This is an incisive and persuasive account of how the story of the Second World World has been the West’s defining narrative of the past 80 years. But when the author predicts the resurgence of a Christian tradition, his polemic becomes vaporous
July 11, 2025 12:26
In 1976, the humorist Alan Coren issued a collection of comic essays titled Golfing for Cats. The cover illustration depicted a ginger tom teeing off on a course bedecked with swastika pennants. In his preface, Coren wrote that he had learnt that Nazis, cats and golf were the bestselling topics of the moment, and while his book had nothing to do with any of them, he knew a marketing opportunity when he saw one.
Alec Ryrie, a British historian of Protestant Christianity who usually doesn’t venture this side of the 17th century, admits in his introduction to The Age of Hitler to using a similar device. The title is, he says, a trick. But that is a double-bluff. His conceit proves a valid one. For the past 80 years, in what it is no longer accurate to call the liberal West (my words, not the author’s), one of the core guiding principles has been to set one’s moral compass to the bearing directly away from Hitler. Ryrie’s hypothesis says this era is now passing. This will not come as news to a Jewish readership.
The trick in the title lies instead in its second part: and How We Will Survive It. Firstly because it is an unnamed coming age we must negotiate, not the titular, departing one. Secondly because, by the author’s own acknowledgement, his presumed audience is chiefly, like him, white and non-Jewish. The punchline to a famous joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto comes to mind: “What do you mean ‘we’, paleface?”
Ryrie’s account of this dying “age of Hitler,” which takes up most of his short and thoughtful polemic, is crisp, lucid, persuasive and quotable. He notes: “In the post-war world the story of Jesus has been replaced as the defining narrative of our culture by the story of the Second World War.” He does not think this is a bad thing; only that this narrative cannot bear the weight placed upon it. Nor does he countenance apologism for anyone who would dispense with Hitler as its Final Boss. He challenges both those on the ever-expanding reaches of the right who think poor old Adolf gets a bad press, and those on the left who would cast Jews not as Hitler’s preferred victims, but as his heirs. Although, in the latter case, up to a point. For example, Ryrie documents the Soviet role in fomenting anti-Zionism. He details the fast-and-loose misapplication of the word “genocide” in certain circles. But he also makes allowances where all the benefit of the doubt is surely long extinguished. Recounting the morbid hilarity of the Ken “Hitler!” Livingstone saga, he mentions Jeremy Corbyn’s “notorious indifference to left-wing antisemitism”, which is rather like describing cats as indifferent to catnip.
He, of course, can afford his optimism. We, not so much. The passing of this post-war ‘age of Hitler’ takes with it that all-too-brief hiatus when the persecution of Jews was, in the West at least, taboo
As often happens with even the most incisive essays, The Age Of Hitler becomes vaporous where historical analysis ends and prognostication begins. Ryrie predicts that a return to the finer moral precepts, rather than the religious specifics, of the Christian tradition will underpin the West’s next era. A secularist myself, I agree we ought not to throw out any religion’s philosophical baby with its doctrinaire bathwater. Even so, we Jews have good reason to be wary of any resurgence of Christian tradition, however benignly cloaked. Ryrie pronounces himself optimistic that the religious right and the regressive left will both crumble, and a synthesis of old and new values will emerge to better steer us.
He, of course, can afford his optimism. We, not so much. The passing of this post-war “age of Hitler” takes with it that all-too-brief hiatus when the persecution of Jews was – in the West, at least – taboo. As another old joke has it: what do you call a Jewish optimist? The deceased.
The Age of Hitler
By Alec Ryrie
Reaktion
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