.
The last section offers a chapter on the Holocaust itself, in addition to a broad conclusion.
The book also includes a mesmerizing appendix listing and categorizing the variety of alternate histories, inviting readers to dip into this literature on their own.
In each chapter, the author not only offers comparatively thorough summaries of the works themselves, but also analyses their immediate reception, requiring him to conduct a great deal of research on reviews.
Rosenfeld concludes that, “time may not heal all wounds, but it does soften some moral judgements, even as it raises others.”
The only reason I am unable to award five-stars to this tome is owing to an atrocious amount of unassociated info-dumping. Even though it is a non-fiction, it makes reading a bit annoying occasionally.
4 on 5. Recommended.
May 15, 2022
I should have read this book a long time ago. The author Gavriel Rosenfeld is a former interview guest of Dickheads and when I had him on I didn’t have time to read this book first. He is a specialist in the history of the Third Reich. He also grew up in my hometown, our parents knew each other from the Jewish community and he was good friends with my step-brother. Small world huh.
The study of the Nazi Germany era is important for many reasons, I should have to explain it but here we go. The current rise of American fascism and homegrown Nationalism came really close last year to overturning an election. Many similarities to those early days of Hitler we see repeated in the Trump years. Just yesterday as I write this review a shooter scared of white replacement theory popularized by Fox News mouthpiece Tucker Carlson killed 10 people in a Grocery store in a Buffalo NY grocery store.
I am a science fiction guy, I love the genre and I love when we as a community add to the discourse. As a sub-genre Alternate history is a valuable tool of speculative fiction. Alt-history has been used for many other parts of history like Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South or more recently Lavie Tidhar’s Osama but the Nazi era is the most popular era to explore. My boy Philip K. Dick might have the most popular with Man in High Castle but there are a lot more examples.
I don’t really have the bandwidth to read them all so Rosenfeld’s very detailed history of fake history is an extremely helpful resource. I was interested to see that Alt-histories exploring the Nazis winning pre-date the war itself. British novels warning of the failure to stop Hitler were more common than I could have imagined. I had heard of Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika night written in 1937, but Rosenfeld does a good job breaking down the various book by the decade.
While not all Rosenfeld's reviews are positive, he highlights the things he feels either make a story work or not work. Most importantly he breaks down the ways each work compares to the fabric of our reality. It makes for a very interesting study. I was surprised that Man in the High Castle only took up a few pages. I made a list of several novels I wanted to check out. Highlighted lots of stuff on several pages. Now I feel when I talk about Man in the High Castle I will have a wider understanding of Alt-history and Nazism.
This book is a great resource that historians of science fiction itself should have on the shelf.
My interview with Dr. Rosenfeld on the Dickheads podcast...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUD46...
https://soundcloud.com/dickheadspodca...
The study of the Nazi Germany era is important for many reasons, I should have to explain it but here we go. The current rise of American fascism and homegrown Nationalism came really close last year to overturning an election. Many similarities to those early days of Hitler we see repeated in the Trump years. Just yesterday as I write this review a shooter scared of white replacement theory popularized by Fox News mouthpiece Tucker Carlson killed 10 people in a Grocery store in a Buffalo NY grocery store.
I am a science fiction guy, I love the genre and I love when we as a community add to the discourse. As a sub-genre Alternate history is a valuable tool of speculative fiction. Alt-history has been used for many other parts of history like Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South or more recently Lavie Tidhar’s Osama but the Nazi era is the most popular era to explore. My boy Philip K. Dick might have the most popular with Man in High Castle but there are a lot more examples.
I don’t really have the bandwidth to read them all so Rosenfeld’s very detailed history of fake history is an extremely helpful resource. I was interested to see that Alt-histories exploring the Nazis winning pre-date the war itself. British novels warning of the failure to stop Hitler were more common than I could have imagined. I had heard of Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika night written in 1937, but Rosenfeld does a good job breaking down the various book by the decade.
While not all Rosenfeld's reviews are positive, he highlights the things he feels either make a story work or not work. Most importantly he breaks down the ways each work compares to the fabric of our reality. It makes for a very interesting study. I was surprised that Man in the High Castle only took up a few pages. I made a list of several novels I wanted to check out. Highlighted lots of stuff on several pages. Now I feel when I talk about Man in the High Castle I will have a wider understanding of Alt-history and Nazism.
This book is a great resource that historians of science fiction itself should have on the shelf.
My interview with Dr. Rosenfeld on the Dickheads podcast...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUD46...
https://soundcloud.com/dickheadspodca...
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