| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld. The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 524. $30.00.

September 11, 2001, reminded people that events can change the course of history, and that no amount of structural reasoning can completely erase the force of contingency in human affairs. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld, a historian of twentieth-century memory, has turned his focus to the genre of writing that centrally turns on contingency: counter-factual history, or alternate history, or, as most people know it, "what-if" history. What if Adolf Hitler had won the war? What if he had survived? What if he had been shot in 1930? Shot in 1944? What if the Holocaust had happened differently? In historical or futuristic fiction, comic books, film, works of history, and even in works by professional historians, these scenarios are played out. Rosenfeld has gathered together the scenarios, considering them in terms of chronology, the national origins of their authors, and the response of their audiences. He starts with the assumption that counter-factual history tells us a great deal about memory, and ends with an insight that Nazism and the Holocaust have in the half-century after their occurrence become normalized to a problematic degree.

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