Great! That is basically the area where I am from! Ok I lived a bit more to the south of Bremerhaven nearer to Bremen itself, but that is still really close, especially for a tl that started so far away.
Happy to oblige. I was only around there once, a long time ago, but I have good memories of the place.
And I am really interested what will become of Bremerhaven itl if like otl the shipbuilding shrinks and the haven automatises. Both are more or less inevitable in my opinion and have left Bremerhaven as one of the poorest West-German cities.
It does seem inevitable, and the question is whether the city can find some other industry to fill the gap - given that it's one of Germany's most international cities in TTL, maybe banking or media.
Do you think Malagasy cooking would add new smoked fish to its meals and mix it with their own recipes?
Almost certainly - like any immigrant group, they'd pick up the local foods. They'd eat smoked fish over rice (every meal in Madagascar involves rice), possibly with greens and a peanut sauce.
Well, I guess you will need to decide how important the Legion was in Australasia. I would imagine not very as it is both too far and too easy to control young men who were thinking about joining. However there may be migrants post war who were veterans.
It definitely wouldn't have been important during the war: not only was it a long way off, but joining would be treason, which would give pause to many who might otherwise sympathize. There might be some postwar immigrants from Ireland, and maybe also from southern or eastern Europe, who served in the Legion, but they might not be as comfortable stirring the political pot in a new country as they would be at home. Their children might, but by that time the Legion values would be attenuated into a more generalized populism.
Anyway, the Pope actually having a proper army, under arms against the Empire would probably heighten everyone's tensions. The anti Catholic rhetoric already being at a high level IOTL! I wonder if you would see activity akin to what happened to German cultural influence during WW1 in Anglophone countries.
It would be harder to root out a religion than a national culture. There's a reason why the Kulturkampf failed, and I suspect any attempt to repress Catholicism in public life would only last a few years. With that said, though, I could imagine near-Kulturkampf levels of anti-Catholicism in some of the dominions during the war, and hostility to any explicit (or even not-so-explicit) Catholic politics for years afterward.
I'm not sure if you've come across the agricultural labourer /labour leagues movements in England especially during the 1860s-70s, but you may find it interesting either way.
I haven't actually - it's interesting reading.
That was something that gave me pause, and offers some dark implications for Catholics in non-Catholic nations (not just the dominions) ITTL. A lot of anti-Catholic conspiracy theories had, at their core, the idea that the Roman Catholic Church was at least as much a political organization as a religious one, that Catholics were more loyal to the Church than to their nations, and that they would turn against their host nation on the Church's orders. In OTL, of course, these wild theories proved to be entirely unfounded, but ITTL, the experience of the Church explicitly supporting the FAR powers in the Great War and organizing the Papal Legion to support it, as well as the subsequent rise of political Catholicism in the form of Belgian-style authoritarianism (often stemming from populist Papal Legion veterans), is likely giving a lot of people in Protestant countries pause.
I imagine it would, especially since the dominant form of political Catholicism is anti-nationalist, which would fuel fears of an international Catholic network. I suspect that the postwar popes have tried to mitigate the effect of the Legion by urging Catholics to obey the laws of the countries where they live and to fight for justice within the law, but that will only go so far. I agree that there will be more anti-Catholicism in Protestant countries ITTL than IOTL, although this will probably be social prejudice rather than legal discrimination.
I wonder if Jews might not be a closer analogue than Mormons - Jews are often stereotyped as an international network loyal only to themselves. The "Christians but not like us" attitude would be there, as you say, but anti-Catholic prejudice ITTL might also include many traditional anti-Semitic tropes. I'd also guess that Catholics in Protestant countries would face the same choice between integration/assimilation and separatism that Jews do, and that a movement toward an alternative culture (which I agree would exist, especially where Catholics are a relatively small minority) would be opposed by a movement to become more culturally Protestant than the Protestants. ("More Catholic than the Pope" probably wouldn't work well here.)
I might explore this in a future update, possibly the next time we get around to the United States or the UK.
Update toward the end of the week - among other things, it will feature Wandervögel in southern Africa and an African youth movement that they inspire, because nothing says "1930s German empire" like globetrotting hippies.
