Es Geloybte Aretz Continuation Thread

[NotBigBrother]

Austrian Jewish writer, raised in cosmopolitan Vienna whose entire world was subsequently destroyed by not one but two world wars.

His book "The world of Yesterday" is a eulogy to pre-war Europe, written with much sadness.

"For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never—and I say so not with pride but with shame—has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths."

Stefan Zweig sent a manuscript of this book to the publisher and at the next day he commited suicide together with his wife.

 

[Stark]

Stefan Zweig sent a manuscript of this book to the publisher and at the next day he commited suicide together with his wife.

Yep. Really sad story.

 

[TimTurner]

Yep. Really sad story.

Quite.

 

[Pax_Nihil]

Quite.

Indubitably .

 

[carlton_bach]

South Africa could also be interesting. No WWI or WWII means more people surviving. A significant proportion of these people will move to colonies. More British origin representation in the white population in South Africa could have huge repercussions for post dominion status politics. No South West Africa mandate either. Potentially could provide a refuge for Afrikaans rejecting British rule.

Any unhappy Boer will be welcome in Südwest certainly. The place is short of settlers and not repaying the economic expectations Berlin had for it. Local German settlers like the Boers and resent the British. I am not sure how many of them there will be, though. It's not a great prospect out there compared to the more fertile and prosperous Orange and Transvaal, let along Cape Province.
I think the ultimate future of ITTL's South Africa is a union of more colonies. For one thing, the railway north is a much more valuable asset and the land along it more closely bound to the ports at its end points. I could see a thinner and longer South Africa reaching up to the Great Lakes, at least initially.

Can you expand on this in regards to minorities such as poles, french, Danes, slaves, and the immigrant community like Muslims, Africans, and Chinese please.

Well, they are broadly speaking welcome on two of the three sides. But initially, their status in the system is marginal, threatened, and resentful. The Danes and Poles have parties of their own and political cultures different from that of Germany, and while not all of them vote for these, their ethnic blocs hold pretty firm. This takes a long time to dissolve. The French speakers of Alsace-Lorraine are integrated a bit better once the place is its own state, but German policy in the years since 1871 left a lot of bad blood. They are a strongly anti-Prussian, anti-Nationalist voting bloc.
The immigrant communities don't become established in large numbers until much later. Being mainly urban and industrial, they are primarily a Social Democratic or left-Zentrum constituency, and those parties defended their rights early. As the immigrants rise in social standing, some of them embrace conservative policies, but the conservative party is unsure it wants them. It's certainly not easy being a DKP or DVP member and Black.

I was thinking about Indonesia, since it's not mentioned as settled - could the Dutch drive it into a 'Francafrique' direction, where (apart from Java with maybe half of Sumatra) various smaller states are essentially subsidiaries of the Dutch government, even as they are also independent? That was the target in OTL, but US disapproval and the impossibility of suppressing an independence-minded Java made it fall apart.

Of course the India example argues against it, if India is united why not the Dutch Indies, but I think especially Aceh and the Moluccas had enough sense of self to split if allowed... and then the Dutch can built on that.

That is an interesting question. The way the Dutch ran indoesia at least suggests they might allow it to fall apart. Especially if it means they can potentially keep pieces of it.

Without American pressure, Papua New Guinea will likely stay a Dutch possession. What happens to the rest of Indonesia depend on Germany and UK, Germany may see Dutch influence in the region as a proxy for German influence and support the establishment of several smaller states.

Good idea, too. And New Guinea could easily stay Dutch, German, and Australian respectively. Beyond that, I'm not sure how it would divide up.

So who's in charge in the eastern bits of what OTL is Saudi Arabia? (That is, the part with all the oil). I can't see the Ottomans being in favor of the Saudis running the place. And the British are probably going to be tempted to meddle.

the coast? didn't the ottomans take over that originally? Anyway i can see a ottoman empire easily pushing in. Rashids are their player their and i can see them making effort to check ottoman influence moreover.

Not all of it. The coast was still Ottoman till 1913, when the Saudis seized the area, and the fight with the Rashidis went on for a while. An Ottoman empire undistracted by WWI may do something about that.

Edit: of course, the relevant dates have probably been butterflied.

The exact chain of events would have changed a fair while ago, but on the whole ITTL, the 1910s are not a good time for any border principality to try and take away things from the Ottoman Empire. It is a very bad time for it, in fact. I suspect the Saudis will not really try, but if they do, they are in for a thorough demonstration of what a few years of victory has meant for the Ottoman military.
Of course I'm partial. The Saudis are one of the parties in modern history I always like to screw over. So ITTL, the House of Saud is a minor desert principality outside Ottoman suzerainty while the Holy Cities and the oil fields both remain under Ottoman control.
I wonder how bad it would get along the oily shore. Many of the people living there are Shia AFAIR. We could easily see another point of friction between Germany (backing Ottoman control and wanting to feed the oil into westbound pipelines) and Britain (backing Persia and wanting to load it onto tankers). It is bound to take a fair bit of diplomacy to sort out.

Stefan Zweig will be a much happier man in this timeline.

Not to mention significantly wealthier. Though again, he will not know what he missed. The descent of much of the eastern part of the Double Monarchy into interethnic violence might be depressing enough to him.

 

[B_Munro]

The exact chain of events would have changed a fair while ago, but on the whole ITTL, the 1910s are not a good time for any border principality to try and take away things from the Ottoman Empire. It is a very bad time for it, in fact. I suspect the Saudis will not really try, but if they do, they are in for a thorough demonstration of what a few years of victory has meant for the Ottoman military.
Of course I'm partial. The Saudis are one of the parties in modern history I always like to screw over. So ITTL, the House of Saud is a minor desert principality outside Ottoman suzerainty while the Holy Cities and the oil fields both remain under Ottoman control.
I wonder how bad it would get along the oily shore. Many of the people living there are Shia AFAIR. We could easily see another point of friction between Germany (backing Ottoman control and wanting to feed the oil into westbound pipelines) and Britain (backing Persia and wanting to load it onto tankers). It is bound to take a fair bit of diplomacy to sort out.

Yeah, most of the people involved are Shi'a.
(Map of oil ) (Map of religion )

Some of the oil fields (Ghawar in particular) extend well inland: I imagine there will be some "border adjustments" once the geology of the place becomes better understood. (My impression was that Ottoman influence was highly nominal once you got much past the Persian Gulf coast, but claim lines can be pretty much what you want if the disputants are weak and not widely recognized.)

Also, if the Ottomans get the OTL Saudi oil fields, the fact that they don't have Kuwait is of little significance.

 

[Stendhal]

The Generation of '98, Bagumbayan Spanish East Indies, 30 December 1896 [Post Canon]

Again they tried to push him around.

"Take the handkerchief" the priest had urged. "Consummatum est."

He turned and shook his head.

With effort, he unfocussed his eyes and sought to see beyond the inner walls, the street urchins perched atop, the palm fronds, the rising sun.

From the edge of his vision he became aware of another civic disturbance.
The peninsular teniente had walked up to the coronel and hotly whispered into the superior ear.

"Your sentence by the Good Grace of the Government of Spain has been commuted."

"Henceforth you will dedicate yourself to alleviate river blindness in Doña María Cristina's possessions off Fernando Poo."

"Dismissed!"

 

[Pax_Nihil]

The Generation of '98, Bagumbayan Spanish East Indies, 30 December 1896 [Post Canon]

Again they tried to push him around.

"Take the handkerchief" the priest had urged. "Consummatum est."

He turned and shook his head.

With effort, he unfocussed his eyes and sought to see beyond the inner walls, the street urchins perched atop, the palm fronds, the rising sun.

From the edge of his vision he became aware of another civic disturbance.
The peninsular teniente had walked up to the coronel and hotly whispered into the superior ear.

"Your sentence by the Good Grace of the Government of Spain has been commuted."

"Henceforth you will dedicate yourself to alleviate river blindness in Doña María Cristina's possessions off San Tomé."

"Dismissed!"

.....what exactly happened here?

 

[Stendhal]

.. what exactly happened here?

José Protasio Rizal Mercado y Alonso Realonda, German trained ophthalmologist, polymath of the Philippine Revolution dies another day.

 

[Vingilótë]

It's complicated, and I think it was addressed somewhere before in part, so I'll try to be brief. This is not a unipiolar world, linguistically.

The upper classes globally are multilingual. If you pretend to a full education, you will speak French, English and German, and read at least Latin, but probably also Greek.

This is something that jumped to my mind earlier today while thinking of something totally different - the formation of Great Books curricula. Long background explanation incoming:

There is a fascinating thread I saw on Twitter (reproduced at this link) to the effect of:

What we know as the Great Books of Western Civilization curriculum OTL was primarily a product of the sociocultural cataclysms of the 1890-1950s, especially as experienced by Jewish scholars, especially philosophers and classicists, of that time. Because they, especially the German Jewish part, were so broken by being evicted from the only racial or national communities which they had ever known or wanted, what remained to them was to create for themselves a civilization to belong to. For many, this took the form of Israel, but for others, Strauss and Arendt notable among them, the answer was a larger Western Civilization (think this is particularly apt for Arendt, who I strongly suspect to her dying day never thought of herself as anything but German). And so it was from this wellspring that it became fashionable to study works of lasting and eternal meaning to the human condition, much of which was in Latin and Greek.

Which brings us to the question of language education. An obvious objection to the above is that European elite children have been studying Latin, Greek, and French for centuries, ever since the dawn of the Renaissance, and this was not cooked up in the 1950s. The rebuttal is that when you examine the curriculum of classics education in Western countries pre-First World War, it is overwhelmingly philological, not philosophical. You read Caesar, Cicero, and Horace to become elegantly conversant in Latin, not to communicate with a millennia old cultural tradition, ditto for Ancient Greek and the New Testament/Homer. The vast majority of the modern Great Books curriculum is not present because if you were to read it in the original you would need to learn at least eight languages. "Great Books" such as they are, are your language's own idiosyncratic wrestlings with the concept; for example, for Italians, you get Dante and Petrarch, but probably not Goethe.

Which brings me to my first question about the role of language education in modern ITTL elite education, particularly that for English, French, German, Latin, and Ancient Greek—what is the nature of it, really? How much of it is functional, you learn it with the intent of becoming conversant in those languages because it will serve you well in your daily life, vice for the cultural value of the languages? I can see arguments for both from your description in my original quoted post. But unlike in a world like today's where the only language anyone learns to get anywhere is English (and which ironically means everyone will read "Great Books" only in translation anyhow), would I be correct in guessing far fewer people learn languages for the joy of reading Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe, Ovid, or Thucydides?

On the other point I touch on in the summary, I am also curious where Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, and Martin Heidegger end up ITTL. There are probably some other notable personalities I've missed but those are the big ones.

I also have one other more banal question about the above quote—five languages I think when you get down to it is quite a big courseload for secondary school students! In gymnasia and academies pre-First World War as I understand it, Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and native language consumed the bulk of the teaching time, and nearly all other subjects were covered cursorily. With modernized education that I presume is going to devote much larger amounts of class time to the sciences, and the addition of German and English to the standard elite curriculum, where do schools find the time to teach it all? I am particularly interested in this question for ITTL Germany. In modern Germany as I understand it, gymnasium students learn a standard of two foreign languages including English, and the net result is that outside of schools with a classical focus, Latin and Greek are sacrificed.

 

[carlton_bach]

Which brings me to my first question about the role of language education in modern ITTL elite education, particularly that for English, French, German, Latin, and Ancient Greek—what is the nature of it, really? How much of it is functional, you learn it with the intent of becoming conversant in those languages because it will serve you well in your daily life, vice for the cultural value of the languages? I can see arguments for both from your description in my original quoted post. But unlike in a world like today's where the only language anyone learns to get anywhere is English (and which ironically means everyone will read "Great Books" only in translation anyhow), would I be correct in guessing far fewer people learn languages for the joy of reading Shakespeare, Moliere, Goethe, Ovid, or Thucydides?

It really depends a lot on the career path that is intended. Of course, reading proficiency in five languages is not at all uncommon today in academics. I have four, five if you count Plattdeutsch. It's a matter of priorities.
Realistically, though, teaching five languages at high level will always be reserved to a small number of pupils - usually the gifted and the very wealthy. Which ones they are depends on what you mean to do with them. But having multiple languages is a more important sign of education and status than it is IOTL. Let's say we are looking at German schools ITTL c. 2000, you would have a breakdown that looks like this:

Volksschule/Hauptschule (vocational and artisanal): English and one more language, usually Spanish or French.
Realschule/Realgymnasium (technical and commercial): English, French, one more language as an elective, often Spanish or Latin.
Gymnasium (academic): English, Latin, French or Spanish, often another modern language as an elective
humanistisches Gymnasium (humanities/clerical): Latin, classical Greek, English, French, another language as an elective, often Hebrew or another classical language
Ritterakademie/other private school (elite): English, French, one more modern language, Latin, classical Greek

The levels aimed for also differ radically. A Volksschule or Realschule aims for basic communication capacity, the ability to deal with forms, signs, maybe business correspondence. Gymnasium instils reading capacity, with composition in the core languages. The traditional humanistisches Gymnasium focusaes very strongly in reading capacity at a high level. Traditional elite boarding schools focus on communicative capacity with native speaker instructors and travel as part of the education and always have. This is the true status marker, and no state school, not even the venerable akademische Gymnasien, can match the expense.

On the other point I touch on in the summary, I am also curious where Hannah Arendt, Hans Jonas, Leo Strauss, and Martin Heidegger end up ITTL. There are probably some other notable personalities I've missed but those are the big ones.

I'm not sure. Heidegger will certainly be a very big cheese in the Konservative Revolution, likely against his will (it's not Nazi Germany, he will be able to speak his mind in reasonable safety, and for all his faults he was a smart man with unflattering opinions about absurd pretense). Hans Jonas looks like a good candidate for an academic career. His whole responsibility ethics fits the tail end of Neo-Kantianism of the day. Strauss is really hard to gauge. He could be a darling of the bourgeois right, or fall out of favour fast and completely. His thinking fits their ideas great, but he strikes me as too rigorous a philosopher top feel at home among them. Hannah Arendt has every chance to become a highly respected niche intellectual ITTL, but I can't quite see her in that role. She could well become a public intellectual / commenator. The German publishing world allows for that role.

I also have one other more banal question about the above quote—five languages I think when you get down to it is quite a big courseload for secondary school students! In gymnasia and academies pre-First World War as I understand it, Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and native language consumed the bulk of the teaching time, and nearly all other subjects were covered cursorily. With modernized education that I presume is going to devote much larger amounts of class time to the sciences, and the addition of German and English to the standard elite curriculum, where do schools find the time to teach it all? I am particularly interested in this question for ITTL Germany. In modern Germany as I understand it, gymnasium students learn a standard of two foreign languages including English, and the net result is that outside of schools with a classical focus, Latin and Greek are sacrificed.

In modern German Gymnasium, the standard is usually three languages, but the third starts so late any real proficiency is uncommon. Still, ITTL will put greater resources towards language education. It's more important, given the need to read French, English, and German in politics, academia, and higher levels of business. And elite schools always invested very heavily in it (consider the impressive language skills of just about any politician and senior officer in the 1850-1920 timeframe).
The main difference will lie in the proficiency aimed for.

 

[avernite]

I also have one other more banal question about the above quote—five languages I think when you get down to it is quite a big courseload for secondary school students! In gymnasia and academies pre-First World War as I understand it, Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and native language consumed the bulk of the teaching time, and nearly all other subjects were covered cursorily. With modernized education that I presume is going to devote much larger amounts of class time to the sciences, and the addition of German and English to the standard elite curriculum, where do schools find the time to teach it all? I am particularly interested in this question for ITTL Germany. In modern Germany as I understand it, gymnasium students learn a standard of two foreign languages including English, and the net result is that outside of schools with a classical focus, Latin and Greek are sacrificed.

Well, Dutch Gymnasium routinely teaches Dutch plus English, French, German, Latin, and Ancient Greek. Of course noone gets conversational in Latin and Greek, and the levels of German and French are always open to debate (and dependent on where; I live near the German border so German gets more weight)... but we've got that 5-foreign-languages courseload just about fine.

 

[Stendhal]

We got that 5-foreign-languages course load just about fine.

German may be a variant of Dutch spoken Up Country -- so tell me in regard to Greek: do Netherland students read The Anabasis ?

 

[avernite]

German may be a variant of Dutch spoken Up Country -- so tell me in regard to Greek: do Netherland students read The Anabasis ?

Some. Others read the Odyssee, the Iliad, theater.

 

[Vingilótë]

It really depends a lot on the career path that is intended. Of course, reading proficiency in five languages is not at all uncommon today in academics. I have four, five if you count Plattdeutsch. It's a matter of priorities.
Realistically, though, teaching five languages at high level will always be reserved to a small number of pupils - usually the gifted and the very wealthy. Which ones they are depends on what you mean to do with them. But having multiple languages is a more important sign of education and status than it is IOTL. Let's say we are looking at German schools ITTL c. 2000, you would have a breakdown that looks like this:

Volksschule/Hauptschule (vocational and artisanal): English and one more language, usually Spanish or French.
Realschule/Realgymnasium (technical and commercial): English, French, one more language as an elective, often Spanish or Latin.
Gymnasium (academic): English, Latin, French or Spanish, often another modern language as an elective
humanistisches Gymnasium (humanities/clerical): Latin, classical Greek, English, French, another language as an elective, often Hebrew or another classical language
Ritterakademie/other private school (elite): English, French, one more modern language, Latin, classical Greek

The levels aimed for also differ radically. A Volksschule or Realschule aims for basic communication capacity, the ability to deal with forms, signs, maybe business correspondence. Gymnasium instils reading capacity, with composition in the core languages. The traditional humanistisches Gymnasium focusaes very strongly in reading capacity at a high level. Traditional elite boarding schools focus on communicative capacity with native speaker instructors and travel as part of the education and always have. This is the true status marker, and no state school, not even the venerable akademische Gymnasien, can match the expense.

In modern German Gymnasium, the standard is usually three languages, but the third starts so late any real proficiency is uncommon. Still, ITTL will put greater resources towards language education. It's more important, given the need to read French, English, and German in politics, academia, and higher levels of business. And elite schools always invested very heavily in it (consider the impressive language skills of just about any politician and senior officer in the 1850-1920 timeframe).
The main difference will lie in the proficiency aimed for.

Well, Dutch Gymnasium routinely teaches Dutch plus English, French, German, Latin, and Ancient Greek. Of course noone gets conversational in Latin and Greek, and the levels of German and French are always open to debate (and dependent on where; I live near the German border so German gets more weight)... but we've got that 5-foreign-languages courseload just about fine.

This is all pretty fascinating - and honestly, I do kind of feel the inadequacy of my American education a bit here. Almost no American secondary school teaches more than one foreign language (maybe really elite private schools, IDK), and the large majority of students in my estimation don't leave with any sort of fluency. Actually, I know at least one teacher who openly suspected that foreign language education in the United States was really a grade bonus for immigrants with heritage languages. I suspect his mind would have been blown by OTL Germans and Dutch maturing to an Abitur having fluency in at least 3 languages.

I'm not sure. Heidegger will certainly be a very big cheese in the Konservative Revolution, likely against his will (it's not Nazi Germany, he will be able to speak his mind in reasonable safety, and for all his faults he was a smart man with unflattering opinions about absurd pretense). Hans Jonas looks like a good candidate for an academic career. His whole responsibility ethics fits the tail end of Neo-Kantianism of the day. Strauss is really hard to gauge. He could be a darling of the bourgeois right, or fall out of favour fast and completely. His thinking fits their ideas great, but he strikes me as too rigorous a philosopher top feel at home among them. Hannah Arendt has every chance to become a highly respected niche intellectual ITTL, but I can't quite see her in that role. She could well become a public intellectual / commenator. The German publishing world allows for that role.

This is also very interesting to me, thanks very much! It's interesting for me to speculate on the direction of Jewish German scholars, without the trauma of the Nazi period, or ITTL the realization of successful (?) integration into the wider German nation.

 

[haider najib]

What are the modern relations between baden baden nations and Russia? Have they by modern times eliminated their Russian Ness? Do these nations hate Russian the amount they do otl?

BTW how do the cod wars develop here between UK and Iceland?

 

[Athelstane]

Do these nations hate Russian the amount they do otl?

I have to think the Poles do, LOL

 

[Pax_Nihil]

I have to think the Poles do, LOL

The PoD must be much further back to avoid Slavic animosity amongst one another, Poles and Russians haven't been particularly friendly on an extra special level lol

 

[kham_coc]

I have to think the Poles do, LOL

More clearly - otl there was some gratitude for liberating them from the nazis, and a few decades of propaganda - ittl, Russia ravaged and raped all over Poland in two brutal wars, and the very national mythos of the Polish state is one of fierce resistance to the Russians. There will be memorial and remembrance events, monuments and gravestones; national holidays, and conscription where everyone is very clear on who the enemy is.

 

[Tibi088]

OTOH TTL Eastern Europe was spared half a century of soviet occupation which did a lot to cement their bad reputation OTL.