Thursday 11 September 2008

Alternative History and 'Turning Point: Fall of Liberty'










At the moment, I'm keen to play the newish (its been out for several months now) game 'Turning Point: Fall of History,' which presents an alternative history in the form of a successful Nazi invasion of the USA in the 1950s. While some of the games' images look stunning, of equal interest will be the degree to which its themes, perhaps, accord with those raised in Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's excellent book, 'The World Hitler Never Made'. Rosenfeld offers a comparative cultural history of allohistorical treatments of the Nazi period found in a broad range of mediums extending from academic essays to popular cultural representations in television programmes, film, and novels. Through these, Rosenfeld examines to what degree the Nazi era, Hitler and the Holocaust have been 'normalized,' and what these various treatments suggest(ed) about different national identities, memory, and past and current politics. In this sense, I wonder what 'Turning Point' might point to (i.e, in a celebratory or self-critical manner) re America's actual participation in WW2 , how it views itself today, and its role in the post 9/11 world?



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