The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It

by Alec Ryrie

We live in an age where Hitler and the Nazis dominate our cultural imagination, shaping values once defined by religion. In this book historian Alec Ryrie explores why society remains captivated by this struggle, from history and fiction to modern myths such as Star Wars and Harry Potter. He examines the costs of our Nazi obsession and questions what will come as our anti-Nazi moral consensus frays and both the Left and Right begin to move on. With a fresh take on modern history and pop culture, The Age of Hitler offers a thought-provoking look at the culture wars and our shifting political crises, challenging assumptions on both sides and asking what a new moral vision might look like.

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction

160 pages, Hardcover

First published August 19, 2025

About the author

Alec Ryrie is a prize-winning historian of the Reformation and Protestantism. He is the author of Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt and Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World. Ryrie is Professor of the History of Christianity at Durham University and Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London.

Reviews

[Daniel Bouchoc · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book argues that the modern Western value system has anchored itself around being anti-Nazi since the end of World War II. It’s hard to imagine a more obvious villain than Hitler, but building a moral framework solely around hating him can’t sustain a society long-term. A system defined by what it rejects leaves a vacuum where a shared vision of what to love should be.

That moral anchor is now cracking. On one side, the left is pushing a human rights movement centered on racism and sexuality; on the other, the right is encouraging pro-facism. The book suggests filling this gap through pluralistic dialogue between the right’s traditions and the left’s liberal human-rights agenda.

I loved many points of this book:
• The post-Hitler era taught us to find our values in opposing what we hate, turning every political disagreement into a Hitler analogy and shutting down dialogue, appeasement, and compromise.
• Western societies lack a coherent sense of what they love.
• The modern human-rights movement floats like a castle in the sky—idealistic but not grounded.
• The emphasis on real dialogue is refreshing. Not everyone fits into the far-left or far-right.

Several points I disagreed with:
• The claim that the political right promotes violence is absurd, especially in light of the assassination attempt on Trump, Kirk’s murder, and the wave of church and school shootings linked to the transgender movement. For a book that was otherwise balanced, this point was shocking.
• While dialogue is crucial, there are issues—abortion, transgender surgeries, public education pushing LGBTQ—where dialogue just isn’t appropriate. These destroy a society.
• Ryrie ends the book with optimism because societies naturally form new value systems. I share the optimism, but not the reasoning. Mine stems from the decline of the left’s moral dominance, and more traditional values starting to win the day in the past year.
• Ultimately, I don’t believe a sound value system will emerge from dialogue. It will come from something more like Christendom. Values need a foundation in the Creator.

I’m very glad I read this book because of how much it made me think about current politics and a needed encouragement that much more conversation is needed than the typical hitlerizing that’s done on X. Full send.

[Jack Eardley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this after listening to the author on the Past Present Future podcast. It is a brave and fascinating book with some challenging arguments and real suggestions for modern political discourse. I will admit that I am probably a poor messenger but my attempts to convince friends and colleagues that a joining of Christian Conservative and Progressive Anti-Nazi value systems haven’t gone well so far. The case that “don’t be Hitler” replaced “be like Jesus” as a moral system of orientation is a compelling one and easy to follow at least for an Atlanticist reader but I think the “what to do about it” section is harder to wrap your head around.

It is probably unreasonable to expect a solution to the culture wars in a book this short that I can understand easily and convince others of but I guess that would be what I would want to give it the full 5 stars.

[Sophie Gallagher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars because I wanted it to be longer. Studying under Ryrie during my time at university has been one of my greatest privileges.

[Harman Bhogal · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ah what a disappointment. I listened to Ryrie’s Gresham lecture on this topic and found the premise intriguing. I was excited to read this book but found it essentially unsatisfying. It is a short book, which might be part of the problem, as it oversimplifies vast swathes of history and issues and seems to become rather meandering and unfocused in Part 2 and 3. He focusses a lot on slavery and racism, first suggesting this hasn’t displaced our anti-Nazi ethics but then suggesting it has, which was a bit confusing.
A lack working definitions didn’t help: what does he mean by religious Left? His examples seem to include civil rights era Christians, but this does not resemble the religious left of today. He also singles out the Dirty Right but has basically nothing to say about the Dirty Left: his association of the Dirty Right with political violence is fine but to omit Leftist political violence is a neck-snapping approach. I also found massive generalisations throughout the book (for example, Crusades = baaaad. This is lazy, tiresome and ignorant). He chucks in COVID too and this reflects an odd theme of the book: that essentially there is not really correct narrative and to try and establish this is futile. And more sinisterly, he seems to imply that anyone interested in exploring issues in a way that rubs people up the wrong way must always have an agenda. I don’t disagree that this may be true on many cases (after all, it is always suspicious if you know someone’s opinion on a topic based on their tribe before they even open their mouth) but a huge number of people are not so aligned but can be questioning and curious simply though experience and observance.
A lot of time is spent urging the White European/Americans to reflect and repent which is bizarre when an acknowledgment is made that the post-world war era is too White West focused: perhaps everyone needs to be more honest about their history and stop this obsession with one sided demonisation?
And finally, his solution of classic cut flowers civilisation: it will not work. This book needed to expand on why the shedding of the religious core derailed the “Religious Left” and perhaps it would have understood that this assumption of good and rights (as he spends much of part one unpacking) does not work. I hope someone else picks up this thesis and develops it in a fuller and more compelling way.

[History Today]

This book represents the published version of 2022’s Bampton Lectures, a series of talks addressing diverse theological issues that have been read at the University of Oxford since 1780. They were delivered by Alec Ryrie, erstwhile Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, with the subject ‘the age of Hitler, and how we can escape it’ (‘can escape’ becoming the more optimistic ‘will survive’ in the title of the book). Ryrie’s core thesis is that the Second World War marked a profound turning point in Western history: whereas, previously, Western society had found its moral orientation in Christian tradition, after 1945 it abandoned this ethical compass in favour of a secular vocabulary of human rights derived from universal revulsion at the crimes of Nazi Germany. This radical rewiring of ethical frameworks following the Holocaust leads Ryrie to term the postwar period ‘The Age of Hitler’. Since 1945, if he is right, we have defined our politics, our values, and ourselves in opposition to him.

Scholars of 20th-century Germany – including me – have long been familiar with the charge that Western society has, as Ryrie puts it, a ‘collective obsession with Hitler’, and Ryrie himself is not immune from slipping into this polemic. Small matter that the high water mark of popular interest in the Holocaust occurred around the turn of the millennium (a generation ago); that A-level German history curricula have broadened to focus on Bismarck, postwar reconstruction, and Helmut Kohl too; that students are far more global in their concerns than Ryrie’s and my cohort ever were; or that, to go by what my colleagues there tell me, few new German undergraduates can name more than three Nazi-era concentration camps. More to the point, might it be that the profound anti-democratic nationalist pushback of the past two decades gives our interest in this period a deeper purpose than superficial fascination?

Read the rest of the review at https://www.historytoday.com/archive/...

Neil Gregor is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton. His latest book is The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

[Igor Jagec · Rating 4 out of 5]

A truly thought-provoking book, Ryrie's central premise resonates deeply: the 'Age of Hitler' is waning, giving way to an era defined less by universalist, post-war liberalism and more by rooted cultures. I particularly admired the author's refusal to prescribe a fixed ideological path, whether progressive or conservative, and his compelling argument that we must learn to affirm our convictions rather than merely define ourselves by what we oppose.

However, my four-star rating reflects some significant reservations. As a reader hailing from Croatia – a nation with a markedly distinct post-World War II trajectory – I found the book's overarching framework somewhat constrained. Our anti-Nazism was never a non-communist phenomenon; it was inextricably linked with Yugoslav socialism, not an imposed Soviet ideology. For us, the 'Age of Hitler' effectively concluded in the early 1990s, and the democratic 'core' that Ryrie treats as a given had to be painstakingly constructed from the ground up.

Indeed, it was precisely at this juncture that the book's thesis struck closest to home. Yugoslavia's identity was forged upon antifascism as a universal value, yet often at the expense of the rooted cultures that predated it. This unresolved tension, in my view, significantly contributed to its eventual collapse. From a Croatian perspective, the transition from universalism to rootedness commenced decades earlier than in the West.

Ryrie's masterful command of Western moral history makes this a compelling and timely read. While it rightly refrains from offering all the answers, it provides an invaluable foundation for asking better, more pertinent questions about the future.

[Michael Samerdyke · Rating 5 out of 5]

A challenging and thought-provoking book that speaks to the present day and not the Forties, although that was apparent to me from the description of the book. He argues that the hold the "Second World War" has on our culture is weakening and talks about what might replace it.

Ryrie "speaks" in a very convincing way and gets complicated ideas across very clearly. He is very persuasive in pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of various intellectual positions. Certainly he convinced me of the soundness of what he was saying. (Of course, I probably was inclined to agree with him, but I admire the precise and concise way that he presents his case.)

I might look up other books that he has written. Highly recommended for those who are interested in the role of religious ideas in society.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

solid summary of the breakdown of the post WW2 consensus. Author does a decent job of speaking fairly across a political divide without allowing his political biases to excessively blind him.

[Johanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

my new favourite non-fiction book

[Xin Wang · Rating 3 out of 5]

the central premise of the book is questionable: was Hitler/Nazi the foundation of post-war morality as the author claims? One part of the post-war history that the book omits is the quick turnaround of the public opinion towards the Germany - at least German people, from the collective war perpetrators to victims within a few short years after the end of the war. It can be argued the civil rights and anti-colonialism movements in 60s and 70s re-ignited the debates and reflections on Nazi, including the most horrific aspect of the Nazism - Holocaust. Thus, contrary to what the author have suggested, the much older sins of the US and Britain - slavery and empire didn't dilute the moral focus on Hitler, they rather co-mingled and co-developed. It is unfair to single out Hitler/Nazi's contribution to the evolution of the post-war morality.