Impotenza, fuga e controidilllio: Schwiebus di Arno Lubos

Abstract

In the nineties, a debate on the “impossible” hypothesis of a victory for the Third Reich in the Second World War and what would happen after it ran through German historiography. According to this interpretation, National Socialism would have been an extreme and unrepeatable phenomenon. After its definitive affirmation, a process of progressive moderation would have started. “If Hitler had won, National Socialism would be stifled in its radicalism, or it would have become bourgeois,” writes Alexander Demandt in Wenn Hitler gewonnen hätte (1995). Arne Lubos’ novel Schwiebus (1980) anticipates this debate by a decade and develops the motif of “Nazism after Nazism” in an all-historical key. It denies “normalizing” perspectives and outlines scenarios in which National Socialist hegemony has given rise to a regime in which repression and terror are not entirely evident but no less widespread and frightening. Our paper aims to explain its narrative strategies.

Keywords

• german literature
• nazism
• allohistory
• arno lubos
• schwiebus