The Age Of Hitler And How We Will Survive It

We live in an age where Hitler and the Nazis dominate our cultural imagination, shaping values once defined by religion. Historian Alec Ryrie explores why society remains captivated by this struggle, exploring history and fiction as well as modern myths such as Star Wars and Harry Potter. He examines the costs of our Nazi obsession and questions what will come as our anti-Nazi moral consensus frays. With a fresh take on modern history and pop culture, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It offers a thought-provoking look at the culture wars and our shifting political crises, challenging assumptions on both the Left and the Right and asking what a new moral vision might look like.

'Provocative...Presented in a light yet not unserious tone, this well-paced investigation of what underpins modern morality is worth grappling with.' – Publishers Weekly

'In the past decade, multiple groups across the political spectrum, both in the United States and worldwide, have invoked Hitler to advance moral judgments about present-day crises. This is a testament to the enduring power of Hitler as a hegemonic historical analogy. It is also a reflection of the tendentious ways in which both liberal and illiberal memory can be used to achieve certain political and social ends. Ryrie is to be commended for encouraging dialogue between progressive secularists and conservative traditionalists.' – Los Angeles Review of Books

'The West has long agreed: Hitler is all we aspire not to be. But Ryrie’s new book shows this waning consensus can’t uphold all our public ethics.' – Christianity Today

'As Ryrie sees it, Hitler was for the second half of the twentieth century and on into the next, what Jesus had been for previous generations: the centre of the moral wheel, around which our ethical instincts turned. Of course, whereas Jesus shaped our moral instincts through positive example, Hitler shaped them by defining what we were against...Ryrie’s study of the shaping of postwar values is compelling and expertly written. As a commentary on the moral condition of our age and what is at stake, it could hardly be bettered.' – Literary Review

'Adolf Hitler has replaced Jesus as the most important moral figure in the Western world, Ryrie argues in his new book, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. It is an assertion that the book unpacks over its 140 pages...The outworking of anti-Nazi sentiment has been the elevation of human rights in the post-war Western world...The lack of philosophical roots also plays out in how each side in the culture wars employs human-rights discourse to make its arguments...The book presents challenges to both sides of the culture wars, progressive and conservative.' – Church Times

'The Age of Hitler serves as a useful mirror, showing how our moral moment took shape.' – The Gospel Coalition

'A very good book...It is erudite, beautifully written, with witty anecdotes and penetrating observations in all the right places. It tells us that we are moving from an age of moral certitudes into one where it is increasingly permissible for world leaders to commit acts of horrific barbarism and to behave like small children, and it gives practical suggestions for how best to survive this moment of historic change. The argument builds methodically, and it leaves one feeling both informed and edified.' – Premier Christianity

'Ryrie’s The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It  alerts us that the old taboos that kept the demons at bay in Western societies for the past eighty years are no longer holding...According to Ryrie, this development is not wholly unwelcome. For too long, Western politics has been defined by its devils. We know what we fear and want to avoid at all costs: the second coming of Hitler, racist fascism, anti-Semitism, and so forth. On these we all agree – or at least we did until very recently. We struggle to find common loves around which to rally, and we are left only with common fears and hates...Ryrie doesn’t want us to lose the insights and values gained during the Age of Hitler; he just thinks they need to rest on the firmer foundations of a richer story.' – WORLD

'Ruminates on how Nazi imagery dominates the modern cultural imagination, from Star Wars to Harry Potter, and questions what that will entail as memory of the real Nazis fades.' – Publishers Weekly Fall 2025 Previews

'Historian Ryrie examines society and popular culture's Nazi obsession, questioning what a new moral vision might look like as our anti-Nazi moral consensus frays.' – The Bookseller

'A brilliant exposition of Hitler’s role as the embodiment of evil in the collective imagination of the West – and of what may happen as it starts to fade.' – Tom Holland, author of Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

'With his lissome prose, Ryrie is a brilliant guide in the best of the essayist tradition, who empowers us to face the formidable moral questions of our age not as victims but through critical self-examination, ethical reflection, and compassionate action. Who are we? The appeal to self-awareness is neither otherworldly nor moralising. Rather, like the great Montaigne, Ryrie meets us in the middle of his and our lives, offering rich and humane historical reflections as wisdom in our consumerist, perpetually online, and post-truth realities. This is an extraordinary book with which you don't need to be in full agreement to emerge radically transformed into a more enlightened and charitable person in a fraught age.' – Bruce Gordon, Titus Street Professor of Ecclesiastical History, Yale Divinity School

'We live amid alarming fractures in the public understanding of our identities, our collective needs, and our perils. Ryrie’s little book of contemporary history manages to be both exhilarating and comforting, based on his rare skill in bringing a historian’s cool gaze on our anxious world to assess its ills, and with due modesty to offer some remedial ways forward.' – Diarmaid MacCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the church, University of Oxford