‘The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It’ by Alec Ryrie review

This book represents the published version of 2022’s Bampton Lectures, a series of talks addressing diverse theological issues that have been read at the University of Oxford since 1780. They were delivered by Alec Ryrie, erstwhile Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, with the subject ‘the age of Hitler, and how we can escape it’ (‘can escape’ becoming the more optimistic ‘will survive’ in the title of the book). Ryrie’s core thesis is that the Second World War marked a profound turning point in Western history: whereas, previously, Western society had found its moral orientation in Christian tradition, after 1945 it abandoned this ethical compass in favour of a secular vocabulary of human rights derived from universal revulsion at the crimes of Nazi Germany. This radical rewiring of ethical frameworks following the Holocaust leads Ryrie to term the postwar period ‘The Age of Hitler’. Since 1945, if he is right, we have defined our politics, our values, and ourselves in opposition to him.

Scholars of 20th-century Germany – including me – have long been familiar with the charge that Western society has, as Ryrie puts it, a ‘collective obsession with Hitler’, and Ryrie himself is not immune from slipping into this polemic. Small matter that the high water mark of popular interest in the Holocaust occurred around the turn of the millennium (a generation ago); that A-level German history curricula have broadened to focus on Bismarck, postwar reconstruction, and Helmut Kohl too; that students are far more global in their concerns than Ryrie’s and my cohort ever were; or that, to go by what my colleagues there tell me, few new German undergraduates can name more than three Nazi-era concentration camps. More to the point, might it be that the profound anti-democratic nationalist pushback of the past two decades gives our interest in this period a deeper purpose than superficial fascination?

For the most part, in fairness, Ryrie eschews this easy invective in favour of a more interesting argument surrounding the limits of the modern discourse of human rights, as embodied in the United Nations Declaration of 1948 and its Convention on Refugees of 1951. As history it is still not entirely persuasive, primarily because Ryrie overstates the degree to which Hitler and the Second World War marked a clear turning point in what were (as always) more complex longer-term processes of change. Postwar discussions were shaped by memory of the Armenian genocide and interwar population transfers as well as by the Holocaust, and were shot through with the politics of the Cold War and decolonisation. In 2003, invocations of genocide as a justification for intervention in Iraq were as much influenced by memories of recent genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda as by obsession with Hitler, and while George W. Bush’s references to genocide might have been contentious they were scarcely ‘gratuitous’, as a moment’s consideration of Saddam Hussein’s 1988 Anfal campaign reminds us.

This might all be a matter of emphasis, and there is certainly room for reasoned difference of opinion. Equally, one cannot help but feel that another rarely appreciated consequence of Hitler’s ubiquity, such as it is, is that it tempts people with passing familiarity with the topic to feel that they can bypass the complex intricacies revealed by decades of deep immersion. Ryrie’s account of the evolution of postwar memories of Nazism itself is a case in point: a smattering of war movies (The Dam Busters, The Longest Day, Where Eagles Dare, Inglourious Basterds) and glancing references to the Eichmann trial of 1961 substitute for engagement with all that literature on multi-directional memory; on violence, trauma, and emotion; on comparative genocide; or the relationship between colonial violence and genocide that have animated vibrant discussions of late. Historians of modern Germany would not lecture anyone on the fascinatingly complex legacies of the Reformation on this basis; it is unclear why the opposite should be more permissible.

If Ryrie’s individual historical claims are not uniformly compelling, however, his overarching thesis remains provocatively engaging. The book is freighted with an unmistakeable scepticism concerning the discourse of human rights that broadens into a wider set of claims regarding liberalism and its limits. While Christianity, in Ryrie’s telling, always had a positive account to offer of what it was for, secular liberalism has been unable to come up with more than a statement of what it is against. Liberalism was always too compromised by its willingness to suspend the discourse of human rights when pragmatic raison d’état demanded it, and by its inability to underpin its espousal of superficially compelling values with a robust architecture of enforcement.

In this critique Ryrie is surely right (if it is wrong to bomb a civilian hospital, it is wrong to do so whether its patients are Israeli, Palestinian, or Iranian). But pointing out the hypocrisy of the West is easy sport, and an exercise in walking through open doors. And liberalism is hardly alone in failing to live up to the promise of its own values – just ask Jewish or Muslim fellow citizens how Christianity has behaved towards them in the past.

What matters is what conclusions we draw from this insight. I do not know Professor Ryrie, and I may be doing him a disservice, but his self-characterisation as a middle-aged, middle-class, cis straight white man means that – like me – he probably has the luxury of taking his human rights for granted in a way that others do not. A consideration both of those currently being rounded up, incarcerated, and deported in the United States, and of those mobilising constitutionally defined powers of redress in their defence is a powerful reminder of the continued differences between rights-based jurisdictions and those where such rights are absent. Ryrie believes that this is not enough, and that society should revive its Christian values. An alternative conclusion might be that we should double down in defence of those human rights themselves.

• The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It
  Alec Ryrie
  Reaktion, 160pp, £15.95
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Neil Gregor is Professor of Modern European History at the University of Southampton. His latest book is The Symphony Concert in Nazi Germany (University of Chicago Press, 2025).