Book review: The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

 

The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld

Hardcover, 524 pages

Published May 2005 by Cambridge University Press 

 

 

I should have read this book a long time ago.  The author Gavriel Rosenfeld is a former interview guest of Dickheads and when I had him on I didn’t have time to read this book first. He is a specialist in the history of the Third Reich. He also grew up in my hometown, our parents knew each other from the Jewish community and he was good friends with my step-brother. Small world huh.

The study of the Nazi Germany era is important for many reasons, I should have to explain it but here we go. The current rise of American fascism and homegrown Nationalism came really close last year to overturning an election. Many similarities to those early days of Hitler we see repeated in the Trump years. Just yesterday as I write this review a shooter scared of white replacement theory popularized by Fox News mouthpiece Tucker Carlson killed 10 people in a Grocery store in a Buffalo NY grocery store.

 I am a science fiction guy, I love the genre and I love when we as a community add to the discourse. As a sub-genre Alternate history is a valuable tool of speculative fiction.  Alt-history has been used for many other parts of history like Harry Turtledove’s Guns of the South or more recently  Lavie Tidhar’s Osama but the Nazi era is the most popular era to explore.  My boy Philip K. Dick might have the most popular with Man in High Castle but there are a lot more examples.
I don’t really have the bandwidth to read them all so Rosenfeld’s very detailed history of fake history is an extremely helpful resource. I was interested to see that Alt-histories exploring the Nazis winning pre-date the war itself. British novels warning of the failure to stop Hitler were more common than I could have imagined. I had heard of Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika night written in 1937, but Rosenfeld does a good job breaking down the various book by the decade.

While not all Rosenfeld's reviews are positive, he highlights the things he feels either make a story work or not work. Most importantly he breaks down the ways each work compares to the fabric of our reality. It makes for a very interesting study. I was surprised that Man in the High Castle only took up a few pages. I made a list of several novels I wanted to check out. Highlighted lots of stuff on several pages. Now I feel when I talk about Man in the High Castle I will have a wider understanding of Alt-history and Nazism.

This book is a great resource that historians of science fiction itself should have on the shelf. 

The Dickheads podcast episode with Dr. Rosenfeld...

Dickheads episode video that includes Dr. Rosenfeld

Audio of the interview