H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (February 2006)

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld. _The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and
the Memory of Nazism_. New Studies in European History. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005. xii + 524 pp. Illustrations, notes,
bibliography, index. $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-84706-3.

Reviewed for H-German by Andrew Stuart Bergerson, Department of History,
University of Missouri-Kansas City

Amazing Tales

Whether literary, popular or scholarly, the vast majority of alternate
histories about the Third Reich have been produced in the Britain and the
United States (p.15). Gavriel Rosenfeld's encyclopedic survey of "what if"
narratives includes fictional literature, mass media and even counterfactual
histories written by academic historians and professional journalists. He
uses evidence from biography, context, hermeneutics and reception in
considering these largely marginalized cultural products in order to draw
fascinating generalizations about trends in postwar memory.

In the 1940s and 50s, the works themselves were few and far between; but
some were quite popular and they all served triumphalist purposes. By
positing the horrific outcomes of alternate scenarios (for example, a Nazi
victory creating hell on earth), these works legitimized Britannia's "finest
hour" and US interventionism by criticizing the policies of appeasement and
isolation. After the 1960s in Britain, and the 1970s in America, the number
of alternate histories dramatically increased, but their content tended to
"normalize" the Third Reich. In the wake of the "Hitler Wave," the feared
figure of a fugitive Hitler ("He's alive!" [1]) cast the Führer as more
human; his supposed successful flight made it seem unlikely that he would
find justice. His absence from history no longer seemed to assure a better
world. (Understandably, given the ways in which they might be misunderstood,
Germans did not initially produce alternate histories, but they were rabid
consumers of Anglo-American ones.) Given the persistent commitment of some
readers and viewers to the earlier, more "narrow spectrum of
representational boundaries," as well as the tremendous popularity of many
of these "allohistories" despite negative reviews, Rosenfeld views the
production of these new alternate histories as evidence of a regime of
public memory that had become "more pluralistic, contested, and divided"
(p.25). By indexing, criticizing and periodizing these rich sources in
postwar remembrance, Rosenfeld has opened new terrain for scholars of
memory.

Yet a more significant contribution of this book lies in Rosenfeldıs attempt
to define normalization (esp. pp. 15-25, 392-395). At times, Rosenfeld uses
normalization to refer to the teleological shift in any posttraumatic society
towards an ideal-typical condition of normality. As they began to produce
more of their allohistories, particularly after reunification, Germans
increasingly demonstrated a yearning for this state. Normalization also
refers to the process by which a particularly extraordinary and/or vivid
historical legacy becomes viewed, treated and remembered like any other.
Here Rosenfeld identifies various interpretive techniques: universalization
(typically liberals warning the contemporary world of the persistent threat
of fascism), relativization (typically conservatives who see more of a danger
in communism), aestheticization (those who use Nazis for entertainment),
humanization (those who aim at normalizing perpetrators) and humor
(most surprisingly as practiced by Germans who, for good reason, preserved
the taboo against laughing at the Nazi past for the longest [p.382]). These
strategies amount to "the waning of a moralistic perspective towards the
past" whereby a "dominant moralistic view of the past" is challenged by
dissenting authors and readers with "views that are less committed to
perceiving it from an ethically grounded vantage point" (p.16).

This shift was caused not just by instrumental attempts to ignore the Nazi
past but also by "organic" normalization and "presentism" (pp. 17, 385-366).
Rosenfeld describes the pattern of gradual normalization that includes, but
is not reduced to, prescriptive attempts to pursue normalization intentionally
for polemical purposes (p. 372). Almost universally, the authors who lived
through Hitler's war wrote allohistories with the intent of reminding their
readers of the horrors of National Socialism. With less fear in their hearts
at the Nazi past (p. 380), postwar authors were more willing to think outside
_that_ box. More concerned after the 1960s with a present than a past evil,
authors who engaged in normalization used the Nazi past instrumentally to
criticize Western imperialism, the corporate-minded BRD, or promote
anti-Communism. According to Rosenfeld, alternate histories of the Holocaust
tend to suggest the "futility of remembrance" (p. 367), particularly when part
of an obligation for public remembrance as in Germany. Rosenfeld is
wonderfully ecumenical in showing that all this criticism emerges from both
left and right.

To be sure, Rosenfeld's own analysis demonstrates the political nature of
alternate history even during the crucial first decades. Already in the
1940s and 50s, the Nazi past was used to constitute moral communities by
legitimizing or delegitimizing the postwar order. Morover, framing these
allohistorical fantasies (testing one's moral fibre against the Nazis) in
national meta-narratives suggests that to a large degree it was those
national myths that were at stake: Britainıs "finest hour," "heroic"
American interventionism, and "ordinary" Germans. During the Cold War
(1945-58), "[w]estern fears of communism kept alternate histories of Nazism
to a minimum" (p. 24), just as the rediscovery of Nazi evil in the wake of
Adolf Eichmannıs trial only served to reinforce Allied self-confidence.
Then, a series of economic, social and international crises challenged
national prestige in each country. Humiliated by the Suez Crisis of 1956,
abandoning their colonies and facing recession and new social movements,
the British lost their sense of moral authority, and, at the same time, they
began to imagine British collaboration with a victorious Nazi Germany. For
the Americans civil rights, OPEC, Vietnam and Watergate led to similar
reexaminations. The inverse is the case for the vanquished Germans after
they regained their national self-confidence in and around reunification.
Rosenfeld correlates shifts in alternate histories with the tides of
national self-confidence that are then projected laterally, as it were, onto
alternate histories of the Third Reich. (My personal favorite is the wave of
allohistorical silence that took place during the Thatcher era [p. 70-1].
Rosenfeld's deft interpretation relies not on the alternate histories
written but on those _not_ written: itself a form of counterfactual logic.)
To be sure, Rosenfeld is able to provide concrete biographical or
hermeneutic evidence that national self-confidence was a primary cause of
these meta-narrative shifts only in certain cases (as on p. 81).
Nonetheless, Rosenfeld convinces the reader through his comparison between
these national cases--for it must be more than coincidence that the
differential timing of this shift in each national case corresponded closely
to the particular crisis of that nation.

Since this shift did occur in each case, however, there seems to be an
overarching cause that transcends national uniqueness: Rosenfeld might have
called this a postmodern fracturing of the modern subject (cf. p. 7). Facing
a Nazi past remembered less for its own sake, less as a unique phenomenon,
and viewed even with downright "apathy" (p. 200) for memory as such,
Rosenfeld recognizes that "increased exhaustion, if not outright boredom,
with moralism" (p. 392) may represent a taboo-breaking backlash, initiated
by pop-cultural allohistories against the representatives of high culture,
who repeatedly affirm the established orthodoxy. Nonetheless, Rosenfeld
repeatedly invokes the "modern" "injunction" to remember the Nazi past lest
we be doomed to repeat it (pp. 367, 375, 378). For the most part, Rosenfeld
treats normalization in modern terms: as a loss of ethical clarity, a shift
away from "an ethically grounded vantage point" to "a less judgmental
approach to the past" (pp. 17, 60, 87, 234, 334). He tends to refer to
remembrance, atonement, memory and the "profound moral implications" of the
Holocaust (p. 345, 372) as proper things to which one is either "committed"
or not (p. 201) as if these terms are set and things with clear "limits" (p.
368), rather than the subject of continual debate even today. Furthermore,
Rosenfeld does not specify what these limits might be, nor does he
historicize those limits. Similarly, Rosenfeld's labels for these periods,
as eras of "moralism" and "normalization," imply that ours is a less moral
(if not amoral or completely immoral) age (p. 23, 375). In short, his
posture presumes that the modern paradigm for ethics is in fact ethical.

At other times, Rosenfeld defines normalization in postmodern terms as an
attempt to challenge the hegemony of that particular paradigm for memory (p.
342). For instance, he claims that cold war alternate histories expressed a
"manifestly" moral perspective (p. 18) that held a "privileged" status
(p.17; see also pp. 24, 94). This definition of normalization sometimes
seems to include a notion of ethical complexity that befits the postmodern.
Rosenfeld argues that the popularity of Robert Harris's _Fatherland_ (1992)
reflected both a "less morally informed view" of the Third Reich in Britain
as well as a more "nuanced" view (p. 87). In all of this, Rosenfeld is being
true to the facts: the postwar period did hear voices insisting on both
ethical postures and it did witness a shift from the one paradigm to the
other, with all the contentious debate associated with the postmodern turn.
Yet Rosenfeld tends towards the modernist take on remembrance. He admonishes
the reader that abandoning "black-and-white" ethical judgments can lead to
ignoring the ethical conundrums entirely: "The long road of normalization,
thus, may well point to indifference, if not amnesia, as its ultimate
destination" (p. 22). He admits that challenging hegemonic moral paradigms
might lead to more accurate histories and may even represent a healthy
process of democratic debate. Yet for Rosenfeld, the dangers of
allohistories are too many too soon: diverting our attention from the
"actual past," confusing readers, or distorting, trivializing, even
condoning the Nazi past (pp. 392-394).

If even the best alternate histories are "flawed" (p. 361), then Rosenfeld's
reader is left unsure how precisely allohistorians should deal with the Nazi
past. A good number of the authors Rosenfeld examines were committed to
"good-vs.-evil" narratives not because they wish to ignore the dangers of
fascism but precisely because they were convinced, and wished to convince
others, that fascism (and not communism) represented the real threat to
humanity. At the same time, Rosenfeld provides examples of how one can use
allohistory to confound ethical categories in order to think more seriously
about the ethical challenges of the Nazi past.[2] Reading his extensive
survey, one is impressed by the vast array of narratives that have served to
exculpate or repress Nazi crimes: the hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, the
explicitly or the implicitly ethical, the personal and the impersonal,
humanizing and abstracting, black-and-white and nuanced. I certainly believe
that there are good reasons for lucidly analyzing ethical complexity, paying
close attention to the lives of the perpetrators and even universalizing
Hitler: one could use them to help fight fascism (cf. pp. 269-270, 372). The
real lesson here is that there is no one correct formula for combining form,
narrative and epistemology to write good (that is, antifascist) allohistory.

Allohistories are particularly well suited for raising these ethical
dilemmas when they pose the question what if "It Happened Here?" (the title
of a book by Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo [1964]; pp. 56-8). Yet the
desire to ignore these ethical dilemmas began long before 1945. Perhaps
sensing this issue, Rosenfeld begins his survey in the years just prior to
the war, when some British and Americans hypothesized as to the consequences
of continued appeasement and non-intervention. These are some of the most
fascinating parts of Rosenfeld's story because they suggest that alternate
histories were already polemical--and thus helped shape Nazi history in the
first place. It is common knowledge that the Nazi regime used counterfactual
histories of all sorts to mobilize support for the regime, the war effort
and the genocide. Indeed, some historians would argue that this tradition of
alternate history began with the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs. Rosenfeld's
study thus raises the possibility of the presence of a longer
allohistoriography of modern Germany--including literature and criticism
(fictional and factual) since the late nineteenth century--that demonstrates
the longitudinal continuities between normalization efforts in response to
the Third Reich and the cultures of normalcy that produced it in the first
place.

Let me mention just two more compelling reasons to read Rosenfeld's
path-breaking survey of postwar alternate histories of the Third Reich. Some
of the sources scrutinized by Rosenfeld are counterfactual essays by
academically trained historians. Rosenfeld entices the reader when he
alludes to the fact that allohistorians struggled with the same theoretical
questions as historians. Either out of convenience or conviction, the former
seemed to presume that individuals make history, so that they can easily
alter its course for the purposes of speculation by killing off Hitler, for
instance, or enabling him to live. Yet some explored the possibility that
underlying structures might have preserved true historical outcomes
nonetheless: such as German national character. The fascinating interplay of
intentionalism and structuralism in postwar allohistories is enough to make
any German historian take notice (pp. 272-329). Rosenfeld also alludes to
the possibility that formal qualities in allohistory might in themselves
encourage us to think in new ways: by raising questions that contradict
"reality" as it happened, as we have been wont to remember it, or as
historians have constructed it (pp. 244, 396-397). By dint of alternate
history's very position on the margins of our discipline, then, Rosenfeld's
allohistoriography offers new insight into the epistemological foundations
of modern (and postmodern) history.

Notes

[1]. Rod Sterling, _The Twilight Zone_, 1963.

[2]. Such as Madeline Bunting, _The Model Occupation: The Channel Islands
under German Rule_ (New York: Harpercollins, 1995); Adrian Gilbert, _Britain
Invaded: Hitler's Plans for Britain: A Documentary Reconstruction_ (London:
Century, 1990).




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