AHC: Surviving Bottleneck Free State

Some vague POD causes post-WWI Germany to effectively collapse. Maybe the war ends a bit sooner, so the Kaiserreich maintains enough support to contest the German Revolution more. The country splits, the Entente support a side but then that side collapses, the Socialists splinter into multiple factions after either the SPD or someone else tries to take control, and everything just goes to hell. People are starving, the Entente doesn't really have a cohesive plan and won't go to war again, and as such they just maintain their occupations as bastions of not dying.

In the end, Germany remains broken. You've got a small Entente-backed democracy along the occupation area, a leftist regime in Berlin and Münich (which both hate each other), the Kaiser still rules in Königsberg with Junker support, at least one area has gone proto-fascist, and that's not even all of it. In all this chaos, what's one more republic that seems downright sensible compared to many of the others? Immigrants arrive from the worse-off German states, and the Bottleneck Republic grows in population (...to maybe like 25,000, but progress was made!).

Without any cohesive German authority, France had just started taking Rhineland goods like they did in the OTL Occupation from the start, so the republic never falls. When the Entente end the occupation, the occupied cities join the republic (which is somehow doing better than most other German nations.) No unified Germany for a good few decades means no remotely similar Hitler, and the republic manages to eke out a survival for at least until maybe 1940ish, when the other German nations begin some form of unification war. After that, they likely fall, unless they get miraculously lucky and manage to be the ones to unify Germany themselves.
 
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Additionally, I wonder if there's the potential for it to become a refuge for intellectuals. Building a commune for example.
 
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