Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 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
1 - A “good war” no more: The new World War II revisionism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgments
- 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
Summary
The [Second World War] … in Europe was dominated by two evil monsters, not by one … Everyone who values the concept of liberty … must admit that the [war’s] outcome was at best ambiguous, that the victory of the West was only partial, and that the moral reputation of the Allied Coalition was severely tarnished. If, after considering all this they can still bring themselves to identify the West with the ‘Good,’ they are entitled to do so. But they can surely do it only with extensive reservations.
Norman DaviesSince the turn of the millennium, a major revisionist offensive has been launched against the longstanding belief that the Second World War in Europe was a “good war” waged against Nazi evil. The offensive has struck many of the countries that participated in the conflict. It has rolled through Germany, where attention has shifted from the Nazis’ perpetration of unprecedented crimes against Jews and other Europeans to the suffering of German civilians at the hands of the Allies. It has also struck Eastern Europe, where Poles, Russians, and the citizens of the Baltic states have battled over claims that Joseph Stalin was just as responsible as Adolf Hitler for causing the war and committing comparable atrocities. But it has been in Great Britain and the United States where the revisionist trend has recently been the most apparent. As is shown by British historian Norman Davies’s assertion above, growing numbers of Anglo-American historians and journalists have explicitly challenged World War II’s reputation as a good war by re-evaluating its origins and consequences. Some of the revisionists have alleged that the conflict erupted not so much from aggressive German expansionism as reckless Allied interventionism. Others have decried the Allies’ manner of waging war, arguing that their brutality differed little from that of the Nazis. Still others have counterfactually suggested that history would have turned out better if the Allies had abstained from fighting the war entirely.
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- Hi Hitler!How the Nazi Past is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, pp. 29 - 77Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014