In Richard Ned Lebow's alternative history, Franz Ferdinand is crowned emperor in 1916 following the death of his uncle, Franz Josef. Without Hitler, in turn, European Jewry was allowed to prosper and grow numerous Israel may not have come into being, however, as Jewry had no need of a salvation abroad. Without Sarajevo, moreover, German aggression might not have been punished at Versailles, and Hitler would have had no cause for grievance.
The first world war may not have broken out as a consequence and the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires would have been left standing. Had Hitler won the war, all Europe might now be a vast German colony living space (Lebensraum) for Hitlerite Germany would be dying space for others.Īrchduke Franz Ferdinand Lives!, a work of counterfactual history, envisages a world in which the assassination of the archduke at Sarajevo in 1914 never happened. Forty years earlier, in 1964, the British film It Happened Here envisaged the wartime occupation of the British Isles by Nazi Germany. The novel tapped into post-9/11 fears of death and dominance by an alien power.
Philip Roth, in his 2004 novel, The Plot Against America, imagined a pro-Nazi United States after aviation hero and antisemite Charles Lindbergh had won the 1940 presidential election. The "what-if" historical genre rewrites the past as fantasy.
0 kommentar(er)
