I recently listened to the audiobook edition of Robert Harris’s Fatherland, which takes place in an alternate 1964, where the Nazis won:
The German armies on the Eastern Front launch a major offensive into the Caucasus in 1942, cutting the flow of oil to the Red Army. With its armies immobilized, the USSR surrenders in 1943. German intelligence learns that the British are reading their Enigma code, and sends false intelligence to lure the British fleet to destruction. The U-Boat campaign against the United Kingdom increases, starving Britain into surrender or armistice by 1944. The United States does not invade Europe and withdraws its troops from Britain prior to 1944, and instead concentrates on defeating Japan. Germany tests its first atom bomb in 1946, and also in 1946 forces the U.S. to sign a peace treaty after firing a V-3 missile that explodes above New York City to demonstrate Germany’s ability to attack the U.S. with long-range missiles. Having achieved victory, Germany annexes Eastern Europe and much of the USSR into the Greater German Reich, and corrals the rest of Europe into a pro-German trading bloc, the European Community. The surviving areas of the USSR are deliberately left alone to fight an endless guerrilla war with German forces in the Ural mountains, according to the Nazi belief that a continual war will hold Nazi society together. By 1964, the United States and the Greater German Reich are caught in a Cold War and an arms race to develop more sophisticated nuclear weapons and space technology.
The novel takes place from April 14 to April 20, 1964, as Germany prepares for Adolf Hitler’s 75th birthday celebrations. A visit by the President of the United States, Joseph P. Kennedy, is planned as part of a gradual détente between the United States and the Greater German Reich. The Holocaust has been explained away to the satisfaction of many as merely the relocation of most of the Jewish population to the East into areas where communication and travel are still very poor, explaining why it is impossible for most of their relatives in the West to contact them. Despite this, many Germans are aware — or suspect — that the government has somehow permanently eliminated the Jewish population.
The Greater German Reich stretches from Alsace-Lorraine in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east. Austria, Czechoslovakia, Luxembourg, Poland, the Baltic States, the Ukraine, European Russia, and the areas ceded by Germany under the Treaty of Versailles have all been annexed directly into the Reich. Major cities in the expanded Germany include old German cities such as Berlin (has a population of 10 million in 1964) and Hamburg, but also include newly-annexed cities such as Moscow, Tblisi, Ufa, St. Petersburg, Krakow, and Sevastopol, which has been renamed “Theodorichshafen”. Berlin has been extensively remodelled as Hitler’s “capital of capitals,” designed according to the wishes of Hitler and his top architect, Albert Speer. By 1964, the city boasts gargantuan Nazi monuments such as the Great Hall (which holds over 150,000 people), a mammoth arch inscribed with the names of the German soldiers killed in the two World Wars, and vast, severe, granite civil buildings including Hitler’s vast palace, the Grand Avenue lined with captured Soviet artillery, and the headquarters of the powerless European Union.
The rest of Europe, excluding Switzerland, has been corraled by Germany into a European Economic Community, formed from the nations of Norway, Sweden, Finland (which has absorbed Karelia from Russia), Denmark, Iceland, the United Kingdom (which has absorbed Ireland), France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Holland, Italy (it is unspecified if Mussolini is still in control of Italy), Yugoslavia, a greatly expanded Hungary which has absorbed Slovakia and much of neighbouring Romania, which has returned to its pre-1918 borders, Bulgaria, Albania, an expanded Macedonia, Greece, and Turkey. A European Parliament is based in Berlin but is virtually powerless. At the European Parliament building, the flags of the member states are dwarfed by a large swastika flag, symbolising the immense power that Germany has in the E.C. of 1964. The nations of the E.C., despite being nominally free under their own governments and leaders (such as General Franco and Edward VIII), are closely watched by Germany. Their military forces are only just sufficient to police their empires, they are under constant surveillance by Berlin, and the rest of Europe is subordinate to Germany in all but name. For unknown reasons, Switzerland has not been annexed by the Reich and is not a member of the European Community. As a result, Switzerland in 1964 is the only free country in Europe.
It’s not Bevin Alexander’s strategy for How Hitler Could Have Won World War II, but it’s plausible. They don’t go on to dam the Strait of Gibraltar and drain the Mediterranean as they do in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.
Harris’s emphasis is not on military strategy though. He portrays a 1964 Berlin rather similar to our own, under a different totalitarian regime.
Ahaha. This eagerness of late ?? century wehraboo… they always deliver. =)
From the very start:
Those silly Nazi should have believed in ze Tru German Fighting Spirit some more. They could just, like, march some forces far Southward (and supply them there), no big deal. It’s not like there would be any sort of defense every bit as desperate as Stalingrad fight was, plus an equally frantic counteroffensive to cut their behinds off.
So, uh… did they themselves get that Caucasus oil? That is, just quickly captured and held the place without an entire new guerilla war in those mountains (presumably after easily quelling those annoying Balkans)? Inquiring minds want lulz, etc. Okay, this was published in 1992, before the Chechen wars proved as bad as mucking around in Afghanistan, or mentions of an Armenia-Azerbaijan war required numerals for clarification. But is it humanly possible to read the briefest history of that region and not see just how feisty the entire place can get at the drop of a hat?
Or… no need for that, may as well produce more and more of synthetic fuel for all the imperial needs forever?
Alternative history literature in the West basically revolves around WWII and, to a lesser localized American extent, the Civil War. I always wonder:
1) Do non-Westerners have the same obsession with alternative history?
2a) If so, what eras are their focus?
2b) If not, why?
3) And finally, what are the commonalities in the kinds of eras which are constantly being given, “alternatives?”
The only two alternative histories I can think of that don’t have WWII or the Civil War as their backdrop are the, “Alvin Maker,” series by Orson Scott Card which focuses on an alternative history of the United States in which Oliver Cromwell survived his illness longer and, “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell,” by Susanna Clarke, which considered the Napoleonic Wars, if England had Old English magic available to it.
‘It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.”
? William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust.
If Faulkner was right, Western alt-history goes back to 1492.
Sam Johnson’s ‘Taxation no Tyranny’:
‘In the same year, in a year hitherto disastrous to mankind, by the Portuguese was discovered the passage of the Indies, and by the Spaniards the coast of America.’
…
Had the western continent been discovered between the fourth and tenth century, when all the northern world was in motion; and had navigation been, at that time, sufficiently advanced to make so long a passage easily practicable, there is little reason for doubting, but the intumescence of nations would have found its vent, like all other expansive violence, where there was least resistance; and that Huns and Vandals, instead of fighting their way to the south of Europe, would have gone, by thousands and by myriads, under their several chiefs, to take possession of regions smiling with pleasure, and waving with fertility, from which the naked inhabitants were unable to repel them.’
WWII alternative history endures because people feel in their bones that the bad side won.
Phileas Frogg says:
Depends on your definition of “Westerners”. Between imitations and “a-la local” derivatives. Keeping in mind the phenomenon Sapkowski tagged in “Piróg or there is no gold in Gray Mountains”. Or, as Schlock Mercenary put it: avoiding certain medication is but another flavor of drug problem.
There definitely exist AH that are not direct derivatives of Anglosphere styles.
I cannot remember good ones, however.
There’s certainly some Japanese AU works. Then there’s a question of how much it “counts” for your purpose if AH is not the point, but an easy way to create a setting?
I have read one good AH with a twist: “Missionaries” trilogy by Evgeny Lukin. It’s a “close enough timeline”, where some dudes found a portal somewhere that looked like a pristine archipelago in Western Atlantic. So they eagerly mistook this for time travel and decided “screw the European asshats, let’s give these feisty people some firepower to meet the caravels and a warning”. Which kind of worked, but in the most pear-shaped way possible.
There are many, many alternate history stories about the Nazis winning World War 2.
Isegoria says:
Unsurprisingly. Seeing how it’s the birth of (now dying) New World Order, and what passes for its history is mostly nonsense to begin with. Smoke and mirrors of fairy tales by the Soviet Communists, fairy tales by the American Communists, overcompensation by the “Allies who also won” and puffs from Wehraboo smoking crack already overlap and easily mix into surreal shapes.
German rule only looks good in comparison to banker rule, but it’s more than enough to sustain fantasy.
Robert Harris’s Fatherland makes Nazi German rule look an awful lot like Communist East German rule.
“Robert Harris’s Fatherland makes Nazi German rule look an awful lot like Communist East German rule.”
Socialisms…
The Germans and the Japanese are very similar in many ways, and the Japanese ran their war economy mostly unmodified until Richard Werner arrived just in time to watch the Bank of Japan shiv the Ministry of Finance in the back. Had Germany prevailed, we would expect to see something analogous to or superior than Japanese development during the time period of 1945 to about 1985, less the feministic social aspects that the population controllers deliberately employ to suppress fertility to subreplacement rates.
Bruce says:
Heh. Genres start long before they become fashionable as often as not.
The oldest detective stories AFAIK were parts of the Arabian Nights and even Oedipus Rex.
Kipling’s “As Easy as ABC” (1912) was the sci-fi story in a style very distinct from early ones (whether Verne, Wells, or early pulp era) and closely resembling styles that dominated much later: exposition cut to bare necessity, more organic structure than Conundrum of The Week #14, neither focused on a single gimmick nor a “10 foot LASER pole” style conversion… oh, and it also introduced a gadget that later was dubbed Tractor Beam. For that matter, he had the impending wave of steampunk predicted (and preemptively mocked) back in 1894 in “The King”.
Kipling’s “As Easy as A.B.C.” presents a future that has lived through populist democracy and mob rule.
Speaking of Kipling, Poul Anderson said, “His influence pervades modern science fiction and fantasy writing”:
I just stumbled across this joke:
Isegoria says:
Indeed.
Britain 1.0 suffers from overexertion and senility, Britain 2.0 emerges from the new US revolution all eager to cut the imperial cake, Stalin runs naked military build-up while on “existentially hostile” terms with Brits 1.0 and plays an agreeable fellow for Brits 2.0… Germany is sour due to Versailles, the rest of Europe is chafing, tired or sometimes (Italy) both…
But some people seem to still believe there was any way this mess could avoid going up in flames — if only that one failed artist with a bad case of brain syphilis did not sniff all the fairy dust.