LIGHTNING IN THE NIGHT
Review by Joseph T Major of
THE WORLD HITLER NEVER MADE:
Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism
by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
(Cambridge University Press; 2005;
ISBN 0-521-84506-0; $30.00)
From the Top 59 Mistakes Made by Adolf Hitler:
1. Land War in Asia
9. Chose “Deutschland Über Alles” over “Let’s All Be There” as party slogan
10. Lost the Ark to Indiana Jones
12. Referring to Stalin as “that old Georgian fat back”
14. Free beer in munitions plants
25. Always got Churchill out of bed for conference calls
30. Strong fondness for sauerkraut and beans made General Staff avoid him constantly
40. Spent jail time planning how to conquer the world instead of his own escape.
47. Used to make prank calls to FDR asking if he had “Prince Albert in a can”
49. Got drunk on schnapps and suggested Tojo attack the U.S. saying, “The U.S. only has twenty times your industrial power, what are you, a wimp?”
56. Alienated Chamberlain at Munich by sticking an “Invade me” sign on his back
— Compiled by Brad Templeton
I once opined that the ultimate alternate-history novel would be Die Gewehre des Südens, the story of how a band of time-traveling Nazis help the Confederacy win the War Between the States, by providing them with MP-44s, so that the future Nazi Germany would have an ally in their coming war. Professor Rosenfeld doesn’t quite cover the full topic; he does discuss the one popular AH topic, that of a different World War Two. Will someday someone do a book on the topic of “The World General Lee Never Made”?
Nazi imagery is today’s political pornography; with historical knowledge being so stunted and blunted, about the only thing most people know in that line is “Nazis = Bad”. Of those who do know something about the history, all too many of them adhere to unrealistic images of Nazi Germany.
There are three main foci of alternate histories of this topic; the U.S., the U.K. — and Germany itself. You’d think the authorities in that last country would be worried about the popularity of that topic among certain people, and that certain people would take to it.
Rosenfeld identifies several trends. One is “normalization”, recognizing the Nazi era as just another historical event. Another is that of collaboration; British writers for example piercing the legend of the united hostile stance against Nazism.
The alternates he covers list everything from the Super-Führer (Gloder of Stephen Fry’s Changing History (1996), a book that takes hundreds of pages to say what L. Sprague de Camp said in his story “Aristotle and the Gun” (1958)) all the way down to Hitler hunted (Philippe van Rjndt’s The Trial of Adolf Hitler (1978))). He searches in popular culture, too, listing the Hitlerian satires put forward by P. J. O’Rourke when he was editor of National Lampoon. (And deriding them; as befits an academic milieu, missing the point.)
He lists what I think is the best portrayal of a Nazis-victorious world, Otto Basil’s Wenn das der Führer wüßte [“If Only the Führer Knew”, tranlated into English as The Twilight Men] (1966), with its portrayal of the irrational Nazi world, obsessed with pseudo-science, laden with Aryan kitsch, splintered amid competing National Socialist sects, each the truest of Führertreu. And of course utterly proud of having removed the threat of World Jewry. This is far truer to the Nazi theme than the super-scientific Reich of Brad Linaweaver’s Moon of Ice (1988) or the angst-ridden “Ach Mein Gott, we killed the Jews!” discovery of Robert Harris’s Fatherland (1992). No matter how implausible the point of divergence, though.
There are some issues. Rosenfeld never quite seems to get to the problem of the “demonization”, or how throwing around comparisons to Hitler does far more to normalize and indeed trivialize the Nazi era than, say The Iron Dream.
Some of the more technical historians find the fantasizing of these works hard to take. Whether it be the miraculous removal of naval opposition and logistic difficulties found in such works as Kenneth Macksey’s Invasion (1980) or the curious why not implicit in the non-ascension of Gloder of Changing History, there are issues. Indeed, the ultimate example of this is Gary Gygax’s Victorious German Arms (1973), where the Germans make all the right decisions, and the Allies do all the wrong things. (Stirling is not original.)
“The World Hitler Never Made” has been used in a variety of ways, from power-wish-fulfillment to vengeance on enemies. Those who actually wish to analyze the circumstances and postulate the results, like David Downing in The Moscow Option (1978) [where the Germans and Japanese get whole bunches of breaks and still lose], or Cecil Lewis Troughton “C. S. Forrester” Smith in “If Hitler Had Invaded England” (1960) [where the Germans get the possible breaks and not the impossible ones, and still lose], don’t have the cachet and don’t get noticed. They don’t have the thrill of Nazism, it’s not, like, kewl to have the grody old Allies, like, win.
From the Top 59 Mistakes Made by Adolf Hitler:
54. Being born