The Iron Dream
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Featured visual  One of the iconic images of French erotica. Notice the peeping tom lying at her feet trying to glare upskirt
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Norman Spinrad's 1972 novel The Iron Dream is an alternate history novel; the bulk of the text is a reprint of a (fictional) fantasy classic, Lord of the Swastika, written in a couple of weeks by Adolf Hitler, who in the reality of the novel is a famous fantasy writer and not a dictator. The remainder of the book is a commentary on the text, pointing out the elements of fetishism, phallic imagery, and paranoia in this most famous and beloved of fantasy epics. As a commentary on and parody of the fascistic undertones in popular fantasy fiction, Spinrad's book was not generally well-received. Both communism and Nazism, of course, have their utopian and even science fictional dimensions: an eternal happy state for the "proletariat", a Thousand-Year Reich for the "Aryans". There are elements of Nazism in some SF works, and of SF in Nazism. Spinrad examines this relationship by magnifying it using post-Freudian psychological analysis. This is a book that shows what a true Nazi would do if he could do absolutely everything he wished. According to an article attributed to Spinrad[1] the book was banned for eight years in Germany, but was finally exonerated after appeals. Actually, the sale of the book as such was not prohibited, because that ban would have been contrary to the freedom of speech, but the public display of the book or its covers was prohibited, because of the swastika symbol, which is banned in Germany. So the book was sold "under the counter", to those buyers who specifically asked for it.
