One of the occupational hazards of being a historian of modern Germany is that people often ask me questions about Adolf Hitler. I was even invited onto Derryn Hinch’s TV program to identify Hitler’s body. (The Russian archives had just released Soviet footage of a corpse outside Hitler’s bunker in May 1945. Spoiler: it wasn’t him.) When I’ve been interviewed about Hitler on radio the switchboard has lit up with listeners wanting to ask all manner of random queries about his life.
Once, an interviewer asked me a much more interesting question: why does Hitler still exercise such a fascination and loom so large in our culture? I responded with something along these lines: in an era in which there is less consensus about traditional religious definitions of what we should consider to be good, there is a broad secular consensus that Hitler (along with Nazism and the Holocaust) represents a definition of absolute evil.
My vague intuition has received a more developed and thoughtful articulation in a short book (or long essay) by Alec Ryrie, professor of the history of Christianity at Britain’s Durham University. In The Age of Hitler: How We Will Survive It, Ryrie argues that the Christian narratives and moral teachings that were hegemonic in Western societies until the second world war have been replaced. Since the war, he says, “we have all been living through the age of Hitler… the age in which our public morals have come to be defined with reference to the Nazis.”
Ryrie provides a concise sketch of how often references to Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust appear in popular culture. Initially he seems to be covering similar terrain to Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s 2013 book, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, which surveys popular culture’s treatments of Third Reich historical themes. Think of all the internet parodies of Hitler’s ranting in the bunker in the 2004 film Downfall. Indeed, analogies with Hitler and Nazism became so ubiquitous online that “Godwin’s Law” — which essentially says that the first person to introduce a Hitler analogy into an online argument loses — became a popular means of trying to stem the tide. But Ryrie soon veers in a different direction.
If Hitler represented absolute evil then the war the Allies fought to resist his aggression and defeat his regime was in some senses a “good war.” The title of Studs Terkel’s 1984 people’s oral history of the conflict, The Good War, might have contained a strong dose of irony given that the accounts he gathered didn’t shy away from the grisly aspects of the conflict. But there was no irony in the celebration of the (mostly) men who fought in that conflict as “the greatest generation” during the Reagan years, even though President Reagan himself spent the war in the studio lots of Hollywood.
As Ryrie justifiably points out, however, a war is a questionable thing to base a set of moral values on. I grew up on a diet of wholesome, morally unambiguous tales of wartime heroism (books like The Dam Busters and Colditz, for instance) but historians have since arrived at much more complex accounts of the war. The mass fire-bombing of civilians in German and Japanese cities, the racism and sexual violence, the grimmer aspects of Stalin’s conduct on the Eastern front — all received more attention as time went on. The Allies’ less praiseworthy acts don’t diminish the evil of Nazism, but they do blur the moral certainties of older narratives.
We also risk drawing lessons from the war that aren’t applicable to present dilemmas. Ryrie justifiably points to the inflationary use of the term “appeasement” in international crises. A respectable body of international relations literature has been devoted to the use and misuse of the “Munich” analogy in debates about how to deal with belligerent countries.
This is not to deny that Western societies drew important lessons from that war, notably the ideal of universal human rights. As Ryrie writes, “we cannot imagine our modern faith in human rights without the experience of the second world war.” Among other things, the post-1945 emphasis on universally valid human rights has energised anti-racist and anti-colonialist movements. But Ryrie sees our “faith in human rights” as flawed, because it is grounded in historical experience that is losing its salience in our culture.
It’s possible to show, on the other hand, that our contemporary concept of human rights has roots much further back than 1945 — at least as far back as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions. Ideas of human rights are grounded in ethics and philosophy, not just historical precedents and memory.
Ryrie argues that the “age of Hitler” is coming to an end, which he doesn’t view as a bad thing. It’s also inevitable, he says, as the remaining number of living witnesses to wartime events shrinks and societies or cultures with different memories of that period make increasing claims on our attention.
Just over twenty years ago, in an important essay on the Crisis of Antifascism (2004), the Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto diagnosed the waning hold anti-fascism had as a founding ideology of the postwar Italian Republic. The passing of the generation of protagonists of the struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, the banalisation of the memory industry, and the active efforts of elements of the Italian right to trivialise and relativise the crimes of Mussolini’s regime had all contributed to the weakening of the tradition of anti-fascism as a way of mobilising democratic politics.
Today Italy is governed by a party that is a direct linear descendant of the neo-fascist party founded in Italy after 1945 by unrepentant functionaries of Mussolini’s Fascist party. Europe-wide, far-right parties have secured large segments of the electorate. In Germany, the inoculation against the far right lasted longer than in many other countries, but the extremist Alternative for Germany is today polling as the most popular party in the country.
Ryrie doesn’t really engage greatly with political-historical analysis of the kind that Luzzatto practises. Instead, he proceeds to argue that it is time for the culture wars that divide contemporary Western societies to give way to a new synthesis of moral values. To get there, “progressive secularists” will need to learn from the positive dimensions of rooted religious traditions and “conservative traditionalists” will need to relearn the values of humility and repentance.
Ryrie’s argumentation doesn’t take account of the corrosive effects of a generation of neoliberalism, with its elevation of self-interest and its tendency to dissolve older sources of social solidarity. Names like Thatcher, Reagan and Hayek are missing from his book, despite its engagingly wide set of cultural references. He tends to be dismissive of class or economic factors, and it is frustrating to read an essay on contemporary history that has so little to say about actual power relations in society.
It is hard to argue against the value of dialogue with people of differing views, in the abstract. But when peaceful protesters tried to reason with Trumpist paramilitaries in the state of Minnesota in January this year, two of them were shot dead. •
