The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism

What if the Nazis had triumphed in the Second World War� What if Adolf Hitler had escaped Berlin for the jungles of Latin America in 1945� Gavriel Rosenfeld's pioneering study explores why such counterfactual questions on the subject of Nazism have proliferated in recent years within Western popular culture. Examining a wide range of novels, short stories, films, television programmes, plays, comic books, and scholarly essays that have appeared in Great Britain, the United States, and Germany since 1945, Rosenfeld shows how the portrayal of historical events that never happened reflects the evolving memory of the Third Reich's real historical legacy. He concludes that the shifting representation of Nazism in works of alternate history, as well as the popular reactions to them, highlights their subversive role in promoting the normalization of the Nazi past in Western memory.

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is Associate Professor of History at Fairfield University, Connecticut.