Review: The World Hitler Never Made
- 46 minutes ago
- 7 min read
By Gary Oswald.
Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is the editor of the What Ifs of Jewish History AH book and owner of the Counterfactual History Review, a blog that has been running for twelve years and covers the way counter-factual thinking has been used and viewed in the mainstream, in both fiction and analysis of the real world. He is also a prominent academic, who serves as President of the Center for Jewish History in New York City and Professor of History at Fairfield University.
The World Hitler Never Made is a combination of Rosenfeld’s personal interests in AH and his academic profession. It is an analysis of hundreds of published AH stories about Hitler and Nazism, the political and cultural messages they send and how those messages have changed in more recent stories compared to older ones. There have been other academic studies of AH fiction by the likes of Matthew Schneider-Mayerson but this is the most comprehensive and influential one.
Rosenfeld’s clear passion for the topic is what makes this book so readable but it’s the sheer amount of research that’s most impressive. It’s astonishing how many works he covers and how far he casts his net, looking at essays, comics, plays, films, books, TV episodes (though no video games interestingly enough, I was waiting for a look at Red Alert) and the like from multiple different countries with forgotten Hungarian writers covered with as much scrutiny as famous writers like Turtledove or Dick. And not only that but he researches the authors statements in interviews and their political views and compiles the reviews, ratings and complaints made about every story covered so as to check which type of AH chimed with the public and which didn’t.
The result is something extraordinarily informative about the growth and scope of this genre. I did not know that the first Nazi victory scenarios in which they conquer the UK were written in the late 1930s prior to war even starting, for instance. But it’s also something genuinely insightful in making connections between stories I did know. The argument that dystopian AH often comes from a self-congratulatory impulse of reinforcing the current world order and that utopian AH comes from a more self-critical impulse is not new, but Rosenfeld fills it out with genuine insight. Identifying that a central dispute in British texts about a Nazi occupied Britain was how much collaboration would happen is relatively obvious but Rosenfeld links that to the idea of British exceptionalism versus the rest of Europe. He picks out that writers sceptical of European unity tend to assume the Brits would collaborate less than their counterparts in France whereas those keen on the EU tend to copy the results of France directly into their fictional UK, assuming the two populations would behave about the same.
This is solid evidence that the worldview of the writers effects the AH they write. Rosenfeld however does tend to over rely on that particular lens to the almost exclusion of any other reasons why certain stories are written, in terms of broad appeal, narrative interest etc. and his desire to view all stories through the lends of their political agenda is often overreaching and one note.
This rather leads into my biggest criticism of the book. Rosenfeld is not just analysing these stories for its own sake, the book has a central argument which Rosenfeld is trying to prove.
The book argues in the prologue that Hitler and the Nazis were originally discussed in terms of strong moral condemnation but this has reduced as they have become normalised. Every chapter is an attempt to prove that hypothesis, comparing works by people who were adults during WWII and viewed Hitler as a demonic threatening figure versus works by those distanced from WWII by years and so soften their views on him. This is undoubtedly true and the hypothesis is convincingly supported, but in many ways Rosenfeld overstates his case because his definition is so broad.
Do you depict the Allies as morally flawed and divided even when up against an evil Nazi state? You’ve normalised the Nazis. Do you depict the Nazi empire as evil but crumbling internally and therefore not needing to be beaten externally? You’ve also normalised the Nazis.
The latter in particular is a stretch, in my opinion. It can absolutely still be possible to morally condemn a state without portraying it as invincible. Indeed, one could argue that it’s a large part of it: that you don’t want to glamorise the Nazis by giving them more successes than is realistic.
Particularly notable as an attempt to crowbar everything into this theory is his analysis of “On the Death of Hitler’s Assassin” by Pol Ribenfeld, writing as Ivor H. Yarden, a mock obituary of the fictional Jewish radical, Paul Aronsohn, who killed Hitler in 1938 and thus provoked a massive anti-Jewish pogrom, which we are told with horror led to the deaths of nearly 40,000 Jews. The point of this story is the irony, wherein the fictional writer of the obituary, writing in a world where neither WWII or the Shoah happened, believes Paul Aronsohn killed a weak leader who was likely to be overthrown by the Army or slapped down by France anyway and so provoked a pogrom that likely wouldn’t have happened, whereas we know Aronsohn saved millions and millions of lives.
This is very clearly a story wherein killing Hitler improves history. But it was written in 1992 so to support his hypothesis Rosenfeld has to pretend it doesn’t and says “by challenging the intuitively appealing view that killing Hitler would have improved history, indeed in being able to conceive of a world in which Hitler’s assassination is regarded as a horrible mistake, Ribenfeld vividly illustrated both the fading fantasy of eliminating Hitler from history and the declining tendency to view him as the embodiment of evil.” Which frankly just feels like bad analysis of the story. We are not meant to agree that Hitler’s assassination is a horrible mistake; the story has no power if Hitler isn’t viewed as the embodiment of evil.
And this is why, as interesting and insightful as this book is, there is something frustrating about it as a reader of AH. Rosenfeld undeniably loves the genre, the book ends with a love letter to the power of counter factual thinking, but he’s viewing it in this book not as a fan but as a political scientist and his interest in it is in what it says about our politics not in what the writers themselves are trying to do so. As such he flattens stories like “On the Death of Hitler’s Assassin” to fit the broader theory he has.
Which brings us I suppose to the ultimate question of any work of literary criticism. Who is this for?
The 2007 film Ratatouille features, as a minor antagonist, a food critic called Anton Ego who gets a monologue at the end about what it is to be a critic.
This includes the lines below.
"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."
This has often been quoted, and the ultimate conclusion of that paragraph, that even bad work is more meaningful and important than accurate criticism or analysis, is often taken out of context. But the film isn't actually criticising the act of criticism. Ego is a figure of authority, someone whose expertise and taste is respected within the film and whose approval of Remy’s cooking is a moment of triumph. And Ego’s speech doesn’t end there, it continues with the following lines.
“But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defence of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”
What the monologue says is that the critic can do something as meaningful as creation if they use their platform to support innovation. That a critic is important in identifying and promoting innovation that allows the art form to grow. (Pixar movies have after all always been critically acclaimed and this was a movie designed to flatter critics more than anything.)
But the monologues hint at a genuine tension between creation and analysis. Something that you see whenever a critic, whatever form of creation the critique is about, becomes well known and influential. That is true of Roger Ebert, John Peel, Anita Sarkeesian, Dave Meltzer, and Jay Rayner alike.
On the one hand, reviewers are useful, they consume much more content than the average viewer and so can draw attention to and promote excellent content that otherwise may not gain such recognition. And that wider range of content allows their analysis to have more insight.
But on the other hand, as taste setters they can have an effect on what is being produced that is often perceived as censorious. If the approval of one of those figures helps give people a break, then you end up with a culture scene designed to appeal to their tastes. This is why Pixar argues that the true sin of a critic is to be unfriendly to the new and innovative, to enforce norms of conventionality by criticising anything which is different even if it is still good. This fear is why critics often face such virulent pushback from creators.
The ultimate conclusion though, one which people often arrive at, is that ultimately the audience for critics is not creators. A creator who gets obsessed with pursuing critical acclaim is one who is less authentic. So the common advice is simply that you shouldn’t be reading reviews or analysis, they are tools for consumers and not creators.
And this brings me back to The World Hitler Never Made. Fundamentally it’s a book I hugely enjoyed but it’s a tool for political analysts more than fans or writers of AH.
It views AH as a lens to look through rather than a subject to look at and as such it's difficult to take any genuine advice from it as either a creator or a reader. This book is not trying to be prescriptive, it is not telling us what the genre should be or what works are worth checking out. It is a description on what the genre is and a meditation on its dangers and what that tells us about society.
It does that as well as any book could possibly do, but it's a book that I would probably recommend to a friend with no interest in AH more readily than to one who loves it.
Gary Oswald is the editor of the Grapeshot and Guillotines, Emerald Isles, and If We'd Just Got That Penalty anthologies.