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http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/908605.html>.
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Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's new book The World Hitler Never Made
<http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521847060/qid%3D1126404375/701...>
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 eld 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 Untied 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 Demand 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
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
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