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The World Hitler Never Made Alternate History and the
Memory of Nazism First Edition Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
ISBN(s): 9780521847063, 0521847060
Edition: First
File Details: PDF, 30.43 MB
Year: 2005
Language: english
 THE WORLD HITLER
NEVER MADE
Alternate History and the Memory ofNazism

GAVRIEL D. ROSENFELD

,. . :~,. . CAMBRIDGE
::: UNIVERSITY PRESS
 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this ride: www.cambridge.org/9780521 847063

© Gavrid D. Rosenfeld 2005

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place wimout
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2005

Printed in the United States of America

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13 978-0-521-84706-3 hardback
ISBN-IO 0-521-84706-0 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy ofURLs for external or
third-party internet websites referred to in mis book, and does not guarantee that any content on such
websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
 Contents

List ofillustrations page Vll

Acknowledgments IX

Introduction

PART I THE NAZIS WIN WORLD WAR II

Comparative overview 29
1. Great Britain defeated: between resistance and
collaboration 34
2. The United States and the dilemmas of military
intervention 95
3. Germany's wartime triumph: from dystopia to normalcy 161
4. Other nations: a dissenting view 187

Comparative conclusions 195

PART II ALTERNATE HITLERS

5. The fugitive Fuhrer and the search for justice 199

6. The world without Hitler: better or worse? 27 1

v
II'! Contents
PART III HYPOTHETICAL HOLOCAUSTS

7. Hypothetical Holocausts and the mistrust of memory 333

Conclusion 374

Notes 398
Bibliography 492
Appendix: Alternate histories by theme, era, nation, and medium 510
Index 519
 List ofillustrations

1. Scene from the 1947 play Peace in Our Time. (Source: John
Knowles, the Noel Coward Society). 43
2. TV Times cover featuring the 1964 film The Other Man.
Used by permission of IPC tx Limited. 53
3. Still from the 1964 film It Happened Here. Used by permission
of Kevin Brownlow. . 56
4. Page from Britain Invaded (1990). Used by permission of The
Trustees of the Imperial War Museum, London (negative
number HU36121). 73
5. Cover of Fatherland by Robert Harris (© 1992 by Random House,
Inc.). Used by permission of Random House, Inc. 78
6. Illustration of Hitler in Washington D.C. from the 1940 novel
Lightning in the Night by Fred Allhoff. © Liberty Library
Corporation. 98
7. Cover of The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (© 1962
by Philip K. Dick). Used by permission ofG. P. Putnam's Sons,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 105
8. Cover of Justice League ofAmerica Nr. 107 © 1973 DC Comics.
All Rights Reserved. Used with permission. II4

9. Still from the Saturday Night Live television skit,

"What If: Oberman" (1979). 136
10. Image taken from The Philadelphia Experiment II provided
through the courtesy of Lions Gate Entertainment. 141
II. Still from the 1994 film Fatherland. 143
12. Cover of The Plot against America: A Novel by Philip Roth.
© Philip Roth. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin
Company. All rights reserved. 153

Vll
Vlll List ofillustrations
I3. Cover of WennAdolfHitler den Krieg nicht gewonnen hiitte (I979)
by Helmut Heissenbiittel. Cover design by Heinz Edelmann.
Used by permission of Verlag Klett-Cotta. I67
I4. Page from Strange Adventures Nr. 3 © I950 DC Comics.
All Rights Reserved. Used with permission. 204
I5. Cover of T-Man, issue Nr. 34 (I956). 206
I6. Still from the television episode "The Master Plan of Dr. Fu
Manchu" (I956). Used by permission of Alpha Video. 2IO
I7. Still from the Twilight Zone episode "He's Alive!" (I963).
Courtesy of CBS Broadcasting Inc. 2I5
I8. Cover of Who Will Watch the Watchers? by Edwin]. Fadiman
(I970). Used by permission of Little, Brown. 222
I9. Cover of The Portage to San Cristobal ofA.H (I98I).
Reprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster Adult
Publishing Group from THE PORTAGE TO SAN CRlSTOBAL OF A.H.
by George Steiner. Copyright © I98I by George Steiner. 228
20. Still from the I996 film The Empty Mirror. Used with
permission of Walden Woods Film Company. 255
2I. Page from the comic book Adolfdie Nazi-Sau (I998-99).
© Eichborn Verlag AG, Frankfurt am Main, Mai I998. 260
22. Cover of Elleander Morning (1984). 275
23. Cover of The Iron Dream (I972). 288
24. Cover of Making History by Stephen Fry (© I996 by Random
House, Inc.). Used by permission of Random House, Inc. 299
25. Still from the Twilight Zone episode "Cradle of Darkness"
(2002). 306
26. Cover of issue Nr. 292 of the comic book The Fantastic
Four (I986). 323
27. Cover of After Dachau by Daniel Quinn (2001). 337
28. Cover of Die Stimmen der Nacht by Thomas Ziegler (I984)· 347
 Acknowledgments

One evening while nearing the completion of this study, I was finishing
dinner at a Chinese restaurant in midtown Manhattan when I opened a
fortune cookie and read the message: "It's not helpful to wonder what
might have been." Had I taken such an admonition to heart, I never would
have been able to finish this book. But I also never would have done so
without the assistance of numerous persons and institutions.
I would like to thank Fairfield University for a third-year sabbatical
grant, which provided me with a semester free of teaching that enabled me
to complete an important portion of my research and writing. Special
thanks go to my department chair, David McFadden, for steadfastly
supporting my research proposals, to Harold Forsythe for passing along
several tips on sources, and to Cecelia Bucki and Patricia Behre-Miskimin
for patiently indulging my own speculations in the department hallway.
I would also like to thank the students in my upper-level seminar on
alternate history, all of whom contributed to my understanding of the
subject. lowe a special debt of gratitude to John Cayer, the director of
Fairfield's DiMenna-Nyselius Library's interlibrary loan office, who was
unfailingly helpful in securing obscure source material and always a joy to
chat with. And finally, I would like to thank Peter Sarawit at the media
center for helping me to produce digital images from VHS tapes for many
of the book's illustrations.
I am also grateful to scholars at other institutions. Particular thanks go to
Alon Confino, Saul Friedlander, Paul Miller, and Eugene Sheppard, who
read various portions of the manuscript and offered perceptive comments
that helped me refine my thoughts. I would especially like to thank my
father, Alvin Rosenfeld, for his careful copyediting and thoughtful stylistic
suggestions. Thanks also go to Volker Berghahn, Noel Cary, Marion
Deshmukh, Alexandra Garbarini, Jeffrey Herf, WulfKansteiner, Michael
Rothberg, Kristin Semmens, and Denise Youngblood, for participating in
conference panels at which selected chapters from the book were presented.

IX
x Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the American Historical Association, the German Studies
Association, and the Association for Jewish Studies, for permitting me to
present portions of my research at the organizations' annual conferences.
Thanks also to Vicki Caron and Cornell University, as well as Jonathan
Petropoulos, John Roth, and Claremont McKenna College for inviting
me to speak on my research. I would also like to thank Peter Baldwin,
Paula Hyman, Ned Lebow, Peter Mandler, Gary Kenneth Peading, Dirk
Rupnow, Jeffrey Weidlinger, and Jay Winter for providing answers to
questions that arose during the course of research and writing, and for
their general interest in my work.
In conducting the research for this book it was a real pleasure to
come into contact and exchange ideas with the producers of the sources
themselves. My most grateful thanks go to writers Jesse Bier, Michel
Choquette, Christian v. Ditfurth, David Dvorkin, AI Franken, Gary
Goss, Richard Grayson, Joseph Heywood, Brad Linaweaver, Arno
Lubos, E. M. Nathanson, Kamran Pasha, Hans Pleschinski, Craig Raine,
Arthur Rhodes, Leo Rutman, Norman Spinrad, Sabine Wedemeyer-
Schwiersch, Len Wein, and Thomas Ziegler for offering personal insights
into their own work. Thanks to playwright Robert Krakow for sending me
both video and print copies of his play, The False Witness, and to scholars
Adrian Gilbert, John Lukacs, Bruce Russett, Hugh Thomas, and Henry
Turner for responding w various questions of mine.
Writing this book has also been a gratifYing experience insofar as it has
confirmed the old adage about the "comfort of strangers." In the course of
my research I cast countless inquiries out into the heavily populated void of
cyberspace like so many digitized messages in a botde, hoping they would
be found and answered. I was extremely gratified that numerous individ-
uals, all unknown to me beforehand, responded with generosiry and
provided indispensable assistance by sending me copies of source material
and answering tough questions. They include: Bill Black and Mark Heike
of AC Comics for sending me a photocopy of the comic book T-Man,
Issue N r. 34 from 1956; Nick Cooper for sending me extremely rare tapes of
s
An Englishman Castle, as well as helpful information about Giles Cooper;
Sean Delaney at the British Film Institute for sending me hard-to-find
s
reviews of The Other Man, An Englishman Castle, and Night Conspirators;
Ida Heissenbiittel for faxing me reviews of her late husband's work; and
Mark Squirek for generously sending me a scan of the 1950 Strange
Adventures tale, "The Strange Fate of Adolph Hider." I received other
reviews from FrjthoffMiiller of the Siiddeutsche Zeitung, John Knowles of
the Nod Coward Society, Matthias Seeberg at Konkret magazine, Beate
 Acknowledgments Xl

Volkenrath at the Institut fur Zeitungsforschung in Dortmund, Monika

Klein at the Innsbrucker Zeitungsarchiv, Esther-Beatrice von Bruchhausen
at Eichborn Verlag, Friedel Wahren and Martina Geissler at the Lektorat
Science Fiction/Fantasy, Sascha Mamczak at Heyne Verlag, Anne Zauner
at the Dokumentationsstelle fur neuere osterreichische Literatur, Ray
Russell at Tartarus Press, and the Science Fiction Versand Wolfgang
Kratz. I am also grateful to Max Brooks for background information on
Saturday Night Live. Finally, Anna Charin, Eli Eshed, Barton Hacker,
Charles Mitchell, and Robert Schmunk were helpful in responding to
various questions of mine.
I benefited not merely from helpful strangers, however, but also good
friends who provided assistance at various stages of my research and writing.
I would like to thank Melissa Clark for sending me a videotape of the
Twilight Zone episode, "Cradle of Darkness"; Johannes Schmidt for sending
me a copy of the hard-to-find film, Conversation with the Beast; and Felix
Singer for providing technical help in producing additional digital images
from VHS tapes for some of the book's illustrations. Thanks also go to
Miranda Banks and Sidney Rosenfeld for assisting me with several thorny
research questions. Finally, longtime colleagues Dani Eshet, Josh Goode,
Ethan Kleinberg, Dave McBride, and Adam Rubin deserve mention for
providing years of loyal friendship and intellectual camaraderie.
It is a pleasute to express my gratitude to the wonderful staff at
Cambridge University Press for their assistance in bringing the present
volume into existence. Michael Watson was unfailingly helpful in respon-
ding to my countless questions and in facilitating the editing and produc-
tion process. Elizabeth Davey provided timely advice and was extremely
resourceful in securing the rights to reproduce many of the book's images.
Isabelle Dambricourt, iikewise, was very helpful coordinating much of the
publication process. Christopher Jackson deserves special thanks for his
meticulous copy-editing. And I would also like to thank the two anon-
ymous readers who offered many worthwhile suggestions and encouraged
me with their enthusiasm for the manuscript.
For obvious reasons I cannot offer any personal thanks to the internet,
but lowe it a substantial debt of gratitude for enabling me to conduct an
enormous amount of the research for this project. Indeed, I sometimes
wonder whether I would have been able to write this study at all without its
existence. My family, in particular, is thankful that this wonderful research
tool enabled me to conduct much of my work at home instead of having to
take long trips out of town. That being said, I did make several research
visits to various archives and libraries, where I completed research the
Xli Acknowledgments
old-fashioned way - by carefully reading through it. I would like to
acknowledge the many helpful individuals at these institutions, in particular,
Volker Kaukoreit and Peter Seda at the Osterreichisches Literaturarchiv in
Vienna, as well as the library staffs at the Academy of Motion Pictures'
Center for Motion Picture Study in Beverly Hills, California, the
University of California at Los Angeles's Young Research Library, Loyola
Marymount University's Von der Ahe Library, Cornell University's Low
Library, Columbia University's Butler Library, Yale University's Sterling
Library, and Indiana University's Lilly Library.
Finally, lowe more than just a word of thanks to my family. My wife,
Erika Banks, patiently listened to me expound upon my theories of alter-
nate history in their roughest form and made the ultimate sacrifice by
sitting through portions of the film They Saved Hitler's Brain. My children,
Julia and Benjamin, meanwhile, were always eager to offer welcome
respites from the long hours of research and writing. For providing
the love and emotional support that only a family can, I dedicate this
work to them.
 Introduction

The streets on the way back into central Berlin seemed unnaturally
quiet, and when [detective Xavier] March reached Werdescher-
Markt, he discovered the reason. A large norice board in the foyer
announced there would be a government statement at 4:30 ... He
was just in time ...
How many of these events could March remember? ... In '38, he
had been called out of his classroom to hear that ... Ausuia had
returned to the Fatherland ...
He had been at sea for the next few broadcasts. Victory over Russia
in the spring of'43-- a triumph for the Fuhrer's strategic genius! ...
Peace with the British in '44 - a triumph for the Fuhrer's counter-
intelligence genius! ...
Peace with the Americans in '46 - a triumph for the Fuhrer's
scientific genius! When America had defeated Japan by detonating
an atomic bomb, the Fuhrer had sent a V-3 rocket to explode in the
skies over New York to prove he could retaliate in kind if struck. After
that, the war had dwindled to ... a nuclear stalemate the diplomats
called (he cold war. I

British novelist Robert Harris's description of a Nazi-dominated Europe

after World War II in his international bestseller, Fatherland (1992),
provides probably the best-known example of an unusual and increasingly
prominent way in which the experience of Nazism has come to shape the
Western imagination. Harris's novel is a work of "alternate history," a
counterfactual mode of narrative representation that, in recent years, has
been applied with striking frequency to the subject of the Third Reich.
Since the end of W orId War II, and particularly in the last generation,
numerous alternate histories of the Third Reich have appeared in Great
Britain, the United States, Germany, and elsewhere in the form of novels,
short stories, films, television broadcasts, plays, comic books, and historical
essays. These diverse works have explored an equally diverse range of
questions: What if the Nazis had won World War II? What if Adolf

1
2 Introduction
Hitler had escaped from Nazi Germany in 1945 and gone into hiding in the
jungles of South America? What if Hitler had been assassinated or had
never been born? What if the Holocaust had been completed or could
somehow be undone? Such counterfactual questions may initially strike us
as absurd, even pointless. But they have been posed by an astonishingly
varied range of people and appeared in a dizzying array of venues. Alternate
histories on the subject of Nazism have been produced by high-brow
writers like Philip Roth, prodigious mass-market novelists such as Harry
Turtledove, playwrights like Nod Coward, politicians such as Newt
Gingrich, filmmakers like Armin Mueller-Stahl, and historians such as
John Lukacs. "What if?" scenarios involving the Third Reich have been
featured in American television shows like The Twilight Zone, Saturday
Night Live, and Star Trek, satirical journals like National Lampoon and The
Onion, comic books like Strange Adventures and The Justice League oj
America, and innumerable internet web sites. The list is an eclectic one.
But it demonstrates a clear trend: speculating about alternate outcomes to
the Nazi era has become a notable phenomenon in Western popular
culture.
What explains the growing tendency to wonder how the history of the
Third Reich might have turned out differently? My interest in this question
dates back over a decade to the year 1993 when I - like millions of readers
around the same time - picked up a copy of Robert Harris's novel
Fatherland, in my case to bring along for "light" reading on a research
trip to Germany. I must confess that my encounter with Fatherland was
hardly a transformative experience. Reading it was entertaining, but the
novel hardly converted me into an avid fan of alternate history. In the early
1990S, as Europeans and Americans were fervently marking the fiftieth
anniversary of the pivotal events of World War II, my attention was largely
focused on how the Germans were coming to terms with the real historical
legacy of the Third Reich half a century after its collapse. Nevertheless, in
the ensuing years my interest in alternate history gradually, if impercept-
ibly, grew. Ironically enough, the reason was not so much my already
strong interest in the past as my increasing fascination with the present.
Outing the second half of the 1990S, the information revolution hit the
mainstream and I, like so many others, became more and more intrigued
with the internet and the new culture it was spawning. As I grappled with
the concept of" cyberspace" and became aware of the blurring boundaries
between the real and the imagined, I became reacquainted with the work of
Philip K. Dick, a writer who was being celebrated for having anticipated
the rise of a virtual world. 2 I had read Dick's classic novel depicting a Nazi
 Introduction 3
victory in World War II, The Man in the High Cast/e, some years earlier,
but only now began to see it from a new perspective. Soon enough,
I recognized Dick's connection to Harris, and then to other counterfactual
texts I had read long before by such disparate figures as William Shirer,
Ralph Giordano, and George Steiner. Finally, thanks to the world wide
web, I learned that my nascent object of interest was shared by others and
that it had a name - alternate history.
As I immersed myself in the field of alternate history and learned of the
surprisingly large number of counterfactual narratives that had been pro-
duced on the subject of Nazism, I became convinced that it represented a
significant trend. I was especially encouraged in this belief after I realized
that the phenomenon of alternate history was hardly new, but rather a
relatively well-established genre. As far back as World War II, and then
throughout the postwar era, a wide range of Europeans and Americans had
been prompted to produce highly elaborate counterfactual narratives about
the Third Reich. This compulsion had intensified in the last generation,
I recognized, but it was hardly unprecedented. In reflecting upon these
facts, I became curious about a variety of related questions: What set of
motivations or concerns had led people over the years to wonder "what if?"
with respect to the Nazi era? How had they imagined that the world might
have been different? What explained the growth of such accounts in recent
years? Finally, and most importantly, what did alternate histories reveal
about the evolving place of the Nazi past in Western memory? My long-
time interest in the shifting status of the Nazi legacy in postwar conscious-
ness made this question the most intriguing of all. In setting out to write
this study, therefore, I decided to focus on the various ways in which
alternate history could help shed light upon the subject of historical
memory.
In the process of researching and writing this book, however, I was
surprised to encounter deep-seated resistance to alternate history as a genre
worthy of serious study. Scholars of alternate history commonly lament the
lack of respect for their subject. Yet the genre's growing prominence had
led me to assume that such opposition had waned. Personal experience
taught me otherwise. At conferences where I spoke about alternate history,
more than a few prominent scholars raised epistemological, methodological,
and even moral objections to it. Some argued that since history deals solely
with the description and interpretation of events that really happened,
exploring what might have happened but never did amounted to little more
than idle speculation based on sheer fancy or wishful thinking. Others
expressed skepticism about the value of examining works of popular
4 Introduction
culture, insisting that they were of inferior quality compared with works of
high culture, that they were of marginal relevance, and that they were
therefore unworthy of serious consideration. I suspect that the moralistic
undertones to these objections, finally, were due to the fact that the
particular alternate histories in question focused on the highly sensitive
subject of the Third Reich. Several scholars expressed qualms about giving
attention to narratives whose unconventional conclusions about the Nazi
past they regarded as impious, at best, and dangerously revisionist, at worst.
Such works, they insisted, should simply be ignored as the rantings of the
lunatic fringe.
As I hope to show in the pages that follow, however, all of these
objections fail to appreciate alternate history's significance as an important
cultural phenomenon and overlook its unique ability to provide insights
into the dynamics of remembrance. In writing The World Hitler Never
Made, I hope to convince readers of alternate history's legitimacy as a
subject of scholarly inquiry and persuade them that examining tales of what
never happened can help us understand the memory of what did.

THE RISE OF ALTERNATE HISTORY

Understanding the appearance of alternate histories of Nazism requires

understanding alternate history itself.3 As a genre of narrative representa-
tion, alternate history resists easy classification. It transcends traditional
cultural categories, being simultaneously a sub-field of history, a sub-genre
of science fiction, and a mode of expression that can easily assume literary,
cinematic, dramatic, or analytical forms. 4 At the most basic level, however,
tales of alternate history - or what have been termed "allohistorical" or
"uchronian" narratives - investigate the possible consequences of "what if"
questions within specific historical contexts. 5 What if Jesus had escaped
crucifixion? What if Columbus had never discovered the New World?
What if the South had won the American Civil War? In posing and
answering such questions, alternate histories assume a variety of different
narrative forms. Those produced by historians and other scholars usually
take the form of sober analytical essays, while those produced by novelists,
filmmakers, and playwrights assume a more overtly fictional form through
the use of such familiar narrative devices as plot development, setting, and
character portrayal. 6 What links such "analytical" and "fictional" alternate
histories is their exploration of how the alteration of some variable in the
historical record would have changed the overall course of historical events.
The inclusion of this element - often called a "point of divergence" - is
 Introduction 5
what distinguishes alternate history from other related genres, such as
historical fiction. Alternate history, to be sure, is far from monolithic and
has various narrative cousins, some of which, such as "secret histories" and
"future histories," I have included in this study.? Without getting bogged
down by complex taxonomical distinctions, however, alternate histories are
essentially defined by an "estranging" rather than a mimetic relationship to
historical reality. 8
As a genre of narrative representation, alternate history is an age-old
phenomenon. Indeed, it traces Its roots back to the origins of Western
historiography itself. No less a figure than the Greek historian Herodotus
speculated about the possible consequences of the Persians defeating the
Greeks at Marathon in the year 490 B.C.E., while the Roman historian
Livy wondered how the Roman empire would have fared against the armies
of Alexander the Great. 9 Ever since antiquity, the posing of counterfactual
questions has constituted an implicit, if underacknowledged, component
of historical thought, helping historians establish causal connections and
draw moral conclusions in interpreting the past. IO Yet, with the rise of
modern "scientific" historiography in the nineteenth century, allohistorical
reasoning became stigmatized as empirically unverifiable and was banished
to the realm of lighthearted cocktail party conversations and parlor
games. II As a result, alternate history slowly migrated to the field of
imaginative literature. It is no coincidence that the first allohistorical novels
appeared in the mid-nineteenth century, most notably Charles Renouvier's
I2
Uchronie (1876), which lent the genre one of its defining terms. Up
through the first half of the early twentieth century, both fictional and
analytical alternate histories appeared largely in scattered pulp science
fiction magazines and scholarly anthologies. I3 On the whole, the genre
remained fairly marginalized, known only to a handful of ardent
practitioners.
Since the end of World War II, and especially since the 1960s, however,
alternate history has gained both in popularity and respectability.I4 The
mass media's recognition of alternate history as a contemporary phenom-
enon in the late 1990S is the most obvious indication of this trend. I5 But this
new attention is itself the result of the even more notable increase in the
publication of alternate history novels and short story collections. I6 Further
evidence of alternate history's new status is provided by the fact that the
writers of allohistorical novels no longer hail exclusively from science
fiction circles but also from the cultural mainstream. I7 The proliferation
of alternate history web sites, meanwhile, reflects the gente's popularity
among the general public. I8 Overall, however, the best evidence for the
6 Introduction
increased acceptance of alternate history has been its embrace by the
academic community, which has demonstrated a growing interest in the
subject with a variety of recent publications. 19 Especially as the most
skeptical academics of all - historians - have slowly begun to set aside
their longtime reservations about the field, it is likely that alternate history
will continue to gain in prominence and respectability.
It is, fittingly enough, still a matter of speculation why the fascination
with alternate history has grown in recent years, but it seems to be the
byproduct of broader political and cultural trends. To begin with, the new
prominence of alternate history reflects the progressive discrediting of
political ideologies in the West since 1945. In insisting that everything in
the past could have been different, in stressing the role of contingency in
history, and in emphasizing the open-endedness of historical change,
alternate history is inherently anti-deterministic. 20 It is no coincidence
that the upsurge in allohistorical thinking has taken place in an era where
deterministic political ideologies have come under unprecedented attack
from the political right, left, and center. The emergence of our post-
ideological age began in the immediate aftermath of World War II,
when rightwing intellectuals, eager to distance themselves from the failure
of fascism, proclaimed the dawning of a new era of "posthistory."21 By the
late 1960s, leftwing intellectuals, chastened by the failure of socialist
radicalism in Western Europe, helped further to erode the authority of
political ideologies by establishing the foundation for the postmodern
movement's rejection of all totalizing "metanarratives" in the 1970s.22
Finally, the end of the cold war and the collapse of communism in the
late 1980s prompted the belief among liberals that humankind had reached
the end point of its ideological evolution and, indeed, had reached "the end
of history" itselC3
The end of ideological struggle has promoted the rise of allohistorical
thinking in diverse ways. Paradoxically, such thinking has been advanced
by a simultaneous increase in both confidence and insecurity since the end
of the cold war. On the one hand, by declaring liberalism victorious, the
end of ideological struggle initially gave many in the West the security to
reconsider whether our present-day world was indeed inevitable or whether
other outcomes - once thought too frightening to consider - were ever
possible. It is only since the threats of fascism and communism have been
eliminated that historians have begun to reconsider whether liberalism's
twentieth-century triumph over them had to occur as it did. 24 On the other
hand, by opening up new ways for history to get "restarted" again, the end
of ideological struggle has made us painfully aware of the open-ended
 Introduction 7
nature of historical development. The end of the cold war has produced
new worries in the West - about resurgent nationalism, religious funda-
mentalism, environmental destruction, and, most recently, global terror-
ism - that have contributed to an atmosphere of renewed insecurity. In our
current transitional era, in which the future is less clear than ever, we
recognize that nothing is inevitable at all. 25
Closely tied to the death of political ideologies in promoting the upsurge
of alternate history is the emergence of the cultural movement of post-
modernism. 26 While alternate history clearly predates the rise of postmod-
ernism, the latter movement has certainly enabled the former to move into
the mainstream. 27 Postmodernism, of course, is a complex phenomenon
that has shaped Western culture in a wide variety of ways. But it is in its
distinct relationship to history in particular that it has helped to encourage
the acceptance of allohistorical thinking. Postmodernism's playfully ironic
relationship to history (seen most vividly in the simulated historical envir-
onments of postmodern architecture) has found expression in alternate
history's playful rearranging of the narratives of real history.28 Indeed, the
blurring of fact and fiction so intrinsic to the field of alternate history
mirrors postmodernisnl's tendency to blur the once-rigid boundaries that
separated different realms of culture. 29 At the same time, the postmodern
movement's general valorization of "the other" and its attempt to resurrect
suppressed or alternate voices dovetails with alternate history's promotion
of unconventional views of the past. Finally, postmodernism has encour-
aged the rise of a more subjective and relativistic variety of historical
consciousness so necessary for allohistorical speculation. 30 If, as historians
now recognize, history is not about discovering a single "truth" about the
past but understanding how diverse contingent factors determine its vary-
ing representation, it is no wonder that accounts of the past that diverge
from the accepted historical record have begun to proliferate as never
before. All of these general trends have eroded the traditional dominance
of an objectivist, scientific kind of historiography and have helped foster
the acceptance of its alternate cousin.
Beyond the influence of postmodernism, recent scientific trends have
further promoted allohistorical thinking. Ever since the appearance of
Einstein's theory of relativity and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle,
modern science has been moving away from determinism and towards
a belief in indeterminacy. The notion of "complexity theory" or "chaos
theory," which asserts that some universal laws are so complex that they
appear to be chaotic or random in appearance, has lessened the appeal of
determinstic explanations of history. Evolutionary biology has shed light
8 Introduction
on the profound role of chance events - like meteor strikes - in negating
seemingly linear evolutionary patterns based on pre-existing genetic advan-
tages. Recent scientific theories regarding parallel or multiple universes can
also be seen as sustaining allohistorical speculation. 31 As a result of such
scientific theories, historians like Niall Ferguson have recommended that
the field of history grant new respect to counterfactual speculation and
embrace something known as "chaostory."3 2 Such an amended notion of
history would aid our understanding of historical causation by considering
the probability of plausible alternatives to the real historical record. It
would make us realize that in order to understand "how it actually was"
we have to understand "how it actually wasn't."B
The new prominence of alternate history can also be seen as a byproduct
of technological trends, specifically the "information revolution." Through
the appearance of new, digitally based computer and communications
technologies, most notably the internet, we have witnessed the birth of
cyberspace, a realm of existence that has broken the restrictions of real time
and space and introduced us to an alternate or "virtual" reality. In a world
where the digital alteration of photographs has become commonplace on
magazine covers, where digitally altered (or generated) actors populate
movie screens, and where online chats replace face-to-face contact, we
have become increasingly separated from the real world. It is little wonder,
then, that in such a climate our imaginations have become separated from
the constraints of real history as well. H As the alternate realm of cyberspace
becomes the place where we live much of our daily lives in the present, so
too does our capacity - and perhaps inclination - to imagine an alternate
realm for the past.
The new interest in alternate history can further be explained by the
growing presence of what might be called a speculative sensibility within
contemporary popular culture. Instead of simply mirroring reality, recent
works of film and fiction have begun to explore alternatives to it. This
speculative sensibility has been most noticeable of late in major motion
pictures - among them, Sliding Doors, Run Lola Run, Femme Fatale, and
The Butterfly Effect - which have portrayed small points of divergence in
the lives of the central characters leading to dramatically different out-
comes. 35 A similar embrace of speculation has further been visible in the
decision of directors to allow audiences to select alternate endings to
their films according to personal preference. 36 And the tendency to envi-
sion alternatives has found expression in the increasing popularity of
"fan fiction" - where amateur writers supply their own supplementary
narratives to established television shows and literary series. The growth of
 Introduction 9
this speculative impulse can be seen as part of a larger imaginative turn
within popular culture in general. Over the course of the last generation,
certain genres of narrative representation - especially science fiction and
fantasy - have left their former location on the cultural periphery and
assumed mainstream status. Beginning with the emergence of the "New
Wave" of socially conscious science fiction literature in the late 1960s,
through the Hollywood blockbuster space epics of Spielberg and Lucas in
the 1970S and 1980s, all the way up to the current vogue for Philip K. Dick,
science fiction has gained a sizable share of the pop culture market. 37 The
same can be said about the genre of fantasy, as seen in the enduring
popularity of J. R. R. Tolkien's epic novel (and Peter Jackson's recent
Oscar-winning cinematic portrayal of) The Lord of the Rings, as well as
the immense success of]. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. Both genres, of
course, are defined by their vivid imagination of alternate worlds far
removed from contemporary reality - the world of science fiction typically
set in a speculative future, thar of fantasy situated in a magical, mythological
past. 38 The popularity of both, however, seems to have facilitated the
acceptance of that one related genre that focuses its imaginative gaze
upon the actual past - alternate history. As allohistorical narratives rely on
the same imaginative speculation as science fiction and fantasy narratives,
it is no wonder that the first-named have ridden the coat-tails of the other
two to new prominence.
Finally, the new prominence of alternate history is explained by the
acceleration of what has been called the "Entertainment Revolution."39
The emergence of entertainment as one of the primary standards of value
in modern Western society is a complex phenomenon with distant origins,
but it has become especially apparent in recent years. 40 If steady economic
prosperity, an increase in leisure time, and growing opportunities for mass
consumption explain the general public's insatiable appetite for pleasurable
diversion, the fiercely competitive (but also immensely lucrative) forces of
the capitalist free market explain why the television, film, newspaper, and
book publishing industries - not to mention less overtly commercially
minded fields like politics, religion, and education - have all attempted to
lure viewers, readers, and supporters by entertaining them. Various obser-
vers have pointed out the worrisome consequences of this phenomenon:
the shrinking attention span of a general public more interested in super-
ficial images than complex analysis; the fascination with celebrity, scandal,
and sensationalism; the dumbing-down of real news into "infotainment";
not to mention the encouragement of increasingly extreme behavior in the
effort to satiate the craving for diversion. 41 Few fields have been spared this
IO Introduction
trend, not even the ivory tower world of academia, which has recently
witnessed the rise of media-savvy, celebrity professors who can entertain
with the same skill as television personalities. The discipline of history, too,
has been affected by the entertainment revolution, as is demonstrated by
the emergence of its own "media dons" like Simon Schama, Niall
Ferguson, and Andrew Roberts, the success of the History Channel, and
the increasing tendency of historical scholarship to focus on sensationalistic
events like criminal trials, massacres, and other scandals (a genre recently
dubbed "the new mystery history").4 2 But the impact of entertainment on
history is perhaps most obvious in the new popularity of alternate history
itself. Unlike conventional history, which remains largely constrained by
the serious imperatives of analysis and enlightenment, alternate history's
penchant for the unconventional, the sensationalistic, and the irreverent
caters to the general public's hunger for pleasurable diversion. Alternate
history, in a word, is "fun." And in a culture increasingly oriented towards
fun, it was probably only a matter of time before the genre's money-
making potential was recognized and it established a firm niche for itself
in the competitive publishing industry.
And yet, no matter how much alternate history's new prominence lies in
recent cultural trends, the genre's appeal may ultimately be rooted in
deeper human urges. It may well lie within our very nature as human
beings, in fact, to engage in counterfactual speculation. Many of us at one
point or another have doubtless asked the question "what if?" about pivotal
moments in our personal lives: What if we had attended a different school,
taken a different job, lived in a different place? What if we had never met
certain individuals who became colleagues, friends, or spouses? In short,
what if we had decided to go down Robert Frost's famous "Road Not
Taken?" Why we ask such questions - and the issue of when we ask them -
is far from simple, but at the risk of over-generalizing, it seems clear that
when we speculate about what might have happened if certain events had
or had not occurred in our past, we are really expressing our feelings about
the presentY When we ask "what if?" we are either expressing gratitude
that things worked out as they did or regret that they did not occur
differently. The same concerns are manifest in the broader realm of
alternate history.
Alternate history is inherently presentist. 44 Jt explores the past less for its
own sake than to utilize it instrumentally to comment upon the state of the
contemporary world. When the producers of alternate histories speculate
on how the past might have been different, they invariably express their
own highly subjective present-day hopes and fears. 45 It is no coincidence,
 Introduction II

therefore, that alternate histories typically come in the form of both fantasy
and nightmare scenarios. 46 Fantasy scenarios envision the alternate past as
superior to the real past and thereby typically express a sense of dissatisfac-
tion with the way thing~ are today. Nightmare scenarios, by contrast,
depict the alternate past as inferior to the real past and thus usually
articulate a sense of contentment with the contemporary status quo.
Allohistorical fantasies and nightmares, moreover, each have different
political implications. Fantasies tend to be liberal, for by imagining a better
alternate past, they see the present as wanting and thus implicitly support
changing it. Nightmares, by contrast, tend to be conservative, for by
portraying the alternate past in negative terms, they ratify the present as
the best of all possible worlds and thereby discourage the need for change.
To be sure, these particular psychological and political implications do not
stand in a necessary or deterministic relationship to the two scenarios.
Indeed, it is fitting that both nightmare and fantasy narratives can reflect
alternate psychological and political impulses. Nightmare scenarios, by
showing how the past could have easily been worse, can function as liberal
cautionary tales that challenge the conservative belief that the present-day
world was inevitable, that it continues to be virtuous, and that it is destined
to be permanent. Fantasy scenarios, meanwhile, can be used in conserva-
tive fashion to construct escapist alternatives to the present that evade the
liberal injunction to confront its problems head-on. The implications of all
allohistorical scenarios, in short, are complex. But, on the whole, they
explore the past instrumentally with an eye towards larger, present-day
agendas.

ALTERNATE HISTORY AND NAZISM

The presentist character of alternate history helps explain its special attrac-
tion to the subject of Nazism. Within the general field of alternate history,
the Third Reich has been explored more often than any other historical
theme. 47 The reason for the Nazi era's popularity is complicated, but it
likely is due to its enduring ability to attract and repel the contemporary
imagination. On the whole, alternate history as a genre tends to focus on
pivotal events of world historical importance that have squarely left their
mark on the world of today. These events, or "points of divergence,"
include the deaths of kings and politicians, decisive military victories or
defeats, the rise of grand cultural or religious movements, and even demo-
graphic trends, such as migrations or plagues. The fact that the Third Reich
is the most commonly explored subject in alternate history reflects Western
12 Introduction
society's enduring awareness of its creation as a pivotal event that has
shaped the contemporary world like few other events have. It is no wonder,
then, that it has become the most commonly explored topic in all of
alternate history. In short, the many speculative narratives of the Third
Reich reflect the enduring centrality of the Nazi past in Western memory.
What specifically, however, do alternate histories of the Nazi era reveal
about how the Third Reich has been remembered? Despite the intrinsic
interest of this question, there has up to now been little scholarly interest in
allohistorical representations of Nazism. 48 This neglect is surprising for
several reasons. For one thing, in recent years a great number of scholarly
works have examined the memory of Nazism in a wide range of cultural
fields -literature, film, architecture, art, theater, and photography, among
others.49 Scholars, indeed, seem to have examined nearly all aspects of
Western culture except alternate history. It is possible that alternate history
has been overlooked precisely because it spans many of these forms of
cultural expression and belongs to none in particular. But whatever the
reason, this omission is surprising, since alternate history possesses a
unique ability to illuminate the workings of historical memory.5 0 Oddly
enough, alternate histories lend themselves very well to being studied as
documents of memory for the same reason that most historians have
dismissed them as useless for the study of history - their fundamental
subjectivity. 51 Speculative accounts about the past are driven by many of
the same psychological forces that determine how the past takes shape in
remembrance, Biases, fears, wishes, the desire to avoid guilt, the quest for
vindication - these and other related sentiments all influence the ways in
which alternate histories represent how the past might have been, just as
they influence the ways in which people remember how the past "really"
was. The role of such forces in shaping the allohistorical reimagining of the
past clearly shows that they are fundamentally rooted in subjective specu-
lation. Yet while they are subjective, alternate histories hardly lack repre-
sentative value. Since 1945, alternate histories of Nazism have rarely
appeared in isolated fashion but usually have emerged in waves during
specific eras. In a word, they have illustrated collective speculative trends
that provide a revealing reflection of broader views of the past.
Of course, there exist numerous challenges to studying alternate his-
tories of Nazism as documents of memory. The most apparent is the
quantity and diversity of the narratives themselves. Well over one hundred
allohistorical works have been produced on the Third Reich in the last half
century. 52 They have appeared in a wide range of cultural forms: highbrow
works of literature, pulp fiction novels, science fiction magazine short
 Introduction 13
stories, independent and studio-based film productions, prime-time tele-
vision broadcasts, theatrical plays, historiographical essays and anthologies,
mass-market comic books, internet web sites, and role-playing video
games. These narratives, moreover, have featured a wide range of allohis-
torical premises and outcomes. Understandably enough, the scope and
diversity of alternate histories of the Third Reich make examining them a
daunting task. After immersing myself in the field, however, I gradually
came to see that analyzing them in comprehensive fashion provided the
best means of gauging their overall significance. I became especially con-
vinced of the merit of proceeding in this way once I recognized that among
the many themes portrayed by counterfactual tales of the Nazi past, four
recurred with striking frequency. These included tales in which: I) the
Nazis win World War II; 2) Hitler escapes death in 1945 and survives in
hiding well into the postwar era; 3) Hitler is removed from the world
historical stage either before or some time after becoming the Fiihrer; 4) the
Holocaust is completed, avenged, or undone altogether. The predom-
inance of these four themes is significant, for it not only suggests their
resonance within the Western imagination but enables us to impose some
conceptual order on what otherwise would be a bewilderingly diverse range
of works.
In structuring the present study, therefore, I have devoted separate
chapters to the themes of a Nazi wartime victoty, Hitler's survival, the
world without the Fiihrer, and the Holocaust. I examine each chapter's
respective theme from a variety of analytical perspectives. First, I classify
and analyze the various narratives either as nightmare or fantasy scenarios.
Some scenarios, such as the Nazis winning World War II, are clear
examples of the former. Others, such as Hitler's elimination from history,
exemplify the latter. Certain themes, meanwhile, bridge both categories. 53
Exploring whether alternate histories have more commonly expressed fears
or fantasies provides one index of Western views of Nazism. A second and
more significant method is provided by analyzing how works of alternate
history have actually answered their respective "what if" questions. 54 In
changing the historical record - say, by having Hitler captured and placed
on trial- have they projected alternate history turning out better or worse
than (or no different from) real history? Examining this question, further-
more, illustrates the function of alternate histories: that is, whether their
reimagining of the past has been intended to validate or criticize the
present. Third, studying the identities of the authors of alternate histories
and their motives for writing them clarifies their own relationship to the
Nazi past. Such factors as an author's national origins, generational identity,
14 Introduction

and political affiliation can illuminate their motives for speculating about the
past. Fourth, looking at how alternate histories of Nazism have been received
by critics and general readers reveals the extent to which their depictions of
the Nazi past reflect the views of the public at large. 55 Discovering whether a
given narrative was a critical success or failure, whether it was a commercial
hit or a flop, and whether it was ignored or caused controversy provides a
sense of its larger resonance. Finally, examining how the conclusions and
reception of allohistorical depictions of the Third Reich have changed over
time reveals whether Western views of the Third Reich have remained static
or have evolved. In short, a synchronic and diachronic method of analyzing
alternate histories provides the most thorough means of understanding their
significance as documents of memory.

ALTERNATE HISTORY, POPULAR CULTURE, AND MEMORY

IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Looking at alternate histcries of the Third Reich in this fashion can yield a
variety of unique insights into how the Nazi era has been remembered in
postwar Western society. First, analyzing alternate histories helps us better
understand the role of popular culture in shaping the memory of Nazism. 56
While scholars have long explored the representation of the Third Reich in
"high" culture, they have only recently begun to do the same thing in the
more "lowbrow" realm of popular culture. 57 Alternate histories, whether
appearing as novels, films, television broadcasts, or comic books, clearly
belong to this latter category of cultud production. Like all works of
popular culture, they have been intentionally made for a mass audience and
thus have pursued commercial aims as much as artistic ones. 58 This fact is
significant, for it alerts us to how commercial pressures can shape the
content of a historical narrative and possibly distort the general public's
broader understanding of history. 59 Arguably the most important thing to
recognize about popular cultural representations of history, however, is
their immense public reach. Given the millions of people who are exposed
to historical films, television broadcasts, and novels, it is highly likely that
mass-market historical narratives are shaping popular historical awareness
to a much greater extent than the histories produced by professional
historians. 60 Alternate histories of Nazism obey these same dynamics.
Whether in the form of bestselling novels, feature films, or prime-time
television programs, they have reached untold millions of readers and
viewers. Analyzing their broader messages, together with their reception,
provides an excellent means of extending our study of memory beyond the
 Introduction 15
more limited realm of high culture and allows us to produce a more
representative portrait of the views of society at large.
A focus on alternate histories of the Third Reich also allows us to
examine memory in comparative fashion. While most scholars have exam-
ined the shifting consciousness of the Nazi era within individual national
contexts, this book aims for a broader perspective. 61 Allohistorical accounts
of the Third Reich have appeared in nations all over the world, spanning
the continents of Europe, North America, South America, and Asia. The
vast majority, however, have aPEeared in three countries: Great Britain, the
United States, and Germany. 2 Of these three, Britain and the United
States far and away have produced the most - 80 percent. 63 Explaining the
significance of this trend is difficult, as we still lack comprehensive studies
of the place of the Nazi past in postwar British and American historical
consciousness. 64 At first glance, however, the Anglo-American origin of
most alternate histories suggests that the impulse to produce them has been
especially strong among those nations that were on the winning side of
World War II. Similarly, the fact that alternate history is a variety of
popular culture and thus a form of entertainment also helps to explain
why the war's primary loser, Germany, has generated such a small number
of accounts - around 15 percent. Audiences within World War II's victor
nations have been able to read and enjoy alternate histories of Nazism as
works of entertainment, but Germans have not been able to enjoy the
luxury of embracing such a playful relationship to the past. Given that the
Nazi era brought unprecedented misery to their country, Germans under-
standably have been reluctant to confront the Nazi experience through a
genre of narrative representation whose chief characteristics and underlying
motives may easily be dismissed as shallow and merely commercial. This is
probably the same reason few alternate histories of Nazism have appeared
in France and Russia, two nations that were ostensibly among the war's
winners but that experienced the war's horrors much more directly than
Britons and Americans. Whatever the case may be, the predominance of
British, American, and German authors in producing alternate histories of
Nazism allows us to compare and contrast how the three nations have
remembered the years of the Third Reich and World War II.

THE NORMALIZATION OF MEMORY

Most importantly, examining alternate histories of Nazism in comparative

fashion provides compelling evidence of the creeping "normalization" of
the Nazi past in Western memory.6 5 The concept of "normalization" has
16 Introduction
frequently been invoked by scholars, but it has rarely been systematically
defined. 66 At the most basic: level, however, normalization refers to the
process by which a particular historical legacy (an era, an event, a figure, or
a combination thereof) becomes viewed like any other. As a concept,
normalization implies that a given historical legacy is somehow" abnormal"
to begin with. It also presumes an ideal-typical condition of "normalcy"
towards which all pasts teleologically proceed in consciousness. Such
assumptions underlying the concept of normalization are problematic.
But whatever one thinks of them, the fact remains that all pasts are not
created equal: some are more "normal" than others.
What makes a particular era in history abnormal? What enables it to
finally achieve the status of normalcy? Generally speaking, most periods of
history are viewed with a relative degree of equanimity, if not apathy, by
society at large. In current slang usage, they are "history" in the sense that
they are "over" and no longer in need of special attention. By contrast, an
abnormal past is one that occupies a disproportionate presence within a
society's historical consciousness. Historical eras that tend to acquire such
exceptional status are those that are associated with the occurrence of
traumatic or otherwise controversial events, whether military defeats,
civil strife, political crimes, or other major social or economic injustices.
These are eras whose traumas remain vivid in the memories of the people
directly affected by them - and, in many cases, among their descendants as
well. The experience of trauma, loss, and injustice, in turn, directly shapes
how the past is viewed, namely by leading it to be surveyed from a distinctly
moralistic perspective. Indeed, a crucial identifying feature of a historical
legacy that has not been normalized is the persistence of ethically informed
calls to study it, learn its proper "lessons," and hold them in memory, lest
the errors of the past be repeated one day in the future. In short, it is the
continued aura of moralism surrounding a given historical era that helps to
d enne
I'.
Its
• "b
a norm al'Ity. ,,67
The waning of a moralistic perspective towards the past, by extension, is
a crucial component of the larger process of normalization. Yet how and
why this process occurs, is a complicated matter. It is important to
recognize, first of all, that memory is not monolithic. There is never merely
one single view of a specific historical legacy within a given society, but
rather a multiplicity of diverse, competing views. Some can be seen as
dominant, or "official," memories, in the sense that they enjoy widespread
popular or state support, while others are better described as "counter-
memories," owing to their dissenting perspective towards the past. 68 These
competing memories, moreover, typically find expression in different
 Introduction 17
forms. There exists the "communicative memory" of historical events,
which refers to the oral transmission and preservation of original eye-
witness recollections of the past. And there exists the "cultural memory"
of historical events, which refers to the more objectified representations of
the past in various cultural forms, whether monuments, holidays, films,
novels, and the like. 69 Whatever their form, the dialectical relationship
between official and counter-memories helps to define the overall character
of a society's historical consciousness. A dominant memory in one era may
be replaced later on by a countervailing memory - one which, in its own
right, may be challenged by yet another dissenting set of views some time
thereafter. With this dynamic in mind, the process of normalization may
be understood to commence when a dominant moralistic view of the past
begins to lose its privileged status within popular consciousness and is
challenged by dissenting views that are less committed to perceiving it from
an ethically grounded vantage point.
It is important to recognize, however, that the process of normalization
can advance in multiple ways, all of which need to be understood in their
own unique dimensions. To begin with, there exists what might be called
the phenomenon of organic normalization, in which the passing of time,
the gradual disappearance ;)f older generations that personally experienced
certain historical events, and the slow maturation of new generations
bearing a less personal - and thus potentially more indifferent - relation-
ship to those events bring about the emergence of a less morally driven, and
thus more normalized, historical perspective?O In this sense of the word,
"normalization" refers to a descriptive concept that denotes a natural, if not
inevitable, process. At the same time, the concept of normalization also
exists in a more prescriptive form, as a goal that can be deliberately pursued
in aggressive fashion. Individuals and groups in society may seek to
normalize the past for a variety of reasons, but they do so usually out of a
sense of impatience with its continued abnormality. Advocates of this
agenda may use different strategies to neutralize or redirect attention
away from the past's resonant singularity. They may seek to relativize the
past by deliberately minimizing its unique dimensions through compari-
sons with other more or less comparable historical occurrences. They may
also attempt to universalize the past by explaining it as less the result of
particularistic trends distinct to the era in question than of broader, time-
less, social, political, or economic forces that they hope to call attention to
(and usually condemn). And they may try to aestheticize the past by
representing it through various narrative techniques that neutralize its
moral dimensions. These strategies all reflect a desire to make a given
18 Introduction

historical legacy no different from any other and can thus be seen as part of
a larger attempt to reduce its prominence in current consciousness, if not to
render it forgotten altogether.
The Third Reich is one historical era that has long resisted normal-
ization. For many reasons, the Nazi period has been viewed as different
from other periods of history. It has cast a long shadow not merely across
German history but also across European history, Jewish history, and the
history of modern Western civilization at large. The most obvious reason
for the Nazi era's disproportionately prominent status in current con-
sciousness is its notorious degree of criminality. In unleashing World
War II and perpetrating the Holocaust, among many other misdeeds, the
Nazis committed crimes that were so extreme as to be epochal in nature.
Beyond being suffused with a unique degree of criminality, moreover, the
Third Reich also lies in the very recent past. To a far greater degree than
more distant historical eras, the Nazi experience survives within living
"communicative" memory. For these reasons, historians and others have
insisted for many years on seeing and assessing the Nazi era from a
manifestly moral perspective. Non-fictional as well as fictional accounts
of the Nazi period since 1945 have long been defined by a shared belief in
Nazism's absolute evil?' They have been characterized by a commitment
to judging the perpetrators for their crimes and granting appropriate
respect and sympathy to the victims. The main reason for this practice
has been the perceived necessity of transmitting moral lessons to posterity,
chief among them George Santayana's oft-quoted admonition, "Those
who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This injunc-
tion has remained widely accepted up to our present day. The continuing
effort to bring Nazi war criminals to justice, the ongoing attempts to
financially compensate Holocaust victims, and the enduring vitality of
the general culture of commemoration in Europe and the United States
clearly demonstrate the enduring belief in the necessity of memory:·
And yet, over the course of the last generation, the perceived obligation to
depict the Third Reich in moral terms has been steadily challenged by the
emergence of a more normalized counter-perspective. The normalization of
the Nazi past has reflected different motives and assumed different forms.
But their differences notwithstanding, the numerous varieties of normal-
ization have all worked to break down the moral framework that has
surrounded the history of the Third Reich since its collapse in 1945.
The normalizing trend first became noticed a generation ago with the
increasing aestheticization of the Nazi era in European and American high
and popular culture. Beginning in the early 19705 and lasting through
 Introduction 19
the 1980s, a wide range of cultural works - Liliana Cavani's film The Night
Porter(1973), D. M. Thomas's novel The White Hotel (1981), Leon Krier's
rehabilitation of Nazi architecture in his 1985 treatise Albert Speer:
Architecture, I93 2 - I94 2 , and Anselm Kiefer's paintings of Hider salutes
and Nazi buildings (spanning the late 1960s to the early 1980s) - shifted
their narrative focus away from the Nazi regime's barbarous crimes
toward an aesthetic interest in its bombastic style and a prurient interest in
its lurid projections of sex and violence/ 2 For various scholars and cultural
critics at the time, this "new discourse" on Nazism was of great concern.
Coinciding as it did with the "Hider Wave" of the 1970S - a period of
intense attention to, and fascination with, the person of Adolf Hitler
himself - the aestheticization of the Nazi era seemed to reflect a growing
attraction to the world of the perpetrators and a diminished attentiveness
to the suffering of the victims. 73 In the process, it seemed to signal a
growing tendency to forget precisely those aspects of the past that most
needed to be remembered in order to prevent their recurrence. This
aestheticizing trend has continued in recent years, albeit in new form.
Since the 1990S, narratives of the Nazi era have been defined less by
prurience and aesthetic delight than humor. As seen in a wide range of
films, plays, books, and television programs - Roberto Benigni's film Life is
Beautifol (1997), Mel Brooks's theatrical revival of The Producers (2002),
Achim Greser's book of satirical cartoons Der Fuhrer privat(2000), and the
recurring appearance of the character "gay Hider" on Saturday Night Live-
the Nazi era has ceased to serve the ends of titillation and begun to serve the
ends of comic relief. 74 Whatever the manner of representation - gratuitous
horror or offbeat humor - the abandonment of a moralistic emphasis has
continued to define the ongoing aestheticization of the Third Reich.
The normalization of the Nazi era has also been pursued by efforts to
relativize its criminal features. This strategy has been the most visible in
Germany since the early 1980s, where politicians - mostly on the conser-
vative end of the political spectrum - attempted to relativize Nazi crimes in
order for Germans to regain a healthy or "normal" sense of national
identity/5 Following Chancellor Helmut Kohl's assumption of power in
1982, his conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) government
actively strove to remove German history from the shadow of Nazism.
Kohl's staging of the 1984 Bitburg "reconciliation" ceremonies and fre-
quent comments by leading conservative politicians like Alfred Dregger
and Franz Josef Strauss about the need for Germany finally to become
a "normal" nation testified to an impatience with the enduring stigma left
by the Nazi experience upon postwar German national identity. The
20 Introduction

Historians' Debate of 1986, in which conservative historians such as Ernst

Nolte attempted to diminish the uniqueness of Nazi crimes by comparing
them to other twentieth-century atrocities, further reflected a German
discomfort with the nation's exceptional historical legacy. The completion
of reunification in 1989-90 has only further intensified the yearnings for
normalcy. Although the negation of Germany's division should have
satisfied conservatives by eliminating the chief source of Germany's abnor-
mal postwar status, it actually did the opposite by leaving the past itself as
the only impediment to full normalization. Thus, in the 1990S, calls to
normalize German national identity have continued to appear - in large
part from members of Germany's "New Right," but also from recently
defected representatives of the old left as well. Thus, both conservative
intellectuals belonging to the "generation of 1989," such as Rainer
Zitelmann, and older left-liberals who lived through the Nazi years, like
Martin Walser, have openly criticized the morally grounded view of
German history established during the Bonn Republic by the radical
"generation of 1968" and have called for a view of German history liberated
from the burdens of Nazism?6 It remains to be seen how the continuing
focus on the Nazi era will shape German national identity. At present, the
only thing that is certain is that every attempt to forcibly normalize the
German past has ended up provoking fierce public debate and further
emphasizing the nation's enduring exceptionality.77
The normalization of the Nazi era has also been advanced by the attempt
to universalize its significance. This process has frequently (though by no
means exclusively) been promoted by scholars - especially historians,
political scientists, and sociologists - who have long been interested in
the broader process of "historicizing" the Third Reich. At the most basic
level, historicization refers to the scholarly attempt to explain the Nazi era
by situating it in its larger historical context and subjecting it to rational
analysis, often with the help of generalizing theories. This process com-
menced soon after the end of World War II and has since yielded many
important insights into the origins of the Nazi regime. But the general
explanatory frameworks that scholars have used to historicize the Nazi
era have frequently contributed to its universalization. For example, the
paradigms of "totalitarianism" and "fascism" which dominated academic
scholarship from the late 1940S through the 1970S ended up portraying
the Nazi period as merely the German variant of a broader European
political and economic crisis?8 This universalizing effect was one way in
which the process of historicization promoted the larger phenomenon of
normalization. But historicization promoted normalization in another way
 Introduction 21

as well, namely by striving to explain the Nazi era from a distinctly non-
judgmental perspective. In the 1980s, the German historian Martin Broszat
famously argued that overtly moral analyses of the Third Reich suffered
from their embrace of a "black-and-white" perspective that drew too rigid a
dichotomy between perpetrators and victims, obscured the era's gray
complexity, bracketed off the Third Reich from "normal" modes of
historical analysis (such as an empathetic perspective towards the historical
actors themselves), and prevented it from being integrated into the larger
sweep of German history.J9 Significantly, when historians in the late 1980s
and early 1990S heeded Broszat's call to assume a more objective perspective
towards the Nazi era, they historicized it with yet another generalizing
theory - that of "modernity" - that ended up universalizing it still
further. 80 To be sure, the universalization of the Nazi era does not inevi-
tably imply the absence of an ethical perspective. Indeed, many scholars
have condemned Nazi crimes in the process of explaining them with
generalizing theories. But by viewing the Third Reich as the result of larger
universal forces, most scholars have de-emphasized its unique German
dimensions and diminished its historic specificity.
Finally, beyond the deliberate strategies of aestheticization, relativiza-
tion, and universalization, the normalization of the Nazi past has pro-
ceeded organically through the natural passage of time. Over the course of
the postwar era, the social composition of the nations that were affected by
the Nazi experience - especially Germany, Great Britain, and the United
States - has dramatically changed, the eyewitnesses to the past getting older
and gradually being replaced by members of younger generations who
never experienced it personally. There is no automatic relationship, of
course, between generational identity and memory, but it seems clear
that for both Europeans and Americans, the passage of time has helped
determine whether they have chosen to view the Nazi past from a moral
perspective or have attempted to normalize it in one way or another. In
Germany, for example, the generations that lived through the Third Reich
were notoriously silent about it after 1945; twenty years later, however, the
so-called 1968 generation born immediately after the war felt sufficiently
unencumbered by personal ties to the Nazi era to confront it head on. The
passage of time within German society, in this instance, essentially enabled
a turn to moralism. The very same passage of time, however, ironically also
promoted a kind of normalization, for as new postwar problems arose
(such as the Vietnam War, economic recession, and so forth) they
gradually began to overshadow the Nazi era in the minds of the ethic-
ally committed younger generation, which increasingly viewed it in
22 Introduction

universalized fashion as part of the continuing, transnational phenomenon

of fascism. To cite a different example: the unpredictable dynamics of
organic normalization manifested themselves in the 1980s, when conserva-
tive members of the aging German generation that had lived through the
Nazi years impatiently declared that the time had finally come to normalize
the German past, which they infamously attempted to do by relativizing
the crimes of the Nazi era. In this case, the passage of time intensified a
latent yearning for normalcy and helped bring it into the open. Finally, the
passage of time has been involved in the aestheticization of the Nazi era, for
it has helped dismantle the taboos that had existed throughout the West
from the end of the war up through the 1970S against representing the
Third Reich in anything but a morally conscientious fashion - an icono-
clastic trend that has been advanced in particular by members of the
younger postwar generations who have been less inhibited in their relation-
ship to the Nazi era. These are but several examples of a complex trend. But
the passage of time - or "organic normalization" - needs to be seen as an
additional factor that has worked in tandem with the more deliberate
strategies of aestheticization, relativization, and universalization to normal-
ize the memory of the Nazi era.
Taken together, all of these dimensions of normalization reflect a
broader tendency to view the Third Reich like any other historical period.
At the same time, they reflect a growing willingness to challenge the virtues
of memory itself. For by viewing the Nazi past as a past like any other, the
injunction to remember its distinctive features has diminished in urgency.
The long road of normalization, thus, may well point to indifference, if not
amnesia, as its ultimate destination.

ALTERNATE HISTORY AND THE NORMALIZATION

OF MEMORY

Alternate histories of Nazism reveal clear signs of the intensifying pace of

normalization. Since 1945, allohistorical works have slowly abandoned the
traditional moralistic method of depicting the Nazi era in favor of a less
judgmental approach that has considerably reduced its aura of evil. This
trend has clearly been visible in the shifting portrayal of the four primary
themes of postwar alternate histories mentioned earlier. A good example is
provided by the subject treated in chapters 1-4, a Nazi victory in World War II.
While early postwar narratives consistently portrayed a Nazi-ruled world
as a dystopian place ruled by fanatical ideologues, later ones have depicted
it as a tolerable place run by reasonable pragmatists. The same is true of the
 Introduction 23
theme examined in chapter 5, Hitler's survival of the war and escape into
hiding. Early postwar narratives portrayed Hider as an unrepentant demon
who is brought to justice for his crimes, but more recent works have
portrayed him as a relatively normal human being who succeeds in evading
humanity's judgment. The subject of chapter 6, the world without Hitler,
demonstrates a similar trend. Early narratives fantasized that the world
would have been better without the evil Nazi dictator, whereas most recent
works have portrayed the world as being no better, if not worse, in his
absence. Finally, alternate accounts of the Holocaust, the subject of chapter 7,
confirm this same pattern. By focusing on perpetrators who are plagued by
the memory of Nazi crimes and who fail in attempting to atone for them,
these narratives have questioned the postwar faith in the utility of remem-
brance. Taken together, alternate histories of Nazism seem to indicate the
emergence of an increasingly normalized view of the Nazi past within
Western consciousness.
The reasons for this normalizing trend are complex. But they can be
better understood by periodizing the appearance of alternate histories of
Nazism into various eras and phases. Postwar alternate histories can gen-
erally be divided into tWo distinct eras: I) an era 0/ moralism, lasting from
1945 to the middle of the 1960s; and 2) an era o/normalization, beginning in
the middle of the 1960s and lasting up until the present day. There are
several differences between the two eras. First, the accounts that appeared
in the earlier era were consistently judgmental in their conclusions, while
those that appeared in the latter era were far less so. Moreover, far fewer
accounts appeared in the era of moralism (20 percent of the postwar total)
than in the era of normalization (a weighty 80 percent). To be sure, the
shift from moralistic to Iiormalized alternate histories has not been abso-
lute. Narratives situated in ethically informed frameworks have continued
to appear since the 1960s. Moreover, alternate histories in Britain, the
United States, and Germany have made the transition to normalized
conclusions at different times: Britain was the earliest, exhibiting this
shift in the mid-1960s; the United States was somewhat later, in the early
1970s; and Germany has been the last, only after the late 1980s. These
distinctions notwithstanding, the broader trend remains clear: the progres-
sively normalized conclusions of alternate histories have gone hand in hand
with their increasing production.
What, then, explains why the decade of the 1960s represents a watershed
in the West's broader views towards the Nazi era? This question can be
answered by breaking down the eras of moralism and normalization into
four smaller phases. During the era of moralism's initial cold-war phase
 Introduction
in the years 1945-1958, Western fears of communism kept alternate his-
tories of Nazism to a minimum. Nevertheless, the accounts that did appear
consistently depicted the Nazi era in morally unambiguous terms as a
symbol of absolute evil. This tendency intensified during a rediscovery
phase that began around 1958 and lasted up through the middle of the
1960s, when renewed international attention to Germany's Nazi past at the
time of the trial of Nazi SS official Adolf Eichmann caused a sudden
upsurge in allohistorical works. During these years, the overtly ethical
conclusions of alternate histories in Britain, the United States, and
Germany served the self-congratulatory function of validating the Allied
powers' real historical triumph over Nazism and affirming the positive
features of the present-day world.
After the middle of the 1960s, however, the moral consensus of the early
postwar years began to break down. During the era of normalization's
initial crisis phase, from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s, new social,
economic, and political crises began to eclipse the memory of Nazi crimes
and place them in their shadow. At this time, Great Britain, the United
States, and Germany entered periods of relative decline. The reasons were
different: in Britain, it was the loss of empire and the onset of economic
stagnation; in America, it was the upheavals of Vietnam, the civil rights
movement, Watergate, and economic malaise; in Germany, it was the
social upheavals caused by the rise of the 1968 generation and ensuing
economic decline. With the emergence of a more pessimistic mood,
alternate histories of Nazism largely changed their function. Instead
of being used to validate the present, they increasingly became used as
a means of criticizing it. Yet with the onset of a post-cold-war phase,
beginning in the late 1980s and lasting up to the present, the tendency
towards triumphalism returned, alongside the ongoing tendency towards
self-critique. This dual phenomenon reflected the ambiguous character of
the post-cold-war world. On the one hand, the cold war's end, the
reunification of Germany, and the accelerating retreat of the Nazi era
into the past produced a new climate of optimism that further eroded
the horror of Nazism in certain works of alternate history. On the
other hand, the emergence of new crises in the wake of the cold war's
end produced a pessimistic environment that encouraged other alternate
histories to preserve their self-critical streak.
The process of normalization visible in postwar works of alternate
history has been promoted by diverse factors. In certain cases, it has
resulted from the process of organic normalization, meaning the natural
passing of time and the growing distance between the present and the
 Introduction 25
increasingly remote past. In other cases, however, normalization has been
the result of conscious intent. Some of the producers of alternate histories
have deliberately universalized the significance of the Nazi era to make
specific comments about contemporary problems on the world stage.
Others consciously have relativizedNazi crimes in order to redirect atten-
tion to other historic crimes or contemporary dangers. Still others have
aestheticized the Nazi era, whether for psychological or commercial
motives. In the process, they have tended to undermine the injunction to
preserve the memory of the Nazi era's crimes lest they be repeated in the
future.
The normalization of the Nazi past in postwar alternate histories has not
proceeded unopposed, however. For one thing, the ongoing appearance of
morally principled accounts throughout the postwar world reflects an
enduring commitment to remember the Third Reich's crimes in their
historic specificity and to preserve their lessons in memory. But more
importantly, the commitment to memory has also been illustrated by the
strongly polarized reactions to many alternate histories of Nazism.
Significantly enough, these reactions have shifted considerably over the
course of the postwar period. During the era of moralism, a close
correspondence existed bet'veen the production and reception of alternate
histories. The ethically grounded conclusions of allohistorical narratives
were consistently accepted and praised by audiences throughout the West.
This confluence of views, however, ended with the onset of the era of
normalization. For more often than not, the less judgmental conclusions of
this period's alternate histories were rejected or otherwise attacked by
critics and audiences. In short, the normalization of the Nazi past in
works of alternate history has run up against the resistance of audiences
unwilling to abandon the use of moralistic frameworks in representing the
Nazi era. As a result, the memory of the Nazi past has become more
pluralistic, contested, and divided.
We seem to have arrived, therefore, at a crossroads in the West's
confrontation with the Nazi legacy. As the Third Reich fades ever more
into the past, authors and audiences continue to disagree about the most
appropriate way to represent and remember it. The producers of alternate
history persist in extending the limit of what is permissible in portraying
the Nazi years, but audiences and critics continue to insist on a narrow
spectrum of representational boundaries. The consequences of these dif-
ferences remain to be seen. But the broader trend is clear: allohistorical
narratives of the Third Reich point to a growing normalizing trend in the
Western memory of the Nazi era.
 PART I

The Nazis win World War II

 Comparative overview

We cut off the [Henry Hudson] Drive onto the Goethe Parkway ...
I still didn't know why we were heading out to Westchester, and to
tell the truth I didn't care much ...
'That's Croton-on-Hudson up ahead,' Kohler said. 'It's not far now.'
You could read the sign from 500 yards, a huge billboard draped
with swastika bunting and crested by an Imperial Eagle with the globe
clutched in its talons: 'Welcome to Croton-on-Hudson. Home of the
Final Solution. Visit the Frederick Barbarossa Death Camp, I mile
ahead, First Right. Admission 35 marks, children Free. No Dogs
Allowed. Picnic area" adjacent ... '
We drove along the road at fifteen or twenty miles an hour ... and
I looked out at the Barbarossa Camp without any great interest. There
wasn't really much to see, just a lot of old barracks and endless coils of
rusty barbed wire plus a string of road signs from the local Elks and
Rotarians greeting visitors: 'Croton-on-Hudson, where Four Million
Enemies of the Reich perished.' I remember reading that Croton was
second only to Auschwitz in its kill ratio, so I guess they had reason for
pride, but I didn't care for the commercialization. One big sign
was decorated with a blown-up color photograph of an emaciated
Jew ... [his] drowned eyes luminous with hunger. It was captioned
in huge red letters, 'If Bread and Water Isn't Enough For You, Visit
Schaumberger's Steak House, Rt. I, 250 yards from the Wesley
Overpass."

New York City detective Bill Halder's blase depiction of the Nazis'
extermination of American Jewry in Eric Norden's 1973 detective thriller
The Ultimate Solution provides a particularly chilling answer to the ques-
tion that has dominated much of the allohistoricalliterature on the Third
Reich: what would have happened had the Nazis won W orId War II? This
nightmare scenario has been the dominant theme of all the alternate
histories on the Third Reich produced since 1945. 2 In Great Britain, the
United States, Germany, and scattered other nations, the premise of the
Nazis winning World War II has been explored time and again in a wide

29
30 The Nazis win World War II
range of novels, films, television programs, plays, comic books, and histor-
ical essays. These accounts have varied considerably in explaining the reasons
for the Nazis' wartime triumph. But they have all focused squarely upon its
consequences for the subsequent history of the world. Interestingly enough,
the narratives that have appeared since World War II have diverged sharply
in their approach to this question over time. For the first two decades of
the postwar era, up until the mid-1960s, most narratives moralistically
depicted a Nazi wartime victory as bringing about a terrifYing hell on earth.
Accounts since then, however, have diminished the scenario's sense of
horror and portrayed it in far more nuanced terms as a relatively tolerable,
if not benign, event.
This shift in the allohistorical representation of a Nazi wartime triumph
points to the existence of a normalizing trend in the Western memory of the
Nazi past. This trend has been visible in the particular ways in which British,
American, and German narratives have depicted a Nazi victory. Overall,
each nation's tales have focused on separate aspects of the scenario unique to
its own wartime experience. British accounts have speculated as to whether
the British people would have resisted or collaborated with the Germans
after being conquered by-them. American narratives have explored the extent
to which a Nazi triumph depended on the United States' decision either to
intervene or remain neutral in the war. Finally, German alternate histories
have largely focused on how the Nazis' conquest of Europe would have
affected Germany itself. Over time, the manner in which these themes have
been depicted has changed considerably. Early postwar narratives in Britain,
for example, portrayed the Nazis as demonic oppressors and the British as
heroic resisters, but later accounts blurred the distinctions between the two
by imagining the Germans as reasonable occupiers and the British as
opportunistic collaborators. Similarly, early postwar tales in the United
States depicted the Germans as ideological fanatics who needed to be
stopped by military intervention, while later narratives projected the Nazis
as much more moderate foes against whom America could safely remain
neutral. Finally, most postwar German narratives consistently represented a
victorious Third Reich as an unmitigated disaster for Germany, while more
recent ones have portrayed it as not such a bad event after all.
The changing representation of a Nazi wartime victory reflects a broader
shift in the scenario's allohistorical function. Initially, the vision of a Nazi
triumph in World War II was conceived as a nightmare scenario. As such, it
partly reflected the lingering trauma of the Nazi experience in popular
consciousness after 1945. But it largely functioned - like many nightmare
scenarios - as a negative foil that helped to validate the virtues of the
 Comparative overview 31
present-day world. Early postwar narratives in Britain, for instance, depicted
a Nazi victory in frightful terms in order to triumphalistically affirm the
belief that the British people's real historical resistance against the Germans
constituted what Winston Churchill called their "finest hour." American
accounts from the same era portrayed a victory of the Nazis in similarly
horrifying fashion in order to justify the United States government's decision
to intervene in the war against them. German tales, by contrast, were some-
what more complex in motivation, depicting a Nazi triumph in bleak terms
partly to condemn the bygone Third Reich, but also to celebrate the Federal
Republic's superiority to it. Midway through the postwar era, however, the
self-congratulatory purpose of alternate histories began to give way to a more
self-critical orientation. This change was particularly apparent in British and
American alternate histories. As Great Britain and the United States began to
experience periods of crisis after the mid-196os, the producers of alternate
histories reduced the horror of a Nazi military victory in order to criticize
their nations' progressive decline. This self-critical impulse began to fade
somewhat with the ebbing of the era's crises and the restoration of stability
by the late 1980s, but from this point on, alternate histories just as frequently
functioned to criticize the present as to validate it. The exception to this rule
was provided by German accounts, which moved in the opposite direction.
While the dystopian narratives of the early postwar period had exhibited a
self-critical dimension from the very beginning, the normalized accounts of
more recent years have expressed a more triumphalistic sensibility, reflecting
the new self-confidence produced by reunification.
In the end, the extent to which postwar allohistorical representations of a
Nazi wartime triumph truly reflect a normalizing trend in the Western
memory of the Third Reich is revealed by their popular reception. Not
surprisingly, the postwar responses to alternate histories of a Nazi victory in
World War II have varied by nation and era. But on the whole, as the
narratives have become more normalized, the reactions to them have
become more divided. British, American, and German audiences have
hailed some accounts enthusiastically, while they have criticized others
severely. These diverse responses are significant, for if the positive ones
suggest the dawning of a less moralistic view of the Nazi era, the more
critical ones indicate an enduring desire to preserve it intact.

A NAZI VICTORY IN ALTERNATE HISTORY

The allohistorical premise of a Nazi victory in World War II has a long

history. Ever since the outbreak of war in 1939, but especially since the
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
— Salvato!
Intanto passava le cambiali numerandole come per accertarsi della
verità alla quale non sapeva credere. Gli sembrava di sognare...
Ad un tratto ricadde nell’abbattimento; mandò un grido di sorpresa
dolorosa...
— Ettore, non abbiamo fatto nulla! Mancano le cambiali scadute
oggi!
— Quali? Non le hai ritirate tu? Qui c’è il saldo completo!
— Sei stato mistificato; non ho ritirato nulla!
— Eppure, le settantacinquemila lire furono pagate.
— Da chi? Da chi mai, se non da te? Per carità, corri alla banca a
chiarire l’equivoco. Tutti i sacrifici di Adele sarebbero inutili.
Settantacinquemila lire, capisci! Eccoti il biglietto di preavviso...
— Non turbarti; se c’è errore, ho la somma occorrente... Pure ti
assicuro che alla banca le tue cambiali non vi sono più...
— Chi mai?...
Lasciandosi cadere su d’una seggiola stette pensoso.
— Oh!... sclamò. Quale umiliazione! Giulia! non può essere stata
che lei... Essa ne sapeva qualche cosa; me ne parlò, io negai
recisamente. Giulia! Ettore, Ettore, è troppo!
Ruggeri non disse parola. Non poteva essere altrimenti, ed
osservava con pietà mista a disprezzo l’amico, le cui avventatezze
dovevano essere riparate da due donne: la sposa tradita e l’amante
milionaria.
Finalmente Ruggeri riprese:
— È troppo davvero! Credevo che da Ferretti, dal tuo Ferretti
arrestato stamattina, da vile malfattore qual è, non si potesse
scendere più in basso... Non mancava che le amanti tue pagassero i
tuoi debiti.
«Giuliano, di’ la verità, devi altre somme alla marchesa?
— No, te lo giuro!...
— Ebbene eccoti le settantacinquemila lire; erano destinate alla
banca, le porterai invece alla signora... La quale avrebbe dovuto
comprendere che meglio era lasciarti in balìa all’inchiesta
parlamentare, che disonorarti co’ suoi soccorsi.
— Non dire così... È una prova sublime di abnegazione e di affetto...
— Come vorrai! replicò indispettito Ruggeri, contando i biglietti di
banca. Prendi la somma, corri dalla marchesa e portami le cambiali;
ti aspetto qui. Purchè nulla sia trapelato del suo concorso... Si
direbbe e... e si stamperebbe in tutta Italia che il deputato conte
Giuliano Sicuri paga i debiti e le differenze di borsa coi denari delle
donne innamorate de’ suoi begli occhî... De’ suoi begli occhi blu,
soggiunse, ripensando alla teoria oculistica del commendatore
Cerasi.
Giuliano nella gioja di sentirsi salvo, quantunque ferito nell’amor
proprio per l’indubitato intervento di Giulia, era raggiante alla nuova
prova d’amore.
Se avesse osato, avrebbe protestato contro Ruggeri. D’altronde,
pensava: — Che c’è di male? Se non avessi potuto rimborsarla
sarebbe stato altro affare... E poi, a mia insaputa; io non sono
menomamente imputabile... Buona Giulia! Mentre io mi disperavo,
essa accorreva tacitamente in soccorso mio... Senza neppur
prevenirmi per delicatezza.
Frattanto si rassettava frettolosamente. Scampato al pericolo, al
pericolo passato non pensava, divorato dall’impazienza di rivedere
Giulia, di ringraziarla, di effondere ne’ caldi baci la riconoscenza
traboccante.
— Poveretta, jersera mi avrà inutilmente aspettato...
Una nube ripassò sulla fronte rasserenata.
— Ferretti arrestato! E la liquidazione di domani? Dovrò nuovamente
ricorrere ad Ettore... A lui che mi fa sì pesantemente sentire il suo
appoggio, i suoi favori. Meno male! Domani si tratterà di riscuotere,
non di pagare...
Ettore, mentre Giuliano stava vestendosi, indovinando gli intimi
pensieri dell’amico, si sdegnava...
— Ha ragione il commendatore; l’acqua non risale alla sorgente. Sul
pendìo precipita... È finita! Compirò il mio dovere, e poi
l’abbandonerò al destino.
Allorchè Giuliano stava per uscire:
— Ti raccomando di far presto. Ritorna colle cambiali... Fra un’ora
devi essere alla Camera... Sollecita!
Nella fretta, Giuliano usciva senza salutare... Sul limitare ristette
pentito; ritornò ad Ettore:
— Come ringraziarti di tutto ciò che hai fatto per me?
— Non ringraziarmi... Va, e ritorna presto. Io sono sulle spine per
quelle tue cambiali, più che se fossero in mano del notajo per il
protesto.
— Buon Ettore!
E giulivo abbracciò l’amico in un impeto riconoscente...
— Fra venti minuti sarò di ritorno... non temere, non tarderò.
Nell’uscire il suo sguardo cadde su di un vaso riboccante di fiori
sciolti; ne tolse un garofano rosso, se lo mise all’occhiello dell’abito e
sparì correndo, mandando ancora un saluto ad Ettore, che, rimasto
solo, ritornò al suo pensiero dominante, a Stella. La distrazione
cessata, il dolore riprendeva il suo impero.
L’eleganza di quella camera da letto, quantunque nel massimo
disordine, rivelava la mano intelligente ed affettuosa della donna, i
mille ninnoli rovinosi e inutili, sparsi sui mobili, regalucci da
innamorati, e fiori... Fiori smaglianti e profumati agonizzavano nei
vasi giapponesi, fiori avvizziti, appuntati a mazzolini cogli spilli al
grande arazzo della parete, contro la quale poggiava il letto di
Giuliano, eran tutto un calendario di giorni felici.
— Giuliano rientra la notte e non getta il fiore donatogli, lo appunta
alla parete, pensava malinconicamente Ruggeri.
Le cento fotografie della marchesa Giulia in cento abbigliamenti
diversi... I cuscinetti da spilli ricamati, la disposizione del sontuoso
mobilio, i paralumi colorati, capilavori di modista, dai nastri
sapientemente intrecciati dalla mano della marchesa, rappresentata
stupendamente in costume di Mignon, nel solo quadro ad olio.
Deliziosa Mignon, pittura del Verni, il celebre autore della Maddalena
ribelle.
Tutto sentiva l’amore, l’amore trionfante, felice, in quella camera
dall’acre sentore di sandalo, che si espandeva inebbriante dal soffice
tappeto orientale.
Come un senso di invidia morse Ettore al cuore...
— Egli ama riamato e felice! Felice anche nel delitto, ch’è delitto
l’abbandono della famiglia; felice nella vergogna per le sue colpe...
Riamato e felice!... A me l’amore nella disperazione. A che giova la
mia virtù?
«Ho anticipata la vecchiaja in un’esistenza da cenobita, casto contro
natura, per serbare fede ad una fanciulla che non sarà mai mia e
forse non mi ama e, nell’illusione di amarmi, sacrifica in sterile
celibato la sua fiorente giovinezza, allucinata, la martire, dalle
bugiarde visioni di una vita precedente, visioni ch’io le feci balenare
ed essa credette realtà nei mistici entusiasmi giovanili...
«Forse non mi ama; si appassiona soltanto al mio romanzo, che
ormai è il suo, eroina fantastica, risorta per riamarmi.
«Amore inverisimile, il quale spezza due esistenze, condanna per la
vita due esseri al dolore.
«Che importa la virtù?
«Giuliano, venuto meno a tutti i doveri, appena salvato dal disonore,
lo rivedo raggiante di gioja per una nuova prova d’amore che,
accettata, sarebbe l’infamia... e nell’incredibile egoismo di amante
non ha un pensiero per la povera abbandonata, che per lui si
immiserisce col figlio.
«Tutto ciò è infame; ma egli non se ne avvede, non si ravvede, ed è
felice.
Con invida curiosità, Ettore esaminava minutamente ogni oggetto, il
monogramma di Giuliano, ricamato in cento maniere... Un serico
cuscino portava una data soltanto...
— Certamente quella del loro primo incontro...
Due figurine di Sassonia, abbracciate, rappresentanti forse Fausto e
l’Elena greca della leggenda; sullo zoccolo di bronzo, a caratteri
d’oro, in rilievo, eravi la scritta: «Oggi e sempre!... anche all’Inferno!»
Sfida terribile di Giulia alla sua fede... Più forte l’amore della
religione... Religione l’amore per Giuliano, nella giovine donna
innamorata!
Un cofanetto in legno di sandalo, lavoro paziente, sorprendente, di
artista arabo, lasciato aperto da Giuliano, era colmo di lettere... Lo
rinchiuse, Ettore, girando la chiave d’oro a doppia mandata, quasi
per vincere la tentazione di frugare in quel cofano misterioso, nel
quale erano custodite le espansioni innamorate della marchesa...
Un lungo sospiro...
— Per Giuliano è finita! Il ravvedimento impossibile; un’anima debole
come la sua non ritorna da un simile amore.
Snervato da quelle indagini, offeso da tanta felicità, insulto per lui in
quei giorni desolati, premette il bottone elettrico ed al cameriere che
si era presentato sul limitare della porta:
— Il conte è uscito... Potete rassettare la sua camera da letto;
l’attenderò in salotto.
La stessa cosa. Anche là, l’acre profumo orientale, anche là la
presenza di Giulia in ogni oggetto... Anche là per lui la inseparabile
ombra di Stella, per sempre perduta, più spasmodico il pensiero
della propria miseria, innanzi alle prove di tanta felicità.
Quando Giuliano fu di ritorno, la serenità giuliva dell’amico lo irritò...
— Le cambiali? gli chiese rudemente.
— Eccole... Le aveva ritirate, per incarico della marchesa, il
commendatore Cerasi... Passai a palazzo Braschi a riprenderle...
— Sta bene! Ora vattene alla Camera, vacci a testa alta... Per oggi il
tuo onore è salvo; non contare mai più su di me. Che Dio, il destino,
ti ajutino... Il mio còmpito di bambinaja è finito!
Giuliano rimase atterrito al brutale congedo. Nell’egoismo di fanciullo
viziato, egli non aveva mai pensato che l’appoggio di Ruggeri gli
potesse mancare, del quale, specialmente in quell’ora, sentiva
l’assoluta necessità.
Fissò in volto l’amico, collo sguardo cerulo, del color del mare,
direbbe il poeta, sguardo attonito e impaurito, come quello di un
piccolo eroe de’ racconti di fate, minacciato dell’abbandono della
provvida guida in oscura, paurosa foresta...
— Ettore, mi abbandoneresti, ora che ho maggior bisogno di te?
— E che posso io fare? Non eri tu jeri lo sposo ed il padre più felice;
non sei tu oggi l’amante più fortunato? Avevi un patrimonio
pazientemente ammassato da tuo padre. L’hai in pochi mesi
dilapidato...
«Che vuoi ch’io faccia? Il tuo onore era compromesso, ho tentato
salvarlo, spero esservi riuscito. Ora a te. Hai appena trent’anni...
Quindi, se saprai, se vorrai, l’avvenire può essere tuo.
«Io partirò presto... Domani a Miralto per i funebri della madre di
Stella... Poi riprenderò la rotta pel capo Horn; presso le coste cilene,
nell’immenso Pacifico, vi è un’isola che si chiama della Desolazione:
quella la mia terra di deportazione.
— Morta la madre di Stella! E non mi hai detto nulla?
— Che dirti? Ti interessi tu a qualche cosa nel tuo egoismo?
Giuliano stette pensoso, umiliato, non potendo in alcun modo
scolparsi...
— È vero... Ancora un favore ti debbo chiedere, poi farò ciò che
vorrai.
«Ferretti è stato arrestato e domani è giorno di liquidazione in borsa,
la seconda profittevole fra tante disastrose. Io non mi intendo di
borsa; vorrei almeno che prima di partire tu andassi dal mio agente
di cambio, per vedere come sono gli affari miei, per liquidare ogni
partita. Ho giurato di non tornarci più... Questo ultimo favore non me
lo puoi negare. Dopo domani, quando sarai di ritorno...
— Se non è che questo, soggiunse interrompendolo, Ettore, con un
amaro sorriso, ti servirò, quantunque di borsa dovrei intendermene
meno io che non ci ho mai perduto un centesimo...
«Ed ora andiamo alla Camera!
 CAPITOLO XX.
La bufera.

La discussione dell’interpellanza bancaria si protrasse tre giorni, fra i

tumulti di un’assemblea sovraeccitata al parossismo. Alle passioni
politiche di partito si aggiungevano interessi personali, di attacco, di
difesa.
Vendette elettorali, rivincite, sfide latenti per inveterate inimicizie;
antipatie in lotta, rappresaglie di abbandoni, di diserzioni e
tradimenti.
Ed ancor più appassionante la manìa dello scandalo, malattia
inguaribile, ereditata colla condanna ai lavori forzati ed a morire, dai
nostri genitori per il primo fallo di Eva.
Le passioni che agitavano la Camera si erano propagate sui fili
telegrafici per l’Italia intiera. I giornali non si occupavano d’altro,
riboccanti di particolari sulle sedute parlamentari, di rivelazioni, di
accuse.
Il sentimento di moralità di un popolo intiero era in rivolta; la
curiosità, curiosità febbrile, si associava allo sdegno.
— I nomi! I nomi dei concussionarî! si gridava da ogni parte... I
colpevoli alla berlina!
Il Governo, sostenuto da una maggioranza formidabile, si opponeva
recisamente alla domanda di una inchiesta parlamentare; ma
l’opinione pubblica lo travolgeva. La difesa era ostinata, pure ad ogni
attacco dell’opposizione perdeva terreno. Tutte le arti di seduzione,
tutti gli strattagemmi parlamentari furono esauriti. Dovunque si
voleva la luce... I fogli degli scribi stipendiati, l’Ordine dell’onesto
Ferretti, il Parlamentare del gentiluomo Mosaici, in testa, invano
proclamavano carità di patria, nell’intento di sopire lo scandalo, onde
salvare all’estero l’onor nazionale, quasi che potesse essere
compromesso da pochi individui, qualunque sia la loro posizione
sociale e politica.
Asserragliato nell’ultimo riparo, il presidente del Consiglio capitolò,
promettendo un’inchiesta governativa. La maggioranza l’accettò.
Il Governo sperava, sottraendosi al controllo parlamentare, assopire
fatti inoppugnabili compromettenti tutti i poteri dello Stato; ma alle
prime indagini dell’inchiesta, le risultanze apparvero talmente
enormi, che l’intervento dell’autorità giudiziaria fu inevitabile.
Il minuto del terrore!... Un direttore di banca fu arrestato per
l’appropriazione indebita di due milioni, dei quali non sapeva render
conto... La voce si propagò di incredibili brogli all’Istituto Romano per
più di trenta milioni di lire. Tutte le voci le più pessimiste si
avveravano. L’opposizione trionfava.
Un mattino, Roma, attonita, vide sfilare per le sue vie un lungo
corteo di carrozze, guardate da un nugolo di guardie e carabinieri,
dirette alle carceri di oltre Tevere... a Regina Cœli... Direttore,
cassiere, alcuni impiegati, perfino l’elegante banchiere Michelini,
alcuni funzionari dello Stato componevano il triste convoglio... E la
folla crudele ad insultare gli arrestati, in attesa del turno dei ministri,
dei senatori, dei deputati ritenuti complici.
L’ora pareva vicina... Nelle carte degli arrestati compromissioni
insospettabili. Correva voce di domande del procuratore generale
alla Camera per autorizzazione a procedere contro alcuni deputati;
affermavasi che il Senato stava costituendosi in Alta Corte di
giustizia, per giudicare alcuni de’ suoi membri accusati.
La febbre dello scandalo, della pubblica curiosità, al delirio.
Dai banchi della Camera partivano accuse e denunzie formali, ed i
gabinetti dei giudici istruttori si erano trasformati in bocca di leone,
ufficî di informazioni, vere e false, per la stampa assetata di notizie.
Ogni reporter faceva bottino di nomi e di documenti onde metterli a
disposizione del proprio giornale, il quale, a seconda del partito
politico, delle sue attinenze e delle influenze, ne usava a proposito
ed a sproposito. Miscela di verità e di calunnie, di esagerazioni e di
pietose o interessate soppressioni. La confusione degli innocenti ai
colpevoli giovava al Governo, che frattanto sopprimeva nomi,
sottraeva documenti, a beneficio de’ suoi, o per ricattare gli avversari
più temibili, col silenzio momentaneo, forte della minaccia di
rivelazioni successive...
Giuliano, il quale, assestati i suoi affari coll’Istituto Romano, munito
della dichiarazione del saldo completo d’ogni suo conto col detto
Istituto, si credeva ormai al sicuro da ogni accusa, vedeva invece
ogni giorno il proprio nome correre su per i giornali, con quelli dei più
compromessi fra i malfattori politici.
Nelle liste, astutamente divulgate dai magistrati, il suo nome
compariva pur sempre fra i debitori... Una sua dichiarazione formale,
stampata sull’Ordine e sul Parlamentare, non servì. Ormai lo si
accusava di aver offerti servigi politici al direttore dell’Istituto, e lo si
additava come uno fra quelli contro cui l’autorità giudiziaria avrebbe
proceduto.
Giorni terribili quelli, di umiliazioni, di agitazioni, di terrori...
Ruggeri nell’ora triste era ritornato, e Lastri non abbandonava il
giovane amico.
Ma, pur troppo, l’autorità giudiziaria nelle lettere di pura cortesia
dell’on. Sicuri si ostinava a trovare un reato... L’intervento
dell’onorevole Lastri non aveva servito... Le vittime si volevano, per
poter salvare i rei influenti, altolocati, potenti... L’opinione pubblica
era assetata di riparazioni, di soddisfazioni... Nel 93 la ghigliottina,
ora la morte civile.
La marchesa Giulia, vera eroina, per salvare l’amante aveva messo
in gioco tutte le influenze della contessa Marcellin, non
risparmiandosi per proprio conto.
Avvocato difensore irresistibile per la bellezza affascinante, il casato
illustre, le ricchezze, era corsa per tutti i ministeri, aveva perorato
presso tutti gli alti magistrati, aveva bussato a tutte le porte di
personaggi politici, non chiedendo grazia, invocando giustizia.
Giuliano, incapace alla lotta, si era ripiegato su sè stesso, chiudendo
gli occhî, come i bambini per non veder la folgore, turandosi gli
orecchî, impaurito dal fragore del tuono.
Spinto alla Camera dalla volontà di Ruggeri, alla quale non sapeva
resistere, sotto la rispettata protezione dell’onorevole Lastri,
occupava ogni giorno il proprio banco di deputato, nell’atteggiamento
di colpevole piuttosto che di innocente.
In quel mattino correva voce che alla presidenza fossero giunte le
domande a procedere contro alcuni deputati.
Giuliano, pallido come cadavere, stava assiso al suo banco,
straziato dal dubbio d’essere compreso fra gli accusati... Gli
sembrava che tutti gli sguardi fossero rivolti su di lui. Per nascondere
il proprio turbamento fingeva scrivere, ma in realtà non tracciava che
parole senza senso... Non udì una sillaba della lettura del verbale, gli
pareva sognare... il sogno tormentoso della notte del suo primo
viaggio di deputato da Miralto, la stessa visione, le risa ed i cachinni
dei colleghi, che lo beffeggiavano, la stessa apparizione; là in alto,
come in una nube, Adele e il suo bimbo!...
La carta su cui la mano inconsciente tracciava i caratteri era bagnata
di lacrime...
L’onorevole Boemi, brav’uomo, vicino di banco a Giuliano... a
susurrargli all’orecchio:
— Coraggio, Sicuri... Tutti ti rendono giustizia... Via! Sii uomo!
Giuliano, richiamato alla realtà, si asciugò frettolosamente gli occhi,
serrando riconoscente la mano al collega...
Un silenzio di tomba s’era fatto nell’aula affollata... I deputati, scesi
nell’emiciclo, all’invito del presidente ritornavano ai loro posti,
compresi della gravità della situazione sentendo tutta l’importanza
delle comunicazioni preannunziate.
Le tribune erano gremite. Pure sarebbesi detto che gli spettatori
rattenessero il respiro per meglio udire, tant’era il silenzio.
Spettacolo imponente, solenne, emozionante quanto quello di una
degradazione militare.
Un colpo di campanello, ed il presidente annunziò essergli
pervenuta, inviata dall’autorità giudiziaria, la domanda di
autorizzazione a procedere contro un deputato.
La comunicazione era aspettata, pure un bisbiglio si sollevò
dall’assemblea, bisbiglio subito represso dagli zittìi universali e da un
rintocco del campanello. Udite! Udite!
Per nessuna catastrofe di dramma, a nessuna Corte d’Assise,
nell’imminenza del verdetto, l’ansiosa aspettazione del pubblico fu
maggiormente tesa.
La lettera del procuratore del re al presidente della Camera
particolareggiava minutamente le prime indagini della giustizia dopo
l’arresto degli imputati appartenenti all’Istituto Romano e complici.
Dalle deposizioni degli accusati, dai documenti sequestrati appariva
che ingenti somme di danaro furono spese dall’Istituto nell’intento di
ottenere l’approvazione della «legge per la proroga del privilegio
della emissione dei biglietti di banca», legge dal Parlamento votata
infatti.
Giuliano, ricordando di aver appunto scritto qualche cosa in
proposito al direttore dell’Istituto, non dubitava più di essere
compreso fra gli accusati; si sentiva morire, avrebbe voluto essere
cento metri sotterra.
Nella tensione d’animo in cui si trovava, tanto apparsagli chiara la
propria compromissione, sarebbe svenuto, se, in quel mentre, un
usciere non gli avesse recato una lettera dai noti caratteri... L’aperse
e, con difficoltà per la vista ottenebrata, potè decifrare:
 «Giuliano,
«Ritorno ora dall’ufficio del procuratore generale. Nessuna accusa
contro di te.
«L’inchiesta trovò regolarissimi i tuoi conti... Le tue lettere
inconcludenti... Salvo! Ed io, nella felice certezza, ti amo ancor più.
«Giulia.»

L’onorevole Sicuri non credette a’ suoi occhî... Rilesse nuovamente

per convincersi di non aver errato... Alzò lo sguardo alla tribuna della
presidenza, come per aver un’affermazione di quella notizia che
poteva essere una pietosa bugia; riconobbe l’amica, indovinò il di lei
sorriso... Giulia salutava scuotendo leggermente il fazzoletto,
raggiante di gioja.
La lettura del presidente continuava nel più profondo silenzio,
appena turbato tratto tratto da qualche bisbiglio... Il nome del
deputato accusato, De Respi, era stato pronunziato, e il documento
assumeva il carattere d’una fiera requisitoria, che non doveva essere
l’ultima, perchè il magistrato preannunziava nuove procedure contro
altri deputati.
Gli articoli invocati del Codice penale erano il 168, il 63, il 171, il 172
ed il 204; ognuno dei quali comminava più anni di carcere.
Come un brivido di terrore, forse di pietà, corse per l’assemblea.
Impressione profonda, terribile.
Terminata la lettura, i banchi, le gallerie si spopolarono.
Scena indimenticabile... Il deputato De Respi, il colpito dall’accusa
giudiziaria, era rimasto solo al suo banco, in atteggiamento in
apparenza impassibile, quasi sorridente. Si alzò, con mano ferma
raccolse le carte, e fattone un plico, che mise sotto braccio, si
dispose ad uscire. Ristette; nella di lui mente d’artista balenò forse
un ricordo, come al narratore, che assisteva dalle tribune pubbliche
a quel dramma: il plotone di fucilazione del maresciallo Ney,
rappresentato dal pennello di Gérome... I soldati guidati da
un’ufficiale, i quali, ad eccidio compiuto, se ne vanno riguardando
con pietà paurosa la vittima inanimata, stesa al suolo bocconi. Così
gli onorevoli, uscenti a frotte dall’aula, si volgevano al colpito dalla
morte civile con sguardo pietoso ed impaurito... La solennità
dell’esecuzione li aveva commossi.
Nessuno dubitava della di lui reità, per il rapido patrimonio
ammassato, per la nomea di audace affarista; ma il collega così
ucciso dalla spada della giustizia, che lo coglieva al sommo della
popolarità, alla vigilia di afferrare l’ambito portafogli, era sì miseranda
catastrofe, che atterriva... I complici suoi, minacciati anch’essi dal
rigido magistrato, s’eran dileguati esterrefatti.
L’onorevole De Respi ristette e, portata una mano al cuore, come
per uno spasimo improvviso, ricadde a sedere. Un coraggioso
collega accorse a lui, l’esempio fu imitato da altri e, l’infelice, nell’ora
fatale dell’espiazione, ebbe il conforto della generosa pietà anche di
qualche avversario.
Di tutto ciò nulla aveva notato Giuliano, che, abbandonata l’aula,
saliva alla tribuna della presidenza, onde ringraziare Giulia, ed
effondere tutta la riconoscenza per l’amica devota, tutta la gioja per
lo scampato pericolo.
L’emozione aveva spezzata la debole fibra. La lieta notizia, giuntagli
tanto improvvisamente, il repentino passaggio dai dubbî accascianti
alla consolante certezza della propria innocenza riconosciuta,
avevan potuto più del supplizio sì lungamente durato; quando fu al
limitare della tribuna, non resse e svenne stramazzando a terra, mal
sostenuto dall’usciere, che, vedendolo barcollare, gli era accorso in
ajuto.
Dai pochi presenti nel corridojo fu scambiato per il deputato De
Respi... l’accusato.
La marchesa Giulia gli prestò le prime cure nell’appartamento della
presidenza. Appena potè reggersi, Giuliano, ospitato nella carrozza
della marchesa, fu ricondotto al di lui appartamento, preceduto da
Ruggeri, avvertito dell’accaduto.
Divorato dalla febbre, fu posto a letto delirante. Febbre cerebrale,
avea dichiarato il medico, sollecitamente chiamato.
Al capezzale, silenziosi, Giulia ed Ettore, che, avversarî fra loro,
dall’amicizia e dall’amore erano stati riuniti nella stessa opera di
carità. Entrambi testimonî dei vaneggiamenti del povero naufrago,
da entrambi, con affetto sì diverso, egualmente amato.
Dei due afflitti, in quei momenti di ansia, sarebbe stata Giulia la più
infelice, non udendo mai il proprio nome pronunziato dal
febbricitante, il quale nel delirio non invocava che Adele; più infelice
sarebbe stata, se Ettore non avesse portato in cuore ben altro
tormento.
L’ultimo addio a Stella era stato dato sulla bara della madre.
Ultimo addio, senza speranza di ritorno. La morente aveva ribadito
nel testamento il divieto alla figlia. Per ciò il notajo Invernizzi erasi
mostrato a conoscenza dell’amore di Ettore, che avrebbe già portato
oltre l’oceano la propria disperazione se l’amicizia per Giuliano non
gli avesse imposto di rimanere, guida ed ajuto, nelle disastrose
peripezie.
Dissi avversarî, Giulia ed Ettore... Non per antipatie personali. Ettore
era l’amico della famiglia Sicuri; Giulia l’intrusa, che la felicità di
quella famiglia aveva distrutta.
Giulia istintivamente indovinava tutta l’avversione che Ruggeri
doveva nutrire per lei e lo detestava, protesta perenne contro
l’amore di Giuliano, ad essa perenne rimprovero.
Entrambi al letto del delirante, egualmente solleciti nel soccorrerlo,
non avevan discorso che a monosillabi e sempre per cose attinenti
al loro mandato, alla loro missione di infermieri.
Il medico era ritornato a sera; la febbre era aumentata, il pericolo si
aggravava. Giulia non si era allontanata dal capezzale che alla
venuta del medico; quando se ne fu andato, rientrò nella camera del
malato per chiedere premurosamente notizia del responso della
scienza.
— Giuliano è sempre più aggravato; a me incombe l’obbligo di
avvertire la contessa Sicuri... Sarà bene, quindi, ch’ella lasci il posto
di suora a chi ha il dovere ed il diritto di occuparlo.
— Mi scaccia? chiese quasi supplicante Giulia.
— Non lo dica... La parola è dura e non risponde alla verità. Vi sono
esigenze più forti della nostra volontà... Sarà mia cura mandarle
notizie replicatamente ogni giorno. Ella deve comprendere che la
contessa, già abbastanza infelice, non deve incontrarla qui.
Giulia non rispose; non aveva argomento da opporre. Solo
argomento il suo amore, la ragione appunto per cui la di lei presenza
in quella casa diveniva incompatibile. Lo comprese e chinò il capo
rassegnata.
— Quando verrà la contessa? chiese, gli occhî pieni di lacrime.
— Non so... Le telegraferò ora... Domani certamente.
— Dunque fino a domani? Acconsente?
— Dovrei dirle di no. Fra poco la notizia della malattia di Giuliano
sarà divulgata... I visitatori affluiranno... Ho data la consegna di non
lasciar passare alcuno, eccezione per l’onorevole Lastri; ma una
indiscrezione dei domestici... Se la contessa venisse a sapere che il
suo posto era preso da lei...
Giulia asciugò gli occhî e lentamente, a ritroso, raccolse i suoi
oggetti sparsi per la camera, il cappello, i guanti, l’ombrellino,
l’enorme portafogli in lampasso antico trapunto, con lentezza, per
ritardare di qualche minuto la sua andata; assestò il cappello davanti
lo specchio. Quando non ebbe altri pretesti a ritardare, posò sul
tavolino da notte del malato una boccetta d’oro da sali, ricordo, della
visita sua, e fattasi incontro a Ruggeri, il quale, ritto, ai piedi del letto,
la considerava commosso, gli porse la piccola mano inguantata:
— Conto sulla sua parola, signor Ruggeri; mi mandi notizie tre o
quattro volte al giorno... E... e, soggiunse, se la contessa non
venisse, mi richiami.
Ettore promise... Giulia, riavvicinatasi al capezzale del caro malato,
inchinatasi graziosamente, depose un lungo bacio sulla fronte
infocata... Il malato si scosse, aperse gli occhî, fissò attonito Giulia,
un sorriso gli sfiorò le labbra, e ricadde nel sopore.
— Mi ha riconosciuta, mormorò ad Ettore raggiante di speranza... Il
medico si è ingannato... Si ricordi! Se non venisse, mi richiami... Il
cuore mi dice che non verrà.
— Impossibile, replicò Ettore.
La marchesa uscì mandando ancora un saluto al suo povero
Giuliano.
 CAPITOLO XXI.
Cospirazioni.

La marchesa si era apposta al vero; la contessa Adele non accorse

alla chiamata di Ettore.
Le indiscrezioni dei giornali avevano prevenuto il di lui richiamo.
Che cosa non sanno i corrispondenti telegrafici di Roma ai giornali
del mondo intiero?
Quando non sanno inducono, qualche volta inventano senza
bisogno di induzioni, e spesso indovinano.
Non vi è polizia meglio fatta di quella dei reporters, che ne sanno
sempre assai più e più sollecitamente delle questure internazionali...
Quantunque concorrenti nella gara alla notizia, allo scandalo,
all’incidente, sono fra essi legati da un certa solidarietà, mutuo
soccorso nel comunicarsi reciprocamente le informazioni,
subordinatamente all’ora dell’uscita dei rispettivi giornali.
Spedita la primizia al proprio foglio in tempo utile per l’edizione più
prossima, la informazione, la notizia ed anche il canard inventato di
pianta diventa di dominio pubblico nella sala della stampa, al
palazzo di San Silvestro, grande cucina di manicaretti offerti alla
pubblica curiosità affamata d’Italia e dell’orbe.
Appena divulgatasi la notizia del malessere sopraggiunto al deputato
Sicuri, fu un via vai degli informatori giornalistici per attingere i
particolari... L’usciere della tribuna della presidenza fu intervistato
come un grande personaggio politico. Si sapeva che il deputato era
stato condotto alla sua abitazione nella carrozza della marchesa. Il
portiere di Giuliano fu assediato... Per quanto discreto, non potè
negare che la marchesa Giulia fosso presso il malato; la carrozza
rimasta alla porta quasi l’intiera giornata ne era la prova evidente, e
sui fili telegrafici, con ogni sorta di esagerazioni, correva la notizia
che l’onorevole Sicuri era amorosamente vegliato dalla bella
marchesa. Seguivano le iniziali. A seconda, poi del carattere del
corrispondente, dell’indole del giornale, commenti, indiscrezioni, più
o meno vere, più o meno fantastiche.
Lo sdegno della contessa Adele mutò in ira feroce, in odio. Ed alla
chiamata di Ruggeri rispondeva:
«Ben altri doveri mi trattengono a Miralto: il mio bimbo malato, la
povera Stella, la mia orfana, inconsolabile per la grande sventura...
A Roma turberei gli amori di un uomo indegno che non ha più
famiglia avendola ripudiata.»
Ruggeri non riconosceva in quella lettera la mite, affettuosa
contessa. La donna offesa nel suo amore, nella propria dignità,
aveva trasformato la dolce sposa in nemesi...

*
**

Mentre Giuliano andava migliorando, assistito ogni giorno da Giulia,

ad onta delle proteste di Ettore, altro dramma politico svolgevasi, al
quale la voce pubblica voleva ad ogni patto accomunare il nome di
Giuliano.
Il deputato De Respi, il colpito dalla giustizia, era stato ferito a morte.
Il mandato di comparizione del giudice aveva seguito
immediatamente l’autorizzazione a procedere.
L’evidenza delle prove della di lui colpabilità non lo indussero a
confessare... Ma rientrato, disfatto dalla lotta impegnata col giudice,
si metteva a letto per non più rialzarsi.
Il pubblico che non crede alla logica di certi scioglimenti, lo proclamò
suicida, e vi furono i pietosi che lo compiansero vittima.
Il funerale fu sontuoso e celebravasi appunto il giorno nel quale
Giuliano, convalescente, per la prima volta affacciavasi alla finestra.
Il corteo funebre si avviava alla stazione, la salma dovendo essere
inumata nel cimitero del paesello nativo.
La banda municipale romana che precedeva il feretro eseguiva una
marcia straziante, tutta lamenti e gemiti di dolore... Al defunto,
strappato dalla morte all’azione della giustizia, rendevansi solenni gli
onori ufficiali, dovuti ai rappresentanti della nazione... Il carro
riboccava di corone. Le notabilità parlamentari lo seguivano, poi
lunga fila di carrozze signorili, fra due siepi di popolo, più attonito che
curioso. Attonito per quelle onoranze rese all’accusato da dieci giorni
in balìa agli spietati commenti della stampa, alle rivelazioni
schiaccianti di fatti innegabili, ormai dall’universale ammessi e
condannati.
— Chi è morto? chiese Giuliano all’onorevole Lastri che lo reggeva
al davanzale.
— Un disgraziato! Un’altra vittima dell’ambizione, della sensualità,
della megalomania... Vittima, ma colpevole, ha espiato colla morte...
Invochiamo l’oblìo sulla sua bara...
— Ma, chi? Chi è?
— Fu il deputato De Respi.
— Morto? Come? Suicida?
— Forse. I medici dicono aneurisma; il pubblico replica veleno.
Giuliano ancor debole si ritrasse come impaurito dalla finestra e
s’adagiò su d’una poltrona soggiungendo:
— Sarebbe stato assai meglio anche per me morire così.
— Bravo! per accomunarti ai colpevoli, ai ladri. Che c’entri tu coi
corrotti, coi corruttori?... Ti sei mangiato il tuo, hai fatto male; ma di
ciò non devi render conto al pubblico... Se tu sapessi! Nel caso tuo
ve ne sono cento alla Camera... Te l’ho detto: Montecitorio è un
ammazzatojo di riputazioni, è un abisso per i piccoli patrimonî... Tu
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