The alternate histories of a Nazi triumph in World War II that have appeared since 1945 point to significant transformations in the Western memory of the Nazi past over the course of the last generation. To begin with, the conclusions of all narratives have shifted over time. While early postwar alternate histories mostly portrayed a Nazi victory in bleak terms, later ones depicted its consequences in far more nuanced, and frequently upbeat, fashion. Moreover, the function of all the narratives has shifted, if not exactly in the same manner or for the same reasons. British and American texts have become less triumphalistic and more self-critical over time, whereas German narratives have largely abandoned their early tendency towards self-critique in favor of a more value-neutral stance. These shifts in the content and function of alternate histories have been closely tied to the changing fortunes of the countries in which they have appeared.

If the Anglo-American triumph in World War II initially brought about self-congratulatory British and American narratives that vindicated both the recent past and the contemporary present, the growing sense of decline within Great Britain and the United States after the 196os and 1970s respectively brought about more critical narratives that questioned whether the course of real history was so positive after all. These pessimistic British and American accounts have differed, however, insofar as the former have exceeded the latter both in quantity and quality. Indeed, whereas self-critical alternate histories have continued to appear in Great Britain in the last two decades, they have declined in number in the United States. This trend reveals that Britons have shown a greater readiness than Americans to reassess their past and view it from a less idealized perspective. In the process, they have given voice to a greater sense of dissatisfaction with the postwar world caused by their nation’s comparatively dramatic decline. Finally, Germany’s postwar development proves this trend in reverse. The Federal Republic’s insecure early postwar history helped generate self-critical narratives, but its growing sense of self-confidence since reunification explains the appearance of less critical accounts in recent years. In all of these nations, it becomes obvious that the scenario of a Nazi victory in World War II has been represented in increasingly normalized fashion.

The reception of these tales, by contrast, offers a much more complicated picture. To a significant degree, audiences in Great Britain, the United States, and Germany have exhibited a growing willingness to accept a more normalized perspective towards the Nazi era. Yet this response has hardly been unanimous, as audiences have frequently demonstrated an enduring commitment to viewing the Nazi past from an ethically informed perspective. Not surprisingly, the responses have varied by nation. The greatest acceptance has been visible in Great Britain, where increasing numbers of Britons have embraced the less judgmental view of Nazi Germany that has accompanied the dismantling of the finest-hour myth. Americans have been somewhat less willing to regard the Third Reich as anything less than the epitome of evil, having accepted this view firmly in the 195os and 196os, strayed from it in the 1970s, and returned to it in the 199os. The greatest refusal to perceive the Nazi era from a value-neutral perspective has been evident in Germany, where readers supported the black-and-white accounts of the pre-1989 years and condemned the less critical narratives that emerged thereafter. Such expressions of criticism are significant. But compared with the unanimously favorable response of audiences to the moralistic portrayals of a Nazi victory in the early decades after 1945, the mixed reactions of audiences to the more recent accounts of the last generation suggest that - from the broader perspective of the entire postwar period - the memory of the Nazi past has become increasingly affected by the powerful forces of normalization.

Alternate histories of the Third Reich sell, too. And like some of the crasser products of Western commercialism, they also reflect the ongoing normalization of the Nazi past. Since they first began to appear during World War II, alternate histories of Nazism have developed from a minor curiosity into a noteworthy phenomenon. Well over l00 narratives have appeared in the form of novels, short stories, films, television broadcasts, plays, comid books, and historical essays. These diverse texts have focused largely on four specific allohistorical themes: the Nazis winning World War II; Hitler surviving the war and fleeing into postwar hiding; Hitler being eliminated from history at some point in his life; and the Holocaust occurring in different fashion. Over the course of the postwar era, the shifting allohistorical- portrayal of these themes has illustrated the emergence of a distinct normalizing trend in the Western memory of the Nazi era. From 1945 up through the mid-1960s, during what I have called the era of moralism, alternate histories adhered to strict ethical conventions in representing the Third Reich. In the ensuing era of normalization, from the mid-196os to the present day, such morally principled tales have continued to appear, but they have been challenged and dramatically outnumbered by those offering a more nuanced view of the Nazi years. This trend clearly reveals that the fears and fantasies which animated alternate histories of Nazism in the first place have begun to fade. In the process, the injunction to remember the past lest it be repeated in the future has diminished in urgency. Alternate histories of Nazism, in short, seem to indicate a growing apathy towards memory. See, among many others, Edward Rothstein, "Artists Seeking Their Inner Nazi," New York Times, February 2, 2002, p. B9. The novel in question is Thor Kunkel’s Final Stage. Andrew Berg, "Novel about Nazi Pornography Scandalizes German Literati," New York Times, March 2, 2004, p. E5. Menno Meyjes’s 2002 film Max, starring John Cusack and Noah Taylor, is a fictionalized account of the young Hitler’s relationship with a Jewish artist in Munich after World War I. See "Portrait of the Führer as a Young Man," Forward, December 2o, 2002. On the Hitler toilet brush, see "Brush with the Past," Glasgow Herald, January 17, 1992, p.7. Grant Morrison’s i99î comic book series The New Adventures of Hitler portrayed Hitler as a disgruntled young man living in Liverpool in 1912. See Rob Rodi, "Cruel Britannia," Comics Journal, June 1991, PP. 41-47. Jonathan Kay, "Defying a Taboo, Nazi Protagonists Invade Video Games," New York Times, January 3, 2002, p. G6.

This trend is made evident by surveying the evolution of alternate histories of Nazism chronologically across the four phases of the postwar era in which they have appeared:

1. To begin with, from 1945 to the late 195os, during the era of moralism’s initial cold-war phase, relatively few narratives appeared. Only 7 percent of all postwar accounts appeared in these years. Eight accounts appeared out of a total of 1o6 postwar works (and out of 116 works surveyed in this study). Several British tales appeared of a Nazi wartime victory, but none were produced in the United States or Germany. A few scattered accounts of Hitler’s survival in hiding, meanwhile, appeared in the United States, as did one tale of the world without Hitler. The small number of accounts reflected the diminished attention to the Nazi era caused by cold-war fears of the Soviet Union. Still, those narratives that did appear in these years consistently featured morally unambiguous conclusions. The nightmare scenario of a Nazi victory, for example, was always depicted in dystopian fashion. Similarly, the nightmare scenario of Hitler’s survival was always represented in such a way as to satisfy the fantasy of bringing him to justice. Both scenarios underscored Nazism’s historical evil. Both, moreover, served psychologically consoling functions. British accounts of a Nazi victory, for instance, validated the myth of the "finest hour" by confirming the importance of the nation’s real historical defeat of the Third Reich and thereby ratified the present as the best of all possible worlds. American accounts of Hitler’s postwar survival, meanwhile, satisfied the fantasy of bringing him to justice, and thus provided a measure of closure to World War II. Significantly, both scenarios offered a welcome distraction from the tensions of the cold war and provided some solace that, even if things were hardly ideal in the present, they could have been much worse.

2. From the late 1950s to the middle of the i96os, during the era of moralism’s ensuing rediscovery phase, alternate histories rapidly increased in number. Compared with the prior cold-war phase, nearly one-and-a-half times more accounts appeared in nearly half the time. Within a span of nine years (1958-67), thirteen moralistic alternate histories appeared, as compared with eight such accounts that appeared in the thirteen-year period 1945-58. Moreover, factoring in two normalized works that appeared in 1964 (The Other Man and It Happened Here) increases the number to fifteen works, which nearly doubles the number of accounts from the cold-war phase and further underscores the importance of the late 195os and early 196os in increasing popular attention to the Nazi past.

The reason for this heightened focus on a Nazi triumph in World War II was the worldwide growth of attention to Germany’s Nazi past in the years 1958-61, caused by the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann, the upsurge of neo-Nazi activity, and the eruption of the Berlin crisis. As with the accounts of the 1940s and 195os, the narratives of these years offered strongly moralistic conclusions, only now they did so with extra urgency. During an era in which many Europeans and Americans were not yet convinced of Germany’s commitment to democracy, fears of a neo-Nazi revival prompted the writers of alternate histories to remind their readers of the Third Reich’s historical crimes. The scenario of a Nazi wartime victory, therefore, was depicted in more explicitly dystopian terms than before, most powerfully in the tales of C. M. Kornbluth, William Shirer, Philip K. Dick, and Comer Clarke. The intensified commitment to memory was also illustrated by the new depiction of Hitler evading justice in The Twilight Zone episode "He’s Alive!" and the British television drama "The Night Conspirators," both of which aimed to underscore the enduring threat of Nazi ideas in the present. Finally, the first-time expression of the fantasy of punishing the Germans for the Holocaust, seen in Jesse Bier’s short story "Father and Son," reflected a reawakened belief in the need for justice. These latter narratives were exceptional for their era, but, like the more numerous accounts of a Nazi wartime victory, they shared a belief in Nazism’s inherent evil and expressed a reinvigorated commitment to remembrance. On balance, the tales of these years reflected the enduring trauma of the Nazi experience. At the same time, by imagining a nightmarish vision of an alternate past, they validated the virtues of the present.

3. With the dawn of the era of normalization after the mid-i96os, however, the ethically conscientious mode of representing the Nazi era began to decline. This trend was especially visible during this era’s crisis phase, from the mid-i96os to the early i98os, when the growing number of alternate histories exhibited progressively more normalized conclusions.’ The content of these tales reflected the new anxieties of the era. As Great Britain, the United States, and Germany entered periods of economic decline and political turbulence, alternate histories ceased representing the Nazi past in a self-congratulatory manner and began to do so more self-critically. Employing the varied techniques of universalization, relativization, and aestheticization, these tales advanced the process of normalization in emphatic fashion.

This trend was particularly visible in accounts of a Nazi victory in World War II. British narratives by such figures as Kevin Brownlow, Giles Cooper, and Len Deighton abandoned the traditional black-and-white portrait of demonic Nazi perpetrators and heroic British victims and instead depicted the latter as collaborators and the former as normal human beings. The goal of this new approach was to challenge the notion - central to the myth of the "finest hour" - of Britain’s moral superiority to the rest of Europe and thereby to express dissatisfaction with the nation’s fall from global dominance. In the process, however, these tales universalized the significance of the Nazi experience by suggesting that Nazism was far from being solely a German phenomenon and could have taken root just as easily in Britain. American accounts, meanwhile, diminished the horror of a Nazi victory in order to cast doubt upon the wisdom of the United States’ decision to intervene against the Germans in World War II. In an era of increasing concerns about the Soviet Union, alternate histories by such disparate figures as John I7ukacs, Brad Linaweaver, and Bruce Russett speculated about whether, by staying out of the war, America could have avoided the costly postwar struggle against communism. In the process, these writers relativized Nazism’s evil by implying that communism was even worse. Present-day fears, in short, were instrumental in diminishing the memory of the Third Reich’s horror. Finally, German accounts of a Nazi victory, which first began to appear in this era, adhered more closely to the reigning moralistic pattern. By depicting the scenario in frightening fashion, they ratified the German present, which, while also characterized by relative decline after the mid-z96os, was far superior to the nation’s devastated reality in the early postwar years.

Alternate histories on other themes related to the Third Reich also reflected the era’s broader normalizing trend. One of the most notable developments was the renewed appearance of accounts depicting Hitler’s survival. Like the tales of the early 1960s, the narratives that appeared after 197o also depicted Hitler evading justice. Now, however, their function was different. If the former had portrayed Hitler’s survival in order to focus on the enduring danger of Nazism as a German phenomenon, the latter were more eager to universalize Hitler’s significance into an all-purpose symbol of contemporary evil. This tendency, which was seen most prominently in the tales of Brian Aldiss, Gary Goss, and George Steiner, reflected the pessimism of an era that was profoundly shaped by the Vietnam War and other crises. The portrayals of Hitler’s survival in the 1970s, however, normalized the Nazi past not only by universalizing it but also by aestheticizing it. Thus, the narratives of Pierre Boulle, Michel Choquette, and Richard Grayson fell victim to the era’s intense fascination with the Führer by using various literary and visual methods to portray his human side - a trend that subtly served to neutralize his evil. In short, the tales depicting Hitler’s evasion of justice displayed a growing apathy towards the injunction to remember the crimes of the Nazi era in their unique historic specificity. The theme of the world without Hitler slowly came into its own during the latter part of this period. Tales on this subject strongly diverged in their conclusions, however. While some, such as those by Jerry Yulsman and Hans Pleschinski, affirmed Hitler’s evil by representing his elimination as improving history, others, like those of Norman Spinrad, diminished his evil by portraying history without him as just as bad, if not worse. The small number of accounts and their competing conclusions in this era make it difficult to identify a single pattern of normalization. But most of the narratives reflected the pessimism of the era and expressed dissatisfaction with the present.

4. Finally, during the post-cold-war phase from the late 198os up to the present day, the normalization of the Nazi past in alternate histories has intensified along with their growing number. The narratives that appeared in Britain, the United States, and Germany during this period were quite diverse in nature and were not linked by a single trend. However, it is clear that in both content and function, British, American, and German alternate histories varied in direct relation to their nations’ divergent experiences of the defining event of the period - the end of the cold war. This epochal event exerted a very different effect upon Great Britain, the United States, and Germany. If all three nations experienced political and economic crises during the late i96os and the 197os, their paths separated after 1989. While the end of the cold war initially did little to shake Britain out of its doldrums, it boosted the status of the United States and Germany, enabling the reunification of the latter and the rise to unrivaled global influence of the former.

These divergent experiences were clearly visible in allohistorical accounts of a Nazi victory in World War II. Most British accounts of the period, like those by Adrian Gilbert, Craig Raine, Robert Harris, Madeleine Bunting, John Charmley, and Christopher Priest, remained self-critical and continued to challenge the myth of the "finest hour" by blurring the line between the British and the Germans. Only by the end of the decade, once Britain had begun to recover its self-confidence under Tony Blair, did a minority of alternate histories once more adopt a self-congratulatory tone and offer ethically grounded portrayals of a Nazi victory. Accounts in the United States, by contrast, were much more consistent in triumphalistically reverting back to the older, morally informed patterns of the early 196os. Yet, although the novels of Leo Rutman, Arthur Rhodes, and Harry Turtledove, and films like Clash of Eagles, The Philadelphia Experiment II, and the HBO version of Fatherland once more portrayed a Nazi victory in negative terms, they were less dystopian than the accounts of the 196os and far more prone to embrace redemptive endings. Both of these trends suggest that the end of the cold war contributed to the fading horror of the Nazi past in American memory. The cold war’s end also had a major impact upon German narratives, which ceased offering judgmental, self-critical depictions of a Nazi victory and instead began to portray it in benign terms in the effort to create a revived sense of national identity. Although it did so in different ways and in differing degrees, the end of the cold war promoted the process of normalization in Britain, the United States, and Germany.

This trend was further confirmed by narratives on other themes related to the Nazi era that appeared during this phase. Accounts of Hitler’s survival exhibited an aversion to moralism by portraying the fugitive Führer continuing to evade justice. These accounts, whether by Americans, such as Steve Erickson, Barry Hershey, and E. M. Nathanson, or Germans, such as Armin Mueller-Stahl and Walter Moers, humanized Hitler by representing him less as a threatening demon than as a debilitated, and at times even imagining alternate history being superior to real history. Originally, the fantasies of bringing Hitler to justice, eliminating him from history, and engendering repentance after the Holocaust testified to the Nazi era’s lingering traumatic effect on the present. The repudiation of these fantasies in recent alternate histories, however, suggests the diminution of Nazism’s traumatic legacy. This process has occurred for two different reasons. In part, the declining tendency to fantasize about history turning out better reveals an increased sense of contentment with the contemporary world - a sentiment that has served to marginalize the Nazi legacy in Western consciousness. Yet the fading of postwar fantasies just as much reflects the emergence of new postwar anxieties. The declining fantasy of bringing Hitler to justice and eliminating him from history has expressed the increasing concern of many writers about contemporary political problems, to which they have tried to direct attention by comparing them to the crimes of the Nazi era - a practice that has ended up either universalizing or relativizing them. It is not only the fading of fantasies that demonstrates the recovery of the Western world from the experience of the Third Reich, however, but also the declining intensity of the major nightmare scenario - a Nazi victory in World War II. The diminishing tendency to portray a Nazi wartime victory as a nightmare provides evidence of the displacement of the Third Reich in Western consciousness by pessimistic concerns about new postwar problems as well as by an optimistic sense of contentment with postwar successes. Fifty years after the collapse of the Third Reich, it seems, the Western world has progressively liberated itself from the nightmares and fantasies related to the Nazi era.

The declining power of these nightmares and fantasies is perhaps best indicated by the increasing use of humor in alternate histories of Nazism. Whereas the total absence of humor in early postwar alternate histories testified to the seriousness of their underlying fears and fantasies, its growing presence over time reveals the dawn of a less earnest mindset. Indeed, it confirms the old adage that tragedy plus time equals comedy.’ The satirical portrayal of a Nazi victory in World War II in John Lukacs’s essay "What if Hitler Had Won the Second World War?", in the Saturday Night Live skit "What If Uberman," and in the National Lampoon cartoon "What if World War II Had Been Fought Like the War in Vietnam?"; the comic portrayal of Hitler in Armin Mueller-Stahl’s film Conversation with the Beast, in Michel Choquette’s satirical photoessay "Stranger in Paradise," and in Walter Moers’s comic book series Adolf die Nazi-Sau; and the disarming application of humor to the subject of the Holocaust in Stephen Fry’s Making History and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow all demonstrate the amenability of alternate history to the use of humor. This trend, of course, is not unique to alternate history, but confirms an increasing willingness within Western popular culture since the late i9Gos to burlesque the Nazis, as seen in television shows like Hogan’s Heroe Mel Brooks’s classic film (and recent play) The Producers, and Roberto Benigni’s film Life is Beautiful. The use of humor is, in and of itself, an important index of normalization. But even more telling is the identity of those willing to utilize it. If, traditionally, most humorous accounts were produced by Americans and Britons, today the fact that Germans have overcome their traditional inability to laugh at the Nazi era reveals further evidence of normalization. Through their use of humor, alternate histories demonstrate that there really are no more limits to representing the Nazi past.

 

The Fading of Memory

Alternate histories also suggest a growing sense of apathy towards preserving the lessons of the Nazi past in memory. For the first two decades after 1940, allohistorical depictions of the Third Reich consistently endorsed the cause of remembrance. More recent narratives, however, have displayed less interest in pursuing this original mnemonic objective. Early postwar accounts of a Nazi wartime victory, for example, depicted the scenario in bleak terms in order to admonish society to, remember the Third Reich’s real historical crimes. By contrast, later narratives, in using the scenario mostly for the purpose of national self-critique, treated the Third Reich less as a topic of intrinsic historical importance – to be remembered for its own sake – than one that could be instrumentally used in the pursuit of other, unrelated agendas. Similarly, while early alternate histories on the topic of Hitler’s survival endorsed the need to remember the Nazis’ crimes by depicting the ex-dictator being brought to justice, later accounts that described Hitler’s evasion of justice programmatically implied that the preservation of memory was either futile, dangerous, or otherwise counterproductive. The same pessimistic message was featured in narratives of the world without Hitler, most of which, by showing how history is not made any better – and sometimes is made worse – by the desperate attempt to eliminate him, highlighted the pointlessness of dwelling on the past and affirmed the virtues of amnesia. Finally, alternate accounts of the Holocaust have cast doubt on the common postwar maxim that memory is the path to salvation by portraying the perpetrators’ attempted (or coerced) attempt to atone for the Nazi genocide as leading to frustration, if not disaster. All of these tales, by questioning the virtues of remembering the Nazi era, have affirmed that it should be regarded as no different from any other historical legacy and thus illustrate the ongoing phenomenon of normalization.

 

Alternate Histories in Comparative National Context

The phenomenon of normalization has hardly been monolithic, however, but has varied according to national context. Alternate histories of Nazism tell us less about the Nazi past than about the shifting concerns within the nations that have produced them. In the early years after World War II, British, American, and German alternate histories were strikingly similar. From 1945 until the mid-i96os, all three nations depicted the era’s dominant theme - a Nazi victory in World War II - in self-congratulatory fashion in order to validate the present as the best of all possible worlds. Britain proudly affirmed the myth that the defeat of Nazi Germany constituted its "finest hour"; America confidently confirmed the wisdom of wartime intervention; and Germany smugly distanced its reformed postwar self from its deviant wartime predecessor. Yet this manner of representation functioned smoothly only as long as the postwar histories of all three nations were success stories. After the mid-196os, all three slowly began to suffer phases of decline that led alternate histories to shift their conclusions, as well as function. In Great Britain, most alternate histories that appeared after the mid-1960s continued to focus on the scenario of a Nazi triumph in World War II, but they now began to portray it in more normalized ways as part of the self-critical mission of challenging the myth of the “finest hour.” Roughly 8o percent of all British alternate histories have focused on a Nazi wartime victory, the highest proportion of any nation. Only 47 percent of American accounts have focused on this theme, while 33 percent of German accounts have done so.

This penchant for self-criticism largely emanated from the political left, which was responding to Britain’s fall from great-power status. Believing that Britain needed to abandon its traditional separatism from, and ultimately link its fate to, the European community, left-liberal Britons took aim at the presumption of moral exceptionalism which lay at the root of the “finest hour” myth by emphasizing the British people’s penchant for collaboration in their accounts of a Nazi wartime victory. Conservatives, by contrast, tried to uphold the “finest hour” myth by continuing to underscore the serious threat posed to Britain by a hypothetical Nazi victory and by emphasizing the likelihood of British resistance to it. On balance, though, the liberal penchant for self-critique has been the predominant trend among British alternate histories. By universalizing the significance of Nazism and portraying how it could have easily been embraced in Britain, these accounts have advanced the normalization of the Nazi past in the process of normalizing British national identity.

In the United States, the alternate histories that appeared after the mid-1960s were much more diverse than those that appeared in Britain. Many American alternate histories also focused on the scenario of a Nazi victory in World War II. Yet in doing so they never completely abandoned the self-congratulatory, moralistic approach of the early postwar years. Not only did this view survive during the self-critical era of the 1970s and r98os, but it experienced a major revival after the end of the cold war. This allegiance to moralism reflects the United States’ greater ability to stave off postwar decline than Britain and explains why it has enjoyed the luxury of a more optimistic and triumphalistic mindset. American narratives on other allohistorical topics, however, have been much less moralistic. Tales of Hitler’s postwar survival and accounts of his elimination from history largely de-demonized the ex-dictator by showing him successfully evading justice and by imagining world history as no better as a result of his absence. These pessimistic conclusions reflect how concerns about new postwar problems (such as the Vietnam War) reduced the singularity of Nazism as the epitome of evil within American consciousness. Unlike the case in Britain, then, where alternate histories normalized the Nazi past for the sake of national self-critique, a broader range of motives, rooted both in triumphalism and pessimism, shaped the allohistorical representation of Nazism in the United States.

German tales demonstrate perhaps the most striking trajectory of normalization. German alternate histories did not appear on any subject whatsoever until the mid-1960s. At this point, they mostly focused on the subject of a Nazi wartime victory, consistently depicting it as a nightmare. Beginning in the 198os and especially since re-unification in 1990, however, this ethically grounded perspective began to wane. It did so at the same time that German alternate histories began to swell in number. Both trends expressed the emergence of a broader desire for a sanitized history and a normal national identity. These desires were visibly present in tales on a variety of counterfactual themes. German depictions of the Nazis winning World War II, for example, ceased depicting Hitler’s triumph as a nightmare and relativized its horror to make it seem not such a terrible event. Accounts of the world without Hitler portrayed it as a better place in order to blame the Führer alone for the Third Reich and thus absolve the German people of the primary responsibility for the Nazi dictatorship. Narratives of the Germans being punished more severely for the Holocaust through the imposition of the Morgenthau Plan allowed Germans to play the role of innocent victims, while depictions of the attempt to undo the Holocaust reflected an enduring German discomfort with the memory of Nazi crimes. The most recent German accounts of all, on the subject of Hitler’s survival, have dramatically humanized the Führer by depicting him as a comic figure who evades justice – a bold strategy of transforming the Nazi past into one like any other. In all of these ways, German alternate histories, like those in Britain and the United States, were involved in the process of refashioning their respective national identities to suit new postwar realities.

In short, British, American, and German alternate histories reveal distinct national differences in the normalization of the Nazi era. In all three nations, the process of normalization commenced at different times, emerged for different reasons, and developed varying degrees of intensity. In Britain, it emerged the earliest, in the mid-r96os, as part of a broader dynamic of national self-critique caused by the dawning awareness of national decline, and has been consistent in its thrust. In the United States, it began somewhat later, after the early 1970s, and was sparked by a growing concern about world problems, but faded in intensity with the end of the cold war. In Germany, normalization emerged the latest, only in the r98os, as part of the desire to renationalize German national identity, and has further intensified with the passage of time.

 

The Causes of Normalization

Comparing British, American, and German alternate histories reveals insights into the specific dynamics of normalization and shows the phenomenon to be really the byproduct of separate, yet mutually reinforcing, trends. Common to all, at the most basic level, has been organic normalization. As the Nazi era has receded further into the past, the disappearance of the living witnesses and the emergence of new generations lacking firsthand knowledge of the Third Reich have promoted the emergence of a less judgmental and more flexible perspective towards it as a historical epoch. This trend has been partly visible, as noted above, in the fading intensity of the fantasies and nightmares that originally underpinned the various allohistorical scenarios in the first place. Yet it is important to stress that these fantasies and nightmares have not so much faded owing to the simple passing of time, but more specifically owing to the emergence of new postwar concerns that have increasingly placed the Nazi era in their shadow. As a result of this trend, the writers of alternate history have ceased viewing the Nazi past as a subject possessing historic value in and of itself.

Instead, they have regarded it more and more from a presentist perspective and have instrumentalized it in polemical fashion to serve other interests. The two primary ways in which the Nazi legacy has been instrumentalized has been through its universalization and relativization. Many writers, typically possessing left-liberal political views, have universalized the experience of the Nazi era in order to draw lessons from it that might help direct attention to present-day problems. Some, such as Brian Aldiss, Norman Spinrad, Harry Mulisch, Ward Moore, and David Dvorkin, used alternate history to condemn cold-war anticommunism, whether during the Vietnam or Reagan eras. Others, like Gary Goss, George Steiner, Simon Louvish, and Harry Turtledove, used alternate history to condemn the persistence of nationalism, racism, and the recurrence of genocide in the present (or, in the case of Daniel Quinn, to condemn the contemporary ignorance of genocides of the past). Many left-leaning British writers, like Giles Cooper, Kevin Brownlow, Len Deighton, and Madeleine Bunting, universalized the Nazi era by claiming that it was not merely the Germans but rather all people (and especially the British) who possessed the capability to embrace fascism. And German writers, like Otto Basil and Helmut Heissenbüttel, used the Third Reich as a universal metaphor for the persistence of various and sundry contemporary evils. The relativization of the Nazi past, by contrast, typically has been promoted by writers on the conservative side of the political spectrum. In the United States during and after the cold war, anticommunist writers like John Lukacs, Brad Linaweaver, and Pat Buchanan portrayed a Nazi Victory in World War II in benign terms in order to focus attention on the evils of the Soviet Union. In Britain, conservatives like John Charmley and Alan Clark dismissed the threat of a Nazi victory in order to condemn the legacy of Churchill. While in Germany, self-professed conservatives like Alexander Demandt and Michael Salewski, as well as less openly political writers like Christoph Ransmayr and Thomas Ziegler, have seemingly done the same in order to help clear the way for the creation of a normal sense of national identity for the newly reunified German nation.

Another factor involved in the process of normalization has been the aestheticization of the Nazi era. This phenomenon - which largely refers to the tendency of writers to approach the Nazi era less from a moral than an aesthetic perspective - has appeared in different forms. Writers such as Craig Raine, David Dvorkin, E. M. Nathanson, and Len Deighton portrayed their Nazi characters as complex human beings partly to reject the common literary stereotypes of Nazis as sadistic brutes." In so doing, however, they abandoned the morally principled tradition of portraying Nazism as absolute evil. Other writers aestheticized the Nazi past by producing narratives that dwelled excessively on the era’s violence and horror. The utilization of sadistic imagery and gratuitous sex and violence by such writers as Norman Spinrad, Steve Erickson, Eric Norden, Joseph Heywood, Brad Linaweaver, David Dvorkin, Newt Gingrich, and Otto Basil, among others, shows an ongoing fascination with the deviant world of the perpetrators and a diminished concern with the suffering of the victims. Finally, the application of humor to the subject of the Third Reich in recent years provides clear evidence of the waning appeal of moralism.

The normalization of the Nazi past, in short, is not an undifferentiated process but should be seen as a complex phenomenon composed of parallel trends that are different in motivation but ultimately quite similar in their cultural consequences.

 

Alternate History and Normalization: How Representative a Trend?

Having described how postwar works of alternate history have normalized the Nazi past, it remains unclear how representative this trend really is. Although a great many allohistorical narratives of the Third Reich have appeared in the years since 1945, they remained largely unnoticed and were regarded as quite marginal until the last decade or so. This relative neglect is partly due to the undeniable fact that many of these narratives are of uneven literary quality. For certain skeptics, this fact alone would suffice to reject alternate histories altogether as unworthy of serious study. It is true that, at their worst, alternate histories are poorly written, implausible works of low-brow literature produced by obscure, mediocre, and onetime writers.” Novels like Newt Gingrich’s 2945 and films like David Bradley’s They Saved Hitler’s Brain have done little to boost alternate history’s reputation. One might object that it is unfair to judge the entire genre by its least distinguished examples, yet even if they are tossed aside, the fact remains that alternate histories of Nazism have largely been produced by amateurs. Few of the figures who have produced such narratives have had significant prior experience writing in an allohistorical vein. Fewer still have devoted their careers to writing about the Third Reich.” Critics could be forgiven, therefore, for viewing these alternate histories with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Nevertheless, such accounts demand respectful consideration for several reasons. While most authors of alternate histories have been newcomers to the genre, they have been able to draw upon unique experiences and indisputable talents in crafting their tales. A significant number of writers possessed direct firsthand experience of the Nazi era, either as soldiers who fought against the Germans in World War II, as journalists who covered it for the Allied press, or as propagandists who were deeply involved in the effort to defeat the enemy. Brian Aldiss, Aaron Bank, Pierre Boulle, Ewan Butler, David Charnay, Giles Cooper, Len Deighton, Edwin Fadiman, H. L. Gold, Helmut Heissenbüttel, C. M. Kornbluth, Philip Mackie, William Overgard, Rod Serling, and Jerry Yulsman all served in the war as combat soldiers or intelligence officers. William Shirer worked as a wartime journalist, and C. S. Forester, Noël Coward, and Hendrik Willem van Loon pitched in as propagandists. Their postwar speculations about how the past might have been different reflect valuable eyewitness experiences of how it “really” was. Moreover, even if the producers of alternate history have lacked experience in the genre and in-depth familiarity with the subject of Nazism, a great many have been highly regarded in their own fields of endeavor. These include prominent science fiction writers like Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, H. L. Gold, C. M. Kornbluth, Barry Malzberg, Ward Moore, Rod Serling, and Norman Spinrad; mainstream novelists like Martin Amis, Pierre Boulle, Len Deighton, Steve Erickson, C. S. Forester, Harry Mulisch, Christopher Priest, Daniel Quinn, Christoph Ransmayr, Philip Roth, and George Steiner; filmmakers like David Bradley, Kçvin Brownlow, and Armin Mueller-Stahl; playwrights like Noël Coward, Giles Cooper, and Philip Mackie; journalists like William Shirer and Robert Harris; historians such as Henry Turner, Niall Ferguson, and Eberhard Jäckel; poets like Craig Raine; and comic book authors such as Len Wein and Walter Moers. As producers of alternate histories, these figures have proved themselves to be thoughtful, creative, and provocative individuals who have earned critical acclaim in the general world of Western arts and letters.

More importantly, these writers’ prominent reputations have enabled their works to reach an extremely large audience. Many alternate histories of the Third Reich have attained impressive commercial success. A significant number of allohistorical novels have become bestsellers, including Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream, Len Deighton’s SS-GB, George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristôbal ofA.H., Robert Harris’s Fatherland, Otto Basil’s Wenn das der Führer wüsste, Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, Joseph Heywood’s The Berkut, Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara, Stephen Fry’s Making History, and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow. 14 Non-fiction works employing allohistorical reasoning have also become bestsellers, such as Pat Buchanan’s A Republic, Not an Empire, John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory, and Ralph Giordano’s Wenn Hitler den Krieg gewonnen hätte. Television broadcasts like The Other Man and An Englishman’s Castle were hailed as media events at the time of their initial showing, while The City on the Edge ofForeverhas gone down in history as among the most notable American television episodes ever. Even those narratives that were not bestsellers reached many millions of people simply owing to the mass-market nature of the cultural media in which they appeared. William Shirer’s Look Magazine article “If Hitler Had Won World War II,” the Saturday Night Live skit “What If: Oberman,” the Twilight Zone episodes “He’s Alive!,” and “Cradle of Darkness,” as well as the satirical pieces published in National Lampoon, reached many millions of readers and viewers when they originally appeared.

With this kind of massive popularity, alternate histories of the Third Reich have arguably reflected as well as shaped Western views of the Nazi era to a greater extent than critics might care to admit. Of course, evaluating the extent to which the normalized conclusions of alternate histories have reflected and influenced the broader views of society is an extremely difficult task that can only be approached by surveying their postwar reception. Generally speaking, the response to alternate histories since 1945 can be divided into two distinct phases. From the time of World War II itself up through the early 196os, alternate histories in Britain, the United States, and Germany largely received unanimous praise.,’ In these years, the general public accepted these accounts’ adherence to the traditional moralistic mode of portraying Nazism as well as their affirmation of the virtues of remembrance. With the increasing normalization of alternate histories after the mid-196os, however, the reaction to them became quite polarized. Hardly any works were given unanimous praise any longer, and quite a number sparked fierce controversy. In Germany, Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream was banned by the courts for over a decade, while Robert Harris’s Fatherland was seized by the police and partially confiscated after being rejected by numerous publishers and roundly criticized by the press. In Britain, Kevin Brownlow’s film It Happened Here was censored for over a generation after being widely attacked in the media; John Charmley’s book Churchill: The End of Glory was unanimously condemned; and novels such as George Steiner’s The Portage to San Cristôbal of A.H., Martin Amis’s Time cArrow, and Stephen Fry’s Making History were subjected to vigorous condemnations as well. These latter works were also attacked in the United States, as was Pat Buchanan’s book A Republic, Not an Empire. Many works of alternate history escaped critical assault and met with respectful, if not admiring, reviews, but the strongly negative reactions towards the higher-profile examples clearly signify that they had struck a nerve. The negative reaction underscores the enduring opposition to depicting the Nazi era in anything but condemnatory terms. In short, as the conclusions of alternate histories have become more normalized, the resistance to them has grown increasingly strong.

What explains the divergence between the representation of the Nazi past in postwar alternate histories and the popular response towards them? In part, it is due to the conflicting priorities of the creators and consumers of popular culture. (Herbert J. Gans, Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (New York, 1999) p. 76.) As Herbert Gans has argued, the writers, filmmakers, and others who create works of popular culture typically come from educational and economic backgrounds that are quite different from those of-their audiences. (Ibid., pp. 33-38.)

As a result, the former bring a range of expectations to their work that are not necessarily shared by the latter. The creators of popular culture are typically driven by genuine artistic ambitions and strive to make their work as original and imaginatively compelling as possible. They are therefore reluctant to remain confined by predictable and stereotypical conventions of character, plot, and setting, and frequently attempt to break with them in the effort to create something inventive and new. Audiences, by contrast, usually expect the familiar. In particular, Gans notes, they expect and prefer works of popular culture to affirm time-honored moral certainties. The, problem, of course, is that these expectations of moralism are frequently not met by authors who are eager, instead, for their work to subvert conventional expectations.

The diverging priorities of the producers and consumers of popular culture partly explain why postwar alternate histories of the Third Reich have met with such a stormy reception. Many of these narratives’ creators have, in fact, been motivated by artistic ambitions to abandon ethically rooted stereotypes associated with the Nazi era and to portray it in more normalized fashion. Various political agendas, as noted above, have also driven the creators to universalize and relativize the Nazi past. But whatever the motives, the result has been the same – the abandonment of moralism. The consumers of these texts, by contrast, have persisted in desiring them to validate pre-existing moral certainties.” Audiences want to see Nazis portrayed as evil demons rather than as complex human beings and protest when their expectations are not satisfied. That being said, how readers have responded to the normalization of the Nazi past in works of alternate history is quite difficult to determine with any degree of certainty. While an enduring desire for moralism is strongly suggested by the critical reviews of many alternate histories, it is true that most reviews are produced by a professional class of critics, journalists, and scholars whose perspectives may not be representative of typical readers. Judging by the fact that many works of alternate history have become commercial successes despite negative reviews, it is possible that their depictions of the Nazi era have resonated with a greater portion of society than the negative reviews suggest. Indeed, the more that alternate history continues to prosper as a commercial enterprise, scholars will have to seriously consider the possibility that the genre is tapping into a popular willingness to accept unconventional methods of representing the real past.

Regardless of how alternate histories have been read and interpreted by a broader audience, their mass popularity reveals the need to acknowledge their importance in shaping the memory of the Nazi era. Until now, alternate history has been seen as a fringe phenomenon and basically discounted as culturally insignificant. Continuing to ignore it, however, would be a mistake. Popular culture, scholars have shown, possesses great subversive potential; its narratives, images, and messages can easily challenge and undermine those produced by the “official” or high-culture establishment.” This being the case, it is highly possible that allohistorical narratives on the Third Reich may be subverting the historical narratives disseminated by political, cultural, and academic elites. In recent years, such elites in Great Britain, the United States, Germany, and other Western nations have worked energetically to keep the Nazi past at the forefront of public attention. Whether in the form of official, statesponsored commemorative sites, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. and Germany’s new national Holocaust memorial in Berlin, or high-brow works of individual creative expression – films such as Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and The Grey Zone-not to mention the unending stream of scholarly monographs on the Third Reich, the representatives of high culture have consistently affirmed a message of Nazism’s inherent evil and the need to remain vigilant against its recurrence by preserving its lessons in memory. Yet this impulse towards cultural moralism has hardly stood unopposed and, indeed, seems to have bein to spawn something of a backlash. This reaction has been most visible in the growing hostility towards Holocaust consciousness among polemically minded academic scholars, such as Norman Finkelstein and Peter Novick. It has further surfaced in recent complaints in Great Britain about the “Hitlerisation” of history courses in British schools, whose strong focus on the subject of Nazi Germany has allegedly led to the neglect of other historical eras.” And, as noted above, it has manifested itself at the popular cultural level in the shameless exploitation of the Nazi past for commercial as well as artistic purposes, whether in the form of Hitler wine bottles or toilet-bowl scrubbers. The impulse to break taboos visible in all of these examples testifies to an increasing exhaustion, if not outright boredom, with moralism and a desire for a more uninhibited relationship with the Nazi past. Alternate histories have strongly contributed to this trend by abandoning ethically oriented modes of representation and by questioning the utility of remembrance. This undercurrent of dissent may, as yet, still be exceptional within an otherwise vigorous tradition of moralistic historical representation, but in the future it may become normative. We need to be aware of its existence, therefore, lest we become overly complacent about the task of educating future generations about the past.

 

Alternate History and Normalization: How Worrisome a Trend?

Given the subversive potential of alternate history, to what extent does its normalized depiction of the Nazi past represent a worrisome trend? To be sure, alternate history is merely one of many forms of culture through which the representation - and, by extension, the eventual memory - of the past is influenced. All the same, it is worth being aware of its potential impact. The proliferation of allohistorical narratives of the Third Reich presents grounds for concern for several reasons. First, alternate history can easily be seen as diverting our attention away from real history." While studying history can enable us to understand the problems of the past (and possibly discover new solutions for the present), reading works of alternate history can easily be dismissed as escapist entertainment. At a time in which educators are constantly bemoaning the lack of historical knowledge within the population at large, alternate history may be worsening the problem by siphoning off the attention that real history deserves, but currently lacks. Moreover, alternate history risks distorting what little people already know of the past. The more allohistorical tales one reads, the blurrier the line can become between fact and fiction, between reality and wishful thinking. The producers of alternate history, furthermore, have frequently been guilty of confusing readers about their underlying motivations or agendas for speculating about the past. Tales of a Nazi victory in World War II, for example, have frequently been misunderstood as fantasy scenarios produced by rightwingers (a suspicion bolstered by the fact that neo-Nazis embraced - even as they overlooked the anti-Nazi messages of - Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream and Robert Harris’s Fatherland).‘ So common have such cases become that the producers of alternate history now frequently take pains to stress the apolitical nature of their work so as to not be branded neo-Nazis." Finally, the humorous depiction of the Nazi era in many works of alternate history risks trivializing the past and dulling people’s sensitivity towards an era of great pain and suffering. Satirizing the Nazi era, after all, makes it harder for it to be taken seriously as a repository of important admonitory moral lessons. By distracting us from, by distorting our awareness about, and by discouraging us from remembering the reality of, the actual past, alternate history represents a phenomenon that bears watching.

Yet the situation is complicated. Although normalization presents certain dangers, it is not without its virtues. For it is precisely by counteracting and breaking down traditional moralistic views towards the past that normalization can be seen as providing a useful service. Historians, after all, have long recognized that an ethically oriented approach to history can easily lead to the subjective distortion of the past and ultimately block true historical understanding. As Leopold von Ranke asserted long ago, to truly understand the past, we have to adopt an objective and empathetic, rather than a judgmental, perspective towards the historical figures who determined its course. Without evaluating the past on its own terms and by its own moral standards, we impose our own values upon the historical record and thereby risk misjudging and distorting it. At the same time, an overly moralistic view runs the risk of mythologizing history and transforming it into a collection of ritualized ethical lessons that, over time, can easily become stale and cease to resonate within society at large. It was for this reason that German historian Martin Broszat in the r98os called on Germans to "historicize" the Nazi era by abandoning their simplistic black-and-white image of the Third Reich as a story of demonic villains and virtuous heroes and replacing it with a grayer perspective that recognized the period’s immense complexity. Normalizing the past thus can be greeted as a method of removing distortions, reinvigorating interest in the past, and advancing genuine historical understanding.

To a degree, the normalization of the Nazi past in postwar works of alternate history can be seen as advancing these praiseworthy goals. The normalized depiction of a Nazi victory in World War II in British alternate histories, for example, can be viewed as a helpful corrective to an overly mythologized view of the war in British memory. For even if the concept of the "finest hour" possessed obvious moral utility in reaffirming the evil of Nazism, it obscured how contingent Britain’s decision to fight on messages of - Norman Spinrad’s The Iron Dream and Robert Harris’s Fatherland).‘ So common have such cases become that the producers of alternate history now frequently take pains to stress the apolitical nature of their work so as to not be branded neo-Nazis." Finally, the humorous depiction of the Nazi era in many works of alternate history risks trivializing the past and dulling people’s sensitivity towards an era of great pain and suffering. Satirizing the Nazi era, after all, makes it harder for it to be taken seriously as a repository of important admonitory moral lessons. By distracting us from, by distorting our awareness about, and by discouraging us from remembering the reality of, the actual past, alternate history represents a phenomenon that bears watching.

Yet normalization also has more problematic dimensions. A valueneutral approach towards history can easily-shade into an apologetic kind of historical writing that excuses the immoral acts of the past as simply the result of different ethical standards. When seeking to explain acts of evil, a purely objective approach fails, for the attempt to understand such acts ends up condoning them. This is particularly true of the Nazi era, for to insist that it be treated like any other historical period necessarily marginalizes its unique criminal features. It is too soon to expect the Nazi past to be treated like more distant eras of history. Indeed, the impatient call to normalize this particular era can often mask a desire to forget it altogether. Certain works of alternate history have clearly fallen into this category, most notably those produced by politically conservative American and German writers, who have consciously relativized Nazi crimes as part of the respective efforts to condemn communism or pave the way for a healthy German sense of national identity. These works embody the form of normalization that is the most troubling, and consequently they should be exposed to rigorous criticism.

To fully assess how worrisome alternate histories of Nazism really are, however, it is necessary to return to the important matter of their national origins.

Thus the allohistorical representation of the Nazi past has largely been an Anglo-American phenomenon. German accounts have been comparatively small in number. This fact provides some reassurance, for even if recent German narratives have normalized the Nazi past for nationalistic reasons, they represent a minority trend within the broader movement. Were Germans today the chief producers of alternate histories, it would be another matter entirely, for it would suggest that the nation responsible for the Third Reich was failing to heed its lessons. As it is, however, German accounts have been far outnumbered by those produced in Great Britain and the United States. And however unfair it might seem to say it, it is less worrisome to see the normalization of the Nazi era being promoted by Britons and Americans than by Germans, for their nations’ lack of responsibility for producing the Third Reich in the first place diminishes (though by no means eliminates) their historical obligation to learn its "proper" lessons. This being said, Anglo-American alternate histories of Nazism are hardly unproblematic. We have seen that they have contributed significantly to an increasingly normalized view of the Nazi period within British as well as American consciousness. Further still, their impact may not merely be confined to the domestic scene but may be international in scope. As Anglo-American ‘alternate histories continue to attain worldwide reach through translation and foreign distribution, their unconventional depictions of the Nazi era may shape the contours of memory worldwide. In partaking of the increasing globalization of culture, in short, alternate histories of Nazism may be promoting the globalization of normalization.

 

Alternate History in 2005

It is far from certain how alternate histories of Nazism will evolve in our world that has been anything but predictable in the wake of the events of September 11, 2001. But if past trends provide any indication, future all historical narratives will directly reflect contemporary fears and fantasies. The rise of Islamic terrorism, for example had a notable impact upo memory. For as this violent ideological movement and its notorious figurehead, Osama bin Laden, have emerged as the new symbols of contemporary evil, they have prompted numerous comparisons among Western observers to the established symbols of evil in the Western imagination - Nazism and Adolf Hitler.27 As long as the latter evils are consistently invoked in order to understand the former, the Nazi past will remain solidly rooted in popular awareness as the West’s benchmark of immorality. (See, for example, Andrew Sullivan, "This is a Religious War," New York Times Magazine, October 7, 2001, PP. 44-47, 52-53. President George W. Bush’s phrase, the "Axis of Evil," is another example of this form of historical analogy.)

Whatever the impact of our post-September ii world on future works of alternate history, the ultimate significance of the latter may lie in their ability to help us understand the former. Throughout this study, we have seen that alternate history relies fundamentally upon the imagination to envision alternate outcomes for the past. At the deepest level, nothing has been altered as much since September 11, 2001 as the Western imagination. Deeds once thought impossible - planes toppling skyscrapers, biological weapons being mobilized against civilians - have now become part of our new everyday reality. Propitiously, alternate history may help us become more attuned to a world as yet unimagined. Eerily enough, some of the allohistorical works discussed in this study anticipated some of the events of September ii. For instance, Vita Sackville-West’s novel Grand Canyon presaged the destruction of the World Trade Center by depicting the toppling of New York City’s skyscrapers along Fifth Avenue in the wake of a Nazi attack, and Craig Raine’s play ‘-‘anticipated the 2000s anthrax scare by depicting Vittorio Mussolini defeating Britain and "changing the face of war ... with the anthrax spore.

Alternate history, of course, cannot predict the future. But it can stretch our ability to imagine how it might come about. At a time in which the United States military has consulted Hollywood screenwriters to conceive of still unimagined terror threats, at a time in which pundits everywhere are calling for the development of new paradigms for formulating foreign policy, collecting intelligence, and ensuring domestic security, any means of reshaping our imagination of what may one day come to pass are welcome.

By reminding us that history’s course is not inevitable, that historical events are highly contingent, alternate history can help us rethink our ingrained assumptions not only about the past but also about the present. More than a few of the works discussed in this study suggest ways to protect against unforeseen perils in the new struggle against militant Islamism. The many accounts that have portrayed the Nazis using the threat of nuclear warfare to triumph in World War II, for example, such as Robert Harris’s Fatherlandor Daniel Quinn’s After Dachau, reinforce the need for vigilance against weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of Islamic terrorists. Alternate histories might also be able to help us avoid major foreign policy blunders in the struggle against terrorism. Had the Bush administration only consulted Stephen Fry’s novel, Making History, and reflected on its underlying premise that pre-emptively eliminating evil villains like Hitler can actually make history turn out worse rather than better, it might have thought twice about invading Iraq in order to preempt Saddam Hussein’s ability to use weapons of mass destruction - a decision that threatens to have a boomerang effect and worsen the course of history rather than improve it. Alternate histories may also caution us against certain unexpected risks in the fight against terrorism. In light of the unforeseen difficulties emerging out of the invasion of Iraq, we might do well to recall Len Deighton’s novel SS-GB and Kevin Brownlow’s film It Happened Here, whose portrayal of the British people turning against each other after being defeated by the Germans provides us with a sober lesson about the dangers of domestic divisiveness. And inasmuch as alternate histories prompt us to imagine not only nightmares but also fantasies, we might take solace in the fact that, just as various writers have imagined a world without Hitler being superior to our own, we too can imagine a better Middle East without Osama bin Laden or any number of other threatening figures associated with al-Qaeda and its allies.

In short, by imagining history turning out differently, alternate histories can help us cope with the unpredictability of our contemporary world. Many people have a sense today that the course of history has been dramatically altered by the attacks of 9/II. In attempting to understand where we are headed, we can profit by consulting alternate histories of worlds that never were. By familiarizing ourselves with them, and with the mode of counterfactual thinking underlying them, we may be better equipped to fashion the world as we would like it to be.

 

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