Gavriel Rosenfeld offers a thoughtful consideration of the ways in which the Nazi past is represented in our media-saturated contemporary culture and of what this means for historical thinking. The internet affords unprecedented access to an overwhelming and ever-expanding archive of significant historical texts and images, but it is also flooded with trivial and satirical sites such as #catswholooklikehitler. Adolf Hitler is the subject of countless memes in cyberspace, and he is banally juxtaposed with Darth Vader in “epic rap battles of history.” What is most disturbing is that historical perspectives that are neo-Nazi, counterfactually speculative, or spawned somewhere else on the social and political fringes receive disproportionate attention and amplification. Rosenfeld boldly attempts to theorize about this by surveying internet culture, popular films and literature, as well as a new wave of revisionist and alternate historical writing about Word War II, Nazism, and the Holocaust.

Rosenfeld frames contemporary culture as the site of a struggle between a “moralistic” view of the Nazi past and a more “normalizing” tendency (7). The former, he argues, is an approach to the past rooted in a belief that the Nazi period was exceptional and qualitatively different from our own era, whereas “normalization” is a complex set of practices that ultimately renders images of National Socialism harmless through familiarization and similarity. Rosenfeld has a deep sense of the politics of memory in a variety of national contexts, and although the book concentrates chiefly on Great Britain, Germany, and the United States, Rosenfeld often provides informed comparative perspectives on the evolving representation of the Nazi past in Eastern Europe, Israel, France, and other parts of the world as well. He explains clearly that “normalization” is often—particularly in Germany—a political position that seeks to displace Holocaust memory and discussions of guilt as a central cultural and political focus. At the same time, he develops a theory of “normalization” as a historical dynamic that is not specific only to Germany. Along similar lines, Rosenfeld understands the interplay between historical orthodoxies and revisionist approaches as a perennial dynamic in historiography, and not just as a political struggle. He distinguishes four modes of normalization: “organic normalization” (10), which is the product of generational change and the passage of time; “relativization” (11), which seeks to minimize the significance of the past through comparison; “universalization,” which attacks the idea that the (Nazi) past is exceptional and specific by attempting to expand its contemporary relevance; and “aestheticization” (12), which promotes normalization when art becomes an end in itself and obscures a moral perspective on the past.

Rosenfeld succinctly recaps a number of debates in the historiography of Nazism and the Holocaust—most notably the debates over the singularity of the Holocaust and the meaning of comparative history in relation to it—in order to frame his presentation of the new historical revisionism, which he sees as related to other phenomena in contemporary popular culture. Hi Hitler! is most effective as nuanced intellectual history and as a critique of historiography. For example, Rosenfeld sees popular revisionist works such as Jörg Friedrich's Der Brand (2002) as both a reflection of post-September 11, 2001, antiwar sentiment and as a not very subtle attempt to shift German memory of World War II in order to relativize German guilt through a focus on the wartime suffering of German civilians. Yet, Rosenfeld sees a “dialectic of normalization” (13–14, 41) at work in the reception of studies like the one by Friedrich, in which attempts at relativization and normalization (again, in Rosenfeld's sense of the word as a “rendering harmless” and a foreclosing of moral judgment) often provoke debates and discussions that do the very opposite.

If Rosenfeld is optimistic that a “dialectic of normalization” can function as a corrective to revisionism and “normalization” in the realm of historiography, he is nevertheless pessimistic that anything can be done to stem the tide of trivialization of the Nazi past on the internet, or to address a dynamic in popular literature and film that “humanizes” (291) Hitler and thus lessens the chance for moral education. While acknowledging that technology offers an opportunity to democratize access to serious historical sources and popularize their findings, Rosenfeld wonders whether there are, in fact, two discrete internet audiences: one for historical information from institutions such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and another, much larger public one content to consume trivializations and specious or tendentious views of the Nazi past. Here, Rosenfeld's book leaves the reader hungry for empirical studies that would provide some preliminary answers to his questions. Has the wave of trivial representations and references to Nazism actually altered the view of the Nazi past held by the general public? If so, is this change equally evident across generations, education levels, regional origins, or other social categories? Rosenfeld does not offer answers to these questions, which are arguably beyond the scope of his study.

Rosenfeld's analyses of recent films (including Downfall [2004] and Inglorious Basterds [2009]) and works of literature (including Timur Verdes's Er ist wieder da [2012] and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union [2007]) are extremely perceptive and insightful, but his category of “aestheticization” as a form of “normalization” is underdeveloped. One wishes for more historical analysis and conceptual probing on this issue. For example, Rosenfeld notes that wartime satires such as Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 film To Be or Not to Be wrestled with similar tensions between anti-Nazi critique and trivial popular entertainment, but his assertion that the film remains within a “moralizing” rather than “normalizing” framework is not sufficiently explained. Another important early work of anti-Hitler satire, Bertolt Brecht's Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (1941), explicitly addressed the danger of crossing the line from satire into farce, and, in this context, would certainly have merited attention in a study like this one. Television is another historical chapter that one wishes Rosenfeld had considered. Are the representations of the Nazi past in today's internet culture qualitatively different from the campy American TV farces of the 1960s, such as Hogan's Heroes (which German audiences viewed only after unification in 1990)? Are the trivialization concerns of today different from those voiced when the Holocaust miniseries aired in the late 1970s? Despite these criticisms, Gavriel Rosenfeld has ventured into an important new area in the study of the historical memory of Nazism. He has provided a thoughtful and rich conceptual vocabulary with which to analyze the ever-expanding culture of popular media.