Es Geloybte Aretz - a Germanwank
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I'm certain that this song does exists in OTL, because such songs were not uncommon during both World Wars.
The difference between black marketeer and quite legal war profiteering is usually a matter of scale...
It's a slightly different version of a real WWI song that folklore has remoulded and remodelled countless times. It is still sung (AFAIK even officially) in the Bundeswehr and OTL's version uncontroversially celebrates the infantry.
this is a traditional, rather - ommpah-ish - rendering
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpPXw7KT44g
lyrics according to volksliederarchiv, taken from a modern military songbook
http://www.volksliederarchiv.de/text1222.html
The point here is, of course, that instead of the traditional senior arm of the Prussian military (the infantry) or the heroes of the upper classes (the cavalry), we see popular culture in Germany increasingly celebrating, positively fanboying over, the technical branches, artillery, engineers, machine gunners, gas troops, airshipmen and, of course, the navy.
THat will have consequences down the road because these branches are dominated by the non-traditional classes. The officer corps in both the navy and the artillery/corps du genie is predominantly petit bourgeois, the NCO cadre mainly artisan and industrial working class. These are exactly the people the traditional leadership took great pains to not allow anywhere near real influence.
The difference between black marketeer and quite legal war profiteering is usually a matter of scale...
And who you know. In this case, though, the business is unequivocally illegal. It's the usual story: in times of war and famine, farmers can leverage their control of scarce resources. State rationing is undercut or ignored. Desperate non-landowners offer whatever they have for food. And of course the men who actually keep the looting enemy from the farms of those profiteers tend to resent their wives and children starving at home. THis, BTW, is one of the reasons Dzerzhinski and the NSB continue to enjoy widespread popularity. The bourgeois intelligentsia may indulge in their bucolic fantasy of rural bliss, but to most people in Poland, landless labourers, proletariat, artisans and small businessowners, men like the innkeeper are the enemy, getting fat on their suffering.
Most man in Poland? I cant find any statistics and i know that Poland was one of the more industrialized parts of Russia but i think that Poland around this time was still more of an agricultural country. I know that a big part of the people living from agriculture are the landless agricultural workers but they too shoudnt be in that bad of a position. What i mean is that a lot of people are in the armies so there is a shortage of working hands meaning that those who are still there can make a pretty good deal for themselfs. I think the bigger rift should be between the rural and urban Poland cause those who really suffer will be those in the cities.
Doesn't Poland still have a currency crisis? I would expect urban Poland has access to a small amount of money but little other than what food is brought in not going to the army, while rural Poland (the part not near the army or their supply lines) has food but difficult access to any money.
The urban/rural divide is very strong, but keep in mind Poland is also divided between the land the Russians despoiled and the part they did not, and the population has been brutally uprooted by war. There are now hundreds of thousands more people living in cities and towns that before the war. Huge numbers of refugees were driven from the eastern parts by the advancing Russians and ended up in the salient the NA was able to defend, or in Germany proper. This pool of floating labour depends on some form of employment. A lot of them will never be able to return to their original homes, their houses destroyed and the rural communities torn apart. All of them at some point or other faced the choice of having to give up some prized possession for a paltry amount of food, or go hungry. Many are recruited for the labour brigades or go to Germany as agricultural labourers, competing for wages with Russian POWs. There is a lot of resentment of those whose communities and land holdings are still intact here. They feel that they gave all while the fat cat landowners gave nothing.
Doesn't Poland still have a currency crisis? I would expect urban Poland has access to a small amount of money but little other than what food is brought in not going to the army, while rural Poland (the part not near the army or their supply lines) has food but difficult access to any money.
The situation is even worse than just a currency crisis. It's a humanitarian disaster in the middle of a war. Basically, you have a government with no real institutional grip trying to acquire the resources to fight its war and feed its population while having neither a working currency nor a tax base. Meanwhile, the Germans, who have these things, are being unhelpful at best.
The established urban population is squeezed, with many young men away at war (recruitment for the NA was always more urban than rural). Industrial workers supplying the war get rations on top of their pay (which is often given in barter goods or IOUs), so they get along most days. But with masses of refugfees cramoped into the cities, many of them rural and desperate, competition for labour is fierce and prices sky-high. Many depend on charity funelled mostly through religious communities to survive. Meanwhile, the Army Council is organising work gangs you can be drafted into if you're an able-bodied man or unattached woman with no proof of employment. Given conditions in those gangs, employers have enormous power over their staff. The threat of dismissal is often enough. Of course most urban employers are also squeezed. Either they go into the black market or produce for the war, otherwise their business is dead (and war production is mainly paid in paper zlotys, so you really need either a class I contract that gets paid in mark or black market contacts to survive).
In the countryside, you have a similarly stark divide. Owners of large farms or estates were often left unmolested by the Russians even in conquered areas (because they dealt with officers instead of troops, and on the assumption these people might be needed to run the country post-war), while smallholders were burned out, massacred, or fled. Landless labourers and newly homeless ex-tenants are at a great disadvantage. Some gentlemen farmers are parlaying their position as employers into near-feudal powers. Tenancies are unfilled or auctioned to the highest bidder. Smallholders must sell or mortgage their land to eat, or lose it to neighbours while they are stuck in refugee camps. A consolidation was due, and landlords use the war to accomplish it. Some people gain, but it's down to luck and unscrupulousness, and most lose out.
And of course the corner that the Russian army did not reach - the salient that the NA defended at Skiernewicze and along the Vistula - still has functioning rural communities with crops in the field and cattle in the stables. These people are making money hand over fist selling to the urban centres and refugee camps - at least those that own the land, not the labourers whose wages are depressed by competing with refugees and who - as 'autarkic rurals' - do not get ration cards.
It is hard to overstate just how sucky life is east of Germany right now.
If this TL is a "wank" then what will be a "screw" look like?I sometimes wonder if you remember you called this timeline a 'wank' for anyone
I sometimes wonder if you remember you called this timeline a 'wank' for anyone
(granted, the actual World Wars were also terrible).
Well, it's a long-term plan.
If this TL is a "wank" then what will be a "screw" look like?
Can you imagine a world where Germany, instead of fighting Russia, faces a two-front war, still manages to drag out the fighting for four years, but ends up defeated. Where, as a result of the damage of that war, all of Central and Eastern Europe and the Middle East are thrown into disarray, civil wars abound and totalitarian governments emerge that will end up causing another, even more horrible war? One where the Jews of Europe are almost completely wiped out in a campaign of deliberate murder and half the continent is soaked in blood as brutal dictators battle it out, and in the end a Russian-based police state enslaves everybody east of the Elbe for fourty years? Where the fallout of the Middle Eastern crisis and the Zionist project still regularly causes wars and terrorism?
That'd be a screw.
If this TL is a "wank" then what will be a "screw" look like?
That's not a screw. That's bukkake at a bug hunter convention.
Thanks but OTL was a screw enough. Especially if you live in the right place.
Actually, there were some threads trying to do a Tepes, making worse than OTL (with ww1 and peace treaties).
Well, making it worse is manageable, but not that easy and needs much of l'art pour l'art clusterfucking, just for the giggles.
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