It can sometimes feel we’ve run out of ground to cover in terms of World War II fiction. To the untrained yet experienced eye, the likes of Band of Brothers (2001) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) may appear to have told all there is to tell, at least about the American war in Europe. (Other theaters are sadly underutilized. I’d like to see more about Burma and the Philippines, to name just two.)

Books including Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See (2014) and Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief (2015) have somewhat shaken up the genre. But there is still room for innovation.

Enter The Liberator, an animated limited series on Netflix concerning Felix Sparks, a man who led a battalion of men from Oklahoma to Italy, France and Germany. In terms of setting, it’s fairly well-trod ground, but in presentation it is quite new.

Left

Diesel

Sarah ZamaApril 4, 2021May 16, 2021

When we think about the Weimar Republic, most likely we think about the time of right-wing power. Certainly, many authoritarian forces were at work in the republic, but this was also the time of a left government, one that shaped the social life of Germany profoundly.

The Weimar Republic was a relatively short experience in the history of Germany. It may even be true that the republic was too weak and unloved to ever be successful. But it was still the first democratic regime of Germany, the first time left ideas got out of the rooms of philosophers to get into the thick of everyday life.

Kulturbolschewismus

Diesel

Sarah ZamaMarch 28, 2021

The Weimar Republic is often considered one of the most remarkably energetic periods in the artistic history of humanity, a roaring surge of modernism in all fields of arts, where experimentation was the norm. For a glorious, if all too short, period over the “Golden 1920s” and the first part of the 1930s, while Germany went through one of the most troubling political and economic times in her history, Berlin was one of the most exciting places in Europe where an artist could be. Possibly in the world.

9

Diesel

Alexander WallaceMarch 26, 2021

9‘s marketing can make this animated film by Shane Acker seem deceptively childish. It revolves, after all, around talking rag dolls. But the movie can get disturbingly dark in a conceptual, atmospheric way that is absolutely unnerving.

The world of 9 is a post-apocalyptic hellscape with barely a sign of life. It is a world brought about by overuse of resources and man’s creations turning against him. This is a land of bombed-out houses and abandoned factories, where wreckage litters the cracked remnants of boulevards. It is a nightmare, one so awful there is no human left to dream at all.

Watch closely and it appears 9 is set in a dieselpunk world, where certain technological advances in the interwar era brought wrack and ruin to the world in a way reminiscent of, but in some ways scarier than, the firebombs and atomic weapons of World War II. At least those left survivors.

The Art of Tari Márk Dávid

Diesel

Nick OttensMarch 23, 2021

Hungarian artist Tari Márk Dávid recreates icon midcentury pictures as well as posters and scenes from the ultimate dieselpunk game, BioShock (our review here and more BioShock art here).

Jews

Diesel

Sarah ZamaMarch 21, 2021

The Weimar Republic’s relation with Jews was contradictory at best. On the one hand, the republic was a first time of full citizenship for the German Jewish people, who became a driving force in the political and cultural life of Weimar. But on the other, it was during the republic’s time that antisemitism rose to upsetting levels.

The Little Traitor

Diesel

Alexander WallaceMarch 19, 2021March 19, 2021

Mandatory Palestine is, to put it lightly, a controversial period. A writer sympathetic to Israel will say the British favored the Arabs. A writer sympathetic to the Palestinians will say the British favored the Zionists. My own view is that they were trying to keep a lid on the powder keg; one that blew off as soon as Clement Attlee pulled British troops out of the Holy Land in 1948.

It is in the last few months of British rule that The Little Traitor takes place. The movie concerns a young Jewish boy, Avi Liebowitz (played by Ido Port), nicknamed “Proffy” for his bookishness, who commits acts of anti-British vandalism. Despite this, he ends up bonding over intellectual topics with Sergeant Dunlop (Alfred Molina). Much of the conflict comes from the dissonance inherent to the friendship between the population under the foreign yoke and one of the chains keeping that foreign yoke in place.

Hitler’s Peace

Diesel

Nick OttensMarch 17, 2021March 28, 2021

Good alternate history sticks close to real history. Philip Kerr forgot that cardinal rule in Hitler’s Peace.

The novel starts off promising enough. Kerr references real-world events, including Heinrich Himmler’s peace overtures to the Western Allies and the German plot to kill Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin at the Teheran Conference in 1943.

But he tries to do too much by featuring not one but two plots against the Big Three and throwing in too many historical characters, including the widowed wife of German security chief Reinhard Heydrich and British intelligence agent Kim Philby, who spied for the Russians, for seemingly no other reason than to mention their names.

Interwar Years

Diesel

Sarah ZamaMarch 13, 2021

In the first half of the twentieth century, two world wars ravaged Europe. The fact that two horrible conflicts on a world scale were crammed into such a short time has always blown my mind. One would think that humans should be smarter than that. I mean, didn’t anyone learn anything from World War I? Why did World War II break out so shortly after that?

Well, what if the interwar years were not a time of peace between two wars at all, but were themselves a time of war?

Overlord

Diesel

Alexander WallaceMarch 10, 2021August 27, 2021

When I first learned of Overlord, I thought that it sounded like something out of the Alien Space Bats subforum of alternatehistory.com. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen threads with the exact premise of this movie: zombies in World War II. What studio executive green-lit this?

Pay close attention to the film, though, and you will see it has antecedents. It has a whiff of Inglorious Basterds and the zany historical carnage of a Wolfenstein game. If you’ve seen many World War II movies, you will notice something very clever: that this is not a zombie movie in Occupied France, but an old-fashioned World War II movie with zombies. The characters match the archetypes of midcentury war epics: gallant American servicemen, resourceful French resistance fighters, sadistic SS officers. This is a decision that makes the whole enterprise more original than it otherwise would be.