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alternate_history:german_techwank

German Techwank

This refers to the cliché that (mad) scientists of German descent can invent just about anything. The origin of this cliché is probably the multitude of German scientists that immigrated to the US during or after WWII, such as Albert Einstein and Wernher von Braun, or to Argentina, like Kurt Tank. In fiction, the cliche is also ripe, as many mad scientists have a German accent. Another very prominent example is Dr. Strangelove (“Merkwürdigliebe”) from Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove - How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.


In AH.com Culture

On AH.com, humorously discussed examples of this phenomennon include the CGI of the Luftwaffe, and more recently, A.I.s in World War One (the latter being a reference to the game Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, where the A.I. threw artillery at you in droves, but never actually attacked anything). As Thande had noted, the first idea would explain where the Nazi era Luftwaffe got the computers for their CGI from, since the Imperial German Reichswehr had apparently developed A.I.s 25 years earlier.


In AH.com Fiction

The cliché was also lampooned in the AH.com The Series episode Hair Today Götterdämmerung Tomorrow, where The Germans simply reply “German Scientists?” upon the question of how they built their spaceship starting from 1940s technology.


See Also

Wehraboo - AH.com slang term for a person who is an obsessive fan of the notion that Nazi Germany had the best and brightest armed forces in the entire history of the universe.

Operation Sealion - Another AH cliché, with a basis in an implausible OTL plan of Nazi Germany for a naval invasion of the United Kingdom, which AH noobs commonly overrate to no end.


alternate_history/german_techwank.txt · Last modified: 2019/03/29 15:13 by 127.0.0.1

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