03-16-2020, 02:31 PM
(11-08-2019, 07:53 AM)Hintergrund Wrote: And Adenauer would have been nothing without the Allies winning the war. During the nazi time, he was busy enough hiding himself, no time for resistance.
I have my idea for a novel in which America becomes a bad guy (rule by the KKK) and the Weimar Republic survives the extremist threat of the early 1930's, and with the democratic trends overpowering the militaristic trends in Japanese life, Germany and Japan become the Good Guys. Note that with a leader like Adenauer Germany has no Holocaust, and Germany's Model Minority makes the sorts of contributions to German society that they do in reality in America. Many American Jews flee to Germany and its partners rather than risk KKK pogroms.
While Britain is fascist under Moseley, India becomes a haven for the British Royal Family and gains independence (analogy: Brazil becoming independent of Portugal). Stalin's Soviet Union can be nothing other than evil.
It would be very different from many of the alternative-history novels not in an Axis victory... I see Adenauer as remarkably similar to Churchill. (The thug powers of the real Axis lost because as gangsters they could never win the peace. Real victory comes when the defeated side loses all cause for resistance or uprisings). Churchill and Adenauer basically trade places in history as do their countries, except that Churchill takes the role in history that the plotters of July 20 had for Goerdeler. The British plotters succeed, and one of the first deeds of the new Queen (guess who!) is to ask forgiveness of the British people that the British Union of Fascists had started to persecute. The yellow badges that read "JEW" become objects of pride in Britain -- and, in view of the swift German victory in France in 1940 -- France, those that read "JUIF" or "JUIVE" . (Laval is also a Bad Guy).
Oh, what of the fearsome Soviet Union? Let's put it this way -- at some point Stalin flees for Klan America in an aircraft that disappears over the Arctic Ocean in one of the great mysteries of history.
I even have an idea for cover art designed by an otherwise-obscure commercial artist who went back to art after his Beer Hall Putsch failed showing a "THIS IS THE ENEMY" poster showing a Klansman as an arsonist, rapist, and torturer.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.