By Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

Cambridge University Press, 2005

524 pages

ISBN 0-521-84706-0

Reviewed by Alasdair Czyrnyj

As any aficionado of alternate history knows, the one epoch that is explored more often than any other is the Second World War. In many ways, this is perfectly understandable. The boom in alternate history started around the 1960s, and many authors who work in the genre either directly participated in the war, or are the children of those who did. Furthermore, the war itself has been scripted in later years as a mythical clash of good versus evil, with many events taking on an almost Homeric cast. However, given the traditional dismissal of science fiction and related genres as "children’s literature," alternate history’s views on that epoch have been regulated to the used bookracks of the world and forgotten.

Gavriel Rosenfeld, a professor at Fairfield University specializing in the postwar reception of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, thinks otherwise. In his new book, The World Hitler Made, he puts the genre of alternate history under the microscope to see how the Nazi era is dealt with, and how views on the Third Reich have changed in the last sixty years.

Rosenfeld assembles an impressive set of samples to study from. He draws from 116 different sources, primarily novels, from the past sixty years to build his case. (Many thanks are given to Robert Schmuck’s massive alternate history bibliography at Uchronia.net throughout the book.) Here, Rosenfeld focuses primarily on material from British, American, and German sources. A few stories from Eastern Europe are noted, but Rosenfeld writes other nations simply haven’t produced enough material to offer any kind of conclusive judgment. While the lack of Nazi-inspired stories from the former Eastern Bloc nations is rather self-explanatory, the lack of stories from nations like France, Italy, and the Netherlands is puzzling. Unfortunately, readers will have to consult outside sources for the answers to these questions.

Rosenfeld further divides his sources into four separate sub-topics: Hitler Wins WWII, Hitler Survives WWII, Hitler is Deleted, and the Holocaust. Here, Rosenfeld focuses on stories that specifically try to talk about the Nazis themselves, rather than those that use the Nazis as a backdrop for high-octane adventure. While doubtless many readers will argue about his choices, the survey he produces is still quite wide-ranging.

The largest section of the book concerns narratives in which the Nazis are the victorious in World War II. Though each national background produces different types of stories, they all follow a similar pattern towards normalization the closer to the present they are written. The British example is a good case in point. During the war, Britain was under daily attack by the Germans, and invasion was a near-constant fear. The heroic British resistance to the Nazi onslaught became known as "the finest hour," and went on to frame British memories after the war. For the 1940s and 1950s, British alternate history took a similar view. The alternate histories of that period were highly moralized tales, often depicting the British citizenry courageously overturning the occupation of the cruel, sadistic Nazis. These tales were very black-and-white, and were generally well-received by critics.

After 1961, there was a shift in the types of stories being told. The British economy remained sluggish throughout the next two decades, and most of leadership was less than charismatic. In foreign affairs, the British had lost their empire, and found themselves playing a subordinate role in the Cold War world. As a reaction, the alternate histories of this period grew more cynical. While earlier works had depicted the British people valiantly resisting the Nazi occupation, these ones portrayed the British as behaving no better than their continental counterparts. A number of narratives depict Britons collaborating with Hitler just to maintain the empire, while others depict the anti-Nazi resistance acting just as cruel as the German occupiers. Moreover, the Germans themselves were depicted more in shades of gray, with many narratives accepting "good Germans" as well as bad. Overall, these narratives were less concerned about preserving the memory of Nazism than about serving as an allegory for modern day problems. The critical response to these works, in contrast to those from the 1950s, was quite mixed, with many receiving highly polarized reviews.

Though alternate histories about a Nazi wartime victory largely disappeared during the Thatcher years, they made a vigorous reappearance in the 1990s, were the subject matter was more divided than ever. While a few stories in the 1950s mold appeared, the majority were highly normalized tales, often with an element of leftist critique. Following the model of the Soviet Union, the Third Reich had evolved from an omnipotent colossus to a tottering totalitarian state, no worse than the Soviet Union or China. Even more interesting, the period also saw the introduction of critiques of the "finest hour" from the conservative side of the political spectrum, arguing that non-intervention in the Second World War would have allowed Britain to keep its empire. While this viewpoint is extremely unpopular amongst critics and public alike, it is another example of the normalization of the Nazis in British memory.

A similar pattern manifests itself in American narratives, though in a much demoted form. In American stories, the primary concern has been the question of intervention or non-intervention, an issue that still raises arguments even sixty years later. The narratives of the 1950s are similar to British ones of the period, with lurid tales of Nazi cruelty serving to justify America’s intervention in the war, as well as America’s fight against the Soviets in the Cold War. However, as the American fiasco in Vietnam and the oil shocks wore on in the 1970s and the 1980s, the narratives grew more cynical again. A number of stories and articles appeared that rehabilitated the cause of isolationism by describing scenarios in which non-intervention allowed the Nazis and the Soviets to destroy each other, leaving America free, prosperous, and unworried about the affairs of the world. At the same time, a number of other stories appeared that used the concept of a Nazi victory to perform self-critique on many of the problems plaguing the United States during the period. As in Britain, these stories have received a rather polarized reception. However, the traditional approach to Nazi victory narratives resurged in the 1990s, with the American triumph in the Cold War and the renewed interest in the Second World War. While conservative critiques of intervention have appeared in America as well as Britain, they have been treated no better than their counterparts across the pond.

The narratives from Germany, though fewer in number, also have similar shifts in portrayal. Beginning in the mid-1960s, concurrent with the rise of the "1968 generation" in German politics, narratives began to appear that depicted the Nazi regime in a highly moralized fashion. Here, the Nazi regime was shown to be just as horrific for the victorious German people as it was for the vanquished. Even when the Nazis were not outright terrible, life in the Third Reich is portrayed as a rather gray, soulless experience, oftentimes resembling a radical’s black parody of the actual FRG. The events of 1989, however, brought a shift similar to those in Britain, as the majority of accounts have been produced by people from the conservative side of the political spectrum. Here, the focus is less on Nazi atrocities than on creating a "healthy" view of the past, one freed of the emotional baggage of the Nazi era. The German appetite for alternate-history novels produced in Britain and America also suggests a shift towards a more normalized view of the past by the public at large.

This tendency to depict the Nazis in shades of gray extends even to the person of Hitler himself. While technically "secret history" than "alternate," the narratives of Hitler’s escape from Berlin tend to follow a similar framework as those of his victory. In the 1950s, Hitler’s escape, in best pulp fashion, involved him sneaking to the jungles of South America or the pyramids of Egypt, readying new plans of world domination. Invariably, he is caught and brought to justice, mostly in the form of a hasty execution. (Though in one memorable comic book, Hitler is condemned by the people of Mars to orbit the solar system sealed in a space capsule, forced to listen to his speeches on a continuous loop forever.) Hitler’s fate remained much the same in the 1960s, though there were more depictions of him evading justice, all the better to spread his hurt around. However, with the increase in interest in the Third Reich in general and Hitler in particular during the "Hitler Wave" of the 1970s, he underwent another shift. Here, Hitler still kept his sharp tongue, but the prospect of holding him accountable to his crimes becomes more and more remote. Thanks to double-dealing with the Allied governments, good deeds performed in exile, to say nothing of the moral ambiguities of his persecutors, the concept of bringing Hitler to justice is far less satisfying than in earlier tomes. By the 1990s, Hitler had faded entirely into a feeble old man incapable of comprehending his judgment, and in many cases he escaped any form of punishment to become a clownish buffoon, more of a cartoon character than a monster.

While speculation about a world without Hitler is a cliché of alternate history, the most striking fact about narratives involving this premise is that, contrary to expectation, almost none of them depict history changing for the better. In many stories, Hitler’s failure to become Fuhrer results in a Soviet conquest of Europe, and an emigration of the early Nazi elite to America, where their ideas find fertile soil in which to blossom. When Hitler is allowed to come to power but is assassinated before 1945, it has almost no effect on the course of history beyond the changing of a few names. Most of these works date from the 1970s and afterwards, so their portrayals of Hitler and the world tend to follow the same pattern as other works of alternate history, with a greater focus on the structural problems of 20^th century history and contemporary social issues, rather than directly on the uniqueness of Hitler.

Rosenfeld’s chapter on alternate Holocausts is a rather piecemeal affair; there are almost no works of alternate history that deal with the event beyond the most general descriptions. The focus of the chapter is, instead, on how alternate history has treated the act of remembering the Nazi past. The works Rosenfeld cites are, without exception, hostile to the practice of remembrance. Perhaps the most unexpected example of this comes from a number of German novels from the 1980s and 1990s that depict a postwar Germany where the brutal Morgenthau Plan was enacted by the Allies, turning Germany into a preindustrial, agricultural "cabbage republic" as punishment for its crimes. In some cases, surreal rituals are enacted to drill the lessons of the past again and again into the defeated populace. All this, however, is to no avail. The characters in these books learn no lessons from the officially-directed cult of remembrance beyond its blatantly obvious hypocrisy, and many grow to embrace violence and take revenge against their oppressors.

Overall, Rosenfeld notes a clear trend in alternate history away from moralism and towards normalization. The farther these authors get from the Nazi era, the more their stories function less to condemn the Nazis and more to use them as any other setting to comment on the world today or on great universal truths. It is an outcome that Rosenfeld is clearly unhappy about, but which he thankfully refrains from using to make cheap shots at alternate history being in the pay of neo-Nazis who plot to destroy the world.

The question remains, though, of how much this analysis applies to the state of the memory of Nazism in Western thought today. After all, many of the accounts Rosenfeld cites were viciously attacked (and in many cases banned) by critics for their unconventional views on the Nazis, and artists are routinely denounced in the daily news for creating works that deal with Hitler and the Nazis in a frivolous matter. On the other hand, many of these stories were written by acclaimed authors, respected journalists, and even politicians and historians. While the popular mood has always been strongly against Nazism, these stories originating from the "intelligensia," for lack of a better term, of the West, do show today’s learned are far less likely to take the old legends of the Third Reich just as they are, but rather seek to twist them into new and uncanny shapes.

For myself, I would say that the fate of Nazi exceptionalism is doomed to end in a whimper. Unless a generation directly experiences these tragedies for itself, it is never going to truly view them as uniquely horrible, or even all that distinctive. After all, during the 19^th century, Napoleon was the bétè noire of historical choice, and now he’s just a footnote to the monsters of today. Even in some circles Genghis Khan has been all but rehabilitated. As the 21^st century prepares to send its new horrors our way, and as the older generations slip away one by one, it’s all but inevitable that the Third Reich fade to the dusty pages of history, to be used as anyone sees fit.

While tragedy offers many immunities, time’s amnesia is rare among them.