Gabriel D. Rosenfeld, The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge University Press, 2005) pp. 524.

More than a half-century ago, Saul Lieberman, the great Talmudist and quasi Czar of the Jewish Theological Seminary faculty, introduced Gershom Scholem, whose studies of Jewish mysticism had pioneered the field, with an irenic dissent. He is reported to have said: “You know that I believe that mysticism is nonsense, total and complete nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship. And the man who is about to speak knows more about the history of nonsense than anyone has ever known.”

With due apologies to mysticism, one is tempted to write of Gabriel Rosenfeld, who has prodigiously researched alternate histories – his term of choice -- of Nazism that no one knows the history of non-events relating to Adolf Hitler, World War II and the Holocaust, better than Rosenfeld; and no one is likely to know more than he does anytime soon,

Rosenfeld analyzes the works of authors who write of events that did not happen, but could have happened, should have happened or might have happened. His scope is wide; literature -- popular or esoteric, novels, short stories, even polemical essays -- films television, comic books and theater. His knowledge is vast and, his exploration cross-cultural. He is at home in American and British literature as well as German literature. His consideration of Dutch, French or Hebrew literature is less broad, but he appears to have read every novel, seen everything film or television program, read every comic book and short story that contemplated a different, what he termed alternate history.

Why should one care? Why should anyone car as passionately as he does about something that didn’t happen, about imagined scenarios as to how the past could have been different?

Rosenfeld makes a compelling case that alternate histories tell us not only of the past but also of our distance from that past and our confrontation with the present and the future. A rewriting of the past is much more than a work of fantasy; it is a screen on which we project our past and present as we confront the future. Rosenfeld argues that alternate histories demystify; they raise previously forbidden issues. They remind us of the contingency of history; they refute historical determinism as they contemplate a different outcome. They are capable of “removing distortions, reinvigorating interest and advancing genuine historical understanding.” And they sell. They are viable commercially, and the best of them can also receive appreciative critical acclaim.

The work is divided into three sections: World War II, Hitler and the Holocaust and each section is further refined into various scenarios, diverse portrayals and major cultural differences. The divisions are necessary for analysis though they surely overlap.  One can imagine the Germans winning World War II with Hitler at the helm and also -- perhaps more easily so, without Hitler in the leadership where some more rational decisions could have been made.

Authors imagine that Germany had won the war,

The scenarios are many: the United States remains isolationist and does not join the battle, Germany develops the Atomic bomb, England succumbs, cowers in the face of bombing, a German-American alliance is created to defeat Communism. These are but a few of the many possibilities. Authors of alternate histories dare to ask: would the world have been better off or not?

What might have happened if Hitler had lived?

Would he have faced justice or eluded justice? Could he have turned the world stage of such a trial into a forum of self-justification? We know what Slobodan Milosevic has done with his trial and we may soon see what Saddam Hussein does with trial.  Some authors imagine what might have happened had Hitler had never been born or if he had been a successful rather than a failed artist? They imagine what might have occurred had he been killed, in 1923, before 1933, before 1939 when Jews were merely being persecuted and arrested but not killed; or even in 1944 when the war was all but lost and when the killing continued unabated. 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? The New Germany was born in defeat and conditions imposed by outside occupying powers. What might Germany look like if it had liberated itself from Hitler, and defeated the Nazi regime on its own? The questions are endlessly interesting; imagined answers are quite intriguing.

Consider what might have happened had there not been the Holocaust. How would the world have been different? Would Israel have been born? Would the Jewish experience be quite as anxious? Would American antisemitism have receded? Sixty years after the Shoah, Jews have yet to recover demographically from the nearly successful “Final Solution.”

Or imagine – and I shudder at the thought -- if the “Final Solution” had achieved all that it wanted.

The fact that alternate histories did not happen does not discourage the audience for such works from suspending their disbelief and going along with the imagined reality. As many of us who read Philip Roth’s compelling novel The Plot Against America recently discovered just because we know an event did not happen, an imagined historical scenario can be quite frightening; finding out how non-events turned out can keep us on the edge of our seats.

At heart, Rosenfeld is a moralist, a trait he shares with his distinguished father Alvin Rosenfeld, one of the finest scholars of Holocaust literature. Gabriel D. Rosenfeld decries the four tendencies that he describes as an inherent part of alternate history of the Nazi era -- normalization, universalization, relativization, and aestheticization. Aestheticization is the treatment of the Nazi era, of Hitler and of the Holocaust in aesthetic not moral terms. Avoiding morality in favor of aesthetics is more than unacceptable; it is abhorrent to Rosenfeld. Universalization is the prevailing tendency of the political left, which seeks to dismiss the singular fate of the Jews under Nazism and the particular vehemence of the Nazi assault against the Jews. Together with the relativists, often of the political right, they contend that the evil of this epoch as no different or too little different from other evils of history, evils so prevalent in the contemporary world; witness the way the political left has compared Israeli treatment of the Palestinians to German treatment of the Jews or consider how it seek to dilute the singularity of Hitler’s obsession and the Nazi focus on the “Final Solution to the Jewish problem” because it is too parochial and “too Jewish.” Relativization denies the absolute evil of the Holocaust and of the Nazi regime that perpetrated it. It also denies the absolute responsibility to win the World War inherent in the praise that is routinely accorded the “greatest generation.” After all, there were other evil events in history, other bad regimes and antisemitism is the “longest hatred.”

Rosenfeld identifies two forms of normalization, organic and prescriptive and opposes both. While one may bemoan the organic normalization inherent in the passage of time and the fading of memory, such a process is natural, perhaps inevitable. Rosenfeld intensely opposes the prescriptive normalization, those who wish that we would merely absorb these events and relegate them to the past. One can take issue with his calling Norman Finkelstein a scholar and his consideration of Finkelstein and Peter Novick in one sentence though both oppose the role that Holocaust memory plays in the contemporary world. Novick is a historian. Finkelstein is at best a polemicist. From personal experience I can attest to the fact that his use of sources is questionable.

Sometimes, Rosenfeld’s passionate sense of morality gets the better of him. The obsession with Hitler, he laments, seemingly exonerates the German people from their responsibility for the events of the Nazi era, most especially the Holocaust. The authors who focus their attention on Hitler and not on the cadre of people who surrounded him and the nation he led that was anything but reluctant to carry out the annihilation of the Jews seemingly minimize German national responsibility for giving Hitler the opportunity of governing and for efficiently, if not enthusiastically, carrying out the murders. At other points, he is critical of those who emphasize on the acts of individuals Germans and the German nation that mitigate the singularity of Hitler’s crime and his overwhelming personal culpability. If Hitler is demonized sufficiently the Germans are relieved if their responsibility for the crime, yet when he is not demonized then the guilt of the Fuhrer is diminished.

Rosenfeld sees a correlation between the apparently marginal phenomena of alternate history and more mainstream cultural trends; he depicts this imaginative literature as a criticism of the society and the era in which it was written for better and for worse. He suggests but does not fully develop what happened at the same time that these alternate histories were being developed in the world Holocaust museums and films, scholarship and commemoration and in the many attempts to find justice, however, flawed and imperfect after the crimes of Nazism.

In the aftermath of this work anyone who wants to understand the cultural impact of the Nazi era will have also explore the netherworld of alternate history -- like it or not, nonsense or not. There is no better guide to this world than Rosenfeld. He takes us through this strange world without descending into it. Like Scholar’s mentor and rival Martin Buber, Rosenfeld elevates our needs before responding to them.