THE WORLD HITLER NEVER MADE Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism Gavriel D. Rosenfeld Cambridge University Press 2005 (pp524 USD30.00 ISBN 0-521-84706-0) Reviewed by L. J. Hurst

What do Philip K Dick, C. S. Forester, Newt Gingrich, Philip Roth and Robert Harris have in common? Not just that they wrote alternate histories, but they wrote alternate histories about Hitler. What, though, distinguishes a Dick from a Gingrich? Toleration according to Gavriel Rosenfeld: that is, the closer to War World Two an author wrote the more likely he or she was to regard Nazism as a total evil, and the later a work was published the more likely it has been to "normalize" (Rosenfeld's term) the consequences of a Nazi victory. It seems a reasonable view, certainly Katharine Burdekin's SWASTIKA NIGHT, published as early as 1937, saw the dreadful consequences of Nazi philosophy (Reviewed VECTOR 129). During the war a small book such as H. V. Morton's I, JAMES BLUNT (1942), set in 1945 a year after a Nazi conquest, makes the consequences clear as miners are worked to death and children hand their parents to the Gestapo, as had Serpell and Brown's IF HITLER COMES (1940/41) (See "Anywhere But Stoke Poges" VECTOR 148).

Sarban's THE SOUND OF HIS HORN (1952) was one Briton's post-war vision of the world if the Nazis imposed their dream - men chased through hunting parks as living prey, and Dick's THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1962) was an American's - Africans kept as cannibal specimens in zoos. Then advance thirty years and in Harris's FATHERLAND (1992) consider that Liverpudlians are migrating to Hamburg to play beat music in the bars of the Reeperbahn - the Nazis might have won, but the victory of pop music seems inevitable. If The Beatles would always have appeared was there any point to the fight against Hitler? Against this apparent stream of determinism, Rosenfeld recognises that there is a contrary stream of alternate history: Hitler was defeated, but he was not killed. From secret bases in South America, or villages in the Tyrol, or in laboratories scattered around the world, Hitler has been living on, like a virus threatening to break out into a new pandemic. The world only seems to have seen the end of Hitler.

Norman Spinrad's IRON DREAM (1972) could imagine Adolf Hitler never becoming Fuehrer but migrating to the USA, working as a comic-book artist and fulfilling his fantasies in sword-and-sorcery. Did Spinrad perhaps normalize (that is, lessen) the horror of Hitler by converting his victims into fictional characters? The Alternate Worlds of Hitler stretch out not just through literature, films, radio and television but also into carton strips, comic sketches and musical theatre. Rosenfeld considers them all in varying depth, and not only British and US authors but German as well, pointing out how neo-Nazis can misread examination as propaganda. Rosenfeld, according to his Introduction, was rather like Moliere's gentleman who found he was speaking prose without knowing it: it was only after he read FATHERLAND, SS-GB (1978) and remembered reading Dick among his SF, that he discovered he was reading Alternate History. He hadn't known that it existed. Double-checking, though, that is not surprising as it sounds - while there are many alternate histories, and SF fans know about them, there are few books about the subject; possibly none. Reading Brian Stableford's entry "Alternate History" in the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SF, there are no studies listed, only theme collections. Rosenfeld's may be the first critical volume dedicated to Alternate History, though it restricts itself very self-consciously.

On the other hand Rosenfeld struggles to master his subject more than the size of this volume suggests. While he appears to give a near-complete coverage of the development of the literature (that movement towards "normalization") he sometimes misses works, does not even refer to them to show that he is aware that they exist. Rosenfeld seems unaware of John Clute's "Hitler Wins" entry in the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SF. According to Clute, a Hungarian, Laszlo Gaspar, published the first post-war Hitler-wins tale in 1945 itself, seven years before Sarban's HORN. Rosenfeld also ignores the Gregory Benford/Martin H. Greenberg-edited HITLER VICTORIOUS (1986) which collects many of the stories he covers and includes a third version of Brad Linaweaver's "Moon of Ice", while Rosenfeld only mentions other re-workings. Paying much attention to the Holocaust and the anti-Semitism of the Nazis, Rosenfeld misses other elements of religion which would have completed the picture. All the Nazi leadership, with the exception of Alfred Rosenburg, were raised as Roman Catholics, and in Frederick Mullaly's HITLER HAS WON (1975) Hitler makes himself Pope, but that is another work missing from THE WORLD THAT HITLER MADE.

If there are works omitted then the tables and percentages calculated by Rosenfeld in his Appendix are near worthless and his analysis of titles by period and tendency to normalization cannot be trusted. Cheekily, in an endnote he comments on his use of figures: "In calling these books bestsellers I do not adhere to a numerical standard of any kind".

While he studies the different themes (Hitler Lives, Hitler Wins, Hitler is never born) he mentions other common areas without interest, or even noticing their commonality. Why, for instance, are some stories cast as dreams, while others are not? C.M. Kornbluth's "Two Dooms" (1958), is set around Los Alamos, but its action takes place in a mescaline dream, while Tom Shippey's 1986 story, "Enemy Transmission" is set in a sleep laboratory at Oxford. Wartime stories are based on "documents" (James Blunt's diary, and a journalist's account in IF HITLER COMES), while it is only the more recent works that use the detective story as their form. The police are co-opted by the Nazis, but Rosenfeld does not consider the difference between the political police such as French Milice, created by Vichy, and other officers. He could have pointed out how earlier works describe characters forced to become criminals (such as Morton's James Blunt), so that the historical movement is from criminal to policeman.

Being an American Rosenfeld may not notice, either, how certain themes are played up in the British works. He mentions Humphrey Jenning's 1943 film THE SILENT VILLAGE that re-created the Lidice massacre in the fictional Welsh village of Cwmgiedd, but does not mention James Blunt's correspondence with his daughter in south Wales and her account of the miners being worked to death. Clearly the Nazi threat to all parts of Britian was being emphasised, but Jennings and Morton had a very tight rope to walk - they had to emphasise the threat without recalling the police and army being sent into the Welsh valleys to force the miners underground before the First World War; forced into submission by Britain's then Home Secretary, Winston Churchill!

Although he does not use the phrase, Rosenfeld is critical of writers who lack high seriousness. They may have technical ability, but they write with an empty heart - this is his criticism of Martin Amis' TIME'S ARROW (1991) and Stephen Fry's MAKING HISTORY (1996) and perhaps also of Len Deighton. However, in his discussion of SS-GB, his lack of reading shows itself again when he fails to realise that the murder victim has a significant name - Spode. Spode, Roderick rather then Deighton's William Spode, was P. G. Wodehouse's send-up of Sir Oswald Mosley, Hitler's British chum - "that frightful ass Spode, swanking about" as he is described. No matter whether Britain could have fallen, Deighton introduced a subversive element into his fiction by re-using the name from Wodehouse's earlier comedy, which Rosenfeld has failed to catch.

One of the strongest criticisms of Rosenfeld, though, must be his historicism, in which any change of decade becomes an epoch. On page 90 he actually attributes the burst of conservative re-appraisals of Nazism in the last ten years (by editors and authors such as Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts) to the "improvement in the national mood" engendered by the election of Tony Blair. There are strong arguments against a work exemplifying its period - as the biography of Morton published this year makes clear, I, JAMES BLUNT was commissioned by the Ministry of Information as a propaganda piece from Morton - it was his only work of fiction. Though free to use his invention he could not have a written a work in which Hitler won and everything was wonderful - it would technically have been defined as "spreading alarm and despondency". On a near-similar basis people who repeated stories they heard from Lord Haw-Haw were prosecuted, frequently fined from 10/- to £2.00, and had the ignominy of seeing their names in the courts column of the local newspapers.

Considering that Hitler might not be born, and what the world might have been like, still appeals - without ever mentioning him, that was the subject of the "Woman's Hour" playlet. The question, though, should not be Should Cousins Marry, but does not reducing the implications of Hitler's birth to a twist-in-the-tail entertainment also reduce the value of all the lives lost because of Hitler? When concern for that question shows itself in THE WORLD HITLER NEVER MADE, as it sometimes does amidst all its other detail, it justifies itself.