Hitler Wins Now: New Nazi Alternate Histories in British Popular Fiction

Hitler Wins in the Twenty-First Century

Small Change is situated near the start of the Hitler wins subgenre’s current phase: debuting in 2006, it appeared five years after Christopher Priest’s The Separation (2001), but was swiftly joined by Owen Sheers’s Resistance (2007); Guy Saville’s The Afrika Reich (2011) and The Madagaskar Plan (2015), part of an in-progress trilogy; C. J. Sansom’s Dominion (2011); D. J. Taylor’s The Windsor Faction (2013); and Tony Schumacher’s thrillers The Darkest Hour (2014), The British Lion (2015), and An Army of One (2017). The trend extends into other media, such as the puppet-animated film Jackboots on Whitehall (2010), the comic book Über (2013), and the BBC’s 2017 adaptation of Len Deighton’s novel, SS-GB, into a miniseries.

This wave of texts continues a long, generic lineage. Gavriel Rosen feld’s historiographies of Hitler wins alternate histories locate several distinct phases, each with a dominant but by no means singular animating ideology and set of tropes. The ongoing twenty-first-century phase is typified, Rosenfeld contends, by “presentist views of the Nazi era influenced by the unsettled political climate of the post-9/11 world” (Hi Hitler! 159). Such presentism, he observes elsewhere, is a hallmark of alternate history novels, in that they “have shifted their representation of a given historical topic in accordance with the mood of the era” (“Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’” 103). For a type of fiction characteristically steeped in historical detail, the Hitler wins alternate history is trained squarely on the present. Furthermore, in a related instance of classification, most of these recent novels (Sheers’s Resistance is an exception) are “narratives of Nazi Britain,” which Gallagher isolates from tales of Nazi invasion and occupation. As depictions of Britain after fascist triumph, whether by Nazi conquest or British appeasement and domestic fascism, these narratives tend to focus less on wartime experiences than on rewritten events of the early postwar years, usually the first decade or so after hostilities end.

In official histories and the culture at large, this immediate post-war period is commonly known as “austerity Britain.” This designation signifies a “general mood . . . of welfare and the public ethic” (Morgan 41) despite continuing wartime “privations of rationing, queuing, and the like” (60). Cultural memories of austerity Britain that balance hardship and deprivation with solidarity and purpose have ideological vectors: a conservative articulation signifies patriotic sacrifices in defense of nation and empire, while a leftist inflection links austerity to an emergent welfarism, casting austerity Britain as a petri dish for the egalitarian impulses of the postwar consensus. Yet in Hitler wins texts, austerity Britain is a condition of Nazi victory, not an extension of Allied triumph—let alone a precursor of postwar prosperity and a welfare state consensus. New Hitler wins tales invert austerity nostalgia, defining the time not by common purpose, sacrifice, and solidarity but inequality and grievous, unsustainable compromises. These alternative representations of postwar austerity resonate with the neoliberal austerity prevailing in the United Kingdom.

Of course, Small Change’s publication slightly predates the 2008 financial crisis that precipitated the official austerity measures of 2010; yet as David Berry writes, isolating 2010 as the onset of a new age of austerity is misleading “in the sense that austerity economics are nothing new within the historical structures of capitalist development. In fact, it’s fair to argue that austerity has been and will continue to be a central feature of said development” (Preface ix). In the neoliberal era, as others have argued, austerity policies and programs “are at once an opportunistic response to specific instances of declared crisis and part of a widespread, long-term . . . agenda” (Scott and Welch 9). In his intellectual history of austerity, Mark Blythe argues that the monetarist economic theory underpinning neoliberalism “paved the way for the modern understanding of austerity by making markets always efficient and the state always pathological” (154). In this spirit, Richard Seymour pithily defines neoliberalism as “permanent austerity” (2). In other words, austerity logics amount to neoliberalism’s sine qua non. Furthermore, as Rebecca Bramall contends, “austerity” signifies not just policies but “a site of discursive struggle” that carries “into the terrain of media, consumer, and popular culture, and into people’s everyday lives” (1). Within this austerity discourse, an “idea that there is an analogy to be drawn between today’s difficult times and austerity Britain began to be communicated, in fact, some years before the financial crisis” (7). Hitler wins novels like the Small Change series, part of this discursive contest, do not necessarily respond to the 2008 financial crisis, but they do detect the various forces in neoliberal Britain that led to it—and have intensified under post-2010 austerity.

To this point, consider Small Change’s point of divergence, the pivotal deviation in alternate history narratives that deforms ensuing events. At first glance, the (small) change is Rudolf Hess’s 1941 flight to Britain: rather than being arrested, here Hess returns to Berlin with the fictional Sir James Thirkie to negotiate the Farthing Peace, so named since Thirkie is part of the aristocratic Farthing Set, modeled on the notorious Cliveden Set. In 1949, a cabal inside the set kills Thirkie in a false flag setup, cutting a path for one conspirator, Mark Normanby, to become prime minister. Framed for this murder is David Kahn, a Jewish banker scandalously married to Lucy Eversley, an apolitical scion of a prominent Farthing family. Scotland Yard Inspector Peter Carmichael, the protagonist, uncovers the conspiracy; blackmailed for his homosexuality, he is coerced into silence and later complicity as head of The Watch, a British Gestapo. As the trilogy goes on, the Normanby government formalizes ties with Nazi Germany, intensifies persecution of marginalized groups, and embraces authoritarianism until it collapses in 1960.

Small Change hints at a deeper, less exact divergence: US noninterventionism. A retrospective account of the war notes “the increasingly isolationist USA was sending us only grudging aid” (Walton, Farthing 110). This isolationism is driven by the US alternate history in which Charles Lindbergh unseats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election. This change’s drastic ripple effects are often noted, for example, in Ha’Penny when a character dismissively scoffs that if the United States “could ever pull themselves out of their series of depressions they might make something of themselves” (231). A 2009 short story coda to the series elaborates America’s economically ravaged, socially fractious condition—and does so using austerity rhetoric. Lindbergh pointedly replaces the New Deal with his “Belt Tightening” program (Walton, “Escape”). Beyond gesturing to modern Britain’s attachments to US interests, these moves reinforce a linkage from austerity to fascism: such references to the United States suggest that the point of divergence or root cause for fascist Britain may be transatlantic austerity economics. Taking this proposition further, once Walton’s fictional quislings are in power, they institute an economic program rooted in inequality and corporally enforced by a robust surveillance apparatus. Walton’s villains, then, are Nazi-sympathizing Edwardian elites with an agenda based in structural inequalities that further empower them, and their privileges are preserved by a racist security-surveillance state. Seen this way, Small Change triangulates the entrenched class inequalities of prewar England, authoritarian ethnonationalism of interwar fascism, and coercive biopolitics of neoliberalism.

This constellation is elaborated via representational and narrative cues that echo political theorizations of neoliberalism’s relations to fascist logics and structures. Wendy Brown argues that neoliberalism, “a political rationality born in reaction to National Socialism . . . paradoxically comes to mirror select aspects of it” (213). Sheldon Wolin gives the Orwellian name “inverted totalitarianism” to governance where an oligarchical private sector acquires control of the economy while a militarized surveillance-security state extends its reach, a conjuncture that, Brown notes, describes “neoliberalism understood as state economic policy” (29). Small Change similarly narrates continuities across neoliberalism and fascism.

Undoing the Demos in Small Change

Cues aligning fascism with neoliberalism begin with the character of anti-Semitism in the Farthing Set. In short, the Set harnesses racism to advance its class’s material interests: its bigotry is not an end but a cudgel in class warfare. Lucy Eversley’s mother, a Set insider, hosts a “dinner for managers and businessmen, and the idea is to put across the case against the menace of trade unionism and Bolshevism” (Farthing 136). Lucy mentions the Set sought peace out of fear of domestic revolution, for “there were strikes and demands even during the war” (112). Carmichael sees the Set court a businessman who “didn’t have any political power, but he had money, and there would be things he wanted that money couldn’t buy— laws against strikes and trade unions, perhaps” (107). At the time of his murder, Thirkie “was sponsoring two bills in the House. One . . . limiting access to Higher Education to those educated in Preparatory and Public Schools. The second . . . lower[ed] the school-leaving age to eleven in rural areas” (102). This legislative agenda aimed at reasserting prewar class hierarchies conjures similar neoliberal assaults on organized labor and public education. These examples indicate how class interests, rather than racist visions of an Aryan utopia, propel the Farthing Set.

Class identities and experiences are likewise essential for Walton’s characters. Farthing opens with Lucy’s memories of her father’s warning that taking a Jewish surname “will close a lot of doors in [her] face” (17), suggesting that preserving class privileges and accesses takes precedence over an uncompromised, total anti-Semitism, while still admitting how racial and ethnic identifications intersect with class hierarchies. But the ultimate orientation is toward class hierarchies, apparent in the series’ representations of sexuality: Carmichael’s homosexuality is wielded against him, but when he learns that Normanby was once arrested in a gay club raid and pulled strings to avoid punishment, he grumbles, “One law for the rich and another for the poor” (147). Other contrasts of queer men from varied backgrounds show how lived experiences of nonnormative sexual identities are shaped by class position. Furthermore, each book switches between third-person accounts of Carmichael and first-person narration from a female character: Lucy Kahn, wife of the framed David; Viola Larkin, an actress who rejects her Mitford-like elite family; and Elvira Royston, orphan of Carmichael’s working-class partner who enters high society. These women’s subjectivities and gendered experiences are guided by their class transgressions. Walton follows Stuart Hall’s dictum: race, gender, and sexuality are shown as modalities in which a more fundamental class experience is felt and lived.

An important caveat here involves the depiction of the internal racist logics of an economic-political system so reliant on rigid class hierarchies. In terms of neoliberalism, Patchen Markell attends to “the complicated intersection of neoliberal rationality with the rationality of white supremacy” noting the unevenness in “which [neoliberalism] does not homogenize all subjects as self-maximizing capitals, large and small, but marks out some populations as manipulable and disposable material, fit to be ruled through the often coercive and violent command-and-control techniques that neoliberal rationality itself eschews” (525). For the Set, likewise, marginalized peoples—primarily British Jews and immigrants—are disposable or surplus populations, usefully expendable. The Set’s racism is real, no matter its instrumentality.

Several examples point to this dynamic between race and class. Once David Kahn is a suspect in Thirkie’s murder, servants deny him service and slur him as “Jewboy,” indicating white supremacy’s maintenance of a capitalist status quo by obscuring class divisions. Later, referring to the Star of David patches worn by European Jews, Carmichael’s partner, Royston, explains, “In the Reich, they are mass produced, and sold, not individually issued . . . and the Jews purchasing them must use ration coupons to do so” (Farthing 121). Royston finds a “black kind of humor” (121) in racism’s deployment to justify economic exploitation that finances further oppression. Anti-Semitism here is not Aryan zealotry but shrewd profiteering, an articulation also found in a headline Carmichael glances at that asks, “Hitler’s work camps: are they really efficient?” (177); this phrasing euphemizes racist state violence with the language of cost-effective labor. For the Farthing Set, race is comprehended in terms of its service to economic imperatives. Indeed, one of Carmichael’s loyal lieutenants in The Watch, Jacobson, unwittingly serves as a “model Jew” (Half 127) whose rank in the agency gives the Normanby government cover against charges of overt anti-Semitism, reflecting how the Set’s economic violence subsumes, channels, or redirects racist violence for its own maintenance and advantage.

This emphasis ultimately lands on class inequalities. The Set, the leading faction within Britain’s ruling establishment, is described clearly as privileged elite: “a party within a party, not really a democratic organization at all” (Farthing 107). Their antidemocratic ethos carries over into Normanby’s administration, one that “didn’t give many opportunities to rise” (Half 183). If the Set’s disdain for democracy befits a remnant of Edwardian nobility, it also has neoliberal inflections. Consider a seemingly incidental moment: Carmichael finds a farthing coin, whose engraved robin is the Set’s emblem. Noting that the British are known as “the bulldog race,” he muses that “if the aristocracy were bulldogs, the poor were robins, hopping about cheerfully in hope of finding something good, never fleeing the winter but putting a good face on it, dowdy brown with one flash of bright color. Yet it was used as the symbol of this group of upper-class politicians” (Farthing 142). The poor are meant to perceive their suffering as deserved, the result of a system as natural as the seasons, while the image of the plucky robin is appropriated by ugly but domineering “bulldoggish” elites. Carmichael’s reflection echoes George Monbiot’s observation that unlike old landed aristocrats’ disdain for the nouveau riche, neoliberal “rentiers and inheritors . . . claim to have earned their unearned income.” Similarly, when Normanby names a viscount as Chancellor of the Exchequer, defying a tradition that it “be an elected member and sit in the Commons” (Farthing 243), The Times rationalizes it as “unfair to keep an able man . . . from high office because of an accident of high birth” (243). This language of access, echoing neoliberal meritocratic rhetoric, inverts the class-conscious reasoning behind the tacit parliamentary rule. A key overlap between interwar aristocratic fascists with neoliberal elite, then, is obscuring class inequalities using the language of merit, even as those inequalities are actively entrenched.

The prescience of Walton’s portrait of fascism as neoliberalism is perhaps most acute in the final novel, Half a Crown, set in 1960. The anti-Semitism and xenophobia exploited by the Set as insurer of inequality metastasizes, and they are threatened by a revolt on the Right: Normanby and the Farthing Set run afoul of the inequality they foster in the form of the Blackshirts, a group resembling today’s latently fascist populist movements—UK Independence Party, the British National Party, and Britain First—that draw energy from neoliberal disenfranchisement. The violent, racist, and ostensibly working-class Blackshirts initiate riots and seek to overthrow Normanby’s regime. Normanby aspires to absorb this militant movement, trying to rebrand them as his “Ironsides,” but they resist co-optation. This dynamic seems akin to a common analysis that finds neoliberal austerity responsible for today’s populist insurgencies. Yet a Blackshirts leader’s denunciations of Normanby are revealing: “Who believes in him and his Farthing elite? Who wants second-rate watered-down fascism, as if the British Empire wasn’t the greatest state the world has ever known? British power!” (43). The key terms in this outburst are second-rate and watered-down, for they indicate that aristocratic oligarchy like the Farthing Set—or its neoliberal counterpart—does not produce economic oppression that breeds fascist reaction but is a less strident and expressive form of fascism. Small Change construes the movement from austerity to authoritarianism as evolution rather than backlash.

Walton effectively anticipates leftist explanations for the “leave” Brexit vote, not to mention the election of Donald Trump in the United States and global rise of the far Right. In an essay on post-2016 critique, Michael Goodhart and Jeanne Morefield name “neoliberal economic globalization” as one of the “failures and contradictions of the liberal world order . . . [that] are implicated in the rise of the very populist movements they condemn” (71). Walton similarly figures right-wing militant populism as austerity’s nurtured, if mutated, offspring. Small Change suggests that racial and economic angsts making up emergent fascisms are fundamental to the austerity regimes responsible for the populist waves in the first place. The nationalist, racist, and fascist Ironsides may have working-class support and evince populist rhetoric, but they are affiliated with Lord Scott, “an aristocrat and a politician . . . born in 1889 with a silver spoon in his mouth” (Ha’Penny 236), and their figurehead is the duke of Windsor, who aims to be King Edward VIII. Thuggish fascism is enmeshed in the very establishment forces it purports to resist. To make this point, Small Change collapses a prewar class-stratified Britain, Nazi fascism, and neoliberal austerity. These conservatisms—aristocratic, fascist, and neoliberal—find their shared node in their fundamental hostility toward democratic processes, norms, and citizenship.

Similar dynamics animate other Hitler wins novels. Briefly, a noteworthy example of these other narratives’ engagements with neoliberalism is Guy Saville’s in-progress Afrika trilogy. Whereas Walton draws on the tradition of the English closed-circle country house mystery, Saville writes in the register of fast-paced, ultraviolent action thrillers. His protagonist is a German-English soldier of fortune named Burton Cole, whom Rosenfeld describes as “a traumatized, opportunistic, and violent figure” (Hi Hitler! 174). Back story reveals that Cole’s political commitment was stirred by Britain’s short-lived war against the Axis powers—he goes AWOL from the French Foreign Legion to enlist in the British army—but after the tide turns, he visits London, acquiescing to a “look of defeat on every face” (Afrika 154). Once peace terms with Hitler are signed, he jadedly “embraced the mercenary’s call to arms” (155). Cole takes on the mission that incites the narrative for several reasons, all self-interested, one of which is to finance a comfortable retirement in a rustic—I dare say, austere—Suffolk country house.

In addition to an antihero who exemplifies the neoliberal entrepreneurial self, Saville’s African setting shines a light on the impact a Britain–Nazi truce might have had on the colonized Global South. Throughout the first two novels, representations of Nazi extermination and labor camps, resource extractions, and luxury tourist resorts for party members across the African continent are coded in ways that triangulate fascism with Britain’s imperial history and the violent structural asymmetries of neoliberal disaster capitalism. Small Change makes passing references to the British Empire—exposition notes that “The Palestine Mandate was under firm British control, and the policy not to allow any more Jews in was very strict” (Half 289)—but for the most part, Walton is concerned with a domestic scene. By allegorizing neoliberalism in terms of empire as well as fascism, Saville’s deceptively nuanced Afrika trilogy helpfully complements Small Change’s attention to Britain’s internal class politics.

What, though, do these novels’ confluences of fascism and neoliberalism actually say about contemporary Britain? Answering this question can be aided by turning to George Orwell. Like many of his fellow 1930s leftists, Orwell saw fascism as an extension of capitalism; he wrote in 1943 how “the lords of property had decided that Fascism was on their side and they were willing to swallow the most stinking evils so long as their property remained secure” (“Who Are” 322). This sentiment surfaces in Small Change, as this section has argued. Indeed, Walton pays tribute to Orwell: Farthing has an epigraph from one of Orwell’s “As I Please” columns, and a character buys a “book from the man who wrote that animal book that was so popular a few years before, some kind of scientifiction thing called Nineteen-Seventy-Four” (301). Orwell appears in other Hitler wins novels as well: Saville’s The Madagaskar Plan and Taylor’s The Windsor Faction make passing references to him as a public figure. In these examples, Orwell is Cassandra-like, condemning the hypocrisies and moral compromises that are so central to the Hitler wins plot. Although the Orwellian allusiveness of Hitler wins novels varies, in a general sense Orwell has a phantasmal presence for the genre. His spectral presence in new alternate histories, moreover, signals a key question: what else is haunting them?

Why Orwell Matters Now

Along with the allusions and direct references to Orwell in many of these novels, there are broader reasons he looms large in a Hitler wins novel. Gallagher, for instance, names Orwell’s 1984 as “an especially apt precedent for the Nazi Britain fictions” in part by setting a standard for considering how “dystopias were defined by their techniques for altering subjective standards” (Telling 286). Bearing on the austerity context for new Nazi alternate histories, Philip Bounds declares, “Whenever there is a whiff of austerity in the air, many of us on the British left set our sights on Wigan Pier. Written in the middle of the deepest depression that Western capitalism has ever known, George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) still powerfully conditions our sense of how austerity should be portrayed” (216). Bruce Robbins writes that unlike Orwell’s “Cold War classics . . . The Road to Wigan Pier has not made a place for itself in the high school curriculum. But in the era of Occupy and the still resonating Bernie Sanders campaign, perhaps its pedagogical day is coming” (35). Robbins makes this observation in his new book, The Beneficiary, a bracing examination of global inequality in which Orwell figures prominently as “a creatively cosmopolitan voice grappling with dilemmas of global injustice that the Cold War obscured” (9). Testifying to Bounds’s and Robbins’s claims, Stephen Armstrong’s The Road to Wigan Pier Revisited suggests that under neoliberal austerity Britain may be in worse condition than in Orwell’s time. Armstrong’s book is in fact a sequel to a sequel: Wigan Pier Revisited by Beatrix Campbell has a more critical, feminist reassessment of Orwell, but still leverages his socialist critique toward the 1980s Thatcherism that was so instrumental in institutionalizing neoliberalism. Orwell, then, is at once a sort of apparition lingering in Hitler wins tales as genre and a reference point, perhaps guiding light, for debates over austerity. As such, his legacy remains essential.

A starting point here can be Orwell’s 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air. In it, George Bowling, one of Orwell’s narrative proxies, dwells on impending war. Bowling comprehends this inescapable conflict proleptically, projecting the war to come onto the landscape before him. These ruminations visualize a further future, one bleaker still, after the war: “The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, slogan-world. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep” (176). Bowling’s uniform sentence structure implies an inevitable march toward this dystopian scenario, turning war’s carnage into mere prologue. Notably, this passage does not cast Bowling’s vision of the future’s future as a cost of defeat, like a jingoist rallying cry, but as a result of the war drive itself. If its fascist imagery anticipates 1984, the novel’s positioning of this imagery as the result of war speaks to alternate history visions of jackbooted England. After all, the plot’s very name—Hitler wins—signals attention to the outcomes and aftermaths of war, not war itself. In a similar vein, 1984 depicts “totalitarianism after its world triumph” so “the society of Oceania might be called post-totalitarian” (Howe 250). Orwell’s thought—perhaps captured in his maxim, “All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure” (“Koestler” 244)—tends to turn less on war, revolution, or any disruptive event and more on what comes after the irruption. Hitler wins alternate histories share this orientation toward the after-war and history’s radical continuity.

To see this orientation in Small Change, note that Walton’s counter-factual fascism is compared to neoliberalism not only for their internal features and modes of governance but also for their political consequences. Both displace—one imaginatively and preemptively, the other actually and retroactively—the postwar welfare state. Small Change’s funhouse-mirror vision of neoliberal Britain emerges within an alternate history in which the welfare state—its entities and ethos—never exists for neoliberalism to dismantle. The welfare state assumes a ghostly form. On this note, Bramall argues that in neoliberal austerity discourse, “the critical referent . . . is the post-war social democratic welfare state, which is shown to be both still with us and decidedly anachronistic” (92). As if to admit the welfare state as critical referent in Small Change, Carmichael’s adopted daughter, Elvira, a debutante, sincerely asks, “We’re all fascists now, surely?” (Half 19). Elvira’s query is formulated in the language of consensus literally and as spin on a phrase associated with Keynesianism: her remark highlights how a postwar consensus with roots in Keynesian economics, a mixed economy, and welfare appears as absent presence.

Put another way, these narratives reflect Orwell’s concern for the after-war by provoking a key question: if Britain lost World War II, what exactly would be lost? Notably, the welfare state’s social protections and economic imperatives were pitched as the British people’s due after enduring the hardships and losses of total war. Quoting Sir William Beveridge, architect of the welfare state, Nicholas Timmins writes that the war “offered the chance of real change, for ‘the purpose of victory is to live in a better world than the old world’”; Beveridge’s vision for social insurance “encapsulated much of post-war aspiration” (24). That aspiration is lost in new Hitler wins fictions that suggest, by projecting that loss onto the present, that neoliberal Britain is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Orwell is a resource for grasping this move’s meaning.

Complicity and Critique

In Small Change, contrast between the trademark solidarity of the postwar welfare state and its alternate Britain in which it—as in the neoliberal present—is erased turns on a key Orwellian resonance: a commitment to English decency. Early in the series, a Jewish character assures a friend that “we could never have fascism here because people were in essence too decent” (Farthing 90). Such denials in the “it can’t happen here” vein are narrative ironies, given the rise of the Farthing Set and later the Blackshirts. Yet decency signifies as a real political value. The same character reminisces about a scuffle with an anti-Semitic fellow pilot during his time in the Royal Air Force; he notes they fought to a standstill and deems this stalemated resolution to be proof “that we were both Englishmen” for “Continentals would have fought dirty” (93). If the hierarchical traditions represented by the Set are admitted to have deep roots in British history—the Set’s headquarters is pointedly described as being “so deep in the country that it’s hard to get away from” (75)—this historical inequality seems to be offset by an ingrained sense of English decency and fair play, a tradition enacted when the pilots call their fight a draw.

This tradition is also embodied in the figure of Queen Elizabeth II. When the young queen appears at the end of the trilogy, she is represented in an old-fashioned (in fact, ancient) way as the living embodiment of Britain’s body politic. As Elvira puts it, “Mr. Normanby’s the Prime Minister, but she’s the one who really matters. He might run the country, but she is the country” (Half 111). Pivotal access to this living manifestation of Britain occurs when Elvira, along with her fellow debutantes, formally meets and curtsies to the queen—an upper-class ritual that in reality ended in 1958 as part of wider modernizing efforts but continues in the 1960 of Small Change. Elvira takes her fleeting moment with the queen to warn her of the dangers posed by domestic fascism and facilitates the delivery of a packet of evidence against Normanby collected by Carmichael. Shortly thereafter, the queen gives a televised speech, shocking her audience by declaring Normanby and the Farthing Set traitors. Calling for a general election, she denounces the fascistic Tory policies of the past decade: “They have arrested those accused of no specific crime and held them in detention for long periods without bringing them to trial, they have created a climate of fear, they have shipped off suspects to foreign prisons where they knew they could expect bad treatment. This is not the tradition of which we, as Britons, can be rightly proud” (314). Her words are the spark for simmering unrest, instigating spontaneous antifascist demonstrations and widespread calls for a return to a purportedly just and transparent democratic heritage, thus affirming decency and fair play as political forces. Once activated, traditional English decency, as embodied in the queen, mobilizes antifascist political action.

Orwell often writes of “decency.” Revisit “The Lion and the Unicorn,” his wartime meditation on Englishness. This essay memorably describes England as a “family with the wrong members in control” (68), a sentiment echoed in Small Change when the Jewish pilot refers to his bond with his anti-Semitic compatriot as “love without liking. The kind you get in families sometimes” (Farthing 93). “The Lion and the Unicorn,” however, also features a six-point program for postwar action, including nationalization of industries, income limits, and educational reform, plus three clear de-colonizing actions. If “The Lion and the Unicorn” shares an interest in “what comes after” found in Coming Up for Air, it contrasts a better post-war world against the pessimism that war is prelude to domestic tyranny. As circumstances change, so does the diagnosis: Orwell revises his thought, but the orientation remains on the future.

Orwell makes his social democratic vision for the future unambiguous. His listed proposals in “Lion” aim “at turning this war into a revolutionary war and England into a Socialist democracy” (96); as Gallagher puts it, here Orwell “makes a case for democratic socialism as a war measure” (Telling 260). His list enumerating the measures, Alex Woloch argues, “weakens the case of critics who rebuke Orwell for a vague, indefinite socialism hinging on imprecise, abstract qualities such as ‘decency’” (35). Orwellian decency serves many rhetorical purposes, and one of them is as shorthand for a specific political program. Taken this way, the fascism in Walton’s alternate history is a betrayal of Orwellian decency that reads allegorically as betrayal of revolutionary opportunity. If Orwell looked at the war and its aftermath as an opportunity to create a socialist democracy—an aspiration pursued if not fully achieved in the actual welfare state—then the authors of new Hitler wins novels cite Orwell to mourn the more just, equal, and decent Britain for which he yearned. This new life for Britain the nation-state showed its fleeting potential in Orwell’s imagining of the after-war. Small Change and other Hitler wins novels, however, suggest that fascism and neoliberalism are likewise opposed to the more egalitarian Britain that Orwell envisioned, one also enshrined more generally in prevailing images of austerity nostalgia and imperfectly realized in the welfare state.

Despite lamentations for the nostalgic solidarity of austerity Britain, new British Hitler wins narratives are also characterized by the sense—pronounced differently across examples—that retroactive fantasies of the postwar welfare state are no true alternative to the neoliberal regime. These texts speak awkward truths of the welfare state as it existed and of its promise as ideological (re)construction. Indeed, during its life span, critics indicted the welfare state for wielding collectivist half-measures in service of capitalism: the historical welfare state was a “post-war compromise between capital and labour” and is associated with a mid-twentieth-century “golden age of capitalism” (Briant and Harkins 93). A representative Left critique is Alan Sinfield’s contention that the postwar settlement was never truly socialist in character, but a “welfare-capitalism” that was at root corporatist, all along meant to preserve capitalism. From a conservative stance, the Tory Lord Woolton memorably diminished the postwar consensus as a weak “‘shandy gaff’ of Conservatism and Socialism” (qtd. in Timmins 47). Far from fulfilling the revolutionary promises of Orwell’s socialist program, the actual postwar settlement with the welfare state at its core was defined and critiqued in terms of ideological compromises.

Awareness of the postwar consensus’s limitations manifests in Small Change’s correspondences (not deviations) with actual history. To wit, regular discursive narration, like Half a Crown’s description of a police desk sergeant “sitting in a glass cubicle, looking very quaint and postwar” (177), calls to mind dominant images of 1950s Britain as modern yet small and parochial. The “shrinking island” of postwar Britain registers too in the United Kingdom’s diminished presence on the world stage. In Ha’Penny, a character gives an account of the country as geopolitical nonentity, using a class-inflected metaphor: “Ah, but we’re all poor relations here, all of us English. . . . The real centers of culture and economics are on the Continent, and we know it. The Empire’s a fading dream, it has been all this century. The countries of the future are Germany and Russia, where they’re prepared to try new things. We only copy them” (231). Germany displaces the United States here, but Britain remains a fading geopolitical power. In such moments, Walton’s fascist post-war Britain is startlingly unchanged from its real-world referent.

Invitations to reconcile historical estrangement with moments of recognition complicate Small Change’s redescription of the postwar period. On one hand, images of “[w]omen who had been sharing cigarettes and sweets beforehand were clawing at each other and shouting names I hadn’t heard for years” (Half 63) upend associations of austerity Britain with decency and camaraderie. On the other hand, the trilogy construes a postwar Britain decidedly unaffected, keeping calm and carrying on, despite a fascist government. This motif gives focus to the theme of appeasement and collaboration: the complicities of its alternate timeline dovetail with the compromises and negotiations of the actual welfare state for which a fascist state substitutes.

The character of Carmichael—Walton’s careworn protagonist—is once again key. Consider, first, the struggles Carmichael encounters in his romantic life. He fantasizes a world in which he and Jack, his partner, whom he met in the army and now presents publicly as his manservant, could love freely: “He regretted that they couldn’t go out like other people . . . [and] be open before the world like couples he saw holding hands as they walked down the street on a warm summer evening” (Half 146). Jack shares these desires and “wanted to campaign for homosexual rights, and would have gone on a march once if Carmichael hadn’t explained to him the likely fate of the marchers” (148). At this intersection of the personal and political, Carmichael settles for bitter conditions, for he “knew what happened if you stuck your neck out” (148), despite his sadness over the limited life such accommodations produce.

Unable to dine openly at “good restaurants,” Carmichael and Jack go for drinks and dancing at a gay club they tolerate as a “compromise” venue (Half 146). Yet Carmichael despises it: if he cannot live openly, he muses, “he didn’t want this tawdry alternative, the half-life of the bars and clubs where homosexuals gathered furtively, almost all of them speaking mincingly and miming effeminacy in their every gesture.” This passage hints at a certain degree of self-loathing. Carmichael’s distaste for fellow patrons—”He didn’t identify with them; indeed they repelled him utterly”—turns on their performances of their gender and sexual identities, “miming” that Carmichael perceives as inauthenticity. Yet such attitudes disclose his reconciliation to a highly performative, inauthentic, and furtive half-life in which he and Jack “might appear as master and man before the world, but in their own space they would just be Jack and P.A.” Notably, any juxtaposition of this example of “half-lives” unfulfilled by compromise with its historical counterpart would show more proximity than distance: scenes of underground gay life mark the sexual politics of the actual postwar period as being on a spectrum with fascism and stress how the theme of compromise transfers from a counterfactual timeline to its counterpart. In other words, Carmichael’s experiences as a gay man invite understandings of postwar, welfare state Britain as similarly defined by “half-lives.”

Furthermore, Carmichael and Jack’s disagreements over how to express their relationship parallel Carmichael’s similar negotiations and conflicts in his professional and political lives. Carmichael embraces his leadership of Normanby’s secret police, The Watch, chiefly from fear of blackmail. But he also takes this “ devil’s bargain,” as he calls it, for “without the apparatus of the law, he . . . could achieve nothing to bring Normanby to justice” (Farthing 312). Moral negotiations of these sorts recur for Carmichael: out of a sense of duty, he foils a plot to kill Hitler, but when state violence against vulnerable populations rises, he forms a seditious “Inner Watch” ring to smuggle targeted people out of Britain. Still, he reluctantly aids Normanby against a coup, since, for Carmichael, “Better the devil we know” (Half 126)—an echo of “no alternative” acquiescence to neoliberal orthodoxy. Resistance is constrained because despite his dissension, Carmichael stays embedded in the crumbling institutions, norms, and structures of liberal democracy—a political formation that put the quasi-fascists of the Set into power via free elections, authorizing them with power to subvert those very structures. In this setting, Small Change enacts exchanges of moral action and their costs, a conflict between principled conscience and practical strategy. Explaining the limits of his dissent to a comrade, Carmichael insists, “We do as much as we can without risking being found out—because if we are, that’s the end of it” (27). As the name of his subversives, the Inner Watch, suggests, even acts of resistance are contained within the confines of the system it attempts to challenge.

Seen this way, Carmichael’s anguish over the various personal and professional accommodations he feels he must make, practically and for a greater good, speak to the insufficiencies of compromise. From here, consider his intermittent dreams of German invasion and the resumption of war. Early in the series, Carmichael is depressed by the English countryside, feelings that he attributes to a sense of complacency. England, he muses, “could do with something to give it a shake and wake it up, like a famine, or a plague, or an invasion or something” (Farthing 24). Later, after speaking to a witness whom he finds politically naive, he “wish[es] for the second time that day for an invasion, even the invasion of the Third Reich the Farthing Set had averted” for “Hitler’s storm troopers” might shake up the citizenry’s priorities (83). In his professional, personal, and political lives, Carmichael discloses an unfulfilled desire to bypass unsatisfying half-measures; his seemingly uncharacteristic war lust, after all, is oriented toward disruption and transformation. In short, he has a revolutionary impulse.

Here, then, the linkage between World War II and revolutionary possibility found in Orwell’s “The Lion and the Unicorn” returns. The third part of Orwell’s long essay begins by declaring, “The English revolution started several years ago, and it began to gather momentum when the troops came back from Dunkirk. Like all else in England, it happens in a sleepy, unwilling way, but it is happening” (90). Small Change also suggests that Britain’s postwar future had the potential for genuine transformation, but it becomes a lost opportunity. Carmichael reflects on the war’s outcome in Ha’Penny: “He had thought the Farthing Peace hollow, had wondered what they had fought for at all, why they had endured the Blitz if they were going to call it a draw with nothing accomplished and claim it as Peace with Honour” (166–67). This passage has a melancholic tone, as Carmichael resigns himself to the belief that “England will always be England” (167). Such sentiments capture the dual directions of Walton’s displaced meditation on neoliberal Britain. Walton’s alternate history, on one hand, aligns its fascist postwar Britain with its present-day neoliberal counterpart to suggest that erasing the welfare state and its values is a betrayal of Allied victory, tantamount to losing the war against fascism. On the other hand, harmonies between Walton’s counterfactual postwar with its historical referent suggest that the Britain of the welfare state never achieved its mythologized solidarity and egalitarianism. New Hitler wins novels like the Small Change series thus more precisely portray neoliberal Britain as betrayal of a promise never fulfilled.

Alternate Postwars

If new Hitler wins narratives amount to counterfactual elegies for the postwar settlement suggesting that in a neoliberal era the welfare state—a formation once described by Neil Kinnock as “decency socialism” (qtd. in Timmins 161)—contains radical energies, then at the same time such narratives admit that recovery of a mythic welfare state is neither realistic nor sufficient. This dynamic reflects an emergent orientation toward the welfare state in Left political discourse. In his defense of mainstream social democracy, Ill Fares the Land, Tony Judt argues that the fading remnants of the postwar consensus now amount to a legacy for the Left to conserve. Judt calls not for idealization but for a purposeful rearticulating of a social democratic past—not just practices like nationalized industries but their communitarian affects and egalitarian impulses—to imagine and create a new social democratic future. Mixed feelings toward the welfare state, its legacy, and its political valences are captured in Hatherley’s remark that “One of the best arguments for the possibility of a social democracy is the fact that one came damn close to being built between 1945 and 1979, despite its many flaws and omissions” (11). Similarly, the alignment of neoliberalism and fascism in Hitler wins novels implicitly mourns the welfare state those formations displace, yet their emphases on complicity can be read mutatis mutandis as critiques of the welfare state’s bargaining with global capitalism—accommodations that are the seeds for a neoliberal assault on the welfare state.

Orwell helps us comprehend the significance of this vexed account of the welfare state in relation to new Hitler wins alternate histories. Consider how Orwell’s work sits at the juncture of genre fiction and literary culture. This overlap points toward integrating new Hitler wins novels into a larger archive, an alternate literary history that includes more traditionally literary writing. This body of postwar novels might contain Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square, Evelyn Waugh’s Love among the Ruins, Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, and others. These texts ponder, as do Hitler wins novels, the compromises of a postwar welfare state and interrogate contradictions of a liberal democracy that seems to nurture its own degeneration. This archive could house the Hitler wins novels that predate Chamberlain’s declaration of war in 1939, speculative fictions that were mainly written by women: Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned from 1935, Storm Jameson’s In the Second Year from 1936, Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night from 1937, and Vita Sackville-West’s Grand Canyon from 1942. Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and essay “Three Guineas” could join this corpus, because virtually all of these texts find convergences between fascism and misogyny, still resonant, which offset the perils of Axis victory with internal critique of the Allies’ hypocrisies. Such an archive documents interwar and mid-century fiction’s grappling with the birth, life, and death of the welfare state, preoccupations that—as this essay has argued—animate new Hitler wins novels.

Indeed, Kelly Rich attends to this literary confrontation with the transition from warfare to welfare in a reading of Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. Rich notes that Spark’s novel raises the “critical problem of what it means to live together under a welfarist ideology, sharing resources, power, and space” (1189). Spark and her contemporaries provide “a literature of reconstruction that critically engages—and ultimately evacuates—the historical valuation and popular memory of Britain’s Second World War as the ‘People’s War’” (1188). Rich ends by turning to Spark’s literary legacy: “Though Spark’s criticism of 1945 may eviscerate wartime nationalism and the mythology of postwar repair, it doesn’t leave us with nothing to see: instead, it creates a literary space that future novelists can inhabit, and that we all, to some degree, have inherited” (1206). Recent Hitler wins novels are tenants of this received imaginative domain.

Walton and other contemporary authors of Hitler wins novels return to the postwar moment of Orwell, Spark, and others who excavated its possibilities and deceptions in real time to put its promises and myths in conversation with its legacies and realities. These alternate history narratives draw on Orwell more than any other predecessor to revisit and rewrite cultural memories of the war and its aftermath. In his examination of how Orwell’s politics inheres in writing, Woloch identifies as his abiding question “Not ‘what would Orwell say?,’ then, but ‘what form would Orwell use?’” (6). One form, it seems, is alternate history.

Alternate histories of the welfare state’s formative period function as displaced meditations on the contemporary moment of the welfare state’s erasure. Such meditations on the past increasingly rest on the principal domestic achievement of the war: the postwar consensus’ welfare state. This political formation is central to contemporary authors of alternate history, reasonably, because today’s prevailing neoliberal regime is committed to undoing its existence, tantamount to erasing the consequences of World War II. Alternate history is also a formal resource since, as Gallagher asserts, telling them compels recognition that “at any single moment numerous unrealized pasts are still alive within us” (“Telling” 24). With this rhetorical function in mind, new Nazi alternate histories’ “what could have been” speculations of fascist triumph at midcentury can be read as also articulating “what could have been” longings for the wayward, unfulfilled promises of social democracy haunting contemporary, neoliberal Britain.