Es Geloybte Aretz Continuation Thread
- Thread starter carlton_bach
- Start date
Yes, but not on any great scale. Zeppelin lines will connect Germany's colonies to the motherland to great fanfare, only to be quietly consigned to an existence as rich people's toys. Colonial service airships will be replaced by aeroplanes as their superior performance becomes evident. And eventually, the last of these great airships will end their service lives as glorified cruise ships taking the upper crust on photo safaris of the interior.
Not a happy one.
South Africa (which is bound to unify for economic as much as political reasons) has all kinds of interesting potential, and with more white settlement the eventual reforms are likely to become more contentious and difficult. But on the plus side, without a World War and a Communist Bloc, the reformist forces will have to draw on a shared platform of values.
Rarely has a disagreement over strategic plans been as thoroughly misunderstood as the purported rift in the Prussian Great General Staff. By the traditional account, the German military was all but paralysed as proponents of a large conscript army with great strategic depth - the Goltzianer led by Field Marshal Colmar von der Goltz – clashed with believers in a technological warfare of movement – the Falkenhayner around General Erich von Falkenhayn. Officers found themselves forced to take sides, orthodoxies imposed on the respective followings, careers ruined, institutions fought over and ultimately turned to the defence of their side’s doctrine against the enemy within. As the combatants vied for the emperor’s ear, control over the General Staff, the Militärkabinett , the Statistischer Dienst and the Wehrtechnisches Amt became the commanding heights contested with every weapon of bureaucratic infighting.
Recent research into Germany’s military leadership has comprehensively demolished this view, though most informed observers were unwilling to lend much credence to the assertions well prior to the 1990s, not least because, as US military attaché Douglas MacArthur observed in 1919, Falkenhayn and von der Goltz were remarkably close friends for people who were supposed to hate each other’s guts. Today, with access to a considerable amount of archival documents opened to researchers for the first time, we can paint a clearer picture of the internal politics that the military historian Hans Delbrück memorably called the only war Germany lost.
In his study of staff officer careers between 1908 and 1935, Olaf Kelterbaum (Kassel) lays out the complex networks that enabled professional advancement in an age when a surplus of decorated veterans competed for a growing, but still limited number of intellectually demanding and increasingly specialised positions. As academic qualifications became increasingly central to rising in the ranks, ambitious officers forged alliances and systematically built up the reputation of the places they received their credentials from. In the process, Lichtenfelde was increasingly eclipsed by the Kriegsschule in Kassel, the Wehrtechnisches Amt, and the various technical officer schools established after the war. This was viewed as a threat by the established senior arms – the infantry and especially the cavalry – and provoked a response in which veteran officers emphasised the importance of character, experience and leadership skills over technical expertise. This debate, carried on in the media of the day, did much to solidify the idea of a struggle between technocrats and traditionalists.
The essays by Harold Lynn (Sandhurst) and Hans Martin von Sadow (Freiburg) both look at technological developments from the perspective of their budgetary and logistical constraints. Lynn’s longitudinal study of the development of Germany’s armoured fighting vehicles highlights the administrative problems that beset their integration into the army’s structure. He traces it from the decision, made in 1907, to place the then experimental Geschützkettenwagen (GKW or G-Wagen) in the command structure of the field artillery while the lighter Panzerkraftwagen (PzKW or Panzerautos) were only transferred from the train troops to the infantry in 1923. Unlike in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the German cavalry was left uninvolved with the development of motorised warfare and developed an institutional opposition to it that lasted into the 1940s. To this day, German ‘cavalry’ regiments are mainly light infantry formations with a scouting or air-mobile function while British hussars and dragoons are mechanised. Without the strong push for high speeds and long ranges, German armoured doctrine focused on Durchbruchstaktik, the ability to overcome enemy defences, leaving the question what to do afterwards – Ausbruchstaktik – in the hands of cavalry and infantry planners. This division of resources led to the development of rugged, but slow GKWs and fast, but vulnerable PzKWs that served the army ill in the coming war.
The work of von Sadow focuses on another example frequently cited, the programme to replace the G98 rifle. The eventual outcome leaving the primary weapon of the German soldier a bolt-action rifle despite a strong portfolio in automatic and semi-automatic weapons research, is often cast as an example of technophobia by the Goltzian faction. In fact, it was mainly owed to the desire to produce a single primary weapon that could be used across all arms and supplied to allies, cutting down supply and training costs and reducing logistical burdens. The Karabiner 35, based on the familiar Mauser action, though lighter and shorter than the G98, proved a versatile and reliable weapon that the infantry successfully complemented with the MPi 08/27 and eventually, the ground-breaking MG 46.
Aaron Pavelcyk (City University of New York) draws attention to a relatively underresearched topic, the technology transfer relationship between the German military and those of its allies. Using reports from observers and instructors in Poland, Finland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire as well as instructions and contract stipulations from the Wehrtechnisches Amt recently declassified, he shows that the needs of allied forces frequently figured more prominently in German armaments programmes than was acknowledged at the time. In several cases, weapon designs were altered to address the needs of allies whose armies faced harsher climates, more forbidding terrains and less educated recruit intakes than Germany.
Finally, Ortrud Schwerdtfeger (Munich), a literary scholar, looks at contemporary media depictions of soldiers. Her assertion is that public perception was skewed by a continuing cult of the war veteran that combined admiration for physical and emotional toughness (“Härte”) with an emphasis on suffering, underpinning widespread disdain for the “cosseted existence” of soldiers in the post-war military. This narrative was particularly developed in the Völkische press of the 1910s and 1920s and helped instil the widespread attitude that modern technology made soldiers less qualified to withstand the rigours of true war.
The editors finally argue the conclusion that what is currently widely depicted as an internal doctrinal conflict in fact consisted of a careful and often successful balancing between competing and often mutually exclusive strategic and logistical demands under considerable fiscal constraint: For Germany to use its technological superiority, it had to secure a broad social base for its military and strategic depth to its defences through the integration of allies. This meant reducing technological complexity to what could be sustained at that breadth, even at the cost of sacrificing added performance. Staff officers at the time understood this, but used the publicly fought arguments to further their careers by developing public personas as technological experts or battle-hardened leaders, roles that were often at odds with their biographies. That familiar figure of mid-century German politics, the politische General, has its antecedents in these men.
(Foreword to Gerhardt Kuhnen and Douglas A. Andrews (eds.): Lions and Foxes; The German General Staff of the Interwar Years, USDA publications, West Point 2007)
Recent research into Germany’s military leadership has comprehensively demolished this view, though most informed observers were unwilling to lend much credence to the assertions well prior to the 1990s, not least because, as US military attaché Douglas MacArthur observed in 1919, Falkenhayn and von der Goltz were remarkably close friends for people who were supposed to hate each other’s guts. Today, with access to a considerable amount of archival documents opened to researchers for the first time, we can paint a clearer picture of the internal politics that the military historian Hans Delbrück memorably called the only war Germany lost.
In his study of staff officer careers between 1908 and 1935, Olaf Kelterbaum (Kassel) lays out the complex networks that enabled professional advancement in an age when a surplus of decorated veterans competed for a growing, but still limited number of intellectually demanding and increasingly specialised positions. As academic qualifications became increasingly central to rising in the ranks, ambitious officers forged alliances and systematically built up the reputation of the places they received their credentials from. In the process, Lichtenfelde was increasingly eclipsed by the Kriegsschule in Kassel, the Wehrtechnisches Amt, and the various technical officer schools established after the war. This was viewed as a threat by the established senior arms – the infantry and especially the cavalry – and provoked a response in which veteran officers emphasised the importance of character, experience and leadership skills over technical expertise. This debate, carried on in the media of the day, did much to solidify the idea of a struggle between technocrats and traditionalists.
The essays by Harold Lynn (Sandhurst) and Hans Martin von Sadow (Freiburg) both look at technological developments from the perspective of their budgetary and logistical constraints. Lynn’s longitudinal study of the development of Germany’s armoured fighting vehicles highlights the administrative problems that beset their integration into the army’s structure. He traces it from the decision, made in 1907, to place the then experimental Geschützkettenwagen (GKW or G-Wagen) in the command structure of the field artillery while the lighter Panzerkraftwagen (PzKW or Panzerautos) were only transferred from the train troops to the infantry in 1923. Unlike in the Anglo-Saxon countries, the German cavalry was left uninvolved with the development of motorised warfare and developed an institutional opposition to it that lasted into the 1940s. To this day, German ‘cavalry’ regiments are mainly light infantry formations with a scouting or air-mobile function while British hussars and dragoons are mechanised. Without the strong push for high speeds and long ranges, German armoured doctrine focused on Durchbruchstaktik, the ability to overcome enemy defences, leaving the question what to do afterwards – Ausbruchstaktik – in the hands of cavalry and infantry planners. This division of resources led to the development of rugged, but slow GKWs and fast, but vulnerable PzKWs that served the army ill in the coming war.
The work of von Sadow focuses on another example frequently cited, the programme to replace the G98 rifle. The eventual outcome leaving the primary weapon of the German soldier a bolt-action rifle despite a strong portfolio in automatic and semi-automatic weapons research, is often cast as an example of technophobia by the Goltzian faction. In fact, it was mainly owed to the desire to produce a single primary weapon that could be used across all arms and supplied to allies, cutting down supply and training costs and reducing logistical burdens. The Karabiner 35, based on the familiar Mauser action, though lighter and shorter than the G98, proved a versatile and reliable weapon that the infantry successfully complemented with the MPi 08/27 and eventually, the ground-breaking MG 46.
Aaron Pavelcyk (City University of New York) draws attention to a relatively underresearched topic, the technology transfer relationship between the German military and those of its allies. Using reports from observers and instructors in Poland, Finland, Romania, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire as well as instructions and contract stipulations from the Wehrtechnisches Amt recently declassified, he shows that the needs of allied forces frequently figured more prominently in German armaments programmes than was acknowledged at the time. In several cases, weapon designs were altered to address the needs of allies whose armies faced harsher climates, more forbidding terrains and less educated recruit intakes than Germany.
Finally, Ortrud Schwerdtfeger (Munich), a literary scholar, looks at contemporary media depictions of soldiers. Her assertion is that public perception was skewed by a continuing cult of the war veteran that combined admiration for physical and emotional toughness (“Härte”) with an emphasis on suffering, underpinning widespread disdain for the “cosseted existence” of soldiers in the post-war military. This narrative was particularly developed in the Völkische press of the 1910s and 1920s and helped instil the widespread attitude that modern technology made soldiers less qualified to withstand the rigours of true war.
The editors finally argue the conclusion that what is currently widely depicted as an internal doctrinal conflict in fact consisted of a careful and often successful balancing between competing and often mutually exclusive strategic and logistical demands under considerable fiscal constraint: For Germany to use its technological superiority, it had to secure a broad social base for its military and strategic depth to its defences through the integration of allies. This meant reducing technological complexity to what could be sustained at that breadth, even at the cost of sacrificing added performance. Staff officers at the time understood this, but used the publicly fought arguments to further their careers by developing public personas as technological experts or battle-hardened leaders, roles that were often at odds with their biographies. That familiar figure of mid-century German politics, the politische General, has its antecedents in these men.
(Foreword to Gerhardt Kuhnen and Douglas A. Andrews (eds.): Lions and Foxes; The German General Staff of the Interwar Years, USDA publications, West Point 2007)
The German "tank" doctrine sounds a little like OTL inter war british doctrine?
Its interesting that A-H (or sucessor states and Ruthenia are not mentioned as German "allies"...
One thing I don't understand : Why does France think it is no longer threatened by the Germans? - and thus concentrates on naval expansion?
Its interesting that A-H (or sucessor states and Ruthenia are not mentioned as German "allies"...
One thing I don't understand : Why does France think it is no longer threatened by the Germans? - and thus concentrates on naval expansion?
A million Germans died and now they're at more or less manpower parity.
Not *tech parity* or *experience parity* though
Please, please, please let there be a Tale of the Seaboard.
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That is the inspiration, and it comes from a similar place (first to field, limited usefulness, but great hopes....)
Skoda is the reason, pretty much. Austria-Hungary does not depend on Germany for its armaments, they make their own (and often of higher quality than the Germans).
Pretty much this. The French were terrified of the idea that a German juggernaut would roll over their eastern border, considering a ruinous three-year consription term and scraping the bottom of the manpower barrel. But that was before the great bloodletting. Now, Germany has about as deep a reservoir or recruits and (more importantly) reservists as they do, and will take about 15 years to replenish the latter (the former is faster, but also less relevant). In addition, of course, to being broke - conventional wisdom holds that having the amount of debt Germany carries is flat-out impossible.
Of course, part of it is also politics. Clemenceau does not want a war, he is happy with peace that leaves France her considerable winnings. But he also knows that tensions are real and he needs to be prepared. For both domestic and strategic reasons, if he must risk war, he would rather risk it with Britain (which he trusts to be amenable to a compromise peace after a few battles) than Germany (which just might conclude that peace in Paris).
Not sure... I'd no particular intention of developing that incident, though. THe usual way an early 1900s debt crisis went, I suppose. Royal Navy acting high-handed, US interests touched, Hearst press getting touchy...
How are the economists trying to explain this? Will there be a Great Depression ITTL, now that Germany seems to be paving the way for fiat currency earlier than RL?
They will keep claim Germany are a few years from collapse and will do so for decades, as example (Anglosphere) economist have claimed that the French economy will collapse in a few years for the last 200 years.
Ostafrika – Risen from the Ruin of War
It was the misfortune of Governor Solf that his approach of government through established native systems, which was successfully implemented elsewhere, came to Ostafrika at exactly the time when these native systems of governance were torn apart by the impact of war. With the exception of commerce raiding and the desultory shelling of Swakopmund by Russian cruisers, Germany’s other colonial holdings were mostly unaffected by the hostilities and experienced administrative continuity. Ostafrika was devastated not so much by the actual invasion or a brief occupation that was characterised more by incompetence than malevolence, but by the economic and social impact of warfare on a society that was still operating largely at the subsistence level and unable to meet the demands of a modern war. We still do not know how many people died as a result of the Russo-German War in the colony, but estimates go as high as 100,000, the majority of them victims of hunger, disease and overwork.
The war, familiar to most Germans through the highly romanticised accounts by Ludendorff (Heia Safari) and Johannes (Kriegszug nach Lindi), ensured that Berlin’s interest was initially military in focus and gave the Schutztruppe command disproportionately large influence against the civilian government in the years up to 1913. Funds were scarce, but could still be made available when crises arose, and the romantic appeal of fighting picturesque enemies in a tropical setting drew volunteers enough to the colonial forces. Many veterans vied for positions providing security for plantations and other colonial ventures, prompting a minor immigration spike that brought the number of Germans resident in the colony to about 8,000, most of them concentrated in the northern highlands and the coastal cities. This stream quickly ebbed after the military command was withdrawn and the pacification of the colony handed over to a succession of civilian governors under great fiscal constraint.
Solf, the architect of the colony’s most successful years, left under a cloud in 1915, having dedicated the latter years of his tenure to a vain attempt to stabilise the native rulers he had based his government on. As budget cuts bit into the central government’s ability to control local affairs effectively, forcing the dissolution of five Askari regiments by 1920, the colony’s management increasingly devolved to its local elites – German settlers in the northern highlands, Arab traders along the coast, and a mix of declining native chieftains and ambitious veterans whom the war had made wealthy in the southern interior. All attempts to shore up effective central governance by tapping new sources of revenue were foiled by a pernicious combination of tax avoidance (the government had allowed tax liabilities to be bought off for years in advance), high inflation, and increasing security costs.
Solf’s immediate successor Walter von St Paul-Illaire attempted to make the best of a bad situation by embracing what he considered the British style of government through privileged ‘martial castes’, a job for which he had selected the Hehe and Maasai. His optimistic assertion that it would thus be possible to forgo the use of Askari entirely, leaving the colony to be policed cheaply by German-officered native forces, was comprehensively dashed when Hehe troops changed sides in a local rebellion in 1918. Though the defectors were captured and forced back into service, this breach of trust poisoned the atmosphere. The Maasai uprising in the following year, mostly supported by refugees from the British colony of Kenya where their lands had been confiscated, put paid to the idea and led to the governor’s recall after a mere three years in office.
Selected for his post by the Emperor himself and promoted over more experienced men, Franz Eduard Walter (from 1923 onwards von Walter) became Ostafrika’s most successful, but also its most controversial governor. An Orientalist by training, fluent in Suaheli and Arabic, and with previous experience managing the business of a major shipping concern, he was seen as the ideal choice by a pro-business colonial faction in Berlin. His remit from the start was to reduce tensions, head off potentially costly conflict, and make the colony profitable. He succeeded in the first two, but – like all other governors – failed at the third. No German government was ever able to make Ostafrika pay its own way.
Unlike Solf and von Paul-St. Illaire, Walter decided to base his government on the very people that his predecessors had abhorred – the deracinated African populace (“entwurzelte Mischbevölkerung”) of the coastal districts. His good fortune was that with the defeat of the Maasai, no major rebellions would take place for the coming decades and he was able to dedicate himself to the development of the colonial economy. His tenure saw a renewed spurt of railway building, the expansion of cash crop cultivation through native intermediaries, and a strong state investment in education, much of it funded and provided by religious charities, but fostered and protected by the government. German settlers in the northern highlands opposed many of these ideas and were eventually able to secure a degree of self-government that allowed them to escape the more unpopular measures (ban on private corporal punishment, free movement of labour, abolition of forced labour on private estates).
Economically successful, Walter was able to ride out a series of political attacks on his policies by settler organisations and missionary orders. His political allies were the colonial trading and mining companies, the German liberal parties, and the coastal Arab and Indian populations whose business interests coincided with his reforms. It was said that while few people became seriously rich in Ostafrika, many managed to achieve modest wealth, and it was mostly the coastal Arabs and their inland partners who did so. In the absence of a strong settler population, most of the day-to-day running of the colony lay in the hands of its educated natives which, especially in the first generation, meant its Arab elites and war veterans who used contacts and skills acquired in military service to establish themselves in business or gain employment with German companies. This also laid the groundwork for one of German colonialism’s inadvertent successes, the largely peaceful Islamisation of southern Tanganyika. The key skills for advancement in the new world – literacy, numeracy, and Suaheli – could be best acquired in one of the many charitable waqf schools that the German government were scrupulous to treat exactly like missionary establishments. Yet where Christian schools mostly took in abandoned children and taught them a demanding and counterintuitive curriculum designed to instil love for the Kaiser and gratitude towards the German settlers, the madrassas readily accepted ambitious adults and offered specific courses in commercially useful skills. In the long run, this was instrumental in creating a rift between the mostly Muslim commercial elite of the country and its mainly Christian, German-educated native bureaucrat class.
Ostafrika flourished economically during the 1920s, and the Berlin government permitted Walter great latitude in taxing the increasing wealth and ploughing the revenues back into railways, schools and port facilities. The connection of the Tanganyika railways with the Cape-to-Cairo railway and the French Trans-Congo rail allowed Daressalam to eclipse Zanzibar in the 1920s, becoming one of East Africa’s most vibrant trading ports. The city was dominated socially and economically by a modernised, commercially-minded class of Arab and Indian businesspeople whose wealth funded its remarkable collection of modernist buildings. Its port handled the growing export of cotton, sesame, sisal, gold, nickel and coffee as well as the even faster-growing imports to meet the demand of a population coming to appreciate the possibilities of being tied into the global economy. For Berlin, the colony never turned a profit.
It was the misfortune of Governor Solf that his approach of government through established native systems, which was successfully implemented elsewhere, came to Ostafrika at exactly the time when these native systems of governance were torn apart by the impact of war. With the exception of commerce raiding and the desultory shelling of Swakopmund by Russian cruisers, Germany’s other colonial holdings were mostly unaffected by the hostilities and experienced administrative continuity. Ostafrika was devastated not so much by the actual invasion or a brief occupation that was characterised more by incompetence than malevolence, but by the economic and social impact of warfare on a society that was still operating largely at the subsistence level and unable to meet the demands of a modern war. We still do not know how many people died as a result of the Russo-German War in the colony, but estimates go as high as 100,000, the majority of them victims of hunger, disease and overwork.
The war, familiar to most Germans through the highly romanticised accounts by Ludendorff (Heia Safari) and Johannes (Kriegszug nach Lindi), ensured that Berlin’s interest was initially military in focus and gave the Schutztruppe command disproportionately large influence against the civilian government in the years up to 1913. Funds were scarce, but could still be made available when crises arose, and the romantic appeal of fighting picturesque enemies in a tropical setting drew volunteers enough to the colonial forces. Many veterans vied for positions providing security for plantations and other colonial ventures, prompting a minor immigration spike that brought the number of Germans resident in the colony to about 8,000, most of them concentrated in the northern highlands and the coastal cities. This stream quickly ebbed after the military command was withdrawn and the pacification of the colony handed over to a succession of civilian governors under great fiscal constraint.
Solf, the architect of the colony’s most successful years, left under a cloud in 1915, having dedicated the latter years of his tenure to a vain attempt to stabilise the native rulers he had based his government on. As budget cuts bit into the central government’s ability to control local affairs effectively, forcing the dissolution of five Askari regiments by 1920, the colony’s management increasingly devolved to its local elites – German settlers in the northern highlands, Arab traders along the coast, and a mix of declining native chieftains and ambitious veterans whom the war had made wealthy in the southern interior. All attempts to shore up effective central governance by tapping new sources of revenue were foiled by a pernicious combination of tax avoidance (the government had allowed tax liabilities to be bought off for years in advance), high inflation, and increasing security costs.
Solf’s immediate successor Walter von St Paul-Illaire attempted to make the best of a bad situation by embracing what he considered the British style of government through privileged ‘martial castes’, a job for which he had selected the Hehe and Maasai. His optimistic assertion that it would thus be possible to forgo the use of Askari entirely, leaving the colony to be policed cheaply by German-officered native forces, was comprehensively dashed when Hehe troops changed sides in a local rebellion in 1918. Though the defectors were captured and forced back into service, this breach of trust poisoned the atmosphere. The Maasai uprising in the following year, mostly supported by refugees from the British colony of Kenya where their lands had been confiscated, put paid to the idea and led to the governor’s recall after a mere three years in office.
Selected for his post by the Emperor himself and promoted over more experienced men, Franz Eduard Walter (from 1923 onwards von Walter) became Ostafrika’s most successful, but also its most controversial governor. An Orientalist by training, fluent in Suaheli and Arabic, and with previous experience managing the business of a major shipping concern, he was seen as the ideal choice by a pro-business colonial faction in Berlin. His remit from the start was to reduce tensions, head off potentially costly conflict, and make the colony profitable. He succeeded in the first two, but – like all other governors – failed at the third. No German government was ever able to make Ostafrika pay its own way.
Unlike Solf and von Paul-St. Illaire, Walter decided to base his government on the very people that his predecessors had abhorred – the deracinated African populace (“entwurzelte Mischbevölkerung”) of the coastal districts. His good fortune was that with the defeat of the Maasai, no major rebellions would take place for the coming decades and he was able to dedicate himself to the development of the colonial economy. His tenure saw a renewed spurt of railway building, the expansion of cash crop cultivation through native intermediaries, and a strong state investment in education, much of it funded and provided by religious charities, but fostered and protected by the government. German settlers in the northern highlands opposed many of these ideas and were eventually able to secure a degree of self-government that allowed them to escape the more unpopular measures (ban on private corporal punishment, free movement of labour, abolition of forced labour on private estates).
Economically successful, Walter was able to ride out a series of political attacks on his policies by settler organisations and missionary orders. His political allies were the colonial trading and mining companies, the German liberal parties, and the coastal Arab and Indian populations whose business interests coincided with his reforms. It was said that while few people became seriously rich in Ostafrika, many managed to achieve modest wealth, and it was mostly the coastal Arabs and their inland partners who did so. In the absence of a strong settler population, most of the day-to-day running of the colony lay in the hands of its educated natives which, especially in the first generation, meant its Arab elites and war veterans who used contacts and skills acquired in military service to establish themselves in business or gain employment with German companies. This also laid the groundwork for one of German colonialism’s inadvertent successes, the largely peaceful Islamisation of southern Tanganyika. The key skills for advancement in the new world – literacy, numeracy, and Suaheli – could be best acquired in one of the many charitable waqf schools that the German government were scrupulous to treat exactly like missionary establishments. Yet where Christian schools mostly took in abandoned children and taught them a demanding and counterintuitive curriculum designed to instil love for the Kaiser and gratitude towards the German settlers, the madrassas readily accepted ambitious adults and offered specific courses in commercially useful skills. In the long run, this was instrumental in creating a rift between the mostly Muslim commercial elite of the country and its mainly Christian, German-educated native bureaucrat class.
Ostafrika flourished economically during the 1920s, and the Berlin government permitted Walter great latitude in taxing the increasing wealth and ploughing the revenues back into railways, schools and port facilities. The connection of the Tanganyika railways with the Cape-to-Cairo railway and the French Trans-Congo rail allowed Daressalam to eclipse Zanzibar in the 1920s, becoming one of East Africa’s most vibrant trading ports. The city was dominated socially and economically by a modernised, commercially-minded class of Arab and Indian businesspeople whose wealth funded its remarkable collection of modernist buildings. Its port handled the growing export of cotton, sesame, sisal, gold, nickel and coffee as well as the even faster-growing imports to meet the demand of a population coming to appreciate the possibilities of being tied into the global economy. For Berlin, the colony never turned a profit.
Ostafrika under Walter sounds a bit like Clifford's Nigeria IOTL - a shift away from the Proud Warrior Race Guys (who Lugard, who hated the educated Igbo and Yoruba, had favored) and toward the ambitious people of the coasts, along with the first paternalistic steps toward self-government. The complicating factor, of course, is the settlers' colony within a colony - it's a small mercy that they don't end up in de facto control of all Ostafrika like the British settlers in Kenya or Rhodesia, but I expect that the 1920s and 30s saw a lot of migration from the settler-run areas to the more favorable conditions of Ostafrika proper.
The divide between the bureaucratic and commercial elites is also likely to cause trouble if OTL Nigeria is anything to go by.
The divide between the bureaucratic and commercial elites is also likely to cause trouble if OTL Nigeria is anything to go by.
Faeelin
Banned
I'm mreminded of the comment that the British settlers in Kenya hated capitalism more than the natives, because they came to be feudal magnates, not to run commercial farms.
It sounds a lot like Nigeria, but we shouldn't take the comparison to far, inland German East Africa are far more more economic viable than Northern Nigeria, and a major problem in Nigeria are that Northern Nigeria are dominated by large kingdoms, whose kings have had a interest in keeping the area rural and poor to stay in power. Here it more sounds like thecGermans accidental creates a kind of Tanganyikan national identity among the inland groups, and they dominates the army and bureaucracy, while the coast stay more heterodox in identity with a greater global outlook.
In the long run "religious" matters might be the deciding factor - if Christians and Muslims clash then brown matter will hit the rotary device, but if a balance can be maintained then all economic difficulties can be overcome.
In addition I don't think that in any case a country you are currently developing (and not plundering) can be run to make profit - this will take decades and probably only your grandchildren will reap what you sow.
In addition I don't think that in any case a country you are currently developing (and not plundering) can be run to make profit - this will take decades and probably only your grandchildren will reap what you sow.
Without the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Islam will develop differently. Not necessarily better but certainly different.
That was part of my inspiration - not least the irony that a German governor trying to rescue a colony from the failed experiment of running it "the British way" would resolve the issue by adopting actual British policies. But there will be differences mainly because of the established presence of a commercial elite and the absence of major native government structures (when every tribal chief lives in terror of being shot or clubbed by ex-rugaruga who refuse to obey him on anything, he's not much of an authority). But there is not going to be that great a divide between administrators and traders because there will never be enough German-trained missionary school graduates to fill all vacancies. The administrative language of Ostafrika is Suaheli.
The Rufiji and Kilimanjaro area, though - that'll be a big headache come time. Pretty whitewashed villages, neo-Renaissance Lutheran churches, decorative fountains and whipping posts in the village square...
A lot of Germans have very odd ideas of what the colonies are like. Unfortunately, their status means they do not necessarily need to adjust to reality as much as adjust reality to their expectations. This is going to be a constant in German colonial history: The fewer Germans live there, the better things work.
Actually, the new Tanganyikan identity comes mostly from the coast. It's part of the selling point: If you learn nothing, you'll stay a stupid nigger forever (the coastal elite actually think like that, even if they are themselves African). If you get baptised and learn German, you will forever be dependent on the goodwill of white rulers who will never accept you as their equal and need an interpreter almost everywhere. But if you say the shahada and learn Suaheli, you can go anywhere in the colony (and beyond), live as a man among men, and be part of the greater world. Many coastal families have links to the Arabian peninsula, Egypt, and India. Very few newly minted Lutherans will ever see Germany, but thousandsa of people from Daressalam will make the hajj. In the interior, Islam means modernity, equality, and opportunity. (It's not reallky like that, but it can feel that way, even if you just end up a night porter at a seedy hotel in Lindi)
Ultimately, there won't be enough Christians to make a civil war. And with the Islamic identity so stronmgly overlapping a 'native' one, it's not likely there'll be too much nastiness (though the colonial bureaucrats will not be overly welcome come independence, many moving to germany once this is permitted)
THere is no way to make a profit here without robbery, and Germany won't countenance the initial investment required to rob efficiently.
German coloniual administrators are very impressed with the Ottomans, and this translates into a sometimes excessive Islamophilia. At some polint, someone should point out to them that the beautiful new madrassas popping up all over Ostafrika are mostly staffed by Indian-trained clergy.
... and patrols to keep the natives from leaving, because otherwise they'd all move to Daressalam?
Ouch. I'm assuming that the settler families won't be welcome to stay after independence.
It'll be interesting when their African employees start showing up in Cairo, the west coast of India, and the Trucial States well ahead of OTL's schedule.
That would be the train from Kampala to Kisangani, boat down to Brazzaville, train to Point Noir Trans-Congo rail ?