Alec Ryrie. The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. University of Chicago Press, 2025. $24.00. 160 pp.
Next summer I’ll be taking a group on a tour of England, France, and Germany, showing them a few of the myriad sites where World War II was caused, waged, and remembered. We’ll stand where soldiers fought on the beaches of Dunkirk and Normandy. We’ll imagine total war as civilians suffered it in the streets of London and Paris. And we’ll go from National Socialism’s birth sites in Munich to its first concentration camp in nearby Dachau and the Nuremberg courtroom where Nazi leaders were convicted of crimes against humanity.
This tour will be something like a modern pilgrimage, if British historian Alec Ryrie is right that “our culture’s true religion” is the Second World War, a faith centered not on the positive moral example of Jesus Christ but the negative one of Adolf Hitler. “Perhaps we still believe that Jesus is good,” Ryrie allows, “but not with the same fervour and conviction that we believe Nazism is evil.”
Except that those of us on this trip, mostly employees or alumni of a Christian university, do believe in Jesus’ goodness at least as fervently as we do in Hitler’s depravity. So does Ryrie, who is both a historian of the Protestant Reformation and a lay minister in the Church of England. The tour I am leading will begin with Sunday morning worship at St Paul’s Cathedral, near the memorial to London firefighters who died during the Blitz, and end at one of the four religious sites at the north end of the Dachau memorial site. We’ll pass under an iron crown of thorns into the Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel, to contemplate the sacrifice of Jesus that inspired the hundreds of Catholic priests martyred at Dachau.
Before I turn in earnest to Ryrie’s work, I ought first to acknowledge that I am not the intended audience for The Age of Hitler. It’s still the story of Jesus that I find to be the greatest ever told, even if no secular “narratives other than tales of the Second World War affect me in quite the same way.” Unlike the generic Anglophone Westerner to whom Ryrie is addressing this book, I haven’t “cast off [religion] like a worn-out garment” nor participated in modernity’s “wider alienation from Christian ethics.” While Ryrie isn’t wrong that the post-World War II ethical consensus is fraying, my frequent encounters with that terrible conflict—as a writer, reader, teacher, tour guide, filmgoer, and a veteran’s grandson—keep reaffirming for me its lessons about the seemingly bottomless depths of human sinfulness and the importance of striving for human equality and human rights.
I suspect that the same is true for many readers of this journal. Yet I still recommend The Age of Hitler for three reasons. First, Ryrie holds “up a mirror to our own age at a particular angle” that reveals how our “deep convictions about justice and human rights” emerged from the wreckage of history’s worst war. Second, he helps those of us who still hold those convictions to recognize the limitations of the anti-Nazi ethical consensus and the reasons that it is weakening. Third, Ryrie suggests how moving past the “Age of Hitler” could bring cultural synthesis rather than culture war—a process in which Christians like you and me might well play a catalytic role.
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Those of us who see the crucifix on the altar of Dachau’s Catholic chapel and ponder the mystery of the atonement may be unmoved by Ryrie’s opening narration of the Christian West entering the twentieth century. Its vaguely religious ethic was centered on the Jesus whose personal example appealed to skeptics like Bertrand Russell, not the Christ who rose from the dead to reign as Lord and will return one day in judgment. But World War II ushered in a new consensus oriented not so much in imitation of the humility, simplicity, and wisdom so widely admired in Jesus as in rejection of the hatred, cruelty, and injustice embodied in Adolf Hitler and his disciples.
“The Western world’s encounter with Nazism and its atrocities,” explains Ryrie, “triggered what we can only call an ethical reawakening.” The postwar ethic centered on the principles articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948, which asserts that the natural rights inherent to being human offer the surest “foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” While Mohandas Gandhi tried to convince the framers of the UDHR that all rights are accompanied by social duties, individual autonomy has joined equality and empathy in making up “the sea in which, during the age of Hitler, we have all been swimming.”
Given how Ryrie describes the post-WWII ethic as succeeding a Christian one, it may be surprising to read him admit later that “the new prominence of gay and transgender rights… is one of the few really direct clashes between our societies’ older, Christian-based moral norms and our newer, anti-Nazi ones.” But even if there is a basic congruence between ethics before and after Hitler, Ryrie argues that contemporary Western values are not timeless or universal but historically contingent: “...we cannot imagine our modern faith in human rights without the experience of the Second World War, and without the understanding of what evil is that came out of that war” — namely, the “grey inhumanity, teetering on the edge of nothingness” found in Hannah Arendt’s notion of an evil that was at once radical and banal. If anything, the most atrocious crimes of the Nazis have become even more central to how we tell the story of WWII, particularly in recent movies like Inglourious Basterds, Fury, and Holocaust films going back to Schindler’s List. Meanwhile, “generations of children in the post-Christian West have been raised” on stories of “fictional Hitlers” in Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and the Harry Potter series, “cleansing the brutal lessons of the Second World War and transposing them into timeless morality tales.”
“We are not, unlike some of our great-grandparents, liable to believe soft-focus nonsense about inherent human innocence,” Ryrie concludes. “We have not only seen what people can do, we believe that these are things that people will do, given half a chance.” That’s the lesson my students typically take away from our discussion of Ordinary Men, Christopher Browning’s famous study of German military police who executed hundreds of Polish Jews and deported thousands more to Treblinka not because they were fanatics, but because they were humans—overly deferential to authority and selfishly concerned with ambition and approval.
“I do not want to unlearn the lessons of Nazism,” Ryrie emphasizes—and reemphasizes, again and again. “To recognize Hitler as representing a truly exceptional evil is the beginning of wisdom. My point, however, is that this recognition is only the beginning; it is not enough. It cannot bear the weight that our age is putting on it, and by now it is cracking under the strain.” Even though “the appetite for telling its story is not fading”—my upcoming course on WWII quickly filled up during Bethel’s last registration period, as it always does—the ethical consensus created by the crusade against Hitler seems to be unravelling. This is not simply Ryrie’s cue to condemn what he labels the “dirty Right” of European and American politics. Based on lectures given during the Biden presidency, The Age of Hitler doesn’t even mention Donald Trump until the half-way point, and only occasionally after that. Instead, Ryrie roots the weakening of the anti-Nazi consensus in everything from an overdue reckoning with injustices perpetrated by the Allies themselves to “the re-emergence, on both political extremes, of the most perennial prejudice of them all: antisemitism.”
That consensus isn’t entirely gone, and “it is still unusual to find a political leader in the democratic world who openly disdains the taboo against Nazism.” Laughably, even Vladimir Putin justified his 2022 invasion of Ukraine as an “anti-Nazi” campaign against a government led by the Jewish descendant of Holocaust victims. But Ryrie is most persuasive when he argues that an ethic birthed by World War II is ultimately inadequate.
It’s not just that many modern-day foes aren’t much like Nazis. (“We brought a Spitfire to a germ fight,” says Ryrie of the British response to COVID-19, “and proved better at stirring wartime rhetoric than at effective public health policy.”) More fundamentally, “deriving moral values from a war, any war, is a problem,” since doing so leaves us with a “moral framework that valorizes just one set of tools, and a very dangerous set at that...” Because we’ve learned from the unique struggle against Hitler the lesson that “evil can be defeated by force if you oppose it wholeheartedly enough,” we’ve tended to devalue negotiation, compromise, and other forms of peaceful conflict resolution, while failing to realize that “attempting to crush evil completely often only contaminates the soil with toxic debris. Tolkien was not wrong to warn of the consequences of trying to conquer Sauron with the Ring.”
Still more problematic to Ryrie is “the whole business of using an exemplar of evil to set our moral compasses. It means that we now know what we hate, but we do not know what we love.” Even if WWII has left us with “quite a deep understanding of evil”—and he’s not so sure of that — “we have a pretty impoverished understanding of what philosophers used to call the good,” lacking any meaningful sense of what to do with our rights and equality. Meanwhile, “defining our morals by the process of hatred has costs all of its own,” such as “a certain inflexibility and brittleness” of political discourse that lacks “much space for forgiveness or redemption.”
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The erudite Ryrie draws from a dizzying array of examples —some theology and ethics here, references to C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling there, the histories of multiple countries and continents everywhere. Yet he doesn’t offer empirical evidence so much as reasons to trust the personal intuitions that he suspects “are often more reliable than mere logic.” Either his sweeping generalizations will feel right to you, or they won’t.
But even if you read the first two sections of The Age of Hitler and don’t see yourself clearly in Ryrie’s versions of “How We Got Here” and “Where We Are Now,” you may yet participate in his closing prediction for “Where We Go Next.” For if Ryrie is right that cultural synthesis is the best, most likely resolution to our culture war, then Christians have a key role to play.
To the “instinctive conservative… who has proudly embraced traditional cultural and religious particularities,” Ryrie warns that the “combative Christian conservatism” of MAGA and its cousins in Hungary and Russia offers nothing more than a “mirage of cultural success… doomed to dissolve into nothingness as we approach it, and to leave us stranded and thirsty in the desert.” But while he sees the religious Right “hollowing itself out” as it becomes clearer that the substance of its politics have “less and less to do with their declared religion,” Ryrie also expects a renewal of traditional values, not their rejection: “...since Christian ethics have deep roots and have successfully weathered some long winters in the past, some version of them will be what ends up springing up and recolonizing this cold earth.”
Just in time to counsel secular progressives, whom Ryrie encourages to “open a dialogue with [the world’s] deep-rooted traditions” that offer “deep wells of wisdom… the sorely needed abilities to forgive and to repent… deeply unfashionable but surprisingly practical ethical techniques” and “some beauty to spice all this tasteless gruel of truth and goodness.” Ryrie commends religious and other rooted traditions that “are endlessly plural and self-critical, but not boundlessly plural and self-critical” as alternatives to the “universalizing ambition” that leaves progressives with “a quixotic sense of moral obligation to the whole of humanity” redolent of older justifications for Western empire.
It will require compromise on both sides, but Ryrie suspects that some synthesis is bound to happen, since the present paths for both Left and Right lead only to dead ends. But if progressives are to draw on “the traditions that, after all, actually helped fight the war against Hitler” while conservatives “fully and honestly own the anti-Nazi heritage,” then perhaps those of us who never abandoned the example of Jesus but are still moved by the struggle against Hitler can serve a mediating role, helping our neighbors to see what it looks like to hold post-WWII “insights together with older and wider traditions.”