Making History Even Worse

Seminar paper from the year 2013 in 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 na