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An Age of Peace? – A 1966 Kaiserreich Sequel
(Special thanks to @pattontank12 and @Historyman 14 for greatly contributing towards the ideas over the years that made this TL possible. Also, to both @Danifa94 and @comrade cat, for being such great friends to me.)
Foreword:
Ever since I first stumbled upon the Kaiserreich mod and while writing my Politics and International Relations dissertation back in university, it has ben an alternate history setting that have captured my imagination. With it indirectly leading me to evenly joining this forum, and some of my earliest posts on this site being KR related discussions. While playing the "Darkest Hour" version of the mod, instead of playing the game it was intended to by allow the random number to decide the state of the world, I have always instead acted like an omniscient control freak ASB, carefully dictating and deciding on what paths and what decisions each country will make, in order to craft the KR world in a manner that tell the story that I wanted to be told. But I have always kept the ideas to myself since more or less every KR player have their own headcanon, and I have thought that mine wasn't that unique or worthy of being shared.
With @Historyman 14's "Hetalia: Kaiserreich Edition" thread back in 2017, I started sharing elements of my my headcanon with others on the forum, with the discussion getting taken to private messaging, where @pattontank12 and I further developed the lore and ideas for each nation in the form of their Hetalia personifications, and coming up with stories for them.
After 5 years and over 80 pages worth of messages, I realized that what he had is something truly unique: A setting that is alive and well developed, with lore and stories for literally every single country down to how the Kaiserreich PoD as well as the events after the 1936 start-date have impacted everything from their national politics to their cuisine and culture. With a setting that does not straightly follow one version of the mod or another, but take elements from all of them, from the latest rework in HOI4, to the older, forgotten versions back in the days of DH, not to mention ideas of our own that we have come up with based on the setting does not exist in the mod itself. In other words, a setting that I really wanted to share with everyone else, beyond my private inbox with just 3 other people.
As such, inspired by @Upvoteanthology's "The People's Socialist Atlas", and AP246's "Thousand-Week Reich - A 'realistic' Nazi victory scenario" I have decided to create a graphic TL, telling the story my Kaiserreich headcanon in the form of detailed in-universe maps from the year 1966, 30 years after the start date of a normal Kaiserreich game. All commissioned and drawn for me by the amazing @procrastinating2much.
So, without further ado, welcome to the world of 1966:
The map of the world (1966):
The year is 1966, 47 years after the guns fell silent with the Treaty of Versailles/Peace with Honor of 1917 which ended the First Weltkrieg, and 26 years after the start of the Second Weltkrieg in 1940 which once again plunged the world into death and destruction on a scale unseen before in history. Though the grudging and reluctant cooperation between the German-led Riechpakt and the Entente remnants, the Syndicalist Internationale's dreams of a World Revolution lay in tatters, and the National Populist Russian States hunger for conquest and revanchism crushed. As the guns once again felt silent in the year 1945, the exhausted and war-wary people of the world who had seen their lives upended time and again over the past few decades overlooked a seemingly return from the new to the old antebellum order before the First Weltkrieg : A multipolar world of rival geopolitical blocs and web of alliances... But with a twist:
Despite the lost of their influence in the Asia Pacific, not to mention the damages that it has suffered during the war, the German Empire and her allies stands dominant as the foremost economic and military power of the world. While the newly restored Entente powers of Britain and France, once the dominant powers of last century that have just regaining their homelands from the revolutionaries, found themselves now as the scrappy upstarts, determined to reclaim their place under the sun...
Yet beyond the powers of old, new powers have also arisen from the ashes: America, China, the Ottomans, Austria Hungary.... Nations that had once been dismissed as nothing but ramshackle walking corpses, have all seemingly emerged form their long agony. Reinvigorated, reenergized, and seemingly stronger then even, they were all determined to make a place for themselves in the world by leveraging their new found industrial, economic, and military might.
The pessimistic feared that another Weltkrieg might be inevitable, one that will once again engulf the globe in the fires of war, this time with deadlier weapons surpassing those used in the Second Weltkrieg... yet for now, their fears seem to be unfounded. Seemingly tired of sending millions of their sons and fathers to die every generation, combined with the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation, the promised new era of peace and cooperation agreed upon by all parties during the 1949 Congress of Verdun have held. While rivalries, competition, and the occasional covert action or proxy conflicts does still take place from time to time, on the whole, the post WK2 world is one of relative clam and stability, compared to the absolute chaos and earth shaking changes around every corner in the 1920s and 30s.
This is an age of globalization and free trade, replacing the zero-dum mercantilist economic system of old, which many argued was what created the conditions leading to the rise of radicalism in the first place, which directly led to WK2. An age of technological advancement and consumerist plenty, as best exemplified by families gathered around their living room televisions, watching footage of the United States of America putting the first human to ever journey into outer space in the year 1963, putting beyond all doubt that the country that once fell into a Second Civil War back in 1936 have fully recovered from its decline.
... Yet things might not be as stable as the optimistic and the naive might wish to believe. Even beyond the borders of the Indochinese Union, the last remaining syndicalist holdout in the world, in the jungles of South America, the mines of Kataga, the squatter camps in South Africa, the textile mills of Port Said, the sweat tips of Central America, and even the working class tenements and student dormitories of Chicago, London, and Paris, the specter of syndicalism might not be as dead and buried as some might wish to think. In the divided and broken land that was once Russia, radical ranging from Neo-Bolshevik to diehard loyalists of Savinkov's old regime wish to average they utter humiliation of their defeated nation. And in Africa and Southeast Asia, while decolonization have taken place for most of the world, France and Portugal stubbornly held on to their remaining colonial possessions, and even for countries that have formally been decolonized, considering the continued economic and political influence of their formal overlords, many question if they have truly been granted independence at all.
Will the so-called 'Peace of Verdun' be able to hold? Or will storm clouds gathered once more?
(Special thanks to @pattontank12 and @Historyman 14 for greatly contributing towards the ideas over the years that made this TL possible. Also, to both @Danifa94 and @comrade cat, for being such great friends to me.)
Foreword:
Ever since I first stumbled upon the Kaiserreich mod and while writing my Politics and International Relations dissertation back in university, it has ben an alternate history setting that have captured my imagination. With it indirectly leading me to evenly joining this forum, and some of my earliest posts on this site being KR related discussions. While playing the "Darkest Hour" version of the mod, instead of playing the game it was intended to by allow the random number to decide the state of the world, I have always instead acted like an omniscient control freak ASB, carefully dictating and deciding on what paths and what decisions each country will make, in order to craft the KR world in a manner that tell the story that I wanted to be told. But I have always kept the ideas to myself since more or less every KR player have their own headcanon, and I have thought that mine wasn't that unique or worthy of being shared.
With @Historyman 14's "Hetalia: Kaiserreich Edition" thread back in 2017, I started sharing elements of my my headcanon with others on the forum, with the discussion getting taken to private messaging, where @pattontank12 and I further developed the lore and ideas for each nation in the form of their Hetalia personifications, and coming up with stories for them.
After 5 years and over 80 pages worth of messages, I realized that what he had is something truly unique: A setting that is alive and well developed, with lore and stories for literally every single country down to how the Kaiserreich PoD as well as the events after the 1936 start-date have impacted everything from their national politics to their cuisine and culture. With a setting that does not straightly follow one version of the mod or another, but take elements from all of them, from the latest rework in HOI4, to the older, forgotten versions back in the days of DH, not to mention ideas of our own that we have come up with based on the setting does not exist in the mod itself. In other words, a setting that I really wanted to share with everyone else, beyond my private inbox with just 3 other people.
As such, inspired by @Upvoteanthology's "The People's Socialist Atlas", and AP246's "Thousand-Week Reich - A 'realistic' Nazi victory scenario" I have decided to create a graphic TL, telling the story my Kaiserreich headcanon in the form of detailed in-universe maps from the year 1966, 30 years after the start date of a normal Kaiserreich game. All commissioned and drawn for me by the amazing @procrastinating2much.
So, without further ado, welcome to the world of 1966:
The map of the world (1966):
The year is 1966, 47 years after the guns fell silent with the Treaty of Versailles/Peace with Honor of 1917 which ended the First Weltkrieg, and 26 years after the start of the Second Weltkrieg in 1940 which once again plunged the world into death and destruction on a scale unseen before in history. Though the grudging and reluctant cooperation between the German-led Riechpakt and the Entente remnants, the Syndicalist Internationale's dreams of a World Revolution lay in tatters, and the National Populist Russian States hunger for conquest and revanchism crushed. As the guns once again felt silent in the year 1945, the exhausted and war-wary people of the world who had seen their lives upended time and again over the past few decades overlooked a seemingly return from the new to the old antebellum order before the First Weltkrieg : A multipolar world of rival geopolitical blocs and web of alliances... But with a twist:
Despite the lost of their influence in the Asia Pacific, not to mention the damages that it has suffered during the war, the German Empire and her allies stands dominant as the foremost economic and military power of the world. While the newly restored Entente powers of Britain and France, once the dominant powers of last century that have just regaining their homelands from the revolutionaries, found themselves now as the scrappy upstarts, determined to reclaim their place under the sun...
Yet beyond the powers of old, new powers have also arisen from the ashes: America, China, the Ottomans, Austria Hungary.... Nations that had once been dismissed as nothing but ramshackle walking corpses, have all seemingly emerged form their long agony. Reinvigorated, reenergized, and seemingly stronger then even, they were all determined to make a place for themselves in the world by leveraging their new found industrial, economic, and military might.
The pessimistic feared that another Weltkrieg might be inevitable, one that will once again engulf the globe in the fires of war, this time with deadlier weapons surpassing those used in the Second Weltkrieg... yet for now, their fears seem to be unfounded. Seemingly tired of sending millions of their sons and fathers to die every generation, combined with the threat of mutual nuclear annihilation, the promised new era of peace and cooperation agreed upon by all parties during the 1949 Congress of Verdun have held. While rivalries, competition, and the occasional covert action or proxy conflicts does still take place from time to time, on the whole, the post WK2 world is one of relative clam and stability, compared to the absolute chaos and earth shaking changes around every corner in the 1920s and 30s.
This is an age of globalization and free trade, replacing the zero-dum mercantilist economic system of old, which many argued was what created the conditions leading to the rise of radicalism in the first place, which directly led to WK2. An age of technological advancement and consumerist plenty, as best exemplified by families gathered around their living room televisions, watching footage of the United States of America putting the first human to ever journey into outer space in the year 1963, putting beyond all doubt that the country that once fell into a Second Civil War back in 1936 have fully recovered from its decline.
... Yet things might not be as stable as the optimistic and the naive might wish to believe. Even beyond the borders of the Indochinese Union, the last remaining syndicalist holdout in the world, in the jungles of South America, the mines of Kataga, the squatter camps in South Africa, the textile mills of Port Said, the sweat tips of Central America, and even the working class tenements and student dormitories of Chicago, London, and Paris, the specter of syndicalism might not be as dead and buried as some might wish to think. In the divided and broken land that was once Russia, radical ranging from Neo-Bolshevik to diehard loyalists of Savinkov's old regime wish to average they utter humiliation of their defeated nation. And in Africa and Southeast Asia, while decolonization have taken place for most of the world, France and Portugal stubbornly held on to their remaining colonial possessions, and even for countries that have formally been decolonized, considering the continued economic and political influence of their formal overlords, many question if they have truly been granted independence at all.
Will the so-called 'Peace of Verdun' be able to hold? Or will storm clouds gathered once more?
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