The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (New Studies in European History) [Hardcover]

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 23, 2005 | ISBN-10: 0521847060 | ISBN-13: 978-0521847063

What if the Nazis had triumphed in World War II? What if Adolf Hitler had escaped Berlin for the jungles of Latin America in 1945? What if Hitler had become a successful artist instead of a politician? Originally published in 2005, Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's pioneering study explores why such counterfactual questions on the subject of Nazism have proliferated within Western popular culture. Examining a wide range of novels, short stories, films, television programs, plays, comic books, and scholarly essays appearing in Great Britain, the United States, and Germany post-1945, Rosenfeld shows how the portrayal of historical events that never happened reflects the evolving memory of the Third Reich's real historical legacy. He concludes that the shifting representation of Nazism in works of alternate history, as well as the popular reactions to them, highlights their subversive role in promoting the normalisation of the Nazi past in Western memory.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"With The World Hitler Never Made Gavriel Rosenfeld takes a completely fascinating and highly original cut into the complex of questions concerning the relationship between history and memory on the subject of Nazism and its place in post-1945 popular culture. He tackles these themes with great verve, writing with admirable clarity, and marshalling a prodigious array of speculative fictions and 'alternate histories' in order to build his arguments. The resulting book is both accessible and challenging, densely documented and thoroughly absorbing. All German historians will want to read it, as will anyone interested in Holocaust memory and the legacies of Nazism." Geoff Eley, University of Michigan

"Gavriel Rosenfeld's analysis of 'alternative historical' treatments of Nazi Germany, embracing a broad range of popular media, is bound to raise hackles. Yet in seeking to comprehend the comparative, changing mentalities of postwar America, Britain, and Germany he has conceived and produced a provocative and deeply insightful book. The World Hitler Never Made is a strikingly original and imaginative cultural history that reveals a great deal about the post-war world by examining 'alternative historical' forays into Nazism and the Holocaust. It is perhaps the most accessible, as well as one of the most important scholarly books ever written about the role of the Holocaust in popular consciousness from the war's end up to our own time." Michael Berkowitz, University College London

"A history of alternative histories, The World Hitler Never Made is an imaginative and intriguing look at our culture's fascination with what might have been, had things gone differently during the Second World War. With panache, erudition and a broad comparative sweep, Rosenfeld analyzes these distorted images of what occurred, unearthing our evident pleasure in imagining other outcomes and what that says about our relationship to the Nazi past. The possibility of evil winning, or at least sidestepping defeat, cuts perhaps all too close to the bone today." Peter Baldwin, University of California, Los Angeles

"In this wide-ranging and highly stimulating book, Gavriel Rosenfeld explores the changing nature yet strange persistence of alternate histories of the Nazi past, showing the ways in which Hitler and the Third Reich have occupied Western popular culture long after the regime's demise. In so doing Rosenfeld does more than simply advance a persuasive case for why such mass market myth-making and counterfactual history deserve to be taken more seriously as revealing expressions of popular memory; The World That Hitler Never Made goes a long way towards furnishing a cultural history of some of the most powerful fears and fantasies haunting the Western social imagination from the end of the Second World War to the present." Paul Betts, University of Sussex

"The World Hitler Never Made is an impressive work." -Financial Times, Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Government at Oxford University

"There is no better guide than The World Hitler Never Made, which takes us through this strange domain without descending into it." -The New Leader

"The World Hitler Never Made is an important, well-researched book."
Ronald Hilton

"Gavriel Rosenfeld's recent study is an interesting and original contribution to our understanding of history and memory." -Clifton Ganyard, German Studies Review

Book Description

What if the Nazis had won World War II? What if Adolf Hitler had escaped from Nazi Germany in 1945 and gone into hiding? What if Hitler had been assassinated or had never been born? Gavriel Rosenfeld's 2005 study explores why those questions about Nazism have proliferated within Western popular culture.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 540 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press (May 23, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521847060
• ISBN-13: 978-0521847063
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.4 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #430,879 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Look At Alternate Hitler History, August 21, 2008

By 

R. W. Rasband (Heber City, UT) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (New Studies in European History) (Hardcover)

Gayriel Rosenfeld's very interesting "The World Hitler Never Made" is a fair and thorough survey of the literature (particularly fiction) that sprang up after World War II asking "what if" the war had turned out differently. Not surprisingly, much of what Rosenfeld examines is science fiction, since that is the genre that is most able to handle that kind of historical/social speculation. This book looks at Philip K. Dick's masterful The Man in the High Castle; Robert Harris' Fatherland: A Novel (Mortalis) both book and movie; C.M. Kornbluth's novella "Two Dooms", which is found in His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of C.M. Kornbluth; Stephen Fry's comic Making History; the almost forgotten-by-everyone pulp novel Who Will Watch the Watchers which I read when I was a kid; and many others.

My favorite of this genre is Norman Spinrad's amazing The Iron Dream which I urge everyone to go out and buy immediately. Rosenfeld raises the question whether Spinrad's historical pessimism lets Hitler off the hook a little bit: in the novel, the Holocaust happens anyway in the Soviet Union even though Hitler never came to power and ended up a hack sci-fi writer in America. I don't agree with this spin on Spinrad, but it's interesting to think about. In spite of all the large historical forces at work, individuals have to be held accountable for the evil that they do. Rosenfeld's not unexpected conclusion is that Hitler was a dominant, horrific figure in the imagination of the culture and we are unlikely to forget him for the foreseeable future.

Incidentally, this book is advertised as a survey of the literature about alternate histories, not as a factual "expert's perspective of what a world in which the Nazi's won WWII would look like." So it's missing the point to give this book only two stars for not being something it was never intended or advertised to be in the first place.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thorough but readable, October 24, 2005

By 

R. Oberdorfer (Virginia Beach, VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (New Studies in European History) (Hardcover)

The scope of this book is what attracted me. It provides insight into how historical eras are remembered and does so by analyzing scholarly as well as popular sources. A unique and very helpful document, especially for the serious historian.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Balanced opinion on "The world Hitler never made", February 18, 2008

By 

J. Michael Innes "(Mike)" (Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (New Studies in European History) (Hardcover)

This is a very well written and scholarly text which provides a nigh on encyclopedic coverage of material published on alternate histories of the rise and fall of Hitler. It also reviews what those histories may signify for an understanding of the cultural import of the rise and fall of fascism and, in fact, the perception that "national socialism" never went away, it just returns under other guises.

From a British point of view the book manages very clearly and persuasively to present the changing manner in which the defeat of Nazi Germany was represented in the general media, not only novels and plays, but as importantly in comic books, television and film. The author shows commendable scholarship in his ability to review work from a broad spectrum of genres, from newspapers and literary plays to sci-fi novels and comics.

I would recommend this work to anyone who wishes to get a very up to date "crash course" in thinking on the impact and the import of events in the middle of the 20th century on contemporary culture, on the consciousness of that culture and of the scholarship of those reflecting upon those events. It is not a book in the same vein as the superb volume on alternate history "Unmaking the West"Unmaking the West: "What-If?" Scenarios That Rewrite World Historyconcerned as it is with the second order issue of the role of popular culture considering the impact of alternate histories,but it has to be reviewed on its own terms and therein it does an excellent job.