In Hitler’s Shadow

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld reviews Alec Ryrie’s “The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It.”

By Gavriel D. RosenfeldSeptember 10, 2025

• Politics

• History

• Philosophy & Religion

ALEC RYRIE’S NEW BOOK The Age of Hitler boasts an eye-catching, if somewhat deceptive, title. At first glance, its resemblance to similarly titled books—such as Eric Hobsbawm’s 1987 classic The Age of Empire: 1875–1914—gives the impression that it will focus on the years 1933–45, when Adolf Hitler dramatically shaped the course of world history. Yet the book’s subtitle—and How We Will Survive It—reveals that its focus is on the present day. Adding to Ryrie’s sleight of hand is the fact that neither the title nor the subtitle hints at its main thesis, which is that the Age of Hitler “is coming to an end.” What he assures us we will “survive,” in short, is an ending, not a beginning.

Making the book even more beguiling is the fact that The Age of Hitler is not really about Hitler. Confirming the truism that big things can come in little packages, the book clocks in at a mere 160 pages but offers a wealth of reflections on the topics of historical periodization, historical memory, and the historical foundations of postwar Western morality. It also offers a thoughtful analysis of why those foundations are crumbling and what the consequences might be for Western cultural and spiritual life in the coming years.

Ryrie presents his case from a unique perspective. Unlike most scholars of Nazism, he does not hail from the field of German history, Holocaust history, or Jewish history. Instead, he is a historian of Christianity who has published prodigiously on the history of the Protestant Reformation. This background explains his book’s mission, which is less about historical analysis than cultural, philosophical, and theological advocacy. Like many cultural critics, Ryrie is distressed by the raging “culture war” between “progressive secularists” and “conservative traditionalists,” and seeks to bridge the gap between them through a program of respectful “synthesis.” An important part of this project, he argues, is ending the hegemonic role the Nazi era has played in shaping postwar Western morality.

As Ryrie explains, the Age of Hitler arose after World War II to provide a new master narrative for structuring moral life. It did so mostly to replace the prevailing “Christian narrative” focusing on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. While this story once enjoyed unchallenged centrality in Western culture—a point Ryrie illustrates by citing the immense popularity of the ABC radio series The Greatest Story Ever Told (1947–56)—it gradually yielded to an even greater story: the world-historical drama of the Second World War. Signs of this shift already appeared early in the conflict. When Winston Churchill declared in 1940 that Britain was fighting to defend “Christian civilization” from the Nazis, he illustrated the vitality of the old narrative. Yet, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his famous “Four Freedoms” speech one year later, his claim that the fight against Nazism was a fight to defend freedom of speech and worship, along with freedom from want and fear, revealed that a new set of secular principles was on the rise.

Further secularizing trends appeared after 1945. Although the Christian narrative retained its influence for the first decade and a half of the postwar era thanks to the Cold War campaign against “godless communism,” it began to break down in the early 1960s. Various social factors advanced this development—including generational turnover and the advent of new gender roles and sexual norms—but a key cause was the “wider alienation from Christian ethics” rooted in the dawning awareness that Christianity had failed “the keenest moral test Western civilization had ever faced” in the years 1939–45. As this self-critical impulse swelled, conscientious Christians increasingly felt it was “arrogant” for them to view the life of Jesus as the greatest story ever told, and they searched for a secular alternative. Before long, they settled on a new narrative and created what Ryrie calls the postwar world’s “true religion: the Second World War.”

This development was part of an “ethical reawakening” that found expression in the widespread embrace of the universal concept of human rights. Embraced by the United Nations in 1948, the “new faith of a secular age,” Ryrie notes, was deeply rooted in a new understanding of evil that emerged from the recent war. Pointing to the role of the Adolf Eichmann trial of 1961 in putting “the Holocaust on centre stage,” Ryrie shows how the concept of “radical evil” came to be directly associated with the ideology of Nazism and the person of Adolf Hitler. In the decades that followed, references to the Nazi era proliferated “with wild abandon” in popular culture and public discourse—so much so that Hitler became “our only absolute.” Because his “indisputable evil makes him a unique and invaluable fixed reference point in our moral landscape,” Ryrie concludes, “whenever we want to condemn anyone,” we just compare them to Hitler.

Of late, however, the moral order established in the Age of Hitler has begun to break down. The decline of Europe as a colonial power and the arrival of millions of non-Western immigrants have changed the composition of European countries and challenged the “moral centrality of the Nazi era” by lending new urgency to questions of racism and racial justice. For increasing numbers of Europeans, Ryrie contends, the Western preoccupation with the fight against Nazism has acted as a “historic virtue shield” that has obscured “the uglier parts of their pasts” and “postpone[d] the moral reckoning” with “older crimes” related to the evils of “empire in general and […] the Atlantic slave trade in particular.” The result is that the Nazi genocide “is no longer the central historical fact, with a monopoly on moral authority.”

For his part, Ryrie welcomes this development, saying it is a “good thing” that the Age of Hitler is ending. All too often, he contends, the era’s moral consensus imparted the wrong lessons. The belief that it was a mistake to have appeased Hitler in the 1930s, for example, ended up valorizing war as a moral principle and set the stage for subsequent ill-advised military adventures by the United States and United Kingdom in Vietnam, the Falklands, and Iraq. As he explains, the belief that “evil is best defeated” through military action was mistakenly based on the exceptional example of an especially rogue state, Nazi Germany, whose behavior was “mercifully rare” in the history of geopolitical conflict. By creating a general rule from an exceptional case, the “post-Nazi ethical consensus” discredited alternative modes of solving disputes, such as pacifism and nonviolence.

Even worse, the transformation of Hitler into a symbol of ultimate evil distorted humanity’s moral compass by replacing the “positive exemplar” of Jesus with the negative one of Hitler. Because people no longer “believe that Jesus is good […] with the same fervour” that they “believe Nazism is evil,” they end up being “flung out into the world” without a clear sense of what they should pursue beyond individualistic rights and freedoms. Without having a positive sense of what freedoms are for, Ryrie laments, people define their morality by what they oppose, even what they hate. This reflex, in turn, has caused a tragic rift between progressive secularists and conservative traditionalists. While the former are constantly on the search for “new people to whom the Nazi label can be affixed,” the latter have begun to walk away from the entire system of “post-Nazi values” due to its “infuriating moral self-importance.” The result is that Western society has become unable to address new collective challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and environmental degradation.

Only by striving for a “moral synthesis” between the Left and the Right, Ryrie declares, will Western society be able to move forward. In his conclusion, he admonishes progressives not only to believe in the post-Nazi values of pluralism and universal rights, but also to realize that there is wisdom in “rooted traditions”—such as Christianity—and to cease viewing them as discredited expressions of primitive particularism. He also pleads with conservatives to believe in the virtues of religious faith as well as to accept that the values of the anti-Nazi era can be profitably merged with Christian principles of repentance, forgiveness, and humility. By restoring a traditional sense of what is good with a more modern sense of what is evil, the culture wars can finally be ended.

While Ryrie presents his recommendations with a heartfelt sense of urgency, they are only tenuously supported by his historical analysis. He contends that the Age of Hitler’s impending collapse requires a new morality, yet what he diagnoses is hardly new. In truth, the notion that Nazism represents the apex of evil has been challenged for decades by multiple parties. Already in the 1930s, Irish Catholics questioned Great Britain’s crusade against Nazism by noting that British imperialism had the same savage effects in Ireland that the Nazis were inflicting on Eastern Europe. During the same period and well into the postwar years, Black radicals in the United States insisted that the lynchings of the Jim Crow era were no less evil than the mass shootings perpetrated by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen. Conservative American isolationists and German conservatives around the same time claimed that the crimes of Stalin were no less atrocious than those of Hitler. These arguments belie Ryrie’s claim that a “post-Nazi ethical consensus” defined the postwar world. Indeed, if this alleged consensus was contested from the outset, the phrase “the Age of Hitler” is too broad to have much meaning.

A more nuanced way of understanding the phenomenon described by Ryrie is to view it as the latest phase of a long postwar process of mnemonic competition. As is abundantly shown in the voluminous scholarship on the memory of Nazism (little of which is addressed by Ryrie), diverse groups across the Western world have competed to shape our contemporary understanding of the Third Reich. Since the end of World War II, these groups have enjoyed periods of great influence. Conservatives were especially powerful in the two decades between 1945 and the mid-1960s, while left liberals asserted their own views from the mid-1960s to the turn of the millennium. What Ryrie views as the decline of the Age of Hitler is merely the waning of the left-liberal memory paradigm. As liberalism has come under attack since the turn of the millennium by illiberal movements of the Right and the Left, a new movement of illiberal memory has arisen as well.

Rather than thinking that “we are losing the shared focus on a single moral moment” epitomized by Hitler, we should realize that, for decades, people have derived vastly different lessons from that moment. For years after the Nazis’ rise to power, countless people in the Anglo-American world viewed Hitler as a symbol of Germany’s deviant path of historical development—toward dictatorship instead of democracy. Others saw the Nazis as a symbol of the negative potential of modernity, with early postwar conservatives blaming Hitler on the French Revolution’s overthrow of tradition, and later postmodern liberals blaming him on the modern world’s predilection for totalizing ideologies. Present-day postcolonial scholars have extended this argument by seeing Nazism as merely a by-product of modern European imperialism applied to Europe instead of to the non-Western world. As the composition of Western nations is becoming less white, this argument is gaining traction. But it’s merely a new front in an old war over memory.

Ryrie’s focus on Christianity also raises questions about his analysis. While he is correct that the Nazi era became a common moral touchstone after World War II, he exaggerates in claiming that what it replaced was the “greatest story ever told”—Christianity. In fact, after Hitler rose to power in 1933, Western observers sought to judge his historical significance not by contrasting him with Jesus but by comparing him to a range of secular historical villains, ranging from Nero to Napoleon. Christianity, in short, was never the exclusive framework for making sense of historical change.

Ryrie’s Christian focus also leads him to overlook the role played by postwar Jews in the Age of Hitler. For obvious reasons, Jews never shared the Christian moral perspective, notwithstanding Ryrie’s claim that they were included in the war’s effort to defend Judeo-Christian values. He partly concedes this point when he clarifies that in using the plural “we” throughout his analysis, he is referring to “the gentiles of the West.” But this leads him once again to overestimate how secure post-Nazi values actually were. For decades after 1945, Jewish observers—especially Holocaust survivors—worried about threats to remembrance coming from all wings of the political spectrum. Writing in 1966, Jean Améry pointed to ongoing efforts to relativize the Nazi era and pessimistically predicted that “Hitler’s Reich” would eventually be viewed as “no better and no worse than dramatic historical epochs just happen to be.” Several decades later, in 1988, Primo Levi feared that young people were increasingly viewing the Hitler era as a “distant, blurred” period “associated with their grandfathers,” and had shifted their attention to “today’s problems.” These and similar comments reveal that the Age of Hitler’s moral consensus was far from confident.

These doubts are especially relevant today, given the ongoing politicization of the Nazi legacy. In the past decade, multiple groups across the political spectrum, both in the United States and worldwide, have invoked Hitler to advance moral judgments about present-day crises. This is a testament to the enduring power of Hitler as a hegemonic historical analogy. It is also a reflection of the tendentious ways in which both liberal and illiberal memory can be used to achieve certain political and social ends. Ryrie is to be commended for encouraging dialogue between progressive secularists and conservative traditionalists, but one serious question remains: how can dialogue be advanced in an era of surging authoritarianism and unending war? While Ryrie’s subtitle, and How We Will Survive It, holds out the hope that genuine dialogue can lead to moral repair, the key words “we” and “how” would benefit from a much clearer road map. In the current moment, is it actually conceivable that the key parties comprising this “we” can be brought into dialogue? Can they actually agree upon a common “how” that can ensure our survival? Without further clarity on these crucial questions, we appear destined to remain stuck in the discursive logjam that marks the Age of Hitler.