Vi ville undersöka några svenska gymnasielärare i historias attityder till att låta sina elever arbeta kontrafaktiskt. Vilka svårigheter de ser med arbetet, hur de arbetar eller kan tänka sig att arbeta med det och om de såg några specifika för- eller nackdelar jämfört med mer traditionell undervisning? För att ta reda på detta utförde vi kvalitativa intervjuer medyrkesverksamma lärare. Vi hörde inte av oss på förhand om huruvida de arbetat kontrafaktiskt tidigare och vi väntade oss en viss skepsis mot arbetssättet. Men vad vi fann var att även om inte alla medvetet arbetat med det så var alla insatta i, och positiva till, metoden. Och trots attde var eniga om att det innebär stora svårigheter att arbeta kontrafaktiskt så vittnade de samtidigt om stora fördelar, såsom effektivt utvecklande av historiemedvetande, främjande avhistorisk empati, samt motverkande av historisk determinism. / We wanted to investigate some Swedish high school history teachers' attitudes towards letting their pupils work counterfactually. Which difficulties they see with this kind of work, how they are working or can fancy themselves working with it and whether they see any specific pros or cons compared to more traditional education. To find these answers we conducted a series of qualitative interviews with working teachers. We did not inquire before hand as to whether they ever had been working counterfactually and we expected some degree of scepticism towards this way to work. But what we found was that even though not all of them had tried working this way, they were all well informed on the subject and favourable towards the method. And despite being unanimous about the difficulties of working counterfactually,they testified to the great advantages to doing so, such as benefiting the development of a historical consciousness, promoting historical empathy and countering historical determinism.

Inspired by 2009 pastiche Inglourious Basterds (US/DE), my research presents counterfactual historical film, firstly, as a marginalised type of film: the 2000s and 2010s have seen an abundance of overtly fictional films which do not intend to represent the past but nonetheless playfully refer to imageries of National Socialist and Holocaust history. These films have so far been neglected by historical film studies which, despite a consensus not to judge films according to their factual accuracy, tend to focus on genres close to historiography. My research considers as historical films the counterfactual parodies Churchill: The Hollywood Years (GB 2004) and Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (DE 2007), as well as Inglourious Basterds and, in a brief conclusion, Nazi zombie films. In this sense, counterfactual historical film is, secondly, a research approach which suggests reconfiguring academic definitions of the field of history and film and historical film. Assuming that historical film never visualises past reality but engages with a history that is always already medialised, I propose that the above films despite their counterfactual plots embark on a visual historical discourse, and what is more reflect upon cinema and history in their own enlightening ways. My analyses show how twenty-first century counterfactual historical films revise Nazi and Holocaust visual history, and how they describe National Socialist history as visually constructed and historical Nazism as an eclectic amalgamation drawing on fictional as well as factual media sources. In regard to the present, they explore tensions between popular and academic culture through the dissolving binaries of fiction film and historiographical fact, and propose to recognise the reciprocity of media representation and actual past as an object of research in its own right. My research demonstrates the value of cinema's playful engagement with history as a potential contribution to the theory and practise of historical film studies.