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#11 |
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Land of the Beer, Home of the Dirndls
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#12 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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The German Empire fared very badly in the Thirty Years' War. There were plenty of attempts at peace before the Peace of Westphalia. What if the peace left the central power strengthened rather than weakened?
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“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” Marcus Aurelius Author of Winged Folk. The GURPS Discord. Drop by and say hi! |
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#13 |
Join Date: Aug 2005
Location: Portland, Oregon
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Why can't you believe it? Does being born on the northeastern border of Germany somehow endow you with a magic spell of infinite wickedness?
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"The navy could probably win a war without coffee but would prefer not to try"-Samuel Eliot Morrison |
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#14 |
Join Date: Nov 2008
Location: Cary, NC, USA, Earth
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I'm floored at how fast and detailed these replies are coming in! Thank you all so much, and, please, keep them coming!
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#15 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA
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My pet alt-history would lead to just this world.
March 1917, February Revolution in Russia, a land so backwards it wasn't yet March. Alexander Kerensky heads the Provisional Government. In our timeline, he's a total nitwit: he keeps Russia in the war to get support from England and France. In the alt-timeline, he gets a clue: he pulls Russia out of the war. Germany gets Courland and some of Poland (use the border the Nazis used for Poland proper), independent Poland and Lithuania get German kings, the Habsburgs get some of Western Ukraine. Then it's mop up work for where things are going well for the Central Powers: Romania loses a little borderland to Hungary and Dobruja to Bulgaria but gets Bessarabia from Russia. Serbia and Montenegro are incorporated into the Triple Monarchy, the Kingdom of Jugoslavia being Montenegro, Croatia-Slavonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Serbia other than Kosovo, which goes to Albania, and Macedonia, which goes to Bulgaria, which also gets some of Greek Macedonia. Austria gets some of Venice that it lost in the 1860s. Now the troops rush to the Western Front. The Americans are still getting ready, so England and France get the picture after a few one-sided battles, England settling early so it keeps it's colonial empire intact. France now feels back stabbed and loses some of its colonies to Germany, and England, France and Germany decide they care about Armenia after all, carving up the Ottoman Empire. Now you have a ticked off France, which allies with Italy and Russia to start a war 20 years later. Sound familiar? England, America and Germany win, the Habsburg Empire implodes, Germany and Russia deal with the pieces, France is divided. There might have been a Holocaust; Russia is traditionally the most anti-Jewish country in Europe. Aristocratic Germany and the Anglo-American alliance spar over France for decades. |
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#16 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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So how about we fragment France after the Hundred Years' War while forestalling the Thirty Years War(s)? Religion could divide France into Catholic and Hugenot on a permanent basis whiel somehow Germany unifies into a new nation-state with a new Protestant identity. You can fracture England during its' Civil War too if you want. Then you make Germany focus on economics rather than militarism (giving it a character much like modern Germany actually) while French and British successor states squabble for colonies, partially because they are all playing second fiddle to Germany in Continental economics. The Indistrial Revolution acerbates all of this.
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Fred Brackin |
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#17 | |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Southeast NC
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The ethno-religious aspects would be complicated (isn't it always?) with a Protestant German ruling Catholic Poles and Orthodox Russians.
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RyanW - Actually one normal sized guy in three tiny trenchcoats. |
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#18 |
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: Land of the Beer, Home of the Dirndls
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I'm Bavarian, where "Prussian" is basically the equivalent of "Yankee", and defined as anyone living above the Danube (i.e. our Mason-Dixon line). So yeah, what you've said ;)
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#19 | |
Join Date: Oct 2005
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I see basically four divergence points.
1. Charles V/I/II manages to hold his collected domains together better. Perhaps he manages to suppress the autonomy of the Lutheran princes, or he influences the Pope to permit Henry VIII's annulment thus allowing England to be a greater counterweight to France. 2. Prevent the Thirty Years war. Either by this: Quote:
Or assassinate Cardinal Richelieu, maybe at the hands of a Gascon extremist. Without the Thirty Years war, Germany (as the HRE) manages to get into the overseas colony game earlier and enters the 18th century a unified nation-state. 3. Let the Germans do better against Napoleon. Maybe an Austrian or Prussian general takes a preeminent role in the Alliance, supplanting Wellington. To go way out there, if Napoleon never invades Russia, then the Russians enter the 20th century either stronger or less-prepared for invasion. If the later, the Germans in WWI walk over the Russians and then turn their eastern army against France before the U.S. gets involved. This forces France and the U.K. to sue for peace which leaves Austria-Hungary intact and Germany much stronger (and much more stable). Alternately, the Germans never attack Russia and do better against France overall. 4. The at the end of the Franco-Prussian war, the Prussians annex large chunks of France and incorporate them into the Prussian Empire. France never really recovers or achieves Great Power status, knocking them out of WWI before it starts. WWI happens much differently (if at all), and the Prussian Empire survives to be much stronger.
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An ongoing narrative of philosophy, psychology, and semiotics: Et in Arcadia Ego "To an Irishman, a serious matter is a joke, and a joke is a serious matter." |
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#20 | |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA
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Hence change the victor in the Great War, and there is, for once, a clear point when this could have happened. Fascism still happens, just next door. The German aristocracy (not just Prussian; none of the other sets of conservative German aristocrats were actually any better, just less powerful) takes the place of the Bolsheviks in the Cold War. |
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Tags |
alternate history, germany, hanseatic league, infinite worlds, nazis |
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