The original is here:
<http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/908605.html>.

***

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 ...

read more »

The book sounds darn interesting.  Just a couple of comments:

Is this a particularly new trend?  I remember watching the British
miniseries "An Englishman's Castle" c. 1978.  That was set in an
alternative Britain under German occupation, and collaboration was
absolutely key to the plot.

Hm.  /First/ time?  I wonder.

Does Rosenfeld distinguish between crank-turning and deliberate
provocation?

The Harris novel, for instance, was clearly the latter.  Making an SS
man a sympathetic protagonist doesn't mean Harris thinks the SS was a
sympathetic organization; rather, it's a deliberate attempt to jar the
reader.  Demand, on the other hand, seems to be a mouth-breathing
anti-Communist with a great big axe to grind.

The two aren't mutually exclusive, BTW. I haven't read the John Ringo
Book That Has Everybody Talking, but FWICT it involves a little of
both.

_Iron Dream_ is a book I didn't appreciate enough at first.  More years
of exposure to SF fandom have made me like it a lot more.

But anyway, that's not a world without Hitler; it's a world where
Hitler became a pulp SF writer.

I shouldn't comment, because I haven't read any Turtledove at all since
the next-to-last Great War book.  But I will say that an evolution of
Naziism parallel to OTL Communism -- radical and deadly -> bureacratic,
much less lethal, and gradually stagnating -> failed attempt at
internal reform leading to collapse -- seems entirely plausible to me.

Absolutely not. It began only in the 1960s, though, with television
dramas and movies challenging the We Would Never Collaborate attitude.

"Ha ha! Superman managed to complete the Holocaust, kill everyone in
England, and lay the framework for a Nazi conquest of the United States!
How droll! How lucky we were!"

Rosenfeld argues, convincingly, that treating a Nazi victory as the
stuff of light comedy--including the consequences of Nazi Germany's
victory like the Holocaust--is a signal shift

Not as such, no. Frankly, I'm not sure that he really has to make that
sort of distinction.

True, quite true. Even so, he suggests quite plausibly that this sort of
even partial rehabilitation would have been impossible in the 1950s when
the memory of Nazi crimes was still fresh.

Oh yes.

I've read it. Yes, it's substantially an effort to shock, but it's an
effort to shock that's rooted in a reinterpretation of history that
makes the SS as a unit worthy of rehabilitation. Making the SS of our
history good, or potentially so, is a different thing from pointing out
that there would be good people in that bureaucracy two decades after
the war's end.

Without Hitler as a political figure, rather.

I link to John Reilly's review of the book on my blog. Suffice it to say
that Turtledove messes up spectacularly. Naziism does not become
bureaucratized and move away from its radical deadliness, since there's
still extensive fighting in the east sixty years later. A Nazi Germany
would not be vulnerable to oil prices in the same way as the Soviet
Union. And so on. IMO Turtledove did a cut-and-paste.

--
 R.F. McDonald
 r_f_mcdon...@yahoo.ca
 http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/

 "What! call a Turk, a Jew, and a Siamese, my brother? Yes, of course;
 for are we all not children of the same father, and the creatures of
 the same God?"

     - Voltaire, from _Treatise on Tolerance,_ 1763

There was a rather (or perhaps borderline depending on how it is
approached) BoP series of posts on "Occupied Russia" in the *1990s some
while back, featuring an *S.S that acts rather more like the IDF
(usually within the bounds of what we would concieve as the rule of law
rather then beyond it, though the whole thing devolved into nastiness
as I recall). In any case unlike _Fatherland_ Turtledove doesn't
mention signifigant fighting in the East, or anywhere else, deeming
them sufficently pacified. I could see a global totalitarian empire
gradually mellowing into something else (perhaps someone should redo
the old "Unification" TL) though I doubt it would fall like the USSR,
which collapsed precisely because the global economy was a Capitalist,
liberal system beyond their control, and their system was unable to
reform, and unlike say Cuba or North Korea it was unable to fade into
irrelevance/rogue state status.

I've read most of Rosenfeld (google on his name and you'll find a
lone post I made about him). His thesis is that 1978 is pretty new
for collaborators in British AH; in the 1950s, every collaborator
in fallen-Britain scenarios was portrayed as an active fascist
or "useful idiot." Portryals of mass "ordinary" collaboration
didn't come until later. (Rosenfeld views post-Suez blues as what
made British authors look at collaboration as likely.)

(snip)

Distinguishing is my pet peeve about the book; he makes no distinction
between AH fiction and "nonfiction analysis" like Buchanan's _Republic,
Not An Empire_. He does note tongue in cheek moments, when he spots
them.

(snip)

Rosenfeld's section on _The Iron Dream_ is the single weakest
essay in the book; he doesn't realize how it was making fun of
SF fandom.

(snip)

"Is this a particularly new trend?  I remember watching the British
miniseries "An Englishman's Castle" c. 1978.  That was set in an
alternative Britain under German occupation, and collaboration was
absolutely key to the plot."

Or the 1966 film IT HAPPENED HERE, which depicted both extraordinary
collaboration (e.g. the SS Division "Black Prince") and ordinary
(otherwise decent nurses who desperately need a job and a ration book).
 Query: did Britons openly discuss OTL collaboration levels among
Channel Islanders in the 50s and 60s, or was this a shunned topic at
the time?

Colin Alberts
quod scripsi scripsi

The study that he was doing doesn't distinguish between the two, and IMO
doesn't need to. How do you characterize _Moon of Ice,_ say? Even
_Fatherland_ dealt with British angst over German reunification.

He didn't realize, but I frankly don't think it makes a difference. How
many top-selling SF books feature ruthless and brilliant men and women,
dressed in snappy uniforms, making the tough decisions that the
cviilians can't.

--
 R.F. McDonald
 r_f_mcdon...@yahoo.ca
 http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/

 "What! call a Turk, a Jew, and a Siamese, my brother? Yes, of course;
 for are we all not children of the same father, and the creatures of
 the same God?"

     - Voltaire, from _Treatise on Tolerance,_ 1763

Eh? I remembered a reference to the protagonist's blood chilling when he
thought of the ongoing slaughterhouse in the east. Am I misremembering?

I disagree. Nazi Germany would control a larger chunk of the world
economy than the Soviet Union ever did, true, but it was hardly
capitalist in any recognizable form. If anything, the exorbitant
reconstruction of German cities, the wholesale massacres and
deportations of Slavs, and the pointless _Generalplan Ost_ would beggar
Germany--and Europe, and the world.

--
 R.F. McDonald
 r_f_mcdon...@yahoo.ca
 http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/

 "What! call a Turk, a Jew, and a Siamese, my brother? Yes, of course;
 for are we all not children of the same father, and the creatures of
 the same God?"

     - Voltaire, from _Treatise on Tolerance,_ 1763

Having only read the short-story version, I'd characterize it as
fiction,
with no pretentions to being nonfiction historical analysis. Does the
long version include essays?

Even

I'm confused as to what point you're making here.

That's my point; _The Iron Dream_ was written to spoof exactly this,
but Rosenfeld's analysis only considers it as a possibility (rather
than something the author has explicitly said was the reason for
writing it).

Arguing that Nazi Germany would inevitably have fallen when faced with a
superior libertarian United States _isn't_ a non-fictional analysis? The
counterfactual argument is clearly there, just more fictionalized than
in Niall Ferguson's work.

Fiction deals with present-day concerns. In _Fatherland_'s case, the
questions of German strength and of historical memory were being debated
at the time. In _Moon of Ice_'s case, the question of whether the Cold
War was necessary was being debated. And so on.

With respect, writers aren't all-knowing cognoscenti. The meanings that
they themselves assign to their books aren't the only meanings which
exist. How many people, I wonder, took _The Iron Dream_ seriously? And
how many part-seriously?

--
 R.F. McDonald
 r_f_mcdon...@yahoo.ca
 http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/

 "What! call a Turk, a Jew, and a Siamese, my brother? Yes, of course;
 for are we all not children of the same father, and the creatures of
 the same God?"

     - Voltaire, from _Treatise on Tolerance,_ 1763

I hate when writers pull this shit.

I'm not fluent in German (or French or Latin for that matter)
and IMO it's common courtesy that when "name dropping" a foreign
language quote into an English language article, the English
translation ought to be included in the text.

Ed Stasiak kirjoitti:

Oh, pshaw, Ed. Even if you happen to be just another English-speaking
monoglot who doesn't know enough German to recognize the meaning of
that title (a defect that can perhaps be forgiven), you should still
have enough wits to conclude its meaning based on the contents of the
article. Would you also raise a similar fuss if someone was making an
educated reference to "Das Kapital", "Mein Kampf", "Also sprach
Zarathustra" or "Der Untergang des Abendlandes"?

So quit complaining. I hereby declare the next week as the
name-dropping week, and in the spirit of that, I'll encourage every
non-English speaker on this group to make full, detailed posts on
alternate history in their own native language. The resident
English-speakers deserve at least one language shower per year.

Cheers,
Jalonen

My point was that while Turtledove's premise was perhaps somewhat
plausible (Nazi Germany reforms in fashion after winning a nuclear
exchange, and thus outright dominating the planet) the spur to reform
that existed in the USSR would be lacking-and I'd argue that if a "Nazi
world" would be rather poor, the average Berliner would notice less,
much as the North Koreans in Pyongyang, are relatively speaking, well
off.

In article <1126855338.072847.196...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com>,

I will note that September 19 (next Monday) is "International Talk
Like A Pirate Day".

--
Tim McDaniel; Reply-To: t...@panix.com

In article <1126855338.072847.196...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com> on 16
Sep 2005 00:22:18 -0700, jussi.jalo...@faf.mil.fi () wrote:

As a not-quite-monoglot Englishman - I can happily read and, with some
effort, write quite reasonable French and have enough of a scratching of
German to work out "If Hitler had won?", I approve wholeheartedly of the
Karl XII thread switching into Polish, in spite of my near-total lack of
an ability to communicate in Polish.

I'm not really fluent in any foreign language, though I can usually manage
a French newspaper, and I really like seeing quotes in the original.  
Sure, it's nice to get a translation, especially of a substantial quote,
but if it's a whole four words, then even bloody babelfish will do an OK
job.

--
Richard Gadsden
"I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death
your right to say it" - Attributed to Voltaire

Even if one could figure out what the quote was, the
process of reading the article and understanding what
it's point is comes to a screeching halt, all because
some pretentious writer decided to show off and suddenly
throw a foreign language quote in front of the reader.

And while a German quote may be translatable by the
average Joe, are all languages acceptable for "name
dropping"?  What about Swahili, Tagalong or ancient
Aztec (or even Polish, try finding an on-line
translator for that)?

And what if you're laying in bed reading a novel?
Are you expected to jump out of bed and boot up the
PC to decipher some quote that the stuck-up writer
could have easily provided a translation for?

Ya know, it wouldn't kill the writer to include the
translation and the reader may even learn something
because of it.

I've never read any English reference to Spengler's "Der Untergang des
Abendlandes". It's always referred to as "The Decline of the West", its
title in English. In English,  "Also Sprach Zarathustra" refers usually
to
Richard Strauss' overture, not Nietzsche's book, always referred to
in English as "Thus Spake Zarathustra".

Hi, talking to me?

--
 R.F. McDonald
 r_f_mcdon...@yahoo.ca
 http://www.livejournal.com/users/rfmcdpei/

 "What! call a Turk, a Jew, and a Siamese, my brother? Yes, of course;
 for are we all not children of the same father, and the creatures of
 the same God?"

     - Voltaire, from _Treatise on Tolerance,_ 1763

Ed Stasiak kirjoitti:

Pretty much. Depending on the context, of course.

So, assuming that someone here would make a short reference to some
piece of Polish literature or cinema by its original name - even if the
original title was something really, really simple, such as "Pan
Tadeusz" or "Kanal" [1] - you would immediately demand that an English
translation of the title should be included, right?

Cheers,
Jalonen

[1] Or, heaven forbid, "Quo Vadis?"

Actually, I thought I was bitch'n about Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
but it seems you're the pretentious "name dropping" author.

I have enough stress in my life without having to deal with
foreign language quotes being dropped into my lap, so...
停止做那!

Let the record show that t...@panix.com (Tim McDaniel) wrote back on 16 Sep
2005 14:17:09 -0500 in soc.history.what-if :

        Better wear your Arrrghyl socks.

tschus
pyotr

--
pyotr filipivich
When I was a boy, we had Outcome Based Education, too.
We called it "Being held back a year"

I disagree. It's one thing to drop "Ich bin ein Berliner"
into a discussion, as most people will get it but throwing
around quotes in Sanskrit, Old Norse or Linear B is just
behaving like a pretentious jerk.

No, a proper name is not the same thing as a random foreign
language quote dropping out of the blue and even then, if
the group you're having a discussion with might not get the
reference, you ought provide a translation/explanation just
to keep the conversation flowing smoothly.

Yes, well. Referring to a silly quip is one thing; but I should think
that extensive quotes in French, German, or Latin would acceptable in
general rather than quoting the three languages you indicate below; you
should be mindful that Rosenfeld's intended audience isn't exactly
laymen, but the academe; PhD students tend to be required to speak two
languages, at least at the U of C. Most of those tend to be European
languages.

Further, most people speak at least two languages; Jussi, I imagine,
speaks rather more than I do, but most people can do English/Spanish,
English/French, English/German. None of those is terribly exotic, and
it would be chauvanistic to claim that we should discuss things in
English only, as an international forum.

No, it's not. If it's appropriate to the context, I think I'd feel fine
quoting Beowulf with no less remorse than Twain. Linear B, I imagine,
is impossible to quote because we simply cannot organize it well
enough. Sanskrit could be applied to some conversations, though not
all.

In any case, those examples are beside the point to the quote that
you're complaining about, the application of German in an
English-language academic text; that's perfectly fair game.

Ed, I think you're asking for a level exactitude that's uncalled for,
frankly. No one does the sort of thing you're ranting against on the
group, and even if they did, I don't think I'd much care. I've used
French, Spanish, German, and Arabic throughout LMHR without any sort of
ill-effect or complaint.

Cheers

L

Chandrasyaloke kumudam vikasati, Ed. Hanta biibhatsam, agratoo
vartatee. Puspani vasante prasphonanti.

Anubhuujatam tarhi narapati-koopah. Oh yeah!

Well, the quote that Randy gave _was_ just that, the proper name of a
book. So, I suppose that you don't have a problem after all.

In any case, I think you're really raising a horrible fuss over a small
issue. And making yourself look a bit silly in the process.

Cheers,
Jalonen

I was purposely exaggerating, as Jussi suggested that it was
acceptable to quote just about any foreign language and leave
it up to the reader to figure out what is being said.

You may be a walking Tower of Babble but most people aren't
fluent in several languages.

What if I were Chinese or Indian?  Seems kinda insulting
to me that y'all think almost 40 percent of the world's
population should be expected to understand a quote in
_another_ European language, after I've gone thru the
hassle of learning English in the first place.

That may be but Rosenfield's book isn't exclusively limited
to academic types fluent in whatever language.

As we saw, his work ended up being quoted in this group
where even lowly-blue-collar-knuckle-dragger types like
me (who only know two languages) had an opportunity to
read it.

Thou English is probably the most widely known second
language and is frequently used in industry, business
and academia throughout the world.

But that's not what I was suggesting, only that if the
article is written in English (or whatever language) then
the author ought to be considerate enough to include an
English translation of any foreign language quote he uses.

Why force the reader to stop and figure out what is
being said, when the author could have easily included
the translation?

I'm not suggesting that foreign language quotes never be used,
only that the author politely include a translation so the reader
doesn't have to stop and figure out what is being said.

But according to you guys the author has no responsibility to
the reader, so tuff shit if the reader isn't fluent in every
language on Earth (including dead languages).

Asking the author to include a translation is too much to ask
(when the author already knows what the translation is) but
expecting the reader to know dozens of foreign languages
or stop and somehow find a translation, ain't no big deal?

While I'm at it, the correct way of using an acronym is to
fully spell-out the acronym when it is first used and then
use the acronym itself later in the text;

"The Lithuanian Motorized Howitzer Regiment opened fire
on Moscow at dawn and after the battle, the LMHR took
up positions in Red Square."