The Fourth Reich
The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present

The first history of postwar fears of a Nazi return to power in Western political, intellectual, and cultural life.

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (Author)

9781108497497, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 14 March 2019

408 pages, 45 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.7 cm, 0.72 kg

'A leading practitioner of counterfactual history, Gavriel Rosenfeld has produced a fascinating account of the perils and pitfalls of our century-long obsession with the 'Fourth Reich.' In navigating a dizzying array of sources, drawn from politics, government archives, mass media, and popular culture, Rosenfeld examines 'the history of what might have happened' in order to 'better understand the memory of what actually did'.' Eric Kurlander, Central European History

Ever since the collapse of the Third Reich, anxieties have persisted about Nazism's revival in the form of a Fourth Reich. Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reveals, for the first time, these postwar nightmares of a future that never happened and explains what they tell us about Western political, intellectual, and cultural life. He shows how postwar German history might have been very different without the fear of the Fourth Reich as a mobilizing idea to combat the right-wing forces that genuinely threatened the country's democratic order. He then explores the universalization of the Fourth Reich by left-wing radicals in the 1960s, its transformation into a source of pop culture entertainment in the 1970s, and its embrace by authoritarian populists and neo-Nazis seeking to attack the European Union since the year 2000. This is a timely analysis of a concept that is increasingly relevant in an era of surging right-wing politics.

Introduction
1. Between fantasy and nightmare: inventing the Fourth Reich in the Third Reich
2. From werewolves to democrats: the Fourth Reich under Allied occupation
3. The Fourth Reich turns right: renazifying Germany in the 1950s
4. From Germany to the United States: universalizing the Fourth Reich in the turbulent 1960s
5. Hitler in Argentina: fictionalizing the Fourth Reich in the long 1970s
6. Re-Germanizing the Fourth Reich: from reunification to the Reich Citizens' Movement
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Fascism & Nazism [JPFQ], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], European history [HBJD]