Author: Gavriel D Rosenfeld
ISBN No: 0521847060
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 0
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
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A local authority community safety officer in the shires seeks to source anti-graffiti coating and specialist cleaning to remove racist and anti-semitic graffiti. Telecoms firms and other bodies with street furniture seek to remove swastikas and other graffiti. For them as for supermarkets, public buildings, leisure centres and anyone else with a swastkia on their wall, quite part from wanting to secure the site from vandals, there is the reputational risk – who wants obscene symbols on their property for all to see?
What is the lingering appeal, obsession, even, with the symbols of Nazism? While a new book by a US historian Gavriel D Rosenfeld, does not tackle this strictly security management question, there is food for thought. Why is the swastika still potent for the graffiti-sprayers of this world, after all the history lessons in school; the TV documentaries; the memorials, which if anything are increasing, the further away in time the Nazis become? Why are the symbols of Nazism still used in graffiti, to shock, when those doing the graffiti, and their parents, never even experienced the world war?
The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism looks at the novels, plays (an early one was by Noel Coward) and TV dramas, films, all portraying what the world might have been like had Hitler won the second world war, or not died in 1945; or if the Holocaust had never happened. While British readers may be familiar with some of the UK subjects – novels by Len Deighton (SS-GB), Martin Amis (Time’s Arrow) and Robert Harris (Fatherland) – it may be news that American and German novelists, historians and film-makers have mined the same vein, asking, what if?
As Rosenfeld notes, over time the way the writers and film-makers have portrayed the alternate world of a triumphant Nazi Germany has changed, as the UK, US and postwar Germany have changed. In a thought-provoking book, Rosenfeld comes closer to answering the question – why the enduring appeal of the evil of Nazism that the world rid itself of in 1945 – by pointing to the unpredictable world after 9-11. Just as the writers of a Nazi truimph use their imagination, so, Rosenfeld notes, have the US authorities after September 11, 2001 turned to Hollywood to ask how the movie-writers and dreamers can imagine the sort of terror risks we may face after 9-11.
God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth, Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (2005) is another work of history that has something to say about the present.
Author Alice Hodge confines herself to a three-page note at the end of the book, to consider parallels between the Plot of 1605 and the Al Qaeda terror of 2005. As the west seeks to respond to the trauma of 9-11, and the methods of the assassin have changed between the 17th and 21st century, the terms of engagement are the same, she writes. How do you, she asks, distinguish between law-abiding members of a faith, and the minority who will die, and kill, in the name of faith? It’s difficult for the state, and even less enviable for Muslims, she says. “We are closer to our 16th century forebears than we might care to admit.”
What of the history then? For like no end of true stories from the past, the truth is stranger than fiction, and makes a thrilling read – of suspicion, informers, and fanatics ready to blow up parliament with the king inside. It’s a story of great houses where Catholic gentry lived and where priests who smuggled themselves in from the Continent worked and hid. Among those houses was Hindlip Hall, today the headquarters of West Mercia Police. When the equivalent of the secret police came knocking at the hall after November 5, 1605, searchers found 11 ‘hides’ and two Jesuits in hiding. The story starts in 1588, with the Spanish Catholic Armada defeated, but two Englishmen trained as priests abroad landing in Norfolk. Doing so, they were by law traitors. There follows an interesting mix of the Jesuits battling for people’s souls, and practical men like Nicholas Owen, the Oxford joiner who built the ‘priest holes’, every one different, and built in silence so that even servants would not know and so could not give anything away under torture. Owen was captured and tortured to death.
