Insight (Pt 2): Germany In The Postwar World
The Narodni Dom, the Slovenian National Hall, in the city of Trieste, serving as a hotel, conference hall, and culture centre
Non-Germans In The Reich
When German unification became a reality in 1870, the name chosen for it was no coincidence: the unified polity would be called the German Reich. It was a specific naming choice on part of the political leadership, that signalled the twin nature of the new country: on the one hand, Germany signalled itself as a spiritual successor to the Holy Roman Empire.
Reich was a word with considerable evocative power in German political culture, especially among the educated in the business community and the aristocracy: it pointed to a state whose authority derived from God, one which existed immanently irrespective of its temporary political forms, and one that would succeed where its predecessor had failed.
On the other hand, this was to be a
German Reich, an ethnic empire meant to be a home to Germans in Central Europe, fulfilling the national liberals’ most coveted demand. And yet, the Bismarckian project had by necessity come up short of that in two ways: millions of Germans were left outside the Reich, and several ethnic minorities were within the Empire’s border. The continued existence of many Germans outside the Reich was seen by a critical flaw in the Bismarckian project, by an initially small, but slowly increasing number of people in Germany between 1871 and the Great War. As the 1920s came to a close, the issue had disappeared: Germans could look back on a decade that had seemingly clinched the dream of a fulfilled German Reich. The incorporation of Austria, and the elevation of German minority elites into power broker positions in a host of new countries now part of the German sphere, seemingly completed the process that Bismarck had started.
And yet, the question of minorities remained, and if anything, grew more pressing after the Great War. Ten years on from the Copenhagen Peace Conference, Germany was not a purely ethnic country – after all, there were even more minorities than there had been in 1871. Progress had certainly been made to reconcile some of the original minorities to German rule. The Reichland of Alsace-Lorraine had given Berlin countless headaches in the decade before the Great War. If grumblings were more muted in Alsace, where regional identity was stronger, they were considerable in Lorraine, particularly the French-speaking fortress city of Metz, which had been included in the 1870 peace treaty on the insistence of the military. The situation improved considerably after the Great War, when Alsace-Lorraine was granted status as a full member state of the Reich, getting its own constitution and duke. This strengthened the regional identity of particularly Alsace, and provided extra cultural freedoms to French speakers in the new duchy. However, other relationships remained more strained. The Sorbs had been subject to intensive campaigns of Germanisation, which were possible due to their low numbers, but complicated public opinion of Germany in Slavic Zollverein Member States.
Perhaps the “old” minority to see the most progress was the Danish population in Schleswig-Holstein. The role played by Denmark in literally feeding German civilians during the darkest days of the naval blockade, the intensive diplomatic contacts surrounding the Peace Conference, and Denmark’s status as a gateway country into the Zollverein, created considerable good will between Copenhagen and Berlin. In time, the more restrictive measures – such as the ban on flying the Danish flag, which the locals had cleverly side-stepped by breeding a red-and-white variant of pigs – were lifted, and provisions for minority rights became a part of bilateral German-Danish treaties. (17)
By far Germany’s most numerous minority, the Poles had a long history of institutional oppression within the Reich’s borders. The Poles primarily inhabited the eastern territories of the empire, in spite of intensive efforts at Germanisation, particularly in the city of Posen. However, hundreds of thousands of Poles had also undertaken considerable internal migration, along with other Slavic minorities, towards the western reaches of the Reich – where they found employment as miners and industry workers. These Ruhrpolen were equally subject to discriminatory measures: fixed quotas determined how many Poles could be in any one city, and how many Polish pupils could sit in any one classroom. Public or private language courses were banned, and the activities of the Ruhrpolen committees in fostering cultural ties with the Polish National Council were discouraged. The Polnische Partei, on the other hand, was a fixture of German politics by the time the Great War began. As the Reich’s largest and best organised minority party in the country, the PP consistently opposed secularisation and Germanisation, seeing natural alignment with Zentrum on a number of policies.
The end of the Great War had altered this picture greatly. Due to the annexation of the Polish border strip into Prussia, the number of Poles living within the Reich was larger. At the same time, the establishment of an independent Poland was to provide at once great inspiration and great practical problems to the Poles living in Germany. Poles – both in Poland and Germany – were divided between feelings of gratitude towards Berlin as the initiator and protector of the country’s new independence, and resentment over the lost ancestral Polish lands of Danzig, Posen, and Silesia. This growing rift in Polish politics was neatly replicated within the PP as well. While some felt that these losses had been adequately compensated by the annexation of Galicia and a generous eastern border, critics were not satisfied: Posen was a sizable city, and Silesia a crucial basin of raw materials. Moreover, the lifeline of Polish industry was the Vistula, whose outlet to the sea was entirely in German hands. This essentially forced Poland into perpetual Zollverein membership if it wanted to have an industry worth mentioning. Calmer heads in the PP labeled these views as radical and dangerous: Poland was a country sandwiched between Germany and Russia, and needed the former if it was to survive the latter – either in its White or its Red form. Moreover, the new Poland had a number of unsettled territorial disputes with its neighbours Romania and Lithuania. Germany’s role as an arbiter proved an indispensable check which prevented the situation from spiralling out of control. Nevertheless, the question of the lost lands was to remain an open wound in the politics of the PP, along with the problem of resettlement. Expectations were high that German Poles would flock to their new country – but these proved exaggerated and misplaced. Neither Germany nor Poland could have straightforward attitudes about resettlement: German leadership by instinct saw the possibility of Poles migrating into newly independent Poland as a positive development, since it reduced the number of Poles to Germanise and removed them from disputed provinces. On the other hand, Prussia’s agricultural economy relied disproportionately on Polish seasonal labour to survive, and even in the Ruhr the years of industrial and economic growth that followed the Great War, and the horrendous casualties of the latter, made the Ruhrpolen an integral part of the industrial labour market. Even Poland experienced a similar ambiguity – returnees were theoretically welcome, but nationalists were worried that this would weaken Poland’s connection to the lost lands. Moreover, contrary to the rosiest nationalist expectations, German Poles were not necessarily a good fit in Poland. If anything, the latter often found themselves in a state of limbo – being not quite German enough for the Reich, and not quite Polish enough for the heady first decade of independence in Poland.
The constitutional reforms profoundly altered the way the PP operated. The introduction of indirect voting reduced the need for the PP to focus on Reich-level campaigning, since German Poles were essentially entirely located within Prussia – Ruhrpolen included. The introduction of proportional voting therefore greatly strengthened the PP as a permanent fixture of the Prussian parliament. On the state level, the PP consolidated its twin political pillars as opposition to Germanisation and promotion of moderate, but firm and political Catholicism. On the federal level, the PP would adopt a different approach, reaching out to potential partners whose power bases were in other states, like Alsace-Lorraine or Austria. Rallying with other centre-oriented minority parties, the PP joined the Zentrum bloc in the Reichstag, aiming to press their positions from the inside – while fully exploiting the enlarged Catholic voting bloc on the Imperial level. The splitting of Zentrum, while a shock to Poles as to any other Catholics, also gave the PP a greater say in the surviving moderate faction, and paved the way for a continued integration of the PP into Zentrum at the Reich level. The PP was to come out of this decade battered, embittered, but with a strengthened voting base and a secure place in German politics. More importantly, the internal debate would see the party come under pragmatic leadership that favoured continued Zollverein membership, and a shift of focus away from the former provinces and firmly to Poland’s future development. (18)
With the incorporation of Austria as a new member state of the German Empire, Berlin had acquired control over even more minorities: the Italian minority in Trentino and Trieste, and Slovenes – the latter due to the inclusion of the Duchy of Carniola in the territories which Germany annexed outright. Under Austria-Hungary, Carniola had possessed its own Landtag, if with heavily restricted membership and close imperial oversight. To avoid making Carniola into a separate member state, this Landtag had been dissolved, and the Duchy fully incorporated with Austria. This was to dismay the Slovenian population, who now found themselves between a rock and a hard place – their two neighbours being respectively communist Italy, and Hungary-Croatia, with many coming to see the Anschluss as the least bad option compared to the infamous Magyar administration. Even so, longing for the good days of the Habsburgs and the Duchy of Carniola became a fixture of postwar Slovenian politics, and the Pan-Slovene People’s Party fully established itself as the prime advocate of Slovenian cultural autonomy within the Reich. The party’s Catholic roots were to facilitate its contacts with other minority parties across Germany. (19)
The unlikely champion of minority rights across Germany, however, was to be an Italian from the Austrian, now German province of Trentino: Alcide De Gasperi. Born in 1881, De Gasperi’s formative political years were as a student and activist: while pursuing education in German at the university of Vienna, and later that of Innsbruck, he campaigned for an Italian language faculty at the latter’s university, if to little success. This experience, together with his profound interest in political Catholicism with a white socialist inclination, led him to join the Trentiner Volkspartei in 1906, coming to lead the party in 1911. The TV was a sibling organisation to the Italian Popular Party, a similarly Christian socialist party which enjoyed great support across Italy. De Gasperi remained a convinced supporter that Trentino and Trieste belonged in the Habsburg Empire, only campaigning for autonomy, and harboured hopes that Italy would enter the Great War alongside Germany and Austria and against the Entente. When Italy joined the opposing camp instead, and the Austrian Parliament in Vienna went into wartime recess, De Gasperi devoted the war years to caring for refugees, POWs, and other victims of the war’s massive dislocation – receiving a government position to do so in an official capacity. (20)
The postwar era was to deeply shake De Gasperi: the split of the Habsburg Empire, the Anschluss with Germany, the Italian Civil War, the Papal flight and the following birth of the Catholic Revolutionary Church acted as profound shocks to De Gasperi, who came to see Germany as an island of calmness in a sea in storm. De Gasperi therefore acted on two fronts: first, he became an intermediary between the new communist government of Italy and the German Empire. This was greatly facilitated by the inclusion of Don Luigi Sturzo – De Gasperi’s primary political interlocutor in Italy – in the governing coalition. While he remained suspicious of communism, De Gasperi’s views were moderated somewhat by the inclusiveness of the Gramsci government, and during a series of personal meetings became convinced that Sturzo had not been coerced into the new regime and was an autonomous political actor. As a member of a minority, and a Catholic to boot, De Gasperi was also an easily disavowable asset for the Germans, who therefore had few qualms about using him as a middleman, until relations with communist Italy were fully normalised. (21)
The other political front where De Gasperi devoted his energies was in domestic politics, and specifically minority representation across the German Empire. Using his Catholic credentials and his extensive Austrian contacts, De Gasperi reached out to minority parties in Carniola, Alsace-Lorraine, and Schleswig-Holstein, as well as to the Polnische Partei. Initially, before the Italian Civil War ended conclusively, De Gasperi had hoped that, together with Bavaria and Austria, a Catholic bloc could be formed to become a real power broker in the Reich. These hopes were dashed by the later events of the Civil War, and Sturzo eventually convinced De Gasperi to embrace the Revolutionary Catholic Church, which matched the white socialist vocation De Gasperi had harboured before the Great War. As such, De Gasperi devoted himself to leading the Christlich-Soziale Partei Deutschland and introducing the ideology of the Revolutionary Catholic Church to Germany. To do so, he relinquished leadership of the Trentiner Volkspartei to his lieutenant, Silvio Bortolotti – but he did not abandon the cause of ethnic minorities, acting as a mediator behind the scenes, and working closely with Bortolotti. The TV continued operating autonomously at the state level, like all other minority parties, but spearheaded the joint electoral list at the federal level which gave minorities a bigger voice in the Reichstag. (22)
Of all the cities incorporated into the German Empire after the end of the Great War, none came to serve as a synecdoche for the Reich as a whole more than the coastal city of Trieste. The port had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and had followed Austria into Germany during the Anschluss - in so doing losing its economic privileges as a Free Imperial City, to considerable dissatisfaction for the local Italians. The city presented both a major opportunity and a headache for the Reich. The opportunity was due to its exceptional location as an Adriatic port which had been the prime shipyard facility for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the Anschluss, Germany inherited Austria's competent fleet of surface ships and submarines, as well as the Austriawerft shipbuilding company - originally the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino, renamed after Italy's entry into the Great War. Trieste would also allow German submarines to penetrate the Adriatic, and as relations with the People's Republic of Italy warmed, and Albania came fully under German influence, the Strait of Otranto no longer presented an insurmountable obstacle to breakouts in the Mediterranean. (23) This great potential, however, met with considerable obstacles: the city was overwhelmingly non-German, with only a small German minority living there permanently and dating back to the Habsburg days. The Italian population enjoyed a slim absolute majority - although their absolute numbers increased, as many Italians living in Dalmatia left Hungary-Croatia to cross the short distance to Trieste, hoping for minority rights closer to what they had enjoyed under Austrian rule. Slovenes represented about a quarter of the population, and were seen with great suspicion from the city's Italians, especially from the middle class. During the chaos which followed the Schoenbrunn raid, and the relatively confused first weeks after the Anschluss, Triestine fascists led by local squadrista Francesco Giunta conducted a number of attacks against the Slovenes, most famously trying (and failing) to burn the Narodni Dom - the Slovenian National Hall, a prominent cultural centre in the heart of the city. The Austriawerft expanded to incorporate the Cantiere Navale Triestino, a similar company placed in the nearby town of Monfalcone - the merged company coming under German purview in the process. (24)
Austriawerft was not the only prize available. Austrian Lloyd also made for a powerful addition to the German civilian naval industry, and the city came to have a considerable cultural role as well. UFA established secondary movie studios in Trieste - as Germany's southernmost mainland possession, it had more frequent sunlight than Berlin, even though the weather could grow positively horrendous in the fall and winter - and as such was perfect for outdoor shootings. This, in combination with its old Viennese coffee houses, scenic plateaus and coastlines, and cosmopolitan culture made Trieste the backdrop of many German books and movies. The city's reputation for seedy, cutthroat politics between newly arrived German corporate giants, inter-ethnic hostilities, and being a port of call for international criminal shipments of hashish and opium, gave the city an especially prominent role in spearheading Germany's love story with Noir detective books and movies. (25)
As German investment flooded into the city, and German engineers, prospectors, and movie industry bigwigs rushed to Trieste, the number of German speakers in the city grew. This was never enough to seriously threaten either the Slovenes or the Italians in sheer numbers, and with proportional voting introduced by the new German constitution, this effectively gave the Italians electoral dominance of city politics. But the German government, with the aid of business interests in the city, was clever to exploit the divisions and fears between the Italians and Slovenes, granting the German minority an outsized economic, cultural and unofficial political influence. (26) The Slovenian minority grew more cooperative, coming under the leadership of the Triestine Slovenian jurist and philosopher of law Boris Furlan, a liberal who came to represent Trieste's Slovenian political community in the Pan-Slovene People's Party, and who increasingly cultivated contacts with De Gasperi, watching his efforts at minority coalition-building with great interests. The Italians' position was more complicated. Traditionally, Triestine Italian irredentists had made use of Austro-Slavism as a threat to rile up popular sentiment - claiming that the Slovenes and Croats were seeking greater autonomy within Austria because their demographic rise would allow them to wrest dominance of the city away from the Italians. The communist victory in the Italian Civil War greatly undermined the irredentists' position. No matter how much Francesco Giunta could agitate - there was no immediate solution for a reunification with Italy on purely nationalist grounds. However, the end of the Habsburgs' reign also undermined those Italian speakers who advocated for continuing loyalty to the Empire, to which Trieste was connected by critical railway infrastructure as well as a long and well-honoured history. The latter had much less cause to love the Hohenzollerns or Germany, and were slower than the Tyrolean Italians in gravitating towards a joint electoral platform. Their mistrust of their Slavic neighbours effectively ensured their political isolation. (27)
Footnotes:
(17) A lot of the build up for this section takes place before the POD, but it’s important we keep this in mind. The presence of minorities was one of the perceived flaws of the Bismarckian design which Germans struggled with during the first decades of unification. It need not have been like this, but this was the late 19th/early 20th century, with all the obvious consequences. What really saves Germany’s grip on Alsace-Lorraine is the end of the Great War. After the horrific consequences of industrialised warfare, and land gains in the colonies and in Europe, no one in France is seriously willing to push the argument that the region needs to be conquered with military force any longer. The elevation of A-L to a duchy with its own constitution also finally gives the region the cultural and political space to find a new identity. The passage of time will do the rest. It’s important to note that Germanisation efforts against the Sorbs are a continuation of imperial policy and not exactly a departure from OTL, even if the nationalism involved is considerably less rabid without the poisoning of wells that followed the Great War OTL. Finally, with northern Schleswig still German, the balance of minorities between Germany and Denmark is a lot more lopsided than OTL, but that doesn’t butterfly away minority protections – it just means the set up is different. Denmark has accrued great international prestige (not to mention wealth) from its role during the Great War, and as such cooler heads prevail in Germany regarding their Danish minority. This is one area of Europe where ethnic strife is definitely on the way out.
(18) OTL, 1919 proved to be a watershed year in the German-Polish relationship. This is obviously less true ITTL. While an independent Poland is a big deal, the situation is a lot more favourable to the status quo: the new country is small, deprived of the lands it would need the most for rapid industrialisation and standing on its own two feet. If you’re a German Pole, it is one thing to move to Poznan and quite another to move to a farmstead in the middle of the eastern marches… therefore, more Poles remain in Germany, and there is much less strife than OTL. Even so, things are not all sunshines and rainbows. Germanisation policies mostly continue as they were before the Great War. Rather than prove a panacea, Polish independence poses a different set of problems to German Poles. The PP is not dissolved, since it still has a German minority to represent, and it has to adapt to widely new circumstances. Their alignment with Zentrum was a fixture in German politics before the POD, and now that Zentrum is divided, this results in greater influence. It’s important to note that the PP are not alone in joining Zentrum on the federal level – they drag other parties and politicians with them, as you will see in the next paragraph. What’s important to keep in mind is that the PP is not dissolving into Zentrum: it’s just running on a joint electoral list for federal elections only. On the state level – well, there were about three million Poles in Prussia, so direct proportional vote has huge consequences and allows the party to act as an independent political player. It shows: while improvement is modest, the situation for Poles in Germany is getting better. Poles are still disproportionately hit by anti-terrorism and libel laws, and it remains difficult to openly teach the language or have too many overt cultural connections with Poland proper, particularly if you live in Posen. But Germans are slowly getting used to being a somewhat multi-national country.
(19) Slovenes were generally content with being a part of Austria Hungary: they were in Cisleithania, were Catholics, had reasons to fear Italy, and were somewhat sceptical of Serbian hegemonic designs. Even IOTL they remained somewhat resistant to Serbian-centric projects for the Kingdom of Jugoslavia, initially pushing federalism and then just trying to have Slovenia survive the onslaught. ITTL, without the violent dissolution of the Empire, or the Rome Congress, Slovenian politics continues on a stabler trajectory. The incorporation into Germany is not painless, however: the Slovenes are now a tiny minority in an overwhelmingly German country, as opposed to a multinational one, and have lost their Duchy. Even so, the idea of going it alone in the current climate does not inspire confidence, so demands range from a restoration of the Duchy inside Germany to the granting of extensive cultural and political autonomy inside the Grand Duchy of Austria.
(20) Most of this is OTL, but I feel like we needed the background to understand where De Gasperi remains the same ITTL and where he changes. In IOTL, he only dropped his support for the Habsburgs in 1918, with the Empire collapsing around him. He accepted Italian citizenship, and saw the rise of Fascism with equanimity, although he ended up spending four years in jail for criticising the new regime. After serving his sentence, he found non-political employment at the Vatican Library, where he wrote articles and devoted himself to studying the history of Zentrum, among other things. The lack of these experiences mean he has less of a conservative turn ITTL, remaining more firmly on a Christian socialist trajectory.
(21) De Gasperi’s views are challenged in almost every direction by the political turmoil of the 1920s. IOTL, he became very suspicious of Soviet communism – not to the point of McCarthyism, mind, even in the OTL Cold War his preference was for peaceful confrontation and a pan-European defence project as opposed to NATO to prevent escalations. But in the 1930s he gained a positive outlook of the Third Reich as a counterweight to Soviet influence in Central Europe, and praised the OTL Anschluss – he quickly changed his mind when WW2 began of course. ITTL, he has a similar admiration of Germany as a safe, stable place while the rest of the continent is experiencing massive turmoil – but he is less suspicious of communism, both because of the latter’s wider inclusivity ITTL, and the crucial role played by Sturzo and Gramsci in giving Italian communism a unique direction.
(22) The Catholic bloc is larger than ever, but it can’t exploit that because of how hopelessly divided it is. De Gasperi was deeply religious, but was also willing to put politics ahead of religion when needs must. Indeed, IOTL he became famous for asking out loud why, of all people, he had to be the one forced to say no to the Pope (this was over an electoral controversy regarding the Roman municipality in the early 1950s). ITTL, he will experience a similar “night of the soul” decades earlier, and will eventually decide to stick with his Christian socialist convictions in his politics as well. Even so, he can’t quite go pedal to the metal with political Catholicism, given the situation. This means that his coalition-building ITTL will be focused on minority rights in the Reich instead. Many Germans see him as a deeply controversial figure, with some hating his guts and others admiring his moral standing. His perfect command of German helps as well. Of course, as the public face of political campaigning for the Revolutionary Catholic Church in Germany, he becomes an extremely polarising figure. Given that he is only 49 in 1930, he basically counts as a “young” firebrand, campaigning for a new Germany. While he keeps a lower profile with the minority question, to avoid causing fissures with those minorities loyal to the Papacy in Santiago or the Zentrum moderates by whose history he is still fascinated, Bortolotti is every bit his political creature ITTL, and a relatively inexperienced figure – allowing De Gasperi to act as a grey eminence to the “minority list” all across the Reich.
(23) The crucial addition that Trieste represents to Germany's sea access cannot be overstated, especially once placed in combination with international developments. Hungary-Croatia is neutral, but mainland Italy is now ruled by German-friendly communists, and Albania is effectively a German puppet. With the Austrian fleet neatly falling into Germany's hands, Trieste is exploitable virtually from day one as an outlet into the Mediterranean, and the city has a healthy shipbuilding industry the Germans can put to use. The change of name to Austriawerft is OTL, but of course there the company reverted to its original name after 1920, and started cranking out ships for the Kingdom of Italy. On the whole, this was a very nice windfall for German naval planners. Should a round two of the Great War ever come about, this would put the British shipping lanes in the Eastern Mediterranean under serious threat - closing Otranto would not be impossible under the circumstances, but it would be a lot more complicated.
(24) The demographics are mostly OTL, with some changes: OTL, the fascists did their best to expel or Italianise the Germans, and as many Slovenes and Croats as they could get away with. This does not happen ITTL, and the usual tactics of Germanisation are not possible, at least initially - the Germans are just too much of a minority here to make it work, and a different approach will be required. The wave of Italian immigration to Trieste happened OTL as a reaction to Yugoslavian repression, and I would imagine the scale is somewhat smaller ITTL - but given the attachment of Italian minority communities to the Cisleithanian half of the Empire, it's hopefully plausible for them to seek a place alongside their fellow Italians under German rule rather than being ruled by Croats and Hungarians.
The Narodni Dom, unfortunately, burned in OTL. It is now a university, with a memorial in the main hall commemorating the Slovenian community. Fittingly, it teaches languages, interpreting and translating. OTL, the strike was triggered by the annexation of Trieste to Italy, which is not a factor ITTL - but the chaotic days of 1925 do seem like a good opportunity for the local fascists to exploit the confusion.
The merger of Austriawerft and Cantiere Navale is OTL, and I see no reason why it would be butterflied away here. The latter company was way too small to survive even with the generous Italian naval procurement of the time, and as Germany takes the reins of shipbuilding in Trieste, the emphasis on rationalisation and increasing capacity will likely see a push for a merger anyway.
(25) Trieste was a vibrant city under Austria, and the Anschluss if anything throws even more elements into the mix. There are considerable economic prizes in the city to be divvied up, and it's conveniently located to ameliorate one of the main disadvantages the German film industry suffers compared to Hollywood - their central location is not great for outdoor shootings. Much like movie companies did OTL, UFA decides to set up secondary studios, and a recently conquered city with great landscapes, warm summers, and a nice harbour where to conveniently park giant yachts seems like a logical choice. This only helps the popularity of the Noir genre, which already had strongly favourable conditions in Germany ITTL: the cartels, the economic empire in the Zollverein, the rapid professionalisation of the police and bureaucracy under the aegis of the modern state - all those factors come together into compelling stories of world-weary detectives in trench coats, coming face to face with the darker seams of German society.
(26) In a way, Trieste comes to resemble Germany's satellites - like Bohemia - where a small but sizable German minority wields outsized influence and power. This makes it very different from the other non-majority-German territories of the Reich, and contributes to Trieste's feel as a "unique" city where the old world of Viennese coffee houses and aristocracy, the cosmopolitan seaside life, the sheer modernity of corporate business and drugs combine into a heady mix.
(27) OTL, Furlan was forced to leave Trieste after its annexation to Italy, making his way into Yugoslavia. Given his considerable intellectual standing, his liberal outlook and his moderate but passionate political vocation, he's an obvious go-to for De Gasperi to contact. The Slovenian community in Trieste is now firmly on the path towards participation into a broad front of German minorities looking for political representation. It's important to keep in mind that Slovenia (ITTL known as Carniola) is fully incorporated into the German Empire at this point. This means that the Triestine Slovenes are not separated from their fellow Slovenes, and as such they are fully integrated in the Pan-Slovene People's Party. The Italian position, on the other hand, is considerably more complicated. The Italians in Trieste don't enjoy a similar connection to a wider national minority - they are geographically isolated from the Italians in Tyrol, and have been on a divergent trajectory for quite some time. The Irredentists get their wings clipped by the communist turn undertaken in mainland Italy, and while the loyalists are nostalgic for the good old Habsburg days, they have trouble redefining themselves in Germany. With anxiety over the growth of the Slovene population (and now the German one, too) and lukewarm feelings at best towards the Tyroler Volkspartei and De Gasperi, they don't have any obvious path into any wider coalition at this point.
DKW motorcycle rider Ilse Thouret in the paddock at the newly-built Nurburgring racecourse
The Changing Face Of German Culture
Germany had enjoyed a prestigious standing among fellow European nations, in cultural terms, since well before its political unification. The decades leading up to the Great War – marked as they were by rapid industrialisation, tortured foreign policy, and the coexistence of old and new political ideas – placed Germany in a unique position: the tensions produced by the uneven development of global capitalism were heightened and intensified, as strong reactionary and reformist or revolutionary movements clashed to determine the future of the Reich.
The tumultous events of the Great War and the following decade had a profound impact on intellectual circles. Powerful figures emerged on the right: Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, while fiercely criticised in academic circles, was met with considerable popular success. His pessimistic and deterministic views with a cycle of rising and falling civilisations did not entirely align with the mood of the German right wing – after all, the Reich had proved its mettle in the Great War – but as abortion rights, new sexual morals, and social democracy made strides all over Germany, conservative voices found in the book a voice for their anxiety over the seeming collapse of the old world. Arguing that mankind has no aim or course throughout history, and that rather history is the result of the interaction between different high cultures with a natural lifecycle that inevitably ends in their deaths, Spengler set out to outline the oncoming “winter” of Western civilisation and its symptoms, as well as the growing conflict between “blood” (meaning race feeling and military power) and money. (28)
The philosopher Martin Heidegger would ascend to greater academic acclaim, if lesser popular success, in the second half of the 1920s, particularly with the publication of Being and Time in 1927 – in which he attempted to restart philosophical debate on ontology, that is the question of being, and how thinking beings analyse the concept of being. While apolitical on the surface, Heidegger came to play a prominent political role. Building on his personal experience as a soldier in the Great War, Heidegger was to enjoy with fruitful correspondence with right-wing and left-wing intellectuals alike, and as his work on Being and Time expanded, he toyed with the possibility of incorporating an analysis of historical communities, the being as part of a given historical generation, and the quest for a Bismarckian figure to embody the new German generation and lead the community into the future. Through his correspondence – particularly with conservatives Schmitt and Spengler, and left-winger Benjamin – he eventually became convinced that this quest was unnecessary, and focused instead on “generational dialogue” among different German political cultures, to engage them in the conversation on ontology. Historical communities did make something of a return in his writing, but as part of joint research projects with other right-wing and left-wing philosophers. His belief in the nefarious role of technology depriving humans of access to being and the self, and his subsequent passion for rural communities, was to leave him frustrated with both the right and the left – which equally embraced technology and modernity – but he would come to see the DFP as a sub-optimal remedy to this state of affairs, given its advocacy for local autonomy. Nevertheless, Heidegger never firmly committed to (or alienated) any one party, and alternatively orbited multiple parties. (29)
Ernst Juenger quickly became an established and deeply influential name on the right as well: born from a rich industrialist family, he lived a rebellious life touring Europe and the world, socialising with influential people in many national capitals – while simultaneously playing a significant political role in Germany as co-founder of the DFP, alongside Richthofen. As a proud bearer of the Pour La Merité for his bravery in the Great War, Juenger never abandoned his unshakable belief that total war and the experience of mobilisation were the best antidote to liberalism and democracy. However, there was more to Juenger than stalwart militarism and conservatism – on the contrary, he proved to be incredibly eclectic: his high society contacts made him a well respected figure in foreign circles, his virulent opposition to liberal democracy made him beloved by reactionary conservatives, and his passion for the plight of workers and farmers won him the respect of the left, up to and including communists like Berthold Brecht. His contributions to the natural sciences, particularly ornithology and marine biology, quickly grabbed headlines and won him a spot in the impressive German scientific community. But it was his military credentials, and ability to narrate the spiritual ordeal of Great War soldiery to a mass audience through his books
Storm and Steel and
On Pain (in the latter, arguing that the ability to withstand pain was the measure of a man), that truly cemented his political legacy. His mark on the fledging DFP, the German liberty ideology, and the conservative revolution was simply indelible, and as such, he soon became a coveted prize for ambitious political schemers. The principal attempt at wooing Juenger and his following was to come from the NSDP, with the party leadership sending out feelers with an offer to stand in elections with them. Juenger vehemently refused, publicly denouncing the party for its anti-Semitism and dismissal of rural communities in a fiery letter to any newspapers who would publish his denunciation, both nationally and internationally. (30)
More traditional conservative thought also had its prominent names, particularly Thomas Mann – a literary giant of pre-war international fame for works such as Death In Venice, the Hanseatic merchant family tale Buddenbrooks, and his novel The Magic Mountain. These contributions would eventually win him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1929, along with great international popularity for his witty quips and his thoughtful humanism. However, his adherence to monarchical conservatism remained a constant in the 1920s – already before the end of the Great War, he had begun work on an essay, Reflections Of A Non-Political Man, which was published in 1918. In the essay, Mann argued that the Great War was a confrontation between decadent, liberal Western democracy, and the unique German system of conservative, militarist monarchism. The seeming victory in the Great War validated his views, although the great cost in human and material terms tempered his view of war as a purifying experience. (31)
However, the bright star of the increasing cultural movement associated with the DFP would prove to be Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. A German cultural historian, he had first become known for his mammooth eight-volume recounting of German cultural history, and upon the outbreak of hostilities, he joined the army and then the Foreign Ministry’s press office. During his service as part of the office, he began making his name in young conservative circles with his essay “The Prussian Style”, which presented Prussia (and Germany by extension) as a unique political entity in world history, characterised by its “will to the state”. In early 1918, he additionally published a book, The Right Of Young Nations, in which he emphasised Germany’s uniqueness as a latecomer to the arena of great power politics, promoting its interests and its grievances, and presenting Germany as the better, balanced alternative to western (and especially American) capitalism, and to the communism that seemed to be on the rise in Russia in the wake of the September Rising. A darling of the Hugenberg press and a founder of the German Gentlemen’s Club which furthered the networking opportunities of German conservative politicians, van den Bruck began tilting away from the traditional conservatives and more towards what he labeled the “true conservative revolution” of the DFP in the aftermath of the Treaty of Copenhagen. This slow drift became an irreparable break in 1923, when van den Bruck published an extremely controversial book, titled “The Third Reich”. In the book, van den Bruck points to the Holy Roman Empire as a spiritual model, an empire that is not just a political entity or a state in the modern sense, but an immanent entity that is home to all Germans – in other words, a Reich. And yet, the failure of the Holy Roman Empire had not been entirely vindicated by Bismarck’s creation, which left so many Germans outside the Reich, and was nevertheless beset by modernity, materialism, and party politics. The new Germany, the titular “Third Reich” would need to unite all German speakers in Europe under the guidance of a hero-figure, but this was only part of the picture – it would have to be an aesthetic, spiritual regime based on the aristocratic way of life and the sophisticated local autonomy and mutual obligations that characterised the Holy Roman Empire. Van den Bruck died by his own hand in 1925, following a long illness which severely damaged his mental health – but his legacy would remain, in the form of a small and extremely active “Third Reich movement” which continued developments on his ideals for a Holy Roman restoration, while cultivating ties to the DFP leadership. (32)
But, as the new decade came to a close, intellectual momentum in the Reich also started building within the left: benefiting from the opennes and experimenting attitude of international leftist movements, as well as their success, German philosophers of a leftist persuasion quickly gathered in an influential political circle – the Frankfurt School – which enumerated such heavyweights as Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Loewenthal, and Juergen Habermas, among others. Together, they were to make the Institute For Social Research a groundbreaking and highly controversial academic institution. (33)
The Institute’s initial groundbreaking work focused primarily on technology and violence. The traumatic experience of mass mobilisation and the Great War was to prove the starting point for a highly critical view of technological progress and the process of alienation in capitalist societies. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, in particular, would devote their intellectual firepower to the Paris of Baudelaire and Proust, and its tumultous period of change under Baron Haussmann – with a resulting analysis in how alienation occurs in modernity. This negative view of technology allowed for considerable overlap with some right wing philosophers, primarily Martin Heidegger, although Benjamin would also conduct a joint research programme that saw Benjamin and Schmitt explore the history of communalism and violence, with a particular eye to the brutal Russian Civil War. (34)
In spite of these joint efforts, the School’s intellectuals ultimately remained very distinct. Walter Benjamin in particular fielded a unique contribution that mixed the great idealist German philosophical tradition with Marxist thinking and some elements of Jewish mysticism, although he remained sceptical of both the KPD and SPD, and was especially fearful of Trotskyite communism for its systematic politicisation and exploitation of art – if with a more moderate outlook towards the Muscovite variant. (35)
Theodore Adorno was to prove the more well-connected of the two however, his pre-war correspondence with Gramsci greatly intensifying as Adorno took an interest in Italian communism – while maintaining critical positions on modernity and technology, which inevitably came to play a part as the Italian communist regime became increasingly absorbed by developmental government efforts. Becoming an enthusiastic student of Nietzsche and pursuing his pianist vocation, Adorno would become the public face of a very eclectic institute, and the go-to reference for any thinker dealing in alienation through technology and modernity. While the Institute remained far from a monopoly of left-wing thought, it became the nucleus of a well-established leftist academic circle in Germany, now fully able to participate in the intellectual quest to explain, and in the cultural battle for, the soul of the Reich. (36)
The intellectual confrontation between left and right, however, soon moved on from the relatively isolated realm of academia and into popular culture – itself a sign of Germany’s aspirations towards the affluent, consumer lifestyle of a modern mass society. From the left’s point of view, this popular culture war represented the intellectualisation of the working class, and a foundational step in cementing the proletariat’s class consciousness. As Proletkult ran rampant in Moscow, and spread like wildfire to other countries, domestic and international organisations soon sprang up to support it. Internationally, the Kultintern was set up in 1925 to promote and foster Proletkult in other countries, with a particular eye to capitalist countries which had proven surprisingly receptive to proletarian culture – a list very much topped by Germany. Domestically, the Reich had even seen an early Proletkult organisation, called the League For Proletarian Culture (
Bund für proletarische Kultur). Founded in 1920, it had gotten off to a sluggish start, until the treaty of Tsarskoye Selo and the emergence of Kultintern provided it with much needed funds and international contacts. In recognition of the great promise represented by the receptive and increasingly sophisticated German proletariat, Germans also occupied important positions on Kultintern’s International Bureau, with Karl Toman, Wilhelm Herzog and Max Barthel all gaining seats. (37)
Under these auspices, Proletkult could truly shine in Germany, and it did so primarily through experimental theatre, where such names as Ernst Toller, Max Horkheimer, Reinhard Sorge, Leopold Jessner and Arnolt Bronnen experimented with expressionist plays. Ernst Toller’s plays on the plight of workers all over the world, and the horrors of the Great War, sought to shock audiences as well as educate them. Replacing a well-crafted set for a crude flat set against a black backdrop, and shining bright spotlights unto the seated audience itself during plays, Toller’s works such as
Transfiguration brought home the utter mental and physical breakdown the author had suffered merely a year into his voluntary military service on the Western Front. Cementing his plays’ weirdness, scene cuts were not marked by the traditional theatrical curtain, but by blackouts of the glaring spotlights used during the scenes themselves. (38) Bertolt Brecht was to achieve even more national and international popularity, with a long series of similarly agitprop plays focused on offering a socialist critique of capitalism, and extolling the virtues of Soviet – particularly Muscovite – communism. As one example, his play
The Measures Taken, which debuted in 1930, followed a group of Soviet agitators being congratulated by the Central Committee for completing a mission in Pessian Persia – but confess that they were forced to execute a young comrade whose fiery passion and disregard for order endangered the entire movement. The play being a retelling of these events, it’s concluded with the Central Committee passing on justice – reassuring the agitators that their actions were correct, and that the young comrade had, by taking matters into his own hands and endangerind the mission, committed the cardinal mistake of allowing personal interests to interfere with his revolutionary duties. While the play was widely praised in communist circles, some came to frown upon it as veiled criticism of Trotsky’s flair for independent action in the wake of the Siberian campaign. (39)
Proletkult works often set out to provide the proletariat with pedagogical and educational tools: art was meant, not just to break down the conservative barriers of expression and style, but to equip the working class with the intellectual and moral tools it would need to clinch its rise to class consciousness. But theatre was not the only avenue for the dialectical tension between left and right to unfold. A similar role was occupied by cinema. Here, too, expressionism and agitprop were to play a part, with a close friend of Toller and Brecht, Karlheinz Martin, directing avant-garde movies with hand-drawn, distorted sets, and bizarre and heavily symbolic plots. But the panorama was a lot more diverse than that – with plenty of more money making the rounds.
As the 1920s came to a close, the Tri-Ergon sound system had become so widespread that most major German theatrical releases featured sound. With the UFA cranking out daring and experimental productions that veered more and more into genre fiction, and the rival industry-sponsored DLG sticking to more traditional and conservative productions, the German film scene became as healthy as ever – with central studios in Berlin (and particularly UFA’s Babelsberg studio) increasingly developing their own economic gravity well. The secondary studios in Trieste further provided a fashionable location for glamour and gossip, and a number of smaller and independent producers – particularly in the environs of Berlin – rushed to try their hand at the new profitable business, with minor producers specialising in silent movies so as to attract foreign actors and directors, allowing their low-budget productions to punch above their weight – Danish actress Asta Nielsen quickly becoming a veritable star to German audiences. (40)
Of course, in a way, everything had begun with Robert Wiene and Fritz Lang. The two heavyweights of German cinema at the beginning of the 1920s, they had respectively penned
The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari and
Metropolis – the two movies that catapulted cinema to the attention of a true mass audience. The former, the story of a hypnotist conditioning a sleepwalker into a murderous rampage, became the face of expressionism in German cinema, with its over-the-top costumes, distorted geometrical set, and incredibly dark ambience. While the Vienna-born filmmaker Fritz Lang was originally sympathetic to this style, he gradually shifted towards Universalist notions – alongside his wife Thea von Harbou – embracing the overtones of Proletkunst cinema while emphasising class peace as an alternative to class strife. (41)
Both movies tapped into the growing German fixation on crime – a consequence of the public debate on eugenics, the troubled return to peace of a generation that had been socialised in the trenches of the Great War, and the fledging networks of international crime that wound their way into Germany across the Mediterranean and the newly minted eastern member states of the Zollverein. Both movies would prove seminal to the future development of new and beloved genres in German storytelling:
Metropolis paved the way for science fiction and, more generally, interrogations about the future, while
The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari became the precursor to German horror movies – which primarily dealt with the psyche, uncontrollable compulsions, and violent crime. While Wiene would dabble in a variety of genres after his big 1920 breakout, the largest movie he worked on ended up being
I.N.R.I., an epic religious feature in which Judas acted the anachronistic part of the social revolutionary, pushing Jesus to take up the mantle as leader of an anti-Roman insurrection army, only to betray him to the Romans out of disillusionment after Jesus’ refusal. With the film openly adopting the Russian civil war (which was still raging when the movie was released in 1923), the movie enflamed German public opinion, and was more often shown with the Judas scenes censored than not. Not content with bringing German science fiction to the big screen, Fritz Lang did the same with fantasy – with his two part movie
Die Nibelungen achieving great international success. However, it was to be the movie he devoted his energies to for the remainder of the decade, to eventually come to be regarded as his highest contribution.
M – A City Searches for a Murderer came out in 1931 as the most mature example of a German noir movie. Set against the dark, cold, rainy backdrop of the cosmopolitan and seedy Trieste, the movie follows the horrifying exploits of a serial killer whose victims are only children – and the resulting manhunt for said killer, conducted simultaneously by world-weary, greatcoat-sporting German detectives, and the international criminal empire of White Russian emigres and Sicilian smugglers, whose cooperation only came at a price. The movie ended with the serial killer being caught and tried, but the mothers of the victims warning the attendants – and the audience – to watch over their children more closely. (42)
As these famous productions took up the spotlight, smaller endeavours that were more closely connected to the ongoing political confrontation in the Reich operated in their shadows. The liberal atmosphere of the 1920s, and the city of Berlin in particular, was reflected by the growing influence of cabaret, documentaries such as Ruttmann’s
Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927). The left, however, was far from the only force operating in German cinema, with New Objectivity providing material for the middle classes with the gritty, hyper-realistic “asphalt movies” dealing with topics ranging from the antisemitism in the old Russian Empire and prewar France to the reality of prostitution. The right also employed its considerable access to funds and political connections to churn out edifying, safely nationalist movies. Those were usually the so-called Bergfilmen, depicting lone German mountaineers climbing, purifying their souls and bodies through contact with nature, and battling against the elements – a genre which was to launch the career of Leni Riefenstahl. However, taking their cue from the incredible popularity of Eisenstein’s revolutionary epics, the right wing was also to focus expanded energies and funds on the development of historical period-dramas aimed at furthering fierce nationalist pride. While less politically controversial period-dramas, focused on topics like the French Revolution and the life of Anne Boleyn, also enjoyed great success, the largest hit of the time proved to be a Prussian patriotic period drama starring Otto Gebühr in the role of Frederick the Great.
The deep relationship between this less starry, but equally contentious section of German film industry and German political culture was best exemplified by the role of women in these productions. Phenomenal careers were launched from this dialectical tension – such as that of actress Marlene Dietrich and that of filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl – but the imagery was the truly powerful coded message of any given movie. Conservative films showed women embracing traditional roles as nurturers and bedrocks of the home and family, wearing modest clothing and conducting primarily chaste interactions with the remainder of the cast. Asphalt movies showed women as operators who needed to survive in the harsh reality of the modern world, resorting to all means from those deemed legitimate to the extremes such as prostitution. Cabarets and left-leaning movies displayed confident, assertive women wearing boots, leather jackets, and scanty clothing, mixing sexual femininity with quasi-military iconographies of power, and period dramas showed women as historical political actors (like in the case of Anne Boleyn) or even outright soldiers (as in the case of Russian Civil War movies).
Ultimately, the German film industry at the end of the decade represented more than the country’s aspirations to a glamorous life of affluence. To conservatives, it represented the new possibilities for defence of the old order opened up by mass media, and to the left, it promised to be the ultimate avenue for the education and mobilisation of the working class. Irrespective of these divisions, however, the industry made money hand over fist as it roared out of the 1920s, and could look to the coming decade with hope and ambition about what would become technically and commercially possible. (43)
As Germany aspired to the status of a true mass consumer society, it found entertainment in places further afield than theatre or cinema. Some of these entertainment forms were traditional, like hunting and dancing, while others were newer products of a changing media landscape, like paperback novels. Perhaps no form of entertainment came to represent the new, “modern” German of the 1930s than national and international sporting competitions, however. Lovers of the outdoors and all manner of competition, from professional to gentlemanly and amateur, the Germans had been avid consumers and practitioners of sports even before the Great War, and the trend was only to intensify when the Copenhagen Conference put an end to the fighting – with domestic and international political battles, debates on eugenics and physical health, and class conflict finding in sport a peaceful vehicle of expression. Football, already a nationally renowned game in Germany at the turn of the century, rapidly became part and parcel of German sports life, with the number of registered players multiplying tenfold to surpass a million in 1929. (44)
German football was not very organised, however. Reflecting the great regional diversity of the Reich and the appreciation of amateur sportsmanship, attempts to professionalise football made only limited inroads in the 1920s, with regional team associations and informal leagues remaining the (literal) name of the game for much of the decade – although the prewar practice of the best teams competing for the Viktoria, a national championship trophy modelled on the Roman goddess Victoria, returned following the end of the Great War. This national trophy, combined with examples from abroad, favourable economic conditions, booming audiences, the large number of teams following the country’s expansion, and the decline of gentlemanly ideals of competition led to the consolidation of German football as the 1930s dawned. Initially, regional clubs offered ferocious opposition to this consolidation, fighting a seemingly successful rearguard action in defence of their autonomy. A sudden change of heart from the regulatory body, however, overturned this opposition virtually overnight, and plans for consolidation went ahead under intense media coverage. The newly inaugurated Reichsliga held its opening season in 1932, quickly building a reputation as one of the most hotly contested football leagues worldwide. (45)
The aforementioned decline of gentlemanly ideals reflected the way in which sports became a vehicle for politics in postwar Germany. Even before the war, sports in Germany had seen a growing reflection of class conflict within the country, with gymnastic, football, and rugby clubs firmly aristocratic in outlook and shutting out middle and working class membership whenever possible. This had led to the creation of the Arbeiter-Turn- und Sportbund (Workers’ Gymnastics and Sports Federation) in 1893, forming alternative clubs and even breakaway championships meant for working class athletes and audiences. Mixing a heavy brew of socialism and “modern” all-German nationalism, the ATSB failed to challenge the popularity of traditional clubs, but it did provide an avenue for the professionalisation of sports, which was to accelerate the demise of amateur clubs. When regional vetoes were finally overturned and the Reichsliga came into being, the ATSB would merge its breakaway championship with the newly formed league – its clubs being admitted in the league to compete against their bourgeois rivals. (46)
Unlike in football, Germany was a relatively late adopter to ice hockey, only joining the International Ice Hockey Federation (based in Paris) in 1909. The federation’s birthing pains, which led to constantly shifting regulatory set ups and conferences marked by politicking, came to an end after the Great War, with a firmly established European championship and a world championship for Germany to compete in. Even with the Anschluss providing a larger player base, Germany didn’t make much of an impression on ice hockey, with the Canadians usually dominating international competitions, the United States close in second. European championships were more contested, with Sweden, Switzerland, France, Bohemia – and, eventually, Soviet Russia – as heavyweights. Whenever their team was outperformed, Germans could find a measure of consolation in Bohemia’s success, the country often becoming a plan-B-choice for German fans, given the ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland playing in the Bohemian team – the close alliance between the two countries didn’t hurt, either. Karel Hartman, one such Bohemian player, quickly became a household name all across the Reich. (47)
Rugby had pretty much the opposite trajectory in German collective consciousness, as a game whose spread in Germany had begun two decades before the country was even united. In the postwar world, therefore, rugby enjoyed a long tradition in Germany, as well as a regulatory independence acquired before the war, when regional rugby associations split from their football counterparts. This healthy environment hadn’t translated in mass audiences before the war, but over the 1920s rugby in Germany saw a steady and seemingly unstoppable increase in popularity, especially as its newly formed international team started claiming win after win against opponents like France. The cities of Heidelberg, Hanover, and Frankfurt further established themselves as the premier centres for rugby activity in Germany, helped along by their small but active cohort of expat Anglo-Saxon students. This steady rise in popularity failed to translate in the establishment of a national championship on the model of football’s Reichsliga, but the annual rugby event of national importance for Germany remained the ultimate fight between regional clubs, divided along geographical lines – in a North vs South match that sublimated the country’s confessional and regional divides on the playing field. (48)
In the late 19th and early 20th century, Germany had also played an instrumental role in the birth, codification, and internationalisation of modern handball – together with Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Not even the war managed to halt this development, with the modern rulebook for the game published in Berlin on 29th October 1917 – henceforth a date marked as the day of birth of modern handball. In the postwar years, Germany and its northern neighbours were to fully reap the prestige of having brought new life into the game, with international matches involving all four and early-adopting opponents, for both men and women, becoming a common occurrence by the mid-1920s. The crowning of this development was to be handball’s inclusion in the Olympics, as well as by the increased popularity of the indoors – as opposed to field – variant of the game as the decade came to a close. (49)
A sport with a small but dedicated following before the Great War, boxing was to see a rapid rise in popularity in Germany, as a nascent star drew up the spotlight on himself. Max Schmeling, a Prussian born in 1905, had fallen in love with boxing when his father had brought him to see a film displaying the fight in which two boxing stars, Jack Dempsey and Georges Carpentier, contested the world heavyweight title. Deciding to imitate his idol Dempsey, Schmeling set himself upon a path that would lead him through amateur, then professional boxing, and to a slew of national championships, as well as a string of victories against famous European boxers. Upon winning the European title, to much celebration from boxing fans in Germany, Schmeling left the Reich and departed for the United States – where boxing was considerably more popular, the circuit was considerably less provincial, and paychecks were on a wholly different scale. An unknown quantity to the American boxing world, which tended to look down upon European players, Schmeling ascended to international fame in 1929 by defeating the aging, but nevertheless fearsome star Johnny Risko at Madison Square Garden, in front of an incredulous audience which eventually burst in roaring applause. Following their new unexpected national hero, Germans began to discover and appreciate boxing more than ever before, and wondered what was next for Schmeling as the new decade dawned. (50)
Mixing the traditional German passion for the outdoors and sporting competitions, with the technical complexity and consumer appeal of sophisticated and fast racing cars, motorsports became a national fever in Germany during the 1920s, although Germans were to be in good company in this respect, as Europe as a whole and the United States participated in the growing enthusiasm for racing cars. Much to the delight of the enthusiastic German audience, the Reich was to play a large role in the newly minted European championship of so-called Grand Epreuves which finally took root in 1930 – being the only country to field two tracks, the legendary Nurburgring and the fan-favourite Spa Francorchamps, which was located in former Belgian territory. (51)
Germany also contributed more teams than any other country, with BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and (starting in 1932) Auto Union fielding fast, powerful, and reliable cars which immediately contested wins and titles with their French Bugatti rivals, although Italy and Britain would also field impressive national teams. All three manufacturers had their distinct identities. Based respectively in Würtemberg and Chemnitz, Mercedes-Benz and Auto Union leaned more on an all-German identity, with Auto Union in particular(a merger of four smaller manufacturers Wanderer, DKW, Audi, and Horch) being innovative in their use of motorsport as a flagship, prestige campaign for their firm as a whole. The Auto Union Rennabteilung, as their racing team was known, soon developed a fearsome reputation. While still convincingly German, BMW was unapologetic about its Bavarian identity, and received a degree of official support from the Bavarian Kingdom, as it sought to race its own international profile. (52)
True stardom was not on hand for racing teams alone – it was there for drivers as well, who soon attained cult status across all countries which followed motorsport. As motorsport became part and parcel of popular culture, Germany did not lack for heroes to cheer on: Hermann Lang, Bernd Rosemeyer and Rudolf Caracciola, widely recognised as two of the most talented drivers of their generation, became household names in the Reich, and came to embody the aspirations of a whole generation of Germans. As individual, daring risk-takers from middle class (or lower, in the case of Lang) backgrounds who mastered technological beasts and brought sporting glory to their country, they personified the promise that the Germany of the future would need ambitious, hard-working people with technical background to shine, regardless of their family backgrounds. Here was an arena where the stranglehold of the nobility on prestigious appointments held no sway, and only results mattered.(53)
Motorsport also opened the door to rather unconventional heroes, as Germany was to find out when two controversial figures made their way to national and international popularity. They had one thing in common – they were both women. The first, Clärenore Stinnes, was the daughter of industrial magnate Hugo Stinnes, and across the early 1920s she had stomped across Europe from the Atlantic to the Vistula and from Sweden (home to her husband, photographer and cinematographer Carl-Axel Söderström) to Socialist Italy, grabbing race cars by the scruff of the neck and collecting trophy after trophy. Come 1927, she ranked among the most successful racing drivers in the world, and decided to embark upon a truly epic journey – attempting to be the first person to circumvent the world via automobile. Together with her husband and a crew of mechanics, Stinnes made her way down the length of the Zollverein, then into Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire, driving north through Don lands and into Moscow. The outbreak of war in Siberia was to force a major deviation from the planned route – which involved driving over a frozen Lake Baikal for good measure – as Stinnes turned southward into China. A series of ferries brought her to the Japanese Home Islands, then Hawaii and South America. Driving through the Andes into Argentina, and then north until reaching Vancouver, the couple journeyed across the entirety of South and North America, with a reception by President McAdoo in the American capital. The final leg of the journey saw the crew disembark from a Transatlantic ferry at Le Havre, and drive the remaining way back to the Reich. Stinnes’ exploit won her immense popularity in Germany just as the European Championship was taking off in its inaugural season – and it was thus no surprise when the Frankfurt-based manufacturer of the car, Adler, decided to enter the European Championship with an underfunded but technically creative operation, and offered Stinnes a seat. (54)
Another woman who made a reputation for herself as an indomitable racer was Ilse Thouret. A motorcycle racer who overcame a ban on women competing in motorbike competitions, she went from victory to victory in the 1920s racing for DKW (a part of Auto Union), additionally serving as an advertiser to fuel, oil, tyres, and other related products. Born in Hamburg to a wealthy Franco-German Protestant family, Thouret impressed wherever she went: she was at ease in the ballrooms of high society, where she had a reputation as a talented conversationalist in multiple languages and across a variety of fields. But she was equally at ease trackside, wearing leather gear when riding and driving, and more than once changing into a mechanic’s coveralls to get her hands dirty fixing or tuning her bike or car. Soon, DKW was to offer her full factory support, turning her into a lead rider for the manufacturer’s efforts in motorbike racing. Thouret’s stellar popularity in Germany would eventually see the addition of car racing to her motorcycling portfolio, with a full-time seat with Auto Union in the European Championship in the 1930s. (55)
Footnotes:
(28) The first volume of Decline Of The West was written during the Great War, and only finished in 1917, so it’s unaffected by the butterflies. The second volume (Perspectives of World-History) is more heavily affected by international events, as it was written between 1917 and 1922, but the general patterns remain similar: heightened tensions and conflicts the world over ultimately reinforce Spengler’s view that military might is dismantling the market- and export- centered world that came before the Great War, and still identifies Caesarism (the emergence of strong leadership) as a symptom that mankind is in its “winter” season. It’s important to note that the book has less success than OTL, due to the lack of a Versailles Treaty – but enough Germans are sufficiently anxious about the future that the book resonates anyway.
(29) Sorry if this got a bit dense at times, Heidegger’s philosophy is incredibly hard to parse. The important takeaway when comparing to OTL is that the lack of the shock of the German defeat alters Heidegger’s thinking on a number of important points. While he is still focused on being, there is less emphasis on the role of a being in its own generation – because Germany, for all its transformations, is not living through the same kind of systemic shock it underwent in OTL. There is also no quest for a saviour or hero figure (which OTL Heidegger identified in Hitler, at least briefly) to embody the national spirit and act as the being revealing itself in history. While he is no stranger to cultural anxiety, Heidegger ITTL is not so apocalyptic or focused on the Volksgemeinschaft/racial community as he was IOTL. Instead, Heidegger focuses more purely on ontology, and seeks to restart a new German philosophical tradition on the matter, with contributions from different parts of the spectrum: in the much more relaxed climate of Germany ITTL, he is not such a militant anti-communist as he ended up being in OTL, and this is true for other ring wing philosophers as well. It’s also important to note that, as a philosopher dealing with being, the question of apocalyptic identity-quest of OTL is somewhat replaced by a calmer pursuit for the meaning of “German-ness” in the ITTL context of multicultural Germany. This is in part what drives Heidegger to further dialogue across the aisle with a multitude of colleagues. The correspondence is OTL, even with the intense culture war of Weimar – therefore, it is expanded ITTL. As for his party relations, Heidegger’s enthusiasm for the Third Reich ITTL was tempered when it became obvious that they fully embraced violence, technology, and technology as a means to violence. Given his very specific beliefs, he is condemned to frustration no matter what – but he has a wider selection of parties to choose from ITTL. The statement on the “inner truth and greatness of National Socialism” which caused such debate in philosophical circles (and which continues to this day) might well apply to how Heidegger sees the DFP ITTL: an imperfect movement corrupted by technology, that nevertheless holds a kernel of truth and purity that makes it worthy of at least partial support.
(30) Ernst Juenger’s life is the least affected by butterflies so far, although this is destined to change significantly, given how very specific OTL circumstances completely reshaped his life and political involvement OTL. His stature as a conservative figure and German literary giant cannot be overestimated, and in the less acrimonious context of ITTL, he’s in for a good time of intellectual correspondence and productivity. His refusal to endorse the NSPD is based on the OTL repeated attempts by the Nazi party to court him, which he always rejected, to the point of assisting Jewish refugees during the war when in his power, and intimating the Voelkischer Beobachter to never dare publish his works again.
(31) OTL, Thomas Mann had the same views, but the German defeat fundamentally undermined them. Moreover, when Weimar emerged, he gave a very peculiar interpretation of the Republic based on his literary experience, which meant he became a rather unusual supporter for somewhat atypical reasons – and motivated other German intellectuals to do the same. In time, exposure turned him more and more into a Social Democrat, and into the firm enemy of Nazism we know him for OTL. ITTL, as the 1920s come to a close, Mann has not had exposure to Weimar, obviously, and neither to German defeat, which means his earlier views are unchallenged – although the Great War proved a sobering experience for him as well.
(32) Hard as it is to believe, this is 90% OTL. The primary difference is that OTL, van den Bruck had little to no political interlocutor for his aesthetic-spiritual Third Reich ideal, and mostly had to content himself with criticising (and occasionally giving credit to) the fledging Nazi party, until his suicide in 1925. Here, the natural fit between him and the DFP gives him a huge popularity boost, and establishes the Third Reich movement as a small circle of academics interested in the German liberty ideology, and with the right party connections. It’s significant to mention that ITTL, van den Bruck gets to witness the Anschluss of Austria – which overjoys him, but is not sufficient to sway him off his path: political unity was always secondary to the spiritual and eternal Germany he had in mind. His book “The Third Reich” therefore, while celebrating unity with Austria, would caution that this is only a superficial achievement – the more important one being to refound Germany, as only thus it can become a spiritual home to all Germans.
(33) This is a largely OTL overview, with some important differences in context. The right wing thinkers we have seen thus far are nothing to sneeze at – their legacy remains large even IOTL, where our Second World War placed many of their works firmly outside the boundaries of respectable politics and philosophy – but the tidal wave of modernity and the emergence of social studies means that the rise of influential left-wing intellectuals is really hard to butterfly away. However, the context is considerably changed, primarily due to the different Russian Revolution and later Civil War. OTL, the feeling that the revolution had been betrayed, the dystopian turn rapidly taken by the USSR, and the CPSU’s determination to stifle any and all “unorthodoxy” which deviated from party doctrine, were profoundly influential to the establishment of the Frankfurt School. Without such reasons for pessimism, ITTL their philosophy is a lot more optimistic about epistemiology and debates, and while the general mood is still anti-capitalist, some of its illustrious members maintain their bourgeois lifestyles – as you will see in short order.
(34) Of course, both Adorno and Benjamin actually worked on these topics IOTL as well. The primary change is that their outlook is less bleak than it was at a time of rising anti-semitism and economic convulsions, which was the case IOTL. This also means they are more open to collaboration with right wing philosophers, especially since those in turn are less driven by anti-communism. It’s important to note that the Schmitt-Benjamin dialogue happened OTL as well, and is only expanded ITTL. Schmitt makes his first appearance here, rather than in the right wing section, because his corpus is arguably the one more catastrophically affected by the butterflies. Without the “Versailles diktat” he doesn’t have the same focus on the change to the nature of war from a gentlemanly struggle that ended in negotiated peace terms to a war of annihilation of opposing political systems in which the victor becomes the arbiter of what is right and wrong (a position that was only reinforced after WW2 OTL, and saw him permanently excluded from respectability and banned from teaching, as he refused to denazify). ITTL, the Treaty of Copenhagen is exactly the sort of negotiated peace conference Schmitt would cite as in continuity with a better past, and he is left to focus on research avenues where he has considerable overlap with the Frankfurt School – primarily communalism and violence.
(35) Butterflies hit Walter Benjamin straight in the face. Firstly, his view is somewhat less eclectic than OTL, where he ended up mixing German idealism, Jewish mysticism, and Marxism. Here, the second of those three components is reduced – he embraced the kabbalah and mysticism OTL as a response to the rise of National Socialism. Secondly, his OTL view that Soviet communism was a mortal threat because it politicised art is partially reduced by the fact that the Muscovite governing clique is much less interventionist when it comes to artistic expression – but it fully applies to Trotsky, whom Benjamin fears and repeatedly warns against. OTL, he paired this with a mirrored analysis of fascism, which according to him did precisely the opposite – turned politics into an exercise in aesthetics. Sidonist integralism, while a powerful ideology in its own right, does not have quite the same visual impact.
(36) Both Adorno and Benjamin came from wealthy, bourgeois families. They were Marxist in the sense that they believed that history had to provide some kind of redemption through violence, or that a "divine violence" would shatter all suffering and prevent its return – a break in the dialectical dynamic of history. Even OTL, their reaction to more practical problems like the question of land reform would have been less than orthodox from a Marxist perspective. ITTL, they are not shocked out of their wealthy backgrounds and into horrified pessimism as they were OTL, which means they continue developing the pursuits they grew up with in their backgrounds – music, literature, and the philosophy of aesthetics. Adorno’s correspondence with Gramsci is OTL, and expanded here as Gramsci becomes an obvious person of interest – although it’s really impossible for Adorno to get behind any one regime squarely. It’s important to note that a lot of Adorno’s (and the School’s) legacy OTL came from the experience of Auschwitz as the end point of modernity. We are still in the 1920s, with Adorno embracing Nietzsche and setting forth a much more traditional “modernity thesis” rooted in a more recognisably German philosophy of history. How this changes in the 1930s and 40s of ITTL is something we will have to find out ourselves.
(37) In OTL interwar Germany, proletarian art enjoyed success in spite of the movement’s early suppression in the USSR, with Kultintern mostly existing on paper, and essentially unable to actually accomplish the tasks it was set up for. ITTL, Proletkult is left to flourish in Russia, and as a result it is that much livelier in Germany. While the authors involved are the same and the productions similar, their impact is larger, and their institutional support stronger – not from the government, but in terms of their ability to organise themselves. IOTL, for example, the League For Proletarian Culture collapsed a mere year after its establishment, due to the sudden turn against Proletkult in Russia. ITTL, Russian support is not immediately forthcoming due to the longer Civil War, so the organisation survives – if barely – until after the treaty of Tsarskoye Selo, where more efforts are devoted to spreading Proletkult internationally. German Kultintern board membership is all OTL, with the difference that Toman represented Austria IOTL.
(38) The artists involved are all OTL – most of them from Germany, but some are from OTL Austria, and obviously find themselves operating within the Reich at this point in time ITTL. Experimental theatre was not without its critics, even among the left, as its “pedagogic” mission was sometimes criticised as bourgeois in disguise. While Dadaists have by and large been absorbed in the wider Proletkunst wave ITTL, as detailed in previous updates, they still remain critical of the more “indoctrinational” impulses of their fellow artists. ITTL, the increased success of Proletkult goes beyond more plays being written and produced, or more households making it a habit to attend Proletkult theatre on a free evening – or sometimes, during a factory shift, out in the streets, or in many other unusual locations targeted by agitprop playwrights. Toller’s section is very close to OTL, except that increased funding grants him access to wider audiences – but it’s good to get an idea of what Proletkult theatre looks like in practice.
(39) The OTL version of the play has the four workers returning from a mission to China. ITTL, China in 1930 is not the warlord-riven mess it was OTL, and especially its northern border is nowhere near as porous. On the other hand, Persia/Iran is close, in flux, and an interesting hunting ground for volunteers and spies to enact their ideological struggles on the ground. This also gives more resonance to the play compared to OTL, because ordinary Germans follow news about the Middle East somewhat more assiduously than they do China at this point ITTL. Another crucial difference is that, while OTL the four workers were also absolved – with the Central Committee commenting that this went to show what a wide gulf communism needed to cross so it could change the world – ITTL, the more communal leadership style of left wing ideologies makes the young comrade’s individual initiative even less orthodox, a strong-headed individualist mentality that sought to hijack the mission through pure, but ultimately misguided intentions combined with personal charisma. The reception to the play is greatly favourable, but it helps to highlight a rift in communist political thinking that is inevitably linked to the rising star of Trotsky, and the disquiet about his exploits in some circles.
(40) Most of this background information is detailed in the timeline’s Update 25 – Society In Flux. OTL, German films were very late to adopt sound, which provided a nice haven for foreign directors and artists who wanted to work with the lucrative and vibrant world of German cinema. ITTL, with no loss of patents in 1919 and a much stronger German economic situation, Tri-Ergon tech is adopted from the get go, and by the time we get to 1930, the true blockbuster theatrical releases in Germany all feature sound. However, a niche market remains for high-brow silent films, which make use of the lack of a language barrier to attract non-German speaking personalities.
(41) For a better description of how
Metropolis differs from OTL, see Update 25 – Society in Flux. As for
Cabinet, Wiene did dabble in horror again, but his major focus was on dramas – both OTL and ITTL. The horror genre therefore takes a lot of inspiration from the movie, but goes on largely without Wiene himself. OTL, the economic dislocation of the Great Depression was one of many factors pushing the German film industry to make for the United States. Right now, prospects are rosy, and while still very young, horror looks set to become a staple of the German film diet – alongside other genres. German horror movies are less about the supernatural and more about the pressures and grinding gears of modern society driving people insane and/or to violent crimes and psychotic breaks.
(42) Both movies exist OTL, but look different ITTL. For a start,
I.N.R.I. is altered by the fact that the Russian Civil War is still ongoing, with far greater horrors. This ultimately makes the movie grimmer and more depressing, and the figure of Judas even more sympathetic than in the OTL film. There is further an element of religious controversy far beyond the scope of OTL, because the Christian world is a lot more interested in its relationship with revolutionary movements – therefore the film is seen as blasphemous and intolerable by some, and as a cult by others, and fiercely censored by authorities wherever they get a chance to get away with it.
M was set in a nondescript German city OTL, but ITTL the evocative power of Trieste as a den of crime, plus UFA’s extensive outdoor shooting in its environs, convinces Fritz Lang to adopt it as the setting. This cements the city’s role as the backdrop
par excellence for German noir stories.
(43) There are a lot of similarities to OTL, so it’s useful to summarise what the greater divergences are. The early adoption of sound and the greater funding available means that German productions are a lot more technically impressive than they were OTL (which is saying something) and makes Berlin/Trieste a true peer of Hollywood in terms of international audiences and blockbuster appeal. It also means that productions are more daring, as they are less constrained by financial restrictions, with an early expansion into genre fiction that will make German cinema look increasingly divergent from its OTL counterpart. Finally, the impact of Eisenstein’s large epic is that period dramas and multi-part historical movies take root in European and German filmmaking in a way they simply never did IOTL. You can expect ambitious filmmakers with access to funds to try and replicate Eisenstein’s success – which will make themed historical movie nights in the future of TTL world very interesting and extremely long-winded affairs!
(44)In OTL, this number was reached in 1932. Here, with an extra year of war (but smaller concentration of casualties) the manpower pool might actually be slightly smaller to begin with, but Germany is considerably larger than it was IOTL, especially after the Anschluss – so the one million milestone is surpassed ahead of schedule.
(45) Close to OTL. Here, two things balance out to ultimately produce a different outcome. On the one hand, regional organisations are actually stronger, given that the Empire is a more decentralised structure still clinging to local identities in a way Weimar did not. On the other, the economic context, extremely large cohort of clubs (given the much larger territorial extent of the country) and the increased cultural fervor create an additional motivation to finally professionalise football. IOTL, the creation of a Reichsliga was vetoed by regional associations – but then the German Football Association had an overnight change of heart, and decided to ignore the vetoes and consolidate competition into a league anyway. The Nazi seizure of power scuppered the plan just as it was beginning to set out. Here, the proposal comes somewhat earlier than OTL, and the consolidation is pushed through just as the new decade dawns.
(46) Hey, it’s early 20th Century Germany we’re talking about, so of course everything has to be insanely politicised. The ATSB was an OTL organisation, forcibly incorporated during the “coordination” policy of the Third Reich which replaced these associations with singular party structures. The ATSB joining the new Reichsliga might seem too generous on my part, but do consider that the merging does not mean the working class football identity gets diluted – on the other hand, it is strengthened. The parallel championship was always on rocky footing as the “bourgeois” teams were simply more popular and had a lot more media coverage. Now, teams from all social extractions are going to square off against each other in the same league. That should make for some… exciting coverage in the future.
(47) Karel Hartman really was a famous ethnic German player IOTL – for the Czechoslovak team, of course. The German relationship with ice hockey OTL was brutally cut short when the Federation decided it was a great idea to expel Germany from the game following the Treaty of Versailles. That’s never the case ITTL, and given the larger playerbase Germany can count on, the team is likely a bit stronger than OTL – but it’s hard to see them becoming an unstoppable juggernaut.
(48) Anglo-Saxon students introduced rugby to German cities as early as 1850, and the sport had a long tradition and a small, but dedicated fanbase before the Great War. Of course, after the war, the butterflies start flapping. Rugby IOTL saw steady and promising growth in interwar Germany, but following the Second World War the sport’s popularity collapsed, and never completely recovered to pre WW2 levels. The rise is following a similar trajectory ITTL, but some developments come about earlier – for instance, Germany only created a national team in 1927 OTL, and does so years ahead of schedule ITTL due to its considerably improved domestic, international, and economic context. Just like IOTL, there is no immediate prospect for a national championship, and the sport remains heavily tied to regional identities.
(49) This happened OTL as well, although Germany’s status as a pariah nation somewhat delayed the full international adoption of modern handball rules, and it took until 1928 for the formation of an international federation. Under northern European auspices, the game has a quicker rise to popularity (and regulatory codification) ITTL than it did IOTL.
(50) Of all the events mentioned in this section, the career of Schmeling is the one to track more closely against OTL, as it’s an upward trajectory relatively independent of butterflies. It’s still worth including, not just for its obvious cultural significance, but because it represents a crucial empirical example of how even in this timeline, for all that is going well for it, Germany’s uneven economic development makes the option of seeking fortune elsewhere attractive – particularly so in those sections of entertainment that remain much livelier in America than they do in the old world. Schmeling OTL became a symbol for German-American relations in the 1930s, and he lived an extremely long life that saw him involved with the country’s turbulent history – his name will definitely be one to check out ITTL for similar, and yet different effects.
(51) Motorsport is my jam, and something I intend to cover from a more international perspective in the future – but it’s also an incredibly significant phenomenon for Germany ITTL, as it was IOTL. The European Championship you see mentioned here is a product of ITTL butterflies – but details are best left to future coverage. Other motorsport fans in the audience will immediately notice other butterflies related to Germany: with its Copenhagen Treaty borders, the country is more awash with human and technical potential than it was even OTL. Hell, Spa counting as a German, rather than Belgian circuit would already count as an “OMG” butterfly to most motorsport fans, given the legendary nature of the circuit. Do note that, with regulations preventing two races from holding the same geographical denomination, ITTL the Nurburgring is still home to the German Grand Prix. Spa goes a number of sad “creative” naming solutions which never really stick and most people tend to forget about, such as “Grand Prix of the Frontiers” or “Trophy Of The German Reich”. Ultimately people just call the race “Spa” and call it a day.
(52) Mostly as OTL, although BMW enters racing – both in cars and in motorcycles – much earlier than they did OTL. During the interwar years, BMW was already a dominant force in motorcycle racing, but their car production only began in 1928, and various economic and political factors pressured BMW into not pursuing car racing until well after WW2. Here, the more favourable situation, the patronage of the Bavarian state, and the simplified technical rules for the European Championship, means that BMW is willing to throw their hat in the ring in the early 1930s. It is arguable whether Auto Union would form without a Great Depression, but my money is on yes: the corporate consolidation that made it possible had already began three years before the OTL Great Depression, and given the German insistence on Fordism and rationalisation ITTL, it’s a reasonably safe bet that a streamlining would take place.
(53) As per OTL. This trio was immensely talented, and got involved with cars and motorcycles – tinkering them, driving them etc – in contexts effectively under the radar of the butterflies, with the significant exception that better economic conditions will make it somewhat easier for them to go through the initial stages of their racing career, before fame and the popularity that went with it. Their exploits are still known to motorsport fans today, and that’s quite rare for most pre WW2 motorsport feats. Together with the Italian Tazio Nuvolari, Rudolf Caracciola in particular is still frequently mentioned today OTL when discussing the most talented racing drivers of all time.
(54) Stinnes’ record of race wins in the 1920s, and her journey around the world driving an Adler 6, are all OTL. The journey here ignores Siberia to avoid the fighting there, and her reception in America is with McAdoo, not Hoover, but otherwise goes as OTL. The Adler company never raced OTL, so this is entirely speculative on my part – but I can see how, awash with the popularity of such an enterprise just when a motorsport series with a simpler entry bar is launched, might convince Adler to give racing a go. Stinnes is, of course, a natural choice for the seat. At this point, I should add that the near-total preponderance of men in motorsport IOTL was actually challenged more often before WW2 than it has been in the postwar years. Given that this update has focused on the rapid evolution of German political culture, the emergence of new social forces, and the effect of butterflies on gender relations, focusing on real-world examples of women who made their name in motorsport seemed more thematically relevant to me than providing the Nth rundown of Rudolf Caracciola’s life.
(55) Again, the most implausible details of Thourer’s life are those belonging entirely to OTL. The only major divergence here is that she gets more involved in car racing. While we might consider it weird from our perspective, the early decades of motorsport were a time when drivers and riders switched bikes for cars (and viceversa) multiple times across their careers, often racing in different championships at the same time – something made possible by the lower professional requirements and relaxed schedules of racing series at the time. OTL, Thouret also raced for DKW in motorcycling – and got around to driving their racing cars in the 1930s. So ultimately, this development has just been bumped forward by a few years.
End note: And with that, the Insight on Germany comes to a close at last. With the more familiar background of economy and wider society firmly established, we can move off the beaten path and into the weirder, but hopefully just as interesting butterflies for Germany in the inter-ethnic and cultural realms. This took a monumental amount of research to get down, but it was an intensely rewarding experience. A lot of these developments are not isolated to Germany, and will see further callbacks in the future, but the important takeaway is that Germany (and by extension its sphere) is in considerable flux, with staunch adherence to the past mixing with a genuine hunger for a different future. Looking forward to hear what everyone thinks of this update!
