Master Race - Master Race in Fiction

Master Race in Fiction

Aryan master race ideology was common throughout the educated and literate strata of the Western world until after World War II. Such theories were commonplace in early-20th century. fantasy literature

In the original 1920s and 1930s, Buck Rogers stories and newspaper cartoons, Buck Rogers, in his adventures in the 25th century that take place on Earth, fights for Aryan-Americans from the liberated zone around Niagara, New York, against the Red Mongol Empire, a Chinese empire of the future which rules most of North America.

In the 1930s, both educational and storybooks for children in Germany taught their readers about the master race. In the Sun Koh science fiction series where Koh says things like "My forefathers were Aryan". In a story about Atlantis, Koh says, "If our Atlantis once again rises out of the sea, then we will get from there the blond, steel-hard men with the pure blood and will create with them the master race, which will finally rule the earth." The German writer Michael Ende, who was born in 1929 and grew up with such books, in the 1950s, wrote his classic novel Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver as a way of opposing the Nazi propaganda he was taught. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writer Julia Voss wrote a book on Jim Button, uncovering the Ende's many references to Nazi symbols. Voss shows how Ende upends the Nazi belief that Atlantis was the original home of the Aryan race by creating his own submerged city and making it rise, but not restore Aryan master-race rule over the earth, rather it becomes a multi-racial paradise with Jim Button, who is black, as its king.

In Doctor Who, the Doctor's frequent enemies, the Daleks, consider themselves a master race who must purge the universe of all others; Terry Nation explicitly modeled them on the Nazis. In the 2009 special The End of Time, when the Master transforms the entire human race into copies of himself, he claims that there is no human race, but only "the Master race".

In the Harry Potter series, while the parallels were not originally intentional, there is much similarity between Voldemort's Pureblood ideology and the Master Race ideology of the Nazis, with wizards being "pure" and anyone with Muggle (non-wizard) blood being considered "half-blood" or "mudblood", a word treated the way a racial slur would be treated in the real world (Neo-Nazis call non-white people mud people).