Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture

The Third Reich's legacy is in flux. For much of the post-war period, the Nazi era has been viewed moralistically as an exceptional period of history intrinsically different from all others. Since the turn of the millennium, however, this view has been challenged by a powerful wave of normalization. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld charts this important international trend by examining the shifting representation of the Nazi past in contemporary western intellectual and cultural life. Focusing on works of historical scholarship, popular novels, counterfactual histories, feature films, and Internet websites, he identifies notable changes in the depiction of the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the figure of Adolf Hitler himself. By exploring the origins of these works and assessing the controversies they have sparked in the United States and Europe, Hi Hitler! offers a fascinating and timely analysis of the shifting status of the Nazi past in western memory.

Introduction; 1. A 'good war' no more: the new World War II revisionism; 2. From history to memory and back again: debating the Holocaust's uniqueness; 3. Probing the limits of speculation: counterfactualism and the Holocaust; 4. Nazis that never were: new alternate histories of the Third Reich; 5. Humanizing Hitler: the Führer in contemporary film; 6. Between tragedy and farce: Nazism on the Internet; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld is Professor of History at Fairfield University, Connecticut. His area of specialization is the history and memory of the Nazi era. He is the author of several books, including Building after Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust (2011), which was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the category of visual arts; The World Hitler Never Made: Alternate History and the Memory of Nazism (Cambridge, 2005); Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments and the Legacy of the Third Reich (2000), and the co-edited work, Beyond Berlin: Twelve German Cities Confront the Nazi Past (2008). He is also the editor of the forthcoming volume of Jewish alternate histories, 'If Only We Had Died in Egypt!' What Ifs of Jewish History from Abraham to Zionism, also to be published by Cambridge University Press. Rosenfeld is a frequent contributor to the Forward newspaper and edits the blog, The Counterfactual History Review.