Isegoria

One of the most popular forms of alternate history is the story in which Hitler wins — but not all such stories are alternate history:

For more than half a century it has been an enjoyable creative exercise to imagine what kind of ALTERNATE HISTORY might have evolved had Germany won WORLD WAR TWO, and many novels and stories have been written to explore that assumption. But even before the rise of Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), novels like Milo HASTINGS‘s City of Endless Night (June-November 1919 True Story as “Children of ‘Kultur’”; rev 1920) – some of the imagery of which influenced Fritz LANG‘s Metropolis (1926) – envision the Germany of the future in stridently DYSTOPIAN terms; indeed, the first explicit Hitler-Wins tales were not exercises in the reimagining of history but Dreadful Warnings in the tradition of the FUTURE WAR tale: graphic anticipations of what might actually come to pass, unless something is done. The difference between these texts and later ALTERNATE HISTORY tales is profound. (For further discussion of the distinction between alternate history and the FUTURE WAR/FUTURE HISTORY, see bottom paragraph of text.)

The exceptionally nightmarish Swastika Night (1937) as by Murray Constantine (> Katherine BURDEKIN) is, therefore, not set in an alternate world, and nor are several others published 1939-1945. Other examples of FUTURE WAR fictions – or, as in the case of Swastika Night, with its long FEMINIST perspective over several centuries, more properly FUTURE HISTORY fictions – are Loss of Eden (1940; vt If Hitler Comes 1941) by Douglas BROWN and Christopher {SERPELL}, Then We Shall Hear Singing (1942) by Storm JAMESON, Grand Canyon (1942) by Vita SACKVILLE-WEST, If We Should Fail (1942) by Marion {WHITE}, I, James Blunt (1943 chap) by H V MORTON, The Bells Rang (1943) by Anthony ARMSTRONG and Bruce Graeme (1900-1982), When Adolf Came (1943) by Martin HAWKIN, the film The Silent Village (1943) directed by Humphrey Jennings (1907-1950), and Erwin LESSNER‘s Phantom Victory: The Fourth Reich 1945-1960 (1944). The only genuine ALTERNATE HISTORY tale from these years seems to be We Band of Brothers (1939) by George Cecil FOSTER writing as Seaforth, in which conflict breaks out in 1938, ending a year later in the retirement of a successful Hitler and the founding of something like the United Nations. A subcategory – tales in which Hitler seems about to win, but loses an important battle or secret at the last moment – includes many borderline tales of warfare and espionage; among the serious examples are detailed fictional prognoses like Fred ALLHOFF‘s Lightning in the Night (31 August-16 November 1940 LIBERTY; 1979), which predicts a US readiness to use nuclear weapons against Germany as a final resort, and Invasion: Being an Eyewitness Account of the Nazi Invasion (1940) by Hendrik Willem {VAN LOON}.

The death of Hitler in 1945 marked the end of the real WORLD WAR TWO in Europe, but for any number of reasons – the astonishing intensity (and intoxicating vacancy) of the evil he represented; the dreadful clarity of the consequences had the Allies failed; the melodramatic intensity of the conflict itself, with the whole war seeming (then and later) to turn on linchpin decisions and events; and (shamingly) the cheap aesthetic appeal of Nazism, with its Art Deco gear, its sanserif, Babylonian architecture, its brutal elites, its autobahns and Blitzes and Panzer strikes, its extremely attractive helmets, its secrecy and PARANOIA – the war very soon became a focus for speculative thought, and it was only a few months before the first alternate-world Hitler-wins tale was published (in HUNGARY): László Gáspár’s Mi, I. Adolf ["We, Adolf 1"] (1945). After Noel {COWARD}’s play, “Peace in our Time” (performed 1947; 1948), which is set in an ALTERNATE HISTORY LONDON just after the Nazis have won the Battle of Britain, the first significant example in English was SARBAN‘s The Sound of His Horn (1952), which sinuously intertwines sadism and aesthetics into a vision of decadence with roots in Germany’s mythic past. The sardonic MEDIEVAL FUTURISM of the book, which Sarban may have taken from Swastika Night (see above), may have influenced – and certainly served as a tonal precedent for – several works both within the field, like Keith ROBERTS‘s “Weihnachtsabend” (in New Worlds Quarterly 4, anth 1972, ed Michael MOORCOCK), and outside it, as in non-alternate-history fictional portrayals of Germany in faux-pastoral terms like The Birthday King (1962) by Gabriel Fielding (1916-1986) or Le Roi des Aulnes (1970; trans Barbara Bray as The Erl-King 1972 UK) by Michel Tournier (1924-    ). A speculative essay of note is “If Hitler had Won World War II” (19 December 1961 Look) by William L Shirer.

The most famous single Hitler-wins sf tale is probably Philip K DICK‘s The Man in the High Castle (1962), where the German and Japanese victory becomes a kind of poisonous backdrop for a complex tale set in a psychically devastated America; and the most telling commentary on the moral underside of the subgenre is Norman SPINRAD‘s The Iron Dream (1972), in which the young Hitler, a failure at politics, becomes a pulp novelist whose tale Lord of the Swastika exploits, to savagely ironic effect, some of the responses of many readers to tales of “genuine” Nazi triumph.

(Hat tip to Dave Gottlieb, who mentioned it in a comment.)

Posted in Media, War | 2 Comments »