Why Alternate History Matters
BERENBAUM, MICHAEL
Why Alternate History Matters The World Hitler Never Made By Gavriel D. Rosenfeld Cambridge. 524 pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Michael Berenbaum Professor of theology, University of Judaism;...
...And the man who is about to speak knows more about the history of nonsense than anyone has ever known...
...Would he have faced justice or eluded it...
...Like Gershom Scholem's mentor and rival Martin Buber, Gavriel Rosenfeld elevates our needs before responding to them...
...And they sell...
...Not so with prescriptive normalization, those who wish we would merely absorb the ugly events of the Nazi years and relegate them to the past...
...Sometimes, Rosenfeld's passionate sense of morality gets the better of him...
...What might have happened if a defeated Hitler had lived...
...Why should anyone care as passionately as Rosenfeld does about what did not happen...
...Germany develops the atomic bomb and England succumbs...
...In addition, he maintains, they are capable of "removing distortions, reinvigorating interest and advancing genuine historical understanding...
...After all, there were other evil events in history...
...With due apologies to mysticism, I am now tempted to say no one knows better than Gavriel D. Rosenfeld the "'alternate history"—as he terms it—relating to Adolf Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust...
...Although one may bemoan the organic normalization that sets in with the passage of time and the fading of memory, the process is natural...
...We know what Slobodan Milosevic has done with his trial at the Hague, and we may soon see what Saddam Hussein does with his in Baghdad...
...Consider what the world might be like without the Holocaust...
...The obsession with Hitler, he laments, seemingly exonerates the German people from their responsibility for the events of the Nazi era, especially the Holocaust...
...Nor is anyone likely to know more than he does soon...
...a German-American alliance is created to defeat Communism...
...speculations involving diverse portrayals, major cultural differences and progressive time periods...
...He makes a compelling case that alternate histories tell us not only how the past could have been different but how far we have traveled from it...
...Some authors explore what might have happened had Hitler never been bom, or if he had been a successful rather than a failed artist...
...The authors of these and numerous similar alternate histories dare to ask whether the world would have been better off or not...
...And how it seeks to dilute the singularity of Hitler's focus on the "Final Solution to the Jewish problem" because it is too parochial...
...His scope is cross-cultural: Though he is most at home in American, British and German literature, he considers as well Dutch, French and Hebrew material...
...The divisions overlap but are necessary for analysis...
...One can imagine the Germans winning World War II with Hitler at the helm and—perhaps more easily—without Hitler, under the leadership of someone making rational decisions...
...Rosenfeld's prodigiously researched volume analyzes the counterfactual works of authors who write of events that never happened, but could or should or might have happened...
...moreover, antiSemitism is the "longest hatred...
...Would American anti-Semitism have receded...
...A moralist at heart, the author views this as not merely unacceptable but abhorrent...
...Sixty years after the Shoah, Jews have yet to recover demographically from the nearly successful "Final Solution...
...Each section is further refined into several "what if...
...he depicts the imaginative literature as a criticism of the society and the era when it was written...
...Novick is a historian...
...From personal experience I can attest to the fact that his use of sources is questionable...
...Witness the way the Left has compared Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to German treatment of the Jews...
...At other points, Rosenfeld is critical of those who emphasize the acts of individual Germans and the German nation that mitigate the uniqueness of Hitler's crime and his overwhelming personal culpability...
...The World Hitler Never Made is divided into three parts: "The Nazis Win World War II," "Alternate Hitlers," and "Hypothetical Holocausts...
...The fact that alternate histories are not reality does not discourage their audience from suspending disbelief and going along with them...
...If Hitler is demonized sufficiently, the Germans are relieved of their responsibility for the crime, yet when he is not demonized the Führer 's guilt is diminished...
...author, "A Promise to Remember" Over a half century ago Saul Lieberman, the renowned Talmudist and quasi-czar of the Jewish Theological Seminary faculty, reportedly introdiiced Gershom Scholem, who pioneered the field of Jewish mysticism, by saying: "You know that I believe mysticism is nonsense, total and complete nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship...
...As many of us who read Philip Roth's The Plot Against America discovered, learning how an envisioned event turns out can keep us on the edge of our seats...
...responsibility to win the War inherent in the praise routinely accorded the "greatest generation...
...What might Germany look like if it had liberated itself from Hitler and defeated the Nazi regime on its own...
...The new Germany was born in defeat with conditions imposed by the occupying powers...
...There is no better guide than The World Hitler Never Made, which takes us through this strange domain without descending into it...
...The works examined that imagine Germany won the War present a variety of scenarios: The United States remains isolationist and does not join the battle...
...Together with the relativists, often on the Right, it is contended that the evil ofthat epoch was hardly different from other evils prevalent in the contemporary world...
...The questions are endlessly interesting, and the answers are quite intriguing...
...Could he have turned his international trial into a forum of self-justification...
...Rosenfeld sees a correlation between the apparently marginal phenomena of alternate history and more mainstream cultural trends...
...Universalization is the prevailing inclination on the Left to downplay, or totally deny, the particular fate of the Jews at the hands of the Nazis...
...perhaps inevitable...
...Gavriel Rosenfeld decries four tendencies that he finds in alternate histories of the Nazi era—normalization, universalization, relativization, and estheticization...
...The best of them even receive appreciative critical attention...
...Rosenfeld identifies two forms of normalization, organic and prescriptive, and opposes both...
...Which brings us to the question of how different the world would be if the "Final Solution" had achieved its goal...
...Anyone who wants to understand the cultural impact of the Nazi era will have to explore the netherworld of alternate history Rosenfeld has uncovered—like it or not, nonsense or not...
...Would a successful assassination have led to a separate peace with the West, to an acceptance of a German defeat on terms less than unconditional surrender...
...Would Israel have been reborn...
...He also suggests, but does not fully treat, the relationship between alternate histories and the development of Holocaust museums, films and scholarships...
...His net is wide: popular or esoteric novels, short stories, polemical essays, films, plays, television programs, and comic books...
...Would the Jewish experience be less anxious...
...The writers who focus their attention on Hitler, and not on the cadre surrounding him and the nation that was anything but reluctant to carry out the annihilation of the Jews, in the author's view minimize German national responsibility for giving Hitler the opportunity to govern and for efficiently, if not enthusiastically, carrying out the murders...
...The last is the treatment of Hitler and the Holocaust in esthetic rather than moral terms...
...Relativization denies the absolute evil of the Nazis, and disclaims any U.S...
...They imagine what might have occurred had he been killed in 1923, before 1933, before 1939 when Jews were being persecuted and arrested but not killed, or even in 1944 when the War was virtually lost yet the killing continued unabated...
...Along the way one can take issue with the author for calling Norman Finkelstein a scholar and speaking of Finkelstein and Peter Novick in one sentence because both oppose the role that Holocaust memory plays today...
...Fmkelstem is at best a polemicist...
Vol. 88 • July 2005 • No. 4
