In regards to Denmark, there is a feeling in Norway and Sweden that Denmark basically consists of the sand and gravel the Glaciers scraped off the Scandinavian mountains. (How flat is Denmark?, the highest point in the country (excluding Greenland) is the top of a TV transmitter that isn't even *on* a hill)
Sequel de Mayo (Cinco de Mayo, Vol. II)
- Thread starter KingSweden24
- Start date
Honestly, given the setup in the CEW, I'm not honestly sure what the losses are going to be for Denmark.
Of the four nations on the French side (France, Belgium, Denmark and AustriaHungary), I give the Danish crown the highest probability of existing in 1925 and unless they Belgians manage to maneuver onto the throne the one who reported his older brother's assault on the 14 year old, I give Belgium the lowest)
Spain has never been a formal part of the German-Italy “Central Powers” formation. That’s 100% with whom their sympathies lie, and the potential of them entering serves as much to distract France as them actually entering in terms of the German view on the matter
It’s a ways off!
😂😅
Well played sir
Denmark is very unique in that regard. Crossing the bridge over from Sweden to Copenhagen you get a sense for how absolutely flat and sandy it is. It’s actually a landscape I really like; the East Coast in places reminds me of it
Germany’s not going to intentionally going to be establishing any republics, that’s for sure.
I can promise that the Danish crown will be intact in 1925. I cannot promise that the Danish King will still be Christian X then
“Association for Getting Danish People to Swallow Their Food Before They Speak”
Universal truth of AH.com: If Scandinavian countries are brought up in a TL, any Danes or Swedes that happen to be in the thread will start throwing zingers at each other. No exceptions. 
The pictures I've seen of the Baltic Sea coast remind me of a more rainy Jersey Shore - or just Cape Cod, for that matter.
I'm getting the opposite vibes.
Which reminds me, given WWII, which way do Portuguese sympathies lie?
So the Norwegian independence fight leads to the first use of a nuclear weapon?
There also seems to be a competition between the Danes and the Dutch to see which country can be more bicycle friendly, which is only really possible if they are in competition for the flattest... (Sort of reminds me of the Delaware/Florida competition for less impressive highest point)
East Coast of the UK, the US or someone else's?
Though the question of who the Germans would like to see as the French chief of state will be interesting. Do we have any Orleanist candidates?
When I saw that, I instantly thought of the following "Scandanavia Against the World" Comic.
Stop Talking - Scandinavia and the World
Webcomic: A very Scandinavian joke. Swedes and Norwegians (and Icelanders) almost sound like they’re singing when they speak, while Danis
satwcomic.com
(And of course we keep forgetting about Finland and Iceland). I don't remember if we've seen Finland as an independent country. It will be interesting to see if/when *that* happens.
We can’t help it!Universal truth of AH.com: If Scandinavian countries are brought up in a TL, any Danes or Swedes that happen to be in the thread will start throwing zingers at each other. No exceptions.
Definitely kinda Jersey/Eastern Shore-esque
Portugal has enough problems on its plate with both the UK and Germany looking at its African colonies and think about how they’re looking thiccI'm getting the opposite vibes.
Which reminds me, given WWII, which way do Portuguese sympathies lie?
So the Norwegian independence fight leads to the first use of a nuclear weapon?
There also seems to be a competition between the Danes and the Dutch to see which country can be more bicycle friendly, which is only really possible if they are in competition for the flattest... (Sort of reminds me of the Delaware/Florida competition for less impressive highest point)
East Coast of the UK, the US or someone else's?
Though the question of who the Germans would like to see as the French chief of state will be interesting. Do we have any Orleanist candidates?
When I saw that, I instantly thought of the following "Scandanavia Against the World" Comic.
He's done others about the relationship between the languages...Stop Talking - Scandinavia and the World
Webcomic: A very Scandinavian joke. Swedes and Norwegians (and Icelanders) almost sound like they’re singing when they speak, while Danis
(And of course we keep forgetting about Finland and Iceland). I don't remember if we've seen Finland as an independent country. It will be interesting to see if/when *that* happens.
Always good to be reminded of your excellent work!
Well, I'd say the "adaptation" faction outside of Erik Scavenius is much smaller and considerably less influential. Zahle et al would likely be staunch proponents of a pacifistic neutrality but accept that being under France's "umbrella" so to speak is the next best thing. And I'd say that Hoyre, especially with the Venstre and Radikale Venstre split still having happened, are a good deal more powerful (though the assassination of Estrup in 1885 may tilt the scale against that, who knows. Perhaps a wash).
So similar, just rejuggled a bit to fit the strategic context of TTL.
Gird your loins, boys and girls
Heinrich: The Life and Legacy of Germany's Goldkaiser
"...country dependent on national mythology as much as it was day-to-day realities.
This was the way in which Heinrich was much more his father's son than even Waldemar, who had always taken after his British mother and in many ways was "the most English German one could imagine," as Duchess Charlotte often put it. Heinrich cared deeply for Germany but set himself apart from his grandfather in that he viewed his role as fundamentally German rather than as a Prussian who happened to also hold a German crown. Wilhelm I had been reluctant to take the German crown; Friedrich had been humbled by its significance but unable to see through his plans to Anglicize the Reich's politics. Heinrich, by contrast, was an enthusiast of the German project and saw in it boundless potential, and along with his Naval career, this point of view made him by far the least traditionally Prussian Kaiser yet.
The 1914 Olympics had been but part of this effort. The ideal at the core of what Heinrich and Furstenburg sought to accomplish was to achieve German greatness through unity, of forging and developing a unified German national and imperial identity and shared cultural experience rather than viewing the Empire as a cobbled-together network of statelets and kingdoms with the Prussians sitting on top. Regional variations would of course exist - to oversimply, Munich was a very different city from Hamburg, and Konigsberg little like Dusseldorf - but Heinrich by the middle of the second decade of the 20th century had, in his advancing middle age, become attracted to the concept of the German people as "Ein Volk", one people, united by their collective Germanness, rather than divided by their identities as Prussians or Bavarians or Saxons, or by their faith into Lutherans, Catholics, Calvinists, or Jews.
In a great deal of ways, then, Heinrich was simply looking back to the liberal nationalism that had failed in 1848 only to achieve a muddled victory twenty years later behind the banner of the Prussian eagle with Bismarck's unification of the Reich in the wars of 1864-67. That great outpouring of revolutionary sentiment had, of course, had a very different idea of where German nationhood would go and what it would deliver than what they eventually received, but Friedrich had always sympathized at least with the notion of a German liberal nationalism and his son had picked up on a great deal of it, too. That being said, the Kaiser was not the avatar of 1848, far from it - especially not with the conservative Furstenburg in charge of his government.
Rather, what Heinrich saw as his chief project for the decade represented was a synthesis of the more thuggish conservative nationalism of the Volkisch movement and the worldview of the National Liberal Party that was entranced by industrialism, commerce and invention. The transition from Wilhelm to Friedrich should absolutely be viewed in its context as a transition from 19th century traditional conservatism to 19th century classical liberalism, and Heinrich's inheritance was a transition to early 20th century paternalist conservatism in, ironically enough, the mold of France. Furstenburg was not just ideologically but culturally the perfect fellow traveler for this purpose. He was a Prussian noble but a Catholic, and his wealth was drawn from holdings in the South German kingdoms ranging from not only timber lands but also his breweries and glass factories. He was an eager investor and unlike much of the Prussian Herrenhaus saw the bustling commercialism of Western Germany from the Main to the mouth of the Elbe at Hamburg as the future of an industrial powerhouse that would dominate the continent from her position in its center, much like the Kaiser.
It was here that Heinrich and Furstenburg agreed that the junker class was increasingly part of the problem, and one of the reasons why both were so keen to move towards a more muscular notion of Germanness was that it would end not only internal resentments towards the Prussian crown but also the influence of "the anachronists" of the East Elbian persuasion. Kaiser and Chancellor both had by 1915 come around to a firm view that the Russophile landowners with their bloated, inefficient and tariff-subsidized estates and obsession with Teutonic notions of eastward dominance were living in not the 19th century but the 18th, when Prussia made her first rise from small duchy to military powerhouse. Junkerism looked inwards and was obsessed with the rights of the nobility in a recent and distant chivalric past; Heinrich's Volkism looked to the future, of a Germany that was the wealthiest and most secure state in Europe from the top down.
It is thus important to note that this dispute was largely one of two strands of conservative intellectual thinking - it just so happened that the one clearly supported by Heinrich and Furstenburg could also appeal straightforwardly to liberals of both the nationalist and progressive schools as well as moderate social democrats, whilst the East Elbian conservatives had only ethnic minorities whom they despised as potential opponents to this policy of Volkism. The representative arithmetic of the Reichstag and Furstenburg's dominance of the Bundesrat a decade into his time as Chancellor made it easy to press ahead with reforms to isolate the junkers, while in his role as Minister-President of Prussia he was constantly flummoxed by outraged junkers in the Herrenhaus who made it their mission to use that body as their last redoubt of resistance.
On many issues and occasions, the junkers thus lost when they were pitted against Germany as a whole. Their attempts to stop the creation of the Oder-Rhine Canal that would link the two western and eastern halves of Germany had finally failed and the waterway's initial construction was inaugurated in 1915 [1]. While laws became increasingly difficult to pass in Prussia in a cold war between Kaiser and landowner, Heinrich's commitment to all of Germany endeared him to parts of the country that generally distrusted Prussians. Furstenburg could not simply abolish Prussian state instruments but he could let them wither on the vine in comparison to his nurturing of their pan-German counterparts. The practice of every kingdom sending formal envoys to one another's capitals within the Empire ended, with the powers of the Reichstag and Bundesrat growing in influence despite the lack of an explicit and provocative constitutional reform as Friedrich had attempted and failed to push forward with multiple times. Germany's sclerotic, chaotic system of governance had gone away, but as it approached it's half century anniversary, the more modest and incremental unity pushed by Heinrich seemed to be winning out..."
- Heinrich: The Life and Legacy of Germany's Goldkaiser
[1] For whatever reason - the book on Kaiser Wilhelm I read didn't get into details - the junkers were violently opposed to the creation of a Oder-Rhine Canal. Not sure why, but here they lose.
This was the way in which Heinrich was much more his father's son than even Waldemar, who had always taken after his British mother and in many ways was "the most English German one could imagine," as Duchess Charlotte often put it. Heinrich cared deeply for Germany but set himself apart from his grandfather in that he viewed his role as fundamentally German rather than as a Prussian who happened to also hold a German crown. Wilhelm I had been reluctant to take the German crown; Friedrich had been humbled by its significance but unable to see through his plans to Anglicize the Reich's politics. Heinrich, by contrast, was an enthusiast of the German project and saw in it boundless potential, and along with his Naval career, this point of view made him by far the least traditionally Prussian Kaiser yet.
The 1914 Olympics had been but part of this effort. The ideal at the core of what Heinrich and Furstenburg sought to accomplish was to achieve German greatness through unity, of forging and developing a unified German national and imperial identity and shared cultural experience rather than viewing the Empire as a cobbled-together network of statelets and kingdoms with the Prussians sitting on top. Regional variations would of course exist - to oversimply, Munich was a very different city from Hamburg, and Konigsberg little like Dusseldorf - but Heinrich by the middle of the second decade of the 20th century had, in his advancing middle age, become attracted to the concept of the German people as "Ein Volk", one people, united by their collective Germanness, rather than divided by their identities as Prussians or Bavarians or Saxons, or by their faith into Lutherans, Catholics, Calvinists, or Jews.
In a great deal of ways, then, Heinrich was simply looking back to the liberal nationalism that had failed in 1848 only to achieve a muddled victory twenty years later behind the banner of the Prussian eagle with Bismarck's unification of the Reich in the wars of 1864-67. That great outpouring of revolutionary sentiment had, of course, had a very different idea of where German nationhood would go and what it would deliver than what they eventually received, but Friedrich had always sympathized at least with the notion of a German liberal nationalism and his son had picked up on a great deal of it, too. That being said, the Kaiser was not the avatar of 1848, far from it - especially not with the conservative Furstenburg in charge of his government.
Rather, what Heinrich saw as his chief project for the decade represented was a synthesis of the more thuggish conservative nationalism of the Volkisch movement and the worldview of the National Liberal Party that was entranced by industrialism, commerce and invention. The transition from Wilhelm to Friedrich should absolutely be viewed in its context as a transition from 19th century traditional conservatism to 19th century classical liberalism, and Heinrich's inheritance was a transition to early 20th century paternalist conservatism in, ironically enough, the mold of France. Furstenburg was not just ideologically but culturally the perfect fellow traveler for this purpose. He was a Prussian noble but a Catholic, and his wealth was drawn from holdings in the South German kingdoms ranging from not only timber lands but also his breweries and glass factories. He was an eager investor and unlike much of the Prussian Herrenhaus saw the bustling commercialism of Western Germany from the Main to the mouth of the Elbe at Hamburg as the future of an industrial powerhouse that would dominate the continent from her position in its center, much like the Kaiser.
It was here that Heinrich and Furstenburg agreed that the junker class was increasingly part of the problem, and one of the reasons why both were so keen to move towards a more muscular notion of Germanness was that it would end not only internal resentments towards the Prussian crown but also the influence of "the anachronists" of the East Elbian persuasion. Kaiser and Chancellor both had by 1915 come around to a firm view that the Russophile landowners with their bloated, inefficient and tariff-subsidized estates and obsession with Teutonic notions of eastward dominance were living in not the 19th century but the 18th, when Prussia made her first rise from small duchy to military powerhouse. Junkerism looked inwards and was obsessed with the rights of the nobility in a recent and distant chivalric past; Heinrich's Volkism looked to the future, of a Germany that was the wealthiest and most secure state in Europe from the top down.
It is thus important to note that this dispute was largely one of two strands of conservative intellectual thinking - it just so happened that the one clearly supported by Heinrich and Furstenburg could also appeal straightforwardly to liberals of both the nationalist and progressive schools as well as moderate social democrats, whilst the East Elbian conservatives had only ethnic minorities whom they despised as potential opponents to this policy of Volkism. The representative arithmetic of the Reichstag and Furstenburg's dominance of the Bundesrat a decade into his time as Chancellor made it easy to press ahead with reforms to isolate the junkers, while in his role as Minister-President of Prussia he was constantly flummoxed by outraged junkers in the Herrenhaus who made it their mission to use that body as their last redoubt of resistance.
On many issues and occasions, the junkers thus lost when they were pitted against Germany as a whole. Their attempts to stop the creation of the Oder-Rhine Canal that would link the two western and eastern halves of Germany had finally failed and the waterway's initial construction was inaugurated in 1915 [1]. While laws became increasingly difficult to pass in Prussia in a cold war between Kaiser and landowner, Heinrich's commitment to all of Germany endeared him to parts of the country that generally distrusted Prussians. Furstenburg could not simply abolish Prussian state instruments but he could let them wither on the vine in comparison to his nurturing of their pan-German counterparts. The practice of every kingdom sending formal envoys to one another's capitals within the Empire ended, with the powers of the Reichstag and Bundesrat growing in influence despite the lack of an explicit and provocative constitutional reform as Friedrich had attempted and failed to push forward with multiple times. Germany's sclerotic, chaotic system of governance had gone away, but as it approached it's half century anniversary, the more modest and incremental unity pushed by Heinrich seemed to be winning out..."
- Heinrich: The Life and Legacy of Germany's Goldkaiser
[1] For whatever reason - the book on Kaiser Wilhelm I read didn't get into details - the junkers were violently opposed to the creation of a Oder-Rhine Canal. Not sure why, but here they lose.
The benefits of not having an impulsive reactionary (or a dithering fool, for that matter) making themselves clear in Germany.
Thanks! We’ll get the somewhat less sunny, positive and hagiographic flip side of this dynamic of German identity next…
My read on Kaiser Bill has always been that he was more of the latter than the former (his political views were more or less mainstream for his time), but I’d say impulsive moron is absolutely what he was.
Kaiser Hank is a major upgrade even if the liberalism of him and his father are often overstated by what-could-have-been historians
So Germany is increasingly viewing itself more as a unified people and nation than a forced together welding of kingdoms. Also, thank fuck the Junkers and their inefficient estates are already losing influence, even if it seems that the Central European War will be needed to accomplish things such as abolishing the 3-class Prussian franchise, maybe allow for universal suffrage( though I would guess that will come a bit later in the 1920s), electoral redistricting and such, Germany seems to be democratizing gradually, but is still in a weird place of having healthy political pluralism and debate (incl secret ballot elections to directly elect Reichstag MPs and a fair few parties to vote for) but still with a government and Kaiser that while more representative and responsible, arguably, than France/Austria/Russia, still doesn't quite stack up to the UK, US, Spain etc.
Is this going to be a new book, or an established one like Europe's Illiberal Hour?
I get the distinct impression that curtailing Junker influence is a prerequisite for making Germany a more unified people, and that’s what we’re headed towards. That said, Imperial Germany is definitely a step behind Europe’s actual democracies, and the experience of somebody in conservative Prussia could be very different from liberal Hamburg despite living in the same country. The Reich’s bizarro clusterfuck politics are imo what makes it so interesting!
Probably either Illiberal Hour or Destiny Beckons, both of which are established