One of the most popular subjects of counterfactual fiction or alternate histories is the outcome of the Second World War, with authors analysing the possibilities of a Nazi victory. This particular type of fiction formed the subject of an article by Gavriel Rosenfeld, an associate professor of history at Fairfield University in Connecticut, in the San Francisco Chronicle.
Such alternate histories engage with the national identities of the United States and Great Britain where the Second World War is represented as the most recent representation of national virtue, a good war, if conflicts can be described as such. Rosenfeld argues that these fictions downplay the impact of the Holocaust and tell of National Socialist regimes that modernise, liberalise or decay, putting their nightmares behind them.
Various factors explain these rosy representations of history as it might have been under Nazi rule.
In some cases, American conservatives’ intensifying fears of Soviet communism and anxieties about American national decline in the post-Vietnam years of the late 1970s and early 1980s helped to challenge the view that an American victory in World War II had actually worked out for the best.
In other cases, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet dictatorship after 1989 provided an optimistic model for how the Nazi dictatorship might eventually have fared had it triumphed in World War II.
The motives and plausibility of these narratives aside, however, the tendency to view a Nazi wartime victory as a fantasy rather than a nightmare suggests the slow emergence in the United States of a less demonized picture of the Third Reich in American memory.
The downplaying of the Holocaust in many of these accounts, in particular, provides the most telling evidence of this trend and suggests a growing willingness to view Nazism as something less than absolute evil.
The equivalent school within British fiction dwells upon the possibilities of collaboration within an occupied nation, or the lower costs of an isolationist foreign policy.
Rosenfeld criticises these stories for being tendentious and relativist. However, one role of fiction is to explore uncomfortable alternatives and anticipate the movement of National Socialism from memory into history. Perhaps the Holocaust is ignored because these authors do not have the tools or the imagination to grapple with the enormity of the genocide and duck the challenge in their work. Most act as alternate visions of the Cold War, not as a darker age of barbarism.
One novella that conveys the evil is David Brin’s “Thor Meets Captain America”, a useful antidote to the swastika equivalents of glasnost and perestroika.
Not all books ignore the holocaust, in fact books like Fatherland are centred directly around it.
But Fatherland makes an important point and one that explains the avoision of the holocaust in many other books. In these alternative histories, the holocaust has been hidden by the Nazis (history is written by the victors, etc), and so there is little to say about it.
I am struck by the fact that despite the popularity of teaching the evils of the Nazi Party to schoolchildren, any feeling that, despite the extremely distorted version of C20th history that results, at least they will able to identify and oppose National Socialism, is soon dissipated when you realise that when confronted by contemporary versions of National Socialism (such as for example the Baarth Party in Iraq) they fail to make the connection.
I can recall marching against NATO intervening in Yugoslavia, but I do not recall anybody marching against ethnic cleaning, or demonstrating against the killing of homosexuals in Islamic countries, or protesting against the increase in anti-Semitism in Europe.
The application of their knowledge of the Nazi Party it seems has only resulted in the ability to describe Bush as Hitler – which demonstrates of course that they have not learnt anything.
Judging from what I have seen in the school history books about the Nazis one would be forgiven for thinking that their only evil was the genecide of minorities, the largest of which happened to be Jewish.
The “lessons” amount to nothing more than that we should protest against genocide, as indeed we should.
But where are the lessons making kids aware of how the state uses propaganda to control how we think and feel about whatever the state is doing? Another more disturbing lesson is that the word “Nazi” is only politically correct to use where the most appalling atrocities are involved. Again this ignores the enormous role of propaganda in making those atrocities possible.
I am not well read in the alternative history of the second world war genre and I wonder if anyone makes this case. Anyone?
I’ve always thought that one of the worst things about the way that the Nazis are viewed is precisely the fact that they’re treated as monsters, or as evil incarnate. I recall Eichmann’s capture, trial and execution, as well as Hanah Arndt’s description of the banality. The problem is that if the individuals were all monsters, then where’s the lesson for us to learn? I don’t know about you, but while I may disagree vehemously with a lot of people, I don’t know of any actual demons walking around. So why worry? And more importantly, what’s the lesson to be learned from that history — avoid monsters and people with horns and hooves? Neither Hussein nor Millosevic, or anbody else I can think of really falls into that category, so I guess we can all go back to sleep until one appears. Then, of course, we’ll all do “the right thing”, won’t we.
The real problem isn’t with monsters or devils, but with rather ordinary (and banal), though twisted people. These are the people who can talk themselves and their drinking buddies into the idea that the world would be a much better place if only “those” people weren’t around. Talk about it enough, always with support and affirmation from your peers, and sooner or later you’re going to do something about it. And if you’ve got enough friends backing you, or happen to be a good enough public speaker, heaven help us all.
In case anyone is interrested the daddy of WWII alternate histories is Philip K. Dick’s “The Man In The High Castle”. The only problem with the book is that Dick paints the Japs a little to sympathetically.
Does anyone know what the follow-on plan to “kill jews, nick their stuff and put it in swiss bank vaults” was? Where does one go after one has a whole continent of living space? Or indeed a whole world of living space?
Some possibilities left out:
It could be that unremitting horror is quite difficult to write about…
….or just not very interesting.
It could also be that in any alternative history the Nazis are more successful, and therefore the Holocaust would be marginalised. Even at the time, under huge pressure from the war, they made efforts at least preparatory to hiding or explaining away the whole thing. This is prefigured in Hitler’s table talk: “Who now remembers the Armenians?” He says.
Who indeed? As the Armenian example shows contemporary politics can control very largely the official view of the past. Ruanda and Cambodia show that who’s being murdered rather affects whether anything will be done about it. Remember the war was not to save the Jews. Had Hitler contented himself with mass murder of his own population, rather than attacking other countries so precipitately, might he not have died in his bed, the Holocaust an undoubtedly regrettable but controversial incident?
Our own history is a set of alternatives, too. We don’t have to interpret it the way we do. How we interpret it affects the present.
Norman Finkelstein’s case that the Holocaust has become more not less noticed with passing time because it is politically useful in underpinning Israel’s notional victim status is quite plausible. I’d also observe (as he doesn’t) that it has become a primary source of modern supernational law and the moral authority of international institutions.
—–
One of the subtlest alternative histories of Nazism on offer is Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream. I recommend it, though it is a bit too long. I think the same sickening effect could have been achieved in slightly smaller compass. But maybe that’s me being too squeamish.
The device is a reissued fantasy novel written by the naturalised US author Adolph Hitler who emigrated from Europe after the Great War. The framing apparatus outlines a very different America as acutely as The Man in the High Castle, while the foreground story presents a neat pathology of Nazi imagery as escalated adolescent power-fantasy.
Frankly, you can tell the quality of the article from the fact that the author cites Harry Turtledove’s “In the presence of mine enemies” in support of his thesis without mentioning in the article that the viewpoint characters are the last surviving Jews of Berlin living a precarious double life in constant fear of discovery. The shadow of the Holocaust permeates the story from end to end.
I was going to recommend Phillip K. Dick’s “The Man In The High Castle”, but I see monkey has beaten me to it. So I shall second his recommendation instead.
I third the PKD recommendation; it certainly doesn’t downplay the holocaust, or the inevitable, much worse, followups.
Also, Strophyx is 100% spot-on. Evil doesn’t have horns. Evil looks like your next door neighbour, until it’s too late. To paraphrase Wednesday Addams:
– “I’m going dressed as a Nazi.”
– “But you’re not dressed up!”
– “I know, that’s because they look like everyone else”
In novels about the USSR during the USSR’s salad days, it was quite rare to hear about their atrocities. You had exceptions, Orwell’s work and things like Darkness at Noon, but for the most part, novels about the USSR didn’t focus on the regime of torture, slavery and murder. Heck, things written about Gorbachev today skip over his bad moments (sending the Alpha Squad to pump peaceful Lithuanian protestors full of lead, say) or those of Eduard Schevernadze (nerve gassing protestors in Tbilisi in April of 1989).
In these alternate histories, the same crew that, in OTL, was covering for the Soviets is engaged in covering for the Nazis. Presumably, in these OTLs, the Holocaust memorials are as ignored as those to the victims of Communism are in our world: thefoundation trying to put up a memorial to vicitms of communism in Washington, DC, has only about half the funds needed.
In novels about the USSR during the USSR’s salad days, it was quite rare to hear about their atrocities.
You’re talking about serious literature, right? Because there were any number of popular thrillers in which the Sovs were the Bad Guys.
One of my favorite alternative history novels involved the Soviet Union, The Kirov Affair, by Adam Ulam. It’s actually more of a historical detective novel: who killed Sergei Kirov, and why? but it gets into an alternative timeline after Khrushchev.
Has any ‘what if’ fantasy literature been written assuming France and Britain never declared war on Germany? Does the holocaust happen the way that it did if Germany carves out vassal states in the East and solidifies its position? How much did the economic privation of protracted war stimulate the turning of concentration camps into death camps? What if France and Britain didn’t get involved and Germany went head to head with the Soviet Union? Would both have suffered and declined, or would one have emerged even stronger?
All the ‘what ifs’ I have seen pick up after the declaration by Britain and France, and eventually the US, as if that was inevitable and righteous from the get go.
And lastly, at it has been touched on already, WWII was much more than just the holocaust, and no one really knew the full tale of woe that it was until AFTER, so the war was not fought against EVIL INCARNATE but fought for all the same reasons all wars are fought, economic security. It is only afterward, and used to lend righteousness to the cause that it was a Good War. I don’t remember France or Britain or the US (in its support role) yelling far and wide that we have to free the jews from concentration camps. It’s just serviceable afterward. And it does an overall disservice because people now put up all sorts of indignities and interferences from the State but feel that it must not be that bad as no one is being whisked off to the ovens.
I feel bound to issue a fourth recommendation of The Man in the High Castle. Without giving too much away, the Nazis get interested in Africa after they are done with the Jews.
Also, this is OT but The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and A Scanner Darkly by the same author (Philip K Dick) are all excellent. Also worth a read are The Game-players of Titan and Ubik among others (he wrote a lot of novels).
We have good knowledge of what victorious nazis would have done; they would have raped pillaged murdered and most of all impoverished the world. The idiocies of command economics would have screwed everything they touched just like the command economies of Stalin and Mao and their lesser imitators have done. Eventually, proliferating lies masquerading as information would have paralyzed the nazi command structure at the top, because, in victory, the only bottom line checking rampant stupidity in a command economy–outside military competition–would have ceased to work.
Think how little accurate information about their own economy got through to the politburo in the USSR–and its party wouldn’t have been competant to make infinitely complicated plans duplicating or surpassing the self regulation of a price based economy even if it had had accurate information. WE can’t model OUR economy well enough to plan it with better info and tools than any totalitarian ever had.
The slaughter would eventually have wound down. Genetic diversity would have thinned slightly; more social genes than physical genes would have been lost. Winners would have blamed losers. The surviving society would have evolved into something different and poorer and less free than our world, but good would have grown up through the cracks in the regime, and the balance between good and evil would eventually have righted itself. (If the jihadis won, Islam might evolve into something better than it is now over the next few centuries, but let’s not find out.)
Hayek’s “the road to serfdom” is better reading and more illuminating than most alternate histories, because he illustrates how well meaning fabians and paternalists evolve lawful market states into barbaric thug arenas. Most Germans didn’t aim at being nazis; nazism was just a natural evolution of German Socialism. If we cede enough power to the state for what we will think of as good and sufficient purposes, and if the state actually achieves those purposes well enough for long enough to convince us that this is a good idea rather than a necessary temporary evil, then what happened to Germany could happen to us. Fortuneately, that’s a big if. The chances of us actually getting all the government that we’re paying for for even a little while are as low as the probability of a highway bill without pork. Americans know that the government is screwed up. We aren’t interested enough in it to fix it, and we don’t believe our politicians can competantly handle all the responsabilities they already have.
The world is getting over Hitler. We are getting over the other socialists as well. It just would have taken longer if they’d won.
Ron Jones, the guy who wrote The Acorn People, also had a short article about an experiment he did once. He was a teacher, and he continually had difficulties explaining why fascism gained such a foothold in so many places (including sympathizers in the US and UK.)
So he started with his class. Wouldn’t it be great if we all sat up straight, that would help us learn. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to make sure that everyone keeps on track. And they all agreed that this was a great program, and talked their parents into it, little realizing that he’d just introduced regimentation and informing into their classroom. In little more than a week, he’d gotten requests for a publicity assembly to speak about his “new vision” for teaching, and requests from varying students to join the class.
By this point, he’d introduced nationalist-style slogans and signs, and he was also beginning to be a bit scared at his own success. So he got up in front of everyone at the assembly and explained what he’d been doing. And everyone, horrified, left quietly and refused to talk about it for years. It’s a fascinating article, because he shows how easily one can fall into the trap. (He also mentions a couple of very bright students who decided against following the program because it disturbed them— which is a hopeful sign.)