Making History Even Worse (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: 1,3, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine", language: English, abstract: Many a German would wish to undo his country's past. We would prefer that Hitler had never been born, that the Third Reich and especially the Holocaust would have never taken place. However, how is it that an immense number of the (non-German) alternate histories about the Third Reich - and there are actually quite a lot - depict the world as not better or even worse without Hitler. This essay will focus on the uchronian nightmare scenario Making History written by the British author Stephen Fry in 1996 and winner of the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. First, I will treat the protagonist's utopian wish to create a better world by preventing Hitler from being conceived and the dystopian effect of the "changing" of history. This playing with expectations attracts the reader's attention and shows the complexity of history and society, even though it naturally has a merely entertaining tenor as well. Second, I will briefly analyze that the style of rewriting history, the contrasting juxtaposition of the different chapters and particularly the two opposing parts of the novel, and, finally, the ironic tone implied continuously underline the sometimes satiric developments of fate and the naïve wish of making a better, "utopian" world without being able to assess the outcome. Finally, against the concept of alternate history in general, it will be seen that alternate history is a means to examine history and present, but how history would have turned out differently is hard to tell since it depends on more than just individual events or persons. By thinking about how things could have been worse, we perhaps learn to accept that everything that happens shapes us and our present, as barbaric as it might be.