The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It
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- USD 19.99
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- USD 19.99
Publisher Description
Examining everything from popular novels to politics, an investigation of persistent fascination with Nazis—and where it might take us.
We live in an age where Hitler and the Nazis dominate our cultural imagination, shaping values once defined by religion. Historian Alec Ryrie explores why society remains captivated by this struggle, from history and fiction to modern myths such as Star Wars and Harry Potter. He examines the costs of our Nazi obsession and questions what will come as our anti-Nazi moral consensus frays and both the Left and Right begin to move on. With a fresh take on modern history and pop culture, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It offers a thought-provoking look at the culture wars and our shifting political crises, challenging assumptions on both sides and asking what a new moral vision might look like.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Religious historian Ryrie (Unbelievers) makes a provocative yet incompletely persuasive argument about the negative impact of Adolf Hitler's centrality in modern discourse. Ryrie posits that the story told of WWII as a grand unifying crusade against the ultimate evil, symbolized by Hitler and his genocidal Nazi ideology, was used in the postwar West as a substitute for a fading Christianity. "The Second World War is our Trojan War. It is our Paradise Lost," he writes, describing how Nazis and Nazi allegories came to be used in pop culture as an all-purpose symbol for badness, whether for dramatic (Harry Potter) or comedic (Seinfeld) purposes. Ryrie goes on to make a persuasive case that the "negative" value system of the "anti-Nazi era" (i.e., being anti-genocidal) created an ethical vacuum in the postwar world—"It is becoming plainer that the anti-Nazi story cannot do all the work we are asking of it," he writes, pointing to developments ranging from a reemerging far right to cancel culture—and that a positive morality is needed to bolster society. However, the narrative feels on thinner ground when Ryrie tries to imagine that positive morality, delivering an upbeat yet muzzy message about an "ethical synthesis" between old and new values. Presented in a light yet not unserious tone, this well-paced investigation of what underpins modern morality is worth grappling with.
